“No, Karema, we only think that we should be if things were otherwise than they are.  But how can I help you, Karema?”

“Least of all by going away and leaving me alone,” she answered with the tears starting to her eyes.

Looking at her, I began to think that the best thing I could do would be to go away and at once, but as ever she read my thought, shook her head and laughed.

“No, no, I have put on my yoke and will carry it to the end.  Have I not two black children and a husband who is a hero, a wit and a mountebank in one, and a throne and more gold and crystal than I ever wish to see again even in a dream, and shall I not cling to these good things?  If you went I should only be a little more unhappy than before, that is all.  Not for my sake do I ask you to stay, but for your own.”

“How for my own, Karema?  I have done all that I can do here.  I have built the army afresh from cook-boys to generals.  Bes needs me no longer who has you, his children and his country, and I die of weariness.”

“You can stop to make use of that army you have built afresh, Shabaka.”

“Against whom?  There are none to fight.”

“Against the Great King of the East.  Listen.  My gift of vision has grown strong and clear of late.  Only to-day I have seen a meeting between Pharaoh, the holy Tanofir and the lady Amada.  They were all disturbed, I know not at what, and the end of it was that Amada wrote in a roll and gave the writing to messengers, who I think even now are speeding southward—­to you, Shabaka.  Nay, do not look doubtfully on me, it is true.”

“Then you did well to tell me, Karema, for within a moon of this day I should have been where perhaps no messengers would have found me.  Now I will wait and let it be your part to prepare the mind of Bes.  Do you think that he would give me an army to lead to Egypt, if there were need?”

She nodded and answered,

“He would do so for three reasons.  The first is because he loves you, the second because he too wearies of Ethiopia and this rich, fat life of peace, and the third, because I shall tell him that he must.”

“Then why trouble to speak of the other two?” I said laughing.

So I stayed on in the City of the Grasshopper, and busied myself with the questions of how to transport and feed a great army that must hold the field for six months or a year; also with the setting of hundreds of skilled men to the making of bows, arrows, swords and shields.  Nor did Bes say me no in these matters.  Indeed he helped them forward by issuing the orders as his own, wherein I saw the hand of Karema.

Three months went by and I began to think that Karema’s power had been at fault, or that her vision was one that came from her lips and not from her heart, to keep me in Ethiopia.  But again she read my mind and smiled.

“Not so, Shabaka,” she said.  “Those messengers have come to trouble and are detained by a petty tribe beyond our borders over some matter of a woman.  Ten days ago the frontier guards marched to set them free.”