Erimem - Return of the Queen by Claire Bartlett

Author:Claire Bartlett [Bartlett, Claire]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Thebes Publishing
Published: 2018-01-05T21:00:00+00:00

A hundred paces behind Erimem, Kerides and Adrea had arrived at the gates of the Palace. A few paces behind them were Karnak and two of his guards with Vizier Mentep shuffling along, struggling to keep up.

'There she is.' Kerides pointed ahead at the young woman, slowly picking her way through the fallen rubble that had once formed the most exquisite building in the world. She looked utterly desolate. 'She's come home.'

'To a pile of ruins?' Adrea said.

Mentep leaned against a wall to catch his breath. He ran his finger along the hieroglyphs. 'These weren't always ruins, child. Look at how ornate the carvings on the stones are.'

'This used to be Pharaoh's Palace,' Kerides explained to Adrea.

She looked sourly back at him. 'I know that. What I mean is, her home is in ruins. Imagine how she feels about that.'

'I hadn't thought of it like that,' Kerides admitted.

'Are you sure you're the smartest man in Alexandria?' Adrea asked. She tempered the sarcasm in her tone with the sweetest smile she could muster.

'Well, we're not in Alexandria, are we?' Kerides replied reasonably.

Adrea just scowled at him. 'It's possible to be too clever for your own good, you know.'

'I'm glad I'm a soldier,' Karnak rumbled. 'Nobody expects me to be intelligent.'

Mentep chuckled. 'They underestimate your brain at their peril.'

'Hush,' Karnak answered. 'I'm happier if enemies think I'm just a violent thug.' He looked up at the young woman approaching them from the palace. 'And talking of enemies...'

'Karnak, Karnak...' Mentep said reproachfully.

'This used to be the grandest, most beautiful place in all of Egypt,' Erimem said as she approached. She turned and looked back at the broken palace. 'I can barely see the shapes of the buildings now. It's just rubble, eaten by the sand.' She pointed away to the open space at the back of the palace. 'Can you believe that there was a garden just over there? Trees and thick grass. It smelled of jasmine. My father had an army of gardeners to maintain it exactly as he wanted.' She turned back to the opening in the wall. 'Where are the gates that could have held an army at bay? That was the palace wall. We fought battles from that wall. Now even that is gone in places. I saw parts of it reduced to nothing.'

Adrea caught the other woman's arm 'I'm sorry.'

Erimem seemed to accept the offer of comfort. 'I was always so eager to leave, to see the world. I have seen that and more.' She shook her head in bemusement. 'I had no idea that coming back would affect me so much.'

The young woman's suffering clearly had no impression on General Karnak. 'It's affected us, too,' he said. 'You've delayed us getting to the valley.'

Kerides' voice sounded alarmed. 'I think it's worse than that, general.'

'What?' Karnak demanded.

To the south, where the wall had taken the worst of the desert winds and had collapsed to little more than a long mound of dirt. A force of more than thirty soldiers in the uniform of the enemy Greek forces was emerging over the remains of the wall.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.