by Nick Drake
He feigned surprise.
I pushed Khay’s papyrus of authorization at him. He unrolled the document, and glanced along the characters swiftly. Then he looked up at me with a different expression.
‘I see. Could you wait here for a few moments?’
I nodded. He disappeared.
I listened to the irrelevant sounds of the corridor and the distant chorus of the river birds for a while. I imagined him knocking on doors, one after the other, like a box within a box, until he arrived at the threshold of the innermost shrine.
When he reappeared, he looked as if he had gone on a long march. He was out of breath. ‘If you would follow me…’
We passed through the deep shadows and the long angles of sunlight laid out along the corridors. The guards at the doors lifted their weapons respectfully. The official left me at the last threshold. He would go no further. A supercilious, brittle assistant-one of three who sat in tense attendance outside the office-knocked on the door like a nervous schoolboy, and listened to the following silence. He must have heard something, for he opened the door, and I passed through.
The chamber was empty. It contained the bare minimum of furniture: two couches, both exquisitely wrought, were set perfectly opposite each other. A low table, beautiful in a purely functional way, was placed just so, equidistant between the couches. Walls undecorated, but clad in stone so fine that the very grain matched up all the way along. Even the light that entered was somehow minimal, perfect and composed. I loathed the immaculate order. For pure pleasure, I nudged the table out of its perfect alignment.
There were two doors in opposite walls, set like choices in a game. Without my noticing, one of them had opened silently. Ay was standing on the threshold of the dark, in his white robe, which glowed in the light from a high window. He looked like a priest. His face was hard to make out.
I bowed my head. ‘Life, prosperity and health,’ I said, according to the formula. But when I looked up I was surprised to see that for all Ay’s great powers, as Ankhesenamun had said, in the years since we had last met time the destroyer had begun his work on him. He moved cautiously, stiffly, as if he did not trust his own bones. He was obviously suffering from ague, although he made every effort to disguise it. But his sharp reptilian eyes had tremendous focus and concentration. He observed me intently, like a connoisseur assessing an object of dubious value. His thin mouth expressed inevitable disappointment and disapproval. I gazed back. There were lines on his forehead, and wrinkles around his chilly eyes, and the skin was stretched tautly across the planes of his face; those eyes were sunken, almost as in death. There were red spots where his blackheads had been erased. I could smell the scent of the lozenge he held under his tongue: cloves and cinnamon, the remedy for toothache, the curse of age.
‘Sit,’ he said, very quietly.
I obliged, observing the difficulty with which he lowered himself on to one of the exquisite couches.
‘Speak.’
‘You will be aware that I have-’
‘Stop.’
He raised his right hand. I waited.
‘If the Queen had ventured to ask my opinion, I would have forbidden her to send for you.’
He looked me up and down.
‘I do not like the city Medjay interfering in the administration and the business of the palace.’
‘She called for me in a private, personal capacity,’ I replied.
‘I am perfectly aware of the nature and history of your involvement with the royal family,’ he said quietly. ‘And if this does not remain an entirely private, personal affair, you may be sure I will show you and your family no mercy.’
I nodded, but said nothing.
‘In any case, I have decided that carving is irrelevant. It must simply be destroyed and forgotten.’
His hand, mottled and bony, quivered as it gripped the head of his walking stick. I looked around the pure order of his chamber. The room seemed to lack life, and its natural state of disorder, entirely.
‘And yet it seems to have alarmed the King and Queen.’
‘They are children. Children fear the insubstantial. The ghost in the tomb. The bad spirit beneath the couch. It is superstition. There is no place for superstition in the Two Lands.’
‘Perhaps it is not superstition but imagination.’
‘There is no difference.’
Not to you, you slice of emptiness, I thought.
He continued: ‘Nevertheless, this represents a failure of order. The officers of the palace should have detected it. That it came to enter the precincts of the palace at all is gross negligence. This will not be tolerated.’
‘No doubt there will be an investigation, and the flaws will be remedied.’
He ignored the contempt that inflected my tone.
‘Order is the priority of power. After the arrogant catastrophes of the past, the glorious reign of Tutankhamun represents the triumph of the divine universal order of maat by the will of the Gods. We have set these lands aright. Nothing will be allowed to threaten that. Nothing.’
‘You called him a child just now.’
He gazed at me, and for a moment I thought he would throw me out. He didn’t, so I continued.
‘Forgive me for labouring a point, but when the crowd start to splatter the King with the blood of slaughtered pigs, in public, at the height of the Opet Festival-’
‘An isolated incident. These elements of dissent are unimportant and they will be crushed out of existence.’
He noticed the table was out of alignment, frowned, and returned it to its perfect position.
‘And then the carving. Discovered on the very same day? Someone within the palace hierarchy is conspiring against the King. And bearing in mind the rumours of the failure of the Hittite wars, and the long absence of General Horemheb-’
I had hit the spot. His walking stick slammed down on the low table between us. A glass figurine tipped over and shattered. He barked: ‘Your job is to apply the law. Not to question the ethics or the practice of its application.’
He tried to calm himself.
‘You have no authority to speak of any of these issues. What are you doing here, wasting my time? I know what the Queen has asked of you. Why should I care if she wishes to indulge her little fantasies of fear and protection? And as for you-you imagine yourself as the hero in a romance of truth and justice. And yet who are you? Others have been promoted before you. You languish in a middle-ranking position, alienated from your colleagues, lacking accomplishments. You think of yourself as complex and subtle, with your interest in poetry, and yet you are uncertainly engaged in a profession that exalts the violent business of the execution of the law. That is the sum of you.’
Silence. I stood up. He remained seated.
‘As you say, I’m a figure from a romance: absurd, old-fashioned and out of date. The Queen prevailed upon me. I can’t help myself. I have a weakness for ladies in distress. Someone shouts the word “justice,” and I appear like a dog.’
‘Justice…what has that to do with all of this? Nothing…’
The mocking way this old and rotting man spoke the word at me made me think of everything that was not just.
I moved towards the door.
‘I’ll assume I now have your approval to continue with the investigation of this mystery, regardless of where it takes me.’
‘The Queen is sufficient authority. I support her wishes in all things.’ And he meant: ‘You will have no authority from me.’
I smiled, opened the door, and left him and his aching bones in his perfect chamber. At least I had now asserted my role in the situation. And I knew one other important thing: he had no idea of Ankhesenamun’s plan.
10
I returned to my own shabby office at the wrong end of the last passageway, where the light gives up in disappointment, and the cleaners never bother. No signs of power here. Ay was right, of course. I was going nowhere, slowly, like a fallen leaf in a stagnant pool. Indeed, t
he glamour of last night’s encounter was now giving way to the harsh light of day, and I realized I hardly knew where to begin. On days like this I felt, as the saying goes, worse than the dung of vultures. Thoth rambled ahead of me, knowing the way, as he knows everything that matters.
Khety was waiting for me. He has a way of brimming with information which I find tolerable only on good days.
‘Sit.’
He faltered for a moment, disconcerted.
‘Speak.’
‘Last night-’
‘Stop.’
He paused, his mouth open, looking from me to Thoth, as if the animal might explain to him the reasons for my temper. We sat like a trio of fools.
‘Do you believe in justice, Khety?’
He looked a bit dazed by the question.
‘What do you mean, believe…?’
‘It is a matter of faith over experience, is it?’
‘I believe in it, but I don’t think I’ve ever seen it with my own eyes.’
I nodded at this good answer, and changed the subject.
‘You have some information.’
He nodded.
‘Something you have seen with your own eyes,’ I continued.
He nodded again.
‘Another body has been found.’
‘That’s disappointing,’ I said, quietly. ‘When was it discovered?’
‘Early this morning. I tried to find you at home, but you had already left. This one is different.’
She would have been beautiful. Last night she would still have been a young woman, eighteen or nineteen, just arriving at the perfect possession of her beauty. Except that where her face and hair should have been there was now a mask of gold foil. With my knife-blade I carefully peeled back a sticky corner, and saw that under the gold there was no face; nothing but skull and bloody tissue and gristle. For someone had, with an exquisite and appalling skill, scalped her, front and back, and removed her face and her eyes. There still remained a vivid trace of her features in the contours of the mask, where the foil had been pressed into shape. This had been done before someone had butchered her beauty. It might help us to identify her.
Around her neck, tucked under her white linen robe, was an ankh amulet on a delicate gold chain; an exceptionally beautiful piece of jewellery bestowing protection, for this was the symbol that writes the word for Life. I carefully removed it and held the cold gold in my palm.
‘That never belonged to this girl,’ said Khety.
I looked around the plain room in which she had been discovered. He was right. It was far too valuable an item. It seemed a treasure, an heirloom perhaps, of a very wealthy family. I had an idea about who might have owned it. But if I was right, the mystery of its appearance made things very much worse.
‘She has a tattoo. Look-’ said Khety, showing me a snake, curling around her upper arm. The workmanship was crude, and cheap.
‘Her name was Neferet. She lived here alone. The landlord says she worked nights. So I think it’s safe to assume she worked in the clubs. Or the brothels.’
I gazed at the lovely body. Why, once again, were there no signs of violence or struggle? No one could endure such agony without struggling, biting and gnawing at their own tongue and lips, as they strained for life against the bonds that must have tied wrists and ankles. But there was nothing. It was as if all this had been accomplished in a dream. I moved around the room, looking for clues, but could see nothing. As I walked back to the bare couch, sunlight filtered in through the narrow window, and across the girl’s body. And it was only then that I noticed, on the shelf next to the sleeping couch, caught in the angle of the strong, elongated morning light, the faintest trace of a circle in the dust; the mark of a cup that had been placed there, and was now gone.
A ghost cup; a cup of dreams. I thought back to my first instinct, that the killer of the lame boy had administered the juice of the poppy, or some other potent narcotic, to his victim to placate him while he undertook his gruesome labour. The secret behind the Two Lands in our time-behind its great new buildings and temples, its powerful conquests, and its glittering promises of wealth and success to the luckiest of those who come here to labour and serve and somehow survive-is that the grinding miseries, daily sufferings and endless banalities of life are mitigated, for more and more people, by the delusions of narcotics. Once wine was the means to artificial happiness; now things are much more sophisticated, and what was one of the great secrets of medicine has become the only bliss many find in this life. That this euphoria is an illusion is irrelevant, at least until its effects wear off, leaving the user abandoned to the same miseries that motivated the flight from reality. The children of elite families now regularly relieve the tensions and so-called pressures of their affluent, meaningless lives in this way. And others, who have for one reason or another fallen through the support network of their families, find themselves soon descending the staircase of shadows to the underworld, where people sell the last things they possess-their bodies and their souls-for an instant of bliss.
In these days, trade of all kinds has extended its routes and tracks into the furthest and strangest parts of the world. So along with the essentials of the kingdom’s economic power-timber, stone, ores, gold, labour-the new luxury commodities make their way here, by land and sea and river: rare animal skins, live clever monkeys, giraffes, gold trinkets, textiles, subtle new perfumes…the endless parade of fashionable and desirable objects. And also, of course, the secret things; the merchandise of dreams.
Physicians and priests have always used the potent parts of certain plants; some, like the poppy, are so powerful that just a few distilled drops in a beaker of water are sufficient to lull the senses of the patient before an exceptionally painful procedure is enacted, such as amputation. I remember one indication of this is that the pupils dilate. I know this because the prostitutes of the night city magnify their allure by taking the same thing to brighten their jaded, weary eyes. But the dosage is a delicate matter-too much and the eyes bloom in the strange, unreal light of the drug, only to close for ever in death.
I explained my idea to Khety.
‘But why doesn’t the killer just kill his victim with the drug, and then do his rearranging of the furniture?’ he asked.
It was a good question.
‘It seems to matter to the killer that the “work” is conducted on a living body,’ I replied. ‘It’s at the heart of his obsession. His fetish…’
‘I hate that word,’ said Khety, unnecessarily. ‘It makes my skin crawl…’
‘We need to identify where this girl worked,’ I said.
‘The kids that end up in the city, doing what she did, have come from everywhere and nowhere. They change their names. They have no families. And they can’t ever leave.’
‘Go to the clubs and the brothels. See if you can trace her. Someone will have missed her.’
I offered him the gold face.
He nodded. ‘And what about you?’
‘I need you to do that while I follow up something else.’
He looked at me, half-amused.
‘Anyone would think you didn’t like me any more.’
‘I’ve never liked you.’
He grinned.
‘There’s something you’re not telling me…’
‘That’s an accurate deduction. Our long years together have not been wasted.’
‘So why don’t you trust me?’
I touched my ear to confirm my silence, and gestured towards Thoth.
‘Ask him. He knows everything.’
The baboon stared back at both of us with his very straight face.
We went to a quiet inn, away from the busy part of the city. It was the middle of the morning, and everyone was at work, so the place was deserted. We sat down on benches at the back to drink our beer and eat the dish of almonds I had ordered from the silent but vigilant owner, leaning close to each other so that we might not be overheard. I told him everything that had
happened the night and the day before. About the mysterious Khay, and Ankhesenamun, and the carving.
He listened carefully, but said nothing, beyond asking for more information about what the palace was like. This was unusual. Normally, Khety has a rational opinion on everything. We have known each other for many years. I made sure he was appointed a Medjay officer in Thebes, to get him and his wife out of Akhetaten. Ever since then, he has been my assistant.
‘Why haven’t you spoken?’
‘I’m thinking.’
He drank deeply from his beer, as if thinking was thirsty work.
‘That family is nothing but trouble,’ he decided, eventually.
‘And I should feel grateful for this jewel of wisdom?’
He grinned.
‘What I mean is: you shouldn’t get involved. It’s bad news.’
‘That’s what my wife said. But what do you propose I do? Leave the girl to her fate?’
‘You don’t know what her fate is. And she’s not a girl, she’s the Queen. You can’t be responsible for everyone. You’ve got your own family to think about.’
I felt obscurely annoyed.
He watched me.
‘But you do feel responsible, don’t you?’
I shrugged, drained my beer cup, and rose to leave. Thoth was already straining at his leash.
We walked out into the heat and light, Khety trotting to keep up with me.
‘Where are you going now?’ he said, as we dodged the crowds.
‘I’m going to see my friend Nakht. And you are going to find out everything you can about the disappearance of that girl. You know where to start looking. Make sure you come and find me later.’
