She watched as if dreaming as he untied his kilt, all he was wearing, and let it fall to the warm ground beneath them. She looked between his legs, but all was shadow there until he turned towards her and she saw the snake’s head loom. Her first sensation was of unfocused disappointment. It was not as large or as upright as the one in the Book of Instruction.
‘Now you.’
Dutifully, even hastily, she pulled the strap down over her left arm and stepped out of her dress. She regretted that it was too dark for him to see how beautiful she had tried to make herself, even using malachite as well as the usual galena. She let the dress fall and took a shy step towards him. He put out a hand and caressed her hair, her head, with tenderness and, she thought, curious detachment. But she knew nothing of these things.
Then he was closer. There was the warm, acrid male smell of his body, and his left arm was round her, stronger than she thought, holding her against him. Her face was against his chest. Clumsily, for he was holding her too tightly for her to manoeuvre, she kissed him there, but he twisted away, bruising her lips and leaving her confused and rejected. What had she done wrong?
‘Teach me,’ she said, raising her head to look at him.
He did not look into her eyes. He was steadying her with his left arm, fumbling with something in his right hand. She was held so tightly now that she could not struggle. Then at last his lips descended on hers and she closed her eyes.
The pain which followed immediately was so sudden and so extreme that it went beyond feeling. She opened her eyes but he kept his arm tightly round her, his lips pressed on hers, so she could not move. But the will do to so did not last. What seemed an age was only seconds, fractions of seconds, before her open eyes no longer responded to the light they received. The side of his face became a range of grey hills towards which she was riding, on some animal whose hoofs did not touch the ground. Then the hills merged into the dark sky behind them, and all was grey, but it was not the hoped-for grey which is the beginning of dawn. It was a grey that went deeper, and deeper, into night.
SIX
They took the brain from her head with long hooks, delicately drawing the tissue out through her nostrils, and discarding it in a small brazier of red-hot charcoal. The brain was of no importance. Then they used water mixed with vinegar in a syringe to rinse the cavity clear, sitting her up so that the residue could run out through her nose. Afterwards, they carefully cleaned her face before the flies could settle.
The vital organs, the stomach, the intestines, the lungs and the liver, were withdrawn carefully and whole. The embalmers laid her flat on a long wooden table, and one of them, the master, took a sharp flint knife to make a long incision low down in her side. Probing with his narrow hands he located the organs he sought, and, using another slender knife, dislodged and withdrew them, handing them to his assistant, who placed them in bronze trays and took them to another table where he covered them with natron salt, to dry and preserve them ready for the four jars which would stand in a chest at the head of the coffin. Their eternal resting place.
Once he had cleared the body, the master embalmer rinsed it through, first with palm wine, and then with a solution of coriander. He would now dry it in natron, before packing the cavities he had made with linen treated with myrrh and cassia; the nostrils and eyes plugged with linen soaked in resin, and the hair dressed with as much care as for attendance at a royal wedding.
The master embalmer had seven bodies laid out in various stages of the seventy-day preparation for eternity, and the open-ended hall where he worked was crowded. He had employed two extra assistants to keep the flies at bay, and he found he had to force himself not to hurry his craft, not to cut corners. His clients were rich and demanding, and all the more likely to notice a botched job. His hall was built on a north-to-south axis, so that the wind blew through it constantly, keeping the air fresh; but the odours of the spices and scented oils he used were the only ones a visitor might smell. All moisture was drawn out of the dead before they could rot.
It had taken a full day for Merymose to obtain permission for Huy to visit the embalmer. By the time he’d got it, the two dead girls the scribe wanted to see had been joined by this third. Her body had been found the morning before by the side of the pool in the little park on the south side of the royal compound. Now, Huy was visiting the embalmer alone, barely repressing his fury at the delay, but for which a girl’s life might have been saved. Inwardly, too, he cursed the arrogance of the latest victim’s father. Above all he turned his anger towards Kenamun, who, on grounds of security, had forbidden Huy to visit the scene of the third murder when it came to light, where he might have had a chance at last of studying the circumstances of death.
Merymose had already seen the body, but now he had been deputed by an increasingly impatient Kenamun to visit the victim’s parents. The father was a general, a commander of cavalry, and the mother a daughter of the army’s chief supplier of salt. The father had not applied for a Medjay to guard his house, giving as his reason that he had efficient men of his own to do the job.
‘She was called Mertseger,’ the embalmer told Huy as he stood looking down at her. ‘She looks terrible now, but I’m going to put packing in the cheeks to fill them up again after I’ve dried her out. The loss of moisture makes the face cave in, look like a skull. But I’ll give her back her beauty.’
The cavity of her abdomen had dropped alarmingly with the removal of its contents. The dark incision running obliquely from just above her vagina seemed a grosser violation of her corpse than anything inflicted on her in life.
‘Did you notice anything, any wound?’
‘No. And she had never known a man. The skin is unbroken,’ he gestured professionally towards the vagina. ‘I don’t need a doctor to tell me that. Do you want to see?’
‘No.’
‘I’ll stitch it up when she has dried out. We seal all the openings to the body. It is an extra insurance against the maggots. Once the flies have laid their eggs on a body, there’s nothing we can do, so we get that seen to as quickly as possible.’
Huy turned to the two adjoining tables. On the one farthest away lay Iritnefert, her arms at her sides, held there stiffly, as if she wanted to deny the downward pull of the earth. Her head was back and her chin raised, resin plugging the eye sockets. An assistant was carefully applying gold leaf to it. The lack of eyes robbed the face of all the character it had had, of personality, of the vestige of life. Huy hoped that when he died it would be in the desert or on the river, so that the vultures or the crocodiles would take him. He did not like the idea of being closed in a black tomb, though he knew that it would be only his Sahu lying there.
Nevertheless he looked more closely at Iritnefert.
Nothing to tell now of the girl she had been. The nose, dried out, was pitifully thin and pinched. The cheeks, also awaiting padding, had vanished into the cavities of the skull. She looked like a leathery caricature of the old woman she might have become.
‘She’ll look as alive as you or me, once we’ve packed her and made up her face,’ the embalmer reassured him again. ‘Normally we don’t like people to see them at this stage. It’s better that way. It’s better for them to see their loved ones as they remember them.’
Huy looked at the man. They were about the same age, but the embalmer seemed older. His hands were soft and wrax-like from frequent washing. He was of medium height, and had regular, even features of the kind which are instantly forgettable. His dark face was framed by raven-black hair so perfectly cut that it barely changed its set as he moved. His expression was one of amused and slightly sinister detachment, which reminded Huy strangely of the young king’s. You could imagine Tutankhamun sparing a man on the point of execution, or ordering the death of thousands, without the slightest twitch of an eye muscle.