Day of the False King (15 page)

As the lamp guttered fitfully in its niche,
he turned over to regard the woman lying beside him. She stared back
with slanted green eyes that were not Naia’s. Aneku saw the lights that
whirled and crashed in Semerket’s black glance, and her hand slipped
slowly down beneath the blankets.

“Don’t,” he said, wincing at her touch.

“Why not? Don’t you think I recognize that
look in a man’s eyes?”

“That’s not why I took you from the temple.
No one will ever force you again.”

“And if
I
choose…?”

He sat up, brushing away her hand and
turning his back on her. “Choose another.”

She reached out to stroke his shoulders,
dragging the tips of her nails down his slim, muscular back. “What’s
wrong, Semerket?” she asked. “Why do you turn away? Is it because of
what I had to do at Ishtar’s house?”

He said nothing, for his tongue clung
inertly to his palate.

She pressed her lips to the small of his
back. “Is it because of Naia?”

Semerket nodded.

Aneku reached around him. “She’s no longer
among the living, Semerket. You and I won’t dishonor her with what we
do.”

“I said no.”

Aneku fell back against a cushion,
uncertain, making excuses for his indifference. “I — I can understand
how you must take some time to accept it. After coming all that way
from Egypt, it must be heartbreaking to discover that she’s —”

He interrupted her curtly, turning to stare
at her. “Did you see it happen?”

“What?”

“Did you
see
Naia killed?”

“How could I? I told you, I was in Eshnunna
when I heard about the raid.”

“Yes. You said how the bandits stormed the
plantation, how everyone there was slaughtered, even the prince and
princess from Elam.” He turned to face her. “But how is it I received a
message from Rami, asking for my help? Wasn’t he supposed to have died
there, too?”

Aneku sat up in the dark. “Rami’s alive?”

He sighed. “Why do you think I came?”

Semerket rose from the bed then, clutching
the woolen blanket to him, leaning against the wall so that he could
look out through the door leading to the terrace. Silver light already
suffused the eastern horizon. Semerket felt the faint half-flush of its
heat rising in the breezes that stroked his body.

“Until I see her corpse for myself, I’ll go
on believing she’s alive, that she escaped along with Rami. I must.”

After a moment, he heard her thin, bitter
chuckle.

“Why do you laugh?” he asked.

“How perverse it all is. After all those men
I’ve slept with at the temple, the only one I’d freely give myself to
won’t have me.” She sighed, laying her face upon her outstretched arm.
“What’s to become of me, then?”

“What do you mean?”

“I belong to you. You bought me from the
Ishtar eunuchs. You have the deed that says I’m yours.”

He shook his head. “You belong to yourself.
I’ll go to the authorities today and declare you a free woman. You can
do what you want to after that.”

Instead of showing gratitude, Aneku’s eyes
became stormy. “But where shall I go? What shall I do?” Her voice was
edged with incipient panic. “You don’t mean to abandon me here, do you?
Better to have left me at the temple, then — at least there I was
needed.”

“Have you no friends you can go to, no
relations?”

She looked at him with disbelief. “Of course
I have relations,” she said, as if speaking to a person of limited
intelligence. “In Egypt!”

“I suppose you can’t go back there…?”

“No.”

He did not press her to divulge the crime
that had caused her banishment. Semerket rapidly considered his
options. He could always give her a handful of Pharaoh’s gold, he
supposed, and be done with her. But that seemed a trifle callow,
somehow — it had become his unthinking and rote solution to almost
every problem he had encountered since his arrival in Babylonia.
Reluctantly, he decided that the unfortunate girl deserved better from
him. After considering her plight for a time, his face brightened.

“What?” Aneku said, suspicious.

“As your expertise lies in being a temple
servant, how would you like to continue the profession?”

AS HE INTRODUCED
Aneku to Senmut and Wia, he noticed how the old man perceptibly
brightened when he looked upon the girl. Wia, however, narrowed her
eyes in skeptical appraisal.

Aneku was dressed in an unassuming linen
sheath that Semerket had purchased for her in a nearby souk, and a
scarf of dark blue covered her hennaed hair. He had bought her three
such outfits, along with the appropriate cosmetics and sandals,
underwear, and some modest pieces of jewelry — everything that she
would need to start her life as a free woman.

Semerket explained to the priestly couple
that Aneku had been a friend of Naia’s and had fallen on hard times. He
had just that morning purchased her from a cruel owner, he said, and
set her free. He showed them the clay tablet that manumitted her,
witnessed by the Bel-Marduk priests at the hostel, which Wia read over
very carefully.

Aneku had nowhere to go, Semerket went on,
and as she had once served in a temple (he was careful not to say which
one), would they consider taking Aneku in to work for them? He himself
would guarantee her wages, Semerket promised.

“You can certainly use some help here,” he
urged, “and Aneku needs a place to stay.”

Semerket glanced uneasily over at the girl.
Aneku was staring aghast at the withered fig trees and broken tiles in
the temple courtyard, all the while attempting to answer Wia’s sharp
questions.

“Do you cook, girl?” he heard Wia say.

“I never learned,” said Aneku, shaking her
head demurely.

“Do you know how to sing the litanies and
chants we use?”

Again, a slight shake of the head.

“Well. Have you been instructed on how to
make offerings to the gods in the proper fashion, then?”

“I don’t think so…”

“Can you mend vestments, at least? Can you
be trusted with the laundry?”

Aneku shrugged.

“By Set and all his devils,” Wia shook her
head in suspicious disbelief, “what duties
did
you perform in
that temple of yours?”

Before she could answer, Semerket hastily
assured them that Aneku was a fast learner. He pressed several gold
pieces into Senmut’s hands, saying that he was to use it in the girl’s
care and provisioning, and gave Aneku an equal amount.

Leaving the trio gawking at him, he departed
quickly. Firmly, he crammed down his fast-rising sense of guilt. There
was a reason to his lunacy in placing Aneku at the little temple, he
told himself. Eventually, Naia’s affection for the gods of her homeland
would lead her to make an offering at the temple. And if — when — she
came, Aneku would be the only person able to recognize her.

NOW THAT SEMERKET
knew the raid on the plantation had also claimed members of the Elamite
royal family, he could no longer put off consulting with the governing
authorities. It was vital to find out what the Elamites knew. Semerket
remembered that in Mari the Elamite commander had told him to seek out
his friend, General Kidin, who commanded Babylon’s garrison; General
Kidin knew everything that transpired in the city, the commander had
boasted, and could help him find his friends.

Semerket therefore took himself to the
garrison’s vast courtyard, in which the Elamites had pitched their
long, even rows of tents. He crossed to the small, low, brick building
that served as its headquarters, and asked if he could have a few
minutes of General Kidin’s time.

“Afraid not,” the desk sergeant replied
curtly.

“It really is a matter of some urgency.”

The desk sergeant leaned forward, whispering
confidentially. “He was executed,” he said. “Last week. ‘Failure in his
duty to the king.’ ”

Semerket swore in vexation. Everywhere he
turned in this benighted city, he seemed caught in some blind alley
leading nowhere. “What did he fail to do?”

“Couldn’t find them that killed the king’s
brother-in-law.”

Semerket hesitated, surprised to hear the
man mention only the prince. “But I’d heard his sister was also
assassinated. Isn’t that true?”

“No one knows. She’s gone, vanished as if
she were some spirit. No corpse, no traces. The king is wild with
grief, as you can imagine, and we’re the ones suffering for it. So when
Kidin came up with nothing…” The man made a slicing gesture across his
throat.

Despite the news of Kidin’s death, Semerket
felt his heart stir with hope. If the princess was missing, she had no
doubt been kidnapped by raiders and was being held for ransom. And if
that were true, perhaps Naia was a prisoner with her. It would then be
a relatively simple task to ransom her freedom. “Was the princess
captured, then?” he asked hopefully.

The desk sergeant shrugged. “No one’s made
any demands, though everyone thinks the Isins did it — and they’re not
exactly shy about asking for ransoms.”

“Who’s replaced the general?”

“Colonel Shepak has that honor.”

“I will meet with him.”

The sergeant’s friendliness abruptly faded.
“Shepak doesn’t have time to meet with foreigners! Go to your own
legation if you need help. We’re stretched thin enough in Babylon as it
is.”

Semerket leaned in, murmuring to the man,
“The name is Semerket. Why don’t you check your official lists from the
palace?”

The sergeant rose grumbling from his desk,
and obediently went into the back rooms to consult with his commander.
It was only a moment before he scuttled back, cringing and apologetic,
to where Semerket waited. “This way,” he said, bowing low. “This way to
Colonel Shepak!”

Semerket followed the man to the courtyard
behind the main building, located in the shadow of the royal palace.
Looking up by chance to the high ramparts that surrounded the compound,
Semerket was surprised to find they were thick with patrolling Elamite
soldiers, each bristling with a formidable array of swords, spears,
bows, and quivers of arrows. A chill feeling of foreboding ran up his
spine. It seemed that the Elamites expected an attack, and soon. Before
he could question the sergeant, however, Semerket was being shown into
a nearby tent.

A sad-eyed man sat at a wooden table, his
chin resting in his hand. The man was young, but his face sagged with a
kind of world-weariness that was not all in keeping with his youth, and
gray already streaked his beard.

“What now?” the man asked the sergeant in a
low, resigned voice.

“An important person, sir,” said the
sergeant. “Lord Semerket, sent all the way from Egypt by Pharaoh
Ramses. He wants to meet with you.”

Shepak, unimpressed, gestured indifferently
to Semerket that he should take the seat in front of him. Another tired
gesture dismissed the sergeant.

“Felicitations on your recent promotion,”
Semerket said, by way of initiating their conversation.

Shepak stared at him, red-eyed. “I’m facing
the Insect Chamber, while you make jokes.”

Semerket opened his mouth to protest, but
stopped. It was the second or third time he had heard reference to an
“insect chamber.” It had to be more than just a Babylonian idiom with
which he was unfamiliar.

“I’m sorry —?” he asked. “What’s this
chamber you refer to? Someone mentioned it to me before.”

“Merely the post I’ll be assigned to next
week this time,” answered Shepak. He waved his hand, dismissing the
subject. “How may I help my distinguished visitor from Egypt?”

Semerket came to the point. “I’m seeking
information about the raid at the prince and princess’s plantation —
the one that happened about twelve weeks ago, to the northwest of here.”

The colonel shot a penetrating glance at
him. “Why, I ask myself, should an Egyptian be interested in what is
only an internal affair of Elam?”

Semerket told him how the Egyptian
ambassador had sent Naia and Rami to the plantation. He also mentioned
that the pharaoh of Egypt was personally interested in their recovery,
letting the tantalizing promise of a fat bribe remain discreetly
unspoken.

But Shepak only shook his head. “You’ve come
for nothing,” Shepak said. “No one survived. The slaughter was
painstaking, even by Isin standards.” This from a man, Semerket
noticed, who decorated his helmet with severed fingers and phalluses
snipped from various Dark Head enemies.

“They left one person alive, however,”
Semerket said.

“Do you mean the princess?”

“Someone else.”

“You’re mistaken.”

“I have proof.”

Semerket reached into his leather pouch and
fetched Rami’s letter into the light. He laid the palm bark on the
table before the colonel.

“This letter came to Pharaoh from the boy I
told you about — Rami — wanting to be rescued.” He pointed to the
glyphs. “He was ‘attacked by Isins,’ it says there. We learned that
he’d suffered a head wound, at a plantation to the northwest of Babylon
— the same place, it turns out, where your prince and princess were
also attacked. It may be that the lad’s dead now — but he wasn’t when
he wrote it.”

“By the Babylonians’ sixty thousand gods,”
Shepak said, awestruck. “We’d very much like to meet this Rami of
yours! If he could tell us what happened to the princess —”

“I was hoping you Elamites had found him.”

Shepak rose, disgusted, to pace the tent.
“You
try to find anything in this demented country. Just when you think
you’ve discovered something, you reach out only to find it wasn’t there
in the first place.”

“So I’ve noticed.”

“What more can you tell me?”

“Only this: I’ve talked to the Isins myself
—”

Shepak interrupted him with a foul oath.
“You’ve actually met with them?”

“When I came down the river, I went into Is
and had a look. A couple of their men talked to me.” Some instinct told
him that it would be unwise to mention that Marduk had arranged the
meeting. “They said they didn’t do it.”

“Egyptian,” said Shepak, “you amaze me. I’ve
offered rewards for anyone who can capture an Isin and bring him to me
alive. They go unclaimed, even though the Isins are becoming quite
plentiful here in Babylon —”

“What do you mean?”

“We’ve had reports that the Heir of Isin
managed to slip into the city a few days ago — along with a great
number of his men.”

That explained the extra Elamite brigades on
the ramparts.

“We expect an attack at any time,” Shepak
continued. “They’ll want to stop Kutir from taking the hand of
Bel-Marduk at the festival next week, for if he does, it means that
heaven favors his claim to the throne. These Dark Heads are very
backward, you know — very superstitious about such things.” Shepak sat
down across from him, leaning forward to stare into Semerket’s face.
“Did you believe the Isins, when they told you they had nothing to do
with the raid?”

Semerket was cynical. “I’m not in a
profession where I can afford to believe anyone.”

“But if you were to wager…?”

Semerket shrugged philosophically. “I don’t
know. If they’d done the deed, why wouldn’t they boast of it? And if
they have the princess, I think you’d have heard their demands by now.”

Shepak looked through the tent flap to the
garrison compound baking in the white sun, and bit his lip. “Why did
you really come to see me, Egyptian? What is it you want?”