Where the Heart Leads

Yet because she had never shared a lover's bed with Baruna, her imagination failed her every time. Her father had been adamant that a princess must uphold her rank in full: even after a betrothal, she was to keep her chastity until the very hour of marriage. She was also to master the tongue of Egypt—the only great power capable of checking the Hittites—and become a princess who could bring diplomacy to bear at the decisive moment. And when the pharaoh came on his visit, she was to enter his chamber and play the harp until he slept, for the king of Egypt, her father said, could not find rest without the finest music.

"Ah! Aneku!"

All of it was the wages of having believed her father to the letter. Narmer cared so little for music that he could not have said how many strings a harp possessed, and on the night she went into his room to play him into a sound sleep, he did not close his eyes for a single breath. Until dawn he held the chaste Nimerut in his arms.

"Ah! Ah! Aneku!"

If it was for Mitanni—the homeland her father ruled, a kingdom on the very brink of being swallowed by the mighty Hittites—then she had to endure this agonizing time. A body that death would erase hardly mattered, however it was used. If only he would spend his desire quickly.

The women of the harem were of one voice that the king's vigor was prodigious, but Nimerut wished only that the moment would pass. She had even gone in secret to Nakhtla, chief steward of the harem, to learn how a man might be brought to a swift end, and she had tried to put the lesson into practice. The stratagem failed utterly. Far from finishing sooner, Narmer showed every sign of the keenest satisfaction and tormented Nimerut all the longer.

A knock. How welcome it was—someone rapping at the tightly shut door of the pharaoh's bedchamber.

"Is the matter urgent?"

The king put the question to whoever stood outside, his voice thick with irritation.

"A report from the scribe Amunuasu, Your Majesty. A dreadful incident has occurred at Deir el-Medina."

Thanks to the report of Akh, Grand Vizier of Upper Egypt, Nimerut was able to slip free of the pharaoh who had been pressing so heavily upon her. As Pharaoh Narmer wound a kilt of soft linen about his hips, Nimerut retrieved the long gown flung far across the floor and dressed.

"Enter."

At the pharaoh's leave, Vizier Akh opened the gilded cedar door and came in with his head deeply bowed.

"A dreadful incident, you say?"

"They report that the names of the pharaohs of former reigns, carved in the House of Eternity, have been defaced."

Taking the papyrus scroll from Akh, the pharaoh spread it wide so that Nimerut, too, might read what it held. But Nimerut, who would have cared nothing even if the mummies themselves had been defaced rather than the names of dead pharaohs, did not spare the papyrus so much as a glance.

"Has my tomb been inspected?"

"It has, Your Majesty. They say no trace of an intruder can be found."

At the word that his own tomb was safe, Narmer smiled in relief and settled himself at a slant upon the couch.

"And the culprit—has he been taken?"

The pharaoh's voice had grown markedly gentler.

"A prime suspect has been seized. They say she is a woman who lives in Deir el-Medina."

"Then it is a matter for the court there to judge."

"Even so, if only to guarantee a fair verdict, would it not be better for the tribunal at Karnak itself to sift right from wrong?"

Akh kept on, addressing Pharaoh Narmer, who sat aslant on the couch, wetting his throat with red wine of the Delta and scarcely attending to the talk.

"Will the craftsmen not settle it well enough among themselves?"

"The foreman who would preside over the hearing is dead, and the mood there is unsettled. Can they truly give a trial their full attention? What is more, the suspect is said not to be a full member of the village guild."

Nimerut, for her part, was hoping Akh would be slow to win the answer he wanted, and linger in the bedchamber a long, long while.

"Hm... Then let it be left to Karnak."

As if he had at last heard what he desired, Akh left the bedchamber with a satisfied look. Narmer stripped off the kilt he had only just put on, and Nimerut sighed over a conversation that had ended sooner than she had hoped.

"Kian, are you in there?"

Anxious, it seemed, for a son who had shot the bolt and was seeing no patients, his mother Alida came seeking Kian's house from first light.

"Kian! Kian!"

He had wanted to see no one. But Alida's lungs were a match for any in the village, and under her urging he had to open the door that had stood fast shut for days.

"Is it because of Pesejet?"

He had never once spoken of it, never once admitted it, yet Mother Alida wore the look of a woman who knew everything. She had been that way since he was very small. A man might deceive the whole world and still not deceive the being called mother.

"Get to the village gate, quickly! They say a courier from the palace has arrived!"

At last. The document concerning the trial of Pesejet and Iuni had come. The road would be a hard one, but a court in this place, where craftsmen were shown their due regard, could never hand down a truly cruel sentence. Out of that regard for artisans, Deir el-Medina held the right to demand a retrial again and again until a satisfactory judgment was rendered.

So why this restlessness, this dread? His chest was clenched so tight he feared something had gone wrong with his heart, tight enough that he thought he might die of it—and yet, at the news that word of the trial had come, curiosity would not let him wait. Kian snatched up his sandals and put them on. With his mother Alida's laughter at his back, he ran full tilt to the village entrance, where the palace courier stood.

"I'm to deliver this to the village's representative, but if the foreman is dead, whom should I give the document to...?"

"You may give it to me."

Scribe Amunuasu, who had taken on the elder's part in the foreman's absence, was just receiving the papyrus the courier held out. He broke the seal, read the contents in silence, and lifted his head with a devastated face.

"What does it say?"

"Please—tell us what's written."

Every eye fixed at once upon Scribe Amunuasu's lips.

"It is an order to escort the prisoners to the court at Karnak."

Karnak. He knew too well what that place meant, and Kian's heart came crashing down inside him. Set them before the tribunal at Karnak, where no courtesy was owed to craftsmen, and for murder or the defacement of a tomb there would be no escaping the extreme penalty. They would be sentenced to death, or shut away for life in a prison reserved for the gravest offenders, such as the Kharga Oasis.

This was a conspiracy. Kian was certain that Iuni and Pesejet were not the sort to commit any evil worthy of the extreme penalty. From the moment Iuni was seized on the charge of murdering Usir, a black plot had plainly seeped into the village.

It was not that he took Iuni's side merely because they were close. For all his fierce looks, Iuni was a man with a truly tender heart. That his former wife Sebua had been unfaithful was a thing known to heaven and to earth, and yet Iuni had worried for her and shielded her, saying that if he brought her before a court she would suffer a heavy sentence. Fearing she might have her pretty nose cut off, or her neat little ears shorn away, he had known even the man she lay with and still chosen a divorce by consent rather than a lawsuit; and to the very last he had taken Sebua's part, calling the order of banishment too harsh.

A man who took a pill to bring on deep sleep, and could scarcely wake before morning, could not possibly have gone to Usir's house in the middle of the night. There was only this: Kian had no clear proof that Iuni had taken the pill on the evening Usir died, and Iuni had begged him to keep the fact of the medicine secret even into the eternal world, so he could not easily step forward. Shattered by the wreck of his marriage, Iuni had been receiving secret treatment from Kian for his melancholy, and he did not possess a heart hard enough to kill anyone.

Sighing over that stolid, foolish Iuni, Kian clicked his tongue as he thought of Pesejet, who had stirred the villagers' anger by bringing up the leopard. A bald lie, that she had ridden off on a leopard. However great the shock of being refused by the god, ought she not to have read the room before talking nonsense?

With the wronged Pesejet and Iuni in his thoughts, Kian made for the meeting hall, where the villagers had gathered in haste.

"We can't leave the foreman's seat empty. If the tomb works are to be finished before Master Usir's embalming is done, we have to shake off our grief and stand up now."

"I recommend Master Pasar, chief of the left gang."

"I'm grateful to be named, but it has to pass through a vote of everyone."

Once a foreman was chosen, the village's stalled time would rush forward again, and every labor and watch laid down in mourning for Usir would return to its proper order. If there was to be an escape, now—while the watch was slack—was the last chance. Yet even if the village guard was thin, how was he to slip past the warders in the temple's undercroft, bronze helmets on their heads, clubs and shields in their hands?

Seeing the debate climb hotter and hotter, Kian slipped quietly outside and sank into worry.

"You've already settled the whole answer. What are you brooding over?"

He had not seen when she left the hall, but Nenefer was at his side.

"What answer am I supposed to have settled?"

"The high priest gave an order. The warders' opinions matter too, he said, so they're to be brought to the meeting hall for a little while."

"I see..."

Once every voice had been gathered and a foreman elected, the village would find its place again. Nenefer seized the arm of Kian, who was murmuring in a daze.

"Do you understand me? I'm saying the warders will be gone for a moment. The warders who guard the prison underground."

"The warders gone for a moment means..."

She pressed a single bronze key into the hand of Kian, whose eyes had gone wide with shock, gave one grim nod, and turned toward the temple of Hathor.

"As the heart goes..."

Turning her words over, Kian laughed once, hollowly. A little later, hidden behind a tree near the temple of Hathor, he watched the warders follow where Nenefer led, every one of them bound for the meeting hall.