Day of the False King

by Brad Geagley

  “The what?”

  “The Egyptian Quarter. The Bel-Marduk priests told me it’s somewhere east of the river.”

  “I’d believe them if I was you.”

  “That’s not the point. I’ve lost my way.”

  “East of the river, you say?”

  “Yes.”

  Shaking his head, the man turned to shout at the potter across the courtyard.

  “The Egyptian Quarter? Ever hear of it?”

  “The what?”

  Semerket felt his gut clench. He detested being lost. As the two men argued, it was clear that they knew very little about their own city. At any other time, he would have asked directions from one of the omnipresent Elamite foot soldiers who patrolled the streets in small units. But he had no wish to approach them, and went out of his way to avoid the Elamites. This was not easy, as most of Elam’s army seemed to be stationed in the capital city—an intimidating, menacing presence on almost every street corner.

  It was noon when Semerket realized that the signs and notices painted on the brick walls had changed from cuneiform to glyph. He had at last arrived in the Egyptian Quarter. To his dismay, however, the upper floors of his own hostel loomed over the rooftops not a furlong away; Semerket had come almost full circle from where he started.

  He cursed aloud, using an epithet he rarely spoke.

  Though the quarter’s featureless mud-brick facades resembled every other place he had seen that morning, eventually his eye found some rudimentary Egyptian embellishments. A single lotus column supported a sagging roof, while a fallen statue of some ancient pharaoh lay forgotten in its courtyard, covered in bird droppings. At best, the quarter was only a tired and dusty refuge for Egypt’s unwanted outcasts.

  These outcasts congregated in the square, loitering in doorways and stables. None seemed to be actually doing anything, and they stared back at him with vacant, surly expressions. Semerket bent to ask a woman sitting in the shade of a spindly palm where he might find the local temple. Listlessly, she pointed to an alley.

  “End of the street,” she slurred, idly waving away the flies that foraged on her grease-stained robes.

  His two spies waited for him behind the temple’s walls, ducking out of sight when he approached. He was pleased to see them, for then they could honestly report to King Kutir that Semerket had done what he said he would do: he had gone to pray to his gods. The two men would never guess that he intended to go directly to the rear of the temple and over its wall to continue his investigations alone.

  Once inside the temple compound, however, Semerket was temporarily flummoxed. There was no hall of columns, no sacred lake, no altars—in fact, the place did not seem like any Egyptian temple he had ever seen. Tentatively, he went inside the unkempt courtyard, where a couple of parched fig trees were its only ornamentation.

  Crossing into the darkened sanctuary, he met a miserable collection of chapels and shrines, though not a single statue of the gods occupied them. The murals, too, seemed poorly painted. A faint though pleasant smell of stale incense clung to the room, but it was clear that no rituals had taken place in there for some time. He looked vainly about for any priest or acolyte.

  Shrugging his shoulders, he plunged forward into the temple, toward what he assumed was its rear. He had gone no more than a few paces when he heard footsteps coming down one of the gloomy hallways.

  “My lord!” A thin craggy voice bleated in Egyptian to him from the dark.

  A gnarled priest of incalculable years was advancing slowly toward him, all the while attempting to straighten his threadbare wig. Behind him padded an elderly woman, her lips quivering in alarm.

  “You must not go that way, my lord,” the priest said. “Only a consecrated priest may enter.”

  “I’m a priest of the second grade,” Semerket said, not precisely lying. All who learned how to write the 770 sacred writing symbols of Egypt in a House of Life, as Semerket had, were designated second-grade priests at their graduation. It was just that Semerket had never truly graduated.

  “Nevertheless, you are a stranger here and you have not been purified…” The aged priest’s voice trailed into muffled uncertainty. “You are a stranger, aren’t you? We’ve never met?”

  “No.”

  The old priest seemed relieved that his mind still functioned, and stood up straighter. “Then I must ask you to leave the way you came.”

  Semerket thought quickly. “But I wanted to offer up a prayer of thanks to Amun, for seeing me safely to Babylon.”

  The old priest glanced at him sharply. “A prayer—? You will make an offering?”

  This was more than Semerket meant to do, but he shrugged. “Yes, all right. Why not?”

  “You’ll purchase onions and bread for the altar?” The priest was smiling with surprised delight. He turned to the priestess behind him. “Mother, today is a fortunate one for us!”

  To Semerket’s distress, he saw that tears flowed down the old woman’s cheeks. Impulsively she reached forward to take his hand and kiss it.

  “It can’t be so strange,” Semerket said, a trifle embarrassed, “for wayfarers to offer thanks to the gods?”

  “Around here it is,” the old woman said forthrightly. “Most of the Egyptians in this neighborhood didn’t come to Babylon willingly. They have very little to be thankful for, and blame the gods for their misfortunes. Hardly anyone makes offerings nowadays.”

  Semerket knew that Egyptian priests and priestesses lived mainly from the sacrifices of bread, vegetables, oil, and other foodstuffs given to the gods. Seeing the old couple’s eyes shining from their sunken faces, Semerket grew concerned.

  “When was the last time you ate?”

  “It’s of no importance. We serve the gods in joy.”

  “When?” Semerket’s voice was perhaps harsher than he intended.

  The woman spoke quickly. “Two days ago.”

  “Hasn’t Ambassador Menef sent you provisions, or workers to help you? Isn’t it his duty to maintain this temple?”

  The thin, little woman narrowed her eyes. “He has his own private chapel, on his estate, with his own priests. He doesn’t come to our services anymore. He said—”

  “Mother.”

  The old woman fell silent, staring at the floor in shame. Semerket noticed how her tunic, though meticulously cleaned, had been patched and repatched so many times that there was more Babylonian wool to it than good Egyptian linen. Semerket bent to regard the woman’s tired eyes.

  “Tell me.”

  With a fearful look at her husband, she whispered, “He said that my husband and I have done too little to lure the people here—that’s what he said, ‘lure’—as if this place were a circus and—”

  “Mother!”

  But the old woman’s words continued to pour out in ever more aggrieved invective. “We’ve even had to sell the gods’ statues from their niches in order to keep the temple up. We traded the last one a month ago, and then only for what its bronze was worth. What’s next for us? My husband forbids me to beg—he says it demeans our calling—though sometimes the pains in my stomach are so sharp, that I—that I—” The rest of her words were swallowed in a sudden, silent convulsion of weeping.

  The old priest stepped between Semerket and his wife. “I’m sure the ambassador has many reasons for why he hasn’t sent us sustenance,” he said firmly. “The war with Elam, I know, has caused much suffering. We’re not the only ones who go hungry in Babylon, you know.”

  Turning suddenly, Semerket retraced his steps through the gloomy temple and out to the gates. The old couple hobbled after him in alarm, believing that he was leaving them for good.

  “You two!” Semerket shouted to the spies when he reached the gate.

  They peeked from behind the wall where they hid. “Do you mean us?”

  “I need you to get some things. Go into the marketplace around the corner. Bread, onions, honey, oil. A goose, if you can find one.” He turned to the wide-eyed priestly co
uple. “Do you think the gods would like some beer?”

  The elderly priest seemed too dazed to speak, but his wife chimed in hopefully, “Oh, yes, please! The August Ones haven’t had beer in so long.”

  The spies frowned. “Who the hell are you to order us around!?” the thin one railed.

  “Semerket, envoy of the fourth Pharaoh Ramses, come to parley with your king Kutir—as you well know, since you’ve seen fit to follow me around all morning.”

  “That’s a lie—!”

  “We never—!”

  The obsidian flash that glinted then in Semerket’s eye made them abruptly cease their protests. “Do I really have to tell the king what inept spies he sets upon me?”

  The men grew alarmed. The fatter one swallowed and asked in a humbler voice, “What is it you want, again, sir? Though we don’t admit to your accusation, mind you, we’d be glad to help.”

  Semerket named the items, and gave them a gold piece. He told them that another would be theirs if they would be quick. With many grumbles, the Elamites went into the nearby marketplace.

  “And some incense,” he called after them. “A big ball of it!”

  “I’m afraid you won’t see them again, young man,” said the priest. “We’ve never been able to trust the locals.”

  “They’ll be back,” averred Semerket, staring after them.

  Despite his impatience to begin his search for Naia and Rami, Semerket assisted the aged couple in preparing the altar for the receiving of sacrifice. They scraped away the lichen growing on the stone and threw away the dead blooms from its vases. At one time, the old priest told him, when Egypt’s eastern empire flourished, the Babylonian temple of Amun had been much larger. He pointed beyond the wall, telling him that the real temple had once stood next door but that it had been lost in a bad business deal with some crooked Babylonian scoundrel, who had razed it to put up a warehouse. Only this collection of odd rooms was left of the original temple, which had once been only its storage area.

  “It’s no wonder the gods have turned their backs on us,” said the old priest mournfully. “My wife and I, I’m afraid, have been very poor stewards of their glory.” He sighed as he bent to sweep up the dust. “Though I doubt anyone ever loved them more.”

  Defying the old priest’s gloomy predictions, the two spies returned with the provisions, and Semerket assisted them in bringing the goods inside the temple. They heaped the groceries on the altar and set wildflowers in the vases. Despite the rumbles coming from their stomachs, the old couple insisted that they celebrate all the obsequies and ceremonies before they themselves partook of the food.

  They lit the incense, and genuflected before the altar, insisting that Semerket perform the rituals with them. Verbosely, the old ones thanked the good gods for the safe arrival of their guest, praying earnestly for his welfare, and begging the August Ones to protect him in all his endeavors.

  Semerket had always disliked ritual and ceremony. He preferred instead to commune with the gods in his own way, silent and solitary. For all of this, his first day in Babylon found him intoning the litanies and psalms he had learned as a child. And after the priest and priestess concluded their prayers, Semerket—who liked to think of himself as a hard-bitten man of little sentiment—meekly asked the old couple to add a prayer or two for the safety of his wife and young friend, whom he had come to Babylon to find.

  “NAIA WAS DEVOTED to the gods. I know she must have made an offering here. It’s what she would have done when she arrived in Babylon. Why can’t you remember her?”

  Senmut the priest and Semerket sat together in the soft light of evening, their backs against the warm granite altar. Senmut’s wife, Wia, had cleared the remains of their dinner away, and had taken the leftovers to the spies who still waited outside the temple gates.

  “Ah, yes,” the priest smiled. “How could I fail to recognize such a paragon from your description?” He paused, and then recited, “ ‘There is no one like her, she is more beautiful than any other, a star-goddess rising, with hair of lapis and sweet lips for speaking…’ ”

  “You remember your poetry well enough.”

  “I was young when I learned the song. You’ll discover when you’re my age it’s easier to recall a poem from your youth than what it was you did yesterday.”

  “I’m sure if you tried—”

  “Semerket,” Senmut admonished, “you describe a goddess, but I must recall a woman. And the world is filled with so many.”

  Semerket tried to hide his disappointment from the priest, making his voice deliberately light. “Then if the most beautiful woman in Babylon does come here, with skin the color of smoke and eyes like the Nile at flood, will you send me word?”

  “Of course. But perhaps there is some other way I can help you.” The priest scratched his brow, struggling to remember. “Mother?” He called over to Wia, who had returned to the courtyard. “Mother, what is the name of that singer?”

  “Nidaba,” said Wia distinctly, instantly knowing who her husband meant.

  “Who?” asked Semerket.

  “Nidaba. A singer of ballads and poems. You must go to her house. It’s where everyone in Babylon meets to find what they need.”

  Semerket was intrigued. “For instance…?”

  Wia, who seemed the more practical member of the family, looked at him slyly and tapped her nose. “The kind of things you don’t find in the regular souks or bazaars, if you know what I mean.”

  “Black market?”

  Wia nodded. “Yes, that, of course. But mostly one goes there for information. If anyone in the city has seen your wife and friend, you’ll find them at Nidaba’s.”

  “Where is her house?”

  “We’ve never been there, Semerket,” said Senmut. “It’s not an…edifying…place for a priest to be seen in. But I believe it’s in the old section of town.”

  “How did you find out about it?”

  “When we had to sell the statues of the gods, we made inquiries. Someone from Nidaba’s house came to collect them. Apparently she knew someone who has a passion for Egyptian objects.”

  Dusk had fallen over the city. Semerket rose to leave, for the Elamites had imposed a nighttime curfew, allowing only those with a pass onto the streets. Semerket hurriedly made his farewells to the old priest and priestess; the gods alone knew how long it would take him to find his hostel. As Wia stood on tiptoe to embrace him, he slipped a few pieces of gold into her tattered sash.

  “You will come back, Semerket?”

  “Of course. It does me good to speak Egyptian again. I hadn’t realized how much my throat ached, speaking only Babylonian as I’ve done.”

  “We will ask after this lady of yours,” Senmut promised earnestly. “And the boy, as well.”

  That night, Semerket discovered that someone had rifled through his belongings while he had been out. The seals on Pharaoh’s letters freeing Naia and Rami were broken. Though his intruder had tried to mend them, Semerket saw the hairline fracture that faintly scarred the wax intaglio. With rising panic, he clawed through his pack, searching for the clay tablets. They were there—a relief, since he must soon go to the temple countinghouse for more of Pharaoh’s gold. The fact that the tablets were still in his pack proved that whoever had searched it was more interested in information than gold.

  He chastised himself for having left his belongings behind during his day’s roaming, for now the Elamites knew that he was searching for two Egyptian nationals, and who they were. He had not declared such an intention to the customs clerk at the Ishtar Gate, and the Elamites would wonder what importance Pharaoh or Semerket attached to the recovery of these individuals. He had no wish to become embroiled in any international gamesmanship, and knew that time was fast running out for him. A few days were all he had left before Kutir would surely demand to see him. He must work quickly, he decided, and without any spies reporting his every move back to the palace.

  AFTER HE LEFT the hostel the following morning,
Semerket moved in a slow, circuitous manner, certain that his two fumbling spies would be following him. Just as he thought, he soon heard the wheezing and panting of the larger one coming down the road.

  “Good morning,” he said, stepping into their path.

  Even though they had been amiable enough the day before, the men became instantly wary. They glanced nervously around the crowded streets, suspicious of the nobles and bureaucrats converging on the various government buildings and temples in the area. They beckoned him into a dark doorway. There, they indignantly told him that it was their job to keep him in sight, and not the other way round.