Day of the False King (26 page)

Fear began blowing coldly into Semerket’s
soul. He knew that he could not let Rami die in such torment, and tried
to keep the fright from his voice when he answered. “What is it, then,
Rami? What do you need to tell me?”

Rami’s eyes grew wide. “Semerket, it was
because of me that Naia died! It was my fault!”

Semerket stared. So there it was, he
thought; the confirmation that Naia was well and truly dead. Strange to
feel nothing. In fact, he felt only a relief to hear the words at last
spoken aloud. No more hope. Everything gone; finished at last. Oddly,
it was an unexpectedly pleasant feeling, an almost buoyant sensation of
complete and utter emptiness.

“I’m sure it wasn’t,” Semerket said
tonelessly.

The boy began to ramble. “No! I should have
saved her! I
could
have, if I’d only known what they were
saying. But it’s such a difficult language — even Naia had trouble with
it. When we were at the ambassador’s, it didn’t matter. Everybody spoke
Egyptian there. But Naia said we must learn the language — Babylon was
our home now — but I was too stupid —”

If anything, the drug was making the boy
more fretful. Semerket canted his head to see if Kem-weset was nearby,
but the old physician was pounding at something in the corridor.
Semerket swabbed Rami’s sweaty forehead with a damp cloth. “It doesn’t
matter,” he said.

“We were happy at the embassy.” Rami ignored
him, and his rush of words came even more quickly. “But when Prince
Mayatum came, everything changed. Why? We hadn’t done anything! Why did
Menef send us away?”

Semerket’s raised his head slowly.
“Who
came to the embassy?”

The boy writhed in sudden pain, and he
gasped the name. “Prince Mayatum!”

Semerket sat back on his heels, stunned. He
put his hand to the wall to steady himself. Prince Mayatum had been in
Babylon? But why should he travel all the way to Babylon just to see
Menef? For what purpose? The alliance between Egypt and Babylon had
existed for hundreds of years; there was no need to send any royal
personage here. Then he remembered Mayatum’s own words that day so long
before in Djamet Temple. The prince had told Semerket that he had only
then returned from a trip to meet with Egypt’s Asian allies. It would
have been a simple thing for the prince to make a secret journey into
Babylon at that time. Semerket shook his head, forcing down the
terrible suspicion that was fast rising in him.

“Do you know
why
he came here,
Rami?”

As his spasm of pain subsided, Rami shook
his head slightly. “No…no. I only know that Naia and I were chosen to
serve him at the feast that night. Out of all the servants, Menef chose
us.”

Menef again! Always Menef at the root of
every nasty little evil in this wretched city!

“All during the banquet, the prince kept
looking at Naia, making comments about you, about what a hero you were
to Egypt. But it sounded like an insult, the way he said it. She got so
nervous she spilled her tray all over him.” The boy spoke with
increasing difficulty, for the medicine was drying his mouth. Semerket
soaked the rag in a jar of water and squeezed a few drops between
Rami’s lips.

“Then what happened?”

“Next day, we were sent away to the Elamite
plantation. But Naia went to Menef, before we left. She told him that
we didn’t want to go. Menef hit her across the face. Said we had no
choice, that he could do what he wanted with us.”

Semerket’s voice went flat. “He struck her?”

But Rami ignored the question. “I didn’t
like it at the plantation,” he said, “couldn’t understand anyone. But
Naia and the princess got along. Naia found out the reason why she’d
come to Babylon…a secret reason…”

“What was the secret, Rami? Did she tell
you?”

Rami shook his head. His eyelids were
drooping.

“Rami!” Semerket’s voice cracked like whip.
“Tell me what happened that night!”

Rami grimaced as if he had been struck. He
screwed up his face, trying to remember. “An old woman came there after
sundown, telling us that…that something was in the sky…blood…a warning,
she said.”

Mother Mylitta. Semerket could see her tall
figure in his mind, banging on the plantation gates, demanding entry.
He closed his eyes, deliberately forcing his ka up and out of his body.
As Rami continued to speak, it left the underground world, rising to
the streets above, plunging through the avenues and out the Ishtar
Gate. Soon it was soaring over the hilltops and wheat fields, heading
to the north, gliding effortlessly past the river levees.

Semerket was at the plantation now, its
walls rising abruptly before him. The guards were closing the gates
against the night and Naia was there — she was carrying a basket of
laundry into the house. As always in his nightmares, he tried to call
out to her, but his voice was wedged in his throat.

He gripped Rami’s shoulder.

“And Mother Mylitta has just arrived,” he
said softly into Rami’s ear, prompting him, “she’s come through the
gate. Where are you, Rami?”

“Outside, in the kitchens, with the cook…”

Semerket’s eyelids flickered. He tried to
open them, but his ka was gone and would not return. Semerket was once
again on his plain of nightmares.

“Where were you when the old woman came,
Rami?”

“In the kitchens, helping the cook prepare
the meal. Then he sent me upstairs to the garden, to help serve it with
Naia. The old woman was already there. She was waving her arms about
and pointing to a star in the sky. I thought she was crazy, but Naia
told me she was a kind of sorceress, that she’d seen a great evil
coming from Egypt to attack us.”

So far, Rami’s story was consistent with the
one that Mylitta had told him. “Go on, Rami. What happened next?”

“Everyone turned to look at Naia and me,
since we were the only Egyptians. But the woman asked us questions —”

“What kind of questions?”

“When we were born — the date, what time it
was, where…”

“Go on.”

“She said that we weren’t the evil ones, and
that we were all to go with her to Babylon. She said she could protect
us there.”

According to Rami, however, the prince did
not trust Mylitta, believing instead that she intended to lure him and
his wife into a Dark Head trap. He had guards enough at the plantation
to protect them, he told her, and would allow neither his wife nor his
servants to come with her. Knowing that her trip to the plantation had
been in vain, Mother Mylitta departed.

“We kept all the bonfires burning that
night,” said Rami. “But everything was quiet as usual. The prince told
us that the old woman was insane, and that we should be laughing at
her. But we were frightened, all the servants were.”

“Where was Naia during this, Rami?”

“She was upstairs with Princess Pinikir. The
princess was scared, too, so Naia came to the kitchens to make her a
sleeping brew. I remember she told me that the princess was distressed.”

As the hours wore on and nothing happened,
Rami said, jangling nerves became calmer at the plantation. The cook
heated some wine for the guards and the boy delivered it to the
watchtower. He climbed the ladder to distribute the clay cups among the
men, taking a moment to look out into the blackness beyond the walls.
Across the plain, Rami believed he saw the movement of the
swift-flowing Euphrates in the starlight. But he suddenly realized that
the river was in fact behind the estate, to the west. Thinking that he
had only imagined the movement in the dark, Rami climbed down to the
courtyard.

When he was on the ground, he turned to look
back at the watchtower.

“But something was wrong! The guards were
suddenly falling over — arrows had struck them!”

Everything happened then in extreme,
exaggerated slowness, he told Semerket. Not until one of the soldiers
in the tower fell upon the tocsin bell, not until he heard the man’s
dying gasps, did Rami’s tongue loosen enough so he could yell an alarm —

“Help! Assassins!” he called. “Help!”

Prince Nugash was in the courtyard and heard
Rami screaming. By then the raiders were throwing grappling hooks over
the wall. Nugash turned in time to see the shadowy figures of men
appearing over the ramparts. The raiders’ heads were swathed in black
cloths, Rami said, so everyone knew it was the Isins who attacked them.

“Prince Nugash rushed up to one of them,
with a battle-ax in his hand, but their archers got him first. Then
they drove a lance through him, to make sure he was dead. All that
time, I just stood there. I couldn’t move!”

The Isins rounded up all the servants and
tied them together in the courtyard. Rami stood rooted to the ground,
hidden in the shadows, still holding his tray. No one noticed him. When
everyone had left the houses, the marauders pitched torches into the
buildings. They caught fire quickly, for their reed roofs became
instant tinder.

“That’s when I thought about Naia. I
remember saying her name aloud,” Rami said, looking up at Semerket. “I
should have been searching for her. I could have saved her if I hadn’t
been so stupid!”

“That’s when you saw her coming out of the
house,” Semerket said, his eyes closed, remembering the image from his
own nightmares. “That’s when she came into the courtyard.”

Rami nodded. “I saw her in the doorway, with
fire raging behind her. I knew it was Naia, because she was wearing the
scarf you gave her — the blue one with the stars.”

“What happened? She was in the doorway, and
—”

“They surrounded her, kept her apart from
the others.” The boy was weeping now, unabashedly, and he thrashed
about on the mattress, so that Semerket had to grip his arm to quiet
him.

“They were on horseback,” Rami said. “One of
them, the leader I think, rode over to her. The fire was so loud, like
a furnace roaring, but I heard him to say to her, ‘You’re the Egyptian
woman? You’re Naia?’ ”

“Those were his words, Rami? His
exact
words?”

“I heard him say it! Naia didn’t answer. I
couldn’t see her face, but I could tell that she was looking up at him.
Then I saw her nod her head. And that’s when he took his lance and
drove it through her! I saw it happen! He killed her!”

In the underground chamber, Rami brought his
hands up to his face, covering his tear-stained cheeks. “I remember
running at him, then. I dropped the tray and I ran toward the man on
horseback. I screamed at him, yelling curses at him. The horse reared
up and the man fell to the ground. Then I was on top of him —
strangling him, hitting his face. I kept trying to get his black hood
off him so I could see what he looked like. Even if they killed me, I
wanted to come back to haunt him. Then the hood came off, just like
that. Right into my hands. And I saw — I’ll never forget —”

“What, Rami? What won’t you forget?”

“His face, like a skeleton’s, with awful
yellow teeth and that mark at his eye.”

Semerket exhaled. “Was it an asp…so small it
could have been a tear?”

Rami nodded, looking at him wide-eyed.

“That’s when they struck you.”

“I don’t remember when it happened, except
that my head exploded. I know that I fell on top of the man. ‘Get him
off me!’ he kept screaming. ‘Get him off me!’ And the funny thing is…”

Rami’s voice was barely audible now, and his
words were slurring together. Semerket laid his ear against Rami’s lips.

“What was it, Rami? What was so funny?”

“…I could understand everything they
said…all of a sudden, I could speak Babylonian…”

“No, Rami,” said Semerket. “You understood
them because they were speaking Egyptian.”

RAMI WAS SUFFICIENTLY DRUGGED
that Kem-weset felt it safe to begin the surgery. But the old physician
was adamant that Rami was not to move by so much as a fraction. “You
two will need to hold his arms,” Kem-weset said to Semerket and Marduk.

Though Semerket was averse to the task, at
least he had been schooled in the House of Purification and was fairly
inured to the cutting and stitching of flesh. Marduk, on the other
hand, instantly paled and instead ordered one of his men to Rami’s
side. But the man fell to his knees, weeping in fear. It was
sacrilegious to open a body with a knife, he said, contrary to the will
of the gods — this from a warrior who had probably disemboweled
hundreds on the battlefield.

Marduk was about to order that lots be
drawn, when a low voice came from outside the room. “I’ll do it,” said
Nidaba, pushing her way past the warriors and approaching the mattress.
Semerket made sure to take the side where the incision would be made,
sparing her the sight of the wound. She sank to the floor and took
Rami’s head onto her lap. Her gold-tipped fingers gripped his skull
tightly.

Kem-weset then demanded that the Isins bring
forth a blood-stauncher. The Isins looked at one another in
bewilderment, for they had never heard of such a person. Muttering to
himself about the backwardness of such people, Kem-weset took his
scalpel and made a cut across his thigh. The blood ran freely down his
leg.

“Let your men be brought here in single
file,” Kem-weset said to Marduk. “Quickly now, before it clots.”

At least twenty soldiers passed into the
chamber before Kem-weset found his blood-stauncher, a young Isin man
who had once been a farmer. When he approached the old physician, the
wound on Kem-weset’s thigh instantly stopped its flow.

“This is the man!” Kem-weset declared.
“Bring him into the room.”

The Isin warriors became alarmed and stared
at the farmer as if he were suddenly revealed to be a demon. Kem-weset
patiently explained that the Egyptians, being more advanced, had long
known of the existence of staunchers — and that approximately one in
every ten persons possessed the power to stop the flow of blood by
their mere presence.