Flowers of Evil, page 10
“My sources say Har-em-heb.”
Hani set down his cup in surprise. “He must not know what sort of a corrupt specimen Mahu is. Otherwise, I can’t believe he’d bring him back. Har-em-heb is uprightness in the flesh.” The infantry general who had become a mentor to the little king had been a friend of Hani’s family for years. He had been a passionate partisan of the Hidden One in the dark days of Nefer-khepru-ra’s religious revolution.
Ptah-mes lifted his eyebrows cynically. He was too polite to eat while Hani sat before him without a setting, and his meat, wafting its delicious, complex perfume of coriander and cardamom, was growing cold in the plate.
Hani eyed it apologetically. “Please don’t let me keep you from your meal, my lord. I should be going. I’ll call on you at your office.”
But Ptah-mes waved him off and poured him some more wine. “We need to warn the ladies to be careful. If Mahu gets wind that they’re asking questions around the edge of a police investigation, he’ll be livid. It would give him the excuse he needs to do them harm.”
“I wish there were some way I could make them stop. But Neferet will do the opposite of anything I tell her. Besides, she’s a married woman. I don’t really have any authority over her anymore.”
“I suppose that should fall to me, then, but our agreement permits her to do as she likes without any commentary on my part.”
Hani thought that it was an interesting aspect of his friend’s character that despite his reputation at work—and among his children—as a demanding disciplinarian, he seemed uninterested in controlling his wives to the slightest degree. Both Neferet and her predecessor, Lady Apeny, were women of firm, independent will.
As if he’d read his friend’s mind, Ptah-mes said smoothly, “I respect your daughter’s intelligence, Hani. And her courage. Perhaps if we spoke to Lady Bener-ib, she might exercise a prudent influence over her.”
“If she’s not afraid to say anything. But it’s certainly worth a try. The challenge will be to catch her by herself.” The little physician was almost always to be found trailing Neferet, content to remain in her shadow.
Hani upended his cup and drained the last few drops of its content, then he rose. “I thank you for this exceptional wine, my lord. I’ll head home now and leave you to your dinner.”
“It’s always a pleasure, my friend.” Ptah-mes got to his feet and graciously accompanied Hani to the door.
As they approached the exit, a three-legged mongrel darted inside, nearly colliding with them, and hotfooted it into the house. Ptah-mes didn’t seem at all perturbed by this invasion of his domestic space. At Hani’s surprised look, he said with a wry twitch at the corner of his mouth, “One of your daughter’s charity cases.”
Hani had to smile. The disreputable-looking mutt certainly didn’t square with the orderly perfection of his friend’s ancestral mansion. He had seen Ptah-mes’s hunting dogs, and they were as elegant and purebred as their master. He wondered what they thought of this common new companion.
The men clasped forearms with affection, and Hani made his way into the cicada-blasted summer noon. Some distance down the street, he realized he’d forgotten to ask his question.
⸎
The next morning, the doctors arrived at the dispensary at the usual hour, accompanied by the children and their nurse. Neferet carried an enormous basket in her arms, the contents carefully hidden by a cloth. After feeding the resident animals and establishing the little ones in the shade of the courtyard to play, Neferet and Bener-ib, with Mut-tuy at their heels, opened up the house and prepared for the day. With a sense of defiant satisfaction, Neferet finally unveiled the basket’s contents, filling the room with the fragrance of toasted sedge nuts and honey. The others stared at her curiously.
“What are all those treats for?” Bener-ib asked.
“They’re to distribute to our patients for free. To make it worth their while to come to us. Don’t you think children are going to want to come back if they get sweets?”
“But how will they know about them? They have to come first, and nobody does,” Mut-tuy said, a sneer sitting ill on her girlish face.
“Because we’re going to go around the block and tell all our neighbors and give them a sample. I’ll bet Djed-har doesn’t do anything like this.”
Bener-ib nodded uncertainly.
“Besides,” Neferet added in a sinister voice, “we never did find out what Djed-har is telling people about us. Sit-amen will let us know if we ask her directly.”
“We don’t want to get him mad at us,” Bener-ib said.
“Oh yes, we do!” Mut-tuy cried, her eyes lighting up.
Neferet said dryly, “See here, my girl. Are you for or against this?”
“I’m for getting up Djed-har’s nose, the jackal turd.”
Neferet was amused and gratified by the girl’s warrior spirit, but Mut-tuy also needed to remember her place. “Let’s wait till you cut off your Haru-lock and grow your maiden braids before we send you into battle, eh? Right now, one of us is going to go door to door, hand out treats to the children, and talk to the parents if they’re people we know.”
“I’ll go,” Mut-tuy said. “They won’t be shy talking about you if neither of you is there.”
“I don’t think they’re likely to reveal anything at all to a child, my girl, and as long as you have the lock, you’re a child.”
“That’s not fair!”
“Life isn’t fair. The gods have their own rules. They just happen to have created you a mere thirteen years ago.”
Mut-tuy stomped out of the room, her face red as a pomegranate. From the former kitchen came sounds of rummaging then silence. A moment later, she reemerged, brandishing her braid, which she’d whacked off close to the scalp. Since the rest of her formerly shaven hair had grown out to about a fingernail’s length, she had a singularly scruffy appearance. A wild light of defiance glittered in her eye.
Neferet took in the sight, her jaw agape. Then she burst out laughing. It was so like something she would have done. “Bravo!” she cried despite herself.
Bener-ib looked horrified at first but then joined in the laughter. Such merriment didn’t please Mut-tuy, who glared at the two young women, her face aflame. “Well? I don’t have the braid anymore,” she said in a tone of challenge.
“You look like Faithful.” Neferet grinned. The old dog had stiff hair that stuck out in all directions. “I’m not sure you’re fit to be seen by anybody now.”
Mut-tuy cried in furious anguish, “But you said—”
“I’ll go around the neighborhood, and you can come with me—in a scarf. Ibet will man the dispensary. Does that suit everybody?”
The others agreed, and Neferet hoicked her basket and headed to the door. Bener-ib found a linen towel and tied it behind Mut-tuy’s nape so that the ends hung down her back. It was a look both men and women affected when doing a dusty job or one in the heat of the sun.
First off, they crossed the lane and stuck their heads in Sit-amen’s door. Nobody was home.
“She’s working in the dyery,” said Neferet. “I wonder where the children are.”
Around the corner of the house, the work yard stretched out within the same wall. Five men and women, the latter with their skirts hiked well up, were busy stirring fabric in plastered vats or treading it to keep it under the foul-smelling blue liquid. The odor of urine was almost too acrid to endure, mingled with the smells of the rotting plants that served as dyes.
Sit-amen sweated over a vat, moving the heavy, wet cloth gently around with a long pole. Her blue feet suggested she had already trod it. She looked up at the approach of the visitors, and a weary smile lit her face. Signaling to her husband, she laid down the pole and came to meet them at a distance from the workers, trailed by unpleasant smells.
“Lady Neferet! What brings you here? I’m due a little break, so we can talk a moment.”
She stopped in the shade of a big persea tree, and the three squatted on the ground.
“We brought you some treats for the children. Where are they?”
“The eldest is at work, and the others are with my mother. How sweet of you! I haven’t had time to bake anything else.”
She was a sinewy young woman, not many years older than Neferet, with a broad, good-natured face. Sit-amen had been the first to welcome the doctors to the neighborhood and was always quick with a greeting.
“We’re going to be offering free treats to any children who come to the dispensary for treatment. If your little ones enjoy these, you might think about it.”
Sit-amen’s face froze, and she looked down guiltily.
Neferet grasped her earnestly by the indigo forearm and said in a lower voice, “We know Djed-har has told everybody something about us that makes people afraid to trust us. Won’t you please tell me what he’s said? It’s almost certainly a lie.”
The woman looked anguished, gnawing her lip and casting her eyes around as if looking for an escape. Eventually she murmured, “He said that you and Lady Bener-ib were bored rich ladies who didn’t really know anything about medicine and were just playing at being doctors. He said your rich husband paid to have the corpses of those who died under your care disposed of.”
Neferet felt the heat rising to her cheeks. It blurred her eyesight for a moment with the red veil of anger. She said through a clenched jaw, “That lying hound. And everybody believed him?”
“We didn’t know you then. This was before you started practicing. It confused us, you know? It would be so much more convenient to go to you, like we used to go to Khuit. But I just wasn’t sure.” The dyer’s wife looked apologetic.
“Let me tell you the truth of the matter, Sit-amen. Lady Bener-ib was trained at Sau. Her father taught there. I started out apprenticed to Khuit, then we both studied under Lord Pentju and his wife, the palace physicians. We were the late king’s personal sunets for more than a year before she died. We’re both literate, my friend—we can read the speech of the gods. It’s true my husband is rich, and that’s why we can afford to do this and not keep working at the palace. We want to help ordinary people. We hardly ask for anything in return. We just want to see people healthier and happier. It’s not pleasing to the gods that folks should die just because they can’t afford a good doctor.”
Sit-amen wiped her nose, looking thoroughly ashamed. “He never said none of that.”
“Of course not. But now you know.” Neferet stared at her neighbor, willing her to come to her senses. “And what are his qualifications? He told us he trained at Sau, but it isn’t true. I think he’s just a self-taught healer who really has no idea what he’s doing. Just like he accused us of being. He’s afraid of us.”
“My husband says he don’t trust women to know what they’re doing.”
“And you’re going to put up with that?” sniffed Mut-tuy.
Neferet said pointedly, “Khuit was a woman. You trusted her.”
Sit-amen heaved a sigh. “I’d come to you happily, my lady. I will. I’ll bring little Huy to have you look at that stye. It’s no better.”
Of course not, Neferet thought hotly. Because Djed-har doesn’t know what ointment to use. “I’ll give you something for that. It’ll clear it up in no time.” She scrambled to her feet, and Mut-tuy and the dyer followed. “You’re a good woman, Sit-amen. You put the welfare of your loved ones above the lies of some malicious old hyena.”
They picked up their basket and took their leave, heartened by Sit-amen’s expression of relief and solidarity. Neferet slipped a little pile of treats inside the house as they passed the doorway.
This is going to take a while. We probably ought to split up and do the others. But she didn’t altogether trust Mut-tuy not to get argumentative.
At the next house, no one answered. Everybody was working, she supposed. At the third house, an old grandmother responded. She didn’t seem to hear at all well, and by the time they emerged, Neferet wasn’t sure whether the woman had ever quite understood why they had come. The sun was high in the heavens, and Neferet’s stomach hinted that lunchtime was nigh.
“Let’s go on back. By the time we get the children home, it will be time to eat.”
They found Bener-ib mixing potions and organizing supplies in the back room. “How did it go?” she asked eagerly.
Neferet made an ambiguous noise and stuck a sedge-nut treat in her mouth. “At least we’ve planted a seed of doubt. But it takes so long. We only reached three households.”
“Sit-amen has come around,” said Mut-tuy. “She’s going to bring Huy for you to look at his stye.”
“I have the ointment ready.” Bener-ib slid a little pot forward. “I made it last evening while you were talking to the rabbit farmer and left it out in the dew overnight. It should be ready to use.”
Neferet stroked her arm gratefully. “Thanks for keeping the dispensary going, Ibet. Now that Sen-em-iah’s murder is more or less solved, I’ll be around more to do my share of the work. I promise.”
“But we haven’t decided what to do about the murder,” said Mut-tuy. “Are we going to report it to the medjay or not?”
“We should at least tell Pen-buy.” Bener-ib folded the towel she’d tied around her as an apron. “Let him decide what to do, perhaps. That way we won’t have to go to the police.”
“Excellent idea, my girl. We can explain that we have some doubts and let him choose whether to go after Surer.”
But Mut-tuy said, “Come on, Lady Neferet! You know it has to be him. Why else would Sen-em-iah’s dying word be ‘rabbit’ if it didn’t have to do with his argument over the rabbits?”
“Oh, agreed. But somebody other than Surer might have made the decision to kill the florist. I can’t imagine he could afford to pay professional killers.”
“Maybe they were his sons or nephews or somebody.” The girl wasn’t about to give up.
“Unless they were soldiers or assassins by profession, I wouldn’t think so. Somebody knew how to handle a knife or sword. They didn’t take any chances on him surviving.”
“If they really hated him...” Mut-tuy mumbled.
Bener-ib added timidly, “It does make sense of the visits by those priests. They might have been encouraging him to deal with the farmer so they could get his land.”
“Then they’re the guilty ones.” Neferet spread her hands to dramatize the evidence. “That’s what’s stopping me. I don’t want Surer put to death if somebody else was behind it. We need to find out who those priests were.”
“Should we go see your uncle again? Maybe he’s talked to the high priest by now,” said Bener-ib.
Neferet suspected he would drop in on his sister to communicate the result of his investigation. He would report to Hani, not Neferet. “We need to check with Papa whether Uncle has come—he probably thinks it’s really Papa’s case. Right after lunch, on our way back. Before Papa’s had a chance to get away.”
They made their way home in the usual unruly procession. Heads turned in amusement or annoyance at their passage. Once at Ptah-mes’s villa, Neferet observed with a pang of conscience that her husband was eating by himself in the salon. Hustling the little ones on into the garden, she resolved that she would eat with Lord Ptah-mes that evening.
She and Bener-ib and Mut-tuy made short work of lunch and charged out, leaving the children at table with their nurse. She waved guiltily at Ptah-mes as they clattered once more through the salon where he still sat. “We’re off to see Papa!” she called.
“Salute him on my behalf.”
They arrived at Hani’s villa in time to find the family still at their meal. Even before they had emerged into the salon, Neferet heard the familiar voices laughing hilariously. Everyone was there—Mama, Papa, Grandfather, with Baket-iset on her couch at Mama’s side, and Maya, with his pen case, as usual, over his shoulder even at table. The family looked up as the trio entered and called out their greetings.
“Amen-em-hut was looking for you,” said Mama.
“Did he think he’d find me here?” Neferet laughed. “I suspect he was looking for Papa.”
Papa lifted his eyebrows in a gesture of guilt. “Yes. He’s under the impression that I’m working on that florist’s murder.”
“If the Third Prophet of the Hidden One thinks you are, maybe you should be. Although I suspect we’ve pretty much resolved the mystery. The question now is what to do about it.”
Neferet and the others pulled up stools and seated themselves. She leaned over the nearly scraped serving dish and fished out a fingerful of mashed lentil.
“Tell, tell,” prompted Grandfather. “Who was the culprit?”
With an appropriate variety of voices and expressions, Neferet summarized their interview with Surer and the connection she’d made with the visits of the priests.
“I thought it was Sen-em-iah’s jilted girlfriend that murdered him,” said Maya dryly.
“That was just a theory, my boy. This refinement of the theory explains not only the involvement of the priests but also Sen-em-iah’s final words.”
“So, you think the rabbit farmer killed him.” Papa cracked a pistachio with a nail and popped it in his mouth.
“Well, that’s the sticky part, Papa. I find it hard to believe Surer literally set the murder in motion. I mean, if somebody had jumped Sen-em-iah on a path among the flower fields, maybe. But it seems a little sophisticated to set hired footpads on him on the streets of Waset. How would Surer have known where he lived?”
Grandfather asked, “Who do you think did it, then, my girl?”
“Maybe the priests. Maybe they were disappointed that he hadn’t been able to dislodge the farmer from his lands.”
There was a moment of uncomfortable silence, during which Papa, Maya, and Grandfather exchanged meaningful looks. Then Papa said, “Only there seem to have been no priests, my duckling. Amen-em-hut asked the First Prophet whom he had sent to talk to Sen-em-iah, and he said there hadn’t been any delegation. Nobody went.”
