by Mike Ashley
Later, Ramose joined Baki on the terrace where he stood gazing at the flamingo-coloured clouds on the horizon that heralded the sun-god’s boat. He handed the Tjati the dagger he had picked up from the floor in Metjen’s chamber.
“The sag, half-hawk, half-lion. The Sphinx, man, lion and eagle in one. Will Ken-hotep ever find them? Do they really exist?”
“Do you doubt the gods, Baki?”
The physician shook his head with a whimsical smile. “Only love, my friend, only love.”
THE SORROW OF SENUSERT THE MIGHTY
Keith Taylor
After the reign of Khafre the Old Kingdom civilization of Egypt sank into decline and for several hundred years (known as the First Intermediate Period) the local provincial nomarchs established themselves as hereditary kings. It was a period of social and civil uncertainty. It suddenly came back into order during the Twelfth Dynasty kings at the start of what is called the Middle Kingdom. This dynasty had several important rulers, but none so powerful as Senusert III. His name is spelled several ways and he’s also known as Sesostris III, a near legendary king, who reestablished a central power in Egypt and reorganized its social and administrative structure. He also undertook immense building works, including reopening and expanding a canal to bypass the first cataract at Aswan and so open a navigable link between Upper Egypt and Nubia. Senusert reigned from about 1874-55 BC, so although we have moved on about seven centuries from the last story (as big a gap as from today back to the time of Robert the Bruce), it is still vastly distant in time.
Keith Taylor is perhaps best known for his Celtic fantasy series featuring Felimid which began with Bard (1981), but he has recently been exploring ancient Egypt for a new series of historical fantasies.
I
. . . and he becometh a brother unto the decay which cometh upon him . . .
– Papyrus of Nu
An extreme contretemps is needed to panic a woman who has been chief cook – and therefore poison taster – to a Kushite king. Tamaket had not trembled at the prospect of cooking for Egypt’s royalty. The King of Egypt would not fling her to crocodiles if displeased. Tamaket had felt almost tranquil as she put the kitchen staff to work.
Until she discovered poison in the dinner wine.
Rakheb discovered it, really. And that was the end of him. Among other duties, he had to fill the wine-bowls from a great river-cooled jar. When he thought that he was not observed, he swigged the wine.
Tamaket noticed. With a dozen kitchen workers and fifty dishes from roast goose to melons to supervise, she saw. In the Egyptian governor’s house at Semna it was no serious crime. At the Kushite court it would have meant death.
This time, death struck quickly. Rakheb groaned with stomach pains in a few moments, then fell down convulsing. A shower of pots crashed down with him as he clutched at the rack which contained them. They bounced and rolled through the kitchen.
Tamaket moved to his side swiftly. She could do that, when she wished, even though her shape was almost a sphere. She carried her weight adroitly.
“Salt water!” she snapped. “Now, O you staring asses!”
She forced it down his throat herself. In a racking heave he brought it straight up. Not nearly enough of the mortal wine accompanied it. With a final spasm of legs and head he perished.
Tamaket rose, shaking. This was an attempt on the life of Egypt’s godking, and she was apt to be suspected. She had no time to feel horror at Rakheb’s vile end. No time at all. She had come into peril; her wits must now avert it.
She tasted the wine, then rinsed her mouth in a hurry. A faint undertaste, thick and murky, told her the nature of the bane: juice of a certain fungus combined with other ingredients, complex and lengthy to brew. It agreed with Rakheb’s symptoms.
She considered hiding the truth, and dismissed that idea as impossible. Rakheb had died before a dozen witnesses. If the wine had been poisoned, so might other dishes be. Nothing, nothing would go upstairs that Tamaket did not know was safe, which meant a delay she must explain, as there had been a death she must explain.
Maybe to Governor Antef only. A clement man, he enjoyed the king’s favour to a high degree, for they had been friends from boyhood. Let him decide how much to say.
Bringing the shaken kitchen staff under control with a blistering lecture, she mounted the outside stair. Her heart hammered with more than the effort of climbing. These people were the tyrants of the earth as far as Kush was concerned, habitually coming upstream with fleets and armies when each new reign began, while Kush made as steady a custom of rebelling. Now someone had tried to assassinate Egypt’s lord – in a household which she administered.
The archers stationed around the roof’s edge knew her, and gave her ingress. Tamaket had arranged the roof garden herself. Small sycamore trees planted in pots gave shade; flowers in coloured brick troughs, perfume. She usually felt proud of it whenever she looked upon it. Now she wondered if she would be strangled here.
“My lord Governor!” Tamaket wailed. “Mighty Khakaure, Living Horus! Great Royal Wife, Mistress of the Two Lands! Your slave implores mercy!”
She pleaded in faultless Egyptian which had been good even before she entered the Governor’s service. Haughty, frowning faces turned towards her, seeing a young Kushite woman huge as a hippopotamus, breathing hard and badly worried. Governor Antef alone replied.
“Tamaket. What delays the food?”
“Hand of the King! I have tested the food constantly as it was prepared. Some – ” She hesitated artfully, in a way that betrayed the artifice. “Some appears tainted. Meanwhile I am sending up roast goose slices, bread and fruit of which I am certain. I beg the Great Ones’ indulgence.”
Antef realized, as he was meant to, that something was amiss. Making an excuse to the King and the Royal Wife, he came near Tamaket. Tall and wide, younger than thirty yet, hard-muscled as a quarryman, he looked down at her.
“What’s this talk? You have never let tainted foodstuffs get as far as the kitchen benches while I have known you – or lost your head like this, either! You are hiding something.”
Tamaket’s glance moved to the royal couple. She said for Antef’s ears only, “Poison in the wine. I ensure there is none in the viands also. A cook is dead.”
It was masterfully done. No one else apprehended it. Hugely taken aback (he was not a devious man), Antef stared at the woman he had made his major-domo, flat against precedent. In about three heartbeats he decided against secrecy.
“Say it now,” he commanded, “and to all. Clearly.”
“O Hand of the King – ”
“Forget the honorifics and speak! No Kushite subterfuge with me!”
Tamaket bowed low to them all, with effort. “Your pardon, Great Ones. It’s a hideous thing, but I have found what I am sure is poison. In the wine. The wine which came in the royal ship,” she added hastily. “I am proving all the food for safety’s sake.”
“Our wine?” Dahi echoed. “Not possible, woman! You imply that it was poisoned before we left, before the jars were sealed at the palace?”
“Your foot is upon my neck. But I supervised while the seals were broken, and with one jar the wax was newer, with crumbs of older, darker wax in it, as though it had been replaced. This I set apart, but one of my lesser cooks drank from it and suddenly died. I know it was bane.”
“You do?”
The words came from the king. His formal royal name, Khakaure, taken when he assumed the Double Crown of Khem, was always used to address him in public. Only his intimates still used his personal name, Senusert. Surely nothing personal or intimate informed his manner to Tamaket. He looked upon her sternly, the god incarnate of Egypt.
“You know much about poisons, in that case,” he said.
“I do, mighty Khakaure. All that there is to know! At Kermah I was the king’s chief cook, and taster of his viands. I had to learn to know and guard against poison, though it were given never so craftily, or have a short life.”
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“And she prepared our meal?” Dahi said, with an astounded look at Antef.
“Who better, Great One? Particularly in these parts. I’m told the savage she served never had so much as a bellyache. Yet Tamaket prefers to serve me. Had she outlived the King of Kush she would have been buried alive in his tomb with his other servants.”
“It is very true, O brother and sister of the gods,” Tamaket affirmed.
“And what sort of alleged food did you cook in Kermah?”
“Egypt’s cuisine is much in favour there, Great Royal Wife. I learned from Egyptians. I believe the meal will not offend even your divine mouth.”
Dahi considered the rotund figure before her. The Kushite woman was young, her face pretty within her orb of crisp dark hair, and fresh-skinned as a child’s despite her bulk. The round dark eyes looked guileless. Dahi did not believe it for an instant. Kushite cunning was a byword in Egypt, and not without reason; under cruel tyrant kings, the crafty survived longest.
“Tell me,” Dahi demanded, “how did you come to serve our valued Lord Antef?”
“I was sent to him as a gift by the king.”
“Because of the love he bears Egypt’s governor?”
“I wasn’t told why,” Tamaket answered, wholly aware of the irony. And the suspicion. She continued deferentially, “However, I did beg the Lord Antef as a favour – and a precaution – to bring my entire family to Semna also. Or someday an ill-disposed person might threaten them, to make me a traitor.”
She dropped her gaze before the sudden fire in Dahi’s. Had she sounded too simple, or too impudent? No. She believed she had said it with enough spirit, but not too much, and the Royal Wife must have been thinking it anyhow.
Dahi laughed aloud. Not cruelly, to Tamaket’s relief.
“Provided the meal is good,” she said, “I think, my lord, that our friend should bring this woman back to Egypt with him – and even her kin, for safety.”
“Let it be so,” the king decreed, “if the warning about the wine proves true. Woman, you say a man died after drinking it?”
“Truly, O Living Horus.”
“Have the wine-jar brought here now, and a kid to test it. I take no Kushite’s word.”
Yet he discovered that in this case he could have done so. The kid died as the man had done. The remainder of the meal proved both superb and safe. Tamaket duly left with the royal ships when their prows turned downstream again. Her brothers and children went also, as ordained by Dahi.
II
May your heart be cheerful, my lord, for we have arrived at the country of Egypt. My sailors have driven home the mooring-stakes, the vessel is attached to the shore safely, the offerings to the gods have been made. We have lost none of our sailors although we went to the furthest parts of Wawat, and we have returned in peace.
– The Shipwrecked Sailor
“Magnificent,” Senusert enthused, with a final glance back at the great dam spanning the Nile. Five hundred paces long and almost two hundred thick, faced with stone, it had been endowed with massive stone sluice-gates at either end for those years when the Nile rose excessively high.
“Yea, magnificent,” he repeated warmly. “I never doubted you would perform the task, but you have surpassed yourself, Antef. This is your greatest work yet.”
Antef smiled with pleasure. He had been appointed Governor of Semna and sent upstream chiefly for the purpose of building the dam, anyhow. He was an engineer above all; some said the greatest since Imhotep. With the dam complete, his work had been done, and a new governor had replaced him.
Montumes, the Keeper of State Records, coughed primly. “The king’s greatest work. What he commands done, he has done himself.”
This bit of sycophancy drew no response at all from Senusert. The Royal Wife vented a small snort and said audibly, “Jealous old crocodile.”
Tamaket rather agreed, except that to her Montumes looked less like a crocodile than a hoopoe with draggled feathers. His wig had been poorly curled, while the pleats and folds of his linen robe might have been crisper. For that matter, saving the royal family themselves, all the king’s entourage bore little resemblance to the comely, dignified images of folk in their prime that Tamaket had seen on the walls of temples and tombs. They displayed the usual incidence of flab, meagre calves, paunches, boils and eroded teeth, while one army officer possessed a spectacular wall-eye. Tamaket had begun putting names to these physical characteristics, and later she would add ambitions, fears, prejudices, rivalries – all the things she must know to survive in Egypt.
The royal family looked uncommonly handsome, though, she had to admit. Senusert made a splendid figure of a man, tall, athletic and straight-featured, and the Royal Wife also needed no artist’s flattery. She stretched her lioness body on the gold-worked couch beneath the deck awning, easy and assured, while two servants stirred the air above her with long-handled fans. It’s as well, Tamaket thought, the king is young and mighty.
Amenemhat was comely too, a slender boy of twelve who seemed to hero-worship his father. And perhaps Antef as well. The latter, Senusert’s friend from boyhood, stood even taller and wider than the king, with a rough-hewn, amiable face wide across the cheekbones and short from brow to chin. She had discovered him to be a kindly master, and hoped he would continue to protect her.
Because she was in dire trouble. Someone had tried to poison the godking of Egypt, the Living Horus. Well – presumably the king. Now she had boarded the king’s own ship for the return to Egypt, with her children and brothers in one of the others, separate from her. Clearly, she was suspected.
It was greatly to her advantage to catch the guilty, then. A long road. She did not even know with certainty whom they had meant to kill. Comprehensive testing had shown that of all the wine-jars brought from Egypt in the royal ship, one, and one only, had been rendered lethal. One out of dozens. Tamaket had chosen it herself and personally seen it carried to the kitchen. (Her idiots of porters might have dropped it otherwise.) The poison must have been added to the jar in Egypt, either before it was loaded in the ship’s hold or during the voyage – but not in Semna. And none but Tamaket could be sure of that.
The longer she cogitated, the less likely it seemed to her that Senusert had been meant for the victim, unless the assassin was crazy, for so much could go amiss. A cook or scullion might drink of the fatal wine before it so much as reached the royal taster, as had in truth happened; poor Rakheb. In fact the king’s taster began to look like the most likely intended victim. She vowed to find out who his enemies and rivals were.
If death hadn’t been meant for the taster, then Tamaket had to conclude that the murderer was not very clever. One who tried to destroy a king by such slipshod methods in Kush would be lucky if the killing dose reached his dog! Why, Tamaket had known poison to be added to one half of a fig only, by a hollow needle so fine it left no mark, so that a murderer might bite from the fruit and hand the rest to his victim, smiling – and that was considered elementary cunning past the Second Cataract.
You worm-wit! Throwing the blame for your baby plots on one who survived two years of the Kermah court is going to be less simple than you suppose!
The three royal vessels proceeded down through the cataract, fifty miles of river studded with islets and boulders. This being low water season, they bulked black and dry everywhere. Because of them, the region had its common nickname – the Belly of Stones.
There were villages, of course, with fields and groves but few irrigation canals. They passed a number of stations, wavering in sun-shimmer, where crushed gold ore fetched across the desert by donkey trains was further crushed, and then washed for its shining content. Kings of foreign nations enviously said that gold was as common as dust in Egypt.
At Antef’s suggestion, she cooked for the royal party at several stopping places. She was closely watched, of course, and each dish tasted at most stages of the cooking. She extended herself to give them superb meals. Oryx roasted over charc
oal; spiced pigeons and cress; duck flavoured with garlic and wine; fresh delicate lettuce from the river-side gardens; chick-peas fried with chopped onion and spices; triangular shat-cakes made with date flour and honey; all irrigated by wine and black beer.
No one fell ill. Tamaket, alert and anxious, was more concerned than any of them to prevent it. The poisoner might be aboard this ship with her; in fact, she suspected he was. Outwardly she took great care to seem cheerful and relaxed. She and the king’s taster, Ipi, a handsome slave with an ironic sense of humour which he greatly needed, found common ground in discussing the vicissitudes of a taster’s position.
For days the royal vessels bypassed the series of huge forts Egypt had built along the Belly of Stones; Mirgissa with its two-mile slipway by which it could be provisioned at any time of the year, Kor, and Buhen with its rock-cut ditch and massive double ramparts of brick.
The garrison commander at Buhen was a war-comrade of Senusert’s from his first – and so far only – expedition into the south. There would be others, of course, as surely as the cranes would migrate. It was why Antef had been sent to build the dam. Now the river had backed up into a long narrow lake and the Nile was navigable far above Semna. The fortress commander looked forward to it, and said so in Tamamket’s presence.
He suggested a lion hunt. Senusert came back jubilant, having killed his prey with a single arrow – not the first such feat he had performed. His reputation as a hunter and archer was more than the usual kingly braggadocio.
The young prince, Amenemhat, seemed less of an athlete, though active and healthy enough. It had disappointed him to be left behind during the lion hunt, and after it he increased the diligence of his archery practice, not that he had skimped it before. A conscientious lad. For a boy of twelve, he did not become distracted easily, except when the huge figure of Antef walked by. Tamaket knew hero-worship when she saw it.