Queen of Ashes (2 page)

Anubis tosses the heart to the demon creature, who devours it greedily, slurping and chewing loudly as two guards grab the prince by the arms. Several of the other suitors cry out in fear.

“Are you going to execute all your suitors?” Djedi asks, struggling as the guards drag him to the side and bind him with chains. “Because the feather will never weigh more than the heart.”

“Lord Amosis, come forward,” Thoth says as Anubis stands behind the scale.

The young Lord of Thebes hesitates a moment, then steps forward bravely as all heads turn to stare at him. He has a strong face with thick black brows, warm brown eyes and beautifully molded lips. Unlike the other suitors, he seems to Laila neither fearful nor arrogant, but thoughtful as he stares at the scales, which are balanced now; the left one empty, the right holding the long white feather of Ma'at.

“Behold, your heart,” Thoth says again, taking another heart from Isis and dropping it onto the scale. But this time it's the feather that sinks down, the heart rising.

The young lord's eyes widen. He opens his mouth to speak, but Prince Djedi interrupts him.

“It's not possible!” Djedi objects. “It's a trick! They've cheated with the scales!”

“Osiris does not cheat or trick,” Laila says, trying to keep the smile out of her voice. “Lord Amosis has fed the poor for many years. He stores up excess grain in his silos for times of famine and gives it to the starving. He has built hospitals and orphanages. He loves kindness more than his own selfish desires. Can you boast of such accomplishments, or were you too busy beating prostitutes to death, my prince?”

Djedi stands with his mouth open. For the first time, his face shows fear.

The others are brought forward one at a time. Laila-Osiris speaks her judgments.

“Prince Shabaqo of Nubia, for welcoming refugees fleeing war from nearby nations, I grant you your reward of eternal life. Prince Baal-Eser of Nineveh for killing and maiming his servants, you have earned eternal death. Hasdrubal the Carthaginian, for sending his personal physicians throughout the Known World to teach others how to fight the spotted plague, rejoice in eternal life.” When she is finished, four suitors are shackled, and four stand blinking in wonder.

Laila-Osiris rises, as shining and slender as a sword. “Those whose hearts are pure will be rewarded,” she says, relishing the feeling of punishing wicked men. Blood pumps through her body. “Those whose hearts are evil will be executed.
Now
.”

The chained men start to scream and struggle as the guards pull them outside. Tall slaves in pleated white kilts ascend the dais steps, affix poles to the bottom of Laila's throne, and carry her down, across the throne room, and out into the garden. She blinks in the sunlight, which is painfully bright after the dimness of the Hall of Two Truths. She sees four blocks set before a rectangular pool shaded by palm trees. Four black-masked executioners wait with iron axes behind the blocks.

The chained men are forced to their knees, thrashing and crying out for mercy. The slaves set Laila's throne on the ground as the twins take their places behind her, and the rest of the courtiers in their animal masks file out around them.

“Behold the doom of evildoers!” she cries. Four axes swing up and slice down. Four heads hit the ground and roll, eyes open in shock, mouth open in silenced protests.

The contest of suitors is over.

Chapter Two

“YOU DON'T WANT IT?” Laila asks, trying to hide her surprise.

Amosis shakes his head, gesturing to the bronze-bound trunk of treasure Laila has prepared for him in the center of the small reception room. Finely cured leopard and zebra skins spill out of it, the gleaming hides lined with scarlet linen. Gold chalices catch the sunbeams next to curved, lustrous ivory tusks. “I came to meet the woman known throughout Egypt for her grace and wisdom,” he says, “but especially for the love of her people. I did not come here for this.” His dark eyes flash, and Laila realizes that despite his reputation for kindness, Amosis is a man of deep passions.

“The other princes were happy to receive the gifts and leave,” she says dismissively.

“It wasn't the gifts they were happy about,” he snaps. “They were just glad to get out of here with their heads still on their necks.”

“I only punish the selfish and cruel,” she says, pacing around the circle of gilded acacia wood chairs.

She turns abruptly and nearly collides with him. Afternoon sun slants in through the open slats of the fretted shutters, making bars of horizontal light on his face.

“How did you do the trick with the scale?” he demands.

Laila smiles. She had promised herself she wouldn't tell, but the satisfaction of her hoax overrides the vow. “It took the chief palace engineer weeks to manufacture a scale that worked. It has a small lever on the back, which, if moved to the right, pulls down the scale on the right side with the feather on it. If the lever is kept in its original position, the device acts like a normal scale. Months ago General Wazba—Anubis—sent spies to investigate the character of all the suitors. He moved the lever accordingly.”

“And the dog? That was horrifyingly realistic.”

“That was Spot, Wazba's trained hound, in a carefully constructed costume.” She realizes as she speaks that she has been waiting a long time to be able to admit all this to someone. She never imagined it would be one of the actual suitors.

“Cleverly done, Princess,” Amosis says. “But what gives you the right to judge men's hearts? Does divine punishment not belong to the gods? To the true Osiris instead of an angry princess wearing a silly pharaoh's hat and mummy wrappings?”

“Do not speak of things you don't understand,” she says, adjusting her gold and crystal diadem, symbol of Sharuna's protector, the sun god, Ra.

“I think I do understand,” he counters. “You aren't the only one with spies and investigators. Before I agreed to come here as your suitor, I looked into your past, too. I know where you were those three years missing from palace records, those three mysterious years no one here is permitted to mention.”

Her heart skips a beat as he places a hand on her arm; it's warm and strong and comforting somehow. “That's it, isn't it?” he persists. “That's what made you do this. When your father banished you and your mother to Memphis at the instigation of his wife. I know that must be what warped you.”

A dull thudding ache spreads over Laila. There is a reason no one in Sharuna is allowed to mention this, and it is not the humiliation of what happened, but the pain, which still torments her today, six years later.

Now the image of her father's wife, Princess Henutmereh, stands before her, strangely beautiful, her face like that of a majestic hawk. And her eyes were like those of a hawk, too, resting with jealous malevolence on Menwi, Laila's mother and the prince's favorite concubine.

Laila stands as straight and tall as she can, her jaw working. Amosis grips her shoulders and looks at her with compassion. “How could a man send his concubine and his own daughter to a brothel?”

How could he, indeed? Because he loved his son and heir, Pu-Imre, more than he loved his illegitimate daughter. Because together his wife and son nagged him until it was simply easier to give in. Because he thought they would be living in a fine house in Memphis along the Nile, not as slaves in a brothel.

Suddenly, Laila is not standing here in this gorgeous room with ochre walls covered with brightly painted reliefs of the gods and the burnished weapons of her ancestors. She no longer inhales the delicate, lilting scent of sandalwood incense burning in the braziers. Suddenly, she is carrying a stinking bucket down a dark corridor in a house reeking of filth and sweat, listening to grunts and slaps and screams. Her mother pushes aside a ragged curtain and Laila sees her left eye swelling and turning purple; blood trickles down her lips. Wazba, one of the brothel's guards, pushes past Laila to help Menwi.

Then came the royal messenger who let her know her brother had died from a fever after stepping on a rusty nail, her stepmother had thrown herself off the tower and she was wanted back as her father's only surviving heir.

Amosis touches her cheek gently. Laila turns away from him. She stops before the open window and looks down on the main palace garden with palm trees surrounding a long dark blue pool. “It is well known,” she says, shrugging, “that Lord Osiris, king of the dead, judges all souls.” She strives to keep her voice light, cool. “He will damn those who are evil and reward those who are good.”

He joins her at the window. She feels the heat of him beside her, though she fixes her eyes on a child, slowly sweeping a net on a long pole through the water to catch fallen leaves.

“True,” he agrees, “but you and your courtiers pretended to
be
gods. Usurped their names and powers. Now the gods might be seeking vengeance on
you
.”

She shrugs again. This time the shrug is real.

“And this contest of suitors?” he asks. “Was it only an elaborate game to punish cruel men? Or are you really looking for a husband?”

She turns to face him but decides he is too close, so close she can smell the spicy scented oil on his bare chest—cinnamon and ambergris, perhaps—mixed with something fresh and clean and entirely his own. She wants to fall into that scent. She wants to get it on her skin and dress and wig so she can smell it after he is gone. Instead, she steps back a bit.

“When I was fifteen,” she begins, “as my father lay dying, he made me swear on the altar of Isis that I would marry for the best interests of my people. That, before I turned twenty, I would hold a contest in which suitors could vie for my hand. But I didn't promise what kind of contest it would be, nor did I say that I would necessarily marry one of them. I have fulfilled my vow and owe him nothing more.”

She turns back to the window and sees the boy shaking the leaves in his net into a wheelbarrow. Hot breath tickles the back of her shoulder, and she turns around. Amosis takes her hand in his and turns it upside down, studying her palm. He bends and kisses it. His lips are strong but soft. “My lady, you have avenged your mother's death on evildoers,” he says softly, raising his eyes to hers. They glow like embers from some inner passion. “Now you must look to the future. If I return, once you have had time to think about my proposal, is it possible you will marry me?”

If I am to marry for the good of my people,
Laila thinks,
you would be an excellent choice. Royal, wealthy, known for wisdom and generosity. Handsome. This heat between us...

Suddenly, his warm hand on hers reminds her of an iron chain. She feels trapped, the way she and her mother were trapped in the brothel, the slaves of men. “I will never give a man power over me,” she says, wrenching her hand from his grasp and massaging it as if to ease the chafing of the chain.

He looks at her with a kind of pity, as if she is a poor, wounded thing. Oddly, her hand feels cold and alone without his strong fingers curling around it. It hadn't been the iron cuff of manacles, after all, but only a warm human hand.

“You must have an heir or this principality will go back to Pharaoh on your death and your princely line will end,” he says.

Laila narrows her eyes. Since romance didn't work, he is now trying to win her through logic.

“I have many years to bear a child,” she says, waving her hand.

“Perhaps not so many,” he says softly. “Illness and accidents often come to the young. Just look at your brother, Pu-Imre, a splendid warrior of eighteen who stepped on a nail and died. You, who so love your people, must provide them with an heir. If there is no heir, Pharaoh will take Sharuna's stone and never think of its prosperity or the people's happiness.”

This is a smart one. Now he is appealing to her love for her people. But he is right. The thought has weighed her down ever since her father died.

For the good of Sharuna she must marry sometime soon. How can something be so frightening and tantalizing at the same time?

She doesn't know what to say, so she says nothing, letting his words dangle between them.

“So tell me,” he says, his voice low and caressing, “if I should come back.”

“You may, if you want,” she says offhandedly, her gaze sliding from his eyes to the floor. “Go back to Thebes now, and return later. I would need at least...” How long? Not until she knows the inundation has come and the grain is growing. Only then can she concentrate on suitors again. “Four months. Come back then and we will talk about what is best for my people.”

He hesitates, as if there is much more he wants to tell her. But he simply says, “Goodbye, my lady.” He bows, walks three steps backward, and leaves the room. She hears his sandals slapping down the marble hallway, fainter and fainter until all sound is gone.

She wonders if he will come back.

She wonders if she has made a mistake.

* * *

Rubbing her aching head, Laila scratches her quill across a roll of papyrus, issuing instructions about the limestone Sharuna will send to Pharaoh as the annual payment to their overlord. He is welcome to it because no one can eat rock. Her principality is mostly a land of harsh desert and rugged cliffs. Only the flatland south of the city is good for raising grain, and every kernel is worth its weight in gold if the Nile doesn't flood.

It hasn't happened in thirty-five years, but every Egyptian trembles with fear at the thought of the drought, starvation and plague that scourge the land when the waters don't rise in the summer. Without the waters, the parched land has no
peret
, or season of growth—and without
peret
, there can be no
shemu
, season of harvest.

Despite her pounding headache, she writes quickly in the flowing demotic script. Hieroglyphs, those complicated symbols of feet and birds, snakes and feathers—are chiseled into the walls of temples, tombs and palaces as writing more pleasing to the gods, but are ill-suited to personal correspondence.

Her half-eaten plate of goat meat and lentils is pushed to the side of a pile of scrolls dealing not just with taxation, but also offerings to temple gods, the weight limits of Pharaoh's new barges and the purchase of new military equipment for her soldiers. She tries to concentrate on her work, but somehow her thoughts keep going back to the same uncomfortable truth: that this tournament of suitors, an event she planned for four years, has not had the desired effect. As she watched the beheadings earlier, she thought the blood gushing out of the necks was the most beautiful thing she had ever seen and hoped it would wash clean the image of her mother's bloody body. It didn't. Their blood was merely added to Menwi's. Now there is more blood than ever and she just feels the same.

The door flies open; it is the twins, she knows before she looks up, as they are the only ones who never knock. Sada—or perhaps it is Sarina—says, “Princess! A new suitor has arrived!”

Laila sets down her quill and massages her temples. “He is too late,” she says. “Tell him the contest has ended.” She looks up, frowning. “And he was supposed to submit a request to compete several months ago.”

The second twin steps forward, the tiny golden leaves in her shoulder-length black wig catching the late-afternoon light. “He did not exactly say he was a suitor, Princess. He says only that it is urgent you see him.” That is Sarina, the calm steady one.

“But it really
is
urgent you see him!” the more exuberant Sada says. “Because he is the handsomest man I've ever seen! His hair is the color of
gold
! A good thing you didn't marry any of the eight suitors, because they are as ugly as baboons compared to this one.”

Laila smiles to herself. The past few days, all the twins could discuss was the good looks of the eight suitors. She makes a mental note to start working on finding them suitable husbands. It is time.

She looks up at them, standing there expectantly in the doorway, identical on the outside yet different on the inside. They are like two halves of the same person, and the only friends she has had since childhood.

“Is he seeking limestone?” she asks. “A trade agreement between us and his country?” “Come and see him,” Sarina says, picking Laila's wig of a thousand tiny braids off her desk and pulling it over her closely cropped head. “You won't be sorry.”

“Very well,” Laila agrees, adjusting the wig so that it feels right. She will find out who exactly this stranger is who showed up on the day of the suitors' contest. She thought she had finished killing for the day, but if he comes with evil in his heart, she could make time for one more execution.

The foreigner who strides through the double doors of the throne room is tall and muscular and radiates a fierce energy. Looking down from her throne, Laila finds herself captivated by his walk—the swinging of his powerful arms and legs as his gold-embroidered sky blue cape billows out behind him. He wears the dress of northerners, a loose belted white tunic covering the chest and shoulders.

He stops in front of Tiy, no longer Thoth but the Royal Mouth again in flowing white robes, an ornate wig and heavily lined eyes.

“Tell the princess who you are,” the Mouth commands.