Sun Thief

First published in Great Britain in 2015 by Egmont UK Limited

The Yellow Building, 1 Nicholas Road, London W11 4AN

Text copyright © 2015 Jamie Buxton

The moral rights of the author have been asserted

First e-book edition 2015

ISBN 978 1 4052 67991

Ebook ISBN 978 1 7803 13689

www.egmont.co.uk

A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library

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For Amanda.

Thank you.

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

1. In which I tell you pretty much all I’ve learned before we’ve even started

2. In which you have the huge honour of meeting me

3. In which a guest actually arrives at the inn

4. In which I talk about mud (yes, mud)

5. In which I introduce you to our dead neighbours

6. In which my sister is too neighbourly

7. In which I overhear what I wish I hadn’t

8. In which help comes from an unlikely source and I behave oddly

9. In which I have a revelation

10. In which I accept that I have ruined my life forever

11. In which my father lets me down. Again. And uppances come

12. In which my fate is decided

13. In which my horizons open

14. In which an old god feasts

15. In which I smell a smell and see a sight

16. In which the Quiet Gentleman changes names

17. In which I draw a blasphemous hippopotamus

18. In which I discover my future

19. In which I learn a thing or two

20. In which I miss the Quiet Gentleman

21. In which I lose an ache and gain a worry

22. In which the Quiet Gentlemen returns

23. In which the Quiet Gentleman puts me straight

24. In which I understand an idea

25. In which an idea bears fruit

26. In which I have an unexpected encounter

27. In which I prove my worth

28. In which I learn my fate

29. In which I leave my sister

30. In which a boy discovers he can look at a queen

31. In which my new life begins

32. In which the queen gives me a name

33. In which I receive a proposition

34. In which Potipher delivers unwelcome news

35. In which I am led astray

36. In which the queen favours me

37. In which I do not ride in a chariot

38. In which I pay for my mistake

39. In which the trap closes

40. In which I do not learn a lesson

41. In which I make a sacrifice

42. In which I learn that death leads a dog’s life

43. In which I meet the king

44. In which I have an unexpected visitor

45. In which I put my experience to use

46. In which I learn that if you don’t move forward, you go back

47. In which I see an unexpected consequence of my actions

48. In which a truth is revealed

49. In which I make a choice

50. In which I see the destruction of Thutmose’s workshops

51. In which I head into the desert

52. In which I learn something surprising about myself

53. In which I take a long walk in the dark

54. In which I state the obvious

55. In which we jump out of the frying pan and into the fire

56. In which I speak

57. In which I find my place

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1. Don’t lie.

2. Don’t kill.

3. Don’t steal.

4. Don’t marry more than one person at a time.

5. Be happy with what you’ve got.

6. Be kind to your parents so long as they are kind to you. If not, don’t bother.

7. Take a day off when you need to.

8. Choose your god then stick to it.

9. Don’t make models of him/her. It only leads to trouble.

10. Now think of something yourself, you lazy dog.

So here I am, standing on top of a pyramid. I’m as high as the sky and king of the world.

In front of me, the Great River is a big, fat, dark, lazy snake, winding through a patchwork of fields: green grass, golden wheat, black earth.

Behind me, the desert is as dull as a dead lion’s hide.

On my left and far, far away, the setting sun has just turned the stones of the old city to gold.

On my right, our town is a muddle of narrow streets and four-square, flat-roofed houses built of brown mud brick. Fires blink like bright eyes as people cook their evening meal. On the back road that leads in from the north, I can just see a small dust cloud. It’s tearing along at a fair old lick and there’s a dark man-shape in the middle of it, like the grit in a ball of raw cotton.

When you’re up on a pyramid, you’re standing on an old king who’s buried somewhere in the pile of rocks beneath you. Soldiers used to march around its base to keep rabble like me away and the common people had to crawl up a long stone causeway to ask for blessings from the priests who prayed in his temple. But the new king in the south has banned the old gods and told us to worship the sun. The Aten, he’s called. I suppose the king has his reasons, but I can’t help feeling it’s a bit boring. I mean, what does this Aten do except shine? The old gods got up to all kinds of mischief, some of which is too shocking to talk about, but that makes me like them more.

Still, look on the bright side: no gods means no priests; no priests means no guards; no guards means I get to climb the Great Pyramid whenever I feel like it.

So I’m up in the sky and feeling great when I suddenly realise that the little cloud of dust I saw on the back road could be a guest coming to the inn. And if it is, I have to be back there to meet him or I’m in trouble – a muddy great heap of it.

As it happens, I reach the inn just before my parents return from visiting neighbours, and they get back just before the guest bangs at the courtyard gate.

I’m sticky with sweat as I open it, still breathing heavily from running home. I grazed my knee from sliding down the pyramid too fast and the sticky trickle of blood is a cool itch on my skin.

The new guest is a big mud-coloured man with thick arms like rolls of linen and a face as smooth as wet clay. Dust is sticking to his shaven head and he doesn’t greet us and he doesn’t say any of the usual things.

Not: ‘I was wondering if you had a room, and do you serve meals?’ (Regular guest.)

Not: ‘I say, what a charming inn! Now, would you be so good as to furnish me with a room for a week or so? And is that cooking I smell? How delicious.’ (Will try and leave without paying his bill.)

Not: ‘Gods, what a dump. Still, I suppose it’s the only place I’ll find in this miserable town.’ (Will pay, but argue every penny.)

Not: ‘I’m a poor, hungry traveller and I need a place to rest my head.’ (Has money, but pretends he hasn’t.)

This man says: ‘I want good stew, strong beer and a quiet room.’ And stares through my father into the space behind him. There’s something in the way he talks, the way he uses just the right amount of words and no more, that feels menacing. I don’t know why. I’m ready for my father to shake his head and say: ‘Sorry – no rooms for tonight,’ but I guess three things stop him.

1. My mother starts to make cooing, welcoming noises. She’s fiddling with her good wig – the one with the beads woven into the braids that she stole from her mother’s hoard of grave goods, though she will never admit it.

2. Although anyone can see that this new guest is trouble, something about him makes it hard to say no.

3. (the clincher) My parents are in no position to refuse anyone, even if they think he’s a murderer. Even if they think he’s a mass murderer, for that matter.

You see, ever since the new king banned the old gods, and the plague started devastating the Two Kingdoms, business has more or less dried up. The tourists who used to come to the pyramids and leave offerings at the temples are staying away and the little shrine at the back of our inn is deserted. Worse than that, no one really knows if the old ways of doing things are legal and, as a result, our regular drinkers – tomb builders, wall painters, grave-goods makers, professional mourners and the like – are broke.

But the new guest doesn’t look like the kind of man to worry about things like that. After he’s eaten his stew and drunk his beer, he quietly says he’s going to the shrine and no one will disturb him while he’s there.

Not: ‘I don’t want to be disturbed.’ Not: ‘No one should disturb me.’ Just: ‘I will not be disturbed,’ like he knows that if he says it, it won’t happen.

We all sit around feeling slightly stunned. A few people wander in for a drink or a chat. I serve two travelling carpenters looking for work and a thickset man with a broken nose who wants to know if we’ve got a room, but he bets we’re too busy for the likes of him.

‘Only one guest and there he is,’ I say, nodding to the new man. He’s just left the shrine and is sitting on a bench the other side of the courtyard, leaning back against the wall, his eyes closed against the glare of the setting sun.

I guess the thickset man doesn’t like the look of him any more than the carpenters because they all drink up and leave.

I, on the other hand, have to serve him.

‘More beer, boy.’

Like I said, he uses exactly the right amount of words – no more, no less – and when he finally opens his eyes and finds me staring at him, he gives me a slow, mean, crocodile stare that zings straight into my brain. It isn’t nice at all, but the funny thing is that the meaner he looks, the more I want him to notice me, even though it frightens me half to death.

Next morning, first light of day, and my mother is screaming questions at me. I don’t answer because she’s managing to do that herself :

‘What have you been doing? I tell you what you’ve been doing – playing with mud. What have you done to earn your keep? Nothing. What have we done to deserve you? Nothing. We’ve worked our fingers to the bone for you and what do we get in return? Nothing, boy. Nothing.’

And however hard I try, however much I hope, nothing is exactly what I mean to them. They found me in the Great River, you see, when I was a baby and although I call my father ‘father’ and my mother ‘mother’, I don’t think they’ll ever think of me as their son, although things might have been different if they hadn’t had Imi, their daughter, a few years later. But it’s no use worrying, because suppose they’d had Imi before they found me? They’d have left me for the crocodiles, I reckon. After a bad day, sometimes I wish they had, but then, after a good one, I’m glad they didn’t, so I suppose you could say it all balances out.

‘Yes, mother,’ I say, but she doesn’t so much as glance at me. All the time she’s been yelling at me, she’s had one eye on our new guest, whom she’s started calling the Quiet Gentleman. He’s sitting on the bench in the sun and looking at her through narrowed eyes. I notice that she’s still wearing her best dress and her dead mother’s wig, and she’s painted her eyes with thick lines of kohl.

So I sweep the yard, I repair the gate, I fix a hole in the roof, I mend a bench, I fetch, I carry, and then when I’m knackered, my mother clips me on the side of the head, accuses me of slacking and orders me to make more plates and beakers.

So I do that too.

My pottery area is in the corner of the yard close to the kitchen and across from the Quiet Gentleman. No bit of him moves apart from his eyelids, which have closed again.

I begin to work. First, I lift the cloth off the special mud I use, feel its consistency, add a touch more water and knead it. Next, I put the mud in the middle of my potter’s wheel and give the wheel a spin. Then I begin to work it.

I’m good at this. In my hands, a blob of mud flattens and stretches to make a saucer, a plate or a cup. I lose myself in my work, as I always do, and suddenly there’s a row of plates and a tray of beakers drying in the sun. Twenty plates and forty beakers.

Each plate will last for one meal and the beakers for an evening. Back before the business fell off, I had to make twenty plates a day. Now the same number will last a month.

‘Boy,’ the Quiet Gentleman says, his eyes still closed. ‘Mud boy. What else can you do with that stuff ?’

He’s talking so quietly that I have to strain to hear him.

‘Make animals,’ I say, ‘as a matter of fact.’

‘Like this, as a matter of fact?’

He holds up a lion that I must have left out.

‘Yes,’ I answer.

‘Any others?’ he asks.

‘Falcons,’ I say. ‘And lionesses and dogs and cobras.’

‘And storks?’ he asked. ‘And a sphinx or two. Maybe a crocodile?’

‘Maybe,’ I answer, wondering what he’s after.

A pause. His eyes snap open. ‘You will show me,’ he says. ‘Mud boy.’ And then they shut again.

Mud boy. Not a bad name. I am a mud boy. In my humble opinion, but in no one else’s, this makes me special. Yes, indeed. For the People of the Two Kingdoms, the People of the Great River, the People of the Black Earth, us in other words, mud is life.

Why are we the greatest nation on earth? Mud.

What do our crops grow in? The Great River’s mud.

How do we build our houses? You guessed it: from bricks made of mud.

What’s wrong with the desert? Extreme lack of mud.

If you work in an inn, you soon see how like mud we all are. Give us too much to drink and we collapse like wet mud. Give us too little to drink and we crack like dry mud. In life, we start out firm and strong and smooth like newly mixed-up mud and then, in the end, we just crumble away like old mud.

But here’s an interesting thought. I know the new king has banned the old gods, but that doesn’t mean they’ve gone away, does it? No, they’re hiding and I know where.

You see, the old woman who used to sweep our yard told me that in the early days of the world, Ra and Isis and Osiris got bored strolling around the muddy young world on their own, so they decided to use the mud to make the man and the woman, the dog and the cat, the crocodile and the hippo, the horse and the cow, and every other animal you can think of. In other words, they must know a thing or two about mud, and that’s a clue.

Here’s another. As she swept our yard, the old woman used to mutter a rhyme as she worked.

The wheel turns, the wheel burns

The stork and the falcon fly.

The wheel turns, the wheel burns

The cobra and lioness cry.

The wheel turns, the wheel burns

The sphinx is buried in earth.

The wheel turns, the wheel burns

The queen of the sun dies of thirst.

The wheel turns, the wheel burns

The king in the cavern turns green.

The wheel turns, the wheel burns

The ram and the phoenix grow lean.

So hey for the wind and hey for the air

For they don’t care for the wheel,

And the black dog walks and the black dog stalks

And the ghosts of the dead city squeal.

And the wheel turns and the wheel burns

The ghouls in the graveyard sigh,

The wheel turns and the wheel burns

And the stork and falcon fly . . .

And so on. And so on. And so on. That old song is as much a part of my world as the feel of dust under my feet or the smell of woodsmoke in the evening, but I never really thought about it as I followed the old woman around the yard.

Then just last year, after the new king had declared the Aten to be the one true god and his soldiers had closed the temples, the old woman checked we were alone, put her broom down, grabbed me by the arm and marched me to the empty temple at the foot of the Great Pyramid. I was frightened of the enormous stone gateway, the dark doors and the huge statues of dead gods and dead kings, their faces and names hacked off on the orders of the new king.

On we walked, through empty courtyards and dusty, high-pillared halls. Courtyards and halls grew smaller, then darker, then even darker and smaller but the more scared I grew, the harder the old woman’s nails dug into my arm.

At last we paused at a low, square doorway. Inside I could hear scrabbling and snarling. The old woman pushed me to one side and threw stones through the dark doorway until a wild dog rushed out and past us. Then she led me in.

We waited in the dark stillness. Slowly my eyes adjusted and dim shapes began to emerge from the walls. Figures carved into stone. The king’s soldiers had been at work with their chisels here as well and it was hard to make the shapes out until the old woman took my hand, laid it on the stone and started to chant.

Through the stone, under the roughness of the chisel marks, the shapes of the falcon and the stork, the sphinx and the lioness pressed up against my fingers. Gods and goddesses.

‘The new king thinks he killed ’em, but he’s just driven ’em out of the stone,’ the old woman whispered in my ear. ‘They’re hiding now. Boy of water, boy of earth: you’ll find ’em, boy. You’ll bring ’em back. That’s your job.’

At the time what she said made no sense to me, but when you’re young nothing does.

All I know is that if I mix water and earth it makes mud, and in the mud I can find the stork, the falcon, the cobra, the lioness and all the rest of them. It’s not me that’s doing it; the shapes of the animals press up against my fingers from inside the mud. The gods are in the animals and the animals are in the mud and that is where they’re hiding.

No time to think about that now. Here comes my mother, swooping down on me, her head pecking the air like a chicken.

‘Time for you to stop daydreaming and fetch your little sister. Can’t you see how late it is? What are you thinking?’

She glances at the Quiet Gentleman out of the corner of her eye and simpers: ‘What is it with the young of today? They’re like chalk and cheese, him and my daughter. She’s as good as gold, but he’s –’ and her voice takes on an all too familiar rasp ‘– he’s like a moonstruck cow. A burden ever since we took him in. Go, child. And be back before sunset or there’ll be a clip round the ear waiting for you.’

She points up at the sun, which is where it always is at this time of day, and nips my earlobe between her finger and thumb. What I’m thinking is that I was told to fetch my sister from her aunt’s house tomorrow morning, but someone’s changed their mind and forgot to let me know.

‘But it’s too late,’ I protest. ‘I’ll never be able to get there and back in time.’

‘Then hurry! And don’t go taking any short cuts through you know where.’

‘But . . .’

‘GO!’

Imi, Imi, Imi. My little sister. My parents’ daughter, their real child, as they never stop reminding me. I’m big enough to admit that Imi’s great, even if she is my kid sister. But sometimes, sometimes, I think that if she wasn’t so perfect, I might seem a little less bad.

I scrape the mud off my potter’s wheel, prop it against the wall and leave.

The aunt doesn’t live far away, just the other side of the pyramids, but between our home and hers is you know where – a place that scares the loincloth off me.

It’s like a town, this place. It has streets. It has squares. It has houses, and the rich stay in the big ones and the poor stay in the small ones. But there’s one VERY BIG difference between this town and the one I live in: everyone in it is dead.

I know, I know. Dying is not really dying. This life is a preparation for the next one which is far, far better and you go there surrounded by all your favourite possessions and pets and food and drink and blah blah blah . . .

But here’s the catch. To keep your spirit alive, your relatives have to say your name and bring food to your tomb, and just to check, your spirit flies back from the underworld like a bird every evening. The houses of the dead sometimes even have a little perch above the front door for the soul to rest on.

But what happens to souls that have been forgotten, whose relatives don’t turn up with biscuits and milk? I’ll tell you. They become wandering ghouls. Not just hungry ghosts but hungry, angry ghosts.

Now, because I actually have eyes in my head and a tiny little bit of reasoning power, I know for A FACT that grieving relatives have pretty much given up visiting these houses of the dead. Result? An AWFUL LOT of whispering ghouls and MORE and MORE every day.

Here I am, walking past the wall that surrounds the City of the Dead. Now I’m passing its main gate and I look in – and wish I hadn’t. The houses of the dead are spilling darkness. It fills the streets and alleyways and in the darkness are the ghouls.

My friends, it’s a good place to avoid.

The aunt is rich. She has a two-roomed house with a bread oven out the back and a slave who does just about everything for her. My little sister Imi goes there to learn manners, weaving, hair-braiding – all a girl needs to hook a good husband.