Free Year of the Hyenas by Brad Geagley Page B

directed a man to fetch the body of
Hetephras from the pool. Seizing a pole with a large bronze hook at its
end, the man began to poke through the cloudy water. One by one he
dredged bodies to the surface, hooking them beneath the chin, bringing
them into the dim light to be identified. Semerket watched closely,
peering with his black eyes.
    “There!”
Semerket said
when an old woman’s body bobbed to the surface. Instinctively he knew
Hetephras. He had imagined her in his mind since he’d received the
case, and felt a pang on seeing the old lady. Though he had once
labored in the House of Purification, and knew what to expect, he had
nevertheless imagined her a living thing—not this poor rubbery piece of
flesh being hoisted to the table.
    Then he saw
the gash
across her throat. It gaped open, as clean a wound as priests make on
the victims of temple sacrifices. No crocodile could make so clean a
gash. Still, there was the possibility that Hetephras had been
mutilated after her death. That question, too, must be asked and
answered, though Semerket was dismally sure that no such thing had
occurred.
    Metufer and
three of
his assistants had disappeared into an anteroom. They returned, each
wearing a leather mask of Anubis, the jackal-headed god. Metufer held a
gleaming knife of basalt, its finely polished edges catching what
little light there was in the room. Muttering a last prayer for
forgiveness, Metufer abruptly thrust the knife into Hetephras’s side
and slashed toward her midsection.
    As quickly as
a fowler
filets a duckling in the marketplace, the Ripper Up opened a long,
bloodless incision. Semerket winced, surprised to find that after all
these years his toughness had gone. As Metufer eased his knife down
Hetephras’s side, Semerket felt his stomach twitch rebelliously.
Silently he bade it behave, as if it were an unruly dog, but a light
sweat nevertheless broke on his forehead.
    When Metufer
at last
withdrew the knife, the other Anubis priests began wailing, raising
their hands in feigned outrage and grief. Using phrases of archaic
Egyptian that had been spoken for a thousand years at the moment of
this ritual “re-murder,” they chased the lumbering Metufer from the
room with shouts and curses. As he left the room, Metufer
surreptitiously directed one of the boys to bring Semerket a box.
    Semerket saw
that the
box contained a linen sheath. He took the garment out, unfurling it.
From the bloodstains cascading from its collar down the front and back,
he recognized it as the dress the priestess had been found in. Despite
the time she had floated dead in the Nile, all its water could not wash
away the blood. Farther down in the box was a wire pectoral, studded
with amulets and some glass jewels. She had not been killed for her
riches, Semerket thought grimly. He folded the sad relics and placed
them in the box. Metufer returned to his side.
    “Was that all
there
was on her? No wig? No sandals?” Semerket asked.
    “Nothing more.”
    Semerket
considered.
More than likely the wig and sandals rested at the bottom of the Nile—a
lamentable possibility. But if they were elsewhere, and if he could
find them, they might indicate where the lady had met her end.
    Metufer stood
again at
the altar table, beckoning for Semerket to join him. “What is it you
want to know, Semerket?” he asked. Remarkably, his cough had vanished.
    Semerket
approached
the table. “Did she drown?” He knew the answer, but the question still
had to be asked.
    “Let us see
what this
dead woman wants to tell us,” Metufer said. He thrust his large hand
into the incision. Semerket saw the flesh of Hetephras’s body roll and
heave with the hand’s searching movements. With practiced touch,
Metufer found what he was looking for and pulled. His hand emerged into
the light, trailing a lung that was brownish and distended.
    “She was not
drowned,”
Metufer whispered. “If she had been, I could have wrung water from her
lung as from a