City of Dreams (16 page)

He returned to the quayside, content for a time to walk up and down, allowing his thoughts to marshal themselves. His eyes wandered from object to object; the facades of the buildings with their dark, secretive entrances, the boats again, the glitter of the restless water, the fishermen’s lights out in the middle of the stream, the faces of the other people taking their evening stroll. Again he found himself wondering how much contentment there was behind any one among this sea of faces; but the pursuit of such reflection was vain. For most of those around him, life was a simple matter ordered by the pharaoh and the gods, by the annual rise and fall of the River and the three seasons, by the narrow strip of green in the desert along which they existed. Complexity was neither necessary nor desirable; it was of no practical use and it solved nothing in the end.

Someone touched his elbow so timidly that he thought it had been accidental, until the gesture was repeated with more insistence. Now he turned and saw Nebamun walking beside him.

‘Hello,’ said the boy, looking at him with hollow eyes. 

‘Hello,’ replied Huy, not slackening his pace.

They continued in silence for several paces, part of the crowd and lost in it. Few people were talking and the silence of night cast its pall over the city. The occasional cry of laughter, or a voice raised in anger, seemed shocking, like a violation. But the silence was not complete; it never was, here, for there was always the insistent murmur of the river and the laborious, unending sawing of the crickets.

‘Do you have a message for me?’ said Huy finally, recognising that the boy looked to him to break the silence.

‘From whom?’

Huy spread his hands. ‘I don’t know. From your father?’

‘No. What would he have to say to you?’

‘That is true.’ The thought of Reni sending any sort of word to him amused Huy; but the boy continued to look at him seriously.

‘Then what is it?’ Huy asked after a moment longer. Nebamun hesitated before replying. When he spoke he looked ahead, only occasionally glancing at Huy, though whether for approval or in anticipation of an interruption, Huy could not tell. ‘We heard today that Kenamun has sacked you. We heard because Kenamun and my father are friends. Business associates. Colleagues. You know. A finger in every pie.’

‘Yes?’ Huy would not be drawn into criticising either Reni or Kenamun. Life here had taught him that much caution, strongly as it ran against his nature.

‘I believe he was wrong to do so.’

‘Do you?’

‘Yes. Aren’t you angry?’

‘He wasn’t satisfied with the work.’

‘Are you going to leave it — just like that?’

Huy looked at him, but there seemed to be nothing to read in the face, beyond a curious anxiety, and a curious devotion. ‘I have no choice.’

‘But can you bear to?’

There was an insistence in the voice which irritated Huy. What need did he have to justify himself to this pampered youth? But then that thought was replaced by another: was not there agony in Nebamun’s voice as well?

‘It is not a question of what I can bear, but of what I have to put up with.’

Nebamun licked his lips and swallowed. ‘If you cannot find out who killed my sister, no one can.’

‘What about your brother Ankhu? I thought he had plans.’

‘Ankhu is good at starting game. He is not good at stalking it.’

The crowd milled around them. Huy took the boy’s arm and guided him through it, to the edge of the quay, where a short, broad jetty jutted out into the water. Resting a foot on the bollard, he faced Nebamun.

‘Now we can speak in more comfort. What do you want?’

‘I want to help you.’

Huy smiled inwardly. After so long alone, now he was surrounded by people eager either to enlist his help or offer theirs.

‘You cannot.’

‘Why?’ There was a touching air of innocence about the boy.

‘Your father would not approve. Kenamun would not approve. It would be bad for me. In any case, I can have nothing more to do with the investigation.’

Nebamun looked at him defiantly. ‘I cannot believe that you are the kind of man who can just stop working on something, leaving it half-finished like this.’

‘What do you want from me? I earn a living the way I have to, not the way I choose to.’

‘But don’t you care about the people? Don’t you want to put an end to this?’

‘The Medjays will do that.’

‘The Medjays! They are donkeys.’

‘No, they are not.’

‘I do not believe that you will simply drop this case.’ Nebamun spoke more quietly, but his tone was desperate.

‘Because you do not want me to. But you must trust Merymose. He knows what to do.’ 

‘Let me help you.’

‘I am sorry. There is nothing to help me with.’

The boy fixed him with a final look, but said no more, and slipped away into the crowd, only turning back once more. Huy wished that he could unravel the message in his eyes. Might there have been a challenge there?

He waited impatiently for news of Surere’s capture. Kenamun’s deadline came and went, but Taheb, with her ease of access to information, heard nothing to suggest that the Medjay captain had been either dismissed or taken off the case.

Huy assumed that he was still working on it. He spent his nights with Taheb, but these days he had begun to notice the glances the servants gave him, and made excuses when she wanted him to join her dinner guests. The role they were casting him in was clear, and he hated it. Sensing this, Taheb sought to reassure him, but his own pride stood between them, and they both knew that their affair had more to do with simple pleasure than deep feelings. Their lovemaking was still passionate, but the tree had lost its spring leaves, and under the summer foliage there was no sign of fruit. A hint of duty had crept into their relationship.

At last Nubenehem had news for him. Huy handed over the fee she had demanded.

‘I should have asked you for more,’ said Nubenehem. ‘You’re getting some real stuff for your money.’

‘What is it?’

‘You’d better not tell anyone where you got this from, or I’ll have to move my business to Napata,’ said Nubenehem, seriously. ‘And if that happens, I’ll see you fed to Sobek’s children.’

‘I’ve no wish to be crocodile fodder.’

Nubenehem grinned. ‘She was called Isis.’

‘Original.’

‘Not her real name. I don’t know that. But where she worked might interest you.’

‘Yes?’

‘At the Glory of Set.’ 

Nubenehem had named a specialised brothel for a clientele which enjoyed inflicting and receiving pain. There was something else about it. It was a place for the very rich, indirectly managed by the priesthood, within the walls of the palace compound. For some time a rumour had persisted that Horemheb, in his moves to clear up the corruption which had flourished like rampant weed during the years in which the city had fallen into neglect, had more than once attempted to close it; but that the interests which protected it were still too powerful for him to dispense with.

Huy would need Merymose’s help if he were to proceed in that direction. He thanked the fat Nubian for her help — it had indeed been well worth the two pieces of silver she had demanded — and left.

He was at the end of his patience when a message came from Merymose.

‘I’m not sure that I enjoy being your go between,’ said Taheb, as she delivered it.

‘You aren’t,’ said Huy, reading the note. It was hurriedly written on a scrap of papyrus which had been used and scraped clean several times before. Taheb watched him.

‘You can’t wait, can you?’ she said, drily.

‘What?’

‘To be back in action. You have changed, Huy. You are a very different man from the frightened little scribe who arrived here a year ago.’

‘Have I offended you?’

‘Why?’

‘There is something in the way you speak.’

She clasped her hands, and took a few short paces. ‘I feel shut out.’

‘There is no reason for that.’

‘Can’t you leave this alone? Isn’t it becoming dangerous? What if Surere knows you’re after him and decides to do something about it?’

‘What makes you mention him?’

Taheb made a gesture of impatience. ‘But he must be the man you’re after. Perhaps he is working for someone else. You suggested that he must have powerful friends. In any case, the closer you get, the more likely you are to be killed.’

Huy smiled. ‘No one is going to kill me.’

‘That is a stupid remark.’

Huy spread his hands. ‘I cannot stop working on this just because it is dangerous. You know that.’

‘You do it simply because the mystery fascinates you.’

‘That is part of it. But also I want to stop a bad thing.’

‘To protect us from it?’

‘Yes.’

‘All of us, in the Southern Capital?’

‘Yes,’ Huy said, wondering what this was leading to. Taheb’s look was ironical.

‘But you do not care for us. What do you care for this society? It is corrupt; it has betrayed the ideals you worked for, and it has robbed you of any position.’

‘There are still good people in it. As for the rest, if I am to survive myself I must adapt to what time brings.’

‘Why don’t you leave this to the Medjays?’ she asked, suddenly changing tack.

‘It is they who asked my help.’

‘Look,’ she said, finally, exasperated. ‘I see this taking you away from me. I do not want it and I do not understand it. Leave it. I have a boat ready and it will take us to the Delta. Let Merymose deal with this.’

‘I cannot let him down. What do you want me to do, ignore this? If so, why did you let me have it? You could have lied to me.’

‘Your heart is too like a maze. It is as twisted as the entrance to a tomb.’

They looked unhappily away from each other. ‘Do you use this as a means to get away from me?’ she asked finally.

‘No,’ he said; but he was no longer sure, and he knew his voice betrayed his thoughts. Taheb, however, only heard the tone that she wanted to hear.

‘But you will not come with me to the Delta?’

‘No.’

She sighed, her eyes bright, but her dignity intact. ‘Then I will go alone. I want to see my children. Write to me when this thing is over. Then perhaps you will know what you want to do.’

‘Do you know what you want to do?’

She relaxed, smiled. ‘I do not. Come, we are grown and we talk like children bickering over gleanings.’ They embraced, but knew that it would go no further. Not this moment, and perhaps not ever again, despite the time it would still take to confront that knowledge. The heart loves security, at almost any price, and for most men it parts company reluctantly, slowly, and selfishly.

‘If you cannot find another way to be in touch in my absence,’ said Taheb, ‘use my steward. He is my cousin, and can be trusted.’

Their spirits had parted, and though their bodies stayed together for a while longer, it was the first time since they had met that they found it difficult to talk. As he left, though he did not like to admit it to himself, Huy felt his sadness tempered with relief. There was little time left before his meeting with Merymose, so he did not return to his house, but took a circuitous route which would bring him to their rendezvous at the moment the sun touched the top of the western cliffs. For a while as he walked, faster as the sun began to dip more quickly towards Nut’s receiving mouth, he thought he caught a glimpse of someone following him; but it was no more than a glimpse, and the figure — a ghost in a dark robe — slipped out of sight behind a building’s corner before he could even take in its size. After that, his senses remained strained and alert for several hundred paces, but there was no more hint of a shadow, and as he moved away from the busier streets he became increasingly confident that he was alone.

As the sun began to set, so the darkness and the light divided into separate, intense pools. The dusty streets, now that the traders had withdrawn from them, seemed to enjoy a silent life of their own. At the end of a shaft of light streaming down an alley which led to the river, a scorpion dozed on a broken brick, though at Huy’s approach the little brown statue bristled, pincers and sting instantly alert. The sounds he made fell into the embrace of a dead echo, and he felt that he might be the last man on earth. He was walking past the barley granaries now, three rough structures of tamarisk planking. A watchman squatted at the entrance of one, but he was asleep, and might as well have been a statue. Near him two other guardians of the granaries, cats, lay curled at the perfect centre of twin outcrops of shade.

Another twenty paces along and around a corner, a fourth granary stood. Its door, as expected, was ajar, and after checking the street Huy quickly slipped through it into the twilit interior. The barn was not full, but in some of the stalls on either side of a broad central aisle he could see heaped mountains of grain as his eyes became accustomed to the dark. There were the long-handled wooden shovels used for transferring the food into sacks, and at the end of the aisle there rose, like the bulk of a god’s statue in a temple, a wooden hopper, its side bound with bronze. It was a huge thing, hanging in the air from a beam, its duct turned to point down over one of the stalls. As he approached, Huy could see that the duct had been opened, for the flax rope which controlled it was pulled down. Smelling the fresh dust in the air he realised that the load of grain in the hopper had only recently been discharged into the stall.