Furies

by D. L. Johnstone

  “Tyche?”

  The girl opened her eyes and looked up at him, startled. Relief flooded across her face and she fell to her knees, pressing her paper-dry lips to the back of his hand over and over again.

  As she ate what little Xanthias could forage from the pantry, Tyche told Aculeo how the pornes had all been sent away from Gurculio’s house the night of the symposium after the festivities wrapped up. Panthea and her harelipped slave, Geta, had finally turned up at the Blue Bird right before dawn. There’d been a mad rush to clear everything out and the pornes were told that whatever they couldn’t carry on their backs would have to be abandoned. There was no word as to where they’d be going. Tyche had been terrified, given Neaera’s disappearance and all the stories of the missing pornes. She managed to slip away in the midst of the confusion and had been living on the streets since then.

  “I’m sorry to burden you,” she said. “I didn’t know where else to go.”

  “I’m just happy you’re safe,” Aculeo said. “Did Panthea or Geta ever speak of Gurculio’s death?”

  “Gurculio’s dead?” the girl asked in surprise.

  “He was murdered the night of the symposium.”

  “Oh.” She looked so small, so vulnerable, with dark circles like bruises under her eyes. She looked like she was ready to collapse. Aculeo helped her to her feet and led her to his bedroom where she fell asleep almost instantly.

  “Was Panthea involved in Gurculio’s murder?” Xanthias asked, watching the sleeping girl.

  “Yes.”

  “Why would she have done it?”

  “I’m not sure,” Aculeo said with a yawn. “But then, I’m not sure of anything these days.”

  “What shall we do with the girl?”

  “Let her sleep for now, we’ll worry about it later. I’ll take your pallet. You take the floor.”

  “Of course, Master. The floor is so much more suitable than a bed for my frail old bones.”

  “Oh stop it.”

  “I almost forgot, a messenger left this for you.” Xanthias held out a scrap of yellow papyrus.

  “I don’t want to know,” Aculeo said. He hesitated before finally accepting the note and opening it. He recognized the spidery scrawl instantly.

  ‘Come to Necropolis! NOW!’

  “The Necropolis,” Aculeo groaned, slumping against his bedroom doorway in utter exhaustion.

  “Does this mean I shall have to sleep on my old pallet after all?” Xanthias said in mock disappointment.

  “Sleep where you like, old man,” Aculeo snapped, heading to the door again. Where else should I go on such a night as this but the City of the Dead, he thought miserably. I’ll feel right at home.

  “Sekhet?” Aculeo called, heading down the steep staircase within the smooth walls of the Necropolis’ cave entrance.

  There was no answer, just a scuttling sound. Rats most likely. Possibly jackals. A pleasant thought. At the bottom of the steps was a narrow passageway cut into the rock, heading off into the darkness. I remember that, Aculeo thought, taking a deep, shaky breath. The walls felt like they were ready to swallow him, steal his air, crush his lungs, bury him alive. He felt his chest grow tight, his breathing rapid, shallow, his head spinning. He closed his eyes, forced himself to breathe slowly, deeply.

  He followed the long passageway, touching the dimly torchlit walls with his fingertips, feeling it twist this way and that. “Sekhet? Are you there?” Still no answer. Did I miss a turn somewhere? It seems to go on forever. Curse this place! And curse Sekhet, the old crone!

  He walked another few minutes that felt like hours, until at last he saw a dim light up ahead. The passageway emptied into a large chamber with four doors facing one another, a crescent moon carved in the pediment above each of them. He could make out the rough cut walls, the high ceiling that had been roughly hewn into a vault. There was a hole carved in the ceiling through which a splash of moonlight spilled, though it had travelled from a very long way up. How deep into the ground have I gone, he wondered. How sturdy are these walls? If they were to suddenly give way I’d be crushed beneath all this rock, unable to breathe, unable to move … his chest was growing tight again. Breathe!

  Three of the doors were partially ajar and seemed to dip down lower than the floor of the chamber, leading further down into the darkness. The fourth door was open and led down another long, dark corridor. “Sekhet?” he called at the doorway. Nothing but quiet.

  He had gone just a few steps down the corridor when he heard a rustling overhead. He raised his free hand warily and felt something brush across his skin, followed by a cacophony of high pitched squeals. He ducked down, covering his head, feeling a thousand leathery creatures slap against his arms and back, their wings thrumming through the air, flapping against the back of his head. When it was over, he looked up at last, saw the last few bats disappear into the chamber behind him, spiralling overhead towards the high ceiling. He shuddered and moved on.

  “Sekhet!” Aculeo called again, an unintended note of anxiety colouring his voice.

  “In here,” came the muffled reply from up ahead. Finally, he thought, more relieved than he cared to admit to hear the sound of her voice. There was a large room at the end of the corridor with several chambers leading off of it. Two of the chambers were lit up with yellow torchlight. And there was Sekhet, standing next to a short, squat man with a shaved scalp polished to a coppery sheen.

  She looked at Aculeo, appraising him, not altogether impressed by what she saw. “You’re pale. And sweating. What’s wrong with you?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Any pains in your chest? Your left arm?”

  “I told you I’m fine.”

  “You’ll end up in here yourself soon enough at the rate you’re going,” Sekhet said, nodding towards a number of cremation jars sitting in niches carved into the rock walls. Cremation, while considered a loathsome taboo among the fellahin, was nonetheless the preferred method among Romans and Greeks and was therefore still regularly performed at the Necropolis.

  “This is my nephew, Paheri,” she said, indicating the man standing next to her. “He’s a Man of Anubis.” The Men of Anubis, the Egyptian jackal-headed god that ruled over the journey into the afterlife, were the priests who dealt with embalming and mummification of the dead. Paheri nodded politely. “How did your journey go with Tisris?”

  “A waste of time. A miserable freedman and his miserable slaves on his miserable fucking farm.”

  “Ah? Well, a worthy try at least. Come, this should make up for it.”

  Behind them, a mummy had been laid out on a stone funerary table. The table had been carved in the form of two lions facing forward with the mummy’s head fitting into a basin between the lions’ tails, a drainage channel running down the centre and feeding into the basin.

  “Who is it this time?” Aculeo asked.

  “Just be patient,” Sekhet snapped.

  “This is most unusual,” Paheri said uneasily. “It’s bad enough to be doing this after the rituals have been completed, but outsiders are not supposed to observe our practices. It is against the word of Anubis. If anyone catches us…”

  “There won’t be anyone down here this time of night and you know it.”

  “Still…”

  “Shall I have a talk with your wife? Or worse, with her mother?”

  The priest shuddered and started to slowly and carefully cut away the rough linen bandages that had been wrapped around the body. Aculeo glanced around the chamber. A densely packed series of rectangular niches had been carved into the rock walls, at least nine across and five high on each wall of the chamber. Some of the niches had not yet been completed but had been marked off with red paint. Mummies had been placed in most of the completed ones, sealed in with thick stone slabs.

  “A million or so,” Sekhet said. She was standing just beside him.

  “What?”

  “There are at least a million people buried here. The caverns go forever unde
r the city. Even I sometimes get lost down here, and I know the paths fairly well.”

  “All this effort to wrap a dead body in cloth and stick them in a hole in the ground,” Aculeo said.

  “It’s the responsibility of the living to provide the dead with their path to the afterlife. When a person dies, their ka can only return to an undamaged body, assuming that Osiris judges them worthy when he weighs their heart. If a body is spoiled or allowed to rot, it destroys their chance for life in the hereafter. An eternal death.”

  The stone slabs that sealed the niches were marked with the occupants’ names and decorated with winged sphinxes, lintels with winged suns and false double doors. Painted keys hung from some of the doors. A few small tokens had been set out in front of the painted doors – oil lamps, incense burners, bowls of wheat, cups of wine – offerings for the dead.

  “Come,” Sekhet said, “Paheri should be ready for us.”

  They returned to the stone funerary table. Paheri was just now starting to remove the rough linen wraps from the mummy’s head. He hesitated a moment, muttered a prayer under his breath, then reluctantly pulled away the last wraps. Her body was desiccated, the dark, plump skin of her face now dry as leather, but her features were perfectly preserved, and all too recognizable.

  “Neaera,” Aculeo said in surprise.

  “No, not Neaera,” Sekhet said. “This one was mummified in the month of Thoth, over ninety days ago.”

  “Who is she then?”

  “Show me the portrait you took from Neaera’s flat.”

  Aculeo retrieved the portrait from his satchel and handed it to the healer. Sekhet unrolled it on the funerary table next to the mummified woman. Three women standing before the Pharos lighthouse. Calisto, Neaera and … Aculeo felt his blood run cold. Her eyes were dark brown to Neaera’s green, her nose slightly broader, her face thinner, and no birthmark on her upper lip.

  “See the piercing on the side of this girl’s nose,” said Sekhet. “In the portrait she wears a jewelled stud there. Do you know her name?”

  “Petras,” Aculeo said. “She disappeared several months ago. Everyone thought she’d run away.”

  “What’s taking you?” Sekhet snapped at Paheri. “Keep unwrapping!”

  “This is so wrong,” the priest muttered. At last, Petras’ body was fully unwrapped. It had been perfectly preserved. Two lines of red wax traced along her naked abdomen and several smaller lines of wax across her breasts, shoulders and thighs.

  “Is that the death wound?” Aculeo asked, pointing to the longest of the lines, which led along the pelvic crest diagonally to the navel, then turned sharply upwards to between the breasts.

  “This was the incision to prepare her body for embalming,” Sekhet said. “We remove all the entrails and inner organs and preserve them in the canopic jars of the four sons of Horus. Amset the man, Hapi the baboon, Qebehsenuf the falcon and Duamutef the jackal. The heart, which holds our intellect and our emotions, is replaced in the chest with a heart scarab that will stand before Osiris in the funerary tribunal of the afterworld.”

  “These cuts we did not make,” Paheri said, tracing his fingertip along the other lines of wax that covered Petras’ body. He touched one as long as his hand that ran beneath the left half of her ribcage. “This cut especially went very deep, I remember, penetrating her abdominal wall almost to her spine, then turned upwards to pierce her heart.”

  “And see here,” Sekhet said, pointing to the girl’s wrists and ankles. Pinkish-brown rope marks were still visible in the soft skin. “And around her neck, another rope mark.”

  “Her neck was broken, her windpipe crushed,” Paheri recalled.

  “She was likely hanged,” said Sekhet. “Like the moneylender.”

  “There’s another thing,” Paheri said. He hesitated a moment, then retreated to his workroom and brought out a much smaller mummy which he laid beside the first.

  “How far along was she when she died?” Sekhet asked, eyeing the lonely little figure.

  “Four months, I would guess. Five at most.”

  “It would have been difficult to ignore at that stage.”

  “But why murder her?” Aculeo asked. “Why not have her abort the child instead?”

  “It’s not so difficult,” Paheri agreed. “Just drink the wine used to smother a red mullet.”

  “There are less idiotic ways than that,” Sekhet snapped.

  “But nothing as foolproof as murder,” Aculeo said. “How did she come to be here in the first place?”

  “Where else would she go?” Paheri asked.

  “Somebody brought her body here. Someone gave you instructions and paid for her to be embalmed. Who was it?”

  “I can’t tell you that,” Paheri said, offended by the question. “It’s bad enough that we have gone back and removed her wrapping after completing the rituals …”

  “We’ll beg Anubis for forgiveness later, nephew,” Sekhet said with a steely smile. “Now tell us who paid for it or we’ll be embalming you next.”

  The Man of Anubis sighed. “Wait here a moment.”

  Aculeo and Sekhet walked to the other end of the long whitewashed chamber as they waited for the priest to return. Some of the niches had already been sealed with stone slabs. There were two scenes on one of them. The top scene was of a naked hunter holding a lance, pursuing an ibis, which was also being attacked by two hunting dogs, while satyrs and nymphs danced at the forest edge. In the bottom scene, someone was escorting a dark-haired young woman through a pair of black gates. Hermes Psychopompus most likely, Aculeo thought, conductor of souls to the underworld, taking the woman’s soul into Hades. Mourners stood at the edge of the scene, saying their farewells. Nearby stood a white tree, with long, oddly shaped branches twisting towards the ground. Aculeo was about to take a closer look at the tree when he was startled by the sound of someone clearing their throat behind him. It was Paheri.

  “The embalming was paid for by Sabazius,” Paheri said reluctantly.

  “Anything else?” Aculeo asked.

  “No, just the name. But there is one more thing I noted in the records,” Paheri said. “I found something unusual on the girl during the embalming process. I forgot to mention it.”He held up a small bleached linen pouch, tapped the contents into his hand and held it up for the others to see.

  A thin yellow cord, tied into a bracelet and stained with blood.

  Tyche walked half a dozen steps behind Aculeo, saying nothing as they walked through the Agora. He’d given her little information about where they were headed that morning, just abruptly told her to follow him as they were going to visit a friend then headed out the door of his little flat and into the street. They walked from the Street of the Marble Workers towards the Agora, past vendors carts selling fruit and fish and cloth towards the great central square, the slave-trade quarter.

  Tyche felt a sick, familiar emptiness bloom inside her chest when she heard the sharp voices of the slave-traders rising above the din as they called out to prospective buyers. She couldn’t help but look at the sullen faces of the slaves chained to one another, their naked skin covered with chalk dust to soak up their sweat and stink while disguising any unsightly scars or blemishes that might bring down their price.

  And she remembered her sister Anchises’ last tears.

  Anchises had cried a great deal during their final days together. Tyche had wanted to go to her, to hold her, comfort her, but she knew the trader would likely beat them both. It made his customers uncomfortable to see slaves caring for one another. Some of the market-goers would stop to look at what he had in – they liked to squeeze the slaves like pieces of fruit, look into their mouths to count their teeth. It had happened so often she’d learned to simply tolerate it. Tyche had tried to make herself look smaller and more sickly when the customers examined her, even made small coughing noises. The trader had noticed and beaten her for that as well, but it had worked for a while at least.

  On their last day toge
ther, she’d waited until the trader was distracted with a customer then tossed a pebble at Anchises, who’d looked up, tears streaking down her dirty cheeks. Tyche had stuck her tongue out and made a face. Anchises had smiled a little, sniffed, wiped her eyes, then stuck her tongue out as well. Tyche had muffled her laughter. The trader shot them both a threatening look, but it was worth it – it was good to see her sister laugh again, even if it meant being beaten for it later.

  A couple had come along shortly after – a red-haired woman and her slave, a cruel looking man with a harelip and greasy, ill-cut hair. He’d spoken to the trader in their babbling tongue. Tyche could understand a little Greek, she’d been around them long enough, but they spoke so quickly it was difficult to follow. The trader pointed to the girls, his brown, leathery face split into a gap-toothed grin and walked them over, babbling in broken Greek to the couple, roughly caressing Tyche’s cheek. She had been beaten enough times in the past two weeks to know not to resist. The customer looked at her critically, took her face between his fingers and squeezed painfully, turning it one way, then another. He forced her mouth open with his dirty thumb then peered into her mouth. Be strong, Tyche had thought, be strong for Anchises. Please don’t buy me, please just leave me be …

  Anchises had started shaking and blubbering like a child. The trader yelled at her to shut up. Tyche had bitten her lip to keep herself from crying as well. The red-haired woman intervened and shushed Anchises then offered her a boiled sweet. She stroked her head, petted her, wiped away her tears. Then she walked over to Tyche, offering her a sweet as well. Tyche had hesitated at first, then accepted it. It was the only food she’d had that day. She rolled it around in her mouth – she recalled its delicious taste, like fruit and honey.

  The woman had cooed, smiling at her. She babbled something to her slave as she stroked Tyche’s face, her smile hardening. Tyche coughed and tried to make herself look small. The woman put a finger to her lips, then reached her other hand beneath Tyche’s peplos, slipped her skinny dry hand between her legs, poked her fingers inside of her. It was so horrid, Tyche had wanted to bite the woman, hurt her, do something, but she didn’t dare. She closed her eyes, trying to think of something else, anything. Then it was over.