Lynda Robinson - Murder at the Feast of Rejoicing

Once aboard the yacht, Meren hurried to the deckhouse. The Nubian vanished inside, then returned and lifted aside the hangings that covered the doorway. Without saying a word, he nodded at Meren, giving permission to enter. Meren slipped inside, glancing around the chamber hung with leopard skins and filled with gilded furniture. His gaze found the room's sole occupant, who was sitting on the floor sharpening the blade of a short sword. Meren took a step, sank to his knees, and touched his forehead to the deck.

The boy looked up from the blade and said, "You're angry."

"Aye, divine majesty." Meren sat up and glared at the king. "I am furious."

"I am pharaoh, you know. My will is as the will of my father, the king of the gods."

At once Meren smoothed the wrinkles of anger from his face and bent to touch his forehead to the floor again. "Thy will is accomplished in all things, golden one. May you have life, health, and strength forever. What is thy will?"

"Vulture dung! If you hide behind ceremony, I'll lose my temper."

Sitting up again, Meren put his fists on his hips. "Then I may speak to the divine one as a friend?"

"Yes, yes. You win." Tutankhamun cast aside the sword and jumped to his feet.

Meren stood as well and threw up his hands. "Then will you tell me, by all the enemies of Egypt, how have you come to be here and why, O divine one?"

The king laughed. Picking up the sword, he deposited it in a long box.

"I gave Ay a choice. He either allowed me to sneak away to see you or allowed me to pursue a horde of Libyan nomads who have been raiding villages south of Memphis. I'm supposed to be sick and confined to my apartments in the palace."

"Do you know that when I saw Karoya at my door, I nearly fell off the roof of my house?"

Tutankhamun gave him a quick glance, and in that brief exchange Meren glimpsed old hurts, dark and painful anxiety, and fear. He should have known that only the gravest of reasons would draw the king away from the possibility of engaging in his first real battle. This wasn't the time to play the stern adviser. Most of the king's life had been spent in duty, in preserving a remote divinity, and in learning diplomacy; how to manipulate powerful princes and kings, how to conciliate factions within his kingdom. But there was a limit to the maturity of even a divine king when that king was only fourteen.

Drawing closer to the youth, Meren said softly, "What has brought thy majesty to my house in secret?"

Tutankhamun lowered his gaze and hesitated. His face had yet to lose the gentle rounding of boyhood, yet his eyes were filled with the brooding sadness of a man thrice his age. The king looked up at Meren and began to speak in a whisper.

"I have to see him."

"Majesty?"

"My brother, you said the criminals had-had desecrated his body. I know the priests have restored him, but still, I failed him, Meren. I was supposed to guard his house of eternity and preserve his body so that his ka could live forever, and I failed. I have to see for myself that he's restored." Tutankhamun turned away. "And I have to face him myself and ask him to forgive me."

"Majesty, thy divine brother is with…"

Meren stopped because he wasn't sure where Akhenaten was. Akhenaten had tried to rid Egypt of the old gods who had formed the world and watched over the land from the beginning of time. He'd tried to establish his sun-disk god, the Aten, in their place. Had the Aten taken his disciple to some sun-disk netherworld? Or had the old gods punished the heretic and fed him to the Devourer when he reached the hall of judgment?

"Thy divine brother is… with the Aten, and he is a god. He knows who the true criminals were."

Turning quickly, the king burst out, "But don't you see? If I'd been stronger, or if I'd driven out the priests of Amun, Tanefer would never have dared plot such a crime."

"Evil finds weak hearts in which to lodge, majesty. Even you cannot prevent this."

He got a tortured look instead of a reply.

"Very well," Meren said. "Thy will is accomplished, divine one. You and Karoya and five of the royal bodyguard will come with me."

"You understand."

"Aye, majesty. But you will return to Memphis at dawn?"

"I suppose it wouldn't be wise to visit your house?"

Meren shook his head. "Not if thy majesty wishes to preserve the secret that has brought us here."

"Then I'll go."

"Thy majesty is wise."

"Wise, ha! What wisdom is there in doing what I know you'll make me do anyway?"

"I would never force the divine one to do anything."

"And I'm a baboon in a fig tree. Don't answer, Meren. Pharaohs should be allowed a little humor. I'm going to need it before this night's work is through."

In little more than an hour Meren was on the journey he'd been anticipating for weeks, the one he'd expected to make unaccompanied and free of distractions from annoying relatives and from the presence of a living god. The king's ship had carefully crossed to the west bank. Meren, the king, and their escort traversed the fields quietly, by foot, and set off into the desert. Their path skirted the mortuary temples of Meren's family and the modest tombs of the local villagers. The desert floor rose gradually to meet the limestone cliffs that formed a towering wall on the horizon. They climbed a ridge and walked down into a small valley formed by an ancient tributary. As Meren approached the valley he began to make out the walls of the old temple. Here, far from the sight of the river, surrounded by barren rock and dust, it had lain for countless centuries. The evil west winds had blown sand around its base and into its chambers. Time and weather had eroded its walls so that their tops were jagged.

Yet the place still stood, possibly because its unknown builders had used clay instead of mud in its bricks. One could still make out its facade-a series of buttresses and recesses like those of an ancient palace, like those he'd seen in Babylon. Like Babylon, the temple was alien, foreign, disturbing in its mystery. Around it lay a series of sand-covered mounds. And the wind was continually scraping the surface of the land to expose strange deposits of crudely painted pottery that bore images of sticklike figures in curved boats or engaged in warfare. Meren couldn't help feeling that whoever had made this place had done so long before the old ones recorded the deeds of the first pharaoh. The temple belonged to a time of darkness about which little was known.

Was it even a temple? The local villagers said that it was one of the resting places of Osiris, but that when his brother Set killed him, the god went to rule in the netherworld. After that Set sent the spirits of the dead to haunt the former domain of his rival. Even the steward Kasa claimed to have seen foul monsters abroad in this place at night.

As they emerged into the valley, the wind picked up, scouring the desert floor, flinging grit in their faces. Meren paused to bring a length of his headcloth over his face. Then everyone went still as a strange sound traveled to them with the breeze. It was like the distant, hollow call of trumpets heralding the approach of ghostly armies. And behind the trumpeting came high, thin wails, crashing upon them with infernal discord.

Several bodyguards drew closer to the king, facing outward and gripping their spears. Karoya set himself at the king's back, and Tutankhamun cast a wild, questioning look at Meren.

Meren smiled at him. "I've been here many times as a child and youth, majesty. Never have I met a demon or a netherworld monster."

"Never?"

"Never, but the villagers are afraid of this place. They say those who stumble upon the haunted temple return cursed with madness, or never return. Remember, that's why I chose it."

"Oh," the king said faintly. "Yes, how clever."