Kenamun sighed, and took a small gadget from the table he stood at: two flat pieces of wood joined by thin wire, and a stick. He wrapped the wire under Nehesy’s left knee and twisted it tight with the stick until blood and muscle burst out and the wire grated on bone. Nehesy screamed with a violence and at a volume which made even the hard skulls of the young torturers crawl.
‘Save yourself,’ Kenamun said softly, after the scream had subsided into a sobbing whimper. ‘Bravery never mattered, never changed anything. Why give yourself all this grief?’
Nehesy spoke at last, bringing his torturer into focus. ‘May Set shit in your mouth.’
Kenamun blinked once. Perhaps the man really knew nothing. But no, that could not be. He was an experienced huntsman, he had been with the king on the last expedition. He was bound to have had suspicions. Inwardly, the police chief cursed. They had been too confident, too arrogant.
‘He can’t take any more now,’ he said. ‘Give him an hour.’ He looked at Nehesy. ‘Show some sense then, or we’ll start on your teeth. Then your other eye. Then your prick. Think about it.’
‘Shall we clean him up?’ asked one of the thugs as he turned to go. Was he imagining more faintheartedness?
‘No,’ said Kenamun.
EIGHT
‘Why?’ Ineny drank fastidiously from his cup of pomegranate wine. ‘Because I don’t think he will have the courage to do anything in the end. That is why.’
Huy, sitting across from him, looked out to where the River had turned a deeper shade of red. The flood was coming. Soon it would be upon them. The chroniclers and measurers of the inundation predicted a strong rise in the water level this year. There would be a good crop later. Peasants talked of the departed pharaoh’s last gift to his people. But in the city the talk was of his successor. Too much time had passed without a nomination, though that morning the official inquiry into Tutankhamun’s death had at last come up with its unsurprising finding: death by misadventure.
‘People are becoming impatient,’ continued Ineny. if Ay does not move soon he will lose initiative and perhaps the chance to move at all.’
‘It is better to prepare your ground before you move, to be certain that your footing will be sure.’
‘Oh, of course,’ said Ineny sarcastically. Huy returned his smile. They had met by chance in the street that afternoon, and Ineny had invited him to share a bottle. It had been an excuse for two off-duty employees to swap opinions about their master. Ineny had thrown off all reserve, and now, relaxed, chatting, he was a different person. At first it had been Huy who had held up his guard, since a chance meeting this type very often turned out to be arranged; but if it had been Ineny’s intention to pump him, then either he was very bad at it or he had been sidetracked by his own preoccupations, because nothing had been demanded of Huy other than polite interjections and the occasional bland statement, to show that he was paying attention.
Ineny was principally affected by the consideration that he had thrown in his lot with the wrong man. Huy sought to reassure him and retain his trust without appearing to be too anxious to do so. Ineny was in on too many of Huy’s secrets to be treated off-handedly.
‘I always wondered if he’d have the courage to stand up to Horemheb,’ he was saying mournfully. ‘Now I’m proved right. But it’s too late for me to change sides. I’m a marked man.’
‘Do you really want to?’
‘I want to get on. That means following the right leader.’
‘I wouldn’t give up Ay yet.’
Ineny looked at him, and drank some more wine.
‘I’ve been with him since he returned to the Southern Capital. He was always so hungry for power – he managed his life so well. But now that the Golden Chair is within his grasp, he hesitates.’
‘Gathering strength before he jumps.’
‘Do you think so?’ Ineny raised his eyebrows hopefully just as Huy was beginning to think that he had thrown in one platitude too many. But for Huy there was nothing disappointing in Ay’s caution. It was to his caution that Huy owed his survival. However, he was not going to spell that out for Ineny. He would be interested to see which way the little man would jump. Ineny was a small piece on the senet board; but he was in an important position.
Huy could not afford to relax. He knew the real reason for Ay’s hesitation – Ineny had not been present for all of his own interview with the old Master of Horse – and he also knew that Ay’s patience would run out as soon as he sensed the moment to strike was passing. Huy would have to give Ay all the information he had within the next two days. To do that and guarantee the safety of the queen would require quick thinking.
‘Has Ay asked after me since our last meeting?’
‘No. But don’t think for a moment that he has forgotten you.’ Ineny smiled. ‘I admire you, Huy. All this time we have been talking I find that I’ve opened my soul to you – such as it is. And you manage to be a pleasant companion, cordial, even warm – and yet at the end of it I know not one grain more about you than I did to begin with.’
‘You would make a poor spy, Ineny.’
‘My wits have not disappointed me so far.’
‘Stay with Ay. It would be foolish to make more enemies than you need to at a time like this.’
‘I do not ask your advice.’
‘Then why have you told me all this?’
‘What is it you know, Huy?’
‘Very little.’ Huy managed to remain close-faced. But Ineny’s restlessness worried him. To take the man into his confidence demanded too great a risk for him to take now. If it turned out later that he regretted his caution, he would accept what the gods arranged. In the meantime Huy would need all the help he could get from the one person he had decided he could trust without any reserve: Nehesy. Senseneb too, perhaps; but she knew enough about medicine to procure and administer poison, and she would not be the first woman to use sex to turn a potential enemy’s judgement. Huy had not forgotten Merinakhte, the young doctor who had climbed as high as he could and whose eye would now be on his next goal – Horaha’s position. Had he enlisted Senseneb’s help to get it?
He shook himself like a dog to cleanse his heart. It was surely not good, not healthy, to see the dark side of everything Ra sent.
For Ay, it was a difficult interview. He had rehearsed it in his heart many times before facing it in reality, and now had to acknowledge that reality has the disadvantage of having no script.
The step he was attempting to take was one which he had considered at length, and he had discussed it with his Chief Wife. Tey had acquiesced, but with reserve, and Ay was left with the feeling that although she had always supported him in his ambitions, she drew the line at agreeing to give up her primacy as a stepping stone. Still, the speed with which Ankhsenpaamun had put her plan to marry the Hittite prince into action had alarmed him. If Ineny had not got wind of it through the royal body servant he slept with, Prince Zannanzash might be in the Southern Capital even now, sending messages about his safe arrival back to his ever more powerful father. An accidental death here would have been out of the question, and it would not have been long before not only he, but Horemheb, would have felt the earth open beneath them.
For a while he had hesitated, hardly daring to believe that Horemheb’s spies had not got wind of the queen’s plot too -and then when he was sure, he had hesitated again; but finally he had given the order to have Zannanzash killed, because Horemheb’s downfall would not necessarily have ensured his own survival; and with Zannanzash enthroned, Ay’s own hope of the Golden Chair would vanish forever.
But the incident had shown him how essential it was for him to strengthen his links with the royal family. It was his own lowly birth which had failed to secure him the succession when Akhenaten had died. He would not make the mistake of overlooking that again. He did not have the time! Age hung like a clinging ape around his shoulders, weighing him down, and no amount of make-up, exercise or a frugal diet could keep the lines from the neck, the forehead and the elbows, or could prevent the skin from sagging at the jowls and losing its elasticity on the hands, or stop the biceps from turning into loose, flabby folds. Ay had his hair dyed, and under his robe he wore a tight linen bandage to hold in his shocking balloon of a stomach, which would not decrease even though he only ate one small meal of rice and figs a day, and drank nothing but water.