Thebes was a month up the river, and Cleopatra spent most of it arguing with him.
"No," she said, on the deck of the royal barge, the first evening out of Memphis, with the river going by the colour of strong tea and the flood spreading out over the fields on both banks like a lake. "I said let them. I didn't say help them. There's a difference."
"Amenhotep says..."
"Amenhotep is a priest of Ptah and twenty-six years old and would put a bronze mask on a goat if it made the priests of Amun at Karnak lose face." She was sitting under the awning with her feet up and a roll of the Theban temple accounts on her knees, which she'd been reading with a reed pen in her teeth. She took it out. "I'm the god in Egypt, John. Me. Isis on earth, daughter of Ra, the whole tiresome list. It's the only thing my family has had here for three hundred years that the Egyptians didn't have to be paid to believe. If I stand up at Opet in front of half a million people with a second god beside me, which of us do they kneel to?"
"Both."
"In Alexandria, maybe. Not here." She pointed upriver with the pen. "Here, the priests of Amun have been making and unmaking pharaohs for two thousand years. They'll take one look at you and see a way to split me in half."
He knew she was right. He'd known it since Carthage, since the posters with his mask on them, since the people in Rhakotis started touching the walls.
He also knew, because Amenhotep had told him the night before at Memphis in the long dark hall of Ptah, that the flood this year was the highest in six years, and that the high flood always brought the sickness. The water in the canals went foul. Children drank it. In the villages around Thebes, Amenhotep said, they were already burying them in rows.
"I'm not asking you to make me a god," he said. "I'm asking you to let me stand where people can see me. If they'll listen to the Bronze Face, there's a thing I want to tell them."
"What thing?"
"How to stop their children dying."
She looked at him for a long time with the pen in her hand.
"You can't heal," she said. "You told me. On the roof. Not flesh, you said. Only things that were never alive."
"Yes."
"Then what are you going to tell them?"
"Salt," said John. "And honey. And boiled water."
* * *
Opet was the god's holiday. Every year in the second month of the flood the priests carried Amun out of his house at Karnak in a gilded boat on their shoulders, and walked him two miles along an avenue of sphinxes to the temple at Luxor, to visit his wife. The whole of Upper Egypt came to watch. They lined the avenue twenty deep and stood on the roofs of the mud villages and climbed the palm trees, and threw flowers, and wept, and sold beer.
John had never seen so many people in one place. Not on the Somme. Not anywhere.
He walked behind the god's boat with Cleopatra, in the armour, with the mask on. She'd decided that much on the last night on the river, without explaining why. She wore the double crown and the cobra and so much gold she moved like a woman under water, and he walked one pace behind her left shoulder, where a bodyguard walks, and the crowd saw them.
He felt it before he heard it. A change in the noise along the avenue, ahead of them and behind, like wind going through a field of wheat. Faces turning. Then the sound came: not a cheer, a word, the same word, passed down the avenue from mouth to mouth in a long rolling wave.
Montu. Montu. Montu.
The war god. Falcon-headed, bronze-faced. Lord of Thebes, before Amun.
Cleopatra didn't turn her head. Under the gold her back was very straight.
"Well," she said, without moving her lips. "Now you've done it."
* * *
The woman came at the Luxor gate.
The god's boat had gone in, on the priests' shoulders, through the great doorway between the two obelisks. The procession had stopped outside for the queen to make the offerings, and the crowd had pressed up against the line of soldiers along the avenue, and somewhere in it a woman began to scream.
She broke through between two of Achillas's men before they could stop her. A farmer's wife in a brown dress, barefoot, with a child in her arms, a boy of four or five, limp, his head hanging over her elbow. She ran straight at John and threw herself down in the dust in front of him and held the boy up.
"Lord," she said. "Montu. Lord. Please."
The child was grey. John knew that grey. He'd seen it in the casualty clearing stations in 1916, in men who'd lain three days in a shell hole drinking from puddles. Eyes sunk in. Lips cracked. The skin on the back of the boy's hand, when John took it, stayed up in a ridge when he pinched it.
Cholera, he thought. Or something like it. He's dried out. He'll die tonight.
He looked up. The crowd had gone quiet all along the avenue. A thousand faces. Ten thousand. On the temple steps above him, the priests of Amun stood in their white linen and leopard skins, and in the middle of them the high priest of Karnak, an old man with a shaved head and a face like a dried date, was watching him with no expression at all.
"Lord of Thebes," said the old man, loud, in Egyptian, so that the crowd could hear. "The people say you are a god. A god heals. Here is a child."
Cleopatra had turned. Under the crown her face was white.
John took off the mask.
The crowd made a sound, a gasp, as if he'd taken off his head. He didn't care. He needed his eyes. He took the boy out of his mother's arms, and he was light, much too light, and hot, and John knelt in the dust with him at the foot of the temple of Luxor in front of the whole of Upper Egypt and said, in his bad Egyptian, to the nearest soldier, "Water. From a jar. Boiled. Now."
* * *
It took two days.
They carried the boy into a side chapel of the temple, out of the sun, and John sat with him on the floor. He made it himself, because he didn't trust anyone else to: a jar of water boiled over a brazier and let cool, a pinch of salt, eight pinches of honey, measured in his palm the way the RAMC orderly at Corbie had measured sugar into his tin mug when he'd had dysentery in the summer of 1916. Little and often, son. Little and often. A spoon at a time. Every few minutes, day and night. The boy brought most of the first ones up. John kept going.
He didn't use the Hold. There was nothing to slow down. He didn't use the Branches either, after the first hour. He looked once, with his hand on the boy's chest, and the Branches showed him a small grave by a canal in most of them, and a boy running in a field in a few, and he stopped looking, because it didn't help.
The mother sat in the corner and didn't speak. Cleopatra came twice and stood in the doorway and went away. Amenhotep came and sat by John for the whole of the first night, without being asked, and fetched water, and boiled it, and learned the measures, and wrote them down.
On the second morning the boy opened his eyes and asked for his mother.
On the second evening he sat up and drank from the cup himself and complained that it tasted horrible.
* * *
When John came out of the chapel at sunset with the boy on his hip, there were people as far as he could see.
They filled the forecourt of the temple and the avenue of sphinxes and the fields beyond it, standing in the flood shallows to their knees, thousands and thousands, silent. They'd been there all day, the soldiers told him. Some of them since yesterday. Waiting.
He'd taken off the armour to sit with the boy. He came out in a linen tunic with his white streak and four days of beard and the boy on his hip, and gave the boy to his mother, and the mother went down on her face in the dust, and so did everyone in the forecourt, all at once, a sound like rain.
"Get up," said John, in Egyptian. "Please. Get up. Listen to me."
They didn't get up.
So he said it to them on their faces. He'd practised the words with Amenhotep all night. Boil the water. Let it cool. A pinch of salt, eight of honey, in a jar. Give it to the sick one, a spoon at a time, all day and all night, even when they bring it up. This is not magic. It's salt and honey. Your children are dying because the sickness takes the water out of them. Put the water back.
Amenhotep stood beside him and said it again, louder, in good Egyptian. Then a priest of Ptah beside Amenhotep said it again, louder. And then a man somewhere at the back of the forecourt stood up and shouted it, word for word, to the people behind him.
And it went out along the avenue and into the fields the way his name had gone the day before. A pinch of salt. Eight of honey. Boil the water. Montu says. Montu says.
He wanted to shout after it that he wasn't Montu. That it was the RAMC and the summer of 1916 and a tired orderly at Corbie. He opened his mouth.
He shut it again.
* * *
Cleopatra was on the roof of the temple when he went up, in the dark, with her crown off and her hair down and her arms round her knees, looking at the fields full of people and lamps.
"I had Amenhotep send riders," she said, without turning round. "Up and down the river. Every village from here to the first cataract. Salt and honey and boiled water, in the name of the queen and the Bronze Face." She was quiet for a moment. "I've told the steward to sell the honey from the royal estates at a quarter of the price. They'll hate me in the treasury."
"Thank you."
"Don't." She turned and looked at him in the lamplight. "You wanted to tell them it was salt. I saw your face. You were going to tell them it wasn't a miracle."
"It wasn't."
"I know. And if you'd said that, John, half of them would have gone home and not bothered. Because it was only salt. Because their grandmothers never did it. Because a foreigner said so." She looked out at the lamps. "And they'll do it now. Every one of them, in every village. Because a god told them. How many children is that?"
He didn't answer.
"I've been thinking about it for two days," said Cleopatra. "In that doorway. Watching you spoon honey into a farmer's boy at the foot of Amun's temple, with the high priest of Karnak waiting for him to die so he could tell all Egypt that my god was a fraud." She was quiet for a long moment. "I was wrong. On the barge. I thought the danger was that they'd split me in half. It isn't. The danger is that they'll believe in you, and I'll be standing next to you pretending I don't. That's how you split a queen." She put out her hand, palm up, and he took it. "So I won't pretend. You'll be Montu, and I'll be Isis, and we'll stand together in front of them, and the priests of Amun can choke on it." Her fingers tightened. "And you'll never be able to take that mask off in public again. You understand that? Never. Not until you die. Gods don't have faces."
He looked down at the fields. At the lamps. At somewhere out there in the dark, a farmer's wife in a brown dress carrying her son home.
"Yes," he said.
"Good." She let go of his hand and stood up and shook out her skirt. "Then on the way back down the river, Montu, we stop at Giza. Amenhotep has a thing he's been dying to show you since Memphis. A door, he says. In the Sphinx. The priests of Ptah have kept it secret for a thousand years, and he says that behind it there's a room that was built for you."