The Mammoth Book of Egyptian Whodunnits

by Mike Ashley

  “It’s . . . a precious sign of your goodness and regard, lord,” Tamaket answered after a moment. “Yet the offering murdered men need most is the blood of their slayers.”

  “They shall have it.”

  Oh, yes, Tamaket thought. I will live to see them seated on tall stakes with their eyes torn out.

  V

  His Majesty found me a common builder . . . And His Majesty conferred upon me the offices of King’s Architect and Builder, then Royal Architect and Builder under the King’s Supervision. And His Majesty conferred upon me the office of Sole Companion, King’s Architect and Builder in the Two Houses.

  – Tomb Inscription of Nekhebu

  The Royal Wife had said those same things, and even more violent ones, when the king told her the significance of his fatal lion hunt. Raging back and forth in a broad chamber of the palace, with none but Senusert and Antef for witnesses, she spat corrosive curses and smashed various objects almost as though she had been an ordinary village wife.

  “This is vile past belief!” she said at last. “And bizarre, as much as monstrous! How does one train a man-eater at all? How be sure – unless by magic – that it will ever come within reach of His Majesty? What sort of plotters are these?”

  “I’ve begun to see,” Antef answered. “Cowards who work at a distance, as from behind two or three curtains. Then if one attempt fails, they are safe, unknown, and can try again from a distance. They attempted such a murder with the poisoned wine, and now with the lioness.”

  “Who?” Senusert demanded. “I wish you, Antef my friend, to find out! Investigate this matter. Act with my authority. Report only to me – not even to the Vizier.”

  “I, Senusert?” Antef was hugely taken aback. “If you wanted a marsh drained, or the largest obelisk ever quarried brought to Ithej-Tawy, I’d be your man, surely. But am I the one for this task?”

  “It’s true, my lord,” Dahi murmured. “Only liars have ever called our friend subtle.”

  Senusert dismissed that. “Quarry the truth as you would an obelisk,” he ordered, “no matter how hard the stone, or where the chips fly, or whose skin the dust inflames. My Majesty knows that you are direct, not devious. That may be no bad thing. Tell me how you would set about it.”

  That formal “My Majesty”, here in private where Senusert had never employed it before, told Antef that here was a command he might not evade. He said slowly:

  “Training a lion is surely no task for any man but a proficient master. The Drunkard was skillfully trained. We have been shown that too well. I’d have thought there was no place in Egypt where lions were kept but the king’s own zoo. Therefore I’d begin by asking the keepers there what men, to their knowledge, have the skill. There will be those who know, those who saw and heard. They can be found.”

  “Let it be done.”

  Antef thought of his father, and fear touched him. Great creating Ptah, let him not be involved!

  That thought had occurred to his shrewd major-domo already. Suppose Antef’s father should be one of the plotters? Antef was a man of strong, simple loyalties. To stand in the open shooting at a crafty man-eater to draw her away from his friend – that he would do, and think only that this was his friend and foster-brother, not that it was the godking of Egypt. Antef choosing to expose his father, perhaps his entire family, as assassins – that she could not see so clearly.

  She had intended to help him find the wretches who had done this evil. She still wished it. However . . . if the trail led to his father, Antef might not be able to face the consequences, and she wanted them destroyed no matter who they were. Better to pursue these hyenas in circumspect fashion, using all the craft she had learned in the life-or-death (more frequently death) atmosphere of Kermah. She needed someone to act for her, someone who would be glad to conceal her part in the affair, and also someone who would be useful. It took no more than two hours’ thinking to convince her she knew just the man.

  Antef’s mansion and estate lay on the outskirts of Ithej-Tawy, the new capital established by Senusert’s dynasty south of Memphis. It made the palace easily accessible nearby. Tamaket had smoothly bribed her way to an audience with the Keeper of State Records before her brothers’ obsequies were finished.

  “You honour me, worthy Montumes,” she said.

  “Yes, that I do,” the birdlike little man answered testily. “What is it?”

  Despite the generosity of her gifts, he had no wish to spend much time on her, she perceived. He must reckon everything about her uncouth; her race, accent, size, coloured robe, and the gashes of mourning on her cheeks and upper arms. The sight of them did remind him of recent events, though. He made an effort at compassion, no matter how insincere.

  “I’m sorry for your brothers’ death,” he told her. “Their bravery is much spoken of.”

  “Yes. I thank you. Have you heard, O Keeper of the Records, that the lioness was trained as a man-eater by evil ones who sought the godking’s life?”

  “I had heard.” Despite the guarded words and supercilious tone, he stiffened with interest. “I did not believe it.”

  “Yet you may. The King and the great Royal Wife believe it. The mighty Khakaure has appointed Lord Antef to find these monsters.”

  “Antef?” Montumes could not have expressed more eloquently in a long speech that he thought all Antef’s talents lay in digging canals.

  “He acts with the power of the King in this matter. Yet it’s in my mind that he may need assistance from the wise.”

  Montumes agreed, and she shared her thoughts with him further.

  “Nothing so terrible and strange could be done wholly in secret! Those who can train lions are few. Men and women must have disappeared to feed her demon’s appetite; at one time she was perhaps carried on a ship to this region. There will be other traces, lost in the records of Egypt, and no man knows those as you know them, O Montumes. I am certain that with your assistance my master can fulfill the king’s command.”

  Montumes’s eyes widened in total agreement, and flashed with the hope of gaining credit. He manifestly felt sure Antef had no chance of finding the culprits without him. Before he replied, Tamaket knew she had hooked him like a fish; it had not even taken any finesse. He would help.

  Antef proved more competent at investigation than Montumes thought. He had always been methodical and thorough, while his determination was a byword. Inquiries among the keepers at the royal menagerie, where he had said he would begin, proved worthwhile. The oldest man there had served a Syrian prince, long ago, a cruel lord who used trained man-eating leopards to destroy his enemies.

  “I was young then,” the man mumbled out of his toothless face. “Never should have left Egypt! I’d not have believed, lord, how you can pervert a big cat if you wish. They can be made so they will touch no prey but live men and women – won’t even recognize dead meat as food, if you can credit that! The Drunkard never touched a poisoned bait, did she, or came to a still carcass?”

  “No, that is true. She was never known to! How’s that done? And what men in Egypt did you ever know who could do it?”

  The animal keeper said grimly, “It’s done by giving them nothing to eat but live men and women, tied wholly helpless at first, then hocked and crippled, more active as time passes and the cat grows confident, lord. I’d hope there is no man in Egypt who could do it.”

  “It seems there is.”

  The old man could think of fewer than half a dozen men he had known with that kind of skill. He gave their names. Antef enjoined him to silence, and went inexorably looking for the men in question. Yes. They were that. Most dreadfully in question.

  He also sought traces of strange disappearances. Egypt was an ordered land where almost nothing happened without being recorded by scribes, least of all the bizarre or criminal. Montumes had most of it at his thin fingertips. What he could not recall offhand when asked, he knew where to find in the archives. Harvest figures, the number of priests, servants and artisans in
this temple or that, soldiers’ movements, caravans across the desert, Nile flood details year by year, legal proceedings – he could provide it.

  Odd disappearances had indeed taken place. They had occurred among the pilgrims going to Abdu, over the years of the Drunkard’s life. Before then, they had been less frequent or regular.

  “Not kidnapped from their homes, then, but in a strange place, nameless among crowds of other strangers,” Montumes said.

  Antef’s big hands closed into fists. “And Abdu, the place of pilgrimage, is above Middle Egypt.”

  Middle Egypt, where the nomarchs remained most powerful, least subdued, and least contented. The two wholly dissimilar men looked at each other with the same thought in their heads.

  Antef chose his agents while the Nile rose, which it did poorly that year, and sent them out after the water receded. To conceal them among the army of scribes who surveyed the fields and marked the boundaries anew was a simple matter. Montumes arranged it almost in his sleep, and men under Antef’s orders travelled the desert roads with the Medjai, camped at obscure oases as well as the greater ones, spoke with Libyan tribesmen. The reports came back, and in them now and then there was mention of a lame man-eating lioness. Usually the mention comprised mere rumour, but sometimes it amounted to more. They pointed to the same place when put together; the Boar Nome in Middle Egypt.

  “Ushikab, the Nomarch of the Boar,” the king said reflectively, reading the summary. “He’s a known malcontent, and a neighbour of your father’s, my comrade.”

  “A close friend too, as you know.” Antef looked unhappy. “He has five sons. One of them married my sister. It comes to me that it’s time I visited them.”

  “You need not,” the king said, “if you do not wish it.”

  “I began this, O Living Horus, and I’ll complete it. Pleasant or not.”

  “If your brother-in-law is innocent, he will not suffer,” the king promised. “Indeed, if there’s merely doubt, he shall have the benefit of it, though his whole family should stand attainted and guilty.”

  Tamaket remained behind. There was an outbreak of smallpox in Memphis which caused the Vizier to quarantine the palace, and she took the same measures in Antef’s house. Hers, though, were more stringent; she had seen the same sickness rage like wildfire in Kush. She accepted no supplies, not even cloth or leather, except from far upstream, until the danger had passed.

  Her vigilance proved wiser than even she had guessed. Someone tried to smuggle infected matter into Antef’s house so that he would come home to perish. The men trusted with the task had both had smallpox before, and survived; their pockmarks were the first thing that made Tamaket suspect them. Just one pitted face might have aroused no misgivings, but both together moved Tamaket to have them taken into close guard and their cart segregated.

  They proved to be from the Boar Nome. Although not supposed to know the significance of that, Tamaket was informed. She had taken care to be. The men defied her and refused to say anything – a silly error, when dealing with a Kushite who had brothers to avenge and children to protect. Within a day they had told her all she desired to know.

  Their orders had come from a former retainer of the Boar Nomarch’s with a grudge against Antef. Tamaket had agents of her own by this time. They discovered the man hiding in Memphis. Again, she passed the knowledge on to Antef through Montumes, letting the Keeper of State Records have the credit. She let him have the men she had questioned, too, or what was left of them.

  Antef seized the nomarch’s one-time retainer in Memphis. Shown what had happened to his hirelings and promised mercy if he spoke, he betrayed all he knew as fast as he could gabble. His knowledge included the name and whereabouts of the Drunkard’s trainer. Before the Nile had receded, that man too had been captured, alive, in the ancient town of Buto.

  He was certainly the one. The Drunkard had left her inscription on him by mauling him – when she was only half grown, which doubtless was how he had survived. Nevertheless, the marks of her cleft forepaw were distinctive.

  Tried and condemned, he talked volubly in exchange for a clean ending, which the King promised. Thus they gained hard proof at last. Antef travelled south again, and stood in a narrow desert ravine, blocked at the ends and walled at the top, where the Drunkard had been raised. Bones of her victims had been buried in the sand nearby. Several, by the pitiful possessions buried with them, had been pilgrims who vanished from Abdu. The nasty tale appeared complete.

  The ravine lay just outside the Boar Nome, and the trainer’s testimony implicated its ruler past any man’s power to effectively deny.

  “And three at least of his sons,” Antef said, in the bleakest tone Senusert had yet heard from his mouth. “I believe the last is innocent, for he’s both too honest and too indolent to scheme like this, but it’s a matter I had rather the Vizier investigated. It’s my sister’s husband; I am partial.”

  “He will never be a nomarch.” Senusert smiled grimly. “The traitors shall die, I shall deprive their family of the Boar Nome, and you shall be lord there instead, my brother. Let other nomarchs who would plot or rebel see this, and learn their mistake.”

  His will was done. Ushikab, Nomarch of the Boar, died as a traitor and his elder sons with him. They went to their doom mouthing accusations against Antef’s family, which was only to be expected, all agreed, from malice against the man who had exposed them. Antef became Nomarch of the Boar, and Senusert gave him a new title to accompany the province – Chief of the Praised Ones, when his honours had been extensive already, so that many were jealous.

  Senusert, Antef and Montumes all knew that certain loose ends had been tucked out of sight and ignored, yet they believed them to be minor, and that the hideous conspiracy was ended.

  Tamaket knew better. She saw no failings in the king’s good sense, or his justice, either. He had punished only those against whom there was strong evidence. In Kush, the traitor’s entire family would have perished with him as a matter of course, like most of his friends and associates. She much preferred Egyptian justice, in spite of the prejudice against Kushites.

  But she knew it was not the end.

  VI

  Be merry all your life;

  Toil no more than is required

  nor cut short the time allotted for pleasure.

  – Instruction of Ptah-hotep

  Senusert removed the sacred Double Crown with relief, having just worn it through a long morning of listening to petitioners. The false plaited beard of kingship followed. He rubbed the point of his lean angular chin, for the ceremonial beard always itched it.

  “I’ve a task for you, my brother,” he said, “which you should like better than the last. It will keep you away from your nome. Appoint a good steward if you haven’t done so yet. I desire you to restore the Waters of Shedet.”

  “Men say it cannot be done,” Dahi remarked, with a flash of malachite-painted eyes. “They say the lake is moribund by the will of the gods.” She smiled. “Like the mighty king, I’ll believe it when you tell us so, Lord Antef, for I have doubts that the others know what they are talking about.”

  Antef smiled wryly. “I do wonder where their eyes were. I’ve surveyed the lake and the country around. The trouble lies with the river that feeds it – one of the Nile’s offshoots, of course. Once I follow its course from the lake upwards I should know what measures are needed.”

  “Amenemhat thought you would say that. He wishes very greatly to go with you. Is that pleasing?”

  “I’ll have joy of his company.”

  Dahi knew that was no polite formula. Antef felt a good deal of affection for the prince. She was willing to entrust the boy to her lord’s friend, even on a journey of some danger.

  He returned dark from wind and sun, cocky, bursting with stories. There had been a sandstorm – small – and an attack by some scruffy Libyan bandits. Antef had called them weak beer compared with the Kushites.

  “He says he does not know how the story
began that the Waters of Shedet are past restoring! There’s a gorge, a passage, that has become choked with sand. That’s the worst part. Once we clear it the lake will be restored after a few high inundations, he says. Then, with new irrigation channels, all the fields and gardens will be rich as before.”

  “One wonders,” Dahi said with purring amusement, “if there is anything Antef cannot do.”

  Senusert kissed her. There was passion in the way his hands closed on her waist, even after years and children.

  “There was a time when he did not give a banquet or entertain in a way to remember,” he observed, “and now even that has changed. A Kushite woman was a strange choice for his major-domo, and all of us looked askance, but now she’s the fashion.”

  “Every hostess in the city would like to win her from Antef for her own household.” Dahi shook her shapely head. “I should use my royal power to steal her myself, save that our worthy Antef needs her more. But he should not need her. A wife would be better for him. Will you command him to marry again, Senusert?”

  Senusert’s lean, energetic face clouded. “Truth. He’s been alone too long. I’ve spoken to him about it and urged just what you recommend, my Isis. But because he is as my brother, I will not command him.”

  “Tamaket is not enough,” she repeated. “Certainly I would never miss a meal she prepared, so long as my tasters were present, but I trust no Kushite. Thieves at the least!”

  “Few servants don’t thieve,” Senusert pointed out, and kissed her again. “Let them, provided they are worth it and keep it within measure.”

  Antef often came home to his mansion, even with the king’s new project begun. The Waters of Shedet lay close to the capital, Ithej-Tawy, as distances in Egypt went. Senusert and Dahi honoured him with frequent visits. Tamaket found herself preparing many a banquet for the royal entourage.

  Her temper grew short and her demands perfectionistic at such times. She remembered Semna and the death of Rakheb. She knew that Senusert and Dahi did, also. If poison appears at one of these meals, she thought, I would not give a mildewed wheat grain for my life.