Year of the Hyenas (15 page)

SEMERKET WENT WALKINGthrough the Place of
Truth, which is what the tombmakers had named their small town. Though
prevented from opening his formal inquiry, he could still do a bit of
exploration on his own. The tombmakers were chary of him, but no one
challenged his reason for being there. Nevertheless he let the vizier’s
seal swing prominently on his chest to discourage any potential
confrontations.

He first made
a mental
map of the village. By pacing from end to end he estimated that it held
about a hundred families, each house sharing walls with its neighbor’s.
He also noticed that some families, including Hunro, had added a second
story to their home.

Semerket tried
to
imagine what the Place of Truth would look like from a hawk’s point of
view. It would be a single building shaped like an immense tortoise, he
fancied, with tapered ends and a wide middle. The crooked main street
he stood in, so narrow he could touch both walls, was its spine, and
the multiple alleyways that led to the east and west were its ribs. The
roofs, being flat and uneven, were the plates on the beast’s gigantic
shell.

Retracing his
steps,
he realized that he was being pursued. Hetephras’s cat, Sukis, followed
him through the streets. When he paused to gaze around at the sights,
she paused with him, sitting down to assiduously groom her yellow coat.
He bent to stroke her, and she wound herself around his ankles, mewing.

The clack of a
shuttle
emanating from an alley caught his ear, and he followed the sound.
Glyphs painted on the wall above the doorway proclaimed the place to be
“Mentu’s Shrouds.” He and Sukis went to the door. The woman at the loom
didn’t even look up at him as he peered inside. A young girl, probably
her daughter, helped to feed the linen thread from a spool. The shuttle
in the woman’s hand flew from left to right and back again, so fast
that Semerket could not see it clearly. The pure white thread the girl
unwound was so fine as to seem nonexistent. The cloth that fell from
the loom to the floor was mist.

A cacophony of
hammers
banging against metal next drew his attention. In a stall farther down
the alley he spied Sani the goldsmith, Khepura’s husband, carefully
polishing the face of a golden mask. All around him Sani’s
assistants—his sons, by the look of their identical silhouettes—were
hammering golden ingots into papyrus-thin sheets. Semerket moved closer
to examine the mask Sani polished and was startled to see the face of
Pharaoh Ramses III himself. On a table behind Sani stood the nemes
crown of striped gold and lapis that would later be riveted to the mask
to form a seamless whole. It was blasphemy for Egyptians to even
imagine Pharaoh dead in his tomb—but there before him was the mask that
would be fitted to his mummy.

Semerket
dropped his
eyes, overcome, feeling that he looked upon something too sacred, too
awful, to be so casually observed. Yet outside the stall, people passed
Sani’s workshop, intent on their own errands, not even slowing to look
inside. Only Semerket was unnerved, it seemed, and he and Sukis hurried
on.

From up and
down the
alley, in every doorway, came the sounds of industry—hammers, the clank
of an anvil being struck, the rasp of saws, voices shouting
instructions. Semerket felt crushed by all the activity, almost
asphyxiated by it. He walked blindly to where the public kitchens were
located, near the village gates. As he came closer, a strong aroma of
fat and oil overtook him. He followed the swarms of flies that were
arriving in great black clouds, drawn to the smell as he was. Sukis
disappeared in the direction of the stables, hoping no doubt for a drop
of sheep’s milk.

Semerket came
around
another corner and saw servants trussing a side of beef. He was taken
by surprise—Pharaoh was indeed generous to his workers if this was how
he fed them. To eat roasted beef on a regular workday was rare anywhere
in Egypt, and he decided that not only was such richness odd, it was
disturbing.

Semerket had
seen how
the women went about with gold and silver sparkling in their hair, or
draped in ropes of precious stones and wearing collars set with jewels.
The weave of their dress was of royal quality, tightly pleated and
embroidered in dizzying patterns. The men, too, wore rich armbands of
copper and bronze, and their work garments were of expensive linen.
These villagers would have stood out even in Eastern Thebes, where the
nobles constantly vied to outdo one another in the richness of their
dress. There were no beggars in the village, either, and this too was
disquieting. Cripples or victims of wars, accidents, and famine, those
poor unfortunates who haunted every corner of Egypt, were nowhere to be
seen.

The entire
village
seemed faked somehow, like one of those model towns or farms that
people took with them into their tombs, perfect and idealized in every
detail. Everyone seemed whole and young, healthy and rich. The paint on
their houses was fresh, the walls repaired, and no sorrow was allowed
to live there. The village of the tombmakers seemed a wizard’s
creation. Any minute Semerket expected the place to vanish, leaving
wind-blown sand in its place.

Nothing could
be so
perfect.

The shadows
were very
long when he and the sand-colored cat traveled the main street back to
Hetephras’s house. As usual, the din of the village was deafening, but
somehow the plaintive notes of a harp came to him. Following the music,
he was surprised to see that it was Hunro who plucked at the
instrument. She was seated in her front room with her back to him,
nestled on cushions, and Semerket ventured the few steps to her door to
listen.

With a painful
thud in
his heart, Semerket recognized the tune as a favorite of Naia’s, an
ancient folk melody from the Faiyum, the huge oasis that was at Egypt’s
center. Hunro began to sing:

Waterwheels
cry to
me,

And seven
geese go
flying,

From the
dark lands
I hear

That my
love is
dying.

Waterwheels
cry to
me,

Alone, on
an empty
bed,

My love is
in the
western land

But still
the fires
spread.

His eyes
blurred as he
remembered Naia’s lovely low voice, and he backed away slowly. But he
accidentally brushed against the door’s rattling hasp, and Hunro
stopped playing and spun around. Her lips formed a slow smile when she
recognized him.

“I didn’t know
I had
an audience,” she said.

“I was
eavesdropping,”
he answered, hastily wiping the tears from his eyes. “I’m sorry. I
should have said something.” He withdrew another step back into the
alley. “You play very well.”

“There’s not
much else
for me to do around here, really, other than to strum my life away.”
She stretched, playing a languid arpeggio on the strings. “I don’t have
a profession like most of the women here.”

“Certainly
your family
occupies your time…” Semerket indicated the house behind her, implying
with a gesture the grievous amount of work it required.

She shook her
head.
“Only my youngest, Rami, is left at home now, and he’s off with his
girl most nights. Now that he’s almost fifteen, he’ll be married and in
his own home soon. As for my husband, he’s gone tonight, too.”

Semerket
raised his
brow. “Where?”

“Is that an
official
question?” Her eyes were veiled, but she laughed, too. “He’s across the
river, in the eastern city. He’d probably kill me for telling you that,
but I don’t care.” She looked away.

“I thought
everyone
here was restricted to this side of the river.”

“Oh, he and
Paneb go
over there all the time—in their ‘official capacity’—every few weeks or
so.” She broke off, and took a long breath. “And so I stay here and
practice my harp.” She began to idly pick out the song again, humming
its refrain, “Waterwheels cry to me…”

“Sing
something else,”
he said harshly.

“Why?” she
asked
innocently, her fingers continuing to pluck at the strings. Then she
laughed in a heartless way, utterly surprised. “Look at that—you’re
crying!”

“No.”

“Yes!” And she
laughed
again, remorseless. “I see the tears on your lashes. Imagine, the
hard-nosed vizier’s man moved to tears by my singing.”

“The song was
my
wife’s favorite.”

She stopped
playing to
casually pick at an imaginary flaw in her sheath. “Wife…?”

“Not anymore,”
he said.

A tiny but
ferocious
smile played about the corners of her mouth. “Did she die?”

“We divorced.”

“Ah,” she
sighed, as
if his words explained everything. “You beat her.”

“No.”

“You slept
with other
women, I suppose.”

“No!”

“Then what a
fool she
was.”

“She wanted
children.”

This made her
reflect
for a moment. “And you couldn’t…?”

He shook his
head.

“Believe me,”
she
said, “some women might find it one of your strongest allurements.” She
turned again to her harp. Her cruel fingers picked out the waterwheel
tune, and defiantly she sang the words, “‘My love is in the western
land, but still the fires spread…’” She stopped again. “What do you
think they mean, those words? They seem silly to me.”

“It’s a song
from the
Faiyum.”

“I’ve heard
it’s
entirely overgrown with green there,” she sighed. “How I should love to
see such a wonder.”

“Huge
waterwheels
carry the water far into the countryside. All day long they creak and
groan. Some people think it sounds like a woman wailing for her lover.”

“But if
there’s so
much water, then how can fires spread? It’s stupid.” She plucked out
the refrain again.

Semerket
suddenly
wrenched the harp from her, dropping it on the cushions with a
discordant twang. “Some fires can never be quenched,” he said roughly.
He hovered over her, close, breathing tightly. Leaning slowly back into
the cushions, Hunro stared into his black eyes.

“Never?” she
said.
Then she laughed, picking up her harp again.

INHETEPHRAS’S HOUSE, he set about to systematically
create an inventory of the priestess’s possessions, searching for
anything that might help him know her better, and by that perhaps
determine who her enemies might have been.

He was in the
priestess’s sleeping room when he found the box hidden beneath a
blanket where Sukis lay. Shooing the offended cat away, Semerket took
the chest into the reception room and held it up into the shaft of
light coming from the high window. On its lid black ravens of agate
flew through the vines, snatching at grapes of lapis lazuli. Grape
leaves of pear wood lay tattered on the ground, and beneath them mice
and dung beetles fought over the grapes the raven had dropped.

Semerket held
his
breath while he ran his fingers over the inlaid woods and stones. The
more he stared at the box, the more awestruck he became, not just at
the chest’s shimmering colors and the perfection of its workmanship,
but at the artist’s eye that could conceive such a work.

It was a poem,
this
box, and a sad one.

More than
depicting a
simple rustic scene, the work was about life itself, how beauty and
perfection are inevitably destroyed by the chaotic evils that assail
them. As he turned the box in his hands, he saw glyphs of bone inlaid
in the dark wood on its bottom panel. “I, this box, belong to
Hetephras, made by Djutmose, cupboard-maker to Pharaoh, her husband.”

Semerket
allowed
himself a moment to imagine this Djutmose stealing a moment or two in
the evenings to work on this gift for his wife. It was plain to see
that Djutmose had poured all his affection for Hetephras into it, and
that he had also foreseen how time would inevitably rob them both of
the moment’s joy.

Semerket
thought of
the things he had given Naia over the course of their marriage. Nothing
so lovely as this box. He remembered how once she had wanted a rare
flowering cactus that grew high on a cliff in the desert, but he had
not been inclined to scale the heights for it.

Carefully he
placed
the chest again in the corner of the room. As the noises of evening
came to him in the chill desert air, he marveled how fate had delivered
him to this place. It was an enchanted city, where beauty was the legal
tender. Strangest of all, the tombmakers took it as much for granted
as other Egyptians regarded well water, or bread.

Semerket
almost hoped
that he would not find Hetephras’s murderer among them. If he did, he
could only play the role predicted on the lid of Hetephras’s chest, the
raven who spoiled the grapes, the defiler of perfection. The
tombmakers lived in an isolation of privilege and confinement; if
Hetephras’s killer was among them, Semerket was sure to become the
breath of air that would burst it apart.

Disturbed, he
scooped
the cat into his arms, where she nestled, comforting him by her purrs.

SEMERKET WENT TOMedjay Qar’s tower
after sunrise. He found the Medjay crouching naked at its base,
sluicing water over himself from a jug. Semerket had come to realize
just how scarce water was in the tombmakers’ village, for no wells or
springs were to be found near the Great Place; the whole land was as
dry and desiccated as the mummies entombed there. Every day, teams of
donkeys bore the tombmakers’ water up the steep trail from the distant
Nile.

“I see you
value
cleanliness over thirst,” Semerket said in a friendly tone as he
approached the Medjay.

Qar stood up,
drying
his body with a rag. “Does it surprise you,” he asked, “that a ‘dirty
Nubian’ cares to wash himself in the mornings?”