City of Lies

by Anton Gill

  ‘We can stay in this house,’ Senseneb told Huy, glowing. ‘There is no need to look further.’

  Samut spread his hands. ‘Reniqer had supposed you would only need temporary accommodation within the town, but if you have changed your plans, then – well, his affairs have fallen into my hands now, and there is no reason why you should not stay here as long as you wish. And,’ he bowed slightly to Huy, ‘as my guests until you are settled. We can talk about business then.’

  Huy protested, then thanked him. But he could not help feeling that all this kindness would have to be paid for in some way – if it were not already being paid for. He reminded himself that he had discussed no fee with Ankhesenamun for his work for her. It was difficult to think how to do so.

  ‘Samut has helped Hapu engage people for us,’ said Senseneb. She was holding the smiling merchant’s arm.

  ‘So I am beginning to learn,’ said Huy, hoping that he kept the slight edge out of his voice. Hiring servants was something he preferred to do for himself, even in a new place. ‘I have met Psaro.’

  ‘Only a handful of people I already know are good, to get you started,’ said Samut. ‘If you do not like them...’

  All this sudden domesticity was grating on Huy, for no good reason that he could think of. He felt pressed in by it. But he remained polite, and eye-prompted by Senseneb, he said,

  ‘You will stay and take meat.’

  ‘No. I have already drunk wine. I must go to my place. I was away too long, and now that Reniqer is gone I am taking on a double load.’ He paused for a breath’s time. ‘I must see if there is not too much for one man to do. Partners support each other.’

  Huy was unsure if this was a hinted invitation; whether it was or not, he decided to ignore it now.

  Samut was already making for the narrow door in the garden wall. One of the puppies galloped after him on ungainly legs, but he shoved it away, perhaps a little too roughly, with his foot. It came back to Senseneb with less enthusiasm, a hurt expression on its face. Senseneb, who had noticed nothing, bent down to greet it.

  ‘I will leave you to enjoy your new surroundings by yourselves,’ he said, turning at the gate as Hapu undid the hardwood lock. ‘But we will meet soon again.’

  After he had gone they turned to look at each other and Huy found for a bad moment that he had nothing to say.

  ‘We must think of names for them,’ said Senseneb. ‘Samut says the cats and dogs are old enough to be trained to hunt.’

  ‘What would they hunt? The geese?’

  She refused to be drawn. ‘How did your talk go?’

  ‘I must help her.’

  Senseneb looked at him. ‘Then she isn’t exaggerating?’

  ‘I do not think so.’

  She looked away. ‘I was hoping perhaps she was.’

  ‘I do not seek to return to the work that was forced on me.’

  ‘You do,’ she said a little sadly. ‘But I believe that Horus gave you this work, to look after Ankhsi. It is not a coincidence. It is the god making sure you use the gift he gave you.’

  ‘Just as Imhotep has seen to it that you become a physician here?’

  She smiled. ‘Perhaps it is also meant.’

  Sitting in the garden in the dusk and drinking wine, half-listening to the new noises around them and aware of how much stiller the night was than in the Southern Capital, Huy told her all of his interview with the former queen. As the evening progressed, the calls of the strange birds subsided into silence and only one or two late ibis flew overhead to roost in the reeds by the riverside. He had not seen the bird before as it lived far to the south of where he had spent most of his life. Even here it was at the northern limit of its range, but it was the bird of the god, Thoth, the god of writing, and the ones he saw now seemed sent to reproach him with the abandonment of his profession.

  Something stirred in his heart. His profession, of which he had been so proud and to which he had longed to return. The safeness and the respectability of it! And yet Senseneb was right. He enjoyed the difficulties of the problems people placed in his way to solve, even though he rarely had any real control over their outcome. What was it exactly that he liked? He could not say, any more than he could say why, sitting here in the garden of a house which most Black Landers only ever dreamt about as they shuffled through their lives in cramped rooms in crowded narrow streets, and sitting with this woman sent by Hathor to him as a gift beyond his deserving, his unhappiness did not leave him.

  Had Horus given him the gift of helping people solve their problems only to make him incapable of solving his own – or even of understanding them? There was an ache within him that would not be assuaged. Was he doomed to be forever a seeker after something in the world that is always elusive, if it is there at all? Why could contentment neither be learned nor acquired?

  ‘What will you do?’ Senseneb asked him. If she sensed his mood she did not show it, and he immediately did his best to hide it. In any case none could have been more eager than he to escape from it, and lose himself in activity. The problem was that the minute he rested, it always came back.

  ‘There is nothing I can do now,’ he said. ‘I must wait and watch.’ He thought again about who the author of the attacks might be, and why they had chosen now to make them. Imuthes was a baby still. He would be a fool not to consider that his true identity had been discovered. But Ay need only have sent soldiers to do the job openly. He was pharaoh: everything in the Black Land was his and he needed to account to no-one for his actions.

  ‘You will be too busy to look for a farm?’

  He smiled. “Do you need reassurance that my farming days are over before they have begun? Even I can see by the land what a life it must be to produce food from it here.’ He thought of the barley and wheat barges he had already seen in the harbour at Meroe, with their armies of maritime cats, bringing food down from fields to the north more generously blessed by Renenutet.

  ‘Samut says they have great plans to increase the farmland here,’ she said. ‘Or bring food from the south. They do not want to be dependent on the north if they grow in numbers here.’

  ‘But food is payment.’

  ‘Samut says that gold is more important.’

  ‘More important than bread?’

  ‘No. But as a means of payment.’

  ‘Samut says much.’

  She looked at him archly. ‘Do not tell me you are jealous.’

  He did not reply. Sometimes, she wished he would be, if only just a little. She looked sadly into herself. If he did not exchange the words with her she would leave him. Soon.

  He leant forward and stroked her eyebrows, which were growing back.

  ‘Let us name the animals,’ he said. ‘Then you had better introduce me to the servants – if they are not already asleep.’

  The gods of the sky had lit their lamps, and though Khons’ chariot showed only a sliver of its shining side that night, the arc of Nut’s body was so bright with the stars that a man whose eyesight had become accustomed to the dark could easily see in it. The man who was watching them from a half-built, deserted tower of the city wall was too far away to see them perfectly, but it was enough. And he did not take the darkness to his heart. He had the Words of Power against the Night, and he was not afraid of the Opening of the Mystery of Life because he would not look into it. Rather, he welcomed the night, because it cloaked his bunched, Bes-like figure. Or worse, like the goliath-beetle. He had never been aware of his ugliness before but he knew that it did not make him weak. I have my feet and legs forever. I rise like Ra, I am strong through the Eye of Horus, my heart is lifted up after it was brought low, I am glorious in heaven and I am mighty upon earth. The double doors of Maat are opened unto me, and the double doors of the land of the great deep are unbolted before me. I set up a ladder to heaven among the gods, and my speech and my voice are those of the Dog Star.

  He watched on without resentment, until Huy and Senseneb got up and went inside. He saw that s
he carried the kittens. He continued to watch as the two little buff dogs lingered, before themselves scuttling into the house as if chased by a small demon of their own. he watched until the geese slept. Then he looked slowly up at Khons’ chariot and, moving his lips without fuss, calculated the time left.

  The lamps in the house were doused before he climbed down the scaffolding, slipping silently into the shadow of a granary door to avoid the Medjay watchmen who passed him once, their long hardwood spears slung over their shoulders. Then he made his way down to the River and along its bank until the town dipped hidden behind a low hill and he found the den he had made for himself among the reeds. There he stripped, washed himself and his clothes, and said his lonely prayers. He lay down in silence, but he did not sleep.

  Painfully, Henka was rediscovering his own heart.

  Chapter Six

  Because of its position on the east bank of the River Meroe was naturally protected to the west by water, and because the unruly desert tribes had no sophisticated river-craft, attack by the River was unlikely. Nevertheless, Tascherit commanded a fleet of ten falcon-ships, which patrolled between Meroe and Atbara, and sailed upriver to escort the trading barges that went further south. To the east, north and south, three large garrisons spread out beyond the town walls. Most of the troops were local men, glad to join up because work on the land was scarce. There were few Black Landers among them, and most of the officers came from UatUat or Kush. There were no charioteers here, just infantry. The bulk of the Black Land’s armies were far to the north with Horemheb.

  Huy had been learning the geography of his new home, and now, after three passages of the Sun, he knew the streets and quays, and had made himself familiar with the garrisons, where his stocky figure had become a familiar sight in the early mornings, and not, at first. a welcome one, for the Black Lander officers had taken him to be an official sent to pry from the Southern Capital.

  Tascherit himself had unbent once he believed that Huy agreed with him that the falling scaffolding and the loose barge had indeed been accidents, especially as nothing further had happened. he remained formal, however, and Huy found it best to follow suit: Tascherit knew something of the circumstances of Ankshi’s escape from the Southern Capital a year or so earlier, and of Huy’s involvement in it; but this did not guarantee Huy’s immediate acceptance as a friend. Huy himself would not have desired it – enough recognition had already been given to Senseneb and to him in Senseneb’s appointment as Ankhsi’s physician. But the formality made Tascherit difficult to plumb, and Huy, who relied much on his reading of people, found this frustrating. There were times when he regretted that he had relinquished his official position: if he had retained it, he might have been able to make comments and ask questions of a more searching nature. As it was, he lived in a house free of rent – for the time being – thanks to Samut, whose hospitality it would be an offence to refuse, and the generous retainer which Ankhsi had now offered him through her steward made him a rich man for the first time in his life, but also by proxy put him in her husband’s debt.

  He had seen Tascherit’s sister from a distance at a large dinner party which the Governor had given to introduce Huy and Senseneb to the landowners and traders of Meroe. Takhana was a tall woman of Senseneb’s age and equally childless. She had a proud nose and a firm chin, which went with the set of her mouth and imperious dark eyes under her own glossy straight black hair – she wore no wig. In her, Tascherit’s features could be seen in clearer focus. There was no chance – or perhaps no opportunity was given – for them to exchange more than the formulaic words of greeting with her, but it was a large party with at least twenty tables set. Her voice was crisp and clear and her manner reserved.

  Senseneb’s reception was friendly as she had a clear role in the community; his own was, it had to be admitted, cooler – but what were they to make of an apparently retired government official who had come amongst them with nothing more than a vague idea of going into business. What was he? A potential competitor or a troublemaker?

  ‘You will find us very independent here’, a large man wearing too much makeup and dripping with gold and even expensive silver jewellery had told him pointedly as they inhaled the odour of mandrake fruit after they had eaten, and watched the naked girl acrobats, imported – at what expense? – from Kheftyu in the Great Green, performing an act of greater eroticism than would have been permitted in the Southern Capital.

  ‘So I see from the dancing girls,’ remarked Huy drily. The fat man had laughed, but not with his eyes, which continued watchful despite the vast quantities of Dakhla wine Huy had seen him drink.

  ‘Just because we’re provincial, you needn’t think we are backward,’ the man had continued. Why did such people always have a chip on their shoulders?

  ‘I have come here to live in peace,’ Huy reminded him politely. ‘I wanted to escape from the Southern Capital.’ In his heart he wondered for an instant why. People were the same everywhere, and no matter how you changed your surroundings, you could never change yourself. Then he reminded himself of the State Archive for Barley Production. He might have abandoned the idea of farming, but he would rather have been producing a crop than filing the records of its harvest.

  The acrobats’ limbs, though, began to intertwine at that point in a manner which quite distracted him.

  Later that evening he had managed to engineer a walk with the Governor on the roof of his mansion. It was a tall house and the roof gave a view over the whole town except the dark hulk of the fortress-palace which loomed at its centre. Under the bowed metal plate of the sky the stars shone like the eyes of the Departed Ones watching over the Earth-mound as it rode alone in the watery waste of Nun. The words of the goddess Isis came into his heart:

  I am the eldest daughter of Geb

  I am the sister-wife of Osiris the King

  I am she who governs Sothis

  I am she who is called Divine Among Women of the Black Land

  They built the City of the Cat for me

  I divided Geb and Nut

  I gave the stars a path to follow

  I gave Ra and Khons a path to follow...

  The lights of the garrison-fires glittered below them; far fewer than there would have been if the garrisons themselves had been fully manned.

  Tascherit was idly inspecting one of the neat piles of dung – human and animal – which the women and children had mixed with straw and which were now drying on the roof to be used as fuel. Huy leant on the windbreak of driftwood kept for the same purpose – but for use only on festivals.

  ‘How safe is it here?’ Huy asked him, noticing that Tascherit’s eye was surveying the garrisons and taking his cue from that.

  Tascherit looked at him. ‘Why do you ask me such a thing?’

  Huy spread his hands. ‘I have come here to live. Naturally I am curious.’

  ‘And can you not draw conclusions from the town?’

  ‘It is very prosperous.’

  ‘Then do you not have your answer?’

  Huy called into his memory a person he had once known, who perhaps reminded him of this town. An old man who scrubbed his worn teeth with natron three times a day to make them gleam, who wore a dark wig and changed his clothes five times a day, who pouched his sagging cheeks with linen when he went out, and who made himself out dance the young men. But his desperate fight against time fooled no one, and if the girls and boys he kept company indulged him, it was with the cruel indulgence youth has for age. The dazzle of this city was too bright, thought Huy. Even the poor wore sandals, and even the streets in the harbour quarter were clean.

  ‘I can see that the gods watch over you here,’ he said.

  Like everything else, the temples shone. The priests must shave their bodies every day, they were so smooth, thought the scribe. They shone with scented terebinth oil, and their linen looked not just clean, but new. Huy had also noticed that of all the temples of the town, the Aten’s was the richest, though it was disc
reetly tucked into the south-eastern corner, under the city wall. He recalled Samut’s words. He wondered how Ay would react if he knew quite in how much honour the discredited god seemed to be held.

  ‘Yes, the gods are good to us,’ replied Tascherit. ‘But we have been fortunate. The tribesmen are as mosquitoes – they irritate but they cannot destroy. All we have to fight are skirmishes, and they are getting rarer. The local people see that friendship can enrich them more than war.’

  Huy reflected that he had heard the same view from Samut.

  ‘Then perhaps our gods have taught theirs. Still, may Amun watch over our tents.’ Huy watched Tascherit carefully as he uttered these last words, a formula prayer to the god of the Southern Capital who had replaced the Aten after the fall of the pharaoh Akhenaten. Either Tascherit was a far better actor than Huy suspected, or he was genuinely unmoved by the invocation. Instead he turned the tables by saying,

  ‘I see you have embraced the old gods again at last. Your rehabilitation must be complete.’

  Huy lowered his eyes.

  ‘There is always a threat from the tribes,’ said Tascherit. ‘The garrison should be stronger.’

  Huy wondered if he suspected him still of being secretly in the employment of the pharaoh. It was possible, the scribe considered, that this might even be the truth. Ay had released him very easily. A spy who does not know he is a spy is the best, if he has the right kind of enquiring nature. But what was there here to betray? A prosperous provincial city that still clung to the old, more relaxed attitude to sex and life? A community some of whose members still chose to worship an old god? As long as they paid their taxes and traded at the prescribed rate, why should the pharaoh care? There were troubles enough where Horemheb was fighting.

  ‘It is always good to keep a strong garrison,’ said Huy. ‘But how can you, when so many soldiers are needed in the north?’

  Tascherit spread his hands. ‘It would be a bad time for the Southern Capital, if there were to be a rebellion here now.’