Beside the leader’s tent was a smaller one, though still larger than the resting places of the fighting men. Surely that must be where the Shrikes kept their booty, close enough so the chieftain would be aware if any of his men tried to steal something for themselves. Then that was where they needed to go. He extended a finger, tracing a path to it among the smaller tents.

‘Please,’ Kyky hissed. ‘Let us think again.’

‘You are free to return to your mother,’ Qen said in a voice as icy as deep river water. ‘Let her wipe away your baby tears.’

Hui rested a hand on his friend’s shoulder. ‘This is not the time to back out, Little Monkey’ he whispered. ‘Not when the most glorious of prizes is almost within our grasp.’

Kyky’s face was ashen in the moonlight, his stare fixed. Would he be able to overcome his terror to do what would be expected of him? Hui wasn’t sure.

He thought back to that grisly display of the Shrikes’ hanging victims, and once again he was choking on the stink of rot.

Hui could feel his heart thundering inside him and that queasy knot in his stomach. His plan had seemed infallible when they sat in the shade of a canopy on the roof of his father’s house in Lahun.

‘We are not fighters,’ Kyky blurted. ‘We are fools who laugh too much and fall over when we’re drunk and always say the wrong things to the girls.’

He was right, Hui thought. But this was their one chance to become something else.

Poor, oft-bullied Kyky. Hui’s heart ached for him. How could he put his friend through any more misery than what he had already experienced in his short life? As they sprawled in the dust, he glanced at Qen.

Qen eased himself onto his elbows, his face burning with defiance.

‘Mother told me that the gods have a plan for all men,’ his brother said, his words emphatic and hard. ‘They reveal it, not with a clap of thunder, but with the slowness of the wind uncovering a gold plate buried in the sand. It is easy to miss that message, and that is how the gods wish it, for they want men to pay attention to their presence at all times. We stand at a fork in the road. One way leads to our destiny. One way leads to a path where the gods will punish us for being blind. On that path we have nothing but toil and suffering until the day we die.’

Hui felt the hairs on his neck prickle. Yes, this was how he felt, though he would never have been able to express it so eloquently, nor to frame it in the wisdom of Qen’s birth-mother, Isetnofret.

Qen looked at both of them. ‘This is our moment.’

Hui nodded. ‘Our choice. A life of toil or a life of joy.’