City of Lies

by Anton Gill

  ‘Dust?’ Huy was a bad actor. He felt stifled indoors these days, and this was the hot time of year.

  ‘Don’t you feel confined, after your freedom?’

  ‘I am free.’

  ‘You don’t mind if I speak openly to you?’ Tehuty drew out a scroll and fussed with it, his skin the colour of the paper.

  ‘No.’

  ‘Would you like news of my sister? Of my nephew?’

  Not, Huy noticed, your wife, your son. Little Heby was no longer little. He would be fourteen. Huy had not seen him since he was four. Aahmes had remarried. Huy preferred to know nothing of them now, and yet of course he longed to, however great the risk to his peace of mind.

  ‘I hope they are well.’

  ‘They thrive. I am joining them for next year’s Opet festival. Heby wants to be a soldier.’

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘I have encouraged him. If the campaign continues, he will serve with Horemheb in the north.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘My new brother-in-law gets richer and richer. He is his own man, of course. Everything he touches seems to turn to gold.’

  Huy did what he could to avoid Tehuty. The man knew his weaknesses. But it was not always possible and Huy, to his dismay, found that he had been too long away from the great institutions to be able to fall back into the way of their petty lines of command and their blinkered, claustrophobic intrigue. He could have used his rank to destroy the man and no-one would have batted an eyelid, but he simply could not be bothered.

  He had to face it: he was bored. But how far did the boredom spread? As the months passed, and as Senseneb’s patient looks became an ever greater reproach at his refusal – or inability – to say the words to her that would have bound them – the words that he had been at the very point of saying a year ago – the more he felt trapped. But how much of what he had did he want to get away from? His hair was not grey, but it was beginning to thin; his God-given muscle was still hard, but his belly was rounder. He was on the threshold of old age, but his heart hated this settledness.

  There were things about the south which were good. Perhaps his ka would find more peace there, in the deep provinces; and there would be just enough danger and challenge to make it interesting. He had never been there, but he had heard great tales. And there, too, it was said, the beliefs he had grown to live in, those of the Pharaoh Akhenaten, still flourished. Gem-aten it was called: the one true dancing power of the sun’s heat, casting out darkness with its light. People feared demons. People feared the living dead – those who had not been buried, those who had lost their hearts to scavenging jackals before their bodies were recovered. Huy knew that such things were shadows; but he had begun to doubt that he knew.

  As for farming, he had no intention of doing it all himself. He would find a place and hire skilled men. He would have his books. He would hunt, perhaps, and trade upstream as he grew bolder.

  Senseneb watched him as he stood looking out over the River, his face bathed in the pale golden light that never ceased by day. A small shadow on his brow showed that he had nicked himself shaving – a poor omen, but she knew better than to invite his scorn by pointing it out. He had a strong face, though it lacked the delicate lines which were a mark of handsomeness; but then she herself was big-boned and long limbed. What was more important went on inside, and though she knew sometimes that she had more than a glimpse of what made him what he was, just as often his eyes admitted no entry to his soul: they were dark eyes, such a dark brown that when in shadow, pupil and iris were one black disc. It was true that they had had a gift together; when they had first met they discovered it: she could call him through her heart and he would come to her. For a long time now she had not needed to use it, and he had never called her. Now she wondered if the gods had taken back the gift or if it could only be used in dire need as it had been then.

  But if she did not know him, how well did he know himself? ‘A man may think there is much to know of himself,’ her father had once said. ‘But in truth the centre of most of us is a void.’ Either that, she thought, or a mirror into which we dare not look.

  ‘This year the Flood may be bad,’ Huy said to her, turning from the window; ‘But we will not be ready to farm until next year. Besides, that far south, it is different. It is plateau-land. I would not like you to think that we were going totally unprepared.’

  ‘We have so much here.’

  ‘Too much.’

  ‘You have no idea how to farm. You are not a countryman.’

  Huy spread his hands a little helplessly and once again rallied his arguments:

  ‘We will not be alone. We have enough stored to pay generously for any labour we need. We could hire a local farmer to run the place for us.’

  He looked around. There was no denying that he felt trapped in the opulent rooms in which he now lived. Their murals showed the ideal life away from towns: a neat white house stood near a well-kept fish-pool. Tamarisk trees and sycomore figs suggested shade and refreshment. The blessed north wind – the Breath of Amun – seemed to stroke their topmost branches. He knew that this was far from reality – he knew that River Horses really did clamber up the banks and rampage through crops; he knew of the threat of the mouse and the locust, the worm in the grain and the sparrow on the field. But –

  ‘There has to be change,’ he said, stubbornly.

  Senseneb lowered her eyes, and busied herself with the lid of Miu’s casket. She was not sure that, if Huy was tired of life here, it was really the city that wearied him, or the kind of life he was living in it. As for herself, well, she was willing to try it, but...

  ‘It will not be for nothing that we go,’ said Huy, catching some of her feelings. ‘And it need not be forever. If we do not try, we will never know.’

  ‘It is so far away.’

  ‘Look! We will not be far from a city.’

  ‘But Meroe...’

  ‘Ankhesenamun is happy there.’

  ‘I am not Ankhesenamun,’ replied Senseneb, crisply. But they had had this argument many times before, each time edging closer to a choice. Besides, it was all but made. They had engaged a man to look for property for them and he was due to arrive in the Southern Capital with the next gold barge. Reniqer had met Huy on his last trip north and Senseneb suspected that he had more than influenced his thinking. But he had seemed a man who lived in Truth and Silence. He was also able to arrange accommodation for them in Meroe while they chose a farm, so, to her dismay, she had seen another objection swept away. She finished fitting the lid of the cat’s coffin, and then realised that she had not consciously given the little swathed body a last look. For some reason her eyes pricked with tears at this.

  She still struggled with herself. The man she loved – though sometimes she wondered why – was bent on this departure. And if provincial life was in truth worse than a journey in the Boat of the Night, they could – in truth – return. Huy, at least, seemed confident enough that they could, though she herself retained a suspicion at the ease with which he had obtained permission to depart from Ay. It was unlike Ay to let anyone with special knowledge go far from him. Huy knew all about Ankhesenamun, and yet Ay was letting him go to where she was. The circumstance had made Huy pause too, but he had said:

  ‘The Pharaoh has given me a job as full of status as it is empty of significance. He knows he can never own me and he will never give me executive power. Why he has not killed me is beyond me. Perhaps he is keeping me in reserve, in case he ever needs me again. Perhaps he thinks I will rot just as happily in Meroe as here.’ Huy had laughed then. ‘I doubt if he thinks I will immediately start plotting against him with his granddaughter. Ankhsi knows that his arm is long; that her best hope for survival – and for her son’s survival – is to keep her head low.’ He did not need to add that as far as the world was concerned, Ankhsi was dead– Huy himself had organised her ‘funeral’ to make possible her escape from the Southern Capital following the death of Tutankhamun, when her life
had been under threat from General Horemheb.

  ‘But do you know how ambitious she is? It is long since you saw her,’ Senseneb had objected.

  ‘She has settled down. What friends has she powerful enough to put her back on the Golden Chair? And she has no more claim to be there than Ay.’

  ‘But what of her son?’

  ‘No one could prove that he was not Tascherit’s.’

  Senseneb had let the matter drop again. There was indeed one good reason for her to go along with Huy’s plan. She was a physician and the daughter of a physician. Horaha had been chief of the House of Healing in the Southern Capital. But now he was dead and without his protection and sponsorship it was hard for her to take her career forward. There were too many male healers, and too many of them clung to means she could not believe in. Of course the heart was at the centre of the net of red rivers which linked all parts of the body, and of course the white milk of life that came from a man’s penis had its origin in his bones; but she doubted that the deliberately foul medicines which her colleagues administered were effective simply because their vile taste drove out the demon of sickness from the ailing person’s body. Usually, she thought, they were not effective at all. And how could the urine of a woman heavy with a male child promote the growth of wheat, and how could emmer be fertilised with the urine of the mother of a girl? Her doubts were known and did not help her career, though her skills were closer to those of the bone setters and cutters among the healers, than to those who gave drugs.

  In Meroe there were few healers, she had learned, and she could learn and grow in her work there.

  Her work was important to Senseneb. She would not have the gift of children. All specifics had been in vain, though she had tried every one she knew – she had inserted dates of the dom palm into her life cave and she had bathed her belly and thighs with her monthly blood. But she had seen twenty-seven Floods now and her situation was clearly hopeless. Tawaret had not heeded her prayers and even Hathor, so kind to her in other ways, had ignored her too. At times she wept at this, but only when she was alone. She could not understand why Huy did not seem to mind. She wondered if this was one of the reasons she stayed with him.

  Huy poured honey and milk for them both – they would both have preferred alcohol but that custom prohibited it until after Miu had been laid to rest – as Hapu came in to take the casket down to where the modest cortege was forming – two boy servants to carry Miu, and two girl servants to represent Isis and Nepthys. Hapu had been Senseneb’s body-servant from well before she had ever met Huy; he had been part of her father’s household and had been appointed by Horaha to serve her after she had returned to her father’s house in shame following the demise of her marriage.

  Hapu rarely expressed any emotion, though of his loyalty she knew there could be no question. She was not sure even what he thought of Huy - though of course such matters would have been no concern of his and he might not have entertained them in his heart.

  Still, she would have liked to talk to him. But what could she have said about Huy? The marriage ceremony was simple: a private exchange of vows made between two people. That was all. Of course there would be a contract covering what each would get if they divorced later. What made Huy hesitate? Like this journey to Meroe, it was something that could be changed if it went wrong. Was it his first wife, Aahmes? He rarely spoke of her. Did he still love her? What was love? She knew what she felt for him. A lot of the feeling had to do with her need for security. And what other Black Lander would put up with a barren woman?

  That night they decided for sure that they would go. Senseneb knew the moment could not be put off any longer as she turned away from the vault in which they had laid Miu to rest.

  But later she lay awake in the darkness. Was it just fear of the new? Her heart brought none of the relief a person usually gets when a hard decision is finally made. Instead, she felt a piercing apprehension, and it would not be denied.

  Chapter Two

  The Pharaoh, Kheperkheprure Ay, paced the long room whose windows faced north to catch the cool wind. He had always risen early, from the days when as Master of Horse he had had to supervise the grooming personally: of course even then he could have delegated, but Ay had always taken his responsibilities seriously, and power too. He could not admit to himself that it was the fear of losing the supreme power which he had gained that kept him from sleep now. He took his insomnia to be a curse of old age; perhaps too a lifetime of intrigue had made him overtired.

  But he did have what he wanted, and he was not going to let it go now. In turn that meant that he must not neglect the smallest crack, potential or real, in his defences. It was one such crack that he was turning over in his heart now: the crack that perhaps the scribe, Huy, could make.

  Huy’s lack of ambition had always confounded Ay; but he had known that sooner or later the stocky little pen pusher would become frustrated in the job he had been given. Could he really just want to go to the south to farm? Retirement for such an active heart seemed inconceivable to the pharaoh, and in this he knew Huy better than the scribe himself did.

  Huy himself had not been wrong about the reason why Ay had kept him alive: his potential usefulness in a crisis. But Huy had underestimated the effect of his own reputation on the king. He might have ceased to practise the profession into which chance had tumbled him – that of a solver of other people’s problems – but he had made powerful friends in the Southern Capital, and his sudden disappearance would have been noticed. Horemheb, though safely away in the north, had left the capital peppered with his agents too, and Ay was not so strong as to be able to avoid being brought down by a scandal. If he were ever suspected of having Huy killed, Horemheb’s agents would capitalise on it. The little scribe himself was not important, of course, but political opportunity could be made out of chaff if the circumstances were right.

  Ay continued his pacing, fingering the broad, beaded wesekh collar he wore over his light linen robe. In the shadows he could see the servants trying not to fall asleep on their feet. The collar had nine rows of turquoise beads, alternated with pellets of gold, and had been made by the dwarf jewellers of the reign of King Userkare, ten centuries before. It had been a gift to him from his Chief Wife, Ty, to mark his first year as king. Only prudence stopped him from emphasising his position by proclaiming a sed festival – at his age, he could not wait the usual thirty years. But if he lived, he would hold one after three more Floods had passed. He needed to keep reminding the people who was pharaoh. His thoughts turned to Horemheb’s wife, Nezemmut – his own daughter. Horemheb had married her because she was also the sister-in-law of the late pharaoh, Akhenaten. The marriage had strengthened the general’s links with the Golden Chair and also made his intentions plain. Now, at last, after many failures, and after a birth that had not been blessed by Tawaret, they had had a son, and Horemheb had given him a royal name: Tuthmosis. That this grandson might one day be pharaoh gave no joy to Ay. He wanted an heir of his own loins. Ty was too old to bear him one now. He had taken younger wives who could, but his seed had not taken in their soil. Yet.

  Nezemmut lived in Horemheb’s house in the Palace Compound with her son. Ay rarely saw her. He knew she was unhappy and hoped one day to capitalise on this. But the general kept her under close watch.

  He returned to his immediate problem: Huy. Why had Huy chosen Meroe? Of course Ay had spies there, and his granddaughter could scarcely sneeze without his having knowledge of it; but Meroe was far away – how could he know that his spies had not been suborned? Replacing them was not an easy option. They were in positions of trust in the south, and could not be replaced without the loss of those positions.

  Ay’s doubts were like the stings of scorpions. He thought of his granddaughter’s new family, and part of his heart regretted that he had not had her killed when he’d had the chance to do it easily. He had been aware of his great grandson’s existence for six months, but Tascherit’s son, little Imuthes, barely a ye
ar old, the same age as Tuthmosis, was of little interest to him. Ankhsi was welcome to vegetate down there with her husband and son forever, as far as Ay was concerned, and up until now he had been prepared to believe that she would. Still, the family in Meroe was a loose end.

  Ay did not like loose ends.

  And now Huy was going down there.

  It was nine days since the scribe had confirmed he was leaving. For a moment, Ay had verged on withdrawing his permission. Weighing as always every possibility, he considered once more whether it was better to have Huy under his eye, or to have him far from a place where his disappearance – should it become desirable – could be attributed to the pharaoh. In the end he had given it, but he continued to gnaw on his concession like a hyena on a bone.

  Now he had formed a plan which he believed would enable him to keep control of all the pieces on the senet board.

  As so often with good plans, it was simple, and once it had been settled in his heart, his heart also told him who should carry it out.

  The man would arrive in the Southern Capital soon. Then Ay would give him his instructions. The pharaoh watched as the blanched yellow that heralded Ra’s arrival began to spill into the dove grey vault of heaven over the eastern hills.

  His fingers wandered back to the beads of his collar, and he resumed his restless pacing.

  As he did so, Huy was making his way through the familiar twisting mud streets and little sun soaked market squares down to the harbour. There were three broad-beamed To-mehu cargo barges anchored at the quays; a cedar-hulled Kheftyu ship was pushing out into the current, its sails furled, for the long haul downstream north to the Great Green. Huy could make out its name, Star-in-Memphis, rather grandiose for this shabby workhorse, as it struggled to gain way among the little high-prowed papyrus local traders, ferries and water-taxis which were already jostling around on the soupy water in their dozens. He could hear the usual dawn chorus of shouts and curses clearly as he approached the dock. On the other side, shimmering in the first heat of the morning, he could see the narrow shore and beyond it the steep cliffs of The Great Place and The Place of Beauty, where the beloved dead lived on in the darkness of their tombs, though to them there was no darkness: they had come forth into the new, eternal day.