Wavering between fear for Bener and the knowledge that she and the pirate were right, Meren nodded. Bener smiled with pride as she recounted her successful ruse for passing messages and told what she, Kysen, and Ebana had discovered.
"So Ebana sought help from an old friend in the office of records and tithes," she said. "This man owes Cousin Ebana many favors, and he has arranged to meet both Turi and Mose."
"How?" Meren asked.
"Ebana's friend is overseer of records and royal gifts, and he has sent word to each separately that there has arisen a question of title to the lands awarded them by pharaoh. Each thinks a rival claimant has appeared and that the overseer wishes to speak with him and take his part in the dispute."
"And the meetings?"
"Ebana instructed his friend to tell both Turi and Mose to meet him on his way home, as his days are full of tasks at the moment. They are to meet at that old shrine behind the grain magazines of Ptah. You remember the place."
"Yes. It hasn't been used since the days of Amunhotep the Magnificent's grandfather, and it was old then. It's still standing?"
Bener nodded. "Each man thinks the overseer is meeting him to get an account of his case to present to the vizier's judges. Kysen and Ebana will be waiting instead, and they want you to be there to question the Nubians."
"I see," Meren said. He closed his eyes and pinched the bridge of his nose. "How will Kysen leave the house undetected?"
Bener was grinning again. "I've offered him the use of my disguise."
It was Meren's turn to smile. He could imagine Kysen's disgust at having to dress like a woman, much less an aged laundress.
"Father," Bener said. "Cousin Ebana says you'll be able to discover the guilty one once you confront him, but I don't see how he can be so confident."
Meren gazed over his daughter's head at nothing, his thoughts traveling years into the past. "I'd forgotten how much my cousin and I think alike."
"But how will you discover the criminal?" Bener repeated.
"The less you know, the better." Meren remembered to be irate with his daughter. "And you're never to come here again. Stay home, where you belong. No following Kysen to the shrine this evening."
"Fear not, Father. Kysen and I made a bargain. He let me come to you, and I promised not to go to the shrine."
"Good," Meren snapped.
Othrys clapped his hands together. "Excellent. I'll be rid of you soon, and all will be well."
Meren glared a warning at the pirate, who caught his look and changed the subject.
"Now, lady, before you set off on your long journey across the city, allow me to give you a morning meal. Food, drink, and time with you will improve your father's foul humor."
One of the hardest things Meren had ever done was allow his daughter to shuffle out of Othrys's house alone with that basket of laundry. He worried about her the rest of the day. Even struggling with the mystery of Nefertiti's death proved but a temporary distraction. So far, he'd managed to knock a few chips from the stone barrier that encased his memories of that time and protected him from the pain they evoked. Keeping out of sight in his chamber until dusk, Meren took out the papyrus upon which he was writing his recollections of Horizon of the Aten.
Nefertiti had taken ill about a week before she died and had gradually grown worse, as had her younger children a few years earlier. Everyone had taken her symptoms for those of a plague that appeared periodically in Egypt, usually from the vassal lands of the Asiatics or from Nubia. Ten days of illness, gradual worsening, then death.
Now that he knew the signs of poisoning by the
tekau
plant from his physician, he could see that the queen had exhibited them shortly before he'd arrived at the palace with foreign correspondence Ay wanted her to see. Upon entering the small audience hall where Nefertiti usually received him, he'd been told that the queen had taken ill with a fever. Later she had received him despite her suffering; the ague had made her skin hot to the touch, red, and dry. So great had the fever been that she'd become disoriented during the interview.
Upon reflection all these years later, Meren realized that it had been that first attack of fever that had misled the physicians and everyone else. A virulent fever was the first sign of the plague. The queen's disorientation, her eventual delusions and blurred vision, had been attributed to the fever, as had that rapid and loud voice of the heart. Although the physicians had noted that the queen had not broken out in red marks—another sign of the plague—before she died, the significance of this had been lost in the shock of her death and the grief that had followed.
Indeed, even in the intrigue-ridden imperial court, where poison was always an unspoken menace, no suspicions had been voiced. The queen's illness had extended over a long period of time. Meren, and certainly everyone else at court, was accustomed to suspecting poison when a death was sudden and the cause unknown.
In the days that followed Nefertiti's first attack of fever, Meren had seldom left the queen's apartments except to go to Ay with reports of his daughter's health. As she worsened, he sent for his mentor, and after that, Ay rarely left her. Meren remained as well, but he kept himself hidden when pharaoh appeared to grieve over his wife and exhort her to rally. In the end, not even pharaoh's pleading helped. Nefertiti suffered fits in which her body contorted violently. Then she became senseless, and on the tenth day after her illness, she died.
Meren knew who had put the
tekau
poison in the queen's drink and food—her favorite cook, at the instigation of her steward. But the steward had been an obsequious place seeker and a coward. He would never have acted alone. If only he could remember more, especially of the daily routine at the palace. Then he might find some sign of the queen's killer.
Until he could recall more, he would continue to review the lists of those who had been Nefertiti's enemies. The more he explored the events surrounding the queen's death, the longer the list of enemies grew. Of these, the greatest had been the Hittite emissary to the royal court, Yazilikaya. In the last years of Akhenaten's reign the Hittite had found his attempts to allay pharaoh's suspicions and keep him inactive against his king's maneuvers thwarted by the queen.
And at the last, when the kingdom and Akhenaten had both deteriorated almost beyond recall, pharaoh turned to Nefertiti for help in a way that had shocked all of Egypt. As with many events deemed great transgressions against the right order of things, the whole kingdom now ignored them. It was as if these events had never happened. Akhenaten's actions during the last few years of his reign were never mentioned. Even Tutankhamun dared not speak of what his brother had done. And, unwilling though Nefertiti had been, her acceptance of Akhenaten's plans had plunged her into the swirling void of chaos that pharaoh created.
All public record of it had been expunged; such a thing had never been done, at least, not within the memory of anyone living. It was unnatural. There weren't words for it, and the gods had rebelled against it. Perhaps their displeasure at the transgression had been the real cause of Nefertiti's death, and Akhenaten's.
Meren's rush pen faltered as he tried to write the next line. The habit of secrecy was too great. He couldn't yet bring himself to write of Akhenaten's last offense. Laying down the pen, he folded the papyri and stuck them beneath his tunic so that they were held in place by his belt. He couldn't leave the record in Othrys's house. His only alternative was to carry it with him, and it was time to meet Kysen and Ebana.
Othrys and several of his men accompanied Meren as far as the magazines of Ptah. The pirate vowed that Meren would be less noticeable walking in their midst than he would be alone. In late afternoon, in the hour or two before darkness, the streets of Memphis teemed with pedestrians, subjects of pharaoh from every station in life returning home from a day's labor.
Temples emptied of priests, students, artisans, and supplicants. Government offices disgorged their workers—scribes of accounts, tithes, granaries, storehouses, and treasures. Port officials went home, as did maids, women market vendors, gold-workers, overseers of cattle, outline draftsmen, carpenters, and fishermen. Meren kept his head down and made way for the chariots of grand noblemen returning from court or from the temple of Ptah. Like Othrys and other more ordinary citizens, he stumbled over boy students who hurtled through the crowds with their scribes kits dangling from grubby fingers.
The crowds thinned as they made their way to the rear of the enormous grain magazines of the temple of Ptah. The high, arched vaults would overflow with grain after next harvest. When they reached the rear of the buildings, only a few stragglers passed them. Othrys stopped at the corner of the last magazine and peered around the corner. Meren came to stand beside his host and looked into the uneven and neglected lane that came to a dead end at the shrine. A dog trotted out from between two buildings, but it saw them and retreated. Nothing else moved.
Othrys backed away from the corner and turned to Meren. "I leave you here. If you don't come back to my house, I'm not going to look for you."
"Your concern for me is touching," Meren said.
"By the earth mother, I've done more than any of your precious Egyptian friends."
Meren smiled and bowed slightly. "Forgive my foul temper.It comes from being forced to wear this cursed wig. It itches worse than these leggings."
"But no one would recognize you in it," Othrys replied.
"You have my gratitude and my friendship," Meren said. He offered his hand, and they exchanged a warrior's grip. "If I live, you will receive proof of my thankfulness."
"Farewell, Egyptian. I'll go home and pronounce curses on those who plot your destruction. May fate be with you."
In moments, Meren was alone. The carnelian orb of Ra was sinking behind the city's tall buildings when Meren stepped into the lane. Elongated shadows cut across his path, and the air seemed to turn gold with the sun's passage. He could smell water from the submerged fields of Inundation, along with the odor of cooking fires. Ahead of him stood the shrine. It had been built as a part of a temple complex hundreds of years ago, when the city was much smaller. Memphis had encroached upon its perimeter walls, and finally the little temple had been abandoned, its buildings quarried for their stone.
All that remained was this little square structure, a processional kiosk that everyone referred to as a shrine. Its columns were square, and it had a central staircase leading up to a threshold from which the doors and shutters had vanished long ago. The doorway was flanked by two tall windows, and the whole of the outer surface was carved. Meren had visited the place as a youth and remembered seeing raised reliefs of a pharaoh, Sesostris, presenting offerings to a god.
Meren reached the shrine. Avoiding the stairs, he went to one of the windows and surveyed the interior. Devoid of furnishings, it was littered with trash blown from the lane— scraps of a papyrus sandal, dead palm leaves, a few feathers, and sand. Meren walked around to the back. A storehouse had been built so close that he had to enter the space between the two buildings sideways. He hadn't been there long when four men appeared in the lane. As they approached the shrine and stepped out of a long shadow, Meren breathed more easily. Abu and Reia walked ahead of his son and Ebana. All of them were armed. Slipping from his hiding place, Meren waited beside the shrine. Abu saw him first and saluted. At his movement, Kysen grinned, called to Meren, and ran to him.
"Father!" Kysen halted abruptly and studied his father.
"I'm well, Ky." Meren dragged his son into his arms for a brief, rough embrace and released him,
"What happened?" Kysen said as the others drew near. He held out a dagger, which Meren took and slid beneath his belt. "How could pharaoh believe you would—"
Meren held up his hand. "Later." He grasped Ebana's arm. "Cousin."
There was no need for words. One glance at those features that were so like his own wiped away years, and they were back at his father's estate in the country, daring each other to spend the night in the ghost-infested desert. They smiled at each other, and for once bitterness and accusations of betrayal failed to divide them.
Ebana put his fists on his hips and grinned at Meren. "If you keep getting yourself into such peril, I'll have to give up being a priest of Amun and become your bodyguard."
"I've missed you," Meren said.
Ebana's smile faded. "Our estrangement wasn't my fault."
"Ebana, don't."
"I know. This isn't the time. With your permission, cousin. Your men should find cover in the darkness of the shrine, as should we."
The kiosk had a central chamber flanked by a smaller room on each side, formed by rectangular pillars. It was gloomy in the larger room in spite of the gaping doorway, and dark in the smaller rooms except near the windows. Abu and Reia melted into the shadows of the two western pillars inside a flanking chamber while Meren and Kysen took a pillar on the east and Ebana the remaining one.
They'd just taken their places when an obsidian figure walked into view from the direction of the magazines. It was Mose. Long strides brought him to the foot of the stairs. As he mounted them, Turi hurried around the corner of the storehouse and to the front of the shrine. The two guards stared at each other in the fading light, then exchanged queries in their native language. In confusion they continued their exchange as they ascended the staircase and entered the shrine.
Meren waited until they were well inside before moving. In silence he slipped around the pillar and put himself between the two men and the doorway.
"Greetings," he said, causing the Nubians to whirl around and reach for their daggers.
As they moved, Kysen, Ebana, and the rest appeared, their weapons drawn. The Nubians froze in the act of drawing their blades.
"Hands away from your daggers," Meren commanded.
Abu relieved them of their weapons as Kysen joined Meren.