The Mask of Ra

by Paul Doherty

Genres: Historical Fiction; Historical Mysteries; Traditional Mysteries

Synopsis

The Pharaoh is murdered... who can the city of Thebes trust to uncover the truth? The Mask of Ra, the first mystery in Paul Doherty's intriguing series set in Ancient Egypt, introduces readers to his enigmatic sleuth, Amerotke, for the first time. Perfect for fans of Brad Geagley and Wilbur Smith. 'The historical mystery genre is still thriving and Paul Doherty's The Mask of Ra is the best of its kind since the death of Ellis Peters. As ever, Doherty dazzles with his knowledge and intimate feel for ancient Egypt' - Time Out His great battles against the sea raiders in the Nile Delta have left Pharaoh Tuthmosis II frail, but he finds solace in victory and in the welcome he is sure to receive on his return to Thebes. Across the river from Thebes, however, there are those who do not relish his homecoming, and a group of assassins has taken a witch to pollute the Pharaoh's unfinished tomb. Reunited with his wife, Hatusu, and his people, Tuthmosis stands before the statue of Amun-Ra with the roar of the crowd and the fanfare of trumpets ringing in his ears. But within an hour he is dead and the people of Thebes cannot forget the omen of wounded doves flying overhead. Rumours run rife, speculation sweeps the royal city and Hatusu vows to uncover the truth. With the aid of Amerotke, a respected judge of Thebes, she embarks on a path destined to reveal the great secrets of Egypt. What readers are saying about The Mask of Ra : 'This is the best book I have ever read ' ' A classic whodunit, it nevertheless manages to spring a few surprises on the way, and I certainly didn't manage to guess who the culprit was ' 'Mr. Doherty takes time to establish the site and atmospheric setting of his story... I barged through the book in one night '

Release date: September 25, 2012

Publisher: Headline

Print pages: 301

Sample

In the month of Athor, the season of the water plants, the thirteenth year of Pharaoh Tuthmosis II, beloved of Ra, Hatusu, Tuthmosis’ only wife and half-sister, held a great banquet in her palace at Thebes. The feasting and revelry continued long into the night. Hatusu had sat, waiting for the moment when the wine left her guests either asleep or watching, glazed-eyed, the naked dancing girls. These moved sinuously, the hollow beads around their waists, ankles and wrists creating their own languorous, attractive tempo. The dancers whirled and turned, their black wigs stiff and soaked in perfume, faces daubed in white paint, their alluring sloe eyes ringed with kohl.

Hatusu left the banquet chamber and slipped along the marble-paved corridor; the walls on either side, decorated in red, blue and green, glowed in the light from translucent alabaster lamps. The triumphant scenes depicted there sprang to life and brought back memories of her father’s reign. Nubians, Libyans, the Mitanni and the raiders from the sea writhed in lifelike representation; they knelt on the ground, necks bowed, hands tied above their heads, awaiting execution at the hands of the victorious Pharaoh armed with club and mace.

Hatusu hurried on. She passed sentries standing at corners or the foot of stairs, men of the royal bodyguard in their white kilts and gold-encrusted belts, their bronze wrist-guards and torques gleaming in the torchlight. They stood like statues, spear in one hand, white and red shield in the other.

Every so often Hatusu would pause and listen to the sounds of revelry. These grew fainter as she went deeper into the bowels of the palace, towards her private chapel dedicated to the dog-headed Seth, god of the underworld. She opened the chapel door and went in. She took off her gold-lined sandals, took a pinch of natron salt to cleanse her mouth and inhaled the sacred fumes from a thurible, hanging on a hook, to purify her nose and mouth before she prayed. The torches had been extinguished but lights from the alabaster vases glowed in the precious mosaic round the walls, which displayed silver melons, edged with gold, grown from the seed of Seth when he had chased a goddess and ejaculated his semen into the soil. Hatusu knelt on the cushion before the sacred cupboard which bore Seth’s statue; around it pots of ivory, glass and porcelain, their handles shaped in the form of the ibis and ibex, exuded sweet-smelling incense.

Hatusu was small and lithe, delicate in her diaphanous white gown. On her head she wore a thick, black, curly wig with three plaits twirling down her neck. On her forehead rested a gold and silver headdress embroidered with red streaks; golden asps, studded with precious gems, hung from her ears; silver and gold bracelets clasped her wrists and ankles; a heavy, bejewelled necklace hung round her soft neck. Hatusu was dressed for celebration but, secretly, she was terrified. She gazed at the cupboard, closed and locked by the priests, and, lifting her arms, hands extended, she bowed her head and prayed. Seth, the god of darkness, must rescue her from these present troubles! Within days, her half-brother and husband, Tuthmosis II, would return to Thebes, victorious in his struggle against the sea-raiders along the great Nile Delta. And what would happen then? Hatusu had read the message very carefully. She was to come here in the dead of night and be instructed more clearly on what might take place. She had taken counsel of no one; the secret was too terrible to share. Nevertheless, here she was, the Pharaoh Queen, the wearer of the vulture crown, slinking like a rat through the corridors of her own palace. Hatusu trembled with rage. How would anyone be so arrogant as to summon Hatusu, beloved of the Pharaoh, into her own chapel? She stared at the black granite statues of the gods, Horus and Osiris, which stood on either side of the sacred cupboard.

All had been going so well! Tuthmosis had his concubines. True, by one he’d even had a son whom he’d recognised as his heir, but Hatusu was his Queen. She was skilled in the art of lovemaking and had drawn Tuthmosis into her net like a spider would a fly. So intense his pleasure, the Pharaoh claimed he had travelled to the far horizon and was already in the company of the gods! Hatusu had prayed that she would conceive. Costly offerings were made to Hathor the goddess of love and to Isis the mother goddess of Horus and Osiris. Perhaps it might still happen! During his campaigns Tuthmosis had sent her letters sealed under his own personal cartouche or mark. He had couched his greetings in cloying, loving terms before proceeding to tell her about his victories on land and sea. He had also informed her how he had learned a great secret during his visit to the Great Pyramid at Sakkara and, on his return, would shatter the dreams of Egypt with his revelations.

Hatusu sat back on her heels. What were these secrets? Tuthmosis had fits which the priests termed ‘divine trances’, when the gods, particularly Amun-Ra, spoke to him. Had this happened in the cold darkness of the pyramids? Hatusu joined her hands together and bowed her head; her eyes caught the scroll peeping out just beneath the Naos, the sacred cupboard. All dignity forgotten, Hatusu scrambled forward and picked it up. She unrolled the papyrus and, in the light of one of the lamps, studied the green and red hieroglyphics neatly etched there. It could have been written by any one of the thousands of scribes who lived in Thebes. However, the message, and the threat it contained, made the Pharaoh’s Queen tremble like a child and the sweat break out on her perfumed body.

Night was falling over red-bricked Thebes. The moon rose glinting on the Nile which wound like a dark-green serpent from south of the Land of the Bow to the Great Sea. The watchers on the barge waited, staring up at the night sky. An order was given and the barge, low and squat, left the quayside, slipping through the water towards the Necropolis, the City of the Dead, which lay to the west of Thebes. One figure stood in the stern, another in the prow, each armed with a pole. They moved the barge silently and swiftly out of the cluster of reeds. Their companions in the centre, dressed in black, their faces hidden like those of the desert people, sat grouped around the witch. She had sightless eyes; straggling, grey hair framed her crazed face. This terror of the night cradled an earthenware pot, capped, sealed and filled with human blood, as tenderly as a mother would her child. The assassins, the Amemets, named after the ‘devourers’, the ghastly creatures which gobbled up the souls of the evil dead, listened to the sounds of the night and studied the river. They heard the bullfrogs croak, the whir of insects, but, here in the shallows, they were wary of the crocodiles which would often slide out against the unwary, before rearing up in a clash of jaws to take a man’s head.

The barge moved like a leaf on a pond, and soon it was on the edge of the bird-thronged papyrus thickets on the western bank. Above them loomed the craggy outlines of the City of the Dead: the mud-bricked houses, the chapels, embalming rooms, workshops and mortuaries of the craftsmen who prepared the dead for their journey into eternity. Deeper into the papyrus the barge moved, aiming for the desolate spot where they could disembark. At last, its prow sank into the soft, dark mud. The leading Amemet, gripping his dagger, stepped on to the wet packed earth. He heard a sound and crouched, peering along the path, where he glimpsed other shapes and figures leaving the Necropolis, slinking down among the rushes to some waiting boat.

‘We are not the only ones.’ His whisper was tinged with humour.

The dark shapes disappeared.

‘Tomb-robbers!’ he muttered and snapped his fingers.

His companions, grasping the witch’s arms, joined him on the river bank. They slipped through the bushes, moving as quietly and as swiftly as hunting panthers, around the City of the Dead up a steep, dusty trackway to the brow of a hill. Below them lay the Valley of the Kings, the chosen resting place of Pharaohs and their families. The leader paused; the moon was full but, now and again, clouds blotted out its light. He glimpsed the torchlight of sentries and, on the evening breeze, heard the occasional shouted order, but these did not trouble him. Pharaoh was absent, the guards were slack and why not? There was enough plunder for the robbers among the tombs and mausoleums of the fat merchants of Thebes. Only a fool would lift his hand against the royal sepulchres. The Amemet leader had laid his plans well. The tomb of Tuthmosis II was still being prepared. It contained no treasures, so why would any thief or robber meddle with it? Moreover, the tomb stood by itself, on the royal road into the Valley. The guards were only bowmen and, by now, probably drunk on the cheap beer and wine they had smuggled across from the marketplace.

The leader of the assassins led his companions on, taking advantage of the rise and dip in the land. The old witch protested.

‘My limbs ache! My feet are sore!’ she whined.

The Amemet leader came back. He pushed his face close to hers.

‘You are being paid well, Mother. We’ll soon be there. Do what you have to, then it’s back across the river: slivers of roast goose, the sweetest of wines and enough wealth to buy you the tenderest lover in Thebes!’

His men sniggered. The witch protested in a tongue they didn’t understand, a harsh, cold sound which froze their blood and pricked their memories with stories of the power of this witch. Did she not raise the spectres and call on the evil one to send the angel of death to hover like a great hawk above her victims? The leader sensed their change of mood.

‘Come on!’ he urged.

The group continued. They reached the foot of the low sloping hill and gazed up at the porticoed entrance of the unfinished tomb of Tuthmosis. The leader chose two of his companions. All three crawled upwards on their bellies like snakes. They reached the top and paused. Three guards in all, lounging against the pillars, bronze helmets off, weapons laid in a pile. The men were talking, the beer jugs scattered around their feet. The assassin leader gestured back. The witch was left while the rest scrambled forward to the top of the hill. A sack was opened, horn bows and arrows distributed. Three of the assassins knelt up. One of the guards, sharper than the rest, heard the sound and, plucking a torch from the wall, ran forward. He was the first to die as the barbed, feathered arrow took him deep in the throat. His two companions jumped up and, in doing so, made themselves clear targets against the torchlight. Again the whir of arrows. Both guards died, legs kicking, coughing on their blood. The assassins raced forward. They paused at the entrance to the tomb. Men of no morals, who believed in none of the stories or the preaching of the priests, they were still fearful. After all, this was supposed to be a sacred place where Tuthmosis the Pharaoh, when his time had come, would rest in glory, his Ka be transformed as he travelled to join the gods over the edge of the far horizon.

‘Go on!’ their leader urged.

He thrust his way through, padding along the gloomy passageways, then turned a corner and almost crashed into the sleepy-eyed young officer. The assassin pulled his dagger and thrust it into the man’s unprotected stomach; the officer fell. The assassin took a club from beneath his cloak and smashed the man’s head, dashing his brains to the ground. He continued on but found no other guards so he returned to the entrance.

‘Bring up the witch!’

A short while later the woman of the night, armed with her small brush and her pot of human paint, daubed the entrance with the magical words cursing the Pharaoh both now and in death. The assassin leader watched, intrigued by the signs she made, her deft movements. He marvelled that a woman with no sight could draw so expertly, summoning up the curses, the powers of the evil one.

Waiting for her to finish, he wondered at the truth behind what was happening. He and his group were often hired for this task or that, but to curse a Pharaoh’s tomb? To malign his name? Perhaps even to block his journey into the west? What would cause this? What had happened to allow such hate and malice to spill out? The Amemet leader had no knowledge of the person who had hired him and the witch. The message had come in the usual way and he had replied as custom dictated, accepting the time, the place and the task to be carried out.

He went back to inspect the corpses in the porchway, and by the time he had returned, the witch was finished. She was crouched beneath the strange markings and, hands uplifted, was praying in a foreign tongue. The Amemet leader recalled the rumours among his men, how the witch was not Egyptian but came from the coastline of Phoenicia with her powers and amulets. Her prayer ended. She staggered to her feet.

‘We are finished,’ she whispered.

‘Truly, Mother, we are!’

The Amemet leader stepped behind her and, seizing her by the hair, yanked her head back and cut her throat.

Tuthmosis, beloved of Amun-Ra, the Incarnation of Horus, Ruler of the Black Land, King of Upper and Lower Egypt, leaned back in his gold-encrusted throne and stared through the open-sided cabin of his royal barge. He closed his eyes and smiled. He was coming home! They would turn the bend of the river and see Thebes in all its glory. On its eastern banks, the walls, columns and pylons of the city and, on the west, the honeycombed hills of the Necropolis. Tuthmosis spread his gold-sandalled feet as the barge pitched slightly in its change of course; its prow, formed in the shape of a screaming falcon’s head, still cut through the river even as the great, broad-brimmed sail billowed slightly but then subsided. Shouts rang out. The sail was lowered and the barge regained speed as the barebacked rowers bent over their oars, heaving under the orders of the steersmen standing in the stern, managing the great rudders. The leading helmsman began a chant, a muted hymn of praise to their Pharaoh:

‘He has shattered his enemies, he is lord of the skies.

He has swooped on his foe, great is his name!

Health and length of years will only add to his glory!

He is the golden hawk! He is the king of kings!

The beloved of the gods!’

The chant was taken up by the soldiers and marines who manned the prow watching for any treacherous sand bank. The oars rose and dipped, the sun dazzling the splash of water.

Tuthmosis, his face impassive under his blue war crown, stared at his soldiers clustered in the stern: Rahimere his Vizier, Sethos, the royal prosecutor, Omendap his general and Bayletos his chief scribe had gone ahead to Thebes. Now, only Meneloto, the captain of the guard, remained. He sat with his officers, discussing their impending return to Thebes, the tasks and onerous duties awaiting them. Above the Pharaoh great, feathery, perfumed ostrich plumes created a scented breeze, waves of coolness as the day was proving hot and the sunlight was strong, despite the silver-embroidered canopy above him. Tuthmosis listened to his glories being expounded but what did they really matter? What did he care? He had visited the Great Pyramid at Sakkara. He had read the secrets on the sacred stela. He had stumbled upon mysteries, yet had he? Had not the word of God simply spoken to him? Had not these mysteries been revealed because he was holy and chosen?

‘Gold are your limbs, lapis lazuli your hands!’ The royal poet squatting to the Pharaoh’s left echoed the praises of the sailors and oarsmen. ‘Beautiful of face are you, oh Pharaoh! Mighty of arm! Just and noble in peace! Terrible in war!’

The recipient of these ornate phrases blinked. What did such flattery matter? Or the treasure hoards contained in the holds of the imperial war galleys which went before and after him as he journeyed along the Nile? Such wealth was passing.

Pharaoh moved his head. He gazed through the heat haze at the banks on either side where he glimpsed the coloured standards of his squadrons of war chariots which escorted and protected him on his sacred journey to Thebes. Such power was illusory! The weapons of war, his crack regiments, named after the gods, the Horus, the Apis, the Ibis and the Anubis, these were nothing more than dust under heaven. Tuthmosis knew the secret of secrets. He had written as much to his beloved, noble wife Hatusu and, on his return, he would tell her what he had discovered. She would believe him as would his friend the high priest, Sethos, the keeper of the Pharaoh’s secrets, the ‘eyes and ears of the King’. Tuthmosis sighed and put down his insignia, the flail and the crook. He touched the glowing pectoral around his neck and moved his legs, the gold-encrusted kilt clinking at his every movement.

‘I am thirsty!’

His cup-bearer, on the far side of the silk cabin wall, raised the ivory chalice. He sipped the sweetened wine and passed it to his master. Tuthmosis drank and handed it back. At that moment the watcher in the prow shouted out. Tuthmosis looked to his right. They were rounding the bend, Thebes was near! The barge swung closer to the bank. In the reeds alongside the river, a hippopotamus, frightened by the noise, crashed about sending huge flocks of geese flying up above the thick papyrus marshes. The chariot squadrons on the east bank had grown indistinct. They were preparing to lead off, to join the other troops massed outside the city. Tuthmosis sighed in pleasure. He was home! Hatusu his Queen would be waiting. He would rest in Thebes!

On the portico of the temple of Amun-Ra, a group of young women stood in the shadows of the soaring pillars. Heavy black wigs of curled, shining hair hung down to their shoulders; pleated robes of fine, semi-transparent linen covered their bodies from neck to their silver-sandalled feet. Fingers and toenails were dyed deeply in henna. Their beringed hands clutched the sistra, loops of metal attached to a wooden handle. When shaken together, these instruments gave an eerie jangling sound. Now they hung silent. Soon they would ring out, welcoming the return of their god. They were the priestesses of Amun-Ra, gathered round Hatusu, the Pharaoh’s Queen. She, also, was dressed in exquisite white linen. On her headdress of gold rested the vulture crown of the Queens of Egypt and in her hands the sceptre and rod of office. Hatusu heard the priestesses giggle but she did not move her kohl-rimmed eyes. She stood impassive as a statue, staring down at the sun-bright courtyard below where ranks of shaven, white-robed priests awaited the return of her husband. A breeze soothed the heat and stirred the banners and pennants which hung from the massive stone pylons around her. Looking over the heads of the priests, Hatusu glimpsed the people massed in the second courtyard, officials and administrators ranged in order of rank and marshalled by officers armed with their wands of office. Beyond this courtyard stretched the Sacred Way down into the city where its citizens lined the Avenue of Sphinxes, massed between the huge black granite statues of crouching beasts with human heads and the bodies of lions.

Faintly on the breeze Hatusu heard the sound of music, the bray of trumpets. She caught the sparkle of armour and glimpsed the lines of troops marching in from the Sacred Way. The Egyptian royal guard, Negroes from the Sudan and the Shardana, foreign auxiliaries in their ornate horn helmets. Tuthmosis was coming home! Hatusu should be pleased but she was fearful. She had scrutinised that scroll most carefully and wondered if its mysterious writer would dare share such secrets with her half-brother and husband. Hatusu lifted her head. The massed choirs had begun their hymn of praise.

‘He has stretched out his fist!

He has scattered his enemies with the power of his arm!

The earth, in all its length and breadth, is subject to him!

He tramples his enemies like grapes under his feet!

He is glorious in his majesty!’

The singing was drowned by a great roar of triumph. The Pharaoh had reached the Sacred Way. He would soon be in the temple. In the inner courtyards the great officials and masked ranks of priests ceased whispering and stood in nervous silence. Their Pharaoh was returning in triumph, Amun-Ra had glorified his majesty but there would also be a reckoning. The books would be opened, the accounts scrutinised, the judges and scribes summoned to the royal presence. In the whispered words of one of them, ‘The royal cat was returning to its basket’.

Hatusu moved to the top of the steps, the priestesses fanning out behind her. All now looked towards the great bronze doors which sealed the inner courtyards of the temple. They heard the shouts, ‘Life! Prosperity! Health!’ A trumpet blast, harsh and braying, imposed silence. The voice of a herald rang out: ‘How splendid is our lord who returns in victory!’

The great bronze doors opened, the cavalcade entered: the priests in white robes, officers of the royal bodyguard with their high-plumed headdresses, their golden torques and arm rings sh. . .