Eater of souls (8 page)

"Kysen, why are you not among that herd of fawning, slack-witted goats surrounding Reshep?"

Meren's arm lashed out and fastened onto that of Prince Rahotep. Hauling the younger man to him, he shot a warning look at his slightly drunk victim, flashed an irritated smile, and hissed at Kysen.

"Keep him at your side. I don't have time to serve as keeper to a man with the tact of a four-year-old child and the temper of a wounded pig."

Slapping Rahotep hard on the shoulders, Kysen grabbed the arm Meren relinquished. "Welcome, my friend. You honor us with your company."

"Huh." Rahotep burped and poured half a goblet of Syrian wine down his throat. "I saw you with that place-seeker. You don't like him any better than I do."

Rahotep scowled at his friend Djoser as he sidled closer to Reshep and fixed his attention on the newcomer's easy conversation. "Only the great god Amun knows why they find the bastard so admirable. He has but one theme to his songs—the perfection and wonder of Lord Reshep."

"Really?"

Kysen followed Rahotep's stare to its object. Djoser was introducing Bener to his idol. Without warning Lord Reshep looked up, over Bener's head, straight into Kysen's eyes. It was but a glance, yet Kysen was left feeling again the force of its perception. It was as if Reshep knew they were talking about him, even what they were saying. Shaken, Kysen felt suddenly angry with himself for reacting with such vulnerability. He dragged his gaze from Reshep. Dislike for the man burst forth, fed by resentment that this stranger could evoke fantasies and baseless fear in him.

"Did you hear what I said?" Rahotep demanded. "Djoser is so besotted he chants Lord Reshep's glorification endlessly to pharaoh, may he have life, health, and strength forever."

Kysen's anger twisted his smile with bitterness. "Father said he looks like a starved frog."

"Ha!" Those nearest them looked their way at Rahotep's loud hoot.

Kysen winced and said through set teeth, "Be quiet."

"Why should I?" Rahotep turned in a circle, glowered at the listeners, and said loudly, "Why should I care what they think? I'm a half-royal, son of Amunhotep the Magnificent, a great warrior, clever of heart, unequaled in wisdom." He appeared to remember his manners. Presenting his back to the largest cluster of eavesdroppers, he lowered his voice. "I tell you, Ky, it makes me want to vomit to see a preening grasper turn great lords into vassals and noble ladies into red-faced and hungry tavern women."

"I've never known you to be so hostile to one of so little consequence."

Rahotep banged his goblet down on a servant's tray and wiped his lips with the back of his hand. "That's it!"

"What?"

"That's what makes me hate him. He's of no consequence, and yet he behaves as if he were spawn from the loins of Ra. My father was a pharaoh, even if my mother was a peasant. I deserve the respect due a great one. When we met, the dog gave me the slightest of bows." Rahotep's bushy eyebrows formed one hairy line over his eyes. "He should have kissed the floor before my feet. Perhaps I'll make him do that one day soon."

"Don't," Kysen replied. "My father has been asked by the golden one to become familiar with Lord Reshep. If Meren approves, Reshep may be admitted to court, and into the king's presence."

Rahotep rocked back and forth on his heels. "I care not." He gave Kysen a sideways glance. "I could beat him in a fight, you know. I'm expert with scimitar, sword, and dagger as well as staves, javelins, and throw sticks."

"Yes, Rahotep, I know."

In Rahotep's opinion, no one, perhaps not even pharaoh, could do anything better than he could. It was only his boisterous openness that saved him from being heartily disliked. How could you hate a man whose blatant exaggerations fooled no one but himself? Kysen felt compassion for Rahotep, something he would never have imagined feeling for a prince until recently.

He glanced over at Reshep again. The newcomer was still the center of a chattering group, but as Kysen watched, Reshep lifted a drinking cup of highly polished bronze and seemed to be examining it as if he were thinking of buying it.

"By Ptah's staff," Kysen murmured.

Rahotep tried to see what Kysen was looking at. "What?"

"I think Reshep is looking at himself in that drinking cup." As he spoke, Reshep adjusted a stray lock of plaited hair on his wig.

Rahotep snorted. "Arse."

Kysen didn't answer, taken off guard by a sudden insight. What an addled fool he'd been to assume that Reshep's powerful gaze held perception, acumen, discernment. What he'd seen in those eyes was a ravenous search for his own reflected magnificence. Kysen had mistaken an appetite for adoration for interest and sympathy.

"Are you paying attention?" Rahotep demanded. "Now if Reshep had my visage, I could understand him wanting to admire it."

He listened to more of Rahotep's bragging until a stir and murmur circling through the assembly caused them to search for its cause. Kysen found it first—a young woman who had emerged from the deckhouse. Startling the whole company, his youngest sister appeared suddenly between two posts that held the deckhouse awning. Silence befell one group of revelers after another.

Regal, with the grace of a white lily and the allure of frankincense, Isis calmly accepted the stunned appraisal. For a moment, no one moved. Then Lord Reshep detached himself from the rest, walking with the suppleness of a leopard to bow low before the girl. Kysen heard his sister employ the rough low power of her voice. She used what he thought of as her man-conquering tones.

"Who is this guest?" she asked of no one. "Surely a highborn noble or a prince of royal blood."

Kysen rolled his eyes and gave a snort of disgust. Then he smiled. With smooth yet relentless firmness, Meren stepped between his daughter and Lord Reshep. Although almost imperceptible, the shattering look of fury Meren threw at Isis turned Kysen's smile into a grin.

For the vast numbers of Egyptians who labored in the fields, on the river, and in the workshops of Egypt, when the sun vanished, work stopped and rest began. It was the time when spirits of the dead roamed and underworld fiends ascended to attack the unwary. For Tcha, servant of a tavern owner, night was the time for the most profitable of his activities. He'd never encountered a spirit or a demon, no matter how late into the evening he worked. He wore an Eye of Horus amulet around his neck anyway, to ward off all evil. No sense in tempting such creatures by being foolhardy.

This night, Tcha was abroad not to work but to obtain the proceeds of his labor from his ally. Not wishing to be seen, he walked in the deepest darkness and avoided more illuminated or open areas. He was startled only once, when he suddenly came out of an alley near a private quay and into a glare cast by dozens of torches mounted on a jewellike pleasure ship. Tcha squeaked in alarm, skittered back down the alley, and turned into the nearest road.

Panting, he muttered to himself. "By Ptah's staff,
Joy of the Nile
." He said a quick spell against ill luck. "Amun, Toth, Isis, bring me not to the notice of the servants or charioteers of Lord Meren." Then he fell to rumbling his usual complaints. "Never had no pleasure yacht, never even had a boat. Never had no taste of roast goose nor heron. Never had no slaves to cool me with ostrich feather fans, nor no charioteers to do my bidding…"

Tcha indulged further in his litany of hardship, a favorite pastime, as he skulked his way across the city, climbing over walls, creeping through deserted gardens, dodging the few streets where light and drunken laughter announced the presence of a beer tavern or house of entertainment. No one else could have traveled so quickly unobserved, Tcha assured himself.

His secret lay in keeping to the refuse mounds where he could. The city was full of them. Each house had at least one outside its walls. Sets of dwellings of related owners tended to grow into contiguous labyrinths, and these usually had several garbage mounds. In a city as ancient as Memphis, the mounds almost outnumbered the houses. During the worst heat of the day they gave off such a powerful stench that even dogs could be seen avoiding them. Anyone frequenting the refuse mounds this late would do so for unsavory purposes and wasn't going to bother Tcha.

At last he came to the giant mound of trash and filth that loomed behind the house of a great man. This one was astronomer of the god Ptah, custodian of the estates of Ptah in the north, and magnate of the Royal Seal of the Treasury of Pharaoh in Memphis. And one thing Tcha knew about great men, they never visited their refuse mounds. It was an excellent place to conceal the spoils Tcha and his ally, Pawah, collected from their occasional house robberies.

The previous evening Pawah and he had done something brave. They had entered the house of a noble and taken away items of moderate value. At least, that had been the purpose they discussed. Pawah had taken things much more valuable.

"Stupid son of a vulture," Tcha grumbled as he crouched behind a stack of empty oil jars to wait.

Tcha prided himself on never having been caught in a large theft. The city police knew him as a trifling prowler among citizens of limited means and a floor sweeper in the establishment of the fabled and exotic tavern mistress known as Ese. The officials of the city thought Ese a charitable woman for employing Tcha in any capacity. Pawah they considered barely clever enough to follow Tcha's lead. That was Pawah's advantage.

Last night he had shown his true nature. He had crept across the roof, stepping over the servants sleeping in the open air, and slithered downstairs. After pilfering a bronze bowl and a small faience serving plate, he had stolen into the master's bedchamber and filched a pair of gold ear studs. Then he'd sauntered into another chamber, and it had been occupied! By this time, as was his habit, Pawah had worked himself into a state of excitement at the risk he was taking. He had walked into the room, past the sleeping man, and snatched a scarab bracelet that lay on top of a jewel casket.

All the while, Tcha had waited perched on the wall surrounding the house keeping watch for guards, the city patrols, or other dangers. When Pawah hadn't come back quickly, Tcha knew what he was doing. And he'd been helpless. Lying flat on top of the wall beneath the branches of a willow tree, he could only curse Pawah and finger his Eye of Horus amulet while reciting a spell of protection.

The memory of his exposure to danger made Tcha angry all over again. "Wretched bastard, greedy-hearted dolt."

Perhaps it had been Tcha's spell that allowed Pawah to leave the house undetected. The magic hadn't lasted long after they left; somewhere between the noble's house and the refuse mound, they had acquired a follower. He and Pawah had parted, taking different routes home, and the follower had disappeared. Now Tcha felt safe enough to meet his fellow thief.

The house lay on the outskirts of the city west of the temple district. Here the great one had caused part of the city wall to be removed to make room for his villa and hadn't yet bothered to rebuild it. Tcha and his friend were to meet at the refuse mound so that they could divide their loot.

Their arrangement was that Pawah would sit sheltered from the refuse mound by a piece of the wall from the collapsed dwelling. By moonlight Tcha had a clear view of his surroundings, the oil jars being situated on a rise near the protective wall of the astronomer's house. He looked out on a vista of waste that formed scattered smaller hills around the great mound, rather like the sacred cities that once surrounded and served the pyramids.

But the little hills and mounds weren't as deserted as the pyramid cities. Beetles, ants, and spiders clambered in and out of the whole field of refuse, filling the narrow footpaths that wound through the area. Dogs and cats crept up to the freshest spills in search of delicacies. Sometimes they disturbed hawks or vultures perched on a fresh carcass. Then shrieks of fury sailed through the air and caused night terrors among those sleeping in nearby houses.

"Never know if one of them dogs is really an underworld fiend," Tcha mumbled to himself while he scanned the refuse field. "Where is that donkey's arse?"

He rose to see over the wall fragment. No Pawah. A scrutiny of the refuse field revealed a cat fastidiously picking its way through a dump of table scraps, an ant mound the size of a sarcophagus, and the same irregular and noxious landscape as before.

His uneasiness was growing. Had Pawah taken their stores of wealth and run away? Yes! That was why he'd taken those valuables; and he'd left Tcha behind to face any inquiries.

"Hathor's tits!" Tcha scrambled over the oil jars, startling the dining cat into flight.

His legs churning, his heart angry, Tcha darted from one heap to another in case Pawah was squatting behind one of them. When he reached the giant mound, he was breathing hard and gulping in putrid fumes. He crept around the base of the hill of rubbish. On the side away from the house wall, between it and the blank expanse of barren ground that became the western desert, lay their hiding place.

The mound had expanded over the uneven ground formed by more collapsed mud brick. Since before the days of the pyramid builders, people had lived in Memphis. When a house aged beyond repair, its sun-dried mud-brick walls were shoved down and became the new ground. Crumbling mud brick stuck up at odd angles on this side of the refuse mound. Scorpions nested there, and cobras burrowed into the aged earth. Few would risk treading here when they could dump their garbage on the nearer side of the mound.

Tcha had dug a hole beneath a slumping corner formed by the remnants of two old walls. Pawah had lined the hole with pottery shards and placed a wicker lid over it. The lid was weighted with and concealed by dirt. Tcha had made sure that the spot would be left alone by digging an imitation of a cobra's nest into the mud-brick corner.

Tcha cast a quick glance around, then dropped to his knees and scrabbled through the dirt. He found the wicker lid and pulled it off. His hand reached inside and touched rough sacking. He grunted and pulled out one of the packages. Fingers clumsy, sweating with agitation, he unknotted the twine that bound the package. Out spilled the spoils of last night, the bronze bowl and faience plate, and even the gold ear studs and amethyst scarab bracelet.