The honey pot sailed at him. Meren dropped a ball and snatched the jar. It bounced in his hand. A sphere hit his head. Another hit his foot, but he kept hold of the honey pot. Brown goo spilled over his hand and through his fingers. Remi crowed, and Meren danced out of the way of a stream of honey. Righting the jar, Meren set it on the floor and wiped his hands on the lip.
"You little demon, for that you must pay. You'll shower with me." Remi turned over from his sitting position, climbed to his feet, and started running. Meren caught him at the door. "Got you. Where's your nurse? Did you put her in a clothing chest? Lock her in with the cattle?" His answer was a smirking giggle.
With Remi in his arms, Meren walked out into the courtyard and headed for the women's quarters. As he passed the dining hall, he heard pounding at the front door. It had to be loud to reach him through the dining hall, reception chamber, and entryway. Servants were stirring; a maid ran up to take Remi from him. Meren was heading back to his room to bathe away the honey that coated his hands when the old man who served as his porter scurried up to him.
Bowing, the man rubbed his hands on his kilt. "Pardon, lord, pardon, pardon."
Meren stopped and waited patiently. It did no good to lose patience with old Seti. He only panicked.
"You know I don't want to see anyone until after I've dined with my son and Remi." Meren turned away.
"Pardon, lord. It is a priest, an embalmer priest." Seti made a sign against evil and lowered his voice. "He seeks help, lord, for there has been a murder in the Place of Anubis ."
* * *
Meren held out his hand for the king's falcon collar. Gold, turquoise, and malachite bead strands curled into his palm, and he stepped back with his eyes lowered. The king stood with his arms at his sides, his gaze fixed on the double doors of his robing chamber. His lips pressed together so hard that their fullness almost disappeared. One hand clenched and unclenched around the belt that secured his kilt.
Since Pharaoh hadn't given permission for anyone to speak, the loudest sounds in the room were the click of gold against stone and the rustle of pleated linen. Meren took an engraved electrum armband from a casket and handed it to the vizier Ay. The king's arm shot out, stiff, the hand balled in a fist. Ay fastened the hinged band. The arm swung down. At the same time a muscle,in Pharaoh's jaw twitched. Meren offered the matching band to Ay; he looked up at the king's face. As he did so, Tutankhamun abandoned his pretense of studying the door and looked at him. Meren winked, and the king's solar smile burst upon him.
"The Lord Meren has permission to speak to my majesty," the king said.
Meren tried not to look at the vizier. Refusing to allow his chief minister to speak was one of the king's small vengeances taken upon the man who was his foster father. It served Ay right for piling too many duties on a boy who was only fourteen, for all he was the son of the god. This morning Ay had foiled the king's attempt to steal from the palace and sail his skiff on the Nile. Instead, Pharaoh spent the morning in ceremony and listening to the avaricious howling of the priests of Amun.
"Sovereign, my master, what is thy will?"
Tutankhamun grinned at Meren while holding out his hand so that Ay could slide a ring on it. "You are one of the Eyes and Ears of Pharaoh. What happenings are there to report?"
"Nubian bandits in the south, majesty. And the prince who absconded with the serfs of Lord Soter has been persuaded to return them."
"Prince Hunefer would rob the night of its stars if he could," Tutankhamun said. He twisted one of the rings on his hand.
"And there has been murder, divine lord."
The king lifted his eyes from the ring. He waved his hand; servants and lords faded away through the double doors.
"Tell me."
Meren hesitated for the space of a heartbeat, during which he stifled his own guilt. He would be commanded to hunt a murderer again, when he was guilty of that crime himself. No matter that he hadn't known they were going to kill Akhenaten. He'd suspected it and let Ay send him to the Libyan border anyway. And even if his own conscience were clear, he worried about the boy king. There was no way of knowing whether his news would bring out the youth in Pharaoh, or the burdened monarch.
"A man has been found in the Place of Anubis," Meren said. "He was stabbed in the neck with an embalming knife, and the Controller of the Mysteries of Anubis begs me for aid."
The king's eyes grew round. He rested a knee on the seat of an ebony chair and shivered. "Desecration of the place of embalming. Do you—do you think that the poor souls of the dead ones have fled in fear? They might be afraid to be reborn."
"I don't know, majesty, but this evil touches a sacred place and involves priests. One must not capture suspicious ones and beat them in hope of finding a criminal."
"No," the king said. "It isn't wise to beat priests."
Tutankhamun turned and slouched down in the ebony chair. "You're going to hunt another murderer, and I will sit for hours in the throne room listening to the complaints of governors, bureaucrats, priests, and that cobra of a Hittite ambassador."
Meren bowed to his king. He took in the wistful expression and slumped shoulders. Once Kysen had been burdened as was the king, and it had taken Meren years to undo the damage wrought by his adopted son's natural father. He would speak to Ay about allowing the king time to be a youth instead of a divine ruler.
"I sent my son to the Place of Anubis before I attended Pharaoh. Shall I come to the sovereign with news of this abomination?"
"Yes!" The king jumped from the chair. It went sliding across the floor. "Yes, tell me everything. At least I can trust you not to conceal the evil from me or dress up your affairs in order to gain favor. You must hurry. This matter of the embalming knife is likely to be the only interesting business of the day."
It was Meren who jumped when Pharaoh grabbed his arm and hauled him toward the doors. Tutankhamun flung open the door and gave Meren's shoulder a push.
"Hurry. I remember what you told me: One must study the place where evil has been done before the scent and markings of that evil vanish. Hurry."
Meren stepped out of the royal suite. The door banged shut, and he looked around at the astonished courtiers, who regarded him as if he were a red crocodile. Hiding the consternation that had gripped him since Pharaoh touched him, Meren ducked behind a column and set off for his chariot. News of that touch would be all over the court in an hour. By nightfall, word of the sign of favor would be on its way to Babylon, Tyre, Sidon, the courts of the Syrian princes, and the king of the Hittites.
As he threaded his way through the crowds of nobles, civil servants, and palace dignitaries, Meren maintained what he liked to call his unseen mask. Having spent many years in a court where a smile at the wrong person or the lifting of a brow at the wrong time could mean death, concealing the true face of his
ka,
his soul, was as natural as wearing a kilt. Before the old Pharaoh killed his father, he'd been as open as a lotus blossom. The day Pharaoh's guards took his father away, the bloom closed up into a tight knot and never reopened. Within the knot he concealed the scars of his father's death, his own torture and degradation—and the suspected truth about Akhenaten's death.
Living with the scars was easier now. As with the scar from his branding, the surface injuries had long since healed. Only occasionally, as this morning, did he suffer from visitations from the past. Did the gods know, and send the memories to haunt him as a warning of coming evil? It was as if they cautioned him to be fair, to seek out Maat, the essential truth and harmony of life by which the world existed. But could he? Once he had confused the good of the country with his own need for vengeance and allowed a man to die.
No, that wasn't true. Others had decided that there had been enough madness in the Two Lands long before Meren suspected a movement to kill Akhenaten. If he had tried to stop them, they would have killed him too. Ay put no one above the good of Egypt.
Meren shook his head in an attempt to clear it of conflicting principles. An old battle, this one. He sometimes imagined himself in the Hall of Judgment in the netherworld, standing before the eternal scales while the gods weighed his heart against the feather of truth. The scales would teeter back and forth. They would sway wildly until the pan that held his heart clattered to the floor. His heart would burst open and swarms of maggots spill out of it, and the gods would condemn him to be devoured by monsters.
Meren, you have the wits of a porcupine.
He deliberately turned his thoughts back to the court and the king.
To survive he'd learned to wear unseen masks, facades constructed to suit his purpose of the moment. It was a skill taught him by his father and the vizier, and it was one he was attempting to pass on to the king. For a trusting, open sovereign courted destruction.
Meren allowed himself a barely audible sigh. It wouldn't be long before the king realized the consequences of that open display of favor. Meren already knew that in those short moments he had acquired many new enemies and false friends. One of the king's ancestors had written something about the court. He'd advised his son not to trust a brother or know a friend, and when lying down to guard his heart himself. Meren had always remembered that advice, along with the caution that in Pharaoh's court, even the king has no friends on the day of woe.
It took less than an hour for Meren and several of the royal charioteers who were his assistants to drive to the Place of Anubis. During the trip down the southern road from the palace on the west bank, Meren packed away his doubts in the sealed casket of his
ka.
He'd indulged in the luxury of self-reproach too long. Pharaoh's justice must be served, his subjects protected from evil, killers stalked and caught. And by doing so, Meren might assuage the yammering hyenas of his own conscience. The embalmers' workshops were placed some distance from the palace, government, and mortuary complexes of western Thebes so that the fumes and waste produced by the mysteries wouldn't disturb Pharaoh and his subjects. As he handed the reins of his horses to a groom, Meren wrinkled his nose. He saw that one of his men was making the sign against evil. Kysen was waiting for him in the embalming shed. As usual, his son was prowling about like a hunting hound. Ignoring the grand lector priest, Kysen bombarded an unfortunate bandager with questions. It was the same with each inquiry. Kysen would drop into conversation with the serf, the artisan, the laborer. Only reluctantly would he spar with a lord or a priest. Meren had tried to wean his son of this preference, but it was hard to wipe out the memories of being sold into slavery by a father, even if one did end up the adopted son of a Friend of the King.
Meren received the greetings of the lector priest while perusing the scene. Teams of embalmers went about their chores with little sign that they feared the presence of a soul dispatched from its body in violence. The drying shed was a long tunnel filled by two rows of embalming tables reserved for the wealthier citizens, who could afford the more expensive process of preservation. Along the edge of the open, roofed structure lay tables laden with the tools of the embalmer's craft— spoons, knives, probes, needles, and thread, all in boxes or on trays. An ornate table set apart from the others held a casket carved with hieroglyphs and the image of the jackal god Anubis. The lid of the casket was askew.
Squatting near the casket, looking miserable and frightened, was a young laborer. Meren could scent fear as a hound scents a wounded gazelle. His curiosity was roused, but he knew better than to let it loose. Kysen was in charge, and his son had left the youth by himself for a reason.
Having responded politely to the formal words of the lector priest's greeting, Meren followed the man to the fourth embalming table on the left row. As he approached, Kysen dismissed the laborer he was questioning with a nod. Meren was proud of that nod. It was one of the first signs that the boy had accepted his new position in the world when Kysen first used the gesture of acknowledgment of a noble to a commoner.
Meren and Kysen met at the natron table. Immediately and without words, they fell into their working habits. Like a skilled artisan and his best apprentice, they worked and thought in complementary directions. Kysen knew what tasks Meren would want done; Meren sensed when Kysen needed direction or advice. Standing side by side, they gazed down at the body nestled in the crystals.
"They haven't touched him since they found the knife," Kysen said. "You're here earlier than I expected."
"Pharaoh commanded me to hurry."
Kysen sucked in a breath, then let it out slowly. "The living god is wise."
"The living god is bored." It was difficult not to smile at Kysen's awe. "Don't wheeze as though you had swallowed a whole pomegranate. Tell me what you know."
"This man is Hormin, scribe of records and tithes in the office of the vizier." Kysen nodded in the direction of the frightened laborer. "As they were digging him out, that water carrier recognized him." He pointed to an engraved bronze bracelet on the wrist of the dead man. "Then the lector priest found his name and titles on that. There are also a signet ring and wig."
Kysen leaned over the natron table and touched the obsidian blade that protruded from Hormin's neck. "This is a ritual embalming knife. It is used to make incisions when the bowels—"
"I understand," Meren said. "And this Hormin, is he known to the embalmers?"
"No, only the water carrier admits to having seen him before. I'm going to talk to him after we get rid of the body and that pigeon-witted lector priest."
Kysen shoved away from the natron table and walked over to the side of the shed, and Meren followed. Kysen stopped beside the table containing the Anubis casket.
"The knife was kept in here," he said. He took a blade from the casket. Even in the shade of the embalming shed the facets of the black glass reflected light. Kysen pointed to the ground around the table.