City of Dreams by Anton Gill Read Free Book Online Page B

negotiate, but they always reply that it’s too hard for them to get. I’d refuse them admission altogether if I could afford to lose the business.’
    ‘I doubt if you’d go under.’
    ‘Maybe not. But this is still a chore I could do without. If you’ve come for a session with Kafy, you’re out of luck — she’s booked for the whole night by one of the priests from the Temple of Khepri. If you’ve come to collect your wig — ‘
    ‘I won’t need it now.’
    ‘Run off, has he?’
    Huy looked at her.
    ‘An order is an order,’ continued Nubenehem, unruffled. ‘And an order fulfilled has to be paid for — if you want more favours in the future.’ She rose heavily, fat cascading over her hips, and crossed the room to a large cupboard set in the wall. Drawing a number of bolts, she opened its door and withdrew from the interior an elderly, moth-eaten wig which she flourished in front of Huy.
    ‘There!’
    ‘It’s terrible. It’d walk away by itself if you put it on the floor.’
    ‘You wanted something quickly. This isn’t a perukier’s, you know.’
    ‘You should be ashamed of yourself, treating a good customer like this.’
    ‘Not such a good customer recently,’ retorted Nubenehem, letting herself flop back down on her couch. ‘What’s happened to you? Min desert you?’
    Their conversation was interrupted by the familiar sound of a girl’s badly-acted laughter from behind the bead curtain which led to the interior of the brothel, punctuated by the growling of a man who is under the illusion that he is cock of the dunghill. The girl remained unseen, but the man emerged a moment later, his eyes, as they caught Huy’s, switching from initial guilt to fraternal collusion as he saw that Huy was someone he did not know. In the dark days of the Southern Capital under Akhenaten, Nubenehem had told him once, a father who had sold his daughter into prostitution sometime later visited the City of Dreams to watch a session: his daughter, whom he had never touched himself, was one of the participants. It seemed that the father had gone straight from the brothel to the River and drowned himself. But there was nothing furtive or guilty about this customer, who radiated well-being and contentment.
    ‘Nice little ass, that Hathfertiti; but a bit of a tight squeeze.’ He gave Huy a connoisseur’s wink.
    ‘It’s a pity you’ve gone off fucking,’ continued Nubenehem when the customer had left. ‘There was a girl here not long ago, looking for fun, wanting to earn a bit on the side. God knows why. One of the aristos slumming. She was your type, maybe a bit on the young side. But you could smell the mandrake fruit on her across the room. I’ll tell you what; I’ll give you the wig for a silver deben . I’ll even throw in some henna for you to tart it up.’
    Huy dug into the leather pouch at his side, concealed under a fold of his kilt, and withdrew its contents: a couple of silver deben were all it contained.
    Leaving the whorehouse with the wig tucked under an arm, he reflected that it was worth at least what he had paid to have Surere off his back. At the same time he found it interesting that prison had made the former district governor more passionate about the cause championed by Akhenaten. The pharaoh had thrown out beliefs held for two thousand years, rejecting them as superstitions, and replaced them all by a single god, whose spirit could not be contained in images, whose love extended to all people, and who lived in the power of the sunlight. In the twelve bright years of the young pharaoh’s reign — he had died insane aged twenty-nine, his dream and his country in ruins — a new light had seemed to dance in the souls of men too.
    But prison had protected Surere from the truth. Huy himself, who had had to adapt to the new world constructed after Akhenaten’s fall by Horemheb, had learnt above all that ideals do not change people. He acknowledged now that the majority of people, the great