Year of the Hyenas Read online

  “A crocodile!” screamed Wia. Kaf-re lunged forward and caught his son in his arms so swiftly that the child’s mask was knocked from his face. Now the boy wailed in earnest.

  Wia’s panicked screams attracted the attention of a guard at a nearby wharf. He ran to where the family stood, holding high a long spear as he made his way through the throng. At the water’s edge, peering into the dark reeds, he aimed the spear carefully. Then he looked closer, slowly lowering his arm.

  “Why do you just stand there?” Wia shrieked. “Kill it! Kill it!”

  The guard did not answer immediately. “It’s not a crocodile,” he answered almost apologetically. “And it’s already dead.”

  He called for a torch, and someone brought one from a nearby stanchion. The crowd gathered round and stared. The guard held the torch close to the water…

  The linen-clad body of Hetephras bobbed before them, face down, caught in a thicket of reeds. She still wore her gilded pectoral, but her skin was a ghastly, puckered white. In the wavering torchlight, the second gash made by the axe at the back of her skull was clearly visible. Blood and matter oozed from the wound, and a small cloud of tiny minnows darted in and out, feasting. One of her arms was outstretched, seeming to point accusingly toward the city itself. A chorus of gasps and screams filled the quay.

  Though no one knew it at the time, the Year of the Hyenas had begun.

  FOLLOWER OF SET

  A FEW STEPS AWAY FROM WHERE HETEPHRAS’S body floated, a man stumbled from a waterfront tavern, oblivious to the screams from the nearby quay. Slim and long-limbed, he roughly shoved aside those trying to make their way to the river’s edge to see why people were yelling. The hardness of his black eyes and the determined line of his mouth were enough warning to those in his way to step quickly aside. He seemed to tempt someone, anyone, to cross him.

  “A follower of Set,” they whispered to one another as he passed, meaning that he looked as if he loved the chaos and recklessness of that god whose kingdom was the fierce alien desert.

  Hot-eyed women in the crowd shot him glances from beneath their lowered lids. He refused to notice them, despite the provocative messages they sent him. As he staggered past, the women turned to stare.

  The man was not handsome. Neither was he plain. His narrow face was arresting, the more so because beauty was not a part of it. It was the intensity of his black eyes that overcame the women. They were a luminous jet in which lights moved and swirled, where intelligence warred equally with passion. The swarthiness of his skin, the height of his cheekbones, and the drawn set of his full lips met in tense collision; the man’s emotions were as apparent as a bloody gash on his face.

  Soon the dark-eyed man reached the boulevards of outer Thebes. Here no festive bonfires lit the streets, only the odd meager torch. He plunged fearlessly into the dark, however, heedless of the thieves who might be loitering in the shadows.

  He strode past long stretches of whitewashed walls that encircled the estates of the nobles and gentry. Only when a group of private guards emerged from an alley, loud and boisterous, did he stop, withdrawing into a statue’s niche. When they had passed he set out again, the hilt of his gleaming knife a comforting weight in his hand.

  When he reached the Boulevard of the Goddess Selket, he slowed his pace. Peering around a corner, his face a study in stealth and craftiness, he paused to stare at a bronze gate across the square. Fresh torches on either side of it streamed droplets of fire onto glazed tiles. No doorman guarded it—the servant had probably deserted his post to slip away to the festival.

  The man’s movements suddenly became as balanced and predatory as a stalking leopard’s. He moved quickly to the gate. Looking furtively to the left and right, checking for any hidden guard, he took hold of the handle and pulled.

  It did not move.

  The man shook his head in muddled confusion, as if this eventuality had not occurred to him. He pulled harder. The gate scraped loudly at its hinges but did not budge. It was locked.

  A distant pounding came to him through the dark, and he realized that his own hands were beating desperately on the bronze plates. Over and over again they smote the doors, and there was wailing, too. He seemed almost surprised to realize it was his own voice that he heard.

  “Naia!” he screamed into the night. “Naia!” His grief-stricken yells merged with the clamor of his own frenzied fists on the door. “Naia! Come out to me!”

  When there was no response, he backed into the middle of the street, standing on the hitching stones near the well, howling even more forlornly, “Naaaiiiaaaa!”

  He beat again on the gate and shrieked the name for what span of time he did not know. Finally he heard the noise of wooden shutters opening in the house. A line of distant torches on the balcony came toward him amid a scuffle of feet and muffled shouts. Torches now shone in the forecourts of the other houses on the small square.

  He heard the voices working their way from the house to the street, and he smiled joyously. Naia was coming to him! He would hold her in his arms again, feel his lips on hers again, the press of her body—

  Servants wielding cudgels and whips burst from the gate, led by their foreman. They fell on him instantly. His curved knife slashed out. The servants began to fan out and encircle him. One of the younger men lunged at him with a club, and the man slashed the servant’s arm to the bone. Seeing their comrade’s blood flow so enraged the others that they fell on the black-eyed man in earnest.

  Though he fought back, slashing a nose or cracking a skull with the dagger’s hilt, some part of him disengaged from the fight to observe the event from afar. Small details came to him as odd fragments of time amid the frenzy. He saw their hard, brown eyes like those of desert jackals circling him. He pondered their fists as they came nearer, and when they connected, there was an almost delicious taste of blood inside his cheek. A club caught him in the side of the head and he crumbled before the well. He fell to his knees, the dagger dropping from his hands. Seeing their advantage, the servants resorted to kicking him with their hard, hempen sandals.

  He no longer felt their blows. He curled into a ball waiting for his death, smiling a little, calm overtaking him. He suddenly heard from far away the voice of a man yelling at the men to cease their punishments, to raise him to his feet and hold him.

  The man who spoke was hastily throwing a linen wrap over himself. He was young, like the black-eyed man, but in his handsome face lurked the indefinable essence of nobility—or fortune.

  “I’ve told you before, Semerket,” the man said in a clipped, toneless voice, “that if you disturbed my wife again, I’d thrash you.”

  Semerket struggled in his captors’ hands. “My wife, Nakht! Mine!”

  “Hold him!” commanded Nakht. “Strip off his tunic.”

  The foreman moved to rip the cloth away from Semerket’s shoulders.

  Seizing a whip held by another servant, Nakht spoke into Semerket’s face. “I’m going to beat you worse than I beat my horses—worse than even my servants. I’m going to show you that if you dare approach my wife again, the next time I won’t hesitate to slit your peasant throat.”

  “Brave man, Nakht, when your men hold me.”

  “Turn him around.”

  A lash rang out. Even through his wine fumes, Semerket felt the whip strip away a ribbon of flesh from his back. Despite any resolution not to give the man satisfaction, he groaned aloud.

  Another lash, and he felt the blood dripping down his back. Then another. He lost count after the sixth blow and fell to his knees. His ears rang from his pain. Dimly he heard a woman yelling at Nakht to stop. Stirring once more to life, he saw the swirl of white linen skirts before him, and smelled her familiar scent of citrus oil even before he saw her face.

  “Stop it!” she screamed. “You’ll kill him, Nakht! Please, my lord— please! Do not beat him further!”

  “He has made our house a place of lamentation long enough. Go back inside.”

 
“My lord, give me a chance with him. I will make him see reason.” She saw Nakht hesitate and pressed the advantage. “I promise that if he comes again after tonight, I won’t interfere. Please. Leave me with him.”

  Nakht angrily beckoned to his men to withdraw, but loudly told the foreman, who was wiping away blood from a gash on his forehead, that he was to stay and watch over his mistress from the gate. “Don’t take your eyes off her!”

  The servants retreated into the house. The foreman sent them to their rooms to have their wounds tended and stitches taken. He himself took up the post at the gate, as commanded, hiding in the shadows, ready if his lady needed him.

  The woman sat cross-legged, leaning her back against the well. She turned the man over and he groaned as she cradled his head in her lap. She unfolded her linen headdress, crumpling it into a ball, and began to dab at the blood on his face. His eyes fluttered open and he smiled up at her.

  “Your perfume… sweet.”

  Her voice was tired. “I’m not wearing it for you.”

  “Have your servants bring a torch, that I can see you again in the light.”

  She sighed. “Oh, Ketty, why do you shame me like this?”

  He spoke simply, surprised by the question. “I want you back.”

  She pressed her lips together. “You must stop all this—shouting my name in the streets every night. It can’t go on. Look what has happened to you. I could prevent my husband from killing you this time—”

  “I am your husband! Me!” His shout was so fierce that the foreman thrust his head from the gate, his hand clutching a spear. Naia caught the movement in the dark and shook her head. The gate closed a bit.

  “No, Ketty. You are not my husband. Not anymore.”

  “Always.”

  “We’ve said the words of divorce. You returned my dowry.”

  “I didn’t know what I was doing! I was drunk!”

  “When were you not drunk at the end?”

  He looked up at her beseechingly. “I’ll give up wine this night if that’s what you want. From now on, only water. Not even beer. By the gods, I swear!”

  Her eyes filled with tears as she rocked his head gently in her lap. “Oh, my baby, my baby,” she crooned to him as to a child. “What am I going to do with you? You know why I left you. Our marriage was cursed.”

  “It was the blessing of my life.”

  She looked away and sighed raggedly. “I thought it mine, too. For a while.”

  Eagerly he pounced on the thought. “It could be again!”

  “No. The gods have willed it.”

  “Gods,” he muttered darkly, spitting out the word as if it were poison. He reached behind himself, felt for something, then suddenly clasped the dagger that he had dropped in the street. He held it to her throat, the curve of its blade against her neck’s gentle arch. “If you won’t come back to me, then he can’t have you either. I’ll kill you here, now!” There was an abrupt grating noise as the foreman came bursting through to the street, spear raised.

  She did not move her head, but her voice was steady. “No!” she firmly commanded the foreman. “Go back! He won’t do it.” The foreman paused, spear still held high.

  Semerket laughed. “How do you know I won’t? Our blood will mingle together here in the street and the poets will sing of it for centuries.”

  She didn’t speak for a moment, and her tears spilled upon his face. “Because… because, my love, you would kill another with me.”

  It was a moment before he registered what she had said. Then he winced as if she’d struck him with a blunt object. She nodded.

  “Nakht’s child is in me.”

  Very gently she removed the dagger from her throat, handing it to the foreman. “Take it away now,” she told the man in a low voice. “Somewhere where he won’t find it.” Then, looking down at the man to whom she was once married, she took the hand that had held the blade and placed it on her belly.

  The tiny movement beneath the linen pleats burned his hand hotter than any fire, cut deeper than any blade. The black eyes in his face became fathomless. Slowly he sat up, not even registering the pain of his beating.

  Naia could not meet his gaze and looked down at her own hands instead, aimlessly clasping and unclasping her crumpled, bloodied head-dress. “Do you finally understand why you can’t come back, Ketty? There is no hope, ever, that I can be your wife again. In the surest way, the gods have decided.”

  He slowly extricated himself from her lap and stood up. Blood ran from his wounds, and his breathing was shallow. He said nothing. He turned away, put a hand to his forehead, and then shook his head to clear his senses. His lips formed silent words, but none emerged. With a desperate final look at her, he stumbled into a nearby alley. He began to run.

  “Ketty—!” Naia yelled after him, standing and calling to the retreating figure. “Ketty…” He stopped, but only to vomit against a wall. Without looking back, he began to run again into the dark.

  “Mistress—” The foreman hovered nearby. “Do you want me to follow him?”

  She shook her head. “No. Tell the others he won’t be coming back. They can relax their guard.” She pressed a fist into her mouth to stop the moan that threatened to escape her. She steadied her breathing, and followed the foreman into the house. With great care, he locked the gate behind her.

  “HE WENT TO HER HOUSE AGAIN.” The woman’s harsh voice filled the small courtyard with indignation.

  Sitting in his tiled bath, four rooms away, Nenry brought the razor to his skull and drew it across his scalp. The morning sun stabbed painfully into his eyes from the mirror held by his whimpering valet, reminding him he had drunk too much at the Osiris Festival.

  Merytra, his wife, continued her tale from the courtyard. “Banging on the door, calling her name over and over again. Of course he was drunk.” When her husband did not respond, her voice became even shriller. “Are you listening to me?”

  “How could I be listening to anything else?” Nenry muttered.

  “What?”

  He called out cheerily, “I’m listening, my love.”

  His wife strode into the bathroom, bracelets jingling as merrily as donkey bells. Her expression was far from tinkling, however. Nenry noticed how his valet shrank from her. Merytra took this as her due and continued her harangue. “It’s a disgrace. And if you’re not careful, it’ll cost you your position!”

  She watched him scrape his head ineffectively with the razor. “Here,” she said with impatient superiority, “let me do that.”

  “I can manage.” In truth, Nenry did not want his wife anywhere near him with a razor.

  “You’ll only hack yourself to pieces and bleed all over your linen again—and I’m not going to wash and pleat your robes twice in one week. I said, give it to me.” Her voice was firm, and the glint in her eye fixed.

  Nenry wanly handed over the razor. Hastily he brought his hands down into the water to cup his soft genitals. She was done in five expert sweeps of the razor. Angry red welts rose burning to replace the stubble, but there was indeed no blood.

  “Thank you, my love,” he said, moving to the farthest recesses of the tiled enclosure, rubbing the stinging welts with one hand, the other still clasped firmly to his midsection.

  “Well?” She crossed her arms.

  With great determination, he forced his features into something resembling casual indifference. “Well…?”

  She looked with a sideways glance at his cringing valet and grabbed the cloth he held. “Leave us,” she ordered. “Bring water from the city well. Two jugs.” The man nodded dully and backed out of the bathroom, limping.

  “And don’t linger!” she called out. She dried her husband briskly with the piece of tattered cloth, as she would a child or a dog. “This is the last time I let you pick a servant. What were you thinking when you chose this one? Better to buy a trained baboon from the temples. At least then we might be able to keep something in the larder for ourselves.”
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br />   “I don’t understand why you’re having trouble with him, my love. You’re always so clever with servants.” This was a lie. Two had run away, and another had hanged herself.

  “He’s slow, lazy, and gluttonous. What’s more, he’s a sneak. Last night he left his station and went off to the festival. When the fool finally returned he was so drunk he peed into my lotus pond. All my little fish were belly-up this morning. I had to throw scalding water on his feet just to wake him for his caning.”

  “So that’s why he’s limping…” Nenry moved past her and into his sleeping chamber. He dressed quickly, feeling less vulnerable when a sheath of linen was between himself and his wife.

  Relentlessly she followed him into the room, still clutching the razor. “So what are you going to do about him?”

  “Enroll him at the servant’s school, I suppose. What else can I do?”

  “Not the servant. Your brother.”

  “I thought you were speaking of—”

  “I wasn’t. Pay attention. Ever since his divorce he’s behaved like a madman. Not that he was much of a prize to begin with—not that anyone in your family is.” Nenry sighed, knowing that she was off on another favorite tangent.

  He had married Merytra because she was the grandniece of Lord Iroy, the high priest of Sekhmet. Glazed with ambition, Nenry had allowed himself to be adopted into Iroy’s family and married to his unlovely ward. Though his home life was sour, advancements had come rapidly; only recently Nenry had been promoted to chief scribe to the Eastern Mayor of Thebes.

  But the price was terrible. Their first and only child, a son, had been snatched by Lord Iroy to be raised in his own house and named his principal heir. Merytra, torn between loyalty to a powerful uncle and hatred because he had stolen her child, was left embittered and frustrated. Nenry became her natural target.

  Nenry hurriedly fastened a sash around his waist and thrust his feet into his sandals. When his wife turned her back, he quietly tiptoed from their sleeping chamber.