He was pondering this dilemma on the front steps when the clatter of hooves signaled the approach of a chariot. Turning, he saw his cousin Sennefer clatter down the avenue toward him. Too fast.
“Sennefer, pull up!”
His cousin hauled on the reins. Meren backpedaled as a wall of horseflesh thundered down on him. A hoof pounded the stone step he’d been standing on. Meren cursed and jumped farther back. Grooms rushed down the avenue from their post beside the gate. Sennefer hopped to the ground and threw his reins at the men.
“Ha! Meren, you jackal, I haven’t seen you in months and months.”
Sennefer clapped him on the back. Meren suppressed another sigh and tried not to sound too morose. “Greetings, Sennefer.”
“Give me beer, cousin. It’s a hot sail and a dusty drive from my place to yours.”
“You can go back.”
Laughing, Sennefer hit him on the back again. “And miss one of Idut’s feasts? Besides, the daughter of the mayor of Abydos has become importunate. Why do they always try to suffocate you, Meren? They demand that you spend time with them, suck you dry, and then want more.”
“Someday you’re going to get a dagger in your heart for interfering with married women, Sennefer.”
“It’s not my fault,” Sennefer said as they reached the reception hall. He broke off to smile at a serving maid who offered a bowl of water for his refreshment. “What do you expect? There are so many, and they want me, they beg. I can see it in their eyes.”
Meren waved the serving maid away, and when she was gone, Sennefer continued.
“You see. That one was ready to jump behind the nearest bush with me.”
“She didn’t even look at you, Sennefer.”
Shaking his head, Sennefer led the way into the central hall and collapsed on a couch with his beer. “You always were jealous.”
“Oh, certainly.”
He didn’t care what Sennefer thought. Sennefer had always been an impoverished version of his younger brother Djet. Sennefer bragged of his exploits; Djet kept quiet and drew into thrall countless admirers of both sexes. Sennefer boasted incessantly of his courage in battle when it was known he never participated in anything more dangerous than a skirmish with unarmed thieves; Djet had received the gold of bravery from pharaoh. Meren stopped listening when Sennefer began to lecture him on how to seduce his serving maid. Then his guest said something that caught his attention.
“Did you say your wife wants a divorce?”
Sennefer waved a hand. “She says she wants children. I can’t help it if she’s barren. And she thinks she’s going to get my estates in the Hare nome. What an imagination, eh?”
“You can’t make her stay if she wants to leave.”
“She won’t leave without the riches she wants, believe me. Anhai’s first love is wealth. I swear, Meren, she’s counted every piece of food, every pot, every grain of barley and wheat we ever produced since the day we married. If there was gain in it, she’d market the sands of the desert and the dung in the cattle pens.”
“You shouldn’t criticize your wife to me,” Meren said. He was going to kill Idut. He was trying to think of an excuse to leave before Sennefer could recall more misery to impart when Isis burst into the hall, obviously aggrieved.
“Father, Remi says he’s going to jump into the garden pool.”
Meren looked at her in surprise. His household did not come to him with the small misbehaviors of a three-year-old grandson. “Where is the nurse?”
“Aunt Idut sent her to help in the kitchen because of the feast tonight, and I’m watching him.”
Waving his daughter away, Meren said, “Then simply tell Remi not to jump in the pool.”
“I have, but he said he’s going to do it anyway, to retrieve his toy chariot. You know he’ll do it, Father.”
“By the gods, Isis, if he does, haul him out.”
His charioteers would have recognized the irritation in his voice and decamped. Not his daughter. She smoothed the pleats of her spotless robe and tossed a thick lock of hair from her wig over her shoulder.
“I can’t,” she said. “I would ruin my costume.”
Meren narrowed his eyes and studied Isis. Why hadn’t he noticed that she was arrayed in elaborate dress? There were more pleats in her robe than feathers on a duck. Her eyes were painted with kohl and green paint, her arms and shoulders laden with electrum and carnelian. He should have noticed, but he thought of Isis as a babe. Yet dressed as she was, she looked older than Bener.
Frowning, he glanced at Sennefer, who had been snickering during the exchange. He intercepted a predatory stare at his daughter. Jolted into awareness, he stood up so that his body blocked Sennefer’s view. His cousin smoothly drew his gaze back to Meren, only to falter at the image of death he found there.
Lowering his voice so that only Sennefer could hear him, he said, “Attempt it, and I’ll cut your cock off and make you eat it.” Sennefer gave him a look of outraged innocence that was ruined by the way he swallowed hard as though nauseated. Turning to Isis, he said, “Come, I’ll attend to Remi. If you don’t intend to take care of him, don’t say you will. Find a maid to do it.”
As he followed Isis, with Sennefer in tow, he passed servants busy cleaning the chambers and hall in preparation for the feast. The garden lay in a walled enclosure behind the house. Its pool was deeper than the reflection pools in front and large enough to support one or two pleasure craft of the type designed to hold several people. In contrast to the barren fields and desert, the garden at Baht was lush with carefully tended greenery.
Generations of his family had cultivated willows, sycamores, pomegranates, and fig trees here. Incense trees graced painted earthenware pots. Arbors of grapevines provided secluded alcoves in which to rest. Flowers bordered the pool in thick beds. Meren scanned the court for the small figure of his grandson and found him bending precariously over the edge of the pool.
Raising his voice, he called, “Remi, stay back.”
Like Meren’s pet hounds and his thoroughbreds, Remi only heard what he wanted to hear. Meren’s second call was drowned by the splash Remi made as he dove into the water. Cursing, Meren raced across the garden, leaped over a flower bed, and dove in after the boy. The exertion caused the newly healed skin over his shoulder wound to pull. He’d jumped in an area thick with water lilies that could bind him underwater.
Fish slithered against his body as he sliced through the water. Shadows from the water lilies obscured his vision. Searching the dappled haze, he spotted the gleam of bronze and a little hand reaching for it. Meren darted for the bottom, snatched Remi and the toy chariot, and thrust himself up and out of the water. Bursting into the open, he winced as the child’s weight stressed his shoulder. Remi sputtered, then laughed and grabbed the toy. Swimming one-handed, Meren reached the side of the pool and handed Remi to Isis.
His hair was plastered to his forehead and hung down over his eyes. Gripping the edge of the pool, he hoisted himself out of the water and stood dripping beside Sennefer and Isis. All at once he noticed there were more people in the garden than he’d realized. Nebetta and Hepu huddled beside a grape arbor and gave him disapproving looks. No doubt they were scandalized at his departure from the demeanor of a great lord. Hepu probably had written a whole Instruction on the subject. He glared back at them, and they scurried out of the garden, muttering to themselves.
Then he heard a soft laugh. Lungs heaving, blinking back the water that dripped from his hair to his eyes, he turned to behold two elegantly dressed women standing beside a flower bed. One was Sennefer’s wife, Anhai. The other was Bentanta, one of the few people alive who could make him blush. Anhai was chuckling at him. Thank the gods, Bentanta wasn’t smiling at all.
“What are you doing, Meren?” Anhai asked. “I thought you were one of the Eyes and Ears of Pharaoh, not a nurse.”
“I was—”
He stopped in midsentence as Anhai suddenly laughed, stepped toward him, and pa
tted his cheek. She had a laugh like the chimes of a sistrum, one that evoked good humor in everyone. Meren forgot his embarrassment as she smiled at him.
“You’re an amazement,” she said. “You’re one of the few who can call himself Friend of the King, you’re entrusted with pharaoh’s secrets, well-being, and defense, you’re quite pleasing to look at, and you love your family.”
“I thank you, Anhai, but—”
She went on as if he hadn’t spoken. “While I am cursed with a man who not only can’t keep his place at court but also hasn’t the seed to give me even one child in the dozen years we’ve been married.”
Meren felt his jaw come unhinged. He’d forgotten for a moment what Anhai was like—a ka filled with putrescence and surrounded by a fine layer of jeweled charm. He stared at her while she appeared to reflect upon her words with pleasure. Bentanta had the diplomacy to appear engrossed in an examination of the water lilies. He didn’t return Anhai’s smile, and stared as she left the garden with an air of having gained some great victory.
Isis, who was holding Remi’s wet hand, also stared at Anhai’s retreating back. “I don’t like her. Come, Remi, you’re going back to your nurse before you get my gown wet.”
Meren regained his composure and glanced at Sennefer. His cousin was one of those men who make up for a lack of stature by cultivating an abundance of muscle. At the moment every one of those visible was flushed, as was his face. He had a short, sharp nose that reddened almost to the color of wine. He muttered something Meren didn’t catch, then excused himself and rushed after his wife.
Meren was left alone, wet and uncomfortable, with Bentanta. She didn’t seem to be in a hurry to leave, and he was slow to recover his composure. Bentanta was a childhood friend grown into a woman of grace. Once he’d swum naked in the Nile with her, Djet, and Ebana, but their lives had taken them along different paths. She was a widow with children the age of his own. Once she’d served the great queen Tiye, mother of Tutankhamun, and Nefertiti, wife of Akhenaten and daughter of Ay. She was as well versed in court intrigue and imperial diplomacy as he, but of late she’d retired from service to Tutankhamun’s queen, Ankhesenamun, to live quietly.
But whether a private person or a royal attendant, Bentanta was a formidable woman. And the last woman in Egypt before whom he wished to appear in nothing but a clinging, wet kilt.
He cleared his throat. “Blessings of Amun be upon you, lady. I didn’t know you were coming to the feast of rejoicing.”
Bentanta left off her examination of the water lilies and gave him a stare that seemed to slice through his body and probe his ka.
“There’s no need for foolish courtesy, Meren. I know you weren’t expecting me. Neither was your sister. I’m here because I was visiting Anhai, and she insisted that I come with her.”
“You sound as if you don’t want to be here.”
Her lashes fluttered, and she gave him a smile as false as the gilt on a coffin lid. “Of course I want to be here. I came to see you.”
Wary, he gave her a skeptical look. “Oh?”
“I’ve much leisure time now that I’m no longer at court, time to reflect on the happy memories of childhood. This reflection has given me a desire to renew old friendships, like ours.” She turned her back on him and walked away. Glancing over her shoulder, she said, “You can stop looking like a trapped gazelle. Meren. I only mentioned friendship, not marriage. My view of husbands isn’t much more cheerful than Anhai’s.”
She left him standing by the pool, dripping, his kilt clinging to his hips. He shoved damp hair from his forehead, looked down at himself, and cursed. This morning he hadn’t bothered to don anything other than a kilt. He might as well have been wearing a loincloth.
Sputtering curses at his own lack of judgment, he stalked back into the house to his private apartments. Zar was already there, instructing bathing attendants. The man seemed to know what he would need before Meren did. A convenient and at the same time unsettling habit. Meren glared at the servant, went into the bathing chamber, and stepped into the limestone bathing stall. As a bathing attendant poured water over him, he wondered that his skin didn’t steam from the irritation that boiled within him.
He consoled himself with the thought that he only had to survive the rest of this day and the evening’s feast. Then everyone would be gone, those slugs Nebetta and Hepu, Great-Aunt Cherit, the lecherous Sennefer, Anhai, Bentanta, all of them. Then he’d have peace, and the freedom to do what he’d promised pharaoh he would do. And if Idut didn’t get rid of his relatives, he was going to throw them out himself.
Chapter 4
Lord Paser was a man of unique appearance; of this he was quite certain. He prided himself on his closely cropped hair and perfectly barbered goatee and mustache. He felt that his missing right canine tooth lent him an air of battle-hardened experience. No one had ever mentioned to him that his forehead shined as if he oiled it, or that when agitated, he flapped his arms like the wings of a pelican coming in for a water landing.
At the moment Paser was quite pleased with himself. Yesterday afternoon he’d given up following Count Meren, depressed that his strategy of spying on the Friend of the King had yielded nothing but boring days of watching the man sail that evil black ship of his. Meren hadn’t, as Paser suspected, gone to some secret meeting of allies. He’d gone home, just as he’d said he would—and stayed there. Paser had watched for two days and then given up. After insisting to Prince Hunefer that Meren never simply went home to rest, Paser had been faced with the prospect of returning to court with nothing to report for his trouble.
He’d directed his ship toward the capital and was drifting slowly northward with the current when he passed a south-going flotilla of trading ships of Ra laden with cargo. He’d been lounging beneath the awning in front of the deckhouse in his favorite gilded cedar chair, his face lifted to the north breeze, when he happened to glance at one of the barges.
The two vessels passed within a few skiff-lengths of each other. As they did, a man walked around the giant mount of grain sacks stacked on the deck, and Paser jumped out of his chair. Hurrying to the railing, he shaded his eyes and peered more closely.
Kysen! Had his yacht been going faster, he might not have had time to make out that wide jaw, the rounded youthful chin shadowed with a man’s stubble, and those half-moon eyes. But he’d gotten a good enough look, long enough to see the grave expression on the youth’s face. Unguarded, not so well versed in masking emotions as his father, Kysen’s expression revealed what Lord Meren’s never did—misgiving, apprehension, uneasiness.
That look was enough to make Paser order his ship to come about once out of sight of the flotilla. Now he was trailing after the slow-moving fleet, biding his time, watching. As he plied his fly whisk in the shade of the canopy that stretched before the deckhouse, a hail signaled the arrival of a visitor. While the last ship in the trading fleet disappeared around one of the bends in the river, the visitor climbed from a skiff up a rope ladder on the side of the yacht.
The newcomer hoisted a leg over the railing, then the other, and stalked over to Paser. Retreating to his chair, Paser flapped his whisk, already annoyed without having spoken to his visitor. The intruder started talking before reaching the awning.
“What are you doing? I’m on my way to Count Meren’s feast of rejoicing, and I see you skulking down the river.”
Paser turned in his chair to scowl at his guest. “I said I was going to follow Meren to see what he was really up to.”
“But you’re not following him, you fool.”
“Don’t you call me a fool. I’m not the only one scrambling for a place at court.”
“And who told you to do your stalking in a yellow-and-green yacht, of all things? Do you think Meren’s blind?”
“There are many craft on the river—mine’s no more noticeable than most.”
The guest lunged at Paser, pulled him out of his chair, and hurried him to the railing. Pointing, the newco
mer hissed into Paser’s ear.
“See! See those fishermen? They’ve been with you for hours, and their nets are empty. Why do you think that is, Paser? I’ll tell you why—because they’re not fishermen. They’re charioteers. Meren’s charioteers, you worm-witted son of a dung beetle.”
Paser jerked his arm free, gave the fishermen a derisive sniff, and returned to his chair with his guest dogging his footsteps. “I care nothing for those spies. My diligence has been rewarded. I saw Kysen on that trading flotilla, and I’ve been following him instead of Meren.”
“You’re following Kysen? Why?”
Tapping his guest with the fly whisk, Paser asked, “The question is, why is he traveling on a trading ship? He was going with the king to Memphis.”
“He’s going to Meren’s feast of rejoicing, you fool.”
“Who is a fool? Would you abandon a place at the side of the living god to attend a paltry feast?”
“Kysen isn’t like those of us with noble blood. He knows nothing of what is proper for the son of a Hereditary Prince and Sole Beloved Friend of the King.”
“But that’s it,” Paser replied. “What if he’s learned? What if he’s pursuing the duties of a Sole Beloved Friend of the King? What if he’s doing that right now?”
There was a long silence in which his guest stared at Paser. Having put this rude interloper in his place, Paser settled back in his chair with a smirk.
“If what you suspect is true, then I have to ask again why you would follow Meren’s son in a bright yellow boat in full daylight.”
“I know what I’m doing. Say!” Paser gasped as a knee landed on his stomach and the tip of a dagger pricked the linen of his robe over his heart.
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