Slayer of Gods (9 page)

Meren had promised himself not to succumb to miserable recollections. He hugged himself and began to pace down the length
of the ship. It was Horizon of the Aten, this near-deserted, decaying carcass of a city that had once been
so
terrifyingly beautiful. Horizon of the Aten did this to him.

Ra, lord of the heavens, rose over the city. Meren went to the railing and looked out, past the docks that had so recently
brimmed with the spoils of the empire, over the rooftops of the storehouses, and glimpsed the top of the ceremonial center
called the Great Palace. There, in a throne room made brilliant with painted tiles and vast quantities of gold and electrum,
Akhenaten had received his ministers and given audience to foreign ambassadors—when he wasn’t at the Great Aten Temple.

The monumental buildings of stone and brick remained; only their valuable metal and wood fittings had been taken away. But
their creator, the man whose presence filled them with the light of fanaticism and the bustle of royal business, was gone,
and no one else wanted to live here. Oh, a few priests stayed to keep up the pretense of tending the royal tombs and make offerings
to the kas of the dead king and his family. Across the river small farms thrived as they had before Akhenaten ever thought
of living here. A few people traded on the docks. But the tens of thousands of royal officials, servants, the master craftsmen,
the laborers and their families, the great freighters full of grain, wood, flax, and the spoils of the empire had vanished,
never to return.

Meren dragged his gaze away and wondered where Anath was. Her smaller yacht had followed
Wings of Horus
up the river, but she spent each day with him and regaled him with tales of her exploits among the Asiatics. Anath could make
the fiercest outlaw chief seem ridiculous with her biting and perceptive observations. This talent for detailed scrutiny made
her an extremely valuable royal agent. She had also learned to use magic to further her aims, and Meren feared she employed
it too
freely
in manipulating people. It was all done, according to Anath, for the good of pharaoh and Egypt.

What surprised him, though, was how she made him laugh, even at himself. She was an amazing woman to have retained her humor
after being exiled among the Asiatics for so long. Meren would have suffered terribly without being able to see the Nile every
day. However, Anath had one weakness—her animals. Luckily she hadn’t brought all of them with her. The one she had was more than
enough.

“You’re glowering like an underworld fiend.”

Meren started and whirled around to find Anath standing a few paces away, her head cocked to the side, hands on her hips.

“Damnation, Anath, where did you come from?”

“I came aboard moments ago,” she said as she joined him. “You would have noticed if you hadn’t been transfixed by the sunrise.
Where were your thoughts, Meren?”

Meren moved away from her, avoiding her speculative gaze. “I was thinking about your recommendation that we begin searching
at the Riverside Palace.”

He went to the awning attached to the deckhouse where his cook was laying out a meal. A small kitchen boat followed
Wings of Horus
with supplies and the cook and his assistants. He sat on a woven mat and drank water while the cook filled a bowl with roasted
goose. Anath strolled over, sat down, and took another bowl.

Meren lifted a drumstick and was about to bite into it when he thought of something. “Cook, this isn’t that evil goose of
old Satet’s, is it?”

“No, lord. Beauty still lives. It would be bad luck to kill that old pestilence. Lady Bener gave orders that Beauty was to
be kept as a pet just as Satet intended.”

Anath was looking out at the city. “I remember how green this place used to be.”

“Everyone took what could be uprooted back to Memphis,” Meren said as he tore off a piece of flatbread. “And the rest, well,
there aren’t enough people to keep a tenth part of the gardens. They aren’t needed anyway.”

They ate in silence, steadily, for it was nearly time to leave for the city. Meren’s sailors and charioteers were busy unloading
chariots and horses from the ship, and activity went on all around them.

Meren forced himself to finish the food set before him, not wanting to risk being scolded by the cook. Then he washed his
hands, gave the cook a nod of approval, and stood. Anath was watching Abu supervise the hitching of Meren’s thoroughbreds to
his chariot. Nearby stood Meren’s three scribes, Kenro, Dedi, and Bekenamun, who was called Bek. They would supervise the search
for documents while Meren and Anath explored the city looking for other likely repositories.

“Dedi, your team will begin at the magazines at the King’s House,” he said as he walked down the gangplank. “Bek will go to
the office of records and tithes, and Kenro, you search the office of the correspondence of pharaoh. That’s where you’re more
likely to find the foreign documents you’re so good at translating.”

The various parties set off, and Meren got into his chariot. Anath was standing with his thoroughbreds, Wind Chaser and Star
Chaser. She murmured softly to Wind and brushed her cheek against his soft nose. Meren was about to tell her it was time to
go when something jumped into the chariot with him. He gasped and looked down at the floor of the vehicle to find that Anath’s
cat, Khufu, had
decided
to join him.

Meren scowled at the
creature,
but Khufu ignored him and calmly began to lick one of his paws. Khufu was named after the mighty pharaoh who built the Great
Pyramid, but he reminded Meren of Tcha, a greasy, illiterate denizen of the Caverns. The cat was striped gray, white, and
black, and built like a compact baboon. He was disfigured from his many battles with dogs, monkeys, other cats, and anything
else that moved. His ears were tattered, his face scarred, and one of his eyelids drooped. Khufu lived to fight, and the only
creature he didn’t try to coerce was his mistress.

“Go away, Khufu.”

The cat glanced up at him, then dropped into a reclining position.

Setting his jaw, Meren gathered the reins. “Come, Anath, we’re wasting time.”

Anath got into the chariot and took the reins from him. “I’ve been cooped up on a ship too long. Driving will do me good.”

Slapping the reins on the horses’ backs, she walked them across the waterfront and turned the chariot onto the Royal Road.
,Meren kept quiet as they slowed and then stopped. They were beside the Mansion of the Aten, Akhenaten’s royal chapel for the
worship of his god. A few hundred yards beyond lay the bridge that Akhenaten had built from the Great Palace to the King’s
House, the place where pharaoh had conducted his daily business.

The Royal Road stretched into the distance, the fencing that had once kept pedestrians safe from passing chariots now slowly
decaying. Here in the central city lay most of the royal departments and the Aten temples. To the north and south stood residential
areas along with the estates of master craftsmen such as the great sculptor, Thutmose. Farther north lay smaller palaces,
and finally, the enormous Riverside Palace, the fortified private residence of pharaoh and his family.

As they surveyed the city, the north breeze picked up. Debris blew over the Royal Road while here and there doors that hadn’t
been removed and taken away slammed back and forth on their hinges. At their feet Khufu gave a low growl and curled himself
around Anath’s ankles, and his mistress shivered.

Meren’s gaze skimmed across the Royal Bridge and lighted on the Great Palace, the formal setting for Akhenaten’s grandeur.
Inside, surrounded by lofty columned halls, small courts, and monuments, lay the vast courtyard. Around its perimeter stood
colossal statues of the heretic, each a ghastly distortion—splayed hips, emaciated shoulders, brooding, slanted eyes painted
a glittering, brittle black. All the brilliantly painted and glazed tiles, the lush scenes of vegetation and wildlife that
made the small courts and halls so beautiful, couldn’t erase the bizarre impression of those colossi.

“Do you know what I remember about this place?” Anath asked quietly.

“What?”

“The disjunction between the beauty of it and the fear that was my enduring companion.”

Meren darted a look at her, surprised that she would echo his innermost feelings. “Yes.”

A look of pain passed over her features, then she shook herself as if to rid herself of bad memories. “Such symmetry, the
balance between the Great Palace on one side of the Royal Road and the King’s House on the other, the soaring reed-bundle
columns in the Great Aten Temple, all of it so new and fresh. So unlike the old cities.”

“We were never afraid in the old cities,” Meren said to himself as he gazed at the King’s House. To the east of it, among
the myriad government offices, lay the guardhouse where he’d been tortured. He could still smell the place, the stench of
old sweat, his own waste, and fear. His face set in an expressionless mask, Meren said, “Drive on. We’re losing time.”

Coming out of her own reverie, Anath slapped the reins once more, and they trotted down the Royal Road in the ruts made from
the passage of the heretic’s royal chariot. As if by mutual consent they refrained from talking about anything but their search
for documents that could reveal a motive for killing Nefertiti. They drove far to the north, to the point where the high desert
cliffs marched down to the Nile valley. Here Akhenaten had built the Riverside Palace, a vast complex with its own storehouses,
grain magazines, and barracks, the whole of which was surrounded by battlements. They had no reason to search the cattle biers,
the stables, or the kitchens, but Anath remembered the half dozen rooms in a building, between the palace and the fortified
walls, where records were kept.

They left the horses tethered in the shade of a colonnade and entered the structure that had once served as an office for
the king’s steward. They stood in a large room, the roof of which was supported by four painted columns on stone bases. Strewn
about the room were pieces of papyrus, broken shelves, and piles of ostraca, the pottery shards and limestone flakes that
served as note tablets. Sand was beginning to form small drifts on the floor. In a few years it would completely obscure the
whitewashed packed earth. In a few more this building and most of the others in the city would be choked with the encroaching
desert.

“I’ll start in the secretary’s room,” Anath said, and she disappeared through a doorway with Khufu strolling after her.

Meren sighed and began to search through a pile of ostraca with little hope of finding anything important. Why had he allowed
Anath to persuade him to come here? He should have gone straight to Syene while his men and Anath searched Horizon of the
Aten. For his part, all he seemed to do was sink into a morass of nightmarish memories that left the taste of blood in his
mouth and the smell of death in his nostrils.

It took some while to sort through the contents of the steward’s office. Anath surprised him with her diligence. She returned
from the secretary’s room with an armload of discarded papyri, which she dumped at his feet.

“I’ll be back,” she said as she sped across to the doorway opposite the one she’d first taken.

The morning passed in this manner, with Anath speeding around the palace offices, ducking into corners, and digging through
piles of rubbish. She would dump documents and ostraca in front of Meren with orders that he pay particular attention to this
text or that, then rush off in another direction. By midday she was almost finished and had settled herself on the floor beside
Meren. Her fingers traced lines of cursive hieroglyphs, muttering imprecations against scribes with sloppy penmanship, and
tossing useless documents in every direction.

Meren was reading a list of recipients of the Gold of Honor when Anath drew in a sharp breath. “Meren, look at this.” She handed
him a fragment of papyrus, one of many that had been left behind because oil from a lamp had spilled on them. It was stained
but readable.

“It’s from the queen,” Meren said. He glanced at the date. “She wrote this about a month before she died.”

Anath pointed to a line. “See what she says of Prince Usermontu.”

Meren read the text aloud. “…the appointment of Prince Usermontu. He has diverted the supplies intended for pharaoh’s garrison
at the port of Sumur in the land of the Asiatics. The king’s soldiers go without grain, and I will not countenance it. There
is no reward…” Meren tried to read further, but the ink had spread and blurred. “I remember now. The queen was furious with Prince
Usermontu, but she didn’t tell me her reasons.”

“He was diverting supplies to himself, stealing from the army,” Anath said. “And she found out.”

Meren nodded. “I remember her summoning Usermontu. I had come to deliver documents for Ay, and she kicked him out of the palace.
Grabbed a spear from one of the guards and poked his arse all the way from the audience chamber to the pylon gates.”

“Ha! I wish I’d seen that. Usermontu is a greedy reptile.”

Narrowing his eyes, Meren studied the letter fragment. “There are many greedy servants of the king, but few angered her like
Usermontu did. There must have been something more behind her anger.”

“Perhaps his stealing caused deaths in Sumur. If the men weren’t paid, they might desert and go home, leaving the outpost
undefended.”

“True.”

Meren set the fragment aside, and they continued their search until the sun was low in the sky. By then they’d finished going
through everything, and had come up with nothing else. A servant had brought roast swan, pelican eggs, date bread, and pomegranate
wine at midday, but now Meren was hungry again, and his mood black.

“You’re scowling again.” Anath rose and dusted off her hands.

Meren threw a limestone flake on the pile that reached to his knees and got up as well. “This was a waste of time.”

“I swear by Ishtar and Baal, Meren, you’re miserable company.”