by Jerry Dubs
Imhotep felt himself start to shake.
“I don’t want the throne,” he stammered. “Teti doesn’t have to worry . . .”
“Teti will not worry that you want the throne, Imhotep. Teti doesn’t fear you. Perhaps he would if he spent more time among the people of the Two Lands, but he is always away fighting and gaining the glory that men find so important. The River Iteru doesn’t flow in his blood as strongly as it flows in yours. He doesn’t understand how much you are loved by the people of the Two Lands.”
Imhotep leaned away from her, shaking his head. He wanted no part of a power struggle with Teti or with anyone else.
He wanted only to be with his wife Meryt and their son, Tjau. He wanted to enjoy the sun on his face and the cooling evening breeze on his skin as he sat on the roof terrace of his house with Bata or Paneb. He wanted a piece of charcoal in his hand and a sheaf of blank papyrus by his side. He wanted to stand in the western desert and envision monuments and tombs that he would build. He did not want power over others’ lives.
“Yes, Imhotep.” Hetepherneti’s voice was firm, a teacher talking to a bright, but reluctant student, “There are those in the Two Lands who see this more clearly than Teti or you. They understand your importance. Kanakht and Djefi might be dead and dust, but there are still those, there always will be those, who covet the throne. They see Teti as a hard rock, but a rock can be broken. You are more difficult, Imhotep. You are in the hearts of the people. Before you can be removed, you must lose the love of the people.”
“I don’t understand,” Imhotep said.
Hetephernebti drew a deep breath and, releasing it with resignation, she closed her eyes and said, “Seeds of anger were planted many years ago.”
Section one
HORUS
RISING
2684 BCE
In the Reign
of King Kha-Sekhemwy
Hetephernebti and the onion
Alone in the walled garden behind her father’s palace, thirteen-year-old Hetephernebti held a small spring onion by its grassy stem. Dangling it close to her face she sniffed at it.
Then, rubbing her fingers over the small bulb she made sure that there was no dirt on it. With a fingernail she scraped off the hair-like roots at the bottom of the bulb and then she examined the pale green translucent root as if she would be able to see into its heart and understand the mystery of its power.
She shook her head. She didn’t understand how it would work, but Iput had told her that this was the way to find out if she was ready to bear children.
With an ease that came from months of practice, she closed her eyes and conjured a picture of herself holding an infant to her small breasts. She could feel the warmth of the baby’s breath on her breast. She could feel his, yes, it would be a boy, weight on her arms and she could hear the soft whistle of his breath as he slept in her arms.
She opened her eyes from her dream and sighed.
She needed to be a mother.
Cupping her free hand over her mouth Hetephernebti exhaled. Her breath smelled fresh and clear, perhaps a little yeasty from bread she had eaten earlier. She shrugged and, opening her legs, she slowly slid the small onion bulb inside herself. Clamping her legs together to keep the onion within she picked up a small green faience figurine of Taweret, goddess of childbirth and fertility who took the form of a pregnant river hippopotamus with the tail of a crocodile. As Hetephernebti caressed the large snout of the goddess she realized that she had forgotten to ask Iput how long she needed to keep the onion inside her.
If she was truly old enough to bear a child, then the fragrance of the onion would pass upward through her stomach and soon fill her mouth with its pungent aroma. If the gates to her womb were not yet open, well, she would try again next month.
She ran her hands over her body. Her breasts were small, barely formed, but she was sure that they would swell with milk if she were to have a child. Her concern was her hips. They were narrow, not the wide girdle of her mother, and even she grimaced in pain as she sat astride the birthing blocks. Hetephernebti didn’t understand how a baby could pass through her own narrow channel.
She caressed the pregnant belly of the icon. The gods would provide.
Just then she heard the shouts of her younger brother. “Nebti! Nebti!”
She crossed her legs to hide the grassy stem that protruded from her.
“Yes, Djoser, I’m over here,” she called.
Her eleven-year-old brother appeared from behind a cluster of young date palm trees. Unlike Hetephernebti who wore only a gold-threaded belt, Djoser was wearing a pleated kilt. His head was shorn except for a short sidelock.
“I’m going with father to Sinai! I’m going to have my own company, the Lion Company!” he shouted as he ran to her.
“That’s wonderful,” she said, standing to hug her little brother. Ever since he was old enough to pretend that a stick was a spear, Djoser had played at being a soldier. He was shorter than his older sister, but broad-shouldered, his ropy muscles growing stronger every day.
“I know,” he agreed. “The Lion Company is from Zau, down in the delta. All the men are fishermen and hunters of hippos, so they have strong arms.” He pulled his right arm back as if he were holding a spear. He hurled the imaginary spear and grunted. “Like that,” he said, laughing.
He stopped and pointed between her legs.
“What’s that?”
Hetephernebti leaned toward him. She put her hands on either side of his head and held his face still. “Smell my breath,” she said, exhaling into his face.
Realizing that she was testing her fertility, Djoser pulled away. “Onions! You reek of onions!” he said and started to laugh.
She cupped her hand in front of her mouth and exhaled. Her breath was sweet as freshly baked bread. She frowned; there was not a hint of onion.
Djoser saw her disappointment and stopped laughing.
“I’m sorry, Nebti,” he said solemnly. “I’m sure you’ll have many, many children.”
He started to smile, “You’ll have so many children they’ll have their own company in the army and I’ll lead them.” He backed away from her. “They’ll be the Onion Company,” he said as he turned to run through the garden.
Hetephernebti couldn’t pretend to be angry with her little brother; they were more than siblings. They confided their dreams to each other, they confessed their fears and they wondered aloud about the many things they didn’t understand.
Djoser often came into her room at night and told her stories about his training at the barracks near the palace.
He would relay rumors from other towns, always filling in the gaps in the stories with his own ideas of what had really happened, who had actually fought someone and who had boasted of things they would be too afraid to do.
As she lay on her bed listening to her little brother, Hetephernebti marveled not so much at his ability to remember all the details of each story but rather his understanding of why some of the boys lied and why others didn’t. He intuitively grasped their characters, their weaknesses and their desires.
She knew other boys his age feared not only Djoser’s strength but also his position as prince of the Two Lands, but she thought that their fears were misplaced. It was his understanding and intelligence that were his true weapons.
Suddenly she remembered the onion.
She checked her breath once more, shrugged at its stubborn sweetness and tugged the onion free. She started to toss it behind a young fig tree and then stopped. It wasn’t the onion’s fault. She found a clear spot in the garden and scooped a small hole in the ground. She put the onion bulb in the hole and brushed dirt over it. She straightened the straggly green leaves only to watch them sag again.
Sighing, she stood and clapped the dirt from her hands.
Her time would come.
She knew that the royal blood of the Two Lands passed through women. Her father Kha-Sekhemwy was king, but it was because he had marrie
d Hetephernebti’s mother, Menathap.
Hetephernebti paused at that thought.
Suddenly it didn’t make sense to her that her mother would know who to marry, that she would be able to pick which of her suitors should become king. She wondered if instead the strongest man decided to become king and then he married a woman with royal blood to make himself legitimate.
She sat again.
What did that mean? Who would she marry?
There was Djoser, of course. He was Menathap’s and Kha-Sekhemwy’s son and the prince of Kemet. It was natural that he would become king.
But what of Nebka? He was also Kha-Sekhemwy’s son, from a wife he had before he became king and took Menathap as his chief wife. Nebka was much older than Djoser, almost thirty years old. If something should happen to Kha-Sekhemwy before Djoser was old enough to take the throne, then Nebka might be king even though he was not truly of royal blood.
She thought of him. He was taller than Djoser, but not as athletic. He spent his time in shadowy, lamp-lit rooms with scribes talking about ... Hetephernebti realized she had no idea exactly what her half-brother did. He never traveled with Kha-Sekhemwy on military expeditions. He didn’t wear the leopard skin of a priest. He wasn’t married. He didn’t hunt or fish. He didn’t lead expeditions to Nubia or Sinai.
I don’t even know him, Hetephernebti thought. He might be king and I might become his wife and he is my father’s son and I don’t know him.
She walked over to the bare patch of ground where she had planted the disappointing onion. Saying a quick prayer to Renenutet, goddess of harvest, Hetephernebti squatted over the onion and watered it. Then, standing she turned toward the palace.
Somewhere in there Nebka was doing whatever he did.
She would find out what that was.
The Terraces of Turquoise
A month later on a distant mountain range King Kha-Sekhemwy poured a handful of turquoise gems from his right hand to his left. Unpolished and rough, just pulled from the sandstone beneath the rocky ground, the stones were more brown than blue-green.
King Kha-Sekhemwy motioned for Djoser to come closer.
“Cup your hands,” he told his son. He poured the stones into Djoser’s hands.
“What do you think, son? Worth dragging our ships across Deshret and sailing them across the Great Green? Worth marching through the red dust and climbing those jagged boulders to these hard, dark caves?”
They were standing in the shade of a small mud-brick hut near the cave entrance to one of more than a dozen mines at the Terraces of Turquoise, the richest gemstone deposit in Mafkat, the Land of Turquoise.
A month earlier, a few days before Hetephernebti tested her fertility, King Kha-Sekhemwy had begun assembling his army of four thousand men, calling on the governors of each nome of the Two Lands to send men to Waset.
They had come from the delta region, racing upriver to beat the floods that would soon wash down the length of the River Iteru. Others had floated down the river from Abu. Some of the men were farmers whose lands would be flooded for the next three months; others were sons of bakers, weavers, fishermen or merchants; some were members of the standing militia from each nome; and others, mingled among them, a platoon within each company, were Nubian archers, tall, black mercenaries from the land beyond the first cataract.
In Waset their first job was to reassemble the wooden sledges kept to carry the flat-bottomed cedar fleet across the eastern desert to the banks of the Great Green, the sea that divided the Two Lands from Sinai, an empty land of deserts and red rock mountains.
Provisioned by merchants who grumbled about the king’s demand for discounted prices but who were happy to find a voracious buyer for their bread and meat and grain, the army marched into the red desert they called Deshret, singing and taunting each other as they dragged the sand-bound fleet eastward. But as the green trees, brown water and dark soil of Kemet disappeared from sight, and as the sledges seemed to grab at the sand as they slid over it, the taunting and singing were replaced by grunts and calls for water.
Leaner and with freshly callused hands and aching backs and legs, the army reached the shores of the Great Green. Across the narrow sea loomed the mountains of Mafkat. Far to the south was the land of Punt, source of gold and incense.
As the army launched itself into the Great Green, a small contingent of men watched from the shore, left behind to guard the sledges. They loudly cheered and silently laughed as the rest of the army, many of the men nervous about crossing the sea, bent to the oars and began to row to the east.
After two days, with a different set of muscles burning and aching, they beached their ships at Ras Abu-Rudeis, a small outpost set in front of distant, red mountains. Here King Kha-Sekhemwy left another company of men to guard the beached fleet. The rest of the army, including Djoser’s Lion Company, marched toward the eastern mountains. At the foot of the mountain range the army entered Wadi Martella, one of the many ancient, dried river beds that wound through the mountains.
A week of trekking, with pain finding home a new collection of muscles, took them deep within the mountain range to the caves where the turquoise stones that decorated the royal jewelry and that provided the rich blues of the tomb paintings and the dyes for the royal linens were mined.
Now, standing before one of the caves, Djoser contemplated the dirty stones while behind him the army erected tents, began cook fires and took turns filling goat skins with water from a stream that trickled down from the mountaintop.
King Kha-Sekhemwy studied Djoser as the boy rubbed his thumbs across the turquoise stones.
“I talked with Sabef while we were marching here,” Djoser said slowly.
“Sabef?”
“He is the leader of the Nubian archers in my company. He showed me how he works flint to create a sharp arrow head.”
King Kha-Sekhemwy raised an eyebrow. He had had little interaction with his youngest son until two years ago when the boy turned nine years old and was ready to begin military training.
Menathap had told him that Djoser was not an ordinary boy. King Kha-Sekhemwy had smiled at her words, assuming them to be nothing more than the boast of a proud mother. She had seen his smile and shaken her head at him, her eyes filled with knowledge that he didn’t share.
“Yes, he is my son, our son, but I am not speaking as his mother, Hemwy,” she had said, “There is a presence about him. He is an old soul, his ba is not that of a child. The look of his eyes when he studies something, the care in his choice of words, his patience and his measured response to surprises, he has a wisdom beyond his years. It is almost ...” she had hesitated until King Kha-Sekhemwy had nodded for her to continue, “I sometimes wonder if one of our ancestors, perhaps Narmer or Menes, has decided to return to the Two Lands.”
King Kha-Sekhemwy waited now for Djoser to explain himself.
“When Sabef began working the flint it was dull and useless, as these stones appear now,” Djoser said, raising his turquoise-laden hands. “But when Sabef was finished he had given the flint an edge so sharp that it drew blood when he pulled it across his thumb.”
“So the turquoise is like the flint?” King Kha-Sekhemwy said.
Djoser smiled. “Yes, father.” He looked up to his father’s broad face and met his eyes.
King Kha-Sekhemwy had to force himself to not look away from his son’s penetrating gaze. After a moment Djoser smiled and slowly blinked his eyes, tacitly conceding his father’s superior position.
“I think, King Kha-Sekhemwy, Powerful One, Lord of Kemet, my beloved father, that stones, trees, earth, water, even men, especially men, are like that. They might seem to have little worth, but if they are worked and polished they become valuable.”
King Kha-Sekhemwy opened a linen bag and motioned for Djoser to pour the gems into it.
“A good lesson, Djoser,” he said, beaming at his son. He tied the bag shut and turned to give it to an attendant. As he presented his vulnerable back to his son, K
ing Kha-Sekhemwy had a sudden thrill of fear.
Yes, the boy was only eleven years old. But he had not merely kept up with the men in the Lion Company in the long march across the red desert, he had led them, even taking his turn pulling the sledges. When the army made camp he was tireless, making sure the men had food and water before he attended to himself. Before he retired each night he always presented himself to Harkhuf, his battalion commander, to review his orders for the next day.
Rumors of his endurance and his strength — he could shoot an arrow nearly as far as the strongest Nubian archer and he could throw a spear farther than most of the men he commanded — had quickly reached King Kha-Sekhemwy, which meant, the king knew, that everyone in the army had heard the rumors and soon the rumors would grow into legends.
Before long, King Kha-Sekhemwy thought, my son will want to sit on the throne of the Two Lands. How many others, he wondered, have already had the same thought?
***
King Kha-Sekhemwy and Djoser peered over the ridge of a small sand dune. Behind them ten men from the first platoon of Djoser’s Lion Company quietly shuffled along the base of the shifting sand.
The hunting party had left the day before, winding their way down twisting mountain passes to the endless desert east of the mountain range. King Kha-Sekhemwy had left the army behind under the command of General Babaef, who led the Upper Division of the army. Babaef had the unexciting job of overseeing repairs to the mines, taking inventory of the turquoise treasure and clearing fallen boulders from the trails connecting the mines.
Meanwhile the king would enjoy a hunt.
But the king had left in a bad mood.
Babaef, a thin, humorless man, with his own small army of aides and scribes, insisted that everything be done properly. It was a good quality in an administrator, but an irritant when Babaef turned that same unwavering attention to the king, which is what happened when Babaef had insisted on knowing where the king was going.
