Bird in a Snare

by N. L. Holmes

  Tutu’s face lengthened in an evaluating look. “I’ll see to it. You’re dismissed.” And turning on his heel, he strode off into the palace.

  Hani could feel the tension draining from his body. It was done. No doubt Lord Yanakh-amu was in the Land of the West by now, and the day of Yapakh-addi’s ruin was drawing nearer with the implacability of the approaching Inundation. Hani heaved a soul-emptying sigh of relief and made his way out the great doors of the vestibule and into the inner court of the House of Rejoicing. The glare struck him sightless for a moment. He shaded his eyes with a hand and struck off, half-blind, across the courtyard, heading for the massive pylon that joined it with the outer court—eager to be away from this place where the bronze-clawed raptor of shame was ready to fall from the sky upon the unsuspecting Yapakh-addi.

  And in the gateway, he ran straight into Yapakh-addi himself.

  At his heels was Aha.

  Yapakh-addi looked like his usual disagreeable self. His first reaction was a snarl, then he realized who had nearly crashed into him, and his little eyes grew slitty with what had to be suspicion. After all, Hani was a man whom he’d tried unsuccessfully to assassinate. “Ah, Hani. What are you here for?”

  Hani’s glance flew to his son, who stood, manifestly surprised but recovering quickly into stony neutrality. Neither of them said anything to one another, although Hani’s heart twisted painfully in a spasm of resentment and sorrow. Part of him yearned to cry to Aha to run for his life. Instead, he addressed himself coolly to Yapakh-addi. “I’m here as your worst nightmare, my lord. Yanakh-amu is dead. I’ve delivered his testament to the king.”

  Hani found it gratifying to see how the color drained instantly from the Fan Bearer’s face, leaching from it his habitual ferocity so that he looked like nothing more than a fat old man who’d had a terrible shock.

  Aha stared at him in confusion then at his father. “What does he mean, my lord?” he cried to Yapakh-addi.

  “Nothing,” growled the Fan Bearer, trying to regroup, but there was no concealing the spark of fear in his eyes. “Idle threats.”

  “In fact, it means your utter downfall, my lord. Your vile deeds will be made known. All the dishonesty, the bribery, the threats. All the amassing of land on the border to make of yourself something greater than a king. And if you deny it, your own meticulous coded books point their finger at you.”

  The Fan Bearer’s face was growing apoplectic with anger and terror. Had they not stood in the doorway of the king’s house, he might have attacked his accuser.

  Hani, his voice rising with contempt, continued implacably. “But what’s more, the king will learn of the ruin you’ve made of young boys’ lives. How many of them, Lord Yapakh-addi? Three generations. Is that hundreds? Thousands? Men like Abdi-ashirta, Yanakh-amu. How many others, alive and dead? The king will be revolted; he will protect you no longer. Your career is finished.”

  Hani cast him one last look of disdain and strode past, avoiding any contact, as if the man of Kharu were contaminated. Still gaping at his protector, Aha stepped back to let Hani through the gate. He shot his father a brief look of consternation as Hani passed.

  Behind him, Hani heard Aha demanding in a shocked voice, “What does he mean, my lord?”

  Then Hani was out into the broad sun-bleached street with the lion-bodied images of the king, stalking along toward the embarcadero like a vulture abandoning a corpse.

  ⸎

  Three days later, Hani, just back in Waset, received a summons to Akhet-aten from Lord Ptah-mes. The high commissioner was unable to leave the capital during the heb-sed festival, but he had some news for Hani. Over breakfast, Hani told his father, “I need to go back to the capital.”

  Mery-ra rolled his eyes. “You need your own fan bearer, my boy. Stay out of the sun.”

  “No danger, Father. I’m just going to the Hall of Royal Correspondence and coming right back.”

  “Too bad you don’t have wings, eh? It’s not so far as the duck flies,” the old man said with a twinkle in his eye.

  “I’m afraid this duck has to paddle. Dear gods, how I wish the capital were still in Waset.” Hani sighed, rising to his feet. “The Field of Reeds will be a place where we never have to travel, not even a little. We’ll just sit under a tree in the shade.”

  “Ah, it sounds divine. With a pot of beer at our side. And a beautiful woman.” At Hani’s scandalized expression he added hastily, “I mean your mother, of course.”

  “Of course.” Hani grinned.

  Mery-ra’s face had grown brilliantly red. “No, really. What did you think I meant?”

  But Hani just laughed, enjoying his father’s discomfiture. He knew very well the affection his parents had shared and how deeply Mery-ra had suffered at his wife’s death.

  “Tell the family where I’ve gone when they get up, Father. I sent Maya word to meet me at the quay.”

  Mery-ra rose and accompanied his son to the door, where Hani’s baggage sat in a single wicker basket. “Travel safely, my boy.”

  ⸎

  Hani had plenty of time en route to think about the possible news Lord Ptah-mes might have to impart to him. It’s almost certainly about Yanakh-amu. The last time Ptah-mes had gone out of his way to inform him of an event, it had been of the sad death of Rib-addi.

  He and Maya had exchanged few words on the boat. Maya wasn’t happy to have to leave Sat-hut-haru, and even by the end of the trip, he was still pouting a little. Or maybe it was the crushing heat that put them both in a silent, grumpy frame of mind. The streets of Akhet-aten were as bare and unrelieved in their sunbaked misery as ever, despite the celebrations of the jubilee that were going on behind the walls of palace or temple. Hani trudged heavily through the courtyard of the Hall of Royal Correspondence with Maya in his wake. The cool of the reception room, with its blinding sudden darkness, was like a bucket of cold water in the face.

  “Wait for me here, Maya. I shouldn’t be long.”

  “Why did I even have to come?” Maya grumbled, holding up his hands in an extravagant gesture of questioning.

  “Because I may have to write something, and you’re my secretary,” Hani reminded him a little tartly. He strode up to the guardian’s table, straightened his clothes, and introduced himself. A moment later, the man summoned him to Ptah-mes’s door, where the high commissioner himself opened to his visitor.

  “Hani,” he said, looking mildly surprised. “You made good time.”

  “I flew, my lord,” said Hani with a grin.

  Ptah-mes raised a quizzical eyebrow, but then his face grew grave. The two men penetrated the office, and Ptah-mes seated himself, gesturing to Hani to do the same. “As seems to be the new custom, I have sad news to give you. Yanakh-amu has died.”

  “So I suspected,” Hani said sadly. “May the Lady of the West receive him gently.”

  “He apparently suffered from too much sun on the opening day of the jubilee. His health has always been rather delicate.” Ptah-mes looked down and blew a breath out his nose. “He was my age, forty-seven. This is quite sad.”

  “It is indeed.” Hani stood silently, his lips pressed together, trying to gather himself. “I was actually with him after he dropped out of the procession. He looked bad, I must say. But I helped him get on board his boat, and after a while, I had the feeling he was doing better. I saw him again... just before he died.”

  “I’m glad you were with him.” Ptah-mes’s lean, patrician face, not much given to displays of emotion, was drawn with real sorrow. “He was far too alone.”

  “I saw no one with him but servants. Does he have a family?”

  “No children. His wife cuckolded him openly with any male she could grab.” Ptah-mes’s tone was offhand, but Hani felt it was to protect himself against his feeling and not due to lack of caring. “You said you were aware of his... relationship with Yapakh-addi, I believe?”

  Hani nodded, moved by the thought of the man’s bitter victimhood and its consequences.
<
br />   “I think all that probably damaged him. Rumor had it that he could never, shall we say, complete his duties toward her.”

  Another humiliation. Another failure to be loved. Hani groaned. After a moment, he said, “You seem to have known him well, my lord.”

  “No one knew him well. I knew him, that’s all. We grew up together at court. Along with Aziru, although he’s younger. And that Ili-rapikh, who’s older. He and Yapakh-addi, who’s older still, were always up to no good together as young men. Yapakh-addi certainly has plenty of misdeeds to hold over Ili-rapikh’s head if he wants to remain a vassal in good standing.”

  “Were you aware that Yanakh-amu was Aziru’s half-brother? Apparently, Abdi-ashirta and Yanakh-amu’s mother had an affair. He was desperately afraid the king would find out that his father was a slave.”

  Ptah-mes looked surprised but then tipped his head in a gesture of fatalism. “He lived in fear. He was always concealing something. He wanted so badly to be what we wanted him to be that we couldn’t ever be sure he was telling the truth. Poor man. Charming and goodhearted as he was as a boy, I found him to be a groveling sort and, with the hard-heartedness of youth, refused him my friendship.” He looked up at Hani, his dark eyes unfathomable. “Now I feel nothing but pity for him.”

  Hani shook his head, unable to speak. His nose burned with tears. “It was he who killed Abdi-ashirta after all, to avenge his mother, but Yapakh-addi was at the bottom of the attempt on me and Maya. He set Yanakh-amu up so he’d look guilty. Yanakh-amu told me... he told me he’d advised the king for personal reasons to let him dispose of Abdi-ashirta but that he later saw it was politically foolish. He deeply regretted that. I think he only wanted to be a good servant of the king but was too hurt by his past to be clearheaded. He was... he was full of regrets.”

  “Not a happy man. And even sadder is the spectacle of a king who is advised by men who have their own personal axes to grind.”

  After a moment, Hani said, “Are you aware of the exposé Yanakh-amu left behind, to be given to Our Sun when he died?”

  Ptah-mes nodded significantly, and his mouth stretched in a grim smile. “I am, as of a few days ago. It has reached the king. Stars are about to fall from the heavens, Hani. Whatever grandiose plans Yapakh-addi has scaffolded in the north are about to crash to the ground. His gold won’t save him. He’ll be protected no longer.”

  Hani nodded and turned to Ptah-mes with a sorrowful smile. “Yanakh-amu’s last service to the crown.”

  And thus have the gods spoken—courage is always the answer. My moral dilemma is resolved.

  ⸎

  The burial of Lord Yanakh-amu took place seventy days later, well after the jubilee’s end and the breaking of the terrible heat. The Inundations had begun, a sign of new life after death. Hani, Maya, and Mery-ra walked back toward the River together from the sealed tomb, white scarves around their heads, each thinking his thoughts. It turned out that Yanakh-amu had been a prince of the royal house of Arwada in Kharu. Hani thought he would never recover from the sad spectacle of the commissioner’s old father howling and tearing his hair over the coffin of his last son. May he never learn the truth.

  Nefer-khepru-ra had sent cartloads of floral offerings as tokens of his esteem for the Fan Bearer. There were plenty of colleagues and clients present at the rites too; the deceased had been well liked. But his wife, standing expressionless at the mouth of the sepulcher, had not loved him. And he’d left no children to tend his tomb and make sacrifices for his poor soul into the future. A sem priest, not a son, had had to open the mouth of his coffin so that he might enjoy the offerings that would accompany him into the Duat.

  “At least we know Yapakh-addi isn’t going to be coming after us anymore,” said Maya as they descended the steps of the quay. “He’s totally disgraced, stripped of his favors and his wealth. That’s a kind of happy ending, isn’t it?”

  Ahead of them stood Nub-nefer and Sat-hut-haru, arm in arm, lovely as a pair of sisters in their mourning scarves. They’d come to the funeral out of respect and pity for a man they’d never met. “Yes, indeed,” said Hani. “And here is the happiest part of all—coming back to these wonderful partners of our lives, eh, Maya?”

  The five of them climbed on board the ferry, and the boat swung out into the River, crossing back toward the city of the living.

  When they arrived home at twilight, another surprise awaited them. Aha paced at the outer gate of Hani’s house, his hands clenched nervously at his sides. He stopped and looked up at the approach of his family. Hani stood still a few cubits from his firstborn, not sure how to react to this unexpected apparition. Behind him, he could feel Nub-nefer tense. He and Aha stared at one another for a space of time that seemed to endure forever.

  Then Aha fell to his knees and put his face to the ground. “Forgive me, Father,” he cried in a shaking voice. “Forgive me, forgive me.”

  Something melting inside him, Hani squatted at the boy’s side and drew him up. “Aha, my son. All you ever needed to say was those words. You’re forgiven as if nothing ever happened.” His arms around the sobbing youth, Hani looked back over his shoulder at Nub-nefer, still expressionless with shock, her eyes running with tears. Mery-ra smiled back in wobbly approval, while Maya and Sat-hut-haru stared on, wide-eyed. “And your mother forgives you, too, son.” He gestured Nub-nefer over with a tip of the head, and she flew to them, dropped to her knees, and joined in the embrace.

  “I’ve been such a fool, Father, Mother. That Yapakh-addi was the vilest turd in the Two Lands, and I was so proud to be his henchman that I never even saw it. I only saw his wealth and his power—how he could advance me. I saw clues about his horrendous deeds. Dear gods, I have children of my own. It turns my stomach to think—but I kept telling myself...”

  Hani gently lifted Aha and led him toward the gate. “Let’s go inside, son, and you can tell us everything that’s in your heart.” His own heart was full of tenderness—and pity for Aha’s innocence and for his painful humbling. But that bloodletting would do his son good.

  They all traveled in a knot, like a flock of birds that maneuvered in a cloud with one mind, and settled themselves in the pavilion. Maya excused himself, no doubt embarrassed by the extreme vulnerability of Aha, who’d always been an undeclared rival of his. Sat-hut-haru and Mery-ra peeled off with him discreetly, and they crunched away through the garden into the house. Hani and Nub-nefer were left with their firstborn as the last of the daylight drained away and the crickets began.

  Aha was a grown man, but for this moment, he was their little boy again. He’d disappointed them, and he needed their forgiveness. Hani could barely restrain the sparkles that threatened his sight. “Sometimes you just have to learn by falling, son. There are some things no one can teach you.”

  “You’re always in our heart, Aha. Nothing you do can unmake you as our child,” Nub-nefer assured him, her head on his shoulder.

  “I was blind, blind.” Aha snuffled, swiping at his nose. “The king wanted the name of Amen wiped out, and what did I do, like a stupid slave? I endangered the souls of my own family.” His voice broke, and he howled, “I endangered your souls.”

  “It’s over, son. All repaired and forgotten. You’ve learned a huge lesson. You’ll be a better man for it.”

  “I abandoned the name you gave me. It’s your name, Father. How could I not be proud of it?”

  “It’s in the air, Aha. A lot of people are acting like that, and very few are man enough to admit their error.” Hani was quiet, struggling with his own pride. Then he said meekly, “I’m sorry if I haven’t been a good father to you—if I’ve been away too much while you were growing up, needing my presence.”

  “Never, Father. You’ve been the best. I never doubted for a moment that you loved me, loved us all. Perhaps you were too good. You gave me everything with no demands. In the end, I wanted to be someone by myself.” Aha shook his head in disgust. “I wanted to find a place for myself on my own and not just be
cause you had earned something for me. I’m a fool. An idiot. I don’t deserve to be your son. You can’t imagine the vileness of that man, and I threw myself into his arms. I could never have lived with myself if I’d been sucked into what he was doing.” Suddenly, he grabbed at the knife at his side and, wrenching at the scabbard, tore it—belt and all—from his waist. He slung it to the ground.

  Hani said quietly, “I think I can imagine, my son. We just came back from the funeral of one of his victims, a man older than me, who was still suffering after all these years. That was the price of exposing Yapakh-addi’s crimes.”

  “All the things I’ve said about the gods, about the King of the Gods. May they forgive me...”

  “They do,” said Nub-nefer. “They see how small and weak we are, Aha, my love.”

  They sat locked in one another’s arms, listening to the crickets, breathing the sweet peace of evening. The sobs and hiccups died away. Aha said in a small voice, “You foresaw it all, Father. In your maxims, the son says to the father, ‘Do not proclaim your powers so as to force me into your ways.’ That was me. But he comes back at the end, doesn’t he, like the child he is, looking to his father for help.”

  “Do you wish us to teach you, or have you been corrupted?” Hani quoted gently.

  “Teach me, Father. Take me back, I beg you...” Aha’s voice trailed off, timid for once, a little gap-toothed boy again.

  “Then everything has its happy ending.” Hani smiled with all his happy heart, even though Aha had no idea what he was referring to. “Welcome home, my son.”

  THE END

  Enjoy this book? Don’t miss the next installment of Lord Hani Mysteries series. Here is a taste of The Crocodile Makes No Sound:

  Already the third month of the summer season is upon us, Hani thought, as he gazed about his garden. The Black Land had begun to pray for a successful Inundation—for high waters and their rich forerunners, the red and green waves, to fecundate the fields. Once the people of Kemet had prayed to Amen-Ra and Hapy, god of the flood. Now Hani wasn’t sure to whom they were officially expected to offer their prayers and gifts. To the Aten, he supposed, the only god formally recognized by their king Nefer-khepru-ra. Certainly not to Amen-Ra, the Hidden One, whose name and cult had become anathema. Hani’s beloved city of Waset, once the capital of the Upper Kingdom and home of the world’s greatest temple, had emptied as the bureaucrats had departed for the new City of the Horizon, and the tens of thousands of priests and lay employees of the god, left without occupation or income, had grown more and more restless. More and more dangerous.