by Brad Geagley
Semerket shook his head. “If these are to be his last moments, I’d rather not torment him with useless questions. There are more important things.” But he was saying to himself, Coward!
Kem-weset gruffly patted his arm. He returned to his box of instruments and asked one of the Isins to bring a flame in which to purify them. He also asked Semerket for a silver piece, though he did not say what it was for. Semerket did not ask. Marduk offered up his own mattress, helping Semerket carry Rami into another small room, where they laid the boy upon it. Every oil lamp in the cistern was collected from the soldiers and brought there, until the area was bright as day.
Rami attempted to lie quietly while the drug worked its magic, but it was apparent that the sedative was having the opposite effect on him than the one intended. “Semerket,” he said anxiously, “Semerket, my Day of Pain has come, hasn’t it?”
“Of course it hasn’t,” came his automatic reply.
“I heard what the old man told you, that you’d better ask me about Naia, now, while I’m still alive.”
“There’s no need. It can wait,” replied Semerket, too quickly. “Tomorrow, perhaps, when you’re well enough.” When I can bear it, he was thinking.
But the boy was not listening. Once he began to speak, his words poured out in a torrent of confession and self-reproach. “I know I’ll die today,” he said in a quivery voice. “I think I only lived long enough so I could ask for your forgiveness…because you loved her so much.”
Fear began blowing coldly into Semerket’s soul. He knew that he could not let Rami die in such torment, and tried to keep the fright from his voice when he answered. “What is it, then, Rami? What do you need to tell me?”
Rami’s eyes grew wide. “Semerket, it was because of me that Naia died! It was my fault!”
Semerket stared. So there it was, he thought; the confirmation that Naia was well and truly dead. Strange to feel nothing. In fact, he felt only a relief to hear the words at last spoken aloud. No more hope. Everything gone; finished at last. Oddly, it was an unexpectedly pleasant feeling, an almost buoyant sensation of complete and utter emptiness.
“I’m sure it wasn’t,” Semerket said tonelessly.
The boy began to ramble. “No! I should have saved her! I could have, if I’d only known what they were saying. But it’s such a difficult language—even Naia had trouble with it. When we were at the ambassador’s, it didn’t matter. Everybody spoke Egyptian there. But Naia said we must learn the language—Babylon was our home now—but I was too stupid—”
If anything, the drug was making the boy more fretful. Semerket canted his head to see if Kem-weset was nearby, but the old physician was pounding at something in the corridor. Semerket swabbed Rami’s sweaty forehead with a damp cloth. “It doesn’t matter,” he said.
“We were happy at the embassy.” Rami ignored him, and his rush of words came even more quickly. “But when Prince Mayatum came, everything changed. Why? We hadn’t done anything! Why did Menef send us away?”
Semerket’s raised his head slowly. “Who came to the embassy?”
The boy writhed in sudden pain, and he gasped the name. “Prince Mayatum!”
Semerket sat back on his heels, stunned. He put his hand to the wall to steady himself. Prince Mayatum had been in Babylon? But why should he travel all the way to Babylon just to see Menef? For what purpose? The alliance between Egypt and Babylon had existed for hundreds of years; there was no need to send any royal personage here. Then he remembered Mayatum’s own words that day so long before in Djamet Temple. The prince had told Semerket that he had only then returned from a trip to meet with Egypt’s Asian allies. It would have been a simple thing for the prince to make a secret journey into Babylon at that time. Semerket shook his head, forcing down the terrible suspicion that was fast rising in him.
“Do you know why he came here, Rami?”
As his spasm of pain subsided, Rami shook his head slightly. “No…no. I only know that Naia and I were chosen to serve him at the feast that night. Out of all the servants, Menef chose us.”
Menef again! Always Menef at the root of every nasty little evil in this wretched city!
“All during the banquet, the prince kept looking at Naia, making comments about you, about what a hero you were to Egypt. But it sounded like an insult, the way he said it. She got so nervous she spilled her tray all over him.” The boy spoke with increasing difficulty, for the medicine was drying his mouth. Semerket soaked the rag in a jar of water and squeezed a few drops between Rami’s lips.
“Then what happened?”
“Next day, we were sent away to the Elamite plantation. But Naia went to Menef, before we left. She told him that we didn’t want to go. Menef hit her across the face. Said we had no choice, that he could do what he wanted with us.”
Semerket’s voice went flat. “He struck her?”
But Rami ignored the question. “I didn’t like it at the plantation,” he said, “couldn’t understand anyone. But Naia and the princess got along. Naia found out the reason why she’d come to Babylon…a secret reason…”
“What was the secret, Rami? Did she tell you?”
Rami shook his head. His eyelids were drooping.
“Rami!” Semerket’s voice cracked like whip. “Tell me what happened that night!”
Rami grimaced as if he had been struck. He screwed up his face, trying to remember. “An old woman came there after sundown, telling us that…that something was in the sky…blood…a warning, she said.”
Mother Mylitta. Semerket could see her tall figure in his mind, banging on the plantation gates, demanding entry. He closed his eyes, deliberately forcing his ka up and out of his body. As Rami continued to speak, it left the underground world, rising to the streets above, plunging through the avenues and out the Ishtar Gate. Soon it was soaring over the hilltops and wheat fields, heading to the north, gliding effortlessly past the river levees.
Semerket was at the plantation now, its walls rising abruptly before him. The guards were closing the gates against the night and Naia was there—she was carrying a basket of laundry into the house. As always in his nightmares, he tried to call out to her, but his voice was wedged in his throat.
He gripped Rami’s shoulder.
“And Mother Mylitta has just arrived,” he said softly into Rami’s ear, prompting him, “she’s come through the gate. Where are you, Rami?”
“Outside, in the kitchens, with the cook…”
Semerket’s eyelids flickered. He tried to open them, but his ka was gone and would not return. Semerket was once again on his plain of nightmares.
“Where were you when the old woman came, Rami?”
“In the kitchens, helping the cook prepare the meal. Then he sent me upstairs to the garden, to help serve it with Naia. The old woman was already there. She was waving her arms about and pointing to a star in the sky. I thought she was crazy, but Naia told me she was a kind of sorceress, that she’d seen a great evil coming from Egypt to attack us.”
So far, Rami’s story was consistent with the one that Mylitta had told him. “Go on, Rami. What happened next?”
“Everyone turned to look at Naia and me, since we were the only Egyptians. But the woman asked us questions—”
“What kind of questions?”
“When we were born—the date, what time it was, where…”
“Go on.”
“She said that we weren’t the evil ones, and that we were all to go with her to Babylon. She said she could protect us there.”
According to Rami, however, the prince did not trust Mylitta, believing instead that she intended to lure him and his wife into a Dark Head trap. He had guards enough at the plantation to protect them, he told her, and would allow neither his wife nor his servants to come with her. Knowing that her trip to the plantation had been in vain, Mother Mylitta departed.
“We kept all the bonfires burning that night,” said Rami. “But everything was quiet as usual. The prin
ce told us that the old woman was insane, and that we should be laughing at her. But we were frightened, all the servants were.”
“Where was Naia during this, Rami?”
“She was upstairs with Princess Pinikir. The princess was scared, too, so Naia came to the kitchens to make her a sleeping brew. I remember she told me that the princess was distressed.”
As the hours wore on and nothing happened, Rami said, jangling nerves became calmer at the plantation. The cook heated some wine for the guards and the boy delivered it to the watchtower. He climbed the ladder to distribute the clay cups among the men, taking a moment to look out into the blackness beyond the walls. Across the plain, Rami believed he saw the movement of the swift-flowing Euphrates in the starlight. But he suddenly realized that the river was in fact behind the estate, to the west. Thinking that he had only imagined the movement in the dark, Rami climbed down to the courtyard.
When he was on the ground, he turned to look back at the watchtower.
“But something was wrong! The guards were suddenly falling over—arrows had struck them!”
Everything happened then in extreme, exaggerated slowness, he told Semerket. Not until one of the soldiers in the tower fell upon the tocsin bell, not until he heard the man’s dying gasps, did Rami’s tongue loosen enough so he could yell an alarm—
“Help! Assassins!” he called. “Help!”
Prince Nugash was in the courtyard and heard Rami screaming. By then the raiders were throwing grappling hooks over the wall. Nugash turned in time to see the shadowy figures of men appearing over the ramparts. The raiders’ heads were swathed in black cloths, Rami said, so everyone knew it was the Isins who attacked them.
“Prince Nugash rushed up to one of them, with a battle-ax in his hand, but their archers got him first. Then they drove a lance through him, to make sure he was dead. All that time, I just stood there. I couldn’t move!”
The Isins rounded up all the servants and tied them together in the courtyard. Rami stood rooted to the ground, hidden in the shadows, still holding his tray. No one noticed him. When everyone had left the houses, the marauders pitched torches into the buildings. They caught fire quickly, for their reed roofs became instant tinder.
“That’s when I thought about Naia. I remember saying her name aloud,” Rami said, looking up at Semerket. “I should have been searching for her. I could have saved her if I hadn’t been so stupid!”
“That’s when you saw her coming out of the house,” Semerket said, his eyes closed, remembering the image from his own nightmares. “That’s when she came into the courtyard.”
Rami nodded. “I saw her in the doorway, with fire raging behind her. I knew it was Naia, because she was wearing the scarf you gave her—the blue one with the stars.”
“What happened? She was in the doorway, and—”
“They surrounded her, kept her apart from the others.” The boy was weeping now, unabashedly, and he thrashed about on the mattress, so that Semerket had to grip his arm to quiet him.
“They were on horseback,” Rami said. “One of them, the leader I think, rode over to her. The fire was so loud, like a furnace roaring, but I heard him to say to her, ‘You’re the Egyptian woman? You’re Naia?’ ”
“Those were his words, Rami? His exact words?”
“I heard him say it! Naia didn’t answer. I couldn’t see her face, but I could tell that she was looking up at him. Then I saw her nod her head. And that’s when he took his lance and drove it through her! I saw it happen! He killed her!”
In the underground chamber, Rami brought his hands up to his face, covering his tear-stained cheeks. “I remember running at him, then. I dropped the tray and I ran toward the man on horseback. I screamed at him, yelling curses at him. The horse reared up and the man fell to the ground. Then I was on top of him—strangling him, hitting his face. I kept trying to get his black hood off him so I could see what he looked like. Even if they killed me, I wanted to come back to haunt him. Then the hood came off, just like that. Right into my hands. And I saw—I’ll never forget—”
“What, Rami? What won’t you forget?”
“His face, like a skeleton’s, with awful yellow teeth and that mark at his eye.”
Semerket exhaled. “Was it an asp…so small it could have been a tear?”
Rami nodded, looking at him wide-eyed.
“That’s when they struck you.”
“I don’t remember when it happened, except that my head exploded. I know that I fell on top of the man. ‘Get him off me!’ he kept screaming. ‘Get him off me!’ And the funny thing is…”
Rami’s voice was barely audible now, and his words were slurring together. Semerket laid his ear against Rami’s lips.
“What was it, Rami? What was so funny?”
“…I could understand everything they said…all of a sudden, I could speak Babylonian…”
“No, Rami,” said Semerket. “You understood them because they were speaking Egyptian.”
RAMI WAS SUFFICIENTLY DRUGGED that Kem-weset felt it safe to begin the surgery. But the old physician was adamant that Rami was not to move by so much as a fraction. “You two will need to hold his arms,” Kem-weset said to Semerket and Marduk.
Though Semerket was averse to the task, at least he had been schooled in the House of Purification and was fairly inured to the cutting and stitching of flesh. Marduk, on the other hand, instantly paled and instead ordered one of his men to Rami’s side. But the man fell to his knees, weeping in fear. It was sacrilegious to open a body with a knife, he said, contrary to the will of the gods—this from a warrior who had probably disemboweled hundreds on the battlefield.
Marduk was about to order that lots be drawn, when a low voice came from outside the room. “I’ll do it,” said Nidaba, pushing her way past the warriors and approaching the mattress. Semerket made sure to take the side where the incision would be made, sparing her the sight of the wound. She sank to the floor and took Rami’s head onto her lap. Her gold-tipped fingers gripped his skull tightly.
Kem-weset then demanded that the Isins bring forth a blood-stauncher. The Isins looked at one another in bewilderment, for they had never heard of such a person. Muttering to himself about the backwardness of such people, Kem-weset took his scalpel and made a cut across his thigh. The blood ran freely down his leg.
“Let your men be brought here in single file,” Kem-weset said to Marduk. “Quickly now, before it clots.”
At least twenty soldiers passed into the chamber before Kem-weset found his blood-stauncher, a young Isin man who had once been a farmer. When he approached the old physician, the wound on Kem-weset’s thigh instantly stopped its flow.
“This is the man!” Kem-weset declared. “Bring him into the room.”
The Isin warriors became alarmed and stared at the farmer as if he were suddenly revealed to be a demon. Kem-weset patiently explained that the Egyptians, being more advanced, had long known of the existence of staunchers—and that approximately one in every ten persons possessed the power to stop the flow of blood by their mere presence.
“Of course, these persons rarely know they possess the talent,” he explained, as he beckoned the farmer into the chamber, placing him near Rami’s head.
Kem-weset was ready to begin. Quickly, he made the incision, a half circle around the indentation above Rami’s ear. The boy groaned, but did not wake. Carefully, Kem-weset peeled the flesh up to expose the bone. Blood oozed from the cut, spilling across Nidaba’s lap. She made no sound, and her expression remained stoic.
“Where is that stauncher?” Kem-weset asked crossly.
The man had backed unseen into the corner of the room. Marduk dragged him into position, and the blood stopped its flow.
“Stay there!” Marduk growled.
Kem-weset took up a chisel and mallet, and began hammering at Rami’s skull. Finally, the physician inserted a bore into the wound. A few taps of the mallet, a twist, and he pulled away a neat plug of bone, exp
osing the pinkish-gray brain inside. It pulsed in the lamplight, and even Semerket noticed the black blood and fragment of bone that pressed against it.
“Now,” said Kem-weset, “all I must do is remove this chip—like so—and tweeze away the bits of old blood. Yes…there!” Deftly, Kem-weset inserted the flattened disc of polished silver he had fashioned from the piece that Semerket had given him, then sealed it with mastic.
“They say the brain’s a worthless organ,” said Kem-weset as he threaded a needle with lamb’s sinew. “But see what this minuscule piece of bone was able to do to the poor lad?” He held the fragment in the lamplight, where it glistened bloodily for all to see. With gasps and curses, the Isin warriors sharply averted their eyes. But Kem-weset continued his discourse, fascinated. “What it tells me is that the brain must be good for something,” he said. “Don’t you agree?”
