The Mammoth Book of Egyptian Whodunnits

by Mike Ashley

  The Keeper of State Records could have the credit and welcome, if he thought that credit would accrue, if he fancied the king would ever like the source of such hideous news. Tamaket knew better. She also knew every poison in three lands, and had recognized the symptoms of the one to which Dahi was inuring herself over a year, no matter what lies her physician told. Dahi had overlooked that. Knowing it, Tamaket had soon surmised that the Royal Wife would hand her husband the bane herself, and choose to do it at some feast where Tamaket was present to be blamed. It had only been necessary, then, to warn Montumes and Ipi, and let them expose the guilty.

  “But how did you know?” Montumes had asked her, bewildered. “Guessing that Lord Antef’s father was one of the plotters, that I can understand. What brought you to suspect the Great Royal Wife?”

  “Oh. I wondered from the start, in Semna,” Tamaket had answered. “Someone, it was plain, would find me a useful fool to blame for murder by poison, and that worried me. It has worried me ever since. It was reasonable for the Royal Wife to suspect me, and she does not care for Kushites, nor is she notably kind to subordinates – yet she spoke in favour of bringing me to Egypt. I had to wonder why.”

  Very softly, she departed.

  As Senusert had promised, Antef’s body vanished, he had no tomb, and his name perished, with no inscriptions to record it. Senusert entered the annals as a great king, and was worshipped as a god in Kush for long after, but his son succeeded him while still a stripling. There are those who say grief does not shorten life, that this is nonsense, but Senusert was a strong vital man whom his servants had thought would live long.

  Also, those sculptors who carved him in granite later, though they could not have known its cause, showed him with haunted eyes and a look of bleak anguish to make the most frivolous halt and wonder.

  THE EXECRATION

  Noreen Doyle

  This story is set during the reign of Amenemhat IV, the grandson of Senusert, from the previous story, and one of the last kings of the Twelfth Dynasty. He reigned from about 1808-1799 BC and, as the story opening tells us, the events happen in year seven of his reign, so we are clearly in the year BC 1801. By now the great power of the Twelfth Dynasty kings is in decline, and the governors are once again exerting their control. The character Senbi, who features in this story, is doubtless descended from the Senbi who lived nearly two hundred years earlier and was one of the powerful provincial nomarchs whose authority was curtailed by the kings of the new dynasty. The resentment of the nomarchs festered for many generations.

  Noreen Doyle is an Egyptologist specializing in nautical archaeology. Although she hails from Maine she is currently undertaking postgraduate work at the University of Liverpool. She has written several historical fantasies set in ancient Egypt since her first story, “The Chapter of Bringing a Boat into Heaven” (Realms of Fantasy, 1995).

  The “lector” priest was an important official amongst the priesthood who recited the incantations and words of the gods, keeping track of the rituals and religious ceremonies down through the generations. An execration is a ritual outburst of hatred expressed as a statement of loathing against specific enemies, as the following story makes abundantly clear.

  Tomorrow, this captain tells me, we will be in Thebes, at the Great Prison. The vizier of the south himself will want to see me.

  The vizier! My lord, who sent me south to Djer-Setiu, on the order of the king. He will want to see me, but will he believe what I now have to say? I am bound and trussed like a liar and a rebel.

  There is a letter that I did not send him, now in possession of others, as is everything else that was mine:

  Year 7, first month of the third season, day 21. It is the lector-priest and keeper of secrets Emsaf who says: “By the order of His Person, the king, I, your humble servant, arrived at the island fortress of Djer-Setiu. The commandant, Senbi, has gone away for a time because Nubians are making trouble in the east near the gold mine, but before his departure he assigned everything necessary that you, my lord, did not dispatch with me. I, your humble servant, write that you may be informed that the execration was performed perfectly.”

  “Did I lie?” I ask this captain.

  Nakht – he is the captain – seems reluctant to speak, and returns to yelling at his rowers.

  He’s afraid, you see, because I killed a man in full view of everybody. He does not yet know what that means for his children, if he has them, or for his wife, or for his mother and father or for the king. Or for himself. Or for the Rightful Order of the world. Neither, in fact, do I.

  Perhaps that is the result of my abomination. Perhaps this is why Senbi stood by the riverbank until Nakht’s boat was out of sight. Perhaps this is why I killed this man.

  But perhaps not, and it happened like this:

  In the hour past noon, Kush came, and Libya, and Asia. In the shape of one man, a Nubian, a wretch, all the hostile foreign lands approached the burial place, all wickedness bundled into one flesh and blood and bone, and Egypt watched. Spearmen and scribes and overseers arrayed themselves on this western shore of the river. They knelt aboard boats moored at the bank. Nubian villagers laid down their chores and neglected their herds to stand in the shade of date-palms and rock, curious and frightened by our display of Egypt’s might. On a hilly island in the midst of the river, soldiers and Medjays, the strong men of Egypt, stood atop the massive, sunlit heights of the fortress that divided the island along its length. Everyone’s eyes fixed upon the wretch as soldiers led him up from the river, to this sandy burial place.

  A low chant rose from among the Egyptians and Medjays, the name of this fortress: “Djer-Setiu, Djer-Setiu: Destroying-the-Nubians, Destroying-the-Nubians.”

  The king had ordered that a lector-priest be sent with mutilated limestone figures from Thebes: “Make a very great execration at Djer-Setiu. Melt the wax figurines, break the red pots, put the enemy upside-down in the burial place.” And he had sent to the vizier of the south, my lord, the names of Egypt’s enemies, along with the names of their children and their servants and all their people. As the king smote them on the battlefield, so would they be stricken here in the burial place.

  This Nubian, stripped naked, his head covered only with new-grown bristle, a battle scar on his chest, came to me.

  I washed my hands in a white calcite bowl, shaking the water from my fingers to hide their trembling.

  Into one pit I cast red pots that I broke, and mud figurines of men and cattle and papyrus rafts, and into a second pit I toppled the limestone figures inscribed with the names of those who would harm Egypt and do injury to Rightful Order. Thus did I, Emsaf, lector-priest and keeper of secrets, begin the execration, a spell known since the beginning of the world.

  Two soldiers who had fasted and shaved and slept alone for seven days set the wretch – designated from the labour prison by Commandant Senbi – upon the ground. His arms were tied behind his back at the elbows and wrists, and now they bound his legs so that he knelt.

  I approached the wretch. He embodied chaos, wickedness, all that would destroy Rightful Order. It was the likes of him who would strip beads from the wrists of high-born ladies and drape them over slave women, give coffins to those who could not afford a tomb, put oars into the hands of nobles, transgress against the god, overthrow the king.

  Now, I have in the past wrung the necks of many ducks and even smashed turtles against the wall, but never before had I done this to a Nubian.

  He looked at me – turning his head about to see behind him – and, with his mouth open, said nothing, for his tongue had been cut out. He looked at me and for a moment, for just a moment, I thought that he might be not a wretch but a person after all.

  I did as the king ordered, in full view of everybody. I drew fast across his neck a sharp copper knife, the knife by which Isis and Horus struck Set, the god of chaos. I did this again and again and he bled and he bled and he bled, like the river in flood, as if it would never stop.

 
; And I wondered, as his bowels relaxed and added their contents to the flow, if I were to extend my hand, my other hand, might I control this efflux, slow it, stop it? What mattered, however, was only that I had started it, and I contented myself with this. Contented? I was numbed as if by wine – no, I was filled up – with something –

  He was emptied, at last, from throat and anus. He died.

  As if he were a small and peculiar ox, I cut away his head and the soldiers cast his body aside.

  In due course I placed his skull upside-down in a bowl and I buried it in the last pit, jawless, surrounded by wax figurines that I burned. I cast sand into the pits, which were then filled up with more sand. The spoken word, the written word, every act of the rite, everything was perfect.

  “Djer-Setiu!” the men cried, more loudly now, while I washed my bloodied hand and the knife in the white bowl, then lit a brazier of incense. As the purified soldiers swept away our footprints and his fluids, and buried the corpse in so shallow a grave that even a Medjay would not place his dead in it, I retired to the island, where a room of the commandant’s house had been reserved for my use.

  It is no mean hovel, this house within the fortress walls, and I was at home there as I might be in Thebes. The ceilings are high and plastered white, held aloft in the hall by columns hewn from wood. The commandant’s own wife, a Nubian woman, oversaw the servants who provided me with dates and other good food and saw that I was undisturbed in the small and bright room beside Senbi’s own bedchamber.

  There I composed my report to tell the vizier that it had been a good execration. I told him of everything but my shaking limbs and my swollen heart.

  The enemies of Egypt would tremble and be afraid, I wrote, for they had been overthrown and cast out in the name of the king. Rightful Order would be maintained. With the fate delivered to that one wretch, the enemy, the rebel, whoever, wherever, he was, was overthrown and upturned.

  But soon I was to learn that so too, perhaps, was the entire world.

  That was five days later when Senbi, commandant of Djer-Setiu, returned from his campaign, triumphant. He had defended the gold mine from rebel villagers and roaming tribes, and ferried their cattle and women and children to the island. The Nubian villagers who lived along both sides of the river put down their water jugs and fishing nets as he disembarked on the island with the wealth of those who, perhaps, had lately been their neighbours. They stared and said nothing, but we, Egyptians and Medjays, called out Senbi’s praises.

  Senbi made a great procession into the fort from the east bank of the island, with fanbearers and spearmen and crack Medjay archers: up from the river, past the settling basins where gold was collected from ore and the labour prison where the miners were kept, through the cool shadows of the long gateway entrance. There is, within Djer-Setiu, an open court bordered by the fortress walls and Senbi’s house and, along the southern side, unyielding knolls of stone that the masons had left in place. Against this little backdrop of desert trapped within the fortress, overseers arranged the cattle and dogs and paraded them before Senbi, who sat beneath ostrich-feather fans with a fly-whisk held to his breast. The captives crawled before him on their bellies. Scribes accounted everything before him.

  Senbi then retired to his pillared hall, where he called an audience. He sat on a lion’s-foot chair on a raised dais, beneath the attendance of two servants who with slow beats of their fans moved the hot, incensed air – it was exceptional perfume, I marvelled: antyu from Punt, which Nubian traders sometimes brought up from the south, much prized in the temples and palace. Senbi was honoured indeed, to have such stuff. Samentju, chief scribe of Djer-Setiu, sat on the floor before him. And he summoned, first, Emsaf the lector-priest and keeper of secrets.

  He asked of the execration, and I told him. Those assembled murmured in concurrence as I said that it had gone exceedingly well. When I was finished Senbi asked: “Did you take the tongueless one?”

  “I did, my lord, as your instructions directed. Each man in the labour prison stuck out his tongue, and he who did not because he could not, him I took. Samentju may vouch for that.”

  Samentju’s pen slipped across the papyrus. He licked away the unwanted ink and the tip of his tongue turned black. He murmured, “It was so, my lord, it was so.”

  “It is an excellent thing, then,” Senbi pronounced, brushing flies away from his face with his whisk. “A troublemaker among troublemakers that one was, a rebel among rebels.”

  “He is now turned upside-down in the burial place, my lord. Rebels and foreigners are overthrown with him, in the name of the king.”

  “In the name of the king,” Senbi replied, “many things are done. We stand in his stead here, we commandants at the very borders of Egypt. We are his eyes and his ears and his strong arms. Foreigners are cast down in defeat, gold is dug up from the earth, men fight and bleed and die in his name, for Rightful Order, while the king lies far away downstream.”

  “Even as ablutions are performed, sacrifices are made, prayers are spoken by priests standing in the king’s stead in every temple,” I added, “while he is absent.”

  “Effectiveness. That is the function of a priest, no less than the function of a commandant! You know this as well as I do, lector-priest Emsaf. I’m pleased. When you return to Thebes the Nubian herds will go with you, and gold for the vizier. I assume, of course, that you will return to Thebes?”

  “I will,” I replied.

  “A shame.” Senbi leaned forward, inviting me onto his dais. “Here we have no priest, no temple, no one who knows –”

  Before Senbi could finish, before I could mount the dais, soldiers entered the hall, in the company of several sailors still drenched from their labours. Senbi stood, unhappy at this intrusion.

  “For the commandant!” the chief of the sailors called. “Nakht, captain of the ship Montu-Rejoices-in-Thebes, seeks an audience.”

  And Senbi bade forwards the captain, who came with his sailors, who dragged forwards a lean, dark man wearing a leather kilt and his hair cropped short in the Nubian fashion.

  “On our way from Iqen we found this man along the river, my lord, nearly drowned,” Nakht said. “So we brought him aboard and in doing so found that he had gold upon him, and beqa-weights.” Nakht presented Senbi with two tiny but weighted sacks and a handful of little square stones inscribed with the diadem-sign. These had only one purpose, to measure gold ingots and dust. There was, though I did not see it, gold dust in the pouches. “We did not know what he might be doing with such things. He cannot trade in this region; he is a Nubian and has no commission. Unless –” Nakht looked at the Medjay archers among Senbi’s contingent and seemed unconvinced of what he was about to say. For generations the Nubian-born forefathers of these Medjays had served Egypt’s kings loyally. “Unless, my lord, he is one of your soldiers?”

  “No, he is not one of my soldiers.”

  Through all of Nakht’s speech, Senbi had taken his eyes from the Nubian only once. When Nakht said beqa-weights, I remember very clearly that his eyes went from the Nubian to me for the briefest of moments.

  “Where did you find this man?”

  Nakht described the spot, a lonely stretch of rocky shore at the bend in the river between Djer-Setiu and the fortress of Iqen.

  “You did not moor in the west?” Senbi said. Now he looked at Nakht.

  “In the west! No, no,” Nakht replied, thinking Senbi made some jest, because to moor and to go to the west both mean to die. “Wet as a fish he was, but quite alive. On the east bank, as it happens.”

  “Tell me your name.” Senbi directed this to the Nubian, who made no reply. Then he said this again, or so I suppose, in the Nubian jabber. Still the man did not answer. “Open your mouth.”

  The Nubian opened his mouth and Senbi leaned close, and one of the soldiers grabbed the Nubian’s jaw and made sure it was open very wide, so very wide that even from where I was standing I could see the mutilation in the moist darkness of this man’
s mouth.

  “Emsaf,” Senbi said, his eyes transfixed upon the mouth of the Nubian, that gullet which had no tongue, “tell me again who it is that lies upside-down in the burial place.”

  “It was the tongueless one,” I said. “The tongueless one chosen from among the men in the labour prison.”

  “That cannot be, for I myself cut the tongue out of that Nubian, and by god, this is he. Emsaf, whom did you kill?”

  A heavy stillness fell over Djer-Setiu in that moment. Everyone, not least myself, seemed afraid to move from our places. The world spun like a potter’s wheel.

  What did this mean? O the terribleness of it for him who had been sacrificed, it was a dreadful fate he had met here and worse in the netherworld. His ba-soul, his ka-soul, were utterly destroyed – he was defeated forever. But for the rest of the earth and for those who still lived upon it, what did it mean? Such an act might be a violation of Rightful Order, an utter abomination. And I had committed it.

  Senbi stilled the whirling of the earth by putting both feet firmly upon it, standing, and ordering some men to this and other men to that. Everyone did precisely what he said, grateful to be relieved of the burden of decision. He posted extra archers on the walls and sent out patrols to the four cardinal points. Nakht and the sailors he ordered to the river, to see that none, Nubian or otherwise, passed this way by boat or raft. As for me, he ordered that I stand beside him, leaving me fearful of his intention.

  Every man, Egyptian and Nubian alike, in the labour prison was tied with rope and brought before Senbi and me, and Samentju tallied them. Every one stuck out his long, pink tongue between bright white teeth or black rotted gums, every single one of them. The one who had been sacrificed, he could not have done so. He had no tongue. It was not there before I slit his throat, nor after. I told Senbi this. He said nothing.