Day of the False King (8 page)

“NAIA WAS DEVOTED to the gods.
I know she must have made an offering here. It’s what she would have
done when she arrived in Babylon. Why can’t you remember her?”

Senmut the priest and Semerket sat together
in the soft light of evening, their backs against the warm granite
altar. Senmut’s wife, Wia, had cleared the remains of their dinner
away, and had taken the leftovers to the spies who still waited outside
the temple gates.

“Ah, yes,” the priest smiled. “How could I
fail to recognize such a paragon from your description?” He paused, and
then recited, “ ‘There is no one like her, she is more beautiful than
any other, a star-goddess rising, with hair of lapis and sweet lips for
speaking…’ ”

“You remember your poetry well enough.”

“I was young when I learned the song. You’ll
discover when you’re my age it’s easier to recall a poem from your
youth than what it was you did yesterday.”

“I’m sure if you tried —”

“Semerket,” Senmut admonished, “you describe
a goddess, but I must recall a woman. And the world is filled with so
many.”

Semerket tried to hide his disappointment
from the priest, making his voice deliberately light. “Then if the most
beautiful woman in Babylon
does
come here, with skin the
color of smoke and eyes like the Nile at flood, will you send me word?”

“Of course. But perhaps there is some other
way I can help you.” The priest scratched his brow, struggling to
remember. “Mother?” He called over to Wia, who had returned to the
courtyard. “Mother, what is the name of that singer?”

“Nidaba,” said Wia distinctly, instantly
knowing who her husband meant.

“Who?” asked Semerket.

“Nidaba. A singer of ballads and poems. You
must go to her house. It’s where everyone in Babylon meets to find what
they need.”

Semerket was intrigued. “For instance…?”

Wia, who seemed the more practical member of
the family, looked at him slyly and tapped her nose. “The kind of
things you don’t find in the regular souks or bazaars, if you know what
I mean.”

“Black market?”

Wia nodded. “Yes, that, of course. But
mostly one goes there for information. If anyone in the city has seen
your wife and friend, you’ll find them at Nidaba’s.”

“Where is her house?”

“We’ve never been there, Semerket,” said
Senmut. “It’s not an…
edifying
…place for a priest to be seen
in. But I believe it’s in the old section of town.”

“How did you find out about it?”

“When we had to sell the statues of the
gods, we made inquiries. Someone from Nidaba’s house came to collect
them. Apparently she knew someone who has a passion for Egyptian
objects.”

Dusk had fallen over the city. Semerket rose
to leave, for the Elamites had imposed a nighttime curfew, allowing
only those with a pass onto the streets. Semerket hurriedly made his
farewells to the old priest and priestess; the gods alone knew how long
it would take him to find his hostel. As Wia stood on tiptoe to embrace
him, he slipped a few pieces of gold into her tattered sash.

“You will come back, Semerket?”

“Of course. It does me good to speak
Egyptian again. I hadn’t realized how much my throat ached, speaking
only Babylonian as I’ve done.”

“We will ask after this lady of yours,”
Senmut promised earnestly. “And the boy, as well.”

That night, Semerket discovered that someone
had rifled through his belongings while he had been out. The seals on
Pharaoh’s letters freeing Naia and Rami were broken. Though his
intruder had tried to mend them, Semerket saw the hairline fracture
that faintly scarred the wax intaglio. With rising panic, he clawed
through his pack, searching for the clay tablets. They were there — a
relief, since he must soon go to the temple countinghouse for more of
Pharaoh’s gold. The fact that the tablets were still in his pack proved
that whoever had searched it was more interested in information than
gold.

He chastised himself for having left his
belongings behind during his day’s roaming, for now the Elamites knew
that he was searching for two Egyptian nationals, and who they were. He
had not declared such an intention to the customs clerk at the Ishtar
Gate, and the Elamites would wonder what importance Pharaoh or Semerket
attached to the recovery of these individuals. He had no wish to become
embroiled in any international gamesmanship, and knew that time was
fast running out for him. A few days were all he had left before Kutir
would surely demand to see him. He must work quickly, he decided, and
without any spies reporting his every move back to the palace.

AFTER HE LEFT the hostel the
following morning, Semerket moved in a slow, circuitous manner, certain
that his two fumbling spies would be following him. Just as he thought,
he soon heard the wheezing and panting of the larger one coming down
the road.

“Good morning,” he said, stepping into their
path.

Even though they had been amiable enough the
day before, the men became instantly wary. They glanced nervously
around the crowded streets, suspicious of the nobles and bureaucrats
converging on the various government buildings and temples in the area.
They beckoned him into a dark doorway. There, they indignantly told him
that it was their job to keep him in sight, and not the other way round.

“Please, sir,” whispered the heavier one,
“it won’t do for you to keep surprising us this way. What if someone
important should see us together? What would they think?”

“We’d lose our job, that’s what,” added the
other man, his voice as taut as a lute string. “It’s hard enough since
the invasion to get honest work. Just go on walking, sir, like you was
doing. We won’t bother you if you don’t bother us. Live and let live,
that’s what we say.”

“How’d you like to work for me?”

Both men were speechless for a moment. Then
the thin one exploded in protests, regardless of who saw them, saying
that a dungeon — or worse — awaited them if they changed allegiances.
Semerket gathered from the man’s repeated entreaties to the sixty
thousand gods of Babylon that the Elamites were not liberal-minded in
such matters.

“Let me rephrase it,” Semerket said. “What
if I pay you
not
to follow me? In that way you can collect
two salaries at once.”

Again, the thin man began to bewail his
fate, but his compatriot’s face took on a shrewd expression beneath its
folds of fat. “Let us hear this gentleman out,” he said, “for even
though he’s an Egyptian, there may be some sense in what he says.”

Semerket quickly sketched his proposal: for
the next week they could earn a gold piece per day if they were to let
him go about his business alone. It amounted to almost a whole year’s
salary, he said, since he would be paying them in Egyptian gold.
Moreover, at the end of the week, Semerket promised, he would dutifully
present himself to King Kutir, and no one would be the wiser.

“But what do we tell the Elamite captain who
pays us?” asked the fat one. “He wants a report detailing your
movements at the end of every day.”

“You’ll follow me to the Egyptian temple in
the morning,” Semerket blithely assured the two spies. “And every
evening I’ll come out the same way. You can report that I’ve been
praying all day, and as far you can tell, it’s true. Everyone thinks
Egyptians are god-crazy, anyway; it’ll be easy for you to convince your
captain.”

The larger of the two spies contemplatively
stroked his scanty beard. Even at rest, the breath going in and out of
his lungs sounded like a punctured bellows. “I confess it’s more
appealing to me than following you around the city all day, going in
circles as you do. I’m a large man, as you can see, more accustomed to
the comfortable benches of the occasional wineshop. The thought of
collecting two salaries at once is very tempting — very tempting.”

“We’ll be caught,” the other man whispered
anxiously. “They’ll find out. The Elamites will flay the skins from our
bodies. They’ll throw us into the Insect Chamber —”

“Why?” said Semerket reassuringly. “Do they
set spies to spy upon their spies?”

“I’d put nothing past them,” the thin man
said glumly. “You don’t know them like we do.” He grimaced, thinking
perhaps of the punishments that would be his.

In the end, however, the two Dark Head spies
agreed to Semerket’s plan, though they warned him that if he did not
emerge from the temple at sundown as he had promised, they would go
immediately to the Elamite captain to report him missing. Semerket
agreed to their single condition. A little more copper persuaded them
to divulge the best route to the Egyptian Quarter. Under their
guidance, he was able to reach it in a fraction of the time it had
taken him on the previous day.

At the Egyptian temple, Semerket told Senmut
and Wia that he must go over its rear wall so that he could explore
Babylon without anyone’s knowing he did. But Senmut showed him a long,
underground passageway instead, damp from the waters of the Euphrates
and smelling foully of waste, which connected the temple grounds to a
distant alleyway. Wia gave him the ancient key that opened its bronze
gate, and Semerket was at last alone in Babylon.

“WINE,” he said. “Red.”

As he frequently did when he first arrived
in a strange city, Semerket went to a tavern. The owners of such
establishments usually were the touchstones for all the gossip and
intrigue of the neighborhood. As a rule, they were garrulous sorts,
willing to share what they knew for a little cash, or even for a bowl
of their own wine.

There was a surfeit of such places from
which to choose in Babylon’s Egyptian Quarter, and he sat in a shop
that occupied the corner of a small square. The term “shop” was a
misnomer, however, for only a single tattered awning barely kept the
hot sun from Semerket’s back. Everyone who passed could peek inside to
see who drank there. Even at this relatively early hour there were more
than a few patrons sitting on the pavement, huddled over their bowls of
wine, like vultures over a corpse.

The owner himself brought the bowl to where
Semerket sat, and Semerket gave him a copper snippet.

“Not enough,” said the man shortly.

“Then you must import your wine directly
from the Heavenly Fields, friend,” Semerket said, smiling to show that
he was joking.

The man regarded him with a blank
expression. “Wonderful — a sense of humor. Now my day can begin. Three
coppers,
friend.”

“Three?” Semerket had never paid so much for
wine before, even in Thebes’ finest inns.

“There’s been a war here, in case you hadn’t
noticed. When trade is down, the price goes up. Three copper pieces, or
get out.”

With a sourness that suddenly matched the
innkeeper’s, Semerket pulled out two more bits of copper from his sash
and added them to the one already in the man’s hand. The shop owner was
about to depart when Semerket stopped him, attempting to arrange his
features into something resembling cordiality.

“Wait,” he said, “for that much copper I’d
like some advice to go with it.”

“Advice?”

“Help, then. I’m new to Babylon.”

The shop owner’s lip curled a fraction. “Go
to one of the temples if you need charity. We’re fresh out.”

“It’s information I want.”

The man looked at him for a moment, eyes
suddenly flat and ominous. “And you thought the wineseller could let
you in on what’s happening in our little world, eh? A few bowls of
wine, a few coppers, and I’d tell you anything you want to know — is
that it?”

“Something like it.”

“Here’s some ‘advice,’ then, and on the
house: this is Babylon, friend, not Egypt.”

“I’m aware of that.”

“Then you should also be aware that any time
some stranger from Egypt comes looking for information around here, it
usually means someone ends up dead, or arrested, or hauled away for a
turn in the Sinai mines. Stick your nose someplace else. We tend to get
jittery when anybody starts asking questions — they’re usually bounty
hunters.”

“I’m not a bounty hunter. I only want to
find my friends,” Semerket said, his voice becoming insistent. “Surely
that’s not —”

The wineseller bent down to where Semerket
sat, bringing his heavy face close to Semerket’s. “The only want of
yours I’m interested in,” said the man, enunciating, “is whether or not
you want more wine.” He paused. “Do you want more wine?”

“No.”

“When you do, I’ll be over there.” The man
pointed to the brick bench where his wine jars were stacked, and left
him.

Semerket looked around the shop. Most of the
people had overheard his conversation with the owner and now
assiduously avoided his gaze. Only one person seemed friendly, an
elderly man whose sagging jowls quivered excitedly when Semerket turned
in his direction. The man lingered hopefully at the outer reaches of
the canopy, in the white sunlight, and when the shop owner turned away,
he gesticulated feverishly so that Semerket might call him into the
shop.

Semerket inclined his head, indicating that
the old man should join him. When he sat down, however, Semerket
instantly regretted it. Stubble blossomed on his chin, and wine stained
his grimy robes.

The old man brought his quivering hands
together, saluting Semerket in the Egyptian fashion. “Thank you, young
man, thank you,” he burbled, taking a seat. “Most kind of you, indeed.”
A miasma of stale wine and garlic instantly stole over Semerket like a
dank river fog.

The shop’s owner appeared at their side.
“Damn you, Kem-weset!” he said. “It gives my place a bad name when the
likes of you comes begging.”

“You have it all wrong, Hapi, dear fellow,”
the old man interrupted quickly, ducking his head as if he expected a
blow. “This young man —” He nudged Semerket in the ribs.