Free Day of the False King by Brad Geagley

following him, he
noticed, a rather disreputable-looking fellow with a sparse beard and
ponderous belly. Semerket turned to stare at him, and the man halted,
overcome by a sudden urge to study the contents of a nearby vegetable
stand. Semerket almost laughed aloud. Did his pursuer really think he
was being subtle — that Semerket did not know him for a spy?
    Semerket decided to confront his pursuer,
striding pointedly toward him. “Since we seem to be headed the same
way, stranger,” Semerket said, bringing his face close to the man’s,
“perhaps you can tell me: am I on the right path to the Egyptian
Quarter?”
    His spy at first pretended that he did not
understand Semerket’s accented Babylonian, and glanced about. To
Semerket’s repeated inquiries, the man simply turned on heel and fled.
In his haste to get away from Semerket, however, he made the mistake of
peering to the rooftops.
    Semerket looked up, knowing what he would
find. Another agent stared down at him from behind a balustrade. The
man, thinner but no less disreputable-looking than the first, quickly
slipped from sight.
    Semerket hurried down a side street, shaking
his head at the spies’ clumsy tactics. He headed east, where the
hostel’s priest had told him he could find the Egyptian Quarter. Once
there, he planned to mingle with his fellow citizens, to ascertain
whether any of them had heard of Naia or Rami, or of any recent attacks
made on Egyptians by Isins. He would also attempt to find where
Ambassador Menef’s residence was located, for he knew from Naia’s
letter that she and Rami had last been living there.
    As he wove through the swarming Babylonians,
who had risen early to open their innumerable shops, he heard his spy
leaping noisily from rooftop to rooftop above him. The streets were so
narrow this was not a difficult chore. Yet even this small bit of
athleticism seemed too much for his hapless pursuer. From below,
Semerket heard an aborted scream and a crash. He looked up to find the
man clinging frantically to a parapet. Semerket debated whether he
should rescue the man, but the spy’s fat friend quickly appeared to
drag him back onto the roof. Several broken mud bricks rained down on
the narrow street with a tremendous crash. Semerket leapt easily aside,
but some of the bricks struck an old crone selling blooms. She lay
senseless in the alleyway, sprays of mountain lupines strewn about her
in a pathetic circle.
    “Look,” Semerket called up, “if you want to
know where I’m going, it’s to Amun’s temple in the Egyptian Quarter.”
His spies made no answer, but cowered behind the roof’s ledge,
pretending to be invisible.
    “Morons,” Semerket muttered darkly. If these
spies were the best Elam could produce, he thought, their occupation of
Babylonia was doomed to be a short one.
    Semerket discovered that the streets of
Babylon seemed to radiate from successive squares like spokes on a
chariot wheel, never leading to where he expected. It was not very long
before he had passed the Egyptian Quarter altogether, finding himself
in an area of town where merchants sold mud bricks, pots, ewers, and
molded terracotta statues. He stopped to ask directions from a seller
of religious figurines.
    “The what?”
    “The Egyptian Quarter. The Bel-Marduk
priests told me it’s somewhere east of the river.”
    “I’d believe them if I was you.”
    “That’s not the point. I’ve lost my way.”
    “East of the river, you say?”
    “Yes.”
    Shaking his head, the man turned to shout at
the potter across the courtyard.
    “The Egyptian Quarter? Ever hear of it?”
    “The what?”
    Semerket felt his gut clench. He detested
being lost. As the two men argued, it was clear that they knew very
little about their own city. At any other time, he would have asked
directions from one of the omnipresent Elamite foot soldiers who
patrolled the streets in small units. But he had no wish to approach
them, and went out of his way to avoid the