Day of the False King

by Brad Geagley

  “She hates me.”

  “I’m sure she doesn’t,” Semerket said without conviction.

  Aneku’s mouth twisted into a wry smile, and a spark of mischief lighted her eye. “It doesn’t matter. I like the way she scolds me; it reminds me of my mother. ‘Just a wild girl who’ll come to no good!’ she used to say.” Aneku’s fleeting cheer deserted her, and her slanted green eyes grew bleak. “She was right about that.”

  “Was she?” Semerket replied carefully. “Is it your wildness that brought you here, then?”

  “Are you finally asking me why I was banished from Egypt?” Aneku asked archly.

  “Only if you want to tell me.”

  “I was banished because I dared to love someone above me.”

  It was not the answer that Semerket expected, and he looked at her with frank curiosity.

  “He was a noble,” she explained. “And I was only a serving maid in a tavern. Every night he came to see me. We fell in love. As soon as he could divorce his wife, he promised, we were going to break the jar together. I didn’t know at the time that his brother-in-law was Menef.”

  Semerket blinked. “Menef? The ambassador?”

  “Yes, Menef—who had me hauled into court on charges of adultery so that his sister’s reputation remained unsullied. A few bribes later I was named an adulteress and banished from Egypt.”

  “But if your lover was so high up, surely he could have forbidden the trial?”

  “Menef threatened him with exposure and he didn’t dare.”

  Semerket shook his head in confusion. “Exposure of what? Adultery’s not exactly an unknown sin in lordly circles.”

  “It was something else. I don’t know what. But Menef knew about it and once my trial began, I never saw him again.” She looked away, pulling a withered leaf from the fig tree beside her. “Naia knew the man, you know. He’d been a friend of her husband.”

  Semerket’s black eyes grew wide. “Nakht was your lover’s friend? Nakht? Well, then, I can tell you exactly what your lover was involved in, what he didn’t want exposed—the conspiracy to kill Pharaoh Ramses, that’s what! No wonder he feared Menef.”

  “No,” Aneku said firmly. “You’re mistaken. He wouldn’t have been involved in anything like that. He was a good man.”

  Semerket made a dismissive gesture, heartless. “You’re lucky you escaped him. Your marriage would have been cursed. Egypt was brought near to ruin because of ‘good men’ just like him.”

  Her slanted green eyes hardened into emeralds. “Egypt? Don’t talk to me of Egypt—Egypt can sink! What did it ever do for me except destroy everything I ever wanted, and then throw me out in the bargain? I’m fed up with Egyptian hypocrisy—and you’re the worst, Semerket! So fine, so upstanding, Pharaoh’s ‘special envoy’ chasing after a dead woman—”

  Her mouth was an ugly twist and her words reverberated in his head: “Dead woman, dead woman!” Semerket turned on her, hot words rising to his lips. Before he could say them, however, Wia’s voice rose sharply in the courtyard.

  “Aneku! Semerket!”

  Both of them whirled guiltily, like a pair of squabbling adolescents. The old priestess stood in the doorway of the temple, glaring at them. She nodded to Aneku, “Senmut needs your help with the morning sacrifices, girl.”

  As Aneku defiantly stalked through the little courtyard to the distant altar, she shot a final hate-filled glance at Semerket. Semerket stared after her, breathing hard.

  “Did you hear us?” he asked Wia, finally.

  “I heard enough.”

  Semerket looked away sullenly. “I’m not sorry I said it.”

  Wia exhaled a long, sad gust of air. “Oh, Semerket, you should be. What’s it to you if her lover was a scoundrel? He’s long gone from her life, and the memory is all she has left of him.”

  He thrust out his stubborn bottom lip. “She can’t live her life in a dream.”

  But Wia’s words made him feel ashamed. The only thing that had seen him through these last couple years of his life was the memory of Naia’s love. Despite all that had happened between them—his inability to father a child, her marriage to another man—he had always known that she never had stopped loving him. Poor Aneku did not even have that to comfort her.

  He looked into the temple doorway where Aneku had fled. “I should go in to her, apologize.”

  “Let her alone, Semerket,” Wia said. “You’re only bound to anger one another now. Come back tomorrow, and you can patch things up.” She patted him on the shoulder encouragingly. “I’ll speak to her in the meantime.”

  Semerket nodded. Mumbling a farewell, he slipped out the temple gate. At the street corner, he turned to look back and saw Wia still standing beneath the miniature pylon. She waved when she saw him turn.

  As he trudged through the streets, his guilt gave way to sudden anxious reflection. If Aneku’s words were true and Menef had threatened her lover with exposure of some crime—and if the crime were indeed what Semerket suspected it was—then Menef must have known about the plot to murder the Great Ramses before it happened. This meant that he had been at least a peripheral member of the conspiracy or, at best, that he had done nothing to prevent it.

  Even in the scorching air, Semerket felt his skin suddenly prickle. Were the remnants of that same conspiracy to be found here within Babylon itself? Is that why the gods had sent him to the city on the plain—to once again battle the very demons he thought he had vanquished?

  And why, wherever he went, was Ambassador Menef seemingly at the source of every ill? The unbidden thought came to him—could the fey, plump ambassador actually have been responsible for the attack on Naia and Rami?

  He shook his head to clear it of cobwebs, for he knew that he was at the point in his investigation where he became so burdened by disparate facts and suspicions that all and everyone seemed guilty of almost everything. It would do no good to bedevil himself with imagining more than what there was; all would be revealed within the province of time.

  Picking up his pace, he did not realize that he had forgotten to warn Aneku that she should take extra care around strangers.

  WHILE ON HIS WAY to his morning appointment with Shepak, Semerket caught the faint, alarming scent of fire. Far in the distance ahead, a flat wall of smoke advanced slowly down Processional Way, concealing the Royal Quarter behind it. He began to run.

  At the garrison’s gate, the gray shroud of smoke thinned a bit, allowing him to glimpse a flurry of activity behind it. Scores of Elamite soldiers lay dead, or moaned in agony. Others shouted hoarsely to one another, attempting to organize the survivors into fire brigades, to throw buckets of water onto the flames, now quickly consuming the once-orderly rows of tents. Most of them were already smoldering tatters, but a quick glance told him that Shepak’s larger tent was among those still blazing.

  In the confusion, no one challenged him as he hurried across the compound. At Shepak’s tent, the smoke was so thick that he had to hold his mantle over his face to breathe. Squinting into the wreckage, he saw a bright heap of glittering armor. A bare arm stretched toward him, lying in a pool of blackening blood. A tangle of blood-soaked hair hid the man’s face.

  “Shepak?” he said.

  He might have thoughtlessly plunged inside had he not suddenly remembered where he had seen that golden armor—at Nidaba’s only the night before. It belonged to the newly appointed garrison commander, Khutran, the man who had drunkenly demanded that Nidaba sing him love songs.

  Though the heat was fierce, Semerket took a few tentative steps closer and saw that a stone-tipped mace had smashed in the man’s head. By now, the roof of the tent was afire, and Semerket retreated into the courtyard. Choking, eyes watering, he did not see the man who had come up behind him. With a crash, Semerket lurched into him. Semerket looked up.

  “Shepak!” he coughed in surprise. “Bless the gods, you’re alive. I thought it was you in there.”

  “Didn’t you hear me shouting at you?”<
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  Semerket could only shake his head, choking. Shepak bundled him away to a distant part of the courtyard, where Semerket could soothe his smoke-singed throat with well water. “What happened here?” Semerket managed to ask between coughs.

  “The Isins struck us a short while ago,” Shepak related grimly, “just after first light. Over two hundred garrison dead, and twenty horses.”

  “How many Isin dead?”

  Shepak was unwilling to meet Semerket’s eyes. “Not a one,” he admitted. “They appeared out of nowhere, like desert djins. Before anyone knew it, they’d picked off the guards on the upper walls and taken their places. There wasn’t even time to sound the alarm. They sent flaming arrows into the hay bales at the stables and then into the tents. Their archers picked us off like sheep in a pen. Then they broke down the gates and went straight for the officers still alive.”

  “You weren’t here?” Semerket asked.

  “No,” Shepak shuddered. “I was at the palace getting my new orders. By the time I got here, it was all over. It didn’t take the Isins more than a few minutes to do their worst, and then they disappeared as quickly as they’d come.”

  Semerket scratched his brow. “How many of them?”

  “Sixty or seventy, I’m told.”

  “But I was on the street this morning,” Semerket said, surprised. “There wasn’t any force like that to be seen—and one that size can’t just disappear. They must have broken ranks, blended into the neighborhoods somehow—”

  “Perhaps. But the Dark Heads are saying that the Isins are using magic to make themselves invisible—that our arrows are useless against them.”

  “Is that what you believe?”

  Shepak shook his head. “I don’t know.”

  Semerket looked over the ruined compound. He was thinking, I was warned not to come here today…

  He gazed at Shepak’s morose face. Should he tell the Elamite of the message he’d received from the man at the Sick Square? No—the admonition had been meant for him alone. In a city where assassins had tried to kill him once, where he owed allegiance to only those who furthered his quest, it would be unwise to displease any who might be watching out for him.

  Semerket took another drink and turned to Shepak. “Let’s leave all this death and stink. You’re free of this place now. Come, we’ve a princess and my wife to find.”

  “But I can’t just leave! What about my men? I’m needed here.” Shepak looked around at the garrison yard, where bodies lay amid the smoke and ruin.

  “They’re not your men any longer; you’ve been assigned to me. And look at it this way: the best thing you can do for them is to find the princess, before Kutir in his wrath hurls these survivors into the Insect Chamber.”

  Shepak saw the sense in Semerket’s words, and nodded, though reluctantly. “Where are we going, then?”

  “To find out what those living near the plantation have to say about that night.”

  Shepak’s lip curled into a sneer. “Those peasants? But we’ve already questioned them. It was like speaking to cattle.”

  Semerket fixed him with a skeptical eye. “When you investigated them, did you by any chance wear your uniform and that helmet?”

  “I was on official business, wasn’t I?”

  Semerket was silent.

  “What?” demanded Shepak.

  “Nothing. It’s just I’m reminded of a Nubian saying my friend Qar is fond of quoting. ‘When the Great Lord passes, a wise peasant bows and farts silently.’ ”

  Semerket pretended not to see the color rising in Shepak’s neck. Instead, he told him to shed his armor and change into civilian clothes. The last thing he needed was the intimidating presence of an Elamite soldier at his side when he questioned the villagers.

  “But you might want to keep that sword of yours handy,” Semerket added, bringing his hand to the bandage at his throat.

  THEY WENT TO three villages before they learned anything. At the first two, when Semerket mentioned that they sought an Elamite princess, the villagers feigned a sudden inability to comprehend him, shrinking back into their smoky mushroom-shaped huts. Their behavior confirmed Shepak’s previous observation that the peasants’ sensibilities were bovine at best.

  But when they reached the third village, Semerket tried a different tack. He made no mention of the Elamite princess, saying only that he was an Egyptian in search of his wife and young friend, whom he believed to have been victims of the plantation massacre. These villagers, moved that he had come so far to seek his loved ones, allowed Semerket and Shepak to pass into their town.

  They brought the two men to a low doorway in a round brick building. Semerket and Shepak had to crawl into its gloomy interior. As his eyes adjusted to the dark, Semerket saw that many of the villagers already awaited them. A woman took an ember from a brazier and lighted a lantern, throwing the interior of the building into sudden relief.

  Surprised by the room’s large size, Semerket saw that its walls were thick with the oily grime from generations of bitumen lamps. Looking up into the high conical reed roof above him, he heard the soft rustlings of rats and birds.

  With gestures, a woman indicated that he and Shepak were to recline on the flyblown cushions she brought them. When they were comfortable, an old, toothless man came forward into the center of the room, taking up his position under the lantern’s soft light.

  “Is this the mayor, then?” Semerket asked eagerly.

  Before anyone spoke, however, the old man began to chant. “She came to us that night,” he sang loudly. “Rings of lapis were on her fingers, and precious beads hung from her neck. A band of gold encircled…”

  As the old man droned on, Semerket grew uneasy. He feared that the villagers’ hospitality might include long-winded poetry recitations before the matter at hand could be discussed. Loudly, he cleared his throat, interrupting the old man.

  “I’m sorry,” he said as earnestly as possible, “but we’ve no time for entertainment, superb as it is. We’ve come to ask you about the raid.”

  The old man glanced at Semerket with something like irritation, and his tongue darted around his rubbery lips. “Yes! Yes!” he snapped. “I know that!”

  Once again, he started to sing, and he made his voice a trifle louder. “She came to us that night! Rings of lapis were on her fingers, and precious beads hung from her neck. A band of gold encircled her brow. She came to this very house, with the scent of death clinging to her, an immortal spirit who dwelt in the river. She came to us that night, to this very house, and sought our help. Desert demons had risen to beset her, she said; out of the night they had risen—”

  “What is this?” This time it was Shepak who spoke. “D’you mean that some woman survived the raid and came here?”

  This time the villagers groaned audibly at the interruption. Semerket could hear them whispering their disapproval to one another.

  “Quiet,” Semerket murmured to Shepak. “When you stop him, he has to start all over again from the beginning.”

  “But what’s it mean?”

  “She came to us that night!” The old man glared at Shepak, defying him to speak again. Shepak fell abruptly silent.

  As Semerket listened, he soon realized that not only had these villagers known about the raid, they had also begun to commemorate it in the florid and repetitious imagery of song. But disturbing, nonsensical elements were also couched within their recitation. Semerket closely observed the rapt faces of the villagers as they listened to the old man; not one of them scoffed or looked askance as the song became even more fanciful. They appeared, truly, to believe a supernatural being had touched them that night, one who had come to them from the river.

  “And though she spoke only the language of spirits and not the tongue of human folk,” the old man at last came to the end of his song, “we understood her and gave her shelter.”

  The old man fell silent. There was a great exhalation of the villagers’ collective breath, and then much hoot
ing and applause for the old man’s recitation. Semerket waited until the room quieted before he spoke.

  “What you’ve told us—all this truly happened that night? Just as the old gentleman sang it?”

  A chorus of voices rang out, each swearing on their children that the story was true and verifiable.

  “And the woman who came to you,” he asked, “—how do you know she was a river spirit?”

  The villagers broke into loud exclamations. “Why, she was soaking wet, as if she’d just leapt from the river itself!” “Beautiful, too, like a goddess!” “Clad in silks, in jewels!” “What else could she have been, but a river nymph?”

  Semerket looked over at Shepak, perplexed.