by Brad Geagley
Semerket could not discern if the prince was displeased or simply indifferent to the news, but Semerket had the eerie sensation that behind Pentwere’s bland eyes, for the briefest moment, he had caught a tiny flash of glee.
“I’m sure you’ll have something soon,” said the prince with royal condescension, then turned to regard the elders behind them. “I want you all to know that my mother, Queen Tiya, expects a quick end to this affair.”
The elders bobbed their heads up and down in mute agreement. The groom then brought the prince a leather bag. Gingerly, he fished about in it, bringing forth a series of amulets and charms. The prince himself strung some of them around Semerket’s neck, and placed the rest in his belt.
“More amulets?” asked Semerket.
“Mother thinks the one she gave you must not be powerful enough, otherwise you’d have solved the case by now. You know,” Pentwere continued in a friendly tone, “my mother and I were very fond of the old priestess.”
Semerket sighed, knowing what was coming.
The prince bent his head and whispered, “Have you ever considered that perhaps she was killed by a foreigner?” He looked solemnly at Semerket. “Or a vagabond… ?”
“I’ve considered it, yes.”
“But you don’t believe it.”
“No.”
“Well, I’m not surprised then that you have no leads. Poor tactics, I’m afraid, to concentrate your investigation here. How could you seriously believe one of her own neighbors killed her?”
Semerket became aware of the hostile stares directed at him not only by the elders, but also by the prince’s men. Assai again was glaring intently at him.
“One,” Semerket said firmly, forcing his tongue loose from his palate, “most victims are murdered by people who know them. Two, the priestess had gone to attend her shrines in the Great Place. Does it seem likely that a stranger wandered in and killed her in a place so tightly guarded? Three, she was blind. Though she was found on the other side of the river, I doubt if she could have made her way there on her own, do you? More than likely she was killed nearby, and her body thrown into the Nile.” He paused. “Do you want me to go on?”
Pentwere frowned. “Have you any proof of these… allegations?”
Semerket shook his head. “No.”
The arm around Semerket’s shoulders was suddenly like granite, and in a moment of irrational panic he felt as if his breath were being slowly squeezed from him. “Then I would advise you,” the prince said, a warm smile still brightening his features, “to either find some proof, or move on. The elders tell me that progress on my father’s tomb slows because of you.” The smile faded. “We can’t have that.”
It suddenly became clear to Semerket what was occurring. The tomb-makers had arranged for someone who outranked the vizier to remove him from the case, under the only pretext that would carry weight with the authorities—that work on Pharaoh’s tomb suffered.
Seeing the elders’ carefully expressionless faces, he also suddenly knew that guilt clung to them like the oily soot of temple incense. What they were guilty of, he didn’t know yet, or even if their unknown crime had anything to do with Hetephras’s death. What nerve they possessed, Semerket marveled, to defy so crafty a man as Vizier Toh, and how clever they were to enlist the royal family in protecting them. But he was nevertheless convinced that the tomb-makers would never have dared to prevent such an investigation on their own; someone had put them up to it.
Semerket bowed low before the prince. “I will keep the prince’s wise words in my heart,” he said. Semerket was sure it never occurred to Pentwere, being royal, that the dog would not obey.
SEMERKET JOINED QAR at the Medjay tower directly after his encounter with the royals. Qar, too, urged Semerket to find some evidence, and quickly, to keep the investigation alive.
“Once they pit the prince against the vizier,” the Medjay pointed out, “court politics will kill it.”
To the north, the royal party had disappeared into Pharaoh’s unfinished tomb, ostensibly to conduct its inspection. Semerket turned to Qar. “You’ve been inside—what’s it like?”
“What? Pharaoh’s tomb?” Qar shook his head. “You’ve got it wrong—only priests and royals are allowed inside, and the work gang, too, of course. We Medjays only guard it—to make sure the likes of us can’t get in.”
Semerket made up his mind. “I want to see it.”
Qar laughed loudly. “You can’t! If you were caught, they’d expect me to execute you. Then we’d have all those priests over here again to drive your blasphemous stink out of it. I want to be spared that, if you don’t mind—for I hate those fat, greasy priests.”
“I need something… anything. It’s the perfect hiding place, when you think of it.”
“Hiding place for what?”
Semerket shrugged. “All the stolen treasure from your plundered tombs, I suppose.”
Qar snorted derisively. “Pharaoh’s tomb is the most public place in Egypt, Semerket, particularly now when it’s almost complete. Every month there’s some new inspection, some new ritual. Nothing could be hidden in it. Better to count on something real.”
“Such as?”
“What about that brother of yours—the one who’s snooping in the bazaars? Have you heard from him?”
Semerket shook his head, saying that he intended to make a secret visit across the river to consult with Nenry. He would wait, he told Qar, until Paneb and Neferhotep went again to Eastern Thebes in their “official capacity.” He was resolved to know where the pair went, what they did there—and to whom they spoke.
At that moment a terrific screech from high above drew their eyes upward. A hawk was swooping down, dropping like a comet straight at them. At the last moment the bird drew up, but Semerket felt the rush of air on his cheeks as it dashed by. The bird fluttered manically around him in circles, chittering and squawking at him. It then perched tensely on one of the tower’s crossbeams, staring directly at Semerket, a tiny thing of great loveliness, head cocked and large eyes alive with intelligence. When Semerket put out his finger to touch it, the tiny hawk chirped loudly and swooped off into the desert toward the Great Place.
Semerket and Qar looked at one another, speechless. Qar traced a holy sign in the air with shaking fingers. There could be no clearer omen. One of the gods who took his form as a hawk—Horus or Khons—had attempted to communicate with them. Semerket picked up his walking stick and Qar his spear, and both set off together in the direction the hawk had flown.
They had walked no more than a few minutes before they heard shouts. A furlong ahead, a party of Medjays came running toward them. Qar called back his greeting, and waved his spear.
The two groups met in a wadi. The leader, whom Qar saluted as his superior, walked directly to Semerket. His name was Captain Mentmose, he announced. Lean as a stick, rigidly erect and grizzled, he addressed Semerket solemnly. “Back there,” he said. “Something you seek… or so we think.”
Semerket followed the Medjays into the wash. His eyes scanned the Great Place, searching everywhere. In the pathway above them, a small chapel had been carved into the living rock. So well camouflaged was the shrine that he had never noticed it before. He pointed to it, asking Qar what it was.
“The shrine of Osiris,” Qar said.
Semerket tensed. It was to this shrine that Hetephras had been going the day she was murdered. Far ahead, where the walls of the small wadi flattened themselves into the sands, a Medjay stood. They walked swiftly to see what he guarded.
At the Medjay’s feet was a ball of broken raffia fibers, crushed and filthy, almost hidden between two small boulders. Semerket knelt to examine it. At one time it had been bright blue in color, but now sand and grit had turned it a dirty dun-colored hue. Something else had dis-colored it and Semerket leaned closer to see. The stain was dried blood, black and odious. Gingerly, he turned it over with his fingers. The thing was trimmed in foil-covered bits of wax. Gently he press
ed the raffia out from the inside so that it might take on its original shape, and noted that the fibers had been woven to resemble the gentle swoop of vulture wings.
Even if he had not seen the painting on the wall of Aaphat’s house or the small diorite figure the sculptor Ramose carved, he would have known he held Hetephras’s ritual wig in his hand—the one in which she had been slain. Here at last was the piece of evidence that tied the murder to the area, the proof that Prince Pentwere had taunted him to find not more than an hour before.
Semerket closed his eyes, sighing; in that small sound was his unspoken prayer of thanks to the gods. After a moment he asked softly of the Medjay, “How did you find it?”
“It was odd,” said the Medjay, leaning on his spear. “We come by this wash every day on our rounds, and never saw it there. But today, a stranger—”
Semerket and Qar tore their eyes from the wig to gaze at the man.
“A boy on a donkey. A prince, we thought, by the look of his robes, and by his side braid. We knew that a royal party was going to inspect the tomb today, and thought that perhaps someone had strayed from it. The lad never responded to our shouts, though, and we could never quite catch up to him. But he led us directly here—and pointed straight to these boulders. That’s when we found it. But—this is the hardest part—” His voice grew quiet with soft dismay.
“The boy was not seen again,” said Semerket.
The Medjay reluctantly nodded.
AS THEY TRUDGED from the wadi, they met the village elders and Prince Pentwere emerging from the royal tomb. From his broad smiles it was obvious that the prince was not at all upset by the “slowed progress” of the workers; nor had he noticed the theft of the four pillars now in Hetephras’s tomb. The smile cracked a bit when he noticed the Medjays and Semerket standing directly below him in the wash.
“How now?” Pentwere’s fine, burly voice rang out in the stillness. “What is this, a search party? There’s no need—we know our way out!”
Fawning laughter broke out all around him.
“Look at the clerk’s expression, my lord,” grinned Assai, teeth gleaming in his handsome, black face. “He must be here to arrest us!”
Again everyone laughed at this jest. Only Semerket and the Medjays stood stern and silent before them. Pentwere’s smile faded.
“Have you something to tell us, clerk?”
Semerket held out the blood-blackened wig in his hands. “Only that I have done what the prince advised me to do.”
“What is that rubbish you hold there?” the prince asked.
“Proof.”
Pentwere blinked. “That noxious blue weed? Proof of what?”
“That the priestess Hetephras was slain here. In the valley, my lord, not in Eastern Thebes. Not on the shores of the Nile, but here in the Great Place. This is the priestess’s wig—we found it not a furlong from here. If you doubt me, see it for yourself in portraits throughout the tomb-makers’ village. In every one of them she wears it.”
Pentwere’s eyes darted about in panic. Helplessly he turned to Assai. It was he who shouted down to Semerket, “How can that be called proof of anything, clerk? A bit of trash in the desert can be whatever you choose to name it!”
At that moment Paneb emerged from the royal tomb, closing its door heavily behind him. He came to where the others stood. It was a moment before the foreman took in the sight before him. His eyes traveled from the prince to Assai, and then down into the wash where Semerket and the Medjays stood. The elders waited breathlessly, and Paneb looked about in confusion. Then he saw the thing in Semerket’s hands.
Paneb’s eyes widened, and a half-scream choked his throat. He suddenly fell to his knees, wailing, “All of the demons from hell have come for me!” Then Paneb—who was known throughout the village for his fearlessness and hot heart—fainted in the sands.
The prince and his companions rushed in the direction of their chariots, not once looking at the foreman lying prone on the ground before them. The elders gathered around the twitching Paneb, throwing glances over their shoulders in the direction of Semerket. Their faces were no longer indifferent masks; they looked instead as if they stared into the very mouth of the Devourer itself.
LIKE THE RUMBLE of an earthquake, the news of the discovery of Hetephras’s blood-stained wig spread from house to house. Overnight, gloom and horror descended. Where before the village had been a place of perpetual din, it was now silent and trembling in the bitter desert air. People locked their doors and huddled within their houses, waiting.
Semerket still trod the deserted main street and alleyways, seeking again to question the villagers, but he met no one. Knocking on their doors brought no answer, however loudly he pounded. Pricking his ears, he could sometimes catch furtive whispers in a nearby alley. Yet when he rounded the corner to catch the speakers, he found the street deserted, and from the corner of his eye he saw a door quickly shut and bolted.
Semerket waited. Finding the wig was the shock he needed to jar the tomb-makers from their smug self-confidence. But their confidence did not so much crumble as explode. The very night he found the wig, the village played host to another uninvited guest—one more frightening than Semerket. She arrived when the moon was at its most full. Some villagers later said they had seen a prowling hyena outside the cemetery gates that changed its shape into a woman’s, passing through the village walls as though they were air. Others claimed to have seen a stain of clouds across the moon’s face in the shape of a woman that descended as a swirling mist into the village, while still others had seen her only as a moving shadow on the walls, cast by flickering torchlight, silently going from house to house.
A servant’s child was the first to see her. She woke on her pallet to find an old woman beckoning to her from across the room. She blinked, and when next she opened her eyes, the figure was bending over her. She could hear her sighs, the child said, as the old woman held out her arms to embrace her. As the child became more wakeful she realized that the woman’s sighs and coughs were actually laughter, as if they came from the dry, parched throat of a mummy. The girl screamed, but the woman fled.
Soon the old woman’s sighs turned to shrieks and wild gibbering in the night-filled streets of the village, rising and falling in mad crescendos. Some claimed to see mysterious lights parading past the cracks of their latched doors, or to hear the babbling voices of a great company of ghostly companions.
Within their homes the villagers clung to their husbands and wives, and draped their children with protective amulets and charms. Everyone knew the same awful truth—that somehow the heavy stone that had been rolled across the tomb’s door had not been enough—that Hetephras had returned to her village.
STREET OF DOORS
SEMERKET AND QAR DREAMED EVERY NIGHT of lionesses. Semerket, who had never before been frightened by the landscape of sleep, was now afraid to close his eyes for more than a few minutes. He discovered that by sitting up all night on the brick bench in Hetephras’s reception room, he could wake more quickly when the lioness sprang, and so elude her fangs yet another night. Since that day when Prince Pentwere had bedecked him with amulets and charms, he had been prey to sharp, mysterious pains in his body, while his skull throbbed with headaches. It seemed at times that he felt a kind of suffocation enveloping him, as if his lungs could not breathe in enough air. During the day he went about his investigations red-eyed and grim, tired from his dream running, his temper short.
Qar, who had been trained by his sorceress mother to confront his nightmares, found his dream-spears powerless against the lioness. They fell short of their mark, or veered away at the last moment, or broke like straw against her. The only defense against her claws and teeth was to remain awake—or to run. Like Semerket, he dared not sleep for long.
Semerket one night woke from a dream where the lioness had lunged at him from behind a nearby tree. She had come so close to seizing him in her claws that she had managed to snag a few strands of his flying h
air. He had wakened then, to find his scalp still stinging from where the dream lioness had pulled out his hair, and found the place shorn as cleanly as if it had been shaved. He felt his head in fearful puzzlement. But then the noise of Hetephras’s door being latched caught him off-guard. Still terrified from the dream, he could not summon the courage to see who—or what—had been in Hetephras’s front room.
Semerket gripped the charms and amulets around his neck given to him by Queen Tiya. They burned his fingers as if they had rested in fire, and seemed to have a weight that had not been in them before. Where they hung against his chest, the skin was chafed and red. In one gesture, without thinking, he tore them away, throwing them far to the end of the room where Sukis lay. She hissed and ran from the room to a wall in the alleyway, and from there leapt to the roof.
SEMERKET ENTERED THE House of Life at Djamet Temple through bronze-clad doors that rose six cubits or more. Situated next to Pharaoh’s residence, the House of Life was a maze of gardens, reflecting pools, and pillared terraces. Within the House of Life were the books on mathematics, the natural sciences, moral precepts, official histories, and magic formulae that comprised the collected wisdom of Egypt, and it was to these he headed.
Semerket walked past the classrooms and lecture halls, glancing at the scribes-to-be who labored in them. Because the tomb-makers still huddled behind the locked doors of their homes, Semerket was taking advantage of his enforced idleness to find out more about the mysterious Queen Twos-re, whose liver—if it was truly hers—resided in the house of Paneb. He hoped to find a logical explanation why the foreman should possess such a relic. Try as he would, Semerket found it impossible to dislike the big man; he wanted to free his mind from the nagging doubts that somehow Paneb was involved in tomb robbery.
Semerket was directed to a librarian named Maadje. The man, slightly hunchbacked, sat on a bench with a papyrus rolled out in front of him. As Semerket neared, the librarian hastily rerolled the scroll, glancing up with irritation. Semerket noticed with distaste the rash of pimples that covered the man’s face, and winced at his disagreeable scent.