Mara, Daughter of the Nile by Eloise Jarvis McGraw

Author:Eloise Jarvis McGraw
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Young Readers Group
Published: 2018-03-20T04:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 14

Shadow of the Dead

There was nothing of the simple scribe about Lord Sheftu as he sat at breakfast the next morning on the roof loggia of his villa on the Street of Sycamores in western Thebes. He was clad in a dressing gown of royal linen girdled with scarlet leather, and beside his chair was a table of carved Lebanon cedar bearing fruit, bread, cheese, and a lily-twined flagon of milk. A Kushite slave hovered in the background. Beyond the balustrade stretched the ample groves, gardens, and stables of Sheftu’s town estate. They were extensive, but not so extensive as his ancestral holdings downriver, where acre upon acre of farmland—vineyards, pastures, orchards, grain fields—poured their riches every year into his storerooms and purse. It was a monthly accounting of those riches that was being read to him now by the old man in an elaborate wig who stood beside the balustrade—Irenamon, majordomo of the entire domain since long before the death of Sheftu’s father, Menkau.

“From your lordship’s dairies near the village of Nekheb, thirty pounds of cheese, both white and yellow, and twenty beef for slaughter.” Irenamon’s voice was like the rustling of a dried palm frond. “In addition, a hundred skins of wine have been brought upriver on your lordship’s barge Hour of Sunset, to be stored in your lordship’s warehouses in the city of Thebes. . . .”

But his lordship was not thinking of beef or wineskins, nor was he showing much appetite for the array of dainties on the golden platter beside him.

While his long fingers crumbled the bread and toyed absently with the fruit, his mind was far away, in the desolate wastes of the Valley of the Tombs of the Kings. In one of the barren gullies of that wilderness was a certain pile of red granite boulders. It looked the same as the other piles tumbled here and there through the valley as if at the whim of a destructive giant. But to Sheftu it was not the same. Far below it, in vast and silent chambers hollowed out of the living rock, slept the one whose peace he must destroy, whose wealth he must steal, whose ka he must impoverish.

The dread of it had lain like a stone on his mind since he had dragged that message out of a reluctant Mara. Though he had not let her see it, he hated and feared his task with all his heart. But it was not the crime she thought it, nor was it certain the guardian khefts would rend his soul or even strike him blind. For there was one thing Mara had not known when she stormed and pled with him, and that was the identity of the royal slumberer. He was Thutmose I, father of the king—and of Hatshepsut. In life, his arrogant daughter had robbed him of his throne when he was ill and feeble. Would he not willingly be robbed once more, in death, if his gold could overthrow her? The prince had vowed he would, and Sheftu believed.

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