Dagger (30 page)

Khamwas touched the brush to the document and drew his name with the sure strokes of an accomplished scholar. His face had no expression and his eyes did not appear to be focused.

Beneath Samlor's fingers, Pre's breast was as densely fluid as molten lava. Patjenfi was muttering unintelligibly to himself; Osorkon's broad jaw was set in grim silence; and the curse Pentweret spoke was fully audible. The scribe rose, holding his desk open with the ink palette upon it. Crushed stone clung in blue shadows on the back of his thighs. His face was professionally bland and perhaps genuinely bored.

Tabubu dropped the executed deed onto the desk and waved the scribe negligently toward Khamwas' brothers. "The witnesses must sign," she said.

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Nodding, the scribe held the desk out for Osorkon to use the brush waiting in the hollow of vermilion ink.

"I thought we behaved badly to you six years ago," said Osorkon. He stared at his lounging brother, then scribbled his signature with disdainful haste. The brush, carefully frayed from the reed which formed its stem, flattened under Osorkon's pressure.

"We were models of familial affection," he added, "compared to the way you're treating your children." He turned his back.

Tabubu was standing at an angle to Khamwas, watching Patjenfi take the brush and fastidiously try to straighten its splayed bristles on the flat of the palette. Her fingertips were massaging the front of her dress, working slowly downward from her navel.

"You'll regret this, my brother," said Pentweret as he took the brush in final turn. "But it won't be undone. It can't." He sighed and turned away. Pre was touching Samlor, rubbing him with feather-light fingers the way Tabubu massaged herself. His vision was blurring. Khamwas's brothers were trudging down the stairs with lowered heads, but reflections from the surface of the wine kept staining their image in Samlor's eyes.

The scribe had squatted again to roll his inked seal behind each signature on the deed.

Tabubu was kneeling beside Khamwas' couch. She allowed him to kiss her as if the prince were a rambunctious puppy whose affections were too cute to be degrading.

"My lady," said the scribe, holding out the completed document. Tabubu rose as she took it and slapped Khamwas' hand with the rolled paper as he reached for her.

"You can't deny me now!" Khamwas bleated. His tone made it obvious that he knew she could—

and that he expected her to do so.

"Deny you?" said Tabubu, snapping the scroll open angrily. "It's you who're denying me!"

Samlor had not heard an order to the servants, but they were returning up the stairs with—

"Your children haven't signed this yet!" Tabubu was 222

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saying. Her voice was as cold and hard as the walls of the crater where Nanefer fought the worm. "Do you think I don't know what will happen? When you're gone, they'll take everything away from me."

"Daddy, what—

" said Serpot. She took a quick step toward Khamwas, past a servant whose reaching hand halted when the child and the child's words stopped at Tabubu's glare.

Serpot hopped back beside Pemu. The boy was as stiff as a soldier being cursed by his superior. Tears rolled down Serpot's cheeks although she tried to hold them back with closed eyelids.

"You see?" Tabubu hissed. "They'll ignore any agreement you make!" Samlor kept seeing Star rather than Serpot facing Tabubu in blind misery. He wanted to get up and hurl a smirking servant through the window to the crocodile pond beneath. . . . That would show this bitch what the real power was in,this world where women were only toys for men.

He didn't move though, couldn't move, because Pre had given the cup to another of the servants. Now, as she caressed Samlor with one hand, she rubbed her own groin with the other.

"Tell them they must sign the deed," Tabubu ordered as she dropped it on the little desk the scribe carried. He bore it to the children as he had to Khamwas'

brothers. His face showed no more emotion than the paper did.

"Father?" said Pemu. His hands were gripping his thighs as if to keep themselves from being dragged upward toward the waiting brush.

"Don't speak, Pemu," Khamwas said. He lay on the couch with his eyes closed and his fists clenched.

"Tell them they have no inheritance!" Tabubu said. Her voice was chilled steel, but her belly thrust and withdrew rhythmically a few inches from Khamwas' face.

"Tell them you have beggared them for life and that they must sign their agreement to what you've done!"

"Da—

" Serpot pleaded.

"I can't bear your voice!" Khamwas screamed in sudden anger. "Sign it! Sign it!

Don't make me hear your voice!"

"I will do as you order, Father," said Pemu stiffly. His cheeks were flushed with embarrassment, at the scene and at his father's behavior. Serpot turned to hide her open blubbering, but a liveried servant stood behind her and she whirled around again. "I can't," she wailed. "I can't write, I can't I can't I can't!"

As Ahwere couldn't write the symbols that would have protected her, thought Samlor.

Pemu wrote his name with the careful certainty of a child who is well taught but as yet lacks the practice which makes the motions instinctive. Prince Nanefer had been a scribe and a scholar without equal in his time, and he was dead as surely as Ahwere. Samlor wanted to say that to Khamwas, but only a sigh of pleasure escaped when he opened his mouth.

"Your brother will sign your name, child," said the bland scribe. "Just make a mark on the paper."

Serpot could not prevent her eyes from dripping as she took the brush from Pemu, but she dabbed the tip against the paper with queenly disdain which belied her sobs of a moment before.

They were good kids, royal in the best sense of the word, but Samlor hil Samt couldn't move a muscle to help them. He was kneading Pre's breasts. The crocodile hide was coarse against the backs of his hands, while the skin beneath was as smooth as finest silk save for the erect nipples.

"My lady," said the scribe coolly as he returned the document to Tabubu after sealing the new signatures also.

Tabubu sat on the couch, her hips to the curve of Khamwas' lap just as the maid sat with Samlor across the table. Her right hand played with Khamwas' hair while the left gently waved the scroll in his face. Khamwas was trying to pull the woman prone onto the couch with him, but only the dimples in the silk beneath his fingers suggested that she resisted him.

Samlor had expected Pemu and Serpot to be led away. They still stood by the window looking doubtful, fright224

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ened—

and as resolute as children could be in the face of unspoken threats.

"You've really tried to provide for me, dearest, flower of my life," said Tabubu as she leaned slightly closer to Khamwas. Instead of icy hectoring, her tone was a lover's in the moment following a splendid climax.

"But you can't, you see, darling—

" her voice was as soft as the breast which

dangled just low enough to brush Khamwas' ear "—

so long as the brats are alive.

You saw how your brothers hate me. If you were gone, they'd snatch everything away from me and give it to—

"

"But they're my children," Khamwas whimpered. His eyes were open, but Tabubu's pendant hung too closely before them for him to be able to focus on it.

"/ can give you children," Tabubu murmured, "and I can give you much more." She leaned still further forward. Samlor thought she was whispering into Khamwas' ear, but instead she was nibbling it. Her tongue was very pink against her teeth for an instant. Then she smiled and purred, "Much more, little flower. Bat first you must kill them."

"Daddy," Serpot cried.

"Silencel" Khamwas shouted back. His face was livid with strain. "I told you to be silent, didn't I?"

"You see how they obey you," said Tabubu, her lips inches from Khamwas' ear. The words drilled through Samlor's brain, but he did not try to move.

"Do the abomination that you demand, then," Khamwas said past the hand that he had thrown over his eyes.

"N—

" Samlor stammered, "N-n—

"

"No, heart of hearts," said Tabubu. Her hand touched Khamwas' and softly guided it to her quivering breast. The agony of his uncovered expression smoothed to chalky emptiness. "Your man must do it. Otherwise the act will be laid to me. Order him."

"No," said Samlor. He got to his feet, though he could not feel anything below the pulse throbbing in his groin 'Wo."

"You heard her," said Khamwas without emotion. Men in scarlet robes held Pemu and Serpot, but the children refused to demean themselves with vain struggle.

"You can't order me!" Samlor shouted. He had drawn his long dagger. If there had been a servant behind him when he flashed around a fierce glance, the watered steel blade would have disemboweled the man. There was no one.

"Samlor, I beg you," Khamwas whispered. "For our friendship—

please. You must

understand. . . ."

Someone did stand behind Samlor now. His motion as he turned seemed as slow as wax melting in the sun. Pre's hands teased open Samlor's sash. She was nude. Her pubic hair had been hennaed to a startling shade of red.

Pre pressed her body against Samlor and kissed him with her whole naked length.

"Now . . . ," she murmured, turning him with her fingertips on his shoulders and the memory of her warmth consuming all choice but obedience to Tabubu's will. Samlor walked slowly toward the children. He tried to grasp Pemu by the hair, but the boy's head had been shaved to mere fuzz in the fashion of the country. Instead, Samlor closed his hand across the skull with his fingertips on one temple and the pad of his thumb on the other. He turned the boy so that Pemu's tightly-clenched eyes were on him.

The eyelids flew open as Samlor cut the boy's throat from ear to ear. The blade severed all four branches of the carotid artery, bathing both victim and killer in hyphenated spurts of blood. It dripped onto the floor, cratering the lapis lazuli dust and turning it into purple gum.

Pemu's head flopped to the side when the muscles holding it erect were cut, but his eyes were still bright as the servant holding him turned and dropped the dying child out the window. The body splashed in the pool beneath. One, then the other crocodile slammed their jaws on it with a sound like vaults closing. In the room's dead stillness, Samlor could hear the boy's ribs cracking beneath the pressure of ragged yellow teeth.

He looked back at Khamwas. He could feel nothing except Pemu's blood, and that burned like boiling vitrol. "Go on," Khamwas croaked. 226

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Tabubu's dress lay crumpled beside the couch. She wore nothing but the dangling crocodile pendant toward which she drew Khamwas' face.

Samlor turned. His bloody left hand was a claw poised to wrap itself in Serpot's hair and jerk the child's throat up for his blade.

Her face was already lifted to him. Her eyes were glistening with tears, but they were open and her slender throat bobbled as she swallowed a sob.

"Don't you want me?" Pre breathed in Samlor's ear. She was standing behind him, so close that when she lifted herself on her toes the pressure of her body slid Samlor's tunic up on his hips.

He swung the coffin-hilled knife in a short arc that grated on Serpot's neckbone as it tore through everything else, skin and flesh and the tough cartilage of her windpipe. Her tongue stuck out in final terror as the force of the blow flung her sideways, against the smiling servant holding her. A voice in Samlor's mind screamed "Fatherl" and his eyes flickered with images of Star, not Serpot, being lifted and hurled through the window to the reptiles waiting below.

His dagger clanged to the floor. There was blood everywhere, ropy trails slung from the blade as it cut clear and great pools splashed on the sparkling dust by the child's jugular emptying her life.

Pre's arms were around Samlor. She kissed him, the touch of her lips beneath his ear drawing his face around to meet them. .

"Now," she whispered as she drew Samlor down onto the blood and lapis of the floor with her, "take what you have earned, my hero." He didn't realize he was tearing the strong linen of his tunic until the fabric ripped. He knelt between Pre's thighs and felt her heels encircle him. As he thrust forward, her grinning mouth opened wider into bestial jaws ... a tunnel of blue fire . . . into a screaming void that filled the cosmos. . . . Samlor was face down on the ground outside the arbor in Khamwas' garden. Khamwas was within, sprawled across

the curved wicker bench in a pose that must have been as painful as the way Samlor's knee pressed a knotted root in the turf.

Samlor had cut the neck off a gourd—

two gourds, he saw, when Khamwas sat up. His

cock was stuck through the hole, and that hurt also.

"What in the name of heaven are you doing?" demanded Osorkon in amazement. Behind stood the palace children, their game forgotten, and the equally frightened servants who had been watching them. "Are you drunk?"

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"COVER YOURSELF, FOR pity's sake," said Osorkon scornfully as he stepped past Samlor to the entrance of the arbor.

Samlor turned toward the wall and tried to blank out the memory of childish faces gaping in amazement at him. The rind was tough enough that the edges scraped as he pulled the gourd off him. That pain helped him—

not forget, but at

least put aside the shock and embarrassment that made his skin burn all over his body.

"Brother," Osorkon said in cold fury as Khamwas disengaged himself from a similar gourd. "If you've returned to degrade yourself and the kingdom, so be it—

your family has no power to stop you, you've made that clear. But tell us now so that we can exile ourselves and avoid watching further disgusting exhibitions."

Samlor squeezed the front of his tunic together. He'd torn it all the way to the waist, despite the brocaded hem. It was an impressive feat of strength—