Day of the False King

by Brad Geagley

  Then, black upon black, he saw them framed in the narrow street—two shapes moving stealthily toward him.

  “Who is it?” he said loudly. “What do you want?”

  The shapes stopped. If they had continued walking, or if they had hailed him, he would have stayed by the well. But when they froze, silent and guilty, their sinister intentions were betrayed.

  Semerket threw the bucket in their path and ran. From behind, he heard one of his pursuers trip over it, coming up cursing. Semerket darted down an alley, trying not to dash himself senseless against any lurking walls or steps.

  The men who followed him did not even try to hide their footsteps now. He heard them split up, one following him down the alley, the other taking off in another direction. Semerket ran full out, heedless of the dark and the snares it contained. He heard his pursuer’s breath coming fast upon him. How was it that they could follow him in all this gloom? Then he realized his new linen robes must gleam like a beacon. He could not even hide in some doorway, hoping they would pass him by. His only chance was to keep running.

  Twice he struck his shoulder painfully on a jutting wall, and another time sent a clay pot flying with his foot. Pain radiated up his leg from the blow, for he wore only the light kidskin sandals the high chamberlain had given him—good for an audience in the royal gardens, perhaps, but scarcely adequate for the evasion of assassins.

  Semerket had no idea where he went, for his terror had by now claimed all his tenuous sense of direction. He splashed through gutters filled with stinking waste, following the streets’ curves and twists with outstretched hands. He no longer heard his assassin running behind him. He canted his head to listen, to make sure that he had lost him.

  Semerket turned, staggering backward, staring into the dark. With an “oomph!” he crashed into something hard and unyielding directly behind him. It was the second assassin, waiting for him. Semerket felt powerful arms encircling him, holding him fast. He tried to struggle, but the arms were like manacles.

  “I’ve got him!” his captor shouted in strangely accented Babylonian.

  “Cut his throat and be done with it! Hurry!” came the distant cry.

  Semerket pulled at the iron arm that clamped him, and he felt his captor’s other hand fumble for the knife in his belt. Then he saw a flash in the dark as a blade of shiny bronze came toward his neck.

  He screamed silently to himself. In the moment before the blade tore out his throat, he uttered a wordless prayer to all the gods of Egypt. Too soon he felt the sting of its cold bronze edge bite into his neck. Hot blood spilled from the wound down his chest. But then he heard the knife scrape across the outspread wings of his falcon badge. In the struggle, the pectoral had been pushed up by the man’s arm, wedged like a protective shield across his throat.

  Semerket sensed the moment when the man’s grip loosened, and he suddenly went limp, slipping out and under his attacker’s arms. He rolled into the street, trying to get as far away from his assailant as possible. He tried to regain his footing, but his limbs were like lead. At any moment, he knew, the other assassin would be upon him to finish the work.

  Sudden footsteps were indeed echoing in the dark, rushing upon him. This was the end, he thought. The other assailant reached him, and now there were two against him. Semerket braced himself to feel the terrible kiss of that freezing blade once again on his throat. He closed his eyes.

  But the footsteps went past on either side of him, going in the direction of his attacker. Semerket heard the sounds of a man’s labored breathing, like the wheezing of a punctured bellows. A tremendous invisible scuffle occurred. From the black came a single, aborted scream, and then a ghastly, gurgling moan.

  Semerket, still lying in the street, felt the shock of impact as a body fell beside him in the dark. A rush of air enveloped him, and warm drops of something splashed upon his face. He was too dazed to register what it was, too confused. Then none-too-gentle hands were pulling him to his feet, and he was being reassured in strangely familiar voices—

  “Do you see now, my lord, why you need us to watch over you? Didn’t we tell you these were uncertain times in Babylon?”

  “DOES HE BREATHE?” Semerket rasped to his Dark Head spies, pressing his hand against his neck to stop the flow from his wound.

  One of the spies moved to the prone form of the assassin, laying his head on the man’s chest to listen. “He lives,” said the stout brother, his familiar wheeze rumbling through the desolate alley. “But barely.”

  “I stabbed him, lord,” the thin one’s voice came to him from his left. “It was a good thrust—in his back, I think.”

  Vaguely, Semerket saw the outline of the thinner spy as he leaned forward over the body. Semerket heard the high-pitched sigh of metal sliding through flesh followed by the gurgle of escaping air as the man removed the knife.

  “What should we do with him, lord?” the thin spy asked. “Throw him in the canal?”

  Semerket tried to piece together some kind of plan, but the attack had numbed his mind. “Where are we?” he asked. “What part of the city?”

  “Just up the road from the Egyptian Quarter, my lord. Near its main square.”

  That was a bit of luck. They could go to Kem-weset’s house, where the physician would be able to tend them both. Semerket directed the Dark Heads to get the man to his feet.

  “He’s going fast, lord,” wheezed the fat spy doubtfully. “I don’t think he’ll make it.”

  “Kem-weset will know what to do.”

  It was some time later when they found the house where Kem-weset lived. It took all of Semerket’s strength to climb the three stories to the physician’s apartment. To his surprise, a young woman opened the door. Wrapped in a thin blanket, she carried an oil lamp in her hand. Her dark eyes widened in fear when she saw him, and her shrill scream filled the stairwell.

  “Kemi!” she cried in Egyptian. “Kemi, come quickly!”

  In the flickering lamplight, Semerket looked down and comprehended the reason for her fright: blood saturated his robe’s pleated bosom. The sight made Semerket feel suddenly faint, and he had to push his way past her to grasp the back of a rickety chair, weaving uncertainly.

  The physician was in the sleeping room, fastening a robe about himself. He did not seem in the least abashed about the young woman. Though Semerket had feared the old man might be bleary from drink, the moment Kem-weset saw the wound on his neck his physician’s eye hardened in professional appraisal.

  “I thought you meant to come to me only for headaches,” he said with a slight smile. Then he spoke softly to the young woman. “Dearest, my medicine chest, please.”

  Casting a stricken glance at Semerket, the young woman slipped from the room. Kem-weset sat Semerket in the chair, and looked at his throat.

  “My attacker,” Semerket said, “he’s downstairs. Punctured lung, I think.”

  “So you’re diagnosing now?” Kem-weset took Semerket’s chin in his hand and pushed his head slowly from side to side. Semerket winced, expecting pain, but there was none.

  The young woman emerged from the other room, lugging a cedar box. Kem-weset unlatched the casket’s top and eyed the jumble of vials and bottles. He removed a small clay jug and unplugged its stopper. The sharp scent of juniper spirits jabbed Semerket’s nostrils.

  “A cloth, please, my child.”

  The woman bent to retrieve a piece of folded linen from the chest.

  “A few drops of this on it, I think,” he told her, handing her the tiny jug.

  The physician began to clean the wound quickly. As he worked, he made the introductions. “Sitamun,” he said, “meet Semerket, a special envoy from our own dear pharaoh. And a man with enemies, I think.”

  Sitamun bobbed her head shyly.

  “Your nurse?” Semerket murmured.

  Kem-weset coughed, and explained, “I removed a few disfiguring moles from her bottom a few weeks ago. Sitamun repays me in her own way.”

  “Kem-w
eset is the finest physician in all Babylonia,” the woman said reverently, gazing at the old physician.

  “A bowl of wine, please, Sitamun,” Kem-weset directed. As the girl poured, Kem-weset quickly wrote out a prayer on a strip of papyrus in red ink. He placed the bowl of wine on the floor in front of him, and dipped the papyrus into the bowl. As the glyphs gradually dissolved into the liquid, Kem-weset added to it a few tinctures of some foul-smelling elixir. He handed the bowl to Semerket.

  “You know I don’t drink wine—”

  “You’ll drink this.”

  Semerket gulped it rapidly, hoping the wine’s taste would not linger on his tongue to torment him. As it reached his belly, he felt its warm, familiar glow radiating into all his limbs. It felt very pleasant…too pleasant.

  “Your wound,” pronounced Kem-weset, “is only a superficial puncture, nothing more.”

  “Superficial?” Semerket said, incensed. “The man tried to cut my throat!”

  “Sorry to disappoint you, but it wasn’t even made with a knife.”

  Semerket was incredulous. “What cut me, then?”

  “This is the culprit.” Kem-weset pointed to the falcon badge on Semerket’s chest. “The tip of this wing, here—it somehow got wedged into your neck and probably nicked a vessel. See there, how it’s bent? How the blood has caked on it?”

  Semerket lifted the pectoral from around his head. He held the badge up to the oil lamp. There, scoring the gold, was the jagged gouge where the assassin’s blade had scraped across the wing, futilely seeking the flesh beneath.

  Semerket swallowed, inhaling raggedly. “The gods were protecting me tonight,” he said.

  Kem-weset fashioned a poultice of honey and herbs, and pressed it to the wound, then tied it around Semerket’s neck with light gauze. The physician leaned back on his heels, satisfied. “Now to your attacker,” he announced. “Outside, you said?”

  “In the stairwell with—” Semerket hesitated. He had never bothered to learn the names of his two Dark Head spies. “With my friends.”

  During the time Kem-weset was gone, Semerket asked Sitamun for some water and a sponge. As she fetched it, Semerket removed his once-fine palace robe, peeling away its sticky, reddened layers. Sitamun brought him a jug, and he began to wash himself.

  He was presentable by the time Kem-weset opened the door. The two Dark Heads staggered into the dim light half-carrying, half-dragging his attacker. At Kem-weset’s command, they laid the man on the floor next to the medicine chest. The assassin’s eyes were closed and the old physician felt for a pulse. Not finding one, he deliberately gouged the man’s right eye with his thumb. There was no response.

  “I’m afraid he’s gone, Semerket,” Kem-weset said simply.

  Semerket muttered a foul word.

  Kem-weset brought the oil lamp close to the man’s face. The assassin was bearded, precluding any possibility that he might be Egyptian. In fact, he did not even seem to be Babylonian, for he was of a slender build and his long hair was braided, tied off at the ends with amber beads.

  “Is he an Elamite?” asked Semerket.

  “No, he’s from the mountains to the northeast of Elam,” said the wheezing Dark Head. “That’s how they dress their hair.”

  On a sudden impulse, Semerket reached forward to open the assassin’s eye. Its color was pale silver—like Queen Narunte’s eyes. A shiver ran down his spine. Had she sent this man against him that evening to prevent the rescue of her despised sister-in-law? He immediately dismissed the thought as being too farfetched. In her drunken state, the queen would have been incapable of arranging anything, much less the assassination of a foreign dignitary so recently employed by her husband.

  “But I know this man!” Kem-weset said suddenly. “I’m almost sure of it!” He handed the lamp to Sitamun, and then withdrew a lancet from his medicine chest. He cut at the man’s sleeve, tearing the cloth up to the elbow. A long and vivid scar, crosshatched with stitch marks, ran down the man’s forearm.

  Kem-weset nodded. “That’s my work there. He and six others came to me one night, all bruised and bloodied. They’d been in a tavern brawl, they said. I remember thinking at the time that their story wasn’t true.”

  “Why?” Semerket asked.

  “Because they were all stinking of soot and fire. There’d been no fire in Babylon that night and no brawl, either.”

  Semerket blinked. “When did this happen?” he asked the physician.

  “Some weeks ago. Early winter. Just about the time you say your wife disappeared…” Kem-weset’s voice trailed off. He shot a stricken glance at Semerket.

  “Were the other men you treated from the mountains as well?” Semerket breathed.

  “No, they were Dark Heads. At least, they were dressed like Dark Heads.” Kem-weset’s voice was uncertain.

  “You doubt it?”

  Kem-weset reluctantly nodded.

  “Why?”

  “Because they spoke an excellent Egyptian.”

  SOMETIME BEFORE DAWN, Semerket and his Dark Head spies took the assassin’s body to a nearby canal. Semerket, clad in an old tunic borrowed from Kem-weset, watched as the two noiselessly rolled the corpse into the water.

  Semerket was almost certain the man had been at the Elamite plantation the night of the raid, and he deeply regretted being unable to force a confession from him. If the man had indeed been one of the raiders, it would go a long way to bolster the Isins’ claims that they had nothing to do with the crime. Then, too, this man’s companions had spoken “an excellent Egyptian,” as Kem-weset purported. Had they been armed with Egyptian arrows, as well? Semerket wondered.

  Semerket forced down a sudden surge of rage. This man, now sinking beneath the canal’s surface, might be the same one he had seen so often in his nightmares, who had stood exultant over Naia’s fallen body.

  “If only you could die twice…” he muttered to the corpse.

  In the dark, he felt a slight gust of warm air from the east, the harbinger of dawn. He looked at his two companions in the silvering light, whose names he had finally learned—they were the brothers Galzu and Kuri.

  “Tell me,” he whispered to them, “how did you know I was in trouble tonight? Why did you show up just when I needed you?”

  “That’s very simple, lord,” Kuri, the thin one, said almost blithely. “We knew you’d need us sooner or later, at the rate you were going, so we kept you always in sight. We hoped to prove our worthiness to you.”

  The explanation, glib as it was, made sense. The two Dark Heads had indeed saved his life—and one does not question too closely a gift from the gods.

  “All right,” Semerket said at last, though halfheartedly. “I’ll continue paying you.”

  “A wise decision, lord,” Galzu said, rubbing his fat hands together gleefully. “You will have no regrets.”

  Semerket eyes were flinty. “You don’t know what I want you to do, yet.”

  Galzu spoke with supreme confidence, “Of course we do, my lord. You want us to continue what we’ve been doing all along. We will watch over you.”

  “But this, too, you must know—they’ve attempted to kill me once and when they find out they’ve failed, they’ll do it again. In a way it’s good news; it means I’m onto something they don’t want me to know. All I have to do is figure out what it is. Next time, though, I want them alive. Understand?”

  Solemnly, the two Dark Heads promised him that they would do as he wished. To ensure it, he filled their fists with pieces of Pharaoh’s gold. Murmuring their joyous thanks, they left him at the canal to take up their positions in the shadows.

  The scent of dung fires lightly stung Semerket’s nostrils. Another day had begun in Babylon, and the indigo sky was turning crimson. Resolutely, Semerket brought his tunic up around his neck, hiding his bandage, and went down the nearby alley.

  “YOU MUST STOP telling people you’re my wife,” he said.

  Semerket was in the little courtyard of the Egyptian temp
le, seated beside Aneku. Hearing him, she hugged her arms around her knees and her sigh was a hollow sound of longing and wistfulness.

  “Am I so hideous to you that you could not be married to me, even in pretense?”

  Semerket knew if he answered that question, he would end up having to meticulously list Aneku’s charms, if only to reassure her that she was not ugly or repellent—something she knew well enough on her own. Why must women always be told such things, he asked himself with rising irritation. Seeking to divert her, he gestured to the forecourt.

  “I’ve never seen this place so clean. Wia must be grateful to have you here.”