Year of the Hyenas (16 page)

“I didn’t say
that,”
Semerket said.

Qar grunted.
“But like
all Egyptians, you thought it.”

Semerket’s
face was
bland. “I envy you, knowing what ‘all Egyptians’ think. It must make
things so easy.”

Qar dressed
quickly,
strapping on his armor and fastening his helmet. When he was finished
he regarded Semerket warily. “What do you want of me?”

“To show you
something, in the Great Place.”

Qar’s grin was
almost
a sneer. “Another invisible prince on a flying carpet?”

“Something far
more
interesting than that,” Semerket said, adding coldly, “and if you’re
lucky, it might even save your post.”

Qar reached
for his
spear. With a nod he indicated that Semerket should lead the way.
Together they climbed the path that snaked around the perimeter of the
Great Place. When they had gone past the cliffs of red sandstone and
entered the valley, they were met by its eerie hush. Their steady
footsteps on the pathway sent the loose pebbles tumbling into the
valley below. In the silence the cascading stones sounded like an
avalanche of boulders.

The sound
evoked
immediate response from the Medjay towers around the perimeter of the
cliffs. At least seven policemen climbed down, spears in hand, to watch
them from various points around the valley, and Qar waved his spear at
them. Satisfied that the intruders were not enemies, the other Medjays
retreated again into their towers. Semerket and Qar continued walking
in silence. Vipers sunning themselves on stones hissed at them as they
passed, or crawled for cover into the crevices. Scorpions fled before
them.

On and on they
walked
until, finally, Semerket was forced to confess, “I’m baffled. I thought
this was the road you arrested me on.”

“It is,”
answered Qar.

“But…”

He wanted to
show Qar
the campsite he had found at the base of the limestone-rubble mound.
Semerket had finally decided that if unauthorized persons were entering
the valley, it was his duty to tell the Medjays.

Semerket
scanned the
place slowly, turning around in a full circle. Nothing was familiar.
There was no limestone mound, and certainly no campfire. They had
vanished into air, as certainly as had the prince astride his donkey.
He remembered Mayor Pawero’s warning about how the desert was
enchanted, the abode of ghosts and demons, and he was slowly coming to
believe it.

“I could have
sworn…”
Semerket began apologetically, then stopped.

“Another
mirage?”
Qar’s voice was flat, the kind used by all policemen when confronted
with an unreliable witness.

“Apparently.”

Qar knelt down
to take
up some sand in his fingers, letting it flow from his hands slowly to
the ground. He gazed down into the valley. “What is it you thought you
saw?” he asked.

“A campfire
site.
There were six torch sticks buried there, fresh ones. I wanted you to
know I wasn’t the only one to get in here undetected.”

Qar pursed his
lips,
and continued to stare unblinking into the sands below. “And you think
the camp was in this canyon?” he asked.

“I’m not sure
anymore,” Semerket answered ruefully. “There was a mound of limestone
shards—behind that crag, I thought.” He pointed to the base of a nearby
wall of stone soaring upward to the pathway. “It sloped all the way
down to the floor.”

“Limestone?”
asked Qar
sharply.

Semerket
nodded. “From
an excavated tomb.” He knelt beside Qar, scratching his chin. “But it
seems I’m mistaken. Perhaps I did indeed imagine it.”

Qar continued
to
stare. Then he abruptly straightened up and pointed to a spot on the
valley floor. “There,” he said.

In the next
breath Qar
was climbing down the side of the cliff, knowing just where to place
his feet against the jutting rocks and crevices. Semerket did not dare
follow him, for fear of injury. Instead he ran down the path to a point
where it coursed low over the valley, and jumped the short distance to
the floor. When he rejoined the Medjay, breathless, Qar had already
unearthed some stray pieces of charcoal from the fire’s remains. It was
all he could find.

“They were
here,” Qar
said. He used his spear to sift through the sand, digging in certain
areas. No torch ends revealed themselves.

“How do you
know?
These are only charcoal pieces; they could have come from any fire made
here in the last fifty years. Where are the limestone shavings?”
Semerket asked, looking around.

Qar did not
speak for
a time. He stood and looked in a semicircle all about him, his keen
eyes searching every crevice. “They got rid of them,” he answered
softly. “Poured them back into the tomb.”

“They? You
mean the
tomb-diggers?”

“No tomb has
been dug
in the Great Place for over thirty years, Semerket, except for
Pharaoh’s. And his is on the other side of the valley.” He spoke
reluctantly, as if he were betraying a great secret.

Semerket did
not care
for the frightened tone of his voice or the expression on his face. “I
don’t understand—” he began.

Qar thrust his
spear
again into the earth, not knowing that he did. “Tomb robbers,” he
breathed, and the words were carried in the air to echo softly against
the stone walls. “Tomb robbers have come into the Great Place. They
filled up the hole they made with the rubble you saw. That’s why the
mound is gone.”

Semerket
swallowed.
Tomb robbery was the most serious offense in Egypt, the highest tier in
the crime of heresy. If Qar was correct, and the Great Place had indeed
been violated, the delicate balance between life and death would be
forfeit. The dead pharaohs, who eternally worked for Egypt’s well-being
in the afterlife, would harden their hearts against the living. Misery
and chaos would be the result.

A small but
definite
click came from the sands at their feet. Qar’s spearhead had struck
something metallic. For a moment he and Semerket looked at one another
dumbly. Then the Medjay was on his knees, furiously digging. When he
saw it he instinctively drew back, as if he had uncovered some hideous
burrowing insect. Semerket bent to look, and there on the valley floor,
shining like a flame upon the sands, was a golden ear loop.

It was
Semerket who
reached down to retrieve the object. The loop was of gold, an immense
and gaudy jewel from a previous dynasty. All around its hammered edge
cabochon rubies were inset, a thing of sunlight and blood.

“IAM TO BLAME ,” said Qar dismally.

High up in the
Medjay’s tower, he and Semerket ate the dinner brought them by the
village servants. The herbs the tombmakers used were not so sharp that
evening, Semerket noted—or else he was getting used to their pungency.

Semerket
raised the
jar of beer to his lips. “You don’t know for certain anything has been
stolen.”

“The jewel—”

“It could have
been
there for centuries.”

Qar said
nothing, as
if considering this explanation for the first time. Semerket chewed
some dates. “Even if not, how is it your fault?”

Deeply
ashamed, Qar
coughed, and began tentatively, “That day you came here—?”

“Yes?”

“I was asleep.”

Semerket said
nothing.
He had known.

“This post,”
Qar
continued, “I’m getting too old for it. I’m so tired it’s all I can do
just to strap on my armor anymore. I tell you, I allowed these robbers
to slip into the valley.”

Qar’s was a
difficult
confession to make, Semerket knew. No one, man or woman, wanted to
admit they had passed their prime. In Qar’s case the admission brought
with it the knowledge that perhaps his feebleness had allowed a great
crime to occur.

Qar went on,
not
finished with confessions. “And that morning Hetephras went into the
hills—the last morning anyone saw her alive?”

“What about
it?”

“I slept
through that,
too. Usually I would check on her during my rounds. That morning I
didn’t even know she’d come and gone.” His voice was very sad.

Semerket let
out a
long sigh. “What are you going to do?”

Qar considered
his
answer. “I’ll meet with the other Medjays and show them the site you
found, and the jewel. Then I’ll resign my post. If I’m lucky, I’ll get
reassigned to some quiet town on the Nile. Who knows?”

Semerket was
skeptical. “Why confess to something you don’t even know is occurring?
What is there, really, to prove a tomb robbery has happened? A few
pieces of crumbling charcoal. An earring. Some limestone chips…”

“We’ll have to
examine
all the tombs and make a list of their contents.”

“That will
take years.”

“We’ll send
notice to
the Medjays in Eastern Thebes, then, to raid the bazaars. If royal
treasure pieces are for sale there, then we’ll know there’s been a
robbery.”

Semerket shook
his
head. “The minute you Medjays appear in the marketplace, any suspicious
goods will get tucked neatly away into sacks of grain or vats of
olives. You’ll never find them.”

“What else can
we do?”

Semerket
thought.
“Send someone into the bazaars as an interested buyer. Someone whom the
dealers would never suspect. Have him buy a piece—it should be proof
enough.”

“Who could do
this?”

Semerket
thought for a
moment. Then he answered slowly, “I may know someone.” He grimly smiled
to himself. He owed his brother something for getting him this
position. It would serve Nenry right.

Semerket then
recalled
the shards of broken pottery he’d collected at the phantom campsite.
For some reason, one that he could not even explain to himself, he did
not tell Qar of them. Though he and the Medjay regarded one another
more amiably since their trek from the valley that first day, they were
not yet friends. Let trust come later, he thought.

“Something
disturbs me
about all this, Qar. Did you ever stop to think that perhaps you’re not
the only one sleeping on duty?” Semerket asked.

“What?”

“If tomb
robbers are
afoot,” Semerket said, “why didn’t the other Medjays hear them digging
during the night? Why didn’t they know that I had come into the Great
Place the other day? And how is it you alone woke to find me?”

Qar was
uneasy, and
spoke unwillingly. “A dream woke me—a terrible one. A lioness stalked
me. The dream seemed so real I could even smell her—the blood on her
breath, her scent. I truly thought I was going to die in her claws…”

It was not the
chill
desert air that caused Semerket to shiver then.

“And as she
sprang,”
he asked in a soft voice, “did you wake and say the prayer to Isis for
nightmares?”

It was Qar’s
turn to
look amazed.

To Toh,
Vizier of
the Two Lands, life! health! prosperity! under PharaohRamses III, life!
health! prosperity! From Semerket, clerk of Investigations and Secrets,
Greetings…

Report to
the Great
Lord in the case of Hetephras, high priestess in thePlace of Truth;
This is what I have discovered—

Quickly
Semerket wrote
of how he had learned in the House of Purification that Hetephras had
indeed been murdered, on dry land. He did not tell the vizier that he
possessed a piece of the axe that had killed her, for he had no way of
knowing who else read his reports. Semerket laid down his reed pen and
considered what to tell Toh next. He sat cross-legged on the floor of
Hetephras’s reception room, Sukis’s prone form sleeping next to him, a
single tallow candle serving as light. Earlier, he had bought a roll of
papyrus from Neferhotep, some new reed pens, and a pot of lampblack
mixed with gum for ink. Now the paper was unrolled before him, the ink
watered, and he had chewed the reed pen to the exact point he preferred.

Semerket
trimmed the
wick of his candle, and picked up the pen again.

From the
Council of
Elders here at the tombmakers’ village I have learned that the
priestess was semi-blind and that she often went alone to attend the
local shrines, even in her debilitated state, and often for a stretch
of several days. This happened so frequently, the elders say, that no
one thought to report her missing.

His thoughts
turned to
his own reception by the villagers, and how they seemed more concerned
about his right to question them than about actually determining who
had killed their priestess. Semerket weighed the possibilities. Perhaps
Hetephras had been resented in her village, a crone who had unwittingly
engineered her own demise with a cruel tongue. But this did not jibe
with the image of the pious mother Queen Tiya remembered. Yet again, he
could not write of that impression, because it was not a proven fact.

The image of
the large
and intimidating foreman Paneb loomed in Semerket’s mind. Despite his
attack on Semerket, Paneb was the only one of these odd tombmakers
whose behavior was comprehensible. Paneb and his aunt must have been
close indeed for him to disintegrate so completely upon learning the
truth of her death—but Semerket could not write down such a supposition
for Toh to read.

Semerket’s
hand went
unwillingly to the bruises on his throat, remembering the thickness of
Paneb’s fingers there. The same nagging thought picked at his mind: why
would the foreman, like the elders, be opposed to finding the killer of
his aunt? It simply made no sense, unless—

Semerket sat
up,
staring into the dark.

Unless Paneb
was—unless they all were—protecting the person who had committed the
crime.

Moments later,
Semerket found himself striding restlessly around Hetephras’s home, his
letter to Toh abandoned, his mind ablaze. Conspiracies were everywhere.
He despaired that he would ever find his way out of the mare’s nests of
possibilities. And now this other mystery had come, more disturbing
than all the rest—why was the Medjay Qar dreaming of the lioness?