Murder in the Place of Anubis Read Free Page A

stepped out of the royal suite. The door  banged shut, and he looked around at the astonished courtiers, who regarded him as if he were a red crocodile. Hiding the consternation that had gripped him since Pharaoh touched him, Meren ducked behind a column and set off for his chariot. News of that touch would be all over the court in an hour. By nightfall,  word of the sign of favor would be on its way to Babylon, Tyre, Sidon, the courts of the Syrian princes, and the king of the Hittites.
     As he threaded his way through the crowds of nobles, civil servants, and palace dignitaries, Meren maintained  what he liked to call his unseen mask. Having spent many years in a court where a smile at the wrong person or the lifting of a brow at the wrong time could mean death, concealing the true face of his
ka,
his soul, was as natural as wearing a kilt. Before the old Pharaoh killed his father, he'd been as open as a lotus blossom. The day Pharaoh's guards took his father away, the bloom closed up into a tight knot and never reopened. Within the knot he concealed the scars of his father's death, his own torture and degradation—and the suspected truth about Akhenaten's death.
     Living with the scars was easier now. As with the  scar from his branding, the surface injuries had long since healed. Only occasionally, as this morning, did he suffer from visitations from the past. Did the gods know, and send the memories to haunt him as a warning of coming evil? It was as if they cautioned him to be fair, to seek out Maat, the essential truth and harmony of life by which the world existed. But could he? Once he had confused the good of the country with his own need for vengeance and allowed a man to die.
     No, that wasn't true. Others had decided that there  had been enough madness in the Two Lands long before Meren suspected a movement to kill Akhenaten. If he had tried to stop them, they would have killed him too. Ay put no one above the good of Egypt.
     Meren shook his head in an attempt to clear it of conflicting principles. An old battle, this one. He sometimes imagined himself in the Hall of Judgment in the netherworld, standing before the eternal scales while the  gods weighed his heart against the feather of truth. The scales would teeter back and forth. They would sway wildly until the pan that held his heart clattered to the floor. His heart would burst open and swarms of maggots spill out of it, and the gods would condemn him to be devoured by monsters.
    Meren, you have the wits of a porcupine.
He deliberately turned his thoughts back to the court and the king.
     To survive he'd learned to wear unseen masks, facades constructed to suit his purpose of the moment. It was a skill taught him by his father and the vizier, and it was one he was attempting to pass on to the king. For a trusting, open sovereign courted destruction.
     Meren allowed himself a barely audible sigh. It  wouldn't be long before the king realized the consequences of that open display of favor. Meren already knew that in those short moments he had acquired many new enemies and false friends. One of the king's ancestors had written something about the court. He'd advised his son not to trust a brother or know a friend, and when lying down to guard his heart himself. Meren had always remembered that advice, along with the caution that in Pharaoh's court, even the king has no friends on the day of woe.

Chapter 2
     It took less than an hour for Meren and several of the  royal charioteers who were his assistants to drive to the Place of Anubis. During the trip down the southern road from the palace on the west bank, Meren packed away his doubts in the sealed casket of his
ka.
He'd indulged in the luxury of self-reproach too long. Pharaoh's justice must be served, his subjects protected from evil, killers stalked and caught. And by doing so, Meren might assuage the yammering hyenas of his own conscience. The embalmers' workshops were placed some