Day of the False King

by Brad Geagley

  Semerket cast about for more. “And gold.”

  “And?”

  “Weapons. Grain. Armor. Supplies.”

  “And?”

  “I’m sorry, but I’ve not been authorized to offer more.”

  Kutir sighed in exaggerated disappointment. “And yet it’s not enough.”

  Kutir rose from the marble bench then, and stared over the edge of the gardens into the city below. Babylon stretched before them in purple shadow. Cooking fires began to flare in the darkened urban expanse. Kutir turned again to face Semerket.

  “Ramses is Pharaoh today because of you. If you hadn’t discovered the plot hatched in his father’s own harem, a traitor would sit on the Falcon Throne today. Everyone knows it.”

  Semerket began to voice his protests. “Majesty, I stumbled on the plot without knowing I did—”

  “Modesty, too, they told me, was a hallmark of your character.”

  Semerket’s voice rose in agitation. “Pharaoh’s father died because of me. If I hadn’t been so blind, so stupid…” He stopped, not wishing to remember those times. “Anyway, I’m not what you think I am. And what does it have to do with your demands, Sire?”

  Kutir took a breath. “I have only one demand. And that is for you to join my service. I want you to find my sister—or find what happened to her.”

  The king began to explain himself quickly, a thread of nervousness running through his voice. “Of all his children, Pinikir was Father’s favorite. If I cannot recover her—even if it’s just her body—my father will take some steps of his own.” The thread pulled, his fear unraveled, and the king’s voice collapsed in a strangulated gasp.

  Semerket tried to offer him some comfort. “If that’s so, perhaps he’ll send you the troops you need to quell the rebels—”

  Kutir turned haunted eyes upon him. “No, you don’t understand. He’ll take steps against me. I’m no more than a vassal king to him, now—one not performing his duties too well at the moment.”

  Semerket stared at Kutir. He knew of Kutir’s father, King Shutruk, the ruler of Elam. Like the rest of the world he had heard, fascinated, as conquest by conquest, Shutruk transformed Elam into a world power. Babylonia was merely the first of his son’s western victories, and beyond that were the new and tempting nations of the Levant—Assyria, Israel, Canaan. Even Egypt, Semerket supposed, would someday lie within the ambitions of so voracious a dynast.

  “But you are his eldest son,” Semerket reminded him. “What is there to fear?”

  Kutir looked at him with a strange glint in his eye. “We have a saying in Elam about an unlucky man. ‘If he were to pick up gold, it would turn to dirt.’ Well, Babylon has turned to dirt in my hands, Semerket. My sister’s disappearance was the start of it all—the bad luck, the turn in the war, the ongoing defeat of my armies—and now you must help me to find her, to bring her back. Perhaps then my luck will change, when my touch will once more be golden.”

  “Majesty—” Semerket began patiently.

  But Kutir cut short his objections before he had a chance to voice them. “If you will not do this, Semerket, then the idol will remain here, forever. Never will it visit Egypt. Never will it restore your pharaoh’s health.” Kutir’s voice became supplicating. “But where is the risk, eh? If you can find your wife in this godforsaken city, I know you’ll be able to find my sister.”

  Again, Aneku’s lie rose up before him. Everyone in Babylon, it seemed, believed that he had already rescued Naia.

  “Are not our objectives well-matched, after all?” the king continued in a pleading voice: “My sister for the idol.”

  “Why do you think I can succeed when your own secret police have failed?”

  Kutir blinked. “Because you’re Semerket.”

  Semerket was appalled at the king’s misplaced trust. Still, by accepting the task—and one, after all, that he was already pursuing—he would be free to continue his search for Naia and Rami unimpeded, with all the resources of Babylon’s king at his disposal. At the end of it, too, the idol would be allowed to visit Egypt.

  Semerket made his decision quickly. “Will you allow me to come and go freely in the city and countryside?”

  “Have I not already?”

  “Will you call off your spies?”

  “Are they not gone?”

  “I’ll need a pass against the curfew.”

  “You’ll have it.”

  “I’ve been told the victim’s bodies are entombed here beneath the palace,” Semerket said.

  “Everyone except my sister, yes.”

  “I will need to examine their bodies.”

  Kutir started, a furtive look of disgust crossing his face, quickly banished. “That’s impossible.”

  “Majesty, it’s extremely important for me to examine their wounds, to see how they were killed. Just as every nation has its own way of living, its way of murder is unique as well. Seeing the bodies might help me to determine who killed them.”

  “But we know the Isins did it!”

  “No, Majesty, we don’t.” He was thinking of the arrow he had found that afternoon, and how the Isins themselves had vehemently denied the crime.

  “Semerket, you’re an Egyptian and don’t know our ways. Once the dead are placed in the crypt, we believe they’re in the underworld. The doors to the crypt are literally the portals to our next life. No one may open them until another burial, and then only after the priests have driven away the demons who guard the entrance. You can’t just go in there—it simply isn’t done. Nor should it be done.”

  When Semerket began to protest, Kutir turned away with a grimace, holding up his hand. “I’ve said no. It’s impossible.”

  With little grace, Semerket inclined his head. “I will need one of your men to help me, then—someone who knows the city.”

  “Name him.”

  “Colonel Shepak.”

  Kutir hesitated. “Shepak? Certainly another man more capable—?”

  “He is a good man, and loyal to your majesty.”

  Kutir nodded, though doubtfully. “I’ll relieve him of his current duties immediately, if that’s what you truly want.”

  Semerket exhaled. Though he had not yet saved Shepak entirely, at least he had extended his life past the Day of the False King. Now that they had reached an understanding, Kutir’s face no longer seemed so pinched and frightened. But at a sudden sharp shriek from the peacock above them, Kutir leapt to his feet.

  “I’ll have that bird’s neck wrung,” the king grumbled, breathing hard. He gazed up resentfully into the branches.

  There was only one thing more Semerket needed to say. “Sire, you must know I am doing this only for Pharaoh. At the end of it, if I’m successful, I expect not only your own consent for the idol to leave Babylon, but the priests’ as well.”

  Kutir nodded confidently. “They will give it.”

  “But willingly? I cannot chance the use of black magic against Egypt.”

  Kutir remained confident. “I guarantee it. For if they don’t agree, another priceless relic of Babylon’s past will never be returned to the city.”

  “What relic?”

  “King Hammurabi’s stone, inscribed with all the laws of Babylonia. Five hundred years old, and almost as venerated as Bel-Marduk’s idol. It’s in Susa now—a gift to my father after I took the city. I will offer the priests an exchange—let the idol visit Egypt for a year and the stone will be returned to Babylon.”

  Semerket thought that he would have liked to see such a stone, to understand how laws were composed. In Egypt, laws were traditions handed down over many generations and had no need to be written.

  “And the magi will agree?” he asked.

  “As it says on the stone, Semerket, ‘An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth.’ ”

  “And a statue for a stone…?”

  “Precisely.”

  AS SEMERKET LEFT the palace, intending to tell Shepak of his reversal of fortune, a waiting woman intercepted him
. “My lord…?” she asked, laying a hand upon his arm. The woman was clad in the same high-necked raiment that Queen Narunte wore, livid with fringes and garish embroidery. “The queen desires a word with you, my lord.”

  Semerket regarded her without enthusiasm. After the hostile reception the queen had shown him in the gardens above, he could see no purpose for such a conference. But he could hardly decline, and said that he would be pleased to meet with the lady.

  The woman led him outside through a series of courtyards. They entered a low building, which Semerket ascertained was Kutir’s harem, for he saw that eunuchs guarded every door. But there were no women about, and Semerket ruefully surmised that they were locked away into their rooms, fearful that his lustful male gaze might somehow befoul them.

  In a far hall of thin alabaster columns, Narunte reclined on a divan, the inevitable cup of beer clutched in her hand. Semerket was surprised to see that Ambassador Menef sat at her side, and that the Asp, his bodyguard, leaned against a pillar at the chamber’s rear. Menef instantly stood when he approached, and offered his chair to Semerket.

  “Well,” said the queen in a voice that was as harsh as two millstones scraping together. “Did my husband ask you to find his sister?” She raised the cup to her lips, drinking the beer straight and unfiltered, not bothering to sip it through a reed. Semerket realized she was drunk.

  “I promised his majesty that I would, yes.”

  The queen let out a whoop of shrill laughter, and nodded her head to Menef. “Didn’t I tell you?” After a moment, her silver demon’s eyes found Semerket’s again.

  “Ever since my husband heard you were coming, it’s been ‘Semerket will find her, Semerket will save us.’ I had to see for myself if you were an actual man of flesh and blood, and not some god.” She looked on him as if assessing the flesh of a slave. “Now that I see you close to, you don’t look either to me.”

  Semerket heard Menef’s bodyguard making choking sounds in the back of the room, and Semerket looked over to see that his shoulders were shaking. An amused smile also played on the ambassador’s lips.

  When Semerket continued silent, Narunte made a peremptory gesture to her waiting handmaidens to bring some silver ewers forward. “Beer,” she said, “wine?”

  “No, ma’am.”

  “You don’t drink either, I suppose.”

  “On the contrary, I drink too much. Wine has become a poison to me.”

  The queen screwed up her sharp features, as if trying to retrieve some fading piece of information in her blurred memory. “Yes…yes…I remember. You drank because your wife divorced you. Yet you rescued her, all the same; loyal to the end. It’s almost like a folk song, isn’t it?”

  The image of the woman Aneku entered the room to hover between them, and still Semerket did not correct the queen. “Your majesty is well informed,” he said obliquely.

  Lost to the fumes of her potent brew, Narunte turned her silver eyes to the distant shadows. “How Pinikir hated me,” Narunte said, “with her narrow head and her pale, delicate skin. I was never good enough for her brother, she said—because I was crude, and couldn’t read, and preferred beer to her fine vintages.”

  The queen’s lip curled and Semerket saw her sharp white teeth beneath her twisted smile. “How she hated me. Pinikir did all she could to push me aside—throwing her maids into my husband’s path, trying to tempt him from my bed.”

  The harshness of her wild laughter scarred the room, reminding Semerket of the shrieks of the peacocks in the rooftop gardens.

  “But he spurned his other wives, those highborn ones who looked just like her, because I told him the truth about his family—about her. And she hated me because he listened.” Her face contorted itself into a mask of utter loathing. “I know the real reason his father sent them here from Susa—don’t think I don’t!—her and that weak husband of hers!”

  “Your Majesty!” Menef sharply interrupted her.

  Narunte, startled, looked up fuzzily into his face. The ambassador had successfully torn her from her reveries, damming her spate of ugly words. It took her a moment to recognize him, and when she did, she smiled—a stiff, automatic smile taught her by some expert in court protocol.

  Gently, the ambassador took her by the arm. “Come, ma’am. You’ll make yourself ill with such memories. I’m sure that after the tragedy at the plantation, everyone desires only the safe return of Princess Pinikir. Our Lord Semerket here will do his best to bring her back—you’ll see.”

  Menef took her hand in his, urging her from the couch, and handed her over to her waiting women. She tripped suddenly, lurching forward, and her maids leapt to catch her. The queen’s alabaster cup smashed on the floor. She turned her pale eyes on Semerket a final time.

  “I didn’t weep overmuch when the plantation was sacked, you know. I only weep to think she might still be alive—like that wife of yours.”

  After her maids escorted the queen to her bedchamber, Semerket, Menef, and the Asp stood awkwardly regarding one another. Menef put a finger to his lips, and gestured that they should withdraw into the outer courtyard, where the three conferred in whispers beneath a flickering torch.

  “I’m sorry you had to hear that,” Menef said in his high-pitched, oleaginous voice.

  “On the contrary, I only wish I could have heard more,” Semerket said. “But you saw to it that I couldn’t. And I find this strange in someone who’s usually so eager to spread knowledge throughout the world.”

  Menef was uncertain what Semerket meant. “My lord…?”

  Semerket fixed him with a level gaze. “Everywhere I go in Babylon, from Bel-Marduk’s temple to the palace itself, I find that Pharaoh’s private wishes are known by everyone—told to them by you.”

  The chubby little ambassador was unprepared for this direct assault. Nevertheless, he inclined his head, instantly comprehending the crux of the matter. “My Lord Semerket is new to Babylon, and unfamiliar with the political realities here. Much has changed since the Elamites invaded,” he said. “If I erred by informing certain high personages of Pharaoh’s request for the idol, it was merely to facilitate your enterprise. If I may instruct you on the situation…?”

  The black fires in Semerket’s eyes instantly ignited. “You may not. But I will instruct you, Lord Ambassador.”

  Menef raised his head abruptly, unused to being addressed as an underling.

  “Your first and only care is the protection of Egypt’s interest and Pharaoh’s good name—”

  “As it ever has been, great lord,” Menef murmured. “I’m surprised you’d think I’d do otherwise.”

  “Yet because of you, the subject of Pharaoh’s health is probably being discussed at this very moment in courts from Keftiu to India.”

  Droplets of sweat began to appear on Menef’s upper lip. “Surely, my lord, it’s naive to think such knowledge can be kept a secret for long.”

  “Yes. Particularly when indiscreet ministers such as you serve Pharaoh.”

  Semerket thought he saw a flash of alarm in Menef’s slippery expression, while the Asp’s hand moved to clutch the hilt of his sword.

  Ignoring the glowering bodyguard, Semerket continued his harangue. “I’ll say it frankly, Menef: whether or not I report this treachery of yours to Pharaoh will depend on the level of cooperation I get from you from now on.”

  Menef hunched his shoulders, reminding Semerket of a tortoise seeking protection from a lion’s fangs. “What will it take to convince you of my loyalty, Great Lord?” he asked meekly.

  “Decide first whom you serve, Pharaoh or the Elamites.”

  Menef came close to groveling. “My lord, I do indeed apologize if I offended, but what was I to do? The king himself asked me to look after Queen Narunte. You can see how she is when she’s…” He gestured, not wanting to say the obvious word.

  Semerket supplied it for him. “When she’s drunk?”

  Menef winced delicately, and looked around into the shadows of the courtyard b
efore he nodded. “My lord,” he said. “There are many things to say, and this is perhaps not the best place in which to say them.”

  “I have only one thing more that I will say, Menef.” Semerket’s voice was colder than the breezes in any winter night. “And that’s to tell you that I’ll never forgive you for sending my wife to that plantation. Never.”

  Semerket noted the quick glance Menef and the Asp exchanged. “Again, my lord, what was I to do? The prince and princess were newly arrived. They needed servants. The queen asked me to send a few of mine to them—”

  “The queen?” Semerket was doubtful. “She didn’t sound as if she’d lift a finger to help her sister-in-law.”