Day of the False King

by Brad Geagley

  Still, he could not look at her face, and his shoulders began to shake. “Naia…Naia…my love,” he moaned in Egyptian, “what have they made you do?”

  Naia’s voice in return sounded higher, more childish, than the one he remembered. “Who in hell are you?” she asked.

  Semerket staggered forward, and felt the floor rising up to meet him…

  WHEN HE AWOKE, he was lying on his back in the House of Ishtar, with his head in Aneku’s lap. She was mopping his face with a moist rag, and before he opened his eyes he heard her high, thin voice rising loudly in the room, lashing out in Babylonian at the eunuchs who had gathered at the cubicle’s entrance.

  “Can’t you let me alone with my husband?” she said in aggrieved tones. “Even you fat oafs must appreciate the shock he’s just had.”

  When the eunuchs had scuttled from the room, Semerket muttered in Egyptian, “I’m not your husband.”

  “You and I know that,” said Aneku, “but those fools don’t.”

  “Why pretend?”

  “Because you’re my way out of this shit hole.”

  Semerket sat up wearily, his head throbbing. “Why should I get you out? I don’t even know you.”

  “Because they told me you’re looking for Naia. Well, it happens that she and I lived together at Menef’s estate, before he sent me to the slave yards—may Set and all his devils blind and castrate him—and, if you’re still interested, I happen to know where she is.”

  His black eyes grew clear. “Where?!” he asked eagerly. “Tell me!”

  She shook her head. “Not so fast, my boy. First you’re going to get me out of here.”

  As Semerket had learned, everything in Babylon had a price, and a sizeable donation of gold into the proper hands effected Aneku’s release. The eunuchs gave him the woman’s deed of indenturement, noting on the clay that Semerket was now her legal owner. They draped the near-naked girl in a blanket, and then both she and Semerket were spirited from the temple by means of an underground passage, to emerge into a neighborhood directly off the Processional Way. Within mere minutes, they were back in Semerket’s rooms in Bel-Marduk’s hostel.

  Aneku exclaimed in delight over the spigots that gushed water into the large basin within the tiled privy. Immodestly, she cast off her blanket and stepped into the steaming water. Her shrill moans of ecstasy filled the rooms, so that Semerket’s aching head throbbed even more fiercely. He plaintively begged her to quiet herself.

  As she diffidently scrubbed herself with mounds of the perfumed lard and ash that the hostel priests provided, he sat watching her from a nearby stool.

  “Tell me, now, as you promised,” he said. “Where is Naia?”

  She merely looked at him. “So you really are the Semerket?” she said by way of answer. “After all Naia told me of you, I feel we know one another.”

  “She spoke of me?”

  Aneku scooped some soap from its bowl. “What a wonderful scent,” she remarked, holding her frothy hands to her face and inhaling. “I’d forgotten what a real bath was like. The Babylonians are pigs, you know, despite all their fine plumbing.”

  “Did you really know her? You weren’t just saying that so I’d rescue you?”

  Aneku splashed irritatedly, and her little pointed chin grew petulant. “I said I knew her, didn’t I? I’m not a liar, you know. We were sent here together on the same ship, with that swine Menef. Then we worked as maids at his estate for a while. But he sent us away, finally.”

  “Where is she, Aneku?”

  She sat quietly in the water, still not looking at him.

  “Answer me,” he said softly. “Please.”

  She swallowed. “I’m sorry. It’s just that Naia was my first woman friend. She was fair, you know? Just about the only woman who didn’t say mean things about me behind my back…”

  “Aneku—”

  The girl looked at him then, and tears welled up in her slanted green eyes to mingle with the bathwater. “Oh, Semerket. Menef knew a prince and princess from Elam. They were the sister and brother-in-law of the new king, or something like that—I forget. Anyway, they needed servants when they arrived in Babylon. Menef sent her to their plantation outside of town, along with that boy who came with us—”

  “Rami?”

  Aneku nodded. “By then Menef was renting me out to anyone who had the right amount of silver. You can’t believe what I was expected to do. When I refused to service his friends anymore, he sent me on to the slave yards with instructions to sell me as a trained whore. At first I cursed Naia and Rami for being the lucky ones.”

  Semerket found he was able only to nod dumbly.

  “But it turns out that I was the fortunate one for once—can you believe it?”

  “Why? What happened?”

  She swallowed, and brought water to her face, bathing it before she answered. “Only a few days after she and Rami were sent to the plantation—it was during the last part of the war with Elam, you know?—the place was sacked by raiders.” She fell silent, staring at Semerket as if she expected him to cuff her.

  “Go on,” he said.

  “Oh, Semerket,” she said softly. “They were all slaughtered. Every one of them. The plantation was burned to the ground. She’s dead, Semerket—Naia’s dead.”

  THE RIVER FEVER came upon him again that night. He lay on his bed and clutched the heavy skins around him, his body shaking with an onslaught of sudden fierce chills. Aneku crossed swiftly to the bed and crawled between its blankets, pressing close so that she might infuse her warmth into him. He would have shaken off her embrace, but she held him fast against her, shushing his protests as though he were a child. In truth, he was so starved for the closeness of another living body that he could not have moved away from her even if he had wanted.

  As the lamp guttered fitfully in its niche, he turned over to regard the woman lying beside him. She stared back with slanted green eyes that were not Naia’s. Aneku saw the lights that whirled and crashed in Semerket’s black glance, and her hand slipped slowly down beneath the blankets.

  “Don’t,” he said, wincing at her touch.

  “Why not? Don’t you think I recognize that look in a man’s eyes?”

  “That’s not why I took you from the temple. No one will ever force you again.”

  “And if I choose…?”

  He sat up, brushing away her hand and turning his back on her. “Choose another.”

  She reached out to stroke his shoulders, dragging the tips of her nails down his slim, muscular back. “What’s wrong, Semerket?” she asked. “Why do you turn away? Is it because of what I had to do at Ishtar’s house?”

  He said nothing, for his tongue clung inertly to his palate.

  She pressed her lips to the small of his back. “Is it because of Naia?”

  Semerket nodded.

  Aneku reached around him. “She’s no longer among the living, Semerket. You and I won’t dishonor her with what we do.”

  “I said no.”

  Aneku fell back against a cushion, uncertain, making excuses for his indifference. “I—I can understand how you must take some time to accept it. After coming all that way from Egypt, it must be heartbreaking to discover that she’s—”

  He interrupted her curtly, turning to stare at her. “Did you see it happen?”

  “What?”

  “Did you see Naia killed?”

  “How could I? I told you, I was in Eshnunna when I heard about the raid.”

  “Yes. You said how the bandits stormed the plantation, how everyone there was slaughtered, even the prince and princess from Elam.” He turned to face her. “But how is it I received a message from Rami, asking for my help? Wasn’t he supposed to have died there, too?”

  Aneku sat up in the dark. “Rami’s alive?”

  He sighed. “Why do you think I came?”

  Semerket rose from the bed then, clutching the woolen blanket to him, leaning against the wall so that he could look out through the door le
ading to the terrace. Silver light already suffused the eastern horizon. Semerket felt the faint half-flush of its heat rising in the breezes that stroked his body.

  “Until I see her corpse for myself, I’ll go on believing she’s alive, that she escaped along with Rami. I must.”

  After a moment, he heard her thin, bitter chuckle.

  “Why do you laugh?” he asked.

  “How perverse it all is. After all those men I’ve slept with at the temple, the only one I’d freely give myself to won’t have me.” She sighed, laying her face upon her outstretched arm. “What’s to become of me, then?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I belong to you. You bought me from the Ishtar eunuchs. You have the deed that says I’m yours.”

  He shook his head. “You belong to yourself. I’ll go to the authorities today and declare you a free woman. You can do what you want to after that.”

  Instead of showing gratitude, Aneku’s eyes became stormy. “But where shall I go? What shall I do?” Her voice was edged with incipient panic. “You don’t mean to abandon me here, do you? Better to have left me at the temple, then—at least there I was needed.”

  “Have you no friends you can go to, no relations?”

  She looked at him with disbelief. “Of course I have relations,” she said, as if speaking to a person of limited intelligence. “In Egypt!”

  “I suppose you can’t go back there…?”

  “No.”

  He did not press her to divulge the crime that had caused her banishment. Semerket rapidly considered his options. He could always give her a handful of Pharaoh’s gold, he supposed, and be done with her. But that seemed a trifle callow, somehow—it had become his unthinking and rote solution to almost every problem he had encountered since his arrival in Babylonia. Reluctantly, he decided that the unfortunate girl deserved better from him. After considering her plight for a time, his face brightened.

  “What?” Aneku said, suspicious.

  “As your expertise lies in being a temple servant, how would you like to continue the profession?”

  AS HE INTRODUCED Aneku to Senmut and Wia, he noticed how the old man perceptibly brightened when he looked upon the girl. Wia, however, narrowed her eyes in skeptical appraisal.

  Aneku was dressed in an unassuming linen sheath that Semerket had purchased for her in a nearby souk, and a scarf of dark blue covered her hennaed hair. He had bought her three such outfits, along with the appropriate cosmetics and sandals, underwear, and some modest pieces of jewelry—everything that she would need to start her life as a free woman.

  Semerket explained to the priestly couple that Aneku had been a friend of Naia’s and had fallen on hard times. He had just that morning purchased her from a cruel owner, he said, and set her free. He showed them the clay tablet that manumitted her, witnessed by the Bel-Marduk priests at the hostel, which Wia read over very carefully.

  Aneku had nowhere to go, Semerket went on, and as she had once served in a temple (he was careful not to say which one), would they consider taking Aneku in to work for them? He himself would guarantee her wages, Semerket promised.

  “You can certainly use some help here,” he urged, “and Aneku needs a place to stay.”

  Semerket glanced uneasily over at the girl. Aneku was staring aghast at the withered fig trees and broken tiles in the temple courtyard, all the while attempting to answer Wia’s sharp questions.

  “Do you cook, girl?” he heard Wia say.

  “I never learned,” said Aneku, shaking her head demurely.

  “Do you know how to sing the litanies and chants we use?”

  Again, a slight shake of the head.

  “Well. Have you been instructed on how to make offerings to the gods in the proper fashion, then?”

  “I don’t think so…”

  “Can you mend vestments, at least? Can you be trusted with the laundry?”

  Aneku shrugged.

  “By Set and all his devils,” Wia shook her head in suspicious disbelief, “what duties did you perform in that temple of yours?”

  Before she could answer, Semerket hastily assured them that Aneku was a fast learner. He pressed several gold pieces into Senmut’s hands, saying that he was to use it in the girl’s care and provisioning, and gave Aneku an equal amount.

  Leaving the trio gawking at him, he departed quickly. Firmly, he crammed down his fast-rising sense of guilt. There was a reason to his lunacy in placing Aneku at the little temple, he told himself. Eventually, Naia’s affection for the gods of her homeland would lead her to make an offering at the temple. And if—when—she came, Aneku would be the only person able to recognize her.

  NOW THAT SEMERKET knew the raid on the plantation had also claimed members of the Elamite royal family, he could no longer put off consulting with the governing authorities. It was vital to find out what the Elamites knew. Semerket remembered that in Mari the Elamite commander had told him to seek out his friend, General Kidin, who commanded Babylon’s garrison; General Kidin knew everything that transpired in the city, the commander had boasted, and could help him find his friends.

  Semerket therefore took himself to the garrison’s vast courtyard, in which the Elamites had pitched their long, even rows of tents. He crossed to the small, low, brick building that served as its headquarters, and asked if he could have a few minutes of General Kidin’s time.

  “Afraid not,” the desk sergeant replied curtly.

  “It really is a matter of some urgency.”

  The desk sergeant leaned forward, whispering confidentially. “He was executed,” he said. “Last week. ‘Failure in his duty to the king.’ ”

  Semerket swore in vexation. Everywhere he turned in this benighted city, he seemed caught in some blind alley leading nowhere. “What did he fail to do?”

  “Couldn’t find them that killed the king’s brother-in-law.”

  Semerket hesitated, surprised to hear the man mention only the prince. “But I’d heard his sister was also assassinated. Isn’t that true?”

  “No one knows. She’s gone, vanished as if she were some spirit. No corpse, no traces. The king is wild with grief, as you can imagine, and we’re the ones suffering for it. So when Kidin came up with nothing…” The man made a slicing gesture across his throat.

  Despite the news of Kidin’s death, Semerket felt his heart stir with hope. If the princess was missing, she had no doubt been kidnapped by raiders and was being held for ransom. And if that were true, perhaps Naia was a prisoner with her. It would then be a relatively simple task to ransom her freedom. “Was the princess captured, then?” he asked hopefully.

  The desk sergeant shrugged. “No one’s made any demands, though everyone thinks the Isins did it—and they’re not exactly shy about asking for ransoms.”

  “Who’s replaced the general?”

  “Colonel Shepak has that honor.”

  “I will meet with him.”

  The sergeant’s friendliness abruptly faded. “Shepak doesn’t have time to meet with foreigners! Go to your own legation if you need help. We’re stretched thin enough in Babylon as it is.”

  Semerket leaned in, murmuring to the man, “The name is Semerket. Why don’t you check your official lists from the palace?”

  The sergeant rose grumbling from his desk, and obediently went into the back rooms to consult with his commander. It was only a moment before he scuttled back, cringing and apologetic, to where Semerket waited. “This way,” he said, bowing low. “This way to Colonel Shepak!”

  Semerket followed the man to the courtyard behind the main building, located in the shadow of the royal palace. Looking up by chance to the high ramparts that surrounded the compound, Semerket was surprised to find they were thick with patrolling Elamite soldiers, each bristling with a formidable array of swords, spears, bows, and quivers of arrows. A chill feeling of foreboding ran up his spine. It seemed that the Elamites expected an attack, and soon. Before he could question the sergeant, however, Semerke
t was being shown into a nearby tent.

  A sad-eyed man sat at a wooden table, his chin resting in his hand. The man was young, but his face sagged with a kind of world-weariness that was not all in keeping with his youth, and gray already streaked his beard.

  “What now?” the man asked the sergeant in a low, resigned voice.

  “An important person, sir,” said the sergeant. “Lord Semerket, sent all the way from Egypt by Pharaoh Ramses. He wants to meet with you.”