Wicked Women Read online

  Then Inubet, in a madness of defiance and rage, spat on the queen’s feet.

  For a moment, the only sound was that of beetles whirring in the dry grass.

  ‘Death,’ Nefersiu said.

  The guards used the same knotted rope that had striped Inubet’s back bloody, looping it around her throat and twisting it tight. It was over fast, but not fast enough, her body thrashing in the dust the way a goose’s did when its neck was wrung. Then came the swift-winged keening passage of the ka-spirit, all but unnoticed. Finally came the ba-spirit, worming its way through Inubet’s slackened lips to creep and writhe in restless searching.

  Sakhmet looked away, glimpsing as she did so the look of astonishment upon the visage of the young prince. Then his nurse swept down, scooped him into her arms, and hastened him from the market-square, crooning to him. ‘There, there, Sefi. The bad, ungrateful creature got what she deserved.’

  Handmaids hurried to attend the queen, removing her befouled sandals, washing her feet with clear water, rubbing them dry with soft cloths. As they did so, Nefersiu began issuing orders. Everyone sprang to obey without hesitation or dispute.

  There were many arrangements to be made for the accommodation, housing, and feeding of their guests. Considerable activity followed.

  Ptahotep, uncle of Atep, was the village headman; his house was nothing compared to the pharaoh’s grand palaces, but it was the best available and so would have to do: news which sent his wife and household into a flustered panic. Dozens of pails of water and bundles of firewood had to be fetched. Bed-linens, chairs and stools would have to be borrowed from every home. The queen’s servants had brought along some stores of provisions, but would need use of the bread-ovens and cook-pits. So much to be done.

  Meanwhile, Atep instructed that Inubet’s body be taken to the trench and placed with the others. Hamun-Ra and his sons would just have to see to her, as well. She was lifted, carried away. The ba-spirit lingered where the royal guards had throttled the breath from her. Its smoky, oily substance roiled around the legs and sandals of those who walked through it, unknowing.

  Another among the dead.

  Another body to be prepared for burial; such as it would be. A full burial befitting a Pharaoh, with embalming, mummification, canopic jars and a sarcophagus, a funeral, a tomb, was a lengthy and expensive process. Even the quicker and cheaper alternatives were more than could be managed here and now, with so many dying at once. Hamun-Ra and his sons were already overwhelmed with the sudden workload they’d been given.

  Another soul followed the sun’s journey west, to the great Seven Gates, to the underworld, through realms of fire and serpents to reach the court of Osiris. Where, if the soul passed judgment before the gods, and if it was weighed against the Feather of Truth and not found wicked, it would go on to dwell forever in the land of Tuat. To dwell forever, as best a soul could, once reunited with a body that might or might not be in the most well-preserved of conditions.

  It was a sad matter to think on, that Inubet and the others must spend the eternity of their afterlives bound to imperfect forms and untreated flesh. But, such was the way of it. Those who could not afford full mummification, or lavish tombs stocked with every luxury, would have to make do with that which Osiris provided. It would still, of course, be a comfortable existence with no fears of illness, injury, famine, flood or attack. That alone set Tuat far above the worldly realm of the living.

  In Tuat, the souls of the dead reunited with their family and loved ones. In Tuat, the most worthy of all might be chosen to sail with Ra on the golden sun-boat through the dark caverns of the twelve Hours of the Night. Best of all, in Tuat, a life of endless hard labour and toil could be set aside in favour of rest and leisure, sports and games, and all manner of pleasant activities, pastimes and entertainments.

  Sakhmet sighed at the prospect. Not that she minded the work of her craft. She enjoyed shaping each figurine, seeing their postures and features give each its own personality; bringing them to their vivid semblance of life with her paint-pots and colourful glazes. That, in her mind, was far different from the daily tedium of hauling wood and water, cooking her meagre meals and cleaning the lonely hovel where she slept. It was far different still from those seasons when every villager able to pick up a dredge, pail, hoe or seed-bag was ordered to the fields from dawn until dusk.

  To be free from those duties; to be freed from the burdens of age and infirmity; to meet her parents and sisters after so very many years, she doubted she would have to confront her former husband, if ever a man had a sin-heavy heart, that man was Thatek, who surely had been devoured by the Gobbler of Souls. But her friend Ayaba had died only last summer, and it would be good to see her again.

  Ah, but her time would come when it did. In the meanwhile, the fruits of her art were needed for the others, to help give them the afterlife of relaxation they had earned. When they were called to work, the shabti would answer for them.

  Leaning on her stick, she made her way to her house. It was of a single room, built so as to share walls with the larger homes on two sides, and had a yard with a reed fence shaded by straw mats held aloft on a framework of poles. This yard faced the marketplace, and was where she sat to both make and sell her wares.

  Her most prized possession was a long low cedar wood box that had been her father’s, and her grandmother’s before that. Like Sakhmet herself, it was old, scuffed and scarred, worn at the edges and corners. She lifted the lid. Inside, packed on layers of hide scraps and dry grasses, were the shabti she had made.

  She smiled on them much as she had smiled at the young prince. That these were the closest she would ever come to having children was a knowledge that had not escaped her notice. Sometimes she named them, or talked to them, and why not? Was it any stranger than Ayaba and her cats?

  ‘Inubet,’ she murmured as she sorted through the contents of the cedar wood box, recalling the young widow, the occasions they’d spoken, and what of her life Sakhmet knew.

  The shabti she chose was of a woman drawing water. Because Inubet had been a wife, she included figurines of Taweret the benign hippopotamus and the grinning god Bes, to ensure a happy home in the next world. Lastly, remembering that Inubet had a special fondness for dates, she selected a wooden carving of a date-palm, ripely laden.

  There would be little payment, if any, of course. Kha’ut, Inubet’s husband, had been a common tomb worker, not a skilled artisan. They’d been as poor as anyone in the village, newly married and still childless.

  Perhaps, when they were together again in Tuat, the gods would grant them that blessing.

  ‘Isis and Hathor be praised,’ Sakhmet said.

  She folded the shabti and figurines into a packet of papyrus-leaves, and placed it with the others in her carrying-basket. Later, when the heat of the day began to wane, she would take them down to the Beautiful House, where Hamun-Ra and his sons did their grim work. Not that it was much of a Beautiful House, just a tent that had been raised beside a sandy trench at the worksite.

  The normal sounds of an afternoon had doubled, with the queen’s company of soldiers and attendants going back and forth. By the snatches of conversation overheard through her windows, she surmised that Queen Nefersiu had ordered a feast to be held that night, after she and the pharaoh’s architect had made their inspection of the tomb. Pigs squealed, being led to the slaughter. Boys ran along the river to check the fish-traps, and girls gathered goose-eggs. Ptahotep’s wife and Ib-Hathor fell to shouting over the quality of melons. Urbu the brewer, a notorious miser, walked by complaining bitterly to someone how many jugs of his best barley-beer the guards had already depleted.

  Despite these noisy distractions, Sakhmet ate a simple meal of bread and dried figs, then lowered herself onto her sleeping-rug. As she often did, now that age wrapped her bones like winding-cloths, she reclined with the slim handle of a willow-wood ankh curled loosely in her fists and resting upon her scant bosom.

  If the cedar wood box
had come to her from her father, the ankh had been a gift from her mother, when Sakhmet became a woman. She and each of her sisters had been given one. Though time and touch had long since worn away the paint and smoothed the intricate carvings, it seemed to glow with warmth and life.

  She felt the painless rising tug as her ka-spirit took flight, unseen on falcon’s wings.

  It was not death, not for her, not yet. It was somewhere beyond waking thought and sleeping dream, a travelling, a release. The sudden freedom from walls, from world, from weight of flesh. This, she knew, was why ka-spirits cried out as they did when parted from their earthly bodies. The shock of it never failed to be both terrifying and exhilarating.

  Shadows surrounded her. The vast and gloomy caverns of the Hours of the Night stretched along the river that flowed in the depths far beneath Tuat. In the distance, the Seven Gates glimmered, promising oases of light. Closer still burned the eternal flames and molten pools of the lakes of fire.

  But here, here where the dead souls waited, cold wet darkness ruled.

  Water dripped from fanglike formations. Crevices gaped in the walls, in the floor, promising the threat of hungry mouths and swallowing throats. Scaled backs split the river’s surface, serpents in undulating ripples, crocodiles lurking.

  Sakhmet, a ghost among ghosts, unnoticed, glided over the gathered souls. Most were incomplete, their ba-spirits still clinging to their places of death, awaiting decent burial. Any who dared try to go onward in such a fragmented state would be at even greater risk of being devoured by the beasts of the river, or at the mercy of clawed demons eager to rend them with searing fire.

  Others were complete, but hesitated. The wicked, perhaps, who knew that their hearts would sink the scales against the Feather of Truth, and were reluctant.

  The confused, who could not realize they were dead; the frightened; the lost and the mad; those with unfinished business, unrequited love, and unavenged wrongs; those who were not ready, or did not wish to go: they were the saddest of all, the most tragic.

  She recognized those from her village. Workers and slaves who’d died in the collapse, or shortly after from their wounds. Kha’ut was there, seeming more bewildered than glad to have his wife Inubet beside him.

  It would be better soon, Sakhmet wanted to tell them. To reassure them, as they shivered, soul-naked on the riverbanks with the black caverns looming around them. Their bodies would be seen to, their funerary rites done with at least the minimum of decent burial. Their ba-spirits would not be doomed to haunt the earth forever.

  They would go on from here, pass the Seven Gates, stand in judgment before Osiris and Anubis, and, because they were good people, honest and hard-working, they would be granted places in Tuat. Fine homes where they could rest, and enjoy the eternal rewards of lives well-lived. When they were needed to do work, they could call upon their shabti, and the shabti would answer for them.

  Unable to comfort the dead, sensing the stirring of serpents nearby and aware that her own ka-spirit was at risk from malicious demons the longer she lingered, Sakhmet flew silent and unseen back to the upper world.

  Just as the departure from the mortal body was always a shock, so too was the return to it. The heavy solidity of even her thin and frail old flesh; the entombment within skin and bone; a heartbeat that had been slow and somnolent jarred to a sudden, frantic pace; breath that had gone shallow becoming harsh gasps...

  Her eyelids flicked open. Sunbeams slanted in through her window, dust-motes and chaff wafting lazily in them. All was bright light and sharp edges and stark detail. Each sound rang clear and loud and distinct. The scents of dung and sweat and cooking food struck strong and pungent. Every knot in her sleeping-rug and every bump in the ground beneath it pressed into her like hard stones.

  Sakhmet clutched the ankh tight in both hands, feeling the rapid drumming of her heart begin to calm itself again. Her gasps steadied into regular breathing.

  A shudder passed through her, a shadow, a chill.

  Something…

  Something was not right.

  Spine creaking, neck crackling, she sat up.

  She hadn’t slept long. Not more than an hour. She looked around her room. All was where it should be, as she’d left it, undisturbed.

  And yet…

  Hurry.

  Whispers from nowhere, from everywhere. A soft, hissing urgency.

  It gripped her, and she did not know why, but was powerless to resist.

  Her walking-stick was near at hand. She pushed herself upright, went to her carrying-basket, and slung it over her shoulder. The contents, wrapped though they were in papyrus leaves and carefully packed, shifted. Stirred.

  As if they moved?

  Moved on their own, rustling like mice in the straw?

  Which was impossible, of course. She might name them, talk to them, think of them in a strange way as the closest she would have to children, but she had never imagined them coming to life.

  Not in this world.

  Hurry. Take us. Give us.

  She’d meant to wait until the heat of the day had waned, but those whispers, that urgency, the shadowing and shuddering chill; these would not be denied.

  Hurry?

  As best she could, at a hobble.

  Outside, everything still bustled with activity, preparing for the feast that the queen had ordered. Greasy smoke rose from the butchered carcasses of pigs, sizzling on spits. Women wrapped grain-stuffed fish in grape leaves to bake in the coals. Girls pulled dozens of loaves of bread from the ovens. Vegetables and eggs boiled in leather kettles. Ib-Hathor arranged platters of melon slices, fruit, dates, and figs. Urbu the brewer kept a shrewd watch on slaves bringing out jug after jug of barley-beer. What appeared to be every pot of honey had been fetched from every house.

  It was more food for one meal than the entire village might otherwise consume in a month. Even taking into account what provisions the royal company had brought with them, the granaries and storerooms must be sorely depleted. What they were to do after? How they were to feed themselves? Yet as surely as the Nile rose and fell, surely as Ra was reborn each morning, the gods and Pharaoh would look after the people of Egypt.

  This, Sakhmet overheard as she made her way through the market-square. And this, she wanted to believe, as she’d believed since she was a child no older than the little prince.

  Yet, as she hobbled, the end of her walking-stick and her cloth sandals scuffing in the dirt, she felt those shadowy, shuddering chills again.

  Hurry.

  ‘Yes,’ she whispered in reply, hardly aware she did so.

  None of her neighbours, busy with their tasks, paid her any notice. Some soldiers, leaning idle on their spears, only glanced at her in passing. An old woman, bent and poor and useless, muttering to herself, senile or mad; not worth their interest.

  Dust hung in the air and the path to the worksite showed the recent tracks of many feet, signs that a group had come this way just ahead of her. Atep the overseer, taking Queen Nefersiu and her attendant priests and scribes and architect to inspect the tomb?

  Sakhmet trudged downhill, following a curving descent into a narrow, winding, sandy-bottomed gorge between reddish rock cliffs. At the far end, the path widened into a road, beaten down by the plodding hooves of donkeys dragging blocks of cut stone from the nearby quarry.

  It was here that Pharaoh Tehenut had chosen as the spot for construction of his tomb. Passageways and chambers had been carved into the cliff-face, shaped with careful chisels. Intricate murals, painted and engraved, covered the inner surfaces. There were pillars, slabs, obelisks. There were niches cut to hold sacred jars, and places for the vast wealth that would be buried with the pharaoh. Once Tehenut’s sarcophagus had been set within, thick walls and hidden doors would be sealed to deter vile tomb-robbers.

  The unfinished grand causeway seethed with dark, writhing shapes. They moved not with the organization of bees at their hive, but with the disorder of ants unable to make sense of a b
roken hill. The debris had been cleared away, the bodies retrieved, the blood soaked in and vanished into the dry soil. This was where they had died, the workers and slaves, and so this was where their ba-spirits remained, and would remain; growing stronger, growing angry and more dangerous, the longer it took for their fleshly forms to be decently buried.

  Atep, out front gesturing and talking in a manner more suited to a merchant desperate to sell dubious goods than an overseer, could not see them. Nor could the queen, or most of those who had accompanied her. Two of the priests seemed able to, however, and side-stepped uneasily whenever the crawling course of one of the smoky, oily shadows came near.

  Flanking the entrance were statues fifteen cubits high. On one side stood the jackal-headed death-god Anubis, on the other, noble Osiris held the crook and flail in crossed arms. The structure between them, the squared-off archways and columns meant to hold aloft a less-than-modest step-pyramid topped with a sculpted limestone bust of Tehenut himself, was what had collapsed, crushing so many men.

  Queen Nefersiu looked impatient with Atep’s explanations. He, for his part, dripped more now with sweat than he ever did during a regular day’s labors. The architect conferred with the scribes. The priests conferred with each other. Again, no one noticed a lone old woman passing by, back bent beneath her burden.

  Sakhmet observed that Hamun-Ra and his sons were not present at the gathering in front of the tomb. She found them further on, at the shoddy tent that had been erected to serve as a makeshift Beautiful House. Not that any full embalming or proper mummification would take place here.

  At the long table, Hamun-Ra worked on Inubet’s body. He was a tall man, and thin, with a jackal-mask covering the upper half of his face. As she approached, he pushed it up on his head so that his tired eyes peered at her from under the scuffed black leather muzzle.

  ‘Ah, Sakhmet,’ he said, in a manner both exhausted and relieved. ‘I was about to send a boy to ask you to come.’