House of Illusions (16 page)

But now as I trod the path through a darkness made thicker by the trembling fronds of palms and saw ahead the glint of water in the little canal leading to Wepwawet’s temple, the full realization of my situation came to me. This was not some strange military exercise conjured by my training officer or a destructive spree devised by my fellow juniors. This was true, this was real, behind me padded a man who would end my life before Ra rose huge and shimmering over the trees on the other side of the river, and then it would all be over. I would never know what happens next. My spine prickled and a sweat of sheer panic sprang out on my body. He walked with such stealth that I was unable to hear his footfalls. I did not know how close he was to me, how much space there was between us. When he suddenly whispered, “Leave the path,” I barely suppressed a shriek. I turned around.

“We must follow it because it passes her door,” I whispered back. “It is not far.”

We went on, and just as we veered with the path to skirt the temple wall, I fancied that I caught a glimpse of movement in the shrubs. Was she there? All at once the frantic beat of panic in my chest was gone, to be replaced by a numb fatalism. I had done all I could. The rest was up to the gods.

At her door I halted. Over the desert the night still hung, but as I glanced to the east I could see the faintest shredding of its cover. “She lives here,” I said, not bothering to lower my voice. “It is wrong for two strangers to wake her so rudely. We can at least knock on the lintel.” He ignored me, raising the reed covering and slipping inside. I did not follow. I knew she was not there.

When he emerged, he took my elbow. “The hut is empty,” he hissed. “Where is she?” I pulled away from him and was about to reply when the bushes stirred and she stepped out. She was wearing the same coarse cloak in which she had hidden her nakedness when I had surprised her dancing under the moon two months ago. It was tied at the neck. One hand held its edge. The other was invisible but I knew that it gripped my dagger.

“An odd hour to be calling on me,” she said warily, her eyes flicking from one to the other of us. “Who are you, and what do you want? If you are looking for a priest, he will arrive shortly to sing the morning prayers. Go back along the path and wait for him in the forecourt.” She was completely calm, completely convincing.

I could sense that the man beside me was troubled. The moment before he replied was too long. I could almost read his thoughts. We were together, she and I, outside. What would he do? Would he say, “I am here to arrest you on a charge of public annoyance,” and end the game my fevered mind had invented? For that second before he opened his mouth the three of us seemed suspended. Then I realized that I could see her more clearly, her face still indistinct and grey in the heatless light of early dawn. She was clutching the cloak too tightly.

“Is this the woman?” His voice was flat. I did not dare to look at him.

“It is.”

“You are sure?” I gritted my teeth.

“Yes.” He nodded then spoke directly to her.

“Woman of Aswat,” he said, “I am here to arrest you on the minor charge of being a public nuisance. I am to take you north. Go into your house and gather up the things you might need.” Shock coursed through me, and I could see that she too was dumbfounded. Her eyes widened.

“What? Arrest me? Is that all?” she almost shouted. “On what charge? Where is your warrant?”

“A warrant is not needed. You are to be held for a short time only.” She glanced at me, at her door, then back to him.

“In that case I shall take nothing with me,” she said deliberately. “The authorities can provide for me. I have had no warning! What will my family think if I simply disappear? Does the mayor of Aswat know about this?”

“They will be notified. Officer Kamen, go back to the boat and tell the sailors to run out the ramp and prepare to sail.”

But of course. I swallowed. How clever, this farce, or how supremely irreproachable. I still did not know which, and we, she and I, would have to play it out to the end. I saluted, catching her eye as I turned to leave. Her face was expressionless.

Once out of sight I drew my sword and left the path, moving back into the undergrowth until I was concealed but could still see the way they would come. The light was stronger now. At any moment Ra would lift himself above the horizon and already the first drowsy pipings of the dawn chorus were beginning above my head. I was staking all my hope on the conclusion that he would bring her a little way along the path until he was sheltered on one side by the trees and on the other by the temple wall, and she would be ahead of him, walking unsuspecting with her back exposed. Would he try to tie her hands? If so he would find my dagger.

They came almost at once, she pacing ahead, he on her heels. She was looking at the ground. He was swiftly running his eye over his surroundings beside and behind, and even as I crouched, sword at the ready, he reached inside his cloak and drew out the garotte. His movements were fluid, easy, and his stride did not falter. Unwinding it he grasped the toggles, leaned forward, and in one graceful, brutal action brought it over and down against her throat.

Something, some kiss of air or tiny sound, must have warned her. Her hand came up, curling between the wire and her neck, and she half-fell, throwing him off balance. As I stood and leaped onto the path, I could see her other hand groping in the folds of her cloak. He was already recovering. Letting go the garotte, he hooked one arm under her chin, ignoring her flailing limbs, and the barbed knife appeared suddenly in his hand. She was trying to scream but could only make choking sounds.

Suddenly I was entirely calm. The sword steadied in my grip. Time slowed. I was closing, rushing towards them, but my mind registered a clot of mud on the swirling hem of the man’s cloak, a perfectly round orange pebble on the path before my foot came down on it. He heard me come and his head half-turned but he did not waver. His elbow came back, ready to drive the knife into her side. It was then that I struck him, both hands on the hilt of my weapon, in the angle between neck and shoulder. He gave a grunt and fell on one knee, swaying. His knife clattered to the earth. I wrenched the sword free, blood following it in a welling tide, but even as he fell on all fours he was groping for his blade. I snatched it up, and with a shout I buried it in his back. He slumped into the dust, face down in the pool of dark red liquid spreading across the path. Briefly his fingers scrabbled among the small stones, then he groaned once and was still. I staggered to the wall, and leaning on my sword, I vomited until I was empty. When I could bring myself to turn I saw that the sun had risen. A gust of warm wind was stirring the stray hairs that had escaped from the man’s glossy black braid and lifting the edge of his cloak in tiny billows.

She was sitting beside the body, cradling her hand from which a few drops of glittering blood were oozing. “Look,” she said hoarsely, showing me the backs of her fingers. There were bruises already swelling on her throat. “The copper cut me to the bone. But he is dead. I examined him. There is no pulse.” She glanced at me sympathetically. “You did well,” she went on. “I was afraid that you might have believed his story and gone back to the boat. I can hardly speak, Kamen. We must bury him before any traffic begins on the path. Go into my house and bring my blanket and broom. Hurry.” I was already recovering, but my legs were weak and I retraced my steps unsteadily to her door. It seemed that I had stood there with them both a thousand hentis ago, and left another Kamen still hovering in that darkness before dawn, full of fear and uncertainty.

Something in me had changed. I felt it as surely as I knew that the sun had risen. I had crossed the gulf between boyhood and manhood in one bound, and it had not happened because I had raised my sword and slashed a man to death. I had found myself compelled to face a challenge unknown to my young fellow officers and I had not refused to see it through. By the time I had returned to her with the blanket and her twig broom, the nausea had completely gone.

We rolled the body in the blanket, leaving the knife in the flesh so that no more tell-tale blood would spill onto the path, and used the broom to sweep into the bushes all trace of the murder. Then, working in a near panic of haste, we half-dragged, half-carried the corpse inside her hut. “It is no use trying to bury him out on the desert,” she said. “The jackals would just dig him up and besides, how long would it take to make a hole deep enough? We would be out there all morning, and I am due to sweep the temple at once. If I do not go, someone will come looking for me.” As she spoke, or rather croaked, for her throat was visibly wounded, she was busy attending to her hand, washing it and applying a salve. She held it up and winced. “I cannot help you,” she added. “But you will find a spade against the outside wall. Put him under my floor. I have no intention of inhabiting this place again anyway. When I return, we can decide what to do.” I had not considered the future. All my thoughts had been bent on saving her and myself. I could not afford to consider it now, either. The morning had begun. The sailors would be breaking their fast and would soon be wondering what had become of me. I fetched the spade and began to dig.

Her floor was of beaten earth, clean but hard. However, when I had broken through the first few inches, I found sand and the work went more quickly. Now and then someone would pass her door and I would pause and stand pant-ing, but no one rapped on her lintel. In the end her one room was a nightmare landscape of piled sand and I knew I could not continue without shovelling some of it outside, so I laid the body in the pit I had made and began the equally backbreaking task of covering it. It was then that she came back and we finished together, she awkwardly with a clay scoop, and we stamped down the earth and piled what little remained under her couch.

For a while we sat half-dazed side by side on the edge of the disordered bed, gazing at the churned floor, then I came to myself. “I must go,” I said. “When I stand before my General, I will have to say that we tied up at Aswat and the man walked down the ramp and disappeared. I attempted to make the arrest myself but found that you had disappeared also.” I was suddenly conscious of an intense thirst. “It is over,” I went on, rising stiffly. “Have you relatives who will give you a bed and help you to build another hut? What excuse will you use for abandoning this one?” She stared at me as though I had lost my wits and I felt her strong fingers bite into my forearm.

“It is not over,” she said urgently. “Do you think that Paiis will trust your word? He will have instructed the assassin to return to him with some evidence that his assignment was fulfilled, and when you arrive with your guileless story he will know that something has gone wrong. If you lie convincingly, you yourself will be in no danger, but you can be sure that he will send another spy or assassin after me. No, Kamen. I cannot stay here and live in constant fear that next time there will be no reprieve. I am coming with you.”

I recoiled. She was right, of course, but the prospect of being responsible for her indefinitely appalled me. I had believed that I could now question her about my mother and then happily set sail for the north and home, putting all this insanity behind me.

“But what of the terms of your exile?” I said hurriedly. “If you leave Aswat the local authorities will search for you, and then they will be forced to report to this nome’s governor that you have run away. Besides, I can take you north as my prisoner but what will you do once we reach the Delta?”

“I have no choice!” she almost shouted at me. “Can’t you see that? I am trapped here, a defenceless target. The villagers are ashamed of me and would not help me. My family would try to shelter me but eventually Paiis would accomplish his end. He will not let go, not now.”

“But why?” I said. “Why does he want you dead?”

“Because I know too much,” she replied grimly. “He did not take my persistence, my determination not to remain dumb and quiet, into account. He underestimated me. I will give you my manuscript to read on the way north, and then you will understand it all.”

“But I thought …”

“I made a copy.” She slid off the couch and stood looking down on her hands, turning them over and over, the calloused palms, the rough skin of her knuckles, the thin red slash where the garotte had bitten into her flesh. “I have been nearly seventeen years in this place. Seventeen years! Every morning I woke vowing never to rest until I was released from this bondage. Every day in humility and shame I have cleaned the temple, cared for the priests who are also my hostile neighbours performing their three-month duty in the holy precinct, planted, tended and harvested my own food, and kept my sanity by stealing sheets of papyrus and writing down my story in whatever few dead hours I had to myself. I am not stupid, Kamen,” she said, and to my astonishment I saw tears in her eyes. “I knew that even if I was able to persuade some kindhearted traveller to take my box, there was no guarantee that the King would ever see it, so I copied each page as I completed it. For some time after I came here, I sent petitions to him through our mayor but they went unanswered. They probably went unread. But surely he has forgiven me after all this time! Forgiven and also forgotten. They say he is ill. I must see him before he dies.”

“But once he dies, the new Hawk-in-the-Nest will review all judgements,” I protested. “If what you say is true, would it not be better to approach his successor?” She laughed shortly.

“I knew the Prince also, when he was young and handsome and hid a cold ambition beneath an aloof but beneficent mask. He will not wish to be reminded that a peasant girl once bargained with him for a queen’s crown. No, Kamen. My only chance lies with Ramses the elder and you must help me reach him. Wait here a little longer.” A blinding shaft of sunlight fell across the floor as she lifted the reed curtain and went out.

This was my chance to run. I could be back aboard the boat within a very few minutes with the ramp hauled in and the sailors pushing us away from the shore. I had done what the gods required of me. Surely nothing more could be demanded. I had saved her life. What she did now was none of my business. I had my own affairs to settle. Indeed she had no right to further endanger my career by foisting herself upon me as though she were a beggar importuning me as I walked down the street. I did not want to know her story. I wanted to retreat to the Delta and the sane ordering of my days. She was like a disease I had contracted on my first trip south and could not purge away.