harm against you and your sister Asti, Mistress of Magic. Rather shall
you be my friend and counsellor."

Then Pharaoh offered high rank and office to him, but Mermes would not
take them, answering that if he did, envy would be stirred up against
him, and in this way or that bring him to his death, since tall trees
are the first to fall. So in the end Pharaoh made Mermes Captain of the
Guard of Amen, and gave him land and houses enough to enable him to
live as a noble of good estate, but no more. Also he became a friend of
Pharaoh and one of his inner Council, to whose voice he always listened,
for Mermes was a true-hearted man.

Afterwards Mermes married Asti, but like Pharaoh for a long while he
remained childless, since he took no other wives. On the day of the
birth of the Princess Tua, the Morning Star of Amen, however, Asti bore
a son, a royal-looking child of great strength and beauty and very fair
in colour, as tradition said that the kings of his race had been before
him, but with black and shining eyes.

"See," said the midwife, "here is a head shaped to wear a crown."

Whereon Asti, his mother, forgetting her caution in her joy, or perhaps
inspired by the gods, for from her childhood she was a prophetess,
answered,

"Yes, and I think that this head and a crown will come close together,"
and she kissed him and named him Rames after her royal forefather, the
founder of their line.

As it chanced a spy overheard this saying and reported it to the