‘You have a choice. There is always a choice.’
I embraced her, felt her shaking, and tried to soothe her. She calmed herself, and gently placed her hands on my face.
‘I never know, every morning, whether this is the last time I will see you. So I memorize your face. I know it so well, now, that I could carry it perfectly to my grave.’
‘Let’s not talk about graves. Let’s talk about what we’ll do with the Lord’s gift I will receive when I solve this mystery and become the most famous detective in the city.’
She smiled at last. ‘Some gift would be welcome. You haven’t been paid for months.’
The economy is a mess, the harvests have been poor for several years running, there are even reports of looting; and the waves of immigration from beyond our northern and southern borders, drawn by the promises of the great new constructions, have created a rootless and hopeless unemployed constituency with nothing to lose. Grain is scarce, they say, even in the royal granaries. No-one has been paid. It is the talk of the town. It has made everyone even more anxious. Everyone has mouths to feed. People fear the shortages. They wonder when they will be forced to barter their good city furniture on the black economy for a side of meat and a basket of vegetables from the countryside.
‘I can take care of myself. And every moment I will be thinking only of coming back to you. I promise.’
She nodded, and wiped her eyes on her sleeve.
‘I must say farewell to the children.’
‘You’re leaving
‘I must.’
She turned away from me.
As I came into their room, the girls stopped what they were doing. Sekhmet looked up at me from her scroll. Her topaz eyes under her black fringe. A hard choice between reading the next words of her story and a proper greeting. I stood her on a chair and put our faces together. I smelled the familiar sweet milkiness of her breath. She draped her weightless arms around my neck.
‘I have to go away for a while. Work. Will you look after your mother and your sisters for me until I come home?’
She nodded, and whispered seriously into my ear that she would, that she loved me and would think of me every day.
‘Write me a letter,’ I asked.
She nodded again. My little sage. She is self-conscious this year: her voice has a new and careful refinement in it.
Next, Thuyu, grinning, her teeth all there now, making a silly face. She wanted to bite my nose, and I let her. ‘Have fun!’ she yelled, and dropped to the floor.
Nedjmet, the baby, ‘the sweet one’ as we call her, hopefully; a determined creature, her absoluteness so shockingly like mine. Her night weeping has given way to an utterly serious consideration of the world around her. I can no longer fool her at breakfast, when I try to persuade her a sweet roll is fresh when it is left over from yesterday’s bake.
And lastly my Tanefert, my heart, with your hair the black of a moonless night, and your strong nose and long eyes. Forgive me for leaving you. If I have done nothing else with my life I have at least made this family. My bright girls. May they be given back to me at the end of this story. I will lay anything on the libation table for this. One knows the things one loves when one must leave them.
As is my habit and working method, I will keep a journal through the time to come. I shall record at the end of each day or night what I know I know, and also what I do not. I shall record clues and questions and conundrums and enigmas. I shall write what I please and what I think, not what I ought to write. In case something happens to me, perhaps this journal may survive as a testament, and return to its home like a lost dog. And perhaps the mystery will unfold from the bits and pieces, the shards and apparent irrelevances, the dreams and chances and impossibilities that make up the evidence and the history of a crime, into a successful, well-ordered and, who knows, sensible, logical, brilliantly deduced conclusion. But it would not be true. In my experience, things do not add up so easily. Things are, in my experience, a mess. So in this journal I will record the digressions, the thoughts that do not fit, the unrefined, the nonsensical and the inscrutable. And see what they tell me. And see if, from the broken evidence (for I normally deal in what is unredeemable), the outline of truth will emerge.
And then I did the hardest thing I have ever done. Dressed in my finest linens, and with my authorizations in my case, I made a brief libation to the household god. I prayed, with unusual sincerity (for he knows I do not believe in him), for his protection, and for the protection of my family. Then I embraced my girls, kissed Tanefert, who touched my face with her hands, put my feet into my old leather sandals and, with shaking hands, closed the door on my home and my life. I walked away towards a future where nothing was certain, everything at risk. And I am ashamed to write here that I felt more alive than ever, even though my heart was broken glass in my chest.
2
Great Thebes, your lights and shadows, your corrupt businesses and your chattering parties, your shops and your luxuries; your rotten, squalid quarters and your youthful, fashionable beauties; your crimes and miseries and murders. I never know whether I hate or love you. But at least I know you. Above the low rooftops of my neighbourhood I can see the blue, gold, red and green of the temple facades, their colonnades and pylons standing to the sun. The holy sycamore groves around them like dark green candles. Orchards and hidden gardens. And next to them rubbish in piles between dark shacks, and in dangerous passageways. Behind the costly villas and great palaces and temples lie the shanties made from the cast-offs and detritus of the rich where the multitudes scrape meagre livings. The niches of the household gods, each dish with its daily offering. They say there are more gods than mortals in the city, yet I have never seen one that was not shaped from the materials of this world. No, I do not hold with gods. They are selfish, in their temples and heavens. They have too much to answer for, in their relish of our sufferings and misfortunes, and their neglect of the petitions of our hearts. But this is sacrilege, and I must silence my thought-although I will write it here, and who reads this must honour my stupid trust.
I walked down the streets towards the docks, beneath the dusty white awnings that protect us from the noon sun. I saw the local kids running along the rooftops, shouting and darting between the piles of drying crops and fruit, jostling the cages of birds causing tiny uproars of shrieks and songs, jumping over the afternoon sleepers and leaping the crazy gaps between the buildings. I passed by the stalls piled with colourful produce and walked down the Alley of Fruit and then into the shadowy passages under the patterned awnings where the expensive shops sell rare clever monkeys, giraffe skins, ostrich eggs and tusks engraved with prayers. The whole world brings its tributes and its wonders to us: the remarkable fruits of its endless labours are presented at our doors. Or, at least, the doors of those who do not have to wait so many months for their gift of pay (note to self: reapply to treasurer for unpaid salary gifts).
I prefer this great chaos of the living streets to the hushed and ordered temples, courts and sanctuaries of the gods and the hierarchies of the Priests. I prefer noise and mess and dirt, even the workers’ suburbs in the east, and the smelly pig yards, and the dogs on chains in the miserable dark hovels these people must call home. Those are the places we enter with the caution of experience, knowing we are hated and in danger. The law of the Medjay, whose authority to maintain order stretches through all the Provinces of the Two Lands, has no power there, although few of us would admit it. When we approach, kites, their stretched canvases painted with the eyes of angry gods, rise, dart and swoop in the sky, to warn of our approach. But then I think our law has no sway in the palaces and temples either. They too have their definitive powers. I will no doubt find this where I am bound.
I arrived, finally, at the docks, and found among the thousands of vessels the boat which was to carry me on the first stage of this journey. I was the last to board, and as soon as I was installed the sailors pushed off, the oars came out, and we began to merge into the life of the Great River, which now spread out wide with all its traffic of people and goods, as far as the eye can travel to the horizon where the Black Land meets the Red and holds it back for all time.
