An itinerant French mercenary stumbles into the Valley of the Kings; driven by thirst and crazed by the eastern sun, he crawls through a crevice in an ancient wall...
The papyrus roll he found contained weird hieroglyphics, an owl, a bolted door, an eagle, an axe and, strangest of all, Xerefu and Akeru - the lions of Yesterday and Today. The scroll found its way to Paris. The year was 1798. The Terror was born. Behind the welter of blood that was revolution, older, darker, more sinister forces were at work. The Revolution was only a means to an end... only a symptom of a deadlier peril, a terror behind the Terror.
Ancient Egyptian power was stronger than the guillotine...
Release date:
September 30, 2014
Publisher:
Orion Publishing Group
Print pages:
320
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NORTH AFRICA in the late 18th century was not a happy place. Its politics and its territorial divisions were so complex, so riddled with intrigue that only a competent and professional historian specialising in the period would be able to do full justice to its rather unwholesome atmosphere. Into this cockpit of plot and counter-plot came the mercenary soldier. He made no attempt to understand the complexities of the political maelstrom in which he was involved as a pawn is involved in a game of chess.
Perhaps a highly intelligent human pawn might be capable of understanding chess, might be capable, with a little thought, of grasping the significance of his part in the game, but the North African human chess of the late 18th century was played out, not between two rivals with straight objectives, but between many smaller groups, whose objectives were particularly difficult to see, and who in their webs of intrigue and espionage, seemed to be as intent upon defeating their own objectives as they were upon defeating the objectives of their many opponents. So the human pawns. The mercenary soldiers, accepted their money and obeyed their orders, it was as simple as that. Simplicity of a kind can always be found in the midst of complexity by adopting an ostrich-like attitude.
Pierre Bonhomme was one of the men who had adopted such an attitude, one of a small group of itinerant French mercenaries, fighting first with this prince and now with that, finding that the pay was a little better and the grass a little greener on the other side of the mountain. He crossed mountain after mountain, taking service with princeling after princeling, fighting in deserts and on seacoasts; fighting down from the Nile and the Sudan. Fighting, always fighting, yet never with the enthusiasm of the patriot, seeing always the cynical side of any battle. For men like Pierre Bonhomme, war held no glory. There was no laurel of peace for which he strove—in fact peace would have meant nothing but unemployment, and if men like Bonhomme had any real interest in politics it was to see that the seething cauldrons of petty warfare were kept gently simmering. War ran in strange tides, it was as though a psychic ocean pulled the hearts and minds of men first up on to the crests of waves and then down into deep troughs, lined with blood.
The mercenary didn’t mind the minor skirmishes when a man could discharge a handful of musket balls at a shadowy, fleeing mark, when he could earn his money by sitting safely behind a rock while musket balls thudded into the sand around him, or ricocheted from the rock behind which he sat. The mercenary was not particularly keen on the violence of a pitched battle. He was of most use in a war of nerves. A war that is fought with mercenaries is very largely a financial war. If you can employ the bigger army you will dispirit your opponents into not wanting to fight you at all. You can therefore obtain your objectives without the necessity of using the armies which you have employed. This was the kind of life that suited Bonhomme and his type. He was not a particularly good man, neither was he a particularly bad man. He was just a man who was swept along on the tide of circumstances, and as that tide of circumstances led in a parallel direction to the tide of war, he found himself victim of both tides. Quite often he and the other mercenaries were able to ride the crests of the waves easily, then it looked as if the sea of events was going to suddenly drop them into a trough of blood, which a really big, pitched battle would have meant, but they were able to manoeuvre themselves out of too much danger or difficulty … sometimes by the simple expedient of taking their pay and departing! This expediency, however, was at best a partial one. Their escape was a doubtful and dubious thing and just as the shifting sands choked the ancient monuments in the millennia-old valleys of Egypt, so the shifting sands of circumstance choked the escape holes of the mercenary. As far as Bonhomme was concerned as he stood looking out over the wide, sandy plain, behind which tall, sandstone cliffs rose aggressively like the walls of an arena shutting him in and forcing him to do combat, this was one of those occasions when everything had gone wrong…. This was one of those occasions on which he would either have to earn the money—which had previously been something of a sinecure—it looked very much as though he would not be able to live to spend any more. The soldiers of his own petty princeling were well and truly outnumbered. They were not outnumbered by another column of mercenaries who would have been quite prepared to accept their surrender. They were outnumbered by a group of fanatical religious patriots of the kind who regarded glory in battle as an important adjunct to happiness in the hereafter. Glory in battle did not consist in giving quarter to your enemy, once he was on the run. Bonhomme and his colleagues found themselves up against an enemy who did not know the meaning of the word ‘surrender’, who did not surrender themselves and who were certainly not going to accept surrender from Bonhomme or his princeling.
The sun came out suddenly from behind red sandstone. It shone on a fissure in the cliffs as though it were a spotlight on the stage of history. Bonhomme was not particularly sensitive neither was he a man without any sensitivity at all. But even an ordinary character like Bonhomme was capable of seeing the dramatic effect, capable of making it somehow subjective as well as merely objective. It wasn’t just illumination, it was a Moment of Truth. It was like a fiery shaft from the Bow of Heaven itself. Almost as though that streak of sunlight, that implacable golden beam, had been some kind of Divine signal to the religious fanatics who opposed and outnumbered Bonhomme’s princeling’s forces, an enormous horde of black-cloaked wild-eyed North Africans began moving across the intervening landscape. It was as though the cliff itself had suddenly given birth to them in their millions. It was as though the cliff was a great termite colony, as though it was a gigantic ant-hill, it seemed that there was no limit to the number of men that were now swarming towards the precarious stronghold of the French mercenaries. The French mercenaries were not entirely on their own. They held a small, sandy outcropping, strewn with boulders—behind those boulders there were about fifty of them of pure Gallic blood. Bonhomme cast a swift glance across the plain, where, less than five hundred yards away, their opponents were swarming towards them. He lifted his musket and waited. To the right of the French group there was a group of crop-haired, square-jawed German mercenaries, beyond them about a dozen Swiss. To Bonhomme’s left there was an odd, rather mixed contingent of men whom he knew were mainly professional soldiers of fortune from England, Scotland and Ireland. Bonhomme looked at his own group again, then his eyes travelled to the other European contingents. On every face, English, Irish, Scots, German and Swiss, he saw the same look. These men were professionals; they were veterans: they had fought in a dozen strange lands for a hundred strange causes, and as soldiers of fortune they knew that death marched close beside them. They were not men who were afraid of death, but they found the thought no more welcome than any other soldier, or any other human being. It was not fear that Bonhomme could see written on the faces around him, neither was it resignation. It was a kind of ultimate knowledge. He and the rest of the princeling’s army were experiencing a Moment of Truth. They watched as their officers prepared to give the order to fire. A human sea of religious, fanatical devotees continued to sweep inexorably towards them…. Now it was not only Bonhomme who looked at his musket. Every man looked at his musket.
“Ready?” called an officer, the officer commanding Bonhomme’s squadron. “Then—fire!” There was a staccato rattle as the first line of black-cloaked fanatics fell. Even as he fired Bonhomme wondered what he was doing and why—what was the point of killing his opponent? Was there any point in it at all? Was there any purpose? He reloaded automatically and kept on thinking. A wind began to rise, just a breeze at first and then gradually stiffening. It grew stronger; sand in his eyes; sand in his mouth. It was as though the sun beating down on him, and the wind blowing. . .
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