The Mask of Anubis

The Medjay had once been nomads of the eastern deserts of Nubia. When they helped the Egyptians of Thebes drive the Hyksos from the Nile Delta, they won such distinction that they settled in Egypt itself, and there they came to serve at once as police and as wardens of the desert.

They patrolled the wastes, the cities, and the frontiers, and they rode as the king's own bodyguard. Their pride in standing as an elite force was immense. So when Setheph, alone, cut down the band of Shasu they had failed to catch—a band that had gone on taking lives—the feat was as astonishing as it was a blow to that pride.

"We truly did our utmost, but finding them was..."

"I was only fortunate enough to come upon them."

Setheph answered the Medjay lieutenant's excuse in a gentle voice. Bright red drops fell steadily from his horse's mane, and the blood lent that mildness a crushing weight.

In Avaris, capital of the Hyksos who had once ruled Egypt, a tale had been told from old times: that the cult image enshrined in the temple of Seth there truly held the terrible might of Seth, god of the sandstorm. Until a pale, murky smoke streamed from that statue—said to have been shaped by Khnum himself, the god of the Nile who fashions men and beasts upon his potter's wheel—and entered Setheph's body, the tale had been nothing but legend handed down.

The moment Setheph drew the smoke into himself, legend became fact. He had been a priest. He left the temple and went straight into the army, and there he led the crushing of one revolt after another. He served among the archers, rose to command the Division of Seth, and was at last chosen Supreme Commander of the army of Lower Egypt, where he unleashed his power to destroy without restraint. It was no wonder he had been able to slaughter a band of Shasu alone.

"There are suspicious persons over that way..."

The lieutenant hinted that they ought to make way, but the horse beneath Setheph did not so much as shift. It stood square across the Medjay's path.

"May we take our leave ahead of you?"

He dared ask to go first only because the Medjay were an independent special force. They did not answer to the Supreme Commander. They followed the orders of Amenwasu, chief of the Medjay.

Setheph did not know how badly the lieutenant longed to run the Nubians down and claim the merit. He was in no hurry to answer. He held them where they stood and let the silence draw out, and only when the fugitives had vanished entirely from sight did he nod, as if the matter did not concern him.

"Whoever sights them first, pursue them even to the Red Sea and take them!"

With that cry he drove his men on across the desert, and the corpses of the Shasu came into view—men cut down by Setheph, who rode by the power of his golden thighs alone and swung his blade from the saddle. The sight unmanned the lieutenant utterly. The proper form of an attack was a chariot drawn by a paired team, with a skilled driver at one's side. To mount a wildly plunging horse with no veteran hand to master it, and from that saddle to annihilate an enemy alone—that was terror itself.

And yet, seeing that the dead Shasu still had their wrists firm upon their bodies, a quiet greed stole over him. What if I cut the wrists from the dead and passed the kills off as my own? While he turned the thought over, a hawk circled above his head. It was the very hawk of which rumor spoke, the one that served Setheph as a faithful messenger.

"Tell me of these persons you call suspicious."

Setheph had blocked the way again.

The lieutenant went tight with fear that his scheme—to make off with the Shasu wrists and steal the credit—had been seen through. Relief loosened him when he found Setheph's gaze fixed on the papyrus scroll.

"Here are their portraits. They are said to have fled on the eve of their transfer to Karnak."

He passed the criminals' likenesses over at once. At the sight of those faces, Setheph's eyes flashed, as if madness had taken hold in them.

"I will take this."

"Yes. Do as you will."

It galled him to surrender the likeness of the woman with the ripe, luscious body. Still, the Shasu wrists were his, and the bargain was no loss.

Whether a far-off glimpse had been enough to convince them they had found their prey, two Medjay of the desert would not relent. They had run a long way, and still they came on, tracking Pesejet and Iuni.

Pesejet had been gazing after the man, absorbed, as he turned his horse and rode away. She started in fright when Medjay appeared out of the very direction he had taken. She could not be certain of his intent, but in the end he had bought them time to flee.

"If I had a weapon, I'd go and deal with them myself. Empty-handed, though..."

Pesejet felt the same regret. If only they had brought the weapons the dead Shasu had carried. They had fled in such a panic that they had snatched up nothing, and now they had no means of dealing with the Medjay closing in. She was lamenting that fact when she startled and shook her head hard. To think first of harming Medjay who were only faithful to their duty of hunting criminals—her thoughts were taking root in the same soil as a criminal's.

"Uncle, we ought to be careful not to act like real criminals. We were already thinking of killing Medjay. They're only trying to uphold the law."

"What? What'd you say? I can't make out your Egyptian."

Iuni spoke faster than people born and raised in Egypt, and he swore far better than they did. Yet he had a way of acting as though he could not understand the language—only when it did not suit him to understand.

"Is that a sanctuary over there? I can see an entrance."

What he pointed to was an embalmer's workshop. It was charged, like Deir el-Medina where the royal tombs were raised, with work of the gravest importance—and, like Deir el-Medina, it was fated to stand apart from Thebes, that splendid, teeming city.

"That's a workshop where they take in the dead and make them into mummies."

"Ugh. Disgusting..."

Iuni was Nubian. His people simply stuffed a corpse into a large leather sack and buried it in the earth. He pinched his nostrils shut with two fingers as though some foul reek were already on the air, and shuddered—yet even as he did, the Medjay's pursuit went on.

"We have to get in there and hide. Quickly. Even if it's that place."

"This is so unfair. When they prove we're innocent later, I'm going to make the kingdom pay me back for every bit of this misery."

Grumbling, Iuni led the way into the entrance of the embalming workshop, a sunless, gloomy place. They followed a damp, dim corridor toward the workroom where light leaked out, and a peculiar smell stung their nostrils—natron, the natural soda used on the dead, and the bodies themselves, halfway through their making into mummies.

The door of the embalming room stood open. A corpse lay on a stone table, and the embalmer was cutting into its left flank to draw out the viscera. He wore a jackal mask: the mask of the god Anubis, who fashions the bodies of the dead into mummies and guides them into the afterlife. An embalmer took corpses doomed to rot and vanish and turned them into the form of Osiris, capable of rising again in the underworld. He was an avatar of Anubis, and a kind of alchemist.

Glittering iron hooks and keen tools, obsidian knives among them, hung on the walls. Jars of unguent crowded the shelves, and sacks packed full of natron, without which no body could be embalmed.

"Back so soon?"

Sensing a presence, the embalmer seemed to think his colleague had returned. He spoke without so much as turning toward Pesejet and Iuni, and he did not wait for an answer. A sharp hook went into the corpse's left nostril, and the soft, clotted brain poured out along the tear.

Watching the brain spill from the torn nostril, it seemed to her that Kian's voice had reached her. Was he all right? Had they found him out—for freeing the criminals held in the House of Darkness and the House of the Abyss, and sending them off in a cart laden with water jars—and was he paying dearly for it even now? Every kind of worry came rushing in. Thinking back, she had not even managed to thank him properly.

"Look at these innards. He died with a belly full of food. Shame to waste a meal like that—I can't even tell what killed him. The natron, over there— Aaaah! Spare me!"

Having wiped the abdomen clean, the embalmer had reached toward where Iuni stood and turned his head, and only then did he see him: a black man, face jet-dark, red ritual tattoos scored across his cheeks like knife-cuts. He lurched backward in horror, struck the wall, and the sharp tools came clattering down.

"We—"

Iuni had begun, in a meek voice, to explain how things stood, when footsteps sounded in the corridor, heavy and measured. They were surely the Medjay who had chased them from the desert—strides urgent and strong. Iuni's gentleness vanished. He snatched up the sharp obsidian knife that had fallen to the floor.

"Take out every Anubis mask you've got."

He set the blade to the embalmer's throat and whispered it low.

"Yes! Yes! Please—don't kill me—"

"Shut your mouth and hurry!"

With trembling hands the embalmer opened the chest of drawers and began to fumble inside. Iuni had no time to wait. He shoved the man aside and ransacked the drawers roughly. There was only one spare mask of Anubis.

"No more masks?"

"No. Only two of us are meant to work in them, so..."

If only there had been a sarcophagus, or even a wooden coffin, in which to hide. Not a single coffin was to be seen in the workshop.

"Uncle, what if we wrapped ourselves in linen bandages?"

"No. There's no time. The footsteps are already close."

Iuni's gaze, darting about the room, stopped on the bath in which natron had been steeped to the full. Beneath that cloudy water, the bath would be crowded with the corpses of common folk who could not afford a fine embalming.

"I'll get into that bath. You wear the mask, Pesejet."

Pesejet, about to put it on, shook her head and held the mask out to him.

"Even with the mask on, my hair and my body would show. It's no use. You wear it, Uncle."

"…Should I?"

Iuni did not trouble to refuse twice. At once he pulled the mask of Anubis down over his head.