Nevertheless, he felt for the Clerk, wearily rubbing his temples and feeling the strain of this terrible heatwave.
Poor overworked sod hadn't even written down the prisoner's name.
To the north and west, rain continued to lash at the Cradle of Ra, flattening the remaining unharvested barley and swelling the apples and the berries and the pears. Seth, dry inside his cave, had almost finished bandaging Donata's corpse, only the neck and head remained. Ideally, he would have had the bodies professionally embalmed, but the logistics of arranging that were far too complex. For a start, he'd have had to travel to Egypt and that was out of the question, and in any case, even if, by some remarkable coincidence, he had found an embalmer locally, he'd have had to keep the man prisoner in this cave while the repellent business was being conducted.
Impossible. Not only would the fellow be permanently trying to attract attention, he'd have the use of a very sharp knife!
And besides, Seth leaned back to admire his handiwork, he was not sure he'd want to know about brains hooked out through the nose, organs removed through the flank. Messy. Unnecessary. The job for a butcher, and for heaven's sake, this cave was no slaughterhouse! His disciples took their own lives, quietly and willingly, the decision entirely theirs. Because not everyone, he acknowledged impartially, would want to be deified, to sit at Seth's Holy Table for eternity. He wouldn't force them, no, no, no, but my word, he had chosen wisely. All six had favoured the path to blessedness, and Seth promised each and every one that they would not regret their decision in the afterlife.
Nevertheless, the smell in the cave was fast becoming intolerable.
He secured the last of Donata's bandages and replaced the heavy cow mask. There were, he knew, other ways of preserving the body, which did not require professional help. One could, for instance, inject the corpse with oil of cedar through the anus and insert a bung. So powerful is the action of the oil, that it liquefies the soft internal organs, but while Seth did not believe himself squeamish, there was no way he could bring himself to remove that loathsome plug and then dispose of the contents.
Alternatively, he could do what the poor settle for in Egypt, simply pickle intact bodies in a bath of natron. Only how would he get his hands on the substance? So much salt would attract attention.
His only solution was to move fast.
The rain hammered down, channelling itself into waterfalls on the rocks, as Seth stood naked in the doorway of his cave. The same cave which had kept the ancient Etruscans dry all those centuries ago and whose paintings still survived in brilliant colour on the walls. Leopards. Lions. Dancers. As grand an entrance to the underworld as Seth could wish for.
He stood there, watching the night. The realm of darkness over which he was Lord and Master. Seth, the Sorcerer, the Measurer of Time. To be fair, he had no real complaints at the speed at which his project was forging ahead. Six down. One earmarked. No problem. Three more was all he required, maybe two, because one of the girls in the laundry was starting to look as though she could be talked into something. Also, he had studied carefully the new arrivals Zer fetched in today. Three of those four recruits had been female — and one of those, Seth reflected happily, was just up his street.
In the meantime, though, he must return to the commune. He'd be missed if he didn't leave now.
But the next time he visited his cave, he resolved to bring herbs to hang here — basil, balm, oregano — to mask the stench, while he bandaged Berenice.
The first real flutterings of panic began to beat inside Claudia's breast. Supper, including the palm wine, had come and gone, and still she had not caught a glimpse of Flavia. Or Flea, for that matter. In fact, Flea, in particular, because the thief would know how to move around unseen and two pairs of eyes are always better than one. The reward for helping would be that Flea could keep Doodlebug, but even the puppy was nowhere to be seen.
The commune was carried along on its own sinister current.
Claudia was being swept along with it.
Resistance was useless. She had tried a direct assault, the
I'm-trying-to-find-my-friend-Flavia routine, only to have it quickly pointed out that no one used their old Roman names here and they were very sorry, unless she could tell them her friend's Egyptian name… and of course she could not. The fact that Flavia was a recent arrival counted for bugger all, as well. Immediately a newcomer arrived at the commune, she was Egyptianised in dress and hair and face paint. Claudia wasn't too sure that Egyptian women wore their hair in buns, but then again, there wasn't much about this place which was genuinely Egyptian when you boiled it down! This was Roman life pasted over with a veneer of the exotic. Nothing threatening, nothing too alien, just Egypt sanitised and repackaged and sold back to them as sun worship. This commune was nothing but a token gesture.
Nevertheless, the machine was brutally efficient. New members arrived and were assimilated instantly.
For her part, Claudia had been adopted by Mercy's 'cell', an ominous title for an innocuous group comprising women aged between sixteen to sixty in age, and in mentality between nought and nil. Sitting with them over supper, she realised their brains were nothing more than sponges which had soaked up Mentu's teachings and Mentu's rites and rituals, with the result that what seeped out was simply a re-hash of Mentu's mindless drivel.
Indoctrination, brainwashing, call it what you like (Mentu, incidentally, called it 'instruction'), had purged them of whatever demons they'd carried on their backs before they came, so that now they were so clean of their old life that they almost squeaked, and with all this holiness and blessedness and paths to righteousness dripping off their tongues, Claudia feared she might be physically sick.
The cells were (predictably) ten apiece, Claudia filled Berenice's place, and that made a good starting point. She might be able to track Flavia that way, because she was also recently arrived and was bound to have filled a vacancy. Were Claudia to establish who had disappeared before Berenice, she might hit home.
'Oh, that was Donata,' Mercy said, topping up the palm wine. 'Odd creature, thought herself a cut above the rest of us and very conscious of her squint.'
A ripple of muted giggles rang round the cell, suggesting that Donata had had good reason to be sensitive. But when Claudia tracked down Donata's cell, she found that her place had been taken by Zer's acolyte from Rome who had arrived with her today, and that was depressing, because she was beginning to run out of leads.
Leads!
Knocking back a shot of palm wine, she set off for the kitchens. Where else would a young puppy aim for?
'Sister.' The greeting was gravelly and low, and not quite as touchy-feely-friendly as the voices in the refectory. Anywhere else, and you might think it was a warning.
Claudia turned a beaming smile upon the voice. Geb, who else, she thought, remembering Mercy's description: a Barbary ape on two legs. The description was apt, too. He had it on his chest, and he had it on his back, and he had it in great tufts underneath his arms. Even the hair on his head, damp and plastered down, was straggly, having grown beyond its natural length. Claudia suppressed the shudder which threatened to engulf her. Civilised men razored off their body hair, kept their skin supple and oiled. But the fact that Geb was hairy (how could one man grow so much fur, did he feed it?) didn't necessarily mark him down as a wife-beater. Mercy would be prejudiced. And the reason Claudia could see so much of his body was that at the moment he was stripped to the waist while a second man with blue-black, slicked-down hair wrapped a bandage round his torso with practised fingers.