Egypt (2 page)

In my years on the Thebes force, I had seen every kind of meaningless brutality enacted on the human body. Cruelty, rage, grief–and something others carelessly name evil–can reduce the strange collation of profanity and beauty which makes up each of us to an inanimate lump of decaying meat. I had stood in grim backrooms, and stooped over the twisted bodies of children battered to death. I had considered the ruined remains of young women face down in the still-warm shadows of their own blood. I had seen the matter of the brain–that peculiar ivory jelly, which some say is the repository of our thoughts and memories–dashed across mud-brick walls. I had seen the raw meat of our physical beings exposed as in a butcher's shop; I knew how quickly youth and beauty bloat and stink, when the
ka
and
ba
spirits have departed.

I had seen much worse things than the sight of these five Nubian boys' expertly decapitated heads. And yet it angered me deeply. Perhaps it was our apparent powerlessness to stop this tide of violence. Perhaps it was the Medjay's obvious lack of interest in protecting the poor. Or perhaps I was simply growing old. The hair on my head was grey now, the glossy black of my youth a distant memory; my belly was still trim, but some dawns I felt my bones creaking, and the weight of the skin on my face, and a strange slowness in my blood when I rose to confront the new day.

I shook my head to dispel such pointless thoughts. And then I noticed something, just visible between the pale lips of one of the Nubian boys' heads. I inserted my finger between his white teeth, and retrieved a folded slip of papyrus. It was sticky with blood and saliva. I carefully peeled it open. Neatly drawn in black ink was a strange sign:
a black star with eight radial arrowheads
. Gangs often left scrawled, barely literate messages with their victims' body parts–all part of the grim ritual, the blood-soaked display of power. But usually the messages were banal:
Learn Respect; Keep Silent; Be Afraid
. This was different. It was not, for one thing, an Egyptian hieroglyph, for our stars have five points, and look nothing like what was before me.

Suddenly, a chariot, drawn by two tired little horses and accompanied by a running guard, clattered up the street, and Nebamun, Chief of the Thebes Medjay, descended. The officers, who until this moment had been sharing their usual diseased banter, straightened up in silence. Nebamun glanced over in my direction. I knew he would want this scene cleared up and the bodies disposed of before dawn broke, and the city awoke. There would, of course, be no proper investigation. Instead, a few likely culprits would be dragged off the streets of the slums, and tortured to confess, and then swiftly executed, as a sign to the world at large that the city Medjay could still do its job. Whatever their petty misdemeanours, these dead boys were still murder victims, and they deserved justice. But because they were poor Nubians they wouldn't get it; Nebamun–‘a man of this world', as he repeatedly claimed, justifying his shortcuts to justice, his casual corruption, and his remorselessly practical violence–would see to that. To talk of justice was to be out of date, old-fashioned and laughable. He was coming towards me. Against the rules, and with a corresponding touch of pleasure, I quickly hid the papyrus in my leather satchel, for further contemplation.

‘Shit always travels downhill, eh, Rahotep?' Nebamun said, nodding at the dead boys, and coughing grimly at his tired, old joke. He wrapped his long, finely pleated linen gown tighter around his stately form. He was wearing his gold
shebyu
collar of honour as always, just to remind us of his worldly success. Once impressively muscular, his stocky physique had collapsed into the soft middle age of a man who had succeeded in his profession. His features were blunt, and his hands were not as steady as they had once been, but his eyes still glittered with the pleasure of power. I caught a waft of the sweet smell of beer on his breath. He had never developed a taste for decent wine. I instinctively took a step back from him. He grinned, revealing his poor teeth, and then spat a fat gob of phlegm into the dust a bit too near my sandals. My baboon, Thoth, growled quietly at him.

‘Five more dead Nubian street kids. Who cares?' he said, prodding their bodies with his sandals.

I knew better than to respond.

‘Let's get this cleared up. No point in distressing the decent hard-working citizens of Thebes with a nasty sight like this, eh?' he said, and he made a sign to the officers to get to work. Then he turned back to me, as if something had just occurred to him.

‘What are you doing here, Rahotep?' he said.

‘I couldn't sleep.'

Which was true.

Nebamun and I had never seen eye to eye. He had beaten me to the office of Chief of the Thebes Medjay, and immediately proved his innate stupidity by becoming a petty tyrant, intimidating his best men rather than freeing them to do their jobs. In particular he had used his power to sideline me to the point where I was no longer ordered to the scenes of murders, but put to work on petty cases which should have been given to junior officers. And in doing so, he had taken from me the thing I valued above almost everything: my work as a Seeker of Mysteries. Twice before, I had been called upon, over his head and beyond his authority, to solve mysteries by the highest in the land–first by Nefertiti, and then later by her daughter, Ankhesenamun, and her husband, King Tutankhamun. Twice I had been summoned and set to work, independent of his authority. And twice, he would insist, gleefully, whenever he had the chance, I had failed. For Nefertiti had vanished, and Tutankhamun had died. And yet I could never tell him the true story behind these events, to justify myself, for I had promised my silence on those matters.

Suddenly, a Nubian woman ran into the street. She was breathless and desperate. The officers moved to stop her, but Nebamun shook his head, casually giving permission for her to approach her dead child. She fell to her knees before one of the heads and began to keen a high, desperate howl of inconsolable misery.

‘I'm sorry for the death of your son,' I said quietly.

She gazed up at me, her face shattered.

‘What was his name?' I asked as gently as I could, but Nebamun interrupted me.

‘You don't belong here, Rahotep. This isn't your case.'

‘It won't be anyone's case,' I said, before I could stop myself. ‘Like you said, five more dead Nubian boys? Who cares? End of story.'

‘Exactly so. So why don't you fuck off home, before I kick you all the way to the end of the street,' he snapped back, delighted to have antagonized me.

He nodded to his men. They grasped the grieving mother under the arms, and dragged her away, her howls echoing through the dark and silent streets.

Once, I would have owned this scene. Once I was known as the best Seeker of Mysteries in the city. This would have been my case, and perhaps I might have been able to give that mother something, in the end, that looked like justice. I might have discovered why the knots on the ropes were expert, and found the killer who was so strangely skilled at beheading teenage Nubian boys.

I looked around one final time, shading my eyes against the dawn light. Soon the day's heat would take control of the city. Thebes would shimmer and bake under the furious eye of Ra. It would be another day ruled by this world's new gods: gold and power.

I took Thoth by the leash, and we walked slowly away into the last of the shadows.

The noble Nakht, tall, slim and elegant, was standing at the top of the entrance stairs of his grand city house, greeting his rich and elite friends as they arrived and passed through into the grand reception hall. He was wearing his finest pleated linens and a magnificent
shebyu
collar–two strands of solid gold rings. Such collars were royal gifts, signs of high favour and office, strikingly beautiful, and very heavy. Such ostentation was a recent development in his personal appearance, which had always been austere; but his rise to even greater eminence, as royal envoy, seemed to have encouraged him to a more open display of personal opulence, about which–as he made very clear–he was not to be teased. Nakht was now one of the most powerful men in the land: the chief official who oversaw the relations between the judiciary, the priesthood, the government and the palace, and who, as royal envoy, represented Egypt abroad. In short, he was the keystone of power. And yet I could never quite square that with the man I knew, who was more interested in studying the mysteries of the stars, and the obscure puzzles of ancient texts, than in the crude, day-to-day business of power and politics. I observed him in action from my bodyguard's vantage, just to his side. His finely drawn face, with its delicate features, moved through exactly the right range of expressions as he greeted each dignitary according to his stature, and by name (for his memory was famously prodigious): the nobles and priests with poised grace, the overseers with a sly, collaboratively subversive wink, the new magnates with respect. And yet, his topaz eyes, alive with intelligence, seemed to observe the pageant of all this, and indeed of all human life, as a slightly remote spectacle. He had the concentrated hunting eyes of a hawk in the smooth face of a gentleman.

Our friendship was unlikely. We had met when we were younger, at a grand reception in Akhetaten, the new temple city built by Akhenaten and Nefertiti midway between Thebes and Memphis. Nakht had been born into a world of gold and privilege, but despite the differences in our origins we had taken to each other immediately.

And now, all these years later, and despite his eminence in high politics and intellectual life, he still seemed to find something amusing and interesting in me. I, for my part, remained intrigued by his life of the mind, his bladed intelligence, and above all by his warm love for my children. Perhaps he borrowed from me the one thing he lacked in his life–a family. And I was glad to share them with him.

Once upon a time, I had been an invited guest at Nakht's famous social functions. Tonight I was here because I was working. Nakht had started to employ me occasionally as his personal bodyguard, saying he could trust my discretion in a way he could trust no one else. With his customary tact, he had made it seem as if it was I who was doing him the favour. And given the unreliable and ever-diminishing payments from my Medjay work, and the spiralling costs of even the most basic of foods, I was absolutely desperate for any means to provide for my family. Many of my fellow Medjay officers, alarmed by the increasing murder rate among our own kind, and the worsening violence in the city, had been drawn into private security work: either at rich men's houses, or rich families' tombs, loaded with treasures and gold–which were always threatened with violent robbery. Some made money on both sides, by collaborating with gangs of tomb-robbers. Others had also been drawn by need or weakness into blackmail, protectionism and extortion. Many times I regretted refusing the Queen's offer to become her private guard, which she had made five years before; but the palace was never my world–I was a Seeker of Mysteries, and no matter what the cost, and no matter how absurd it might seem, I had no choice but to remain true to myself.

Up on the roof, the large terrace was set out with many trays on stands, piled high with the finest of foods in ostentatious quantities: whole ducks in thick glazes; big roasted haunches of gazelle, sliced finely to reveal the pink meat; roasted gourds and shallots; bread rolls; honeycombs; olives glistening in oil on decorated platters; lustrous bunches of shining grapes that caught the evening sunlight; and mountains of figs and dates. Servants dispensed fine wine from the Dakhla oasis. I would dearly have loved a goblet of decent wine, as I could no longer indulge such luxuries at home. My mouth watered; I stopped myself from smuggling a handful of almonds from a dish. After the last guests had departed, Nakht would insist that I take as many of the leftovers as I wished home for the children. ‘Otherwise it will just be thrown away,' he would say, trying to find a way to make his charity acceptable, while pressing a small cask of excellent wine upon me. We would eat like kings for the next few days; and for a little while we would not have to suffer the same old onions, garlic, bony fish and gritty bread that had become our staple diet.

As Nakht made elegantly witty conversation with a rich couple, while they fawned over and flattered each other, I gazed out over the city in the glorious evening light. The grey, red and yellow flat rooftops of Thebes, crowded with drying vegetables and broken bits and pieces of household furniture, spread away in every direction. The Avenue of Sphinxes, the vast, straight, paved processional, ran to the north, joining the Temple of Karnak and the Southern Temple, whose towering, painted mud-brick walls reared up near by. I watched as a temple army phalanx laboriously conducted the handover to the night guards in the open ground before the vast pylon. To the west ran the Great River, the source of all life, like a brown and green serpent, glittering silver now as the sunset flowed on its ever-changing surfaces. Further, beyond the cultivation on the west bank, and the stark borderline where the Black Land of the cultivation and the Red Lands of the desert divided, lay the long stone mortuary temples; and beyond them the hills and valleys, now painted in the blacks, yellows and reds of sunset, where the royal tombs preserved the great kings in their stone sarcophagi and gold coffins, timeless and secret. To the south, also on the west bank, I could just make out the squat shapes of the Malkata Palace, home of the royal family, hidden at the heart of the extensive labyrinth of overseers', administrators' and officials' accommodation. And beyond the city's boundaries, beyond the green and black fields, beyond all the monuments and statues made by men upon the face of the earth, lay the great unknown of the Red Lands, that other world of dust and sandstorms and dangerous spirits and death, which had always held such power for me.