City of the Dead

touched their faces.
    ‘Will you tell me now what Horaha believed happened?’ Huy asked quietly, hoping he was not pushing too fast or too soon.
    ‘Yes.’ She sighed again, sipping the wine and drawing her legs up, encircling her knees with her arms, it is certain that the king died because of a blow to the head; but if he had been thrown from the chariot there would have been bruises on other parts of his body. My father thought that the only other explanation was that he might have been thrown clear and struck his head on a rock.’
    ‘No,’ said Huy. ‘There are no rocks. And the king could not have been thrown clear, because he would have had one foot in the floorstrap of the chariot.’
    Senseneb said, ‘Then he was killed deliberately.’
    ‘Yes.’
    ‘That is what my father had begun to think.’
    ‘I see.’
    ‘Who did it?’
    ‘I do not know.’
    ‘Was it Horemheb?’
    Huy sighed. ‘Or Ay.’
    ‘But Ay has hired you to find out the truth, hasn’t he?’
    Huy smiled. ‘You think as an antelope runs.’
    ‘What will you do with what you know?’
    Huy was silent.
    ‘But you must tell Ay,’ continued Senseneb. ‘He must be impatient for news from you.’
    ‘I am expecting his messenger to come today.’ Huy drank a cup of wine, and squinted up through the leaves at the sun.
    ‘He would reward you well.’
    ‘That is true. But then I would be in his debt.’
    Senseneb looked at him. He was not the kind of man whom she would have thought attractive, but the eyes carried the face. 5he wanted to tell him about herself, to explain why she had been unfaithful to her husband, to tell him how certain she was that she could bear children. But why did she want to?
    ‘Do you think your father was killed because of what he believed?’
    ‘Yes,’ she replied quietly.
    ‘Who was with him at the Oblation to Hapy?’
    She looked at him. ‘His colleague Merinakhte, and Senefer, the High Priest of Amun. Horemheb and Ay, and the priests of Mut and Khons; and Horemheb’s chief of police, Kenamun.’

    After he had left her and made his way home again to await Ay’s messenger, Huy thought about his own powerlessness to stop a chain of events which would lead to more deaths within the next days, or weeks at the latest. He was sure that, short of a miracle, a bloodbath would follow the burial of the king, and he knew that unless he acted very quickly, the net gathering round the queen would have so tightened that he would not be able to release her from it. He wondered what secret guard had been placed on her already; then he considered that perhaps it was too soon. The general might feel confident enough not to place a guard on her. For after all, what could she do to him?
    Any last doubt about who was responsible for the king’s death had vanished with Senseneb’s news that Kenamun had been near her father close to the time of his death, despite the fact that Horemheb liked to show off his control of the powerful police at any and every public occasion — especially the corps now known in the city as the Black Medjays, created by Horemheb in the national interest, as e Put it, but answerable only to him. The warning function Horaha’s demise was clearer than ever.

    The Problem which faced Huy was how much to tell Ay. He had looked at what he had learned, and he knew that in Ay’s hands, it could be enough to bring Horemheb down. He acknowledged to himself that he was now in water so deep that his feet no longer touched the bottom. He was unsure what beasts might be swimming below the muddy surface, ready to seize his legs and drag him under. Ay had his own ambitions, and Huy was wary of underestimating so adept a survivor.
    There was no way of avoiding a report to the Master of Horse. As the time for his interview with the old man approached, he went over the ground he had covered. What could he say, and what could he leave out? It seemed to him that he had three aims to serve: what was best for Queen Ankhsenpaamun; what was best for his own survival; and finally, what was best for the country.
    The Black Land was in a deep crisis. Critically weakened by Akhenaten’s neglect of its northern empire, now lost, the country was threatened by warring Syrian tribes and by the Hittites, now pressing forward from the north, from the lands beyond the Great Green. The army was concentrated in the Delta, since to the south the peoples of Napata and Meroe had remained loyal, taking no advantage of the