Day of the False King

by Brad Geagley

  Shepak shook his head in wonder to see such courage in so delicate a creature. Leaving Kuri and Galzu to guard the crypt’s entrance, the three walked silently forward. To Semerket’s eyes, the place looked like one of the huge river warehouses in Thebes, with thousands of clay jars filled with grain or olives. But these jars held a different treasure—the preserved corpses of Babylonian kings, their wives and nobles, families and servants.

  Semerket had no idea how he was ever to find Naia in them. But Shepak said they would locate Kutir’s brother-in-law in the far end of the crypt, where the most recent chambers had been dug. As they walked further into the crypt, Semerket noted that each jar was inscribed with the name of the entombed, together with the clay seal of the king or queen they had served. Semerket was surprised by the fact that king and servant alike were buried in exactly the same kind of jar. In Babylonia, kings were not gods as they were in Egypt; in death, all were equal before an unforgiving and indifferent heaven.

  As they penetrated into the most distant reaches of the crypt, the jars were newer-looking, not covered with the dust of centuries. The honey smelled fresher, too. Soon the jars became pristine in their newness, shiny with brown glaze, and the honey was still sticky on their sides.

  “Here they are,” whispered Shepak.

  Shepak pointed to the seal on the jar in front of him. It was Kutir’s seal, and the name below it said that the body within belonged to Nugash, the husband of Princess Pinikir. To Semerket’s dismay, many of the jars bore only the words “servant of Nugash” or “servant of Pinikir.” As there had been no one left alive to identify the servants, Shepak explained, there had been no record of their names. Semerket groaned aloud. It meant that he must search every jar reading “Servant of Pinikir.” He counted them—there were at least six such jars in the row before him, perhaps more behind.

  He went to the first jar that bore the inscription. Nidaba, white-lipped, came forward to say a prayer to the jar’s inhabitant, begging their forgiveness. At its conclusion, she nodded to Semerket. His hands were trembling as he smashed the jar’s seal of dried clay. The moment he did, the foul stench of putrefaction flooded the room.

  Shepak brought the torch nearer so Semerket could look inside. It was worse than he thought—a foamy scum of rot was on top of the honey. The Babylonians did not remove the soft inner organs as the Egyptians did; all the gases and liquids of corruption had therefore been released, to rise and pool at the top of the jar.

  Semerket felt his stomach twisting, and a sour taste rose again in the back of his throat. Firmly, he willed his nausea away; he simply could not give in to it now. Holding his breath, he fiercely plunged his hand into the viscous mess. He closed his eyes, reaching further, until he felt his hand brush against a nose, and then an ear.

  He gasped, took another quick breath, and held it. Moving his hand slowly through the thick honey, he reached for the woman’s floating hair and pulled. The weight of the body was much heavier than he had imagined, for the honey did not want to release it so easily. Suddenly the scalp tore loose from the skull, and he stumbled backward.

  Semerket stood in the middle of the crypt, clutching a wad of dripping hair in his hand. Shepak’s face was a mask of horror, and Nidaba made a strange noise, turning away. Semerket looked down at the gooey mess. The hair was white; the woman had been elderly.

  Naia was not in that jar.

  He and Nidaba went to the next jar. Again, a prayer was intoned, and again he broke the jar’s seal. Once more, the fetid, sour odor rose in his nostrils. He plunged his hand once more into the mess; this time, however, he reached down further than the corpse’s head, hoping to snag an arm. Semerket was surprised when he felt a piece of cloth, wrapped around the body’s shoulders; for some reason, he had assumed the dead would be buried in the nude. His job became a bit simpler by this discovery, for a robe or mantle would be far easier to grasp than a slippery piece of flesh.

  Bracing himself against the side of the jar, he pulled on the cloth. Slowly the body rose; finally, the top of the head emerged. This time the color of its streaming hair was black, and he strained to lift the rest of the body into the light.

  “Bring the torch closer,” he panted.

  Shepak moved the torch, angling it toward the face. Both of them winced to see it. Even with the natural slackening the features had undergone, Semerket could not remember ever having seen a picture of such affecting and hideous agony. The woman had suffered massive burns, and one side of her face was gone. The features that remained were horribly distorted; her torn mouth a hideous grimace.

  But the woman was not Naia.

  Semerket let the body slip back again into the dark, golden ooze, where it settled slowly. Honey drizzled across the tiles from his arm as he went to the next jar. He did not know how much more of this horrific gruesomeness he could endure. But when he broke the seal, he knew his search was over.

  There, floating at the top of the jar, fouled by putrefaction, was Naia’s mantle. It was the one he had given her on the Theban docks, as she was about to set sail for Babylonia. It had been the color of the Egyptian sky, embroidered in five-pointed stars of gold thread.

  Tears ran down his face as he reached his arm into the jar. Sobs began to wrench from him. Shepak had to look away, seeing his friend so grief-stricken. Nidaba dropped her head to stare at the tiles. Within the thick honey, Semerket felt his fingers move across his beloved’s features, reaching to the lips that he used to kiss so fondly, to the nose, over the closed eyes fringed in black lashes. Summoning all of his resolve, he reached for the yoke of her rough servant’s dress and gently lifted her into the light.

  Her head emerged, the honey streaming over her domed forehead, black hair glued to her narrow skull. The honey had altered her lovely dark features, however, for her skin seemed bleached of all color…

  Then Semerket looked again.

  “That isn’t Naia,” he whispered.

  Both Nidaba and Shepak jerked their heads to see.

  “Why, no,” Shepak said, after a moment, and his voice was faint with shock. “That’s Princess Pinikir.”

  Book Four

  Day of the

  False King

  THE FIRST WHEAT HAD BEGUN TO SPROUT across Babylonia’s fields. Overnight, the bearded spears covered the tamped, rutted earth left behind by the retreating Elamite armies. The priests of Bel-Marduk, after consulting many sheep livers, went into the cities of Babylonia to declare that the New Year had begun. After the proper rites and observances were made, after sacrifice and prayer had propitiated the sixty thousand gods of Babylonia, the priests proclaimed that the Day of the False King had at last arrived.

  The drab, mud-brick cities of the river plain transformed themselves overnight into riotous fairgrounds, decked in floating streamers that flew from every building. Babylon, of course, was the loudest and most riotous of all. On the Euphrates, the gilded barges of the gods assembled in a magnificent river procession, parading in splendor around its walls. The flotilla’s progress signaled to the thousands who lined the banks that the gods had returned from their annual retreat into the high mountains to extend once again their blessings to humankind for another year.

  The Day of the False King was above all a topsy-turvy day, when every role and law in the land were reversed. In private homes, masters waited on their servants, while in the thoroughfares, vendors good-naturedly opened their shops to looters. But the most important part of the festival was the coronation of the False King. Every year the priests of Marduk launched a citywide search for the most foolish man in the kingdom, to name him Babylon’s king for a day.

  That very morning the priests had gone through the city, breaking into the homes of rich and poor alike, shouting the ancient words, “Where is the king? Bring him forth! He must be arrayed in his royal robes and given the rod and ring so that he can dispense justice to his people! Show us where he is, for we have lost him!” And the people ran about, pretending to be frightened,
shouting with alarm, “Where is our king? He is lost! Let him be found at once!”

  Of course, everyone knew that the real king was safe in his palace, and that he had already chosen the most foolish man in the kingdom to rule in his place. This year’s festival promised to be among the most memorable in all of Babylon’s long history, for there were not one, but two False Kings, and they sat enthroned together in the vast courtyard of Etemenanki. One of them was a short, plump man, who wept piteously and bewailed his fate, even though his elite guards jabbed him with their spears, urging him to put on a better face for the crowds. The other, a scary-looking fellow with a macabre smile and a mark at the corner of his eye, thrilled the Babylonians with his glowering stare and defiant posture. Though the pair’s lack of humor was disappointing, the crowds had every faith that their new king had chosen wisely.

  The new king of Babylonia was in fact such a beloved figure that nothing he did could ever be amiss in the eyes of his subjects. He was so handsome and so clever, his subjects boasted, that people vied to see how extravagantly they could praise him, and even predicted that Babylon was poised to embark on a new golden age.

  The proof of all this?

  Why, hadn’t the new king delivered the country from the detested invader without a blow being struck? Such a hero had not walked the streets of Babylon since Gilgamesh himself was a lad!

  As the crowds laughed and caroused drunkenly in the corridors of the city, they did not know or even notice the true author of their good fortune—the black-eyed Egyptian man, slim and long-limbed, who skirted the crowd’s edge. Some of the more spirited Dark Heads tried to pull him into the streets to join their shameless dances, but he slipped from their hands, smiling but firm, intent on his own business. His prudery did not offend them, for they soon found other amusements to divert themselves.

  As he entered the forecourt of Etemenanki, Semerket slowly forced his way through the crowds to where the two False Kings were enthroned together on their raised dais. Menef was weeping copious tears, which only seemed to induce more cruel behavior on the part of his “subjects,” who expected their False Kings to be foolish and ridiculous, not sad. The crowds pelted him with waste and spat on him as they came near, enjoining him to laugh and prattle as a proper False King should. Menef did his best to placate the Babylonians with halfhearted antics, but the crowds still covered him with offal.

  The Asp’s aggression was more satisfying to them, for it somehow seemed more kingly in their eyes that he should roar and stamp his feet when they ventured near him. Chains bound the False Kings to their thrones, but the Asp’s cruel expression was enough to deter the people from taunting him as they did Menef. But when Semerket emerged from the horde to stand at the base of their thrones, to stare at them and nothing more, the behavior of the two False Kings changed abruptly.

  Menef’s eyes bugged out of his head, and he began to scream in fright. He struggled to turn away, dementedly gibbering. Even the Asp cowered, calling on the gods of Egypt to protect him from vengeful ghosts. The crowd roared in delight to see the two False Kings behave in so cowardly a fashion.

  This was more like it!

  Semerket merely watched the two kings, a scornful smile tugging at his lips. Menef and the Asp had not been told that he had survived the Insect Chamber, and they no doubt believed that he had come back from behind the Gates of Darkness to snatch them both into hell. Semerket made a sudden lunging gesture at them, and the crowd screamed with laughter to see the two False Kings fall backward, tugging at their chains, shrieking in terror.

  Bored with his game, Semerket moved away. When Menef and the Asp dared to look up again, he was gone, confirming their supposition that they had indeed seen his vengeful spirit.

  Semerket did not pause to look at the wrestlers or jugglers who entertained the mobs. He was too intent on his final task to clutter his mind with nonessentials. Semerket usually detested festivals, discomfited by the crowds and the noise, but Mother Mylitta had told him to wait by the gagu’s drawbridge. Nothing that morning—neither riot nor war nor even a festival—could have kept him away.

  Semerket did not call out his arrival to the female guards, for Mother Mylitta had warned him that the gagu had its own rituals to perform and he was not to disturb them. So Semerket joined the others who took their ease near the gagu’s moat and did as he had been told; he waited quietly.

  The Babylonian sun was its usual savage self, and Semerket wished that he had bought one of the wide-brimmed straw hats that the mat-weavers sold in the streets. Removing his sandals, he plunged his feet into the moat’s cool water. With the sounds of a mirthful people all around him and the pleasant feeling of tiny fish nibbling at his toes, he was soon lulled into an agreeable torpor.

  Though he was not exactly dozing, he was able to reflect at last on all that had happened to him since his discovery of Princess Pinikir’s body. Whether he could make sense of it all was an entirely different matter…

  DOWN IN THE CRYPT, he and Shepak had decided that it was too dangerous for Semerket to appear immediately at the palace. They reasoned that if Queen Narunte or Menef saw him, the two might even then engineer some desperate attempt upon his life. Shepak therefore went alone to fetch King Kutir to the crypt in secret. Shepak later told Semerket that he had found the solitary king in a council chamber, pale and anxious, reading some recent dispatches from his father’s capital city of Susa.

  “Sire,” Shepak said, “we’ve found your sister.”

  Kutir gave a start, rising to his feet slowly. “Alive?”

  Shepak dropped his eyes, staring at the floor, and the king had his answer.

  “So the Isins killed her, then…”

  “No, Sire.”

  Kutir looked up sharply.

  “Semerket is in the crypt below the palace, where we found the princess’s body. He will be able to explain—”

  “The crypt?” Kutir was appalled.

  “Will you come, Sire?”

  Kutir glared, unused to interruption. “Yes—and my bodyguards will arrest him for heresy. I told him specifically he was not to violate our dead.”

  “I think it best, Sire, that you hear his tale first, without your bodyguards as witnesses. Afterward, you can decide for yourself who can know the truth.”

  Kutir immediately comprehended Shepak’s meaning. “Is it conspiracy, then?”

  Again, Shepak said nothing. Kutir strapped his sword to his side and thrust a dagger into his belt. Though he had every confidence in both Semerket and Shepak, he did not intend to walk blithely into a trap, for in the past Elamite kings had been slain by trusted underlings.

  In the palace cellars, they came to the red wall that separated this world from the next. Nidaba and the two Dark Heads were gone, dismissed by Semerket. Their presence would have only served to alarm the Elamite king.

  Shepak and Kutir found Semerket, stained and sticky, in the far end of the crypt. Kutir saw the shards of the shattered seals littering the floor, and his eyes flashed indignation.

  “Sire,” Semerket said before the king could vilify him, “rest assured that a priestess said every proper prayer over the dead before I searched here.”

  Kutir fell silent, and Semerket continued warily. “We believe that your sister’s body was mistakenly identified as a servant and placed into this jar. Will you look?”

  Kutir exhaled, then nodded shortly.

  Semerket reached again into the jar and gently pulled the princess’s head into the torchlight. The honey streamed in oozing rivulets from her nose and forehead, and the torch picked out her features in wavering outline.

  “Is this your sister, lord?” Semerket asked.

  The king looked away quickly. He nodded. “Who did this?” muttered Kutir darkly.

  “I’m ashamed to say, Sire, that Egyptians committed the crime. It was Menef who sent the raiders to your sister’s home. And it was the Asp, his bodyguard, who carried out the murders.”

  Semerket related how he ha
d discovered that Menef had been part of the conspiracy that had taken the life of the Great Ramses III, and that Menef kept his ties to the remaining conspirators in Egypt, principally Prince Mayatum, who himself had instructed Menef to execute Naia and Rami.

  “Are you saying that my sister and her husband were killed because this Egyptian prince wanted to revenge himself—on you?”

  “No, Sire. It was not Menef, but your wife who ordered your sister’s death. All the killings occurred at the plantation to make it seem as if Isins had carried them out. The queen admitted this to me herself.”

  Kutir, who must have known of his wife’s hatred for his sister, put a hand to his forehead and looked as if he might have fallen had not Shepak assisted him to a bench. Leaning heavily against the wall, the king listened in wonder as Semerket told of being locked in the Insect Chamber by Narunte and the scheming Menef.

  Kutir was incredulous, and he shook his head. “The Insect Chamber? But that’s impossible. No one survives it—”