A Vile Justice
Page 8
"You're wise and noble beyond your years, sir. I trust you always to make a right and proper judgment, to aid all who need help, to . . ."
Amonhotep stepped forward. "That's enough, Ipy. Either make your petition or leave us."
"But, sir, I was just trying to. . ."
"Guard!" Djehuty stood up and pointed. "Take this man away," he commanded. "I've no time to listen to foolishness." He gave Ipy a venomous look. "A few days' imprisonment should teach him the value of short and concise speech."
A guard hurried up, grabbed Ipy by the arm, and jerked him to his feet. The craftsman's sly smile faded. His eyes darted from Djehuty to Amonhotep to the guard, registering confusion and fear.
"Sir," Amonhotep said, "Ipy's been here before, more than once. You know he meant no harm. If you let me speak with him, I'm certain he'll tell me the reason he's come again, and he'll do so with no further nonsense. Why lock him up if there's no need?"
Djehuty, his mouth tight and determined, waved his hand, signaling the guard to take the craftsman away. The guard stood where he was, looking from the governor to his aide as if unsure what he should do. Bak guessed from his failure to respond immediately that Djehuty's quick anger and Amonhotep's attempt to moderate were not new to those who stood in the audience hall day after day, watching the proceedings.
Djehuty glared at the officer, the guard, and finally the craftsman. Not until Ipy began to whimper did he drop back into his chair. "Alright, Lieutenant, if you want to waste your time with this spawn of a dog, you may do so."
The guard released Ipy's arm and pivoted. As he did so, he winked at his colleague standing before the double doors, verifying Bak's guess that Amonhotep often tempered the governor's hasty decisions.
"They try my patience, Lieutenant." Djehuty closed his eyes and rubbed the lids, a man utterly exhausted by the pressure of duty. "If I could sit on this dais and judge matters of importance brought before me each day by men of substance, I'd feel my task of some use. But all too often, a week will go by-a month even-and no one comes before me with any petition more weighty than that of that dolt Ipy."
"Yes, sir." Does the man believe justice thrives solely for those of lofty birth and position? Bak wondered.
"My father sat in this chair, as did his father before him and his before him. I often wonder if they had some special way of maintaining patience."
Bak shifted his weight from one foot to the other, unable to think of an appropriate response. In fact, he was not sure the governor expected one.
As if roused by the silence, Djehuty's eyes popped open and he looked at the younger man as a schoolmaster would a pupil he suspected of whispering behind his back. "Are you aware that my family goes back all theway to Sarenput, who was governor of the south and hereditary prince during the reign of Kheperkare Senwosret many generations ago?" He stared at Bak as if daring him to doubt. "Yes, young man, I have royal blood coursing through my body. The blood of those brave and noble men whose houses of eternity look down upon Abu from the hillside on the west bank of the river."
"I've seen them from afar,' sir." Bak longed to get on with his pursuit of the slayer, but too abrupt a dismissal of Djehuty's heritage might seal the man's lips forever. He regretted Amonhotep's hasty departure with Ipy. The aide appeared quite adept at manipulating his master.
"Sarenput had his eternal resting place excavated among other, far older sepulchers, those of men who governed this province when the land of Kemet was young and Abu stood on its southern frontier." Djehuty clutched his long baton of office, leaning against the chair beside his leg, and his expression grew wishful. "Maybe they, too, were my ancestors. Would he have chosen to dwell forever among strangers?"
..Sir ... "
Djehuty sat back in his chair and smiled, cheered by the possibility, unlikely as it was, of so long a regal lineage. "Fortunately, my distinguished heritage has given me a strength of character few men can claim and the fortitude to do what I must, no matter how distasteful. Take that man Ipy, for example ..."
"That's why I've come to you now, sir," Bak said, leaping through the door the governor had unwittingly opened. Djehuty's eyes narrowed. "Oh?"
"If I'm to find the man who's slain five people, you must help me." Remembering Antef's admission that he had pushed Djehuty too hard, thereby sentencing his troops to unending duty at the quarries, he spoke with the honeyed tongue of a nobleman who has spent all his days in the royal house. "I realize you've a multitude of tasks, all far more weighty than you're willing to acknowledge, but if you could spare me some time and the benefit of your experience and knowledge, your insight, you might set me on a path I've up to now failed to find."
Djehuty stared at the man standing before him. Bak feared he had gone too far.
"When first I saw you at the back of the hall, Lieutenant, I looked also for a man in shackles, thinking an officer so fast to find a pattern in these crimes would be equally quick to lay hands on the slayer." Adopting a fatherly manner, Djehuty chuckled. "Now, with no prisoner in tow, your initial confidence seems to be wanting."
Biting back a sharp reply, nearly choking on it, Bak did his best to sound like a dutiful officer, not a humble servant. "I freely admit I know scarcely more now than I did at this time yesterday, when the servant Nefer came with word of mistress Hatnofer's death. Sir."
Djehuty's mouth tightened at Bak's near lapse in courtesy. "I told you all I knew when first we spoke. I've nothing more to add." He stood up, gripped his baton, and stepped down off the dais, forcing Bak backward. "Now, as you yourself have pointed out, I'm a busy man. My daughter Khawet must already have servants waiting to bathe me." He strode across the pillared hall with the same air of purpose he might have used to approach a formal dedication.
Bak kept up with him step for step. "Will you tell me, sir, anything you've done that could've set off this string of deaths? An incident that may not have seemed significant to you but was important to someone else? Possibly resulting in a threat?"
Djehuty's step faltered, but only for an instant. "I've done nothing wrong. Nothing."
"Men have hinted that you've a secret, one all who know you are either afraid or ashamed to repeat."
"All lesser men wish to tear down the stronger, Lieutenant, hinting at weaknesses that burden them alone. Surely a man as experienced as you can sort the grain from the chaff."
Bak stopped, demanded, "Do you want to die, sir?" Djehuty, his face flaming, pivoted and raised his baton, ready to strike. Realization came to him, the knowledge that Bak was another man's man, and he whipped the baton down, making it whistle through the air. "You want to know what secret I harbor in my heart, Lieutenant?" His lips twisted in a sneer. "I don't like you. Nor do I like the insinuations you're making. If I hadn't sent a message to the vizier, telling him of your arrival, I'd send you back to Buhen before nightfall."
Bak's eyes met Djehuty's. The governor tried to hold the stare, but could not. He looked away, seeking escape, and strode rapidly to the door.
No, Bak thought, you're not worried about the message you sent to the capital. You're afraid to die. And you know of no one but me who has the slightest chance of laying hands on the slayer before he comes for you. The slightest chance? Perhaps no chance at all unless 1 can soon break down this wall of silence.
Bak followed Djehuty out the door, but turned left at the first short passage. At the end, he came upon a large room, its ceiling supported by two tall brightly painted lotus-shaped columns, with high windows admitting light. Ten scribes sat cross-legged on the floor, each surrounded by the tools of his trade. The reed pens darting across the regular columns on their scrolls sounded like birds scratching in a pile of spilled grain.
Simut, seated,on a thick linen pad in front of the lesser scribes, frowned at Bak. "May I help you, Lieutenant?" The soft scraping sound dwindled and ten pairs of eyes turned Bak's way. "I'm searching for Lieutenant Amonhotep. I've been told he came here after he finished with the craftsman Ipy."
scribe's face. "He's come and gone. There was a problem at the harbor above Swenet, where ships unload their cargo for overland transport around the rapids. A fight between caravan masters, I understand."
Bak longed to ask again what secret Djehuty held in his heart, but knew he would get nothing with so many men listening. "Have you told him of my questions?"
"What the two of you discuss is between him and his master and the gods. It's none of my affair."
The answer was oblique, but Bak gathered Simut had said nothing. In the unlikely event that no one else had warned the young officer, he would be unprepared for the difficult questions Bak meant to ask and the even harder choices he would have to make. However, unprepared did not mean compliant. Bak had learned during the voyage from Buhen to Abu that if Amonhotep deemed he should say nothing, he would remain mute.
"Your Medjay Psuro is at the landingplace, sir." The servant, a boy of about eight years, tried hard to look solemn and trustworthy, but his eyes danced with excitement at being entrusted with a message of such great import. "He has news he says you'll want to hear."
Bak thanked the boy with a smile and hurried outside. He found the Medjay a hundred or more paces downstream of the landingplace, talking to a gap-toothed old woman with spotted hands and the protruding stomach of one who has borne many children. While they spoke, she lifted sheets and clothing from the bushes and boulders across which she had draped them to dry, folded them, and laid them in a basket. Psuro might not have had the gift Kasay`a had of attracting women who yearned to mother him, but he had a way with those who eked out a living selling foodstuffs and providing minor but necessary services.
Bak stood off to the side, saying nothing, until she had gone on her way. "She'll wash our linen?"
"She has a taste for pigeon," Psuro grinned. "Though she has far too many customers, so she says, she'll squeeze
our meager laundry in among the rest, and she'll mend torn articles as well. Each time, I'll give her a bird."
Bak thought the price too steep, but held his tongue. Every time he had tracked a slayer, he had come away bruised and battered, his kilts torn and filthy. If the slayer in the governor's villa proved equally difficult to lay hands on, he feared the old woman would earn a flock of pigeons.
They headed back upstream, walking close to the river's edge, stepping over rocks and around brush, slipping in patches of mud. The western sky was pale, a sheet of gold diluted with silver. To the east, tiny pinpoints barely visible so early in the evening promised a night brilliant with stars. "You've news," Bak prompted.
Psuro, looking pleased with himself, nodded. "The trader Pahared sends his regards. He remembers well the afternoon he spent with you and Troop Captain Nebwa in Nofery's house of pleasure." A studied seriousness could not quite ,hide a smile. "A time of revelry and excessive drunkenness, he says."
Smiling at the memory, pleased with Psuro's success, Bak stepped over a turtle making its slow way toward the water. "I thank the lord Amon you had better luck in Swenet than in Abu."
"You must first thank my tenacity," Psuro laughed. "If I'd not searched with due diligence, I'd never have found him."
"He doesn't dwell in Swenet?"
"His wife has a house of pleasure near the market, and they live in a villa close by. I found him in neither place but at the harbor." Psuro pulled back the branch of a bush and held it while Bak edged by. "Pahared, I suspect, is on his way to becoming a man of wealth. He's the master of a trading ship, as he was when you met him in Buhen, and he shows no outward sign of success. But he buys hay downriver, ships it south to Swenet, and sells it to caravan masters to feed their donkeys. He admits he has no competition."
"I took him to be a resourceful man." Bak climbed onto the stone landingplace, thought what best to do, crossed to the skiff. "I must speak with him, Psuro. Maybe one who dwells in Swenet, a place where men come and go, transients who owe no special loyalty to Djehuty, can unlatch a door I've failed to open."
Pahared was just as Bak remembered him: a large, heavily muscled man with an incipient paunch and a hint of gray at the temples. His knee-length kilt rode low on his belly and wide beaded bracelets accentuated the thickness of his wrists and arms. He was good-natured under normal circumstances, Bak recalled, but formidable when pushed too hard. They had greeted each other like old friends, not men who had spent a single afternoon drinking and playing games of chance.
"There's not a man or woman in this province who hasn't heard of the murders." Pahared, seated on a low stool, watched his wife break the dried mud plugs stoppering two beer jars. She was almost as tall as he, but reed-thin, and she had the dark skin and woolly hair of the peoples living far to the south of Kush. "With so many dying so fast and all in the governor's household, most whisper that a demon of the night has come to lay waste to this province. They're scared, if the truth be told. Afraid the crops will fail, their animals sicken and die, their families starve."
Bak accepted a jar with a quick smile of thanks, toed a stool away from the wall, and sat beside the trader. "If Djehuty is the ultimate goal, as I think he is, the demon resides in a man, and he's out to avenge some unspeakable deed."
"I wouldn't know about that." Pahared eyed five sailors filing in through the door, their unsteady. gait and slurred speech pointing to earlier visits to other houses of pleasure. "I'm not sure anybody knows. That's what scares them so. They don't know where to turn, which demon or genie or god to placate."
Having no patience with superstition, Bak scowled at the room in which they sat: a large, open space with a high ceiling supported by one square mudbrick column. Long shafts of the waning light of evening filtered down from high windows. A large, gangly gray monkey searched through the straw covering the floor, hunting insects. Three-legged stools and a few low tables stood around the room, while the walls were lined with beer vats, wine jars, and baskets filled with drinking bowls. The room smelled of beer and vomit; the sailors reeked of sweat and fish and garlic.
This place of business reminded him of Nofery, though it resembled neither the old hovel where she had once toiled nor her new, much grander house of pleasure. It must be the smell, l e thought, the ever-present stench of the brew and overindulgence. "You've heard no tales that discredit Djehuty?" he asked.
"I've known of more popular governors, no doubt about it, but nothing that would bring the wrath of the gods upon his head."
Bak gave the trader a wry smile. "You disappoint me, my friend. When I saw this place of business, located on the main thoroughfare running through Swenet, close to the market and within easy walking distance of the encampment where the merchants unload their caravans, I thought to myself. how ideally situated to attract patrons from all walks of life-men who ofttimes drink to excess and speak with loose and frank tongues. When I saw your wife..." He nodded toward the woman, who stood with her shoulder against the doorjamb, keeping a close eye on customers and servants alike. ". . . she reinforced my confidence in you. I never thought superstition would reign."
Pahared chuckled. "I hear many tales, I'm bound to admit, some less fanciful than others. Among them, complaints about Djehuty. But none unique to him, I suspect."
"Tell me. I've nowhere else to turn."
Pahared laugaed again, not taking him seriously. "They say he's indolent, a man who lives a life of luxury and ease. One who, in his youth, loved to hunt and fish and fowl, but now prefers to loll away the hours in his villa, eating sweets and drinking wine. A man responsible for meting out the law, yet one who has scant knowledge of the laws of the land. A man who, thanks to the gods, is surrounded by men of talent and knowledge who tend to the needs of this province in his stead."
Bak suspected the assessment was fair. The brief time he had spent in the audience hall had divulged no brighter side to the man. "What of the men close to him? Have any of them committed an offense that might be laid at Djehuty's feet?"
Bak expelled a quick, frustrated sigh. "When I press Djehuty for help, he acts like a man with guilt in his heart but denies all wrongdoing. Three men on his staff have hinted he has a guilty secret, and none will enlighten me."
Pahared frowned. "Well, whatever he's done, it wasn't here." He watched two men of middle years, merchants from the look of them, wander in from the street and pass through the room to the courtyard beyond. His wife hastened out to serve them. "He was in the army, you know. In fact, as a young officer, he spent a couple years on the eastern frontier. I wonder how he conducted himself there?"
Bak knew garrison duty could sometimes bring out the worst in a man, but the assignment seemed too long ago, the eastern frontier too distant. Especially when trying to account for the death of five other people, two of whom-mistress Hatnofer and the child Nakht-he knew for a fact had never set foot out of Abu.
A new thought struck and his eyes narrowed. Djehuty had succeeded his father as provincial governor. During the older man's tenure, a seasoned officer had probably led the garrison, keeping the troops alert and trained, but the governor had in effect been in command-as Djehuty now commanded Antef. "After he served out his time on the frontier, did he remain in the army?"
"He did." Pahared glanced at his wife, who returned to her spot in the doorway. If he noticed the tension in Bak's voice, he gave no sign. "First he served as an aide to a royal
envoy, traveling north to the land of Amurru. Then, when the commander of the garrison of Abu was recalled to Kemet, his father appealed to our sovereign, Maatkare Hatshepsut, asking that Djehuty be given the post. That was ten or so years ago, when she was new to the throne and anxious to win the loyalty of powerful provincial governors. So she agreed."