Day of the False King

by Brad Geagley

“They gave no reason, Highness—only that you must go to Djamet at once.”

  While the prince and his butler spoke, the servant girl crept noiselessly from the bed, passing the other servants who waited, cringing, outside the door to dress and barber their master. The major-domo himself quickly laid out the vestments that Mayatum would wear.

  Naked, Mayatum wandered into his privy and sat on the bench in his tiled bath, yawning. He was not much concerned with the summons; convinced that he had so far successfully enacted the part of loyal brother and patriot. As his valet poured scented water over his shoulders, he ruminated on the reasons why Ramses had called for him at such an odd time of day.

  Irresistibly, a smile stole over his lips. Perhaps his half-brother was dying at last. Ramses had not been well during the few times that Mayatum had seen him during the previous months. Now that Semerket was dead, killed by the loyal Menef in far-off Mesopotamia, there would be no foreign idol to cure the rottenness in his brother’s lungs. Mayatum frowned, remembering that for six months he had heard nothing from Menef, no confirmation that Semerket’s assassination had indeed occurred. But he remembered that Babylon was yet again in the throes of establishing a new dynasty, and this undoubtedly explained the slowness of the post.

  Then a happy thought occurred to the prince. Perhaps Mayatum had been summoned so that he could be named official regent to Ramses’ young son, his nephew. His smile grew wider still as he tenderly contemplated his young charge, so sadly soon to lie within the Great Place in a tomb next to his father’s, another of those forgotten boy-kings Egypt produced with such frequency.

  A shadow crossed Mayatum’s handsome face. Alert to his fickle moods, his barber stepped hastily backward, avoiding the prince’s pinching fingers. But Mayatum was not thinking of the barber, but of his mother Tiya.

  She should be here, he thought bitterly. Tiya should be the one going to Djamet Temple. How she would have relished it, this triumph over her husband’s Canaanite whore, mother of Ramses IV. Upon this thought, Mayatum’s smile grew even more malignant. He positively chuckled as the valet fastened the leopard skin around his shoulders, denoting him the high priest of On, then placed Mayatum’s most formal wig upon his head.

  Preceded by his attendants, Mayatum made his way to the temple barge that awaited him at his private wharf. Mayatum lived a few leagues north of the city, on his own vast estate, situated far away from the stink and sprawl of Thebes. Not for him the cramped, private apartments at Djamet, so coveted by other nobles because of their proximity to Pharaoh. Living in so teeming a place would not allow him to practice his secret pastimes—ones that he preferred to keep far from the prying eyes of his family. His thoughts turned reminiscently to the little serving girl who had shared his bed that night. He must remember to ask whether she had any relatives still among the living who might miss her and start to ask questions after she had disappeared.

  His midsection was beginning to pulse pleasantly as the gilded ship rounded the bend in the river, bringing Djamet Temple into view. When he saw it, however, the pleasant feeling in his groin died away, replaced by a dull knot of disquiet. Instead of the mournful chants and dirges he expected to hear, signifying the end of his brother’s life, Djamet Temple was alive with lights and celebration, and the music of drums, panpipes, and lutes wafted over the water to him. The docks were crowded with the barques of other nobles and gentry, summoned in the dead of night just as he had been.

  As the sailors rushed to tie his ship to the pilings, Mayatum stared in dismay at the avenue in front of the temple, lit by bonfires and smoky with thick clouds of incense cascading from great stone censers. Then he saw the reason for all the commotion: a bizarre and splendid wagon had halted before the gates of the Great Pylons. There must have been a hundred oxen tethered to its reins, and the thing was painted in bright, barbaric colors, its sides inset with gems and gilded traceries that twinkled in the firelight. In its bed, the wagon bore some kind of shrine, the doors of which had been thrown open to the night. But whatever had been inside it was gone.

  As Mayatum stepped forward onto the dock, he saw that an entire train of accompanying carts and drays extended down almost the entire concourse to the Nile. The noise and congestion around the temple were intolerable, and he had to wait as his attendants lashed at the people, shouting at them to step aside so that Prince Mayatum might pass inside the gates.

  The moment he was through the Pylons, the pounding of drums insinuated itself into the ground beneath his feet. He made his way with the rest of the puzzled, excited courtiers to the rear of the temple grounds, where a great pavilion awaited them. Purple curtains hanging from silver rings kept its interior hidden. But lanterns and torches illuminated it from within, making it blaze like a comet in the night sky.

  Pharaoh’s elite Shardana guards met him at the pavilion’s entrance, and they indicated that Mayatum was to go into a small ancillary hall around the corner—a private reception, they told him. There, he found his brother surrounded by his favored courtiers. Mayatum noticed that Ramses was arrayed in his most formal robes of pleated linen. His head bent under the red and white crowns, and his thin neck sagged under the weight of jeweled collars, heavy pectorals, and chains of gold. But Mayatum also saw that Pharaoh’s eyes shone brightly (though this may have been from fever) and that his normally pallid complexion was livid with color (though this may have been from the rouge). When Ramses glanced in his direction, Mayatum made quick obeisance before him.

  “Brother!” exclaimed Ramses. “You are here at last. Now the ritual can begin.” He nodded to an attendant, who hurried into the pavilion. Ramses bent to lift Mayatum to his feet. “I wanted you particularly to come tonight, to see it for yourself.”

  “But…what am I to see, Majesty?”

  “Something about which you must be sure to tell my other half-brothers in Pi-Ramesse. I wanted them both here, of course, but I could not tarry another moment. So you must describe to them exactly what you see here tonight.”

  “I will of course do whatever Pharaoh desires.”

  The drums from the pavilion increased their fierce tempo, and the attendant returned, whispering into Pharaoh’s ear. Pharaoh took off at a quick pace, going through the tent’s flap and into the pavilion. Mayatum stared after him with foreboding. Pharaoh’s odd, smiling manner troubled him deeply.

  The remaining courtiers deserted the small tent and Mayatum was alone, save for two loiterers. Being royal, Mayatum scarcely noted them. But as he looked about for his own attendants, he chanced to notice that the two people—a lad and a beautiful woman—were now looking directly at him with piercing glances. Such an act was in flagrant defiance of royal protocol.

  Mayatum’s eyes began to snap fire—a prince of the royal blood must never be gawked at—and hot words of condemnation bubbled to his lips. But he choked them back when he looked fully at the woman. There was something reminiscent in her glance, now as scornful as his own. He tried to think where he had seen her, she with her skin the color of smoke, with her eyes like the Nile at flood…

  “Do you not recognize me, Great Prince?” murmured the woman, as if reading his thoughts.

  “Should I?” Mayatum said tightly, annoyed that she should address him so boldly. By rights, she should have waited until he had spoken to her. He disliked how informal his brother’s court had become, when any courtier felt free to burble anything to a member of the royal family without invitation. When it was his turn on the throne, he thought—

  “I thought you would remember the occasion,” the woman continued blithely, determined to interrupt his sanguine thoughts. She turned to the youth beside her. “My friend here met you at the same time. Perhaps you recall him…?” The youth’s expression was strangely malevolent, and he did not even bow his head to the prince.

  “Am I expected to remember everyone I meet?” asked Mayatum coldly. “My life in Egypt is full—”

  “But it wasn’t in Egypt that we met, Great Prince,” the woma
n interrupted him. “It was during your recent visit to Babylon.”

  Mayatum paled. No one was supposed to know of his secret visit to Mesopotamia, where he had commanded Menef to kill the wife and friend of the hated Semerket. “But I’ve never been to Babylon…” he began to sputter.

  Once again the woman defiantly interrupted him. “I spilled a tray of sweetmeats upon your lap. Do you remember now?”

  Mayatum felt a film of sweat break upon his upper lip. Now he knew who they were. By the gods—by the gods—were they ghosts, then? Spirits come to bedevil him? He began to back slowly from the tent, his shaking hands clutching the linen drapes behind him. They were supposed to be dead!

  The woman laughed charmingly to see him so undone. “I can admit it now,” she said, “spilling the food was no accident. I do hope you’ll forgive me, but you’d said such distressing things about my husband that night, you see.”

  Mayatum was at the tent flap, and he turned quickly, only to careen into a slim, long-limbed man with eyes of blackest jet.

  “Semerket!” he gasped.

  “Highness.”

  Mayatum marveled how in that single word, uttered in such a flat and toneless way, there could be found such malevolence. Semerket, not even inclining his head, shot a glance over the prince’s shoulder to the woman and lad.

  “It’s time,” he said.

  Mayatum was alone in the tent, now. He was soaked with sweat and his hands were shaking uncontrollably. He was feverishly thinking that if Semerket had returned—if Semerket’s wife and friend were truly alive—then Pharaoh must know of his own secret journey to Babylon, and how he had plotted with Menef to kill one of Pharaoh’s most trusted envoys. Sudden images of his dead brother Pentwere danced in his mind. Mayatum suddenly felt the slick, braided white cord of silk slipping over his head, just as it had Pentwere’s—how it tightened beneath his chin as it was thrown over the cedar beam and made secure. Then he imagined himself stepping forward from the stool into space—and heard the sudden crack of his own neck breaking—

  Mayatum screamed aloud. He would have run from Djamet then had not Pharaoh’s Shardana guards been waiting for him outside the tent. When he emerged, shaking and sweating, they urged him firmly into the purple-curtained pavilion.

  What he saw there confirmed all his darkest fears. The magi of Bel-Marduk whirled in frenzied circles before their golden idol, spinning faster and faster to the shrill piping of priestesses and the primordial pounding of their drums. The magi held sharp knives in their frenzied hands, and they slashed at themselves in ecstasy, so that blood ran from their limbs and spattered the faces and robes of the courtiers who stood nearest them. Mayatum could already see that Pharaoh, standing in their center, was sodden with red. The furor of the music increased so that Mayatum felt that even his heart’s own beating had been seized by it. Then, at a final roar of the drums, the magi ceased their frantic twirling and the musicians fell silent.

  The high magus stepped forward, his hands dripping green bile from the liver he had ripped from a she-goat, intoning a short prayer in Babylonian as he genuflected before the idol. With a gesture, he beckoned Pharaoh to approach the god with him. Before Pharaoh’s family, before his court, before all the important personages who were the witnesses for the rest of Egypt, Ramses turned and seized the idol’s outstretched hand in his.

  Mayatum saw for himself how Pharaoh’s limbs became infused with sudden strength, how his shoulders appeared no longer so rounded, how his neck straightened beneath the heavy crowns, saw that his stance became more solidly planted upon the earth. And then Mayatum saw the look of triumph in Pharaoh’s suddenly unclouded eye.

  Mayatum fled the pavilion. This time no Shardana guards rose to stop him. He ran through the temple grounds, panting, out between the Pylons and to the docks. His attendants had been so entranced by the spectacle in the pavilion that they had not seen him leave. Mayatum was forced to look himself for a ferryman to take him across the river. As they traversed the Nile, he looked back to see if he was being followed. But he was not.

  Alone in Eastern Thebes, he stumbled into the street that led to the foreign quarter. Only a tiny, silver scrap of moon lit the twisting alleys. Though he was a prince and wore enough gold to make him a tempting target, not one of the denizens who lingered in the lightless doorways dared to make a move against him. Mayatum was known and protected in these parts.

  Soon he stood before the rotting gates of the Hyksos temple, the one-time abode of the King of the Beggars. The place was ruled by another now, a female this time, but it was just as foul a place as it ever had been. Mayatum pounded hysterically on the gates, crying, “The queen! I must see her! Open up!”

  The black door slowly opened. An old woman appeared, giggling in delight to see him. Once, long ago, she had been his wet nurse at the palace. Quickly she bolted the gates behind him. Still chuckling fondly, she pulled him by the sleeve past the overgrown oasis of reeds and grasses that had once been the temple’s sacred lake.

  Inside the temple proper, only a few oil lamps lighted its twisting hallways, and he had to be careful where he trod. Hundreds of beggars slept on the floor—like bees in a hive, he thought, guarding their queen—and he was loath to touch them even with his gilded sandal.

  His one-time nurse led him to a suite of rooms, high in the back of the temple, overlooking the Nile. “Majesty,” the old woman whispered into the gloom, “our Mayatum has come to visit you!”

  There was a rustling from the darkened recess. A black, bent shape crept into the dim circle of candlelight. Even now, after so many months, he was shocked by her appearance. All his tension broke then, and tears of despair stung his eyes, for she was hideous to see, almost immobile from the injuries she had suffered. Her flesh seemed fused together, as if she had been caught in some terrible conflagration, barely escaping with her life. Flaps of melted skin covered her eyes, so that she had to crane her neck up from her crooked back to see him.

  Her voice was an ugly rasp, barely intelligible as language. “You’ve come to tell me that the rumors are true,” she said, slowly hauling her bulk toward him. “That Semerket is back in Thebes.”

  “Yes, it’s true—and he’s brought the idol with him!”

  “Has Ramses taken its hand in his?”

  “I saw it with my own eyes! Ramses forced me to watch while he did it!”

  The woman emitted a demented shriek, her damaged scream a thing of broken stones and gravel. Mayatum winced to hear it. He saw the furious tears running down her wrinkled cheeks, tinted with red. Even now, almost two years since she had come there, the Beggar Queen had not yet healed from the Cripple Maker’s artful attentions.

  “He should never have done it!” she railed, tearing at herself with talonlike fingers. “It’s heresy for a king of Egypt to seek the protection of a foreign idol!”

  Mayatum was too numb to say anything.

  “Well,” the woman said finally, “what can you expect from a northerner whose mother is a Canaanite whore?”

  Mayatum began to shake again, and he blurted out shrilly, “That’s hardly important! Semerket has brought his wife and friend back to Egypt with him. They survived. Menef failed us. Now Pharaoh will know of my secret trip to Babylonia, and how the conspiracy still lives. I will be judged and condemned a traitor, given the white cord to strangle myself with—just as my brother Pentwere was!”

  His tension broke at last and he fell into choking sobs, hiding his face in his hands. The crippled woman crawled painfully toward him. She took him into her arms then, and laid his head upon her bosom.

  “Don’t be afraid,” she croaked to him. “Remember that you are a royal prince, and that the blood of Amun-Ra himself flows within you. Semerket is less than the dust beneath your feet. And remember, too, that I—and all the beggars who serve me—will protect you.”

  “But how…?”

  “You will stay here, with me, for the time being. No one will think to look for you here, not even S
emerket. It’s been half a year since he left Thebes. He doesn’t know of the changes that have occurred in the city.”

  “What of his brother? Won’t he tell?”

  “Do you mean the mayor? That twitching halfwit?”

  “He must know that you’re the Beggar Queen now.”

  “Doubtless he’s heard that a woman rules the beggar kingdom. But that’s all he knows, and ever will.”

  “But what can we do against them?”

  “We wait. Semerket will be afraid of losing his wife again. This will make him either ferocious or timid. We must see how he plays out the game. In the meantime, I shall make new spells against him.” She grasped the prince’s head in her hands, peering at him from beneath the folds of melted skin. “Do you trust me? Do you know I love you best of all?”

  Mayatum swallowed. He nodded his head. As always, her presence served to reassure him. Even as a little boy, she had possessed this same power to make everything seem possible. It all would turn out all right; he knew it now.

  “Yes, mother,” he sighed contentedly, laying his cheek once more on Tiya’s slowly heaving breast.