City of the Dead (26 page)

I stood and tightened my grasp on the knife hilt. I stood over Rashidi’s unconscious form.

Then I went to a clump of papyrus reeds, taller than my head, and sliced a thin one from its root at the base.

I flipped the priest over onto his belly. He moaned but did not resist.

I pinned his legs with my own, then used the reed to lash his wrists together. Back and forth, around, between, under. I twisted the pliable reed around his soft hands and again thought of the lies and secrets that had been buried in this marsh. Finally, they were coming to an end.

Rashidi was fully conscious now and flopped his head around to remove his face from the mud. I pulled him to his feet and spun him back the way we had come.

A stream of curses called down upon my head flowed from him as though he had practiced them for years. His gods did not answer, and I pushed him ahead of me with no small amusement at the frenzy with which he interceded for my destruction. But the insults and curses soon grew hard to ignore, and I stopped and held my knife to his throat, reminding him who held his life now. “It is not so pleasant to feel like an animal marked for sacrifice, is it Rashidi?”

He said nothing. But there came a crashing through the marsh ahead of us. I pointed the knife in that direction, still standing behind Rashidi, with my other arm wrapped round his shoulder.

Two figures burst through the reeds and drew to a stop.

Ahmose? Khufu?

“Hemi!” Ahmose yelled. “What are you doing?”

“He is going to kill me,” Rashidi said, his voice the whimper of the innocent. “Help me.”

Khufu moved toward me, hand upraised. “Hemi, lower the knife. This man is a priest of the gods. You cannot—”

“You are always ready to think the worst of me, aren’t you, Khufu? After all these years.” I dropped my arm and stepped to Rashidi’s side, retaining my hold on his arm.

Ahmose ran a hand over his head. “Hemi, let the priest go. We can settle this another way.”

“There is nothing to settle, Ahmose. If you would but hear the truth.” I looked at the two of them. “Why are you here? How did you find us?”

“Sen,” Ahmose said. “He showed us Rashidi’s message. We knew you would come to the marsh.”

“Then you know he took Neferet, that he wanted me to follow so he could kill us both.”

Khufu crossed his arms over his muscular chest. “I know only that the two of you have unfinished business.” His voice seemed to bounce around the clearing in which we stood.

Rashidi took advantage of this moment of ambiguity. “Your Majesty, Beloved of Horus, you know that I would do nothing to bring disorder to Egypt. I sought justice alone, for the death of Amunet.”

Khufu’s face passed from stern tyrant to uncertain young man.

I shook Rashidi by the arm. “Justice? You think that the deaths of the others brought justice?”

Rashidi laughed. “You are a fool, Hemiunu. A fool. I—”

A misplaced yet familiar sound buzzed through the marsh. The sound of sliced air, and then the
thwump
of a target well struck. Rashidi turned his eyes to me, a look of surprise on his features. He lowered his head to examine his chest. An arrow had buried itself there, deep and true.

Ahmose and Khufu shouted and turned together. Behind them, Tamit stood, bowstring still vibrating at her shoulder.

She held there only a moment, then reached for another arrow.

“Tamit, hold!” Khufu yelled. “What are you doing?”

“The arrow was meant for Hemi,” she called. “I will not miss again.” She nocked another and lifted the bow.

Beside me, Rashidi still stared at me. And then the staring eyes clouded with the confusion of death, and his legs failed him. I loosed my grip on his arm. He fell to the ground at my feet.

“No!” It was another voice, from behind Tamit still. She turned, arrow ready.

Neferet held up her hands as a shield. Her left arm was red with blood.

My breath caught in my chest.

“Tamit,” Neferet said. “It was Rashidi who forced me here. To kill me. And to kill Hemi. It was Rashidi. Hemi rescued me.”

Tamit swung her bow back toward me. “That doesn’t matter to me,” she said. “For Hemi killed my sister.” She closed one eye and stilled her posture.

“No!” It was Khufu’s shout this time. “I killed her! I killed Amunet!”

The marsh quieted at the shout of confession, as though it had waited many years to hear it, and Khufu’s chest heaved as though he had run many miles to tell it.

Tamit’s bow faltered, then lowered. “You?”

He turned to her, the sorrow of a decade in his eyes. “I—it was an accident, Tamit. I swear upon the life of the gods.”

Tamit dropped the bow to her side, and her voice was dry, like desert sand. “How?”

Khufu pressed his fingers into his eyes. When he spoke, it was with the voice of a younger man, one who had not yet ascended the throne of his father.

“She was so lovely. You know that. And Merit.” His voice wavered. “Merit loved another.”

I looked to Neferet. She wandered closer, her eyes on the king.

“We went together that day, into the marsh to raise the birds. We were laughing, teasing. She—she let me—” He stopped and lifted his head. The agony on his face broke my heart.

“Say it,” Tamit whispered. “Say the words.” The repetition of Rashidi’s demand chilled me.

Khufu was crying now. My mouth had grown dry, and I licked at cracking lips. “She let me kiss her,” Khufu said. “Let me—touch her. And I could think of nothing but the way that Merit looked at Hemi, not me. And I wanted to hurt Merit like she had hurt me. To show her that I could love another.” His chest jerked in sobs he tried to suppress. “I thought of nothing but my own pain, of nothing but myself. I—I forced her to the ground. She knew, she could see it on my face, what I wanted. And she fought me.” Khufu’s eyes drifted to the sky at his left as though he had slipped back to that day. “‘I am the future king of Egypt,’ I told her. ‘Nothing can be refused the prince of the blood.’ But she spat in my face and told me that I was no king yet and she would not have me. My anger— I was so angry. I struck her. She beat her fists at me, and I struck her again. Harder.”

He lowered his eyes to me, as though he must make his confession to me alone. I felt my own sorrow rise, hot and full of regret, to my face and my eyes. Khufu saw my empathy and it seemed to destroy his resolve to remain in control. He sobbed in full now and dropped to his knees in the marsh. “I did not mean to kill her. I am sorry. So sorry.” He fell forward, hands in the mud, like a dog waiting to be whipped. “I never meant—I never—” His voice trailed off to an unintelligible whisper.

I swallowed and looked to Ahmose.

He stared at me. The look of a man whose world has been turned on its head. “But I saw you,” he said. “I saw you with her. Dead in your arms.”

Tamit’s head whipped toward me.

“Yes.” I wiped at the tears that coursed down my own face and onto my chest. “And I have lived with the shame of it these many years. I found her there, where Khufu had left her. I found her, and
I suspected what had happened.” I rubbed my forehead and risked a look at Neferet. Her expression did not condemn me. Not yet. “I knew that Khufu would soon be king. And that I would be grand vizier. I feared that none of that would come to pass if I told what I knew. And so I left her there.” I looked to Tamit. The bow had slipped from her fingers and lay at her feet. Her face had whitened, and her red-painted lips looked like a bloody gash across her face. “I left her there, where the animals could reach her. For the sake of my own ambition.” The rest remained unspoken. We all knew what my actions had meant.

Ahmose cried out. With hands to his head, he turned a slow circle where he stood. Khufu fell to a sitting position on the ground.

“All of this is my fault,” Ahmose said, with such pain I had never heard in his voice.

“Ahmose, you are perhaps the only innocent one among us!” I said.

“No, no, no,” he said. “Do you not see? It was I who went to Rashidi. I told him my suspicions. I caused him to take his revenge, to kill the others.” He leaned over, hands upon his knees, and heaved. Neferet slipped behind him and put a gentle hand on his back.

“All these years,” Ahmose said, wiping at his eyes. “All of these wasted years.” He turned grief-stricken eyes to me. “Thinking that you killed Amunet. That you somehow convinced Khufu to name you grand vizier anyway.”

I now saw in my brother’s eyes the realization that his distrust had kept us apart for so long.

The tension that had held us all apart seemed to break in that moment. I went to my brother, who stood and fell upon me with the regret and sorrow of the years and embraced me for the first
time since we were children. “Hemi,” he cried. “Hemi, I am so sorry.”

I wrapped my arms around him and wept on his shoulder for the lost years. It was good, very good. “It is behind us now, Ahmose. All of it is behind us.”

We pulled apart. Khufu climbed to his feet.

Tamit still seemed to be paralyzed with shock. “She never would have harmed anyone,” she whispered, her dark eyes trained on Khufu. “It should have been Merit that day, not my sister.” Khufu looked away.

I went to Neferet, who tried to smile but who seemed pale herself. “Let me see it,” I said and reached for her arm.

“It hurts a bit,” she said. And then she fainted.

* * *

I carried Neferet through the marsh. Ahmose and Khufu transported Rashidi’s body between them. Tamit trailed behind.

We passed the group of hunters, trapping birds by pulling the four corners of a spread net. Without a word, Tamit passed the bow to one of them, and I realized she must have procured it as she came through the marsh with Ahmose and Khufu.

The bleeding had been stanched in Neferet’s arm. The wound did not threaten her life with blood loss, but it had weakened her. She barely stirred in my arms. I tried not to remember that it was I who injured her. I wished for water to wash the wound and clean rags to bind it, but the marsh was not the place for such ministrations.

We walked in silence, each of us captured by our own thoughts. After some time, we reached the skiff that the other three had used to reach us from a larger boat left in the wider river.

“Take the women,” Ahmose said to me. “Put them on the boat and come back for us.”

I did not argue. I placed Neferet carefully on the mat of reeds bundled together with a threefold rope. Tamit sat beside her without speaking. I used the pole to propel us southward.

We reached Pharaoh’s sailing barque quickly. I carried Neferet onto the boat with care and laid her on a woven mat in the cabin. “If she wakes, Tamit, tell her I will return very soon.”

Tamit turned her eyes to me but said nothing. I realized she had not spoken to me since Khufu’s confession in the marsh.

I retrieved Ahmose and Khufu, and we laid Rashidi’s body on the skiff. The king and my brother had removed the arrow while I had taken the women and had closed the priest’s eyes. He lay reposed, as if in sleep, if not for the open wound on his chest.

Ahmose took the pole from me. I gave it up willingly and sank to the floor of the skiff. The warm smell of blood and marsh floated around my senses.

We left the marsh then. Birds floated overhead, their lazy calls unaware of any danger. I felt myself pulling away from the marsh with more than my body alone. It was as though some part of my heart had remained here all these years and was finally going home.

Back at Pharaoh’s boat, I returned to Neferet. She opened her eyes and blinked at me once, then returned to sleep. I washed her arm and neck with water the oarsmen had brought to drink and bound her arm with linen torn from the inner folds of my skirt.

Tamit sat beside us watching my every movement.

Neferet awoke and whispered to me that she was cold. I carried her out of the cabin, into the sunlight. Tamit followed.

I laid Neferet on the deck, and Tamit pushed between us. “Let me tend to the peasant,” she said. “It is a woman’s job.” She bent to Neferet’s side.

I watched for a moment, then joined Ahmose and Khufu in the prow, where they watched our progress toward Giza.

The journey was swift in the king’s boat. We flew upriver toward the plateau, and it seemed only moments before I could see my pyramid on the horizon.

The sight of it caused me to breathe deeply and to realize that something had changed within me. Something I could not identify.

I looked back to Neferet. She was awake now and talking with Tamit. I saw her smile at the other woman and smiled myself. It would not surprise me if she had claimed Tamit for a friend by the time we reached the harbor.

And then suddenly my legs would not hold me. I turned to the other men, then sank to a bench at the side of the boat and leaned my back against the side. My arms and shoulders felt as though I alone had dragged the weight of a hundred quarry blocks up the pyramid ramps.

I closed my eyes and knew nothing more until we had docked.

I awakened to see a big man pacing the quay, waiting for the boat to be moored. The moment we had been dragged in, Sen was on the boat and at Neferet’s side. She patted his hand and nodded. He scooped her up and pushed past me with a look I could not read.

We disembarked and litters awaited us. Axum stood nearby and nodded to me with a trace of a smile on his lips. I pondered that it was a good thing to return with the king.

I crossed the dock to Neferet and Sen. He was placing her carefully onto the chair inside the box. She blinked at me through hazy eyes and smiled.

“Not now, Grand Vizier,” Sen said. “She has had enough for one day, I believe. Let her rest.” His voice softened. “And rest yourself,” he said. “Come tomorrow. And we will speak of the future.”

I thought this wise advice and let Pharaoh’s slaves carry me home.

Tomorrow. The future.

I awoke the next morning and felt disoriented in my own bed. It seemed unreal that I should wake here, healthy and whole and free. I bathed quickly and dressed. I then reached to the back of my neck, untied the knotted cord that hung there, and set Merit’s gold ankh on the table beside my bed.

Then I set out for the workmen’s village.

The half-finished pyramid loomed behind me, already busy with laborers. I would get there eventually. I had other business to attend first.

I entered through the village gate this time, without fear of recognition. I welcomed it, in fact, and greeted each person I passed with a smile and their name if I recalled it. No doubt the laborers passing through on their way to the pyramid thought I had gone mad. Surely they had heard that the Scourge of Anubis was no more.

I reached Sen’s house and called through the door. My overseer of constructions was still at home. He greeted me in the passageway to the courtyard. “What are you doing here?” he asked with a smile.

I laughed. “You promised we would speak of the future today.”

Sen’s smile faltered. “But I thought you would be with Neferet.”

“She is not here?” My heart thudded with disappointment.

“I don’t understand,” Sen said. “She told me that the king had called you both to the palace.”

“Neferet told you that?”

Sen shook his head and looked past me to the open door. “No. That animal woman. Tamit.”

“Tamit was here?”

“Yes.” Sen studied me like I was a puzzle. “She came at dawn and said that the king had requested Neferet’s presence in the palace. Something about the priest and his wanting to show his gratitude. I—I thought she said that you were to be there too.”

I frowned. “I heard nothing of it. But perhaps I left before I was summoned. I will find her at the palace then. And later,” I smiled at him, “we will have that talk.” I left his home, pushing away the now-practiced sense of foreboding that tried to build in my chest.

An hour later, the feeling had only grown.

Neferet was not in the palace. Nor Tamit. Khufu knew nothing about Tamit’s message. He was barely arisen from his bed and had summoned no one.

Tamit was not in her home. Nor was her son. “The boy has gone to stay awhile with the prince of the blood,” Tamit’s head slave told me at the door of her home. A strange expression crossed his face.

“Why?”

The slave opened his mouth, closed it, then opened it again. “So that the two of you could be together.”

“Who?”

“You and the princess,” he said, with a tone of growing impatience at my stupidity. “After you are married.”

“Married?” My own mouth dropped open.

The slave took a deep breath and stared me down. “The princess left in the night, taking many of her favorite belongings with her. I thought she went to your home.”

“My home?” I knew that my repetitions of his words seemed foolish, but I seemed barely able to make sense of the words to repeat them. “Why did you think she went to my home?”

“She said that you and she were to be joined forever, that you would live together in a chamber all your own, for eternity.”

A strange buzzing began at the base of my neck. “Did she have anyone with her? A girl?”

The slave shook his head. “No, she left in the darkness. Alone.”

I left him standing in the doorway, no doubt still puzzled.

A chamber all our own. For all eternity.

By the gods, the woman had gone mad.

I raced from Tamit’s house, along the path to the entrance of the royal estate, then up the plateau toward the pyramid.

The structure crawled with laborers, as usual, and around the base hundreds of stonemasons worked to dress the stones that would soon travel upward. Calls of managers to their gangs drifted down toward me. My breath soon came in short gasps as I propelled myself up the hill.

The truth about Amunet, about Rashidi—it must have driven Tamit to this madness. She wished to die now. And she wanted me to join her. Why she had taken Neferet, I could not fathom.

She has always had a certain coldness about her.

I remembered the way she had said that it should have been Merit who drowned in the marsh instead of her sister. Even after Mentu was murdered, she still threw insults at him, calling his unattractive features beastly, as if to draw attention to the way in which he had died in the slaughterhouse.

My steps slowed, then stopped.

And Ebo. She had told me that he was too loyal. Like a pet. An animal. Ebo, who had died from the drug given to animals in the temple.

I looked up to the pyramid, and it was as if missing parts of a whole fell into place with each new memory.

Rashidi in the marsh, telling me I was a fool. That I still did not understand the truth. He was about to say more when he was silenced by Tamit’s arrow. The supposedly misplaced arrow of an expert archer.

I ran now, my blood boiling in my veins. Past the stone meeting table where I should have been talking with my overseers. Past the work gang fixing ropes around a new block, preparing to haul it up the ramp.

I fled up the ramp myself, to the entrance of the pyramid on the north side, not far below the topmost course.

A supervisor watched me come, frowned as I passed him, and called after me when I grabbed a small torch and disappeared into the stone.

The corridor I had created to lead to the subterranean burial chamber descended for two hundred cubits at a steep incline of a seqed of two cubits. I used the footholds as best I could, but my anxiety caused me to slip more than climb down. Not far down the corridor, I reached the intersecting ascending corridor, which led
upward to the burial chambers Khufu had decided should be built above ground. The descending corridor continued.

Down and down I went, hunched over to barely more than half my height, as though falling into the underworld. Behind and far above me, the sunlight faded until it seemed but a faraway star in a black sky.

The awful oppressiveness of countless tons of stone threatened to drive me to madness, and the heavy air seemed thick with dust.

Finally, deep in the bedrock of the Giza plateau, the corridor leveled to horizontal, to a passageway that forced me forward on my hands and knees. I left the torch in the chamber behind me, led now by another light in the chamber ahead. A light that held both relief and terror for me.

I crawled for twenty cubits, until the tunnel finally opened up and I had breached the underground chamber, which was lit by a small oil lamp set on the floor near the wall. I stood painfully and looked around me.

A horrible sliding sound came from behind. I spun in time to see the blocking stone crash to the floor of the chamber. Beside it, Tamit stood holding the release rope.

Neither of us spoke. We only looked at each other.

And then I pulled my gaze away to scan the chamber. It was a huge room and twice the height of a man. In the center of the chamber was a deep square pit.

“Where is she? Where is Neferet?” Then I saw her on the floor, laid out on the far side of the chamber, her arms crossed on her chest in the repose of death. “What have you done?” I ran to Neferet and dropped at her side. In the darkness I could not see if
she was injured. A strange smell hovered about her. It took me only a moment to recognize the drug used to kill Ebo.

“She is only sleeping,” Tamit said. “I gave her a small amount.”

I stood and turned to face her. “You? All of this was you?”

I noticed now that the chamber was not empty. The walls were lined with household goods, food and wine jugs, small lamps, jewelry and clothes. “Why? How did you get these things in here?” My voice was hollow and dead in the earthbound chamber.

She smiled and approached me. “For us, Hemi. I brought all of it for us.” She put her hands on my chest and I pulled away. She frowned. “It was not easy. I had to lower it all down.” She pointed to a large basket, with a long rope strung through its handles. “It took most of the night. And getting her down here,” she jabbed a finger at Neferet, “was not easy, either.”

“Why, Tamit? I don’t understand any of this.”

Her eyes narrowed and she touched my chest again. I let her alone, hoping she would give me answers.

“Are you still so unaware of your own charms, Hemi? You never notice the trail of women who follow you around, hoping for your attention, do you? The same way you never noticed me.”

“You have always flirted with everyone, Tamit.”

She rubbed her fingers along my shoulders. “Only when you were present, Hemi. Only for you. All those years ago, when I used to throw myself at your brother. He knew better. He knew I only tried to make you jealous. But then, you would not have me. And I had to marry. Thankfully, my husband did not live long.”

Her hands ran up to the back of my head, raising gooseflesh on my skin.

“But Merit? And Mentu? Ebo?”

She sighed and turned away. “Nothing turned out as I planned. I was confused.” She crossed to the other side of the chamber and picked up a string of colored stones. The turquoise caught the light and glowed like cats’ eyes. “When Rashidi told me that you killed Amunet, I—I am afraid that all the passion I felt for you turned to rage. I found that as much as I had wanted you before, now I only wanted you to pay. For murdering my sister, for rejecting me. I thought at first I would kill you.” She ran the stones through her fingers. “But then I wanted you to suffer first. And so I killed the others and arranged to have you blamed.”

“You gave money to Ebo and said that it was from me.”

She turned and smiled. “Yes. And I told Rashidi that you and Mentu had argued before he died.”

“And the masks?”

“I had them specially commissioned.”

“The artist—”

She waved a hand. “He could not be left to tell who had hired him.”

“But why? Why did you cover their faces?”

Tamit stroked the jewels at her throat. “It has always been about secrets, hasn’t it, Hemi. Secrets, deception, lies. Masks seemed … appropriate.”

“And did you really think I would take my own life, as Khufu ordered?”

She bit her lip. “I was disappointed that he gave you that choice. I thought surely he would execute you since you killed his wife. I underestimated his esteem for you.” She came back to stand before me and lifted her chin to look into my eyes. I remained still, watching her painted lips.

“And then you escaped,” she said, “and ruined my plan. I knew that if you found Rashidi, he would not remain silent for long. He knew it was I who killed them.” She touched my lips with her fingers. “When Khufu told us that it was he who killed my sister, I realized that my feelings for you had not been false, and I knew then that I must have you.”

“But Khufu—”

“What can I do to raise my hand against a god?” She stood on her toes and kissed my lips. “And now at last,” she said, “you have the truth.” She turned brightly to her belongings, stacked against the chamber wall, and began arranging them as though this were her home.

The truth
. It pounded against the walls of my heart, screaming at me. I had sought justice. Neferet stirred and moaned, and I wondered if she would now deny that justice and truth existed. But I knew she would not deny it. Nor could I.

In that moment, under the perfect angles of the pyramid, I acknowledged what I had always known: Order exists. It is in the math. It is in the stars. It is even in the music. Order and, therefore, truth and justice are chiseled into the bedrock of the earth.

But with justice, I knew, came condemnation. There could be no other honest conclusion. I had built my life one layer at a time, with precision. Like the pyramid, I had tried to be perfect in order to reach the gods. But I had done too much to violate order and truth to ever achieve perfection. I suspected that even the tools I used to measure my life were faulty. Perhaps I didn’t even know what perfection was.

Yet I knew my heart could not be weighed and found innocent. I was nothing more than a pyramid of my own construction, with
dark and hidden chambers and full of death. And only the atonement offered by a merciful god could make me righteous.

All of this I realized in the breath of a moment, while Tamit went about arranging her household. She now cut my revelations short by turning back to me, the lamp in her hands. “It is time,” she said.

“Time for what?” I inched closer to the side of the chamber where Neferet lay.

“I have brought all we need, Hemi,” she extended a hand toward her things. “Everything for the afterlife. Even a peasant to serve us. But you did not think I would leave us here to die slowly, did you?”

For the first time since I entered the chamber, I felt the tickle of panic at the base of my spine. “Tamit, think of your son.”

“He will be well cared for,” she said. “And someday, perhaps he will be Kawab’s grand vizier.” She stepped to the edge of the square pit at the center of the chamber and held the burning oil lamp aloft.

“What are you doing?”

“It will not take long,” she said. And she dropped the lamp.

I watched it tumble into the dark pit, lighting the sides as it fell. When it hit the bottom, it exploded into a ball of fire.

Tamit had filled the pit with straw and dried grasses. The pile blazed like an altar sacrifice, blinding me. I backed away. The fire would soon devour the air inside the chamber. The smoke would likely kill us before we succumbed to the flames.

“Come to me, Hemi,” she said, holding out her hands. “Come and lay beside me. We did not live our lives together. But we can enter the afterlife together.”

I glanced at the blocked entrance to the chamber. I could lift the stone momentarily, I thought.

Tamit followed my look. “You could escape, Hemi,” she said. “But not with her.”

Neferet was now sitting up and looking at me in confusion.

Tamit was right. I could not lift the stone and run under it with Neferet in my arms.

My eyes teared with the smoke. Tamit coughed, and my lungs grew ashy a moment later.

Without another thought, I leaped into the burning pit.