Day of the False King (7 page)

Semerket looked up, knowing what he would
find. Another agent stared down at him from behind a balustrade. The
man, thinner but no less disreputable-looking than the first, quickly
slipped from sight.

Semerket hurried down a side street, shaking
his head at the spies’ clumsy tactics. He headed east, where the
hostel’s priest had told him he could find the Egyptian Quarter. Once
there, he planned to mingle with his fellow citizens, to ascertain
whether any of them had heard of Naia or Rami, or of any recent attacks
made on Egyptians by Isins. He would also attempt to find where
Ambassador Menef’s residence was located, for he knew from Naia’s
letter that she and Rami had last been living there.

As he wove through the swarming Babylonians,
who had risen early to open their innumerable shops, he heard his spy
leaping noisily from rooftop to rooftop above him. The streets were so
narrow this was not a difficult chore. Yet even this small bit of
athleticism seemed too much for his hapless pursuer. From below,
Semerket heard an aborted scream and a crash. He looked up to find the
man clinging frantically to a parapet. Semerket debated whether he
should rescue the man, but the spy’s fat friend quickly appeared to
drag him back onto the roof. Several broken mud bricks rained down on
the narrow street with a tremendous crash. Semerket leapt easily aside,
but some of the bricks struck an old crone selling blooms. She lay
senseless in the alleyway, sprays of mountain lupines strewn about her
in a pathetic circle.

“Look,” Semerket called up, “if you want to
know where I’m going, it’s to Amun’s temple in the Egyptian Quarter.”
His spies made no answer, but cowered behind the roof’s ledge,
pretending to be invisible.

“Morons,” Semerket muttered darkly. If these
spies were the best Elam could produce, he thought, their occupation of
Babylonia was doomed to be a short one.

Semerket discovered that the streets of
Babylon seemed to radiate from successive squares like spokes on a
chariot wheel, never leading to where he expected. It was not very long
before he had passed the Egyptian Quarter altogether, finding himself
in an area of town where merchants sold mud bricks, pots, ewers, and
molded terracotta statues. He stopped to ask directions from a seller
of religious figurines.

“The what?”

“The Egyptian Quarter. The Bel-Marduk
priests told me it’s somewhere east of the river.”

“I’d believe them if I was you.”

“That’s not the point. I’ve lost my way.”

“East of the river, you say?”

“Yes.”

Shaking his head, the man turned to shout at
the potter across the courtyard.

“The Egyptian Quarter? Ever hear of it?”

“The what?”

Semerket felt his gut clench. He detested
being lost. As the two men argued, it was clear that they knew very
little about their own city. At any other time, he would have asked
directions from one of the omnipresent Elamite foot soldiers who
patrolled the streets in small units. But he had no wish to approach
them, and went out of his way to avoid the Elamites. This was not easy,
as most of Elam’s army seemed to be stationed in the capital city — an
intimidating, menacing presence on almost every street corner.

It was noon when Semerket realized that the
signs and notices painted on the brick walls had changed from cuneiform
to glyph. He had at last arrived in the Egyptian Quarter. To his
dismay, however, the upper floors of his own hostel loomed over the
rooftops not a furlong away; Semerket had come almost full circle from
where he started.

He cursed aloud, using an epithet he rarely
spoke.

Though the quarter’s featureless mud-brick
facades resembled every other place he had seen that morning,
eventually his eye found some rudimentary Egyptian embellishments. A
single lotus column supported a sagging roof, while a fallen statue of
some ancient pharaoh lay forgotten in its courtyard, covered in bird
droppings. At best, the quarter was only a tired and dusty refuge for
Egypt’s unwanted outcasts.

These outcasts congregated in the square,
loitering in doorways and stables. None seemed to be actually doing
anything, and they stared back at him with vacant, surly expressions.
Semerket bent to ask a woman sitting in the shade of a spindly palm
where he might find the local temple. Listlessly, she pointed to an
alley.

“End of the street,” she slurred, idly
waving away the flies that foraged on her grease-stained robes.

His two spies waited for him behind the
temple’s walls, ducking out of sight when he approached. He was pleased
to see them, for then they could honestly report to King Kutir that
Semerket had done what he said he would do: he had gone to pray to his
gods. The two men would never guess that he intended to go directly to
the rear of the temple and over its wall to continue his investigations
alone.

Once inside the temple compound, however,
Semerket was temporarily flummoxed. There was no hall of columns, no
sacred lake, no altars — in fact, the place did not seem like any
Egyptian temple he had ever seen. Tentatively, he went inside the
unkempt courtyard, where a couple of parched fig trees were its only
ornamentation.

Crossing into the darkened sanctuary, he met
a miserable collection of chapels and shrines, though not a single
statue of the gods occupied them. The murals, too, seemed poorly
painted. A faint though pleasant smell of stale incense clung to the
room, but it was clear that no rituals had taken place in there for
some time. He looked vainly about for any priest or acolyte.

Shrugging his shoulders, he plunged forward
into the temple, toward what he assumed was its rear. He had gone no
more than a few paces when he heard footsteps coming down one of the
gloomy hallways.

“My lord!” A thin craggy voice bleated in
Egyptian to him from the dark.

A gnarled priest of incalculable years was
advancing slowly toward him, all the while attempting to straighten his
threadbare wig. Behind him padded an elderly woman, her lips quivering
in alarm.

“You must not go that way, my lord,” the
priest said. “Only a consecrated priest may enter.”

“I’m a priest of the second grade,” Semerket
said, not precisely lying. All who learned how to write the 770 sacred
writing symbols of Egypt in a House of Life, as Semerket had, were
designated second-grade priests at their graduation. It was just that
Semerket had never truly graduated.

“Nevertheless, you are a stranger here and
you have not been purified…” The aged priest’s voice trailed into
muffled uncertainty. “You
are
a stranger, aren’t you? We’ve
never met?”

“No.”

The old priest seemed relieved that his mind
still functioned, and stood up straighter. “Then I must ask you to
leave the way you came.”

Semerket thought quickly. “But I wanted to
offer up a prayer of thanks to Amun, for seeing me safely to Babylon.”

The old priest glanced at him sharply. “A
prayer —? You will make an offering?”

This was more than Semerket meant to do, but
he shrugged. “Yes, all right. Why not?”

“You’ll purchase onions and bread for the
altar?” The priest was smiling with surprised delight. He turned to the
priestess behind him. “Mother, today is a fortunate one for us!”

To Semerket’s distress, he saw that tears
flowed down the old woman’s cheeks. Impulsively she reached forward to
take his hand and kiss it.

“It can’t be so strange,” Semerket said, a
trifle embarrassed, “for wayfarers to offer thanks to the gods?”

“Around here it is,” the old woman said
forthrightly. “Most of the Egyptians in this neighborhood didn’t come
to Babylon willingly. They have very little to be thankful for, and
blame the gods for their misfortunes. Hardly anyone makes offerings
nowadays.”

Semerket knew that Egyptian priests and
priestesses lived mainly from the sacrifices of bread, vegetables, oil,
and other foodstuffs given to the gods. Seeing the old couple’s eyes
shining from their sunken faces, Semerket grew concerned.

“When was the last time you ate?”

“It’s of no importance. We serve the gods in
joy.”

“
When?”
Semerket’s voice was
perhaps harsher than he intended.

The woman spoke quickly. “Two days ago.”

“Hasn’t Ambassador Menef sent you
provisions, or workers to help you? Isn’t it his duty to maintain this
temple?”

The thin, little woman narrowed her eyes.
“He has his own private chapel, on his estate, with his own priests. He
doesn’t come to our services anymore. He said —”

“Mother.”

The old woman fell silent, staring at the
floor in shame. Semerket noticed how her tunic, though meticulously
cleaned, had been patched and repatched so many times that there was
more Babylonian wool to it than good Egyptian linen. Semerket bent to
regard the woman’s tired eyes.

“Tell me.”

With a fearful look at her husband, she
whispered, “He said that my husband and I have done too little to lure
the people here — that’s what he said, ‘lure’ — as if this place were a
circus and —”

“Mother!”

But the old woman’s words continued to pour
out in ever more aggrieved invective. “We’ve even had to sell the gods’
statues from their niches in order to keep the temple up. We traded the
last one a month ago, and then only for what its bronze was worth.
What’s next for us? My husband forbids me to beg — he says it demeans
our calling — though sometimes the pains in my stomach are so sharp,
that I — that I —” The rest of her words were swallowed in a sudden,
silent convulsion of weeping.

The old priest stepped between Semerket and
his wife. “I’m sure the ambassador has many reasons for why he hasn’t
sent us sustenance,” he said firmly. “The war with Elam, I know, has
caused much suffering. We’re not the only ones who go hungry in
Babylon, you know.”

Turning suddenly, Semerket retraced his
steps through the gloomy temple and out to the gates. The old couple
hobbled after him in alarm, believing that he was leaving them for good.

“You two!” Semerket shouted to the spies
when he reached the gate.

They peeked from behind the wall where they
hid. “Do you mean us?”

“I need you to get some things. Go into the
marketplace around the corner. Bread, onions, honey, oil. A goose, if
you can find one.” He turned to the wide-eyed priestly couple. “Do you
think the gods would like some beer?”

The elderly priest seemed too dazed to
speak, but his wife chimed in hopefully, “Oh, yes, please! The August
Ones haven’t had beer in so long.”

The spies frowned. “Who the hell are you to
order us around!?” the thin one railed.

“Semerket, envoy of the fourth Pharaoh
Ramses, come to parley with your king Kutir — as you well know, since
you’ve seen fit to follow me around all morning.”

“That’s a lie —!”

“We never —!”

The obsidian flash that glinted then in
Semerket’s eye made them abruptly cease their protests. “Do I really
have to tell the king what inept spies he sets upon me?”

The men grew alarmed. The fatter one
swallowed and asked in a humbler voice, “What is it you want, again,
sir? Though we don’t admit to your accusation, mind you, we’d be glad
to help.”

Semerket named the items, and gave them a
gold piece. He told them that another would be theirs if they would be
quick. With many grumbles, the Elamites went into the nearby
marketplace.

“And some incense,” he called after them. “A
big ball of it!”

“I’m afraid you won’t see them again, young
man,” said the priest. “We’ve never been able to trust the locals.”

“They’ll be back,” averred Semerket, staring
after them.

Despite his impatience to begin his search
for Naia and Rami, Semerket assisted the aged couple in preparing the
altar for the receiving of sacrifice. They scraped away the lichen
growing on the stone and threw away the dead blooms from its vases. At
one time, the old priest told him, when Egypt’s eastern empire
flourished, the Babylonian temple of Amun had been much larger. He
pointed beyond the wall, telling him that the real temple had once
stood next door but that it had been lost in a bad business deal with
some crooked Babylonian scoundrel, who had razed it to put up a
warehouse. Only this collection of odd rooms was left of the original
temple, which had once been only its storage area.

“It’s no wonder the gods have turned their
backs on us,” said the old priest mournfully. “My wife and I, I’m
afraid, have been very poor stewards of their glory.” He sighed as he
bent to sweep up the dust. “Though I doubt anyone ever loved them more.”

Defying the old priest’s gloomy predictions,
the two spies returned with the provisions, and Semerket assisted them
in bringing the goods inside the temple. They heaped the groceries on
the altar and set wildflowers in the vases. Despite the rumbles coming
from their stomachs, the old couple insisted that they celebrate all
the obsequies and ceremonies before they themselves partook of the food.

They lit the incense, and genuflected before
the altar, insisting that Semerket perform the rituals with them.
Verbosely, the old ones thanked the good gods for the safe arrival of
their guest, praying earnestly for his welfare, and begging the August
Ones to protect him in all his endeavors.

Semerket had always disliked ritual and
ceremony. He preferred instead to commune with the gods in his own way,
silent and solitary. For all of this, his first day in Babylon found
him intoning the litanies and psalms he had learned as a child. And
after the priest and priestess concluded their prayers, Semerket — who
liked to think of himself as a hard-bitten man of little sentiment —
meekly asked the old couple to add a prayer or two for the safety of
his wife and young friend, whom he had come to Babylon to find.