City of Dreams (5 page)

Huy had wondered whether he should not go to Taheb for help — she had seemed more than friendly the previous evening — but he did not know her as he knew this obese brothel keeper. Taheb was too intelligent not to deduce what a request for a man’s wig meant.

Nubenehem’s professional incuriosity, on the other hand, was unimpeachable.

‘All right,’ he said, knowing that to bargain would be futile.

‘Come back at dusk,’ she said, then added, looking at him directly. ‘Make time to stay if you can. Kafy is free tonight. I know you like her — and I can’t stop her singing your praises.’

* * * 

Preoccupied, Huy hurried back up the street to his house, his sandals raising dust. A gaunt cat darted across his path to squeeze itself into the handsbreadth of shadow at the base of a wall as he passed, where it settled, glaring at him with pale eyes, the pupils crocodile slits in the fierce light. He looked up from the animal to see Merymose and three Medjay officers waiting outside his door. Merymose was already looking at him. Somehow he managed not to allow his step to falter, and continued on, neither slackening nor quickening his pace, calculating the time he had to compose himself. It would not take him nearly long enough to cover the thirty paces that separated him from the policemen. People were about, and several cast curious stares at the waiting group; though Huy felt confident that no one had seen or heard Surere in the short time he had been in the house. But Huy had left him sleeping, and nothing would help either of them if the Medjays entered now.

Merymose greeted him neutrally. Huy noted that at least there was no aggression in either his face or his voice, and took brief comfort from that: the captain had not been tipped off. It seemed an eternity since they had parted company — but it had only been at dawn on this same day. The Medjay looked as tired as Huy felt.

‘I had not expected to meet you again so soon.’

‘Nor I.’ Merymose’s tone was severe, but perhaps that had more to do with the official nature of the visit than anything else. Huy wondered about the escort, and how soon it would be before he had to open his door to them.

‘You did not tell me about your past last night,’ continued Merymose.

‘I wasn’t aware that it was something that interested you,’ replied Huy.

‘It could have been embarrassing for me to be seen with a former official of the Great Criminal,’ continued Merymose. ‘Taheb should have warned me.’

‘I am sure she thought we would have things to talk about and that is why she placed us together,’ said Huy. ‘As for me, I have done nothing against the edict which prevents me from working as a scribe. If you have read my records, you will know now that I am kept under supervision for some of the time, and that after all I am a very small splinter in the buttock of the state. I doubt if it notices me at all.’

‘Let us hope that is all you are,’ said Merymose. ‘These men will search your house. It is a matter of routine. The homes of all old servants of the Great Criminal are being searched for any sign of the escaped quarryman-prisoner. My own feeling is that, even if you have helped him, you are far too intelligent to allow a trace of your action to become evident to us.’

‘Then why are you here?’

‘First let these men do their job.’ He indicated the door curtly, the bronze bracelet of office on his wrist glinting dully in the sunshine.

Suddenly aware of a tightening at the base of his sternum, and aware too of the beautiful value of the freedom he was about to lose, Huy opened the door and stood aside. The heat of the sun on his face no longer seemed real. He watched the three policemen file into the house as he might have watched actors. He wondered if he should make the usual offer of bread and beer; but this visit was too stiffly official, and in a moment it would be over. He found himself regretting not getting to know Taheb better, now that the opportunity was there; she might genuinely have helped him. He should have let Surere sink or swim by himself. He should have reported him immediately. Perhaps then he might have been reinstated as a scribe. Perhaps…

They stood opposite each other in the street. Huy looked at the familiar scene as if the gods had suddenly placed an invisible screen between it and himself. Half an hour earlier he had belonged here, had had his place, had been the object of no particular attention. He longed to be left alone with the simple problems of loneliness and unemployment again — the two pebbles that had seemed like boulders. The gaunt cat loped by. He looked at it and could not believe that it was the same animal he had seen minutes earlier. The truth was that he was not the same person. How could such an upheaval happen to him, and his surroundings not change? 

Merymose showed no desire to enter the house, but lounged idly, ignoring the stares of the passers-by. He balanced on one foot and pivoted the heel of the other against the ground, his arms folded, his torso bent forward and angled to one side. The question came unbidden into Huy’s heart that this was strange behaviour from a man whose summons to work eight hours earlier had been so urgent that his superiors had sent horses for him; but he thrust that problem aside. What would it matter to him either way, in another minute? Perhaps after all this was the culmination of the work which that summons had set in motion.

Huy looked sharply at the house. How much time had passed since the policemen had gone in? Surely by now they would have found him. Before he could stop it, hope, that insidious and beguiling demon, had risen in his heart. It could not be. It could not. Even if he had gone, Surere would have left some trace: he would not have thought to cover his tracks.

Even as these thoughts clambered over one another in his heart, the first policeman emerged, quickly followed by his two colleagues. They were all young men, perhaps sixteen or seventeen years old, and this business of searching houses, exciting to begin with, had palled. Their faces were tired and dull.

‘Well?’ asked Merymose, going through the form.

‘Nothing, captain.’

Huy was aware that Merymose was looking at him, and forced his expression to stay blank, even relaxed. He knew he was not a good actor and was sure that the effort would show, but Merymose did not react.

He sent the officers on their way, but made no move to leave himself. Immediately Huy prepared himself for a more thorough, more experienced search of the house, one which would reveal — what? Surere had come with nothing, and would have left with nothing, unless he had taken food from the scant store, or located and raided the battered sycamore box containing the handful of copper, gold and silver which remained from Taheb’s fee, and which Huy kept in a hollow behind a loose brick in the wall which ran under the bedhead.

The Medjay appeared to reach a decision. ‘Come with me,’ he said, ‘I want to show you something.’

THREE

The girl was not more than fourteen. She lay on her back on a wooden trestle table which stood under a palm leaf awning in the shady corner of a broad courtyard in the Place of Healing. They had placed linen wadding soaked in water around her to keep her body cool, but despite the attentions of the attendants there was no stopping the persistent flies, and although it was still early enough in the season of
shemu
for the sun’s heat to be mild, her face was already puffy.

Huy could see no mark on the body to indicate how she had died. She was naked, except for golden anklets and bracelets set with emeralds. A rich girl, then; but he could see that already from the delicacy of her skin, and the fine soft hands which lay crossed over her small breasts.

‘What is this?’ he asked Merymose cautiously. The two of them stood side by side by the corpse. From time to time a little breeze, trapped in the courtyard, eddied and gusted in their direction, bringing with it the first hint of the sweet smell of decay.

‘It is something I need your help with. Or at least your advice.’

Huy glanced at his companion, but there was nothing in his expression except serious concern. There was not even tension or anxiety. It was as if what had happened did not surprise him.

‘But you know my background. It’s unlikely that asking my help will be approved by your masters.’

Merymose returned his look. ‘For the moment I am in sole charge of this death. In any case, I am not making an official request.’ 

Huy hesitated. ‘It is difficult for me. You cannot forget who I am and what I was. With a political prisoner escaped, all of us who were at the City of the Horizon must come under increased scrutiny.’

‘Your house will certainly be watched.’

‘And I will be followed. I might lead your men to the fugitive.’

‘That is true. But, if you were prepared to be of service to us…’

‘What makes you think I can be of help?’

‘Everything Taheb has told me about you. Don’t blame her. She wants to help you; and of course people will employ you to help them solve their problems; but that will not make you popular with the Medjays or with Horemheb.’

‘Thank you for the advice. I will be careful.’

Merymose relaxed slightly. ‘It is a pity that you are not a Medjay yourself. Our organisation is only efficient at keeping the streets quiet, and then not always. As for what you do — investigation — that is something new. It interests me, but I am one of very few, and I need instruction.’

‘It would be a case of one blind man leading another.’

‘At least they would be moving along the road. And they might learn to find their way together.’

‘They might fall over a cliff together, too.’ Huy was put at his most suspicious by the policeman’s flattery.

‘Are you not curious about this girl? At least look at her. I cannot keep the body later than this evening. It must be handed over to the embalmers then, or it will be too late.’ Huy paused before asking, ‘Who was she?’

‘Her name was Iritnefert. Her father is Ipuky.’

Huy looked sharply at the Medjay. ‘Ipuky — you mean the Controller of the Silver Mines?’

Merymose nodded.

‘What happened?’ Huy was alarmed. Ipuky was one of the most important men in Tutankhamun’s court.

‘We don’t know. A group of workmen crossing over to the Valley just before dawn found her by the shore.’

‘Where were they crossing? Not from the harbour?’ 

‘No, further downriver.’

‘Nearer the palace?’

‘Yes.’

Huy thought for a moment. Ipuky had a house in the palace compound.

‘As soon as they reported it, Ipuky was informed and I was sent for.’

‘The horses?’

‘Yes.’

Huy looked at the girl again. She had a delicate, innocent face; the cheeks still round with the plumpness of childhood. Someone had closed her eyes, placing white stones on the lids to keep them down. There was nothing in the cast of her features to suggest that she had been alarmed or frightened at the moment of her death.

‘Did anybody take note of how she looked when she was found? Of how she was lying on the ground, for example?’

‘The first people to arrive were servants from Ipuky’s household, and they took the body there. If I hadn’t requested a delay the embalmers would have already covered her in natron.’ Merymose looked grim.

‘You were brave to make that request. What did they think of it?’

‘They were astonished; but Ipuky is an intelligent man, and he wants whoever did this caught. I am sure his wife thought I was in league with Set.’ Merymose’s face betrayed a flicker of amusement. ‘But the murderer must be brought in, or I will have to pay the price.’

‘It is a pity you didn’t see the girl at the place she died. That might have told us much.’

‘I know. I talked to the workmen. The foreman said that the girl was lying on her back, her hands folded, as she is now.’

‘Was she dressed?’

‘She was naked.’

Huy stepped closer to the body. He had no medical knowledge, and no idea of what to do, what to look for; but the calmness of the body intrigued him. It raised many questions. 

He touched it softly. The sun had warmed the skin, giving it the illusion of life.

‘Are there any marks on her back?’

‘None that I noticed.’

Huy looked at the girl’s hands again: they were without a blemish. Her heels were grazed. The rest of her skin, over all the visible part of her body, was clear and unbroken. He would need a doctor to tell him if she had been violated, but there was no indication of it, not even a bruise on an arm where a strong hand might have held her. He reached gently behind her head and felt her hair and the back of her neck, detecting no damage. He registered the stiffness in her body as he lowered her head again.

‘Well?’ asked Merymose.

‘I can tell nothing,’ Huy said. ‘There has been no violence, and there is no way of telling the manner of her death.’

Merymose sighed. ‘That is what the doctors say.’

‘Have you spoken to Ipuky?’

‘They have shut themselves in their house. I will speak to their chief steward before night.’

‘What will happen to Iritnefert?’

‘Since she can tell us no more, I will give the order for the embalmers to take her.’ He paused irresolutely. ‘The way this has been done, you might think a god was to blame. Has she been struck down by heaven, do you think?’

‘No.’

‘If she were not the daughter of such an important family…’

‘Yes, how much easier it would be. I am sorry I could not help. Perhaps Taheb overestimated my talent.’

‘I will speak to you again of this.’

‘You know where I am. How much time will they give you?’

‘Seventy days. The time that it takes to embalm her and send her to the Fields of Aarru.’

Huy wondered, as he walked away, what Merymose would do if in that short time no killer had been found. Someone would be made to die for the crime; but for all his reservations, Merymose did not strike him as the kind of man who would fall on just anyone in order to present a solution. At least, not until the three months had passed and the knife was poised over his own neck.

His route took him past the City of Dreams. Remembering the wig which now he did not need, he pushed open the door and entered the antechamber which served as a reception area and office. There was no other way out of the building than through here, though the girls may have had a secret exit of their own, and this antechamber was guarded more fiercely by Nubenehem than ever a desert demon guarded its cave.

The large Nubian was discussing something — evidently money — with a client who bent over the desk towards her, his back to Huy. A middle-aged man, well-dressed, but furtive.

‘It’s too much!’ he hissed at the madam.

‘For what you want to do, it’s a bargain. Take it or leave it.’

He half turned, indecisive, and Huy caught sight of a grey profile, vaguely familiar, but the man turned back to Nubenehem before he could place it.

‘All right. But they’d better be good.’

‘You’ll have a ringside seat.’

The man giggled — a horrible noise — before setting off for the curtain at the back of the room.

‘Just a minute.’

‘What now?’

‘Pay first.’

Cursing under his breath, and still keeping his face averted from Huy, the man threw a handful of small silver bars in front of the fat woman, who scooped them up almost before they had settled on the surface of the table.

‘They’ll show you where to go inside.’

The man vanished. Only now did Huy approach.

‘Who was that?’

‘You know better than to ask questions like that. He’s too important a client for me to tell you.’

‘That’s a lot of money he paid.’ 

‘What he likes is specialised. We don’t usually do it.’ The Nubian looked up from the couch where she half lay by a low table on which a number of limestone flakes were scattered. They were covered with calculations.

‘The accounts,’ she explained, deliberately changing the subject. ‘The farmers coming in from outside the city always want to pay in so much emmer, so many hides, so much barley. I tell them to pay in metal, it is easier for me to negotiate, but they always reply that it’s too hard for them to get. I’d refuse them admission altogether if I could afford to lose the business.’

‘I doubt if you’d go under.’

‘Maybe not. But this is still a chore I could do without. If you’ve come for a session with Kafy, you’re out of luck — she’s booked for the whole night by one of the priests from the Temple of Khepri. If you’ve come to collect your wig — ‘

‘I won’t need it now.’

‘Run off, has he?’

Huy looked at her.

‘An order is an order,’ continued Nubenehem, unruffled. ‘And an order fulfilled has to be paid for — if you want more favours in the future.’ She rose heavily, fat cascading over her hips, and crossed the room to a large cupboard set in the wall. Drawing a number of bolts, she opened its door and withdrew from the interior an elderly, moth-eaten wig which she flourished in front of Huy.

‘There!’

‘It’s terrible. It’d walk away by itself if you put it on the floor.’

‘You wanted something quickly. This isn’t a perukier’s, you know.’

‘You should be ashamed of yourself, treating a good customer like this.’

‘Not such a good customer recently,’ retorted Nubenehem, letting herself flop back down on her couch. ‘What’s happened to you? Min desert you?’

Their conversation was interrupted by the familiar sound of a girl’s badly-acted laughter from behind the bead curtain which led to the interior of the brothel, punctuated by the growling of a man who is under the illusion that he is cock of the dunghill. The girl remained unseen, but the man emerged a moment later, his eyes, as they caught Huy’s, switching from initial guilt to fraternal collusion as he saw that Huy was someone he did not know. In the dark days of the Southern Capital under Akhenaten, Nubenehem had told him once, a father who had sold his daughter into prostitution sometime later visited the City of Dreams to watch a session: his daughter, whom he had never touched himself, was one of the participants. It seemed that the father had gone straight from the brothel to the River and drowned himself. But there was nothing furtive or guilty about this customer, who radiated well-being and contentment.

‘Nice little ass, that Hathfertiti; but a bit of a tight squeeze.’ He gave Huy a connoisseur’s wink.

‘It’s a pity you’ve gone off fucking,’ continued Nubenehem when the customer had left. ‘There was a girl here not long ago, looking for fun, wanting to earn a bit on the side. God knows why. One of the aristos slumming. She was your type, maybe a bit on the young side. But you could smell the mandrake fruit on her across the room. I’ll tell you what; I’ll give you the wig for a silver
deben
. I’ll even throw in some henna for you to tart it up.’

Huy dug into the leather pouch at his side, concealed under a fold of his kilt, and withdrew its contents: a couple of silver
deben
were all it contained.

Leaving the whorehouse with the wig tucked under an arm, he reflected that it was worth at least what he had paid to have Surere off his back. At the same time he found it interesting that prison had made the former district governor more passionate about the cause championed by Akhenaten. The pharaoh had thrown out beliefs held for two thousand years, rejecting them as superstitions, and replaced them all by a single god, whose spirit could not be contained in images, whose love extended to all people, and who lived in the power of the sunlight. In the twelve bright years of the young pharaoh’s reign — he had died insane aged twenty-nine, his dream and his country in ruins — a new light had seemed to dance in the souls of men too.

But prison had protected Surere from the truth. Huy himself, who had had to adapt to the new world constructed after Akhenaten’s fall by Horemheb, had learnt above all that ideals do not change people. He acknowledged now that the majority of people, the great brown mass of the fieldworkers, had not even been noticed by the visionary pharaoh he had followed with such devotion, let alone been affected by his thinking. In a matter of weeks, not months, the old, disgraced order had reasserted itself. The priests of the old deities had emerged from the desert or from hiding in neglected provincial cities in Shemau and Tomehu, and established themselves again, without difficulty, the people grateful to have the old gods returned to them, who demanded no more than unquestioning duty, propitiation and sacrifice; gods who did not require a man to think for himself; gods who forgave sin if the price was right, and who guaranteed a good time in the Hereafter.