The Last Breath of Apis

This brother and sister from Emar, their skin paler than any Egyptian's, stood as living emblems of Egypt's famed liberality: that a foreigner, given only ability enough, might rise to the highest office in the land, and even marry into the nobility.

"Has some pressing matter arisen?"

When Setheph asked, Akh nodded, his face grave, and said, "The sacred bull Apis has breathed his last."

So wholly did Apis embody the pharaoh's mighty power that, in the great rites, the king himself wore a bull's tail. And was it not Apis who had borne the mummy of Osiris upon his back, raced the heavens, and restored the god to life?

"The temple of Ptah at Memphis will have its hands full."

"It will. The funeral rites must be prepared, and men will have to range the whole of the land for a bull black over every inch of its body, marked with a white triangle upon the brow and bearing a scarab-shaped growth beneath the tongue."

"The temple of Neith at Sais will be thrown into alarm as well."

The priests of Sais, charged with weaving the shroud for the mummy of Apis, would have to go at once to Memphis, take the measure of the dead bull, and labor without rest to fashion linen that fit the body.

"You will be busy as well, General."

Akh was right. If every function of the temple were bent upon the shroud, the city of Sais itself would grind to a halt, and Setheph ought to hurry back to Lower Egypt. Yet he could not easily cast off his wish to remain in Thebes. He wanted to watch the arrest of those he had seen in the desert, their transport, and the course of their trial.

"I speak of what happened at Deir el-Medina."

At Setheph's words the vizier Akh drew the outer corners of his eyes long and sharp. It was a habit of his, when he had no wish to yield a point.

"It beggars belief—a crime committed by those who ought to stand foremost in guarding the royal tombs. They dared to desecrate the valley where the sacred power of the ancestral pharaohs who protect Egypt still lingers, and they murdered the chief of the artisans. They must pay the price in blood."

To ruin the place where the soul of a pharaoh came and went—a pharaoh who, after death, became a divine being watching over Egypt—was to invite calamity upon the state. It was a grave crime indeed, grave enough that one might well insist the price be paid in blood.

Even so, he could not leave the matter as it stood.

"You know as well as I that to erase a name, so a god may never call it, is as a rule an act of vengeance by those entangled in politics."

"I cannot say that I do. Tomb robbers are plentiful enough, but the defilement of a tomb is rare, is it not? They ought to be put to death on the spot."

"Even if one refrains from speaking of the fact that His Majesty is even now destroying the relics of the Amarna age..."

"What is it you want?"

To mention aloud the pharaoh's demolition of the city and the relics left behind by a failed religious reform was a forbidden thing. Only after Setheph had dared to touch upon what amounted to the king's own shame did Akh set himself to listen.

"To fix them as the guilty is dangerous. Spare them summary judgment. Their motive, and whoever stands behind them, must be drawn out at trial. Once they are taken, the army will answer for them in full, from their transport through to the judgment."

"......It shall be done so."

Akh gave his word with a face that plainly did not wish to.

"Haaah..."

Nehesyu of the river police heaved a long sigh as he watched the moon shed a wan light from behind the clouds.

An order had come down from Vizier Akh that not a single soul coming or going at the docks was to slip past unexamined, and so tonight there would be no sleep. Until Khepri, god of the morning sun, showed his face, Nehesyu would have to stand in the clamorous harbor and inspect every traveler and every cargo they carried.

"Honestly, they're a damned nuisance. We draw our grain from the state regular as the flood, so I suppose they've no notion that for us boatmen a promise of time weighs heavier than life itself."

The resentment of sailors whose tempers had soured after too long waiting at anchor already had his head throbbing. He could endure being cursed at. What he feared was a scuffle breaking out with some hulking crewman. That three of the eight men on his shift had failed to appear was another reason the sighs kept escaping him. One was still not sober from the wine he had drunk the night before. Another had gone to look in on his father's corpse, which was in the midst of being made into a mummy. The third had sent word that a horned viper's bite had swollen on him.

He prayed and prayed that traffic would be light today. Contrary to that fervent hope, the docks of Thebes were already packed with people, though it was only the faint edge of dawn. It was only natural that so many traveled by water: bound for Upper Egypt, one raised a sail and rode the north wind upstream against the current, and bound for Lower Egypt, one simply gave the boat over to the flow of the river. Even so, he had wished it might not be so on this day of all days.

"By the vizier's order, I'll be conducting an inspection."

The man who had come leading a donkey, grease fairly sliding down his face, was already twitching both brows in a threatening way at the mere word inspection. Nehesyu was afraid. Still, a river policeman had his duty to discharge. Cursing the parents who had pushed him into office—he might have stayed quietly in his home village milking cows, but they had insisted that drawing a steady ration of state grain was the finest life there was—he opened the packs on the donkey's back. Dried fish, a leather waterskin, and a few loaves of barley bread. That was all.

The man seemed to dislike hands rummaging among his food. Checked against the portrait on the papyrus, his face looked one heartbeat short of exploding into curses.

"Thank you for your cooperation. On your way."

Orders had come down, and so he was looking the travelers over; in truth, though, he doubted he needed to scrutinize them one by one to find the people in the papyrus portraits. A blue-eyed woman with a figure to stop the heart, a Nubian man with a pitch-black face and red tattoos, a man with green eyes and golden hair—how hard could people like that be to spot? Confident he would know them at a glance even under this faint moonlight, he was turning a drowsy eye toward the next traveler when that eye flew wide open.

A blonde beauty of astonishing loveliness was standing there in the moonlight!

He loathed a petite woman, and here before him stood a beauty on a level with his own eyes—he had never once been called short anywhere—her skin so white it was nearly translucent. To meet like this the ideal he had dreamed of all his life, the woman he had thought could not exist in the world! If only she had worn nothing but a linen dress that clung to her. She must have worried over the chill wind of dawn; shawls wrapped two and three deep hid the lines of her body, and he regretted it keenly, though the concealment seemed, somehow, to lend her a still greater elegance.

"Is there some problem with my wife?"

His wife! The strong-accented male voice beside him jolted Nehesyu of the river police back to himself, and his eyes met those of the Nubian man standing at the beautiful woman's side. He had been straining with all his might for a glimpse of breast and waist, hidden and yet not quite hidden, and now it felt as though the woman's husband had seen straight through to that lecherous heart. Shame burned him.

"Ah—it's nothing. Next!"

No sooner had he found the ideal of his life than he learned she was a married woman. Clutching at his sore heart, Nehesyu of the river police called the next traveler forward. She was a priestess in a neat wig of braided hair. Eyes modestly lowered, she was probably on her way back to her own temple after a visit to Karnak. He had not yet shaken off the lust he had felt toward the married woman, and he had no idea what calamity might befall him if he addressed a sacred priestess in that state. Remembering the colleague who had tossed a bawdy jest at a holy priestess and been found the next day dead of a scorpion's sting, Nehesyu resolved to pass this one through as quickly as he could.

Just then Pepi, the police dog who had been dozing at Nehesyu's side all this while and earning nothing of his keep, looked at the priestess and burst into loud barking. He might only have been barking in his sleep, head hung low. Even so, one could not ignore the opinion of a dog whose record of arrests was the finest among the river police dogs of Thebes.

"There will be a brief inspection. Might you show me papers proving your identity?"

"I am on my way to the House of Life."

Receiving the certificate of the Temple of Neith at Sais that named her Second Prophet, Nehesyu bowed his head. Her station was confirmed, and he meant to let the priestess go—but the police dog Pepi bared his teeth and began to growl. Woof! Woof! Pepi barked savagely at the priestess as she tried to step on, and even made to lunge.

"You stupid dog!"

Seizing Pepi by the scruff, Nehesyu slapped the barking muzzle again and again until the animal quieted, then bowed to the priestess in apology.

"Forgive the rudeness of a stupid dog. May the gods watch over your road."

The next needed no papers at all. Was this not Sebua, mistress of the Drunken Cobra, famous among the taverns along the Theban waterfront for selling the finest drink and food? When the river police paid a call, she thanked them for their labors with things they had never ordered—a roast haunch of gazelle, skewers of grilled fowl—and among officials worn raw by the sneer that they drew their grain from the state and still could not do their work properly, this open-handed woman was supremely popular.

"Lady Sebua! Where are you bound?"

"Off to see for myself whether the branch is actually minding the beer, and what state the kitchens are in. I'll check the scented oils at the massage house while I'm at it, and I want a look at the men in the vineyard."

"Diligent as ever. A pleasant journey to you."

There was no cause to detain any longer a woman who kept branches of the tavern called the Drunken Cobra and the massage house called the Sluggish Viper busy with trade across the whole of Egypt.

"Next!"

"Has this donkey lost its mind? Why won't the beast listen!"

Waiting on the next traveler, who was wrestling a donkey that refused to obey, Nehesyu of the river police let his eyes chase after wherever that beauty of a moment ago was likely to be. Coveting a married woman was a sin, but merely looking—that was no sin at all, was it? Yet amid the bustle of a cargo barge putting in beneath a great load of rose granite, and a ferry putting out with beasts and people aboard, the luck of seeing her again did not, alas, come to him.

"The General's chariot!"

"All of you—make ready to receive him!"