Flesh of the God lb-7

by Lauren Haney

  As they drew closer to the house of pleasure, Nofery’s voice took on a note of urgency. “Fight, you curs! You’re men of Kemet! Show the barbarians what you can do!”

  The words fueled Bak’s anger and his mouth hardened into a thin, tight line. With his shield clamped to his forearm, he gripped both ends of his baton, raised it horizontally at breast level, and shoved it forward, pushing the bodies ahead of him. Nofery glanced his way; her sly smile dissolved. She tried to back off, but he grabbed her upper arm. It was so fat and soft, all he caught was a wad of sagging flesh. He squeezed, forcing a groan from her lips. With the other hand, he shoved the end of the baton into the mass of fleshy wrinkles beneath her chin, forcing her head high.

  “You, old woman, will be silent.” He spoke with the soft hiss of a crocodile slipping into the water. “If not…” He nudged the baton deeper into her neck, letting the threat hang unspoken, planting a seed of anxiety he hoped would sprout and grow.

  He pushed her into the building and hurried after his men, who were already two-thirds of the way along the lane. Beyond them, he heard angry shouts and ugly, resentful taunts. He cursed aloud, knowing he must resolve the situation before it developed into a pitched battle. He caught up, slipped past his men. Facing the Medjays at the far end of the lane were six or eight men who had worked themselves into a mindless fury.

  A hulking dark-visaged man-a sailor, Bak thought-was standing in the center of the group, hands on hips. “Sons of whores!” he sneered. “Hairless monkeys!”

  Imsiba and the Medjays with him stood stiff and mute, their muscles as taut as bowstrings, their eyes glittering with anger.

  “We police ourselves!” yelled a tall, gangly man, a clerk, from the look of him. “We don’t need outsiders to do it for us!”

  “My father came here with the army twenty-five years ago,” hissed a stocky, balding man. Bak had seen him on guard duty at the quay. “He was slain fighting your fathers. Am I supposed to submit to you now?”

  Bak shoved his way around the motley group to stand with Imsiba. He whistled a long, piercing note to summon additional men. The sergeant gave him a tight but relieved smile. Some of the tension seeped from the other Medjays’ faces.

  “You!” Bak aimed his baton at the sailor. “And you and you!” He pointed to the guard and the clerk. “And you!” He swept his arm from right to left to indicate all those standing with them. “You will spend the night as my prisoners. Tomorrow the commandant will pass judgment.”

  Defiance darkened the faces of the sailor and two or three others. The less belligerent looked at one another with flagging confidence. The rabble behind them muttered and shrank back as if to distance themselves.

  “We’ve done nothing wrong,” a squat bow-legged man whined. “We were having a good time, that’s all.”

  “Go!” Bak commanded, aiming his baton toward the intersecting lane that ran along the base of the fortress wall.

  The sailor sneered. “Who are you to tell us…?”

  “Look!” the clerk exclaimed. “Patrol dogs!”

  All eyes turned in the direction he pointed. Six Medjays had appeared in the lane behind Imsiba. Standing among them were an equal number of brindle and tan and white dogs with pointed muzzles, upright ears, and lean, powerful bodies. Each was poised for action yet ominously quiet.

  The sailor’s words died away; his companions’ last drop of resistance dissolved. With drooping shoulders and slow, shuffling feet, they allowed themselves to be taken into custody. Well contented with the outcome, Bak ordered his men to escort all the brawlers to the commandant’s residence. There, a scribe would register their names and offenses before they were taken to the barracks to sleep off the beer.

  As soon as the lane was empty of humanity, Bak entered Nofery’s house of pleasure, a mean and cramped space, hazy with smoke from oil lamps, though only three burned. The obese old woman was standing at the back beside a table piled high with pottery drinking bowls. A dozen low three-legged stools were scattered about, some overturned. Large pottery jars were stacked next to dirty, scarred walls. The air reeked of burned oil, sweat, and Nofery’s alcoholic wares. Beyond the curtained door at the back, he had been told, lay the room where her women serviced their customers. They would have slipped away during the melee.

  “Now, old woman,” he said, “we will talk.”

  Rather than cringing and whining as he expected, she gave him a sly, gap-toothed smile and handed him an unplugged jar of beer. “I’ve heard of you, Officer Bak, and I think we can be friends, good friends.”

  He eyed her narrowly, sniffed the contents of the open jar, and wrinkled his nose at its sour odor. “You serve this swill to your friends?”

  Cackling like a trussed guinea fowl, she pawed through a stack of jars against the rear wall. “From what I hear, you aren’t always so particular, but maybe I can find something that’ll please you more.”

  He stiffened at her words but kept his expression coolly indifferent.

  She took the beer jar from him and presented a taller, slimmer vessel, this one topped with the clay seal of one of the finest breweries in Kemet. He broke the seal and removed the plug, sniffed the contents, and nodded his appreciation. Waving away the drinking bowl she offered, he sat on a stool and pulled another close to use as a table.

  “What have you heard, old woman?” he asked. “Tales of vile Medjays? Savages one and all?”

  Her smile was smug. “You were a charioteer, they say, a lieutenant in the regiment of Amon. They say you led the men of your company in a brawl in a house of pleasure. Not a lowly place like mine, but one in the capital itself, where the wealthy and powerful play. The scandal reached the ears of our sovereign, they say, and you were stripped of your rank and sent here with the Medjays so you could no longer embarrass your regiment and your commander.”

  He sipped his beer, allowing no hint of irritation to show on his face. He knew rumors flew through the land of Kemet faster than the swiftest bird, but he had not expected word of his humiliation, his disgrace, to spread through this fortress outpost so quickly.

  “That makes you my friend?” he asked.

  She drew a stool near his makeshift table and sank onto it, her fat haunches drooping around it. She leaned toward him, gave him a coy look. “We were molded from the same clay, Officer Bak. You enjoy the pleasures of the flesh, and I can provide them.”

  Bak pictured the back room, filthy, lice-infested, little better than a pig sty. He laughed. Even in Buhen he should be able to do better for himself than that. “Pleasure is not the reason I came here alone, old woman.”

  Her smugness faded; her voice grew defensive, plaintive. “I’m the poor slave of a business that barely keeps me in food and dress. Other than pleasure, what can I give you?”

  He took another sip, set down the bowl, and tapped her fat knee. “Inciting a riot is an offense against the lady Maat.” Maat was the goddess of order and truth.

  She jerked away from his touch, almost toppling her stool. “You can’t take me before the viceroy! No! You can’t! I’d lose everything! It would kill me!” She dropped her face into her hands, moaned, and rocked back and forth on her stool as if mourning the death of a loved one.

  He continued to sip the beer, allowing her to bleat on and on, giving her ample time to dwell on her fate. At last he said, “Be quiet, old woman. Listen to me.”

  The moaning stopped and she lowered her hands. Her face was wet, but with real tears or sham he could not tell.

  “I don’t like being a policeman,” he said, his voice grim and hard. “I don’t like this barren land of Wawat and I don’t like this dreary fortress of Buhen. The only way I know of escaping, of getting back to my regiment, is to make the city within these walls a place of law and order, a city pleasing to the lady Maat. And you can help me.”

  She sat dead quiet, her expression a mixture of wariness and doubt.

  “First,” he said, “you must control your customers. I want no more compl
aints from your neighbors about brawls in this lane. Second, you must speak at all times with respect when you talk of my men. They’re Medjays, yes-but their loyalties lie with Kemet, and you must tell your customers this truth. Third, old woman, you must tell me all you see and hear within these walls that will help me with my task.”

  “You’d make me your spy?” she asked, stiff with indignation.

  “Would you prefer to face the viceroy?”

  She studied the set of his jaw, gave a harsh but not altogether unfriendly laugh, and heaved her bulk off the stool. “You’re a hard man, Officer Bak. And I like hard men. If I were twenty years younger…”

  “Sir!”

  Bak’s glance swiveled toward the outer door. A slim young man stood in the portal, panting, sweat running down his bare breast. He carried the shield and spear of a fortress guard.

  “You must come at once, sir. It’s Commandant Nakht. He’s been slain! His life taken by a hand not his own!”

  Chapter Two

  Nakht lay on his back in the middle of his private reception room. His eyes were closed, his face contorted in an impossible smile. Fresh blood was everywhere. It was smeared across the white-plastered floor beneath him. It stained his hands and his bare torso and his kilt. A reddish trickle ran from his mouth to the hair at the nape of his neck. A second, wider stream had flowed from the dagger imbedded in his breast and down his ribcage to a streaked puddle on the floor. His death could not have been easy, but with luck and the quick intervention of the gods, his ka, his eternal double, had slipped from his body soon after the attack.

  Bak stood on the threshold, barely aware of the armed guard at his shoulder or the murmurs of disbelief and curiosity issuing from the lips of the dozen or so people clustered in the torchlit courtyard behind him. He stared with dismay at the scene. All he could think of was Nakht’s reference to offenses against the gods and a burden he alone must shoulder. Had he been slain to keep secret the knowledge he had refused to share? If he, Bak, had been less concerned about himself, if he had urged the commandant to speak, would he still live and breathe?

  The watch officer, Lieutenant Mery, the man who stood at the head of the fortress guard, knelt beside the bloodied form. His slim, boyish torso glistened in the light of a flaming torch mounted in a wall bracket next to the door. His face, as perfectly molded as a statue of royalty, was drawn and pale, accenting a small livid scar at the corner of his mouth.

  An overturned chair lay behind Nakht’s body. On a narrow cedar table standing beside it, a pair of pottery oil lamps burned with a dull glow. Several chests, low tables, and stools, all simply but beautifully crafted, were scattered around the room. A lean, hard-faced spearman was posted before a second open door. Through the portal, Bak could see part of the long mudbrick stairway that climbed the inner side of the fortress wall from the ground floor to the battlements, dark and enclosed to roof level, open to the air from the roof to the walkway atop the wall. A stairway for soldiers to use in time of battle, unlike a more formal stone stairwell in another part of the building, which rose to the private apartments on the second floor and opened onto the courtyard.

  A fleeting whimper, like the mewling of a newborn kitten, drew him into the room. Standing next to the wall to his right, beside a cedar chest inlaid with ebony, was a shapely young woman of no more than twenty years. Her face, her hands, her ankle-length white sheath were smeared with blood. Her eyes, pools of amber in a rigid, stark white face, were locked on the dead man. Her red-brown hair was pulled back and braided, the thick plait hanging to her waist.

  Hovering by her side, his cheeks wet with tears, was a stocky man of middle years wearing a belted white knee-length tunic. His brown braid was as thick and long as the woman’s. He was the commandant’s personal servant, Bak knew, a man named Lupaki, whom Nakht had brought with him from the land of Hatti. If the woman’s hair and pale eyes told true, she too must have come from that distant place. Bak wondered who she was. A servant, most likely, or perhaps Nakht’s concubine.

  He recalled the words of Maiherperi, who had advised him at length before sending him to Buhen with the Medjays. When a man is slain in his home, the commander had said, look first to the members of his household; learn which had reason to hate him and which had the most to gain from his death and you’ll very likely learn the name of the guilty man-or woman. If the burden Nakht had mentioned concerned domestic matters, Bak thought, that might well explain his reluctance to speak.

  He crossed to the body, relieved this death would be so easily resolved. Kneeling beside Mery, he placed his fingertips on Nakht’s neck to search for a pulse of life. As he expected, he found nothing but the chill sweat of the dead man’s last fatal struggle.

  “Who did this, Lieutenant? The woman?”

  “No,” Mery said. “No!” His dark eyes were clouded with unhappiness and something else. Uncertainty? “I saw him in her arms, Bak. I saw the pain they shared at the end. She couldn’t have done this.”

  “You were here when he died?”

  “I came as soon as I heard her scream. Too late to see the one who stabbed him, but he still lived-barely.”

  “Tell me what you saw.”

  Mery glanced toward the woman and his mouth tightened. “Her husband is dead. Must she stand there and listen? Must she be forced to relive those moments while I describe them?”

  “She was his wife?” Bak asked, surprised.

  Mery nodded. “Azzia, she is called.”

  “She speaks our tongue?”

  A humorless smile formed on Mery’s lips. “Better than you and me.”

  Bak eyed the lifeless commandant, who had been a healthy, vigorous man of at least fifty years. More than twice the age of the foreign woman. Not unusual for a man to desire a young wife, but a choice which often led to domestic troubles. Yet he saw no reason to keep her here.

  He stood up and walked to her. “You may go to your chamber, mistress. I’ll speak with you later.”

  She moved not a single muscle and her eyes never left the face of the inert form on the floor.

  “You may go,” he repeated, making it an order this time.

  “The shock of my master’s death has stolen her reason,” Lupaki said, his voice husky with emotion.

  He placed a brawny arm around her waist, clasped one of her blood-stained hands, and led her like an un-resisting child through the door and into the courtyard. Exclamations of shock and dismay filtered through the open portal.

  Bak ordered the guard posted there to stay with her. Closing the door, he turned to Mery. “Tell me what happened.”

  Mery stood up, his glance accusing. “Must you treat her as a prisoner in her own home?”

  “For the love of Amon, Lieutenant! She’s covered with his blood. What do you expect me to do?”

  Mery glared at him, but his defiance quickly melted. “You’re right, of course, but I can explain her appearance.”

  Pulling a stool away from the wall, Bak placed it a few paces from the body and motioned Mery onto it. He chose his words carefully lest he offend this officer who was his superior in rank if not in authority under the laws he had been sent to uphold.

  “I see you admire her,” he said, “but you must do nothing to protect her. If I’m to find the one who committed this terrible deed, I must be led along a straight and true path.”

  With an unhappy nod, Mery sank onto the stool and clasped his hands between his bare knees. Bak walked around the body and knelt on its opposite side so he could watch the officer’s face while he talked.

  “I was making my rounds,” Mery said. “After checking the sentries on the battlements, I realized I’d forgotten the list of men assigned to the gates. I came here to get it. I found the audience hall filled with the rabble your Medjays had brought and your scribe Hori placing their names on a scroll. Twenty or more other men, clerks and soldiers, were standing around the chamber, watching the activity. Lupaki and Azzia’s female servants were among them.”

>   Not surprised but irritated nonetheless, Bak said, “In other words, instead of being almost empty as it would normally have been at this time of night, the building was filled with curiosity seekers as well as my own men and their prisoners.”

  Mery hurried on, as if anxious to get his tale over and done with. “As I crossed the audience hall, I heard a scream. I ran up the stairs. From the courtyard, I saw light flowing through the open door of this room. I looked inside.” His voice thickened. “The commandant was on the floor and mistress Azzia beside him, holding him in her arms. His blood was flowing from the wound as water through an open irrigation channel. I knew no man could save him. I motioned Lupaki and all those who’d followed to stay back and I stood there, listening. I heard Nakht say, ‘Don’t cry, my beloved.’ And she said, ‘You can’t go away; you can’t leave me.’ He replied, ‘I love you more than life, my beautiful bird.’”

  Mery stared at his hands. “She said, ‘How will I live without you? You’re my heart.’ Nakht raised his hand from his breast, his bloody hand, and laid it on her face. ‘I was a man when you were a babe,’ he said. ‘You’ve always known I’d die before you.’ She covered her mouth to soften a moan and said, ‘But not like this.’ Nakht drew her face to his and their mouths met in a kiss. When she raised her head, she asked, ‘Who did this to you? Why?’ He shuddered as if in terrible agony and his body went limp.” Mery paused, swallowed, and his eyes found Bak’s. “She refused to leave him until I summoned Lupaki.”

  Bak was touched in spite of his better judgment. “Did she know you were standing close by when she asked who slew him?”

  “I think not. She was too intent on him to see me or anyone else.”