The Mammoth Book of Egyptian Whodunnits

by Mike Ashley

  The rule of the khamsin was inviolable, a tradition begun by Amenhotep I, patron of the Village. Neither she nor the painter, outsiders both, could have known. Crimes committed during the khamsin were pardoned. Yes the rule had been abused, but it was still upheld. The painter had never been in danger of death.

  I had manipulated her. Nofret, a girl who bore my very name.

  When I emerged from the temple, day was full upon the land. I entered my chambers, and the girl was there, my cat sniffing her feet. “She breathes?” I said to the attending physician, stunned.

  “The venom was weak, if, as you said, it was the third strike of the day. She will live, I think. Should we inform her mistress?” he asked.

  I shook my head. “No, her accomplice Nofret died. That is all she need know. Then execute the widow for murder with intention.”

  “What about this maid?”

  The cat wove between my ankles. “When she wakes, she can choose her own name.”

  And her own life.

  THE WEIGHING OF THE HEART

  F. Gwynplaine MacIntyre

  We are now at the end of the twentieth dynasty in the reign of Rameses XI, in the year BC 1073 to be precise. Once again Egypt was heading for another period of decline (what became the Third Intermediate Period) with a rise in the defiant power of the priesthood and increasing strength of Egypt’s southern neighbours in Kush. It was a time of unrest with an outbreak of tomb robbing, which meant more work for the courts.

  This is the background to F. Gwynplaine MacIntyre’s story. MacIntyre is perhaps best known for his science fiction and fantasy, including his novel The Woman Between the Worlds (1994), but he has a wide knowledge on a vast variety of subjects and has appeared in several of my anthologies. He has a particular fascination for ancient Egypt as the following story shows.

  “A dead man speaks the truth.” Khnemes uttered the words of the tongue-twisting proverb that was popular among Egyptian schoolboys and apprentice scribes: “Medu m’at mai ma’at mety” . . . or, more formally, “speaks a mummy in straightforward truth.” The phrase was merely a writing-exercise, but on many occasions Khnemes had thought that there was wisdom in these words. For a living man may utter falsehoods, but a m’at – a corpse, or a mummified man – can only speak the truth.

  This was one such occasion. Khnemes had accompanied his employer Perabsah on the journey upriver from Aneb Hetchet to Thebes, along with Perabsah’s wife Merytast and a retinue of servants and slaves. While Merytast and her attendants took lodging in Thebes, Perabsah had brought Khnemes and three sledge-bearing slaves across the river, to the Village of Labourers on the western bank of the Nile. As night fell, they made camp here by torchlight. Then, at dawn, they proceeded beyond the workmen’s village, into the foothills further west.

  Perabsah led his attendants into a landscape stippled with crude mud-brick domes shaped like giant breadloaves. This was a village of the dead. Khnemes had heard of this place: the Plain of the Loaves. Few tomb-robbers ever tarried here, for only lowborn peasants were buried in this place. A few of the domes displayed crude hieroglyphs etched into the clay above their lintels: daubed by a finger when the bricks were still wet from their moulds, and left to bake hard in the Egyptian sun. Now Perabsah pointed to the inscription above the lintel of a dome that seemed no different from its neighbours. Khnemes was unscribed, and could not read, yet above this dome’s sealed entrance he recognized the familiar glyphs identifying the ancestral household of his master Perabsah. So this dome had been built here by order of one of Perabsah’s forefathers.

  At a nod from Perabsah, his trio of slaves raised sharpened adzes and broke the mortarwork beneath the lintel. Bricks which had lain undisturbed for a century were now seized, torn loose from their mortar, and flung aside by the slaves.

  Khnemes cringed at his employer’s sacrilege. Khnemes was Nubian-born, yet he had lived in Egypt long enough to know the customs of this land. To defile a grave was always a serious crime . . . and made even riskier now, due to the recent political upheavals caused by the long famine known as the Year of the Hyenas. Officially, this was Year Eight of the Repeating of Births in the reign of the aged king Re’s-Abiding-Truth . . . but the old king’s power had dwindled, and now Egypt was divided into two kingdoms ruled by rival god-cults. Perabsah owned property and wealth in Aneb Hetchet . . . but that was in Lower Egypt, and now here he was across-river from Thebes, defiling a grave in Upper Egypt, where Perabsah’s titles and estates were too distant to protect him.

  Khnemes glanced round nervously as Perabsah’s slaves enlarged the hole in the broken dome, and now Perabsah spoke a challenge to Khnemes:

  “Most excellent servant, you have often impressed me with your cleverness. Let us see if your wisdom extends into the realm of the dead.” Perabsah’s three slaves downed their tools and clambered over the heap of shattered bricks, while he continued: “Within that residence sleeps a bondsman of my household, entombed here more than a century ago. I know nothing about him, save the fact of his existence. I challenge you, Khnemes, to unriddle the stranger who is entombed here. Let us see if you can read the pattern of his life . . . or the chapters of his death.”

  “I accept your challenge, heri sa’ur,” said Khnemes, flattering his employer. Perabsah preened at this compliment, and daubed himself with a few drops of scented oil from the vanity-phial he always carried. Khnemes often addressed Perabsah as heri sa’ur, or “wisdom-master” . . . not because Perabsah was wise enough to deserve this title, but because Khnemes was wise enough to know that there is more than one way to oil a conceited man.

  As the slaves emerged from the shattered loaf, Khnemes was astonished to see them bearing an earthenware coffin. The Plain of the Loaves was a burial-ground for paupers: most of the dead in this place were not even properly embalmed. How came this one corpse to possess a coffin? When the grunting slaves set down their load, Khnemes was astonished again: for this was a child’s coffin in the sands before him. A coffin too small to contain a grown man.

  The coffin was oval-shaped, unglazed, with no inlays or inscriptions. “Whoever this coffin contains,” observed Khnemes, “he received only the most meagre of death-rites. His mourners were swift to send him on his journey.”

  Perabsah tucked the small white alabaster vanity-phial back into its pouch on the waistband of his shent kilt, and rubbed his hands eagerly. “Because the coffin is unadorned, you mean?”

  Khnemes shook his head in the still air, feeling no breeze among the tight rows of echelon curls in his wig. The Mehut – the prevailing wind from the north which usually sang through the Nile valley – was strangely absent today. “No, heri sa’ur,” he told Perabsah. “Even unwealthed peasants can honour their dead. This coffin betrays not only an absence of wealth, but also a poverty of time: there are no luck-marks, no death-charms. See? The coffin is boat-shaped, to transport its passenger along the River of the Underworld . . . yet the ritual utchati Eyes of Horus are missing from the coffin’s prow. If the dead man was too paupered to equip his coffin with golden utchati, his mourners could still have applied the sacred Eyes by drawing charcoal images on the coffin’s prow. Yet that was not done.”

  Perabsah’s eyes gleamed beneath his headcloth. “Excellent! What else?”

  Khnemes circled the earthenware cask. “This is a child’s coffin, yet your three strongest bearers exerted themselves whilst carrying it a brief distance, so this coffin contains something heavier than a child.” Perabsah stiffened at this, and Khnemes quickly continued: “Mayhap this small coffin’s occupant is a deng: a dwarf or pygmy, who served as a jester in your ancestors’ household.”

  “Let us see the wisdom of your guesses, my servant.” Perabsah beckoned to the tallest and brawniest of his three slaves, who rejoiced in the name Qesf. This man came forwards with his adze. Khnemes saw what was intended, and he raised one arm to protest the sacrilege, but Perabsah anticipated him: “Turn your head aside, then, if it bothers you to see this.” Perabsah flung
his own hand towards Khnemes, masking the Nubian’s eyes while the adze descended. Khnemes heard but did not see the impact of obsidian blade against earthenware. By the time that Perabsah had lowered his hand so that Khnemes could see again, the slaves had picked away the fragments of the coffin’s lid. Some sort of pliable material was underneath: this too was pierced now by the slaves, and Perabsah’s eager hands tore at this. Only when several pieces of the flexible covering had been ripped away did Perabsah step aside.

  A mummy was inside the coffin: a fully-grown man. His arms and legs had been broken, then bent back upon themselves, and the shattered man had been crammed into this too-small coffin. The dead man’s face was contorted into an expression of hideous agony.

  Khnemes approached the coffin slowly. The mummification was a crude one: the corpse’s broken limbs were shrivelled and thin, while the dead man’s belly was distended. The mummy’s odour was surprisingly pleasant, like a mixture of pickled fish and black pepper. Whoever this dead man was, the embalmers had taken care to preserve him with mummy-resins. Khnemes expected to see the familiar black seepings of bituminous repnen oozing from the mummy’s shattered limbs, but there was no sign of leakage.

  Now Khnemes noticed something. “This man was a slave, or the servant of a cruel master. See? Here and here on the shoulders and arms, and across his chest, there are marks where flails and whips have visited his flesh.”

  Perabsah arched one eyebrow. “Have a care, Nubian. Do you accuse my ancestors of cruelty? No lord of my house would ungentle his servants.”

  Khnemes frowned, and Perabsah’s three slaves looked up sharply. The faithful Qesf was well-treated, but his bond-brothers Huti and Djeb had not been so favoured: their naked backs and shoulders bore testament to their master’s cruelty. Khnemes shook his head again. “The flesh of this mummy clearly shows scars. They are partially healed, so he received these scars long before his death. Yet look here.” Khnemes pointed to some small discolourations near the dead man’s nostrils and eyelids. “These are flea-bites . . . in places where a corpse, not yet mummified, would leak the body’s natural contents. This man probably died during Shemu, the harvest-season, when fleas are most plentiful. And he was left for some time dead – outdoors, in hot weather – before the embalmers worked their craft upon him. If the mummification had come swiftly after his death, the resins used in the embalming process would have repelled the hungering insects.”

  “Excellent, my servant!” said Perabsah. “What else do you see?”

  “It is what I do not see that puzzles me,” Khnemes confessed. “This coffin contains no death-honours. Even the lowliest citizen of Egypt owns a few delight-beads, or a clay amulet, to bring with him into the afterworld. But I see none here. This man was entombed in a hurry, by someone who had no time to give him the proper death-rituals. Observe his broken limbs: they must have been intact during the embalming process, or else the mummy-salts would have leaked from his body. His arms and legs were deliberately broken after his mummification . . . so that his corpse could be compressed into the smallest and cheapest coffin available.”

  Perabsah raised one hand to his face to adjust his headcloth. “And you discern nothing else of this man, then?”

  Khnemes shook his head once more. “I have told all I see, heri sa’ur. Only the gods can reveal more.”

  At that moment a sudden wind sprang up from the north, filling the Plain of the Loaves with a shrill distant howl. The Mehut had returned.

  The wind snatched several yellowing objects which Perabsah had torn from the coffin and placed aside. Now Perabsah bellowed: “Kefaythen sen! Seize them! Capture them all! Haqythen er cher sen!” and at once his three slaves hurried to thwart the wind. Something sailed past Khnemes, and he caught it: a large flake of ancient papyrus, torn at its edges, and strangely stiff; the fibres of the papyrus were glutted with a substance which had stiffened the material. Khnemes turned over the papyrus, to see if anyone had written on it. No; it was blank. But . . .

  “Give me that!” Perabsah snatched the stiffened flake of papyrus, turned it over, then flung it aside. “Help them, quickly!” Perabsah nodded at his slaves, who were scrabbling to capture other pieces of the wind-torn papyrus. Just then, in the sands near his feet, Khnemes saw a large fragment of papyrus, covered with dark lines of hieratic script from some lost century. He reached for this . . . but the wind from the north snatched the fragment, and swept it whirling away into the deserts beyond. Whatever was written on that page, only the wind knew.

  “Mamu Mehut ma’at,” Khnemes whispered to himself, inventing an impromptu wisdom. “The north wind knows the truth.”

  Now Khnemes learnt why Perabsah had instructed his slaves to bring a sledge with them. “This man served my ancestors faithfully, and I would have him conveyed to a burial-place more dignified than this,” Perabsah announced, gesturing at the shattered clay loaves on every side.

  The child-coffin was grunted onto the sledge by the three slaves, while Khnemes inspected the draught-lines. The brawny slave Qesf had brought along a dozen tarred wineskins, filled with water. Djeb and Huti had brought a dozen oxen-horns, filled with flaxseed-oil and carefully sealed. Khnemes collected these now, while Qesf and his two bond-brothers manned the sledge’s tow-ropes.

  They began. Khnemes unstoppered a horn, and poured forth a thick gobbet of its oily contents into the sands in front of the sledge. Before the thirsty sands devoured this offering, Khnemes opened a wineskin and poured a drizzle of water on top of the oil. The two liquids beaded, briefly forming an ooze. Quickly, the three slaves dragged the sledge forwards. It slid across the oiled sand easily. Keeping pace with the slaves, Khnemes continued to pour his oil-carpet ahead of the sledge as their journey progressed: first the oil, then the water on top of it. Khnemes took care to ration both liquids: they had a long distance to go.

  They made their way eastward, Perabsah watching from the rear to satisfy himself that his servants gave their full efforts. The sledge-procession reached the Village of Labourers, the work-camp of the tombmakers who lived among the cemeteries of the Nile’s western bank. Several workmen left their kiosks to stare at the child-coffin . . . but they saw Perabsah’s headcloth and his shent kilt of fine linen, and the workmen knew better than to challenge the retinue of a wealthy man.

  Beyond the Village of the Labourers, on a hillock to the left as Khnemes trudged eastwards, was the temple Per-Reshtu, erected twelve decades ago by Rameses God-King. Beyond this, two giant figures loomed in the path. Twin sentinels, nearly four times a man’s height, had guarded this place for three centuries: the sandstone statues commemorating the reign of Lord-Re’s-Truth Amunhotep. Long ago, these two awesome colossi had flanked the largest building ever erected on the west bank of the Nile: now Amunhotep’s mortuary temple lay in ruins, yet the sentinels endured. Khnemes was reluctant to approach these silent stones, but he knew that Perabsah would prefer to strut along the wide clear avenue between the twin colossi rather than stumble among the uneven pathways to either side. “Forgive me, centuries,” Khnemes whispered as he stepped between the pair of ancient sentinels, and led the way towards Thebes.

  At noonday they reached the cane fields on the western bank of the Nile. Here the sledge and its coffin tipped forwards, as if eager to hurtle down the slope. Khnemes helped the slaves hold the sledge back, easing it down the riverbank instead of allowing it to tumble headlong.

  The Nile’s crossing at Thebes is always attended with ferrymen, to transport passengers from the living city of Waset on the eastern bank to the realm of the dead among the cemeteries on the western bank . . . and sometimes back again. Near the marketplace of the burial-hucksters on the western bank, Khnemes hailed a ferryman. Perabsah called out as the ferry approached: “What will you bargain for conveying myself and this sledge? Akhi! I have my manservant and these other men as well, but they are only slaves . . . and the manservant is merely a Nubian.”

  The ferryman made the appropriate gestures: right hand to h
eart, to demonstrate respect for Perabsah; left hand to kneecap, to signify submission. “All men are equal aboard my boat, sir,” the ferryman answered, “for it tasks me the same effort to convey a living prince or a dead slave.” At length it was agreed that the ferryman would be paid one deben of copper to transport the lot, if Perabsah’s three slaves lent a hand with the bargepoles. The sledge was loaded onto the deck, and the crossing began.

  Perabsah seated himself on the ferryman’s bench, placing the papyrus fragments in the lap of his kilt. “Mah’ek! Behold thee, Khnemes: see what this is.”

  “I behold, neb-i: sovereign-my-lord,” said Khnemes, “but I do not comprehend.”

  Merabsah held up a stiffened shred of papyrus. “This material is utau: plastered cartonnage. A century ago, embalmers often used cartonnage to enswathe the mummies they fashioned. Pieces of scrap papyrus, no longer needed by the scribes, would be soaked in wet gypsum plaster to strengthen their fibres, and the plastered sheets glued together to fashion a shroud. The soaked papyrus was moulded round the face and body of the mummy, and sewn together at the back. When the plaster dried, the shroud hardened . . . and the cartonnage formed a protective shell encasing the mummy’s remains.” Perabsah brandished two more fragments of the stiffened fabric. “Usually the cartonnage was painted by the embalmers, but this one was not. See! There is writing on these utau.”

  Khnemes glanced at the dark lines of hieratic script on the dusty papyrus: cryptic black symbols, randomly speckled with a few symbols in red. For the thousandth time, Khnemes wished that he knew how to read. “These words, heri sa’ur . . . they are death-texts for the soul of the dead man?”

  “Probably not,” said Perabsah. “The embalmers likely used any papyrus at hand, discarded by the archivists. Before we leave Thebes, I must engage a scribe to translate these lines. But I can read a few words myself. See? This word here is ‘Rekhseth’: the name of my thrice-tef.”