The Drunken Cobra

Freshly astonished that he could level a threat more deftly than any Egyptian, so fluent was his command of the tongue, Pesejet rolled tight one of the qat leaves set out on the table for packing a corpse's hollow belly and flung herself into the cloudy bath. Leaves of qat, brought in from Canaan, were much in demand in the markets of Egypt, for if you rolled one, set a light to its tip, and drew the smoke, it gave a keen pleasure. She had long wondered what qat felt like—they said it brought the same drifting haze as eating poppy—and never dreamed she would be using it as a breathing reed, sunk in a tub crammed with the dead.

Eyes squeezed shut, pinching her nose between two fingers, Pesejet breathed only through the mouth that held the leaf and waited for the Medjay to go. Under the water, though, the nape of her neck began to sting. She had not noticed before. A Shasu arrow must have grazed her as it passed.

The sting made her crack her eyes open despite herself, and the moment she saw the livid blue-green face of a corpse still under embalming, hanging right in front of her, she clamped them shut again. It was hideous.

She was wishing the Medjay would leave this place at once when something—illusion or not—bumped her, tap, tap. A corpse that had drifted as far as her hiding place seemed to be knocking against her body. Gooseflesh rising, she inched her hips backward to get clear of it, but she had not gone far before her back met the wall of the tub.

With nowhere left to retreat, eyes pressed tight, Pesejet remembered what Iuni had said: that they ought to speak of the wrong done them and claim compensation from the state. In point of grievance, she was no less wronged than he. She had lived without doing ill, and still the god had refused her, declaring she might not join the guild, so that she could not even claim a single plot in the cemetery where everyone from the village was laid to rest. And now, branded overnight a desecrator of tombs, she was a fugitive sunk in a bath full of corpses.

She was lamenting that wretched lot when two large hands plunged in and hauled her up by the shoulders.

"Pesejet! They've all gone!"

Never had Iuni's voice been so welcome. She shot out of the tub as fast as salt leaping in a fire.

"Ugh……. It's that man and that woman from the papyrus we just saw……."

The embalmer, having learned from the Medjay who had come calling that Iuni and Pesejet were a vicious murderer and a tomb desecrator, trembled visibly from head to foot, his eyes rolling this way and that in naked panic.

"That man? So you know who I am?"

Iuni advanced on him, eyes blazing.

"Please spare me! I won't say a word—just leave quietly, I beg you! If I die, my beloved wife, and my five sons, and my two daughters……."

"Shut up! Hold your hands out."

Whether the talk of a beloved wife and children had sounded like boasting, Iuni's mood had visibly soured. With rough hands he seized both the embalmer's wrists and bound them tight in linen bandages, and not to be outdone, Pesejet gathered the poor man's feet and began to tie them as well.

"Huuuhhh……. Uuugh—hk—hk—hk……."

Seized by utter terror, the embalmer at last broke into sobbing.

"We don't mean to hurt you. I'm truly sorry."

Guilt pricking her, Pesejet finished the knot in the linen about his ankles as neatly as a Tyet, the Knot of Isis.

"There's a cut on your neck. Want me to wrap what's left of the bandage around it?"

"……No. I'm all right."

She refused him. She had no wish to bind her wound in linen that had wrapped the corpse on the stone table, though the cut, perhaps turned foul in the water, stung now and again.

"We need a healer, we need information, we need coin……."

Unable to go on, Iuni let out a heavy sigh, rolled one of the qat leaves from the stone table, and set its tip to the brazier. Drawing deep on the smoke that rose, he spoke in a grim voice.

"I hate it, but that woman……. We need Sebua's help."

He had at last accepted it. Without Sebua—Pesejet's friend, and his own former wife—they could do nothing at all.

Night along the Theban waterfront was bright as day with torches. Pilgrims to the temple of Karnak passed with flushed faces, bearing bouquets and fruit for offerings; stevedores showed plain weariness from the endless heave of their labor; sailors, pleasantly drunk, hummed as they went. Into that tumult of bargaining from the market by the docks, of shouts hurrying the unloaders, of music spilling from the taverns nearby, Kian had come.

He kept himself small, afraid someone might know him, but no one looked at him twice. The river police, the ones he most had to beware, were wholly taken up with seeing off the retinue of some noble bound on a journey. Hidden behind a hulking sailor so as not to catch their eye, he slipped past the hills of unloaded cargo and entered the market street, where merchants' wooden stalls stood in a row offering wheat, onions, broad beans, cucumbers, oily perch, and smoked duck.

He had not eaten properly. Even the sight of ingredients still unprepared filled his mouth with spit, but he could not spare the time. He choked down his hunger and passed the food, and then the merchants who had brought out every sort of thing in leather and cloth were each bellowing that his own wares were the finest of all. Among that multitude, a pair of women's leather sandals struck Kian's eye at once. Pesejet's bare feet had been weighing on him, and now not even the richest delicacies waved at his elbow could draw his gaze.

"I'd like to buy these leather sandals."

"Properly tanned, finished to a fine standard—they're dear. That ring you're wearing would buy them. Otherwise, have a look at the ones set out in front."

The merchant openly coveted the ring set with a scarab beetle, emblem of Khepri, god of the morning sun, of regeneration and resurrection. But an oracle of Meretseger had charged him never, whatever befell, to let the scarab ring leave his body, so Kian drew out the amulet hung at his neck and showed it instead.

"The ring won't do. What about this?"

At the sight of the papyrus amulet, promise of happiness in the afterlife, the merchant nodded readily. The barter was done at last.

Sandals for Pesejet in hand, Kian passed the place heaped with great jars and barrels bound out of Thebes and stood at the mouth of a street loud with revelry. It was packed with every sort of person, dizzying just to look at. Nobles rode splendid litters that would have been heavy even for several servants; farmers went by with faces burned black by the sun; others wore clothes worked with Syrian patterns. The people threading that street of pleasure houses were various indeed, but their expressions were all alike—bright, and keyed up.

"Ever eaten the fat braised duck at our place? If you haven't, don't go around saying you've eaten duck."

"If you want dancing that borders on high art from the girls come out of Nubia, then of course you come to us."

"Hear the astonishing playing of a trio—lute, harp, and pipe!"

Touts stood before every shop lit by torch and little lamp, tempting whoever passed, and Kian saw that each house hung a sign of its own. One tavern had a red heron hung up for ornament; another had set out a hippopotamus with a drowsy look. And so, more easily than he had expected, he found the place crowned with a sinuous bronze cobra: The Drunken Cobra.

At the door of the tavern Sebua kept, a grim-faced bruiser stood.

"You've come to the right house. The drink here wakes a sleeping tongue and sets a failing heart ablaze. Even a mummy a thousand years in the grave would bolt upright and walk the moment it tasted our wine."

Puffing himself up, he opened the door, painted all over with grapevines. Kian's expectation of a dark room reeking of sour beer proved entirely wrong. Whitewashed walls and lamps burning fine oil made the inside of The Drunken Cobra feel almost pleasant. There was no foul smell of food—only a faint fragrance of white lotus drifting on the air.

"What can I bring you?"

As Kian sat at a low table, a server set down a basin of water strewn with perfumed oil, washed his hands, and asked.

"We've everything from red wine of the first year of King Narmer's reign down to beer for easy drinking. For meat, there's nothing we lack—finest roast of young lamb, goose, duck, beef……."

"I've come to see the proprietor. A friend from home."

"Is that so? Whom shall I say is asking?"

A warrant might already have gone out, and to give his true name seemed dangerous. Kian hesitated.

"……Tell her the Golden Vulture. She'll know."

He had no choice but to offer the old nickname.

"Very well. Please wait a moment."

Watching the server vanish somewhere behind the kitchen, Kian settled aslant on a cushion stuffed thick with goose down and looked the tavern over. A singer gave a love song to the lovely measure a stringed instrument wove, and in time with it a young, beautiful woman and a sturdy, handsome man danced with elegance. Perhaps it was the grace of the dance and the music; even the pleasantly drunk guests raised no loud voices and made no excessive gestures. They simply ate, and ate, without end.

When he had taken in roughly all of The Drunken Cobra, the singer's voice—carrying a love song that had been in fashion from the days of Queen Hatshepsut down to the present—brought back to him the end of the tomb robber caught desecrating that queen's tomb. Condemned to a death in which a man is dropped from a height onto a floor set with sharp stakes, the robber had suffered hideous pain, impaled, until his life broke.

Let Ma'at, goddess of justice, and Mafdet, goddess of law and execution, protect the two of them. Let the escape succeed. Let them come safe as far as The Drunken Cobra.

Kian prayed it with all his heart. Iuni had heard Iset as well—the charge to go and find Sebua—so if they had got clear as they ought, Pesejet and Iuni would come here.