Digging into this historical adventure set in the eighth century BC, I felt more like a child reader than usual, because the story features the Kushites, an ancient African nation that I had never heard of. Ancient Egyptians have, over the centuries, scored all the attention, leaving the Kushites as also-rans. Henry T. Aubin, who has also written a scholarly adult book on this nation, managed to convince me, by the end of chapter one, that this gap in my education was a great shame. He also managed to convince me that it was worth making the initial effort to sort out Nimlot, Piankhy, Tefnakht, and all the other unfamiliar names, flipping back and forth to the cast list so helpfully provided.

Writing historical fiction is always a juggling act between the familiar and the exotic. We need to feel at home, to recognize familiar feelings and dilemmas, but we also need to feel like a traveller, marvelling at the unfamiliar, intrigued and stretched by situations and ideas not our own. Aubin maintains this tension with nary a fumble.

The adventure concerns a military action taken by Piankhy, the king of Kush and South Egypt, against Tefnakht, the ruler of an alliance of North Egypt’s leaders who seek to conquer all of Egypt. Our companion on this campaign is 14-year-old Nebi, a servant who manages to escape after his Kushite master is slaughtered by the traitor Nimlot, a thoroughgoing
sadistic bad guy. We follow Nebi to Thebes as he delivers an essential message to Princess Amonirdis, to Napata to report to the king, and north by land and river, with the troops, to Memphis, the scene of battle. All along the way we are surprised with twists and turns in the plot, with identities concealed and revealed, 11th-hour reprieves, an attempted poisoning, a cobra attack, and unrelenting political intrigue.

Aubin invites us into Nebi’s world with an accumulation of fully realized sensual details – honey pastries, the palace of Princess Amonirdis with its seven-storey lotus-decorated columns and smell of incense, the healing of battle wounds with slabs of freshly butchered horsemeat, the sweet smell of alfalfa, and the reek of pre-battle fear.

At the same time that Aubin is inviting us in, he creates a sense of gravitas in his use of dignified, leisurely language, such as “the weight of the commission rendered him speechless” and “The Kushite sprang to his feet with agility uncommon for someone of his girth.” It is both familiar and not.

As a war story, this is by no means a bash-the-bad-guy narrative. Aubin creates situations of considerable moral ambiguity in which individual, family, and group loyalty are often in conflict, forcing Nebi to examine the urge toward personal revenge, and suggesting that a policy of fairness and decency toward conquered people, a policy that Nebi admires, might, after all, simply be a matter of political expediency.

Aubin excels at his portrayal of two elements of war – espionage and ingenuity. He creates a tense climate of secrets, codes, spies, double-crossing, and the huge challenge of information gathering and dissemination. This is war for chess players. Aubin is also highly inventive with his machines of war. The Kushites manage to get over the high walls of the enemy stronghold by building platforms atop the tall masts of their ships. Nebi’s two finest moments both involve inventing a device. In the second chapter he manages to escape almost certain death using the thongs from his sandals to trip Nimlot’s horse. In the final conflict scene in Memphis, he spooks the enemy’s horses using an abandoned stretcher, and turns the tide of the battle. This is war for budding engineers.

With the Kushites Aubin has obviously found largely uncharted territory for his considerable skills as a storyteller. The press release tells of his desire to find stories of African heroes for his adopted son, and race plays an understated but definite role in the story. The colours of the narrative – blue tent, bronze medallion, yellow desert – include the colours of the people: “tan Egyptians, black Kushites, pale traders from the Middle East.” Nebi is biracial and multilingual. These two qualities are closely related to his effectiveness as a scribe, messenger, and, finally, soldier.

The implications about the nature of heroism are all the more effective for being subtle. If you are both us and them, you are forced to find your own moral compass. And so this remote kingdom starts to feel oddly familiar.