Seer of Egypt (54 page)

“It takes about three weeks to travel the miles between Weset and the Delta, sailing against the current,” Thothhotep said lamely as the scroll rolled closed in her hand with a polite rustle. “The period of mourning—”

“Leave me.” Thothhotep laid the scroll on the desk without looking at him and quietly went out.
The period of mourning has already run for twenty-six days
.
In another forty-four days it will be over, and Anuket will be entombed during Pharmuthi, the twelfth day of Pharmuthi if my calculations are correct. If I’m to attend the funeral, I ought to leave here during the first week of the month before. That’s next month, Mekhir, and Mekhir begins in three days, so I should warn Merenra to prepare for a long journey and then a week at least in Weset with Amunnefer. It would be a good idea to travel south in a flotilla with Thothmes and Ishat and Nasha. After all, Iunu is on the way …
A sudden pain brought him to his senses and, looking down, he saw that he was holding an earring smeared with blood. His necklet on which hung the sa amulet the Rekhet had made for him lay on the floor at his feet, together with the thin hoop of bracelet he had been wearing. His ear was throbbing. Stupidly, in a daze, he fingered his lobe and his hand came away wet.
I must have torn off my earring without unscrewing it,
he thought, watching it fall to lie on the small pile of his other jewellery.
What a foolish thing to do!
Nevertheless, he had already pulled his braid forward automatically and was tugging at the frog ornament holding it tied. His eyes followed its swift descent to the floor with mild interest.

Then all at once reality deluged him. Anuket was dead. Anuket was murdered. Strange men, wild men, had … had done what? Dragged her from the beer house and raped and beaten her? Stabbed her? Flung her from one to the other and then strangled her? “Amunnefer did not say,” he said loudly, “but surely these were base creatures living without Ma’at. They will be found eventually and the King will give her justice.”
No, they will not be found,
something inside him whispered back.
Anuket could not escape the fate her name demanded, the fate Anubis showed me, the fate she herself could not have imagined that day long ago in her father’s herb room when she told me that her name meant “to embrace.”
She had been sitting cross-legged on the floor surrounded by a clutter of leaves, twigs, and flowers, in the act of twisting the stems of two white water lilies together, as he entered. The room had been redolent, as always, with the aromas of thyme, mint, dill, spices, and flowers, odours that always brought her tiny face to mind when they assailed his nostrils. On that day she had settled a wreath of yellow daisies around his neck and he had suddenly, irrevocably, fallen in love with her. She had been named after an ancient water goddess who embraced the fields with the Inundation, a minor deity but a symbol of chastity, of purity. Over the long passage of the hentis she had slowly become a goddess of lust and obscenity. “No totem of Anuket stands in my bedroom!” her namesake had told Huy vehemently. “I shall try to embrace all that is good. I have never felt lust, but if I ever do, I shall not allow it to engulf me. Even if I feel it!”

Huy, now standing swaying in his office, unaware that he had begun to dig his fingers into his hair, could hear her voice, could see that dainty oval face with its wide brows drawn together in a frown of seriousness, the graceful, vulnerable hands stilled on the wet and quivering petals of the waxen lilies. He had kissed the top of her head, he remembered, had put his mouth against the black, sweet-smelling sheen of her hair, lost to all else but the throb of desire within him. “You felt it in the end, and you forgot how you told me that you would never let it engulf you,” he went on aloud to the niches full of scrolls, the tangled shadows of shrubbery on the tiled floor, his distorted reflection on the polished surface of the desk. “You lived your name, Anuket. Anuket!”

The memories were pouring into his mind with all the force of a desert wind, and he let them come. Running into the passage, he stumbled for the stairs, his unbound hair streaming down his naked back. Briefly he was aware of his body servant’s shocked expression as he fled towards his bedchamber. “Bring me poppy, a lot of poppy,” he croaked as Tetiankh backed against the painted wall of the upper passage. “Keep everyone away from me for the rest of the day, Tetiankh—and hurry up! I refuse to suffer this pain!” Falling into his room, he saw his long censer lying beside Khenti-kheti’s shrine. A few fragrant ashes remained in its bowl. Knocking them out onto one trembling palm, he knelt, ground them into his scalp, and began to weep, not for the licentious, wine-soaked woman he had encountered at Thothmes’ wedding but for the lovely child who had made him her youthful prisoner, both of them briefly fresh and innocent before the slow tide of maturity with its subtle corruption flowed in to taint their hearts.

He knew, as he drank the poppy a worried Tetiankh had brought, that he was being cowardly, and he did not care. Lying on his couch, he let the blessed opium blunt his grief and then cocoon it. He slept while the household filled with the news the scroll had brought, the word spreading quickly and dying as his loyal servants heard and then closed their mouths. It was still dark when he woke to the sound of gentle breathing, and, sitting up, he saw Tetiankh on his pallet inside the door instead of outside it.
He is concerned for me,
Huy thought as he lay down again.
I suppose that in the morning I must endure the mute expressions of sympathy on the faces of all I meet, and for their kindness I will be grateful. I must dictate a letter to Thothmes and Nasha, and to Amunnefer. He loved Anuket very much, but will there be a tiny portion of relief mingled with his tears of loss? And you, Ishat. In spite of your happiness with Thothmes, will you allow yourself a moment of purely feminine spite at her shameful end?
Searching himself, Huy found a bed of resigned acceptance under the spate of memories.
She tried to avert the fate her name decreed,
his thoughts ran on.
It was a valiant effort, but it failed. Or did it?

Suddenly alert, he sat up again, settling his pillow at his back and pulling the sheet up over his waist. The attempt was not her own, he knew with the clarity of certainty.
O Atum, how merciless you are in the pursuit of your mysterious will! My punishment for standing mute before the King was the attack on Ishat, but you did more, did you not, implacable one? For a brief time you took Anuket’s destiny and laid it on Ishat. You did not care about Amunnefer’s hope as he saw his wife become sober. You disregarded Thothmes’ anguish when he believed that Ishat would die. All that mattered to you was my humiliation, the conviction that my visions had become false. I failed you, and you retaliated with the callousness of a cruel and selfish taskmaster. Did Anuket have a choice when she woke on the morning of the second of Tybi and felt again the craving she supposed she had conquered? Do the visions, once told, remove the freedom of choice from the petitioner, fix unchangeably a fate that might have been subject to the will of those who extend their hands to me if their future had remained unknown? Is that how you steer Egypt, by using the visions you send me to force the unfolding of this country’s fate? Yet I had a choice when I sat on that accursed stool with the courtiers watching me like vultures, and I made the wrong one. Your anger was great and your judgment swift, Holy One. In agreeing to help his mother nurture young Prince Amunhotep towards ultimate godhead, did I make the right decision and thus Anuket’s true destiny was returned to her?

All at once Huy realized that he had finally been able to give shape to the puzzle that had occasionally dogged him since the earliest days of his gift, namely, why was it that a handful of those for whom he had Seen, or healed by Anubis’s prescriptions, returned later with relatives suffering a similar malady, of either body or event? “Because I foresaw the future of the wrong person,” he said aloud, forgetting that Tetiankh was asleep in the room. The servant sighed. Huy heard the soft movement of his sheet as he turned over.
Then why did I not See the original petitioner’s correct future?
Huy’s thoughts ground on.

There was something wrong with his reasoning, he knew, something that should be obvious, perhaps even familiar, but the flaw in his argument eluded him. The soporific effect of the poppy had worn off, leaving him aching for a lost love, for the comfort of Ishat’s presence, withdrawn from him years ago, for the cheerfully ignorant child he had been before Sennefer’s throwing stick and the permanent scar it had caused, now hidden by his hair. His sadness grew, encompassing Thothmes, Nasha, and Amunnefer, all of them in mourning as he was, but he found that he could not cry anymore for Anuket. She had been Atum’s gaming piece. Would the weighing of her heart against Ma’at’s feather in the Judgment Hall be favourable because of it? Huy wanted more poppy, but he fought the hunger, not because the Princess Mutemwia had cautioned him but because, now that the first agony of loss had passed, he would not insult the memories any further. He would honour the young Anuket he had known best. Pain came with that resolve. Lying down, he stared into the dimness above him while the remainder of the night wore away.

In the morning, he dictated a letter of condolence to Amunnefer and a more informal missive to Thothmes and Nasha:

Huy stopped pacing and looked down at Thothhotep. “Finish with the usual dating and I will sign it. Do you think I’m wrong to stay home, Thothhotep?”

She glanced up at him, brush in hand, a smudge of ink across her nose. “You have your own reasons for not making the journey to Weset,” she retorted. “I must confess, I’m surprised, though. The Lady Anuket was one of your oldest friends.” Her head went down again over the papyrus uncurled across the palette on her thighs.

I cannot speak of how I could not bear to see Anuket’s bandaged body standing in its coffin beside the tomb’s entrance,
Huy thought, going to his chair.
To imagine the mourners wailing in their blue sheaths is dismal enough, and the funerary priest, the Kher-heb, approaching her corpse holding the Ur-hekau, the rod used as part of the ceremony to reopen Anuket’s mouth and eyes. Those beautiful eyes,
Huy remembered with a pang,
and that mouth full of an ingenuous invitation. No. If my mind would present her to me as she was when I last saw her, with the pouches of dissipation under her eyes, her slim lines blurred by too much flesh, an ill-fitting wig on her bald head, I could endure the ritual that will leave her in the darkness of dank rock. But that image is ephemeral, that image has no substance beside the girl I worshipped.

Thothhotep was holding up a loaded brush and the scroll for him to sign. With a gust of breath, he wrote his name and title—Huy, Seer—and handed the scroll back to her. There was no need to tell her what to do with it. Anhur would hire a reliable herald in the marketplace or delegate one of his soldiers to take the road the short way south to Iunu.
It’s almost time to hire a permanent herald or even two,
Huy thought as Thothhotep left the floor, gave him a quick bow, and went away.
Doubtless the Princess will resume her correspondence to me, and almost every day there are letters delivered that require an answer. Perhaps Merenra can see to it
. He knew he ought to get up, go into the passage, resume the customary activities of the day, but he sat on, gazing unseeingly at his ringed hands resting on the table, the office an oasis of silence around him.

The King did not consult Huy, nor did any of his commanders. He and his army filed past Hut-herib on the east bank of the river—to the delight of the town’s citizens, who lined the west bank to watch the cavalcade go by—and then struck out towards Rethennu. Huy was relieved. Two weeks later, a letter arrived from Heby. “I allowed Officer Irem to escort Amunhotep-Huy into the tents of the officers while the army was briefly bivouacked here,” Heby had dictated to Nanai, his scribe.