As a boy Kysen had been outraged when he discovered the existence of the Caverns. But Meren had shrugged and said that there had always been chaos in the midst of harmony, and that Egypt was fortunate that the god of disorder, Set, ruled over so small a kingdom within the imperial capital. Besides, where else could common men go for entertainment?
Kysen had grown up since asking that question, and now he frequented the Caverns for his own purposes. Nowhere could one hear fresher rumors of corruption, bribery, abuse, and murder. Gossip in the Caverns was more efficient and sometimes more accurate than a royal messenger. Kysen smiled as he approached the tavern and rest house called the Divine Lotus. Its owner, the woman Ese, was the font of all gossip, rumor, and scandal. If she was in a tolerant mood this evening, he might persuade her to make inquiries about the former intimate servants of Nefertiti.
Here in the shadowed world of thieves, dishonest government underlings, whores, and murderers, he went by another name, Nen. Nen was supposed to be the sixth son of the assistant to the steward of a minor noble. As one of eight children, he had little wealth but a taste for luxuries he'd seen at the household where his father worked, no matter how they were obtained. In the Caverns he was known as a clever and easygoing lover of idleness. Everyone knew Nen's time was spent designing clever schemes by which he would profit with as little labor as possible. Outlaws, cheaters, and the corrupt felt at ease with him.
As he set his foot on the step before the threshold of the Divine Lotus, a dirty, sweat-stained body hurtled into him. Kysen fell back against the wall beside the door, the wind knocked out of him. He gulped in air, and with it whiffs of a sickly sweet odor that spoke of months without bathing. Few men smelled like a wet oxhide that had been covered with tallow and baked under a hot sky; the whining shriek that assailed his ears confirmed the figure's identity.
"Tcha, get off me!"
The thief uttered a hyena's yelp, missed his footing on the steps, and fell on his ass in the street. Kysen would have left him there, but Tcha squeezed his eyes shut, covered his head with his arms, and burst out with a spell.
"I am the chosen one, I am the chosen one whose name is unknown! If a creature of the water open his mouth to strike, I speak my name. I speak my name, and the water boils. Evil is destroyed, evil is destroyed!"
"By my ka," Kysen said. "Are you cursing me, you sniveling teller of tales?"
Tcha lifted his head so that two slanted eyes like wet
nabk
berries peered over his arm. "Master! It is you." Tcha untied the knot he'd made of his body and scrambled to his feet. Glancing over his shoulder every few moments, he hurried over to Kysen, bowing and bobbing.
"You've stolen something valuable, haven't you?" Kysen said.
Tcha was Kysen's oldest, and one of his most useful, acquaintances in the Caverns, and the only one who knew who Kysen really was. Almost a year ago he'd fished the thief out of a work gang to which he'd been condemned and arranged for his crimes to be forgiven in exchange for guidance into life here. Now they saw each other infrequently, but Tcha knew that Kysen could find him. He also knew what would happen to him should he reveal what he knew of his benefactor to anyone.
"Tcha never steals, O great master. Everyone thinks I'm a miserable thief, just because I never had no fine house, no fertile fields, no good bread nor beer nor linen robes nor—"
"Tcha, close your mouth."
"Yes, O great master, giver of bounty, gracious of heart, divine of beauty—"
"I said no more!" Kysen again turned to enter the tavern, but Tcha started to follow him, bringing the thief close enough for him to get another noseful of his incomparable odor. "Gods deliver me from your foul smell, Tcha. It's worse than usual." Sniffing, Kysen lifted his brows. "Do I smell honey amidst your other disgusting humors?"
His eyes shifting to the side, Tcha mumbled something inaudible. He edged away from Kysen. As he moved, he clicked, and his movement brought him into the light of a taper in a sconce beside the door.
Kysen descended the steps and planted himself opposite the thief. "What in the name of Amun have you done to yourself?"
Tcha had never been presentable. He was as emaciated as a body fresh from the embalming table, short because of bowed legs, and scarred from beatings that were the rewards of unsuccessful thievery. Although no more than six years older than Kysen, he looked older than Meren. His skin had the cracked, baked appearance of a field at the end of the season of Drought, and three of his upper front teeth were missing. Their absence caused a lisp in his speech. Brittle, dried-reed hair formed greasy plates that issued from the crown of his head and snaked over his ears and forehead and down to the back of his dirty neck.
Indeed, Tcha had always been painful to the eye and to the nose, but he'd never emitted anything resembling a pleasant odor. And he'd never covered himself in more magical amulets than a pharaoh's corpse. Nor had he painted his grimy body with expensive honey. Yet here Tcha stood, his arms, legs, neck, waist, and head encircled with old string, twine, and narrow papyrus rope from which he'd strung countless amulets. And he was evidently reluctant to speak of his strange appearance.
"Tcha, I asked you what you'd done to yourself."
"Precautions, O great master," Tcha muttered. He stuck his arms behind his back as if this action would hide all the amulets.
"Precautions against what?" Kysen asked.
Tcha's eyes darted from shadow to shadow, corner to corner. "Against evil, lord. There be great evil abroad."
"Blessed Toth and Anubis," Kysen said with an increasing grin. "You've thought of a way to protect yourself against the city police. That spell you screeched at me was for use against crocodiles, you know, not men. And if you wear all those amulets while skulking around some artisan's house, you'll clatter like a sistrum."
"The master is wise," Tcha mumbled as he snaked a glance up and down the Street of Foreigners.
"In truth, Tcha, many of those amulets are only for funerary use. Look at this. You have Djed-columns, the girdle amulet, the four sons of Horus, the amulet of the headrest, heart scarabs. Are you planning a journey through the netherworld soon? Don't tell me you plan to rob Osiris and the other gods."
Tcha started, then laughed with a sound like a throw stick scraping polished granite. "Thy jest is most humorous, great master."
"You only need a few amulets to protect yourself from harm," Kysen said as he tried not to smile. He noted that most of the amulets were cheap faience, but a few were of more expensive but damaged stones. He saw a green jasper turtle, a double lion in carnelian, and an amethyst falcon. "I recommend wearing one Eye of Horus, one scarab, and perhaps the ankh, sign of life, so that you will continue in this existence. But why in the name of Amun have you coated yourself with honey?"
"Mistress Ese give it to me. She says that which is sweet to the living is foul to demons."
Shaking his head, Kysen went to the tavern door and opened it. "True, but if you insist on creeping about your business in that condition, you'll end up fodder for crocodiles no matter how many spells you chant. Keep your distance from me, Tcha. The next time I see you, you will have bathed in the Nile. At least five times. With soap paste."
He left Tcha and entered the Divine Lotus, still shaking his head. He forgot the thief with his first glimpse of the tavern interior. He'd heard that Ese had expanded the place and refurbished it. She was known for changing the tavern's appearance so that her patrons were continually surprised and delighted. But this time Ese had surpassed her own reputation for the exotic. She had turned the Divine Lotus into a Mycenaean Greek villa.
Kysen stepped into a megaron, a Greek great hall nearly the size of the one in his own home. The walls shone with brightly painted frescoes of women in Mycenaean dresses with tight bodices that bared the breasts, flounced skirts, and gold rosette earrings. Some of their hair was pulled up and knotted at the crown, while a ribbon bound a long coil of it that hung down the back. Designs of running spirals, zigzags, and stripes bordered the frescoes and the ceiling.
A circular central hearth provided heat, for even in Egypt the nights often brought a chill. Woven cushions and mats were strewn in groups around the hall to form private clusters lit by alabaster lamps. The place was crowded, as usual, but Kysen noticed that tonight most of the customers were foreign, Greeks from Crete and Cyprus, Libyans, several nomads. He saw traders from the great Mycenaean city-states—Argos, Corinth, Pylos, and the city of Mycenae itself. Others he knew to be nobles and merchants from the islands of Rhodes, Melos, and Samos. One group around a lord from Rhodes included captains of ships from Byblos and Tyre, and even a Hittite overland trader.
Those who preferred to conduct their pleasures less visibly sat against the walls or leaned on one of the four tall columns that surrounded the hearth and supported a clerestory that allowed light in during the day and provided an escape for smoke. In corners and places away from the hearth lurked the less grand denizens of the Divine Lotus. The door behind Kysen opened a crack. Tcha slipped inside and scuttled around the perimeter of the hall to join a hive of charlatans, villains, and corrupt minions of corrupt officials. It was as if a ring of corrosion surrounded a central core of bronze ridden with its own, less visible defilement.
Kysen threaded his way through the groups of customers. He paused to acknowledge a greeting from a trader who regularly bribed dock officials to let him ship in unrecorded luxuries that he sold to Egyptian clients. Returning the bow of a dealer in perfumes who had fled Corinth after sleeping with a nobleman's wife, Kysen took a stool beside the hearth and surveyed the megaron.
Strange that the place was so devoid of Egyptians this evening. He saw a few in the rooms beyond, even a particularly bloodthirsty Nubian prince playing a game of senet with one of the tavern women. The prince led royal expeditions deep into the southern wild lands in search of leopards, elephants, and rare spice trees. At least once during a regnal year his expeditions were attacked and robbed by savage tribes who seemed to know their exact route.
Kysen paused in his survey of the patrons. He leaned to one side in order to get a better view of a dark corner of the megaron. There, among the less accomplished villains, sat Prince Rahotep. Wearing a plain kilt and no jewels, he was slumped on a stool against a wall, alone, his hands fastened around a drinking cup big enough for three men. As Kysen watched, the prince hiccuped, bent over his cup, and sucked wine like a cow at a drinking trough. Then he came up for air and cradled the cup against his chest, all the while wearing an expression more suited to an embalming shed than a tavern.
Rahotep had always been given to bouts of sorrowful drinking. Kysen had noted that lately the episodes were growing more frequent. He and most of Rahotep's friends refused to go with the prince on these outings. Inevitably, when he'd had a cup or two of wine, Rahotep would grow quarrelsome. After his fourth or fifth cup, he stopped fighting, stopped talking altogether. He sank into a private world of anguish from which he wouldn't surface for the rest of the night. After hours of black silence, Rahotep vanished. Then in a day or two he'd reappear wearing his old brash manner, oblivious of the irritation of his friends. Kysen turned his back on Rahotep, who was deep in his misery and wouldn't notice him.
A serving boy brought Kysen beer in a double-handled chalice of the hard, eggshell-thin pottery for which the Greeks were famous. Ese had gone to much expense to acquire the finest of such vessels for the use of her guests. Kysen was admiring the tall stem of the chalice that flared out into a graceful bowl when he noticed that the people around him had stopped talking and were staring over his head.
He turned to face a curtain of blue, white, and green flounces. Lifting his gaze, he saw hips bound by a tight skirt. He continued his visual climb and found two small mountains of flesh surrounded by a tight bodice. Above these he encountered a rounded face framed by tight Greek curls of dark brown tinted with red.
Two dark eyes met his. They were eyes that could convey any emotion their owner wished. Most often, in the great hall, they held graciousness combined with a hint of the exotic and promises of the pleasures of Hathor. Kysen had seen them as they truly were—flat, with a serpent's lack of pity, glittering with cold resentment, alight with the amusement of a cat playing with a wounded field mouse.
She spoke in a low, rough voice that sent hot spears of reaction through her male guests and caused her tavern women to fall silent. "May Hathor bless you, Nen."
"She has blessed me beyond wishing by your presence, Mistress Ese."
"That Syrian wine you asked for has arrived," she said.
He'd ordered no wine, but Ese had already left, giving him no choice but to follow her. The din of conversation, gaming, and drinking rose around him once more as he stood and went after the woman. Ese walked out of the hall to an inner stairwell. Instead of ascending the stairs, she opened a door and vanished. Kysen hurried after her. As he pulled the door closed, he glimpsed a shadow sailing into the stairwell. By its shape and the odor of honey and decay, he knew it was Tcha.
Shutting the door, Kysen found himself in an open garden court with a central reflection pool. Ese was reclining on a couch beneath an awning at the opposite end of the pool. A Syrian slave waved a white ostrich feather fan over her mistress. When Kysen approached, Ese pointed to a cushion on the ground beside the couch. He lowered himself to it and accepted wine in a vessel of unusual design, a bronze drinking cup shaped like the head of a gazelle. The modeled nose was made to be set in a stand.
"You have become Mycenaean," Kysen said.
"For the moment."
"After this, what will you become?"
Ese lifted her face to the silver moonlight. "Babylonian, perhaps." She glanced down at him. "Perhaps a Hittite."