Year of the Hyenas

by Brad Geagley

  Escaping to the mayor’s home was the only way to avoid Merytra’s tongue on such days. Lately he had been leaving earlier and earlier. In the courtyard he looked unseeing upon the ground, wanting to weep from the unhappiness of his life.

  “Ah me,” he sighed.

  And now this trouble with his brother had compounded his woes. Semerket had always been a trial, his pitiless black eyes forever belittling Nenry’s desires for advancement and position. Where the older Nenry followed every stricture and rule in Egyptian society, the younger Semerket had been wild in his ways, intemperate in his habits. Early in his youth people had taken to calling him a follower of Set. He was never easy with words, and the few things Semerket found to say were mostly unpleasant—but always truthful. Truth was, in fact, Semerket’s chief mode of warfare against others.

  Then, almost miraculously, Semerket had met and married Lady Naia. He was besotted by her, and under her influence Semerket had become almost pleasant in his society. The few words he spoke lost most of their rough sting. Naia had even prevailed on him to accept a post in the courts’ administration, for like Nenry he knew how to write.

  Semerket had become the clerk of Investigations and Secrets, a position in which he was used to ferret out the truth in confusing criminal cases. He was even praised by the judges for whom he toiled, though grudgingly, for he was not above hurling a few truthful observations in their direction when he thought the need warranted.

  For a while it seemed that such pleasant times might endure. But Semerket’s marriage was cursed; Naia failed to conceive. Physicians with their poultices and bitter brews; priests with their chants and prayers, incense and candles; even Nubian witches with their amulets and eerie rites of magic had failed to kindle Semerket’s seed in his wife’s womb.

  More than anything Naia desired a child of her own body. In despair of ever becoming a mother, she had convinced Semerket that divorce was the only solution. Soon after, she married Lord Nakht, a nobleman who was responsible for the upkeep and provisioning of Pharaoh’s royal harem in Thebes.

  Semerket’s reaction to his wife’s desertion had been characteristically simple. He had fallen apart. Never at peace with words, he found his tongue at last through drink. For weeks he had howled his grief and rage into the night, pounding on his ex-wife’s gate, pleading in vain with her to return to him. Many nights embarrassed Medjays awakened Nenry, whispering that his brother had been arrested again. Nenry paid the bribes to keep the policemen quiet, but Merytra was correct—such behavior could not go unnoticed much longer. In Egypt, when a family member committed a crime, all the family suffered the resulting loss of status—and status was the one craving shared by Nenry and his fearsome wife. Something indeed had to be done.

  “Nenry!” He jumped when he heard Merytra’s voice in his ear. He’d been so wrapped in his own misery he had failed to hear her jangling approach.

  “I was inspecting the lotus pond, my love. Yes, I can see how all your little fish have died. Why don’t I give you a few copper rings and you can buy some new ones… or anything you choose…?” He searched desperately about in his sash.

  “I want something done about your brother.”

  “But what can I do?”

  “Use your influence, however small it might be. Get him a position somewhere.”

  “How can I? People know him. They’d think I was trying to foist him off on them.”

  “I don’t care what they think. I won’t have what little we’ve managed to seize for ourselves ruined by your brother’s sordid behavior….Are you listening to me?”

  “It seems I do nothing but listen to you.” In his misery he had spoken the words aloud, without thinking. He had gone too far. Nenry saw her arm drawing back, her right hand forming a fist, the expression of rage on her face. He closed his eyes, waiting for the blow.

  A burst of rapid knocking at the gate made them both jump. He and his wife stared at one another.

  “Who could it be?” he whispered.

  “The police, who else?” she hissed back. “Here about your brother again!”

  Nenry slowly pulled open the gate. A Medjay was indeed standing there, black skin gleaming in the morning sun, dressed in the uniform of the Temple of Justice. His insignia proclaimed him to be a bodyguard of the high vizier. Nenry felt his knees swimming beneath him. The high vizier! How could his brother’s scandal have reached that high?

  “Are you Nenry, scribe to Paser, the Eastern Mayor of Thebes?” The guard was terse, his manner cold and official.

  “He is.” Merytra pushed herself forward. “What do you want?”

  The man, surprised by the woman’s forcefulness, blinked. “An… an urgent summons for the Eastern Mayor. I was instructed to give it to his chief scribe.”

  Trembling, Nenry broke the seal on the wax tablets, eyes becoming wide as he read. “Oh, my,” he said helplessly.

  “What is it?” Merytra clutched his shoulder, looking from the tablet to peer anxiously into his eyes.

  “A priestess has been found dead—possibly murdered. There’s to be an investigation. I have to fetch the mayor to the Temple of Ma’at. The high vizier himself commands it.”

  “A priestess, dead! How horrible!” She paused, and in the interval he saw her face once again harden. “Just remember what I told you. You’ll either deal with your brother or you’ll deal with me.” She strode back into the house, the merry jangle of her bracelets filling every corner.

  Nenry glanced at the Medjay, and was comforted to see a shred of pity in the man’s eye.

  WITH HIS WIFE ’S WORDS still ringing in his head, Nenry hurried to the poor section of town where Paser, the Eastern Mayor of Thebes, lived. Glancing around at the refuse and rot of the area, the teeming crowds of beggars, he could not fathom why his master chose to reside in such an awful place. Nenry had spent his whole life trying to flee such poverty.

  To create the imposing abode of a mayor in so poor an area, Paser had simply purchased all the little houses there and knocked holes through the walls to link them together. Nenry hurried through the compound’s many kitchens and storage rooms, past its harem, to finally pace anxiously outside the mayor’s distant sleeping chamber.

  Nenry glanced past the flapping curtain at its doorway and saw that Paser was already awake and dressed, adjusting his wig. Nenry’s ears pricked when he heard other voices in the room. To his horror, he recognized one of the voices as belonging to Nakht, Naia’s husband. Nenry’s knees buckled, and he leaned against the mud brick wall to steady himself. He would be ruined, just as his wife had predicted.

  The other person beside Nakht was someone unknown to him—a large, powerful man with a brutal profile, dusted in the grime of limestone chips and desert sand. Nenry momentarily pitied the man that he should appear before the mayor in such humble attire. Incredibly, as if to confirm Nenry’s thoughts, it seemed as if the man were indeed weeping.

  Before he could hear what the men said, two slave girls wearing only leather thongs emerged from the mayor’s chamber. Seeing Nenry’s face, which had furrowed itself into a mask of tortured remonstration, they smirked.

  “Is he almost finished?” Nenry asked them. “Will he be out soon? What’s he talking to Nakht about? And who’s the other man?”

  “I thought I heard him say he was going back to bed,” the African girl said with a sideways look at the other girl.

  “After last night, who could blame him?” the tall one chimed, with a pretty yawn. The two glanced lewdly at each other and burst into laughter.

  “How now,” Paser said as he pushed his rotund bulk from behind the curtain. “What’s all this noise out here?” He casually glanced at his scribe. Beyond the curtains, Nenry noticed Nakht and the stranger departing through a rear door in Paser’s chambers.

  “It’s Nenry, lord,” the tall girl answered Paser. “That’s why we laugh! When he scrunches his face like that, he’s so funny!”

  “And I’m not?” The mayor’s booming v
oice filled the tiny room. “I was amusing enough last night, you fickle things!” He feinted at the girls and they fled, trailing behind them their piercing and highly satisfying shrieks. Paser smiled to see them run away, a reminiscent gleam of lust in his eye. Reluctantly, he turned to his scribe.

  “What’s all this with the vizier, then, Nenry?”

  “You know of the meeting, lord?” His surprised manner quickly became honeyed. “But then of course you’re so perceptive, so quick. What is there in Thebes you don’t know?”

  “Nakht told me of it.”

  “Has… has Lord Nakht spoken of anything else, lord?”

  Paser didn’t answer him. With long strides he left the room and went to his front stoop. “Come on then, Nenry,” he called. “Don’t dawdle. Mustn’t keep the old dear waiting.” The mayor did not waddle as most fat men did, but strode like a wrestler. The mayor and his scribe resembled nothing so much as an enormous hippopotamus with its flapping tickbird.

  “Apparently a priestess has been murdered.” Nenry was breathless, trying to keep up.

  “Yes, poor nag. Nakht says it’s all over town. Nasty business. But we don’t know it’s murder yet, Nenry. Mustn’t jump to conclusions. More than likely it was an accident of some sort.”

  The mayor stepped into his waiting sedan chair. “Up!” he shouted. With many a moan and curse, his bearers lifted the chair to their shoulders and then exited through the front gate.

  “The Temple of Ma’at,” Nenry directed the lead bearer. Sweat already trickled down the man’s face, and he merely nodded. There were more strenuous careers in Egypt than being a bearer for the porcine Eastern Mayor—pyramid builder, perhaps; obelisk hauler.

  Two mayors were appointed to rule over Thebes-of-the-Hundred-Gates: one for the part of the city on the east bank of the Nile, the other for the section west of the river. Paser ruled the living, while his cohort, Pawero, ruled the dead in their tombs in the west. And though they shared the capital of the world between them, the mayors were so unlike in temperament and philosophy that there could not be found two more dissimilar men in all the rest of it.

  Paser was fat, prosperous, quick to laugh, in character exactly like the people over whom he ruled. His true parents had been lowly fishmongers, but the young Paser was so pleasant and engaging that a childless scribe had adopted him into his family years before and sent him to the House of Life to become a scribe himself. There Paser had learned the 770 sacred writing symbols in the shortest time ever recorded in the temple’s history—for the one thing that exceeded his girth, it was discovered, was his cleverness.

  After graduation into the priesthood, Paser entered the city administration offices and had risen swiftly. At twenty-seven years of age, he now found himself appointed mayor of Eastern Thebes, reporting directly to the high vizier of Egypt. It was a satisfying position to have achieved at so young an age. Paser relished his office enormously and never so much as now, when the gates of his compound opened and the cries of the crowd greeted him.

  Paser leaned from his chair to clasp their outstretched hands in his. “Nefer!” he called to an ancient crone. “Still the most beautiful woman in Egypt!” The woman blew him a kiss from withered lips. “Hori, you rascal!” He turned his attention to a legless beggar. “Watch your purses, citizens; he’s quicker than a gazelle!” The beggar laughed in glee, taking no offense at his words.

  Then, sniffing the air, Paser swore that the fish frying on a nearby griddle was the best to be had in all of Thebes—and who should know better than he, the child of fishmongers? This was the cue for Nenry to toss small rings of copper into the crowd. The mayor challenged them all to taste for themselves and see if he was a liar. The grateful fish vendor sent over a slab of greasy river perch, spiced with cumin, and the mayor gobbled it down, delivering hymns of praise and delight between gulps. By the time his chair was borne to the main avenue along the riverfront, the crowd was chanting hymns to him as though he were Pharaoh himself.

  Nenry trotted alongside the sedan chair, all the while trying to answer the sharp questions that Paser put to him.

  “Is the Old Horror coming as well, Nenry?”

  The “Old Horror” was the epithet by which Paser designated his colleague Pawero, the Western Mayor.

  “Yes, lord, the summons included the Old—the mayor of the West.”

  “What was its tone?”

  “Pardon, lord?”

  “Come on, come on, Nenry—what did it read like? Angry, threatening, cold, what?”

  “No, my lord! It was full of the usual compliments.”

  “Nothing indicating displeasure?”

  “Nothing, lord.”

  The mayor brooded. “I still don’t like it. Why ask the Old Horror to attend? A crime, after all, that occurred in my side of the city. What does it have to do with him?”

  Paser fell to uncharacteristic moodiness and he and his scribe traveled the last few furlongs to the Temple of Ma’at in silence. As luck would have it, Pawero’s river barge pulled up to the stone wharf just as Paser and Nenry came to the broad stretch of ramp that led into the temple. Pawero sat motionless as a god’s statue beneath the barge’s wooden canopy as the boat bumped against the bales of straw cushioning the wharf. Once the tethers were secure he rose, majestic in his starched white robes.

  Where Paser ruled the living part of Thebes, Pawero’s jurisdiction extended over the tombs and mortuary temples across the Nile in the west. This included the Place of Truth where Pharaoh’s tomb-makers lived, the Great Place where the Pharaohs rested, the Place of Beauty where their queens were buried, and the fortress temple of Djamet, the southern residence of Pharaoh.

  Pawero was at forty-three a man given to pious readings and long-winded prayers. No wife or slave girl warmed his bed; Pawero was drawn to the lean, hard life of the most rigorous priesthood. He was a zealot, in fact, who secretly disapproved of the increasingly casual way Pharaoh performed his religious duties in his later years. Pawero longed for the day when a more god-fearing pharaoh might rule; perhaps— Amun willing—a pharaoh from his own family, whose lineage was far more ancient than Ramses’.

  Such a miracle was a possibility, too, for Pawero’s sister Tiya was the second of Ramses’ great wives and had borne him four sons. One son in particular, his nephew Prince Pentwere, was commander of an elite cavalry unit and a great hero to the Thebans. He would make a splendid pharaoh. But to even imagine the death of a pharaoh was an act of treason, and Pawero sternly banished such thoughts from his mind.

  As Pawero descended from his barge, head held high as the slaves and temple guardians bowed, he crossed in silence to the jetty. The effect would have been grand, indeed, had he not placed his sandaled foot in fresh horse dung left by a passing chariot. Stopping abruptly, gazing down, Pawero murmured a most unprayerful word.

  Paser’s laugh bellied out across the quay. “That should teach you to raise your sights too high, Pawero. You’ll only land yourself in shit.”

  The Western Mayor’s eyes went as flat and deadly as a cobra’s. “I must heed my revered colleague,” Pawero said as his valet rushed forward to clean his sandal. “For he comes from shit himself.”

  In the uneasy silence Paser laughed loudly again, as if appreciating a fine jest. Only Nenry recognized the cold, subtle anger that lurked in it. “I’ve never made any secret about my lack of pedigree, Lord Mayor,” Paser said. “Everyone knows your glorious birthright, while I merely had my wits to get me by. But here we are, all the same, equals.”

  “Equals?” Pawero mused. “Yes. As we all are before the gods, even Pharaoh himself.”

  “Well, you must tell Pharaoh that, for I don’t have the nerve.” Paser bade his bearers to set his chair on the ground. After a few false starts he was able to wrench himself at last from the narrow seat and hurtle himself over to where Pawero stood. Their contrast was never more evident than at that moment. Lean and fat. Haughty and simple. Tall as a reed. Compact as a wrestler. Yet they were united
in something greater than their differences: their pure and utter loathing for one another.

  Paser held his arm for Pawero to lean on. Together, they ascended the long ramp that led into Ma’at’s Temple of Justice, each clutching his identical staff of office. To all who saw them from afar, it seemed the mayors were the most cordial of friends. But Nenry privately was reminded of the stilted and wary courtship dances performed by certain desert spiders, where death, not mating, was often the result of such delicate footwork.

  The high vizier received the two mayors in the usual temple ante-room reserved for such meetings. Outside, a long line of petitioners and litigants waited. With shouts and pleas they tried hard to catch the vizier’s attention, for Toh was not often in Thebes these days, being instead at Pi-Remesse, the northern capital where Pharaoh resided. If the petitioners could not catch the high vizier’s ear, or failed to bribe him sufficiently, it might be weeks or months before Toh was again in the south.

  The vizier was a wrinkled old man of some seventy years, older than even his friend, the Pharaoh. He tottered slowly to his chair, waving his hand in the direction of the litigants, and exchanged compliments with the mayors. Wanly, he directed a slave to take them a bowl of fried dates and other dainty tidbits. Beer mixed with palm wine—a most heady brew—was next brought, and the old man treated himself to a hefty draft to fortify his liver. He then directed all the litigants to wait outside and wiped his toothless mouth with his hand, ready for the business at hand.

  When the room was empty but for the mayors and their retinues, Toh spoke. Gone was the feeble, tremulous voice, the doddering manner. “By Horus’s little brass balls,” he shouted, “I want to know what’s going on.” He slammed the goblet down on the arm of his throne and peered at the two mayors. “A priestess murdered. There’s not been such infamy in Thebes since the Hyksos left. I want answers and I want them speedily.”

  “I beg to remind you, Great Lord,” Paser began with a broad smile, “that we’ve no way of knowing whether or not it even was a murder. And I beg to inquire why this incident should justify the presence of the two mayors of Thebes?”