Men of Bronze
Authors: Scott Oden
DEDICATION:
For my parents, Arthur and Polly Oden, who taught me that reading was the door to a thousand possibilities, and for Laura Hipps, my first librarian, who made sure I opened the right doors.
Published 2006 by Medallion Press, Inc.
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is a registered tradmark of Medallion Press, Inc.
If you purchased this book without a cover, you should be aware that this book is stolen property. It was reported as “unsold and destroyed” to the publisher, and neither the author nor the publisher has received any payment from this “stripped book.”
Copyright © 2004 by Scott Oden
Cover Illustration by Adam Mock
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission of the publisher, except where permitted by law.
Names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictionally. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Printed in the United States of America
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First Mass Market Edition
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS:
I owe a tremendous debt of gratitude to the men and women of Egyptology, Archaeology, and related disciplines, whose passionate pursuit of understanding has given generations of novelists a skeleton on which to hang the imperfect flesh of fiction. Any historical veracity to
Men of Bronze
exists because of their scholarship; any mistakes are my own.
A very special thank you to my incomparable agent, Rebecca Pratt, who became a tireless champion of the work despite the neuroses of her client. Equally important to me has been the support, advice, and encouragement of my Medallion Press family: Helen Rosburg, my publisher; Leslie Burbank, Medallion’s Vice President; and Connie Perry, C.O.O. and Author Liaison. Their patience made the process of shepherding a project from cluttered manuscript to finished book look easy. I cannot thank them enough.
Thank you, too, to the extraordinary artist, Adam Mock, who captured perfectly the book’s essence in his fabulous cover.
I place a terrible burden on those people around me, readers and writers, when I foist pages off on them and monopolize their time. I thank them for their graciousness and expertise: Darren Cox, Jason ‘Who’ Hatfield, Sarah Hocutt, Abe Johnson, Adam ‘Bean’ Johnson, Edna Leo, Tanja Lewis, Wayne Miller, Nancy Morris, Kristie Oldaker, Josh Olive, Kris Reisz, and Rob Reser.
Finally, thanks to James Byron Huggins, friend and author, who blazed a trail that’s been easy to see yet hard to follow.
Table of Contents
“There was another thing which helped to bring about the Egyptian expedition. One of the Greek mercenaries of Pharaoh, being dissatisfied for some reason or other, escaped from Egypt by sea with the object of getting an interview with Cambyses. As this mercenary was a person of consequence in the army and had very precise knowledge of the internal condition of Egypt, Pharaoh was anxious to stop him …”
—Herodotus,
The Histories
Year Forty-four of the reign of Khnemibre Ahmose
(526 BCE)
In the blue predawn twilight, a mist rose from the Nile’s surface, flowing up the reed-choked banks and into the ruined streets of Leontopolis. Remnants of monumental architecture floated like islands of stone on a calm morning sea. Streamers of moisture swirled around statues of long-dead pharaohs, flowed past stumps of columns broken off like rotted teeth, and coursed down sandstone steps worn paper-thin by the passage of years. As the sky above grew translucent, streaked with amber and gold, a funerary shroud settled over the City of Lions, a mantle that disguised the approach of armed men.
From the desert came two score and ten dark shapes clad Greek-fashion in leather cuirasses and studded kilts, Corinthian helmets perched atop their foreheads. Bowlshaped shields hung from their shoulders by gripcords of plaited hemp, freeing each man to wield a short, recurved bow. They moved in earnest, silent, a company of phantoms drifting through the fog.