The North Wind Descends

by N. L. Holmes

  Hani sighed, his euphoria cooling. “Probably.” The specter of civil war again floated before his eyes. He gathered himself and said more cheerfully, “Well, off to Kumidi as soon as we get the word.”

  ⸎

  The word came the next morning. The courier must have traveled by dark, Hani thought, marveling. He and Maya precipitously loaded into their donkey-borne litter and, the small escort surrounding them, headed for nearby Kumidi. They arrived late the same morning, and Hani presented himself before the majordomo again. He had no idea how to find Zalaya’s widow—he wanted to hear anything she might recall of her husband’s death—but it seemed safe to assume that one of the slaves would know.

  The official said, “You may ask any of them you find, my lord. Some of them should be cleaning while Lord Amen-nefer is absent; others will be at work outside. Do you want someone to accompany you?”

  “No, no. I know the place fairly well by now,” Hani said with a genial smile. He wondered if the man had reported his last visit to the commissioner. Almost certainly. Hani hoped Amen-nefer didn’t decide to make a surprise return.

  Hani and Maya looked around and saw a trio of men beating the laundry at the cistern in the center of the courtyard. “The skinny one with the big nose is the one I talked to at the beginning,” Maya said under his breath.

  Hani strolled up the men, who were engrossed in their work, bare-chested, glistening with sweat, and splashed with wash water. The sodden linen was heavy, and the cords of their muscles stood out as they raised and lowered the clothing violently, smacking it upon the stone rim of the cistern. They were so intent upon their work that they didn’t even notice Hani until he stood directly behind them. Over the whacking and splattering, he yelled to make himself heard. “Oy, my friends. Can one of you help me?”

  The men stopped, uneasiness taking over their faces as they recognized him and Maya. One of them wiped the water from his eyes. “We don’t know nothing, my lord.”

  “Including my question!” Hani said with a friendly laugh. “I only want to pay my condolences to Zalaya’s widow. Anyone know where she can be found?”

  The big-nosed slave looked suspicious, but he said, “From the north gate, second street over on your right and down to the end, my lord. There’s a big house, and she has a room there.”

  “Thank you, my friend. And what’s her name, if I may ask?”

  “Amaya.”

  “That information is worth something.” Hani produced from the waistband of his kilt a pair of copper bangles. “Buy yourself and your colleagues a pot of beer.”

  They thanked him profusely and bobbed many a bow, and Hani and Maya headed toward the city gate to count streets on their right.

  “What do you hope to find out from her?” Maya asked as they walked the baked, dusty lane toward its end.

  “Anything at all. Maybe she knows why Amen-nefer killed her husband. It apparently happened before her eyes.” Hani tried not to think of the horror of such a spectacle. How can she or the children ever get over it?

  The shade came and went as they passed taller or shorter houses, but as noon approached, even that little was withdrawn. Down in the canyon between walls, Hani was slippery with sweat by the time they reached what was a conspicuously larger house than the others.

  With some trepidation, he knocked on the door. No one responded for a long time, but finally, an old woman with a dark veil over her head unbarred and opened it. She stared at them suspiciously. “What is it?”

  “Is the master or mistress of the house at home?” he asked politely, putting on an amiable smile.

  “I’m the mistress of the house. What do you want?” She was a squat, spindle-shanked old personage with a nose and chin that met over her toothless mouth.

  Hani was completely uncertain about her class, but she didn’t seem very prosperous, despite the large house. He would have thought she was the doorkeeper. “I’m looking for a woman named Amaya. She recently lost her husband. Is this where she lives?”

  The old woman eyed him with mistrust. “Who are you? Why do you want to see her?”

  Hani could barely understand her garbled speech. He put on his best disarming smile. “My name is Hani son of Mery-ra. I’m the king’s investigator. My mission is to bring to justice the murderer of her husband.”

  The old woman stared at him for a moment more then opened the door and drew back for them to enter. “The room in back, next to the kitchen.”

  “Is she your servant?”

  “No. She pays me for a room for her and her brats. She works for a weaver.”

  “Did her husband come here often?”

  The woman shrugged. “Sometimes. He was a slave at the commissioner’s residence, from what I hear. Brings down the tone of the place, you know—having slaves live here. But grain is grain. She pays.”

  Hani thought that the tone of the place was none too elevated even without slaves renting rooms. The packed-earth floors didn’t seem to have been swept clean of their detritus for a long time. Grimy handprints marked the walls and dirty scuffs the risers of the plastered stairs. He sniffed a suggestive odor of rotting garbage. Perhaps the dimness of the light is a mercy. Hani nodded pleasantly to the mistress of the house, and he and Maya set off through the dark room toward the shaft of sunlight that proclaimed an exterior court. Open to the court was a primitive lean-to kitchen, and adjacent to it was a door that Hani took at first for a cupboard. But from within, he could hear the cries and shouts of children squabbling.

  “I guess this is it,” he said to Maya with a rise of the eyebrows. He knocked.

  The voices of the children stopped abruptly. After a moment, a small, thin woman peeped from the doorway. Her face was purpled and disfigured with swelling so that her normal appearance was impossible to imagine, and her movements were painful looking. Behind her, set up against the wall, was a loom, the colored wool warped but not yet woven.

  “Who are you?” she asked in a faint, scratchy voice. Her veil was tied back over her hair as if she’d been working.

  “Are you Amaya?” Hani asked kindly, conscious of the horrors the woman had undergone in recent months.

  She nodded vaguely, her eyes apathetic as if she were still in shock. He’d expected her to be fearful of visitors who for all she knew might have been sent by Amen-nefer, but she didn’t seem to care. Perhaps the idea of losing her life was attractive to her.

  “My name is Hani. I’m investigating the misdeeds of the commissioner. I understand he has dealt your family a cruel double blow. Would it be too painful to tell me everything you remember about that terrible day? It may help us arrest him.”

  She opened the door wider and stepped back in silence. Hani entered, ducking under the low lintel, and Maya squeezed in behind him. Except for a space under the ceiling beams where a slit of sunlight came in, the room was tiny, dark—almost surely intended to be a closet. Two children stood staring at them, round-eyed and fearful.

  “Is he gonna hurt you, Mama?” the smaller one, who must have been around six, asked in a trembling little voice.

  Amaya shooed them toward the door. “Go play in the courtyard, you two.”

  The children scampered off, giving the men a wide berth.

  She turned her suffering face to Hani. “What do you want to know?” As if remembering her manners, she gestured for the two scribes to have a seat on the floor and stiffly lowered herself to the ground as well, leaning back against the wall.

  “Did the commissioner say why he’d come after Zalaya?” Hani asked in a gentle voice, as if speaking to a frightened animal.

  “He was mad at him for not setting up somebody’s room right. This was in the kitchen, with other slaves looking on. At first he just threw words at him, and Zalaya didn’t answer back except to say, ‘Yes, my lord’ and ‘No, my lord.’ But Lord Amen-nefer got madder and madder. I think he wanted Zalaya to fight him back, but he dared not.” She was overcome with a need to swallow, which she did several times and t
hen continued in a fainter voice that had risen in pitch. Hani saw her thin hands twisting in her skirts. “The commissioner got all red in the face and was spitting saliva all over as he yelled, and his eye was like a demon’s. He picked up Zalaya by the front of his tunic and slapped him around and knocked him on the wall a few times and then grabbed him by the throat. I was screaming and tried to pull away his hands, but he just threw me against the wall too. He kept calling me a bitch. And then”—she put her face in her hands—“Zalaya was hanging limp in his hands, and the commissioner let him fall to the floor like an old rag.” She was openly crying by then. “Then he came for me.”

  Hani cringed. He deeply regretted having reawakened those terrible memories, but the woman had told him something interesting. “The others never intervened?”

  She shook her head, dashing at her eyes. “They were afraid, my lord. No one dared to raise a hand against his master.”

  “Amen-nefer never said anything like ‘You know too much’?”

  She shook her head, wiping her nose on her sleeve. “No, my lord. Just that he hadn’t done his job right. For that, my husband had to die. What are we going to do now? We can’t live on the little I make. It barely pays for the room.”

  His heart heavy, Hani pulled off his faience ring and passed it to the woman, folding her fingers around it. “This should feed you for a few days at least,” he said quietly.

  She seemed dazed. “Th-Thank you, my lord.”

  “Had the commissioner ever roughed up your husband before that?”

  The woman gave a bitter snort. “His slaves were always bruised and bloody, and some of them even crippled. They lived in dread of their master. I’m surprised nobody’s ever killed him.”

  We’ll do our best, Hani resolved silently. “Tell your husband’s friends that if they have any information, we’ll be in Mankhate for a few days.”

  They took their leave and made their way sadly back into the bright street. Hani stood for a moment until his eyes had readjusted. “I don’t think I’ve ever met a truly evil human being before,” he said, wondering. “He may be possessed by a demon.”

  Maya mopped his face and blew out a breath. “I just don’t want to be here when he comes back from wherever he is, Lord Hani. What else do we need to do in Kumidi?”

  They set off back down the little street, heading toward the gate. The sun had declined just enough to cast a permanent shadow over them, and Hani shuddered. “I was surprised at the motivation for Zalaya’s murder, if you can call such an overreaction a motive. I would have expected Amen-nefer to say something about knowing too much. That’s what the other slaves suggested, remember? If Amen-nefer was afraid Zalaya knew he was the murderer, that would explain why he killed him.”

  “This whole business is depressing,” said Maya with a sigh. “Somebody has to know something. But no one is willing to talk.”

  “You can understand why they’re terrorized.” The two scribes were drawing into the courtyard of the commissioner’s residence. Hani hailed their escort, and they set off as soon as the donkeys could be hitched up. Hani guessed that it was early afternoon, which his stomach confirmed with a growl. “We’ve missed lunch. But I don’t want to dawdle. We can get some food in Mankhate.”

  They rode in silence. Not a bird passed in the sky, which was white and still with the distant threat of rain. Their trip in the litter seemed more than usually quiet, in fact, as if the great cloak of silence that had held them off from any testimonies from the commissioner’s slaves had folded itself around their very faces and was clogging their noses, thickening in their throats. Hani felt as if his thoughts were being weighed down by the silence, as if he couldn’t latch onto something that was right before him. It was early evening by the time they reached Mankhate and could breathe freely once more.

  ⸎

  “And so that’s all we could find out in Kumidi, my lord,” Hani said, concluding his report.

  Ptah-mes looked into space, his face set. “That doesn’t particularly help us. But I may have something that will. A courier arrived yesterday from Sangar with a letter addressed to you. It’s from a man named Nabu-ahhe-idin. Do you know him?”

  Hani ransacked his memory and then cried, “Why, yes, I do. He was the military scribe of the invasion force at Urusalim—longtime friend of the murder victim. It was he who told me about Amen-nefer’s involvement with my daughter’s death. Have you looked at the message, my lord?”

  Ptah-mes shook his head. “I didn’t know if it was a personal letter or not.” He reached under his chair and held out to Hani a clay envelope, such as the Babylonians used to conceal the contents of a tablet from prying eyes.

  Hani took it carefully, a bulging packet about the size of his hand. “Do you want me to open it now, my lord?”

  “As you like, Hani. If it’s personal, you certainly don’t have to let me see it.”

  Hani cracked open the envelope and laid the pieces in a careful pile on the floor, then he drew out the letter. “Lord Hani,” he read aloud, translating as he went, although he was fairly sure Lord Ptah-mes would understand the Akkadian. There followed a florid greeting. Hani skimmed a few sentences and continued reading. “Mindful of your questions when we saw one another in Urusalim some time back, I’ve done a little inquiring of our late friend Shulum-marduk’s widow. I asked if she could remember any details of the tragic boat accident in Waset seventeen years ago or if her husband had ever spoken of it at all. She said she remembered it well because it was so horrible and she’d been a little frightened every time she got into or out of a boat ever since. Shulum-marduk had told her that he saw the one-eyed man arguing with the girl in an increasingly furious tone and trying to force himself on her. Shulum-marduk himself had just resolved to step in to protect her when the man pushed the girl through the open gunwales. He turned and gave our friend a wild-eyed look of hatred and melted back into the crowd that had gathered. She said that Shulum-marduk was sure the man had fixed his face in his memory forever, just as he himself would never forget the one-eyed man. The rest you know. I hope this was useful. Your colleague from afar, Nabu-ahhe-idin.”

  Hani lowered the tablet and looked up at his superior. Rage was starting to build within him again like the River rising in its banks at Flood season, blinding him, taking away his breath, and he fought to subdue it and remain rational. “Here is our motive, my lord. Shulum-marduk had seen him commit what might well have become a murder. He must have recognized the Babylonian when he and his colleagues entered the palace that night, seeking protection.”

  Ptah-mes spread his lips in a grim, predatory smile. “I’m sending troops. Do you want to go along when they arrest him?”

  CHAPTER 15

  That evening, as Hani and Maya finished their supper, Lord Hani said, “I’m going back up to Kumidi to be present at the arrest of Amen-nefer, son.”

  “What?” cried Maya, horrified. He could think of no place in which it would be less safe to be. Amen-nefer probably wouldn’t go down without a fight. “Oh, Lord Hani. Are you sure that’s a good idea? He’ll surely hold this against you.”

  “Since he’ll be dead and unburied, there won’t be much he can do to me, will there?” Hani smiled, remarkably calm. “You don’t have to come if you don’t want to, Maya. I certainly won’t think any the worse of you. This is just something I need to do for Baket’s sake.”

  Maya sat for a moment’s silence, considering. He was torn between his need to be with Lord Hani—especially in a dangerous situation—and the need to think about the safety of his family if anything should happen to him. “I’m coming, of course, my lord. It will make an exciting Tale.” He smiled a little wanly. And Sati would want me to help avenge her sister.

  “Don’t worry. We’ll be surrounded with troops. And Lord Ptah-mes is coming, too, as the representative of the king. It’s an official act of state.” Hani winked at him because they both knew very well that it was not official. It was clandestine. It was outside the l
aw, and Lord Hani and Lord Ptah-mes were in a very dangerous position if word of it should get back to the vizier. Maya hoped fervently that the solution to the Babylonian murder would make a sufficiently positive impression that it might erase the shame of this insubordination, were it to become known. He let out a big breath. Lord Ptah-mes, who used to be such a force for temperance, had become quite the reckless one. Maya had the impression that the high commissioner downright enjoyed thumbing his nose at his superiors—even at the king.

  They pushed back from their little tables, and Maya rose, brushing the crumbs off his kilt. “I’ll leave you to your sleep, my lord. When do you foresee us taking off for Kumidi?”

  “When Ptah-mes’s spy tells him the commissioner is in residence. And I hope that will be soon.” Hani pushed to his feet and stretched his arms wide with a huge yawn. Surely, nothing can overturn such a man, Maya thought worshipfully. Look how broad and thick and immovable he is.

  Maya took his leave and went back his own room. He was tired, too, and gave a big stretch and a yawn, with a roar like Lord Hani’s. Satisfying.

  Maya awoke sometime in the night, hearing footsteps in the hall. He opened the shutters of the window to look at the stars, hoping to judge the time, only to find that the sky was beginning to lighten. He pulled on a shirt and wrapped his kilt around him then tied the belt in a nice half hitch—he wanted to be ready to go when the word came. He’d just hung his writing case over his shoulder and splashed a little water in his face when a knock sounded at the door.

  He opened, and Hani stood there, dressed, his toiletries basket under his arm. “The courier came back early this morning,” he said under his breath. “Lord Ptah-mes said we’re going to move up to Mankhate to be ready to pounce. We’ll send the scout back to be sure Amen-nefer hasn’t left again before we arrive.” Hani thrust a flatbread into Maya’s hand. “Here’s some breakfast so we don’t hold anyone up while we eat.” He looked calm and cheerful, but Maya knew he must be salivating inside, ready to tear apart the monster who’d stolen his daughter’s life.