Year of the Hyenas

by Brad Geagley

  “There!” Semerket said when an old woman’s body bobbed to the surface. Instinctively he knew Hetephras. He had imagined her in his mind since he’d received the case, and felt a pang on seeing the old lady. Though he had once labored in the House of Purification, and knew what to expect, he had nevertheless imagined her a living thing—not this poor rubbery piece of flesh being hoisted to the table.

  Then he saw the gash across her throat. It gaped open, as clean a wound as priests make on the victims of temple sacrifices. No crocodile could make so clean a gash. Still, there was the possibility that Hetephras had been mutilated after her death. That question, too, must be asked and answered, though Semerket was dismally sure that no such thing had occurred.

  Metufer and three of his assistants had disappeared into an ante-room. They returned, each wearing a leather mask of Anubis, the jackal-headed god. Metufer held a gleaming knife of basalt, its finely polished edges catching what little light there was in the room. Muttering a last prayer for forgiveness, Metufer abruptly thrust the knife into Hetephras’s side and slashed toward her midsection.

  As quickly as a fowler filets a duckling in the marketplace, the Ripper Up opened a long, bloodless incision. Semerket winced, surprised to find that after all these years his toughness had gone. As Metufer eased his knife down Hetephras’s side, Semerket felt his stomach twitch rebelliously. Silently he bade it behave, as if it were an unruly dog, but a light sweat nevertheless broke on his forehead.

  When Metufer at last withdrew the knife, the other Anubis priests began wailing, raising their hands in feigned outrage and grief. Using phrases of archaic Egyptian that had been spoken for a thousand years at the moment of this ritual “re-murder,” they chased the lumbering Metufer from the room with shouts and curses. As he left the room, Metufer surreptitiously directed one of the boys to bring Semerket a box.

  Semerket saw that the box contained a linen sheath. He took the garment out, unfurling it. From the bloodstains cascading from its collar down the front and back, he recognized it as the dress the priestess had been found in. Despite the time she had floated dead in the Nile, all its water could not wash away the blood. Farther down in the box was a wire pectoral, studded with amulets and some glass jewels. She had not been killed for her riches, Semerket thought grimly. He folded the sad relics and placed them in the box. Metufer returned to his side.

  “Was that all there was on her? No wig? No sandals?” Semerket asked.

  “Nothing more.”

  Semerket considered. More than likely the wig and sandals rested at the bottom of the Nile—a lamentable possibility. But if they were elsewhere, and if he could find them, they might indicate where the lady had met her end.

  Metufer stood again at the altar table, beckoning for Semerket to join him. “What is it you want to know, Semerket?” he asked. Remarkably, his cough had vanished.

  Semerket approached the table. “Did she drown?” He knew the answer, but the question still had to be asked.

  “Let us see what this dead woman wants to tell us,” Metufer said. He thrust his large hand into the incision. Semerket saw the flesh of Hetephras’s body roll and heave with the hand’s searching movements. With practiced touch, Metufer found what he was looking for and pulled. His hand emerged into the light, trailing a lung that was brownish and distended.

  “She was not drowned,” Metufer whispered. “If she had been, I could have wrung water from her lung as from a sponge. Look what comes now when I squeeze.” His hand clutched the flesh. Blackened blood poured from between his clenched fingers. “She was on dry land when she was killed, and blood filled her lungs from the wound to her neck and windpipe. This is what makes the tissue so brown.”

  “Then she did drown—in her own blood,” Semerket said.

  “No.” Metufer shook his head. “There’s not enough of it here. She was dead before she could inhale more.” He handed the organ to his assistant, who packed it in a jar of natron. Later, when thoroughly drained of moisture, it would be sealed in hot juniper resin and bandaged for burial with Hetephras’s other organs.

  “Could the wounds have been made after her death?” Semerket asked.

  Metufer instructed the Anubis priests to turn Hetephras onto her stomach. “See the color of her flesh, Semerket? What do you know of blood, when a person dies and it lies within, undrained?”

  “It pools, drawn down toward the ground, however the body lies.”

  “And Hetephras’s flesh is white. No pooling blood has turned her black. What do you learn from this?”

  “That all her blood ran from the wounds before she died.”

  “Yes!” Metufer clapped his hands at Semerket’s cleverness, as if he were once again his student and Metufer his teacher.

  It was then that Semerket saw the second wound at the base of Hetephras’s skull, a depression in the bone and flesh, revealing the brain within. Metufer’s old but keen eyes saw it, too. He seized a small wire hook and began to intently probe the wound. “I would usually make an incision through the sinuses and remove the brain, but since there is such convenient access here…” He began to withdraw bits and pieces of the brain without much finesse, large and small chunks quickly extracted. The brain was not to be preserved, being a useless thing, so Metufer was thorough rather than neat.

  Then, without expecting to, both he and Semerket heard a slight ping of metal against metal. They looked at one another. Delicately, Metufer moved the hook back and forth within the priestess’s skull. Again the small metallic noise sounded. Gingerly, Metufer probed further, homing in on the object of his search.

  Semerket barely breathed.

  Metufer found his quarry. Semerket bent closer to look. The Ripper Up manipulated the hook a final time, and withdrew it slowly from the skull. At its curved tip, a piece of dark metal shone, glued to the hook by serum and bits of brain.

  It was unmistakably the tip of an axe blade, made from the rare blue metal of the Hittites, broken at its corner. Metufer held it between his fat thumb and forefinger. With great deliberateness he placed it at the edge of the second wound at the back of Hetephras’s head. Allowing for the natural slackening that had taken place within the Nile, it fit exactly.

  Metufer handed the piece of axe to Semerket. “Obviously our priestess wants you to know something. She has seized this metal, even though it is the strongest in the world, and clung to it in death. Not even the Nile waters could take it from her. Find the owner of the blade this piece fits, and you will find her murderer.”

  Semerket was doubtful. “If it hasn’t been melted down already, or hidden from sight. But at least we do know the poor lady was murdered.”

  Metufer merely nodded, and very carefully bent to rinse the bit of blue metal in the pool of milky natron. He wiped it with great care, then gave it to Semerket. Semerket pocketed it in the folds of his sash. Turning once again to the fat, old priest, Semerket placed a grateful hand on Metufer’s shoulder. The dry hacking cough erupted from the old man, filling the chamber to the rafters. With a last lingering look at Hetephras, Semerket put the bag of cedar again to his nose and left the way he had come.

  DAWN CAME WITH a formidable, glinting brightness. Semerket stepped from the reed craft that had ferried him across the river and tossed the boatman a copper. He turned to face the Gate of Heaven, the pyramid-shaped mountain protecting the Great Place, where the pharaohs lay. The newborn sun dyed the mountain a vivid shade of melon; as it rose, the shadows on the mountain visibly flattened so that its rock face soon took on its usual hue of dusky pink.

  Semerket strode quickly from the boat landing to the causeway that led west. The raised paving stones were not crowded; he saw only a few fishermen heading for the river. Semerket’s walking stick smote the stones with a steady rhythm that echoed through the clear, cool morning.

  A few minutes later he found himself passing the temple of the great god Amenhoteb III. The decrepit building was guarded by the former pharaoh’s twin colossi, which the l
ocal people called the Rulers of Rulers. The seated statues were still vividly painted, though now flaked and peeling. No pharaoh—not even Ramses II—had built larger. The temple they guarded, however, was inhabited by only a handful of priests. The main structure had crumbled years before, for the ambitious architects had located the building near the river so that the Nile waters surrounded it at flood time. Thus the temple became the symbolic mound of earth that had first emerged from the waters of primeval chaos. Unfortunately, years of Nile flooding had undermined the temple and it had collapsed in on itself. Later pharaohs—particularly Ramses II—had used its vast ruins as a convenient quarry. The remaining temple complex was overgrown by grasses and seedling palms, and the chirps of larks and katydids were the only orisons sung there now.

  Even in its ruined state, its priests were offering up platters of onions and loaves of bread to the statues’ spirits as Semerket passed. They returned Semerket’s stare matter-of-factly. Semerket walked on, turning his face resolutely toward the Gate of Heaven.

  The causeway soon diverged. The southernmost road, he knew, would take him to Djamet Temple. Crowded and noisy, Djamet was the hub of all industry and wealth in the area, being the southern abode of the current pharaoh, Ramses III. To Semerket’s right, the northern path led to the mountains, and beyond that into the fierce, red desert where the god Set resided.

  Semerket hesitated. The Western Mayor’s offices were also at Djamet. He knew he should present himself to Pawero as a gesture of courtesy, for the mayor was the absolute lord of Western Thebes. Semerket was technically violating the mayor’s jurisdiction by treading there.

  Yet some force drove him to seek the harsh silence of the cliffs and desert. It was where Hetephras had tended her small shrines and temples. He must go there in any case, if only to get a sense of where the priestess had lived, what she had seen and heard during her days on earth, even to smell the air she had breathed.

  Semerket made the decision that Pawero could wait. He turned north onto the road that led to the Gate of Heaven.

  Peasants still harvested the fields, gathering the last of the emmer wheat. None hailed him. They hurried in their labors, for soon the inundation of the Nile would be upon them. In the fields several bonfires were lit to consume the chaff, and the black smoke rose thickly upward. It was a smell that caught him unaware, abruptly reminding him of Naia. He remembered how their home, built at the edge of similar fields, had been filled with these same earthy smells, and how he and Naia often joined the peasants in their harvest festivals…

  Semerket stopped. His great bitterness suddenly engulfed him, and he could feel again how his ka shriveled to nothingness. Her name was a scream in his head. He did not know whether he actually cried her name aloud or if he remained silent, but it seemed the entire countryside rang with it.

  Some demon or evil genie must have taken possession of him, he decided. How long would it take to forget her and become himself again? How long before this crushing sense of loss would lighten? At that moment he wanted nothing so much as a long draft of soothing wine.

  Resolutely throwing his gray woolen cloak over his shoulder and setting his feet firmly one ahead of the other, he continued walking. The paved causeway became a dirt road, and then narrowed into a small pathway bordered by tufted grasses, barely wide enough for a single person to tread. As the minutes elapsed, the scream in his head that was Naia subsided to a whisper.

  The harvested lands abruptly stopped. He could actually place one foot in the black land where the Nile had crested in last year’s flood and another in the red sands where the desert began. A well was there, and he drank deeply of its cold water, not knowing when he would drink again.

  The sun was overhead now, the morning chill vanished. The trail rose, ascending sharply through cliffs of sheared red sandstone. Ahead of Semerket was a Medjay tower. He reckoned that these Nubian policemen would surely stop him, to challenge his identity and review his credentials. The Nubian Medjays were fierce in keeping all unauthorized persons out of the Great Place, or so he had heard.

  But as Semerket advanced, no one called down to halt him. Drawing nearer, he heard the faint but unmistakable sounds of snoring from high above him. He shook his head in disapproval. The wealth of the generations of Egypt was buried in tombs not more than a few feet away and no one was guarding it.

  “Medjay!” Semerket shouted up to the tower.

  There was no answer. The snores continued.

  “Sergeant!” he called louder, picking up a stone and throwing it through the tower window. It struck something soft, and the snores were abruptly choked off. Semerket waited patiently for the policeman to appear, but soon the sounds of heavy slumber again wafted down to him.

  Shrugging, Semerket turned away and headed once more into the mountain gorges. Such laxity was a sad example of how poorly Pawero governed this side of the Nile. Semerket’s disdain for the Western Mayor honed itself to a keener edge.

  By now Semerket had penetrated deep into the Great Place. The red of the sandstone cliffs had gradually given way to the dull white of weathered limestone. The silence was so pervasive that it assumed a noise of its own, an eerie primordial roaring. He discovered that if he stood very still, the noise was actually caused by the beating of his heart.

  Somewhere beneath these rocks Egypt’s most important crop was sown: the mummies of the dead pharaohs. The tombs were in fact the forges that sparked eternal life in the kings. Magical inscriptions painted on the walls ensured they awakened to life, to eternally labor for the good of Egypt. In return, the people worshipped them in perpetuity and kept their names alive.

  Something at the corner of his vision made him cease his musings. What had he glimpsed? He peered again at the horizon and then saw it—the remains of a small encampment littering the valley floor. Instantly he was striding the mountain pathway that led to it. The thin road twisted in and out of the jutting crags, and as he followed its serpentine path around a cliff face, he was suddenly blocked by a mound of limestone chips. He had not seen it before, located as it was in the shadows and crevices of the mountain. Semerket looked about for any sign of a work gang, for limestone rubble was a sure sign of tomb-makers laboring at their profession.

  But no workman’s chant reached his ears, nor any mumbled word. Not even the wind blew. High up a hawk wheeled, the only evidence of any living thing. On the tops of the cliffs surrounding the valley, Semerket saw other Medjay towers, identical to the one he had passed before. One reason the kings had chosen this desolate place for their burials was that it was so easily observed and protected. But this pile of limestone rubble was somehow hidden from the Medjays’ view, he noticed, obscured by crags and their long shadows.

  Even so, the distant lookout posts seemed deserted; as before, no one shouted at him to explain himself. Gingerly Semerket stepped onto the pile of white rubble. Its gentle slope allowed him to half-walk, half-slide to the floor of the Great Place.

  The rubble deposited him directly at the deserted campsite. Whoever had been there had attempted to hide the remains of their fire with a light covering of sand. Throughout the day the winds had blown the sands away to reveal its dark circle of ash.

  Haphazardly littering the camp were the shattered pieces of an earthen pot, the shards blackened from long use over a fire. Apparently the pot had broken from the intensity of the heat, then been discarded. Semerket noticed that no residue of food caked the interior surfaces of the shards. But traces of gilding could be discerned upon it, and on one of the pieces he was almost certain he recognized a rudimentary glyph, perhaps the name of the pot’s former owner. Idly he began piecing the shards together. He dug around the camp, looking for more of the earthen remains. It was then he struck a wooden rod with his fingers.

  From the sands he withdrew the blackened end of a sycamore branch that had been the stick of a torch. Whoever had used it had been working too quickly to refuel the torch with a wax-soaked cloth. He thrust the branch aside and
began to kick at the surrounding sand. Five more of the crusted sycamore torch ends emerged: at least six persons had camped there.

  Semerket asked himself what kind of labor in the Great Place required such light? Medjays camping outside would have made do with only a fire. Perhaps inside a tomb? Dimly he remembered that tomb workers used a special mixture of expensive sesame oil and salt that supposedly made a torch smokeless. These in the sands were only ordinary torches.

  As he puzzled the conundrum out, Semerket began to quickly amass as many pieces of the shattered clay pot as possible, not knowing why he did so. Tying them into his cloak, he was fastening the ends when he heard the voice.

  “God-skin is made there…”

  From where he sat on the desert floor, the voice seemed to assail him from all directions. Semerket whirled around, peering up and into the crags. He at last spied a young boy astride a donkey. The boy stared down at him. His head was shaved, and he wore the plaited side lock of a royal prince.

  “What did you say?” Semerket called up to him.

  “It’s where they make it. The god-skin.”

  Semerket began to clamber back up to the pathway, finding it difficult to retrace his steps up the mound of limestone shards. He spoke to the boy as he ascended. “I don’t understand what you’re saying!”

  “Every month they come.”

  “Who?”

  “The ones who make the god-skin. When Khons hides his face.” He was smiling.

  “When there’s no moon …?”

  The boy said nothing. Semerket remembered that there had been no moon for the past two days.

  “Who are you? Wait there, please! I want to talk to you.”

  Semerket reached the pathway and ran in the direction the boy had gone. He followed the twisting road, hoping to catch a glimpse of the boy in the fissures ahead. “Please!” he shouted into the air again. “Wait!”