Day of the False King (16 page)

“I want to go to this plantation. I want to
see for myself what happened.”

Shepak shook his head doubtfully. “You won’t
find anything. We’ve scoured it clean.”

“I
haven’t scoured it.”

Shepak looked at him for a moment. Then he
abruptly stood, seizing his grisly, trophy-bedecked helmet from its
wooden perch. “All right. I’ll take you there myself. Maybe you’ll find
something my own men have overlooked.”

Semerket was surprised when Shepak also
donned his bright crimson commander’s mantle. “But surely…” Semerket
began, and then stopped.

“What?” asked Shepak.

“If you expect an attack, won’t you make a
tempting target, wearing such a red cloak?”

“I certainly hope so,” the colonel muttered
dolefully.

SHEPAK LED SEMERKET
to the stables and ordered two horses to be saddled. Semerket
appreciated the aesthetics of a horse, certainly, its grace and power —
but preferably from as far away from its mouth and hooves as possible.
Overall, he said to Shepak, he preferred to ride a good little donkey
whenever possible. In fact, there were those who said his rapport with
donkeys was amazing…

Shepak gave him a disgusted look. “A donkey?
It’s almost twenty leagues to where we’re going. We’ve no time to waste
with a donkey.”

Semerket suggested nervously that, if that
were the case, perhaps it would be best if they rode together on a
single horse. The Elamite colonel also dismissed this idea. “Too
dangerous,” Shepak said with finality. “If anyone comes after me,
they’d be sure to kill you, too.”

Semerket reluctantly allowed a groom to help
him atop a dusty black nag, which the Elamite grooms assured him was as
gentle as a pet rabbit. And though the beast plodded through the
Babylonian streets in a complacent manner, Semerket grew uneasy at the
way she kept rolling her eyes backward to see what kind of fool guided
her. But the mare was a seasoned veteran of many wars and many riders,
and did her best to keep Semerket from tumbling to the ground. Though
he never quite lost his wariness of her, Semerket was soon able to
unbend his spine a little and breathe regularly.

All the way to the Ishtar Gate, Shepak rode
some fifty paces or so in front of Semerket, so that any lurking Isin
assassin would not think they were together. It was not until they
reached the lonely road leading to the northwest, far outside the city,
that Shepak reined his horse and allowed Semerket to catch up to him.

“Let’s pick up the pace a bit, shall we?”
said Shepak.

With a click of his tongue, Shepak increased
their speed to a slow gallop. Sometime after noon, they reached an area
where rich fields had been plowed into long furrows. At the junction of
a second road, they came upon a village of tenant farmers. Their
curious round houses and barns, with pitched roofs made of dried reeds
caulked with bitumen, made Semerket think of toadstools.

The children grew quiet as he and Shepak
passed, running to their mothers to stare at the strangers from behind
their skirts. He turned his head in time to see an old woman make the
sign of evil at Shepak. Semerket made a mental note that if he came
back to question these farmers later, he would do it without an Elamite
colonel at his side.

As they neared the plantation, Semerket
began to feel uneasy, his mouth growing dry. Everything seemed so
weirdly familiar to him — the level brown land; the glimpse of the
shimmering Euphrates in the distance; the upright, unbroken walls of
the approaching estate. Then, with a start of horror, he realized that
the place exactly conformed to the eerie landscape of his nightmares —
the ones in which he had seen Naia repeatedly slain before the eyes of
his wandering ka.

Then they turned down a path that Semerket
knew, absolutely knew, he had seen before. In the afternoon’s humid
stillness, Semerket turned his head and finally saw the ruins.

The plantation’s buildings were parodies of
their original shapes, with an obscene smell to their ashes that
Semerket doubted he would ever forget. Several structures had once
stood in the compound — stables, worksheds, grain silos, servants’
quarters. Now all of them were gone.

Semerket trod into what was left of the main
house. Large and sumptuous at one time, it had been three stories or
more when intact. Most of its floors had collapsed in on themselves,
leaving its gaping husk open to the sky. Going from room to room, he
glimpsed odd bits of pottery on the floors, fragments of furniture
crushed beneath the charred rubble.

There was no logic to why something had
survived the flames; a broom of palm leaves remained barely singed,
while the stone statue beside it lay shattered in fragments. As he
roamed, he vaguely wondered what Naia’s duties had been within this
house. Had she swept these rooms with the palm broom? Or carried the
water jug to the pantry where it now lay in pieces? Perhaps she had
polished the little statue of the Elamite household god, still standing
in its niche, headless.

He went out the rear door. The thing hung on
leather hinges, its paint charred and blistered. A few steps more and
he was at the kitchen. Ironically, the structure had been built away
from the main house so that its hearth would not set the larger
building afire. Nearby was a well, and out of long habit Semerket
stared down into its depths. The water’s scent was fresh, smelling
vaguely of citrus. The smell reminded Semerket of Naia, who habitually
wore a perfume distilled from lemon blossoms.

He turned again and made another walk
through the kitchen. Semerket found only copper pots, clay dishes, and
broken cups. A sudden glint of gold caught his eye amid the rubble. He
bent down to retrieve a flat serving tray, shaking off the ash and dust
that covered it, and saw the design chased into its surface.

“The royal crest of Elam,” whispered Shepak,
who had silently followed him through the grounds. “The prince and
princess must have brought it from Susa.”

“It tells us one thing,” Semerket grunted.

“What?”

“The raiders didn’t come here for plunder.”
He threw the tray onto the ashes.

Semerket strode to a nearby grove of date
palms. Wandering through the cool shadows, he examined the high brick
walls that surrounded the estate. He saw the telltale marks at their
top. “That’s where they came over,” he said to Shepak, pointing. “See
how every few feet there are marks from grappling hooks? They would
have been seen during daylight — but this far away, at night…”

Shepak looked up. “How many of them were
there, do you suppose?”

Semerket shrugged. “I wouldn’t imagine there
were very many. Surprise and the dark were on their side. The raiders
needed only a few of their men to scale the walls, to open the gates
for the rest. If they were experienced, ten men could have handled the
job from start to finish —”

Semerket stopped speaking when a cloud of
flies darted past them. Alert to where they flew, he saw them disappear
behind the wall and into the far courtyard. He followed for a few
paces, and the flies’ buzzing became louder and more frenetic as he
approached.

When he came around the corner of the wall,
he saw what attracted the flies — a massive stain of black blood
stretching across the limestone tiles in a side courtyard.

“This is where they slaughtered them,” he
said to Shepak.

“You’re right,” Shepak confirmed curtly. “We
found the bodies here, their hands bound together. There were
thirty-three of them. All the water from the well couldn’t wash the
blood away.”

“Then they had been at least two days dead
before you found them.”

Shepak looked at him oddly. “How did you
know?”

“I know blood. You can wash it away if it
hasn’t been sitting for more than a day and half. After that, no matter
how hard you scrub, some of it will remain.”

Shepak swallowed uneasily. Despite being a
hardened warrior, he possessed the same squeamishness about death and
its detritus that all the peoples of Mesopotamia shared. “You Egyptians
certainly possess a ghoulish streak, knowing such things,” he said.

Semerket did not reply as he walked around
the perimeter of the stain. Though the blood had long since dried, the
flies were dense on the tiles, and the stain seemed to roil and heave
iridescently in the sunlight.

“Where are they buried?” Semerket asked.

“Who?”

“The ones slaughtered here.”

“Kutir brought their bodies back to the
palace in Babylon, to bury them with the prince. He placed then into
funeral jars, and embalmed them in honey.”

“Everyone?”

Shepak nodded.

Semerket turned away, so the Elamite could
not see the pleased look on his face. Honey would preserve the victim’s
features. “These jars — where are they?”

“In the royal crypts below the palace.”

Semerket looked at Shepak with an enigmatic
expression. He was remembering the vision he had had upon the river,
searching the jars of honey. He knew he had to see those bodies for
himself, to discover finally if Naia was among them. He did not intend
to leave her behind in Babylon, alive or dead. Somehow, he must find a
way to convince Shepak to get him inside the royal crypt.

“I must see their faces, before they’ve
decomposed any further.”

Shepak looked at him with revulsion. “They
won’t decompose. But it’s against all our laws to interfere with the
dead.”

“How am I to learn the truth, then?”

“You’ll have to figure it out another way,
that’s all.”

“If you don’t help me view those bodies,”
Semerket said shortly, “and find out what happened to your princess,
how will I ever be able to save you from the Insect Chamber?”

The Elamite colonel raised his head
abruptly, and stared at him.

They sat in the shade of the outer wall, near
the broken gates. Shepak had brought a loaf of round bread and some
cheese in his pack, but neither of them was hungry.

“I’ve only a week left to find Pinikir,”
Shepak said, drinking wine from a leather flask. “When the Day of the
False King dawns, if I haven’t produced the princess, I’ll suffer the
same fate as Kidin. Kutir’s promised to go through the officers’ ranks
until either Princess Pinikir is recovered, or we’re all dead.”

“And execution will be in this Insect
Chamber I’ve heard about?”

Shepak was quiet. Then he nodded. “Yes.”

“But what is it? I mean, what is the method
of…?”

Shepak took a ragged breath before he spoke.
“We found it in the palace dungeon and thought at first that it was
just another prison cell — until we put one of our own men in there.
He’d gotten drunk on duty, and needed a scare, we thought. We hadn’t
even closed the doors before the screaming began. Some mechanism is
triggered when the door closes, we discovered, allowing other trapdoors
inside the chamber to open.”

He had to rinse his mouth with wine again.

“First come the shredders, those with their
claws and pincers and beaks, the beetles and mantids, the scorpions and
centipedes. Those that fly get there first. They flay the outer flesh
open, crawling between the lips, competing for the tongue, burrowing
into the ears and nose and eyes. When they’ve eaten their fill, then
the next trapdoor opens. This time, it’s the gray flesh eaters — the
worms and grubs that go to work on the softer tissues, the organs and
vessels. You can hear their jaws clacking together, thousands of them.
Worms cluster in the victim’s belly, feast in his skull. When they’re
finished, the third and final door opens — and the small parasites
stream out, the most voracious of all, ants and mites and maggots. They
clean the bones to a glistening white in a matter of minutes. It’s said
that the Kassites invented the chamber to secretly rid themselves of
their most hated enemies, so that nothing would be left that could
identify them.”

Shepak fell silent. Semerket realized that
he was staring at the Elamite with his mouth open. “I can’t believe
it,” Semerket said.

“Believe it. Kutir forced the officers to
watch Kidin when he was put in there.” Shepak looked at him with the
same haunted expression. “But I’ve not yet told you the most terrible
part.”

“What could be more terrible?” Semerket’s
voice was faint.

“You’ve seen the insects in this accursed
country — how monstrous they are? How aggressive?”

Semerket nodded. He remembered that night
outside the gates of Is, when he waited for Marduk to reappear from
inside the city.

“Imagine them twice and three times that
size,” Shepak said. “It’s what happens when they’ve a ready supply of
meat.” He drained his leather canteen. “And come next week, it’ll be my
turn.”

Grim silence hung between them. Then
Semerket moved decisively to his feet.

“Well,” he said, with as much confidence as
he could muster. “There’s nothing for it, then, but to find the
princess.”

Shepak had to laugh, however morbidly. “And
you think you can?”

“Why shouldn’t I? She disappeared the very
moment my own wife did, and in the same place.” Semerket looked around,
surveying the ruins of the vast estate. “If I can find one woman, I’ll
certainly be able to find the other.”

BEFORE LEAVING, SEMERKET
made one last search of the grounds. It was true that the Elamite
forces had scrubbed the place clean of any evidence. When he mentioned
this to Shepak, the colonel told him that there had not been much to
discover in the first place; the raiders had themselves removed all
traces of their attack, careful to leave nothing behind that might
identify them. This in itself was curious.

A while later, however, Semerket glimpsed
something embedded in the underside of a fallen cedar crossbeam. He had
not seen the object when he first had come through the ruined chamber,
for the beam had been in shadow. Now that the sun had moved across the
sky, its rays revealed a single arrow, slightly charred but still
intact. It pierced the beam deeply. When Semerket bent to pull it out,
it did not move.