The Rise of Amhotep

There weren't always dragons in the Valley. Or in the Nihayan Desert. I miss those days. Life was simple.

- Harut, King of Ra

QUADIRA

It’s days like this Quadira wishes she had three children and not four. Where is he? she thinks as she searches for her son through the camp, her right hand blocking the hot desert sun beaming down on her face as she passes camel after camel after camel. Her herd. The boy had one task. One! “Bring me my yehkeff,” she had told him nearly an hour ago. My scarf. She groans, annoyed that she has no protection from the sun, annoyed that she has to treat Shavo, an eight-year-old boy, like a dog. A dog would do better. Her twin sister has done better. Naila helps around with their daily errands just as much as her eldest daughter, Sahar. But Shavo? No. The boy spends all of his time bothering Aban, their large and strong shepherd dog that’s been more useful and resourceful than the boy ever has.

Convinced that Shavo’s with the canine, Quadira heads to where Aban rests underneath a red canopy, and finds Naila resting with him instead. “Naila, where is your brother?”

Naila, petting the dog, replies, “I saw him with Amira not too long ago.”

Quadira nods and heads to another canopy across camp where she finds Amira, her second eldest daughter fifteen summers old, resting with her arms behind her head with a bored expression on her face. Quadira crosses her arms over her chest and sighs. Two. It’s days like this I wish I had two children and not four. Naila understands the life of the Urateg. Sahar understands it. But Amira. She hates it. She hates living in the desert; she hates constantly having to travel and trade with the Kingdoms of Ra and Ahma year after year. Ra. Ahma. She’d rather be there and live the life of a princess. That’s why she insisted she have her own space, her own tent, rather than have to share one with the rest of her family. Where did she get this mentality? Not from my mother. Not from my grandmother. Where? Amira fixates on her hair and looks to a degree a princess of Ra or Ahma would.

“What?” Amira snaps when Quadira’s stood silent for too long.

Quadira chooses not to scold her daughter’s attitude this time. “It’s your brother. Naila said he was with you.”

“Well, look around, he’s not.”

Quadira scoffs. She can’t do it. She can’t hold her tongue and let her own daughter walk all over her. “Well, then where is he?”

Suddenly, Quadira hears her eldest daughter call out her name from afar. Turning around, she spots Sahar, wearing the blue cloak-dress of the Urateg, carrying a small boy drenched in blood. Shavo. Quadira gasps and rushes to meet them, soon patting her son’s bloody face as her heartbeat gets faster.

“He’s OK,” Sahar assures her. “He fainted. It’s not his blood.”

Quadira raises an eyebrow. “Then whose is it?”

Once Quadira has bathed and changed Shavo’s clothes, and once she’s set him down in her bed with Amira and Naila snuggled up next to him, she steps out of her tent and walks toward Sahar, who stands near their herd, away from prying ears. Sahar sighs before telling her what happened, saying that on her run back from collecting water, she found Shavo wandering the desert by himself. When Sahar called out for him, he ran, soon tripping and falling down a dune that led him to a massacre of a dozen of Ra’s warriors. “The Cultists slaughtered them. All of them.”

“No.” Quadira remembers her first encounter with a Cultist. On a hot summer night while the Palace of Ra celebrated the coronation of the new king, Quadira carried on with her usual routine: bartering and negotiating in the flea market held outside the palace walls. After she had traded a camel for new blankets for her children, she headed for her camp ten minutes away from the market, passing a tall and slim man who looked different from the rest. He wore a dark red cloak-dress, its color not a member of Ra, Ahma, or the Urateg. Strange, she had thought as she glimpsed past the earrings on his nose, lips, and eyebrows, and observed the tattoo of a serpent slithering around his neck and forehead. Once they passed each other, Quadira turned around, staring at the tattoo of a broad face of a serpent-like creature on the back of the man’s shaved head. Amhotep, Quadira widened her eyes as she clutched the yehkeff around her neck, remembering the stories her mother used to tell her as a child of the God of Chaos. “It’s ok,” her mom would tell her after a tale as Quadira hid underneath her covers. “It’s just a story.”

No. It’s not just a story. After her encounter with the Cultist, she expected acts of violence to spread across the Nihayat Desert, acts meant to summon Amhotep just like the stories foretold. The violence didn’t happen. Not for nearly ten summers. But it’s happening now, Quadira thinks as she remembers her son’s bloody face. “You’re sure,” she turns to face her eldest daughter, Sahar. “You’re sure it was them?”

“I’m sure. I saw one Cultist among the dead.”

Quadira remains silent, worried for her family. They could come after us. “Are they still there? The Cultists?”

“Maybe.”

Quadira groans. “What do you mean maybe?”

“Don’t get mad at me! Shavo fainted, I freaked out and carried him and ran. I didn’t have time to scope out the entire place, but I don’t know, maybe there were still a few Cultists there.”

“And maybe one of those Cultists saw you and followed you here.” Quadira crosses her arms over her chest, her breathing speeding up as she turns around to look at the tent where her children are. “We must leave and head to Sada’s clan, or Nuha’s, they’re the closest.”

“Mom, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to—”

Quadira cuts her off. “Go. Now. Take Aban and lead the herd. I’ll gather the children.”

They traverse the Nihayat Desert for the rest of the day, not stopping. Sahar leads the herd with Naila and Amira beside her, and Quadira watches the rear, riding a camel and holding on to Shavo, who still lies unconscious in her arms. She pictures the massacre Sahar saw, pictures dozens of dead bodies lying still on the sand, and she glances behind her, paranoid that Cultists are trailing close. She spots nothing. She should feel relieved, but instead, she shouts at Sahar and urges the herd to move faster.

When the sun is at its highest point in the sky, Shavo wakes up screaming and rambling about dead bodies everywhere and blood on his face. “It was just a nightmare,” Quadira assures him as she kisses the back of his scalp. “You’re OK.” He doesn’t believe her, so she tells him to look at his clothes and touch his face to inspect for blood. “See?” she says when Shavo finds no blood on him. “You’re fine.” He believes her and then asks where they’re going. “To visit Saha and Nuha,” she answers.

“Why?”

“For trade, what else?”

When the sun sets and the moon rules the sky, Amira, riding with her little sister, Naila, approaches Quadira and begs her to stop and rest. “No,” Quadira replies firmly. “We keep moving.”

“But it’s late and we’re tired and hungry,” Amira presses.

“No.”

Amira stares at Shavo. “What did he see?”

Quadira groans. “Go join Sahar at the front.”

“I’m not a fool, you know? Neither is Naila. If we don’t get it out of you, we’ll get it out of—”

“Amira!” Quadira hisses. “Enough!”

They set up camp not too long after. Amira, Naila, and Shavo sleep together under a canopy with Aban resting beside them. And Sahar and Quadira start a fire at a distance, both of them eating bread dipped in tomato sauce and sitting with their legs crossed. “Do you really expect trouble?” Sahar asks her as she stares at the ilkgai, a slender, iron-tipped hardwood spear light enough to throw, resting next to Quadira.

Quadira groans. Of course, I do. Why else would I bring it with me? “We shouldn’t be resting,” she complains to Sahar. “We should keep moving.”

“The children need to rest. You know this.”

Quadira remembers Amira asking her what Shavo saw before running to the front of the herd with Sahar. “I know Amira spoke with you. Did you say anything?”

“Of course not.” Sahar washes down her food with a sip from her canteen of water. “But don’t think they don’t know that we flee from danger.” Quadira sighs. She wishes Naila and Amira hadn’t seen their little brother covered in blood. “Hey.” Sahar grabs hold of Quadira’s hand and squeezes. “We’ll be OK.” Quadira gives a faint smile.

Sahar. It feels like it was just yesterday that Quadira was carrying her in her arms. Now, she’s old enough to leave her family should she choose to. She can start her own clan. Her own family. That is, if she finds a man suited for her. The women of the Urateg are strong and stubborn and therefore require men who are able to handle such temperaments. Like Rashid, Quadira’s first husband. She looks just like him, Quadira thinks as she stares at Sahar. Broad shoulders, square face, black hair, strong legs; the only trait that Sahar has of her mother is her light-hazel eyes, not her father’s dark and solemn ones. He gave me you and Amira.

Amira. I don’t understand the attraction she has for Ra and Ahma. They aren’t free. We are. Unlike Ra and Ahma, the women of the Urateg have power in who they choose to marry. We can do as we please, when we please. Even before marriage, they can choose to spend a night with a man so long as the man sneaks into the women’s tent before dark and leaves before sunrise. That’s what Rashid and I did. When Quadira was sixteen summers old, still living with her mother’s clan, she met Rashid at a trading event that was held outside Ahma’s walls. She liked him. And he liked her. And so, the following time they ran into each other, she invited him into her tent in the dead of the night.

Not long after that night, Quadira left her mother’s clan and started her own, soon marrying Rashid. She would have shared the rest of her life with him, but he died not too long after Amira was born. The cause was a fever from the ingestion of contaminated water. Too stubborn and prideful to seek treatment, Rashid brushed off the fever as something that would easily pass. It didn’t.

Quadira sighs as she thinks of the man who came after him. Naaman. She lay with him out of pity. One day, when she was on a run to fetch water, she found Naaman stranded in the middle of the desert on his own after a sandstorm, the weight of his dead camel on his left leg. Quadira helped him, took him to her home, and nurtured him back to health. He should have been gone once he was well. But Naaman insisted he wasn’t and asked her if he could stay a little longer. Quadira agreed. The man was in need of help. So, she helped. And during one of those nights he was recovering, she lay with him. I don’t know why. Maybe it was part pity. Maybe it was part lust. Though Naaman was not the man Rashid was, he wasn’t bad to look at. It was both. Pity. Lust. Once he had recovered, they parted ways, and that night ended up leaving Quadira with two children. Shavo. Naila. Both of them raised with the help of Sahar.

She’s helped me so much, Quadira thinks as she holds Sahar’s hand and squeezes back. “You’re right. We’ll be OK.”

Later that night when Sahar falls asleep by the campfire, Quadira prays to her ancestors. She prays to Asha, Duaa, and Ambra: mother, grandmother, and great-grandmother. Asha for strength, Duaa for wisdom, and Ambra for safety, to look after her clan, her family.

Finished, she grabs her spear and moves toward the outskirts of her camp, soon doing three rotations to make sure her family can sleep undisturbed. On her fourth walk around the camp, as she stands atop a dune that hides her herd and tent, she spots something off in the far distance. No, she thinks as she notices three distant riders approaching with the moon behind their backs.

Quickly, she slides down the dune, rushes to her herd, grabs the reins of the nearest camel, and mounts it, looking back at her family one last time before she urges the beast to a gallop. She ascends the dune and charges the three riders with her spear held above her head, yelling and calling to get their attention as they come into better view. Cultists.

She notices them unsheathe their curved swords as she grows closer and closer. And when she’s seconds away from clashing, she hurls her spear at a rider, the point impaling the neck of one man. Right after the throw, she pulls the reins to the right, urging the camel to break away from the charge in order to avoid impact. The two riders pass her, and Quadira glances behind her, hoping they turn around and chase her. They do. The riders make an abrupt turn and prompt their horses into a gallop. Quadira taps her camel, urging it to pick up its pace as she continues forward, leading them to where she wants to go: a patch of land in the desert abundant with quicksand. “Hyah! Hyah!” She looks behind her one more time, noticing the great distance between them. That’s far enough. Quadira clicks her tongue, urging her camel to slow down its pace as she enters the quicksand territory. Aware of where to step even if the night hides most of the dark patches of mud, Quadira maneuvers past the treacherous desert sand with ease, soon slowing down even more as she looks back for a moment.

The first Cultist, coming in for a charge, tumbles off his horse when it rears, and he soon collapses into quicksand. The second, slowing his pace and minding his surroundings, manages to make it halfway past the treacherous zone before he meets the same fate.

Quadira clicks her tongue, urging her camel toward the enemy horses. She grabs the reins of one, and then the other, slowly heading back the way she came. Once she’s outside the quicksand zone, she slaps the rear of each horse, forcing them to neigh and run off.

She thinks of her family. Her children. And she prompts her camel to a gallop. “Hyah! Hyah!” She worries if there are more Cultists. She pictures them laying a finger on her babies. And she huffs and slaps the rear of her camel, urging it to go faster. “Hyah! Hyah!”

Come on! Come on! She feels a gust of wind strike her face. And another. And another. Each growing stronger and faster than the last. Then, she notices many thunderclouds forming at a close distance. No. No, no, no. Not now. Keeping the same pace, she sees the sand bounce along the ground, the telltale sign of an incoming sandstorm. Squinting her eyes, she sees a wall of brown dust heading her way. Dammit! Instinctively, she dismounts her camel and orders it to sit as she lifts up her yehkeff, covering her mouth and nose. Clutching onto the saddle, she huddles close to the beast and uses it as a shield before the sandstorm strikes. When it does, the impact is stronger than any storm she’s encountered before, making her camel groan as the sand rushes past her at a speed as fast as a galloping Nihayan horse. Vision dark, moon nowhere in sight, Quadira doesn’t let go of the saddle as she soon closes her eyes and buries her face into her camel’s coat as the storm grows more violent. Go away. Just go away. She thinks of her family. She pictures Sahar fighting off more incoming Cultists. And she groans. I can’t wait. They need me.

Still using her camel as a shield, she orders it to stand and take slow steps as she clutches onto its reins, heading forward in a slightly diagonal line. Legs exposed, the storm knocks her off her feet four times in a minute, but Quadira manages to hang on to the reins as she keeps her breathing steady and her eyes closed, taking one step at a time. One. Two. One. Two.

Suddenly, her progress is ruined when she hears hissing whispers around her. The sound makes her camel anxious, and the beast groans and picks up its pace, breaking its course. “No!” Quadira shouts. “Calm!” Even she can barely hear herself, her words drowned out by the storm and the mysterious whispers that grow louder and louder, the language spoken in a dialect she’s never heard before.

“Abar!” The whispers turn into the roar of a man who sounds more beast than human, scaring her camel and forcing it into a gallop as he drags her through the sand like a rag doll. Groaning, Quadira hangs on until her camel comes to an abrupt stop at a place somehow not ravaged by the sand.

The eye of the storm.

On her back, Quadira lets go of the reins and opens her eyes, gasping at the sight before her: the entrance of a temple made of red limestone. To her left and right stand five statues five times the size of her of Amhotep slithering around a man. The men wear no shirt, only golden trousers. Pieces of a striped headcloth rest on their crowns and the back of their heads and the napes of their neck. That striped cloth has two large flaps that hang down behind their ears and in front of their shoulders. Each statue holds a scepter by its side. Past the statues and before the storm lays a hill that gives a brief view of what lies beyond. A black ocean.

Impossible, Quadira thinks as she looks back at each statue, remembering the stories told to her by her mother. Stories on the history of the Nihayat Desert. “What do you mean we aren’t the oldest?” Quadira asked her mother one night around a campfire when she was ten. “We have to be, right?”

Her mother had smiled at her. “No. We’re not. The desert has been roamed long before the Urateg ever set foot in it.”

“By who?”

“Their name has been long forgotten. But, you want to know something else?”

“What? What?”

“The desert hasn’t always been a dry desert. It once had an ocean.”

Quadira shook her head. “No.”

“Yes. And by the ocean once rested a temple far grander than anything Ra or Ahma ever created.”

“Where is it?”

“Gone. Like their people.”

Quadira frowned.

“But…”

“But?”

“There’s a legend that states that the temple presents itself at a time when the desert mourns.”

“No way,” Quadira said, amazed. “What did this temple worship?”

“Do you really want to know?”

“Yes!”

“Chaos.”

I want no part of it, Quadira thinks as she steps away from the temple and heads to her camel. None. She reaches her camel, who bellows and groans and backs away from her. “It’s OK, you’re alright.” She approaches the beast slowly, her arms raised above her head. Once she’s close enough to pet it, she caresses its neck until the camel’s breathing slows down. When the beast is calm, she grabs the reins and urges it toward the sandstorm.

But when she takes five steps forward, the limestone ground beneath her suddenly crumbles and swallows her and her camel whole and she plummets two stories down, crashing into dark and murky water.

Submerged in a great depth, the back of her head strikes a hard object that disorients her senses. She closes her eyes for a moment. And when she opens them, she panics and flails her arms and legs all over the place, trying to reach the surface. She reaches it for a second, takes in a desperate breath of air, and sinks back down, drowning. No! No! No! A tightness forms in her chest, and she soon hears a loud ringing in her ears that grows louder and louder. She searches for her camel, hoping to hold onto it to float… but her companion has vanished somehow. No! That ringing in her ears intensifies and soon her vision grows white. No! No! She thinks of Sahar. Of her family. And she flails her arms and legs even faster until she can barely even feel that. No.

Suddenly, she hears something that sounds like a distant well being drained. Then, she swears she feels the water begin to lower more and more until she finds herself lying on a cold limestone floor. Rolling over to her belly, she coughs and coughs, an excess amount of water escaping her mouth. Once she catches her breath, she touches the back of her head and feels a sharp sting. Inspecting her hand, she notices blood. Lots of blood. No. My family. They need me.

Dazed and weak, it takes her five tries to get up. When she does, she limps over to a part of the limestone ground at the end of the trap room that opened up and drained all the water. Standing above it, she sees that it leads to a dark staircase. No other way to go, she glimpses around the dim room, wondering where her camel could have vanished to. I hope you’re well. Sighing, she descends the staircase, soon following a one-way passage with no twists or turns. When the tunnel narrows, she squeezes between two walls. When she has no visibility to guide her, she uses her hands to feel her way through and then crawls for a long time, fighting back the pain from the gash on the back of her head.

There, she thinks once she sees a light at the end of the tunnel. Eager to get out of this place and back to her family, she picks up her pace, reaches the end, squeezes past a tight crevice, and steps into a crystalline cave with crystals twice the size of a man that glow violet and pink. At a distance, she hears the stream of a gentle waterfall and…

The hissing whispers she heard in the sandstorm.

No. I am not going towards it. She turns around, determined to find another way out. But the crevice she crawled through is no longer there. She scoffs, wishing that her gods would give her a break. Help me. Please.

She follows the sound, then hides behind a boulder, looking down at a man standing in the shallow end of a turquoise pool. Shirtless and with a shaved head, with skin darker than hers, the man has a tattoo of Amhotep on the back of his head. The serpent-like god slithers farther down than his neck. It passes his chest, waist, and Quadira’s sure it stretches all the way down to his ankle. Knife held near his chest, he cuts his skin open and speaks in an ancient dialect Quadira doesn’t understand. “Abar!” he rages as he pounds on his bloody chest. “Abar!” He pounds his chest again, harder, and then lifts his head to the ceiling of the cave and screams, repeating these words: “Riz! Riz! Riz, Amhotep, Riz!”

Amhotep. He’s summoning Ahmotep! Quadira moves away from the boulder, hoping to take a step away from the ritual.

She can’t.

On the last “Riz!” the turquoise pool flashes a bright white light before turning black. It flashes white and then black again. White. A breeze forms. Black. The breeze turns into a strong gust that tries pulling Quadira towards the pool.

White. Hands held over her face, Quadira fights the wind, heading for a tunnel.

Black. The air grows stronger and Quadira remains where she is, neither moving forward nor backward.

White. Shadows suddenly appear around her. Shadows that take the form of the statues Quadira saw outside the temple: men enveloped by Amhotep. Quadira stares at the floor, ignoring them as she pictures her son and daughters. My children. I have to get to my children.

Black. The shadows whisper Amhotep’s name.

And Quadira hears a loud boom, like the roar of thunder that brightens the room with a thousand different colors. Colors from an inferno that has instantaneously circled Quadira. Wind gone, shadows vanquished, Quadira remains still as the flame twirls faster and faster, its colors shifting from red, blue, green, amber, violet, and more. All at once. From top to bottom.

Boom! Another roar like thunder prompts the flame to circle her faster and Quadira soon swears she sees images in the flame. Images of every member of her family. Every woman. Every leader. She sees the first of her ancestry. Then her grandmother. Mother. Her. And Sahar.

Sahar. Quadira’s heart skips a beat. How? She squints her eyes together. How is this possible? She raises an arm.

Sahar does the same. “Come,” her daughter urges her. “I have something to show you.”

Quadira shakes her head in disbelief. “What?”

Sahar moves aside and waves her hand, conjuring a rush of images to appear in the flame, one right after the other. Images of her past that shows her cuddling with her mother as a little girl. And images of a future she’s never lived that shows her herding camels with her first husband, Rashid. “The end,” Sahar answers as she holds her hand out, waiting for Quadira to take it. “And the beginning.”

Rashid. Quadira’s gaze remains fixated on a life she could have had. A life she’s yearned for in the dead of night.

She smiles and accepts her daughter’s hand.