Year of the Hyenas (23 page)

Within their
homes the
villagers clung to their husbands and wives, and draped their children
with protective amulets and charms. Everyone knew the same awful
truth—that somehow the heavy stone that had been rolled across the
tomb’s door had not been enough—that Hetephras had returned to her
village.

SEMERKET ANDQAR DREAMED EVERY NIGHTof lionesses.
Semerket, who had never before been frightened by the landscape of
sleep, was now afraid to close his eyes for more than a few minutes. He
discovered that by sitting up all night on the brick bench in
Hetephras’s reception room, he could wake more quickly when the lioness
sprang, and so elude her fangs yet another night. Since that day when
Prince Pentwere had bedecked him with amulets and charms, he had been
prey to sharp, mysterious pains in his body, while his skull throbbed
with headaches. It seemed at times that he felt a kind of suffocation
enveloping him, as if his lungs could not breathe in enough air. During
the day he went about his investigations red-eyed and grim, tired from
his dream running, his temper short.

Qar, who had
been
trained by his sorceress mother to confront his nightmares, found his
dream-spears powerless against the lioness. They fell short of their
mark, or veered away at the last moment, or broke like straw against
her. The only defense against her claws and teeth was to remain
awake—or to run. Like Semerket, he dared not sleep for long.

Semerket one
night
woke from a dream where the lioness had lunged at him from behind a
nearby tree. She had come so close to seizing him in her claws that she
had managed to snag a few strands of his flying hair. He had wakened
then, to find his scalp still stinging from where the dream lioness had
pulled out his hair, and found the place shorn as cleanly as if it had
been shaved. He felt his head in fearful puzzlement. But then the noise
of Hetephras’s door being latched caught him off-guard. Still terrified
from the dream, he could not summon the courage to see who—or what—had
been in Hetephras’s front room.

Semerket
gripped the
charms and amulets around his neck given to him by Queen Tiya. They
burned his fingers as if they had rested in fire, and seemed to have a
weight that had not been in them before. Where they hung against his
chest, the skin was chafed and red. In one gesture, without thinking,
he tore them away, throwing them far to the end of the room where Sukis
lay. She hissed and ran from the room to a wall in the alleyway, and
from there leapt to the roof.

SEMERKET ENTERED THEHouse of Life at
Djamet Temple through bronze-clad doors that rose six cubits or more.
Situated next to Pharaoh’s residence, the House of Life was a maze of
gardens, reflecting pools, and pillared terraces. Within the House of
Life were the books on mathematics, the natural sciences, moral
precepts, official histories, and magic formulae that comprised the
collected wisdom of Egypt, and it was to these he headed.

Semerket
walked past
the classrooms and lecture halls, glancing at the scribes-to-be who
labored in them. Because the tombmakers still huddled behind the
locked doors of their homes, Semerket was taking advantage of his
enforced idleness to find out more about the mysterious Queen Twos-re,
whose liver—if it was truly hers—resided in the house of Paneb. He
hoped to find a logical explanation why the foreman should possess such
a relic. Try as he would, Semerket found it impossible to dislike the
big man; he wanted to free his mind from the nagging doubts that
somehow Paneb was involved in tomb robbery.

Semerket was
directed
to a librarian named Maadje. The man, slightly hunchbacked, sat on a
bench with a papyrus rolled out in front of him. As Semerket neared,
the librarian hastily rerolled the scroll, glancing up with irritation.
Semerket noticed with distaste the rash of pimples that covered the
man’s face, and winced at his disagreeable scent.

“What do you
want?”
the librarian asked coldly.

“I’m looking
for
information on a Queen Twos-re.”

Maadje reacted
with a
small but scandalized gasp, his eyebrows arching high. “Restricted
section,” Maadje said. “No one’s allowed in there without permission.”

Semerket was
surprised. “Why should that be?”

“If I told
you, there
wouldn’t be any need to restrict it, would there?”

Semerket
sighed
inwardly. Like many librarians Semerket had run across before, Maadje
regarded the scrolls in the House of Life as his own property, to
remain pristinely unopened and safe upon the shelves. He held up his
vizier’s seal hanging on the chain of jasper beads around his neck.

“Will this
admit me?”
he asked.

Sighing
dolorously,
the hunchbacked librarian rose to his feet, adjusted his kilt, and
disappeared into the rear of the building. After he had gone, Semerket
idly knelt to open the scroll the librarian had been reading. Images of
the most outrageous sexual debauchery met his eyes. So exotic were the
drawings that Semerket in his naïveté would have had
difficulty even imagining the acts—let alone expecting to see them in a
scroll belonging to the House of Life.

“Well?” Maadje
called
irritatedly from a distance. “Am I to wait for you until day’s end?”

Semerket let
the
scroll roll shut. When he caught up to Maadje, the librarian pointed to
a shelf full of scrolls located in a separate room. “In there,” he
said. He did not wait for any more questions, but scuttled quickly back
to his papyrus.

Two other
individuals
were in the “restricted room.” One was a Libyan, which Semerket
discerned from the style of his beard—a bodyguard, by the look of him.
He hovered near a very light-skinned gentleman, who squinted at
Semerket with the pale eyes of a northerner.

Though the man
might
rank a personal guard, Semerket noticed, he was nevertheless dressed
very simply, and his fingers were black with ink-stains. Semerket saw
that the man was holding ancient building plans close to his face.

An architect,
Semerket
surmised. The man noticed him looking, and helpfully moved his scrolls
aside so that Semerket could approach the shelves.

They nodded
gravely to
one another.

Semerket chose
a
scroll from the shelf that Maadje had indicated and opened it. He sat
down on the floor and began to read, but as the minutes passed he
became increasingly frustrated. The scroll had nothing to do with
Twos-re, being instead a treatise about someone called “the great
criminal of Akhetaton,” someone who had supposedly ruled Egypt a couple
of centuries before. He pushed the scroll aside, his mouth pursed in
annoyance.

The man across
the
tiles squinted shortsightedly at him, and put aside his pens. “Might I
help? I’ve become quite familiar with the arrangement of the scrolls
here. If you’ll tell me what you’re looking for…?”

“Well,” began
Semerket, doubtfully. “I need to find out about a certain Queen
Twos-re.”

“Really?” The
man
looked at him sharply. “May I ask why?”

Semerket spoke
in
vague terms. “I’m a clerk of Investigations and Secrets for Vizier Toh,
and I’ve recently come across a—well, something—that refers to her. I
need to know more, to make sense of it.”

“Then you must
be
Semerket; Toh’s mentioned you often.”

Semerket gaped
at the
man, taken aback. It always surprised him to be known by others. Before
he could ask his name, however, the man had seized the scroll Semerket
had been perusing, and laughed. “Maadje’s sent you to the wrong shelf,
as usual. If you like, I can tell you what I know about her.”

“You… ? You’re
a
historian? I thought you were an architect.”

The man was
puzzled.
“Architect?” Then he saw the plans that were laid out before him, and
his voice became amused. “You think because of these plans here that
I’m a…” He turned to the Libyan and laughed. The other man smiled as
well. “Well, perhaps, but I also know a little history,” he said.
“Secret history, in this case.”

“Secret?”

“Twos-re was
not just
any queen, you know—she was also a king.”

Semerket
remembered
the glyph for “divine female” that he had found next to the queen’s
cartouche on the canopic jar. “She must have ruled quite a while ago,
then. We haven’t had a female king since Hatshepsut.”

“She ruled
just forty
years ago, in fact.”

Semerket was
shocked.
“But there is no monument to her, no mention of her at all on the
temple walls. You’d think that with her reign’s being so recent, one
would hear at least a mention of her.”

The man shook
his
head. “Her name was stricken from the official lists of rulers by King
Setnakhte.”

“Pharaoh’s
father?”

“He had her
statues
hacked to pieces, and her name obliterated everywhere it was found.
Even her tomb was destroyed.”

“What had she
done to
deserve so terrible a fate?”

“She had
killed her
own husband, so that only she was left to put on the red and white
crowns. Even her nephews died mysteriously. But the gods were appalled
by her sins, and they caused the Nile to fail in its flooding. Famine
and plague broke out, and civil war ravaged the country. This was how
Pharaoh Setnakhte became king.”

“And she
thought she
could actually succeed?”

“Oh, there had
been a
precedent. Her own father had usurped the throne himself. Amen-meses
was his name.”

Amen-meses!
Where had
he heard the name before? He suddenly remembered—it was the name of the
so-called merchant from whom Paneb had obtained the canopic jar that
held the queen’s preserved liver. Or so Paneb had said. It seemed
strange, Semerket mused, that two names so accursed—Twos-re and
Amen-meses—were linked to a foreman in the Place of Truth. The hair
prickled on his head, and he felt exactly as he had when he was young,
staying up at night to hear the ghost stories told by his parents.

At least the
architect’s tale explained to him why Twos-re’s name had been hewn from
the canopic jar containing her liver. How despised she must have been,
that even her grave-goods had been defiled.

Semerket made
the sign
against misfortune. “At least we are spared such evil in our own day,”
he murmured piously.

The man and
his
bodyguard looked at one another cryptically. “Have we been spared?”
murmured the man, looking off. He seemed to wrestle with himself for a
moment, then leaned forward and whispered, “The tainted blood of
Twos-re and Amen-meses is still alive in Egypt, Semerket, make no
mistake, ready at any moment to—”

The architect
abruptly
ceased speaking when the librarian Maadje appeared, looking stricken.
An imposing priest, tall and thin, hovered behind him.

“There he is!”
Semerket heard Maadje whisper to the priest.

The priest
entered the
room, bringing his arms down to knee level and genuflecting
elaborately. “Your Royal Highness!”

Semerket
looked about,
confused. Did they address the man who sat next to him? But he was an
architect…

“Lord Messui.”
The man
inclined his head to the priest.

“I had no idea
this
man was disturbing you. Maadje will be punished, for bringing him here.”

“I was not
disturbed,”
said the man. “If Maadje is to be punished, then let it be for having
directed this gentleman to the wrong scrolls.” He gathered together his
pens and notes, which the Libyan stashed in a wooden case. With a nod
to everyone in the room, coughing gently into a kerchief, he departed.

“Who was
that?”
Semerket asked the priest after a moment. “Why do you call him ‘Royal
Highness’?”

Messui looked
at
Semerket as if he were simple-minded. “That,” he said with a scowl, “is
to be our next pharaoh. If he survives.”

“Survives?”
Semerket
started to ask.

But Messui was
gone.
Maadje whispered to explain to Semerket what the priest meant,
smirking. “He’s very sickly, the crown prince. Even so, they say he
will be declared the official heir by Pharaoh. That’s why he’s come
here incognito from Pi-Remesse. Queen Tiya has locked herself in her
rooms because of it, they say.”

“Really?”

“Oh, it’s a
great
scandal at court! When Pharaoh married her, it was with the promise that
her
sons would inherit
the throne, but instead he’s going to name this son by his northern
wife, Queen Ese, and she’s just a Canaanite—”

“Maadje!” The
priest
Messui’s voice came sharply over the shelves.

Instantly, the
smelly
little hunchbacked librarian was gone, leaving Semerket to muse alone.
As he rolled up the scrolls and replaced them on the shelves, his mind
once again took up the story of the evil Twosre and her equally
despicable father, King Amen-meses.