Day of the False King

by Brad Geagley

  When no one answered him, Kem-weset shrugged and began stitching up the flap of skin. Then he made a paste of honey and herbs, lathering it onto a bandage, and pressed it against the wound. Finally, he wrapped a cloth tightly around Rami’s head.

  It was not until Kem-weset rose to his feet, saying, “I’ll have that wine now,” that everyone realized the surgery was over. A collective sigh of relief sounded through the room.

  Semerket found that he was drenched in sweat, that his forehead blazed with pain. The headache that had threatened to overtake him all day had at last arrived. He did not mention it to Kem-weset, however, lest the physician in his enthusiasm suggest a second surgery.

  “When will you know if the boy will live?” Semerket asked him.

  “The next ten measures of the water clock are critical,” replied the physician. “If he develops a fever, he will die.”

  Ten hours. He could not wait ten hours. He would go mad in this tomblike place. He needed to walk, to wander, to breathe fresh air. And then he knew what he needed more than anything else in the world at that particular moment; a demon had taken possession of him, thirsting with a demon’s ferociousness—he needed wine.

  “I must leave,” Semerket said abruptly. “I’ll come back later. I have business in the city.”

  Kem-weset reassured him that he would stay with the boy until they knew his fate, one way or another.

  Without a word to even Marduk or Nidaba, Semerket had already turned on heel and started to sprint down the tunnels. Marduk called out, saying that if he waited he would send a man with Semerket to lead him out. But Semerket would not wait. Even when Nidaba called after him, offering to take him back through the cisterns herself—even then he ran.

  Possessing no torch, he had no idea where he went. He simply kept running forward, tripping over the roots and broken tiles, sometimes falling. A faint light appeared in the distance, seeping down from a cistern grate, and he ran to it. He found a curving stairway and climbed, coming upon the grate at its far end. It took him a moment to figure out its latch, but he was finally able to lunge into the Babylonian twilight after a few moments, gasping.

  Semerket leaned against a wall. The street was unfamiliar to him. As always, he attempted to orient himself to Etemenanki, but the angle of the buildings in the area prevented a clear view of the tower. At the end of the street, however, he saw the pediment of the Ishtar Temple. He knew he was near the Egyptian Quarter. From deep within the cistern he heard Nidaba faintly calling to him. But he was unable to face her—anyone—and began to run.

  “WINE,” he said. “Red.”

  “Going to drink it this time?” the wineseller asked, his disdain for Semerket as marked as ever.

  “What’s it to you whether I drink or not?” The black jets in Semerket’s eyes flashed dangerously.

  The wineseller swallowed his impertinent retort; there was something about Semerket that night that reminded him of a coiled serpent. Best not to tease it into striking.

  Semerket sat at the rear of the tavern, away from the lantern light. Though the Elamites patrolled the city, enforcing the curfew where they could, they ignored the Egyptian Quarter. Semerket had known instinctively that this tavern, where he had first met Kem-weset, would continue to serve wine regardless of riot, upheaval, or war.

  “Planning on staying long?” the wineseller asked.

  “What’s it to you?”

  “No reason, no reason—just making conversation.”

  “Bring me the wine.”

  The wineseller shrugged and went back to where his wine jars were stacked. Semerket watched him as he poured out a bowl. The seller caught the eye of his servant, a sheep-faced youth who collected the empty bowls strewn about the disordered place. The wineseller whispered into the boy’s ear, then nodded in the direction of Semerket.

  “He’s telling him to charge me double,” Semerket thought morosely. He dropped his eyes, past caring, for his body throbbed with fatigue and grief. The bowl was set before him. It was not the servant who put it there, but the wineseller himself. Semerket looked around in dim surprise, and noticed that the serving boy was gone. Pulling out a gold piece from his belt, he flipped it into the air. “Keep the wine coming,” he said shortly.

  The wineseller caught the ring in his fist. He saluted Semerket smartly, and returned to his jars.

  Semerket brought the bowl to his lips and the red flowed into his throat. For a whole year he had not tasted wine, save for the cup that Kem-weset had forced into him, mixed with medicines. On the Theban docks, when Naia had sailed away from Egypt forever, he had solemnly promised her that he would never again drink it. She had placed her son in his arms, saying that if Semerket ever tasted wine again, then her child could not thrive and she would grieve for them both.

  For an entire year, he had kept his promise.

  But Naia was dead. Gone from him forever. Surely that invalidated his pledge.

  A paroxysm of grief shook him, starting from his stomach where the wine lay cold and sour, refusing to do its work. He called for another bowl. It was delivered. Then another. It was doing nothing for him, this wine. What kind of piss did they serve here? Rage suddenly blazed through him, and he hurled the bowl across the room.

  “I still feel!” he shouted. “Bring me another bowl!”

  “Why don’t I just bring you a jar of my very finest?” the wineseller suggested from across the room.

  The establishment’s very finest tasted suspiciously like the wine he had been drinking all along. By the end of the jar, however, he didn’t care, for it had finally succeeded in calming his roiling mind. Now he could take out the terrible revelations that Rami’s confession had stirred; he had the courage to examine them at last.

  He stared into the distance, allowing the spectre of Prince Mayatum to appear before him. Semerket finally acknowledged to himself the thought he had been trying to keep at bay, that the prince had come to Babylon not for any diplomatic discussions, nor for pleasure.

  The prince had come simply to arrange the murder of Naia and Rami.

  It seemed almost a ridiculous thing to admit. Semerket could not comprehend why the prince had gone to such lengths to strike at him. Semerket was a nobody, beneath his notice. Mayatum and his brothers were princes of the blood, tracing their lineage to the great god Amun himself, while Semerket was only a generation from the peasantry.

  Self-effacing, willfully naive, Semerket had always considered himself scarcely worth the attention of even ordinary people. That was why, when Naia had approached him, seeking him out above all the other youths who trailed in her wake, he had lost his heart to her.

  Then he remembered something else and his tears dried.

  Menef had struck her!

  Icy wrath surged through his body, and the thought came upon him succinctly—I will kill him. Tonight. Before the dawn arrives, I will drive the life out of him.

  His rage was not directed at the ambassador’s bodyguard, the Asp, the one who had impaled Naia on his lance. No, the Asp was an animal, scarcely human, who gloried in pain and suffering. Semerket had known it the moment he had seen him, with his ghoul’s smile and yellow teeth. Why expect an animal to be something other than what its nature compelled it to be? No, it was Menef who said, “Fetch!” and it was Menef who said, “Kill!” and the animal went just as willingly to either task.

  He was convinced now that Menef had been a member of Queen Tiya’s foul conspiracy. Prince Mayatum’s secret visit to Babylon proved it. The remnants of the terrible cabal were alive, Semerket realized, and their sinister hand had reached all the way into Mesopotamia to take their revenge upon him. He had been the one who foiled their ambitions, who had also been the author of their subsequent humiliations, testifying at the trials against them. How stupid he had been to consider their conspiracy dead and forgotten! Though the queen had mysteriously disappeared, rumored to be the victim of her husband’s secret revenge, as long as her remaining sons were still alive, h
ow could it ever be over? By killing Naia they had sought the most vicious and painful way possible to kill him as well.

  Well, he was not dead yet.

  He would go that very night to Kutir, to make his accusations against them. They had caused the massacre at the plantation, to make Rami’s and Naia’s murder look like the work of Isin terrorists. But he shook his head, uncomfortable with the logic. Was it not strange that so many had to die because of some distant Egyptian quarrel—that a massacre of more than thirty Mesopotamians was perpetrated just to kill two ordinary Egyptians?

  He looked at the empty wine jar in front of him. Perhaps another would help him reason out why so many had to die at the same time. Semerket raised his head to call again to the wineseller, but discovered that a group of men had quietly stolen around him.

  Rough hands suddenly pulled him to his feet. “Whoa there, my lord!” a harsh voice came to him, loud enough for all to hear. “It seems you’ve drunk a wee bit too much tonight—as usual. Don’t want you to go making a spectacle of yourself again, eh? You might fall into the wrong hands!”

  The Asp leered at him. Semerket whirled around to see the other man who gripped his shoulder; the young man’s face was very familiar and he strained to remember who it was. Then he knew—it was the guard from the embassy, the one to whom he had given the new spear.

  “What’re you doing here?” Semerket mumbled to him. “I thought we were friends…”

  The young man glanced fearfully at the Asp, and his grip on Semerket’s arm became tighter. “Come along quietly now, sir,” he urged.

  But that was precisely what Semerket would not do. He struggled, cursing, shrieking for help, but none in the shop made a move to aid him. He was just another obstreperous drunk to them, fortunate to have people who cared enough to rescue him before he passed out. As they dragged him from the wineshop into the dark street, Semerket saw the Asp toss a couple of gold pieces to the wineseller and his serving boy. He suddenly knew where the boy had disappeared to that evening: he had been sent to fetch the Asp.

  In the empty streets, Semerket’s screams caromed off the brick walls of the shuttered buildings. He saw heads peeping at him from over the balustrades, and he shrieked up to them for help. But they quickly withdrew into the shadows; in times of war, no one willingly went into the dark to aid a stranger.

  In his hysteria, Semerket noticed that he and his captors were skirting the Processional Way, heading in the direction of the royal quarter. Surely there must be Elamite soldiers on the avenues, he thought, and craned his neck to see. But the dark was by now so pervasive that he could not even see the faces of his captors.

  “I know it was you who attacked the plantation,” he hissed in the direction of the Asp.

  “We suspected as much,” came the indifferent answer.

  “Kutir knows,” Semerket lied. “I told him.”

  “No, he doesn’t.”

  “Even now his men are searching for you.”

  “No, they aren’t.”

  “How do you know? Where do you think I’ve been all day? I’ve been at the palace! I told Kutir everything—how it was you who dressed up as Isins and killed his brother-in-law. I showed him the Egyptian arrow I found!”

  “Did you, now? I’m curious to learn, then, what Ambassador Menef had to say. He’s been at the court all day, too, you see. Did you have an opportunity to chat?”

  Semerket cursed inwardly at his slip, but continued to hurl his accusations into the dark “I told him that it was you who attacked the Egyptian temple, that you thought my wife was there—”

  “No. We knew your wife wasn’t there.”

  The Asp and his men came to a halt. The man’s ghastly yellow smile lit up the dark as he drew close to Semerket. “We knew your wife was dead, you see. Because I’m the one who killed her. My only regret is I hadn’t the time to rape her first, for she seemed a tasty little morsel.” His jeering laughter filled the street.

  Semerket hung between the two men that held him, dead-eyed. He suddenly hawked up deeply and spat in the Asp’s face. Though the man’s frozen rictus of a smile remained unchanged, Semerket saw his eyes become lethal.

  “Hand me that spear, will you?” the Asp said calmly to the young embassy guard. “Nice,” he said when he held it in his hands. “Good weight. Expensive.”

  The guard merely swallowed, saying nothing.

  Semerket knew he was going to be impaled, just as Naia had been, and closed his eyes. He braced himself for the terrible thrust. Instead of freezing metal in his guts, it was his head that erupted in a blaze of golden sparks. The Asp had struck him with the butt-end of the spear. A metallic taste filled Semerket’s mouth, and a pitiless black overtook him. The last sense to go was his hearing.

  “There,” the Asp said. “That ought to shut him up for a while.”

  THEY WERE STILL carrying him when he wakened. Hearing the loud echo of his captors’ footsteps, he thought that he was once again in the cisterns beneath the city. But there was no accompanying sound of running water, and through the slits of his eyes he saw no roots snaking along the footpaths and up the walls. Torches lit the long hallway at regular intervals, telling him that the place was inhabited.

  His head ached and his mouth tasted of blood, but he was no longer drunk; either the Asp’s blow or sheer terror had driven the wine fumes from him. Semerket decided that if he continued to lie motionless in their grip, a dead weight, the men would have to lay him down eventually. The moment they did, he would spring away.

  The men stopped at a doorway. Semerket tensed. This was where he would have to make his move. But he heard a bolt drawn and then a heavy door pulled open.

  They had brought him to some sort of cell, he realized. Semerket was simultaneously relieved and fearful; it meant that they were not going to execute him immediately, yet it precluded any attempt at flight. The men carried him inside, dropping him roughly onto the brick floor. From the movement of light through his closed eyelids, he sensed that they had brought a torch into the room with them.

  When he felt rough hands begin to remove his clothes, he surrendered all pretense at unconsciousness. Semerket yelled loudly, striking out at them, and rolled away from their grasp.

  “He’s awake!” one of the guards shouted.

  “Ah, good,” said the Asp from outside the cell. “That should make it all the more interesting for him.”

  Without much difficulty, the Asp’s men caught him again and continued to strip off his garments. All the while, he noticed, they glanced nervously over their shoulders to the rear of the cell. At last he was quite naked, for they had removed even his sandals. They shoved him roughly against the wall and backed out of the room, holding their swords in front of them to foil any attempt to rush past them.

  The last to leave was the young guard to whom he had given the spear. The lad said nothing, but his glance was peculiarly intense. He looked from Semerket to the wall, indicating with his eyes that Semerket should look up as well. Semerket moved his head to see that the guard had left the torch in its socket.

  What was the lad getting at? Semerket thought. So what if he could see the cell where he was imprisoned? Of what value was that?

  As the guards closed the door, he threw himself upon it, pushing at it, pounding, but he heard only its bolt slide into place. Then a small grilled window set high in the door opened, and a pair of dark brown eyes stared at him—the Asp’s.

  “Let me out of here,” Semerket pleaded. “I have gold. I’ll make you rich.”

  “I’ve gold enough,” the Asp said. His indifference was chilling; how many people had offered him gold to spare their lives? It was hopeless, anyway, Semerket thought, suffering, not gold, was what the Asp relished.

  Semerket heard the sound of approaching footsteps from down the hallway. The high whinny of Menef’s voice reached him. “Is he in there?”

  “He’s there,” replied the Asp.

  “Let me see!”

  The ambass
ador was so short that he had to struggle to put his eyes to the grille.

  “You’ll answer to Pharaoh for this, Menef! You’ll be lucky if you’re not burned to death for it! I know you were part of Tiya’s conspiracy—”

  Menef turned unconcernedly to the unseen Asp. “I told you that Aneku would burble everything to him.”

  “Does it matter?” murmured the Asp. “She can’t talk anymore.”

  Semerket pounded on the door in rage. “When I get out of here, Menef, I’ll tell Kutir you ordered the attack on the plantation, that your own men did it—”

  The ambassador interrupted nonchalantly. “But I didn’t order it, Semerket.”

  Semerket fell silent. Even at that moment of extremity, his mind sought to solve the puzzle. Another person suddenly pushed Menef away from the grille. A pair of familiar silver eyes took the place of the ambassador’s.