Pharaoh by Jackie French

night to catch up to them. Anything rather than return home a failure. Step, swing, step, swing…
    ‘Narmer! Narmer!’
    For a moment he hardly heard the words. Then the mist cleared before his eyes and he saw Nitho in front of him. She was holding out a water bag. The porters stood beside her with his chair.
    ‘You did well,’ she said gently. ‘But that’s enough. Drink now, then ride. You can walk again tomorrow.’
    ‘I walked! I really walked!’
    ‘Of course you did.’ Her crooked smile was as wide as the River. ‘The crocodile couldn’t stop you, and neither will your leg. You can do anything you put your mind to, Narmer. Anything at all.’
    And for a moment, there on the chair, with his leg shaking uncontrollably and triumph in his heart, he believed her. And it felt better than all the cheers and flattery in Thinis.

CHAPTER 13
    A night, trying to sleep in a goatskin cloak, feeling the teeth of the rocks beneath. The stars wheeling above him in the clear desert sky, seeming so close he felt he could poke them with a stick. Oats for breakfast and half a day of jolting in the chair…
    They were out of the hills and into the real desert now.
    Narmer had never been more than half a day from the green safety of the River, with its water and its wildlife. Out here there was neither.
    The first thing he’d noticed was the light. It was pure white, out here away from the green River valley. The sun was so strong it seemed to bleach all the colour from the world. White light all around him, white light reflecting off quartz in the rocks, off sand.
    The next thing he noticed was the space. The desert filled the world from horizon to horizon, with no human thing to break the monotony.
    And then he noticed the noise.
    He’d thought the desert would be silent. It wasn’t. The sand rustled; in other stretches rocks creaked underfoot.The wind was always howling somewhere past the horizon, even when the air around them was still.
    But even in the Endless Desert, it seemed, there was grass, thin tufts sheltered by clumps of rocks, and the occasional seep of water, trickling into the sand or forming tiny puddles in the rock.
    By now Narmer was getting to know the porters too, the big men who carried the baggage, put up the tents and, hopefully, frightened off any passers-by who might be tempted to steal their goods—or their lives.
    Narmer had assumed that the Trader had hired his men on the journey. But it seemed that they were from Sumer too: Akkadians, the dark-skinned early inhabitants of the land between the rivers.
    Narmer had heard of Sumer, but it had never quite seemed real before, just another story from places far away. Now, listening to the porters’ strange language, Sumer became part of the new world he had to learn about.
    Portho the porter with the scar on his shoulder, was the oldest. He had worked as a boy for the Trader’s father, who, it seemed, had been a trader too. Portho could tie a piece of cord around his upper arm and flex his muscles so it snapped, and could whirl a stick in tinder to light a fire faster than anyone Narmer had ever seen.
    Nid was the tallest, a giant of a man. He had lost his eye in a scuffle with tribesmen to the east. He munched grass stems as he walked, and one of his teeth was worn down further than the rest from his chewing.
    Jod was the youngest, and smaller than the other two—though still half as tall again as any man in Thinis. But hehad a soft voice of authority that the other guards obeyed even when the wind blew sand into their faces, and humans and animals alike were cranky.
    The porters mostly chattered among themselves, in their own language, and the Trader seemed to enjoy silence. But most days Nitho talked to Narmer as she walked beside his chair. She was still teaching him Sumerian, but they spoke of other things as well.
    It was Nitho who helped him climb a dune to watch a desert hare whirling in the sand, circling and prancing as though it had decided