This story is set during the reign of Amenemhat IV, the grandson of Senusert, from the previous story, and one of the last kings of the Twelfth Dynasty. He reigned from about 1808-1799 BC and, as the story opening tells us, the events happen in year seven of his reign, so we are clearly in the year BC 1801. By now the great power of the Twelfth Dynasty kings is in decline, and the governors are once again exerting their control. The character Senbi, who features in this story, is doubtless descended from the Senbi who lived nearly two hundred years earlier and was one of the powerful provincial nomarchs whose authority was curtailed by the kings of the new dynasty. The resentment of the nomarchs festered for many generations.
Noreen Doyle is an Egyptologist specializing in nautical archaeology. Although she hails from Maine she is currently undertaking postgraduate work at the University of Liverpool. She has written several historical fantasies set in ancient Egypt since her first story, “The Chapter of Bringing a Boat into Heaven” (Realms of Fantasy, 1995).
The “lector” priest was an important official amongst the priesthood who recited the incantations and words of the gods, keeping track of the rituals and religious ceremonies down through the generations. An execration is a ritual outburst of hatred expressed as a statement of loathing against specific enemies, as the following story makes abundantly clear.
Tomorrow, this captain tells me, we will be in Thebes, at the Great Prison. The vizier of the south himself will want to see me.
The vizier! My lord, who sent me south to Djer-Setiu, on the order of the king. He will want to see me, but will he believe what I now have to say? I am bound and trussed like a liar and a rebel.
There is a letter that I did not send him, now in possession of others, as is everything else that was mine:
Year 7, first month of the third season, day 21. It is the lector-priest and keeper of secrets Emsaf who says: “By the order of His Person, the king, I, your humble servant, arrived at the island fortress of Djer-Setiu. The commandant, Senbi, has gone away for a time because Nubians are making trouble in the east near the gold mine, but before his departure he assigned everything necessary that you, my lord, did not dispatch with me. I, your humble servant, write that you may be informed that the execration was performed perfectly.”
“Did I lie?” I ask this captain.
Nakht – he is the captain – seems reluctant to speak, and returns to yelling at his rowers.
He’s afraid, you see, because I killed a man in full view of everybody. He does not yet know what that means for his children, if he has them, or for his wife, or for his mother and father or for the king. Or for himself. Or for the Rightful Order of the world. Neither, in fact, do I.
Perhaps that is the result of my abomination. Perhaps this is why Senbi stood by the riverbank until Nakht’s boat was out of sight. Perhaps this is why I killed this man.
But perhaps not, and it happened like this:
In the hour past noon, Kush came, and Libya, and Asia. In the shape of one man, a Nubian, a wretch, all the hostile foreign lands approached the burial place, all wickedness bundled into one flesh and blood and bone, and Egypt watched. Spearmen and scribes and overseers arrayed themselves on this western shore of the river. They knelt aboard boats moored at the bank. Nubian villagers laid down their chores and neglected their herds to stand in the shade of date-palms and rock, curious and frightened by our display of Egypt’s might. On a hilly island in the midst of the river, soldiers and Medjays, the strong men of Egypt, stood atop the massive, sunlit heights of the fortress that divided the island along its length. Everyone’s eyes fixed upon the wretch as soldiers led him up from the river, to this sandy burial place.
A low chant rose from among the Egyptians and Medjays, the name of this fortress: “Djer-Setiu, Djer-Setiu: Destroying-the-Nubians, Destroying-the-Nubians.”
The king had ordered that a lector-priest be sent with mutilated limestone figures from Thebes: “Make a very great execration at Djer-Setiu. Melt the wax figurines, break the red pots, put the enemy upside-down in the burial place.” And he had sent to the vizier of the south, my lord, the names of Egypt’s enemies, along with the names of their children and their servants and all their people. As the king smote them on the battlefield, so would they be stricken here in the burial place.
This Nubian, stripped naked, his head covered only with new-grown bristle, a battle scar on his chest, came to me.
I washed my hands in a white calcite bowl, shaking the water from my fingers to hide their trembling.
Into one pit I cast red pots that I broke, and mud figurines of men and cattle and papyrus rafts, and into a second pit I toppled the limestone figures inscribed with the names of those who would harm Egypt and do injury to Rightful Order. Thus did I, Emsaf, lector-priest and keeper of secrets, begin the execration, a spell known since the beginning of the world.
Two soldiers who had fasted and shaved and slept alone for seven days set the wretch – designated from the labour prison by Commandant Senbi – upon the ground. His arms were tied behind his back at the elbows and wrists, and now they bound his legs so that he knelt.
I approached the wretch. He embodied chaos, wickedness, all that would destroy Rightful Order. It was the likes of him who would strip beads from the wrists of high-born ladies and drape them over slave women, give coffins to those who could not afford a tomb, put oars into the hands of nobles, transgress against the god, overthrow the king.
Now, I have in the past wrung the necks of many ducks and even smashed turtles against the wall, but never before had I done this to a Nubian.
He looked at me – turning his head about to see behind him – and, with his mouth open, said nothing, for his tongue had been cut out. He looked at me and for a moment, for just a moment, I thought that he might be not a wretch but a person after all.
I did as the king ordered, in full view of everybody. I drew fast across his neck a sharp copper knife, the knife by which Isis and Horus struck Set, the god of chaos. I did this again and again and he bled and he bled and he bled, like the river in flood, as if it would never stop.
And I wondered, as his bowels relaxed and added their contents to the flow, if I were to extend my hand, my other hand, might I control this efflux, slow it, stop it? What mattered, however, was only that I had started it, and I contented myself with this. Contented? I was numbed as if by wine – no, I was filled up – with something –
He was emptied, at last, from throat and anus. He died.
As if he were a small and peculiar ox, I cut away his head and the soldiers cast his body aside.
In due course I placed his skull upside-down in a bowl and I buried it in the last pit, jawless, surrounded by wax figurines that I burned. I cast sand into the pits, which were then filled up with more sand. The spoken word, the written word, every act of the rite, everything was perfect.
“Djer-Setiu!” the men cried, more loudly now, while I washed my bloodied hand and the knife in the white bowl, then lit a brazier of incense. As the purified soldiers swept away our footprints and his fluids, and buried the corpse in so shallow a grave that even a Medjay would not place his dead in it, I retired to the island, where a room of the commandant’s house had been reserved for my use.
It is no mean hovel, this house within the fortress walls, and I was at home there as I might be in Thebes. The ceilings are high and plastered white, held aloft in the hall by columns hewn from wood. The commandant’s own wife, a Nubian woman, oversaw the servants who provided me with dates and other good food and saw that I was undisturbed in the small and bright room beside Senbi’s own bedchamber.
There I composed my report to tell the vizier that it had been a good execration. I told him of everything but my shaking limbs and my swollen heart.
The enemies of Egypt would tremble and be afraid, I wrote, for they had been overthrown and cast out in the name of the king. Rightful Order would be maintained. With the fate delivered to that one wretch, the enemy, the rebel, whoever, wherever, he was, was overthrown and upturned.
But soon I was to learn that so too, perhaps, was the entire world.
That was five days later when Senbi, commandant of Djer-Setiu, returned from his campaign, triumphant. He had defended the gold mine from rebel villagers and roaming tribes, and ferried their cattle and women and children to the island. The Nubian villagers who lived along both sides of the river put down their water jugs and fishing nets as he disembarked on the island with the wealth of those who, perhaps, had lately been their neighbours. They stared and said nothing, but we, Egyptians and Medjays, called out Senbi’s praises.
Senbi made a great procession into the fort from the east bank of the island, with fanbearers and spearmen and crack Medjay archers: up from the river, past the settling basins where gold was collected from ore and the labour prison where the miners were kept, through the cool shadows of the long gateway entrance. There is, within Djer-Setiu, an open court bordered by the fortress walls and Senbi’s house and, along the southern side, unyielding knolls of stone that the masons had left in place. Against this little backdrop of desert trapped within the fortress, overseers arranged the cattle and dogs and paraded them before Senbi, who sat beneath ostrich-feather fans with a fly-whisk held to his breast. The captives crawled before him on their bellies. Scribes accounted everything before him.
Senbi then retired to his pillared hall, where he called an audience. He sat on a lion’s-foot chair on a raised dais, beneath the attendance of two servants who with slow beats of their fans moved the hot, incensed air – it was exceptional perfume, I marvelled: antyu from Punt, which Nubian traders sometimes brought up from the south, much prized in the temples and palace. Senbi was honoured indeed, to have such stuff. Samentju, chief scribe of Djer-Setiu, sat on the floor before him. And he summoned, first, Emsaf the lector-priest and keeper of secrets.
He asked of the execration, and I told him. Those assembled murmured in concurrence as I said that it had gone exceedingly well. When I was finished Senbi asked: “Did you take the tongueless one?”
“I did, my lord, as your instructions directed. Each man in the labour prison stuck out his tongue, and he who did not because he could not, him I took. Samentju may vouch for that.”
Samentju’s pen slipped across the papyrus. He licked away the unwanted ink and the tip of his tongue turned black. He murmured, “It was so, my lord, it was so.”
“It is an excellent thing, then,” Senbi pronounced, brushing flies away from his face with his whisk. “A troublemaker among troublemakers that one was, a rebel among rebels.”
“He is now turned upside-down in the burial place, my lord. Rebels and foreigners are overthrown with him, in the name of the king.”
“In the name of the king,” Senbi replied, “many things are done. We stand in his stead here, we commandants at the very borders of Egypt. We are his eyes and his ears and his strong arms. Foreigners are cast down in defeat, gold is dug up from the earth, men fight and bleed and die in his name, for Rightful Order, while the king lies far away downstream.”
“Even as ablutions are performed, sacrifices are made, prayers are spoken by priests standing in the king’s stead in every temple,” I added, “while he is absent.”
“Effectiveness. That is the function of a priest, no less than the function of a commandant! You know this as well as I do, lector-priest Emsaf. I’m pleased. When you return to Thebes the Nubian herds will go with you, and gold for the vizier. I assume, of course, that you will return to Thebes?”
“I will,” I replied.
“A shame.” Senbi leaned forward, inviting me onto his dais. “Here we have no priest, no temple, no one who knows –”
Before Senbi could finish, before I could mount the dais, soldiers entered the hall, in the company of several sailors still drenched from their labours. Senbi stood, unhappy at this intrusion.
“For the commandant!” the chief of the sailors called. “Nakht, captain of the ship Montu-Rejoices-in-Thebes, seeks an audience.”
And Senbi bade forwards the captain, who came with his sailors, who dragged forwards a lean, dark man wearing a leather kilt and his hair cropped short in the Nubian fashion.
“On our way from Iqen we found this man along the river, my lord, nearly drowned,” Nakht said. “So we brought him aboard and in doing so found that he had gold upon him, and beqa-weights.” Nakht presented Senbi with two tiny but weighted sacks and a handful of little square stones inscribed with the diadem-sign. These had only one purpose, to measure gold ingots and dust. There was, though I did not see it, gold dust in the pouches. “We did not know what he might be doing with such things. He cannot trade in this region; he is a Nubian and has no commission. Unless –” Nakht looked at the Medjay archers among Senbi’s contingent and seemed unconvinced of what he was about to say. For generations the Nubian-born forefathers of these Medjays had served Egypt’s kings loyally. “Unless, my lord, he is one of your soldiers?”
“No, he is not one of my soldiers.”
Through all of Nakht’s speech, Senbi had taken his eyes from the Nubian only once. When Nakht said beqa-weights, I remember very clearly that his eyes went from the Nubian to me for the briefest of moments.
“Where did you find this man?”
Nakht described the spot, a lonely stretch of rocky shore at the bend in the river between Djer-Setiu and the fortress of Iqen.
“You did not moor in the west?” Senbi said. Now he looked at Nakht.
“In the west! No, no,” Nakht replied, thinking Senbi made some jest, because to moor and to go to the west both mean to die. “Wet as a fish he was, but quite alive. On the east bank, as it happens.”
“Tell me your name.” Senbi directed this to the Nubian, who made no reply. Then he said this again, or so I suppose, in the Nubian jabber. Still the man did not answer. “Open your mouth.”
The Nubian opened his mouth and Senbi leaned close, and one of the soldiers grabbed the Nubian’s jaw and made sure it was open very wide, so very wide that even from where I was standing I could see the mutilation in the moist darkness of this man’s mouth.
“Emsaf,” Senbi said, his eyes transfixed upon the mouth of the Nubian, that gullet which had no tongue, “tell me again who it is that lies upside-down in the burial place.”
“It was the tongueless one,” I said. “The tongueless one chosen from among the men in the labour prison.”
“That cannot be, for I myself cut the tongue out of that Nubian, and by god, this is he. Emsaf, whom did you kill?”
A heavy stillness fell over Djer-Setiu in that moment. Everyone, not least myself, seemed afraid to move from our places. The world spun like a potter’s wheel.
What did this mean? O the terribleness of it for him who had been sacrificed, it was a dreadful fate he had met here and worse in the netherworld. His ba-soul, his ka-soul, were utterly destroyed – he was defeated forever. But for the rest of the earth and for those who still lived upon it, what did it mean? Such an act might be a violation of Rightful Order, an utter abomination. And I had committed it.
Senbi stilled the whirling of the earth by putting both feet firmly upon it, standing, and ordering some men to this and other men to that. Everyone did precisely what he said, grateful to be relieved of the burden of decision. He posted extra archers on the walls and sent out patrols to the four cardinal points. Nakht and the sailors he ordered to the river, to see that none, Nubian or otherwise, passed this way by boat or raft. As for me, he ordered that I stand beside him, leaving me fearful of his intention.
Every man, Egyptian and Nubian alike, in the labour prison was tied with rope and brought before Senbi and me, and Samentju tallied them. Every one stuck out his long, pink tongue between bright white teeth or black rotted gums, every single one of them. The one who had been sacrificed, he could not have done so. He had no tongue. It was not there before I slit his throat, nor after. I told Senbi this. He said nothing.
After Senbi had inspected the prisoners, most of whom were runaway labourers now assigned to the gold mine, he himself went to the emptied prison to see that there were no more that the guards had forgotten – or perhaps hidden. Senbi was always concerned about rebels, and I understood, not only because this was the storehouse of grain and supplies for every other fort in Nubia but because there was gold in this land over which the king had given Senbi charge.
“You must know them, rebels,” he said, looking about the largest vaulted cell in the prison. It was nearly as large as Senbi’s hall, stinking of urine and faeces and buzzing with countless flies.
“And you must write their names upon red pots, cast them down and break them,” I said, as we inspected other rooms which stank no less.
“But first you must know them.”
He had Samentju and the other scribes make an accounting of all three hundred soldiers within the fortress and every man in the Nubian villages on both shores of the river. Together, Samentju and I checked and rechecked this with an earlier census and with the memories of the scribes. All were accounted for in the prison, barracks, and villages, none were missing.
Seven times Samentju and I examined these figures over twice as many days. “Have we accounted for Captain Nakht’s men?” asked Samentju with some hope in his voice. But we had. Finally, his voice rising from despair to the kind of hope to which only desperate men can aspire, Samentju said, “Does it matter who he was, Emsaf? How many people in the world are wretches? He was bound to have been one of them, and the fewer, the better. The execration will be no different for it.”
“That man, whoever he was, did not cut out his own tongue and place himself among your prisoners, Samentju. This means it mattered to someone,” I replied. “Which perhaps means that he was not a wretch at all.”
“Was not,” Samentju said, unhappily.
Was not. Whatever he had been, he was nothing now, nothing at all. Who had he been, this one whose ba-soul, ka-soul, shadow, effectiveness, and name I had caused to suffer and to perish utterly. And I had done so under the authority of the king. The execration –
– execution – murder –
– what would become of it? The ritual, it was spoiled. What would come of its power? What abomination had I wrought upon the Rightful Order of this world?
These nights I did not sleep well. Thought of disturbing the pits to look upon the dried remains of his mutilated face haunted me. But I could not violate the burial place. The rite had been done in the name of the king and the god; there was too much Power there. Still, I wondered if the sun would rise in the east, if it would rise at all. I did convince myself that such a worry was foolishness over the course of the next three days, during which Samentju and I tallied and retallied every man, every cow and bull, all the small cattle, all the dogs, each Nubian, within Djer-Setiu and in the Nubian villages. We received reports from Senbi’s messengers, who brought word from the fortresses of Iqen and Buhen to the north and the fortress Dair-Seti and the rest to the south. And every day the sun rose, in the east, as was its custom.
Now, I have seen a lector-priest drunk and heard him slur the holy words he was reading, and I have suspected a pure-priest of having slept with a woman or eaten fish when he ought not to have. The world did not end, Rightful Order persisted. But they, and others like them throughout Egypt, had otherwise performed their daily tasks in good order, and that is what matters: if I had slain one who was not an enemy, I had failed in my unique task, even if every word of the spell had been uttered perfectly. And the words were uttered perfectly, as anyone who heard them knows and will attest. What is done overpowers what is said: are spoken lies more powerful than silent truths? If a man claims to have given bread to the hungry, clothing to the naked, and a boat to the boatless when in fact he has not, these lies will not serve him in the netherworld.
I did not know if I had lied: I did not know if I had slain a wretch or a person.
So even as the sun rose each morning – as it will no doubt do so tomorrow, too, when we have reached the Great Prison – I worried over what chaos would result from my error.
My error! My abomination.
Each morning, as the sun rose, Senbi summoned Samentju and me to a private audience. “What did you find yesterday? Are infants laid on high ground? Does he who had no bread now have a granary?” Such would tell us that chaos had overtaken Rightful Order, and there was little sign of these things, either in Nubia or Egypt, for which I gave thanks. As days passed, however, this began to concern Senbi: I supposed he, a soldier, was waiting for the onslaught of an enemy he knows to be lurking somewhere in the hills, the wait more dreaded than the attack.
Each day, too, he would ask, “What will you do today?” We told him of our next census and accounting; everything that we had done yesterday we would do again today.
When we came to him on the fifteenth day of our labours and he asked, “What will you do today?” I said: “Today, my lord, we must have words with Captain Nakht’s half-drowned Nubian.”
“Words! Emsaf, I personally cut out his tongue and threw it into the sand.”
“He has control of his ears and his hands, my lord.”
Senbi’s lips turned into a frown. “We can only hope that he likewise has control of his heart. Go then, you and Samentju, and afterwards tell me what you learn.”
We went to him with pens – old ones, chewed down and of no use to a conscientious scribe – and ink and bits of stone and broken pots. He had been sequestered in an emptied room in the storehouse beside the labour prison. Samentju entered first; stripped naked, the Nubian watched him calmly until I followed. Then he began to struggle at his bonds, making a breathy noise like a dog. He shook his head, staring wild-eyed at Samentju, pleading with tears, stealing only the briefest of glances my way, as though sight of me were a burning ember thrust into his eyes.
“You’ve killed someone – someone that should have been him,” Samentju explained to me. “No wonder he’s afraid. Hai, there, Pa-Nehesy,” he said to the Nubian, and that was all Samentju or anyone else ever called him: Pa-Nehesy, the Nubian. “That’s done with. It’s over. Unless the king demands another execration.”
This settled him; I wonder how much he understood. Samentju, like Senbi, had learned a little Nubian jabber; a number of the Nubians who lived near Djer-Setiu had some command of Egyptian, and I thought this one might as well, if he recognized the value of the beqa-weights lately in his possession. I wondered where they had come from, too. Not from Djer-Setiu; we had accounted for all that had been apportioned to the fortress and indeed found a few weights, and even a little gold, that had never been entered into the accounts, a carelessness for which Samentju severely beat one of the other scribes.
Would we have to beat the truth out of Pa-Nehesy? I wondered. My fingers trembled at this prospect.
“Does he speak Egyptian?” I asked.
“Not any more,” Samentju replied. “No doubt he still understands a bit of it.”
“Why did Senbi cut out his tongue?”
“He was a rebel.”
“So Senbi would want him dead –”
“Of course!”
“– but who would want him alive? What was his tribe?”
“He’s from the village on the east bank, and he knows the hill-country and its gold better than any other,” Samentju answered. To Pa-Nehesy he said, “The village?” and the Nubian agreed with a nod. “His tribe could not have got him out; they know better than to try. And besides, they have no boats of their own.”
“Someone did get him out, boatless or otherwise. Who was it?” I demanded of Pa-Nehesy. “Who got you out?”
He looked at me as if he did not understand, so I repeated myself more slowly. He then looked at Samentju, his expression one of puzzlement.
“Should you translate for him?” I asked.
Samentju paused. “I suppose I should,” he replied to me, and did so, haltingly in the Nubian jabber, which he evidently did not speak so well as Senbi. I laid out the bits of broken pottery and an old brush, and crushed and dampened ink for him on another potsherd.
Samentju unbound one of his wrists. Pa-Nehesy shook his arm violently and I jumped back, but he did no more than shake it for a time and then took the pen in hand.
“Can you write?” I asked Pa-Nehesy, who shook his head but proceeded to make a figure on the ostracon. If he could not write, he nonetheless had a little crude skill, and produced the outline of a man. This figure had a staff in one hand and his back was bent.
“An old man?”
“Look, he’s lying. There are no old men here,” said Samentju. “The frontier is no place for the aged.”
“There are none truly old,” I said, “but I have seen a few almost-old, with bent backs and with broad bellies. Who are they?”
Samentju thought for a moment, then spoke their names: Hetepi, Ameny –
Ameny. Yes, said Pa-Nehesy’s gestures and the look upon his face, it was Ameny. One of the stone-slingers.
It was Ameny.
So we had one of the soldiers bind up Pa-Nehesy’s free hand and went to question Ameny.
Ameny was not an old man, but his belly hung low and hid a little bit of his linen kilt and his hair was thinning. He was vigorous, with a dark, handsome face, and I did not think he would stand still in a fight. Senbi presided over his questioning, which took place in the open yard with men watching from their stations.
“You have put men into the labour prison.” Senbi made no question of this statement, and Ameny did not deny it. “How many of the men that you have put into the labour prison are there still?”
“All of them,” Ameny replied.
“There is not one who now lies in the burial place?”
Ameny looked at me, then at Samentju.
“I know of none of them who now lies in the burial place, but I do not know every action of these men, lord, nor if one of them might have died by the god’s will since yesterday.”
“You did not put a tongueless man into the labour prison?”
“I myself have never put a tongueless man into the labour prison nor removed one, nor has any man I have put into the labour prison lost his tongue. At least,” he said, again looking at me, “not of which I am aware.”
“Did you know the man whom the lector-priest put in the burial place?”
“I could not see from my position on the wall. From there–” he gestured with his head to the soldiers overlooking us from the heights “–all of the prisoners look much alike.”
Something was not right here; his answers were too clever. Senbi must have thought so, too, because he gestured that I come forward and take up his part.
“Let the lector-priest try to get the truth out of you. Try to keep your secret from the keeper of secrets!”
“I have spoken with people about you,” I told him. “Your wife is a Nubian from the village on the west bank.”
“From east or west, so is my lord Senbi’s. So would yours be, if you don’t already have a wife waiting at home in Thebes or wherever you’re from. Or perhaps even if you do.”
My wife did wait for me – in the hills, and she would wait for me in our house of eternity until my last day. But I had no such patience to wait for Ameny. There were lies stuffed within these fat truths he told.
“But that is only,” Ameny went on, “if you live long enough here in Djer-Setiu.”
“Enough!” Senbi roared. “Ameny, I will not have you demeaning the lector-priest on whom I would rely, the keeper of secrets who knows the gods and their ways. I do not think you realize your position. Pa-Nehesy has painted you as the man who freed him, so we can assume only that you are likewise the man who put the other tongueless in his place. This will be reported to the vizier.”
“Perhaps,” I said, thinking to turn Ameny’s cleverness against him, “we should ask your wife if she knows Pa-Nehesy.”
“My wife?”
“His wife?” Samentju broke in. The expression on his face revealed that he himself had not thought of such a thing. A murmur rippled among the other soldiers.
“His wife,” Senbi said flatly. The idea seemed new to him, too, but his surprise was more guarded. “So be it. Samentju, fetch her. Emsaf –” and he gestured again to Ameny.
So I took to questioning Ameny again, and asked him what his duties were, if they had not involved the tongueless. He guarded the wall and accompanied shipments of grain to Buhen and the other fortresses; he had nothing to do with the prisoners except to watch over their passage from the labour prison to the boat that took them to the eastern shore.
“And even then I was atop the wall. If the tongueless was ever among the other prisoners then,” Ameny said, “I would not know. They were all rendered as tongueless by the overseers’ lashes.”
I said, “I believe, my lord, that this will require the twisting of hands and of feet.”
Ameny blinked and rocked back on his heels but said nothing as the guards laid him down on the ground. At Senbi’s order they turned the wooden shackles that bound his hands and his feet, slowly, that Ameny might have time to contemplate his position.
Senbi stood over him for a time as Ameny writhed there; staining the hard-packed dirt with his sweat. Senbi knelt beside his head and said, “You know what will happen if you do not tell the truth.”
“I know, my lord, I do!”
They were turned again, a little bit. And again.
“I am innocent of this!” Ameny begged. “I swear, I swear,” and after some hours both Senbi and I had had enough. Indeed, Ameny seemed likely enough innocent of this.
By this time Samentju had returned with Ameny’s Nubian wife and babe. He gaped to see Ameny on the floor, looking more surprised than the woman. To Senbi Samentju said with hesitation, “I did not think it would come to this.”
“Ameny has not spoken,” Senbi said. “Except to protest his innocence.”
“Perhaps,” I said, “it will prompt Ameny’s wife to speak.”
Her name was Tyetyeb now, but it was not the name she had been born with; Ameny had given her a good Egyptian name. She was young and had given Ameny a son, their only child, not long before. The birth had been hard on her, I could see. Her eyes were sunken and shadowed, her hands shook, and she leaned on Samentju for support; I wondered indeed if he had carried her here. No, no, she could not possibly have freed Pa-Nehesy, not herself. She could scarcely manage the skinny, listless newborn in her arms.
“Do you have brothers here, either in the labour prison or the villages, male relatives of any sort?” I asked.
“I have no brothers anywhere.” Her Egyptian was heavily accented but well-ordered. “My father is dead and I have neither uncles nor brothers.”
“Do you know Pa-Nehesy the tongueless whom Captain Nakht brought?”
“I do not know. I have been ill in my house with my son and have not seen him.”
I believed this but said, “You might yet know something.”
“She knows nothing!” Ameny said. Senbi slapped him with his fly-whisk, drawing blood from Ameny’s lips.
“You know what will happen if you do not tell the truth,” Senbi said to Ameny in measured tones.
Ameny’s tongue licked at the seeping blood. “Yes, I do, yes, my lord. My lord, my lord, my lord,” he said, and I wondered if he was beseeching Senbi or a god. The note of his desperation and the condition of his woman touched me then and I ended my inquiry. Senbi ordered Ameny released with neither ceremony nor haste.
Samentju said to me, “Pa-Nehesy was mistaken.”
“Evidently. I wonder whom he is protecting.”
Ameny sat listlessly on the floor for several minutes, as if uncertain that his ankles would ever hold his weight again. He stood at last, stumbling to the wall beside his wife. They left together in the company of a soldier, neither of them well, neither able to help each other, walking like two old persons.
“Do you have doubts, my lord?” I whispered to Senbi.
“No,” Senbi replied, looking at the soldiers on the walls, who, having seen everything that had befallen their fellow, now turned away. “I have doubts no longer.”
A hot wind blew from the west that night. I lay in my camp-bed with one foot upon the floor, listening as the sand beat against the walls of Senbi’s house. I ordered servants to place wet linen over the high windows, and these billowed like sails as the storm bellowed like bulls. I cursed the wind, and blessed the thick walls of Senbi’s house.
“Such is Egypt.”
I stumbled from the bed, falling to one knee, then both, by no design. Senbi stood in the lamplight, wrapped in a cloak laden with dust. He had been out tonight.
“Stand, Emsaf. I wish to sit.”
“Would you care for wine?” I asked as I placed a stool beside him. Anyone who had been out on such a night would be parched. And desperate – or mad. What was he about?
Senbi took the seat, then the cup that I offered, filled with wine I had brought from Thebes. “This is Egypt’s predicament.” He gestured around the room. “Orderly, neat, pleasant. Stout walls, good wine, good company.”
“The commandant is gracious.”
“While outside–” he pointed to the window where the linen was holding its own “–howls all the rest of the world. Hordes beat upon our threshold, upon our windows, upon our walls, upon our roofs. They would sweep the king from the Residence, Emsaf, and would wear Egypt away.”
“Egypt is too great for that.”
“Do you have a drinking reed?”
“Why, yes, my lord. Would you care for a jug?”
“I have no plans to get drunk tonight! No, I want to show you a trick. It is a good trick. A magician taught me this.”
I felt my eyes grow wide beyond my will but, saying nothing, presented Senbi with a drinking reed.
He took, too, from an open chest beside my bed, the calcite bowl that had been given to my father by the king’s father. I used it daily in my ablutions. It was old and fine, very white and very beautiful.
“This is like Egypt: fine, complete, beautiful. Pure.”
He shook out his cloak, then swept the fallen sand into a mound. “This is the rest of the world, from Asia to Kush, from Punt to Libya. Fragmented, little, irritating.” And he emptied the sand into the bowl.
“At the time, did you feel nothing amiss?” Senbi asked, placing one end of the straw against the bottom of the bowl. Idly he began to turn the straw between the palms of his hand.
“What’s that?”
“When you killed him, cut off his head with the copper knife of the god.”
I remembered what I had felt, and measured my words. “What should one feel? I have burned wax figurines, wrung the necks of ducks –”
“But not killed a man?”
“He was a wretch, my lord,” I said with more hope than conviction. “He was not a person, not like you and I.”
“Now, I know what it’s like to kill a man. In the name of the king, like you. Many times over. I have brought a rain of arrows upon their fields, stampeded spearmen among their miserable huts. I have poisoned their wells. By the score, Emsaf, I have killed. So very many times have I stood in the same position that you did! We both stand in the place of the king. I understand what you felt.”
“There was –”
“What?” He leaned forwards, pausing in the work of his hands, and it was as though a shadow had entered the room, a night upon the night. In that moment something I cannot understand bound us together.
I did not answer at once. I searched for a word, unsure if I should speak it when it came. Senbi resumed his work and did not repeat his question; the echo of it alone prompted my reply.
I knelt before him. “A power.”
“Like a god?”
“Like a god – no –” Senbi looked disappointed, perhaps; I do not know. “It was like the king moved within me. His effectiveness.”
“His effectiveness. Yes, that’s what it’s like, Emsaf. To move in the name of the king is to move as the king, in the moment.”
“Should I have felt that?”
Senbi shrugged. “Who is to say what we should or should not feel? Did you like it?”
“Like it? I –”
“You did. I can see it in your face, it’s so plain.”
“Should I?”
“Like it?” Senbi laughed, now wagging the worn-down straw at me, and the darkness that had grown close around us seemed to disburse as if a new lamp had been lit. “Emsaf, such power is one of those fleeting things. For such power, such effectiveness, to remain in our hands, the whole world would have to be topsy-turvy!
“Do you know what this is?” He offered me the drinking reed, what remained of it, and I shook my head, answerless.
Senbi stood, throwing his cloak across his back. “I thank you for your hospitality, Emsaf. Theban wine is almost as good as the beer my wife brews from the fruit of the date-palm trees of this place.” He laughed quietly. “Good night, Emsaf. May you not have to go abroad tonight.”
Alone now, I reached for my calcite bowl. The trick of Senbi’s magician, I thought, was one of revealing my own gullibility. I would have to find a good stoneworker to polish away the damage. Senbi had scratched it with the reed, no doubt.
But no. As I picked it up a shower of dust fell from the bottom, pale yellow dust and a tiny white disk. There was a hole now, the size of a drinking straw, straight through the stone.
So I left no man unconsidered, nor woman: I wondered if some village wife hated her husband enough to make him drunk, cut out his tongue, and bribe another soldier to place him in the labour prison. A Nubian husband – or an Egyptian one? “After all,” I said to Samentju as we sat on the floor of Senbi’s pillared hall, “we do not know that the tongueless was a Nubian. His skin was dark.” I grasped Samentju’s wrist, which was lighter than the skin of my hand, which was not like that of the Nubian. “What does that prove?”
“It proves that he was from the south. Unless he was from the north.” Samentju raised his bottom up to sit on the edge of Senbi’s dais. “I think you should give up your search, Emsaf. What do you think?”
“I think that the world is made up of lies and ignorance. The liar will not speak the truth and the ignorant cannot,” I said. “Perhaps that is the result.” Of my abomination. “There is no more truth in the world. It cannot be twisted out of men like water from a rag. But I will not give up.”
“Ignorance?” Samentju said, leaping up. “Ah!”
“What’s this, now?” I said. It had been days since I had seen him look so eager.
He laid a hand on my shoulder. “I am going to speak to Pa-Nehesy again.”
“Aren’t there enough lies in the world, Samentju?”
“There are lies enough indeed,” Samentju said, “but one who is ignorant can be taught. Meanwhile, do you wish to question someone? I will have him brought to the courtyard and send for the shackles if you do.”
I named two men, scribes. “They might know about the gold weights with which he was found. So,” I said, dropping my voice, “might you.”
“Indeed, indeed, I have considered that,” Samentju said. “I will not be angry with you if it comes to my turn, Emsaf. But I will ask that you turn only my ankles.” Smiling, he lifted his left foot and let the papyrus sandal dangle from his toes. “I would happily spend my days seated at Senbi’s feet, unable to walk, if it came to that, but a scribe’s hands – you know.”
And I knew, and hoped it would not come to that indeed.
I had finished with one of the scribes – minding his hands, too, in the event of his innocence, which seemed probable – when Senbi summoned me back into his hall.
Samentju was with him, holding a potsherd, which he presented to me. It held a drawing executed with a bad pen. There was a bold stroke of a crescent; a slanting line balanced at one tip of the crescent, and other little lines fell from it like rain. It was, recognizably, a boat with rudder and oarsmen.
“Pa-Nehesy – he did not know Ameny, any more than Ameny knew him. He merely agreed with a name he had heard before,” Samentju said. “What we took for an old man with a staff was a man bent over an oar. It was, it is, Nakht.”
“Nakht?” I exclaimed. “And his entire crew?”
“It would have to be,” said Senbi, “would it not?”
“Yes, but –” I stopped, trying to puzzle this out. “An entire crew of rebels?”
Senbi shrugged. “Does the idea surprise you?”
“It is only difficult to imagine a gang of sailors at the borders of Egypt having any such need for an elaborate plan. Conspiracy on such a scale is a thing for the court.”
“One might think so, but it need not be so.”
“If they wanted someone dead, they could have drowned him themselves. And why would Nakht bring back the only evidence that would convict him – the only evidence, in fact, that there had been a crime at all?”
“Why indeed. I make no claim to understand it,” Senbi said. “You, perhaps, possessor of secrets, a priest who has been to Thebes and Memphis and to the borders of Egypt, might have more insight.”
“Perhaps,” I said. “I will investigate Nakht and his crew. You will see that they do not leave Djer-Setiu, my lord?”
He promised this. I went out to tell the other scribe, who had been awaiting the shackles while standing in a puddle of his own urine, that he was dismissed.
I did not summon Nakht or any of his sailors. I had grown tired of listening to wagging tongues, tired of hearing the creak of bones and sinew. I went back to accounting, this time not taking stock of men, nor even gold and beqa-weights, but of days. All the dispatches Nakht had aboard his boat I gathered in a basket, and I confiscated, too, his logbook. I spent the evening and next morning reading everything.
When Senbi saw me that next day, Samentju sat with a fresh, white papyrus stretched across his lap and a new pen in his hand.
Senbi said, “Let’s take care of this quickly, then. A report of your findings will be delivered straightaway to the vizier, Emsaf.”
“A report on an innocent man?”
“Innocent?” Senbi said. “What do you mean?”
“Nakht cannot have freed Pa-Nehesy.”
“Ah, then, one of –”
“Nor any of his crew.”
Senbi stood. “How is it that you will prove this?”
“The dispatches, my lord. Nakht was moored at Iqen before you left on campaign and did not leave until after the execration. Neither he nor his crew could have been here at Djer-Setiu to free Pa-Nehesy and put the other tongueless one in his place.”
Senbi sunk back into his chair, staring blindly at the floor. The situation was wearing on him at last, I thought. This was not the sort of battle he was accustomed to fighting, and he was accustomed to losing no battle at all.
“My lord,” I said, “I will find the rebel responsible for this.”
His head jerked up, and he stared at me, searching my face, perhaps for lies. But I did not lie. My face, I am sure, made this evident. “Do what you must, Emsaf, and I will do what I must.”
In a small ferry-boat I paddled myself to the western shore at dawn the next day, having first performed my ablution – in the river, for my bowl no longer held water – and prayed to god for the strength and the right to do what I was about to do. Perhaps I ought to have gone at dusk, when my destination might have been less obvious in the dying light, but I wanted the great god Re as my witness. Venturing to a burial place is not a thing an honest man does at night, and I was, and remain, an honest man.
That someone had wanted the tongueless dead was one of the very few other things of which I was certain. Did someone want his body, too, some piece of it other than his tongue? Magic could be worked with such things, as Nubian magicians are well aware.
Sherds of broken pots – red – poked through the sand where I had thrown them. Figures of limestone, melted figurines of wax. Teeth intact, and the base of a skull. In a grave shallower than a pan, a length of rope, ribs and drying flesh. The Power of the ritual still hung about the place; I could feel it in my limbs and in my heart, this magic that I myself had worked in the name of the king. Everything but the smallest pieces, susceptible to the wind, lay where it had been thrown.
The pits had not been violated, nothing had been stolen.
I puzzled this, that no Nubian magician had yet stolen his bones, and as I did my eyes were drawn to the scar on the torso. It had opened now, pressed by a few stones, and from it protruded something long and dark, neither bone nor flesh. My hand reached out to touch it, and my fingers closed about a thin shaft and did not release as my arm pulled back from the corpse.
It was the stone tip of an arrow affixed to an arrow shaft made of reed, long ago buried beneath his flesh, likely an accustomed discomfort. An Egyptian arrow.
Or, an unbidden voice seemed to whisper into my ear, a Nubian arrow?
I threw myself upon my stomach and crawled to the execration pit in which lay his skull. Why had I thought such a thing? In what chest would a Nubian arrow be but an Egyptian one? How could one tell arrows apart? They were the same.
And the wretch whose throat I had slit was a – what was he? Nubian? Egyptian? A wretch? A person? Who was he? He had been stripped of everything but his body and his heart and this arrow when I killed him. Stripped of his clothes, of his insignia, of his hair, of his tongue, of his name. Of everything that might have told one sort of man from another.
“O but what was your name?” I whispered across the broken teeth that protruded from the sand.
This was the very body someone had desired, and here was the very place they had desired it to be. Whoever had cut out his tongue might have as easily – no, more easily – killed him outright. Murder was not what they had wished: it was the god’s magic, the king’s effectiveness, they wished to harness. Through my abomination they sought to turn the world topsy-turvy and lay Egypt open to chaos, to overthrow the king. What had Senbi said? For such power to remain in our hands . . .
At that very moment I knew why no one man would speak against the guilty. I knew what would have happened if Ameny, if anyone, had spoken the truth. Senbi had reminded them. They knew. They all knew. As, now, did I.
It was a lie. Everything that they had said, everything that they had done. Help was hindrance. Truth was falsehood.
Chaos had overtaken Rightful Order.
In the name of the king, with my bare hands I tried to remove the skull from the burial place, to restore Rightful Order, to undo my abomination.
In the name of the king, this is what I was doing when they found me. No matter what Ameny says, my story is the truth. In the name of the king.
“He sought to undo the king’s execration,” is what Ameny said to Senbi. “We found him at the pits, which were much disturbed.”
My arms were bound, my feet were bound. I was on my knees before Senbi, naked, Ameny’s hand upon my neck, so that all I could see was the chamber floor and my legs and my manhood, and all I could think of was that soon it would be sand beneath my legs, and that I would turn my head to see my copper knife – my? – the god’s –
“Only his footprints lay about the place, my lord. He had no accomplice.”
“You are certain?” Senbi said heavily. I heard the swish of his fly-whisk.
“I am, my lord, as certain as the morning light that comes over the eastern hills like gold.”
Senbi grabbed my jaw. Would he tear it off? And my tongue?
“I had thought,” he said in a close whisper, holding my jaw tight, speaking across my teeth, “that you might be trustworthy, Emsaf. You understand what you and I truly are, effectiveness. You also understand the Rightful Order of the world, with the king in his place – and you and I in ours. But you also understand that it could be otherwise. And it could have been otherwise, Emsaf. You know that. You felt that. You did that.”
He poked his finger into my mouth, and his fingernails felt like little stone blades along my tongue. My tongue – by which I spoke the words of the gods, as important to a lector-priest as his hands – “Emsaf, you might have stood upon my dais. What king would not welcome beside him a priest who knows the gods and their secrets? And though you are indeed a fine keeper of secrets, for this one you dug too deep, too deep, and then when you found it –”
He ripped his fingers free of my mouth and the taste of salt gushed along my tongue. There was a bit of blood beneath his nails, but that was all; otherwise his hand was clean and my tongue remained in my mouth.
“Samentju will prepare documentation and accompany him downstream,” Senbi said to Ameny. “Let the vizier of the south deal with this rebel.”
And so I departed Djer-Setiu, trussed to the cabin of Nakht’s boat, facing the stern. Samentju lay comfortably on my camp-bed within the vaulted cabin, drinking my Theban wine and writing his letter to the vizier. Nakht’s crew rowed in silence but for the creak of the looms in their grommets and the lap of their blades across the water.
When I raised my head I saw that everyone in Djer-Setiu had come down to the river to watch my departure, Senbi himself among them.
And they remained there for as long as I could see them, motionless along the stony shore of the island like a stand of so many reeds.