Year of the Hyenas (42 page)

A day before,
the
bodies of Neferhotep and Hunro had been recovered. Qar had ordered the
corpses, which were damaged almost beyond recognition, taken to the
House of Purification. Though he could have prevented it, he allowed
Neferhotep to be mummified. As Qar told Semerket—he did his duty, but
was no lion. As for Hunro, Semerket himself had volunteered to provide
a tomb for her afterlife. He had no wish to see her buried next to a
man whom she had so detested and who had engineered her terrible death.

Another
division of
soldiers labored in the Great Place, attempting to recover as much of
the stolen treasure as possible. But the wild river that had washed
through the canyons of the Great Place like a gigantic purge had
scattered the gold far through the ravines and gullies. Even the
furtive tomb of the accursed Amen-meses had been flooded, being built
so low into the mountain. What desecrators from other times had
overlooked, the sands, rock, and grit that had broken through its
weakened doors destroyed. The gesso coating on the limestone had peeled
away to mix with the churning waters, congealing like rock around the
treasure that remained. Months would be needed to recover it all.

But for now,
the
Medjays had finally removed the last bit of trash from Paneb’s cellar.
Qar and Semerket stared at the brick wall that had been revealed.

Semerket began
tapping
at the bricks, pushing on them to see if any of them could be
dislodged. Qar did the same, and for many minutes they worked in
silence.

“Here,
Semerket!” said
Qar. He had found a loose brick at the wall’s farthest corner.
Carefully he drew it out. Semerket brought a candle near. The flame’s
light revealed a large niche that extended almost a cubit into the
earth beyond.

And there it
was, just
as he had known it would be: a long object wrapped in a cloth. Qar
gingerly removed it from its hiding place and handed it over to
Semerket.

It was a
moment before
Semerket could find the strength to uncover it. Because his legs and
hands were shaking, Semerket was forced to sit down on the nearby
stairs. The gash in his forehead throbbed. Breathing deeply, summoning
his resolve, he at last unwrapped the object.

He stared for
a moment.

Semerket
abruptly laid
the thing down, and thrust himself into the room’s corner, bringing up
bile. Qar went upstairs, returning with a jug of water, and Semerket
rinsed his mouth.

He looked at
Qar
sideways, and nodded. “I’ll see them now,” he said.

Paneb and
Rami, tired
but wary, faced Semerket and Qar in the village kitchens. They had been
brought at Qar’s command from the Medjays’ jail, where all the village
elders were crowded together. He had brought the two of them, father
and son, to these kitchens because he could not endure Khepura’s
continuous weeping and wailing in the jail cell.

Semerket spoke
to the
point, without greeting. “Who first came to Neferhotep with the idea of
robbing the tombs? Was it Pentwere, Paser? Who?”

Despite the
fact that
he had lost everything, Paneb was still all dissimulation. “You make no
sense, Semerket, as always,” he said, eyes indignant.

“What had they
promised the tombmakers? Gold, treasure? Freedom to leave the
village—what?” His voice became harsh. “It must have been something
worthwhile, Paneb, to have killed Hetephras over it.”

Paneb’s head
snapped
up, startled. “She was my beloved aunt!” he said automatically. “How
can you accuse me of… A foreigner or vagrant—”

Semerket
reached for
the object he had found in Paneb’s cellar, and unwrapped it. It was an
axe from the Hittite nation. Into its haft of carved citrus wood was
fitted a blade of rarest blue metal, the hardest known on earth. Yet
the blade was nevertheless damaged, for a chip was missing from its
lethally sharp edge.

“Do you want
to tell
us about this weapon, Master Foreman?” Semerket asked softly.

At the sight
of it,
Paneb buried his face in his arms, shaking his head.

“What about
you, Rami?”

The boy looked
in
horror at the axe, and then turned pleading eyes on the foreman.
“Paneb—?”

“Leave him
alone!”
Paneb shouted, rising to his feet, his chains ringing. His face was
ravaged by anguish. “He and I know nothing—
nothing!”

Paneb fell
silent when
Semerket brought out a tiny wedge of blue-black metal from his sash.
Holding the Hittite axe’s blade so that Paneb could see, he fitted the
two pieces together so that not even the faintest trace of light shone
between them.

Paneb stared.
“Where…?”

“A gift from
Hetephras,” Semerket explained. “From the House of Purification. The
Ripper Up found it when he pulled her brain from her skull with a hook.”

Paneb’s eyes
rolled
into his forehead and he began to teeter on his feet, as though he
would faint. His breath came in large gulps.

Semerket and
Qar
caught him, staggering beneath his weight, and placed him in a heap
against the wall.

“Get him some
wine,”
said Semerket.

Qar brought a
jug from
the storeroom and held it to Paneb’s lips. It was a moment before the
vapors hit him. He recoiled a bit, stiffening, but then drank
gratefully.

“Do you want
to know
what I think happened?” Semerket asked gently. Paneb only looked away.

“She was
murdered on
the first morning of the Osiris Festival, correct? At dawn, she had to
make the offerings at the shrine. It’s a hard walk from here—I know;
I’ve walked it. Rami was supposed to accompany her. Isn’t that true?”

“Y-yes,” the
boy
muttered. “But I overslept that morning. She left without me.”

“She left
without you,
yes, but you hadn’t overslept. In fact, you were somewhere else
entirely. Would you like to tell me where?”

His low voice
and
genuine compassion seemed to confound the boy. The resentment in Rami’s
eyes slowly dissipated. He only shook his head and stared at the ground.

Sighing,
Semerket
began to speak once again. “There was no moon the night before—I
checked the records. Earlier that evening you had robbed a tomb, one
that was located near the path that Hetephras would take. You must have
been late in leaving it, if I’m guessing correctly? But you never
expected her to actually show up—not with Rami in the tomb beside you.”

Semerket saw
that
Paneb’s face was growing ruddier by the moment, and that tears were
welling in his eyes.

“Say that I’m
wrong!”
challenged Semerket harshly.

But father and
son
remained silent, heads bowed in shame.

“Hetephras
discovered
you. It’s as simple as that. And you killed her. Your ‘beloved aunt’
got in your way, and you cut her down. She was murdered by the man she
had taken in as a child. You had no more thought for her than for a
dog. With a couple of blows from your axe it was done, over.”

“It wasn’t
like that,”
Paneb said harshly. Rami cradled his head in his hands. Qar and
Semerket stared at one another. Qar looked suddenly old, thought
Semerket. His own head throbbed and he could only imagine what kind of
ancient mummy he himself resembled.

“Tell me what
it
was
like…”

Paneb shook
his head.

“If you won’t
save
yourself,” Semerket said, staring straight into the foreman’s gold
eyes, “will you not save your son here?”

Their eyes
met.
Semerket nodded, a promise. With a great sigh, Paneb regarded Semerket
with both loathing and respect. “All right,” he said.

Semerket
leaned
forward. “Tell me first, Paneb—what could the old lady have seen that
morning?” he asked. “Why did you have to kill her? She was
blind
.”

“I—I was in a
panic.
We’d just come out of the tomb, to find her there. She just kept
saying, over and over again, ‘I see you! I know who you are!’ Who could
tell what she really saw, what she meant? All the men were looking to
me to do something.” He swallowed tightly. “I had a Horus mask in my
hands, I remember, from the tomb. I went to her and raised my axe. It
was the only thing I could think of doing to silence her. But when I
raised it, she looked up at me as if it were the happiest moment of her
life. I almost couldn’t do it then. But…” Paneb wiped his eyes with the
heel of his hand.

“And then you
cast her
body into the Nile,” Semerket prompted.

Paneb nodded
his head,
breathing heavily to fight back more tears. “We thought if the
crocodiles would take her, she’d go directly to heaven. That’s what the
priests say, anyway.” He wiped at his nose. “Then we heard that her
body had been found on the eastern side of the river. Even that was a
blessing, we told each other, because then Paser would find a way to
cover it up.” He raised his head and stared at Semerket. “But then you
came to the village.”

“Yes,”
Semerket said
bitterly. “Sent to make a hash of everything. I was a drunk, who
couldn’t even find his own backside. ‘A vagrant or a foreigner did it,’
you all said.”

Paneb nodded.
“If
everyone told you the same story, we thought, you’d go away to look for
a make-believe stranger. It was Neferhotep’s idea.”

“Did they get
to him
first? Was it Nef who brought up the idea of robbing the tombs?”

Paneb’s face
became
flushed with anger, and he nodded. “Yes. He said we could help build a
new era in Egypt, get our empire back. We’d all be made into nobles, he
promised, with estates. The queen had promised him—and we believed it.”

“But you two
fell out.
I heard you fighting that day in Hetephras’s tomb. You almost killed
him then, didn’t you?”

Paneb again
nodded.
“Because he kept pushing. Every tomb was to be the last one, he said,
but it never was. Nef told us that Queen Tiya was protecting us through
her spells and enchantments. But when Hetephras died, it changed
everything. I didn’t believe him anymore. I began to hate him, for what
he’d brought upon our village, for what I was forced to do. We were
artists—we didn’t need titles or riches. That was his dream, not ours.”

Semerket
looked at
Rami then. “Did you take your mother’s jewels, as Amenhoteb’s oracle
said?”

Rami nodded
unwillingly.

“Why?”

“Because
Neferhotep
and Khepura came to me the night before. They said my mother was a…
that she was a bad woman, and that everyone would know she was one
because you had convinced her to tell the authorities how she got the
jewels. I knew where they were hidden.”

Semerket
sighed, once
again sorry for the role he had played in Hunro’s sad life. “Where are
the jewels now?”

The boy shook
his
head. “I don’t know. I gave them to my fa— to Neferhotep.”

That was all
Semerket
asked. At his gesture, Qar took them once again to the Medjay jail.
Semerket was left alone in the kitchens to consider what they had said.

It was all a
terrible
family tragedy, he thought—two of them, in fact. One lone murder of a
minor priestess in the desert had destroyed a family of artists, and
another family living in a palace. In the end, family was the center of
everything that was both good and bad in this world, he thought.

Before he left
the
village, Semerket went a final time to Hetephras’s home to retrieve the
body of her cat, Sukis. He had promised the old lady’s spirit—promised
himself, really—that the animal would be mummified and laid beside the
old priestess in her tomb. But when he searched the house, the cat’s
body was missing. He found the cloth that he had wrapped Sukis in after
she died—but no corpse. Puzzled, he sat upon the stone bench and wadded
the cloth in his hands. From its folds a small metallic object of
bright silver clattered to the ground.

It was a small
figure
of a god. He stared at it. The thing was so small it fit in the palm of
his hand, an image of a boy—a prince. On the side of his head was a
braided side lock, while his lips were twisted into a mischievous
smile. The cartouche at his feet bore the single name of “Khons.”

Semerket
remembered
how the nieces of the weaver Yunet had told him that the moon god Khons
was Hetephras’s special patron, the god whom she most adored. In
addition to the moon, Khons was also the god of time—and of games. And
he looked remarkably like the prince whom Semerket had met in the
desert, on his very first foray into the Great Place. “God-skin,” he
had told Semerket, “is made there.” It had been the first indication of
what the solution to the priestess’s murder might be. He was the lad
who had pointed out Hetephras’s battered wig to the Medjays… and the
one who had pulled him to safety from the raging torrent.

Semerket fled
quickly
from Hetephras’s house. All the way back to Eastern Thebes he said
nothing, nor did he speak a word to anyone at his brother’s home that
entire evening. He simply kept looking at the tiny silver figure,
shaking his head and shivering.

“HAVE YOU CONSIDEREDwhat your reward will
be, Truth-Teller?”

Keeping his
word to
Toh, Semerket had returned to Djamet to meet with Pharaoh Ramses III.
They met on a palace terrace overlooking the Nile. Ramses reclined on a
couch, his midsection tightly bandaged. On one side of him stood the
crown prince; on the other was Vizier Toh. The usual throng of
courtiers and servants was kept far away that day.

Since the
rains,
spring had appeared quickly in Egypt. The hills and cliffs around
Djamet were brushed with the bright tints of wildflowers, while the
fields next to the river were hazed with a faint fringe of green, emmer
wheat thrusting up in the good black earth. Though it was the season
for life renewed, on that terrace in Djamet Temple it was death that
made a home. Pharaoh’s bandages were soaked with his blood, and his
breathing was labored.