by N. L. Holmes
But all class consciousness fell away as Maya churned up the road to the grandiose gate. He had a mission that transcended his artisan roots. Panting, he hammered on the panel. A porter in livery appeared, looking askance at the sweat-dripping dwarf on his doorsill.
“Quick, man. Your master or mistress. It’s urgent,” Maya cried in his most authoritative voice. “Quick! Quick!”
The man disappeared through the garden, and Maya eyed his surroundings. Enormous sycomore trees shaded the path, trimmed neatly—everything relating to Ptah-mes was neat. But the patina lacking in his newly planted garden in the capital buttered the grounds here with the golden softness of ages of wealth.
A moment later, quick footsteps, almost running, came crunching down the path, and Lord Ptah-mes appeared, his eyes wide, his chest heaving. “Maya, I thought it must be you. Come in. What’s wrong?”
“My lord, the medjay have arrested Lord Hani”—Ptah-mes’s face went pale—“and we don’t know why or where they’ve taken him. But just in case, you’d better get you-know-who someplace else.”
Ptah-mes stared at the gate as if he expected to see policemen marching in. Then he turned and hustled off, crying, “Come with me.”
Maya scarcely noticed the endless manicured gardens and pools that flashed past him as he ran. He was reaching the end of his energy, but Lord Ptah-mes’s long legs strode relentlessly on. Maya followed Lord Ptah-mes into a painted portico, where astounded servants drew back at their master’s passage.
“Stay here,” Ptah-mes directed, and Maya gratefully stopped in the dim, cool vestibule while the lord of the house stalked into the interior, his form reflected in the polished floor as if in water.
Maya could hear urgent voices in the salon, a man’s and a woman’s, increasingly raised in argument. Then Ptah-mes’s shouted, “And if they torture Hani and he talks, my dear? Get the son of a bitch out of here immediately.”
He appeared once more in the doorway, his face red and grim, his nostrils taut with anger. “Let’s go. My boat will be faster.”
“Lord Mery-ra is expecting me, my lord.”
Ptah-mes called his litter bearers and said to Maya, “Take the litter back to Hani’s house and pick up his father, then come to the quay. I’ll be waiting.” Over his shoulder, he yelled, “Out. Immediately.”
Maya crawled into the litter, trying to blot from his mind the argument he’d just heard, while Ptah-mes ran down through the garden to his private landing. The men picked Maya up, and off he swayed through the streets in effortless comfort.
He found Lord Mery-ra waiting impatiently in the gate. “Did you find him?”
“Yes. He said to join him on his boat, and we’ll all go down to the capital together. It’s faster. Here’s his litter.” Mery-ra climbed in, and to the bearers, Maya said grandly, “To the quays, men.”
Lord Mery-ra had seen the yacht before, of course. He hailed it, and the two scribes galloped up the gangplank, followed by the litter bearers. Maya stared around him. Gods, the luxury! What stories I’ll have for Sat-hut-haru! But of course, her father was in the clutches of the medjay. Maya blew out a distraught breath.
Lord Ptah-mes welcomed them. “We’ll travel all night, whatever the risk. We may actually get to the capital before the police boat.” He was both anxious and angry, his lean face whetted sharp, his mouth a grim line. “This was inevitable,” he muttered.
“My lord, I feel sure Hani would never say anything about your role in this,” Mery-ra said.
“If they torture him, Mery-ra? Will he be able to stop himself?” But then Ptah-mes seemed to realize the selfishness of his concerns, and he added, “For his sake above all, let’s hope they don’t torture him. My wife has taken this upon her of her own free will.”
They stood tensely at the gunwales until the crew cast off and veered into the stream. Maya heard the rhythmic splash of the paddles that propelled them past other boats just riding the current. At last, their host led them up the sloping deck to the stern, where they seated themselves in the curtained kiosk between the steering oars. Ptah-mes sat preoccupied, staring ahead of him. Finally, he said, “Do you know anything more, Mery-ra? Did they say what this was about?”
“Nothing, my lord. The doorkeeper announced an unidentified guest this morning, and Hani went out to the pavilion to speak to him. The next thing I knew, the man was marching my son to the gate, and Hani cried, ‘They’re arresting me for knowing nothing.’”
Ptah-mes nodded. They subsided into silence, and the morning passed in that silence, the sun rising in the sky. No one spoke. Occasionally, somebody would sigh. Ptah-mes’s face never changed expression, as if it were permanently imprinted with care and anger. Maya watched the grandee surreptitiously, observing his unconsciously graceful gestures and how his clothes never seemed to wrinkle. Perhaps it was because he was slim; there was no straining of shirt over belly or kilt top crumpled from the overflow. Still, he has to bend his legs when he sits.
Mery-ra, on the other hand, had something rumpled about him; his wig was always a little askew. He was closer to the ideal of the scribe—sedentary, well fed, cheerful. But even at his age, there was a sense of power in those broad shoulders and big hands. He was surely the image of Lord Hani in twenty years’ time.
If Lord Hani lives. Maya felt fear well up inside him, an icy seepage. Hani was so solid, so calm, always in command of things. He was such a bulwark. Maya couldn’t imagine a life in which his father-in-law was no longer there, looking out for him and Sat-hut-haru. And their son. Oh, Great One, please let him live to see his grandson. Maya could feel his nose begin to burn. Let him be all right.
⸎
Lord Mahu and the four medjay cast off from the quay with their prisoner in tow. Although there was little chance of Hani making an escape from the deck of a boat, they left his hands tied and made him sit on the deck with the baboon staring at him from a cubit away. Hani entertained himself for a while, making faces at the animal, which watched him with world-weary close-set amber eyes and finally turned away in apparent disgust. It scratched behind its knee in an absent way and then examined its nails like a bored human. Once, it yawned, revealing enormous yellow fangs. They probably trained it to do that to intimidate prisoners. Hani tried to picture the baboon raising its hands and ecstatically praising the rising sun, but this was clearly a jaded, soul-hardened police baboon incapable of such sensibility.
After some time had passed, Mahu stumped over to where Hani and the baboon sat face-to-face on the deck and squatted at Hani’s side. “Here’s what’s going to happen,” he said in a tone of barely contained hostility.
I shouldn’t have antagonized him so, Hani thought, uneasy but resigned to his fate.
“You’re going to tell me honestly and completely what you know about Amen-em-hut’s whereabouts since we released him last summer. Get up.” He barely gave Hani time to put a foot beneath himself before he hauled him up by the neck of his shirt. “Now, talk.”
Standing in the midday sun, where Mahu had positioned him so that he had to squint into the glare, Hani said, “He came home from the police barracks in Waset, bruised and limping. He refused to tell his wife what had happened to him, saying only that he’d been told to keep his mouth shut. He went to bed at her side, and when she awoke in the morning, he was gone.”
“All right. That’s day one. Go on.”
“Nobody knew where he was. The family was distraught. We thought you had him or that he was dead. After the Inundation, his boat turned up downstream, and everyone figured he’d been drowned. More than a month later, I went into the boat shed at my country house, and there he was. He apologized for endangering my family, and the next day, I think it was, or a few days later, he disappeared again.”
“And he didn’t tell you where he was going?”
“I specifically told him I didn’t want to know.”
“Does his wife know?”
“No. He didn’t want anyone close to him to know. Fo
r this reason.” Hani nodded at his bound hands. “I told him to leave the country if he knew what was good for him.”
“Do you think he did that?”
“I have no idea.”
Mahu looked sly. “You’re in the foreign service, Hani. If you were sending a family member abroad, where would you send them?”
Hani pondered that. Of course, he’d done no such thing, but it was interesting to speculate. “Given the situation in the north, I would tell them to go to Kebni or Arwada. Far enough away to be out of sight but not so close to the border to be endangered. Enough Egyptians around not to be completely isolated but not so many as to be running into people who knew them.”
Mahu sauntered away then drifted back and glared at Hani. “Do you think that’s what he did, Lord Hani?”
“I have no idea,” Hani said. “I think it would be hard for him to leave Kemet, but maybe he was desperate enough to do it.”
“And if he didn’t leave the country, where might he have gone?”
Hani wrinkled his brow as if in thought. “He might have found a way to get into one of the estates of the god. I think he’d feel he had some right to be there.” He looked up with a smile. “But that’s just a guess.”
“Any other family members who might have helped him hide?”
“All his children still live at home with their mother except his son. None of them knows where he is. They all think he’s probably dead. And maybe he is.”
“And what about his sister?”
No, no, not her, Hani thought, panic flaring. He tried to smile. “She lives with me, my lord. If I don’t know, neither does she.” His heart had started to hammer.
“What about your children? At least two of them are married.”
You dirty bastard. You’ve studied up on my children? “I know my middle daughter doesn’t know. I see her nearly daily. My oldest son lives in Akhet-aten. He’s no friend of the old gods, my lord. It would surprise me mightily if he knew and didn’t turn his uncle in.” Breathing had become difficult. Anger flickered like a cold fire in Hani’s middle. Stay away from Nub-nefer and the children. He clenched his fists quietly.
Mahu sensed Hani’s rage and seemed to enjoy it. “Perhaps we should call your wife in.”
Hani fought down the urge to throw himself at Mahu and knock him over the edge of the boat. “She knows less than I. I only encountered him by accident,” he said, forcing his voice to remain level. He hoped the medjay couldn’t hear how his breath shook in his nose.
They fed him at mealtime and permitted him to sleep uncomfortably on the deck. But every day, Mahu asked him the same questions, no doubt expecting to find some telltale differences where the truth didn’t underpin his words. For the rest of the time, Hani and the baboon confronted one another in boredom at first, then with a kind of fascination. Hani observed that a big, tooth-exposing grin was taken as a threat rather than an expression of good humor and learned to smile according to the baboon’s taste. At one point, the animal reached out a long hand and picked at something on Hani’s kilted thigh, examined it, then popped it in its mouth.
The young policeman who was the animal’s handler observed the interchange with amusement. “He likes you,” he said on the third day.
“Does he have a name?”
“Djehuty’s Cub.” The man laughed. “Only we can’t say that anymore. He’s just Cub.”
At last, after five interminable days, Hani saw, sliding toward them on the bank, the white walls of the riverside palace and the beige cubes of private dwellings and warehouses that told him they’d reached the capital. The thought of new possibilities made swallowing difficult. The medjay might imprison him and continue to interrogate him. Presumably, that was why they’d taken him to Akhet-aten. Surely, Mahu sees that I know nothing. But they were in Mahu’s home terrain now. He had full authority to do whatever he wanted to a person of interest.
One of the policemen prodded Hani to his feet. Mahu stood before him, hands behind his back. The boat had started to swing out of the current and draw toward the shore. “Here we are, Hani. I’m going to turn you loose for the moment, but be aware that we’re watching you.” He gave a disagreeable smile that spread his lips without touching his eyes. “I’m not convinced you don’t know more than you let on. Perhaps it will just take a little more motivation to make you share that knowledge, eh?”
His back to the shore, Mahu staggered as the boat slid up into the shallows with a lurch, and he had to put out his hands to steady himself. Hani forced himself not to sneer—that small discomfiture gave him so much satisfaction. He suspected Mahu wasn’t a man who easily endured looking ridiculous.
“I can’t tell you what I don’t know, my lord,” he said mildly.
Mahu flicked a gesture to his men. While the sailors threw down the gangplank and lifted the segment of gunwales that blocked the opening, two of the medjay untied Hani’s hands and pushed him toward the exit.
Suddenly, Hani stopped, a thought forming that set alight a spark of suspicion within him. “Excuse me, Lord Mahu,” he said, turning back. “May I ask how these threats against the king or calls to regicide or whatever they are have been disseminated? Because Amen-em-hut saw absolutely no one, at least during that month or more he was in my shed. He certainly didn’t say anything to anyone.”
Mahu sauntered closer, a dark light flickering in his eye. “They were written, Hani. They were posted in places where the lettered could read them. They were aimed at priests and scribes, I’d say, wouldn’t you?”
“Then it wasn’t Amen-em-hut!” cried Hani triumphantly. “He had no writing implements. He didn’t even go into my house—he just stole from the garden to live. Where would he have gotten papyrus and ink in a boat shed?”
“Perhaps you could tell me.”
“I could not. Because he didn’t have any. Much as he might have liked to write such calls to arms, it wasn’t him. It couldn’t have been.” Hani was unable control his grin. Why didn’t I think of this sooner?
Mahu’s eyes narrowed in reflection. Then his thin lips parted in a smirk. “And yet he signed them. Strange, isn’t it?”
Hani made a dismissive sound. “Not at all. Anybody could have written the threats and signed his name to them. Do you have them? I could recognize his handwriting.”
“And what reason do I have to trust you if you tell me it isn’t his?”
A slow burn of anger had begun again under Hani’s breastbone. Mahu didn’t want to know if Amen-em-hut was innocent. He didn’t want to consider any evidence that might exculpate him.
“I’m sure there are other people who know his hand,” Hani said coldly. “You don’t have to trust me. Confirm it with someone else.”
“Who? A priest of the Banished One?” Mahu said sarcastically.
Hani threw up his hands. “I’ve tried to help you, Mahu. But it seems you don’t care about the truth of this matter.”
To one of the policemen at his side, Mahu made a gesture so quick Hani could hardly react. The man hurled himself at Hani and struck him, hard knuckled, in the face. Hani reeled back, his stomach in his mouth as he felt himself fall backward through the opening in the gunwales onto the narrow gangplank. All he could think of was Baket-iset toppling from the deck years before. Someone grabbed his feet, and he just avoided sprawling all the way down the cross-staved boards or into the water. But his back and ribs ignited with pain almost as intense as the blow to his cheekbone as they dragged him heavily back over the edge. He groaned as two of the medjay hauled him to his feet without tenderness.
“You need to learn some respect for authority, Lord Hani,” said Mahu, breathing as hard as if he himself had thrown himself on the scribe. “I think I’ve had enough of your company for the moment. But we know where to find you when we need you.” He turned his back, and the soldiers loosed their prisoner’s arms. Gasping and staggering, Hani lurched down the plank and onto the land, half his body on fire with pain.
He stared up at t
he boat while his face began to swell and obstruct his vision. He pressed the back of his hand to his cheek, and it came away bloody. I shouldn’t have acted so cocky, he thought ruefully. But I’ve found out something. There’s somebody else out there acting in Amen-em-hut’s name.
Hani tried to plan his next move. He had nothing on him with which to pay the ferry back to Waset. He thought of heading to Lord Ptah-mes’s house, but Mahu wasn’t aware of his—or his wife’s—involvement in the affair, and if Hani were followed, he would implicate Ptah-mes unnecessarily. He figured the least suspicious place for him to go was to Aha’s.
Walking was painful and slow. Hani had lost his sandals and his wig, on top of everything else. He limped along, his teeth gritted, his face pulsing, his clothes filthy from his slide down the gangplank—amused at the scandalized stares he drew from the relatively few people he passed on the back streets. He couldn’t understand this new capital, which seemed not to be a real city at all. It reminded him of the jubilee courts of ancient kings he’d once seen near Men-nefer, where all the “buildings” that surrounded them were in fact nothing but handsome facades.
He pounded on Aha’s gate and was met by the porter, who somehow recognized him under his disfiguring injury and cried in shock, “Lord Hani! Come in, come in! What’s happened, my lord?”
“A run-in with wild animals,” Hani said wryly. “Is my son home?”
“Lord Hesy-en-aten is at the Hall of Royal Correspondence, my lord. But I know he would want you to come in and let Lady Khentet-ka bandage your wounds.”
