Sphinx's Princess (34 page)

He raised his head and looked at me. “Why did you do it, Nefertiti?” he asked sadly. He reached beneath the throne and pulled out a wad of white cloth. “What did you hope to gain?” With a flick of his wrists, he unfurled it at my feet. It was badly stained and crumpled, but I still
recognized it. It was the dress I’d worn on the night of Thutmose’s family party. I remembered how Ta-Miu’s antics had shattered a glass vessel filled with wine, splashing my gown, but I didn’t understand why it was also marked with so many small rips and slashes.

Then I realized that not all of the stains were wine.

“Why, Nefertiti?” Thutmose repeated. “She was Bast’s child, she was sacred, but she was also the only creature whose love I could ever trust. Why did you do it? Why did you kill Ta-Miu?”

I stared at the bright red spatters of fresh blood among the darker blotches of wine on my dress. At the heart of a spider web of scratch marks that had torn the linen, the scarlet imprint of a cat’s paw bloomed like a flower.

“N-n-never,” I said. My tongue was still like wood. It was a struggle to turn my horrified thoughts into words. “I n-never would hurt—hurt Ta—hurt her.”

“Listen to how she stammers!” The priest who’d led the guards into my apartment jabbed his finger at me. “Her voice breaks with guilt because she feels the wrathful breath of Ma’at searing the back of her neck, parching her throat, making her lying tongue shrivel in her head!”

“No!” Thutmose was on his feet, glaring at the priest. “Don’t talk to her like that. Let her defend herself.”

“She will lie.” The priest folded his arms, defying anyone to contradict him. “If she says one word denying
her crime, she will double the charges of blasphemy against her.”

“Bla-blasphemy?” Why
wasn’t
this a dream? It was bizarre enough. “No. N-n-
no
!” I shook my head insistently and raised my hands in a gesture of prayer. If I couldn’t speak to clear my name, I’d fight to make them understand and accept my innocence.

One of the other priests laughed at me and ridiculed my attempts to act out my reverence for the gods. Thutmose was nose-to-nose with him in an instant, his face distorted with rage. “Is this the time for laughter, with a life in the balance? Do you find that funny? Or are you mocking my authority here? Go,” he snarled. “And offer Amun thanks that you serve him. If you weren’t a priest of the supreme god, I would break your bones for such insolence.” The priest went white and scuttled out of the room.

Thutmose resumed his place on his father’s throne. “Nefertiti, you know that to kill one of Bast’s children is sacrilege against that goddess. To lie about it is blasphemy against Ma’at’s sacred truth. I want to believe that you are innocent, but how can I, with this evidence in front of me?” He indicated the torn and bloody dress at his feet. “Justice must be done, in my father’s name. Please help me see proof that you’re guiltless of this dreadful crime.”

A dozen protests and a dozen frenzied questions seethed inside me, unable to be expressed. I thought I would choke to death on my frustration. What was wrong with me? Why couldn’t I speak, except so clumsily that I might as well have been as mute as Nava?
Is this some act of
the gods?
I wondered. But in the next instant, I thrust that thought aside.
Why must it be from the gods? Mortal hands and minds could teach Set himself the art of malice and destruction. If I’ve been left this vulnerable, may Aten’s all-seeing light witness that there’s something human behind it. But how was it done to me? And why? And—and—

—and what good will learning any of those answers do me, if I can’t defend myself right now?
I remembered the fate of Nava’s sister, Mahala, also falsely accused of blasphemy.
You gave up your life to save mine, and now your sacrifice is wasted.

I clenched my teeth.
No. No, Mahala, you did
not
lose your life in vain. I won’t let it be so, I
won’t
! Even if my voice fails me, there must be
something
I can do to save the life that you gave back to me.

I cast a desperate look at the evidence on the chamber floor. The smears of blood on my wine-stained dress mocked my powerlessness. They looked like some of Nava’s first failed attempts to try writing with a scribe’s brush on papyrus instead of her sharpened reed on wax.

Writing!

I broke away from my guards, throwing myself at the nearest servant who held a lamp. Before he could react I yanked it from his hands and blew out the flame. I spat on my fingers and pinched off a bit of the blackened wick. Then I dropped to my knees and began to scribble across the floor. Every man in that small room gaped at me. They must have thought I’d lost my mind. I ignored their stares and whispers. I wrote on. I had to choose my words with care; the little bit of burnt wick wouldn’t last forever. When
it crumbled into black ash in my fingers, I spat on them again and wrote more. And when that was gone, I dipped one fingertip into the lamp’s spout and scrawled my words in oil.

The men leaned closer, reading as I wrote. When I was done, I sat back on my heels and waited for them to read it all:
I swear by Ma’at, my hands are clean of blood. My dress proves nothing. Anyone could have taken it. Prove that this is Ta-Miu’s blood. If she is dead—Bast forbid it!—show her body. Let her wounds accuse me. I say she lives. All cats roam. Wait five days. Her return will prove that I am innocent.

The muttering began, though only among the vizier and the nobles. The priests kept a stony silence.

“Five days … that seems reasonable.”

“Cats do go wandering everywhere.”

“Were we shown the cat’s body? I’m so sleepy, I don’t remember.”

“I think you would have remembered that. But the girl is right: Anyone could have taken her dress and smeared it with any kind of blood.”

“What about that paw print?”

“A live cat can leave paw prints, too. We mustn’t act hastily. She’s the favored niece of Pharaoh’s Great Royal Wife. Do
you
want to tell Queen Tiye—may she live!—that we condemned a member of her family on such chancy evidence?”

With an inarticulate roar of rage, the priest who’d brought me hurled his clay lamp into the center of what I’d written. Flames erupted and raced across the puddled oil. I screamed and jumped back while servants rushed past me
to stamp out the fire. When they were done, my words were only a slick, black smear on the floor.

He showed a demon’s face to the vizier and the nobles. “Dogs!” he shouted. “Is this how you deal with a case of sacrilege? You fear a mere woman more than you fear the anger of a goddess!”

The vizier’s lips tightened and he stood his ground. “Queen Tiye is not a ‘mere woman,’ nor is Princess Nefertiti. She is the chosen bride of our crown prince. When Pharaoh entrusted me with the office of vizier, I swore to serve the living god by upholding his justice. If sacrilege
has
been committed, the guilty one will be punished, no matter how highborn or powerful he—or she!—may be. But until we have better proof than that rag, I refuse to give my approval to any action against this girl.”

“As do I,” Thutmose said quietly. I looked at him with grateful eyes. How changed he was from the cold, suspicious person I knew!
Maybe … maybe it’s done him some good to be free of his mother’s shadow
, I thought. It was an unexpected change, but I wanted to believe it. I
needed
to believe it. I was alone and in peril and afraid, confused by my inability to speak clearly when my life depended on it. In my fear, I clung to any hint that Thutmose had found a kinder heart the way an ant clings to a straw when the sacred river sweeps him away.

The other nobles murmured their agreement with Thutmose and the vizier. They, too, wanted more proof.
Isis be praised!

The priest glowered at them all. “So be it.” He turned to one of his attendants. “Bring him now.”

The second priest moved swiftly from the room and came back leading a boy almost past the age for wearing the braided youth-lock. The women’s quarters teemed with children exactly like him, though he was a little pudgier and fairer-skinned than most. Even so, we might have encountered one another a score of times, and I never would have been able to pick him out of a crowd.

Despite the hour, when most children were deeply sunk in sleep, the boy didn’t look at all drowsy. His eyes were bright and keen, like a well-bred hound’s when the hunt was on. When he glanced in my direction, I thought I saw a glint of hostility as well, but why would a boy I’d never seen wish me ill?

“My lord vizier,” the priest said as pleasantly as if his recent outburst had never happened. “Your proof is in the mouth of this lad. Hear him.”

The vizier and the nobles looked as confused as I, but they motioned for the boy to speak. He stepped forward and bowed to Thutmose before he began.

“Hail, my brother. I am Meketre, son of our divine father, Pharaoh Amenhotep—may he rule forever!” His prim, mannered words would have sounded more natural coming from the priest’s mouth. “Last night, I had a dream in which the god Amun himself appeared and warned me that my father’s life was in great danger, as was your own. He showed me a vision of a garden in the women’s quarters where thirteen sycamore trees grow. It’s set apart, a place the royal physicians sent my father’s wives when they suffered from con-contagious sickness.” He stopped, flustered for having tripped over that word, and looked at the priest.

“Yes, we’re listening,” the man said harshly. “Go
on.”

Meketre recovered his poise and continued with his testimony. “The healing rooms are empty now. Everyone in the women’s quarters knows this, and we all thank great Amun daily for his mercy. But when I came there, obeying the god, someone was in the garden.” He pointed one shaking finger at me.

My head began to spin as I heard the boy describe how he’d seen me crouch in the moonlight under the branches of the sycamores with Ta-Miu pinned helpless under my hand. “She called on the power of Set the Destroyer. She held a flint knife over the she-cat’s body, but when she first tried to kill Bast’s sacred child, the cat squirmed free and slashed her dress. She laid hold of it a second time and killed it. She took its blood and mixed it with a handful of soft wax. She made the wax into two figures and gave them the names of my father and my brother, pronouncing ghastly curses against them. Then she crushed them under her feet, she pulled them apart in small pieces, she oblit-
obliterated
them utterly.” He inhaled deeply and concluded: “I followed her when she carried the cat’s body to the river and threw it in. I watched her return to her rooms. I went back the next day, when she was gone, and with Amun’s help I was able to take that dress and bring it to the priests and tell them what I had seen and—and—and I think that’s all.”

I blinked rapidly, trying to focus my gaze and make sense of what I was hearing. The vizier, the nobles, and Thutmose all heard Meketre’s oddly formal recitation with expressions of growing horror. The priests looked grave, but
there was no surprise on their faces. I was so overwhelmed by the scope and audacity of the lies filling the chamber that I wouldn’t have been able to refute them then and there even if I’d recovered the full use of my tongue.

If I made and destroyed those wax images, where are the pieces? If I killed Ta-Miu with a knife, where is that? And why would I want to curse Pharaoh and Thutmose in the first place? Meketre’s story is a tattered fishing net that can’t hold the truth. Doesn’t anyone else
see
that?

All that I could do was appeal to the one friend I had: “Th-Thutmose—”

“What would you have me do, Nefertiti?” he asked mournfully. “This boy’s—my brother’s testimony changes everything.”

“He—he isn’t tell—telling …” My speech was coming back to me, but not fast enough. I shook my head and mimed the act of writing, mutely imploring Thutmose to have someone bring me a pen or a brush, a scrap of papyrus or a shard of broken pottery.

Thutmose closed his eyes and sighed as if his heart were being crushed under a stone. Had he seen my gestures at all? “The penalty for blasphemy—” he began.

A commotion from the back of the chamber interrupted him. A tall figure paused in the doorway chamber. A trick of light and shadow made it look like an impossible monster, a two-headed beast that stalked the shadows just beyond the lamplight’s reach.

“What is going on here?”
Amenophis used one arm to push his way through the men who stood between him and his brother, the other arm holding Nava to his bony chest.
The instant she saw me, she thrust free of Amenophis’s hold and hurled herself into my arms.

“Brother, how did you know—?” Thutmose stared at Amenophis, perplexed.

“She brought me.” He pointed at Nava, who was clinging to me as if I were all that stood between her and the jaws of Ammut. “She woke as Nefertiti was being taken away. She followed silently and once she saw where your men brought her, she ran to tell—” He paused. “It doesn’t matter
who
she told, only that he was able to tell me. Now in the name of our father’s justice, explain this!”