Themes

There are a number of saga themes that run through the Valley of the Nile. None of these are mutually exclusive, and in fact some complement each other well.

The continent of Africa - which includes the lands of Egypt, Nubia, and Ethiopia - is a battleground between two vast magical spirits, entities so great that it is difficult to conceive of them as singular beings. Instead they are constructs of ideas that are most commonly summarized as The Red and The Black. The Red, sometimes called the Hunger, is the destructive force of the desert. It seeks endlessly to consume the lands on the edges of the Great Desert that constitutes the heart of Africa. It is a force of chaos inimical to mankind by its very nature and that promotes sterility and destruction. The Red has servitors and allies among hostile creatures, spirits, faeries, and jinn. One of its chief servants was a giant called The Kom, but it was slain and seeks to reconstitute itself (see Chapter 7: Pakhoras). The Cult of Dedun (see Chapter 7) indirectly serves the Red by accumulating power through death and decay.

The Black, or the Hope, is best expressed as the spirit of the Nile. The lands described in this book are awash with fertility and abundance, located as they are within the stronghold of the Black. This power is beneficial to humankind, but only by accident - the Black is too vast to notice the humans that thrive under its auspices. The Black has its servants much like the Red, including the lector priests who served as magicians to the pharaohs. Wesir, the human who first discovered how to become a Daimon (see Chapter 4: The Akh), became a powerful servant of the Black and is more commonly known under his Greek name of Osiris.

More about the Red and the Black can be found in Between Sand and Sea, Chapter 2.

The vast number of tombs found in Egypt is a puzzle. Muslim scholars are keenly aware that Herodotus, writer of the Histories, did not agree with the age of the world as calculated from Scripture, and that his list of pharaohs is far longer than possible. They are also aware that if they look for physical evidence of the pharaohs Herodotus names, they can find it: their tombs are where he says they are, and their names appear on lists written by the ancients. This contradiction is meditated upon by Sufis and Christian mystics alike, who have come up with a variety of conclusions, most of which have little bearing on the daily life of people. It is, however, considered good for every person, whose path on the Hajj goes through Egypt, to see the monuments, as they are part of the shared accomplishment of humanity.

It is generally believed that God put all these monuments in Egypt so that people would look at them and become wiser. There are more tombs than historically possible because God has made the lands of the Nile as a storehouse of wonders. By seeking out these monuments and digging up their treasures they are not diminished in any way, for God will make sure there are enough for all to appreciate the wonders. This is another aspect of the superabundance and fertility that is characteristic of The Black.

Every place along the Nile has an undiscovered treasure. This is a belief so firmly held by Egyptians that there is a government department which licenses a guild of treasure hunters, and takes a cut of their finds (see the Guild of Seekers in Chapter 4). For decades, during droughts, the Egyptian government subsisted almost entirely on treasure taxes. Treasure is everywhere, and if there is a place without a treasure, a faerie is likely to put one

there and then help you find it, or help you suffer in failing to do so.

Egypt is frequently visited by Westerners keen to trade in gold, spices, ointments and lectuaries, precious stones, and silks. Merchants from various European nations have fondachi, or trading stations, in Alexandria. Papal injunctions on the export of wood and iron - both vital to the Saracen war efforts to Egypt are largely ignored in the pursuit of profit. However, few westerners have bothered to leave the Lower Nile, and many have penetrated no further south than Cairo. Most of Egypt is a mystery to them. The lands to the south of Egypt - the Nubian kingdoms of Nobatia, Makuria, and Alodia, and the Ethiopian Empire beyond that - are even less well-known in the west. The Great King of Makuria has forbidden all foreign trade, and this has rendered Ethiopia Orientalis (as Europeans call the land south of Egypt) a mystery.

The Red is a devourer of secrets, and many mysteries are buried under the sands. As an agent of oblivion, some of these mysteries no longer have answers; their explanations have been consumed and lost for all time. Other mysteries never had answers; they are simply marvels created by God. Player characters who are used to uncovering secrets might find this lack of explanation frustrating, but that is the nature of the land.

Of course, not all mysteries lack or even need explanations. Egypt in particular is seen as a storehouse of ancient knowledge just waiting to be uncovered, and some within the Order of Hermes wonder if the secrets of the first magicians can be found hidden in its tombs. Mystery and lost knowledge is great motivation for stories.

There is an endless quality to the Nile Valley, a feeling of perpetuity that can be disquieting to those not used to it. Every day is the same as the previous one; the weather is largely unvarying from day to day, and there is little change in day length with the season. Crops grow all year round, and there is no clear season of new life or harvest as there is in more temperate climes. The only true marker of the turning of the year is the annual flooding of the Nile, and this only affects Lower Egypt to any great extent.

Ancient religious practices focused on another aspect of endlessness: immortality. The elaborate ritual of death was geared toward the apotheosis of the ghosts of the favored dead, granting immortality as a Daimon. As a consequence of these rites, ghosts would become cleansed of the negative influences of the Red and become pow-

This book reflects 13th century Egyptian folklore, and deliberately includes some features that contradict modern knowledge of ancient Egypt.

Legible Scripts

The most learned of Copts can read hieroglyphics, because hieroglyphics are just another way of writing an ancient form of the Coptic language called Demotic. In the real world, this is partially true: some later hieroglyphic inscriptions are in a Coptic language. In period it was believed that the oldest and wisest Copts could freely translate the writings of the ancients. This makes some of them great healers, oracles, and magicians since they can read the spells encoded by ancient priests, while others can read the language but pursue the will of the Divine instead.

Key hieroglyphs denoting warnings and curses are taught at the Seekers' Guild (see Chapter 4: Tombs) by rote rather than as a language, and the gist of a text can be understood with an Intelligence + Profession: Seeker stress roll against an Ease Factor related to the age and complexity of the text (common curses are Ease Factor 6, typical texts are Ease Factor 9). A botch indicates a tragic misunderstanding of the content.

Tomb Traps

Hundreds of books were written for medieval, Egyptian treasure hunters. Books that described realistic tombs were not as popular as those that claimed to provide the secret methods of disarming intricate traps and pacifying guardian spirits. The more exaggerated a book's claims, the more comprehensive it was seen to be, and so the more popular it was. In the setting, tombs are filled with bizarre traps, strange creatures and logic puzzles, because people in the thirteenth century believed they were. It was a way of explaining why the omnipresent treasures had not been taken already.