‘Are you sure? They were loyal servants of the old king, but they were also your children.’
Ipuky looked at him with hatred. ‘They are dead to me. I do not even acknowledge them as my own.’
‘What is in his heart?’ Huy asked as they left. They had seen little of the house apart from a gloomy garden and a long corridor which led from the entrance hall to the room in which they had been received. All the doors off it had been closed, and the only light came from the open archways at its beginning and end.
‘Nothing. Stones,’ Taheb answered. Her voice was weary. ‘It is a miracle a man like that has any children at all.’ Taheb smiled thinly. ‘You are wrong. Look at how he described his wife.’
‘What?’
‘She didn’t leave him because his star had fallen; she knew well enough that he was the kind of man who’d recover. But the collapse of the City of the Horizon gave her the chance to escape. He would never have let her go if he hadn’t been distracted by his own interests. His second marriage is a marriage of conformity. Its children are the children of duty.’
‘How do you know?’
‘Ipuky’s new Chief Wife is the daughter of a colleague of his. She is fifteen years his junior, and little more than a housekeeper and unpaid bedslave. She is a human letter of partnership between two businessmen. Iritnefert’s mother, if you can believe it, could make Ipuky burn.’
‘Why didn’t Iritnefert live with her?’
‘That was Ipuky’s way of punishing her. And torturing himself, I think. Iritnefert looked like her mother, had the same temperament. She was also the price her mother had to pay for her freedom.’ Taheb paused. ‘He was lying about the painting on the wall. That is a torture, too,’ she added. ‘Then why does he have it there?’
‘Ask the gods. They made us this way.’
‘Do you think he loved his sons?’
‘He only loved Iritnefert’s mother. That was all the love he had to give. To others, he would give something called love; but it was only a reward for loyalty.’
They were being carried along a man-made gorge – a yellow road of sandstone flags between two red cliffs of plastered wall which sloped inward at the top, towards the building they were encircling. On them, giant painted images of the gods walked in a stately procession. The stiff representations were new. Harsh and impersonal, they had no life in them. Huy looked at them. These were not gods with whom you could speak.
At the house of the Chief Scribe, Reni’s major domo was waiting at the gate to meet them. He guided them through a broad passageway flanked with heavy half-columns surmounted with lotus blooms, and protected by the couched forms of rams, Amun’s beast, in sculptures larger than life. They entered a large garden, which was protected from the heat by the umbrella of a huge and ancient vine, the shadow of whose leaves dappled the paved floor. From an intricate system of pipes, water flowed everywhere, in fountains and little artificial streams, irrigating a profusion of plants, set in the earth or clustered in countless pots, whose unaccustomed variety and colour dazzled the eye. The gabbling of the water mitigated the noise of the crickets. The cool of the garden greeted you as you went in with a breath as welcome as that of the north wind at the top of a house during the season of akhet.
As they approached, Reni rose from his seat at a table near the large rectangular pool which was the centrepiece of what – as Huy now saw it to be – was an unconventionally asymmetrical garden. The scribe was dressed in the white garb of mourning, and his lined face looked worn. His own hair was combed out over his shoulders, and for make-up he had used only the faintest trace of kohl. He was pale, but his careworn expression could not disguise the malice in his eyes.
There was cunning in the face, too. Huy could not guess by what means Reni had saved himself and his family from the debacle that followed Akhenaten’s fall; but he knew many good men whose ruin had been the price the scribe had paid to be sitting here now, and the thought tempered his sympathy. He looked around for Reni’s wife – the mother of Neferukhebit – wondering if she was the source of the girl’s character.
If Reni remembered Huy from the past he made no reference to it, nor did his face betray the slightest sign of recognition. He motioned to the chairs around the low table, standing and positioning Taheb’s himself, as servants approached with wine jars and food: honey cakes, figs and heron’s eggs. Huy allowed a beaker to be filled so as not to transgress the etiquette of hospitality, but he did not propose to drink any wine. Ipuky might have saved himself, but at no one else’s expense. What was on Reni’s table was blood-food, and Huy would not touch it.
He tried not to let his feelings show in his eyes; but he sensed that the scribe knew them anyway. Neither of them, however, gave any sign, and indeed Reni seemed too preoccupied by his grief to give other matters much thought. But he was too intelligent not to have a conscience. Whether he was intelligent enough not to pay heed to it was another matter.
‘I hope you don’t think it strange of me to sit here,’ said Reni. ‘It was here that my middle daughter, Nephthys, found Nefi. I feel close to her here, as if perhaps her Khou were hovering near me.’ He smiled sadly, taking Taheb’s hand and squeezing it.
‘What do you think happened?’ asked Huy.
‘I don’t follow.’
‘Surely my question was clear?’
Reni’s brow darkened. ‘My daughter was killed, here, in my own garden. No one can find out how, or why. That is what happened.’
‘And that is all you can tell me?’
‘Do you think I have time to play games? If there were more, I’d have told the Medjays.’
‘Do you remember me from the City of the Horizon?’ Huy asked.
‘Yes, I do. You are working for Kenamun now?’ replied Reni, mildly.
‘In this matter.’
‘Kenamun and I know each other well, despite our differences in the past. Nowadays, we visit each other’s houses,’ Reni continued, in the same mild tone.
Huy registered the threat, and Reni saw that he had, before turning to Taheb, stroking her hand as he spoke. ‘Nephthys found Nefi’s body early, when she returned from the house of her husband-to-be. My sons were not yet back. The gates were still open, but there were servants about.’
‘Were there any in the garden?’ asked Taheb, wishing she could draw her hand away. There was something reptilian about the old man’s grip.
‘It is unlikely. For most of them the day’s duties were over.’
‘So it was unguarded.’
Reni shrugged slightly. ‘Taheb, my dear, I have a gatekeeper, and this house is within the palace compound. Besides, there had been one killing. No one had any reason to suspect a second.’
‘But you knew that Surere had escaped. That he was in the capital,’ said Huy.
Reni looked at Huy in contempt. ‘The Medjay captain asked me that too, and I give you the same answer: how would an escaped convict find his way into the compound? All the gates are guarded. Even you and people like you have to have special permission to enter.’ He turned away with a dismissive, impatient gesture.
‘Do you have your own men working on this?’ asked Taheb.
Reni looked across at her. ‘Ipuky wanted me to join forces with him, but I decided to leave matters in the hands of the authorities. I would not know what orders to give my men. But my sons…I cannot answer for them.’
‘How did they react?’ asked Huy, remembering what he already knew about this.
‘The older boy is angry – but then, Ankhu is a man of action. He never learnt his letters properly, to my shame, and now he talks of the army. He hunts with the young king, so no doubt some sort of career is assured him.’ Reni had not changed, thought Huy, remembering the oily modesty with which, even in the old days, he had scored social points off colleagues who he knew could not compete. ‘Nebamun is more like me,’ continued the scribe complacently. ‘He controls his grief, turns it into a subject for contemplation. But I would not say he was beyond revenge.’