Seer of Egypt (44 page)

Thothmes’ estate lay just to the north of Iunu’s wide watersteps. All were relieved when the captain gave the order to tack west and the Governor’s own set of steps came into view. Anhur hailed the guards on the bank, two sailors hurried to secure the mooring rope, and the ramp was run out. Huy sent Tetiankh on ahead to warn the house that he had arrived. Apart from his body servant, only Anhur and Thothhotep, with her servant Iny, had accompanied him. All were hot and thirsty.

Huy had barely stepped across the threshold of the reception hall when Thothmes came hurrying towards him, a distress bordering on panic filling his face. He was unpainted and unshod. The odour of incense clung to his clothes as he grasped Huy’s shoulders. Instinctively, Huy jerked back. “I sent a runner for you yesterday,” Thothmes said. “You must have passed him on the way. What are you doing here? Did the gods impel you to come? Never mind. The physician says she is dying, but if you See for her, Atum will make her well again.”

Huy wrenched himself free of his friend’s frenetic grip. For one dizzying moment he was young again, walking thankfully towards the cell they shared at the temple school after he had spent time in Thoth’s temple at Khmun, and Thothmes was racing towards him with the terrible news of Nefer-Mut’s accident. “You must save her! You must!” Thothmes had begged, but his mother had died. Huy had stood with her in the Judgment Hall and watched her enter the Paradise of Osiris. “There is no Duat for you,” Anubis had told her. “The Son of Hapu has saved you from that ordeal.” Huy had never been able to understand how or why.

“Make sense, Thothmes!” he barked now, out of his own mounting dread. “Sahura. Is it Sahura? What has happened?”

Thothmes gave him a blank look. Then the frenzy went out of his eyes. “Not Sahura—it’s Ishat,” he rasped. “She was coming home late from the Naming Day feast of one of her friends. She was slightly drunk and the bearers and two guards were tired. They were taking a shortcut through the Street of the Beer Houses. It was a stupid thing to do!” His voice had begun to rise and he struggled visibly to control it. “Intef should have known better!”

His fingers had curled around one of Huy’s long braids and he was pulling Huy deeper into the house, like a child with a special surprise to show, but his features were distorted by fear.

“A group of foreigners came out of one of the beer houses. They seemed very drunk, but when they attacked the litter, their actions were full of purpose. It was dark. My captain, Intef, could not understand their language. They barred the way. The bearers tried to go around them. Ishat started to shout at them. They set upon my men. The bearers were unarmed. One of the guards was badly injured. Ishat fell out of the litter and began to run, but some of them pursued her. The rest were beating the bearers to the ground. Ishat was caught. They tore off her sheath, Huy. They broke three of her fingers taking off her rings, and beat her about the face when she tried to stop them taking her earrings. She was screaming and struggling. They had her down. They were going to … to… But there were soldiers from Iunu’s garrison drinking in one of the other houses, and they heard her and rushed into the street and saved her. The foreigners ran away into the darkness. Not one of them was caught, Huy, not one! These things do not happen in Egypt, where Ma’at is revered! The soldiers wrapped her in a cloak and put her in the litter and brought her home. The bearers are injured, but they’ll recover. Ishat … Ishat had bruises all over her body and an eye swollen shut and some of her hair pulled out. She was in great pain. The physician set her fingers and gave Iput a salve for her bruises and put her to sleep with a large dose of poppy, but then she didn’t wake up! She can’t wake up, Huy! The physician said that there must be some invisible injury inside her head. He can do nothing— but you can. Atum can, can’t he?”

Huy had listened to Thothmes’ almost hysterical recital with a mounting horror mingled with alarm, scarcely aware of their progress through the reception hall, along a wide passage, and through the tall double doors leading to the women’s quarters, where Ishat had made a retreat for herself away from the demands of her position as a Governor’s wife.
This is the future I Saw for Anuket,
Huy thought, the words erupting in his mind and flooding him with panic.
Anuket has triumphed over her fate. She is free of it, but instead Atum has visited it upon her sister-in-law Ishat, her kin, as though, once shaped, it must be fulfilled at any cost.
His limbs trembled and he was forced to steady himself against the wall.
I Saw for Ishat years ago in the hovel we shared,
his feverish thoughts ran on,
and in the vision she was painted and bejewelled, but Anubis gave me no more than that. Has Anuket’s deliverance meant a doom for my dear friend? A doom that Atum transferred to her so that my vision for Anuket did not mark the god as a liar?
Real terror sliced through him as he stumbled after Thothmes.

The children and the servants filled her small reception room. When they saw Huy, they surged towards him. Thothmes let go of his hair. Sahura and Nakht flung themselves sobbing at Huy. The boy Huy, his namesake, had started towards him but then hung back, biting his lip, his eyes huge with the tears he was trying to suppress. Huy untangled himself and beckoned him.

“I want you to take Nakht and Sahura into the garden,” he said. “Anhur will go with you. He has many fine stories to tell. Put them on mats under the trees and give them a little wine,” he ordered the servants. “If they can fall asleep, so much the better.” At once Anhur scooped up the two younger children and went out. Huy squatted and, placing his hands on the older boy’s cheeks, kissed him on his hot forehead, almost moved to tears himself by the child’s likeness to Ishat. “You must be brave,” he said, “but not so brave that you dam up your fears until you cannot cry. Whatever happens, tonight you and I will share the cabin of my barge. We haven’t seen each other for a long time, have we? I want to hear all your news.” The relief on his namesake’s face was reward enough for Huy’s effort to pause and deal with the boy’s defencelessness when all he really wanted to do was hurry to Ishat’s couch.

“I’ve had no strength to give them,” Thothmes said when they were alone. “I cannot lose Ishat, Huy!”

“Come with me and prepare your palette,” Huy said to Thothhotep, who was standing just behind him.

Thothmes turned and led them through another doorway and partway along a passage with several doors opening off it. Huy had been here many times. He followed Thothmes into Ishat’s bedchamber.

The shaft of sunlight falling from the clerestory window high up in the wall was murky with the smoke of frankincense. Its scent gave Huy the impression that he was entering a holy place. Frankincense was extremely expensive and usually reserved for temple use. The priest wielding the long shaft of the censer had been chanting softly. Now he fell silent, bowed to Huy, and left the room. The physician rose from his stool by the couch. He also bowed.

“I have set the fingers with linen stiffened in resin, Master,” he said in answer to Huy’s raised eyebrows. “I have applied a mixture of honey, castor oil, and myrrh to her cuts and bruises. I applied these remedies when the Lady Ishat was first brought home. She was shaken but alert. I gave her a small dose of poppy for her pain, and shortly thereafter she fell asleep. Three days have passed, and she will not wake.”

Huy rounded on Thothmes. “Three days? She’s been unconscious for three days and you send for me only now, Thothmes?”

“We kept expecting her to wake up,” Thothmes replied miserably. “Her injuries, apart from the broken fingers, were not serious. You love her too. There seemed no point in asking you to come, and the next time you visited us she would tell you all about it, once it was over.”

“It is my belief that a vehedu has entered the Lady Ishat through the metu of her ears or nostrils, and lodged in her head,” the physician broke in. “I cannot locate it, let alone dispel it. The Governor hoped that prayers might dislodge it, but to no avail.”

Huy stared at him while the information reeled slowly through his mind. The vehedu were the unseen carriers of pain and of the illnesses of internal inflammations and fevers. They could enter through any bodily orifice and travel through the metu, the channels inside the body responsible for the movement of essentials— air, blood, mucus, semen, nourishment, the proper passage of urine and feces. It was entirely possible that Ishat had fallen victim to some unknown vehedu passed to her from the filthy foreigners who attacked her.

The physician bowed again and moved towards the door. “Now that you are here, Great Seer, neither I nor the priest is needed. With your permission, Governor, I shall go to my quarters until I am summoned.” Thothmes nodded once in his direction. The door closed behind him.

Unwillingly, now full of a strange reluctance, Huy approached the couch. Ishat was lying on her back under a clean white sheet, her hands loose across her chest, three of the fingers of her right hand encased in stiff, slightly yellowed linen. Both forearms were heavily bruised and cut where she had tried to defend herself. Her head, resting on the spotless pillow, looked curiously malformed because of the narrow patch of red scalp showing just above her ear, where her hair had been torn out, and the black swelling of her eye on the same side. Huy wondered whether the physician had tied a piece of raw beef against her eye, and decided that the remedy was so commonplace there could be no doubt. The other eye was fully closed. Huy looked for any movement of the eyeball, but her whole face, unnaturally pale and oddly lax, was still.
She looks dead already,
Huy thought with a stab of fear as he took the stool the physician had vacated and carefully lifted her undamaged hand, placing it between both of his own. A soft movement behind him reminded him that both Thothmes and Thothhotep were present. Huy had forgotten they were there. He closed his eyes.
Now, Anubis, Atum has deigned to prescribe for and heal much lesser folk than Ishat through me. You know how much I love her. Tell me what to do.

“Atum’s gaze roams elsewhere, Great Seer,” the familiar voice of the jackal god answered the thought at once. “There are more pressing affairs to be dealt with in Egypt than the fate of one peasant woman, no matter how important she might be to you—the seed of heresy within the bosom of the King, for instance. Atum seeks a man who will root out this danger to his beloved daughter Ma’at. He had believed,” Anubis went on conversationally, “that he had found such a one long ago, but he was sadly mistaken.”

“Do not mock me,” Huy begged. “I have admitted my guilt before the Great He-She. I am culpable. I deserve to be punished—but not this way, Anubis! Not at the expense of an innocent life! What ails Ishat? Tell me!”

“You are very free with your commands, arrogant human.” The words had become a hiss of moist animal breath that Huy felt against his ear. Out of the corner of his eye he caught a glimpse of a white kilt, a black, tightly muscled calf, a long black foot encased in golden sandals studded with blue lapis. “Atum is not concerned with this female’s guilt or innocence, only with her use as a discipline for you,” the god went on. “He gave her to you once to ease the years of your poverty. He removed her when you no longer needed her. She is his tool.”

“And so am I!” Huy shouted. “He has taken me, body and ka and akh and ba, he has used me times without number, as is his right! If I have betrayed a flaw, was it not created in my mother’s womb, with Atum’s full knowledge?”

“And what a flaw,” Anubis purred. “Atum must now pass his rod over Egypt’s future and conjure another for this, the land he loves above all others, because of you. Don’t you know that your audience before the King was the most vital moment of your life, and that every god watched it with bated breath? You have condemned Amunhotep and, yes, his son Thothmes to the judgment, and Ma’at will not be lenient.”

“Then leave me alone,” Huy whispered. “If Atum has decreed that Ishat is to die, just go away.”

“You deserve her death!” Anubis snarled.

Suddenly Huy found himself on his feet and facing the god’s angry black eyes. The long furred nose almost touched his own. With a jolt of horror, Huy realized that the room had lengthened and widened. Dull ochre light illuminated the fetid air. The rank smell of death filled his nostrils. Motionless forms on plain slabs filled the sombre space.
I have been here before,
he knew with terror.
This is a House of the Dead.
He did not want to look behind him, but in spite of himself he found his body turning, his gaze dropping to the figure at his rear. Ishat lay naked, the marks left by her attackers clear on flesh that seemed pathetic and so very frail. Even as he stared down at her, one lifeless arm slid from the panel on which her corpse was lying and brushed against his hip. There was a flurry of movement as two men came close.

“The Governor’s wife,” one of them said. “What a pity! She was well loved throughout the sepat. The Great Seer could do nothing for her, although he tried. Well, we must begin her Beautification.” He leaned over her, the obsidian disembowelling knife poised, and Huy stumbled away with a cry.

“Have pity, Atum! Pity for Thothmes and her children, if not for me!”

“Did you have pity for the wounds of Ma’at?” Anubis growled. He was leaning towards Huy, his eyes narrowed and now yellow in their nest of fur. As he spoke, Huy could see past his slick fangs and long tongue to the dark maw of his throat.
He could devour me if he wished,
Huy thought.
One word from Atum and he could gulp down the forces of my life and leave me nothing but a body and a name. Yet he is kind, this divine jackal. He leads the dead into the Judgment Hall, to Ma’at and her feather and the scales. He wishes Sobek, eater of souls under the scales, to go hungry.

“No, I did not,” Huy replied with resignation. “I cared only for my own preservation, Anubis, something I bitterly regret. I accept the consequence.”

For answer the god swung round and, sweeping his staff carelessly over Ishat’s carcass, drew his lips back over his teeth in a disdainful smile. Instantly, Huy was back in Ishat’s bedchamber, her hand in his, the scent of frankincense strong in his nostrils.