After the reign of Khafre the Old Kingdom civilization of Egypt sank into decline and for several hundred years (known as the First Intermediate Period) the local provincial nomarchs established themselves as hereditary kings. It was a period of social and civil uncertainty. It suddenly came back into order during the Twelfth Dynasty kings at the start of what is called the Middle Kingdom. This dynasty had several important rulers, but none so powerful as Senusert III. His name is spelled several ways and he’s also known as Sesostris III, a near legendary king, who reestablished a central power in Egypt and reorganized its social and administrative structure. He also undertook immense building works, including reopening and expanding a canal to bypass the first cataract at Aswan and so open a navigable link between Upper Egypt and Nubia. Senusert reigned from about 1874-55 BC, so although we have moved on about seven centuries from the last story (as big a gap as from today back to the time of Robert the Bruce), it is still vastly distant in time.
Keith Taylor is perhaps best known for his Celtic fantasy series featuring Felimid which began with Bard (1981), but he has recently been exploring ancient Egypt for a new series of historical fantasies.
. . . and he becometh a brother unto the decay which cometh upon him . . .
– Papyrus of Nu
An extreme contretemps is needed to panic a woman who has been chief cook – and therefore poison taster – to a Kushite king. Tamaket had not trembled at the prospect of cooking for Egypt’s royalty. The King of Egypt would not fling her to crocodiles if displeased. Tamaket had felt almost tranquil as she put the kitchen staff to work.
Until she discovered poison in the dinner wine.
Rakheb discovered it, really. And that was the end of him. Among other duties, he had to fill the wine-bowls from a great river-cooled jar. When he thought that he was not observed, he swigged the wine.
Tamaket noticed. With a dozen kitchen workers and fifty dishes from roast goose to melons to supervise, she saw. In the Egyptian governor’s house at Semna it was no serious crime. At the Kushite court it would have meant death.
This time, death struck quickly. Rakheb groaned with stomach pains in a few moments, then fell down convulsing. A shower of pots crashed down with him as he clutched at the rack which contained them. They bounced and rolled through the kitchen.
Tamaket moved to his side swiftly. She could do that, when she wished, even though her shape was almost a sphere. She carried her weight adroitly.
“Salt water!” she snapped. “Now, O you staring asses!”
She forced it down his throat herself. In a racking heave he brought it straight up. Not nearly enough of the mortal wine accompanied it. With a final spasm of legs and head he perished.
Tamaket rose, shaking. This was an attempt on the life of Egypt’s godking, and she was apt to be suspected. She had no time to feel horror at Rakheb’s vile end. No time at all. She had come into peril; her wits must now avert it.
She tasted the wine, then rinsed her mouth in a hurry. A faint undertaste, thick and murky, told her the nature of the bane: juice of a certain fungus combined with other ingredients, complex and lengthy to brew. It agreed with Rakheb’s symptoms.
She considered hiding the truth, and dismissed that idea as impossible. Rakheb had died before a dozen witnesses. If the wine had been poisoned, so might other dishes be. Nothing, nothing would go upstairs that Tamaket did not know was safe, which meant a delay she must explain, as there had been a death she must explain.
Maybe to Governor Antef only. A clement man, he enjoyed the king’s favour to a high degree, for they had been friends from boyhood. Let him decide how much to say.
Bringing the shaken kitchen staff under control with a blistering lecture, she mounted the outside stair. Her heart hammered with more than the effort of climbing. These people were the tyrants of the earth as far as Kush was concerned, habitually coming upstream with fleets and armies when each new reign began, while Kush made as steady a custom of rebelling. Now someone had tried to assassinate Egypt’s lord – in a household which she administered.
The archers stationed around the roof’s edge knew her, and gave her ingress. Tamaket had arranged the roof garden herself. Small sycamore trees planted in pots gave shade; flowers in coloured brick troughs, perfume. She usually felt proud of it whenever she looked upon it. Now she wondered if she would be strangled here.
“My lord Governor!” Tamaket wailed. “Mighty Khakaure, Living Horus! Great Royal Wife, Mistress of the Two Lands! Your slave implores mercy!”
She pleaded in faultless Egyptian which had been good even before she entered the Governor’s service. Haughty, frowning faces turned towards her, seeing a young Kushite woman huge as a hippopotamus, breathing hard and badly worried. Governor Antef alone replied.
“Tamaket. What delays the food?”
“Hand of the King! I have tested the food constantly as it was prepared. Some – ” She hesitated artfully, in a way that betrayed the artifice. “Some appears tainted. Meanwhile I am sending up roast goose slices, bread and fruit of which I am certain. I beg the Great Ones’ indulgence.”
Antef realized, as he was meant to, that something was amiss. Making an excuse to the King and the Royal Wife, he came near Tamaket. Tall and wide, younger than thirty yet, hard-muscled as a quarryman, he looked down at her.
“What’s this talk? You have never let tainted foodstuffs get as far as the kitchen benches while I have known you – or lost your head like this, either! You are hiding something.”
Tamaket’s glance moved to the royal couple. She said for Antef’s ears only, “Poison in the wine. I ensure there is none in the viands also. A cook is dead.”
It was masterfully done. No one else apprehended it. Hugely taken aback (he was not a devious man), Antef stared at the woman he had made his major-domo, flat against precedent. In about three heartbeats he decided against secrecy.
“Say it now,” he commanded, “and to all. Clearly.”
“O Hand of the King – ”
“Forget the honorifics and speak! No Kushite subterfuge with me!”
Tamaket bowed low to them all, with effort. “Your pardon, Great Ones. It’s a hideous thing, but I have found what I am sure is poison. In the wine. The wine which came in the royal ship,” she added hastily. “I am proving all the food for safety’s sake.”
“Our wine?” Dahi echoed. “Not possible, woman! You imply that it was poisoned before we left, before the jars were sealed at the palace?”
“Your foot is upon my neck. But I supervised while the seals were broken, and with one jar the wax was newer, with crumbs of older, darker wax in it, as though it had been replaced. This I set apart, but one of my lesser cooks drank from it and suddenly died. I know it was bane.”
“You do?”
The words came from the king. His formal royal name, Khakaure, taken when he assumed the Double Crown of Khem, was always used to address him in public. Only his intimates still used his personal name, Senusert. Surely nothing personal or intimate informed his manner to Tamaket. He looked upon her sternly, the god incarnate of Egypt.
“You know much about poisons, in that case,” he said.
“I do, mighty Khakaure. All that there is to know! At Kermah I was the king’s chief cook, and taster of his viands. I had to learn to know and guard against poison, though it were given never so craftily, or have a short life.”
“And she prepared our meal?” Dahi said, with an astounded look at Antef.
“Who better, Great One? Particularly in these parts. I’m told the savage she served never had so much as a bellyache. Yet Tamaket prefers to serve me. Had she outlived the King of Kush she would have been buried alive in his tomb with his other servants.”
“It is very true, O brother and sister of the gods,” Tamaket affirmed.
“And what sort of alleged food did you cook in Kermah?”
“Egypt’s cuisine is much in favour there, Great Royal Wife. I learned from Egyptians. I believe the meal will not offend even your divine mouth.”
Dahi considered the rotund figure before her. The Kushite woman was young, her face pretty within her orb of crisp dark hair, and fresh-skinned as a child’s despite her bulk. The round dark eyes looked guileless. Dahi did not believe it for an instant. Kushite cunning was a byword in Egypt, and not without reason; under cruel tyrant kings, the crafty survived longest.
“Tell me,” Dahi demanded, “how did you come to serve our valued Lord Antef?”
“I was sent to him as a gift by the king.”
“Because of the love he bears Egypt’s governor?”
“I wasn’t told why,” Tamaket answered, wholly aware of the irony. And the suspicion. She continued deferentially, “However, I did beg the Lord Antef as a favour – and a precaution – to bring my entire family to Semna also. Or someday an ill-disposed person might threaten them, to make me a traitor.”
She dropped her gaze before the sudden fire in Dahi’s. Had she sounded too simple, or too impudent? No. She believed she had said it with enough spirit, but not too much, and the Royal Wife must have been thinking it anyhow.
Dahi laughed aloud. Not cruelly, to Tamaket’s relief.
“Provided the meal is good,” she said, “I think, my lord, that our friend should bring this woman back to Egypt with him – and even her kin, for safety.”
“Let it be so,” the king decreed, “if the warning about the wine proves true. Woman, you say a man died after drinking it?”
“Truly, O Living Horus.”
“Have the wine-jar brought here now, and a kid to test it. I take no Kushite’s word.”
Yet he discovered that in this case he could have done so. The kid died as the man had done. The remainder of the meal proved both superb and safe. Tamaket duly left with the royal ships when their prows turned downstream again. Her brothers and children went also, as ordained by Dahi.
May your heart be cheerful, my lord, for we have arrived at the country of Egypt. My sailors have driven home the mooring-stakes, the vessel is attached to the shore safely, the offerings to the gods have been made. We have lost none of our sailors although we went to the furthest parts of Wawat, and we have returned in peace.
– The Shipwrecked Sailor
“Magnificent,” Senusert enthused, with a final glance back at the great dam spanning the Nile. Five hundred paces long and almost two hundred thick, faced with stone, it had been endowed with massive stone sluice-gates at either end for those years when the Nile rose excessively high.
“Yea, magnificent,” he repeated warmly. “I never doubted you would perform the task, but you have surpassed yourself, Antef. This is your greatest work yet.”
Antef smiled with pleasure. He had been appointed Governor of Semna and sent upstream chiefly for the purpose of building the dam, anyhow. He was an engineer above all; some said the greatest since Imhotep. With the dam complete, his work had been done, and a new governor had replaced him.
Montumes, the Keeper of State Records, coughed primly. “The king’s greatest work. What he commands done, he has done himself.”
This bit of sycophancy drew no response at all from Senusert. The Royal Wife vented a small snort and said audibly, “Jealous old crocodile.”
Tamaket rather agreed, except that to her Montumes looked less like a crocodile than a hoopoe with draggled feathers. His wig had been poorly curled, while the pleats and folds of his linen robe might have been crisper. For that matter, saving the royal family themselves, all the king’s entourage bore little resemblance to the comely, dignified images of folk in their prime that Tamaket had seen on the walls of temples and tombs. They displayed the usual incidence of flab, meagre calves, paunches, boils and eroded teeth, while one army officer possessed a spectacular wall-eye. Tamaket had begun putting names to these physical characteristics, and later she would add ambitions, fears, prejudices, rivalries – all the things she must know to survive in Egypt.
The royal family looked uncommonly handsome, though, she had to admit. Senusert made a splendid figure of a man, tall, athletic and straight-featured, and the Royal Wife also needed no artist’s flattery. She stretched her lioness body on the gold-worked couch beneath the deck awning, easy and assured, while two servants stirred the air above her with long-handled fans. It’s as well, Tamaket thought, the king is young and mighty.
Amenemhat was comely too, a slender boy of twelve who seemed to hero-worship his father. And perhaps Antef as well. The latter, Senusert’s friend from boyhood, stood even taller and wider than the king, with a rough-hewn, amiable face wide across the cheekbones and short from brow to chin. She had discovered him to be a kindly master, and hoped he would continue to protect her.
Because she was in dire trouble. Someone had tried to poison the godking of Egypt, the Living Horus. Well – presumably the king. Now she had boarded the king’s own ship for the return to Egypt, with her children and brothers in one of the others, separate from her. Clearly, she was suspected.
It was greatly to her advantage to catch the guilty, then. A long road. She did not even know with certainty whom they had meant to kill. Comprehensive testing had shown that of all the wine-jars brought from Egypt in the royal ship, one, and one only, had been rendered lethal. One out of dozens. Tamaket had chosen it herself and personally seen it carried to the kitchen. (Her idiots of porters might have dropped it otherwise.) The poison must have been added to the jar in Egypt, either before it was loaded in the ship’s hold or during the voyage – but not in Semna. And none but Tamaket could be sure of that.
The longer she cogitated, the less likely it seemed to her that Senusert had been meant for the victim, unless the assassin was crazy, for so much could go amiss. A cook or scullion might drink of the fatal wine before it so much as reached the royal taster, as had in truth happened; poor Rakheb. In fact the king’s taster began to look like the most likely intended victim. She vowed to find out who his enemies and rivals were.
If death hadn’t been meant for the taster, then Tamaket had to conclude that the murderer was not very clever. One who tried to destroy a king by such slipshod methods in Kush would be lucky if the killing dose reached his dog! Why, Tamaket had known poison to be added to one half of a fig only, by a hollow needle so fine it left no mark, so that a murderer might bite from the fruit and hand the rest to his victim, smiling – and that was considered elementary cunning past the Second Cataract.
You worm-wit! Throwing the blame for your baby plots on one who survived two years of the Kermah court is going to be less simple than you suppose!
The three royal vessels proceeded down through the cataract, fifty miles of river studded with islets and boulders. This being low water season, they bulked black and dry everywhere. Because of them, the region had its common nickname – the Belly of Stones.
There were villages, of course, with fields and groves but few irrigation canals. They passed a number of stations, wavering in sun-shimmer, where crushed gold ore fetched across the desert by donkey trains was further crushed, and then washed for its shining content. Kings of foreign nations enviously said that gold was as common as dust in Egypt.
At Antef’s suggestion, she cooked for the royal party at several stopping places. She was closely watched, of course, and each dish tasted at most stages of the cooking. She extended herself to give them superb meals. Oryx roasted over charcoal; spiced pigeons and cress; duck flavoured with garlic and wine; fresh delicate lettuce from the river-side gardens; chick-peas fried with chopped onion and spices; triangular shat-cakes made with date flour and honey; all irrigated by wine and black beer.
No one fell ill. Tamaket, alert and anxious, was more concerned than any of them to prevent it. The poisoner might be aboard this ship with her; in fact, she suspected he was. Outwardly she took great care to seem cheerful and relaxed. She and the king’s taster, Ipi, a handsome slave with an ironic sense of humour which he greatly needed, found common ground in discussing the vicissitudes of a taster’s position.
For days the royal vessels bypassed the series of huge forts Egypt had built along the Belly of Stones; Mirgissa with its two-mile slipway by which it could be provisioned at any time of the year, Kor, and Buhen with its rock-cut ditch and massive double ramparts of brick.
The garrison commander at Buhen was a war-comrade of Senusert’s from his first – and so far only – expedition into the south. There would be others, of course, as surely as the cranes would migrate. It was why Antef had been sent to build the dam. Now the river had backed up into a long narrow lake and the Nile was navigable far above Semna. The fortress commander looked forward to it, and said so in Tamamket’s presence.
He suggested a lion hunt. Senusert came back jubilant, having killed his prey with a single arrow – not the first such feat he had performed. His reputation as a hunter and archer was more than the usual kingly braggadocio.
The young prince, Amenemhat, seemed less of an athlete, though active and healthy enough. It had disappointed him to be left behind during the lion hunt, and after it he increased the diligence of his archery practice, not that he had skimped it before. A conscientious lad. For a boy of twelve, he did not become distracted easily, except when the huge figure of Antef walked by. Tamaket knew hero-worship when she saw it.
The king, it was evident, also thought highly of Antef. One bit of conversation she overheard at Buhen fortress was especially revealing. The pair had discussed the skill of Kushite archers, and Antef had endorsed their famous reputation.
“None knows better than you!” The king had spoken with vehemence. “As Khonsu expels demons, my heart turned cold when I heard you had been laid low by a savage’s arrow. I would have come. But I could not. And from Memphis to Semna is so far that I knew you would either recover or join the blessed before I could arrive.”
“The doctor you sent south with me saved my life, Senusert.”
“He’s worth a thousand,” Senusert agreed. “I would not have sent you into danger without him. Still, I’d far rather he had never been needed.”
“He was needed often enough when the desert patrols came in, and for worse injuries,” Antef said bluntly. “Mine was nothing much in itself – but the dog must have steeped his arrowhead in filth.”
“Nothing much!” Dahi repeated derisively. “A hand’s width over and a hand’s length down, Lord Antef, and the king had needed a new engineer. It pleases us both to have you returning to Egypt. It surely pleases Amenemhat.”
The prince nodded, tongue-tied. But his heart could be seen in his eyes.
They came to the First Cataract, the southern gate of Egypt, after a few heavy portages. This had always been the first great obstacle to pass on any voyage to Kush. It could be navigated with ease now. Senusert had ordered it cleared and dredged before his first expedition south. One passage, spear-straight, ten paces wide and more than eighty long, had been cut through the sun-darkened granite in a deep-water channel.
Tamaket had learned how to approach those of the king’s entourage for instruction. Montumes, Keeper of State Records, the one who looked like a hoopoe, never gossiped with his inferiors and viewed Kushites as barely human savages. Nevertheless, if one asked him humbly and flattered his high concept of his own wisdom, he would grow informative.
“O wise Montumes, who did this work for the king?”
Montumes lifted his round little head with its ill-shaped wig and responded.
“The same who raised the Semna dam. He whom you serve, woman. In the seventh year of mighty Khakaure’s reign he accomplished it, by the king’s command.”
Tamaket widened her glossy eyes. “Truly, he must be a great builder. I saw him plan and raise the dam, but I did not know what else he had done. And he is not thirty yet.”
“He was making canals and irrigation layouts at twenty, a noted surveyor. The king appointed him Supervisor of Quarries soon afterwards.”
Tamaket could have reeled off all Antef’s titles, past and present. Besides King’s Friend and Child of the Royal Nursery, they included Master of Irrigation and Canals, Chief Builder of the Two Lands, and – replacing his earlier position as Supervisor of Quarries – Master of the Mines and Quarries. She knew Antef had led a couple of expeditions into Sinai after copper and turquoise, an enterprise less than safe considering the nature of the nomads.
She did not tell Montumes she knew all this. Parading one’s knowledge before the little man was no way to gain his cooperation. Tamaket needed friends. Above all she needed her master Antef. Frowning, she asked herself if someone might have been trying to poison him, and might try again. A troubling thought.
Increase your subjects with new people, See, your city is full of new growth.
– Instruction of Merikare
Each subsequent day of the voyage downstream brought new matters for awe. Tamaket had never seen the Two Lands before. Oh, Kermah, with its great palace and temple and thousands of folk, had been a respectable city even by Egypt’s standards, but not beside Thebes. Looking upon its huge stone wharves, its mansions, the colossal Temple of Amun and avenue of ram-headed sphinxes, Tamaket felt a pang of despair for Kush. How could it resist this?
Well, she could not stop it. Her fate and her family’s lay in Egypt now. Her two brothers, brave and loyal but scarcely brilliant, needed her nearly as much as her children. Other Nubians and Kushites had settled in Egypt down the ages – as forced labour, artisans, prisoners of war, honoured hostages, bowmen in the army, and the famed Medjai desert police. Some had risen high.
Antef, she noticed, though cheerful most of the time, appeared downcast in Thebes. She wondered why. She chose the captain of his household spears to ask, feeding the man a magnificent meal to sweeten him.
“The Lord Antef doesn’t seem to enjoy his food since we arrived here,” she remarked. “Or much of anything else.”
That was all it took. “You don’t know,” the spearman said. “The Lord Antef lost his wife in Thebes. He married young, they had two children, and then she died in a boating accident. The children followed. An outbreak of sickness.”
“Ah,” Tamaket breathed. “Sad. I knew he had been married, but not that she died in Thebes.”
“He’s shut-mouthed on the subject, for it pains him yet. Nor should you chatter of it.”
“I surely will not, brave captain. Thanks.” Tamaket sighed deeply. “My husband died young also. He displeased the King of Kush and was buried in an anthill.”
“I’ve heard that. Here even the king may not violate ma’at on a whim. No, not though he is a god. Your husband was a good man?”
“I always found him so. At least our children still live. The twins were born after his death. There were those who wished to slay them at birth. Twins are held unlucky in Kush.”
This appeared to be more knowledge than the spearman wished for, but Tamaket was his master’s major-domo; he displayed polite interest.
“They could not be more alive, so you would have none of that plan, clearly. You must be glad to be out of Kush!”
Tamaket shrugged her ample shoulders. “It was my home, but now my life is here. Yes, I am glad, and also to be serving the Lord Antef. He’s been kind. More than kind.”
“And to others. It’s his way.”
But had plotters wished to kill him nevertheless? Or, perhaps, him and all the other important servants of the king they could poison at one sitting? Or just the king and his chief wife? If Senusert were to die and Dahi survive him, the new ruler of Egypt would have to marry her for valid kingship. Tamaket did not like his chances unless Dahi found him attractive! To impose on that one against her will would be a mighty feat.
She observed that Senusert and Dahi had both been much freer, more like natural human beings, beyond the cataracts. Each mile they travelled into Egypt, their royal roles seemed to settle more heavily upon them, and their manner became more remote and high, in accordance with their divine status. Senusert had a dull time in Thebes, rising daily at dawn to read endless reports, records and petitions. Montumes gave him brisk, methodical aid in those duties.
They embarked again. The next important stopping place proved to be Abdu, burial place of Osiris and pilgrimage shrine for all Egypt. Here, as everywhere, the king must examine the administration of temples, their huge estates, the probity and competence of his officials, and perhaps most ominously doubtful of all, the loyalty of nobles.
Tamaket knew something of that situation, too. Egypt’s present king ruled over a land which had descended into chaos, the most feared of all conditions to Egypt’s people. Only during this dynasty had the precious principles of ma’at been restored. The king embodied these. The nobles, particularly the great nomarchs, had enjoyed autocratic feudal power in the bad times and felt other than comfortable without it.
A motive for poison, and an obvious one.
Tamaket discussed it with her brothers. This far into Egypt, the rulers no longer troubled to keep them apart. Besides, Antef considered them honest; they were archers of his own bow company, nearly as good as the king himself, and like him tall and leanly muscular. Conversing with their sister they resembled a couple of upright sticks beside a ball.
“The nobles are having their wings clipped and their talons cut,” she said. “They may not raise war-hosts unless the Living Horus gives the word. They have been forbidden to build, as they used to, tombs and mortuary temples fine as a king’s. Khakaure’s father took a number of nomarch’s sons into the Residence and had them raised with the princes, to be as their foster-brothers. Our lord Antef was one of these.”
“We know that, sister,” Oruno told her. “We have served him too! His father rules the Heron Nome two day’s journey away. The king means to stop there to awe the man.”
“Rumour says he’s among the most fiercely jealous of his power and rights,” Zebei added. “Or was when young.”
“All of which may affect us. Listen, my brothers. I will not be with Lord Antef when he visits his father. You and the king will. Observe for me; see how his sire welcomes him! How his family regards him. Tell me how they welcome the king. Certainly they’ll be humble before him, but look for what lies beneath.”
They would do their best, she knew. They would bring her their observations without holding back. The king’s taster would observe more sharply, and be closely present throughout the banquet, as her brothers would not. However, Ipi had no reason to open his mouth to her, as yet. She must cultivate him and place him under obligation.
“Well?” she said when her brothers returned. “Tell me of Lord Antef’s father, this hereditary Nomarch of the Heron? What sort of man do you think him, and how did he greet his son?”
Zebei grimaced. “From what we saw? Cold as deep water, my sister. His welcome to his son was like his welcome to the king. Formal and stony.”
“We didn’t go within,” Oruno added, “but we saw the Lord Antef come out with a sombre look, and he is brooding yet, if you notice.”
“Indeed I notice,” Tamaket said. “Did the nomarch’s servants say anything that can explain it?”
Her brothers shook their heads in unison.
“Not in our hearing,” Oruno told her. “They are as close-mouthed as Kermah palace guards. All that household. Their discipline must require it.”
This was interesting. Seemingly, Antef had a hard man for a father. Formal and stony? When Antef had been long absent from Egypt, a success at difficult tasks, and once almost died from an arrow! Belike he was furious at Antef’s being close as a brother to the king, and yearned for the power his forebears had held in the time of chaos.
Nor was he the only one. Gossip, flying like cranes, said there were at least twenty in Middle Egypt. And more elsewhere. Tamaket saw the number of folk who might be guilty multiplying before her eyes.
I swear by my life that when I gained mastery over men it was very pleasing to my heart.
– The Destruction of Mankind
“A lioness, a man-eater!” Zebei repeated, his voice excited. “Egyptians call her the Drunkard. She appeared here while Khakaure was in the south. Eight deaths she has caused, sister – eight.”
“Eight,” Tamaket said sardonically. “How many would she slay sober? You talk as though this is cheerful news.”
“It is,” Oruno told her. “The king goes to hunt her! He wishes Lord Antef to be there, and Lord Antef is taking us.”
Well, it made sense that Senusert would do so. The king had a duty to protect his people. Besides, he revelled in lion-hunting.
“Why is she called the Drunkard?”
“She’s lame, and runs like one.”
Zebei gave that answer. He had always been the more down-to-earth and succinct of the pair. Oruno snorted, and added his own version, that of a man with a flair for storytelling which made him welcome at any camp fire.
“Bah! She’s called the Drunkard after the lion-goddess Sekhmet, dull one, that Ra sent to punish a disobedient folk. She slaughtered and tore and would stay for nothing, even when Ra commanded her, fearing mankind would be utterly destroyed. To halt her the other gods had to make a vast flood of red-coloured beer. She took it for blood and drank it all. When she slept, stupefied, the race of men was saved.”
Zebei chuckled. “So? Well, and now I know. A pleasant story, brother, but we will not stop this lioness with beer! It’ll take spearmen, bowmen and a thousand beaters.”
“The king will bring them. Sister, the Drunkard may be a demon! Cunning past belief, as the people tell. Why has she appeared here, alone, as one might say out of nowhere? Lions are uncommon so near Memphis and the capital.”
Tamaket’s heart chilled at the word demon. They were real to her, real as stars after sunset, real as food, the dark powers that hunger and lust and gibber in the night. Yes. A man-eating lioness of exceptional craft might be one.
But probably not.
“The desert wastes are close enough,” she said. “Maybe this – Drunkard – drifted in from yonder. Maybe the Waters of Shedet. The lake silted up long ago and the fields around it are going back to waste.”
“Wherever she came from,” Zebei said confidently, “she will soon go to the abodes of the west.”
Stringing his tough longbow with a movement that looked easy, he fired three arrows swiftly at a copper target one hundred paces off. They crowded each other in the centre. Oruno cocked an eyebrow, sent four to join them just as swiftly, spaced just as closely, and smirked at his brother.
They left with Antef on the lion hunt a few days later. Tamaket remained, if not in charge of the estate – its steward managed that – at least of the great house, its servants, and all that belonged thereto. The place had betrayed the lack of a woman’s touch. Antef absolutely ought to marry again, Tamaket thought. As should she, no doubt. It would be madness to do that before she dispelled the cloud of suspicion hanging over her, though.
Tamaket worked hard while her brothers were gone. Then they returned, and her screams of anguish rang over the immense estate. Zebei came on a bier, ripped and dead, Oruno on a bloody litter, one arm in rags, face grey and wet. She abandoned her duties and tended him only. Antef, who was unhurt, not only allowed it but spent much time with Oruno himself. Her brothers had saved his life, it appeared.
“Sister, she is a demon, that lioness!” Oruno raved. “A demon! Two of the beaters died driving her before we ever saw her! The others stayed resolute, else she had escaped.”
Tamaket wished fiercely that the Drunkard had. So they had successfully killed her. What of it?
The beaters had moved forwards bravely, it seemed, swinging their torches and great wooden rattles. They advanced at a run in a long crescent three deep. Three groups of hunters waited. Senusert led one, Antef the second, and the king’s half-brother Rhamsin, an army commander, the third. Each leader, and two picked men with him, carried bows. The rest had spears and oblong shields.
“We did as planned,” Oruno croaked. “We zigzagged, to catch her in a crossfire. It should have worked! But it all went wrong, sister, all! Rhamsin had a clear shot at her flank while she charged the king – and then she turned and charged Rhamsin. She sprang over the men with shields and came down on him. Tore away the top of his head. Then she turned on the others, and sister, she picked out the bowmen! Slew them both, then a spearman, and rushed the king’s group again afterwards.
“The king shot twice. Hit her once. Behind the neck . . . Lord Antef ran from the midst of us into the open, arrow on string, to draw her attention from the king.
“He did. She charged him next.” Oruno’s unmaimed hand closed on his sister’s. “It wasn’t because he shouted or stood alone in the open, but because he held a bow. I swear it! She knew!” He half rose, gasping. “We went to his aid. The king may not trust us, but he does. He knows we are true men.”
Tamaket did not have to ask what had happened next. The evidence lay here in front of her – and silent in the house of the embalmers, where Zebei’s body had gone by now. The doctors shook their heads gravely over Oruno’s mangled arm and, when the first touches of gangrene appeared, they tried to save him by amputation. Antef held him down with all his granite strength while it was done, and Tamaket cauterized the stump herself, fast and deftly.
It proved too late. Oruno died two days later.
The brothers were embalmed and buried by Egyptian practice. These rites took seventy days. Long before they ended, Tamaket knew all that had happened on that dreadful lion-hunt, the secret of the Drunkard’s preternatural cunning, and the very reason she had become a man-eater. It defied belief. At first.
“Someone split her forepaw lengthwise, when she was a cub, with care, most deliberately,” Antef said harshly. “Lame for life, she could not take her true prey. Nor is that all. We found, when she was dead, that her neck was chafed under the fur by frequent use of a choke-chain. She had been a captive for long.”
“My great lord!” Tamaket’s grief had dulled the sharp edges of her mind temporarily, but this was not difficult to grasp, merely hard to accept. “Did someone cripple that lioness? To make her a man-eater?”
“They must have done more.” Antef’s broad face was rigid with disgust. “She knew how to avoid hunters, how to pick archers from a group and destroy them. Surely she was trained for years in secret, then brought to this region by men who knew the king would act himself. This was another plot to murder him, begun years ago and set in motion if the poison at Semna should fail.”
With slow mounting fury of her own, Tamaket said, “This attempt on the king took my brothers’ lives!”
“Truly. They were brave men. I would not be standing here but for them. It’s why I tell you this.” Antef added with what seemed real sorrow, “I regret taking Zebei and Oruno on the hunt, now. I might still have come away alive without them.”
“No, lord! They would have been hurt in their honour – held that you did not trust them!”
“There is no man who can say they were not trustworthy now. I’ll build a fine tomb for them. Offerings shall be made and prayers said while a man of my line survives.”
“It’s . . . a precious sign of your goodness and regard, lord,” Tamaket answered after a moment. “Yet the offering murdered men need most is the blood of their slayers.”
“They shall have it.”
Oh, yes, Tamaket thought. I will live to see them seated on tall stakes with their eyes torn out.
His Majesty found me a common builder . . . And His Majesty conferred upon me the offices of King’s Architect and Builder, then Royal Architect and Builder under the King’s Supervision. And His Majesty conferred upon me the office of Sole Companion, King’s Architect and Builder in the Two Houses.
– Tomb Inscription of Nekhebu
The Royal Wife had said those same things, and even more violent ones, when the king told her the significance of his fatal lion hunt. Raging back and forth in a broad chamber of the palace, with none but Senusert and Antef for witnesses, she spat corrosive curses and smashed various objects almost as though she had been an ordinary village wife.
“This is vile past belief!” she said at last. “And bizarre, as much as monstrous! How does one train a man-eater at all? How be sure – unless by magic – that it will ever come within reach of His Majesty? What sort of plotters are these?”
“I’ve begun to see,” Antef answered. “Cowards who work at a distance, as from behind two or three curtains. Then if one attempt fails, they are safe, unknown, and can try again from a distance. They attempted such a murder with the poisoned wine, and now with the lioness.”
“Who?” Senusert demanded. “I wish you, Antef my friend, to find out! Investigate this matter. Act with my authority. Report only to me – not even to the Vizier.”
“I, Senusert?” Antef was hugely taken aback. “If you wanted a marsh drained, or the largest obelisk ever quarried brought to Ithej-Tawy, I’d be your man, surely. But am I the one for this task?”
“It’s true, my lord,” Dahi murmured. “Only liars have ever called our friend subtle.”
Senusert dismissed that. “Quarry the truth as you would an obelisk,” he ordered, “no matter how hard the stone, or where the chips fly, or whose skin the dust inflames. My Majesty knows that you are direct, not devious. That may be no bad thing. Tell me how you would set about it.”
That formal “My Majesty”, here in private where Senusert had never employed it before, told Antef that here was a command he might not evade. He said slowly:
“Training a lion is surely no task for any man but a proficient master. The Drunkard was skillfully trained. We have been shown that too well. I’d have thought there was no place in Egypt where lions were kept but the king’s own zoo. Therefore I’d begin by asking the keepers there what men, to their knowledge, have the skill. There will be those who know, those who saw and heard. They can be found.”
“Let it be done.”
Antef thought of his father, and fear touched him. Great creating Ptah, let him not be involved!
That thought had occurred to his shrewd major-domo already. Suppose Antef’s father should be one of the plotters? Antef was a man of strong, simple loyalties. To stand in the open shooting at a crafty man-eater to draw her away from his friend – that he would do, and think only that this was his friend and foster-brother, not that it was the godking of Egypt. Antef choosing to expose his father, perhaps his entire family, as assassins – that she could not see so clearly.
She had intended to help him find the wretches who had done this evil. She still wished it. However . . . if the trail led to his father, Antef might not be able to face the consequences, and she wanted them destroyed no matter who they were. Better to pursue these hyenas in circumspect fashion, using all the craft she had learned in the life-or-death (more frequently death) atmosphere of Kermah. She needed someone to act for her, someone who would be glad to conceal her part in the affair, and also someone who would be useful. It took no more than two hours’ thinking to convince her she knew just the man.
Antef’s mansion and estate lay on the outskirts of Ithej-Tawy, the new capital established by Senusert’s dynasty south of Memphis. It made the palace easily accessible nearby. Tamaket had smoothly bribed her way to an audience with the Keeper of State Records before her brothers’ obsequies were finished.
“You honour me, worthy Montumes,” she said.
“Yes, that I do,” the birdlike little man answered testily. “What is it?”
Despite the generosity of her gifts, he had no wish to spend much time on her, she perceived. He must reckon everything about her uncouth; her race, accent, size, coloured robe, and the gashes of mourning on her cheeks and upper arms. The sight of them did remind him of recent events, though. He made an effort at compassion, no matter how insincere.
“I’m sorry for your brothers’ death,” he told her. “Their bravery is much spoken of.”
“Yes. I thank you. Have you heard, O Keeper of the Records, that the lioness was trained as a man-eater by evil ones who sought the godking’s life?”
“I had heard.” Despite the guarded words and supercilious tone, he stiffened with interest. “I did not believe it.”
“Yet you may. The King and the great Royal Wife believe it. The mighty Khakaure has appointed Lord Antef to find these monsters.”
“Antef?” Montumes could not have expressed more eloquently in a long speech that he thought all Antef’s talents lay in digging canals.
“He acts with the power of the King in this matter. Yet it’s in my mind that he may need assistance from the wise.”
Montumes agreed, and she shared her thoughts with him further.
“Nothing so terrible and strange could be done wholly in secret! Those who can train lions are few. Men and women must have disappeared to feed her demon’s appetite; at one time she was perhaps carried on a ship to this region. There will be other traces, lost in the records of Egypt, and no man knows those as you know them, O Montumes. I am certain that with your assistance my master can fulfill the king’s command.”
Montumes’s eyes widened in total agreement, and flashed with the hope of gaining credit. He manifestly felt sure Antef had no chance of finding the culprits without him. Before he replied, Tamaket knew she had hooked him like a fish; it had not even taken any finesse. He would help.
Antef proved more competent at investigation than Montumes thought. He had always been methodical and thorough, while his determination was a byword. Inquiries among the keepers at the royal menagerie, where he had said he would begin, proved worthwhile. The oldest man there had served a Syrian prince, long ago, a cruel lord who used trained man-eating leopards to destroy his enemies.
“I was young then,” the man mumbled out of his toothless face. “Never should have left Egypt! I’d not have believed, lord, how you can pervert a big cat if you wish. They can be made so they will touch no prey but live men and women – won’t even recognize dead meat as food, if you can credit that! The Drunkard never touched a poisoned bait, did she, or came to a still carcass?”
“No, that is true. She was never known to! How’s that done? And what men in Egypt did you ever know who could do it?”
The animal keeper said grimly, “It’s done by giving them nothing to eat but live men and women, tied wholly helpless at first, then hocked and crippled, more active as time passes and the cat grows confident, lord. I’d hope there is no man in Egypt who could do it.”
“It seems there is.”
The old man could think of fewer than half a dozen men he had known with that kind of skill. He gave their names. Antef enjoined him to silence, and went inexorably looking for the men in question. Yes. They were that. Most dreadfully in question.
He also sought traces of strange disappearances. Egypt was an ordered land where almost nothing happened without being recorded by scribes, least of all the bizarre or criminal. Montumes had most of it at his thin fingertips. What he could not recall offhand when asked, he knew where to find in the archives. Harvest figures, the number of priests, servants and artisans in this temple or that, soldiers’ movements, caravans across the desert, Nile flood details year by year, legal proceedings – he could provide it.
Odd disappearances had indeed taken place. They had occurred among the pilgrims going to Abdu, over the years of the Drunkard’s life. Before then, they had been less frequent or regular.
“Not kidnapped from their homes, then, but in a strange place, nameless among crowds of other strangers,” Montumes said.
Antef’s big hands closed into fists. “And Abdu, the place of pilgrimage, is above Middle Egypt.”
Middle Egypt, where the nomarchs remained most powerful, least subdued, and least contented. The two wholly dissimilar men looked at each other with the same thought in their heads.
Antef chose his agents while the Nile rose, which it did poorly that year, and sent them out after the water receded. To conceal them among the army of scribes who surveyed the fields and marked the boundaries anew was a simple matter. Montumes arranged it almost in his sleep, and men under Antef’s orders travelled the desert roads with the Medjai, camped at obscure oases as well as the greater ones, spoke with Libyan tribesmen. The reports came back, and in them now and then there was mention of a lame man-eating lioness. Usually the mention comprised mere rumour, but sometimes it amounted to more. They pointed to the same place when put together; the Boar Nome in Middle Egypt.
“Ushikab, the Nomarch of the Boar,” the king said reflectively, reading the summary. “He’s a known malcontent, and a neighbour of your father’s, my comrade.”
“A close friend too, as you know.” Antef looked unhappy. “He has five sons. One of them married my sister. It comes to me that it’s time I visited them.”
“You need not,” the king said, “if you do not wish it.”
“I began this, O Living Horus, and I’ll complete it. Pleasant or not.”
“If your brother-in-law is innocent, he will not suffer,” the king promised. “Indeed, if there’s merely doubt, he shall have the benefit of it, though his whole family should stand attainted and guilty.”
Tamaket remained behind. There was an outbreak of smallpox in Memphis which caused the Vizier to quarantine the palace, and she took the same measures in Antef’s house. Hers, though, were more stringent; she had seen the same sickness rage like wildfire in Kush. She accepted no supplies, not even cloth or leather, except from far upstream, until the danger had passed.
Her vigilance proved wiser than even she had guessed. Someone tried to smuggle infected matter into Antef’s house so that he would come home to perish. The men trusted with the task had both had smallpox before, and survived; their pockmarks were the first thing that made Tamaket suspect them. Just one pitted face might have aroused no misgivings, but both together moved Tamaket to have them taken into close guard and their cart segregated.
They proved to be from the Boar Nome. Although not supposed to know the significance of that, Tamaket was informed. She had taken care to be. The men defied her and refused to say anything – a silly error, when dealing with a Kushite who had brothers to avenge and children to protect. Within a day they had told her all she desired to know.
Their orders had come from a former retainer of the Boar Nomarch’s with a grudge against Antef. Tamaket had agents of her own by this time. They discovered the man hiding in Memphis. Again, she passed the knowledge on to Antef through Montumes, letting the Keeper of State Records have the credit. She let him have the men she had questioned, too, or what was left of them.
Antef seized the nomarch’s one-time retainer in Memphis. Shown what had happened to his hirelings and promised mercy if he spoke, he betrayed all he knew as fast as he could gabble. His knowledge included the name and whereabouts of the Drunkard’s trainer. Before the Nile had receded, that man too had been captured, alive, in the ancient town of Buto.
He was certainly the one. The Drunkard had left her inscription on him by mauling him – when she was only half grown, which doubtless was how he had survived. Nevertheless, the marks of her cleft forepaw were distinctive.
Tried and condemned, he talked volubly in exchange for a clean ending, which the King promised. Thus they gained hard proof at last. Antef travelled south again, and stood in a narrow desert ravine, blocked at the ends and walled at the top, where the Drunkard had been raised. Bones of her victims had been buried in the sand nearby. Several, by the pitiful possessions buried with them, had been pilgrims who vanished from Abdu. The nasty tale appeared complete.
The ravine lay just outside the Boar Nome, and the trainer’s testimony implicated its ruler past any man’s power to effectively deny.
“And three at least of his sons,” Antef said, in the bleakest tone Senusert had yet heard from his mouth. “I believe the last is innocent, for he’s both too honest and too indolent to scheme like this, but it’s a matter I had rather the Vizier investigated. It’s my sister’s husband; I am partial.”
“He will never be a nomarch.” Senusert smiled grimly. “The traitors shall die, I shall deprive their family of the Boar Nome, and you shall be lord there instead, my brother. Let other nomarchs who would plot or rebel see this, and learn their mistake.”
His will was done. Ushikab, Nomarch of the Boar, died as a traitor and his elder sons with him. They went to their doom mouthing accusations against Antef’s family, which was only to be expected, all agreed, from malice against the man who had exposed them. Antef became Nomarch of the Boar, and Senusert gave him a new title to accompany the province – Chief of the Praised Ones, when his honours had been extensive already, so that many were jealous.
Senusert, Antef and Montumes all knew that certain loose ends had been tucked out of sight and ignored, yet they believed them to be minor, and that the hideous conspiracy was ended.
Tamaket knew better. She saw no failings in the king’s good sense, or his justice, either. He had punished only those against whom there was strong evidence. In Kush, the traitor’s entire family would have perished with him as a matter of course, like most of his friends and associates. She much preferred Egyptian justice, in spite of the prejudice against Kushites.
But she knew it was not the end.
Be merry all your life;
Toil no more than is required
nor cut short the time allotted for pleasure.
– Instruction of Ptah-hotep
Senusert removed the sacred Double Crown with relief, having just worn it through a long morning of listening to petitioners. The false plaited beard of kingship followed. He rubbed the point of his lean angular chin, for the ceremonial beard always itched it.
“I’ve a task for you, my brother,” he said, “which you should like better than the last. It will keep you away from your nome. Appoint a good steward if you haven’t done so yet. I desire you to restore the Waters of Shedet.”
“Men say it cannot be done,” Dahi remarked, with a flash of malachite-painted eyes. “They say the lake is moribund by the will of the gods.” She smiled. “Like the mighty king, I’ll believe it when you tell us so, Lord Antef, for I have doubts that the others know what they are talking about.”
Antef smiled wryly. “I do wonder where their eyes were. I’ve surveyed the lake and the country around. The trouble lies with the river that feeds it – one of the Nile’s offshoots, of course. Once I follow its course from the lake upwards I should know what measures are needed.”
“Amenemhat thought you would say that. He wishes very greatly to go with you. Is that pleasing?”
“I’ll have joy of his company.”
Dahi knew that was no polite formula. Antef felt a good deal of affection for the prince. She was willing to entrust the boy to her lord’s friend, even on a journey of some danger.
He returned dark from wind and sun, cocky, bursting with stories. There had been a sandstorm – small – and an attack by some scruffy Libyan bandits. Antef had called them weak beer compared with the Kushites.
“He says he does not know how the story began that the Waters of Shedet are past restoring! There’s a gorge, a passage, that has become choked with sand. That’s the worst part. Once we clear it the lake will be restored after a few high inundations, he says. Then, with new irrigation channels, all the fields and gardens will be rich as before.”
“One wonders,” Dahi said with purring amusement, “if there is anything Antef cannot do.”
Senusert kissed her. There was passion in the way his hands closed on her waist, even after years and children.
“There was a time when he did not give a banquet or entertain in a way to remember,” he observed, “and now even that has changed. A Kushite woman was a strange choice for his major-domo, and all of us looked askance, but now she’s the fashion.”
“Every hostess in the city would like to win her from Antef for her own household.” Dahi shook her shapely head. “I should use my royal power to steal her myself, save that our worthy Antef needs her more. But he should not need her. A wife would be better for him. Will you command him to marry again, Senusert?”
Senusert’s lean, energetic face clouded. “Truth. He’s been alone too long. I’ve spoken to him about it and urged just what you recommend, my Isis. But because he is as my brother, I will not command him.”
“Tamaket is not enough,” she repeated. “Certainly I would never miss a meal she prepared, so long as my tasters were present, but I trust no Kushite. Thieves at the least!”
“Few servants don’t thieve,” Senusert pointed out, and kissed her again. “Let them, provided they are worth it and keep it within measure.”
Antef often came home to his mansion, even with the king’s new project begun. The Waters of Shedet lay close to the capital, Ithej-Tawy, as distances in Egypt went. Senusert and Dahi honoured him with frequent visits. Tamaket found herself preparing many a banquet for the royal entourage.
Her temper grew short and her demands perfectionistic at such times. She remembered Semna and the death of Rakheb. She knew that Senusert and Dahi did, also. If poison appears at one of these meals, she thought, I would not give a mildewed wheat grain for my life.
Once, standing before the Royal Wife to receive a compliment, she had a very bad moment. Dahi was saying amiably that she never feasted better at the palace, and biting with gusto into a steaming quail flavoured with delicate traces of aniseed. Then her expression changed. Clenching her teeth, she bent forwards. The cone of perfumed ointment on her head wobbled. Tamaket, nearest to her, said deferentially, “Your pardon, O Wife of the Living Horus,” and steadied her, looking intently into her face. “Are you ill?”
“Of course I am ill,” Dahi said harshly. “Ah! I know what this is. I have had these inner pains since I last gave birth . . . they come and go. Forgive me, my lord, I would retire. Send my physician to me, woman.”
“At once, Great One.”
A common woman’s ailment, and her physician confirmed it. The gods be thanked for that! Tamaket sweated to think what might have happened if Dahi’s pains had been caused by suspect food. By morning she seemed much improved. Tamaket witnessed two more such attacks over the months that followed, and heard of others, since her master was now something of a courtier – by force of circumstances, not by nature. It always tickled her humour when he appeared at court. Seeing him in ornate formal garments, among soft priests, sleek placemen and over-precise scribes like Montumes, was downright funny.
His father and brothers came downstream to visit him. They seemed willing to treat him as a kinsman again, though the father especially had no warmth. Still, after the fearful blasphemy of murder attempts against the godking had struck so close to his house, he must reckon it wisest to seem more friendly. Tamaket did not suppose the king – or Antef, either – was at all deceived.
Time flowed by as surely as the Nile. The months became a year, then three. After that one meagre inundation, the river rose high two years in a row, and with the obstructed gorge successfully cleared, the Waters of Shedet rose also. So did Antef’s reputation.
Tamaket enjoyed success herself. As the Royal Wife remarked, she had become a fashion, almost a craze, in Ithej-Tawy. Her circle of powerful well-wishers increased, and with them the number of spies she now possessed in many places, high and low.
She took to saying, “Oh, my master, may I assist at the feast Lady Nefer is giving? Her steward has been dropping hints for a week.” Then it would be, “The Temple of Hathor wishes me to help organize the moon ceremony, noble one, and the king will attend. May I do so?”
Antef was patient with his servants, even indulgent, but he saw Tamaket had gone to excess.
“You do not serve the whole of Lower Egypt, but me,” he warned her. “One last time. Then it must cease.”
In the event, one last time proved more appropriate words than either of them had imagined.
Those who are in the sky are made wolves, and those who are among the sovereign princes are become hyenas. Behold, I gather together the charm from every place where it is, and from every man with whom it is, swifter than hunting dogs and quicker than light.
– Papyrus of Ani
Antef, as the King’s Friend, sat on a gold-inlaid chair beside Senusert. Lesser guests used mats and cushions among a forest of dark-red pillars. They made a great throng. Priests, scribes and officials mingled with a group of dignitaries from Crete with their curled dark hair and narrow-waisted kilts, bright with colour in contrast to the milky linen of Egypt. There were no envoys from Kush.
“It’s time,” Senusert said quietly to Antef. “When the river stops rising, and before it recedes, the fleet will depart.”
“Good,” Antef replied. “I’ve heard about the Kushite attacks against Semna. Two major ones in a season.”
“They will regret it. The dam you built has opened a door. Now we are going through it. To the ends of the land of Yam.”
“Don’t speak of it, my lord,” Dahi said. “I’ll be sorry to see you and our brother, the Lord Antef, go! Conquer these wretches, since you must, and then come home quickly.”
Antef did not hear what Senusert replied. Something affectionate, no doubt, but he found himself thinking of what was to come, and thinking of it darkly. He had been with Senusert on one expedition through Nubia. He began drinking deeply in an effort to be merry. This attracted no undue notice; it was a rare banquet at which wine passed around slowly. Dahi did not spare her cups, either, but then she had a good head for liquor.
She raised yet another to her lips. The cone of scented ointment atop her wig had melted to a stub by now, running down over her cheeks and shoulder so that her flesh glistened. She smoothed the remnant back, then drank half the cup’s contents in one gleeful draught.
“Fortune attend your campaign, and all that you do, beloved,” she said, passing it to Senusert.
The king took it.
His poison-taster, Ipi, plucked the goblet from Senusert’s grasp as he had been poised and waiting to do.
“No, mighty Khakaure; this holds poison.”
Senusert sat motionless in a haze of perfume and wine and light, calling on his savoir-faire. On campaign or on a throne, one acquired it. His face never changed, and his gaze travelled around to see who else was aware. Nobody, it appeared, except Antef. Then Montumes sidled in beside the taster, busy and knowing.
“He tells the truth, O king.”
Montumes dipped a finger in the royal cup and withdrew it with something adhering. Staring, the king saw what seemed to be a fragment of eggshell. He found no especial significance in that.
Montumes could not wait to enlighten him. “A dove’s egg, mighty king, blown, filled with death and resealed, ready to crush into your festive wine.”
Dahi snatched the cup in anger. “Oh such nonsense! Are you wit-stricken, Montumes? I have just drunk, and I am well. Look!”
In one impatient gesture she drained the rest and tossed the cup aside. People were staring, though it had not been the case before. The attention Senusert had wished to avoid was thoroughly upon them now.
“How did you ever conceive this ridiculous idea?”
Montumes picked up the fallen cup. “Ah. Ah. Great Ones, perhaps I was wrong.”
“Wrong?” Senusert snapped. “You must explain some way further than that.”
“Yes, O Living Horus.”
Antef, watching, knew by now that something was deeply amiss, as he saw Dahi’s eyes change and Montumes’s smirk. He never had cared for the man. Nor did Senusert, in that moment. The contretemps was growing worse.
It might be carried off with discretion yet. Rising with a yawn, the king declared that he and Dahi were retiring, with the ease of one whose word was law, and wished the company goodnight. He returned with Dahi to their private rooms. Montumes shortly followed, needing no command. You must explain some way further than that, Senusert had said.
He welcomed the Keeper of State Records with a curt nod, and ordered his guardsmen at the door to admit nobody else.
“There are witnesses I may have to call, O king,” Montumes ventured. “That young poison-taster – ”
“I will wish to see him in time. Not yet.”
Dahi said wearily, “All this talk of poison is folly. I am alive, my great lord, and not even in discomfort, though I drank the cup to the lees before you. Montumes’ reasons for doing this I do not know, but I remember he was with us at Semna when that wine-jar proved to be deadly.”
Senusert made no reply. Very clearly he was thinking. Frowning, he gazed at the Keeper of State Records, who continued to look at Dahi.
“There is something on your gown, just above the knee – Great One,” he said with poorly concealed spite.
Dahi, royal and divine, did not look down like a disconcerted servant. She shrugged in disgust. Montumes caught the king’s glance, and pointed to the Royal Wife’s gown, whereupon Dahi did lower her gaze, and and bring down her hand in an impatient brushing motion.
Senusert caught her hand before it could touch the linen. What he removed from his wife’s gown was a fragment of eggshell, adhering by some dark fluid it had contained, that was certainly neither white nor yolk.
“That isn’t proof,” Senusert said grimly. “If indeed a dove’s egg charged with poison was crushed into our wine, a bit may easily have fallen on the Royal Wife’s gown by no action of hers. You have accused her of the vilest crime one may conceive. You must prove it past doubt. You will wail in regret that ever you were born unless you do.”
“Indeed and truly!” Dahi concurred. “Where did I hide it, for one thing, you dog? In my navel, perhaps?”
“In your perfume cone, Great One,” Montumes answered, “and it is a horror to me to declare it. Your fingers could find the egg readily, once the cone melted to a remnant. Not I alone, but Ipi the taster, saw it happen.”
“The taster? Your accomplice in this?” Dahi looked incredulous. To Senusert she said, “Am I to listen further?”
“I scarcely think so.” Senusert turned on his Keeper of State Records in anger. “This babble of poison fails on the most important point! Dahi and I were to share the cup you assure me was deadly. First she drank half, and then the rest, while I drank none. She is unharmed. Nothing can surmount that.”
Dahi nodded, lips shut hard and eyes fiery. Her look promised ruin to the record-keeper for this.
“Alas, O Living Horus!” Montumes answered. “What your wisdom perceives, the Royal Wife foresaw. She is inured to this poison. Since bearing her last child, she has taken slowly increasing doses, until she can swallow unharmed what would kill a company of soldiers. It is why she gave her child to a wet-nurse this time. She never did before.”
“Liar!” Dahi spat.
“That is why she was ill with recurring belly pains,” Montumes said inexorably. “Poison, not infection. Her physician was part of this impious scheme. I have had him watched day and night. He supplied the poison, measured the doses, and made lying pronouncements about the results being due to infection! If questioned, I think he will speak.”
Dahi’s face changed then, so terribly that the king felt a chill rising to his heart, as if he had indeed drunk the lethal cup and its working had begun. He knew Montumes. Scarcely the most daring of men, he would not accuse Dahi unless he was sure of her guilt – and sure, too, that he could substantiate it. The Nile would flow backwards first.
Senusert felt dazed. The air seemed to blacken and curdle around him. Taking it into his lungs became an effort. His face had changed also, and the change was not good to see.
As from a vast distance he heard Montumes say in a low tone, “I am grieved, O Living Horus, grieved – but there is more. I have scarcely begun.”
The sky pours water, the stars darken;
The Bows rush about, the bones of the Earth-god tremble.
– Hymn to Wenis
Senusert entered the empty, darkened banquet hall. Smells of food, wine, perfume and many warm bodies had grown stale in the past few hours. Mixed into the thick miasma were whiffs of vomit, also. Feasts began better than they ended.
The servants who cleaned up the mess had gone. One man had not. One man remained, a cup in his hands, drained to the lees, as he turned and turned it slowly in his fingers.
A brazier standing near cast a dim red glow on the seated man’s arm and profile. He never moved as Senusert approached; even his hands ceased turning the empty cup.
The king wasted no time. “How could you do it?”
“What?” The big man shook his head. “I’m drunk.”
“You may have emptied an entire wine-jar without help, but I know you are sober,” Senusert told him. “I asked how you could do it! Montumes knew everything, Antef. And so do I, now. Explain to me – that’s a command. When did you become a traitor?”
“Me?” After a moment Antef said disbelievingly, “Montumes says that? Of me? And you credit him? I’d say you must be joking, but this is not your kind of joke.”
“It’s no laughing matter, and I take oath to that on my father’s tomb.”
Antef said bluntly, “Then you’re the one drunken. Eye of Ra! I’m the one who caught the traitors for you!”
“Dahi confirms him.” After a pause, Senusert said in a voice like death, “I discovered tonight that there is nothing she does not know about treason. I credit her. You cannot shield her, or your father, Antef. And, by the Double Crown, if you prevaricate one heartbeat longer, I use this dagger.”
Antef heard the raw grief in his king’s voice, and the certainty. His own came back thick with pain.
“I discovered the traitors. They were guilty, not innocent. I delivered them to you. Senusert, I see you’re not joking. But what makes you believe this?”
“You know well! You discovered that your own sire was one of them – of the leaders! You did not tell me that.”
“No,” Antef agreed, his voice flat. “I did not. I warned him that I’d denounce him at any hint of a further threat to you. I left full written testimony sealed and safe lest he should try to silence me first – for he loves me little and I do not doubt he’d be capable of it – and let him know it was written. You will find it with my will in the vaults of the Temple of Sobek. I couldn’t hand over my father to disgrace and vile death, Senusert, no matter how black a traitor.”
“And so you became one yourself,” the king said bitterly. “Antef, you fool! Did you think you could outwit a man like your father, or hold him on a leash by such a simple threat? Dahi informs me – the bitch – that he was glad to have the other traitors caught, and be rid of them, they having proved so inept. I am sure he was. Madmen must have conceived the idea of training a man-eater in the hope that she would destroy me. The night of the lion hunt you were still true, were you not? When did you turn against me?”
Antef said wearily, “Does it matter?”
Senusert had been hoping that it might still turn out to be untrue.
“Not now. No matter when it began, I wonder how you could feast with me, hunt with me, take the honours I heaped on you, all the while intending my death. When did you learn that Dahi shared in the plot?”
He spoke Dahi’s name like a man taking his death-wound.
“She was not. Until she became enamoured of me. Then – it happened one step at a time.”
Senusert swore vilely. “When I called you a fool it was less than the truth! Dahi brought that poisoned wine to Semna three years ago and longer! She and your father – you don’t know it yet? They began this treason together.”
“No,” Antef said harshly. “I became enamoured of Dahi, Senusert. When she loved me also – there was no way to possess her but to murder you. Thus I joined forces with my snake of a father and became a snake myself. My suggestion was that I should kill you in the confusion of battle when we campaigned in Nubia again.”
“Your suggestion,” the king said, sickened. “But Dahi wanted something more certain, didn’t she? She has sharper fangs than your sire, knows less about honour – and until tonight I would have killed the man who uttered such things in my hearing. If I have to know it, by all the gods, so do you! Dahi desires power. With me as king, she did not rule. Married to you, with your father as Vizier, she could rule in all but name, for you can be managed, and would be content with building. She lured you, you dolt, and you do not know it! She loves you not. She loves no man.”
He saw Antef’s eyes blaze and the great muscles harden. Senusert’s own grip tightened on his poniard’s hilt. The blade was broad, hard and sharply pointed, and if Antef lunged at him, Senusert was more than ready to drive it through his heart.
“Sit still,” he said in the king’s voice.
“Not,” Antef growled, “if you say that again.”
Senusert could almost have pitied him, then, except that his own heart had turned to seared sand and boulders with death resident therein. He wanted to inflict pain so vile that his own pain would vanish. He wanted to drive Antef to attack him so that he could strike with the dagger.
He made his face a mask.
“She rejected your plan to kill me in the tumult of battle. Not certain enough. She was probably afraid that you might remember you had been my friend, and honest, and not be able to murder one who trusted you. It’s no failing of hers. She handed me that cup with a loving smile. Does that not tell you all you need to know?”
He knew the message had not come to him yet, either. Soon, he told himself, it is going to strike me, and I shall realize what this means, wholly. My friend, my brother, the one who never failed me, has turned traitor . . . would have murdered me, and she I love, who sat a royal throne beside me, bore my children . . .
“What will you do?” Antef asked.
“Keep this secret,” the king answered. “For now. I cannot decide at once, but to my son you are a hero, an example of courage and honour. He should not know the truth too young. With regard to his mother, perhaps he should never know it.”
He considered, while Antef waited in silence.
“Keep your great name,” Senusert said at last. “Come with me as planned on our expedition to the land of Yam. However, you are not to return alive. My Majesty commands it. Have you heard me?”
“Yes.”
Bending forwards, his eyes black in the brazier-glow, Senusert pronounced doom. “Your body shall be lost. You shall have no tomb. Your name shall vanish, and so also shall I deal with your father.”
“It is just,” Antef said resignedly. “But Dahi is the Royal Wife. You cannot deal so with her.”
“She is my children’s mother, and that is a great misfortune. She shall bear me no others. Having her buried with me is a thought I cannot stomach, but some way can be found to arrange it otherwise.” He added after a moment, “Plausibly.”
Antef nodded heavily. “There seems no more to say.”
They spoke so quietly that none watching – and there was always someone watching the king – could have heard the exchange. Tamaket, in the night shadows of the hall, did not catch a word for all her sharp hearing, but she saw both men’s faces in the brazier-glow, and it told her enough.
The Keeper of State Records could have the credit and welcome, if he thought that credit would accrue, if he fancied the king would ever like the source of such hideous news. Tamaket knew better. She also knew every poison in three lands, and had recognized the symptoms of the one to which Dahi was inuring herself over a year, no matter what lies her physician told. Dahi had overlooked that. Knowing it, Tamaket had soon surmised that the Royal Wife would hand her husband the bane herself, and choose to do it at some feast where Tamaket was present to be blamed. It had only been necessary, then, to warn Montumes and Ipi, and let them expose the guilty.
“But how did you know?” Montumes had asked her, bewildered. “Guessing that Lord Antef’s father was one of the plotters, that I can understand. What brought you to suspect the Great Royal Wife?”
“Oh. I wondered from the start, in Semna,” Tamaket had answered. “Someone, it was plain, would find me a useful fool to blame for murder by poison, and that worried me. It has worried me ever since. It was reasonable for the Royal Wife to suspect me, and she does not care for Kushites, nor is she notably kind to subordinates – yet she spoke in favour of bringing me to Egypt. I had to wonder why.”
Very softly, she departed.
As Senusert had promised, Antef’s body vanished, he had no tomb, and his name perished, with no inscriptions to record it. Senusert entered the annals as a great king, and was worshipped as a god in Kush for long after, but his son succeeded him while still a stripling. There are those who say grief does not shorten life, that this is nonsense, but Senusert was a strong vital man whom his servants had thought would live long.
Also, those sculptors who carved him in granite later, though they could not have known its cause, showed him with haunted eyes and a look of bleak anguish to make the most frivolous halt and wonder.