There were no torches burning inside the tunnel beneath the temple of Mut. Only the brazier Bek carried behind her drove back the blackness, and it was dimming with every passing second. Itaweret occasionally paused to search the floor for branches that she could toss into the brazier but found nothing but cold and damp stone.
Finally, they reached a rectangular outline of light at the tunnel’s end. By the mercy of fate, the pair had not stumbled into any booby-traps, nor run into any dead ends branching off from the main passage. While dark, the journey was not as perilous as Itaweret had feared…
Hopefully, it would stay that way.
“How do you know this doesn’t lead to a trap?” Bek asked.
“Think about it. Why would Mut lead us into a trap? Don’t you trust her enough, brother?”
“Assuming that was Mut speaking to us. What if it was that Achaean demon she talked about, that Athena?”
Itaweret fought hard within herself to ignore him, and the possibility he raised. It was a valid point, if she were honest with herself, but it seemed unlikely that an Achaean deity like Athena could penetrate the sanctum of Mut. At least she hoped so. And hope was all they had left.
Itaweret walked up to the rectangle of light and pressed her shoulder against the surface, feeling the same cool stone texture as the tunnel’s walls. She pushed all her strength onto the door, groaning from exertion and the exhausting day, until it fell forward with a hard thud and crumbled outside.
A flood of daylight blinded her. Once her eyes readjusted from the subterranean darkness, she found herself on the summit of a grassy hill that sloped into a gravelly beach beside the sea. The setting sun gilded the crests of the waves, but the colors of the sky graded ominously, from dark red to black. Itaweret wrinkled her nose from the smell of smoke and burnt flesh.
Behind the hill, the city in which she had lived her entire life bloomed into a colossal inferno of flame. The fires that roared on rooftops, together with thick black rivers of smoke, obscured any sight of the carnage that, she realized, must have clogged and already begun to rot over the streets. Still, she could make out a stream of people being herded out through the city gate, prodded along by Mycenaeans in their bronze suits.
They were her fellow citizens of Per-Pehu. Her people, friends and neighbors, reduced to human livestock in one evening.
“How dare they!” Bek shook his fist while watching what she watched, quaking with rage. “We’ve got to do something!”
“We will, brother. We wouldn’t be out here if we weren’t going to do something about it. But we cannot fight now. Come on!”
She took his hand. They descended the hill to a dirt path that meandered northeastward. The cover of the olive and cypress trees alongside it, together with shadows that grew darker with each passing minute, would conceal them from any prowling Mycenaeans.
At least she hoped so.
Less than two hours later, the scarlet heavens faded into blackness almost as pure as that within the tunnel. Now their only light was the half-moon and dusting of tiny stars around it, giving off a faint white glow reflected upon the vegetation and stones. Itaweret huddled close to Bek as they hiked up the path through the foothills, pausing only to pick up sticks to feed the fire in the brazier. If there was one thing to praise the wilderness for, it was an abundance of cheap firewood.
They ascended higher into the hills, climbing until the open, scrubby landscape of the low plains gave way to oak and pine forests that girdled the mountains. They climbed over fallen logs and boulders strewn about with increasing density. If walking uphill had not already worn away at the strength in their legs, maneuvering around these obstacles in the terrain taxed their muscles to aching even more.
Underneath the soft fragrance of the pines, Itaweret’s nostrils flared, capturing another odor, more rancid and unpleasant. She traced the scent to the gleaming, red-spattered bones of a lamb, flies buzzing around the few scraps of meat that clung to it. She had seen cattle and goats sacrificed to the gods in the temple complex at Per-Pehu, but never witnessed their gory remains in a state like this. The sight almost shoved her last meal from her stomach into her throat.
“How could this have died?” she asked.
Bek crouched over the bones and ran his finger over one of five parallel scars raked across the ribcage. He pointed to a weathered impression in the nearby earth, broader than a human hand, with claw marks sticking out before each of its five toes.
“I would have guessed a lion, but cats in general don’t leave prints like this,” Bek said. “Normally they retract their claws, so they wouldn’t show like they do here.”
“Could it be a dog?” Itaweret asked. “Or a jackal? Or one of those gray monsters the Achaeans call wolves?”
Bek shook his head. “Much, much too big for any of those. Truth be told, I have no idea. It must be a kind of monster we’ve never seen in our lives.”
Back home, everyone inside Per-Pehu’s walls had heard travelers’ stories of the beasts that roamed the wilds beyond the colony. Some spoke of cannibalistic men with singular eyes or the heads of bulls, giant swamp-dwelling serpents, or fire-breathing creatures that were part goat, part lion, and part snake. Itaweret had always considered the descriptions too ridiculous to be real. More frightening were the accounts of hulking beasts with dog-like faces and claws like knives, giant cats with dagger-long fangs, and ill-tempered elephants covered in shaggy hair. Those stories sounded almost truthful.
Itaweret wrung her hands around Mut’s scepter, shivering with a dread colder than the nocturnal air itself. “Do you know whether it could be nearby?” she asked.
“I don’t know,” Bek said. “The tracks are a little worn. It could have left here hours or even a day ago.”
Two glowing specks of yellow blinked behind a nearby patch of bushes. Leaves rustled and branches snapped as the specks drifted towards them. The furry outline of a thick, stocky body gleamed from the brazier’s firelight. The creature’s snout was long like a dog’s, but its ears were smaller and more rounded. As it panted and grunted, it exuded the same stink of decayed flesh as the sheep carcass.
Itaweret took a step back from the lumbering animal. “What do they call things like that?”
“A bear, I believe,” Bek whispered. “Stand your ground. That could scare him off.”
Itaweret forced herself to stay put and waved the scepter of Mut like a warrior’s staff as Bek shook the brazier back and forth at the beast. Rearing ten feet into the air on its hind feet, the bear curled its lips back, exposing pointed canines. It uncorked a menacing roar while brandishing clawed forepaws.
With a single swat, the bear knocked Itaweret’s scepter out of her hands. She jumped to grab it, but the bear seized the scepter in its mouth and tossed it into the darkness. It swiped at her bosom, raking through her linen cloth and skin with its claws. Sudden pain swept through her chest as she collapsed to the ground.
Bek thrust his brazier again, the heated ash landing on the bear’s backside. Now aggravated, the the bear turned away from Itaweret, roared, and charged him. The bear’s attack on Bek gave her enough time to crawl over and retrieve her scepter. Just as the bear was about to punch the brazier out of Bek’s grasp, she chucked the scepter into its shoulder.
Her blow distracted the beast for another second. Then it swung around and barreled towards her again. She had no another weapon to beat it aside.
Another roar followed.
All the children of Kemet could recognize that deep feline roar. Along with it appeared a pair of yellow eyes, set in a bright tawny form. The feline sprang from the blackness and landed on the bear. The two creatures rolled in the dirt in a chaotic melee of biting and slashing.
The battle ended with the bear’s growling breaking up into gagging, as if it were being choked. It fell limp, with a viscous river of blood gushing from its neck and more spilling from the cuts that had been slashed all over its body. The bear’s slayer stood over it and roared with a savage exultation.
Itaweret and Bek looked upon the largest lion they had ever seen, one with a thick dark mane and faint leopard-like spots on its flanks. She had heard stories of giant spotted lions that once roamed the countries north of the Great Green Sea, but according to those same stories, they had all died out centuries ago. Was this the very last of that breed, or did it have a whole pride behind it? If the latter, would they be seeking dinner too?
Itaweret could only hope the bear’s big and meaty carcass would distract them from she and Bek.
Then, a voice, a proud voice: “That’s a good boy, Xiphos!”
A young Achaean man in a sleeveless wool tunic walked toward them, carrying a wooden shepherd’s staff. He stroked the big cat’s mane as if it were a tame dog while it gorged itself on the dead bear. Much to Itaweret’s surprise, the lion tolerated the boy’s touch, rather than fending him off like any truly wild animal.
Itaweret brushed droplets of blood off her clothing and jewelry. “Xiphos? Is he your pet or something?”
“My father brought him in when he was a cub,” the Achaean youth said. “No need to fear him, my lady. He’s as gentle as a puppy unless you provoke him. Are you folks all right? It’s not every day we have black people come to these parts.”
“Why do you call us ‘black’ people?” Bek asked. “Our people are various shades of brown, some of us darker than others. If we are ‘black’, would that make you, what, ‘white’?”
The Achaean chuckled. “No use arguing over what we call each other. Trust me, I’ve heard far nastier names for your kind of people. Name’s Philos. And you two?”
Itaweret did not want to know those “nastier” names. “I am Itaweret, High Priestess of Mut from Per-Pehu. And this is my brother Bek, son of the Great Chief Mahu.”
“Aye, so you’re from the colony over the hills.” Philos looked up and down Itaweret’s body, his eyes following her contours in much the same gazing way as Scylax of Mycenae. “And, by Aphrodite, are you fine to look at, scratches and all! Nice curves, especially.”
Itaweret shook her head and grumbled. Achaean or Kemetian, white or black, men were all the same. Though she had to admit, the muscular young Achaean, with his flowing long black hair, wasn’t a wholly unattractive specimen.
“Anyway, either of you wouldn’t have seen a little ewe around these parts, would you?” Philos asked.
“We saw a sheep’s skeleton,” Bek replied. “We think the bear ate it sometime back.”
“Hades be damned, then! Xiphos and I have been looking for her the past couple of days. At least she was only one ewe. So, what are you two Kemetians doing out here?”
“In case you haven’t heard, Per-Pehu has been brutally sacked by King Scylax of Mycenae,” Itaweret said. “Our goddess Mut has sent us a quest northeast, one that will lead to Scylax’s defeat. We hope it does, anyway. She told us that we would find our answer in the first village over the mountains.”
Philos scratched his hair. “By Zeus, that’s my village! I don’t know why we’d know how to beat the king of Mycenae, out of all people in the world. But, if your goddess says so, I ought to help you the best I can.”
“How far is your village, anyway?”
“A few more hills to the east. But we ought to rest here for the night. Xiphos doesn’t like being dragged away from his meals, and I think we’re all damned tired anyway.”
Bek yawned. “Yeah, tell me about it.”
Itaweret nodded. Almost every muscle burned from straining, even beyond her wounds from the bear’s attack. Her stomach groaned with hunger. Once the lion filled himself, she wouldn’t mind cooking leftovers of the bear over a fire lit by Bek’s brazier. Never had she eaten bear meat, but food was food in uncivilized places.
She looked up at the treeline and caught the flicker of little eyes. They weren’t the yellow eyes of a bear, lion or other predator, but silver-gray eyes…familiar eyes.
Itaweret blinked. The eyes were gone.