Day of the False King (22 page)

Her mouth was an ugly twist and her words
reverberated in his head: “Dead woman, dead woman!” Semerket turned on
her, hot words rising to his lips. Before he could say them, however,
Wia’s voice rose sharply in the courtyard.

“Aneku! Semerket!”

Both of them whirled guiltily, like a pair
of squabbling adolescents. The old priestess stood in the doorway of
the temple, glaring at them. She nodded to Aneku, “Senmut needs your
help with the morning sacrifices, girl.”

As Aneku defiantly stalked through the
little courtyard to the distant altar, she shot a final hate-filled
glance at Semerket. Semerket stared after her, breathing hard.

“Did you hear us?” he asked Wia, finally.

“I heard enough.”

Semerket looked away sullenly. “I’m not
sorry I said it.”

Wia exhaled a long, sad gust of air. “Oh,
Semerket, you should be. What’s it to you if her lover was a scoundrel?
He’s long gone from her life, and the memory is all she has left of
him.”

He thrust out his stubborn bottom lip. “She
can’t live her life in a dream.”

But Wia’s words made him feel ashamed. The
only thing that had seen him through these last couple years of his
life was the memory of Naia’s love. Despite all that had happened
between them — his inability to father a child, her marriage to another
man — he had always known that she never had stopped loving him. Poor
Aneku did not even have that to comfort her.

He looked into the temple doorway where
Aneku had fled. “I should go in to her, apologize.”

“Let her alone, Semerket,” Wia said. “You’re
only bound to anger one another now. Come back tomorrow, and you can
patch things up.” She patted him on the shoulder encouragingly. “I’ll
speak to her in the meantime.”

Semerket nodded. Mumbling a farewell, he
slipped out the temple gate. At the street corner, he turned to look
back and saw Wia still standing beneath the miniature pylon. She waved
when she saw him turn.

As he trudged through the streets, his guilt
gave way to sudden anxious reflection. If Aneku’s words were true and
Menef had threatened her lover with exposure of some crime — and if the
crime were indeed what Semerket suspected it was — then Menef must have
known about the plot to murder the Great Ramses before it happened.
This meant that he had been at least a peripheral member of the
conspiracy or, at best, that he had done nothing to prevent it.

Even in the scorching air, Semerket felt his
skin suddenly prickle. Were the remnants of that same conspiracy to be
found here within Babylon itself? Is that why the gods had sent him to
the city on the plain — to once again battle the very demons he thought
he had vanquished?

And why, wherever he went, was Ambassador
Menef seemingly at the source of every ill? The unbidden thought came
to him — could the fey, plump ambassador actually have been responsible
for the attack on Naia and Rami?

He shook his head to clear it of cobwebs,
for he knew that he was at the point in his investigation where he
became so burdened by disparate facts and suspicions that all and
everyone seemed guilty of almost everything. It would do no good to
bedevil himself with imagining more than what there was; all would be
revealed within the province of time.

Picking up his pace, he did not realize that
he had forgotten to warn Aneku that she should take extra care around
strangers.

WHILE ON HIS WAY to his
morning appointment with Shepak, Semerket caught the faint, alarming
scent of fire. Far in the distance ahead, a flat wall of smoke advanced
slowly down Processional Way, concealing the Royal Quarter behind it.
He began to run.

At the garrison’s gate, the gray shroud of
smoke thinned a bit, allowing him to glimpse a flurry of activity
behind it. Scores of Elamite soldiers lay dead, or moaned in agony.
Others shouted hoarsely to one another, attempting to organize the
survivors into fire brigades, to throw buckets of water onto the
flames, now quickly consuming the once-orderly rows of tents. Most of
them were already smoldering tatters, but a quick glance told him that
Shepak’s larger tent was among those still blazing.

In the confusion, no one challenged him as
he hurried across the compound. At Shepak’s tent, the smoke was so
thick that he had to hold his mantle over his face to breathe.
Squinting into the wreckage, he saw a bright heap of glittering armor.
A bare arm stretched toward him, lying in a pool of blackening blood. A
tangle of blood-soaked hair hid the man’s face.

“Shepak?” he said.

He might have thoughtlessly plunged inside
had he not suddenly remembered where he had seen that golden armor — at
Nidaba’s only the night before. It belonged to the newly appointed
garrison commander, Khutran, the man who had drunkenly demanded that
Nidaba sing him love songs.

Though the heat was fierce, Semerket took a
few tentative steps closer and saw that a stone-tipped mace had smashed
in the man’s head. By now, the roof of the tent was afire, and Semerket
retreated into the courtyard. Choking, eyes watering, he did not see
the man who had come up behind him. With a crash, Semerket lurched into
him. Semerket looked up.

“Shepak!” he coughed in surprise. “Bless the
gods, you’re alive. I thought it was you in there.”

“Didn’t you hear me shouting at you?”

Semerket could only shake his head, choking.
Shepak bundled him away to a distant part of the courtyard, where
Semerket could soothe his smoke-singed throat with well water. “What
happened here?” Semerket managed to ask between coughs.

“The Isins struck us a short while ago,”
Shepak related grimly, “just after first light. Over two hundred
garrison dead, and twenty horses.”

“How many Isin dead?”

Shepak was unwilling to meet Semerket’s
eyes. “Not a one,” he admitted. “They appeared out of nowhere, like
desert djins. Before anyone knew it, they’d picked off the guards on
the upper walls and taken their places. There wasn’t even time to sound
the alarm. They sent flaming arrows into the hay bales at the stables
and then into the tents. Their archers picked us off like sheep in a
pen. Then they broke down the gates and went straight for the officers
still alive.”

“You weren’t here?” Semerket asked.

“No,” Shepak shuddered. “I was at the palace
getting my new orders. By the time I got here, it was all over. It
didn’t take the Isins more than a few minutes to do their worst, and
then they disappeared as quickly as they’d come.”

Semerket scratched his brow. “How many of
them?”

“Sixty or seventy, I’m told.”

“But I was on the street this morning,”
Semerket said, surprised. “There wasn’t any force like that to be seen
— and one that size can’t just disappear. They must have broken ranks,
blended into the neighborhoods somehow —”

“Perhaps. But the Dark Heads are saying that
the Isins are using magic to make themselves invisible — that our
arrows are useless against them.”

“Is that what
you
believe?”

Shepak shook his head. “I don’t know.”

Semerket looked over the ruined compound. He
was thinking, I was warned not to come here today…

He gazed at Shepak’s morose face. Should he
tell the Elamite of the message he’d received from the man at the Sick
Square? No — the admonition had been meant for him alone. In a city
where assassins had tried to kill him once, where he owed allegiance to
only those who furthered his quest, it would be unwise to displease any
who might be watching out for him.

Semerket took another drink and turned to
Shepak. “Let’s leave all this death and stink. You’re free of this
place now. Come, we’ve a princess and my wife to find.”

“But I can’t just leave! What about my men?
I’m needed here.” Shepak looked around at the garrison yard, where
bodies lay amid the smoke and ruin.

“They’re not your men any longer; you’ve
been assigned to me. And look at it this way: the best thing you can do
for them is to find the princess, before Kutir in his wrath hurls these
survivors into the Insect Chamber.”

Shepak saw the sense in Semerket’s words,
and nodded, though reluctantly. “Where are we going, then?”

“To find out what those living near the
plantation have to say about that night.”

Shepak’s lip curled into a sneer. “Those
peasants? But we’ve already questioned them. It was like speaking to
cattle.”

Semerket fixed him with a skeptical eye.
“When you investigated them, did you by any chance wear your uniform
and that helmet?”

“I was on official business, wasn’t I?”

Semerket was silent.

“What?” demanded Shepak.

“Nothing. It’s just I’m reminded of a Nubian
saying my friend Qar is fond of quoting. ‘When the Great Lord passes, a
wise peasant bows and farts silently.’ ”

Semerket pretended not to see the color
rising in Shepak’s neck. Instead, he told him to shed his armor and
change into civilian clothes. The last thing he needed was the
intimidating presence of an Elamite soldier at his side when he
questioned the villagers.

“But you might want to keep that sword of
yours handy,” Semerket added, bringing his hand to the bandage at his
throat.

THEY WENT TO three villages
before they learned anything. At the first two, when Semerket mentioned
that they sought an Elamite princess, the villagers feigned a sudden
inability to comprehend him, shrinking back into their smoky
mushroom-shaped huts. Their behavior confirmed Shepak’s previous
observation that the peasants’ sensibilities were bovine at best.

But when they reached the third village,
Semerket tried a different tack. He made no mention of the Elamite
princess, saying only that he was an Egyptian in search of his wife and
young friend, whom he believed to have been victims of the plantation
massacre. These villagers, moved that he had come so far to seek his
loved ones, allowed Semerket and Shepak to pass into their town.

They brought the two men to a low doorway in
a round brick building. Semerket and Shepak had to crawl into its
gloomy interior. As his eyes adjusted to the dark, Semerket saw that
many of the villagers already awaited them. A woman took an ember from
a brazier and lighted a lantern, throwing the interior of the building
into sudden relief.

Surprised by the room’s large size, Semerket
saw that its walls were thick with the oily grime from generations of
bitumen lamps. Looking up into the high conical reed roof above him, he
heard the soft rustlings of rats and birds.

With gestures, a woman indicated that he and
Shepak were to recline on the flyblown cushions she brought them. When
they were comfortable, an old, toothless man came forward into the
center of the room, taking up his position under the lantern’s soft
light.

“Is this the mayor, then?” Semerket asked
eagerly.

Before anyone spoke, however, the old man
began to chant. “She came to us that night,” he sang loudly. “Rings of
lapis were on her fingers, and precious beads hung from her neck. A
band of gold encircled…”

As the old man droned on, Semerket grew
uneasy. He feared that the villagers’ hospitality might include
long-winded poetry recitations before the matter at hand could be
discussed. Loudly, he cleared his throat, interrupting the old man.

“I’m sorry,” he said as earnestly as
possible, “but we’ve no time for entertainment, superb as it is. We’ve
come to ask you about the raid.”

The old man glanced at Semerket with
something like irritation, and his tongue darted around his rubbery
lips. “Yes! Yes!” he snapped. “I know that!”

Once again, he started to sing, and he made
his voice a trifle louder. “She came to us that night! Rings of lapis
were on her fingers, and precious beads hung from her neck. A band of
gold encircled her brow. She came to this very house, with the scent of
death clinging to her, an immortal spirit who dwelt in the river. She
came to us that night, to this very house, and sought our help. Desert
demons had risen to beset her, she said; out of the night they had
risen —”

“What is this?” This time it was Shepak who
spoke. “D’you mean that some woman survived the raid and came
here?”

This time the villagers groaned audibly at
the interruption. Semerket could hear them whispering their disapproval
to one another.

“Quiet,” Semerket murmured to Shepak. “When
you stop him, he has to start all over again from the beginning.”

“But what’s it
mean?”

“She came to us that night!”
The
old man glared at Shepak, defying him to speak again. Shepak fell
abruptly silent.

As Semerket listened, he soon realized that
not only had these villagers known about the raid, they had also begun
to commemorate it in the florid and repetitious imagery of song. But
disturbing, nonsensical elements were also couched within their
recitation. Semerket closely observed the rapt faces of the villagers
as they listened to the old man; not one of them scoffed or looked
askance as the song became even more fanciful. They appeared, truly, to
believe a supernatural being had touched them that night, one who had
come to them from the river.

“And though she spoke only the language of
spirits and not the tongue of human folk,” the old man at last came to
the end of his song, “we understood her and gave her shelter.”

The old man fell silent. There was a great
exhalation of the villagers’ collective breath, and then much hooting
and applause for the old man’s recitation. Semerket waited until the
room quieted before he spoke.

“What you’ve told us — all this truly
happened that night? Just as the old gentleman sang it?”

A chorus of voices rang out, each swearing
on their children that the story was true and verifiable.

“And the woman who came to you,” he asked,
“— how do you know she was a river spirit?”