Doctor Who_ Set Piece - Kate Orman [35]
‘And you’re too crukking used to getting your own way,’ said Ace, more gently.
She held out the generator to him. He looked at it, that idiot expression slowly covering his features. Ace rolled her eyes and pressed it into his hands.
‘Just so you don’t forget me,’ she said, and walked away into the gathering evening.
She didn’t know whether he kept it, or hurled it into the dusty road.
She also didn’t know that she would never see Sedjet again.
They were thieves, cut-throats, kidnappers, criminals of every kind. They were scarred and dirty, grinning as they downed pottery cups of raw homemade booze in the oil lamp dimness of the tavern.
The songs faded into a murmur. The ruffians looked up from their games of dice and their back street deals. They gaped at the woman standing in the doorway.
She was pale-skinned, tall and well-shaped. She was dressed like a man, in brown shirt and trousers, a leather satchel slung over her shoulders. On her head was a white hat, pristine, lacking the mud and the miscellaneous stains on the rest of her clothing.
She walked in, smiling nastily as she realised every eye was on her. There was a French pistol on her hip; she moved her satchel away so that everyone could see it.
‘Ah,’ she said out loud, ‘a wretched hive of scum and villainy. Just what I’m looking for.’
She walked right up to the dice game, half a dozen lowlifes on stools around a badly-constructed wooden table. She picked up the beer mug of a staring one-eyed man and drained it at a gulp. ‘Tastes like camels smell,’ she said. ‘I think I’ll have another.’
67
She picked up an overturned stool and sat down at the table. The two thugs to either side of her moved a little to give her space. Excellent.
Vivant would have had a fit if he had known she was coming here – a lady exposed to scum like these: a fat thief and his wife, fanning herself in the smoky atmosphere; the man with the eye-patch, his working eye running over Benny’s body; a tall man and a short man in black clothes, almost a sort of uniform, with tiny bulges that suggested hidden weaponry; a drunken French soldier chewing on a cigar. She wondered who was winning the game of dice.
Probably whoever was cheating the most successfully.
In Benny’s experience, the second best archaeological information came not from textbooks or learned professors, but from the locals – people who had lived with, and perhaps even lived in, the ruins or remains or tombs you were interested in. If they didn’t know where something was, they could find someone who did.
A bored waiter slammed another mug of beer down in front of her. Benny grinned and hefted the glass in a toast. ‘Right,’ she said. ‘Who’s for a little bet, then?’
Sesehaten the scribe took his leave of Lord Sedjet – who had been in a foul mood for weeks – and went to the local tavern to quench his thirst in black beer and bad singing.
Sesehaten sighed as he trudged through the streets of Akhetaten. He was carrying his sandals in one hand, feeling the intense heat of the day soaking into the soles of his feet through the dust.
He hated this city. He hated its hodgepodge of hastily erected buildings.
He thought very little of its lazy inhabitants, courtiers uprooted from Thebes in the great rush to join the Pharaoh at his new capital. Oh, the Lord Sedjet wasn’t too bad an employer, even if his skull were thicker than a mud brick.
But Sesehaten hated paperwork, and a wealthy man’s estate is nothing but paperwork.
There was a lot of paperwork these days. Every time the Pharaoh found some new tradition to skittle, there were more forms and plans and receipts, on papyrus or slates or bits of broken pottery.
It had been, what, seven years since the new king’s coronation? And in that time, the inheritance of centuries had been knocked over like so many ducks being taken with throwing-sticks. Just trying to think about the pace of change these days gave Sesehaten a headache.
Worse than that was the thrumming behind his eyes. It came with sunset, not every night, but strongly this evening as the fierce stars