The Mammoth Book of Egyptian Whodunnits

by Mike Ashley

  “This is like Egypt: fine, complete, beautiful. Pure.”

  He shook out his cloak, then swept the fallen sand into a mound. “This is the rest of the world, from Asia to Kush, from Punt to Libya. Fragmented, little, irritating.” And he emptied the sand into the bowl.

  “At the time, did you feel nothing amiss?” Senbi asked, placing one end of the straw against the bottom of the bowl. Idly he began to turn the straw between the palms of his hand.

  “What’s that?”

  “When you killed him, cut off his head with the copper knife of the god.”

  I remembered what I had felt, and measured my words. “What should one feel? I have burned wax figurines, wrung the necks of ducks –”

  “But not killed a man?”

  “He was a wretch, my lord,” I said with more hope than conviction. “He was not a person, not like you and I.”

  “Now, I know what it’s like to kill a man. In the name of the king, like you. Many times over. I have brought a rain of arrows upon their fields, stampeded spearmen among their miserable huts. I have poisoned their wells. By the score, Emsaf, I have killed. So very many times have I stood in the same position that you did! We both stand in the place of the king. I understand what you felt.”

  “There was –”

  “What?” He leaned forwards, pausing in the work of his hands, and it was as though a shadow had entered the room, a night upon the night. In that moment something I cannot understand bound us together.

  I did not answer at once. I searched for a word, unsure if I should speak it when it came. Senbi resumed his work and did not repeat his question; the echo of it alone prompted my reply.

  I knelt before him. “A power.”

  “Like a god?”

  “Like a god – no –” Senbi looked disappointed, perhaps; I do not know. “It was like the king moved within me. His effectiveness.”

  “His effectiveness. Yes, that’s what it’s like, Emsaf. To move in the name of the king is to move as the king, in the moment.”

  “Should I have felt that?”

  Senbi shrugged. “Who is to say what we should or should not feel? Did you like it?”

  “Like it? I –”

  “You did. I can see it in your face, it’s so plain.”

  “Should I?”

  “Like it?” Senbi laughed, now wagging the worn-down straw at me, and the darkness that had grown close around us seemed to disburse as if a new lamp had been lit. “Emsaf, such power is one of those fleeting things. For such power, such effectiveness, to remain in our hands, the whole world would have to be topsy-turvy!

  “Do you know what this is?” He offered me the drinking reed, what remained of it, and I shook my head, answerless.

  “This is the rebel.”

  Senbi stood, throwing his cloak across his back. “I thank you for your hospitality, Emsaf. Theban wine is almost as good as the beer my wife brews from the fruit of the date-palm trees of this place.” He laughed quietly. “Good night, Emsaf. May you not have to go abroad tonight.”

  Alone now, I reached for my calcite bowl. The trick of Senbi’s magician, I thought, was one of revealing my own gullibility. I would have to find a good stoneworker to polish away the damage. Senbi had scratched it with the reed, no doubt.

  But no. As I picked it up a shower of dust fell from the bottom, pale yellow dust and a tiny white disk. There was a hole now, the size of a drinking straw, straight through the stone.

  So I left no man unconsidered, nor woman: I wondered if some village wife hated her husband enough to make him drunk, cut out his tongue, and bribe another soldier to place him in the labour prison. A Nubian husband – or an Egyptian one? “After all,” I said to Samentju as we sat on the floor of Senbi’s pillared hall, “we do not know that the tongueless was a Nubian. His skin was dark.” I grasped Samentju’s wrist, which was lighter than the skin of my hand, which was not like that of the Nubian. “What does that prove?”

  “It proves that he was from the south. Unless he was from the north.” Samentju raised his bottom up to sit on the edge of Senbi’s dais. “I think you should give up your search, Emsaf. What do you think?”

  “I think that the world is made up of lies and ignorance. The liar will not speak the truth and the ignorant cannot,” I said. “Perhaps that is the result.” Of my abomination. “There is no more truth in the world. It cannot be twisted out of men like water from a rag. But I will not give up.”

  “Ignorance?” Samentju said, leaping up. “Ah!”

  “What’s this, now?” I said. It had been days since I had seen him look so eager.

  He laid a hand on my shoulder. “I am going to speak to Pa-Nehesy again.”

  “Aren’t there enough lies in the world, Samentju?”

  “There are lies enough indeed,” Samentju said, “but one who is ignorant can be taught. Meanwhile, do you wish to question someone? I will have him brought to the courtyard and send for the shackles if you do.”

  I named two men, scribes. “They might know about the gold weights with which he was found. So,” I said, dropping my voice, “might you.”

  “Indeed, indeed, I have considered that,” Samentju said. “I will not be angry with you if it comes to my turn, Emsaf. But I will ask that you turn only my ankles.” Smiling, he lifted his left foot and let the papyrus sandal dangle from his toes. “I would happily spend my days seated at Senbi’s feet, unable to walk, if it came to that, but a scribe’s hands – you know.”

  And I knew, and hoped it would not come to that indeed.

  I had finished with one of the scribes – minding his hands, too, in the event of his innocence, which seemed probable – when Senbi summoned me back into his hall.

  Samentju was with him, holding a potsherd, which he presented to me. It held a drawing executed with a bad pen. There was a bold stroke of a crescent; a slanting line balanced at one tip of the crescent, and other little lines fell from it like rain. It was, recognizably, a boat with rudder and oarsmen.

  “Pa-Nehesy – he did not know Ameny, any more than Ameny knew him. He merely agreed with a name he had heard before,” Samentju said. “What we took for an old man with a staff was a man bent over an oar. It was, it is, Nakht.”

  “Nakht?” I exclaimed. “And his entire crew?”

  “It would have to be,” said Senbi, “would it not?”

  “Yes, but –” I stopped, trying to puzzle this out. “An entire crew of rebels?”

  Senbi shrugged. “Does the idea surprise you?”

  “It is only difficult to imagine a gang of sailors at the borders of Egypt having any such need for an elaborate plan. Conspiracy on such a scale is a thing for the court.”

  “One might think so, but it need not be so.”

  “If they wanted someone dead, they could have drowned him themselves. And why would Nakht bring back the only evidence that would convict him – the only evidence, in fact, that there had been a crime at all?”

  “Why indeed. I make no claim to understand it,” Senbi said. “You, perhaps, possessor of secrets, a priest who has been to Thebes and Memphis and to the borders of Egypt, might have more insight.”

  “Perhaps,” I said. “I will investigate Nakht and his crew. You will see that they do not leave Djer-Setiu, my lord?”

  He promised this. I went out to tell the other scribe, who had been awaiting the shackles while standing in a puddle of his own urine, that he was dismissed.

  I did not summon Nakht or any of his sailors. I had grown tired of listening to wagging tongues, tired of hearing the creak of bones and sinew. I went back to accounting, this time not taking stock of men, nor even gold and beqa-weights, but of days. All the dispatches Nakht had aboard his boat I gathered in a basket, and I confiscated, too, his logbook. I spent the evening and next morning reading everything.

  When Senbi saw me that next day, Samentju sat with a fresh, white papyrus stretched across his lap and a new pen in his hand.

  Senbi said, “Let�
�s take care of this quickly, then. A report of your findings will be delivered straightaway to the vizier, Emsaf.”

  “A report on an innocent man?”

  “Innocent?” Senbi said. “What do you mean?”

  “Nakht cannot have freed Pa-Nehesy.”

  “Ah, then, one of –”

  “Nor any of his crew.”

  Senbi stood. “How is it that you will prove this?”

  “The dispatches, my lord. Nakht was moored at Iqen before you left on campaign and did not leave until after the execration. Neither he nor his crew could have been here at Djer-Setiu to free Pa-Nehesy and put the other tongueless one in his place.”

  Senbi sunk back into his chair, staring blindly at the floor. The situation was wearing on him at last, I thought. This was not the sort of battle he was accustomed to fighting, and he was accustomed to losing no battle at all.

  “My lord,” I said, “I will find the rebel responsible for this.”

  His head jerked up, and he stared at me, searching my face, perhaps for lies. But I did not lie. My face, I am sure, made this evident. “Do what you must, Emsaf, and I will do what I must.”

  In a small ferry-boat I paddled myself to the western shore at dawn the next day, having first performed my ablution – in the river, for my bowl no longer held water – and prayed to god for the strength and the right to do what I was about to do. Perhaps I ought to have gone at dusk, when my destination might have been less obvious in the dying light, but I wanted the great god Re as my witness. Venturing to a burial place is not a thing an honest man does at night, and I was, and remain, an honest man.

  That someone had wanted the tongueless dead was one of the very few other things of which I was certain. Did someone want his body, too, some piece of it other than his tongue? Magic could be worked with such things, as Nubian magicians are well aware.

  Sherds of broken pots – red – poked through the sand where I had thrown them. Figures of limestone, melted figurines of wax. Teeth intact, and the base of a skull. In a grave shallower than a pan, a length of rope, ribs and drying flesh. The Power of the ritual still hung about the place; I could feel it in my limbs and in my heart, this magic that I myself had worked in the name of the king. Everything but the smallest pieces, susceptible to the wind, lay where it had been thrown.

  The pits had not been violated, nothing had been stolen.

  I puzzled this, that no Nubian magician had yet stolen his bones, and as I did my eyes were drawn to the scar on the torso. It had opened now, pressed by a few stones, and from it protruded something long and dark, neither bone nor flesh. My hand reached out to touch it, and my fingers closed about a thin shaft and did not release as my arm pulled back from the corpse.

  It was the stone tip of an arrow affixed to an arrow shaft made of reed, long ago buried beneath his flesh, likely an accustomed discomfort. An Egyptian arrow.

  Or, an unbidden voice seemed to whisper into my ear, a Nubian arrow?

  I threw myself upon my stomach and crawled to the execration pit in which lay his skull. Why had I thought such a thing? In what chest would a Nubian arrow be but an Egyptian one? How could one tell arrows apart? They were the same.

  And the wretch whose throat I had slit was a – what was he? Nubian? Egyptian? A wretch? A person? Who was he? He had been stripped of everything but his body and his heart and this arrow when I killed him. Stripped of his clothes, of his insignia, of his hair, of his tongue, of his name. Of everything that might have told one sort of man from another.

  “O but what was your name?” I whispered across the broken teeth that protruded from the sand.

  This was the very body someone had desired, and here was the very place they had desired it to be. Whoever had cut out his tongue might have as easily – no, more easily – killed him outright. Murder was not what they had wished: it was the god’s magic, the king’s effectiveness, they wished to harness. Through my abomination they sought to turn the world topsy-turvy and lay Egypt open to chaos, to overthrow the king. What had Senbi said? For such power to remain in our hands . . .

  At that very moment I knew why no one man would speak against the guilty. I knew what would have happened if Ameny, if anyone, had spoken the truth. Senbi had reminded them. They knew. They all knew. As, now, did I.

  It was a lie. Everything that they had said, everything that they had done. Help was hindrance. Truth was falsehood.

  Chaos had overtaken Rightful Order.

  In the name of the king, with my bare hands I tried to remove the skull from the burial place, to restore Rightful Order, to undo my abomination.

  In the name of the king, this is what I was doing when they found me. No matter what Ameny says, my story is the truth. In the name of the king.

  “He sought to undo the king’s execration,” is what Ameny said to Senbi. “We found him at the pits, which were much disturbed.”

  My arms were bound, my feet were bound. I was on my knees before Senbi, naked, Ameny’s hand upon my neck, so that all I could see was the chamber floor and my legs and my manhood, and all I could think of was that soon it would be sand beneath my legs, and that I would turn my head to see my copper knife – my? – the god’s –

  “Only his footprints lay about the place, my lord. He had no accomplice.”

  “You are certain?” Senbi said heavily. I heard the swish of his fly-whisk.

  “I am, my lord, as certain as the morning light that comes over the eastern hills like gold.”

  Senbi grabbed my jaw. Would he tear it off? And my tongue?

  “I had thought,” he said in a close whisper, holding my jaw tight, speaking across my teeth, “that you might be trustworthy, Emsaf. You understand what you and I truly are, effectiveness. You also understand the Rightful Order of the world, with the king in his place – and you and I in ours. But you also understand that it could be otherwise. And it could have been otherwise, Emsaf. You know that. You felt that. You did that.”

  He poked his finger into my mouth, and his fingernails felt like little stone blades along my tongue. My tongue – by which I spoke the words of the gods, as important to a lector-priest as his hands – “Emsaf, you might have stood upon my dais. What king would not welcome beside him a priest who knows the gods and their secrets? And though you are indeed a fine keeper of secrets, for this one you dug too deep, too deep, and then when you found it –”

  He ripped his fingers free of my mouth and the taste of salt gushed along my tongue. There was a bit of blood beneath his nails, but that was all; otherwise his hand was clean and my tongue remained in my mouth.

  “Samentju will prepare documentation and accompany him downstream,” Senbi said to Ameny. “Let the vizier of the south deal with this rebel.”

  And so I departed Djer-Setiu, trussed to the cabin of Nakht’s boat, facing the stern. Samentju lay comfortably on my camp-bed within the vaulted cabin, drinking my Theban wine and writing his letter to the vizier. Nakht’s crew rowed in silence but for the creak of the looms in their grommets and the lap of their blades across the water.

  When I raised my head I saw that everyone in Djer-Setiu had come down to the river to watch my departure, Senbi himself among them.

  And they remained there for as long as I could see them, motionless along the stony shore of the island like a stand of so many reeds.

  NO-NAME

  R. H. Stewart

  350 years flash past and we are now in the time of the New Kingdom and at the start of the reign of the eighteenth dynasty king, Tuthmosis (or Thutmose) III. After Amenemhat IV, Egypt entered a second period of decline but recovered under the powerful eighteenth dynasty kings who established the New Kingdom in around 1550 BC. Tuthmosis III reigned from 1479-25 BC initially jointly with his step-mother (and aunt) Hatshepsut. This period, running for the next four hundred years, is the true Golden Age of Egypt. The most famous of Egyptian pharaohs ruled at this time, including Akhenaten, Tutankhamun and Rameses II, all of whom feature over the next few
stories.

  Men-amun, aged twenty, in his second year as a lector priest, was returning to duty in the great Temple complexes of Amun-Ra.

  Slim and personable in pristine white linen, he was shaven-headed; purified by triple washing; waxed and tweaked clean of every last body hair which could be located. He possessed distinct ambitions to set beside his wits and his elegant scribal skills, though possibly a critical superior might have thought – when pushed – that Men-amun’s intelligence was likely to outrun his actual courage.

  He was not late, but he felt it unseemly to appear laggard. Thus he moved quickly, head down, among the afternoon crowds circulating the outer, public Temple courts. He walked aloof along the shadowed side, avoiding contact with any who might attempt to touch him for the offering of prayers, written Letters to the Dead, or petitions to Higher Authority. And once he had thankfully left the heat and general clamour behind, he took a short-cut which otherwise he might never have considered. Turning aside from the vast columned halls ahead, he sought instead a long, narrow corridor of polished stone unpierced by door or window and therefore dark, except for the dust-hazed indirect blear of day at either distant end.

  Traversing this passage was like journeying through a tomb shaft towards Judgment, he thought – toying lightly with the idea of apprehension. All external sound was lost. It smelled of nothing here but the cold, unyielding nature of stone. His awareness reduced itself to the enhancement of his own breathing and the slurred punctuation of his rush sandals on the ground.

  The shock he sustained two thirds of the way along was absolute – when the floor in front of him quite simply erupted.

  A flagstone lifted before his disbelieving gaze, tilted and crashed over backwards.

  From the square black pit thus revealed arose the head and shoulders of a man. The face was frantic – slashed and weeping blood – and he was shouting.

  Men-amun skittered to a standstill, transfixed.

  “Seek help!” this lacerated visage yelled up at him. “Now! Run! Fetch the First Prophet in person – anyone – but by all that’s good: go! Tell them it’s real trouble! Say I’ve got him jammed in, but the frenzy’s terrible and he’s killed again!”