Seer of Egypt (59 page)

But Huy had not noticed. Now he saw Tetiankh’s sagging jowls, Merenra’s increasing portliness, Kar’s habit of cocking his ear when spoken to. The thought of retiring the bulk of his staff was almost as daunting as losing Ishat to Thothmes had been all those years before. Seshemnefer and his wife, Khnit, caring for his holdings at Ta-she—were all of them ready to leave his employ? He could support them all, no doubt. That was not what concerned him. He shrank from the ultimate necessity of hiring new staff, meeting strange faces in the passages of his home, trying to determine whom to trust. What if Thothhotep, now in her forties, decided to go with Anhur when he took his leave? In the end Huy thrust such conjectures away. The passing of time would see everything resolved.

On the fifteenth day of Mesore, the last month of the King’s ninth year, Thothmes died suddenly during a feast celebrating the abundant harvest the whole country had enjoyed. According to a letter from Heby, who together with Iupia had been present, the King appeared to be choking. A flurry of agitated servants had flocked to the royal dais, obscuring Heby’s view, and when they dispersed in a shocked silence, King Thothmes lay slumped across Queen Neferatiri’s lap, quite dead. Huy, hearing his brother’s words issuing from Thothhotep’s mouth, had a moment of dislocation. They were in Huy’s office, where the worst of the heat could not reach them, and somehow the dimness coupled with Thothhotep’s carefully modulated voice seemed at variance with the violence of the news. Huy felt no surprise. Each day he had woken with the knowledge that the usurper, King or not, was one step closer to the Judgment Hall and Ma’at’s scales, not the blessed sanctuary of the sacred barge with Egypt’s great rulers. Now his vision had been realized. Thothmes was gone and the throne stood empty, waiting for the body of a young boy to grace its golden seat.

But for Huy, that death was eclipsed by two others. A month into the seventy days of mourning for the King, Huy’s father died. Word came to Huy in person from his uncle Ker’s steward, who told him that Hapu had been found lying in the garden, his chair toppled beside him, an empty mug by his outstretched hand. Huy told Thothhotep to send word to Heby immediately and ordered out his litter, first sending Merenra to Hut-herib’s House of the Dead with gold and instructions to spare no expense in his father’s Beautification. Sitting tensely in the swaying litter, he examined his inner self, and though the memories of his years as Hapu’s son flowed in abundance through his mind, they brought no emotion with them. For the first twelve years of his life he had loved and respected his father, but that deep affection had soured, become tinged with a mild resentment he had never been able entirely to overcome, when Hapu had turned from him in fear before the Rekhet’s exorcism had proved him free of demonic influence. Fiercely Huy tried to conjure only those early years so that he might begin to grieve honestly for the man who had sired him, but his bearers set him down outside the house where he had been born and he stepped into the clinging humidity that heralded the start of the Inundation with little more than a pang of sadness for his own mortality.

Itu rose from the floor of the tiny reception room as he entered, her lined face further disfigured by tears, the soil she had ground into her hair powdering her shoulders and clinging to her mouth. Huy took her into his arms. “The servants from the House of the Dead have already taken him away,” she said, her voice muffled against his chest. “His weighing will be favourable, won’t it, Huy? He cared little for the gods, but he revered the laws of Ma’at and did harm to no one!”

Only to me, Huy thought, and rejected the spasm of bitterness at once. “Of course he will be justified,” he said, standing her away and cupping her hot cheeks, engulfed in a wave of love and protectiveness for her. “He laboured honestly, he cared for his family, he did not eat his heart without good cause.”

“He was seldom angry,” Itu agreed more calmly. “Oh, Huy, he lived in so much pain in spite of the poppy you provided for us, but he did not complain. ‘I’ve exhausted my body in a good cause, Itu,’ he used to say. ‘Perfume for the King and food for my family.’ What shall I do now without him?”

“You will come and live with me,” Huy said quickly to stem a new outbreak of weeping. “Hapzefa can retire. Ishat will probably have a home built for her and her husband on the grounds of Thothmes’ estate. Sit down and I’ll find you something to drink. Have you eaten today?”

“But if I leave my house, it will fall into ruin and my garden will fill with weeds,” Itu protested between sobs. “Hapu would not want that.”

Huy squatted in front of her, dismayed at her gauntness, the jutting collarbones, the ropes of tendons standing out on her neck. Her hair had not been dressed. It hung in grey locks to her frail shoulders, and all at once Huy was drowning in an ocean of wistfulness, a longing for the past when she was lovely and vigorous and smelled of lilies.

“I’ll send someone to live here and tend house and garden,” he said.

She shook her head. “Give me someone indeed, but I intend to stay here. Now I must go to Khentikheti’s shrine and pray for Hapu’s ka. Will you take me there, Huy?”

They went into the town together in Huy’s litter. Methen greeted them sombrely, joining them in the supplications for Hapu’s safe journey. While he repeated the words, Huy’s mind wandered. The tomb he had begun to prepare for his parents as soon as he and Ishat had moved onto the estate was finished. That was good. How many mourners should he hire? The more mourners, the greater the deference shown to the memory of the deceased and his family. Ishat would know. Huy wanted her nearby with a kind of homesickness he had not felt in years. He needed to reminisce with her, speak to her of his father in the certain knowledge that she, above everyone else, would understand the conflict within him that had never been resolved.
Whom else should I notify of Hapu’s death?
he wondered.
Ker and Heruben already know. They will declare a holiday for their other field workers so that the funeral will be well attended. I must have the finished tomb opened and readied and tell Anhur to set a guard over it. Oh, Ishat, I need you now!

Heby and his family arrived four days later. Apologetically, Huy was forced to request that his brother and sister-in-law sleep on their barge, and Ramose in a tent erected in the garden; there was no space left in the house. Amunhotep-Huy did not demur when asked to quarter with Huy’s soldiers. “I would have wanted to do so anyway, Uncle,” he told Huy. “I would rather throw my pallet down on the floor of your little barracks than share a tent with Ramose.”

In spite of the solemnity of the occasion, the house filled with chatter and laughter as well as bouts of weeping. Hapu had led a long and useful life, something that Ishat pointed out in her letter to Huy and Heby. She wrote, “Thothmes and I will come north for the funeral. I have already made plans to care for my parents here, and will take them back to Iunu after Hapu goes to his tomb. Thus our youth sinks ever more deeply into the past, Huy darling, and our own Beautification looms nearer. As I love life and hate death, I dread being laid in the darkness of a cave hewn out of the rock far beneath the earth. How can any Egyptian bear to leave this blessed land?”

As I love life and hate death,
Huy repeated silently, pressing Ishat’s scroll to his cheek in the relative solitude of his office.
An ancient oath that arrows straight to the heart of everyone born and raised in a country that is the envy of every foreigner.
Beyond the door he could hear Amunhotep-Huy shouting something unintelligible and Amunmose replying politely but forcefully. Amunhotep-Huy was now twenty. He had long since left Heby’s home for two rooms of his own beside his employer’s house in the army barracks west of Peru-nefer in Mennofer. Tjanuni had no complaints regarding the loyalty and efficiency of his scribe, but Heby, in his letters to Huy, had described Amunhotep-Huy’s harshness in his dealings with servants and the common soldiers. The young man could scarcely conceal his impatience at being dragged to Hut-herib for his grandfather’s funeral. He showed Itu, his grandmother, every deference, but away from her he bullied his half-brother Ramose and kept Huy’s staff in a state of watchful nervousness.
Whipping never worked with that boy,
Huy mused, reluctant to leave the sanctuary of the office for the maelstrom of family activities.
Perhaps if he’d been allowed to join the army, if he’d marched into Wawat with the Division of Ra and seen men wounded and dying, his disposition might have been changed.

He continued to go about the town prescribing and scrying with Thothhotep as the river rose and the flood spread, fighting his private battle against the constant need to take more and more poppy, while he mourned for his father as best he could. The whole of Egypt was also in mourning for the Osiris-King, but Huy seldom thought of him. The life of the palace seemed very far away. He had received formal letters of condolence from Mutemwia and from the Prince. They told him nothing other than their sympathy, and he was content to exist within the curious hiatus of waiting while his father’s disembowelled husk lay under the deft hands of the sem priests and his mother sat on the roof under a linen canopy, her thoughts turned inward while she squinted unseeingly into the bright afternoons.

Huy’s Naming Day on the ninth of Paophi passed quietly, without the usual gifts and feast. Huy, critically examining his features in the polished disc of his copper mirror and then angling it downwards to reflect the rest of his body, could see no evidence of aging even though he was now fifty years old.
Atum continues to preserve me,
he thought, laying the mirror down and sitting so that Tetiankh could kohl his eyes and braid his hair.
I exist suspended in time, while all around me its passage slowly breaks down and decays everything and everyone I hold dear. Long ago Anubis told me that I would be given a chance to redeem my moment of cowardice. It is obvious to me that that moment has not yet come. How can it? My life now follows the rigid path set before me by my ability to prescribe for the sick and predict the future for the anxious. Ra is swallowed each evening and is born each dawn, and we in this household follow the habits long established by custom and daily necessity. There is a staleness to my life. I resemble a donkey that walks blindfolded round and round a grinding stone, and Atum is the master holding the goad. I know how the grain is ground. I know how it sifts into the basket. Has all the turbulence of my youth come to this?

Three days later, he had finished his morning meal and was about to leave his couch when Iny, Thothhotep’s body servant, burst into his room followed by an annoyed Tetiankh. “I apologize, Great One,” he said loudly. “I could not reach your door before the girl thrust it open.”

Huy gestured impatiently. “Never mind. What do you want, Iny?”

The servant managed an agitated bow. “Your mother, Master,” she blurted. “Please come.”

Huy’s heart sank. Even as he stood and reached for yesterday’s limp kilt, he knew what he would find. Following Iny along the passage with Tetiankh behind, turning into the guest room, his bare feet padding over the huge lion’s pelt presented to him when he and Ishat had first occupied the estate deeded to him by the Osiris-King Amunhotep, he approached the couch. Itu’s dark eyes stared up at him lifelessly, her grey hair tangled on the pillow, her lips curved in a tiny smile. Huy lifted the hand that lay on the sheet over her breast. It was quite cold.

“Fetch my brother,” he ordered his body servant, then he bent, kissing the loose cheek and tenderly closing the eyes that had always spoken to him more clearly than her words.
Already you were lonely for him,
he thought as he drew up a stool.
You loved him very much and served him well. In spite of the happiness your children and grandchildren brought to you, the prospect of a life lived without the part of you that was Hapu was too much to bear. Your weighing was easy, my mother, and he was waiting for you, young and vigorous once more, under the shade of the Ished Tree. I envy you.

Hapu and Itu were buried together at the beginning of Tybi, two days after the Feast of the Coronation of Horus. The flood had withdrawn, leaving its blanket of life-giving silt on the little fields. Where the ground had begun to dry, the peasants were at work, rhythmically tossing the new seed as they walked, their progress followed by clouds of greedy pigeons. The Delta air was heavy with the fragrance of thousands of blooms, and the palm trees had put out delicate, pale green spears. Huy was taken aback by the number of Hut-herib’s citizens who attended the funeral along with the crowd of peasants, many of them as old and bent as his father had been, who had worked the perfume fields beside Hapu. Ker and Heruben, Huy’s aunt and uncle, stood solemnly with the other members of the family while Methen conducted the rites and the forty blue-clad mourners Huy and Heby had hired interjected the sonorous words with cries and moans. They were not needed, Huy reflected, glancing around at the crowd gathered behind him and Heby. Many of those present were weeping, including Hapzefa, who was supported between Thothmes and Ishat, her husband behind her.

The Governor and his wife had arrived at Huy’s watersteps the week before. After a hurried greeting, Ishat had gone to greet her mother, Hapzefa, and her father. Thothmes and Ishat settled into Huy’s guest room. In spite of the sad occasion of their visit, Huy was overjoyed to see them. “You should have this ratty old lion skin burned,” Ishat had said, staring down at it while her laden servants waited in the passage to enter and unpack her belongings and Thothmes’ entourage was still unloading his chests from the barge. “I’ll wager that it’s full of fleas. We never liked it anyway, did we, Huy darling?” She turned and flung her arms around him, enveloping him in the perfume blend of myrrh, cassia, and henna flowers, returning Huy vividly, almost savagely, to their years together here on his estate.

“Lions hate hyenas,” he blurted over the top of her head, the sweet familiarity of her embrace filling him with a sense of security.