Year of the Hyenas (14 page)

How did these
tombmakers sleep, Semerket wondered, so tightly packed together for
all of their lives? It was a wonder they did not murder each other more
often.

And then, from
somewhere close by, he caught the sounds of a couple arguing, their
voices scarring the dark. He fought to keep slumber at bay, straining
to listen, and their angry words came to him in slurred phrases, like
screams from hyenas.

“…gave it to
me… Why
not? You never… stingy, good-for-nothing—”

“…imbecile!”

“…talking to
Khepura
again… don’t care… leaving you!… across the river!”

There was a
sharp
slap. An outraged wail in the dark, then the sounds of a real physical
fight commenced. Punches and more slaps. Curses. Oaths. Silence.
Semerket was about to drift off, but then there came to him different
sounds.

The sounds of
a couple
making love.

He jolted
awake again.
What strange people these tombmakers are, Semerket thought. Yet even
the sounds of furtive lovemaking could not keep sleep at bay. His ka
strained to flee his body. With a long sigh he let it loose and closed
his eyes.

WHETHER IT WAShis profound
exhaustion or because he was in a strange place, wakefulness and sleep
soon became blurred. Sometime after the fifth hour, when the village
was at its most quiet, Semerket finally slipped into something
resembling slumber.

Only moments
later,
however, he gave a great start, his ka rushing to rejoin him, his eyes
jerking open. He had heard something—the latch on Hetephras’s door
being opened.

Fiercely he
quieted
his heart, willing it to beat at a more subdued tattoo. Concentrating,
he heard nothing more than the noises he expected to hear at night in
the desert. A kite-bird whistled high above. Somewhere a cow lowed in a
distant paddock. A vole, or maybe a scorpion, scuttled nearby. He
closed his eyes once again, convinced that he had heard nothing out of
the ordinary.

But just as
sleep
began to pluck once more at his eyelids, he heard a different noise—the
deep, primordial breathing of some huge beast, too low to even register
as a sound. Semerket sat up, staring into the dark, hearing the
sonorous panting growing louder as it came into the house through the
front door. Semerket’s ears grew numb with fear as a feral animal reek
oozed into the room, bringing with it the rank and bloody odor of the
hunt.

Silently,
Semerket
threw back the skins. In three strides he was at his small sack of
belongings. Throwing it open, careful not to make a noise, he felt
about in the dark for his curved knife. The weapon would provide little
protection, but it was all he had.

The knife was
not
there.

Only then did
he
remember that Naia had taken it from him on the night of the festival,
when he had howled his drunken rage and grief at her door.

He tried to
call out
for help, but his throat was so constricted by fear he managed no more
than an absurd croak. Semerket peered into the dark, trying to find a
weapon, anything, with which to defend himself. Then he saw her, and
froze.

The lioness
entered
the room, rubbing her spine against the lintel like any ordinary house
cat. In the dark, its coat emitted a kind of golden light. Semerket saw
her clearly now, muscles taut beneath her fur, long strands of red
saliva stringing from her fangs.

Death has come
for me,
he thought; this is what it looks like.

Though he had
sought
death so keenly just a short time before, every part of him now
shrieked for his life. He didn’t want to die like this, torn to pieces
by fang and claw. He backed slowly away from her. Her yellow eyes
glittered, and the lioness lowered herself into a crouching stance.
Slowly she advanced on him.

He ran—to the
rear of
the house, past the kitchen, to the stairway leading to the roof. The
lioness snarled and leapt after him. Semerket climbed swiftly. He was
on the roof of the village now, emerging into the most profound
darkness he had ever experienced. No moon lit the sky. Taking refuge
behind a huge urn used to collect rain water, he waited. His eyes began
to pick out bits of detail—the distant torches at the village’s
southern gate, the outline of a Medjay tower beyond, and farther away
the fires of Eastern Thebes, throbbing on the other side of the river.

The communal
roof over
the village was a patchwork quilt of many differing levels;
occasionally a small second story had been added to some of the homes.
He thought if he could just sprint to one of them, he could pound on
the doors for help.

But then he
saw that
the lioness had somehow silently scaled the side of the building from
below, to perch on the top of the small wall that surrounded
Hetephras’s home. He could hear the lioness’s low, even panting, like
the scrape of millstones. Slowly he peeked at her from behind the urn.

She saw him,
and
dropped to the roof from the wall. She was going to leap—

A prayer
suddenly
bubbled up to Semerket’s lips, one that every Egyptian child spoke upon
waking from a nightmare. “Come to me, Mother Isis! Behold, I am seeing
what is far from my city!”

The lioness
sprang
with a terrible roar. Semerket threw his arms over his head, falling
onto the roof, waiting for the kiss of her teeth—

The impact of
cat and
man never occurred. In the ensuing silence, Semerket forced himself to
peer from beneath his clenched hands. He was again in Hetephras’s
house, atop his bedroll. Behind him, there was a slight noise. He
whirled around with a gasp. It was a house cat, obviously a pet, for it
did not shy away from him.

Semerket,
breathing
hard, lay back down on his pallet. It had been a dream, probably the
trick of wine vapors still festering in his blood. His breathing became
calmer, and he laughed out loud.

A dream lion,
nothing
more.

The cat came
over to
snuggle beside him on his bedroll. He fell asleep to the rumble of its
purrs.

THE KNOCKING WOKE HIM. Dazed, he shook his
head to clear it of cobwebs. What hour was it? Glancing up through the
clerestory windows to the slit of sky above, he found the sun
impossibly high overhead. He sprang to his feet, and the cat leapt
away, accompanying him to the courtyard.

Khepura waited
for him
a few steps down the alley. “I’m here to tell you that the elders are
assembled at Neferhotep’s house,” she said, “to consider your request
to question the villagers.”

“Request?” he
asked.
He was still half in the land of sleep. He thought it odd that a
directive from the vizier should be considered a request.

“You said you
wanted
to meet them,” she went on accusingly. “I heard you myself.”

“Yes, but—” He
was
irritated. Nevertheless it was probably best not to appear too
high-handed. At that moment the cat slipped through the door, heading
in the direction of the kitchens.

“Sukis!” cried
Khepura. “She’s come back!” The cat turned and regarded the head woman
with palpable scorn.

“Last night,
in fact.
She gave me quite a start, too.”

“She was
Hetephras’s
cat. We haven’t seen her since the priestess went missing.” She bent to
scratch the beast’s ears, but it shied from her hand, backing into a
corner and hissing. “Sukis! What’s the matter with you?” said Khepura,
offended. The cat ran down the corridor.

Shrugging,
Khepura
turned again to Semerket. “Well, are you coming?”

“I’ll be
there,” he
said. The head woman walked back down the narrow main street, in the
direction the cat had gone. Then Semerket remembered and yelled after
her, “Khepura—?”

She did not
turn
around, merely saying over her shoulder, “Five houses down, at the end
of the alley.”

Moments later
he was
standing in Neferhotep’s dark front room. Seven men waited for him,
none of them very old despite their designation as “elder.” They
gravely told him they were the elected heads of the village clans.
Khepura as head woman had a place on the council as well, along with
Neferhotep as chief scribe. Khepura informed them that she would speak
for the absent Paneb, who was at the royal tomb, and proceeded to do
so. “Paneb opposes any investigation into the village,” she declared.

Semerket
raised an
eyebrow. “Why should he?”

“It’s an
insult,
that’s why,” Khepura said flatly. “To believe that any of us had
anything to do with such a crime…” Her nostrils flared with
indignation. Though she meant her expression to connote dignified
outrage, she resembled nothing so much at that moment as an irate water
buffalo caught in a thicket. “It was some brigand or other criminal who
murdered Hetephras—if that’s what really happened—not any of us from
the village.”

“It’s
strange,”
Semerket said, almost to himself, “I would have thought that Paneb
would be the first to demand an inquiry.”

One of the
elders
coughed, a man smeared with slurry stains. “I am Sneferu, potter to
Pharaoh,” he introduced himself quietly, leaning forward. “Why do you
say that Paneb should desire this inquiry?”

Semerket was
surprised
the situation needed explaining. “Because Hetephras was his aunt, for
one thing,” Semerket said.

Sneferu looked
sideways at the other elders. They fidgeted uncomfortably for a moment
and then broke into soft chuckles. Noticing Semerket’s shocked
expression, they immediately resumed their sober demeanors. “But we are
all nephews of poor Aunt Hetephras,” Sneferu said.

Semerket
blinked.

Sneferu held
his hands
wide, attempting to explain. “Oh, he was her true nephew by blood. But
as tombmakers we’ve rarely been allowed to leave here, and so we marry
our cousins. In this village, we’re all related in some way or another.”

The elders
grunted to
show their approval of Sneferu’s words.

The sun had
reached
mid heaven, and the temperature had climbed with it. Looking away,
Semerket spied Hunro at the doorway of a distant room, listening. He
nodded a surreptitious greeting. She instantly stepped back into the
concealing darkness.

“Yet the
vizier sent
me here to make an inquiry and I must insist on it.” Semerket stood up
from the bench, crossing his arms in front of him.

Neferhotep
deftly
interrupted. “Please, please—don’t be hasty. We’re not forbidding this
investigation. Not at all.” He looked around with a glance, letting his
sharp gaze rest significantly on Khepura. “But we have our traditions,
too. All we’re saying is that we must debate the issue together as
elders. Even the vizier will understand this.”

Semerket was
nonplussed. Never before had he encountered so phlegmatic a crowd,
particularly one that had only recently learned that a relative had
been brutally slain. Usually the victim’s relations would be screaming
for vengeance at the tops of their lungs in some public place.
Suspicion flooded through him.

“How long, do
you
think,” he asked, “before Hetephras’s angry spirit howls through this
village, seeking vengeance?” A note of incredulity crept into his
voice. “Ghosts of murder victims are the angriest spirits of all. They
vex your crops, cause illness in your children. They can even stopper
the gods’ ears against your prayers. Why do you risk it?”

Sneferu was
about to
say something, but Khepura coldly cut in before he could speak.
“Hetephras’s spirit will understand the need for the elders to debate
this issue, even if you do not.” Her clipped voice was dismissive.
“Why, she was gone three days before any of us even knew she was
missing, and in that time no ghost—” Khepura’s words dissolved into
silence. She had said too much and looked desperately at Neferhotep to
rescue her.

Semerket’s
eyes were
black isinglass. “She was gone three days before you noticed she was
missing?”

No one said a
word.

“When did you
report
her disappearance?”

Again, no one
spoke.
Semerket had his answer. “You mean… no one
did
report it.”

Khepura was
the first
to recover her speech. “You needn’t be so accusing,” she said.
“Hetephras tended shrines all over these hills. It was commonplace, her
being gone so long.”

One of the
elders
spoke up, his enthusiasm getting the better of him. “Why, before the
gods afflicted her with blindness, we often didn’t see Hetephras for
weeks at a time.”

Khepura winced
at his
words, her lips forming silent curses. Neferhotep cupped his head in
his hand. Seeing their reactions, the elder who had spoken became
confused. “What?” he asked. “What did I say?”

“She was
blind
?” Semerket’s black
eyes shone harshly.

“But this is
no
secret,” the elder insisted defensively. “Everyone knew it!”

“I want to
understand
this,” Semerket said quietly. “A blind old lady—your aunt—wanders the
hills for three days with everyone knowing about it—and not one of you
thought to inquire after her when she didn’t come home?”

The elder
clapped his
mouth shut. He suddenly understood the import of what he had burbled.

“It was Rami’s
job to
accompany her,” said Khepura into the void. “But don’t blame him. When
he arrived at her house that day, she had already gone up the mountain.
Hetephras could be very stubborn, you know.”

Neferhotep at
last
spoke up, smiling apologetically. “This is all very interesting, but
I’m afraid I can’t allow this line of questioning to continue, friend
Semerket—not until after the elders have debated.”

Semerket shot
the
scribe an irritated glance. “When will you have debated?”

“Tomorrow, or
by the
end of this week,” Neferhotep answered. “No later.”