by T. L. Higley
Khufu hopped onto his throne, his head nearly brushing the canopy suspended on four carved wooden pillars. He kicked out one foot, then the other, and I half expected him to try a backflip off the throne. Instead, his foot caught on the armrest, and he careened off the side.
Without thought, I darted between them and absorbed his weight.
He would have fallen on the queen. Hurt her, perhaps. The metal buckle engraved with his cartouche dug into the skin of my forearm.
Merit was there, hovering over the two of us, her honey-sweetened breath warm at my ear, the elegant line of her jaw close to mine.
“Our Hemi,” she said, low and soft. “Like the pyramid he builds. Always solid and dependable, always protecting.”
I righted Khufu, who still laughed and clapped with the music. A slave appeared with a wide palm leaf to fan the king.
I turned to Merit and lowered my head.
“My life is yours, my queen.”
She smiled and laid a cool hand on my scraped arm, but her touch burned like fire and caused me more pain than the scrape itself.
“So serious, Hemi,” she said. “I am only your old friend, Merit.”
Yes, only my childhood friend.
The musician faltered at some noise at the entrance to the Great Hall.
The three of us turned our attention there. Khufu’s chief servant, Ebo, strode in, his face solemn.
“Your Majesty,” he began, “Beloved of—”
“What is it, Ebo?” Khufu leaned forward.
“I have evil news, my king.” His eyes strayed to me. “It is Mentu-hotep, Overseer of Constructions.”
My hand tightened on my cherp. I stepped forward. “What of him?”
“He has been found dead. Murdered.”
Khufu jumped to his feet, and Merit gasped behind me.
“Where?” I asked, fingers digging into the wood. “How?”
Ebo held out his palms. “No one knows who has sent his ka to the west. His body was found in the royal slaughterhouse.”
The carved columns of the palace hall seemed to tilt, then right themselves. My breath caught, then surged in my chest. My hands felt slick on my staff.
I looked at Khufu. “I will go,” I said.
His eyes told me that he too felt the bond of the day we did not speak of. “We will both go.”
THREE
We departed from the Great Hall with haste. Pairs of slaves ran ahead to line the lofty passageway on bent knees with hands outstretched and palms on the floor. We did not wait for the king to be announced, but whispers of “Life, Health, Strength!” followed us through the corridor.
The sun was beginning its descent in the west, and it threw long shadows of the palace over the road. The temple lay two thousand cubits to the north, below the pyramid, and would someday serve as the place of Khufu’s mummification. For now, newly appointed priests of Ra served there, and the slaughterhouse stood nearby, between the workers’ village and the temple, ready for its double duty of providing meat for the workers and sacrifices for the temple. A sedan chair waited to lift Khufu to the shoulders of more slaves. I chose to walk alongside.
Khufu’s head servant, Ebo, accompanied us, as he had done for so many years when we were young. Our destination this day was not so pleasant, however, as the many hunting and fishing trips we had taken together in our youth.
“Who found him?” I asked as we hurried along the road.
Ebo turned to me. A white scar slashed his dark forehead, the cause of which had always been unknown to me. “I received word from another slave, my lord.”
Thus far I had refused to let Ebo’s announcement penetrate to my heart. It was impossible that Mentu had crossed to the west. Only last night we had been together. Only Mentu understood. About the past, about Merit. About my brother. And my father. I would not believe he was dead until I saw with my own eyes.
We passed the pyramid on our left, still busy with laborers adding to its courses. My eyes strayed there despite our errand. I could never cross the plateau without a loving glance at its perfect lines, as though my own child stood tall to impress me.
We reached the slaughterhouse, a flat-roofed structure with a narrow doorway. An angry bellow tore through the building.
“They are bringing down an ox,” I said to Khufu behind me. “There can be no murder here. They would not—”
Ebo pointed through the door. “His body is in the back.”
Khufu shoved past me, and I realized that Merit had followed behind us. I lowered my staff to bar her entrance, and her eyes flashed at me.
“Not in here, Merit. Remain outside.”
Her nostrils flared. “He was my friend too, Hemi.”
“Come!” Khufu called to the two of us from the slaughterhouse entrance.
We crossed under the lintel, into the dusky gloom, to a sight that would have been comical were it not so gruesome. Two slaughterers were bringing down a brown bull, one beefy man attempting to wrap a rope around its forelegs, and one wiry and quick who rose upon the bull’s back, twisting at its horns and trying to keep his seat.
The building was filled with the buzzing of flies on carcasses that hung from hooks, their lifeblood draining into a mud-packed floor already stained by the exsanguination of countless others. The place smelled of blood and excrement, and the faintness that swept past my eyes angered me. The ox’s tail whipped against its backside, and flicked sweat across my cheek.
I swiped at the wetness and shouted to Khufu over the animal’s groans. “Could they not wait until our business here was concluded?”
The larger man heard me, realized who it was that stood before him, and thrust without regard to safety between the bull’s legs. Another moment and the bull was on the ground, his hind and forelegs lashed.
The wiry man dismounted and bowed low before Khufu. “A sacrifice for your accession festival, your Majesty, Chosen of Ra.” His booming voice mingled with the terrible moan of the ox.
I scanned the slaughterhouse for any sign of Mentu, half-expecting to hear my friend’s laughter at the joke he had played.
The beefy man stepped to the ox’s head, a flint knife in one hand and a basin in the other. “For his Majesty, Son of Ra!” he shouted, then slit the throat of the ox at the tender place where the vessel carried blood to the head. The bright red fount spurted, then poured into the basin, and the ox gave a last groan and lay still.
I jumped back. I could hear Merit’s deep breathing behind me as I fought to remain on my feet.
The slaughterers stood before Khufu now, smeared with the bull’s blood, happy smiles upon their faces.
“Well done, men!” Khufu raised a fist.
I stared at him and found there the same expression prompted by Perni’s dancing. “We were told that someone—a man—has been killed here,” I said. A sweat had broken over my forehead and back, and my neck crawled with it.
The ox-killers nodded, and the muscular one pointed to the back. “We found him back there.”
I pushed past Khufu and circled the bloody mess in the center of the room. “And you felt no need to cease your activity?”
The smaller man’s glance jumped to his companion then back to me with confusion. “The priests await the sacrifice for the festival.”
I waved a hand at their single-mindedness and pushed into the darkness of the back of the slaughterhouse. “Bring a torch,” I called to Ebo. He and Khufu were at my side a moment later, the torch illuminating the dark corners. Merit pushed up between us, and we stood in a line, looking down upon the body of my fallen friend.
I could not take it in all at once. Mentu’s familiar face stared up at me, his crooked-toothed smile still intact, the large ears that had provoked teasing as a young boy, the deep-set eyes that knew how to show sympathy. He was still the same Mentu, and I thought for a moment that his ka had not fled.
Then I saw the gash. From right ear to left shoulder, his throat had been cut. His hands had been bound. His feet as well. He had been t
reated no better than the bull. Cut with a flint knife and left to bleed into the dust. I could do nothing but stare, and the blood seemed to drain from my own body.
Khufu whispered beside me, in a voice hollowed by fear, “By the jackal-headed Anubis, what has happened here?” Merit wept softly beside him, fingers pressed to her lips. I wished to comfort her, but she was not my wife.
I knelt to untie Mentu’s wrists with trembling fingers, an attempt to restore some dignity to my friend. His bloody hands must have tried to stanch the flow.
“He has been cut,” Khufu said.
“Yes. Clearly.”
“No,” Khufu said and squeezed my shoulder. “His hand has been cut.”
I stayed my hand at the bindings. Mentu’s wrists had been lashed together, but there was no mistaking the mutilation.
The forefinger of his left hand was missing.
“No!” It was Merit who cried out, but we all felt the impact. A person’s body must be whole to travel to the west and join the council of the gods.
This was worse than murder.
This was eternal damnation.
Some men, in the midst of grief, find themselves unable to control their spirit and display a certain chaos of emotion that is unseemly. I have never struggled with this tendency. Instead, now I felt a tightening inside of me, as though the strips of linen wound tightly around a corpse were wrapping themselves about my heart, the black resin hardening. I welcomed this feeling, as it would make me impervious to pain.
I backed away from the body. “Who would have done this? Mentu was not a man with enemies.”
Khufu studied Mentu’s body, then focused on Merit, who wept violently now. “No. But it seems he had a good friend in my wife.”
I searched my king’s face, unable to read the emotion there.
Khufu turned the Great Wife away, at last, and circled her with his arms. “We will have the finest physicians attend to him,” he said in soothing tones. “They will fashion another finger, attach it well. He will be whole when the seventy days of purification are accomplished. I promise you, his ka will rest with the gods.”
A glint on the floor a few cubits away caught my eye, and I directed Ebo to bring the torch closer. I moved toward it on wooden legs. “What is this?”
Ebo answered. “It was found on his body. Those that found him removed it to see if he still breathed.”
In the dust at my feet lay a golden mask, the likes of which is rarely seen outside a pharaoh’s tomb. I laid my staff on the floor and lifted the mask. It was fashioned as the face of a man, with bright blue inlaid lapis lazuli eyes and red painted lips. The craftsmanship was exquisite, the heavy Nubian gold pounded smooth and the details intricate.
“Found on his face?” I asked.
Ebo nodded. I turned the mask over, looking for the artist’s mark but found only a glyph for Anubis, the god of the underworld.
I bent to reposition the mask on Mentu’s face, grateful to see that it covered much of the wound on his neck. I touched the forehead with my fingertips and closed my eyes. “I will find the one who did this to you, my friend. I will make him pay.”
“Come,” Khufu said. “Leave him to the priests and embalmers. You have important work to attend. The project awaits.”
I paused to steady my voice, then squared off against the king. “I cannot allow his killer to remain unjudged.”
Khufu put his hands to his hips and lifted his head. “Justice will do nothing for Mentu. And I cannot spare you from the building project to chase after a mystery.”
Merit’s eyes darkened and a crease formed between them, but she said nothing.
“He was my friend,” I said.
“And also mine. But as one of your chief overseers, his crossing to the west will endanger the timetable of the project even further.”
“Do you care for nothing but the pyramid?”
In the dim light I saw Khufu’s eyebrows lift in amusement at the accusation I’d heard directed toward myself. He nodded toward Mentu’s body. “We never know when the gods might require our presence. And what of Egypt, if I should be called before my tomb is ready?”
Behind us, the slaughterers had begun hacking up the ox’s carcass. Death seemed to hover in this place, ready to alight on any of us.
Khufu was right. The House of Eternity I built for him was, in some way, a guarantee of eternity for all of us. As the king went, so went all of Egypt.
Still, Khufu’s refusal to pursue justice in this matter troubled me. Mentu’s death had brought a disruption to ma’at, that principle of justice and divine order that held all of Egypt together. This also was important.
I raised my chin like a faithful soldier. “I will not fail you,” I said.
He gave me a quick smile, as though he knew I would not refuse him, and turned away.
My gaze slipped back to Mentu. Last night had been goodbye, though neither of us knew. And I will not fail you either, my friend.
* * *
If there were a way to keep crews working through the night on this great project we had undertaken, I would have done so. But the desert at night is as black as the soil after the flood waters have gone, and men fear darkness as much as they love their sleep. As it was, I spent a restless night, tossing in my bed, with images of Mentu’s lifeless eyes, oxen blood, and the half-finished pyramid chasing through my meager dreams.
Midway through the night, I finally rose and applied myself to a design I had been drawing in my leisure—a corral of sorts for the masons’ tools when they laid them aside on the pyramid. Of late, chisels and drills had been slipping over the edge, injuring laborers on the ramps below. Men of Egypt, even common workers, were not expendable to my mind.
I finished the drawing and rolled the papyrus. The sun god had not yet been reborn in the east, but I undertook my morning rituals and then headed for the workmen’s village. It was time to find answers. And to find justice for Mentu, regardless of Khufu’s instructions.
The village spread only a few thousand cubits south of my own home on the royal estate and could be reached on foot. We were all connected, the people who had undertaken the Horizon of Khufu. I walked the path with my staff at my side, poking angry holes in the soft sand.
Few people understood the scope of my project. It was left to me to chart the twenty-year course of the work. We were five years in, and only slightly behind schedule. A harbor had been excavated at the edge of the desert, to bring the Nile water and ships from Tura, from Aswan and Nubia, carrying all manner of wood, stone, and gold for the project. The village had been built to house the labor force—forty-five streets intersecting in a lovely grid of sixty symmetrical blocks, like two enormous Senet boards laid side by side. The valley temple at the edge of the harbor was already in place, and the mortuary temple at the base of the pyramid would be finished after the great structure was complete, as would the causeway that would connect the valley and mortuary temples. There were still the queens’ pyramids to be built, the boat pits, the many flat-topped mastaba tombs for officials and nobles. A true city of the dead.
I passed the wheat and barley fields and the pens of cattle and goats kept outside the wall. The stone wall, about my height, enclosed the village, and I entered through the main gate on the south side. Even from inside the wall, the pyramid overlooked all we did, waiting to be made whole. More than ten thousand men lived in this village which had been called Hotep-Khufu—“Khufu is satisfied.”
By Horus, it is I who will be satisfied. But not today. Today, disorder had been brought to my village, and I would root it out.
It took me some time to walk to the top of the village, where the wealthier homes of the project administrators, including Mentu’s, lay in the cool shadow of the north wall. The streets filled slowly as the town awoke. Old men took their places on benches outside their homes, and children ran past, with shouts and jeers as their games of tipcats began. A stick fell at my feet, and a child yelled to me to toss it back. I flung i
t at the boy, still young enough to run naked in the street, and he shouted his thanks and used his own stick to knock it skyward toward his friend.
Serenity had fled from Mentu’s house, however. Here, no one sat outside and no children played. Instead, the sounds of a family in mourning washed over the street. I stood outside the door and braced myself for the ordeal, then passed under the lintel.
I had been here many times, just two nights ago when my friend and I had passed the evening in conversation and wine. I took the central passage through the house, until I reached the four-pillared hall where Mentu had entertained guests. Beyond this room lay the open courtyard with its shaded colonnade and squatty palm trees.
My entrance drew attention, and the wailing increased. I bowed my head to Hasina, Mentu’s wife, where she sat on the ground. My presence seemed to cause her fresh grief, as though the sight of her husband’s friend made his absence more bitter.
Mentu’s children huddled around their mother, some too young to understand their loss, some old enough to feel anger at the gods. A brazier burned hotly at the side of the courtyard, incense for gods who did not seem to care.
“Hasina,” I said. “I grieve with you in the loss of Mentu.”
She squinted at me from where she sat. She was a heavy woman, and her kohl-smeared cheeks quivered, her eyes accusing. “He cared nothing for his own life, only this pyramid you are building together!”
“He cared for you, Hasina. And the children—”
“Then why did he stay out, night after night? Nothing but work! It is not safe out there in the darkness. You should not have allowed—”
“Mentu made his own choices, Hasina.”
She shifted her ponderous weight and struggled to her feet. I took a step backward. The children cleared a path as she lurched toward me. “How could you let this happen, Hemiuni?” Her fists pounded my chest, yet I remained still under the blows, feeling they were justified. Her children pulled her away, but she dug her fingers into my arm. “Who did this?” she cried. “Who took him from us?”
“I came to ask you the same, Hasina. Who had reason to harm Mentu? He was not a man to make enemies.”