by Anton Gill
CITY OF LIES
Anton Gill
© Anton Gill 1993
Anton Gill has asserted his rights under the Copyright, Design and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work.
First published in 1993 by Bloomsbury Publishing Ltd.
This edition published in 2015 by Endeavour Press Ltd.
Table of Contents
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
AUTHOR’S NOTE
THE BACKGROUND TO HUY’S EGYPT
A man will sit and turn his back
while someone kills another.
I will show you a son who is an enemy,
a brother who is a foe,
a man murdering his own father.
- from The Prophecy of Neferti
Chapter One
‘We have spoken of this before. You still say you want to farm? I still say you are mad!’
Huy did not reply. He knew that she was angry in any case. But he was stubborn. He spread his hands and shrugged.
‘There is no land to farm in the south. And you are a scribe. A scribe does not farm.’
‘It is not my fault that Miu is dead.’
‘You compound my grief. And you will not marry me. You will not exchange the words. I have waited; but now I have waited long enough.’
Huy’s thoughts ran through his heart one beside another. One thought was long: farming would be tough in the south. Getting there would be bad enough. The River between the second and third cataracts, where the desert cliffs crowded in on it, was savage. But there was a route. The gold barges coming downriver from UatUat to the Southern Capital managed it. There and back they went: there with the wine of Kharga and Dakhla, and cedar wood; back with rough bars of gold. And there was farming. Not much, it was true: WatWat was an inhospitable land: a desert with dark-skinned people in it. But there were places you could farm in patches. And scarce enough to be valuable. And he needed a challenge again. Here, in the city, in a soft job. He was getting stale. His belly grew. He found himself in the usual position of having got what he’d wanted, and hating it.
The second thought was shorter, but more complex: Senseneb looked beautiful. Her golden skin shone with the scented balanos oil she wore; and she stayed with him. They had exchanged hearts; but he still could not say the words which would bind her to him. Why was the step so great? Did the ghost of his first wife, remarried far to the north, still linger within him? Senseneb the daughter of Horaha the physician had been patient - he should honour that.
He watched her as she finished shaving off her left eyebrow and started on the right, wielding the bronze trapezoid razor with absent-minded skill. On a low chest by the wall stood a miniature mummy-case, open, containing Miu’s remains, swathed in several cubits of linen bandage doused in resin. Despite these, the contours of the head stood out clearly still: the pricked ears, alert for any sound; the sharp nose, the large eyes, the aquiline profile: only the body, limbs and torso entwined in linen, suggested the mould of any swaddled animal: man or hawk; ibis, crocodile or dog.
She finished shaving her brows and turned to him with so slight a hint of anxiety under the defiance in her eyes that no-one but he would have noticed it: how did she look now? Not just for him, but for people?
‘You will shave your eyebrows too?’
‘Yes.’
‘You don’t have to.’
‘Miu was your father’s cat. He was your last link with him. I respected him. I owe respect to the akh of Miu, may it prosper in the granaries of Aarru.’ Huy took the razor and wet it, rubbing oil into his eyebrows. The hair was so much the colour of his brick dark skin that he doubted if anyone would notice it had gone. He wanted to kiss the bare skin where Senseneb’s eyebrows had been but a mark of mourning was a mark of mourning. As he watched, she burnt the hair at the little clay oil lamp on her dressing table.
The south would be difficult, but not impossible, and not lonely, either. The late king’s wife lived down there – Ankhesenamun, queen to Tutankhamun, now wife to the Military Governor of Meroe. Huy knew the man only slightly but Tascherit had seemed on their one short meeting to be a person who lived in Truth. A strong soldier too, because Meroe was so far south as barely to be part of the Black Land any more. The empire reached as far as the Viceroy’s palace in Napata, and even there, in that fortified town, the surrounding land was maintained only in an uneasy peace. Meroe lay further upriver still, at the gates of the land of Kush.
Huy had saved Ankhsi’s life and she would not forget – from her letters she still regarded him as her protector, though by now she was a mature woman of nineteen. He could depend upon her help. If the farming for any reason failed, so he told himself, there was gold – the fields of UatUat yielded four thousand deben of smelted gold a year. He would not starve. And he would not be bored.
He finished his shaving and ran a finger over the smooth skin. He had been right; he looked no different. The face that stared back indistinctly at him from the highly polished copper mirror could belong to no one else anyway, with its crags and fissures come too early in life – he had seen thirty-seven floods of the River – and the long white scar down the cheek just under his left eye where Kenamun had knifed him. How much worse it would have been if Senseneb had not been such a neat needlewoman! He remembered how she had stitched up the gash as you would remember a dream: it had happened, yet now it seemed unreal. But once any moment had been left upstream during the drift down the river of life, it ceased to be true and joined the realm of dreams.
‘You are thinking of adventure when already you have seen enough,’ said Senseneb, joining her finger to his and running it down the scar in company.
‘I am unhappy here.’
‘I know. But you should endure.’
‘I know how to endure.’
‘You should rest. Take pleasure. This is what you wanted.’
Huy thought of the verse:
A man spends ten years as a child before he understands death and life.
He spends another ten years acquiring the instruction by which he will be able to live.
He spends another ten years earning and gaining possessions by which to live.
He spends another ten years up to old age, when his heart becomes his counsellor.
There remain sixty years of the whole life which Thoth has assigned to the man of god.
Not that he believed that Thoth, the ibis-headed god of writing and wisdom, allowed very many men one hundred years between leaving the Boat of Night and re-entering it; even among the most fortunately born, old age was a state rarely reached. But the thought was good, and indeed the favour had been granted to some of the old kings. Of their lives he was well aware, having read and catalogued the writings of their scribes almost to weariness in the Great House of Correspondence where King Ay had appointed him Assistant Deputy Head of the State Archive for Barley Production. But he had not completed his fourth decade, he was healthy, and he did not feel ready to sit down by the fire yet.
‘Let me show you the farmer’s state,’ quoted Senseneb, mockingly. Huy remembered the sentences well, from his long years of training as a scribe: the scribe’s was the most favoured of professions in the Black Land. You did not even have to pay tax. The sentences described how awful other jobs were compared with administration. He let her continue, though. It gave him time to order his heart. ‘When the water is up, he irrigates the fields and cleans off his machinery. He spends the day cutting tools for cultivating barle
y, and the night twisting ropes. Even his lunch hour is spent working. He sets about equipping himself to sally forth to the field like any warrior. The field is parched and set out before him; he goes out to recover his team. Many days later, after tracking the herdsman, he recovers the team. Have you heard enough?’
‘I know it. He loses the team again, and then finds it after another few days, stuck in the mud and bitten half to death by jackals.’
‘And then the scribe comes along...’
‘Yes...’
‘He estimates the harvest tax, attended by men carrying sticks, and dark men of UatUat carrying clubs. They say, “Produce barley!” but there is none, and the farmer is beaten violently. He is tied up and cast into a pool. He is ducked and thoroughly soaked, while his wife is tied up in his presence, and his children are in shackles. His neighbours desert him, and are fled...’
‘It is the end,’ completed Huy. ‘There is no barley. If you are mindful, be a scribe. You didn’t mention the bit about the farmer’s hands swelling with work, and how he stinks,’ he added. ‘But you were never a scribe: you don’t know the truth of it: A boy’s ears are on his back. Do you know how often we were beaten?’
‘My father taught me my profession without beating me.’
Huy bit back a retort about physicians always considering themselves a cut above the rest. In a normal time, that sort of badinage would have been all right, even welcome, between them: but now was not a normal time. First and foremost, there were Miu’s obsequies to be observed – he would be interred in the special vault near the temple of Bastet as soon as Ra had passed into the Seqtet Boat. Then there was his decision, which had been brewing so long, to be resolved between them.
He turned his face to look out of the window across the narrow strip of land between the high, red, painted walls of the Palace Compound to where the River rolled sluggishly north, as it had done since before the time of King Menes, fifteen hundred years ago, and as it would always until the final time came and the desert swallowed it.
The stone sill was hot although the day was still young. It was near the beginning of the year, and with the season of Akhet the water of the River was rising slowly; already it had turned green. A bad flood was predicted: the number of kittens bred amongst the granary cats would not be controlled this year, and still the rats would take more than their share.
‘A bad omen, to think of starting a farm in such a year.’ Senseneb had always had the knack of picking up his thoughts. As they lived closer now, the need to do so had become slighter; but it was still there and at times he resented it.
He watched the River glint like metal in the sun, and as he looked out over the roofs of the harbour township he thought of the little house he had lived in there when he’d first returned to the Southern Capital. They’d left it when he had entered Ay’s service, and now it, too, had become part of the dream that was his past.
He twitched at his soft woollen overtunic with its blue and gold edging – a mark of his senior status in Ay’s civil service. It was ironic that the old man – this would be Ay’s sixty-sixth Flood – had been at once the source of his reinstatement and his frustration. He had been of help to the elderly Master of Horse. He had enabled him to become Pharaoh in the face of fierce rivalry from General Horemheb. Horemheb had thereupon gone north to fight the Kheta and the Khabiri. Nobody thought that he had only this one plan, but Ay was not strong enough to break him, and after the debacle of the past decade, the northern frontiers needed securing – Horemheb was the only man to do it. It was in his own interest too, since no-one seriously believed that he had relinquished his designs on the Golden Chair. Under the youthful Nebkheprure Tutankhamun, he had become strong, and loaded himself with titles: Greatest of the Great; Mightiest of the Mighty; Great Lord of the People; King’s Messenger at the Head of his Army to the South and North; Chosen of the King; Presider over the Two Lands; General of Generals. These things could not be cast aside. And Horemheb, though old, was nine summers younger than Ay.
Nevertheless, before the coronation, Ay had even felt secure enough at the Committal to the Tomb to wear the spotted cat cloak, and cast himself in the role of sem priest, opening the mouth of his dead predecessor, a duty normally that of the rightful blood heir. Ay was Tutankhamun’s father-in-law. Tutankhamun had, so it seemed, died childless, and it had been thought that Queen Ankhsi was barren though Huy knew better than that. But at the time of the burial, Ay had arranged for the foetuses of two children, wrung from the life-caves of two of the concubines, to be buried with Tut, to establish a mournful posthumous virility for him.
A year later, Huy had enjoyed his reward to the full, though he had never been quite sure that he wanted it. Had that conversation really been a year ago? Had he managed to vacillate, while outwardly being a model servant, that long?
He and Ay and Horemheb shared a common past: they had all been servants of the discredited Pharaoh Akhenaten, now only known as the Great Criminal. They had survived the wreck of that reign, and Ay and Horemheb were still busy excising all memory of it from monuments and the public memory. But perhaps all three still shared something of the experience the young, mad, visionary Pharaoh had given them: the sight of reason in place of superstition; the sight of one god in place of many; the sight of light in place of darkness.
But light, as Huy had learnt, was not always a politically expedient thing to encourage. In the time following the death of Akhenaten, he had been forced to give up his job as a scribe. He was a marked man: a disciple of a rejected code, but not too small fry to be forgiven.
The way to earn bread was given him by chance: and for a decade now he had been a Solver of People’s Problems. There had been long years within that time when he had done nothing – loafed along the docks, or unloaded cedarwood from the ships that came from beyond the Great Green – for he was unfashionably muscular and stocky – and he had pimped for Nubenehem, the sprawlingly fat Madam at the brothel called City of Dreams, now dead and the brothel closed. But he had had some success too, and people in power noticed him. In the end he got his old job back – longed for, but given back in a form which manacled him.
‘I know that Ipuky was generous to you,’ Ay had said in the large, cool, dark room, where he did his work, whose great verandah protected it from the relentless sun. ‘But be honest about your pay. What have you made as a Solver? There is no one like you. But originality is dangerous.’
‘I have gained five-and-a-half khar of wheat a month, and two khar of barley.’
Ay, tall and stooping, pressed the long nervous fingers of one hand to his full lips.
‘As much as a scribe. How very convenient. Are you lying?’
‘No.’
‘Your dress tells me you lie.’
‘No.’
Ay closed his eyes briefly, then exchanged a quick look with Kenna, his secretary, whose brush was already skimming across the papyrus roll spread on the leather portable desk balanced on his crossed legs.
‘You have been of service to me,’ said Ay finally.
‘Yes.’
‘But perhaps you are too clever.’
‘I wanted to serve.’
Ay looked at him, and spread his hands briefly. ‘I am sure. What do you want now?’
The question caught Huy on the wrong foot. He was striving to stay alert, but they were burning some kind of scented wood in the room, and its odour blurred his spirit just as its smoke obscured his vision. What he had wanted since his loneliness in the wreck of the City of the Horizon was his old job back – but now – could he ask for it?
‘I am trained as a scribe.’
Ay actually rubbed his hands, and almost smiled. ‘And a scribe you shall be again. You have blotted out the shame of your attachment to the Great Criminal.’
Huy wanted to say that there had been no shame. But that would have been foolish. And that there had been shame fallen on the Black Land was not in doubt. Following Akhenaten’s death, a plague had destroy
ed many in the north. Senseneb had thought the mosquitoes carried an infection of the blood – but that was not medicine: that was heresy. The old gods were back, driving reason before them.
‘I have a job for you,’ Ay was continuing, in a tone that brooked no argument. And so it was that Huy became, whether he liked it or not, an Assistant Deputy at the State Archive for Barley Production. At three times the salary he had mentioned.
He had not learnt his trade as a Solver for nothing, and it did not escape him that Ay was keeping him away from any of the legal or police departments of the administration. But it had taken him a long time after that to learn that security and a solid income did not buy happiness.
In the year that had elapsed since his conversation with the king, though Huy had barely seen Ay, and never to talk to except on formal and public occasions, he had been aware that the pharaoh held him in no trust. He had tried to suppress this uncomfortable suspicion, but confirmation of it had come from an unwelcome and unsympathetic source.
It had been many years since he had seen his former brother-in-law. Now he found himself in the unpleasant situation of being his boss. At their first meeting, Tehuty must have been forewarned, because he was well able to conceal the shock and envy he must have felt. Tehuty had the soul and the vision of a filing clerk, and these had enabled him to survive all the storms and destructions of the fall of Akhenaten, because mediocrity passes unnoticed. Unfortunately, Tehuty believed that he was worthy of great things, and so he lived the bulk of his life, despite his comfortable home, loyal wives and four children, in a state of anguish. As happens with many unhappy people, Tehuty found his expression in venom and spite, and after only a few months – Huy remembered that it had begun in the peret season of the previous year – the barbs poison-tipped with truth for Tehuty was not a fool – started to fly.
‘How do you find the dust?’ said Tehuty one day, meeting Huy in one of the corridors between the long racks where the papyri were stored in the East Quarter of the House of Correspondence.
