A Light Among the Tombs

Steeped in the feeling of having gained everything she wanted all at once, only to have it snatched away, Pesejet wiped the tears from her cheeks and stepped out of the house.

The night walk had begun with no great purpose, and it was pure chance that, walking into the cool wind, she turned her head toward the valley of red sandstone.

Deir el-Medina kept scarcely twenty guards, so the finished tombs—unlike the mouths of the shafts still under furious work—were never thickly watched. And yet an oddly great number of lights flickered from the quarter where the tombs of previous pharaohs lay.

They were small as lamp-flames, easy to miss, but to Pesejet's eyes, her nerves drawn razor-sharp by the unsatisfying aftermath of a dream, they stood out with terrible clarity. However she looked at them, those trembling lights did not belong to the village guild. They had the look of a tomb robber's secret labor. She had to catch them.

The lights were a long way off. Even if she chased them alone this instant, she doubted she could close the distance. Call villagers to run with her, and she would likely lose the lights for good; cry out loudly enough for everyone to hear, and the ones who carried them would hear her too and flee far beyond reach.

She stood biting her lip, able neither to go nor to stay, when a jet-black leopard appeared before her, the outer corners of its eyes lifted in a seductive sweep. It showed not the slightest aggression. One elegant step at a time it came on, then bent its legs and lowered itself in front of her, as if bidding her climb onto its back.

"You mean for me to sit?"

As if it understood human speech the way the crocodile in her dream had, the leopard nodded.

A little afraid, Pesejet climbed carefully onto its back and wrapped her arms around the sleek-furred neck. As though it had only been waiting for her to hold fast, the leopard gathered its body in half and then sprang it wide, racing nimbly toward the suspicious lights.

So swift that it seemed to run against the flow of time, the leopard was, in the space of a blink, directly before a man whose face was mostly hidden by cloth. Startled by the sight of Pesejet astride a leopard, he dropped the lamp in his hand.

Her first suspicion was that he was a thief after the burial goods, and she looked to see what he held—but strangely, he did not carry even the smallest sack in which stolen things might be hidden.

"What business brings you here?"

Her voice seemed to jolt him back to himself. The man, who had been standing as if his soul had left him, drew the dagger at his waist. Under the soft moonlight the intruder pulled free a blade of uncanny blue light, and a tremendous killing intent flashed in his eyes. Fortunately, the sword-aura he showed was clumsy.

Pesejet drew the dagger she kept at her right thigh and hastily met his blade as it came slashing through the air.

Clang! Metal struck metal, and the sound rang sharp in her ears.

Her father Raherka, an officer, had taught her swordsmanship in whatever spare moments he could find, telling her that one must know how to protect one's own body. Thanks to that, Pesejet could use a blade as well as any soldier who had passed through a recruit's training.

The meeting of the blades astonished her. The man's sword sheared the edge from her fine bronze dagger—the one Raherka had specially commissioned from the village metalworker—as easily as if he were cutting a papyrus scroll.

With her weapon lost, the fight turned hard against her, and disaster came piled upon disaster: two more men, their faces mostly veiled in cloth, were running this way. The unwavering set of their stride told her they had been properly trained as soldiers. She had no chance against them. Dawdle here as she was, and she would be hard-pressed to keep her life. She needed a bold decision.

To buy time, Pesejet flung the broken dagger at the man who had shown that clumsy sword-aura, then turned and ran for the hidden sanctuary known only to the villagers.

Seen from outside, the place was an ordinary gorge of rock. It was a sanctuary sacred to Meretseger, the cobra goddess.

Pesejet slipped into the sanctuary, which seethed with cobras and vipers, quietly shut the stone door, and set her ear to what lay outside. A moment later she heard the men searching for her.

"Where did she go?"

"She cannot have gone far."

"Shine a light on this dagger. We have to find out who she is."

On the dagger she had thrown to buy even a little time, words were engraved.

"Pesejet? We have to find this woman's house."

"And then we kill her."

At the outsiders' talk, which set a plan for murder on their tongues without a moment's hesitation, Pesejet nearly screamed and clapped a hand over her mouth.

Now she was certain. These were the true culprits who had murdered Usir, and tonight they had crept in to commit yet another crime. If she was to clear the name of Iuni—whose clear eyes a murderer could never have possessed—she ought to have caught the veiled man. Or at least torn the cloth from his face and looked well enough to remember it.

She crouched beneath every kind of regret, her face buried against her knees, and the vipers lifted their heads and came toward her.

"I'll stay here only a little while."

It was not the first time the hiss of snakes had reached her as sweetly as instruments being played. When she had kept the village coming-of-age rite and spent a night in the serpent sanctuary, the snakes had given out a slow, steady sound that let her forget her fear.

She would hide, somehow, until morning brightened or until the villagers came. She held out inside the sanctuary for a long while. She could not have said how much time passed, but at last a long ribbon of bright light seeped through the crack of the stone door.

Thinking morning had come, she opened the stone door with care and stepped out. There was only the bleak desert. The intruders were nowhere to be seen, and the sole living thing in sight was one small scorpion, passing by as meekly as if it meant no harm.

Once they were gone, Pesejet was more troubled than ever over how she was to explain the night, and to whom. All the long way home, trudging across the parched sand, she calmly retraced it—from the moment she had left the house alone in the deep of night and found the lights, to the moment she fled into the sanctuary—but her thoughts would not settle into any good way of telling it.

Perhaps her worry ran too deep. She came to her own door without ever noticing that the village she had entered was unnaturally quiet.

She longed to go in and wash herself clean, but the words of the men who had read her name on the dagger—their talk of her house, their promise to kill her—caught at her heart, and she could not easily step inside. She was pacing nearby when a shout went up.

"Pesejet! Pesejet!"

Roused villagers were swarming toward her in a pack, calling her name.

"So you all knew!"

She was sure they had learned of the intruders she had met in the night—the very men who must have murdered Usir—and had come looking for her. But unlike Pesejet, who greeted her neighbors with gladness, the people came on wearing faces that were strangely savage.

"So brazen, even after committing a crime!"

"Don't you know our village exists to make a place of eternity, not to deface one!"

"The shame of the village!"

"We should have known from the moment the cobra goddess of the peak refused you!"

Their reaction was just as it had been when the knife was found at Iuni's bedside. Something was going wrong.

"What is it you think I've done?"

When Pesejet asked, the scribe Amonuas answered, his face sunk in gloom.

"The tomb of the previous pharaoh has been defaced. The seal of the stone door was torn away, and the inscriptions cut into the walls were scraped out."

Scarcely had he finished before the others piled on.

"There's a witness who saw you going toward the Valley of the Kings in the night."

"There was a dagger hidden in the room, too. How do you explain the limestone on it?"

"The draftsman and the painter both testified that the limestone and the pigment on that dagger are the same as those from the damaged eternal resting place. Have you anything left to say?"

Watching them drive at her so fiercely, Pesejet understood that she had fallen into some vast conspiracy. She had to make them hear of last night, no matter what. She clenched her trembling fist and spoke.

"Last night I saw a faint light flickering over by the previous pharaoh's tomb."

"Then you should have called people!"

"It was too urgent. A leopard appeared at just the right moment and carried me to where a man with a covered face was standing, but two of his companions showed up, so I hid in the sanctuary of the goddess of the peak and waited for morning."

From a leopard that ran with a rider on its back to a woman alone in a sanctuary seething with snakes, it must have sounded like pure nonsense. The people scoffed outright.

Even Kian, in the moment before she was dragged off to the holding cells beneath the Temple of Hathor, spoke to her in that same vein.

"You went there riding a leopard? Why would you say a thing like that? Lies will only make this worse for you. When you stand before the court, say something sane, for the gods' sake. Pull yourself together!"

If even he went so far, what the rest of them would think was plain enough.

"Aneku! Ah, Aneku!"

Even as he held Queen Nimerut in his arms, Pharaoh Narmer was calling for Aneku again.

He himself had given the Mitanni princess Pritibi the name Nimerut, telling her it was the name she would use in Egypt—and yet, whenever the pharaoh lost his reason, he invariably cried out for Aneku. It was not the name of the queen said to have died several years before, and not one among the concubines of the harem was called Aneku.

"Aneku!"

Then again, it hardly mattered what he called her. Nimerut, eyes closed, had given her swaying body over to him without resistance, and all the while she was imagining that the man who held her now was not Pharaoh Narmer at all, but Baruna, the betrothed she had known in Mitanni.