The Oasis (47 page)

With an exclamation he spun round and hurried to the stairs that led back down into the women’s quarters, intending to rush to meet her, but at the first step a paralysis fell on him and he could not move. Clenching his teeth in a paroxysm of anxiety and haste, he willed his feet to obey him. He fancied he could hear her coming through the dimness below. Her feet were on the stairs. She was climbing, her tread soft and sure. She is coming to me! he was shouting silently. At last my heart’s desire will be fulfilled, my soul’s wound healed. I have been faithful to you, mysterious messenger of the god. I have craved no other embrace but yours. Heal me. Heal me!

She had reached the top. One delicate hand curled about the rough corner of the windcatcher. One brown knee was flexed. He caught the blur of her face, one swift glimpse of dark almond eyes, the curve of a cheek. She was singing to him, her voice high and piping like a bird, then he found himself awake and panting, clinging to the windcatcher with both shaking hands in an early, windless dawn. His feet were tangled in the blanket on which he had slept. His headrest had tumbled across the roof. Birds swooped around him, filling his ears with their early morning melodies as they fed.

Confused and aching with loss, sweat pouring from him, he staggered to where he could look down on the gaping hiatus in the old wall. Briefly he thought he saw the box still there beside the dawn-deserted path but he blinked and there was nothing but beaten earth and straggling grass and the cool flow of the river. He fell to his knees. “Amun, no, Amun, no,” he groaned, over and over again, until the pain in his ka overwhelmed his tongue and he could do nothing but rock with his arms around himself as the sun pulled itself ponderously free of the desert horizon behind him and began to fill the air, already stale, with its fire.

He had intended to bathe, eat, and then walk to the temple to greet Amunmose and consult with him regarding the great thanksgiving to take place, but instead he paced in the garden until he had ceased to tremble and his mind had cleared. The house was stirring as he made his way to his sister’s apartments. Servants burdened with fresh linen, jugs of water and trays that exuded the wholesome odour of newly baked bread bowed to him as he went. The guard was changing, the night watch wearily giving up their posts to the soldiers of the morning. Twig brooms stirred up dust. Doors stood open. Kamose heard Behek’s deep, commanding bark coming from somewhere outside.

Reaching Aahmes-nefertari’s door, Kamose knocked. After a moment it was opened and Raa looked at him inquiringly. “Is my brother within?” Kamose asked. The servant shook her head.

“No, Majesty. His Highness has just gone down to the river to swim.”

“If Aahmes-nefertari is awake, I want to speak to her. Please announce me.” Raa bowed and closed the door. Kamose waited. Presently she admitted him, slipping past him into the passage as she did so, and Kamose walked up to his sister’s couch.

The room was east-facing, as were all the family’s bedchambers, so that the gentler morning sun might be enjoyed but the heat of the afternoon sun could not penetrate. Raa had already tidied any litter from the night before and raised the hanging on the small window so that a shaft of white light lay across the blue-tiled floor and filled the pleasing space with a cheerful glow. A chair draped with the sheath Aahmes-nefertari would wear that day sat a little way away from the window and next to it her cosmetic table was open, displaying the pots and jars that held her perfume and face paint. Under it her sandals stood neatly in pairs. In one corner her shrine to Sekhmet, the lion goddess, was closed, the incense stand before it full of grey ash, but beside the couch a small likeness of Bes, fat and smiling protector of families, presided. Kamose remembered it. Bes occupied a place of honour in Tetisheri’s quarters until called upon to protect the pregnant members of the family, and Kamose, who had been three years old when Ahmose was born, could see Bes squatting in a similar spot close to his mother’s couch. The memory included his father’s laugh and Si-Amun’s unbroken treble and he pushed it away before any emotion came with it.

His sister was still in bed, propped up on cushions under a disorder of sheets, her face somnolent with sleep, her long hair tousled about her white-clad shoulders. She held out a hand to him as he crossed to her, but her welcoming smile faded as she looked at him. “Kamose!” she blurted. “What have you been doing? Were you drunk last night?” Her eyes scanned him again and the smile returned. “You slept in the old palace, didn’t you? You have stone dust all over you.” He took the proffered hand, finding it hot, and kissed it tenderly.

“You are right,” he admitted. “I love the old palace. I go there for privacy and to think, Aahmes-nefertari. Are you well this morning?” She made a face.

“I am perfectly well but very uncomfortable. I wish that this baby would hurry up and decide to be born. I feel so ugly. And I’m often too lazy to get up.” Kamose raised his eyebrows.

“Ahmose adores you,” he said. “You can never be ugly to him. As for being lazy, why should you get up until you are ready to come to my great thanksgiving ceremony?” She sighed and lay back.

“Yes,” she nodded. “Thanksgiving. It has been quite a wonderful year, hasn’t it? Babies conceived, battles won, you and Ahmose home once more.” She bit her lip. “But Tani … I forgot at first when I woke and then your news came back to me and, Kamose, the anger was still there. I did not sleep it away. I try to feel the love I once had for her but it is gone. Not even pity remains. She betrayed us all. I suppose I imagined that you and Ahmose would defeat Apepa and rescue Tani and you would all come home in triumph and she would marry Ramose and everything would be as it was before. But it never will.” She ran a hand across her face and up into her uncombed hair. “I was wandering in some childish dream but it has fled. In one evening I grew up.” Her words mirrored those of her husband. Kamose scrutinized her carefully. There was indeed something different about her, in the eyes perhaps. They were as clear as ever but their brilliance seemed to have taken on a hard shine.

“Try not to let it make you bitter,” he said quickly and she laughed. The sound was harsh.

“Bitter? This from the King whose pursuit of vengeance has disembowelled Egypt like a sacrificial bull? Oh, do not be alarmed, Kamose,” she added as his expression changed. “It was a means to an end we all recognize as entirely necessary. Egypt is now being reborn. For this you deserve all honour. But you cannot deny that there is much bitterness in your own heart.” He shook his head.

“I do not deny it, Aahmes-nefertari. Forgive my patronizing words.”

They sat for a while in a silence filled by the last of the dawn chorus and the far-off murmur of the gardeners’ voices as they began their morning chores. Then Aahmes-nefertari said, “You have not often come to my room, Kamose. Was there something in particular you wanted to discuss?”

“Yes.” He looked full into her face. “I want you to tell me the thing you are keeping from me.”

“What thing?” She seemed utterly bewildered, but Kamose thought he caught a gleam of something, a shrinking, perhaps even a spasm of fear in her face and the minute twitching of her fingers against the rumpled sheet.

“You know what thing,” he said roughly. “The thing I have seen twice in your eyes since I returned. Twice in one day, Aahmes-nefertari! Please do not lie to me.” She pursed her lips.

“I try never to lie, Kamose,” she faltered. “Really, I am not sure I know what thing you mean.”

“Then let me help you. I will confide in you, my sister, and in return you will tell me everything. Are we agreed?” She nodded hesitantly. Kamose left the couch and went to stand by the window. Now that the time had come to unburden himself, he found it difficult to begin. He kept his face turned away from her. “I have always been happiest when alone,” he ventured quietly. “Even as a child, though I loved you all and played and swam and hunted, there was something in me that could only be satisfied in some solitary place.”

“The old palace,” she suggested. “Even when we were small and Father warned us to keep away from it, you defied him.” Kamose turned long enough to smile at her.

“Yes. But it is not my aloneness I want you to understand. It is my continual reluctance to marry, to take a wife. That reluctance is certainly allied to my desire to live a celibate life but it is not the chief reason. I am not a virgin, Aahmes-nefertari. Neither did I refuse to marry you, although that was my right, because I found you distasteful. Far from it! I could not consider such a thing, dearest, because of another woman.”

“But, Kamose …” He held up a hand.

“Wait. She is not flesh and blood, this woman. She visits me in dreams, very rarely. It was she who showed me how to mount our rebellion after Apepa had come here to pronounce sentence upon us and all hope seemed lost. Before that I used to think that she was nothing more than the embodiment of all I wanted, the perfect female constructed from the yearnings of my ka, but not any more.”

He paused, looking out over the sun-drenched garden. It is one thing to come to the conclusion that she has been sent to me by Amun himself, he reflected, and quite another to voice such a deduction aloud. It is frightening to have evidence that I am under the direct scrutiny of a god, even though I address prayers to him every day. “I did not see her again until last night,” he went on. “All through the months of campaigning I missed her and longed for her as though she were a lover. I have never seen her face, Aahmes-nefertari. Only her beautiful, lithe body and her magnificent hair. But I have come to believe …” He swung back into the room. Aahmes-nefertari was staring at him with rapt attention. “… to believe that she comes to me with messages from Amun himself,” he managed. “I will tell you what she did last night and then you will interpret her actions. I have the distinct feeling that you can.”

“But, Kamose, I am not priestly, I am not one of the Purified,” Aahmes-nefertari protested. “You should go to the temple for an interpretation.” Her words seemed nothing more than a desperate defence to Kamose. He smiled thinly and ignored them. Carefully he recounted the dream, leaving out no detail and as he relived it the sadness and frustration welled up in him so that several times he was forced to stop speaking. Aahmes-nefertari became more agitated as he went on, until by the time he had finished she was sitting bolt upright, the sheet clutched in both hands. “Now,” he said, coming forward and pulling the chair close to the couch. “I have confided in you, my dear one. It is your turn to be honest with me.”

He expected a continued resistance, denials, even the tears to which she had always been prone, but slowly her grip on the bedclothes relaxed and her stance loosened. She folded her arms across the bulge of her belly. “People think that you are not perceptive because you are so silent most of the time,” she said after a long hiatus. “They think that you are continually turned in upon yourself and simply do not notice the words that fly around you, let alone the half-hidden meanings behind a look or a gesture.” She sighed. “You are an intelligent man, Kamose. A great warrior, with your own kind of integrity and an unyielding disposition that makes you easy to respect but hard to love. I do not speak of the family of course. All of us seem to have underestimated your power of discernment. Forgive us for wanting to spare you misery.” She was hunting for a way to express something terrible, Kamose realized.

“Go on,” he said tersely.

“When you were home last winter, before you set out again for the north, Amunmose made two sacrifices for you, a bull and some doves. The bull’s blood was diseased and the doves were rotten inside. Amunmose was distressed. He approached the Amun oracle for an explanation.” Kamose’s gut began to churn.

“These sacrifices,” he interrupted. “Were they for my success in battle or for me alone?” She swallowed audibly.

“For you alone. The oracle pronounced and Amunmose as one of the Purified interpreted. Oh, Kamose!” she burst out passionately. “You know what the oracles are like! They couch their messages in obscure language that can easily be misread! Please agree to take lightly what I must say!”

“That depends on what it is and whether or not it accords with my reading of the dream,” he answered. “How do you know all this?”

“I overheard Mother and Grandmother talking about it one afternoon by the pond. They thought I was asleep. They presume that I am light of mind, you see, and do not care to retain what I hear, much less ponder it.”

“I am sorry,” Kamose said softly, and she shrugged.

“It does not matter. Ahmose knows better, and that is all I care about.”

“Have you told him about the oracle?”

“Yes. I needed to share its weight with someone, and I did not want to go to Mother or Grandmother to admit that I had been eavesdropping, however inadvertently.”

“And what was the oracular pronouncement?” He did not want to hear it, not really. Now that the moment had come, he shrank from it as though it were the breath of some vile pollution and in his shrinking he recognized the knowledge that the words would be true and his fate inescapable. Aahmes-nefertari looked down at her folded arms.

“‘Three Kings there were, then two, then one, before the work of the god was done,’” she half-whispered. “It is not so hard to untangle, Kamose.”

“No,” he agreed after a while, suddenly aware that the room was becoming hot as the summer sun rose higher, but his feet and hands were very cold. “I watched her stop by the box,” he murmured. “My heart leapt. I thought she would pick up the Royal Regalia and bring it to me after laying down the weapons. The fighting is almost over, I told myself in my dream. Soon I will be crowned Beloved of Ma’at, Ruler of the Two Lands. But she left it there. She came to me empty handed …” With an effort he controlled his voice. “I will never sit on the Horus Throne, will I, Aahmes-nefertari? Never wear the Double Crown. That glory will belong to Ahmose. Then am I to die soon?” She threw back the sheet, and pushing herself to the edge of the couch, she bent forward and embraced his neck.