Ebana flushed. 'I'm no murderer, and don't try to distract me.'
A breeze caught and tossed the leaves of the sycamore. Meren breathed in cool air, closed his eyes, and raised his face to sunlight dappled by leafy branches. 'Follow your own reasoning. Of all the priests of Amun, you're the one I talk to the most. Therefore, you're the one most likely to be my spy. Does Parenefer suspect you?'
When Ebana didn't answer, Meren opened his eyes. Had he not shared a childhood with the man, he couldn't have read anything in his expression. Ebana's eyes weren't simply the dark brown of Egypt. They were true black, like the Nile at night. Only Meren could catch a glint as if the full moon had dropped into them, and the skin around them seemed pale from tension.
'I didn't know,' Meren said softly.
'You know nothing. I have orders to report to the king. I could tell him what I know of your spy.'
'Don't,' Meren said as he began to rub the scar on his inner wrist. 'You'll only annoy him and create further strain between the temple and the court.'
'Amun has no fear of-'
'Ebana, sometimes you're wearisome beyond endurance. I've had a letter from my sister. She's at home with Bener and Isis and says they're both learning the running of an estate quite well. I have to admit that I didn't think Isis would do well. You have daughters. You should understand how the youngest always manages to slip away from responsibilities.'
'The way you slipped away from yours to me?'
Ebana touched his temple where his scar began. It crossed his left cheek and slanted down his neck, where it disappeared under a gold-and-carnelian broad collar.
Meren shoved away from the tree trunk and planted his feet apart. 'Damn you. I tried to warn you, but I found out too late.'
'I'll never believe that you didn't know Akhenaten had condemned me. You knew how unpredictable were his humors.'
'Why won't you understand? He almost killed me as well. I'd only been released a few days when I found out he'd sent men after you. I could barely stand, yet when I heard he'd taken it into his head that you sympathized with Amun, I tried to come to you. I could trust no one with a message, so I tried to warn you myself.'
Ebana wasn't looking at him. His gaze had gone distant. His mouth contorted as he sank into the memory.
'You found them, didn't you? My wife. My son. The guards dragged me away from their bodies. I never saw them again.'
Slowly, Meren reached out. He touched his cousin's arm, but Ebana shook him off.
'You know I took care of them. Did I not conceal them and have them taken to Thebes? The old king never found their bodies, did he? I tried, Ebana.'
'Did you?'
Meren met his cousin's gaze. For a moment he glimpsed the old Ebana, his friend and companion, the one who had studied with him, hunted with him, sailed with him. Then the pit of distrust and old hurts opened between them again. Meren subdued the pain of loss he always felt during one of these confrontations. Ebana chose to live in a netherworld of timeless grief and hatred. He couldn't make his cousin whole again.
'Leave it,' Meren said softly. 'Leave it before it destroys you.' Ebana said nothing, and Meren veered away from the matter, glancing over his cousin's shoulder in the direction of the palace. 'Difficult as it is to believe, I've other tasks of greater importance than this accident. However, as a favor to Maya, I'm sending Kysen to inquire into the happenings at the god's gate.'
Ebana looked over his shoulder to watch Kysen's approach. 'Ah, your peasant son. Have you no seed left in your loins, that you have to adopt the spawn of a commoner?'
Meren stepped close to Ebana. 'Shut your teeth, cousin, or I'll reach down your throat, pull your spine out, and make you eat it.'
Moving back, he smiled sweetly at Ebana before welcoming Kysen. He heard Ebana curse him, but by the time Kysen greeted him, his usual mask of unconcern had settled over his features. With Ebana lurking beside him, he couldn't warn Kysen of the significance of this death. He could only hope that Ky had learned enough to recognize danger without help.
Kysen approached the statue of the king before the gate of Amun, his head throbbing from a night spent drinking beer and losing wagers at games of senet to Tanefer, Ahiram, and several other friends. He should have looked at a calendar this morning, for surely today was a day of misfortune for him. He knew his eyes were red- rimmed. His head felt like it had been filled to bursting with swamp water. And now he had to spend the day with his father's serpent of a cousin.
The noise of the temple aggravated his pain, for the house of Amun was more a city within a city, its great walls enclosing not only the home of the god but lesser shrines, the House of Life, workshops, a treasury, libraries, the high priest's residence, and service buildings. In addition there was a sacred lake, and every building contained its own staff of busy priests, servants, slaves, and sometimes priestesses.
Blinking against the sun's glare, he shaded his eyes and tried not to kick up dust as he walked. Something was wrong. Ordinarily the death of a lowly pure one wouldn't concern the great Servant of the God, Ebana.
Neither would it have attracted his father's attention. Yet both men had been reserved as they gave him the task of investigating the accident.
Meren rarely spoke of Ebana. His silence hadn't kept Kysen from recognizing the violence of whatever secret lay between the two men. Nor had it disguised the place Ebana still held in Meren's affection. Few had such a claim on his father. Kysen had learned long ago that Meren guarded his ka against deep attachments outside the family. He suspected the reasons lay in too many losses-father, mother, a beloved wife and infant son, comrades in warfare.
The sun was rising high above the walls of the temple now, glinting off the gold-and-silver inlay of the god's gate. The light sent jabs of pain spiking behind Kysen's eyes. He squinted and stepped into the shadow cast by the statue of pharaoh. Workmen crawled over the great stone figure, climbing the scaffolding, carrying baskets of tools and waste flakes.
Kysen stopped beside the base and studied the ground. 'You let them move the body? Where is it, and where was it found? Gods, they've tramped all around here.'
Ebana rounded on him.
'Don't address me as if I were a fruit seller, boy. Surely Meren has beaten some civilized behavior into you by now.'
A white-hot poker drilled its way through Kysen's skull, and he felt his cheeks burn. Ebana always managed to make him feel like fish dung, but he'd learned a little from watching his father.
He inclined his head at Ebana and said, 'I was abrupt. However, I doubt anyone could rid me of my plain blood, adopted cousin.' He paused to lift his head and stare dagger-straight at Ebana. 'It sometimes makes me- unpredictable-to those whose raising was softer.'
'By Amun's crown, your blood may be plain, but you've acquired the clever tongue and slippery wit of your second father.'
Ebana turned to point at a dusty spot near the base of a ladder that scaled the statue. 'He fell from the top of the scaffolding. There.'
Kysen knelt and brushed dust and flakes of stone away to reveal dried blood, a few dark hairs embedded in it. Standing, he looked across the flagstones, then up the ladder, then back at the blood. All at once, he looked around, scooped up a heavy mallet from a basket of tools, and began scaling the ladder.
'What are you doing?'
He ignored the impatience in Ebana's voice. Reaching the top of the ladder, he mounted the platform. All work on the statue stopped. Two artisans on the scaffold stared at him as he turned to look down at Ebana. More stoneworkers, apprentices, and laborers stared up at him from the ground.
'You'd better stand back, O Servant of the God.'
He didn't wait. Stretching out, he dropped the mallet. The tool plummeted to land almost directly below the ladder.
Kysen stared at it, then muttered. 'A man's weight. He trips, falls, tries to grab the ladder and misses.
