The Gardener and the Assassin Read online

  The Gardener

  and the

  Assassin

  The Murder of Ramesses III

  A Tale of Ancient Egypt

  Mark L. Gajewski

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  This book is a work of fiction. Its contents are wholly imagined.

  All rights reserved. Aside from brief quotations for media coverage and reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced or distributed in any form without the author’s permission. Thank you for supporting authors and a diverse, creative culture by purchasing this book and complying with copyright laws.

  Copyright @2018 by Mark L. Gajewski.

  Table of Contents

  1159 BC: 27th Regnal Year of Ramesses, Third of His Name

  1157 BC: 29th Regnal Year of Ramesses, Third of His Name

  1156 BC: 30th Regnal Year of Ramesses, Third of His Name

  1155 BC: 31st Regnal Year of Ramesses, Third of His Name

  1154 BC: 32nd Regnal Year of Ramesses, Third of His Name

  1153 BC: 1st Regnal Year of Ramesses, Fourth of His Name

  1152 BC: 2nd Regnal Year of Ramesses, Fourth of His Name

  1150 BC: 4th Regnal Year of Ramesses, Fourth of His Name

  1148 BC: 1st Regnal Year of Ramesses, Fifth of His Name

  1145 BC: 4th Regnal Year of Ramesses, Fifth of His Name

  1144 BC: 5th Regnal Year of Ramesses, Fifth of His Name

  1143 BC: 1st Regnal Year of Ramesses, Sixth of His Name

  Epilogue

  1159 BC: 27th Regnal Year of Ramesses, Third of His Name

  Shemu (Harvest)

  Neset

  “Neset! Freeze!”

  Startled, I dropped my brimming leather waterskin, drenching my bare feet and the hem of my skirt, splashing the nearest plants in my rooftop garden. I spun around, peered down the mud–brick stairway into my living quarters. Amennakht, chief scribe of my village – Ta Set Maat, the Place of Truth – was glaring up at me. What was he doing uninvited inside my house at dawn?

  Raised, excited, indistinct voices came from behind him, shattering the early morning calm. Amennakht wasn’t alone. One voice was louder than the rest – my husband Mesedptah was hurling curses. Amennakht pointed a copper–bladed knife at me menacingly. Something was terribly wrong. Mesedptah and two village proctors swung into view at the foot of the stairs. The proctors were struggling to subdue my husband. My cousin Reshpetref was astride Mesedptah’s back, his arms locked around my husband’s neck. Khamose was clutching his waist. Mesedptah was lunging and twisting and thrashing desperately, trying to swing them off. The trio crashed into Amennakht and knocked him to the ground. He cursed too. Reshpetref lost his grip and went flying into a wall with a loud cry. Parahetet leaped to take his place, trying to avoid Mesedptah’s jabbing elbows. Anhirkawi drove his shoulder into Mesedptah’s knees from behind. Everyone tumbled to the ground in a heap. Ipi and Parahetet jumped onto my prone husband’s back. Wadjmose quickly fastened his wrists together behind him with a length of rope. Khamose and Wadjmose ungently jerked him to his feet. Mesedptah stood defiant in their grasp, chest heaving, nostrils flaring, hostile, furious. His captors were gasping for breath and dripping sweat.

  “What’s the meaning of this?” Mesedptah roared.

  Reshpetref got to his feet. His mouth was bloody. He pressed his palm to the beginnings of a large lump on his forehead. He staggered, straightened, confronted Mesedptah chest to chest. “Qenna and Hay both claim you’ve done something bad in the Great Place. We’ve come to discover the truth of it.”

  The Great Place? The barren desert valley less than an hour’s walk from my village where two dozen justified kings and pharaohs slept in golden splendor? What could Mesedptah possibly have done there?

  Anhirkawi, foreman of the village’s left work gang, bounded up the stairs directly to me. He clamped his fingers on my left bicep.

  I jerked my arm free, incensed. “You have no right to come into my house and assault me and my husband! Get out!”

  Anhirkawi yanked a copper blade from his belt. “I have every right!” His white kilt had ripped nearly in two during the fracas. Blood oozed from several long scratches on his dark glistening chest, souvenirs of Mesedptah’s fingernails. “Confess, Neset! Show me where he hid it!” His face was inches from mine, spit flying with every word. “Or I’ll make you pay, you red–haired witch!” He pressed the tip of his knife against my belly hard enough to draw blood.

  Ipi and Wadjmose and Pendau clattered up the stairs.

  “Hid what?” I demanded. I slapped the hand holding the blade aside. Anhirkawi didn’t scare me. None of these men did.

  “The treasure!”

  “Treasure?”

  “Your husband and his gang broke into the tomb of Ramesses the Great!”

  “Ramesses? Gang?”

  “Mose and Qenna and Hay and Weserhat and Pentauret. We’re here to retrieve everything Mesedptah took.”

  “Liar! No one’s stupid enough to steal from a justified pharaoh! The gods would strike him dead!”

  Anhirkawi scanned my roof, now bright with early morning sunlight.

  Dozens of earthenware pots large and small arranged in rows covered most of its surface, planted with vegetables and spices and fruit, and flowers in a rainbow of colors. The plants ranged from knee to chest high. Of all the rooftops in Ta Set Maat, the village that housed the craftsmen who excavated and decorated tombs in the Great Place, mine was the most lush and colorful and beautiful, a virtual oasis in a drab landscape. My grandfather Meniufer, overseer of Pharaoh’s gardens on the east and west banks of the river at nearby Waset, the land’s Southern capital, had passed his gift for making plants grow to me. Several very large pots held small trees. Vines climbed trellises and four tall wooden poles topped by a linen canopy that shaded a corner where Mesedptah and I sometimes slept on linen pallets on hot nights. Bees buzzed in and out of a small hive in one corner. Like most of my neighbors I produced my own honey.

  Anhirkawi snorted. “Plenty of hiding places here. You best tell us where the treasure is, Neset, or it’ll go worse for you when we find it.” His eyes narrowed. “We know you helped Mesedptah.”

  “I don’t know about any treasure!” I insisted.

  “Now who’s lying?” Anhirkawi exclaimed. He shoved me hard.

  I staggered backwards, knocked over half a dozen flowerpots, awkwardly recovered my balance.

  He was a bully who’d courted me vigorously even before I’d become a woman. He resented that I’d been given to Mesedptah eight years ago instead of him. As if I’d had a say.

  Anhirkawi bent and seized one of my specially–prized plants by the stalk and pulled it from its pot and tossed it onto the roof. He took hold of another.

  “No!” I lunged at him and grabbed his arm with both hands. The plant was a descendant of one brought to Ta Set Maat by my ancestor Tjanuni, a scribe who’d accompanied the third Thutmose, mightiest pharaoh of all, on his military expeditions beyond the valley’s borders more than three centuries ago. Anhirkawi had no right to destroy what I and the rest of Tjanuni’s descendants had kept alive all that time.

  Anhirkawi viciously shoved me again. This time, before I could regain my balance, Wadjmose grabbed me from behind. He pinned my arms against my ribs with his and pressed his fists into my belly. I drove my right heel into his shin with all the force I could muster. He yelped, released me for an instant, grabbed me before I could spin away. I tried to twist free but Wadjmose squeezed me so hard I could scarcely breathe. Anhirkawi emptied a pot onto the roof and sifted through the dirt and greenery with his fingers. Ipi and Pendau joined
in and before long the northern edge of my roof was entirely denuded and covered with piles of dirt and crushed broken plants.

  Angry tears rolled down my cheeks. I watched, helpless, struggling fruitlessly to escape Wadjmose.

  “Mesedptah’s going to pay!” Pendau hissed as he moved beside me and vindictively emptied an earthenware pot of onions on my feet. “I caught him sleeping with my wife. And then my daughter. He beat me when I threatened to report him. No one would do anything about him – until today!”

  “You’re a liar!” I cried. Mesedptah and other women? Ridiculous! The nights he spent in our village instead of the rest house near the Great Place I never got any sleep. He was a lusty and vigorous and insatiable man. And a tomb robber? Qenna and Hay must be accusing him out of jealousy. After all, Mesedptah was the most accomplished of the craftsmen who painted the carved walls in the royal tombs. And he and I were well–off because of it.

  “You’re a blind fool, Neset,” Pendau retorted.

  The men were rapidly emptying my pots. Green plants were already wilting and shriveling and turning brown in the hot sun in the midst of piles of dirt. Two brawny men were gleefully tearing apart my trellises and several more were crouched near a corner of the wall, gouging the mud–brick with copper chisels. It was going to take me years to set everything on my rooftop right again, if that was even possible.

  While the men continued to destroy my garden Ta Set Maat awakened around us. The three hundred fifty year–old Place of Truth had been the brainchild of King Amenhotep – not until the time of the third Thutmose did the valley’s rulers begin referring to themselves as pharaohs. He’d gathered in this secure place craftsmen with the skills necessary to carve and decorate tombs in the Great Place for himself and his successors. Ever since his death we’d worshiped him and his mother, Ahmes–Nefertari, as village gods. Located in a dusty desert valley between the hill Qurnet Murai on the east and the holy mountain Qurn on the west, the seventy or so mud–brick houses, each resting on a stone foundation, lay within high rectangular walls. A single street ran one hundred–forty yards through the center of the village, from north to south, so narrow I could stand in its middle and nearly touch the houses on either side. The houses, each four rooms deep, with twenty–inch thick common walls between them, all opened onto the street, which was roofed over. The village was much like a fish’s skeleton – the street its spine, the common walls its bones. A second very short street ran east–west, intersecting the main street, marking what had been the southern boundary of the original village before its expansion a century ago. The rear of my house abutted the western wall. From my vantage point on my roof the village looked like a single low dusty–brown building occupying the entire floor of the valley. A narrow path descended eastward from the village, winding between barren rocky hills that rose abruptly to its right and left, crossing the desert to the wide flat cultivated strip that hugged the west bank of the river. The distant river, sun–dappled, sliced through the valley’s heart, both of its banks dotted with groves of palms and lined with emerald–green fields ready to be harvested. Far to the east, well back from the river, desert hills rose ephemeral through a film of dust already being stirred by the morning wind. Waset lay between those hills and the river’s east bank, a drab crowded town stretching between magnificent temple complexes both north and south. The river alongside the town was crowded with boats of all sizes, some with graceful sails billowing in the wind, others with oars churning the water white.

  An ebony–skinned policeman ascended the stairs, glanced at the activity on my rooftop for a moment, then descended. He was one of the Medjay mercenaries from south of the cataract at Abu who protected the Great Place and the pharaohs’ memorial temples along this section of river. This particular Medjay normally guarded Ta Set Maat’s single gate, his job to protect the costly materials and tools used by Pharaoh’s craftsmen that were stored in the village, as well as limit the amount of traffic in and out. Because the craftsmen had excavated and decorated the tombs of royals, tombs now filled with fabulous riches, they couldn’t be allowed to wander the valley freely.

  One of a new pharaoh’s first tasks was to order the construction of his tomb in the Great Place on the far side of the western mountain. No pharaoh dared leave creation of his eternal home to his successor. Once these multi–year projects began craftsmen toiled on the tomb eight of every ten days – except for during the village’s numerous holidays, or days they convinced their foremen they needed to stay home to brew beer or whatever excuse sounded plausible. On work nights they slept in the huts of the rest house on a high plateau overlooking the village so that the next morning they’d have a shorter walk to the tomb. The tomb of the current pharaoh, the third Ramesses, had been completed decades ago, but he’d recently ordered that eight more storage rooms be added. Many men in the right and left gangs had been fully engaged in that task ever since. A handful, though, had continued to labor on tombs for royal wives and children in nearby Ta Set Neferu – The Place of Beauty – or on temples and pylons in the vast sacred complex across the river, Ipet–Isut – Chosen of Places. But today was a rest day and so the village was alive with sound and bustling with activity. Thin columns of smoke drifted skyward from kitchen yards of numerous houses. I saw knots of women and girls gathered atop their own roofs, watching the raiders destroy my garden. I knew every woman and was at least distantly related to most. We were all descended from architects and stonemasons and draftsmen and plasterers and painters and carpenters and goldsmiths and countless other craftsmen who’d been excavating and decorating royal tombs for generations. What was happening to me today would give their sharp tongues fodder for gossip for years to come.

  Pendau emptied the last pot with a flourish and sifted through the remains. “Nothing!” he announced, frustrated. He smashed the pot against a wall.

  “I told you!” I cried, defiant.

  “Bring Neset down into the house,” Anhirkawi ordered Wadjmose.

  “I can walk by myself.”

  Anhirkawi shrugged his shoulders. Wadjmose released me.

  I stalked angrily towards the stairs, sidestepping as best I could the debris of the garden I’d tended so lovingly since the day of my marriage, then stomped down. At the bottom I turned left into my small kitchen yard. The intruders had dug up every square inch. Ashes from the bread oven were scattered atop the dirt. I glanced down the adjacent cellar stairs. Men had ripped every storage container open. Emmer and barley and onions were strewn all over the floor. I moved into the storeroom next to my kitchen. They’d shattered every one of my earthenware bowls and platters and storage jars. They’d scooped all the grain from large earthenware pots set in the floor. They’d emptied jars of animal fat atop the grain. The floor was drenched; they’d smashed our massive water jar and all our small jugs of beer and jars of wine. I bent and reverently picked up a shard decorated with a portrait of Bes, the god who protected pregnant mothers and children – a dwarf with a mask–like face, lion’s ears and mane, broad nose, tongue hanging out of his mouth, short arms, bandy legs and exposed penis. I set the shard on a shelf.

  The vindictiveness of the destruction was overwhelming. Angry and dazed, I stepped into my living room, fifteen feet long and a dozen wide, the ceiling supported by the trunk of a palm tree resting on a stone base. The living room and the similarly–sized reception room just beyond were in shambles.

  Parahetet and a few other intruders were still sifting through the wreckage they’d created, several on their hands and knees. Amennakht was in the middle of the room barking orders. Reshpetref was poking around the domestic altar just inside the front door, which was wide open. Women were gathered in the street directly outside, my neighbors, staring, pointing, gossiping. I’d never been so embarrassed in my life. Sunlight slanted through small slots below the roofline and illuminated my whitewashed and plastered walls, once bright with colorful designs, now marred with deep scratches and gouges. Amennakht’s men had dug up the
plaster floors and a low mud–brick bench along a wall that served as seat by day and bed by night. They’d yanked brightly colored textiles from my walls and the bench and scattered them on the floor. They’d overturned and smashed to pieces small stools and chairs, wooden boxes, storage chests, tables and cabinets. They’d split Mesedptah’s and my wooden headrests in two. They’d ripped apart baskets and fans and footstools made of reeds and rushes, and sleeping mats and reed sandals. They’d shredded several large woolen cushions we used on our chairs in wintertime, and our linen sheets and blankets. They’d emptied our clothing from storage chests and ripped every article apart – voluminous woolen cloaks for cold days, linen garments embroidered or edged with colorful weavings, shirts, kilts, skirts, Mesedptah’s red leather slippers, my delicate papyrus sandals.

  Khamose was guarding Mesedptah in a corner, his wrists still bound behind him. I hurried to him, terrified, clutched him tight, pressed my head against his chest. “Why is this happening?” I choked out.

  “They’ve made a terrible mistake, Neset,” he replied angrily. “They aren’t going to find any treasure here.” He addressed his nearest captor, sharply. “You’re going to pay for this, Khonsu. Every one of you in this room is going to pay.” He laughed viciously. “You know what I’m capable of.”

  “I’m just following orders,” Khonsu said defensively. He sounded intimidated.

  I spotted a small bone protruding from the earth in a corner of the room. What have they done? I rushed to it, fell to my knees. “You monsters!” I screamed. They’d desecrated the remains of my first daughter, Ipu, dead within an hour of her birth, buried as most village children were in its own house. Reverently, I rearranged the bone in the makeshift grave, then pushed dirt from the now hole–pocked floor into it and gently smoothed it with my palm. Someone had scraped the hieroglyphs that spelled her name and those of her two stillborn sisters from the nearby wall, condemning them to oblivion. “I hate you all!”