by Mike Ashley
“This riddle must wait a while longer,” Khnemes said aloud. “I caught a fish in the river, but he has not been grilled yet. Qesf, give these men some honest barter for their time and their indignities. Gentlemen, please tell Qesf the names of the crossroads nearest your dwelling-places in Thebes, in case I need to speak with you later. Now I must interview a murderer.”
The central police-court of Thebes is where many journeys reach their endings, and where darker journeys begin. This red adobe building adjoins the Kamur, the central canal which runs west-to-east through Thebes . . . in fact, the hind section of the police station overhangs the canal’s southern wall. Some criminals of Thebes have speculated that the police-court has a trap door above the canal, so that the Theban police can dispose of inconvenient guests.
Khnemes was sitting on a stool, in a room that was otherwise bare except for two oil-lamps placed in niches in the wall. The lamps were needed for their light, because this room was underground. Above the lamps was a chimney-flue, admitting air from the street level above. The brickwork floor was ramped, tilting slightly southwards to the edge of the room nearest the canal. At this wall, the floor’s adobe bricks terminated in a drainage gutter.
Khnemes was facing north. From beyond the red adobe wall directly in front of him, he heard the nearby sounds of screaming, and the irregular rhythm of wood against flesh. Through the wall to his right, he heard someone sharpening a tool. From the room above him, there came through the brickwork the noises of sobbing and prayers to unnamed gods.
A door opened in the wall to his left, and Chief Constable Peth entered with his prisoner. The shaggy bowman’s hands were shackled behind his back. The prisoner’s linen kilt was stained. His feet were bare, and he walked painfully. In the lamplight, Khnemes saw bruises on the prisoner: clearly, the policemen’s batons had forced this man to play the grim sport which Egyptian criminals have named “smelling the stick”. Peth seized the bowman’s shoulders and pushed downwards, forcing him to kneel in front of Khnemes.
“Thank you, chief,” said Khnemes. “Remove his handcuffs, please.”
Peth arched an eyebrow at this breach of procedure. “Softly-softly, Nubian. If you weren’t a former Medchay – and serving the interests of a wealthy house – I wouldn’t let you see the prisoner at all. Well, it’s your lookout if he gets violent.” Peth tried to unbuckle the prisoner’s handcuffs, but the buckle was snagged on the stiff leather shackles. Peth took his dagger from his scabbard and used this to unbuckle the cuffs.
“We questioned him before you got here,” Peth went on, while the prisoner rubbed his chafed wrists. “He says his name’s Secheb, a humble fisherman from down north in the Prospering Sceptre district . . . and his accent’s northern, right enough. We can’t verify the rest.”
“Then let us see what can be verified.” Khnemes appraised the man’s beard and unkempt hair. “In Egypt’s hot climate, most men keep their heads shaven. Yet this man does not.” Khnemes thrust his hand into the bowman’s matted locks. “Ehui! What’s this?” Khnemes withdrew his hand quickly, cracking a sand-louse between his fingertips. More carefully this time, he probed the murderer’s greasy tresses again. “Here is something, chief . . . or a lack of something. Bring that lamp closer, please.” Peth fetched an oil-lamp from its niche, while Khnemes pulled back the bowman’s lanky hair.
Secheb’s right ear was missing. A thick whitish scar had formed where, long ago, the ear had been neatly sliced off. “So! You have one previous conviction, serious enough to bring a sentence of disfigurement,” Khnemes deduced. “But still a minor offence, as you have kept your other ear and your nose.”
“He’s probably a leg-stretcher,” said Peth, using the slang of the criminal world. “Takes his exercise climbing up and down the shafts of tombs. Sooner or later, all the grave-robbers in northern Egypt get word of the riper pickings in the tombs near Thebes, and they slime their way into our precinct. This likely lad must have got himself nicked for selling stolen burial-goods: that’s a lesser offence than getting caught in the act of tomb-robbing.”
Khnemes glared at the suspect. “Your ear-lack marks you as a thief, so you grow your hair long to conceal it . . . and you wear a beard so that your long hair seems to be the result of neglect rather than intent.” Khnemes reached for something on the floor behind his stool. “Here, catch!”
Khnemes flung something at the prisoner’s face, and Secheb instinctively raised his left hand to protect himself and catch the object. He found himself holding a cassia-wood longbow.
“That is the murder weapon. You see the hatrit?” In the lamplight, Khnemes pointed to the bow’s leather handgrip, which also served to support the arrow while it was nocked and aimed by the archer. “This hatrit shows a great deal of wear on the left side of the bow, where many arrows have rubbed against the leather, but the right side of the leather is scarcely worn. This longbow has been drawn, and used often, by a smehi: a left-handed man.”
Secheb had caught the bow with his left hand; now he dropped it as if it had river-plague. He tried to stand up, but Peth kept him kneeling. “All right, I’ll admit it: enuk smehi,” said Secheb. “But just because I’m left-handed doesn’t mean I’m an archer. I’m a fisherman, coming up-Nile to Thebes from the delta.”
“We found no nets or reed-traps in his boat,” Peth told Khnemes. “His boat didn’t stink enough to be a fishing-boat. Especially not from the delta, where all those foul marshlands are.”
“From the delta, you say?” Khnemes frowned. If this man was indeed from the Prospering Sceptre – the administrative district at the apex of the Nile’s delta – then Secheb and Perabsah might have met in northern Egypt. “Did you know my master?” Khnemes asked.
“I don’t know anyone in Thebes,” Secheb whined, in the flat nasal accent and pinched vowels of northern Egypt. “I’m from downriver. I was just coming up south to Thebes when your men grabbed me, and . . .”
“That’s a lie,” said Khnemes, leaning forwards. “A mast and a sail were in your boat: I saw them. But the mast was stowed beneath the thwarts, and your sail was furled. So you were travelling north, not south.”
This logic was merciless. The Nile’s great gift is that it enables transport in both directions. Northbound vessels strike their sails and stow their masts, allowing the Nile’s steady current to bear them downriver. Southbound vessels raise their sails, and allow the prevailing northerly wind of the Mehut to carry them upriver. Caught in his falsehood, Secheb said nothing.
“Why did you kill Perabsah?” Khnemes asked.
“I never met him,” said Secheb.
“That is an answer to a different question,” said Khnemes. “You are clearly unwealthed, for your speech and your bearing proclaim you are a labourer. Yet, when you were arrested, I saw that you wore expensive sandals, of new leather. Your kilt is new, and made of good white shent linen: I would expect a labourer to wear brown muslin. You dress well for a fisherman, especially one who has no nets.”
Secheb looked desperate. “Right, Nubian. I’ll tell all I know. Yesterday, during the revels, I met a man outside a wine-kiosk near the Street of the Sedge. He offered me three copper debenu if I would shoot someone with my longbow. He told me where to find the victim, and he kept a boat ready at the quay for my escape.”
Khnemes and Peth exchanged glances. A single qed’t of copper was an excellent day’s pay for an unskilled labourer; three debenu would buy many months of comfort. “Who was this man?” Peth asked the prisoner. “Describe his face.”
“I can’t!” Secheb whimpered. “He wore a revel-costume, with a mask. A bird’s face, it had: some sort of carrion-bird. He made a joke about robbing the tombs. He said tomb-robbers were like vultures or carrion-feeders. I think his costume was meant to resemble a bai.”
Khnemes looked up sharply. “A bai? A brown-necked raven?”
Secheb nodded mournfully, and began to weep.
“I’ll give you reasons to cry, you bastard,” said Peth. “I�
��ll see you go on the wood for this.” But Secheb was already crying, and Peth’s threat of a death-sentence by public impalement on a sharpened stake made no difference.
Khnemes felt hollow inside. This man had clearly slain Perabsah, but he was only an agent of the true murderer: a man in a raven’s disguise. One hundred years ago, Perabsah’s ancestor Rekhseth had sacrificed a brown-necked raven every night, in the goldfields. The bai was a very obscure bird in Egypt, not a totem in any cult known to Khnemes: surely, the murder of Perabsah and the murder of Teknu – a century apart – were somehow intertwined.
The language of Egypt is subtle, and it comprehends two different forms of time: the momentary, and the infinite. During Secheb’s arrest on the quays of the Nile, Khnemes had said to him: “Tu ma nikeh: you are a murderer.” It was true at that time and that place. Now Khnemes said the same thing, but the rules of Egyptian grammar compelled him to use different words to speak a different truth. “Netek nikeh: you are a murderer,” he told Secheb, “and this fact is truth for all eternity. It is your shadow now: it will follow you through all your days of life. It will travel with you on your journey to the afterworld, and it will stand alongside you in the Hall of Judgment. No matter where you go, your shadow cries ‘murderer’. One million years hence, this truth will endure: netek nikeh.”
Khnemes rose from his stool. “I have more questions, but the answers are elsewhere. Please take this killer away, chief constable.” Khnemes strode towards the door.
There was a clatter and a shout. Khnemes turned to see Secheb snatching at Peth’s dagger. Peth’s foot struck the oil-lamp beside him, snuffing the wick, and he cursed as hot oil splashed his leg. Khnemes rushed to aid the constable, just as Secheb broke free, with Peth’s knife in his left hand and ran across the cellar towards the chimney-flue. The light and shadows in the room swung madly as Secheb snatched the second oil-lamp from its niche with his right hand, and flung this at his pursuers. Khnemes saw Secheb raise the stolen dagger to his own throat . . . then the lamp struck the brick floor, and shattered. The cellar went dark.
“Don’t do it, man,” said Peth, in the darkness.
Khnemes heard a sharp gasp, then a gubbling sound . . . then a thud.
From somewhere in the dark came a howl through the walls: the voice of a criminal screaming a confession. But it was in another room, another crime. Nothing to do with the murder which Khnemes must solve. In the darkness, he felt his way towards the door.
At the lodging-house, Khnemes found Merytast garbed in mourning. Her finery and wig were put away: now she wore her plainest dress, with its hem torn picturesquely in three places. Her face-paint and smedyt were gone: her cheeks and hair were now daubed with a few discreet traces of mud.
When Khnemes entered the upstairs bedchamber where Perabsah and his wife had slept, several of Merytast’s attendants were gathering the belongings of their mistress for her journey downriver. Near the door, Khnemes saw the coffin-boat from the Plain of the Loaves. The broken mummy – surely he was the murdered labourer Teknu – was still crammed into his too-small coffin. The mummy looked more at peace now than when Khnemes had last seen him: his face seemed rather less distorted than before, and the distension of his belly had lessened.
“I am surprised, my lady,” said Khnemes to Merytast, “to find this mummy cloistered in your private rooms.”
“This is a lodging-house, not my boudoir,” said Merytast. “My husband desired to bring this mummy home to our estate, to be entombed respectfully. This man served Rekhseth faithfully, and so he merits honour. Perabsah was Rekhseth’s sasasa – the son of his son of his son – and so he inherited that debt of honour . . . which now passes to me, as his widow and the mother of his son.”
“My lady?” asked Khnemes, who knew that Perabsah was childless.
“I had not yet told my husband that I bear his child. You see this vessel?” Merytast beckoned to one of her maids, who fetched a clay pot filled with earth containing brief sproutings of grain. “Here are seeds of barley and wheat. Each day when I awaken, I pass my morning-water over this soil. The barley has languished, but the wheat has prospered . . . so I know that the child in my womb is a son, not a daughter.”
This womb-wisdom was of no matter to Khnemes. “Neb’t-i, can you think of anyone who wished your husband slain? Is there a grudge . . . possibly going back to the time of Rekhseth?”
Merytast shook her head. “My husband had wealth, and such men always have enemies. In recent days, our estate’s wealth has dwindled, yet my husband’s enemies endure. Beyond that, I know nothing.”
Khnemes gestured towards the mummy. “If Perabsah felt a blood-debt to retrieve this mummy, why did he wait so long? Ten years ago, when your husband was wealthy and Egypt was not yet divided, Perabsah might have ventured to Thebes in safety. Why did he make this quest now? The civil wars along the border between the two Egypts have made our journey perilous. Why did Perabsah risk his own life and yours to honour a debt to the dead? I knew your husband, neb’t-i. Perabsah was not inclined to honour his own debts . . . much less the obligations of his ancestors.”
“Think you?” Merytast’s tone became suddenly less gracious. “Then you knew not my husband at all. Perabsah’s heart brimmed with charity and honour. Now he begins his journey to the afterworld. The god Anubis will escort him through the doorway Khersek-Shu and usher him into the Hall of Judgment, the coffin-shaped room where Osiris reigns as Lord of the Underworld, sitting in counsel with the forty-two demons who are the Judges of the Dead. While the demons bear witness, Perabsah must undergo the Weighing of the Heart. Anubis will take my husband’s heart from his reborn and transformed body, and place it on the balance scales . . . weighing it against Ma’at, the goddess-feather of Truth. If Perabsah’s heart weighs heavy with sins and unpaid debts, then it will be thrown to the monster Amemit, who will devour it and cause Perabsah’s damnation. But I tell you, Khnemes, that my husband’s heart will be weighed in the balance with Truth, and judged to be feather-light and virtuous . . . and the doors to the afterworld will swing wide to admit him. And now, steward, I have a task for you.”
Khnemes nodded. “It is begun, my lady. I seek your husband’s murderer.”
“What? No; something more important. Perabsah’s earthly remains – his kha’t – must be conveyed down-Nile for entombment on his family’s estate. But the journey to Aneb Hetchet takes three days by barge, and Perabsah’s flesh would be corrupted by then. I have arranged for a guild of embalmers here in Thebes to prepare my husband’s body for the journey home . . . and for his longer journey to the afterworld. Faithful steward, I require that you tarry here in Thebes and oversee the process of my husband’s mummification, whilst I and my retainers go home with the mummy of this servant Teknu. After my husband is properly embalmed, it will be your task to escort Perabsah’s mummy homewards to our estate.”
To the mind of Khnemes, the task of finding Perabsah’s murderer was more urgent than the readying of his mummy. Khnemes began to protest, but Merytast silenced him: “Yes, my steward, I sense your concerns. I lack the wealth to pay your wages during the seventy days of Perabsah’s embalming. Fear not, Khnemes: I have arranged for you to enter the priesthood of a local uabet, as an apprentice embalmer.”
This was not at all to his liking: Khnemes had been suddenly stripped of his livelihood. But a thought occurred to him: by remaining in Thebes, he might perhaps be able to find Perabsah’s killer . . . if the villain was still in Thebes.
Khnemes bowed, reluctantly. “It will be done, sovereign-my-lady.”
“Excellent. Then report to the uabet in the Street of the Four Sons. In six weeks’ time, when the embalming-rituals are nearly completed, I shall send a messenger to Thebes with arrangements for your return downriver with my husband’s mummy. Have you any questions?”
“Two, my lady.” Khnemes studied Merytast’s face intently. “Do you know of any sect in Egypt which sacrifices a brown-necked raven?”
“A bai?
” Merytast frowned. “I am quite certain there is no such cult. The death of a bird is an omen of doom, in all corners of Egypt. Birds are the emissaries between the earth and the heavens. Some cults worship specific birds, and will mummify a bird if it has died a natural death. But to kill a bird wilfully, for the whim of a god?” Merytast shook her head. “Non wun mun’et-ef: there is no such thing. You had another question for me?”
“Aye, my lady,” said Khnemes. “When did you learn how to read?”
Merytast gasped. “How did . . .”
Khnemes pointed to the mummy. “You knew that this man’s name is Teknu. That name comes from the cartonnage which your husband found, and which he left on the offering-table where you have seen it. But Perabsah could not read the name: he sought to hire a scribe to read the fragments. Perabsah would never have paid a single deben of copper for any scribe’s hire if he knew that his own wife possessed scribe-wisdom.”
Merytast seemed impressed. “You are clever, my steward. You recall that our household’s scribe Seshem died recently, midway through his long task of unjumbling the archives of my husband’s ancestors? Before his illness, Seshem had taught me some of the scribe-truths, without my husband’s knowledge. I have the scribe-wit of a third-year apprentice. Yes, I did read the cartonnage last night. Now, go: prepare my husband for his journey.”
The Street of the Four Sons – in the eastern quarter of Thebes, near the canal – was far from the Opet festivities . . . so the streets were nearly deserted when Khnemes came in search of the embalming-house. He was caught unaware by a shout from behind him: “Ho, Nubian!”
Khnemes turned. He was alone, except for a few stray geese. Behind Khnemes stood a bare wall of dressed granite, with four oracle-masks sculpted into the stone. So this place was a temple, then: the temple for which this street was named. The masks depicted a falcon, a jackal, a baboon and a man with a plaited beard . . . the faces of the mesu-Heru: the four sons of Horus, the patron gods of embalming who also represented the four quarters of the world. All four faces hung silently with their eyes and mouths closed. The human-faced deity Masety ruled the south, so here in Thebes and in all of southern Egypt he was the most favoured son of Horus. Khnemes stepped towards the man-faced mask: “Did you speak, lord?”
