Death of an Eye

by Dana Stabenow

  Nebenteru and Keren exchanged concerned glances. “You saw Hunefer last night?” he said.

  “Not voluntarily,” she said. “This cheese is excellent. I wonder where Phoebe got it.” She helped herself to more bread and oil.

  Neb broke the silence before it became that much more awkward. “I have meetings all morning in the Emporium. Can I trust you to conclude the inventory?”

  “Of course, Uncle.” Tetisheri grinned. “I can’t wait to wade through the loot you brought home from upriver.”

  “Wait till you see the herbs!” Keren said. “I don’t know what half of them are. I’m going to take samples to the Library this morning to see if they are listed in any of the herbals.”

  After breakfast Tetisheri visited the kitchen, where their guest was rolling out pastry under Phoebe’s direction. There were already two trays piled high with tiny savory pastries stuffed with anchovies and spinach and cheese, and a large basket full of green grapes with the dew still on them sat in the sink.

  Their cook, Phoebe, a thin, energetic Greek woman originally from Athens, looked up. “Ah, Tetisheri,” she said. “The dough likes our new friend.”

  A bit of the dough adhered affectionately to their new friend’s nose and more down the front of what was obviously one of Phoebe’s old tunics, belted with an old faded scarf wrapped three times around the girl’s waist. “Good morning… you know, you’re really going to need a name. Any ideas?”

  The girl cast a sideways look at Phoebe, who said, “I’ve been telling her about our gods. She seems taken by the story of Nike. She likes that Nike fought. And has wings.”

  “And Phoebe has seen a statue of her,” the girl said unexpectedly. Her Greek was pure Alexandrian. She had to have spent most of her life in the city learning it.

  “At Samothraki?” Tetisheri said. “Yes, it is spectacular. Uncle Neb has a picture of her hanging somewhere in the house.”

  “I showed her,” Phoebe said.

  “I will go see the statue myself one day.”

  “Ah.” Tetisheri looked the girl over critically. “So, Nike. You’ll need some clothes of your own. We can go to a clothier I know this afternoon. Would you like that?”

  Nike shrugged.

  “I’ll take her when we’re done with the pie,” Phoebe said, looking amused.

  “All right. Do you know how to read, Nike?”

  Another shrug.

  “You will learn to read,” Tetisheri said sternly. “Keren and I will tutor you until you feel comfortable enough to attend a class.”

  The girl’s voice dropped so low that Tetisheri had to strain to hear her. “If I go outside he might find me and take me back.”

  “You don’t belong to him anymore, Nike.” Nike shrank against Phoebe’s side, and Tetisheri tried to moderate her tone. “You are now a member of our house. You are safe anywhere in Alexandria.”

  Nike looked unconvinced, but they always did at first.

  Before she could go into the vast warehouse and give the inventory of new goods the concentration it deserved, she wrote a note to the family scribe, Sheftu, instructing him to send the market price of one ten-year-old slave to the House of Hunefer along with a brief contract of purchase. Hunefer would remember Sheftu from the divorce. She anticipated no problems.

  She folded and sealed the letter and took it to find a courier, and found herself stopped at the main door to the house, unable to open it.

  If I go outside he might find me and take me back.

  Her jaw tightened. By now Apollodorus would have informed the queen of the previous evening’s events. She in turn would have instructed her brother as to how her friends would be treated by him in future. Probably in some public way that would be as humiliating as it would be infuriating.

  Kinglet.

  She felt a smile forming on her face, and it was easy, after all, to open the door and step outside into the street. She walked the missive to the corner courier service and stood for a moment, watching the boy hurry down the Way with the note clutched in his hand. The sun was warm and she raised her face to it, eyes closed, letting the events of the night before fall away, replaced by the hurry and bustle of another day in the city.

  Well. All the events save one. She opened her eyes again and returned home slowly, the memory of Apollodorus’ lips and hands and body as startling as it was arousing. She paused before their door and touched her lips with the tip of one finger. They felt entirely unlike the lips that she’d lived with for the previous nineteen years. And her body, too, seemed somehow more vibrant in every part, more alive, more awake. Hopeful, even. There was a vague memory at the back of her mind of long ago, when she was young and immortal, when she had last felt like this. When she had entertained certain thoughts of the handsome young guard assigned to her friend and queen.

  Before her marriage, and the stillbirth of her child.

  Keren opened the door abruptly and Tetisheri nearly fell inside.

  “Sheri! I’m sorry, I didn’t know—”

  Tetisheri had not had time enough to rearrange her expression into something approaching serenity and Keren said sharply, “What’s wrong? Sheri?”

  Tetisheri took a breath and summoned up a smile. “It’s nothing. Really.” She noticed the basket in Keren’s hand. “You’re off to the Library with your herbs, then? I’ll be interested to hear what you find out.” She stepped inside and shut the door firmly between them.

  Neb’s foreman was rearranging the antiquities section of the warehouse—there was a particularly fine bust of Artemis she hadn’t seen before whose style looked to predate Scopas, if not Praxiteles. The latest shipment was stacked in the staging area against the dock wall. There were small jars with airtight wax seals full to the brim with pepper and cloves and nutmeg and cinnamon from Maluku, the aforementioned baskets of dried herbs from Punt, copper cookware from Bactria, large spindles of silk thread from Sinae ready to be dyed and woven here in Alexandria. There was a bundle of ebony planks, planed but not finished, and a dozen elephant tusks which must have cost Uncle Neb the equivalent of the price of the Hapi but for which they would earn back ten times the cost when they turned them over. There was a small, heavy chest full of lapis lazuli, also from Bactria, and another of, unbelievably, white jade, the purest and most highly valued color of that gemstone, one that almost never made it out of Sinae and certainly not in a commercial quantity such as this.

  Riches, indeed, and Tetisheri spent the morning happily cataloguing the contents and directing the staff to store them in the appropriate places, a job which felt far more comfortable than the one the queen had assigned her the day before. The spices, jade, and tusks were locked safely away under her direct supervision in the strong room built into the shared wall between warehouse and home. She carried her lists to the office to enter them into the account books to estimate the import tax due the throne. Friendship was one thing but business was something else entirely, and Cleopatra was still paying off the massive sums her father had borrowed from the Romans to take back his throne. The queen was known to extract the smallest coin owed her by whatever means necessary, up to and including confiscation of such property as satisfied the sum set by the royal tax commissioner, imprisonment of the offender, and, in especially egregious cases, torture and even death, which sentence was enacted in public as a warning to others foolish enough to attempt to cheat their sovereign out of her just due. Even if the task the queen had set before Tetisheri had been requested as a favor instead of a royal command, Cleopatra had made no promise of material reward and Tetisheri had no realistic expectation of same. She checked her figures twice.

  Bast was sitting motionless on the minute square of desk top where the sun shone the strongest, watching the movement of Tetisheri’s stylus as it scratched across the papyrus. A claw flicked out and the stylus sailed into a corner.

  “You,” Tetisheri told her, “are a nuisance. I shall lodge a complaint with your mother.” She touched the pendant at her throat.r />
  Bast yawned, unalarmed.

  “Was that a comment on my figures? My penmanship? Approval of my determination to pay the queen her due?”

  Bast tidied her whiskers and resumed her impression of a statue. Tetisheri fetched the stylus and sat back down again.

  Her morning tasks were routine enough that they occupied only the front of her mind. In the meantime, the back of her mind worked at the queen’s task.

  The theft had been perfectly orchestrated. The thieves had known when the coins would arrive, on what ship, and where that ship would dock.

  She raised her head and stared out the window that looked onto a little walled garden where Phoebe raised flowers and herbs. The roses were nearly spent but a few blooms lingered, scenting the light breeze that crept in through the window unannounced.

  The thieves would have been better informed even than that, she thought. Good plans took time, and this had been a very good plan. They had to have known that the coins were to be struck in the first place, and where. They would have to have known when they would have been ready to be shipped and when they would arrive in Alexandria. They had to have arranged a secure hiding place because the coins had vanished into the city without a trace, and what’s more, without the whisper of a rumor of their theft. Such a rumor would ordinarily have spread around the city like wildfire and inspired every aspiring treasure hunter within the city walls to try their hand at finding it and stealing it for themselves.

  Such a robbery was not something invented on the instant, an opportunistic snatch-and-grab. Apollodorus and by extension the queen vouched for Laogonus’ integrity and there were enough suspects already that Tetisheri was willing to trust in that judgement, at least for the present. She still wanted to talk to his crew, though. The queen’s agent on Cyprus she knew nothing of and ships traveled between there and Alexandria daily. It would have been easy enough for him to pass on information from Lemesos and even to coordinate the theft. Apollodorus was right—he must either be summoned back to Alexandria or Tetisheri would have to go to Lemesos.

  And then there was Khemit. While the existence of the Eye of Isis was the stuff of legend in Alexandria and Egypt, the Eye’s identity was never generally known, for his or her own protection, and for the access anonymity lent to any investigation. But whoever killed her had to have known who she was and what she did for the queen, and that Cleopatra had given her the job of finding the thieves and retrieving the new issue.

  Tetisheri was certain that she had, and that they had killed her for it.

  The inescapable conclusion was that someone in the queen’s confidence had betrayed her trust.

  Why?

  So far, Tetisheri could identify only two motives. One, common greed, was simple and easy to understand. There were always those who wanted more than they had, and who preferred stealing to earning. A shipment of new currency would be an irresistible target. But greed alone as a motive for crossing Cleopatra VII’s will? For stealing from a queen who was proving to be the most fiscally prudent Ptolemy in their entire three-hundred-year dynasty? A queen who had already demonstrated by her treatment of tax cheats what she thought of robbing the royal treasury? It was difficult to conceive of such foolishness. Although Maat above knew that one of the first things a beginning trader learned was that the world was full of cheats who believed implicitly that they would never be caught and who were always astonished when they were.

  The other motive would be political and more difficult to substantiate, but one Tetisheri found far more likely given the current climate. The theft could have been intended to undercut the Alexandrian economy, just now beginning to regain its footing after the improvidences of Ptolemy Auletes and the subsequent wars of succession. As the winner of those wars, Cleopatra had more enemies than friends and some of the most dangerous of them were close kin.

  The Ptolemies bred for blood, not brains.

  “Mmrow?”

  Tetisheri realized she had said the words out loud. “My apologies for disturbing your meditation,” she said gravely.

  Bast sniffed, possibly in agreement with Apollodorus’ sentiments, and resumed her resemblance to a graven image.

  If anything, last night’s audience with Ptolemy XIV had only underscored Apollodorus’ dictum. She shifted on her stool. The ache in her back and shoulders was easing courtesy of Keren’s salve. She wondered fleetingly if Keren might like to make and package it in retail quantities.

  She reined in her wandering attention. No, it would take much less time to make a list of the queen’s friends than it would a list of her enemies. Nevertheless, Tetisheri pulled out a fresh sheet of papyrus and began to do just that, beginning with the queen’s siblings, Ptolemy XIV and her sister Arsinoë IV, now held captive in Rome against the day of Julius Caesar’s triumph, when she would be paraded in his train and then strangled. She added a number of Alexandrian nobles for any number of reasons, including Hunefer and his mother (it wasn’t just because she wanted them to be guilty, she told herself) and pretty much every Roman citizen with the slightest pretense to power on either side of the Middle Sea. Too many of them would benefit from a destabilization of Cleopatra’s rule and the subsequent diminution of Caesar’s power. Even better, removing her from her throne all together—after all, she had lost it once already, and if their history lessons had taught them anything, citizens not having enough money to buy food for their families was a powerful tool with which to break a reign.

  A knock sounded. She put the list aside gladly. “Yes?” The door opened and she looked up to behold Nike in the doorway. A Nike transformed by a bath, a brand new knee-length linen tunic dyed a luscious red that set off her dark skin to admiration, a narrow, braided leather belt buckled neatly round her waist, and braided leather sandals on her feet. She had cut her hair, too, so that it formed a smaller, neater cloud around her face instead of that tumble halfway down her back. Tetisheri rather missed the tumble.

  She preened beneath Tetisheri’s admiring gaze.

  “Yes?” Tetisheri said blandly.

  “You have a visitor,” Nike said. She stood very straight, chin up, shoulders back, hands clasped formally before her. All that was missing was the crown, but that would have been superfluous—one would never dare trifle with a person of such immense dignity. “He gives his name as Aurelius Cotta, and begs you to favor him with a few moments of your time. He waits for you in the atrium.”

  Cotta. Caesar’s most trusted aide. The man with the scar she had stumbled over on their way out of Cleopatra’s presence the previous morning. This could not be good. “Thank you,” Tetisheri said. “Please tell him I will be with him directly.”

  Nike bent her head and whisked off. Tetisheri grinned at her receding back and turned to tidy her desk and lock away her notes. It would never do to allow these Romans to think they could summon an Egyptian citizen with the snap of their fingers, especially in that citizen’s own home. She neatened her desk, waited for Bast to decide if she would accompany Tetisheri to greet this Roman, and took her time walking to the atrium so as not to be construed to be in any way out of breath.

  He stood very much where Apollodorus had stood the previous morning, by the fountain, watching the water trickle from one level of marble tier to the next. It was near the Sixth Hour and from directly overhead the light of the sun poured through the compluvium and erased any lingering shadows. He raised his head when he heard her step, and contemplated her for a few moments. She refused to fidget beneath that encompassing stare. Bast leapt up on the bench in front of the fountain, unerringly found the spot where the sun was strongest, and began to wash.

  “So,” he said. “Caesar was right. Not a cook.”

  He spoke in Latin and she responded in kind. “I’m sorry, sir. I don’t believe we’ve been introduced.”

  “Instead, a merchant,” he said, “and a partner in a flourishing concern. Extraordinary. Women aren’t merchants in Rome.”

  “No,” she said. “They are wives a
nd mothers. And, sometimes, if they are very, very good, they might be allowed to weave a length of linen.”

  He did not leap to the defense of Rome’s superior social mores as she half expected he might. “You’ve been to Rome, then, lady,” he said, his affability unruffled. “If nothing else your Latin gives you away. You sound like Cicero at his most poisonous. My compliments. Perhaps you accompanied the queen when she was there with her father some years ago?”

  “I’m a merchant, sir. A facility for languages is necessary in my business.” She raised her chin. “If you won’t introduce yourself, may I ask why you are here?”

  “Come, come,” he said, “you know very well who I am.” He pointed at his scar. “Everyone knows who I am.” The blow had shattered Cotta’s helmet and left him with a white scar that twisted up his left eyebrow and the outer corner of his left eye and pulled his entire face a little off-center, giving him a look of perpetual skepticism.

  That look was now bent on her. If it was meant to intimidate it failed. She did not escort him to the more comfortably appointed receiving room reserved for honored guests. She did not offer him refreshments. She didn’t even ask him to sit down on one of the benches ringing the fountain. She simply stood, squarely in front of the door that led deeper into the house and not coincidentally blocking it, hands clasped demurely before her, a look of carefully cultivated polite inquiry on her face. If anything, she was very probably giving a good imitation of Nike’s new-found gravitas. “Again, sir,” she said, controlling a quivering lip, “how may I help you?”

  He cocked an eyebrow. “What have I said, I wonder, that amuses you so?”

  Damn the man. Romans as a race were usually very jealous of their dignity, ready to take offense at even the mildest joke ventured at their expense. Any other Roman would have stamped out in a huff by now, but this one persisted in having a sense of humor. “Very well, Aurelius Cotta,” she said. “Yes, I know who you are, and—”

  “And just to save time, we met briefly yesterday in the private apartments of Queen Cleopatra. My general wishes to know why the queen felt it necessary not to introduce him to such an old and dear friend.” He correctly identified the look in her eye and said soothingly, “Yes, yes, you’d like to say that Caesar has no claim on the obedience of a loyal subject of the queen of Alexandria and Egypt.” His smile, too, was twisted up by the scar. “But we both know that for the fiction it is, do we not?”