Death of an Eye

by Dana Stabenow

  “What the—”

  Tetisheri cut off Apollodorus’ angry comment with a look. “When did this happen?”

  Aristander looked down at the body. “The body has yet to begin to stiffen. Anywhere from one to two hours ago, would be my guess.”

  “I have been at Uncle Neb’s reception, in full view of at least a hundred people, since the Twelfth Hour. Further, I have no reason to kill Hunefer.”

  “You hated him.”

  “He hated me and in his opinion with more cause. Sheftu nearly beggared him in the divorce settlement.”

  Aristander sighed. “I know.”

  She touched his arm. “It’s all right, Aristander. I understand. You had to ask.”

  Some of the tension eased and he gave a small, apologetic smile. “Like I said. You think like a shurta.”

  Apollodorus growled something beneath his breath. Tetisheri touched the back of his hand briefly and felt him relax. “May I take a closer look?” he said.

  “Of course.”

  Apollodorus went forward and stooped over the body, his hands searching over Hunefer’s scalp. After a few moments he stood up and took the cloth from Aristander’s man with a nod of thanks. “The wound is long, thin, and feels to me like it’s in a half-circle shape.”

  “And?”

  “Much like a sally stick,” Apollodorus said. “Have you seen any similar wounds lately?” Their eyes met and there was a pregnant pause.

  “Aristander,” Tetisheri said, in a flat, hard tone that made them both look at her. “Take his body to the morgue. Shave his head so you can get a good look at the wound and make a drawing.” She hesitated, and added, “You should also shave the heads of any other victims with head wounds who came to your notice recently.” They couldn’t be more specific with all of Aristander’s men standing around.

  “And I should do this why?”

  “Come here.”

  Aristander sighed and came to stand next to her. She turned so her back was to the rest of them and reached into her pocket. The Eye of Isis gleamed up at them.

  She heard his quick, indrawn breath. He stared from it to her, and even in the dim light she could see the friend warring with the loyal shurta. The friend won. “Are you sure about this?”

  She put the Eye away. “It’s only temporary.”

  He raised a skeptical eyebrow, but all impatience vanished from his face and he even bowed his head. “It will be done.”

  “Send one of your men to my house and bid Keren come to the morgue and do as I asked her.”

  “Now?”

  “Now. Tell your man to tell the morgue attendant she has your full authority.”

  Aristander gave the order and his man set off at a run. “And now?”

  “Is that Ipwet inside?”

  While they’d been standing outside the door the shrieking from inside the house had risen and fallen and risen and had now fallen again, replaced by a dull, continuous sobbing. Aristander winced. “That’s her.”

  “Have you talked to her?”

  “She found him. She’s in no condition to be interviewed.”

  “Really.” It was her turn to be skeptical.

  In a lower voice he said, “I know you hate her, and with cause, but she did just lose her son.”

  “Her son was just murdered. I would think that she’d be interested in finding out who did it.”

  He cast up his eyes. “Fine, but I’ll talk to her, not you.”

  “Fine,” she said. “While you do, Apollodorus and I will search the house.”

  Aristander looked first startled and then resigned. “As the Eye commands.”

  “This wasn’t a random killing, Aristander. This was a man killed on his own doorstep, and he’s still wearing all his jewelry and those ridiculous sandals. And there, look at his belt, he still has his purse. He wasn’t robbed. Why, then, was he killed?”

  “Just don’t let her see you, please?”

  They slipped inside through the atrium, bypassing the room where the sobbing was again gaining in volume. Tetisheri led the search in quick, efficient fashion, having far too much familiarity with the floor plan of Hunefer’s house.

  Like most homes and buildings in Alexandria the house had a single floor and, because the family of Hunefer was old and wealthy when it was built, the rooms were large and well appointed, with tiled floors and walls either paneled in polished wood or painted with murals depicting romantic scenes of rural life featuring farmers and craftsmen. Not that any Hunefer in three generations had ever been closer to a farm than a boat on the Nile. Every wall had its niche and every niche a bust or a statue of a god or an ancestor (that ancestor almost invariably Alexander), the standing lamps were every one of them wrought of the finest bronze, and half a dozen rooms had their own shallow pools, all of which were murky and greening over. There were multiple shrines with candles burning before small figurines carved from ivory and exotic woods. Mostly Greek, of course.

  The house had been built more as a showcase than as a place to live in peace and comfort. See how rich and powerful we are, we Hunefers whose line goes back to Alexander. However, compared to Tetisheri’s memories of two years before, it now had acquired a slight aura of decay. The coverings on the furniture were threadbare, the paintings on the walls faded, and there were—horrors—cracked tesserae in every room that had not been replaced. A faint layer of dust showed here and there.

  “The august House of Hunefer feels down on its luck,” Apollodorus said, putting her thoughts into words.

  One door was locked and guarded by one of Aristander’s men. “The house slaves,” he said when they asked.

  There was nothing suspect in Ipwet’s room other than her ostentatious taste in clothes and furnishings. They came finally to Hunefer’s room and Tetisheri had to steel herself before she pushed open the door. Inside, the furnishings were almost exactly the same as when she had left—fled—that dark winter evening, and for a moment she quailed.

  “Tetisheri?” His voice was warm, intimate, even, as was his hand, steadying her at the small of her back.

  “That night…” She swallowed. “The night I… left this place.”

  “Yes?”

  “He was gambling with Nenwef and others of his friends, and losing. So he placed me as a wager. I was eight months gone with child and I couldn’t stand for long, but he paraded me in front of his friends. ‘She might be a mongrel but at least she’s fertile,’ he said. And he laughed. And then they all laughed, too.”

  She had never told the story before, not to anyone, not to Neb, not to Keren who had attended her labor, never to her mother who had sold Tetisheri into marital slavery in exchange for a connection to one of the oldest and most noble families in Alexandria.

  “How did you get away?”

  “I said I had to use the chamber pot.” Her voice shook. “No matter what my mother said, no matter how angry she was, no matter what she threatened, I would not stay another night in this house.” A laugh escaped her that was more a sob. “Although Hunefer’s luck was running very badly. Chances were I would have been sleeping somewhere else.”

  Without any warning, Apollodorus swept her up into a crushing embrace and kissed her, hard, demanding, very nearly ferocious. He forced her mouth open and then licked at her tongue, and his hands were everywhere, cupping her breasts, sliding between her legs to toy with a place she had thought died the day she was married, grasping her hips and pulling her hard against him. He demanded all her focus, all her attention, and he would not be denied.

  She shocked herself by rising up on her toes and rocking against him, her legs parting so she felt the full length of him against her, chasing that elusive feeling she had felt only once before when last he kissed her. She heard herself moan, a long, low sound she had never before heard come out of her mouth. He growled and bit the soft spot beneath her ear, sucked at the madly beating pulse at the base of her neck, slid his mouth down to close over the tip of her breast.

&nb
sp; She cried out but she did not recoil. In this room where she had suffered so much pain and so many indignities, in this house beneath whose roof she had known only shame and fear, the white heat of his attention and her involuntary response to it seared everything else out of her mind for at least those few precious moments.

  He let her go at last and she stood there, staring up at him. They were both breathing hard. She raised her hand and placed it over his heart, and thrilled to the feel of the drumbeat beneath her palm. The same palm he had bitten the night before. It was still a little sensitive. “I thought all that was dead in me,” she whispered.

  He dropped a light kiss on her mouth. “I was afraid it might be.” He smiled. “I’m glad we were both wrong.”

  She took a deep, shaken breath. “In the meantime, this does not put forward the queen’s business.”

  “Come a time, the queen’s business can go hang,” he said, his voice still rough with desire.

  His retort surprised a laugh out of her, and the laughter stiffened her knees. She turned to look at the room. Now it was just a room, a sleeping room like a thousand others in Alexandria, a room with a wide wooden bed with a light coverlet in dark red, a table bearing a wide onyx bowl and a matching pitcher. A wooden press inlaid with coral and nacre yielded nothing more sinister than Hunefer’s clothes, erring always just this side of vulgarity, instead of the elegance to which he and his mother—and her mother—had ever aspired and always failed to achieve.

  She even looked under the bed. Nothing.

  “There is bound to be an office, with papers.”

  There was, and a desk piled high with unpaid bills. There were several notices of late payments and one threat to sue if Hunefer did not pay promptly and in full.

  “Anything else?”

  “The kitchen.”

  “Do we really think Hunefer even knew where the kitchen was?”

  “Let’s go look, just in case.” She led the way to the back of the house and outside, where the kitchen was housed beneath a roof depending from the edge of the house and two posts. She paused for a long moment.

  “What?” he said.

  “This was the way I left, that night.”

  His hand was again warm and reassuring at the small of her back.

  The stoves were on the open side, and there was a door into the wall of the house. “Where does that go?”

  “The pantry,” she said, and opened it. It was dark inside and she groped for the candle she knew was on the shelf to the right of the door. Dinner coals were banked in the stove. She lit a twist of grass from them and touched it to the candle. She went back to the pantry and stepped inside, holding the candle high.

  Silence.

  “Tetisheri?” Apollodorus came to the door and peered over her shoulder where she had stopped dead. “What—”

  The room was small, with shelves piled with herbs and foodstuffs and heavy canvas bags filled with more piled haphazardly on the floor below. Some unlucky slave had dropped a sack of grain and footprints had been left in the residue.

  Nothing out of the ordinary so far, nothing to keep Tetisheri mute and frozen. But on the left wall, in a stack that nearly reached the low ceiling, were twenty small wooden chests, sturdily made, each fastened with a hasp and a lock and tightly corded. All but one.

  Tetisheri heard Apollodorus swear beneath his breath. She put the candle down on a high shelf, noticing distantly that her hand was surprisingly steady, and went to the chest without the lock. The lid fit tightly around a raised lip and had to be coaxed into opening. When it did, it revealed a thick cloth bag tied tightly at the mouth. “Hold the lid for me, please?”

  Apollodorus stepped forward and put his hand on the lid.

  She fumbled at the knot and at last pulled it free, and spread the mouth of the bag open. They both stared inside. Finally Tetisheri put in her hand and pulled out a single coin. It felt heavy, and the raised images on the face and back of the coin sharp against her fingertips. She held it closer to the light of the candle. The raised image of Isis and Horus was very clearly stamped into the metal.

  It was the same coin Cleopatra had tossed her two days before.

  “Get Aristander,” she said.

  “No,” he said. “You go get Aristander and I’ll stand guard.” He pushed her out of the pantry, shut the door and set his back to it. The gladius at his belt was in his hand.

  Aristander came, saw, and summoned more of his men. He ordered all the lamps in the house to be brought out and lit. He opened the unlocked box and called Tetisheri and Apollodorus to witness that, yes, they were looking at what they thought they were looking at. He sent a man to the palace to alert the queen’s guard to send a detachment to protect the transfer of an important shipment to the royal treasury as soon as humanly possible.

  Tetisheri stood out of the way, watching the chests empty out of the pantry. The remains of the spilled wheat had been obliterated by the tramp of many feet but the grain on the floor beneath the chests was still relatively whole, each of the chests on the bottom row having left behind its own clear, square imprint in the faint dusting. “I need to talk to the cook.”

  Aristander, organizing the shifting of the chests from the pantry to the street and considerably hampering his own efforts in his determination to have each chest or chests in full view of a minimum of three or more of his men at all times, cast her a harried look. “Fine, yes, go ahead.”

  She turned on her heel and found the room where the slaves had been sequestered. “Open the door,” she told the guard.

  He looked over her shoulder. “But Aristander said—”

  “He won’t be best pleased with you for interrupting him at present. But I’m willing to do it if you are.”

  He unlocked the door and stood back far enough that no one could blame him if this all went horribly wrong. Tetisheri wrenched open the door and immediately someone inside started wailing.

  “Stop that noise this instant,” Tetisheri said, in no mood. “Nebet? Nebet, are you in here?” No one had thought to give them a lamp so she couldn’t make out individuals in the room’s dark interior. Her nose told her that some of them were so terrified they had lost control of their bowels. She pulled back and told the guard in a tone of voice that brooked no denial, “Fetch a lamp and a chamber pot.” He hesitated. “Do it. Now.”

  He scuttled off and she turned back to the room. “Nebet? Please come out here in the hallway where I can see you.”

  An older, querulous voice answered her out of the huddle of bodies. “Tetisheri? Is that you? What are you doing back here, child? You know better.”

  “I really do. Could you come out here, please?”

  After a moment Nebet emerged out of the gloom, blinking in the torchlight. “Tetisheri. It really is you. Have you heard? The master is dead.”

  “Yes, I know.”

  “They’re going to blame us, Tetisheri. The slaves are always blamed.”

  “I don’t think so, Nebet, not this time. I need to ask you a question. When did you last buy grain for the kitchen?”

  Nebet was short and wiry, with skin as black as Nike’s and muscles like Edeva’s on a smaller scale. In two years in this house Tetisheri had had one friend in the one place that afforded her some temporary respite from the hell that was her everyday life. Nebet had not been obliged to offer that respite and indeed had put herself to some not inconsiderable risk by doing so. Rebel called to rebel. There was more gray in Nebet’s hair and more lines in her face now but the old defiant fire still burned in her dark eyes. Some people just wouldn’t be owned.

  She hadn’t answered and Tetisheri said again, “When did you last buy wheat, Nebet? Believe me, it’s important.”

  Nebet smiled slowly. “If it’s that important...”

  In spite of the urgency of the situation Tetisheri had to laugh. “What do you want, my friend? If it’s in my power I will give it to you.”

  “What have I ever wanted?”

  Tetisher
i considered the cook for a long moment. “Wait here.” She went to find Aristander. “I want to remove the cook from this house.”

  “What the—” He threw up his hands when he saw her hand go to her pocket. “Fine. Of course. Certainly. Anything else I can do? And by all the gods, will you please tell me why?”

  “Because I believe she has—unknowingly—information we need.” She hesitated. “And, yes, because she’s a friend, and I want to help her buy her freedom as soon as possible. Ipwet cannot know, Aristander, because she would forbid water to be boiled ever again if I said I wanted tea.”

  “Ipwet is not going to be in a position to refuse anything in future,” he said grimly, but he accompanied her to the room and Nebet was formally released into Tetisheri’s custody.

  Tetisheri drew her to one side. “Now tell me. When did you last buy wheat?”

  “Yesterday,” Nebet said. “And then Gorgo dropped it when she was putting it away in the pantry, the silly little fool, and of course the mistress—” she spat the word “—heard of it immediately and had her beaten, and then Gorgo was too ill to clean up the mess so I had to do it.”

  And had resented doing something so beneath her station and so had done it badly. “Yesterday,” Tetisheri said. “You’re sure?”

  Nebet looked at her.

  “Yes, of course. All right. Thank you, Nebet.”

  Nebet folded her arms. “Now what?” She was doing her best to sound truculent but there was no mistaking the fear for the future any masterless slave faced in that time and place. Especially one who had died by violence.

  Tetisheri’s heart turned over. “You’ll come home with me.”

  “For how long?”

  “For the rest of your life if you wish, or until you decide what you want to do next.”

  The calm certainty in her voice pierced Nebet’s ironclad composure for the first time. The cook’s eyes filled with tears as she allowed herself to believe, perhaps just this once in a life spent in abject service to unkind, unappreciative, and uncaring masters.

  Aristander’s man hustled up with the chamber pot and the lamp, and the room was revealed to contain six slaves, a quarter the amount that the House of Hunefer had owned when Tetisheri had been in residence. One woman older than Nebet took immediate advantage of the chamber pot. The rest huddled together, fearful of being blamed for the master’s death, because slaves were always to blame for something and punished whether they were guilty or not.