Year of the Hyenas (25 page)

Pharaoh was
borne by
his sons through the Avenue of the Rams into Amun’s Great Temple,
accompanied by the chanting of priests, to spend the night within the
god’s sanctuary and commune with his celestial father. On the following
day he would sail across the river to the fortress temple of Djamet,
where he resided when he was in Thebes.

The nobles of
the
court followed Pharaoh into the temple, and after them, the city
officials. From a distance, Semerket saw the mayors of Thebes, fat
Paser and thin Pawero, hoisted onto the shoulders of their bearers.
Pawero was rigid and dignified, never deigning to look at the crowds,
but Paser smirked and shouted to the Thebans, who clapped their hands
for joy to see him. They shouted his name and blessed him, and Paser
kissed his fingers to his lips, waving to them as he disappeared behind
the gates of the temple.

Though the day
was not
an official holiday, the Thebans nevertheless made for the pleasure
houses and inns that lined the waterfront. The poor sat at the river’s
edge, laughing and singing together and generally behaving as if
Pharaoh’s arrival were a sanctioned celebration.

Semerket paced
at the
tavern’s door, impatient for his brother’s arrival. He gnawed at a
thumbnail and went back inside, where he discovered that the
tombmakers had been joined by two other men. Their backs were to him,
and he could not readily make them out in the gloom. He could only see
that one was dressed in the fine linen of a noble, while the other wore
filthy rags.

By now the
tavern was
full of strident Thebans whose noise made it impossible to hear
anything the men said. A sudden tap on his shoulder made him spin
around. It was his brother, mouth pursed in disapproval.

“I might have
known
you’d be in here.” Nenry spoke loudly to be heard over the din. “I
thought you said you’d wait out by the tree. Why are you all wrapped up
like that, Ketty?”

Semerket made
a
gesture to quiet him and led Nenry into a corner of the tavern. “Keep
your voice down,” he whispered into his ear. “I’m following someone.”

“Who?” Nenry
whispered
back, eyes wide.

Semerket
pushed him to
the edge of the pillar for a better view of the village’s scribe and
foreman. “Those in the far corner. The big one is named Paneb and the
other Neferhotep.”

Nenry peered
into the
gloom. “No,” he said flatly. “Those are not their names.”

Semerket
blinked at
Nenry’s blithe denial.

“If you’re
going to
follow someone,” Nenry continued, “I really think you should know who
they are. The big one is named Hapi and the little round-shouldered one
calls himself Panouk.”

Semerket’s
mouth fell
open in amazement. He closed it and swallowed.
“What?”

“I’ve seen
them often
at Mayor Paser’s house. They’re engineers.” He turned to Semerket,
smug, but a serving maid’s passing oil lamp briefly illuminated
Semerket’s face in the tavern’s gloom and Nenry’s expression changed to
alarm. “Ketty! Are you ill? What’s happened? You’re so thin!”

Semerket shook
his
head dismissively. “What do you know about them?”

“Let me think.
I first
saw the big fellow, Hapi, on the same day we found out your priestess
was dead. He was in the mayor’s private rooms, early in the morning,
and he was covered in limestone dust from head to toe. I remember how
embarrassed I was for him. Don’t you think that when one stands before
the mayor, one should dress for the occasion?” Whenever Nenry discussed
proper attire, Semerket began to feel as if he were slowly settling
into the ooze at the bottom of the Nile.

“But what do
they
discuss with Paser, Nenry?”

Nenry opened
his mouth
to answer, but stopped. A puzzled look came over his face. “I don’t
really know. It seems the mayor always has some errand for me to run
the moment they…” Nenry’s words trailed off. He looked sharply at his
brother, and his voice became suspicious. “What don’t I know, Ketty?”

Semerket
rubbed his
forehead. “I’m suddenly in the dark, as well. But I do know their names
aren’t Hapi and Panouk. And they’re not engineers—they’re tombmakers.”
He indicated the other two men, the noble and the man in rags. “What
about their guests—do you know them?”

Too many
people had
crowded into the tavern by this time, obscuring Nenry’s view. “Give me
your cloak,” Nenry said. Draping it over his face as Semerket had done,
he affected the unbalanced gait of a drunkard, lurching to the ditch at
the tavern’s corner as if to urinate. As he went past, he peered at the
table where the four sat.

“The one to
the left
is nobody,” Nenry said when he was again at his brother’s side, “some
awful beggar or criminal. His nose and ears are gone—there now, why do
you look at me like that, Ketty?”

Quickly
looking into
the gloom, Semerket saw that it was indeed Noseless who sat with Paneb
and Neferhotep—there could be no doubt. He quickly looked around the
tavern for the beggar’s two companions. If they were there and
recognized him, he and his brother would be in danger. But though the
tavern was crowded and smoky, he became fairly certain the other two
beggars were not with Noseless.

“And the other
one?
The noble?”

“I know him,
yes,”
Nenry said, looking at his hands. His face was beginning to contort
again. “And so do you.”

“I don’t.”

“Yes, you do,
Ketty.
It’s Naia’s husband, Nakht.”

SOMEHOW HE HAD GOTTEN OUTSIDE. Pushing his way
through the still-crowded avenues, he ignored Nenry’s attempts to
restrain him. He soon found himself at the end of the jetty where the
deep-water harbor was dredged. Semerket sat on the pilings, staring out
on the streaming Nile, breathing hard.

Nenry caught
up to
him. “Ketty…”

Semerket shot
his
brother a hate-filled look.

“Don’t blame
me,”
Nenry said, sitting beside him. “You were the one following them, not
I.”

Semerket’s
anger
melted away. “You don’t understand,” he said with a sigh. “I’d thought
I was finally getting over her. There was a whole day, once, when she
didn’t even enter my mind. But seeing Nakht…” He became silent.

The scents of
pepper
and cinnamon emanated from a nearby warehouse, while a recently laden
ship in the berth next to them exuded the musty scents of corn and
emmer wheat. The resulting effluence, mixing with the stale smell of
bilge water, conspired to make Nenry a trifle nauseous. He glanced at
his brother’s furrowed expression. Always believing that it was his
duty to cheer up people, Nenry cast about for something to beguile his
brother from his gloom.

“Well,” he
asked, “do
you want to hear about what I discovered in the bazaars? Isn’t that why
you wanted to see me?”

Semerket
sighed. “I
suppose.”

“I did just as
you
said to do. Picture me, in the robe of a Babylonian merchant. I even
covered my eye with a jeweled patch, if you can believe it, and spoke
in that singsong way they have. ‘Jewels,’ I said. ‘Royal jewels for my
wives back in Babylon.’” He stared at his brother, who still continued
morose. Nenry made his voice even more animated. “I winked at them, you
know, so they’d understand what I meant. But they pulled out some
rubbish even I could tell were fakes. ‘No, no, no!’ I said. ‘Why do you
slander my wives with this whore’s trash?’ I was so insistent they told
me to come back the following day. Well, what could I do but return?
Even though my wife was absolutely against it…”

This at last
piqued
Semerket’s interest. “Why?” he asked, a trifle harshly. “What business
is it of hers where you go?”

“Well,
frankly, she
thinks anything connected with you brings disaster. Not that I blame
her—it usually does.”

Semerket
grunted, not
being able to argue the point, and turned his gaze once more to the
river.

His brother
again took
up his tale. “So the next day I returned to their stalls. But what do
you think? The merchants said I should go away, that they didn’t have
what I wanted. Quite a different reception from the day before, let me
tell you. What made them change their tune like that, do you think?”

Semerket
continued to
stare at the river. “Someone had tipped them off that we knew about the
tomb robberies,” he said dully.

Nenry’s lips
began to
move spasmodically and his face contorted into a quivering mass of tics
and spasms.
“Tomb
robberies?!”
The words were almost a shriek.

Semerket
reached
forward and put his hand over his brother’s mouth. “Calm down. Do you
want everyone to hear?”

Nenry pulled
away.
“You’re going to have to tell me everything, Ketty! If I had known
these things about the jewels, I’d never have gotten involved. You know
that. Tomb robberies!”

So Semerket
related to
Nenry all he had learned from the time he had begun his
investigation—about finding the abandoned campsite within the Great
Place and the ancient ear loop buried in the sands; of his suspicions
concerning the tombmakers and their odd, unfeeling reaction to the
death of Hetephras; of being afraid to eat the village food for fear
that it was drugged—or worse. He told him of the woman Hunro, and how
she had hinted and teased of murky doings in the village. Semerket
described the enmity of Paneb and Neferhotep, who nevertheless still
worked in tandem, and how they often slipped from the village into
Eastern Thebes, though it was forbidden for them to do so. He told of
that day when he’d confronted the beggars outside the village temple,
and now Noseless had shown up at the Elephant Tusk that very night… for
what purpose he did not know. He told his brother, too—whose mouth by
now was hanging slightly ajar—how the Medjays had discovered
Hetephras’s bloody wig on the sands of the Great Place, and how he
suspected that the tombmakers had enlisted the support of Prince
Pentwere to confound and possibly stop the investigation. He related
how he had found the criminal queen’s liver in Paneb’s house and
learned about the mysterious merchant named Amen-meses who had
supposedly sold it to him. Then he told of how the ghost of Hetephras
haunted the village of the tombmakers.

“I’m walking
down a
street of doors, Nenry,” Semerket concluded, his head in his hands. “I
search every house, open all the doors, and when I think I know
everything there is to know, I go to that last door and pull it
open—only to find an entirely new street, with new doors. The more I
know, the less I know. And now, tonight, two new ones have opened—the
door to Mayor Paser’s house, and the one to Naia’s.” He sighed
dejectedly. “The gods are dicing with me, Nenry. There is conspiracy
here.”

Nenry felt a
sudden
great surge of fear for his own position. “How can Mayor Paser have
anything to do with this? For what purpose?”

Semerket stood
up and
headed for the main boulevard. “I don’t know,” he said tiredly. Always
with his brother it was the same question—how did the situation affect
his own career and standing in Thebes?

“Where are you
going,
Ketty?” Nenry said when they reached the main boulevard.

“Where you
must not
follow. Go home, Nenry.”

Semerket was
about to
enter another door that night, one that had in fact opened weeks before
on the day he had run into Noseless and his friends behind the village
temple. He had to go through that door now, no matter how fearsome it
was.

ALONE, SEMERKET FOLLOWEDthe streets that led into the foreign
quarter of Thebes. Here lived the traders, mercenaries, and
émigrés from distant lands who called Egypt their home.
Many were exiles, banished to Egypt because of crimes they had
committed elsewhere. Others were simple tourists who found Egypt too
pleasant to leave.

Above the
streets
where Semerket walked were a profusion of galleries and balustrades, so
close they seemed to touch. Where once they had been brightly painted,
the balconies were now tattered and bleached with age. When a building
fell, the rubble lay in streets fouled with heaps of rotting refuse.

The sordidness
of the
district was compounded by its other inhabitants, the vagrants,
cripples, and mendicants who made up the Kingdom of the Beggars.
Miscreants of every ilk loitered in the doorways, eyes staring after
him as he passed. As he had done with Noseless and his accomplices back
in the tombmakers’ village, he flashed them the secret sign of their
kingdom with his fingers. This time the signal had the desired effect:
seeing the sign, the beggars withdrew again into the dark alcoves and
did not threaten him.

Soon he stood
before
the rotting gates of an abandoned temple. A foul place that good
Thebans avoided, the building had been erected by the Hyksos hundreds
of years earlier. Not many knew that it was the abode of a king.

Semerket
waited at its
pylons. He wanted to do nothing more than flee, but could not.
Stiffening his resolve, he pounded with his fists on the rotting gates,
crying, “Open up! I have business with the king!”

The black door
slowly
opened. A man immense as a god stood in the gloom. Semerket made the
secret sign, and the giant returned the gesture. The man glowered
beneath brows painted in the Egyptian manner, though he was bearded
like a foreigner. Two curved knives crossed at his chest. He beckoned
for Semerket to follow him.

In the temple
courtyard, a strange silence reigned. The temple’s sacred lake had
silted up over the years, but was still connected by some
long-forgotten underground viaduct to the Nile. Now it was an overgrown
oasis of palms and reeds. Semerket followed the giant through the tiny
forest, hearing the slither of asps and scorpions beneath the rot.