The Mammoth Book of Egyptian Whodunnits

by Mike Ashley

  After Senbi had inspected the prisoners, most of whom were runaway labourers now assigned to the gold mine, he himself went to the emptied prison to see that there were no more that the guards had forgotten – or perhaps hidden. Senbi was always concerned about rebels, and I understood, not only because this was the storehouse of grain and supplies for every other fort in Nubia but because there was gold in this land over which the king had given Senbi charge.

  “You must know them, rebels,” he said, looking about the largest vaulted cell in the prison. It was nearly as large as Senbi’s hall, stinking of urine and faeces and buzzing with countless flies.

  “And you must write their names upon red pots, cast them down and break them,” I said, as we inspected other rooms which stank no less.

  “But first you must know them.”

  He had Samentju and the other scribes make an accounting of all three hundred soldiers within the fortress and every man in the Nubian villages on both shores of the river. Together, Samentju and I checked and rechecked this with an earlier census and with the memories of the scribes. All were accounted for in the prison, barracks, and villages, none were missing.

  Seven times Samentju and I examined these figures over twice as many days. “Have we accounted for Captain Nakht’s men?” asked Samentju with some hope in his voice. But we had. Finally, his voice rising from despair to the kind of hope to which only desperate men can aspire, Samentju said, “Does it matter who he was, Emsaf? How many people in the world are wretches? He was bound to have been one of them, and the fewer, the better. The execration will be no different for it.”

  “That man, whoever he was, did not cut out his own tongue and place himself among your prisoners, Samentju. This means it mattered to someone,” I replied. “Which perhaps means that he was not a wretch at all.”

  “Was not,” Samentju said, unhappily.

  Was not. Whatever he had been, he was nothing now, nothing at all. Who had he been, this one whose ba-soul, ka-soul, shadow, effectiveness, and name I had caused to suffer and to perish utterly. And I had done so under the authority of the king. The execration –

  – execution – murder –

  – what would become of it? The ritual, it was spoiled. What would come of its power? What abomination had I wrought upon the Rightful Order of this world?

  These nights I did not sleep well. Thought of disturbing the pits to look upon the dried remains of his mutilated face haunted me. But I could not violate the burial place. The rite had been done in the name of the king and the god; there was too much Power there. Still, I wondered if the sun would rise in the east, if it would rise at all. I did convince myself that such a worry was foolishness over the course of the next three days, during which Samentju and I tallied and retallied every man, every cow and bull, all the small cattle, all the dogs, each Nubian, within Djer-Setiu and in the Nubian villages. We received reports from Senbi’s messengers, who brought word from the fortresses of Iqen and Buhen to the north and the fortress Dair-Seti and the rest to the south. And every day the sun rose, in the east, as was its custom.

  Now, I have seen a lector-priest drunk and heard him slur the holy words he was reading, and I have suspected a pure-priest of having slept with a woman or eaten fish when he ought not to have. The world did not end, Rightful Order persisted. But they, and others like them throughout Egypt, had otherwise performed their daily tasks in good order, and that is what matters: if I had slain one who was not an enemy, I had failed in my unique task, even if every word of the spell had been uttered perfectly. And the words were uttered perfectly, as anyone who heard them knows and will attest. What is done overpowers what is said: are spoken lies more powerful than silent truths? If a man claims to have given bread to the hungry, clothing to the naked, and a boat to the boatless when in fact he has not, these lies will not serve him in the netherworld.

  I did not know if I had lied: I did not know if I had slain a wretch or a person.

  So even as the sun rose each morning – as it will no doubt do so tomorrow, too, when we have reached the Great Prison – I worried over what chaos would result from my error.

  My error! My abomination.

  Each morning, as the sun rose, Senbi summoned Samentju and me to a private audience. “What did you find yesterday? Are infants laid on high ground? Does he who had no bread now have a granary?” Such would tell us that chaos had overtaken Rightful Order, and there was little sign of these things, either in Nubia or Egypt, for which I gave thanks. As days passed, however, this began to concern Senbi: I supposed he, a soldier, was waiting for the onslaught of an enemy he knows to be lurking somewhere in the hills, the wait more dreaded than the attack.

  Each day, too, he would ask, “What will you do today?” We told him of our next census and accounting; everything that we had done yesterday we would do again today.

  When we came to him on the fifteenth day of our labours and he asked, “What will you do today?” I said: “Today, my lord, we must have words with Captain Nakht’s half-drowned Nubian.”

  “Words! Emsaf, I personally cut out his tongue and threw it into the sand.”

  “He has control of his ears and his hands, my lord.”

  Senbi’s lips turned into a frown. “We can only hope that he likewise has control of his heart. Go then, you and Samentju, and afterwards tell me what you learn.”

  We went to him with pens – old ones, chewed down and of no use to a conscientious scribe – and ink and bits of stone and broken pots. He had been sequestered in an emptied room in the storehouse beside the labour prison. Samentju entered first; stripped naked, the Nubian watched him calmly until I followed. Then he began to struggle at his bonds, making a breathy noise like a dog. He shook his head, staring wild-eyed at Samentju, pleading with tears, stealing only the briefest of glances my way, as though sight of me were a burning ember thrust into his eyes.

  “You’ve killed someone – someone that should have been him,” Samentju explained to me. “No wonder he’s afraid. Hai, there, Pa-Nehesy,” he said to the Nubian, and that was all Samentju or anyone else ever called him: Pa-Nehesy, the Nubian. “That’s done with. It’s over. Unless the king demands another execration.”

  This settled him; I wonder how much he understood. Samentju, like Senbi, had learned a little Nubian jabber; a number of the Nubians who lived near Djer-Setiu had some command of Egyptian, and I thought this one might as well, if he recognized the value of the beqa-weights lately in his possession. I wondered where they had come from, too. Not from Djer-Setiu; we had accounted for all that had been apportioned to the fortress and indeed found a few weights, and even a little gold, that had never been entered into the accounts, a carelessness for which Samentju severely beat one of the other scribes.

  Would we have to beat the truth out of Pa-Nehesy? I wondered. My fingers trembled at this prospect.

  “Does he speak Egyptian?” I asked.

  “Not any more,” Samentju replied. “No doubt he still understands a bit of it.”

  “Why did Senbi cut out his tongue?”

  “He was a rebel.”

  “So Senbi would want him dead –”

  “Of course!”

  “– but who would want him alive? What was his tribe?”

  “He’s from the village on the east bank, and he knows the hill-country and its gold better than any other,” Samentju answered. To Pa-Nehesy he said, “The village?” and the Nubian agreed with a nod. “His tribe could not have got him out; they know better than to try. And besides, they have no boats of their own.”

  “Someone did get him out, boatless or otherwise. Who was it?” I demanded of Pa-Nehesy. “Who got you out?”

  He looked at me as if he did not understand, so I repeated myself more slowly. He then looked at Samentju, his expression one of puzzlement.

  “Should you translate for him?” I asked.

  Samentju paused. “I suppose I should,” he replied to me, and did so, haltingly in the Nubian jabber, wh
ich he evidently did not speak so well as Senbi. I laid out the bits of broken pottery and an old brush, and crushed and dampened ink for him on another potsherd.

  Samentju unbound one of his wrists. Pa-Nehesy shook his arm violently and I jumped back, but he did no more than shake it for a time and then took the pen in hand.

  “Can you write?” I asked Pa-Nehesy, who shook his head but proceeded to make a figure on the ostracon. If he could not write, he nonetheless had a little crude skill, and produced the outline of a man. This figure had a staff in one hand and his back was bent.

  “An old man?”

  “Look, he’s lying. There are no old men here,” said Samentju. “The frontier is no place for the aged.”

  “There are none truly old,” I said, “but I have seen a few almost-old, with bent backs and with broad bellies. Who are they?”

  Samentju thought for a moment, then spoke their names: Hetepi, Ameny –

  Ameny. Yes, said Pa-Nehesy’s gestures and the look upon his face, it was Ameny. One of the stone-slingers.

  Samentju frowned. “Ameny?”

  It was Ameny.

  So we had one of the soldiers bind up Pa-Nehesy’s free hand and went to question Ameny.

  Ameny was not an old man, but his belly hung low and hid a little bit of his linen kilt and his hair was thinning. He was vigorous, with a dark, handsome face, and I did not think he would stand still in a fight. Senbi presided over his questioning, which took place in the open yard with men watching from their stations.

  “You have put men into the labour prison.” Senbi made no question of this statement, and Ameny did not deny it. “How many of the men that you have put into the labour prison are there still?”

  “All of them,” Ameny replied.

  “There is not one who now lies in the burial place?”

  Ameny looked at me, then at Samentju.

  “I know of none of them who now lies in the burial place, but I do not know every action of these men, lord, nor if one of them might have died by the god’s will since yesterday.”

  “You did not put a tongueless man into the labour prison?”

  “I myself have never put a tongueless man into the labour prison nor removed one, nor has any man I have put into the labour prison lost his tongue. At least,” he said, again looking at me, “not of which I am aware.”

  “Did you know the man whom the lector-priest put in the burial place?”

  “I could not see from my position on the wall. From there–” he gestured with his head to the soldiers overlooking us from the heights “–all of the prisoners look much alike.”

  Something was not right here; his answers were too clever. Senbi must have thought so, too, because he gestured that I come forward and take up his part.

  “Let the lector-priest try to get the truth out of you. Try to keep your secret from the keeper of secrets!”

  “I have spoken with people about you,” I told him. “Your wife is a Nubian from the village on the west bank.”

  “From east or west, so is my lord Senbi’s. So would yours be, if you don’t already have a wife waiting at home in Thebes or wherever you’re from. Or perhaps even if you do.”

  My wife did wait for me – in the hills, and she would wait for me in our house of eternity until my last day. But I had no such patience to wait for Ameny. There were lies stuffed within these fat truths he told.

  “But that is only,” Ameny went on, “if you live long enough here in Djer-Setiu.”

  “Enough!” Senbi roared. “Ameny, I will not have you demeaning the lector-priest on whom I would rely, the keeper of secrets who knows the gods and their ways. I do not think you realize your position. Pa-Nehesy has painted you as the man who freed him, so we can assume only that you are likewise the man who put the other tongueless in his place. This will be reported to the vizier.”

  “Perhaps,” I said, thinking to turn Ameny’s cleverness against him, “we should ask your wife if she knows Pa-Nehesy.”

  “My wife?”

  “His wife?” Samentju broke in. The expression on his face revealed that he himself had not thought of such a thing. A murmur rippled among the other soldiers.

  “His wife,” Senbi said flatly. The idea seemed new to him, too, but his surprise was more guarded. “So be it. Samentju, fetch her. Emsaf –” and he gestured again to Ameny.

  So I took to questioning Ameny again, and asked him what his duties were, if they had not involved the tongueless. He guarded the wall and accompanied shipments of grain to Buhen and the other fortresses; he had nothing to do with the prisoners except to watch over their passage from the labour prison to the boat that took them to the eastern shore.

  “And even then I was atop the wall. If the tongueless was ever among the other prisoners then,” Ameny said, “I would not know. They were all rendered as tongueless by the overseers’ lashes.”

  I said, “I believe, my lord, that this will require the twisting of hands and of feet.”

  Ameny blinked and rocked back on his heels but said nothing as the guards laid him down on the ground. At Senbi’s order they turned the wooden shackles that bound his hands and his feet, slowly, that Ameny might have time to contemplate his position.

  Senbi stood over him for a time as Ameny writhed there; staining the hard-packed dirt with his sweat. Senbi knelt beside his head and said, “You know what will happen if you do not tell the truth.”

  “I know, my lord, I do!”

  They were turned again, a little bit. And again.

  “I am innocent of this!” Ameny begged. “I swear, I swear,” and after some hours both Senbi and I had had enough. Indeed, Ameny seemed likely enough innocent of this.

  By this time Samentju had returned with Ameny’s Nubian wife and babe. He gaped to see Ameny on the floor, looking more surprised than the woman. To Senbi Samentju said with hesitation, “I did not think it would come to this.”

  “Ameny has not spoken,” Senbi said. “Except to protest his innocence.”

  “Perhaps,” I said, “it will prompt Ameny’s wife to speak.”

  Her name was Tyetyeb now, but it was not the name she had been born with; Ameny had given her a good Egyptian name. She was young and had given Ameny a son, their only child, not long before. The birth had been hard on her, I could see. Her eyes were sunken and shadowed, her hands shook, and she leaned on Samentju for support; I wondered indeed if he had carried her here. No, no, she could not possibly have freed Pa-Nehesy, not herself. She could scarcely manage the skinny, listless newborn in her arms.

  “Do you have brothers here, either in the labour prison or the villages, male relatives of any sort?” I asked.

  “I have no brothers anywhere.” Her Egyptian was heavily accented but well-ordered. “My father is dead and I have neither uncles nor brothers.”

  “Do you know Pa-Nehesy the tongueless whom Captain Nakht brought?”

  “I do not know. I have been ill in my house with my son and have not seen him.”

  I believed this but said, “You might yet know something.”

  “She knows nothing!” Ameny said. Senbi slapped him with his fly-whisk, drawing blood from Ameny’s lips.

  “You know what will happen if you do not tell the truth,” Senbi said to Ameny in measured tones.

  Ameny’s tongue licked at the seeping blood. “Yes, I do, yes, my lord. My lord, my lord, my lord,” he said, and I wondered if he was beseeching Senbi or a god. The note of his desperation and the condition of his woman touched me then and I ended my inquiry. Senbi ordered Ameny released with neither ceremony nor haste.

  Samentju said to me, “Pa-Nehesy was mistaken.”

  “Evidently. I wonder whom he is protecting.”

  Ameny sat listlessly on the floor for several minutes, as if uncertain that his ankles would ever hold his weight again. He stood at last, stumbling to the wall beside his wife. They left together in the company of a soldier, neither of them well, neither able to help each other, walking like tw
o old persons.

  “Do you have doubts, my lord?” I whispered to Senbi.

  “No,” Senbi replied, looking at the soldiers on the walls, who, having seen everything that had befallen their fellow, now turned away. “I have doubts no longer.”

  A hot wind blew from the west that night. I lay in my camp-bed with one foot upon the floor, listening as the sand beat against the walls of Senbi’s house. I ordered servants to place wet linen over the high windows, and these billowed like sails as the storm bellowed like bulls. I cursed the wind, and blessed the thick walls of Senbi’s house.

  “Such is Egypt.”

  I stumbled from the bed, falling to one knee, then both, by no design. Senbi stood in the lamplight, wrapped in a cloak laden with dust. He had been out tonight.

  “Stand, Emsaf. I wish to sit.”

  “Would you care for wine?” I asked as I placed a stool beside him. Anyone who had been out on such a night would be parched. And desperate – or mad. What was he about?

  Senbi took the seat, then the cup that I offered, filled with wine I had brought from Thebes. “This is Egypt’s predicament.” He gestured around the room. “Orderly, neat, pleasant. Stout walls, good wine, good company.”

  “The commandant is gracious.”

  “While outside–” he pointed to the window where the linen was holding its own “–howls all the rest of the world. Hordes beat upon our threshold, upon our windows, upon our walls, upon our roofs. They would sweep the king from the Residence, Emsaf, and would wear Egypt away.”

  “Egypt is too great for that.”

  “Do you have a drinking reed?”

  “Why, yes, my lord. Would you care for a jug?”

  “I have no plans to get drunk tonight! No, I want to show you a trick. It is a good trick. A magician taught me this.”

  I felt my eyes grow wide beyond my will but, saying nothing, presented Senbi with a drinking reed.

  He took, too, from an open chest beside my bed, the calcite bowl that had been given to my father by the king’s father. I used it daily in my ablutions. It was old and fine, very white and very beautiful.