Dagger (28 page)

"Yes . . . ," Khamwas said, focused on the doorway. He turned sharply and added,

"But you mustn't disturb her."

Samlor nodded and said with heavy irony, "Oh, you can trust me to handle the business with all the subtlety you would bring to it yourself." A cloud softened Khamwas' intense features and he stared at the hand which had clasped Samlor so harshly. "I ... ," he said, looking up again as Samlor rose and shrugged his garments into place. "I'm sorry, my friend. She's very important to me in some way. I'm sure."

"No problem," Samlor grunted as he walked past the priest and lesser servants to the stairs within the temple.

No reason to imagine that it was a problem, and a dead

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certainty that Khamwas and the Book of Tatenen could handle any difficulty that arose.

But Samlor kept remembering a grinning crocodile.

The forecourt was busy, though from the height of the loggia it was obvious that there was more empty pavement than there were people. From the pavement itself, nothing but moving walls of people were visible.

Shrugging again—

the brocade collar of his new tunic chafed him, though the fabric was soft enough—

Samlor strode across the area. As he neared the far side

of the court, his eye caught a flash of scarlet: not the woman but her tall headdress, leaving the shop and preparing to enter another one. He started after her, then thought again and stepped into the shop his quarry had just quitted. The maid who waited while the shopowner wrapped a purchase was dressed even more strikingly than her mistress. Her skirt was of pleated linen, cut to beneath her navel in front but rising almost to shoulderblade level in back. Instead of an ordinary blouse or jacket, she wore the skin of a spotted cat pinned to bare her left shoulder.

The head hung over her right breast. The beast's eyes had been replaced by topazes, and the maid's own irises were of the same tawny lambency.

"The cat won't bite," the woman said drily to Samlor. He blinked, realized that he had paused with his hand resting on the doorjamb—

and then realized that his mouth was open.

"Yes, sir, may I help you?" asked the shopman with a tinge of concern underlying his professional brightness. He was folding the second of a pair of carnelian earrings, elephants astride the globe of the cosmos, into a square of velvet.

"Ah, I—

" Samlor said. "Ah, my business is with the lady."

"Is it indeed?" said the woman, giving him a look of appraisal as cool as that of a cook pricing fowls in the market.

"The, ah, the lady who was here a moment ago, in red," he plowed on. "I believe you may know her?"

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"Know my mistress?" said the woman. When she smiled, her mouth opened as wide as the cat's. "Yes, I should say 1 do."

The shopman was listening to his customers in obvious interest. Samlor gave him a look freighted with the frustration he could not let loose on the woman. The man jumped, then trotted to the back of the shop muttering that he needed better ribbon.

Samlor relaxed. The maid was playing a game, flirting at second-hand as it were, and there was no harm in that. He smiled and said, "Milady, a friend of mine—

a

high-placed friend of mine—

noticed your mistress and was curious about who she

is. Rather than make a public production of it, he asked me to check quietly." That was pretty close to the truth, and it conveyed the threat without stating it. Coquetry was very well and good, but this amber-eyed woman had to know where the real power in the discussion lay.

"I'm sure my mistress Tabubu would thank your friend—

' her tone made the word

'master' and a slur because Samlor had not used it "—

for his solicitude, if he

chose to present himself in person," said the maid. "A lady of her position isn't in need of help from others, however highly placed, of course." She shifted her stance. The false cat eyes winked from her breast. Samlor raised an eyebrow and one corner of his mouth.

"She is here to make offerings for her father on the seventh anniversary of his death," the maid continued, bowing to the silent goad. "He was the prophet of the god Mnevis.

"I would have thought your highly-placed master would know Tabubu," she added with a tart voice and a flounce of the cat's head. "But—

" she smiled again "—

her

house is in Ankhtawi, across the river, and we don't leave it very often."

"You've been very understanding," said Samlor—

an understatement if ever he had

made one. "I appreciate it. Perhaps we'll have the opportunity to speak again." The woman stretched her shoulders back so that her chest arched and the cat slid against her. "And you?" she asked. "Do you have a name, or shall I call you

'Boy'?"

Samlor grinned back, aware of the game she was playing and too controlled to lose at it. "I'm Samlor hil Samt," he said. "But I answer to any name that seems appropriate."

He turned and strode out of the shop, hearing the owner bleat something inconsequential.

The woman called, "My name is Pre," but the words did not bring Samlor back into the shop. He had information to pass on to Khamwas, whose anxious face peered from the loggia opposite.

Besides, Samlor had a nagging fear that if he continued talking to Pre, he would succumb to his growing desire to throw her down on the floor and screw the hell out of her.

"Well, what have you learned?" Khamwas demanded, his discourtesy redeemed only by his obvious agitation. "She'd already left the shop when you went in, you know?"

"Sure, I know," said Samlor, frowning. "Look, you can hire people to snap at. All right?"

Khamwas' left hand touched his sash. His thumb hooked beneath it, toward the Book of Tatenen—

but he snatched his hand back as if it burnt, an instant before Samlor would have buried the watered steel blade in his chest, determining for good and all what protection the book afforded.

"My . . . ," said Khamwas, pale with amazement. He reached out and clasped Samlor's hand, drawing him willingly back into his chair by the rail. "Samlor, I don't know why I'm so jumpy. Please forgive me."

The sincerity could not be doubted. "I'm not my best either," said Samlor, apologizing for what he had been ready to do.

"But what about her, the woman?" Khamwas went on eagerly. Already he had resumed his appraisal of the crowd below. "There, she's still here!"

"Her name's Tabubu," Samlor reported.

He kept expecting Tjainufi to make a comment, but the

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little manikin wasn't on Khamwas' shoulder. Hadn't been since . . . the day before, in the garden, he thought.

"She's the daughter of the Prophet of Mnevis, and she's here to make offerings on the anniversary of his death."

"Good, good," said Khamwas, though his enthusiasm did not cause him to look around at his companion. "That means she's the head of her household and able to make decisions for herself."

Samlor was watching the crowd also. The scarlet garments were easy to spot. Now the woman was leaving a booth selling floral sprays to be laid at the feet of the statues of gods in memory. She didn't hold the caravan master's eyes, though. His concentration was on the maid beside her, as lithe as the cat whose skin she wore.

"Now . . . ," said Khamwas. "I want you to approach her. Tell her that I'll give her ten gold pieces to spend an hour with me. Only an hour, and no one will ever know about it."

Samlor blinked as if Khamwas had just taken his clothes off and begun to dance on the railing.

"Well?" Khamwas prompted, glancing at his companion with an incipient scowl.

"Ah," said Samlor. "Ah, Khamwas, I'm not—

I wasn't born here, so I wouldn't know.

But this Tabubu—

friend, she doesn't seem to be the kind of woman you'd, you know, offer money to. Not even her servants. ..."

He didn't realize at once that he had let his voice trail off. He was too engrossed in his imagination.

"Yes, yes of course," agreed Khamwas. "Of course. I told you, I'm not feeling myself today."

He paused, cleared his throat and went on. "She owns property, so she'll have a lawsuit with a neighbor over boundaries or irrigation rights. Tell her I'll have it settled in her favor."

"Ah?"

"Or perhaps she has a complaint over her tax assessment." Khamwas burbled on, oblivious of the wondering look on his companion's face. "There's nothing simpler. All she has to do is tell me what the problem is and it's solved. For just an hour with her."

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He beamed.

Samlor shrugged as he got up again. "Well," he said—

aloud but speaking to his

own doubts, "you're the local. I'll see what I can do." He might have been more hesitant about his mission were he not looking forward to talking again with Pre. If Khamwas were successful, well—

Samlor was going to

have an hour to fill also, wasn't he?

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PRE CARRIED THE velvet parcel of earrings, but lesser members of the retinue bore the sprays of flowers which would be thrown onto the altar. As they withered, their color and vibrancy would infuse the spirit on whose behalf they were offered.

Tabubu strolled free as a flame, pausing now to examine fabrics racked in an open-fronted shop. Her staff-bearers watched the crowd with their mistress in the corner of their eyes—

ready to conform to her movements, protecting her

without blundering into her path.

Good men, and they had more than a casual awareness of Samlor hil Samt. _At closer look, Samlor found Tabubu imposing, but the feeling she aroused in him was awe similar to that he felt beneath the gigantic reliefs of the river temple. The red silk of her headdress was diaphanous. Through it he could see that her hair was dressed in multiple braids, each banded at intervals with broad gold rings. Tabubu's bracelets bore complex designs in coral, carnelian and turquoise, all mounted in heavy gold.

The material of her dress was only slightly less transparent than her headgear, and the straps plunged to waist level in front. The pendant dangling across the cleft between her breasts was of metal filigree, gold and electrum—

the alloy

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of gold and silver. It seemed to depict a crocodile swallowing the ball of the world.

Tabubu's eyes glanced across Samlor like sunlight from a glacier. The pendant, rather than the two husky attendants, changed his intention of speaking directly to her. Instead, he approached Pre. She had been watching him with amusement from the moment the caravan master reappeared in the forecourt.

"My friend," said Samlor carefully, using the bustle around them as an active form of privacy, "believes he can be of service to your mistress. It may be that she has a lawsuit that he can have settled to her advantage. Or—

"

Pre's eyes had grown as hard as the jewels glaring from the cat on her bosom.

"What would your master," she asked, "expect in exchange for these services? If he is merely a generous man, let him help those who have need of it."

"He's a very discreet man," said Samlor, aware that his own desire for discretion had put the situation in the maid's hands. "As discreet as he is powerful."

He could feel Khamwas staring at his back, demanding some indication of success. Damn him, he could handle his own affairs if he was in such a hurry! Where did he get the notion that Samlor was a pimp?

The spotted cat, smaller than an adult leopard, rose and fell with the breasts it covered.

"He would spend an hour with your mistress," Samlor plowed on, proceeding with what he had started, "in the most complete secre—

"

"What!" Pre cried, bringing stares from all directions. "Why doesn't he just offer money, then? Does he think my mistress is a whore?" Samlor trembled. All his emotions were turned to lust for the splendid woman whose harangue was making a public fool of him. He didn't understand it, but he neve/understood much when he was thinking with his dick.

"You there," called Tabubu imperiously. "Samlor. Come here." Feeling as though he were encased in crystal, Samlor obeyed the scarlet-garbed woman. He remembered that he

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had intended to speak with her before, but he could not imagine how he had presumed so far. Her voice was contralto, and it reverberated as if it were coming from a hot furnace.

"If Prince Khamwas has something to tell me," said Tabubu, "then he can visit me at my home tomorrow."

She was tall to begin with, and the red silk of her headdress waved above her like the plume of a volcano. Samlor faced the woman as he had faced death many times before.

And not even Tabubu's dominating presence could quell his desire for her maid Pre.

"He should remember," Tabubu added, "that I am a priest's daughter and not a common prostitute. Not common at all."

She turned away with a flash of the pendant swinging between her breasts. The staff bearers moved to block Samlor if he tried to follow their mistress toward the inner court of the temple, reserved for religious purposes. Samlor didn't notice them. For a moment he stood puzzled, though he knew that Khamwas would begrudge him every instant until he had reported. Most people in Napata didn't even realize that Khamwas was alive, much less that he was accompanied—

served, if you would—

by a Cirdonian named Samlor hil Samt.

Tabubu's knowledge was as striking as the woman herself. It was something for Khamwas to think about before he decided what he should do next. As Samlor made his way back across the court, he thought of Pre clasping her arms around his shoulders and crossing her legs behind his buttocks as he thrust within her.

THE STATE BARGE was too reminiscent of Nanefer's yacht for Samlor to find the river crossing pleasant, but Khamwas was so abstracted that he did not appear to recall the disastrous journey of his dream.