The rowers fell on their backs, cursing and struggling to keep their oars from slipping away into the river. I was thrown flat along the prow. The reeds scratched my face. From stem to stern, cages fell over and lay at crazy angles in the bottom of the boat, the animals inside shrieking and screaming. Ibrim slid, yelling, off the deckhouse roof and landed on the rush baskets full of bird seed. The small monkeys clung to one another, round-eyed, baring their sharp little teeth. The falcons’ perches snapped and hung over the side like broken branches. The reed bundles which made up the Palm of Thoth crackled and crumpled upwards as she settled harder and harder aground.
On the distant riverbank, a single mould-green crocodile raised its grisly head and stared. Its angular legs took a few sidling steps and it sank from sight under water until only its upper jaw showed. Splash. Splash. There were others coming.
My father stumbled along the boat, stepping over the fallen rowers. I was expecting him to shout and rage at me, but he was too busy soothing and shushing the animals. The rowers were glaring at me, shouting prayers and reciting the crocodile spell. But father went on righting cages, apologising to the animals, hardly noticing as they bit the fingers gripping their cages. The cheetah was a ball of golden muscle and fur, clawing at her cage, chewing at the slats, spitting and arching her back into a shape as unnatural as the broken boat’s. The ibises, in a cage by my feet, were beating themselves ragged against their bars, against each other, handfuls of slender feathers bursting out around my ankles.
‘Let them go, fool! Let them go!’
I realised Father was speaking to me, telling me to unlatch the cage and loose the beautiful birds he had so painstakingly trapped, before they broke all their wings or drowned along with the boat. I did it.
The ibises burst out around me, battering my face with their scarlet wings, so that my world turned red. They fountained into the sky, piping shrilly. But the tethered falcons were past help. They were being pulled under the water as the boat settled lower. Their struggles brought the crocodiles in, slowly, glidingly. They were in no hurry. Their feast would not escape them; this basket of assorted meats that was gradually breaking up in front of their noses.
Father opened cages with trembling, hasty hands. ‘Hold on, Ibrim!’ he told my brother. ‘Get up higher, boy! Good boy!’ But he went to help the animals first. The reeds that made up the deepest part of the boat were sodden now, awash with river water. One by one, he opened the cages. His baboons lumbered out to sit on the sides of the boat, feet tucked up, backs hunched, long arms dangling, like miserable old men.
The crew would not let father loose the cheetah. They threatened to knock him overboard if he so much as went near the frenzied beast. Bad enough to drown, without being savaged, mid-river, by a wild cat. The boat shivered and hissed, and began to break apart.
Suddenly, a shadow flowed over us all like spilt ink, and a ship twice our size glided alongside. Had the Ship of Heaven indeed been watching us from the sky and swooped down to help us? I truly thought it had.
The baboons leaped in huge elegant bounds over our heads and into the rescue ship. The crew scrambled clumsily to safety over its smooth, painted sides. I edged my way round to where Ibrim was clinging to the steering paddle, and with my arm around his shoulders waited for help. ‘Don’t cry,’ I said. ‘Don’t cry.’ Only afterwards did I realise it was I, not he, who was crying.
Two oars, painted blue with pure white blades, reached out to us from the other vessel. I wrapped Ibrim’s arms tight around one and, hugging the other myself, was lifted out of the Palm of Thoth by a huge, black-skinned, Nubian steersman. As I crossed the yawning gap, I looked down and saw a crocodile open the yellow shutter of an eye, startled to be robbed of his meal.
My father, too, was offered an oar’s end to lift him clear. But he refused to be rescued until he had opened every cage, loosed every animal. At last, with his feet splashing through black, silty water, sinking deep into the fabric of the boat, he struggled aft towards the cheetah. But in her panic and fury, she hurled herself at him, overturning the cage which rolled through a gaping split in the boat and sank out of sight into the river. Crocodiles moved in under the hulk. Only then did my father allow himself to be lifted to safety with the blue-and-white oars.
The top-spar of the beautiful rescue ship was now alive with baboons swinging by their hands and feet, grimacing at the people below. I saw several little girls huddled together in the prow, pointing up at them and laughing uncertainly. The ship’s rowers were now easing the barge upstream, away from the sandbar, leaving the Palm of Thoth foundering in midstream like a bale of straw pulled apart by rats.
Rather than watch ours sink, I looked around at the boat that had come to our rescue. The deckhouse was more sublime than most houses I had ever seen on shore, with blue-and-white chequered walls and a gold-leaf balustrade. At the door stood a man and woman, hand in hand. They could have been westerners – spirits from the Land of the West where the fortunate go when they die. Their clothes were of gauzy white linen, and they wore jet-back wigs and amulets of gold and silver.
But they were not spirits, of course. They were gods. For we were aboard The Splendour of Aten. We had been redeemed from drowning by its captain, the god-king himself. ‘Lie down on your face and pray,’ I whispered to Ibrim. ‘We are in the presence of the pharaoh!’