The Mammoth Book of Egyptian Whodunnits

by Mike Ashley

  “What about the ‘eart?”

  Malinferno let a superior smile cross his lips. “Oh, don’t you know? The heart, being the seat of the intellect and the emotions, was left in the chest cavity. The brain, on the other hand, was deemed of no importance. It was mushed up, and pulled out through the right nostril with a hook.”

  If he thought by this lurid description he would cause Doll Pucket to swoon like the rest of the fair sex at the Countess’ soiree, then Malinferno was much mistaken. She was already groping through the gash in the mummy’s side, her pale alabaster arm contrasting starkly with the livid grey of the body. Before Malinferno could stop her, she was up to her delightful armpit in the mummy’s interior.

  “I can’t feel it. There’s nuthin’ ‘ere.”

  “Let me try.” Malinferno pulled Doll’s arm out, feeling the heat of her body as it pressed against him. He rolled back the sleeve of his linen robe, and inserted his arm in the opening. His eyes rolled in his head as he groped around inside the queen.

  “You’re right – it’s not there. That’s very odd. Who would have removed it?”

  “Mebbe it was the same geezer what did this.”

  Doll was pointing at a small round hole in the leathery skin of the queen just below her dry and empty left dug. In life, it would have looked no more than a pin-prick. But the natural drying process had tightened the skin and turned the pin-prick into a small but discernible hole just about where the heart would have been beating in life.

  “Fascinating.” Malinferno loved a mystery. Una tema recondita.

  “Where do yer reckon the ‘eart is, then?”

  “Heart, Doll, heart’ ” He emphasized the aspirate. “Take a look in the sarcophagus.”

  “Wot? You think it might . . . have just fallen out?”

  Doll snorted in derision, and raised Malinferno’s temperature by flapping the neckline of her diaphanous robe back and forth to waft cool air over her bosom. The ballroom was decidedly hot thanks to the new-fangled steam radiators, and her robe was already sticking to her curves. He tore his gaze away from the clinging material, knowing there was no point in making any advances now. He recognized one of Doll’s intransigent moods coming on. So Malinferno went over to the stone coffin himself. He had to climb up on the wheeled bier on which it had been transported before he could reach down inside. And even then he could not see clearly to the bottom. He felt around blindly, and his hand encountered all sorts of nasty debris. Some of which no doubt could have been parts of queen Ankh-Wadjet. Then something dry and papery rustled under his probing fingers.

  “There’s something here, Doll. I think it’s a papyrus.”

  Carefully he got his fingers around the rolled-up bundle and lifted it from the sarcophagus. It was indeed a papyrus.

  “Give it ‘ere.”

  Doll made a grab for the precious document, and Malinferno had to sweep it away from her grasp.

  “Careful. It could crumble to dust, if you handle it carelessly.”

  “It’ll crumble apart if you keep wafting it around like that too. Don’t fret, I’ll treat it as careful as if it were the King’s private orb and sceptre.”

  She gave Malinferno a coarse wink. It made him wonder, not for the first time, if Doll had fondled the “Crown Jewels”. Bearing in mind good King George’s propensity for dalliance, and his treatment of poor Queen Caroline, he would not be surprised. Still he was reluctant to give the papyrus wholly over to her. It might be of great value, and without the Countess present to observe their discovery, the principle of finders-keepers was foremost in his mind.

  Together, they unrolled the crackling papyrus on to the surface of the rosewood table. Doll peered at it, and began to translate.

  “ ‘I, ‘arkhuf . . . er . . . Harkhuf the embalmer, do set this rxecord out as a true statement of my discoveries concerning the murder of the old queen Ankh-Wadjet.’ ”

  She looked at Malinferno with sparkling eyes.

  “It’s a murder tale from four thousand years ago.”

  “Go on, go on.”

  “Move yer thumb, then. ‘I say murder because of what I found on the embalmed body that was brought to me by Shemai the vizier of the court of Meryakare. Let me start from the beginning . . .’ ”

  *

  Harkhuf could not understand why the old huckster Shemai had brought him the queen’s mummy to deal with. True, there was a strike of necropolis workers happening at the moment. Who could blame the poor devils – no one had fed them for days. So there were few embalmers available to do the work. Even so.

  “I’m doing it for old times’ sake,” explained the haughty Shemai. “I liked you around at court.” He paused. “It was a shame about the king’s sister.”

  “It was all her fault – not mine. I am the aggrieved party here.”

  Harkhuf’s innocent tones sounded strained and false even to himself. Shemai sniffed in that famous way, making full use of that hawk-like, hook nose of his, with its long and ample nostrils.

  “Think yourself lucky there was no child, or Great Meryakare, the All-Knowing, the All-Powerful, the Engineer of the Rising Sun, and Lord of This and the Next World, would have suspected you of trying to create your own dynasty. I would not then have been able to prevent him doing what he had wanted to do to you.”

  Harkhuf gulped, and thought of the eunuchs at court.

  “So what does little Mery want?”

  “King Meryakare, to you. The All-Knowing, the All-Powerful, the Engineer of the Rising Sun, and Lord of This and the Next World.”

  Harkhuf waved a hand. “Yeah, and all that. What does he want me to do with his mother?”

  Shemai winced. “Repair the damage done, and make sure the grave robbers don’t get to her tomb again.”

  The worst nightmare of all sleeping royalty. Those thieves who steal through the night, and plunder all the goods the king needed to see him through the next life. Shemai hawked and spat on the sandy earth of Harkhuf’s workshop. Then for good measure he ground the thick, yellowy gob into the sand with the sole of his elegant leather sandal. Harkhuf felt as though it was grinding him down too.

  He sat for some while after Shemai had left, staring at the ornate coffin on its wooden sled that dominated the centre of his workshop. He could feel the icy chill that rolled out from the open top, like the cold and powerful hands of the woman who lay inside. Queen Ankh-Wadjet’s tomb had been robbed barely five years after she had been tucked away for all eternity. Now it fell to Harkhuf to put right the damage.

  But it still didn’t make sense to him. After all, he was a second-rank embalmer, only entering the craft that had been his father’s after his short-lived career as a court musician had foundered. Courtesy of King Meryakare, the All-Knowing etc’s sister. He had never intended it to get so serious with Sekhmet-her-Sokar. Despite her name – it meant “the face of Sekhmet is beautiful” – she was a dumpy, plain girl. Her only appeal was the frisson of her blood relationship to the king. Plus the fact that he had heard the High Priest of the temple had fancied her. He always did like to irritate Wephopte.

  Harkhuf’s father had always said he lacked judgement. And the dalliance with Sekhy had proved him right. He had only done it for the fun of it. Still, the abrupt and forced severing of the relationship had provided ample compensations. It had ended up throwing him into his new wife’s arms. Which only served to remind him. There was no point worrying why he had been given the work, because there was no doubt he desperately needed it. Suffice it to say that he now had Nefre and her expensive tastes to support.

  *

  “Nefre!” exclaimed Doll Pucket. “Harkhuf’s wife has got the same name you gave me. That’s weird.”

  “Not really, it’s a fairly common name. Read on.”

  “OK, Joe. But I got a funny feeling about this.”

  A cold shiver ran through Doll, and suddenly she was aware of the gathering gloom in the vast, echoing ballroom. The cold sarcophagus lay empty, and Queen Ankh-Wadj
et stared glassily at the lofty ceiling. She ran her finger up the next column of hieroglyphs and read on.

  “ ‘It all went wrong after I unwound the damaged bindings on the body . . .’ ”

  *

  Harkhuf began unwinding the linen bandages which had been slit in places where the robbers had sought to find any jewels bound into the linen. This was going to be a long and fiddly job. But he still had time to admire the work of the previous embalmer. Someone from the old days like his father, who took his calling seriously. The old queen had been given the works – removal of the brain and viscera, natron dehydration, body washing, bandages wrapped and fixed with resinous gum. Nowadays, it was as much as most people could afford to pay for their dear, departed one to have some cheap oil injected up their back passage, and a quick natron treatment if he was lucky. You pay a small reward, you get a cheapskate job. A sign of the times.

  Things had gone downhill since old Pepy II had died, and Egypt had fallen apart. There was no one now who could claim to be Lord of the two Kingdoms, and to wear the White Crown and the Red Crown together. Oh, Meryakare liked to consider himself the successor to Pepy, but he was no more than a jumped-up son of a self-aggrandized local nomarch. No, the world was going to the dogs in a bucket, and even the bucket had a hole in it. The fabled maat – the social order – whose praises Harkhuf sang in his ritual incantations over the dead was a myth.

  “Oh Imsety, Hapy, Duamutef, Kebehsenuef,

  . . . Where are you now?”

  Singing softly to himself, Harkhuf uncovered the desiccated body. He ran his hands over the soft, greasy surface of the skin. It was a first-class job indeed, the sort no one bothered with now. It was because of his protracted admiration for the wasted excellence of the old embalmers’ work that he saw it. Well, felt it more like.

  At first, he thought it was a blemish left over from the living body, then he looked closer. It was a puncture in the skin. To imagine it had been perpetrated by the embalmer, whose work he had been admiring so much, was impossible. The man would not have been so careless with such a corpse. And he too had been extremely careful as he unwrapped the body. It was King Meryakare’s mother, after all. So he came to the only conclusion he could.

  Murder in the royal household. Worse. It was nothing less than assassination. No one but other members of the royal family, priests and officials, could have been close enough to the old queen to do what that mark suggested had happened. Demanded had happened. Harkhuf felt a constriction of his own heart, as if the hand of the old queen was squeezing the life out of him. It thumped in his chest. Involuntarily, he mumbled the spell that would protect his heart from theft.

  “Let not this my heart-case be carried away from me. I make you to ascend his throne, to fetter heart-cases for him in Sekhet-hetep. This my heart-case is devoted to the decrees of the god Tem, who guideth me through the caverns of Suti, but let not this my heart be given away.”

  Uneasily, Harkhuf removed the beeswax plate that covered the incision in the queen’s left side and slid his hand into the abdomen, then up into the chest cavity. He felt the heart, and his finger fumbled around until it poked into a hole. There was no doubt. Someone had violated the queen’s heart, the seat of life and all reasoning.

  Harkhuf the embalmer did the only thing possible on discovering this awful truth. He went and got drunk.

  *

  “He must be an ancestor of yours, Joe.”

  “Just read.”

  *

  Sut’s hovel suited Harkhuf’s mood. It was dark, grim and smelled of unwashed bodies. The odour was understandable as most of the takers for Sut’s barley beer were farm labourers. They had just finished a day of harvesting the pitiful, dried stalks that claimed to be the barley and wheat crop these days. And didn’t have the energy to complain. They just wanted some fun, which suited Harkhuf down to the ground. He often escaped the eternal backbiting and incestuous prattle of the royal court and the necropolis village to slum it at this end of town. Most everyone at Sut’s knew him, and so there was no reaction when he stooped through the low doorway in his neat, white kilt, and well-groomed and close-cropped black hair. Most of the denizens of Sut’s wore no more than a stained loincloth round their hips. And their grooming left much to be desired.

  “Ah. Our very own Hery-Wedjeb. Welcome.”

  This was always Sut’s gently mocking greeting for Harkhuf. The court official whose title he bestowed on the embalmer distributed donations to temples and cults. Hery-Wedjeb - the Master of Largesse. In the eyes of most of the poor labourers in the room, Harkhuf knew he must seem that way. Rich beyond their wildest dreams. But that didn’t stop them letting him mix easily with them. Especially if he dropped some of his possessions in a game of Senet.

  There was a table already set up in one corner of the gloomy room with a rush light burning over it. The long board with its thirty squares and disc-shaped counters drew Harkhuf like a magnet. Sut placed a beaker of his best bitter brew in his hand – no honey sweetening here – and motioned Harkhuf over to the table. The others round the board made room for him, and the game began.

  It was only later, when he was staggering home through the silent mud huts, that he realized what he had done. He had let slip the most dangerous of secrets. It had been old Sut’s fault. He was down on the game, and chasing his losses, when the old man had told him he had had enough. Harkhuf protested.

  “You can’t stop me now. I need to win back that scarab necklace. Nefre gave it to me for my birthday. Well, I paid for it. But she gave it to me, and I can’t go home without it.”

  Sut looked at the greedy eyes of the other players. They didn’t want Harkhuf to stop either. Each was thinking how they could feed their families for a month on just one of his pieces of jewellery. But Sut didn’t want to lose the favours of his best customer.

  “Time to go home, embalmer, and beg forgiveness from that lovely new wife of yours.” He glanced over at the old, wrinkled drab clearing away the remains of the mammoth drinking session. “If I had such a wife as your Nefre, instead of that one, I wouldn’t be dallying with this bunch of drunkards. Go home.”

  “I’m scared to.”

  He didn’t know why he said it, but he did. Of course, the erstwhile band of fellow gamblers took it all wrong, and hooted at this apparent fear of his wife. He had to stop them mocking him.

  “No, no, you don’t understand. It’s not Nefre. It’s the old queen herself.”

  That was when he told them. He told them what he had found, and that the queen had been murdered for sure. And that he had the evidence lying right there on the slab in the Pure Place – his workshop.

  That did it for him having any chance of getting his losses back. The superstitious labourers suddenly melted into the night. All they left as proof they had ever existed was the distant sound of mumbled spells, and the after-image of magical signs made in the air to ward off the evil, to which Harkhuf had exposed them.

  Sut abruptly pushed him out of the hovel, suddenly not caring whether he had Harkhuf’s custom ever again. Harkhuf heard the door being firmly bolted behind him. He was locked out in the darkness with Ankh-Wadjet’s restless spirit for company. Suddenly, the grubby, little peasant houses huddled close to each other didn’t seem as welcoming as they had done when he arrived. Doors were barred, and the tiny, dark window openings, set high on the otherwise blank walls stared down at him like the dead eyes in a corpse. Then he thought he heard a scuffling sound behind him, and when he looked, he was almost sure he saw a shape melt into the darkness. A large, glistening shape the colour of night that just melted away. Nervously, he realized the shape had come from the west, the abode of the dead, and he scurried off in the opposite direction. He rushed headlong through the narrow warren of alleys, making for the greater familiarity of Ta Djeser – the necropolis village – and home. Where at least the bodies stayed put.

  The next morning, his head throbbing from the aftermath of Sut’s strong beer, Harkhuf could laug
h at his own fears. Since when had he been afraid of the ka and ba – the spirit and soul – of those that were his stock in trade? His discovery concerning the old queen had certainly unnerved him. Even his hands were trembling slightly as he wrapped the fresh bandages around the body. Though that too might have been due to the beer. Normally he would have bandagers to carry out this mundane task, but they too were striking until all the necropolis workers received their wheat and barley payments. At least the normality and humdrum nature of the wrapping helped to clear his mind.

  Until later that afternoon, when Metjen arrived. Metjen was physician to the royal family, a bumbling, self-important old man of 50 years. He feigned to know how to cure every ill by his magic, and in fact could quote a specific for most common ailments. Which is what he proposed to do right now.

  “I can see by the tenseness around your eyes that you are suffering from a migraine or the like. I would suggest the use of aloe or catfish oil.”

  “Thank you Master Metjen, but I will be fine.”

  Metjen shook his greying locks.

  “I can assure you that you are not fine. In fact I would say that you have a life-threatening problem, unless you take some restorative action.”

  His eyes narrowed, and with a practised flick of his wrist he unrolled his medical kit next to Ankh-Wadjet’s body on the slab. Harkhuf’s eyes opened wide in horror as he looked over the array of knives, forceps, and pincers, hooks, saws, and bags tied with string. But most of all his fearful eyes lit on the drill. Metjen stood at his shoulder, and whispered in his ear.

  “I would recommend a little trepanning for head pain. A hole in the skull goes a long way to relieving the pressure.”

  Harkhuf felt dizzy, and clutched on to the edge of the slab, his eyes tightly closed. When he opened them again, the tools of Metjen’s trade had disappeared, and the old man was exiting his workshop. He did offer one last piece of advice.

  “Actually, I think all you need is to take care of your body more. Remember the heart controls the blood, sweat, urine, and sperm. Drink less, and in better company.”