The City of Refuge: Book 1 of The Memphis Cycle (31 page)

LI

“You're with the Nome Army,” Khonsu said through the grille of his cell. “Aren't you?”

His guard stopped in the act of slamming the door shut and frowned at him. “That I am, my lad,” he said grimly. “And you'd best remember it! I'll take no lip from you!”

“Oh you'll get no lip at all!” Khonsu said, trying to keep the smile from his face. “I'm Nome Army, too, from Khemnu. My name is Khonsu: perhaps you have heard of me.”

The name did not impress the guard, who cocked his head and eyed Khonsu with irony. “Oho!” he said. “So you're Commander Khonsu! It's a pleasure meeting you. And I'm Djeser-Khepru-Re, but you may address me as Horemheb.”

“No, I mean it,” Khonsu said. “I am Khonsu, commander of the Army for this Nome, and if you're one of my men, you'll–”

“Well I'll damned well not open the door on your say-so and let you walk out!” the guard snorted. “Commander, indeed! You're a smooth-tongued bastard!”

“No, listen to me,” Khonsu said. “I'm not asking you to free me. But I do ask you to bring Captain Hapu here right away. He'll identify me for you. What happens after won't be upon your head, but if all goes well, I'll remember you.”

The guard considered, idly testing the security of the lock, then nodded. “Maybe I'm a bigger fool than usual,” he said after a moment. “But you don't talk like the usual spate of liars I run into. I'll bring Hapu to you, like you said. If you're lying to me after all—”

“If I'm lying to you, you can bastinado me yourself,” Khonsu said. “I'll even hold still for it.”

The guard tested the door one last time, nodded thoughtfully, and left.

Khonsu watched the door close behind the man and sat down with a curse. He had been caught as neatly as any green recruit! He should have noticed the arrow was untouched and taken steps to remedy it. A moment's work would have saved him all this annoyance and he could have been well on the way back to Akhet-Aten at that moment. But it would not take long to mend matters.

Khonsu had not raised any objection to his arrest. Huni had been more frightened by the arrow than he had cared to admit if he had forgotten that Khonsu was Commander of Army for his Nome. Khonsu had realized this and turned back to fix Huni with a frowning gaze.

His expression had remained unchanged as the guards seized him and, upon Huni's command, marched him to the barracks and handed him over to one of the officers, who took him to a cell.

The room was fairly comfortable; Khonsu folded his arms behind his head and took a deep breath. He still had time, and if all went well he could take care of matters without exciting Huni's suspicions further.

He heard the sound of approaching voices; he turned and watched as the now uncomfortable guard returned with the man that he, Khonsu, had introduced into the Nome Army and set on the path to an excellent career.

“I knew you were jealous of your own power, Hapu,” he said as the other stopped and stared at him, his jaw sagging. “But I never dreamed you would clap me in prison!”

**   **   **

Neb-Aten hesitated before the blazing pylon of the temple of the Aten, his fingers tightening on his horses' reins, his eyes narrowed against the glare of the flames. The heat beat against his cheekbones, and he could feel the gold of his necklace grow hot and burning around his neck.

Heat and light, creation and—sometimes—destruction. You can feel it in the sun, like hands touching all around them, imbuing them with light and beauty.
He could hear his uncle's voice, as though he were speaking across the years of silence.
Even the fire that dances on our hearths is an echo of the Aten, the sun's long years of shining imprisoned in the fuel that feeds the fire and breaking free once more to return to its place of birth.

And now it is indeed returning,
Neb-Aten thought.
Returning and taking with it all memory of the brief interlude of my uncle's reign.

The horses tossed their heads and sidled. The fire was probably heating the bronze of their bits and making them uncomfortable. The sudden movement rattled the arrows in their quivers to either side of the body of the chariot. Neb-Aten clucked to them and moved southeast, toward the frowning line of cliffs, at a smart trot. There was much to do, and time was growing short. Dusk would be coming soon.

**   **   **

“Those damned arrows have driven the man out of what mind he had!” Hapu said as he and Khonsu hurried along the quay toward Lord Nebamun's ship. “It started a year ago, and it's continued unabated ever since! He couldn't get it through his head that someone was playing a prank and if he ignored it, it would go away.”

“A prank?” Khonsu said, trying to ignore the panicked tightness gripping his temples. “No, I don't think so. When he came to Akhet-Aten—”

“He went to the city?” Hapu demanded. “He's always stayed away from it, as though he was afraid of it. Or as though...” He hesitated, weighing his words. “As though he was afraid he might meet his greatest fear in its streets.”

“He certainly acted like a man with something on his conscience,” Khonsu said. He stopped and frowned at the Second Prophet's ship, seeing in his mind's eye Huni's blank, blazing glare.

The memory of that narrow glare frightened him. If ever an omen could be read in an expression, this was the time. And it was bearing down on Akhet-Aten even as he hesitated.

He turned to Hapu. “Huni's heading toward Akhet-Aten,” he said. “He took a guard with him-how many?”

“He has five men he trusts,” Hapu said. “They were soldiers once, just like the mayor. They aren't in the army: he's their commander He was in the army, himself, once, if you believe him, and they do what he says.”

Khonsu nodded. It was as he had feared. “Have you a faster boat?” he asked. “I need to reach Akhet-Aten near the time he does.”

“We have a galley close by,” said Hapu. “It's small, and it goes along even more swiftly when it has a sail up and helping the rowers. That'll get you back to Akhet-Aten in good time.”

“Take me to it,” Khonsu said. “And find a crew for it. We haven't a moment to lose!”

**   **   **

Neb-Aten feather-edged the chariot into a tight pass in the cliffs and then stepped down and hobbled the two horses. The burning temples were casting an increasing pall over the city; from where he stood he could see the thickening, ropy smoke interspersed with flashes of red fire. The heat fanned out toward him; he could feel it against his skin.

He smiled to himself as he turned away and reached to the floor of the cab to take up a stonemason's mallet and chisel, and a torch. He turned back toward the city with them heavy and solid in his hands, and gazed into the flame and darkness with stinging eyes.

He had expected to feel sorrow at Akhet-Aten's destruction, but the sight made his heart thrill with pride. The city of his childhood was as magnificent in its death as it had been beautiful in its life. Let those who did not understand say whatever they wished, Nefer-Khepru-Re Akhenaten, his uncle, had been a splendid architect and a great man.

The thought of art made him remember mallet and chisel. He nodded, turned, and climbed the slight incline leading to the courtyard of the tomb. He crossed the flat, sand-choked expanse and paused to take the ember-carrier from his belt and light the torch.

The dry, pitch-impregnated wood caught satisfactorily. Neb-Aten raised it and entered the tomb.

The fitful light of the torch highlighted a hypostyle hall leading back toward the bowels of the rock. He could see partially hewn pillars before him, rising up out of the rock-strewn debris of the floor.

The walls were blank, all but the ones to either side of the opening.

Neb-Aten raised his torch and went over to it, and as he approached, the streets of Akhet-Aten sprang to vivid, busy life. The king and queen stood at the Window of Appearances and showered gold, jewels and even a pair of gloves upon the tomb-owner, Huy, and Teye, his wife. Huy's arms were raised in adoration while a crowd of soldiers, dancers and children behind him shouted their joy.

Huy had left the palace; his friends surrounded him, crying congratulations and admiring the gold chains and necklaces weighting him. Two sentries squabbled over which could leave his post to witness the celebration; a schoolboy dropped his satchel and ran to join the festivities.

The cobra of royalty had been carved lightly on the brow of all Huy's depictions, obviously added some time after the initial carving to reflect that he had become pharaoh.

“Well met, Huy,” Neb-Aten said. He wedged the torch between several heavy stones, took up the chisel and hammer and stepped over to the carvings. He touched one of the arched serpents with a dark smile. “I know you have been expecting me,” he said as he set the tempered copper point against the cobra-crowned face of the owner. A blow of the hammer drove it downward through the stone as Huy's face vanished in an explosion of stone chips.

Neb-Aten turned his calm attention to the name beside it. In a moment that, too, was obliterated, and he was moving down the register with his chisel ready to strike at name and face wherever they appeared as the day flowed away on the sound of chisel against stone.

The torch was giving a feebler light when Neb-Aten finally stepped back through the scattered stone fragments and gazed upon his work.

“There,” he said. “It is done. My father will know that I have beaten for him the one who hounded him to a hideous death. I only regret that I was not able to do it while you walked beneath this sun and could feel every stroke in your living flesh. It is almost tragic to reflect that fate is reserved for one who was little more than your cats-paw. But his evil was his own choice. And now it is time to deal with him.”

LII

Hapu's ship skimmed the surface of the Nile as though it had wings. The banks slid past Khonsu's gaze in a blur of motion, and the wind of his travel strained his hair back from his forehead. He gazed southward along the river, and as the distance shortened between him and the city, it seemed as though the shadow of foreboding in his mind was finding reality in the growing smudge of darkness lying to the south.

The boat echoed with questions: Was there a fire? What could be burning in this stretch of desert land? And, as the smudge seemed to spread and draw closer, the crew began to feel a touch of increased heat.

They were was entering the eastward turn that would bring them straight to Akhet-Aten and the answers to Khonsu's questions. He turned his eyes from the shadow and gazed westward toward the sinking sun as the boat turned east. A shout from the bow lookout coming at the moment a blast of heat smote his back, tore his gaze away and brought it back south.

“There's fire ahead!” the lookout shouted.

Khonsu stared. The river lay open and straight before them, but where the city of Akhet-Aten should have gleamed in the sun within its cup of brilliant, green fields, a, black shadow, shifting with the wind, filled their view from bank to bank.

Hapu had been frowning at the spreading stain of darkness. “What do you see?” he demanded of the lookout.

“I can see flames,” the man replied from his perch atop the mast. “Flames and more smoke!”

“Sekhmet's teeth!” Hapu exclaimed. “It's directly ahead of us!”

“The city's ablaze!” Khonsu cried. “But how–? The gods save us! Look!”

A bank of smoke was billowing across the water toward them. Khonsu watched its advance; even with the wind straining against it, the smoke was reaching out to them with tendrils of darkness and blistering heat.

“No one can pass through that and keep his lungs filled with air!” Khonsu said. “Whatever may have happened at Akhet-Aten, it's now no place for a living man! Furl the sails! Put the boat about and pull hard!”

When they hesitated he said, “Do as I tell you! There's a cove north of here. The smoke and the heat is following the river, where the ground is low. We'll be safe enough if we can climb the cliffs.”

“Hard about!” shouted Hapu.

The rowers to port backed water while those to starboard pulled hard, spinning the boat as neatly as though it were the axis of a circle. Once facing north, they set their backs into the oars and raced downriver.

Hapu was staring at the smoke. “What happened?” he demanded. “No one can be in that city and live!”

“It was being evacuated,” Khonsu said. “I had thought it would be later, but... Set the bow into the shore. There's a path scaling the cliffs that'll bring us to the main road between Asyut and Khebet. Hurry!” He turned to Hapu and said, “We'll join His Grace's force. I think I know where they're heading.” And then he frowned at the darkness shrouding Akhet-Aten, his mind caught by the memory of a dream of death and treachery.

**   **   **

Huni wiped at his streaming eyes with the back of his hand. Nothing had gone quite as he had expected. He had boarded his private ship and sailed south with his handful of picked men, expecting to finally obtain answers to the doubts that had returned to trouble him after almost three decades of profitable, placid living untroubled by questions of conscience or pain.

The past is shaped at each moment by what is done in the present. He had taken hold of the present with both hands and shaped it to his own advantage with a fine, even a ruthless, disregard for all that had gone before. Past life, past regrets, betrayals arising from expediency, all those had vanished in the splendid present as inexorably as motes of sand scattered before the wind. Whenever the tides of his memory had cast up some battered emotion from long past years, he had taken comfort from that thought. And yet—

And yet, recently, he had had a recurring dream, a dream of silence and light, filled with a strange sense of vertigo. He was trying to climb the smooth side of a wind-sculpted dune beneath a hot, unmoving sun. His life depended on his success in scaling the dune.

His feet burned and ached with effort, his breath came in swift, shallow gasps, but his motion was nightmarishly slow. The sands were as soft and formless as water, and each time, just as he approached the crest of the dune, he felt it move and shift beneath his feet like the negligently powerful motion of a hippopotamus heaving itself from the water. The sides of the dune curved upward like the crest of a wave, curling up and over to crash down upon him, burying him in all the motes of sand the winds had once scattered before him. And in the moment when the wave of sand was poised to crush him as he floundered, choking, stretching out his hands for help, he glimpsed the white, set face of Neb-Aten as it had been the last time he had seen him alive, just before he had turned and run to his chariot, to go careering off northward. That had been the moment that had led to Huni's present wealth, and he did not regret it. Indeed, if the choice were to be made again, he would have lived through it and all the following ones once more.

And yet in the dream Neb-Aten fixed him with a gaze that cut through all the layers of self-justification and lay bare the quivering core of guilt he had not quite been able to kill.

Where is the message?

The voice was the same one he had known and even once loved during his youth. There was no condemnation, only the question, but the words would send Huni spinning into wakefulness in his sweat-drenched bed time and again, until he had finally summoned the priests and the sorcerers and demanded that they put a stop to the evil dreams.

And then the messages had begun, driving all peace and complacency from Huni's mind.

He was ill-used, persecuted. Had he not taken an intolerable situation and turned it to his best advantage? How could anyone blame him for that? How could anyone blame him now for what had happened in the distant past? People were given choices at various times in their lives, and it was not his fault they made foolish or even fatal ones.

He had a chance to end the messages once and for all and exorcise the ghost that had plagued him over the past year, turned his well-ordered life into hell and sent his son to the brink of death. But the task was proving more difficult than he would ever have expected.

His ship had sailed into smoke and heat. The crew, blinded and choking, had run her aground and scrambled to safety. Huni had paused only long enough to dip a cloth in the river and wring it out, tying it over his nose and mouth, signaling his guards to do the same before making his way up to the cliff top. The crew had been lost in the smoke; he had heard them choking, but time had been precious, and he had pressed on.

Once he had gained the top of the cliffs, it was easy to get his bearings. The city was perhaps two leagues to the south, and he was only a league from the place where he had been given the message almost thirty years before.

He opened the fragile, tattered papyrus given to him by the commander of the guard force headquartered at the city, and scanned the words written there:

It is time to make an end. You have one last chance to discharge your duty. You were given a message to deliver by one whom you once loved as a father. He awaits you at the spot where you met him all those years ago. If you fail this time you will surely die.

The spot where you met him all those years ago. Huni nodded and folded the message away. It would not take long to reach that spot. And not much longer to make an end.

**   **   **

Neb-Aten tethered his horses and gazed down at the burning city. The flames were billowing outward without any apparent change from earlier that day, the heat still beat in breathless, brassy waves across the wastelands surrounding the city. The fire was spreading; the central portion of Akhet-Aten was being consumed, the palaces that had sheltered him in his youth, the gardens that had offered shade and coolness, the temples in which he had witnessed his uncle's magnificence. All were being swept away in a golden tide of flame, as though the sun were swallowing them.

He turned his back on the city and gazed with narrowed eyes toward the twisting passages carved into the hillsides. He caught motion near their crest. Six men, moving cautiously.

He smiled and limbered his bow. The quiver of arrows between his shoulders was satisfyingly solid and heavy.

Not much longer now.

**   **   **

Huni moved closer to the tomb entrance. Old, half-forgotten training came to his mind; he kept well to one side, edging along the walls of rock until he reached the doorway.

He motioned to two of his men. “Go in there and see what there is to see.” He watched as they obeyed. “What do you find?” he called after a moment.”

“A rich tomb, my lord!” came the cry.

“No one in there, then?”

“No one, my lord!”

“Then come out,” Huni said. “There'll be time for other matters later.” He saw them emerge, nodded, and climbed the steep track back to the crest of the hill.

The other three were standing by the chariots where he had left them, gazing at the glare of Akhet-Aten's death throes. They turned when they heard him approach.

“Nothing, my lord?” Djedi asked.

“Nothing,” Huni replied.

“Maybe it was a prank,” said Amenmose.

“No prank,” Huni said. He frowned and stared down the track toward the tomb. “Paneb!” he called. “Kheruef! Get over here! Now!”

The only sound was the distant hiss of the flames. Huni's frown became a scowl. “Go after them, Huy,” he said. “Tell them to stir their stumps! We haven't got all night!”

“At once, my lord!” Huy said, and hurried down the path.

“Akhet-Aten's engulfed,” said Amenmose, turning back to the burning city. “It's like a sandstorm made of fire. Who would have thought there would be enough to burn there?”

“There's plenty to burn,” Huni said. “And plenty to loot. It's a waste.”

“I wonder who ordered it,” said Djedi.

Huni did not comment. His eyes, wide and somehow unseeing were focused on the flames. A scream behind him made him whip round with a hand on his knife.

“My lord!”

“Huy,” Djedi said.

“What is it?” shouted Amenmose.

“They're–they're dead?”

“What are you talking about?” demanded Huni.

Huy appeared at the head of the track, winded and white. “Dead!” he panted. “Dead in the track, just at that doorway!”

“How–” Huni began. The words died as Amenmose offered two broken arrow shafts. The fletching was gray, tipped in red, and blood channels had been carved into the shafts. They were red and wet to the eye, with the distant flames casting an even redder light upon them. Huni took them from Huy, inspected them more closely, and looked up.

“How was it done?” Huni demanded. “Damn it, I know these passes! No one could have gone past us!”

“But they're dead!” Djedi breathed. “Someone got through!”

“I'll kill that murderer!” Huni said through his teeth.

A voice echoed from the high-walled canyons, repeating more and more faintly. Huy, Amenmose and Djedi drew closer together, fingering their knives.

Where is the message?

It seemed to Huni that his nightmares were coming true. He threw the broken arrows to the ground and raised his fist. “There is no message!” he screamed. “I had none to bring!”

But the voice came again and again, fainter and fainter in the twilight.
Where is the message? Where is the message? Where is the message... The message... Message...

“Let's get away from here!” Djedi said through chattering teeth. “I'm not about to fight a kheft!”

Huni's rising anger steadied his voice. “That's no demon!” he said, taking the arrow from his belt. The firm, cool feel of its shaft in his hands was reassuringly solid and mortal. “Demons don't shoot arrows! This came from a man's bow, and I am going to find the man and kill him!”