Blood on the Lion Skin

"If he had been the god Anubis, he would never have reeked of rotting meat."

Kian whispered it, low enough for Pesejet's ear alone.

"I think so too."

"So who was the man you met that night?"

He had not forgotten, and he was asking again about her partner from the Night of Hathor. Pesejet stamped down on his foot with all her strength, then hurried over to the weaver Iset.

No one handled loom and needle with more gift than Pesejet, and Iset had begged her more than once to turn from a life in the temple, take up the weaver's craft, and follow in her place. Pesejet had not chosen an artisan's life, yet the moment she said she wished to help with the work, Iset caught both her hands, overcome with gratitude.

And so a hard night came down on the stonecutters and the weavers—splitting stone, drawing cloth from the loom, snipping with shears, stitching through the dark with bronze needles. There was a mercy in it, though. The village, feverish from one great occasion after another, the festival of Hathor and then the pharaoh's visit, had grown quiet again after the black presence appeared. For a little while it seemed ordinary peace had returned.

"Aaaah!"

It held only until the next morning, when Iset, home at last from the night's labor, split the village air with that scream.

When her desperate cry rang through the lanes, Pesejet was lying naked on the terrace, trying to shake off the exhaustion of a night spent sewing shrouds. She had given herself over to the mild sun and the breeze of early morning; the instant she heard Iset, she knotted her clinging linen sheath beneath her breasts and ran toward the sound.

A crowd had already gathered at the house of Iset and Usir.

"Lord Usir!"

"Ah—what is this…"

"Great Osiris, why have you laid such suffering upon Lord Usir!"

"The god Anubis warned us of this!"

Through the press of horrified onlookers, Pesejet saw Usir's body, stabbed again and again until the breath had left him, and the walls drowned in red blood.

Usir had been murdered. His wife Iset had survived—under orders to cut a shroud to his measure, she had spent the night not at home but in the workshop. She lived, and the shroud that fit his body perfectly was finished.

"Wait! Look at the scrap of hide caught on Lord Usir's desk!"

Iset, still dazed, followed the pointing finger and picked up the piece of leather snagged on the edge of her dead husband's desk. To the astonishment of all, it was a fragment of Nubian lion skin—hide the whole village knew by sight.

"Isn't this a piece of Iuni's lion-skin garment!"

"Then—!"

Rage boiled up in them at the scrap torn from the clothing of Iuni, officer of the guard, and they stormed at once toward his house.

Iuni was a Nubian who had come to Thebes for a time to receive an Egyptian education. The army had recognized his skill with the club, the immigration office had granted him naturalization, and he had become a guardsman of the Place of Truth. He was also the former husband of Sebua, who brewed the finest beer and baked the best barley bread in the village—and he was to be the man who had killed Usir?

Their fury reached its peak when they found him asleep with a flint knife, still smeared with red blood, laid beside his head.

"Sleeping easy with a knife stained in Lord Usir's blood right beside your head!"

"Iuni! By the Feather of Ma'at, goddess of justice, you will be punished!"

"If you weren't one of the company of the Place of Truth, you'd have been sentenced to death on the spot!"

Only then, under the blaze of their anger, did the jet-black Nubian wake. He scrubbed at eyes that would not quite open and asked them back.

"Who's getting executed? There's blood on it?"

"Don't even think of wrapping this in lies! We've found proof you murdered Lord Usir!"

"What? I murdered Lord Usir? Have I understood your Egyptian correctly?"

"Why in the world would you do such a thing?"

"I was asleep—what am I supposed to have done?"

Jolted from sleep into disaster, Iuni groped for words that might prove his innocence, then saw the bloodstained knife, and his eyes flew wide. It was only the look of a startled man, but unluckily the stark white of his eyes against that black skin made his face seem all the fiercer. The marks peculiar to Nubians—red lines cut with a knife across the cheeks and beside the philtrum, drawn into the black of the face—looked more terrible than ever today.

"We should have known from the day he started swaggering about in that lion skin!"

"What? You're insulting the hide I wear? This is plain discrimination against Nubians. Have you forgotten the pharaoh's word—that everyone who comes inside the boundary stones of the frontier is an Egyptian? Under this kind of prejudice I can't say a single word."

"Can't say a word? Under Egyptian law, refusing to testify is obstruction of justice."

"Damned, cursed Egyptian law!"

At last, when words condemning Egypt left Iuni's mouth, the crowd recoiled in shock.

"Well!"

"He just insulted Egypt!"

"There's his true color!"

Iuni, still half asleep and talking as he pleased, seemed only now to come fully awake at their reaction. He started and waved his hands.

"No! That's not what I meant…. I learned Egyptian in the army, so my tongue runs rough. Egypt isn't a damned country, and it isn't going to fall, either."

He scrambled to repair the damage, but Pesejet and the others fixed him with cutting glares.

"There was anger toward Egypt in his heart all along."

"A frightening man."

Flustered by the murmuring, Iuni scratched at his tight curls.

"This is maddening. Believe me—do I look like a man who would kill someone?"

He would have done better not to add that last part. The villagers had not forgotten the day they chased a tomb robber who had broken into the Valley of the Kings to steal a golden scarab and flee: Iuni had smashed the struggling thief's skull with his club. To them, he had always looked entirely capable of killing.

"Ever since he divorced Sebua for her adultery, he's been nursing a hatred."

"Why drag Sebua's name into this! That damned woman's name! Say it in front of me again and I'll wring your neck!"

The unhealed wound of the divorce had been touched, and Iuni bellowed. Then, as the air turned suddenly cold, he shut his mouth and tried to smile his way clear of it. It was already too late to take back the threat of a wrung neck.

Amunuasu, the village scribe, who had been watching it all from a step behind, stepped forward at last.

"You will remain beneath the temple until your innocence is proved. You will stand before the court soon enough. Prepare your defense there."

"I told you I was asleep! Breaking into a man's house and hauling off an innocent—I'll report every one of you!"

Iuni roared and thrashed, swearing he would not be taken, but his fellow guardsmen soon conveyed him to the House of Darkness beneath the temple of Hathor.

With the prime suspect locked away, the village sank into deep grief. A period of mourning began for Usir, the overseer of works who had listened to every craftsman of the gangs of the left and the right and labored to raise the pace of the work, and every hand in the village fell still. The guards abandoned their watches. The workshops shut their doors. Work ceased in the sandstone valley where tombs were cut and walls adorned, and the priestesses of the temple forbore song and dance. The men left their beards unshaven; the women put aside their bright clothes. Even the wind, passing, sounded like a wail of mourning. With the death of Overseer Usir, the whole village seemed to have lost its life.

In a red linen dress, a white-lotus ornament in her hair and deep-violet amethysts at her ears, Pesejet was laying a great bouquet woven of persea leaves upon the altar of Hathor's temple. She could not understand how she had come in to offer flowers when a life in the temple was no longer permitted her—but life, after all, is full of things one cannot understand.

When she set the bouquet down and stepped back, a black shadow fell before the altar of rose-colored granite and slowly took on form. As the faint shape grew denser, Pesejet had to clutch at her pounding heart.

The shadow was the man with whom she had spent the Night of Hathor!

Fully opaque at last, a proper figure, he opened his mouth. Those hot lips that had explored every part of her moved, shaping some word—but not a sound of it reached her.

"How did you get into the temple?"

The frustration plain on his face told her that her own words were not reaching him either.

"What is your name?"

They had barely managed to speak at all before his shadow began, slowly, to fade.

No!

She could not lose him again like this. There was no room left for a scrap of pride. She seized his arm in desperation.

"Where can I see you again?"

She held on, wanting even a moment more of him, but the arm in her slender hand slipped away like smoke. He was gone. Utterly.

"How can this be happening? How? How, truly…"

Still crying how, Pesejet's eyes flew open. It had been a dream again.

Not Hathor's temple with its splendid altar, but a pitch-dark room where not a thread of moonlight entered—and there, at last, she let fall a single hot tear. To have been a priestess of Hathor within the temple, and to have met him again: both were nothing but a dream that vanished the moment she opened her eyes.