The Chief Judge's Burden
"Make way! This is Lord Hatiai, Chief Judge of Karnak! Proxy of Ma'at, blessed by Mafdet, and servant of the living god Pharaoh who rules the Two Lands of Upper and Lower Egypt…"
Along the Avenue of Sphinxes that joined the temples of Karnak and Luxor in Thebes, Chief Judge Hatiai ducked his flushed face and grumbled at the racket the scribe Hormin was raising.
"Hormin, please shut your mouth and let's go home. Even a pharaoh's procession would be quieter than this."
"This is the only way they won't slight you for being young. It gets your face known, too. Look at this man! This is Lord Hatiai, Chief Judge of the Temple of Ma'at at Karnak in Thebes!"
Weary of Hormin's antiquated habit of piling on epithets as florid as a pharaoh's, Hatiai hurried into his single-story house, with its garden of maple and persea.
"Master, you're home?"
The instant the uproar outside died, the maid Iole's litany of Master began. Every time the word left her mouth, it made Hatiai flinch.
He had lived simply, and alone, with his assistant scribe Hormin—more a brother than a subordinate—and he still could not grow easy with Iole, the maid a Cretan merchant had all but dumped on him as a gift. Two young men under one roof meant the house was, of course, a wreck, and a maid's hand was needed. But sharing that roof with Iole, barely come of age, was a tremendous burden. A matron of settled years and ample figure would have been another matter entirely.
Yet he had already learned the comfort of a house touched by a woman's care, and now he could not send her away.
"This isn't Crete. Don't call me Master. I've told you—you're not a slave."
"But my former master gave me to you as a slave."
"Enough, enough. Every time you say Master, my headache seems to get worse. You work for wages, so just use my name and be at ease."
"All right. Master, Lord Hatiai."
Thinking he would have to ask Hormin, who was fluent in the Cretan tongue, to drill her properly in forms of address, Hatiai removed the thick, tidy wig that upheld a chief judge's dignity. Once the wig that shielded his scalp from the fierce sun was off, his short, thinning hair felt all the more pitiful. The strands that slipped through his fingers were not what they had been. He closed his hand around a handful and found the thatch considerably reduced. All of it, no doubt, was the stress brought on by the heavy office of Chief Judge of the Temple of Ma'at at Karnak.
"Sit in the chair. I'll massage you."
"Will that even help? I feel as if I'll be bald any day now. And my face is wrinkling wretchedly."
Perhaps the gazes that looked down on him—a young man set in a seat too high for his years—would ease once he was a wrinkled bald man. Iole had procured castor oil, said to be good for hair loss, and massaged his scalp with devotion nearly every day, but she could not slow the rate at which his hair was falling out. He would have to accept his fate: a gleaming bald pate, like the priests of the temple.
"Have you taken on a difficult case?"
"In Deir el-Medina, a murder and the desecration of the previous pharaoh's tomb happened almost at the same time."
"Isn't damaging a tomb sacrilege? They won't escape the extreme penalty."
"That's right. Except the suspects in both cases have fled."
Hatiai had received, at the same moment, a papyrus stamped with the pharaoh's seal demanding stern judgment upon the culprits, and a report stating that the two criminals had escaped. His head rang at the prospect of a case that would not go smoothly. He had gone to the pharaoh's own physician and swallowed a headache remedy of willow bark, laurel, crocodile oil, and reed juice, yet the pain would not lift. Wondering whether some clue had been missed, he had even gone to Deir el-Medina himself, but a difficult guardsman would not let him set a single foot inside the village.
Still, the trip had not been entirely fruitless. He had not entered the village, but a painter there, taking pity on his predicament, had drawn portraits of the suspects. He could not say whether the likenesses were exaggerated, but the woman named Pesejet possessed curves that looked ready to burst. Her eyes—nearly missed while he took in the dazzling swell of breast and hip—were blue as turquoise. The Nubian with a red tattoo grimly carved into his cheek was a soldier named Iuni, who had killed a work overseer and fled: jet-black skin and hair coiled tight, the typical look of a Black man. The physician Kian, suspected of aiding their flight and then vanishing without a trace, had skin as white as Queen Nimerut of Mitanni, deep green eyes, and golden hair.
The bizarre portraits, overflowing with intense color—blue, black, red, and blue again—had struck him as absurd, yet every guardsman who saw them praised the pictures as remarkably lifelike. If the fugitives were truly so gaudy a company, they would all be taken before long.
Yet the man called Iuni weighed on his mind. Mishandle a Nubian, and he might earn the hatred of the warriors of that region, famed for their formidable prowess in battle. Like a Nubian leopard carried about on a pole with its limbs lashed, he might be seized by their rage, trussed hand and foot, and dragged off to distant Nubia. He also could not understand why a physician guilty of nothing had fled with them. Everything about the case felt grotesque. Many had looked askance at young Hatiai's rise to the high seat of Chief Judge of the Temple of Ma'at at Karnak. This grotesque affair might have been a fabricated conspiracy from the start.
Somehow sensing the muscles at the nape of his neck knotting tight with stress, Iole let the hands that had been pressing his scalp with all ten fingers slide down to his neck. Hatiai closed his eyes, bowed his head, and savored the touch of her hands working his neck.
"You're always worn down on the first day you take a case. You think so much, and you worry so much."
She spread a thin layer of sharp-scented ointment, then went on with the massage.
"Even so, as always, everything will turn out well. I believe in your ability, Lord Hatiai."
Iole's words seeped into his body like a spell, easing the headache and letting the tension slip away.
The jar, filling with the fierce heat of midday, was as hot as sitting inside an oven where barley bread was baking, and the cart that had stopped somewhere showed no sign of moving again. If she waited for Iuni to act first, she felt she would lose consciousness, so Pesejet lifted the lid and poked her head out.
A desert of nothing but sand and rock, without a single low building in sight, waited for her. Trackless waste and sky stretched on without end, and there was no guessing a direction—yet not far from the cart she saw a linen tent raised on poles. Beneath it, two water-carriers were eating barley bread and drinking beer.
Thinking this might be the best moment to get free of the jar, Pesejet slipped quietly out and opened the lid of the one that held Iuni. The instant the lid came off, a black face, soaked with sweat and gasping, shot upward.
"Get out, sir. Stay any longer and you'll become a mummy inside that jar."
In truth Iuni was the same age as Kian, but whenever she faced the violent contrast of his jet-black face, the red tattoo cut with a knife, and the whites of his eyes, the honorifics came naturally.
"Yeah. I can't stand it anymore either."
About to climb out, Iuni jabbed a finger urgently toward the tent. The water-carriers, their hunger sated, were approaching the cart's donkey again.
"Have these beasts grown old already? Even after we emptied the water, they're sluggish as anything."
"There's no reason they should be struggling with foam at their noses, is there?"
"Right. We only loaded empty jars."
Listening to them grumble over donkeys that would not move with any briskness, she felt they might soon check the jars themselves. So Pesejet boldly jumped down from the cart and hid behind a rock. She had been certain Iuni would jump down as well. Instead he—head alone thrust into the open, gauging the moment—did something bizarre, and folded his body back down into the jar.
"Count how many jars there are. Next time we'll have to cut the number."
At the words of the older water-carrier, seated on the leather saddle across the donkey's back, the younger man approached the cart lashed firmly to the animal.
"If you don't want to meet Osiris, god of the underworld, you'll tell me every last detail of that story about your comrade who took a lump of silver and put on an act!"
"Aaaah!"
When Iuni, eerie to look at, bellowed with glaring eyes, the water-carrier who had come up to the cart unguarded started in terror and toppled backward.
"You beasts! Run! Run!"
Gripping the reins, the older man drove the donkeys at full speed—whether to shake Iuni off or to keep him from coming near. And so the cart that carried Iuni drew away from Pesejet. Absurdly, before she could do a thing, it vanished from sight for good.
Left alone in the desert, she came out from behind the rock and looked this way and that, but she could not tell which way led to the Square of Truth and which led to the Nile. However far she walked, she saw only red sand, yellow dust, and blue sky—a monotonous world ruled by three colors. The heat of the bone-dry red desert, and the wind freighted with coarse sand, rapidly drained what little strength she had left.
She wandered alone for a long while in a desert that did not readily grant survival to a reckless visitor. Utterly spent, she stopped walking and sank down where she stood.