Seer of Egypt (11 page)

“This is not going to be fun,” Ishat whispered to Huy under cover of their bows. “He’ll drive us all into the Duat before he leaves.”

Huy hid the jolt her comment had given him. Heqareshu was striding towards them. He stopped before Huy.

“So,” he said smoothly, “you are the Seer Huy. I am the Noble Heqareshu. I believe that you have met my son Kenamun, Foster Brother of the Lord of the Two Lands.” His expression conveyed Huy’s good fortune. “My steward and the commander of my bodyguards will decide where I am to sleep, and whether or not your staff may remain in the house while I am here. I do not have time to waste. I must return to Mennofer as soon as possible to continue my care of the Prince Amunhotep. Therefore, you will See for me as soon as I have broken my fast tomorrow morning.”

Huy bowed again. “You are welcome in my home, Royal Nurse Heqareshu,” he responded carefully. “However, as you can see, it is small. Perhaps you would prefer to rest for the night aboard your barge.”

“My steward will make that determination. For now you may escort me within and offer me water and wine. The sun is hot.”

Huy, feeling Ishat’s indignant struggle to keep her mouth closed, fought against his own desire to laugh. He was distinctly nervous. “I trust that both His Majesty and the Prince are in good health?” he inquired politely as he and the small crowd began to move.

Heqareshu nodded. “They are both well. His Majesty has just announced that Her Majesty Tiaa, his half-sister and Second Wife, is pregnant. I shall, of course, be appointed as Royal Nurse to the new baby.”

Of course,
Huy thought as they entered the reception hall, where cushions and low tables were waiting.
Amunhotep wants a prediction for this birth. He needs to know whether or not it will be a male. If so, it will be either an insurance against the death of the heir or a latent threat to him if he proves weak. But why the privacy, the need to acquire the Seeing through this man?

He and Ishat waited while Heqareshu chose a table, lifted his linen with one graceful gesture, and sank onto the cushion behind it. At once a servant began to wave an ostrich fan over him. Huy could feel the minute but pleasant backrush of air. Heqareshu’s steward took the flagons of water and wine a stone-faced Merenra was holding and began to serve his master.

Heqareshu looked about him. “You have good taste, Seer Huy,” he said, sipping his water. “Your house is indeed small, but well appointed. How long have you lived at Hut-herib?”

A polite conversation began, from which Ishat was excluded. It was not a conscious slight on Heqareshu’s part, Huy decided. The man simply did not see Ishat at all. To formally acknowledge the presence of another’s scribe would never have occurred to him.

After some moments, the commander of his bodyguard came up to him, bowed, and spoke quickly into his ear. Heqareshu inclined his head. “Your guest room will be suitable for me,” he said. “I shall not need to deprive you of your own couch, Seer Huy. However, my body servant must be near me. Therefore, he will occupy your scribe’s quarters.”

Ishat had taken a sharp breath, her cheeks flaming. Huy reached across and gripped her shoulder hard. “The arrangement will be acceptable,” he said firmly. “But Ishat must not sleep in the servants’ cells. She must be ready to take my dictation at any hour. Merenra! Have a pallet set up in my room for Ishat!” He felt the muscles loosen under his fingers and withdrew his hand.

Heqareshu looked interested. “Do the gods speak to you in the night, then?” he wanted to know. “Kenamun told me of your prediction to Pharaoh, how every detail of it was fulfilled. You are blessed, Seer Huy.”

“He ate every single pastry Khnit made,” Ishat remarked later to Huy as they lay slumped on reed mats under the garden’s shade. “How does he stay so skinny?”

Heqareshu had gone upstairs for the afternoon sleep, and the lesser members of his retinue had flocked back onto his barge. Neither Huy nor Ishat wanted to retire to Huy’s room, so close to the one where Heqareshu was doubtless snoring on the couch.

Huy smiled at a purely feminine question that did not really require an answer. “His food is surely nothing but fuel for his overweening arrogance, and does not benefit his body at all,” he replied. “The King must have formed an affection for him in his younger days, before he acquired discrimination. Such early associations cannot easily be broken.” He was immediately aware of the truth of his words, and glumly fell silent. Ishat said no more. Both of them drowsed uncomfortably as the implacable heat of the afternoon shrivelled the grass around them.

In the evening, after finding fault with everything in the bathhouse, from the temperature of the water to the quality of the massage oils and the grit in the natron, Heqareshu sat in the reception room and methodically demolished the sumptuous feast Khnit, Huy’s cook, had laboured all day to produce. Yet between mouthfuls his conversation was light and correct, the accomplished patter of the seasoned courtier. He continued to behave as though Ishat failed to exist. Afterwards, surrounded by his guard and with his body servant holding a parasol over his head, he took a short walk along the river path in the red-drenched sunset. Once full night had fallen, he climbed the stairs to the roof, where he sat listening to the stories his scribe read to him from his box of scrolls.

Huy and Ishat retreated once more to the now dusky garden and lay looking up at the stars. “How clear the Red Horus is tonight!” Ishat commented. “Can you see the Leg of Beef? The Inundation is late. The Running Man Looking Over His Shoulder should be appearing on the horizon very soon.”

She turned towards him, propping her head on her hand, her features indistinct in the weak starlight, but Huy did not need illumination to trace every line and curve of the face he had known since boyhood. Her perfume rose to his nostrils as she moved.

“I can hardly wait until he sails away tomorrow,” she went on. “Even his scribe deigns to speak to me only if I ask him a deliberate question, and then very brusquely. Are all courtiers like him, do you think? Must I continually put up with them for Thothmes’ sake?”

Yes, they are,
Huy wanted to insist with vehemence
. I met some of them during my audience with the King. You will come to hate them all, Ishat. Stay here with me!

“No, they are not,” he admitted. “His son Kenamun is unpleasantly jealous of his closeness to Amunhotep, but the rest of the King’s servants and companions I met were kind. You will only have to curb your tongue upon occasion, Ishat.”

She was quiet for a moment, then she said, “Why do you think he’s here, Huy? It has seemed to you that Amunhotep is reluctant to allow any noble to consult you. Is he afraid of what you may discover about him? Something about his future? Why him?”

Why indeed,
Huy thought, sitting up.

“I don’t think he’s here on his own behalf, although I expect that he believes otherwise,” he said. “In my opinion the King wants information regarding his unborn child.”

“But why send the Royal Nurse? Why not send Queen Tiaa?”

“Because a Royal Nurse spends far more time with a royal child than does a Queen. He engages the wet nurse, appoints the nursery guards, oversees the daily routine. He even selects the tutors who will guide the Prince or Princess—under the King’s direct approval, of course. His responsibility is heavy. Amunhotep will learn more about his child’s future from Heqareshu than he would if the Queen had come for a Seeing.”

“He is clever and subtle, then, our King.”

Clever and subtle. And filling me with anxiety for some reason,
Huy thought.

“I wish he would go to bed. I need to be on my couch instead of lurking in my own garden like a criminal,” was all he said.

He spent a restless night, sleeping fitfully, unable to still his mind, his body too hot under the one thin sheet with which he had covered his nakedness for Ishat’s sake. He worried, as always before a Seeing, that the god would reveal nothing and he would seem like a charlatan. Added to that, when he attended the few nobles allowed to consult him, was the fear that if he Saw nothing, Pharaoh would begin to doubt his power and remove the patronage that had so suddenly and wonderfully changed his and Ishat’s lives. And this time there was a new concern: what if he Saw something that would anger or distress Amunhotep? He wanted to wake Ishat, sleeping quietly on her pallet, her sleeping robe a grey jumble on the floor between his couch and the slatted hanging of the window. He wanted to hear her reassurance that the King’s generosity would continue regardless of what was Seen, that even if no vision was fed to Huy through the Royal Nurse’s aristocratic fingers, Amunhotep would be satisfied.
But soon Ishat will be gone,
he told himself miserably.
I must learn to rely on my judgment alone. I can ask for her advice through letters. I can even visit her if I must. But that strong, honest, often caustic voice will answer to Thothmes’ needs, not mine. How in the name of all the gods can I go on without her? Ishat!

As though he had cried her name aloud, she stirred, muttered something unintelligible, and fell into deep unconsciousness again. Huy resigned himself to an anxious boredom.

Heqareshu took his morning meal in the privacy of the guest room. By the time he was escorted to the bathhouse by his guards, his body servant, his masseur, and his tiring woman, Huy and Ishat had been washed, painted, and dressed and were waiting tensely in Huy’s office for their summons. Heqareshu, for all his protestations of haste, took his time, but at last Merenra bowed himself into their presence. “Royal Nurse Heqareshu will receive you now, Master,” he said, unable to fully conceal the relief on his face. “He has already given orders for his belongings to be transferred to his barge, and his sailors wait to cast off.”

“Well, thank the gods!” Ishat blurted, reaching for her palette. “Let’s hope that this Seeing will be over quickly, Huy, and we can wave goodbye to a most disagreeable man. Lead on, Merenra. You can announce us.”

Half a dozen pairs of eyes were fixed apprehensively on Huy and Ishat as Merenra bowed them into the guest room and withdrew.
It is as though none of them has seen me before,
Huy thought irritably as he performed his obeisance, Ishat beside him, and rose to meet Heqareshu’s heavily kohled gaze.
But I suppose this morning I have become something exotic and perhaps even threatening in my guise as mouthpiece of Atum.

Heqareshu gestured him forward. “I do not wish to hear the words of the gods in the presence of your scribe. Dismiss her.”

“My scribe always transcribes the proceedings so that those who consult me may have an accurate record of what is said,” Huy said mildly. “Ishat must stay.”

Heqareshu frowned. There was a flutter of shocked whispers from those around him. “My scribe will perform this duty,” Heqareshu answered coldly.

Huy shook his head. “Your pardon, Great Lord,” he objected. “I fully trust my scribe, even as you trust yours. This is the way I work. Perhaps you wish to leave at once, and carry a complaint to Pharaoh?” For the first time Huy saw uncertainty flit across the haughty face. He pushed his advantage. “Furthermore, I would like you to order all your servants to leave the room. I do not know what Atum may say to you, but his words must be private, for you, me, and my scribe’s records alone.”

The frown deepened, but after a moment an imperious hand waved once, betraying the savagery of the man’s acquiescence. The room emptied swiftly. Ishat went to the floor, saying the customary prayer to Thoth under her breath as she plied her papyrus scraper and uncapped and mixed her ink.

Huy approached Heqareshu and knelt. “I must hold your hand. Atum speaks through the physical connection between us. Forgive my temerity.”

For answer, five heavily ringed fingers were extended. Huy took them softly, laying them between his palms, and as he did so a wave of pity swept over him. Startled, he glanced up. Heqareshu’s eyes were closed and he had folded against the gilded back of the chair, the stiffness of blood and protocol going out of him. Huy closed his own eyes.
Now,
he said mutely to the god,
let your power flood through me, Neb-er-djer, Lord to the Limit. Show me why I tremble with compassion for this proud creature. Tell me what it is that you wish Amunhotep to know.

There was no moment of transition, no vertigo. At once he found himself standing in a pleasant room facing Heqareshu across an ornate crib. Behind him, the chatter of many female voices mingled sweetly with the swish of linens. He could feel the rhythmic swirl of perfumed air as someone just beyond the range of his vision plied a large fan. He bent over the crib. A pair of alert black eyes regarded him solemnly out of a tiny face. Suddenly the baby smiled. His arms and legs jerked in excitement. Heqareshu leaned down and picked him up, crooning wordlessly to him, the mop of black hair settling against the hollow of his shoulder.

A hush fell. Heqareshu turned and so did Huy. A woman was sweeping towards them, her delicate little face dwarfed by the ornate crown of Mut, the queens’ crown, which sat firmly on her long, ringleted wig, its vulture beak jutting over her forehead, its golden wings wrapping behind her ears and touching her shoulders. With a rustle and a sigh, the servants behind Huy went to the floor. Heqareshu, the baby in his arms, bowed low. “Give him to me,” the woman said. “I wish to hold him for a moment. Is he well? Does he feed lustily?”

“He is perfect in every way, Majesty,” Heqareshu answered, passing him carefully to his mother. She bent her head and kissed her son’s button nose. The baby gurgled blissfully. The scene was touching: the naked child held close to the Queen’s lapis-and-gold-hung breast, her face, as she gazed down at him, soft with love, the vulture goddess on her head seeming to lean over the boy protectively. But Huy, caught up in the charm of the moment, was startled by a sudden shadow that passed over him and came to rest on the crib. He glanced up. A hawk was hovering erratically over the baby, uttering cries of distress. One of its wings hung bedraggled and useless. It was trying unsuccessfully to make it beat. Huy automatically put out an arm so that the bird might have a place to rest, and right away it struggled towards him, perching awkwardly on his wrist. Then, as he turned his head towards it, it drove its sharp beak against his mouth and vanished. Stunned, Huy put a finger to his lips. It came away red.