by Brad Geagley
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 tomb-makers 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, th
en 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.
IN HETEPHRAS’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 tomb-makers 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 tomb-makers 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 TO Medjay 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 tomb-makers’ 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 tomb-makers’ 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?”
“I didn’t say that,” Semerket said.
Qar grunted. “But like all Egyptians, you thought it.”
Semerket’s face was bland. “I envy you, knowing what ‘all Egyptians’ think. It must make things so easy.”
Qar dressed quickly, strapping on his armor and fastening his helmet. When he was finished he regarded Semerket warily. “What do you want of me?”
“To show you something, in the Great Place.”
Qar’s grin was almost a sneer. “Another invisible prince on a flying carpet?”
“Something far more interesting than that,” Semerket said, adding coldly, “and if you’re lucky, it might even save your post.”
Qar reached for his spear. With a nod he indicated that Semerket should lead the way. Together they climbed the path that snaked around the perimeter of the Great Place. When they had gone past the cliffs of red sandstone and entered the valley, they were met by its eerie hush. Their steady footsteps on the pathway sent the loose pebbles tumbling into the valley below. In the silence the cascading stones sounded like an avalanche of boulders.
The sound evoked immediate response from the Medjay towers around the perimeter of the cliffs. At least seven policemen climbed down, spears in hand, to watch them from various points around the valley, and Qar waved his spear at them. Satisfied that the intruders were not enemies, the other Medjays retreated again into their towers. Semerket and Qar continued walking in silence. Vipers sunning themselves on stones hissed at them as they passed, or crawled for cover into the crevices. Scorpions fled before them.
On and on they walked until, finally, Semerket was forced to confess, “I’m baffled. I thought this was the road you arrested me on.”
“It is,” answered Qar.
“But…”
He wanted to show Qar the campsite he had found at the base of the limestone-rubble mound. Semerket had finally decided that if unauthorized persons were entering the valley, it was his duty to tell the Medjays.
Semerket scanned the place slowly, turning around in a full circle. Nothing was familiar. There was no limestone mound, and certainly no campfire. They had vanished into air, as certainly as had the prince astride his donkey. He remembered Mayor Pawero’s warning about how the desert was enchanted, the abode of ghosts and demons, and he was slowly coming to believe it.
“I could have sworn…” Semerket began apologetically, then stopped.
“Another mirage?” Qar’s voice was flat, the kind used by all policemen when confronted with an unreliable witness.
“Apparently.”
Qar knelt down to take up some sand in his fingers, letting it flow from his hands slowly to the ground. He gazed down into the valley. “What is it you thought you saw?” he asked.
“A campfire site. There were six torch sticks buried there, fresh ones. I wanted you to know I wasn’t the only one to get in here undetected.”
Qar pursed his lips, and continued to stare unblinking into the sands below. “And you think the camp was in this canyon?” he asked.
“I’m not sure anymore,” Semerket answered ruefully. “There was a mound of limestone shards—behind that crag, I thought.” He pointed to the base of a nearby wall of stone soaring upward to the pathway. “It sloped all the way down to the floor.”
“Limestone?” asked Qar sharply.
Semerket nodded. “From an excavated tomb.” He knelt beside Qar, scratching his chin. “But it seems I’m mistaken. Perhaps I did indeed imagine it.”
Qar continued to stare. Then he abruptly straightened up and pointed to a spot on the valley floor. “There,” he said.
In the next breath Qar was climbing down the side of the cliff, knowing just where to place his feet against the jutting rocks and crevices. Semerket did not dare follow him, for fear of injury. Instead he ran down the path to a point where it coursed low over the valley, and jumped the short distance to the floor. When he rejoined the Medjay, breathless, Qar had already unearthed some stray pieces of charcoal from the fire’s remains. It was all he could find.
“They were here,” Qar said. He used his spear to sift through the sand, digging in certain areas. No torch ends revealed themselves.
“How do you know? These are only charcoal pieces; they could have come from any fire made here in the last fifty years. Where are the limestone shavings?” Semerket asked, looking around.
Qar did not speak for a time. He stood and looked in a semicircle all about him, his keen eyes searching every crevice. “They got rid of them,” he answered softly. “Poured them back into the tomb.”
“They? You mean the tomb-diggers?”
“No tomb has been dug in the Great Place for over thirty years, Semerket, except for Pharaoh’s. And his is on the other side of the valley.” He spoke reluctantly, as if he were betraying a great secret.
Semerket did not care for the frightened tone of his voice or the expression on his face. “I don’t understand—” he began.
Qar thrust his spear again into the earth, not knowing that he did. “Tomb robbers,” he breathed, and the words were carried in the air to echo softly against the stone walls. “Tomb robbers have come into the Great Place. They filled up the hole they made with the rubble you saw. That’s why the mound is gone.”
Semerket swallowed. Tomb robbery was the most serious offense in Egypt, the highest tier in the crime of heresy. If Qar was correct, and the Great Place had indeed been violated, the delicate balance between life and death would be forfeit. The dead pharaohs, who eternally worked for Egypt’s well-being in the afterlife, would harden their hearts against the living. Misery and chaos would be the result.
A small but definite click came from the sands at their feet. Qar’s spearhead had struck something metallic. For a moment he and Semerket looked at one another dumbly. Then the Medjay was on his knees, furiously digging. When he saw it he instinctively drew back, as if he had uncovered some hideous burrowing insect. Semerket bent to look, and there on the valley floor, shining like a flame upon the sands, was a golden ear loop.
