by Brad Geagley
“What do you want?” the librarian asked coldly.
“I’m looking for information on a Queen Twos-re.”
Maadje reacted with a small but scandalized gasp, his eyebrows arching high. “Restricted section,” Maadje said. “No one’s allowed in there without permission.”
Semerket was surprised. “Why should that be?”
“If I told you, there wouldn’t be any need to restrict it, would there?”
Semerket sighed inwardly. Like many librarians Semerket had run across before, Maadje regarded the scrolls in the House of Life as his own property, to remain pristinely unopened and safe upon the shelves. He held up his vizier’s seal hanging on the chain of jasper beads around his neck.
“Will this admit me?” he asked.
Sighing dolorously, the hunchbacked librarian rose to his feet, adjusted his kilt, and disappeared into the rear of the building. After he had gone, Semerket idly knelt to open the scroll the librarian had been reading. Images of the most outrageous sexual debauchery met his eyes. So exotic were the drawings that Semerket in his naïveté would have had difficulty even imagining the acts—let alone expecting to see them in a scroll belonging to the House of Life.
“Well?” Maadje called irritatedly from a distance. “Am I to wait for you until day’s end?”
Semerket let the scroll roll shut. When he caught up to Maadje, the librarian pointed to a shelf full of scrolls located in a separate room. “In there,” he said. He did not wait for any more questions, but scuttled quickly back to his papyrus.
Two other individuals were in the “restricted room.” One was a Libyan, which Semerket discerned from the style of his beard—a bodyguard, by the look of him. He hovered near a very light-skinned gentleman, who squinted at Semerket with the pale eyes of a northerner.
Though the man might rank a personal guard, Semerket noticed, he was nevertheless dressed very simply, and his fingers were black with ink-stains. Semerket saw that the man was holding ancient building plans close to his face.
An architect, Semerket surmised. The man noticed him looking, and helpfully moved his scrolls aside so that Semerket could approach the shelves.
They nodded gravely to one another.
Semerket chose a scroll from the shelf that Maadje had indicated and opened it. He sat down on the floor and began to read, but as the minutes passed he became increasingly frustrated. The scroll had nothing to do with Twos-re, being instead a treatise about someone called “the great criminal of Akhetaton,” someone who had supposedly ruled Egypt a couple of centuries before. He pushed the scroll aside, his mouth pursed in annoyance.
The man across the tiles squinted shortsightedly at him, and put aside his pens. “Might I help? I’ve become quite familiar with the arrangement of the scrolls here. If you’ll tell me what you’re looking for…?”
“Well,” began Semerket, doubtfully. “I need to find out about a certain Queen Twos-re.”
“Really?” The man looked at him sharply. “May I ask why?”
Semerket spoke in vague terms. “I’m a clerk of Investigations and Secrets for Vizier Toh, and I’ve recently come across a—well, some-thing—that refers to her. I need to know more, to make sense of it.”
“Then you must be Semerket; Toh’s mentioned you often.”
Semerket gaped at the man, taken aback. It always surprised him to be known by others. Before he could ask his name, however, the man had seized the scroll Semerket had been perusing, and laughed. “Maadje’s sent you to the wrong shelf, as usual. If you like, I can tell you what I know about her.”
“You… ? You’re a historian? I thought you were an architect.”
The man was puzzled. “Architect?” Then he saw the plans that were laid out before him, and his voice became amused. “You think because of these plans here that I’m a…” He turned to the Libyan and laughed. The other man smiled as well. “Well, perhaps, but I also know a little history,” he said. “Secret history, in this case.”
“Secret?”
“Twos-re was not just any queen, you know—she was also a king.”
Semerket remembered the glyph for “divine female” that he had found next to the queen’s cartouche on the canopic jar. “She must have ruled quite a while ago, then. We haven’t had a female king since Hatshepsut.”
“She ruled just forty years ago, in fact.”
Semerket was shocked. “But there is no monument to her, no mention of her at all on the temple walls. You’d think that with her reign’s being so recent, one would hear at least a mention of her.”
The man shook his head. “Her name was stricken from the official lists of rulers by King Setnakhte.”
“Pharaoh’s father?”
“He had her statues hacked to pieces, and her name obliterated everywhere it was found. Even her tomb was destroyed.”
“What had she done to deserve so terrible a fate?”
“She had killed her own husband, so that only she was left to put on the red and white crowns. Even her nephews died mysteriously. But the gods were appalled by her sins, and they caused the Nile to fail in its flooding. Famine and plague broke out, and civil war ravaged the country. This was how Pharaoh Setnakhte became king.”
“And she thought she could actually succeed?”
“Oh, there had been a precedent. Her own father had usurped the throne himself. Amen-meses was his name.”
Amen-meses! Where had he heard the name before? He suddenly remembered—it was the name of the so-called merchant from whom Paneb had obtained the canopic jar that held the queen’s preserved liver. Or so Paneb had said. It seemed strange, Semerket mused, that two names so accursed—Twos-re and Amen-meses—were linked to a foreman in the Place of Truth. The hair prickled on his head, and he felt exactly as he had when he was young, staying up at night to hear the ghost stories told by his parents.
At least the architect’s tale explained to him why Twos-re’s name had been hewn from the canopic jar containing her liver. How despised she must have been, that even her grave-goods had been defiled.
Semerket made the sign against misfortune. “At least we are spared such evil in our own day,” he murmured piously.
The man and his bodyguard looked at one another cryptically. “Have we been spared?” murmured the man, looking off. He seemed to wrestle with himself for a moment, then leaned forward and whispered, “The tainted blood of Twos-re and Amen-meses is still alive in Egypt, Semerket, make no mistake, ready at any moment to—”
The architect abruptly ceased speaking when the librarian Maadje appeared, looking stricken. An imposing priest, tall and thin, hovered behind him.
“There he is!” Semerket heard Maadje whisper to the priest.
The priest entered the room, bringing his arms down to knee level and genuflecting elaborately. “Your Royal Highness!”
Semerket looked about, confused. Did they address the man who sat next to him? But he was an architect…
“Lord Messui.” The man inclined his head to the priest.
“I had no idea this man was disturbing you. Maadje will be punished, for bringing him here.”
“I was not disturbed,” said the man. “If Maadje is to be punished, then let it be for having directed this gentleman to the wrong scrolls.” He gathered together his pens and notes, which the Libyan stashed in a wooden case. With a nod to everyone in the room, coughing gently into a kerchief, he departed.
“Who was that?” Semerket asked the priest after a moment. “Why do you call him ‘Royal Highness’?”
Messui looked at Semerket as if he were simple-minded. “That,” he said with a scowl, “is to be our next pharaoh. If he survives.”
“Survives?” Semerket started to ask.
But Messui was gone. Maadje whispered to explain to Semerket what the priest meant, smirking. “He’s very sickly, the crown prince. Even so, they say he will be declared the official heir by Pharaoh. That’s why he’s come here incognito from Pi-Remesse. Queen Tiya ha
s locked herself in her rooms because of it, they say.”
“Really?”
“Oh, it’s a great scandal at court! When Pharaoh married her, it was with the promise that her sons would inherit the throne, but instead he’s going to name this son by his northern wife, Queen Ese, and she’s just a Canaanite—”
“Maadje!” The priest Messui’s voice came sharply over the shelves.
Instantly, the smelly little hunchbacked librarian was gone, leaving Semerket to muse alone. As he rolled up the scrolls and replaced them on the shelves, his mind once again took up the story of the evil Twosre and her equally despicable father, King Amen-meses.
What had the crown prince meant when he said that the blood of Twos-re and Amen-meses still lived? Some inchoate instinct told Semerket that the story of a Kushite merchant of the same name was a lie—that the merchant and the king were the same person. But if that were true, he reasoned, the logical extension of the thought was that the malignant spirit of Amen-meses still walked the pathways of the Great Place. And hadn’t the crown prince himself just told him the blood of the evil pair still lived in Egypt—?
Again, Semerket felt his scalp bristle.
THE NEXT DAY, Semerket was in the village kitchens with Qar, looking for something they could eat without fear. They chose unpeeled onions with dirt from the fields still on them, cheese, and a loaf of bread pulled fresh from the ovens.
“Look what it’s come to,” Qar said to him in a low, dispirited voice. “Afraid to sleep because a lioness hunts us—afraid to eat because it might put us to sleep.”
In any other mood, the irony of the observation might have amused Semerket. But he was too tired and too hungry to care. The morning was quiet. The tomb-makers had still not found the courage to leave their homes. Only the servants were up and about. Sukis wound herself about his feet, begging for scraps. Hunro’s voice suddenly came to them from over the wall, raucous and angry. Sukis fled the kitchens. Catching Qar’s eye, Semerket rose to peer through a crack in the gate.
Hunro was at the cistern, braying her anger to the few persons who had ventured out to draw their water. She was being forsaken—again, she said—because Neferhotep had forbidden her to attend the gala arrival of Pharaoh in Thebes, something she wanted to see just once in her lifetime. Yet here she was, imprisoned in this dreary hole of a place, guilty of an unknown crime she had not committed. It wasn’t fair, she intoned, it wasn’t fair at all!
“But they’re going, oh yes,” she said, pointing with her thumb at someone Semerket could not see. He shifted his position, straining to see who it was she addressed. Paneb and Neferhotep were striding up the path from the cemetery, conferring in low tones.
Hunro lunged at Neferhotep, claws out. A short, angry scuffle ensued, but Paneb and Neferhotep deftly grabbed her arms and hustled Hunro back into the village. She tried to wrench herself free, her mouth full of curses, but was caught between the two men like a mouse between two millstones. In a moment they had dragged her into the smoky maw of the village, her screams fading with her.
“If they’re going across the river today,” Semerket whispered to Qar back at the bench, “I’m going to follow them.”
“See if that brother of yours has found any jewels in the markets,” Qar reminded him.
Semerket slipped from the village at noon, long before Paneb and Neferhotep departed. It was a much shorter walk to the river than when he had first come to the village, for the burgeoning Nile waters now reached almost to the steps of the western temples. When he came to the place in the river where the ferrymen congregated, he waited in the shadows of a stable and folded his gray woolen mantle around his face.
The wharf was teeming with chattering Western Thebans anxious to be taken across to welcome Pharaoh Ramses III. Until that morning Semerket had not known of Pharaoh’s return. Though normally Semerket despised crowds, they would be a boon to him this day—for if Paneb or Neferhotep happened to look in his direction, he could easily blend into the multitude.
Semerket paid a ferryman an entire gold piece to reserve his skiff, almost thirty times the man’s normal fare. He wanted to be sure a boat would be available when he needed it, and did not count the cost.
An hour or so passed before he caught sight of his quarry. Paneb was a giant in the throng at the shore, easy enough to keep in sight. His broad face was implacable, but Neferhotep appeared uneasy. The scribe’s eyes darted about and he kept looking behind himself to see who was on the causeway. Semerket heard his quavering voice rising tensely; Neferhotep was angry that no boat was instantly available.
At long last another ferryman gave them passage. Semerket sprinted to where his own skiff waited, and bade the man shove off. Inspired by the gold, or perhaps because he carried only one passenger, the ferryman quickly overtook the boat bearing Paneb and Neferhotep. Hunching his shoulders so that he appeared an old, frail peasant, and turning his face to the north so he would not be recognized, Semerket was at the eastern docks long before the tomb-makers landed. From behind a mooring stanchion he watched them disembark.
It seemed that all Thebes waited for Pharaoh at the quay. Though a Sed Festival had been proclaimed in Thebes the previous year to commemorate Ramses III’s thirtieth year on the throne, tensions arising with the western barbarians had prevented his visit. Since then a peace treaty had been signed with the tribes, so there was no excuse for Pharaoh to spurn Thebes a second time. Word had been received a week before that the royal fleet was en route to the southern capital.
By now it was late afternoon and Pharaoh’s fleet had not yet appeared. Paneb and Neferhotep mingled on the wharf for a time. Then, as the shadows lengthened, the two stepped into a quayside tavern called the Elephant’s Tusk.
Semerket knew it for an awful place that reeked of stale wine and urine. Frequented by foreigners and fish-gutters and slaves, it was not a place Semerket liked to go—not without his knife—and he was surprised that the fastidious Neferhotep would consent to go inside such a hovel. But Semerket also knew that the Elephant Tusk possessed no back door, which would prevent the tomb-makers from eluding him.
Semerket slipped inside the tavern, bringing his cloak again around his face, keeping to the shadows. Paneb and Neferhotep sat at the rear, where it was gloomiest. It appeared to Semerket’s eyes as if they had only stopped there for a cup of wine, for they remained alone and unspeaking. Semerket stepped back into the street, squatting beneath an ancient sycamore tree at the corner of the tavern.
Ra’s barque was low in the west now, but the crowds were very thick, bright-eyed with excitement and dressed in their holiday best. All across the great stone wharves, pennants of azure and crimson undulated from tall spires, while the plating on Amun’s temple doors was polished to new brightness.
The city’s dignitaries and nobles took their places. A deputation of Pharaoh’s sons was in its first rank, although there was no sign of the crown prince, whom Semerket had met in the House of Life. It was Pentwere who led them, dressed for once in royal linen and not armor. Tall, thin Pawero next stepped forward; at his side was the smaller, rounder Paser. As mayors of the city they would be among the first to welcome Ramses back to Thebes.
When Semerket finally caught sight of his brother, Nenry, as expected, was hovering behind Paser in birdlike attendance. His face wore its customary mask of tics and grimaces, indicating to his brother even from a distance that he was overburdened with responsibilities.
Semerket called a nearby urchin to him and pointed out Nenry among the courtiers. “Tell him that his brother waits for him under the big sycamore.” He gave the lad a copper and watched him dart through the crowds. The boy found Nenry without effort and pointed back to where Semerket stood. Nenry squinted in the direction of the tavern.
Semerket removed his hood and waved, but he could not tell if Nenry had seen him. Shouts coming from the lookouts atop Amun’s Great Temple suddenly proclaimed that the masts of Pharaoh’s fleet had at last been sighted.
/> From far up the river came the faint pulse of drums, pipes, and rattling sistra, beating out a steady rhythm for Pharaoh’s oarsmen. As the music wafted to the throng along the shore, voices became more animated. Soldiers lit the bonfires on the street corners and priests placed balls of incense into huge censers so that pungent clouds soon enveloped the wharves like a low-hanging fog.
Cheers rose from a hundred thousand throats when the fleet rounded the bend in the river. The ships’ lanterns had been lighted, and they blazed on the water across the Nile’s entire breadth. The ships’ riggings were strung with blooms, and every ship displayed the protective totems of its gods.
On the shores, temple choruses burst into chants of welcome. Though Semerket kept close watch on the tavern’s doorway, expecting the tomb-makers to emerge, he could not help but be caught up in the spectacle played out on the river.
Rams’ horns blew again when Pharaoh’s venerable ship, Horus-of-the-Morning, pulled ahead of the other vessels. The dark green man-of-war was the same one in which Ramses had so triumphantly defeated the Sea Peoples some twenty-five years before. Though her bulwarks were scarred from battle and she listed to port, the ship was still a formidable instrument of war—like Pharaoh himself.
Sailors leapt to furl the Horus-of-the-Morning’s rectangular red sail in preparation for docking. As the warship slowly came round, the rays of the setting sun glinted on the bronze lion-head jutting from its prow. Its brazen jaws were clamped firmly around a glowering human skull—all that remained of the chieftain who had dared to lead his navies against Egypt. Grandparents hoisted their grandchildren to their shoulders to point out the hole in the skull’s shattered cranium. Semerket heard their voices excitedly describing the splendid day when Ramses had clubbed the captive king to death with a granite mace in Amun’s temple.
Another shout from the captain, and the rowers lifted their oars from the water. Towropes were cast to the dock, where they were secured around the stone stanchions. As the Horus-of-the-Morning was pulled into its slip and made fast against the bundles of straw that cushioned the stone wharf, Ramses III stepped from the vessel’s canopied pavilion. Instantly the cheers doubled in volume, verging on the hysterical. Pharaoh majestically ignored the noise.