Pillar of Fire Read online

  It was nothing she could help. Nor did she see the use in panic. She had to keep her wits about her if she was to get out of this unharmed.

  It would not hurt, she decided, to say a prayer to Amon whose amulet she wore. He was not her god, but after all she had paid for his protection. She spoke in the barest breath of a whisper. “Amon, great god, look after me. I’m your enemy’s servant’s servant, but I’m none of his, not after what the king has done to his children. Guard me and I’ll give you . . .” She paused. Here was a difficulty. Gods needed bribes, and she had nothing, not even the bag of barley that her mistress had given her to buy fripperies in the market.

  She drew a deep breath. “I’ll give you my thanks, and if I ever become the chief over all of a queen’s servants, I’ll dedicate an offering of bread and barley beer to you.”

  There. That should be enough, and Egyptian enough, too. In Great Hatti it would have had to be a whole sheep at least.

  Taking her courage in both hands and tugging at her amulets for luck—both of them: Sobek too, whose crocodile-teeth would be welcome against king’s men and priests alike—she slipped with hunter’s stealth toward the light.

  Eighteen

  The light was lamplight in a room. It was a scribes’ storeroom from the look of it. There were book-rolls everywhere, packed into cases along the walls, heaped on a table, piled like logs on the floor. Nofret, keeping cautiously to the shadows beyond the spill of light from the doorway, saw a scribe’s palette on the table, and a scatter of pens and inks and paints.

  Amid the clutter sat a pair of men in priests’ robes. The lamp caught the sheen of a shaven skull, the glitter of an eye in its rim of paint. They were men of no particular age, neither young nor very old. One was fat and soft like a merchant in Great Hatti, the other whip-lean, with a sharp jut of cheekbones. They were drinking from a jar of what must be the ubiquitous barley beer, and ignoring a basket of bread and a bowl of dates.

  The fat one drank in the morose silence of the suddenly drunk. The thin one watched him as a cat will watch a rathole, smiling slightly to himself when the other’s eyes wandered away from him.

  At length the fat man said, “See what we come to. A jug of beer in a back room, and young men brawling in the street.”

  “Even kings die,” the thin man said coolly, as if he were speaking of nothing in particular.

  The fat man drained his cup of beer and reached for the jar. It was nearly empty. He sighed. “Do you think it would do us any good to have him killed?”

  “I doubt it,” the thin man said.

  “It hasn’t done us any good to send people to court to speak for us to the young king. He’s completely his brother’s creature. Amon is dead, old friend. Dead and gone.”

  For the first time the thin man showed a flicker of emotion. It was not anger, Nofret realized. It was amusement. “You think so? No, no. He only waits, and bides his time. A king may be unassailable by the law and custom of the Two Lands, but one of the great gods is stronger in the end than any king and god.”

  The fat man, finding both cup and jar empty, flung them aside with a clatter. “What use is it? What use is any of it? Unless that man dies, there will be no god in the Two Lands but his fever-dream of divinity.”

  “Patience,” said the thin man. “Be patient.”

  “I have been patient!” cried the fat man. “Ever since he built that city of his, ever since he sealed our temple, I have been exquisitely patient.”

  “So was Thutmose,” the thin man said, “and for longer than we. Twenty years he waited for his stepmother to die. All that while he nursed his hate and waited. But she was king. Better to wait and suffer than to endure the god’s curse for the murder of a king.”

  “I believe in curses,” the fat man muttered. “One lies on us all. A curse of a king, that misshapen madman with his harem of loyal daughters.”

  “Wait,” said the thin man with maddening persistence. “See what in the end the gods make of him.”

  “There are no gods left alive,” the fat man said.

  oOo

  Nofret slid along the wall. The two men in the light seemed intent on their litany of despair, but she was not about to trust her life to chance. The passage beyond was black dark, a torch flickering in a wall-socket where seemed to be a corner. The wall was cold against her back, and faintly rough: plaster over mudbrick, painted with images that were little more than shadows on shadow except where the light struck them. There they were flashes of sudden brilliance, the Egyptians’ peculiar writing like marches of beasts and birds and parts and wholes of human bodies.

  Magic lived in the holy writing, Nofret had heard. She did not sense anything here but what one would expect in a temple denied its god.

  That was bad enough. Her spine was cold. She did not know for a fact where she was going, except from torch to torch through the shadows between. These were murmurs in the dark, faint voices, mew of cat, squeak of mouse, rustle of beetle in the wall. Or maybe those were the voices of ghosts, thin and bloodless.

  She should have stayed in the palace. Oh, she should, indeed.

  A temple was not a single building inside of its walls. There was the god’s house, and there were the houses of the priests, and the scribes’ workplaces and their houses. This temple, like the Great Temple of the Aten in Akhetaten, was as vast as a city, and all of it shut up, abandoned.

  Nofret felt like a soul wandering lost among the houses of the dead. Doors were shut, but not all of them were barred. Outside of the scribes’ house in which she had begun, there were no lamps or torches lit in the windowless places, no priests lingering where they were not supposed to be. She saw two cats fighting in a courtyard, and doves fluttering and cooing in a rank and wilting garden, but no other living thing.

  Somehow she had got turned about. She did not know where she was, or how long she had been trapped in this place. Maybe she was dead and had not known it. Maybe a god had cursed her.

  She stumbled through yet another door, from yet another court in which the light was growing suspiciously golden, the sun sinking beyond the temple’s walls. If night caught her here, she would go mad.

  Here was another of the priests’ houses, where they had slept while they did duty in the temple. Priests in Egypt were not like priests elsewhere: many of them lived the lives of ordinary men, except that for part of the year they were servants of their god. So were Amon’s priests all sent back to their places in the world, and such of them as fought the king’s men or drank themselves into a stupor in a storeroom were the bold and the recalcitrant, and the ones who would not accept any upstart god.

  There were memories of them here. A sandal forgotten in a corner. A scattering of blue beads on a dusty floor. Nofret felt the presence of men who were not dead, and she knew it, but their spirits lingered nonetheless.

  And their anger.

  So much anger. Nofret was all raw to it. She thrust against a barred door, fell forward as it opened, caught herself up short against an obstacle that was warm; that breathed.

  She recoiled. The obstacle did likewise, with an exclamation that made her ears burn. Soldier’s crudity—and a soldier’s voice, too, and a man she knew too well.

  There was no telling if he knew her. She was nothing memorable, she did not think: a slave like a hundred other slaves, with amulets woven into her mane of hair.

  Gods. If she could think . . .

  “What are you doing here?” she heard herself say.

  General Horemheb raised his brows. “Are you the porter of this gate, then?”

  “It seems I must be,” she said, tongue running ahead of wits, and dangerous in it.

  “Well then,” he said, “fetch your master, and be quick.”

  “What, the god?” she wanted to know.

  That was in no way wise. She saw death in those flat black eyes, though the face barely changed expression.

  Death she knew. It was an old friend, an old enemy. She grinned at it.


  He raised a hand as if to strike. She did not flinch. “There are two priests getting blind drunk in a storeroom. Was it one of them you wanted?”

  His hand lowered. For a moment she knew he knew her, but a frown’s shadow flickered and passed. She was too far out of her place. He did not remember who she was.

  “You are a poor servant,” he said, but as if he had lost interest in her.

  She stepped inside. “You can find your own way in. I have duties I can’t shirk.”

  Truth, after its fashion. And breathtaking insolence. It seemed to shock him enough that he let her go.

  The way out must be close if he had come in by it. She only needed to find it.

  Instead she found herself shadow-creeping back the way she had come, following the general of the king’s armies in the Delta, the commander of his guards in Akhetaten, the loyal servant of the king.

  He went direct and without hesitation. Of course, she thought, he would know this place. He had served the old king. He would have worshipped Amon as everyone did in Thebes, and known the ways of his temple.

  She was hard put both to keep up with him and to avoid being seen. She lost him at a turning where the priests’ houses came close together, but before panic could possess her she heard the slap of his sandals. His long stride was firm, sure of itself. There was nothing furtive in him.

  And yet he was alone. He was in Amon’s temple, and he had come to speak to one who hid in it. If the king knew . . .

  The king, in most things, would do nothing. But in this that touched his god, he could be deadly.

  General Horemheb did not seem to care. Nofret had never noticed that he feared or greatly respected the king.

  Caught up in her maundering, she nearly fell over him. He had stopped in a stone-paved court beside a statue of an old king. At the court’s far end, just within the colonnade, a man stood waiting, evidently for him. It was not either of the priests whom Nofret had seen before.

  She clutched at a column and at what shadow it could offer, crouching low to make herself smaller. She felt like a mouse in sight of a snake.

  That was an old man who stood across the courtyard. His linen robe glowed dimly in the fading sunlight. His bare arms and his face were the color of the Red Land. His eyes had the hard flat glitter of a cobra’s.

  If this was not the chief priest of fallen Amon, then it was one who claimed that office and power by sheer strength of will. He offered the king’s general no gesture of respect, still less of submission. The king’s general bowed in front of him, not too low, not too quick.

  They did not waste time in greetings. No more did the priest invite Horemheb inside, nor he insist on it. They spoke as they began, he in the courtyard as the light died about him, the priest in the deepening shadow of the colonnade. Nofret caught glimpses of light behind, and a shifting of shadows. There were people listening, maybe armed, maybe ready to strike if their master gave them leave.

  No one waited on Horemheb. No one stood guard over him. His courage was breathtaking, and he wore it as easily as he wore his kilt.

  He spoke without raising his voice, but the walls and pillars of the courtyard made it stronger, clear enough to be heard no matter where one was. “Call off your dogs,” he said. “They’re winning out there, for the moment, but the king has men to spend. You don’t.”

  “What do you know of our numbers?” the priest asked. He spoke softly. His tone was mild. It was the sound, Nofret thought, of perfect and implacable hate.

  “I know what all my spies tell me,” said Horemheb, “and what your own people will admit to. You can’t win while the king is in Thebes.”

  “And yet because he is in Thebes we must make it known how little we either love or fear him.”

  “He doesn’t care,” said Horemheb.

  “He should,” the priest said. “It will be his downfall.”

  “But not yet.” Horemheb set his feet apart and folded his arms: a soldier’s posture, at ease and yet poised to act if there was need. “You’d do best to kill him, you know. Poison’s easy. A knife in the back is simple.”

  “No,” said the priest, as soft as ever. “We do not kill the son of Horus, not though he be apostate. The gods would curse us and all our posterity.”

  “So they would,” said Horemheb, “but wouldn’t it be worth it? He’d be dead, and his god with him. The Two Lands would be free.”

  “But we would not,” the priest said, “nor our god in whose name we did it.”

  “Then you’ll wait him out? As your young men are waiting in the streets?”

  “My young men convey a message to the king,” the priest said. “When the dark falls, they will withdraw and be concealed. Your spies will find nothing but their blood on the paving stones.”

  “They won’t bother to look,” said Horemheb.

  The priest’s face by now was no more than a blur in the gloom, but Nofret thought he might have raised a brow. “And what do you ask in return?”

  “What I’ve always asked,” Horemheb answered. “That you wait, and that when the time comes, you support me. I’ll get rid of your king for you.”

  “If you kill him,” the priest said, “you will bear the curse of it. We will not—cannot—suffer your presence then.”

  “I,” said Horemheb, “won’t kill him. But I’ll open the way for you to come back.”

  “How long?” the priest demanded, the first sign of emotion that Nofret had heard in him.

  “As long as it takes,” Horemheb said. “Call off your dogs and keep them kenneled. I’ll get the king out of Thebes and see to it that he doesn’t come back. The longer he stays away, the easier it will be for you to show the people how strong Amon still is.”

  The priest nodded slowly enough and deeply enough that Nofret saw the movement. “We will be patient again. We will wait. Only keep the king shut up in his city as we keep our young men under restraint in our own. And leave us free to do as we must here—as the god decrees that we should.”

  “As long as you don’t go to war with the city guard,” said Horemheb, “do the rest and welcome. And when the king is gone, I’ll come to claim my reckoning.”

  “It will be waiting for you,” said Amon’s priest.

  Nineteen

  Nofret had in her bones the memory of the way that Horemheb had taken to come to this place. She followed that memory backwards to the gate where she had collided with him, and found that the gate opened on a court, and the court ended in a wall, and in the wall was a door like the one through which she had come.

  By then she could just see her hand in front of her face. The light that lingered in the sky made the earth below seem darker than it was. Her fingers, groping, found the latch. She tugged at it. For a moment she feared that the door was barred from without, but suddenly, so suddenly she nearly fell, it opened.

  The street was strange to her, dark and empty. She turned at random, not knowing which way was right, trusting to fate or chance or whatever god might happen to be watching. She brushed one of her amulets with a finger. It was cool, smooth, lifeless.

  Briefly she hesitated.

  No. She would go on, and not turn back.

  The narrow street gave way to a wider one. She refused to be afraid. It was night now, no question of it, and she was on the wrong side of the river from her lady. No one would ferry her across.

  Unless . . .

  General Horemheb must have a boat. He quartered in the palace with the king, on the sunset bank.

  She could not name herself to him and demand to be returned to her mistress, or hope that she could hide on a boat as small as a lord’s ferry, among the oarsmen and the attendants. She was not bold enough for either one.

  Nor was she fool enough to think that she could sleep safe in the streets of Thebes, or mad enough to swim the river. Crocodiles hid in the reeds, feeding on the leavings that the city cast into the water, with the odd stray cat or goose. Or, if fortune favored them, an idiot of a slave who stayed
away too long and could not go home till morning.

  The city was strange now that night lay on it. Lights were few and far between, in doorways mostly, or dancing along with companies of young bloods exploring the taverns or accompanying one another to a revel. In the darkness thieves crept, and slayers of the unwary, and other, darker things. Nightwalkers, drinkers of blood, souls of the dead in search of warmth and life.

  She gripped her amulets tightly and made her way through the shadows. The stars were out, and a round-bellied moon, nearly full. It was the blind eye of Horus, the Egyptians said. It stared blankly down, casting cold white light that made the darkness darker. It did not see Nofret, nor would it have cared if it had.

  Let thieves and footpads do the same. She made herself as invisible as she could, as negligible as a cat slipping from doorway to doorway. Her hands were cold. Her skin shuddered with the touch of the night air.

  To shut off fear, she ran through over and over the things that she had heard in Amon’s temple. The king’s chief of guards wanted to be something more than he was, and he was not averse to a bit of petty treason. That much she could be sure of. Whether the priests of Amon would actually shrink from murdering a king for the sheer and holy terror of his office, she could not tell. Horemheb would do whatever he needed to get what he wanted. Even if it meant arranging for—but not exactly causing—the king to be killed.

  A messenger who brought such news to the king might be rewarded richly—or she might be flayed and bathed in salt for afflicting his sacred ears with lies. The king trusted the general of his armies. Insofar as he could be said to like anyone at all, he liked—was fond of—General Horemheb. That soft awkward unbeautiful man with his stammering tongue might even envy the tall strong soldier who never failed in a speech, or stumbled over a word.