The Golden Vulture

Of course Iuni would try to hold out. He wanted to avoid Sebua, and he would grit his way through it if he could. Even so, if the man possessed even a scrap of sense for reading a situation, surely he would see the advantage in taking his former wife's help—dodging the extreme penalty, and bringing the truth to light.

And if the escape had failed?

They would have been hauled to Karnak in Thebes, where the strictest law of Ma'at was carried out, and sentenced to death before they ever had the chance to prove their innocence.

The image of Pesejet run through on a sharpened stake rose unbidden. Kian clenched his eyes shut and shook his head hard.

"What are you doing? Are you drunk?"

To his astonishment, it was Iuni's voice.

"Pesejet?"

"Right here, brother. Too filthy for you to recognize me, was I?"

Gaunt past the point of merely looking thin—grimy, bedraggled—Pesejet stood at Iuni's side. At the sight of the two of them safely out, Kian swept a hand down the chest that had felt ready to burst with worry and gave thanks to every god in Egypt.

"Where's Sebua?"

He could curse her for a damned woman all he liked. The moment Iuni set foot in the Drunken Cobra, he was searching for his former wife with a thoroughly flushed face.

"I already told the staff. You'll see her soon enough."

"I can't look at her sober……. Right! Drinks first. Over here!"

From who knew where, Iuni pressed a keen obsidian dagger and a handful of khat leaves into the hand of the server who came to take the order, and called for the strongest palm wine, with almonds and pistachios besides.

Kian left him there—legs jittering with nerves, eyes darting every which way—and dropped to one knee, bending to see the state of Pesejet's feet. They were caked thick with the harsh sand of the desert, swollen so pitifully he could hardly bear to look. Regretting that he had come away without his medicines, he examined them with care.

"And the clinic? You just walked out?"

"My friend and my little sister are about to die. You think I'd sit there easy, seeing patients on my own?"

Afraid his heart would give him away, Kian snapped for no reason at all, then worked onto her feet the leather sandals he had traded for a precious amulet said to guarantee comfort in the afterlife. Soft and yet firm, the leather closed snug around her, and only then could he breathe.

"Lord Golden Vulture! Lady Sebua says I'm to bring you in. If you'll follow me."

The server had plainly seen the others standing right there, and still he plucked out that nickname—Golden Vulture—with perfect indifference. Anger shot up in Kian.

"You knew they called you the Golden Vulture?"

Pesejet was clutching her belly, laughing as if she had never heard anything funnier, and the rigid anger in his face came undone.

Golden Vulture or not—what did it matter, when she smiled like that?

Looking over the kitchen, Sebua smiled at the certainty that today's trade would be a success. Yesterday had been a success, of course, and the day before that, and it would go on being so. There was no reason the business should fail.

The beer jars were sunk deep in pits in the earth, so they gave up their finest flavor and their coolness together, and she kept nearly every sort of drink on hand—from wine she had vintaged herself to Cypriot wine said to be hard to come by. The cook she had taken such pains to secure was a master no less skilled than the pharaoh's own royal chef. A duck toughened by too much running, a goose worn thin to the bone—it made no difference. Once either passed into his hands, it became the finest meat on a skewer. Cumin, sesame, pepper, and every other aromatic obeyed that bold hand of his. Catch some nameless bird and roast it under his care, and a small miracle occurred: it tasted of the highest grade of beef.

Drink and food, the two things that mattered most in a tavern, and Sebua had them both. Her confidence rose until it pierced the sky. Even without naked dancers, the Drunken Cobra could boast the finest liquor, a superb cook, and a fair price, and its low tables and plump cushions had not an empty place among them today either.

And yet business had not been good for a mere day or two. From this morning her mood had been strangely bright—a flutter, a lift, a strong sense that something very good was about to happen. And then it did. Kian, a friend of her former husband Iuni, had come all the way to the Drunken Cobra looking for her.

"Knead it that sluggishly and you think it'll taste of anything?"

The woman at the dough—bare from the waist up, barefoot, in nothing but a simple white skirt—startled at the rebuke and ducked her head. Learn everything under Sebua, and you might be given the chance to run a Drunken Cobra branch in another district, so her people worked hard. To become a branch keeper, supplied cheaply with the beer and wine Sebua herself brewed—that was the dream of everyone who labored at the Drunken Cobra.

"Paw at it slow and lazy, and the dough goes into a sulk."

Sebua had been wearing a close-fitting linen gown. She dragged the upper portion down below her waist until it served as work clothes, washed her hands, and stepped in herself.

"Think of the dough as a man you fancy. So—like this, and like this……. You melt it. When you knead barley flour off the millstone, you put strength in your fingers the way you'd massage a lover's body, ride the run of the flour, and work it, squeeze it, until the flavor comes right. Next step. Bring it."

She never took her eyes from the dough as she scattered date juice and honey from a silver bowl evenly across it.

"The way you'd anoint a lover with perfumed oil—like this. Soft, and missing not a single place……."

At last the dough was done. Bake it, and it would be good barley bread. Seal it away and let it ferment, and it would become the liquid called beer.

"Men. Lovers……. You haven't changed a bit. Same as ever."

At the familiar voice Sebua dipped her head and smiled, just a little. So that was why the morning had felt so strangely good. Not a dream—standing there in the flesh was Iuni, black skin gleaming with a wet sheen, red tattoos that looked ready to drip blood.

"I'll have to try harder. If I'm going to catch you, I've still got a long way to go."

She tossed the words at him, then turned a bright smile on Iuni, whose gaze shook like a lamp flung into a sandstorm.

"Sebua! Have you been well?"

She had thought it was only Iuni. But the voice belonged to Pesejet—the friend she had missed—standing there with him.

The third floor of the Drunken Cobra held several guest rooms, enough to swallow a rush of visitors coming and going on business. Wardrobes were stocked with linen a man or a woman of any build, young or old, might wear; a bath chamber stood ready with perfumed oils; the beds were linen mattresses filled with fresh cedar sawdust. All of it had been prepared with care, so that even a stay of several days, sprung on them without warning, would not be the least uncomfortable.

"You got out clean. And thanks to that, here we are, meeting again. Now you've only to shake off the false charge—and take a fat sum in damages while you're at it."

Even hearing they had fled under a false accusation, the businesswoman answered with brisk good cheer. Pesejet could not lift her bowed head, nor find the next word. To have come begging help in a plight this ugly left her ashamed.

"I'm sorry. The staff who saw us might put you in a difficult spot……."

"None of you need worry. Our people are trained never to say a word about a guest—to anyone, about anything."

Iuni, too, could not quite raise his head before the Sebua he was seeing again.

"You—you really didn't harm Lord Osiris? How are you going to prove you were asleep?"

"There's no way to prove it."

"If there was even a woman with you, she could vouch for you, couldn't she?"

Iuni let out a sigh that sounded like a plea of injured innocence, having entirely failed to grasp that she was fishing to learn whether he was seeing anyone. Sebua sighed along with him.

Kian, who had been staring at Iuni as if the man were hopeless, spoke.

"Helping fugitives who'd face the extreme penalty the moment they were transferred to Karnak—that takes a tremendous resolve, truth be told. So I'm sorry we've come like this, but as for money to travel on, we need a little……."

"You worry as much as ever, brother. It's all right. I'll help! Lord Golden Vulture!"

"Then—do you happen to have any of these? Fig-tree sap, leeks, yellow ocher, marigold juice, honey?"

Sebua had been about to go down to the shop. At his asking after things one could not even gather all of at the market, a puzzled look crossed her face.

"I haven't the rest, but there are leeks and honey in the kitchen. What do you want them for?"

"Pesejet's been hurt a little. Leeks treat a cut from a blade, or burned skin. Soak them in wine, especially, and they make an excellent disinfectant. Honey calms inflammation, and on a wound that hasn't closed it helps a scab set quickly, so it doesn't fester……."

"Things you actually need, then. Wine, leeks, honey—I can give you as much of those as you like."

Pesejet was freshly startled by the care with which he tended the wound at her neck, a hurt she herself had forgotten entirely. Watching him burn with a physician's calling—to rescue the suffering and keep life in the body—she thought she could almost see why the House of Life at the Temple of Neith in Sais was called the finest of them all.

"And you? Nothing you need?"

The talk done, Sebua had been heading down to the shop when she turned her head sharp toward Iuni, as if she had only just remembered him.

"Nothing at all."

"Don't you need paint to cover those tattoos on your face? Mix powdered galena into a fine ointment and fill in that skin sunk so deep and red, and you won't draw a guardsman's eye. You'll look a great deal kinder, too."

"No, I wouldn't go that far……."

"Listen to me."

She said it with finality, and went down the stairs that joined the Drunken Cobra.

"Isn't it ridiculous? You, she says. You. Not a scrap of conscience. How can she pretend nothing's changed and call me the old way, sweet as ever? Has she already forgotten we're divorced?"

His mouth grumbled; the corners of it seemed to smile. Pesejet and Kian looked away from that bizarre face.

The guest room at the Drunken Cobra came with a very fine bath. The water jars held water warmed through, and the water that washed sweat and desert dust from the skin and ran down the body flowed out of the building along copper pipes set into the marble floor. Ordinary buildings let used water seep into the earth through a drain. This elaborate plumbing seemed to be a builder's secret Sebua had picked up while raising the massage house, the Sluggish Viper.

Washed clean, Pesejet wrapped herself in a linen towel large enough to go around her several times over, and came out.