Eater of souls (3 page)

"Goat-witted fool," Sokar had muttered to himself as he stuffed the remains of a slice of date bread in his mouth. "Dragging me out for the murder of some farmer. I'll dock his rations, I will."

Sokar preferred reducing rations to administering beatings as punishment. He kept the confiscated grain and beer for himself. The attendant led him past a house concealed behind high walls and into a street hemmed in on both sides by narrow dwellings and a beer house with cracked and pitted plaster, tightly shut doors, and blank windows.

Upon turning another corner, they left the crowds behind to enter a lane that seemed more tunnel than street, so close were the surrounding structures. Littered with refuse thrown from upper stories and the droppings of geese, ducks, and donkeys, it was almost deserted. The only inhabitant lay across the bottom stair before a front door, his head hanging over a pool of vomit. Sokar followed the watchman into an alley opposite this door and stopped abruptly. Three men from the day watch stood with their backs to a prone figure. One of them held his hand cupped over his nose and mouth. Sokar's walking stick stabbed the ground near this man's bare foot; he jumped and bowed several times to his master.

Wiping a stray crumb from the shelf of his belly, Sokar launched into his habitual bellow. "This had better be worth my time, Min, or I'll have your beer rations for a month!"

"Yes, master. I—we—that is, it—" Min glanced over his shoulder, swallowed, and covered his mouth.

Fat furrows appeared between Sokar's brows. "What woman's weakness is this? Get out of my way."

He shoved the men aside and loomed over the body they'd been shielding from him. He was immediately assaulted by the odor of exposed and decaying raw meat. Sokar covered his nose and mouth while swiping at the hordes of flies buzzing around the body of a man lying on his back. He stepped back, almost stumbling.

The man had obviously been one who labored with his hands, one of moderate height, thinning hair, and skin turned almost black from working in the sun. His nose had been broken and had healed crookedly, but the parallel slashes across his throat were far more conspicuous than this facial flaw. The cuts exposed tendon and flesh and distracted the viewer from the bloody wound above his ear. But what had made Sokar retreat and nearly gag was the hole in the man's chest.

Something heavy and sharp had cleaved flesh and bone in slanting blows deep enough to expose the heart. But the heart wasn't there. In its place, stuck upright into the tangle of vessels, muscle, and chipped bone at the bottom of the cavity, was a feather. Cloud-white, a little more than the length of a man's hand, it seemed to defile the dead man by its very beauty and purity.

A fly launched itself off the exposed meat of the wound and buzzed at Sokar. The chief of watchmen yelped and flailed at it with his walking stick. The fly soared away to perch on the dead man's nose. Sokar straightened from his defensive pose and scowled at the other men.

"Fools!" he barked. "This is a peasant come from his farm to the city on some worthless errand. No doubt he came with fellows and quarreled with them. We do not concern ourselves with the doings of lowlings, however grotesque. Get a shroud—a heavy shroud—and send him to the necropolis. And bother me no more with such insignificances, or I'll set you to guarding dung heaps."

"But, master, the feather," Min wailed.

"An accident." Sokar cast a furtive glance at the body and its obscene decoration. "Some goose or other fowl strayed near the body and left it. You're nearly soiling your kilt over something that has an ordinary explanation. Some quarrel has ended in death and a little magic."

Keeping his gaze averted from the body and making the sign against evil, Sokar shook his walking stick at Min. "No more wild imaginings. If you bother me with something like this again, you'll regret it."

Sokar spun around and tramped out of the alley before anyone else could speak. Once he reached the street, his pace quickened, and he kept looking over his shoulder as if he expected the heartless corpse to get up and chase him. He went so fast that his attendant was forced to trot after him.

Back in the watch compound, Sokar called for beer and more date bread. He scurried into his workroom, shoved apprentices and citizens waiting to see him outside, and collapsed on a cushioned wicker stool. The seat creaked in protest at his weight. He settled into the cushion and wiped sweat from his forehead, nose, and upper lip.

Everyone knew peasants had been ordained to their brutal existence by the gods. The sacred ones had created the orderly society in which Egyptians lived, each man and woman assigned a place with certain work, certain duties. Some, like the dead man, led a rough, contentious life that ended in violence. Who knew why such low ones behaved as they did? No doubt some netherworld demon had caused the quarrel in which the farmer was killed.

Vengeful spirits of dead ones who had been abandoned by their descendants lurked in the darkness. Their kas had been left to starve for lack of offerings, and these miserable spirits often wrought havoc among the living. They incited evil as surely as a pretty woman evoked lust. And Min hadn't the sense to recognize such a common truth and behave accordingly.

Sokar sucked in a deep breath and let it out slowly. Taking a long sip of beer, he picked up a length of papyrus that rested beside him on the floor. He drew a lamp closer, picked up a rush pen, and dipped it in water and black ink from a palette. Now, to continue his reports. Each day he composed one for the mayor, a copy of which would be sent on to the office of Lord Meren, Eyes and Ears of Pharaoh. When one's writings might be inspected by a great one such as Lord Meren, one chose one's subject and phrases most carefully.

Under a column headed "Happenings of the Day" Sokar wrote in cursive script: "One death, a farmer not of the city." No need to disgust a great one with meaningless details. He moved on to list the theft of valuable chisels from a stone worker.

A little girl followed her mother past a fruit stall in a crowded market near the palace district. She yanked on her mother's skirt and pointed up, past the rooftops, at a bird of prey soaring on the invisible winds that swept the sky. Horus, the falcon, "Far-Above One," god of the sky, son of Osiris, protector of pharaoh. This was the sky-falcon, whose eyes are the sun and the moon.

The Horus falcon embodied the majesty and power of Egypt and her king, from its hooked upper bill to the tips of its slate-gray wings. Gray darkened to black as it reached the bird's nape and head, creating a startling contrast with the white of its underside. A curved black slash marked its white cheek.

The bird suddenly dove straight down and vanished near the bank of the Nile, then reappeared, its attack aborted. Banking sharply, it left the market behind to glide easily over the massive ramparts of the royal palace. Uttering an ascending wail,
weechew-weechew, weechew-weechew
, it began a long, graceful descent. The falcon's path took it over colossal pylons, palace lakes and gardens bursting with exotic flowers and incense trees, masses of lofty palms around courtyard after courtyard filled with festival-dressed men and women. At last the bird landed on top of an obelisk carved in pink granite and covered in electrum. Strong wings swept back and forth for balance before folding to the creature's sides.

The sky-falcon tilted its head. The eye of the sun, round and obsidian-black, looked down at a gravel path lined with guards along which two men walked. The taller, darker one followed the other, and they disappeared into the palace. With a rasping
kack-kack-kack
, the Horus falcon sprang aloft, climbing the sky to leave behind the palace called Domain of Tutankhamun, Great of Conquests, and the court of the Golden Horus.

As Meren stepped inside the royal palace he heard the harsh cry of a falcon. If he could have escaped on wings like that bird, he would have. But a summons from pharaoh couldn't be escaped, even if his mood was as foul as a chamber pot. Why had fate thrust upon him this burden of discovering secrets so dangerous that even suspecting them could result in the annihilation of his whole family?

Thus preoccupied, Meren spared no glance at the dozens of guards on alert in the palace corridors and faience-tiled reception rooms through which he walked. Trying to hurry without seeming to do so, Meren reached an antechamber behind the imperial throne room. It was protected by the largest and most formidable of the king's personal bodyguards, under the command of Meren's even more formidable escort.

None of the guards took notice of Meren as Karoya came forward and opened the polished cedar door. The antechamber was filled with more of Karoya's men. Each was armed with a scimitar and a dagger thrust into his beaded belt. All wore engraved bronze-covered leather corselets wrapped across their chests.

Meren felt almost naked without his own armor. He was dressed for court, bejeweled and painted, decked in gold, lapis lazuli, turquoise, and malachite. His own weapon was a ceremonial dagger with a hilt of beaded electrum. A brief thought flitted into his heart. If he pursued Nefertiti's killers—there had to be more than one— and made the slightest mistake, it would take an army of royal bodyguards to keep him and the family safe.

He should be making preparations, not wasting time at court. The moment he'd seen Karoya at his house, Meren knew his plans for the morning were ruined. Karoya only appeared when pharaoh sent a personal rather than official message. He had been summoned to a ceremony he'd thought to avoid—the king's reception of the long-awaited Hittite royal emissary. Meren's own web of informers was convinced that the king of the Hittites, Suppiluliumas, had been using rebellious vassals and disgruntled rival claimants to princely thrones to create unrest at the edges of the Egyptian empire.

Several princes loyal to pharaoh had already been attacked and defeated in their city-states in Syria and Palestine. Ordinarily Egypt would have attributed such events to the perennial eddies and currents of warfare that plagued the region. But Suppiluliumas was a conqueror. If he was allowed to continue his depredations unchecked, Egypt might someday find the Hittite armies at her own borders. It had happened once, with the Hyksos. That humiliating conquest had left Egypt with an abiding determination never again to fall victim to an invasion of Asiatics.

Pharaoh must have decided he needed all his foremost servants beside him to present a united phalanx to the Hittite emissary. Thus it was that Meren had donned court garb and come to the palace. Karoya had taken up a stance beside the door that opened into the imperial throne room, a vast, pillared audience hall fabled throughout the world for its magnificence. Nodding to Karoya, Meren waited for the Nubian to open the door, then sighed and walked into a blaze of gold. Blinking in the light of a thousand tapers and alabaster lamps perched on stands, he entered behind and to the right of the throne itself. Karoya went to his place in front of the right-hand support column of the dais.

Pausing, Meren surveyed a sea of the finest starched and pleated linen worn by dozens of courtiers. Ministers, nobles, and government officials rivaled the raiment of the gods in their stone temples with their plaited and smoothed wigs, their heavy earrings, their collars of gold and electrum. None, however, equaled the splendor of pharaoh.

Tutankhamun was seated on an ebony-and-gold throne, and he wore the double crown of Upper and Lower Egypt. Though only fourteen, he carried the heavy gold, lapis lazuli, carnelian, and turquoise of his royal costume as if it were unadorned linen. Meren had to stop himself from smiling. It wasn't long ago that the boy-king had complained bitterly of the nuisance of having to wear the tall, heavy crowns, the ceremonial gold beard and cumbersome imperial rings. He'd said it was like wearing the contents of the royal treasury.

A snakelike movement caught Meren's attention. Lying beside the throne and swirling his tail was the king's black leopard—Sa, the guardian. The double crown moved slightly. Meren's gaze flicked upward to meet the solemn regard of pharaoh. Tutankhamun lifted his eyebrows, a signal so fleeting that most wouldn't understand it.

Meren eased his way through the ranks of ministers close to the king and joined the vizier Ay and General Horemheb beside the first step of the covered dais upon which the throne rested. The entire hall gleamed with the jewels of the courtiers, the decorations on the weapons of the guards, the embellishments on the posts and awning over the dais, the throne itself. More royal guards stood in motionless rows against the walls. Behind them rose great painted reliefs showing the king slaughtering his enemies in his golden chariot, the king returning from battle with hundreds of prisoners, the king trampling a Libyan rebel while hacking a Syrian with his war ax.

Tutankhamun complained increasingly that Meren and his other ministers wouldn't let him go into battle and make these brilliantly executed paintings more than examples of royal aspirations. The boy was growing more and more impatient to measure up to the warrior-king images with which he was confronted daily. Soon Tutankhamun would make Meren fulfill his promise to take him on a raid against one of the bandit gangs that plagued the more isolated Egyptian villages.

An abrupt silence fell over the assembly. A hollow pounding echoed through the hall and bounced off the high walls. The overseer of the audience hall paced slowly down the long avenue formed by column after column, each in the form of a bundle of papyrus plants. Meren had to stop his thoughts from wandering back to his own troubles as the overseer stopped some distance from pharaoh.

"Mugallu, prince and emissary of the king of the Hittites prostrates himself and begs to come into the presence of the living Horus: Strong Bull, Arisen in truth, Gold-Horus: Great of strength, Smiter of Asiatics, the King of Upper and Lower Egypt, Nebkheprure Tutankhamun, Son of Ra, Lord of Thebes, beloved of Amun-Ra."

The elderly Ay left Meren's side to stand before the throne. He would speak to the Hittite prince, for pharaoh never deigned to engage in personal speech with mere emissaries, even if they were princes. Trumpets blared, and the towering double doors, each encased in gold, swung open. Mugallu strode quickly into the hall. His clothing gleamed strangely, and Meren swore under his breath. The emissary was wearing Hittite silver.