Year of the Hyenas (9 page)

“Does Metufer
the
Ripper Up still live?” he asked.

“He’s old, and
his
hands shake, but, yes, he’s still the Ripper Up.”

Semerket held
the beer
up to the boy. “Take me to him.”

Eagerly the
boy seized
the jar. He tore off the soft clay seal and smelled the brew. “Ah!
Fresh, too. Not like the piss they normally bring us.” A suspicious
look shadowed his face. “But you bring no one to be purified. What is
it you want with Metufer anyway?”

“I’m his
friend.
Semerket is my name.”

The boy
snorted. “A
friend who doesn’t know if he’s alive or dead. Maybe you bring him
trouble.”

“If you don’t
want the
beer…” Semerket shrugged and reached out to take the jar. The boy
quickly stepped back, just out of Semerket’s reach.

“I’ll take you
to him.
I’ll take you,” he said in a wheedling tone. “We don’t get many
visitors, is all. I’d be beaten if I brought someone Metufer didn’t
want to see.”

The boy opened
the
door a fraction wider. Semerket took a last breath of fresh air and
crossed the threshold into the dim interior of the House of
Purification. The boy closed the door.

Slowly
Semerket’s eyes
adjusted to the gloom. He was in the entry hall where Osiris’s shrouded
limestone form loomed, blackened with generations of oily incense. The
god was still garlanded from the festival, though the flowers were
limp. An equally filthy Anubis stood to Osiris’s right. Windows set
near the roof admitted the hall’s only light. Beneath his sandals
Semerket felt the soft crunch of natron, the fine granular soda
quarried in the desert.

“Wait here,”
the boy
said. “I’ll fetch the Ripper Up.” Semerket realized he had not taken a
breath since he entered the house. Steeling himself, he exhaled. Even
before his nose drew in its next breath, he could smell the cloying
spices. Heavy resinous myrrh clashed with the effluvia of sweet floral
attars. Juniper resin, salts, and above all the salty smell of natron
conspired to make his gorge rise. But it was the intense underlying
odor of rotting meat that made him gag—a pervasive stink the perfumes
failed to mask.

Semerket
fumbled in
his sash for the bag of cedar chips he’d brought and inhaled deeply of
the aromatic wood. Though he could still smell the rot, it was fainter
now.

With knowing
steps he
made his way through the entry hall, cedar bag held resolutely to his
nose, finding his way through the gloom to the rear of the compound. A
wooden shutter was propped slightly ajar, noon sun streaking through
its slats. He pushed it farther open and stared, blinking, into the
gauzy light of the yard.

The sheds were
to the
left of the yard, as he remembered them, placed tightly next to one
another, each monotonously alike. Built to the fringes of the desert,
with layers of tight shelving, every level was covered in mounds of
yellow natron.

At the far end
of the
yard, Semerket saw furtive movements at the desert’s red edge—pariah
dogs nervously worrying the rim of the estate. The dogs eyed the sheds
avidly, ears pricked in their direction. The boldest of them, his
scrawny beige flanks a moving carpet of ticks and fleas, crept toward
the farthest shed. The sentry boys had withdrawn to sleep through the
hottest part of the day. Only one youngster was on guard at that hour,
and he ran forward to fling stones and yell at the curs.

The lead male
dog
stood his ground, head down and snarling. When struck by a piece of
broken pottery, the dog ran at the boy, barking ferociously. The young
sentry instantly turned and fled, screaming for the other boys to help
him.

Seeing the
sheds
temporarily unguarded, the dog immediately seized his chance and ran to
the nearest one. He pawed furiously at a mound of natron, the dust
flying up in yellow clouds between its legs. In seconds, his quarry was
exposed—a thin, shriveled, human arm.

Seizing it by
the
wrist, the dog yanked. The rest of the body soon emerged from the
yellow dust, a woman in the last stages of her purification. Her hair
was bleached yellow by the natron, her body a thing of leather, taut,
dry, and stringy.

With a sharp
crack the
dog snapped the arm off at the elbow. Two ragged bones and a hand with
blackened nails were his reward. The pariah dog ran as fast as he could
back into the desert, growling fiercely at the other hounds who now
hurled themselves at him, tearing at the arm for a morsel of the
desiccated flesh.

Semerket saw
other
sentry boys emerge from the house to bury the woman once again under
the heaps of natron. The woman’s relations, if she had any, would never
know she lacked an arm, for the embalmers in the House of Purification
would supply her with one of clay, or perhaps a palm frond whittled to
the correct shape. Under her tight wrappings no one would be able to
detect the forgery.

Semerket
returned to
the reception hall to wait for Metufer on a rickety bench. The heat,
together with the nauseating smells, combined to form a kind of
narcotic vapor. As he waited for the Ripper Up to appear, his eyelids
began to close against his will. Soon he was oblivious to the
omnipresent droning buzz of black flies that swam lazily around him.

A distant
laugh that
erupted into a wracking cough exploded in Semerket’s head. “By Anubis’s
shiny red pizzle, it’s Semerket! After all these years!” The dry
hacking filled the gloomy hallway. Semerket awoke, almost choking as he
swallowed his wandering ka once again into his body. His eyes opened
calmly, and he beheld his old friend and former mentor, Metufer.

“But here you
are,”
the old man coughed out, “snoring away in my house, when I expected you
to be up and amazed that I am still alive!” Metufer was grotesquely
obese. Though it had been ten years since they had last seen one
another, Semerket was surprised to find the Ripper Up so little
changed. His hands did indeed shake a bit and his voice seemed a trifle
querulous, but Semerket marveled that not one line or wrinkle creased
his face.

“Metufer.”
Semerket
clasped his arms as far as they could reach around his friend. “You
look fit.”

The old priest
threw
back his head and laughed, which again induced a fit of savage
coughing. “Never… better… in my… life,” the old man managed to gasp
between breaths.

As long as
Semerket
had known him, Metufer always had the cough; he claimed that natron
irritated his lungs. But if the cough had robbed him of clear speech,
it had somehow enhanced his powers of intellect. Metufer in fact was
regarded as something of an oracle in the House of Purification, both
for his intelligence as well as his skill with the basalt dagger. It
had been the reason he was appointed the Ripper Up.

Something of
the
oracular seized Metufer at that moment. As he regarded Semerket, he
ceased laughing. “Something troubles you,” he remarked, his mouth drawn
down. “But if I remember correctly, that’s nothing new. You were always
a surly youth.”

“Trouble does
bring me
here, Metufer,” Semerket answered. “A priestess is dead. If it is
murder, I am to find her killer.”

“So once again
you are
the clerk… of…” The old man clutched his wide stomach and bent double
to retrieve his breath.

“Investigations
and
Secrets,” Semerket finished for him. “Vizier Toh appointed me.” He
lifted his mantle and revealed the badge inscribed with the vizier’s
insignia. It hung about his neck on the long chain of jasper beads. “I
must first determine if the priestess’s death was accidental,” he said.
“Her body was found in the Nile. She might have drowned. A crocodile
might have made the wounds, or perhaps they were made after her death;
I don’t know. I only know that you, Metufer, are able to hear the dead
speak long after their lips have ceased to move.”

“Your timing
is
fortuitous,” Metufer said. “Hetephras’s body has been here in the
natron baths, as the tradition prescribes. I was just about to open her
up when you came along. Come and help me, then, as you did in the old
days.”

The room to
which he
followed Metufer was the largest in the compound. Like all the others,
it nestled in gloomy, torch-lit twilight. A large pool, filled with
Nile water stained yellow with natron, took up most of the southern
corner of the chamber. Here Semerket could pocket his bag of cedar
chips once again, for the smell of rotting meat had been replaced by
the harsh medicinal smells of juniper resin and bay.

Beyond the
pool, in
neat rows, were large stone tables upon which lay bodies in various
stages of purification. Boys, wakened from their noon naps, began again
to sweep the floor, sluicing it down with jugs of water. This was a
necessary chore, for drains on the altar tables carried a constant
stream of fluids from the dead. Other youngsters carried baskets of
natron that they scattered about on the floor, which helped to absorb
the runoff from the tables.

Metufer went
to a
table that was free and from there directed a man to fetch the body of
Hetephras from the pool. Seizing a pole with a large bronze hook at its
end, the man began to poke through the cloudy water. One by one he
dredged bodies to the surface, hooking them beneath the chin, bringing
them into the dim light to be identified. Semerket watched closely,
peering with his black eyes.

“There!”
Semerket said
when an old woman’s body bobbed to the surface. Instinctively he knew
Hetephras. He had imagined her in his mind since he’d received the
case, and felt a pang on seeing the old lady. Though he had once
labored in the House of Purification, and knew what to expect, he had
nevertheless imagined her a living thing—not this poor rubbery piece of
flesh being hoisted to the table.

Then he saw
the gash
across her throat. It gaped open, as clean a wound as priests make on
the victims of temple sacrifices. No crocodile could make so clean a
gash. Still, there was the possibility that Hetephras had been
mutilated after her death. That question, too, must be asked and
answered, though Semerket was dismally sure that no such thing had
occurred.

Metufer and
three of
his assistants had disappeared into an anteroom. They returned, each
wearing a leather mask of Anubis, the jackal-headed god. Metufer held a
gleaming knife of basalt, its finely polished edges catching what
little light there was in the room. Muttering a last prayer for
forgiveness, Metufer abruptly thrust the knife into Hetephras’s side
and slashed toward her midsection.

As quickly as
a fowler
filets a duckling in the marketplace, the Ripper Up opened a long,
bloodless incision. Semerket winced, surprised to find that after all
these years his toughness had gone. As Metufer eased his knife down
Hetephras’s side, Semerket felt his stomach twitch rebelliously.
Silently he bade it behave, as if it were an unruly dog, but a light
sweat nevertheless broke on his forehead.

When Metufer
at last
withdrew the knife, the other Anubis priests began wailing, raising
their hands in feigned outrage and grief. Using phrases of archaic
Egyptian that had been spoken for a thousand years at the moment of
this ritual “re-murder,” they chased the lumbering Metufer from the
room with shouts and curses. As he left the room, Metufer
surreptitiously directed one of the boys to bring Semerket a box.

Semerket saw
that the
box contained a linen sheath. He took the garment out, unfurling it.
From the bloodstains cascading from its collar down the front and back,
he recognized it as the dress the priestess had been found in. Despite
the time she had floated dead in the Nile, all its water could not wash
away the blood. Farther down in the box was a wire pectoral, studded
with amulets and some glass jewels. She had not been killed for her
riches, Semerket thought grimly. He folded the sad relics and placed
them in the box. Metufer returned to his side.

“Was that all
there
was on her? No wig? No sandals?” Semerket asked.

“Nothing more.”

Semerket
considered.
More than likely the wig and sandals rested at the bottom of the Nile—a
lamentable possibility. But if they were elsewhere, and if he could
find them, they might indicate where the lady had met her end.

Metufer stood
again at
the altar table, beckoning for Semerket to join him. “What is it you
want to know, Semerket?” he asked. Remarkably, his cough had vanished.

Semerket
approached
the table. “Did she drown?” He knew the answer, but the question still
had to be asked.

“Let us see
what this
dead woman wants to tell us,” Metufer said. He thrust his large hand
into the incision. Semerket saw the flesh of Hetephras’s body roll and
heave with the hand’s searching movements. With practiced touch,
Metufer found what he was looking for and pulled. His hand emerged into
the light, trailing a lung that was brownish and distended.

“She was not
drowned,”
Metufer whispered. “If she had been, I could have wrung water from her
lung as from a sponge. Look what comes now when I squeeze.” His hand
clutched the flesh. Blackened blood poured from between his clenched
fingers. “She was on dry land when she was killed, and blood filled her
lungs from the wound to her neck and windpipe. This is what makes the
tissue so brown.”

“Then she did
drown—in
her own blood,” Semerket said.

“No.” Metufer
shook
his head. “There’s not enough of it here. She was dead before she could
inhale more.” He handed the organ to his assistant, who packed it in a
jar of natron. Later, when thoroughly drained of moisture, it would be
sealed in hot juniper resin and bandaged for burial with Hetephras’s
other organs.

“Could the
wounds have
been made after her death?” Semerket asked.