House of Illusions by Pauline Gedge

Author:Pauline Gedge
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Mystery & Detective, General, historical, Fiction
ISBN: 9780143167433
Publisher: Penguin Global
Published: 1996-01-02T00:00:00+00:00

9

MEN WAS ALREADY WAITING outside, muffled in his cloak. “I have spoken to Shesira,” he said as he started down the path. “If anyone comes to take Takhuru away, she is to be hidden inside the granary and the soldiers must be allowed to search without hindrance. What a damnable business this is!” I caught up with him and grasped his arm.

“Master, I do not think we should take the skiff,” I said. “Paiis will have rightly presumed what our next move will be. His men will be watching your gate and Nesiamun’s also, and he may even have soldiers lingering about the palace entrances. We should slip out through the rear wall and proceed behind the estates. Put a couple of well-swaddled servants in the skiff and tell them to row to Nesiamun’s watersteps, but slowly. Of course, they should not speak.”

“Good. Wait here,” he breathed, and was gone. Before long he returned with Setau and a house servant, both wearing full-length cloaks. “Keep your faces in shadow until you are well away from the watersteps,” he told them. “When you reach Nesiamun’s steps, tie up but stay in the boat for a while and pretend to debate your next action. Kaha and I need time. We do not know for sure, but we believe that General Paiis’s men are watching both establishments.” He clapped them warmly on the shoulder and turned away and I followed him into the darkness.

Once at the rear of the gardens we used the lip of the well that was set hard against the perimeter wall to hoist ourselves up and over into the littered alley behind. It ran in a rough curve, in one direction back towards the narrow bottleneck of the Lake’s entrance and in the other to the huge compound where the army lived and drilled. Many noble estates backed onto it to left and right but it was not used for traffic. It was choked with the offal and rubbish tossed over the walls by lazy kitchen servants, and inhabited by feral cats. We turned left, for Nesiamun lived close to the neck of the Lake and not far from the factories in his charge.

We met no one. Slinking along in the shadow of the succeeding estate walls, stumbling over unnameable refuse, our progress was slow. We perceived it to be less rapid than it really was, for each wall seemed to stretch away blackly forever, elongated in the tepid moonlight, and the pocked ground beneath our sandals was vague. But at last Men came to a halt, his hand on the mud brick. “I think this is it,” he whispered. “I lost count somewhere. Surely that is the branch of the big acacia tree Nesiamun will not let his gardener fell. Kaha, climb on my shoulders. You will have to find Nesiamun. I am too old to go scrambling over walls.”

I placed my precious bundle at the foot of the wall and removed my sandals. Men bent over, and balancing myself with one hand on the bricks, I hoisted myself up.

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