The Sleeper in the Sands (28 page)

That same day, Joseph led her into the presence of King Thoth-mes, to ask for the blessing of his master on the marriage. But King Thoth-mes, when he saw Thua before him, seemed suddenly to blanch, and to grip the two sides of his golden throne. Then he rose to his feet and took Joseph by the arm; but all the while, even as he led Joseph away, he could not tear his gaze from Thua’s beauteous face. Only when they were alone together in a private room did King Thoth-mes turn back to Joseph, his expression still dark, and stamped with doubt.

‘O Prince of Counsellors,’ he exclaimed, ‘I have had a dream which I must tell you, for you alone of all my servants have the wisdom to interpret it. I imagined that I was standing in the hills beyond the desert, above the valley where the tombs of my forefathers He. As I watched, however, I saw that blood was rising up from the hidden entranceways, and all the dust in the valley was being stained by the flow.’

‘This is a great wonder!’ Joseph said. ‘For just a few hours ago I fell asleep above the valley, and I dreamed the same thing myself. But tell me, O mighty King -- did you not then see the blood washed away?’

King Thoth-mes gazed at him strangely. ‘I did,’ he nodded, ‘by a mighty deluge. But did you not see from where the deluge flowed?’

‘No,’ answered Joseph, ‘that was not in my dream.’

‘But it was in mine; and I shall tell you what I saw. There was a Nubian girl by the entrance to the valley, and she was carrying a large jar of water in her arms. She tipped this jar, and spilt the water, and the water flowed from the jar without stop. And this was the cause of the deluge in the valley’

For a long while Joseph stood, and did not answer. Then at last he frowned and shook his head. ‘O mighty King,’ he said, ‘how can I interpret your dream when you have not told me all?’

King Thoth-mes smiled slowly. ‘Truly’ he answered, ‘there is nothing which can escape you.’

‘Please, O King, tell me what else it was you saw’

Still the King smiled, but his expression grew very strange.

‘The face of the girl in my dream,’ he said at length, ‘was the same as that girl’s whom you have brought here to marry.

Can you be surprised, then, that I was struck pale with wonder?’

‘It may be,’ said Joseph slowly, ‘that you will not wish to hear the meaning of this dream.’

‘Tell me nevertheless, without any fear.’

Joseph bowed. ‘Very well,’ he replied. ‘You must know, O mighty King, that there is a curse upon your blood-line, stretching back I know not how far nor to what source. It must be that you too have the same curse within your veins.’

King Thoth-mes’ face, once again, had become very pale, and his expression frozen. ‘I have the blood of Osiris in my veins,’ he said at last. ‘I am the heir to that god who taught the arts of life to man, and revealed the wonders of the heavens and the stars. How can such a blood, then, such a heritage, be cursed?’

‘That, I am afraid, your dream does not reveal.’

‘Then how am I to judge what the curse might be?’

Joseph’s expression, like his master’s, was now very set. ‘If you do not know, O Prince, then who am I to tell you?’

A shadow passed across King Thoth-mes’ face, so that he seemed for a moment as fearful as before, when he had first re-emerged from the temple of Amen. ‘This is folly’ he murmured at last.

‘Indeed, O Prince?’

Still the King stood rapt in thought. ‘Folly!’ he repeated, clenching his fists. He shuddered suddenly. ‘And yet if it were true -- is there no hope at all?’

Joseph smiled. ‘All things are possible to the will of the Most-High.’

‘Then tell me, O my friend, what message of hope you can read in my dream, for I am filled with horror and a nameless dread.’

Joseph smiled again, and kissed Pharaoh’s hand. ‘You saw the flood which washed clean the tombs of your ancestors. What else could that mean, O Prince, save that the curse upon your blood-line will likewise be washed away?’

‘But how?’ he whispered. ‘I beg you, tell me, how?’

‘In your dream,’ Joseph answered, ‘it was Thua who washed the valley clean; it was from her jar that the water flowed. Similarly, I prophesy that it is from her womb that the saviour of your blood-line will come. All praise, then, to the Most-High, Who showed your dream to you, and Who at the same time cast Thua in my path to be my wife!’

But King Thoth-mes did not reply. Instead, he turned and crossed to where his gardens stretched away, filled with flowers of every colour, and sweet-smelling trees, and fountains as cooling as the snows upon the mountains, his best-beloved refuge from the burning heat of day. He stood there a long while, gazing out in silence, and Joseph, watching him, was filled with disquiet. ‘O my dearest master,’ he said at last, ‘and my even dearer friend, will you not share with me this secret which oppresses you?’

King Thoth-mes turned slowly round, and Joseph saw what he had not observed previously - how thin his master’s face had begun to seem again, as it had been before his entry into the temple of Amen, and how withered and taut the flesh across the skull. For a moment, indeed, he appeared barely like a mortal man at all; but then he smiled, and once more he wore the face which Joseph loved so well and knew. ‘O Prince of Counsellors,’ he whispered, ‘give me your hand.’

Joseph did so, and for a long while King Thoth-mes held it; then he smiled once again. ‘Marry Thua,’ he whispered, ‘and give birth to many sons. And let us pray that the meaning of what I dreamed is what you claim.’

But at this point, Haroun saw the approach of morning and broke off from his tale. ‘O Commander of the Faithful,’ he said, ‘if you would care to return here tomorrow evening, then I shall describe to you how the Queen bore a deathly portent, and how King Thoth-mes kept a mystery dark from Joseph.’

And so the Caliph did as Haroun suggested; and the following evening he returned to the mosque. And Haroun said:

Joseph lived with Thua, his new wife, amidst great joy, and after a year she gave birth to a son, and Joseph gave him the name of Inen. He was loved not only by his parents but by King Thoth-mes as well, who ordered him brought to the Great Harim of the Palace so that he could be raised with his own son, the Crown Prince Amen-hetep, as though the same royal blood flowed in both of their veins. To Thua too, though she had been just a slave, he granted splendid honours, appointing her the Superior of the Harim and Chief Companion to his sister, the Great Queen. As for Joseph himself, that wise and happy man, King Thoth-mes hated to be parted from his company and whenever he was, it was observed how his spirits would begin to grow downcast and his temper shadowed by strange fantasies and fears.

Then it happened that Thua announced that she was pregnant once again, and some few days later the Queen announced the same. Joseph greeted the news with great joy, but King Thoth-mes, he saw, to his consternation, did not, and instead grew ever more nervous and withdrawn. Joseph sought to comfort his master, and distract him with his favourite pleasures, but still King Thoth-mes brooded, and as the months began to pass, so his moods grew ever worse, until at length he seemed as fearful as he had been long before, when he had first emerged from the temple of Amen; but what it was that he dreaded, he refused to discuss.

One evening, though, it happened that he and Joseph were walking through the gardens when they saw Thua and the Queen together by the lake, the marks of their pregnancies by now very plain. King Thoth-mes gazed upon their bellies in silence for a moment, then frowned, and shuddered, and took a step back. The Queen, made aware of his presence by the sound, at once rose to greet him, but as she did so King Thoth-mes frowned and flinched again. ‘Keep away,’ he whispered. The Queen gazed at him in perplexity. ‘Keep away’ he whispered hoarsely once again. His face now was black with foreboding and revulsion, and for a moment it seemed, as his Queen stood before him, that he would raise his hand and strike her swollen belly. But with a visible effort he controlled himself and, turning violently, he hurried away. As he did so, it was not only the Queen who gazed after him in perplexity, for Joseph too, in all his years of service, could never recall his friend behaving so. He turned back to the Queen and Thua, to comfort them. At the same moment he glanced down at their swollen bellies once again, remembering King Thoth-mes’ dream, how Thua had been seen washing away the blood of the royal line; and he began to wonder all the more what it was that his master feared.

When the time came for Thua’s confinement, however, Joseph observed how for a few days King Thoth-mes appeared almost happy. At length the news was brought to them that Thua had given birth to a second son, and Joseph praised the All-High and named the boy Ay. King Thoth-mes ordered the infant to be brought to him, and he stood for several minutes inspecting the child. ‘What do you think?’ he murmured at last, glancing up at Joseph. ‘Is it this child, or your elder, or one yet to be born, who will purge my blood-line of the curse which you saw?’

Joseph bowed his head. ‘I cannot answer that, O Prince, for there is only One Whose eye can penetrate all things.’

‘So you say,’ nodded King Thoth-mes. For a further moment, he inspected the child. ‘And yet I wish I could glimpse the hidden pattern of the future. For in a very few weeks, my own child will be born.’

He said nothing more upon the matter, and Joseph wondered greatly at what his meaning could have been. He observed, though, in the following weeks, how the flesh upon King Thoth-mes’ bones began to dry again, so that his whole appearance seemed ever more thin, save that at the same time his belly and his thighs were growing rounded. These marks of disease struck Joseph full of unease, for he had never heard of such symptoms and he knew himself powerless to suggest any cure. But King Thoth-mes, as when he had started to sicken once before, retreated to the sanctuary of the temple of Amen, and there he remained closeted deep within its blackness, even as the Queen went into her confinement. Only as the labour began to draw to its close did he re-emerge at last, and Joseph at once saw how the bloom of the King’s health had been restored. But although in his appearance he seemed utterly recovered, his mood remained even more haunted than before, for it seemed that even as he listened to his Queen’s distant shrieks, he dreaded the possible fruit of her childbirth. At length, when the screaming had finally faded and all sounded calm, Thua emerged, her cheeks streaked with tears, from the chamber in which she had been tending to the Queen in her labour. She wiped her face, then bowed low before Pharaoh. ‘O mighty King,’ she stammered, ‘your child, your child . . .’

King Thoth-mes clenched his fists, as though grinding something small. ‘What is it?’ he whispered. ‘What have you seen?’

Thua’s brow creased for a moment with bemusement, and then she choked and shook her head. ‘No,’ she said, ‘your child . . . your child was born dead.’

For a moment, it seemed to Joseph that the face of King Thoth-mes appeared to lighten with relief. ‘And how did it look, in its appearance?’ he asked.

‘A girl,’ Thua answered. ‘She would have been a most beautiful girl.’

King Thoth-mes breathed in deeply, and his expression of relief could now no longer be mistaken, although he at once sought to conceal it and, hurrying to the chamber of his Queen, he sat with her a long while, seeking to comfort her in her grief. From that time on, however, for a few brief months, he seemed restored to his former good spirits, and Joseph recognised the man whom he had first learned to love. But then, just when he had begun to hope that all his fears had come to nothing, Thua announced that she was pregnant for a third time, and Joseph observed the shadow in King Thoth-mes’ stare once again, and an expression almost of something like guilt -- made all the worse, so it seemed, when he met Joseph’s eye. He began to dwell ever more upon his dream of the valley, and upon the meaning which Joseph had discovered within it. Whenever he did so, it appeared to Joseph, King Thoth-mes’ flesh would hang drier and thinner upon his bones, and the marks of his disease grow more haggard in his face. Then his Queen revealed that she was pregnant once again; and the news cast Pharaoh deep into a black and icy fury.

Certainly, from that moment on his disease appeared ever more implacable, as though its grip were squeezing and moulding his bones and could no longer be loosened. In his moods too he no longer seemed himself, but rather the thing of strange and violent rages, such as Joseph had seen before in the garden, when he had almost raised his hand to strike his pregnant wife. His restraint, though, Joseph feared was now a thing of the past, for although the Queen never spoke of it, she was sometimes seen red-eyed and with the marks of bruises on her shoulders and arms. King Thoth-mes himself was more rarely seen by now, for he passed many days closeted within the temple of Amen. Yet even the mysteries of the god’s sorcery, so it seemed, were losing their power to keep the sickness at bay; and it was whispered that a tomb was being readied in the valley beyond the Nile’s western bank, where the dead had their realm. Not even Joseph though, the Great Double of the King, could be certain of this news; and so he came to fear that King Thoth-mes might indeed be dead.

A month passed, during which time he never once glimpsed his royal master, and then it happened that the hour of Thua’s labour arrived. Joseph, infected by his memory of the Queen’s last confinement, waited for the news from his wife’s chamber with a nervous impatience, and a dread which he did not care to think upon too closely, for his dreams had recently been haunted by dark visions and omens. Dimly, from his wife’s chamber he had heard the screams of childbirth all day; yet as evening began to deepen, they seemed to grow ever more desperate with pain. At last they reached a pitch, and then fell silent; and Joseph, listening to the murmurs of the palm trees in the breeze and to the far-off noise of the geese above the Nile, could not imagine that such sounds, at such a moment, could be real. His skin began to burn as though with a flush. Very distantly, he wondered why. The shadows were still dusty with the heat of the vanished day - yet he knew it was not the heat which was pricking his eyes.