Wicked Women

by Gaie Sebold

  We left the floor with the commander’s office behind us without incident but the runes rolled against us on the next floor. A door opened and a watch man dressed only in his shirt appeared, rubbing his eyes and frowning at the unexpected gloom. ‘Who put the candles out?’

  ‘Run!’ growled Sorgrad.

  We did, heedless of the noise. We took the next flight of stairs and the next. The slam of doors and confused exclamations drowned out the sound of our boots on the floorboards. We ran up the final flight of stairs and faced a blank wooden door. Halice kicked it open, barely breaking step. Just as Sorgrad had predicted, there was a garret running the length of the building. The pale light that presaged dawn spilled through cramped dormer windows. Halice stripped off the watchman’s coat and draping it over her two fists, punched out the glass in the closest. ‘Gren scrambled out with the thick leather protecting him from the bottommost shards.

  He leaned back in and held out a hand. ‘Let’s be away from here,’ he grinned, teeth filmed with blood.

  I climbed out onto stone slates, treacherous with moss and blinked in the pallid light. The commotion below was rising as watchmen reached for boots and breeches before starting the chase. We’d been counting on them being unwilling to chance a fight with their shirt tails flapping around naked thighs. The watchmen dressed to stop us were wrong footed and all the way down the empty street below, their shouts echoing from building to building. I didn’t look down.

  Halice followed Sorgrad out of the window, her head bumping his thigh. ‘Gren was already on the ridge of the roof, running lightly along to the next building. Sorgrad had been right; these houses were all built hard up against one another. I followed ‘Gren, stepping lightly up onto the next roof.

  Sorgrad was hard on my heels. ‘Quick as you can,’ he said coolly. ‘Before someone down there thinks to find a cross bow.’ With dawn building, he looked even worse than he had in the cellar’s candle light.

  ‘They’re out,’ called Halice and I chanced a glance over my shoulder to see three watchmen cautiously emerging from the window we’d smashed, hands and feet clinging to the slope of the roof.

  Turning to look straight ahead, I concentrated on running, on keeping my footing on the rough slates, on not looking down, on not thinking what the fall would do to me. End my troubles, that’s what it would do. I wasn’t ready to settle for that, not yet.

  The shouts in the street rose to a frustrated screech. We were outstripping our hesitant pursuers. A long building boasting angular chimneys stacked in fours and sixes offered some concealment and we took a brief pause.

  ‘Down?’ Halice wondered.

  Sorgrad scanned the mismatched eaves and gables ahead. ‘See there, that house with the wing running down to the back. We can get down onto that outhouse roof and then on that wall.’

  Halice nodded. ‘Keep down, so they don’t see us from the street.’

  We slid down the far slope of the roof on hands and knees, pressed close to the slates. I began to breathe easier. There was no sound of any watchmen tackling the tangle of alleys and blind entries running along the back of these merchants’ marts and warehouses as yet. Crouching, running bent double, hands steadying ourselves as we went, we made it to the building Sorgrad had spotted without mishap. We dropped down onto the outhouse roof without any cry of surprise from an early rising housemaid to set the Watch’s dogs on our trail. It was a nerve-wracking jump to the narrow, sloping coping of the wall. We made it and down to the alley below. The others were panting and trembling just as much as I was.

  ‘Time-’ Sorgrad paused to catch his breath. ‘To leave town. I know where we can get horses on the Kadras road.’

  ‘We’ll have to get down to the river. Swim for it.’ Halice turned to face the unseen river. She always had an unerring sense of direction.

  ‘I can’t swim!’ I protested.

  ‘You’ll float,’ Sorgrad assured me. ‘I’ll do the rest.’

  ‘Gren smiled widely at me, setting the split in his lip oozing again. He licked it. ‘So, going to say you told us so?’

  ‘No, because I didn’t.’ Relief and anger were a heady mix, loosening my tongue like fine wine. ‘I cursed well should have,’ I told him in no uncertain terms as we ran. ‘It’s a solid gold certainty I will next time, before I let you drag me into something like that.’

  ‘Good girl,’ ‘Gren approved.

  I didn’t have the breath to answer him. We ran through the empty streets. Men delivering coal and kindling shouted questions after us. A baker walking slowly home after a night making the city’s morning bread stopped to look at us, face appalled at ‘Grad and ‘Gren’s injuries. The Watch would easily be able to map our course later that day if they so chose. That was no matter. We would be long gone. We climbed ivy covered walls and trampled through vegetable plots, cutting across the gardens that backed onto the ancient and lofty wall that held the river back from the city. As soon as we found one with a gate to the bank and no sentry in sight on the wall walk above, Halice and Sorgrad broke it down with swift, measured violence.

  Out on the broad grassy swathe, laundresses setting great swags of linen to dry on the elder bushes watched, astonished as we plunged into the wide river with its gravelly shoals and willow crowned islets. Sorgrad was right, I did float, just about, as he dragged me across the stretches too deep for me to wade. I scrambled out half drowned on the far side, coughing and spluttering like an unwanted kitten thrown into a stream.

  We found the horses where Sorgrad said. We didn’t steal them, leaving Sorgrad’s silver and emerald brooch pinned to a halter left hanging from the stable door. We’d made enough enemies in Selerima without adding to them.

  ‘Where do you suppose Cordainer’s got to?’ I wondered when we felt far enough from the city to slow and let the horses choose their own pace. I was riding pillion behind ‘Gren.

  He shrugged, adding venomously. ‘Wherever it is, it can’t be far enough away.’

  ‘We need to get a letter to Charoleia as soon as we can,’ commented Sorgrad coldly. ‘She’ll be out for his blood just as much as us.’

  ‘He’ll pay us back, sooner or later,’ agreed Halice ominously. ‘And we’ll repay him with interest.’

  ‘Sooner or later,’ I echoed.

  THE SHABTI-MAKER

  Christine Morgan

  ‘Why is my husband’s tomb not yet completed?’

  ‘There was an accident, oh merciful one, oh jewel in the crown of Isis. A terrible accident.’

  Ateb, overseer of construction, abased himself before the queen and her company. The other workers did likewise, folding their bodies to the ground, bowing their heads. Sweat gleamed on their bare backs and dripped from their shaven scalps.

  She had come among them with little warning. Her arrival caught them in the midst of the day, Ra’s great sun-disk burning white-hot in the sky and the date-palms rustling, desultory in an arid eastern breeze.

  Kepu and Tamit had run in breathless from the fields, having seen the dust-cloud stirred up from the road by the royal procession. There’d been time, just barely, to gather everyone together, labourers and villagers, elders, children, and slaves. Tools were put hastily aside from work-roughened hands. Bread was pulled from the ovens, stew-pots swung from the coals so that they would not boil over.

  Goats and pigs roamed freely, the streets strewn with dark piles of their droppings. Geese honked and waddled atop the mud-brick houses, their own droppings streaked yellow-brown against the faded white-lime plaster on the walls. A dog sat, leg-raised and licking himself, in the shade of a squat stone block carved on all four sides with the likeness of the grinning god Bes. Dung-baskets, heaped high and stinking, half-blocked the gate into the humble market-square.

  Into this came their queen, the pharaoh’s eldest sister and chief wife, Queen Nefersiu. She rode in comfort upon cushions in a covered litter, carried by Nubians in leopard-skins. Servants, scribes, soldiers, handmaids and priests accompanied her. So di
d a nurse, in whose charge was young Prince Utsef, the pharaoh’s son and heir.

  The Nubians had held the litter low enough for Nefersiu to step down, which she did once her handmaids spread out cloth of linen so that the queen’s golden sandals should not be soiled. She stood proud and beautiful before her subjects, and even as they grovelled, few could help sneaking an admiring glance.

  ‘An accident,’ Nefersiu said, in response to Ateb the overseer’s words.

  ‘Yes, revered one, carer of Egypt,’ said Ateb with a vigorous nod. ‘We lost two donkeys, thirty-one workers and almost a dozen slaves.’

  ‘How did this happen?’

  Atep nearly fell all over himself in his too-eager rush to explain. As he did so, the other workers remained bowed low. Some had brought their families with them, wives and children – or widows and orphans now – and these clustered nearby with sorrowful expressions. Several wept silent tears.

  The tragedy was but a few days past, the memories fresh and raw in their minds.

  All had been well, the work going as usual. Old Sakhmet, listening to Atep tell the queen, even remembered which of her figurines she’d just finished – a fat, funny little monkey to tumble and caper and do tricks to amuse a child – and how she’d been trying to decide if she would start the next right away, or go over to the stall where Ib-Hathor sold melons first.

  Any walk was a long walk for an aged woman on a hot afternoon, but the prospect of a juicy slice of melon, and perhaps a juicier slice of the latest gossip, had Sakhmet reaching for her trusty stick when disaster struck.

  So sudden. A warning shout from the direction of the worksite, a strange groaning noise, a grinding crack, and then such a tumult it sounded as if a mountain had shattered.

  It was not in fact a mountain, but the shattering effect had been much the same.

  Though she had not arrived soon enough to witness anything but the aftermath, hobbling along on her stick as fast as her stiff legs and aching hips could carry her, Sakhmet found she could envision it in all too vivid detail.

  Great chunks of stone smashing and bouncing, cracking apart on each other when they struck … the creak of wood as scaffolding gave way, collapsing in a jumble of timbers, planks and poles … snapped ropes lashing like whips … a clattering rain of tools and sun-baked bricks … men falling, screaming … tremendous earth-shaking deafening crashes…

  Then silence. Silence and a billowing gritty sand-storm of a dust cloud, gradually settling, gradually clearing to reveal the destruction. Followed by the feeble struggles and cries for help of those not killed instantly. Dirt sticking to the bloody streaks and smears, making a muddy reddish plaster. Thick puddles soaking into the dry, thirsty sand.

  Some of it she had not needed to witness with the senses of her body. Some, she knew even from afar – hearing the high, shrill cries of the ka-spirits flown swift from their mortal abodes. Others, she saw when she came to the site, when she saw what few else in the village could see, only those such as Hamun-Ra, the priest, touched with the gifts of the jackal-god. She saw the ba-spirits, crawling and slithering, flowing low and oily like liquid smoke, over and around the places of death.

  All other activity in the village and at the worksite went forgotten until much later, when the demands of the living finally overpowered those of the dying and the dead. There had been scant sleep. Chores were neglected. Meals were indifferently taken when opportunity allowed.

  They tended to the injured as best as could be done, but, for some, no amount of tending would do. The piercing shrieks of their departing ka-spirits were followed by the sight – to the eyes of those who had such sight – of the ba-spirits issuing forth. They squirmed from breathless mouths, blind and plaintive. Even those who could not perceive them knew of them. Knew they were there and would be there, and would remain as long as the dead went unburied. Growing stronger. Growing dangerous.

  The survivors gathered, hungry and tired, unwashed…hardly fit to be in the presence of their glorious, gold-adorned queen.

  And their little prince, the next pharaoh.

  Sakhmet smiled to see the boy. She liked children, though she’d had none of her own. They, in turn, tended to like her, or at least the cunning figures she made. Sometimes, to please them, she set her skilled hands to the task of crafting toys for them to play with, toys of wood or clay, brightly painted.

  Looking at Prince Utsef, she supposed that he had thousands of toys, far finer than anything she could ever hope to create. Clever toys with jointed limbs and moving parts; valuable toys set with precious metals and jewels, armies of tiny soldiers; toy chariots with wheels that rolled.

  At the moment, however, the young prince seemed bored. He fussed and fidgeted, clearly uninterested in the adult conversation. Now and then he tugged at the wrist of his nurse, but the girl only patted and shushed him before going back to taking coy glances at a handsome guard.

  The children Sakhmet knew, the sons and daughters of villagers and workers and slaves, were lean and wiry, already accustomed to toiling in the fields or doing other labour. On all but the coldest of days, they went naked more often than not, and their hair was kept cropped short or shaved except for a side-lock.

  Not so Prince Utsef. The more she watched him, the more splendid he appeared. Plump and well-fed, his limbs almost chubby, dimpled at the knees and elbows. His skin smooth, unscarred, soft-looking, sleek as if regularly bathed and rubbed with scented oils. Beaded braids of black hair framed his round-cheeked face, long ringlets tightly curled and waxed hung to his shoulders in the back. His lips tinted ripe-red, his wide eyes outlined by kohl. He wore a pleated kilt of white linen bound with a gold-and-scarlet sash, sandals to match his mother’s, and a pectoral necklace set with ebony, turquoise and green copper.

  Oh, he had never known a day’s want or deprivation. He had never gone to bed with an empty belly. This was a boy-child coddled and indulged. His nurse, when not making eyes at soldiers, must fawn and dote on him, feed him sweets, pet and pamper him. All those around him would treat him as the living royal god-blood incarnate he surely was, their next pharaoh, their next king of the lands of the Nile.

  As if he detected her scrutiny, the prince’s head turned, searching her out. Their gazes met. His was fearless, inquisitive. Sakhmet smiled more widely, feeling her thin old skin crease along its wrinkles at the corners of her eyes and mouth. To her delight, after a moment’s dubious inspection, the boy gave a smile of his own. It beamed like Ra’s shining rays, flashing teeth white as chalk.

  Perhaps he wouldn’t snub a small gift? A trinket that might not be so fine as whatever toy-treasures filled his palace chamber, but might please him nonetheless?

  Atep, having described the collapse at the worksite, went on to tell the queen that they had cleared away most of the debris already, as well as retrieving the corpses; though there had not yet been the time to do more than the most basic of burial preparations for the workers.

  Nefersiu raised a beringed hand in a regal gesture to silence him. Thin bracelets clinked and jingled on her slender wrist. She was a tall woman with a long, elegant neck and a stately profile. Her dress, of linen so sheer it might have been woven from moonbeams, fell from a pectoral banded with lapis and carnelian. Both her hair and cosmetics were elaborately done and sweet fragrances surrounded her. She might have stepped whole from a wall-mural, or been a statue brought to life.

  ‘And the tomb?’ she inquired. ‘When will it be done?’

  ‘Soon, oh fairest flower of the earthly gardens,’ Atep said. ‘Soon.’

  ‘My husband does not have time for further delays.’

  An anguished cry took them all by surprise. ‘Your husband?’

  ‘Tsst!’ someone hissed in warning, but it was too late.

  Shaking off the neighbours that sought to dissuade her, Inubet pushed her way through the crowd. The widow was dishevelled, hair unkempt, her face harrowed and eyes reddened from grieving. Several alert guards stepped forth, but she hardly
noticed.

  ‘What is the meaning of this?’ Queen Nefersiu’s voice was as obsidian – dark, sharp and cool.

  ‘Your husband does not have time for further delays? Your husband yet lives! He has the best physicians, and every medicine… he may live for years! He lives, waiting for his tomb to be fitted out like a palace, while our husbands rot in a trench.’’

  ‘They have not even been wrapped in the winding cloths’. Tchah added, clutching two scrawny children to her sides.

  The guards closed ranks between the distraught women and the queen, not brandishing their spears but neither holding them entirely at rest. Sakhmet saw the nurse lift the young prince, hoisting him onto one ample hip.

  ‘How many more?’ cried Inubet. ‘How many men must die to appease Pharaoh’s vanity?’

  The queen regarded Inubet, eyes glittering through kohl. ‘How many do you have?’

  Shocked gasps from several villagers greeted this, and were met by some smirks from the royal company. Atep, the overseer, interposed himself and performed another unctuous, abasing bow.

  ‘Pardon them, most gracious daughter of Ra,’ he said. ‘They forget themselves. They forget their place.’

  ‘Hmf.’ Nefersiu sniffed. She flicked her fingers. ‘See that they remember.’

  At once, the insolent women were seized and dragged before the queen. Tchah shrieked as she was torn from her children. Inubet lashed out, raking a soldier’s face with gnawed, dirt-caked nails. No one objected or dared move to intervene, except for Tchah’s sister-in-law darting forward to collect her nephew and niece.

  Sakhmet grimaced, wishing she did not have to watch, but that was a luxury to be denied the workers and villagers. It was not the whip, there was that mercy at least, but ten strokes each from a length of knotted rope. When their backs were striped and bloody, Tchah was permitted to scurry to her family, but Inubet was made to grovel before Nefersiu so that her tears fell like desert rain to sparkle upon the golden sandals.