Year of the Hyenas (10 page)

Metufer
instructed the
Anubis priests to turn Hetephras onto her stomach. “See the color of
her flesh, Semerket? What do you know of blood, when a person dies and
it lies within, undrained?”

“It pools,
drawn down
toward the ground, however the body lies.”

“And
Hetephras’s flesh
is white. No pooling blood has turned her black. What do you learn from
this?”

“That all her
blood
ran from the wounds before she died.”

“Yes!” Metufer
clapped
his hands at Semerket’s cleverness, as if he were once again his
student and Metufer his teacher.

It was then
that
Semerket saw the second wound at the base of Hetephras’s skull, a
depression in the bone and flesh, revealing the brain within. Metufer’s
old but keen eyes saw it, too. He seized a small wire hook and began to
intently probe the wound. “I would usually make an incision through the
sinuses and remove the brain, but since there is such convenient access
here…” He began to withdraw bits and pieces of the brain without much
finesse, large and small chunks quickly extracted. The brain was not to
be preserved, being a useless thing, so Metufer was thorough rather
than neat.

Then, without
expecting to, both he and Semerket heard a slight ping of metal against
metal. They looked at one another. Delicately, Metufer moved the hook
back and forth within the priestess’s skull. Again the small metallic
noise sounded. Gingerly, Metufer probed further, homing in on the
object of his search.

Semerket
barely
breathed.

Metufer found
his
quarry. Semerket bent closer to look. The Ripper Up manipulated the
hook a final time, and withdrew it slowly from the skull. At its curved
tip, a piece of dark metal shone, glued to the hook by serum and bits
of brain.

It was
unmistakably
the tip of an axe blade, made from the rare blue metal of the Hittites,
broken at its corner. Metufer held it between his fat thumb and
forefinger. With great deliberateness he placed it at the edge of the
second wound at the back of Hetephras’s head. Allowing for the natural
slackening that had taken place within the Nile, it fit exactly.

Metufer handed
the
piece of axe to Semerket. “Obviously our priestess wants you to know
something. She has seized this metal, even though it is the strongest
in the world, and clung to it in death. Not even the Nile waters could
take it from her. Find the owner of the blade this piece fits, and you
will find her murderer.”

Semerket was
doubtful.
“If it hasn’t been melted down already, or hidden from sight. But at
least we do know the poor lady was murdered.”

Metufer merely
nodded,
and very carefully bent to rinse the bit of blue metal in the pool of
milky natron. He wiped it with great care, then gave it to Semerket.
Semerket pocketed it in the folds of his sash. Turning once again to
the fat, old priest, Semerket placed a grateful hand on Metufer’s
shoulder. The dry hacking cough erupted from the old man, filling the
chamber to the rafters. With a last lingering look at Hetephras,
Semerket put the bag of cedar again to his nose and left the way he had
come.

DAWN CAME WITHa formidable, glinting
brightness. Semerket stepped from the reed craft that had ferried him
across the river and tossed the boatman a copper. He turned to face the
Gate of Heaven, the pyramid-shaped mountain protecting the Great Place,
where the pharaohs lay. The newborn sun dyed the mountain a vivid shade
of melon; as it rose, the shadows on the mountain visibly flattened so
that its rock face soon took on its usual hue of dusky pink.

Semerket
strode
quickly from the boat landing to the causeway that led west. The raised
paving stones were not crowded; he saw only a few fishermen heading for
the river. Semerket’s walking stick smote the stones with a steady
rhythm that echoed through the clear, cool morning.

A few minutes
later he
found himself passing the temple of the great god Amenhoteb III. The
decrepit building was guarded by the former pharaoh’s twin colossi,
which the local people called the Rulers of Rulers. The seated statues
were still vividly painted, though now flaked and peeling. No
pharaoh—not even Ramses II—had built larger. The temple they guarded,
however, was inhabited by only a handful of priests. The main structure
had crumbled years before, for the ambitious architects had located the
building near the river so that the Nile waters surrounded it at flood
time. Thus the temple became the symbolic mound of earth that had first
emerged from the waters of primeval chaos. Unfortunately, years of Nile
flooding had undermined the temple and it had collapsed in on itself.
Later pharaohs—particularly Ramses II—had used its vast ruins as a
convenient quarry. The remaining temple complex was overgrown by
grasses and seedling palms, and the chirps of larks and katydids were
the only orisons sung there now.

Even in its
ruined
state, its priests were offering up platters of onions and loaves of
bread to the statues’ spirits as Semerket passed. They returned
Semerket’s stare matter-of-factly. Semerket walked on, turning his face
resolutely toward the Gate of Heaven.

The causeway
soon
diverged. The southernmost road, he knew, would take him to Djamet
Temple. Crowded and noisy, Djamet was the hub of all industry and
wealth in the area, being the southern abode of the current pharaoh,
Ramses III. To Semerket’s right, the northern path led to the
mountains, and beyond that into the fierce, red desert where the god
Set resided.

Semerket
hesitated.
The Western Mayor’s offices were also at Djamet. He knew he should
present himself to Pawero as a gesture of courtesy, for the mayor was
the absolute lord of Western Thebes. Semerket was technically violating
the mayor’s jurisdiction by treading there.

Yet some force
drove
him to seek the harsh silence of the cliffs and desert. It was where
Hetephras had tended her small shrines and temples. He must go there in
any case, if only to get a sense of where the priestess had lived, what
she had seen and heard during her days on earth, even to smell the air
she had breathed.

Semerket made
the
decision that Pawero could wait. He turned north onto the road that led
to the Gate of Heaven.

Peasants still
harvested the fields, gathering the last of the emmer wheat. None
hailed him. They hurried in their labors, for soon the inundation of
the Nile would be upon them. In the fields several bonfires were lit to
consume the chaff, and the black smoke rose thickly upward. It was a
smell that caught him unaware, abruptly reminding him of Naia. He
remembered how their home, built at the edge of similar fields, had
been filled with these same earthy smells, and how he and Naia often
joined the peasants in their harvest festivals…

Semerket
stopped. His
great bitterness suddenly engulfed him, and he could feel again how his
ka shriveled to nothingness. Her name was a scream in his head. He did
not know whether he actually cried her name aloud or if he remained
silent, but it seemed the entire countryside rang with it.

Some demon or
evil
genie must have taken possession of him, he decided. How long would it
take to forget her and become himself again? How long before this
crushing sense of loss would lighten? At that moment he wanted nothing
so much as a long draft of soothing wine.

Resolutely
throwing
his gray woolen cloak over his shoulder and setting his feet firmly one
ahead of the other, he continued walking. The paved causeway became a
dirt road, and then narrowed into a small pathway bordered by tufted
grasses, barely wide enough for a single person to tread. As the
minutes elapsed, the scream in his head that was Naia subsided to a
whisper.

The harvested
lands
abruptly stopped. He could actually place one foot in the black land
where the Nile had crested in last year’s flood and another in the red
sands where the desert began. A well was there, and he drank deeply of
its cold water, not knowing when he would drink again.

The sun was
overhead
now, the morning chill vanished. The trail rose, ascending sharply
through cliffs of sheared red sandstone. Ahead of Semerket was a Medjay
tower. He reckoned that these Nubian policemen would surely stop him,
to challenge his identity and review his credentials. The Nubian
Medjays were fierce in keeping all unauthorized persons out of the
Great Place, or so he had heard.

But as
Semerket
advanced, no one called down to halt him. Drawing nearer, he heard the
faint but unmistakable sounds of snoring from high above him. He shook
his head in disapproval. The wealth of the generations of Egypt was
buried in tombs not more than a few feet away and no one was guarding
it.

“Medjay!”
Semerket
shouted up to the tower.

There was no
answer.
The snores continued.

“Sergeant!” he
called
louder, picking up a stone and throwing it through the tower window. It
struck something soft, and the snores were abruptly choked off.
Semerket waited patiently for the policeman to appear, but soon the
sounds of heavy slumber again wafted down to him.

Shrugging,
Semerket
turned away and headed once more into the mountain gorges. Such laxity
was a sad example of how poorly Pawero governed this side of the Nile.
Semerket’s disdain for the Western Mayor honed itself to a keener edge.

By now
Semerket had
penetrated deep into the Great Place. The red of the sandstone cliffs
had gradually given way to the dull white of weathered limestone. The
silence was so pervasive that it assumed a noise of its own, an eerie
primordial roaring. He discovered that if he stood very still, the
noise was actually caused by the beating of his heart.

Somewhere
beneath
these rocks Egypt’s most important crop was sown: the mummies of the
dead pharaohs. The tombs were in fact the forges that sparked eternal
life in the kings. Magical inscriptions painted on the walls ensured
they awakened to life, to eternally labor for the good of Egypt. In
return, the people worshipped them in perpetuity and kept their names
alive.

Something at
the
corner of his vision made him cease his musings. What had he glimpsed?
He peered again at the horizon and then saw it—the remains of a small
encampment littering the valley floor. Instantly he was striding the
mountain pathway that led to it. The thin road twisted in and out of
the jutting crags, and as he followed its serpentine path around a
cliff face, he was suddenly blocked by a mound of limestone chips. He
had not seen it before, located as it was in the shadows and crevices
of the mountain. Semerket looked about for any sign of a work gang, for
limestone rubble was a sure sign of tombmakers laboring at their
profession.

But no
workman’s chant
reached his ears, nor any mumbled word. Not even the wind blew. High up
a hawk wheeled, the only evidence of any living thing. On the tops of
the cliffs surrounding the valley, Semerket saw other Medjay towers,
identical to the one he had passed before. One reason the kings had
chosen this desolate place for their burials was that it was so easily
observed and protected. But this pile of limestone rubble was somehow
hidden from the Medjays’ view, he noticed, obscured by crags and their
long shadows.

Even so, the
distant
lookout posts seemed deserted; as before, no one shouted at him to
explain himself. Gingerly Semerket stepped onto the pile of white
rubble. Its gentle slope allowed him to half-walk, half-slide to the
floor of the Great Place.

The rubble
deposited
him directly at the deserted campsite. Whoever had been there had
attempted to hide the remains of their fire with a light covering of
sand. Throughout the day the winds had blown the sands away to reveal
its dark circle of ash.

Haphazardly
littering
the camp were the shattered pieces of an earthen pot, the shards
blackened from long use over a fire. Apparently the pot had broken from
the intensity of the heat, then been discarded. Semerket noticed that
no residue of food caked the interior surfaces of the shards. But
traces of gilding could be discerned upon it, and on one of the pieces
he was almost certain he recognized a rudimentary glyph, perhaps the
name of the pot’s former owner. Idly he began piecing the shards
together. He dug around the camp, looking for more of the earthen
remains. It was then he struck a wooden rod with his fingers.

From the sands
he
withdrew the blackened end of a sycamore branch that had been the stick
of a torch. Whoever had used it had been working too quickly to refuel
the torch with a wax-soaked cloth. He thrust the branch aside and began
to kick at the surrounding sand. Five more of the crusted sycamore
torch ends emerged: at least six persons had camped there.

Semerket asked
himself
what kind of labor in the Great Place required such light? Medjays
camping outside would have made do with only a fire. Perhaps inside a
tomb? Dimly he remembered that tomb workers used a special mixture of
expensive sesame oil and salt that supposedly made a torch smokeless.
These in the sands were only ordinary torches.

As he puzzled
the
conundrum out, Semerket began to quickly amass as many pieces of the
shattered clay pot as possible, not knowing why he did so. Tying them
into his cloak, he was fastening the ends when he heard the voice.

“God-skin is
made
there…”

From where he
sat on
the desert floor, the voice seemed to assail him from all directions.
Semerket whirled around, peering up and into the crags. He at last
spied a young boy astride a donkey. The boy stared down at him. His
head was shaved, and he wore the plaited side lock of a royal prince.

“What did you
say?”
Semerket called up to him.