The Horus Road

by Pauline Gedge

  “Can I swim when I wake up?” he asked. Ahmose gave his youth lock a gentle tug.

  “We will go and look at the baby hippopotamus if you like,” he said. “An hour or two on the river with you is just what I need.” Ahmose-onkh’s face lit up.

  “Thank you, Majesty Father!” he crowed. “And I can practise with my throwing stick!”

  “At ducks, not hippopotamuses,” Ahmose said, amused. He watched the boy race away towards the house and turned to his wife. “He has a throwing stick?” Aahmesnefertari dabbled her fingers in her waterbowl and dried them on the proffered napkin before replying.

  “Emkhu had a little one made for him,” she said. “He can’t hit anything with it yet. Emkhu tells me that the ducks will be quite safe for some years to come.” Ahmose did not smile.

  “He is almost five years old,” he commented. “From now on he will change and grow very rapidly. We must have more children, Aahmes-nefertari, another son, a daughter to legitimize Ahmose-onkh’s accession to divinity in his turn. He is all that stands between Egypt’s stability and a return to chaos. I would lock him up to preserve him from every vicissitude of life if I could.” He had never before spoken so directly of a fear she knew had begun to obsess him and at once she was filled with a sense of failure.

  “I know,” she murmured. “I am sorry, Ahmose. But perhaps if you are able to stay home for longer than a day or two we might indeed begin to fill those new apartments of which Sebek-nakht spoke.” Her attempt to keep her tone light was successful. He laughed and kissed her on the neck.

  “We might,” he agreed, a glint in his eye. “We must try to do so very hard, my beautiful warrior, in fact tonight …” He broke off, seeing his mother emerge from the shade at the rear of the house and come walking towards the pool, Kares pacing behind her carrying a stool. “Aahotep!” he called. “You have missed a fine meal!” She waved and soon came to a halt under the protection of the canopy. Beads of sweat stood out on her forehead and one tendril of dark hair was stuck to the moisture on her neck. Bowing shortly to Ahmose, she gestured to her steward, who set down the stool and snapped his fingers at a servant who was holding the beer jug. Aahotep lowered herself onto the seat and drained the cup being held out to her.

  “The day is warm for spring,” she said. “I was not hungry, Ahmose. I have been with Tetisheri in the vegetable garden. I had it enlarged this year to cope with greater demands. Loads of silt from the flood had to be hauled to it and dug into the sand, and watering it has become a problem, it is now so vast. I want to move it entirely, turn one of the fields to the north from grain to vegetables so that they can be irrigated directly from a canal connecting with the Nile.” Kares handed her a square of linen and she wiped her forehead delicately, careful not to smear her kohl. “The days of a few rows of garlic, lettuce and onions is over. I am tired.”

  “Surely you were not weeding yourself?” Aahmesnefertari expostulated, and Aahotep gave her a wry smile.

  “Certainly not. But I found myself embroiled in an argument with Tetisheri over the cucumbers.” Aahmesnefertari blinked at her, puzzled, and her smile became half-chuckle, half-groan. “Tetisheri does not approve of cucumbers because they first came into Egypt with the Setiu. She does not want us to increase the crop. I told her not to be ridiculous, that cucumbers were cool and juicy to eat and in any case, all permitted food is a gift from the gods. But she was adamant. I was forced to directly override her commands to the garden overseer. She has gone to her quarters to sleep.” Aahmes-nefertari did not find the situation funny and neither, obviously, did Ahmose. His expression became thoughtful.

  “Although she is aging, she is still in possession of all her faculties,” he said. “She should be accorded the reverence and respect due to both and I wish that I could give her some task that would absorb those remarkable energies of hers, but how can I when she continually tries to argue the smallest responsibility into a right to dictate the future of Egypt? I love her as my grandmother. In any other capacity she is an exasperation.”

  “I want to make the journey to Djeb as soon as Hent-ta Hent’s funeral is over,” Aahotep said. “I had intended to send Yuf alone to inspect the tomb of my ancestor Queen Sebekemsaf but I have decided that I need a change of scene.” She cast a rueful glance at her son. “I am surely a little bored, Ahmose, when I am reduced to investigating the state of the vegetable garden and quarrelling with another Queen over cucumbers. Let me take Tetisheri with me.” She hesitated. “It will be a full progress, two ships, all my staff. She will enjoy it. We will put in at Esna and Pi-Hathor, and Nekheb too of course. We will be fêted and entertained along the way.”

  “So you believe that Esna and Pi-Hathor need to be reminded that they are now under my permanent rule,” Ahmose said. It was a statement rather than a question and Aahmes-nefertari marvelled at her husband’s flash of acuity. Like so many others, I am occasionally lulled into thinking Ahmose as straightforward and uncomplicated as he seems, she thought to herself. I ought to have learned the fallacy of that impression a long time ago. Aahotep met her eye.

  “The spies tell us that there are always grumblings in those two towns but that the complaints have been growing,” she said frankly. “It will do no harm to be seen there. But I do not go south merely to test the public temper. An inspection of the tomb of my ancestor is not an excuse.”

  “Ask Grandmother if she would like to accompany you, by all means,” Ahmose acceded. “Some time spent on the river and in the reception halls of worshipful mayors will divert her, and perhaps she will return in a better humour. How long will you be gone?”

  “I am not sure. A month or two, maybe more.” Ahmose’s eyebrows rose.

  “You must indeed be bored, Mother,” he said slowly. “Are you unhappy as well?” She bit her lip, a strangely shocking gesture in one so usually composed.

  “Ahmose, I am forty-one years old,” she admitted. “I have lived through many experiences that rightly belong to the world of men. I have put down a rebellion. I have killed a traitor. It has been difficult for me to return to the mundane chores of household management, in spite of Aahmes-nefertari’s kindness in allowing me to share in some of her more important duties. The Gold of Flies sits on the table beside my couch. I sometimes lift it up when I am wakeful at night and remember how you made me go to the temple in the sheath stained with Meketra’s blood, the blood I shed, and laid the award around my neck.” She put a hand up to her breast as though the three precious golden insects, symbols of her courage, were resting there. “Do not mistake me,” she went on more strongly. “I would not go back to that time for all the gold in Kush. I have no desire to be a General. Or an assassin.” She smiled at her own small joke. “I am not unhappy but I am restless. A journey upstream will cure me.”

  “Shall I find another husband for you, Aahotep?” her son enquired impulsively, and now she did laugh, fully and musically.

  “Gods no!” she choked. “You would be forced to search beyond the borders of Egypt, for am I not a Queen, wife of one King and mother of another? Besides, to be in Weset as it is transformed is intriguing and to sleep in peace alone is bliss.”

  Is it? Aahmes-nefertari found herself wondering as she studied her mother’s handsome face. You have always been a sensuous woman, Aahotep. It is in your bones, your walk, the grace of your movements. Does your body feel no lack? As if Aahotep had read her mind, her gaze swung to her daughter and in the wide, dark eyes there was a message. Yes I lack, she seemed to be saying, but it is Seqenenra for whom I long, and that yearning cannot be satisfied in this life. I am not happy, but I am teaching myself contentment.

  One week later Hent-ta-Hent’s tiny coffin was carried across the Nile and Amunmose performed the funeral rites. The day was fine and clear. The sky held nothing but the outspread wings of the hawks gliding languidly on the updraughts of mild spring air. The odour of the river mingled with an almost indefinable essence emanating from the still half-buried crops forcing their way wit
h blind purpose through the wet soil. The proper rituals were observed. The mourners wailed and sprinkled their heads with sand. The sacred adze, the pesesh-kef, was touched to the bandaged corpse to open Hent-ta-Hent’s mouth, eyes and ears. Incense billowed about her in streaming clouds.

  Yet to Aahmes-nefertari, crying quietly beside her husband, there was something careless and even insincere about the proceeding, a feeling of impatient surprise that the baby should need the full trappings of a funeral at all. She did not live long enough to impress a personality on those around her, Aahmes-nefertari thought. Not even on me and certainly not on Ahmose. He is not weeping. He stands here dry-eyed. No one has mourned her honestly but me. My body carried hers. My breasts nurtured her. I held her close to me day after day, watching her face, rocking her to sleep, seeing her eyes open and her lips smile in recognition when she woke. I soothed her when she cried, her head with its soft covering of down tucked into my neck. The only true anguish is mine.

  After the obligatory feast Ahmose dismissed the company but he did not return to the east bank himself. Instead he took a guard and a servant with a sunshade and wandered among the other tombs scattered across the sandy waste like monuments to the inevitability of fate. Aahmes-nefertari, wrapped in grief and unwilling to confront the noisy and commonplace life of the estate for a while, sat under the protection of a canopy and watched him appear and disappear as he wove his mysterious purpose. He paused for some time outside his father’s edifice, standing very still, arms at his sides, his blue mourning kilt fluttering in the wind, the sunlight flashing on the gold adorning his brown chest and encircling his wrists.

  When he at last moved on to his brother’s small courtyard, a grey shape detached itself from the shadow of the stones and came shambling reluctantly towards him. Aahmes-nefertari saw him crouch and fondle the dog’s ears before turning and making his way towards her. Coming in under the thin shelter of the canopy, he sank onto the sand by her stool. “What is Behek still doing here?” he asked abruptly. He did not look at her. His gaze, narrowed against the noon glare, was fixed on the stark panorama stretching out before him. Beyond the cluster of tombs the ground ran in an unhurried, slow rise to the funerary temple of Osiris Mentuhotep neb-hapet-Ra that nestled beneath the sharp tiers of the cliff of Gurn, its pale stones almost indistinguishable from the dun rocks behind it.

  “He found his own way across the river at the time of Kamose’s funeral,” Aahmes-nefertari answered. “Don’t you remember? There are enough skiffs plying between the banks. He lives at the door to Kamose’s tomb. I have appointed a servant to bring him food and water every day, for he will not leave.”

  Ahmose made no comment. He continued to stare at the silent aridity that seemed to possess its own peculiar sense of exclusive isolation. But presently he stirred and covered her foot with his hand.

  “Hent-ta-Hent achieved nothing, became nothing,” he said quietly. “She was given no time to emerge from the cocoon of her babyhood. And yet she is here among those who fought and suffered, loved and hated, died of old age on their couches or in the prime of their lives on the point of a spear. When we buried our father and Kamose, we did so in the midst of a turbulence of life that made their deaths seem simply a part of that great agitation. Even Si-Amun, killing himself in guilt and remorse because he betrayed us to Apepa, even his suicide, was stitched into the flow of our living. But Hent-ta-Hent …” He withdrew his touch and his arms went around his knees. “Her death seems unnatural to me, something unreal, something grotesque and foreign in this time of peace and new prosperity. It does not belong to the common ebb and flow of existence, it does not fit, not like the other losses we have endured.” He glanced swiftly up at her and then away. “I am sorry, Aahmes-nefertari. I am expressing this clumsily. I wish I could be more clear, because it is yet another reason why I no longer feel any emotion for our child’s death.”

  “Well at least you are able to admit the lack,” she replied thickly.

  “I am sorry,” he repeated. “It was not for want of memories of her, few though they were, nor for a coldness towards her. She was here. Now she has gone to the gods. I was her father, and that going has indeed left a trail across my ka. But it is a trail of events, not sentiment. Death is no longer intertwined with life as it used to be during our family’s struggle. It is something separate, apart.”

  “It is never separate,” she retorted savagely. “If you believe that, you are deceiving yourself, Majesty.”

  Again there was silence between them, broken only by the scream of a hawk circling somewhere high above and the creak of leather as one of the guards hitched up his belt. Then Ahmose said, “Do you ever miss Si-Amun, Aahmesnefertari? Do you think about him often? After all, he was Kamose’s older twin, your husband before me, Ahmoseonkh’s true father. Does he still have a place in your heart?”

  “Of course he does!” she burst out. “He was well-meaning and weak and his fate was cruel and dark but I loved him. So did you. As for the love of a wife for her husband, mine belongs now to you and you alone. When I think of Si-Amun it is as though I am peering down a long tunnel to a pinpoint of light at the far end where a man without features stands blurred and indistinct. I do not miss him. If I grieve sometimes, it is for the brutal necessities of the past in which Si-Amun played his part, not for Si-Amun alone.” She rose in one agitated motion. “What has come over you today?” He still would not look at her.

  “I know that I am causing you to go to the riverbank,” he said in a low voice, using the expression that described the plight of women left husbandless and homeless by war. “I am afraid that I am losing your esteem.”

  A dozen bitter responses sprang to her tongue. Today is for Hent-ta-Hent, not for your self-indulgence. You have treated me without tact or tenderness since you came home. Your insecurity has its roots in a selfish fear, not in love for me. But she swallowed them all with an effort that left her throat parched and her mouth dry. Jerking her chin at her guard and her servant, she walked unsteadily towards the litter that rested at the base of an aged sycamore. The bearers scrambled up at her approach.

  “Back to the watersteps,” she snapped, and climbing onto the cushions inside she pulled the curtains closed.

  With the beginning of the month of Phamenoth the period of growing began. Everywhere along the narrow strip of land bordered on each side of the Nile by desert, the fields were dense with lush crops of wheat, barley and flax, brilliant green carpets whose irregular palm-lined perimeters met the barren sand to east and west in a sharp division between fertility and aridity. Smaller fields held the fronds and traceries of vegetables and herbs. All were patch-worked with brimming irrigation canals whose placid surfaces teemed with insect life. Everywhere, the peasants could be seen muddy and barefooted, backs bent over their hoes or standing calf-deep in the thriving profusion of their labours, while the fishermen in their feluccas on the river glided to and fro, the sound of their chanting and the light beat of their finger drums an audible accompaniment to the silent melody Egypt was singing.

  Aahotep, Yuf and Tetisheri left for Djeb with a great entourage of servants and guards, boxes, chests, formal gifts for the mayors of the towns where they would put in, Aahotep’s personal physician, and private instructions from Aahmes-nefertari to contact the spies in both Esna and Pi-Hathor for whatever news they might have. “I feel uneasy about those cities without quite knowing why,” she had said to her mother. “Try to keep Grandmother away from any suspicion of our clandestine activities if you can. She will only confuse things. Use your own intuition, Aahotep, and may the soles of your feet be firm.” The whole household had turned out to bid the women farewell. An unusually effusive Tetisheri had embraced Aahmesnefertari and had tripped up the ramp onto the deck of Aahotep’s barge with an uncharacteristic enthusiasm. Her parting shot, though expected, was mild.

  “I suppose you will enjoy being rid of me for a while,” she had snapped, but the smile that followed had softened the tartness of
her words. She is wrong, Aahmes-nefertari thought as she watched the two gaily bedecked craft beat slowly away south, the royal flags of blue and white flapping busily in the breeze off the water and the oars dipping in cascading showers. I will miss her, and Mother too. Mother most of all. She casts a sane presence over the house, although she is so seldom in evidence.

  Before she left, Aahotep had approached her priest with the request for a suitable tutor for Ahmose-onkh, and within a week a young man had presented himself at one of the morning conferences where Ahmose had begun to preside with increasing confidence. His name was Pa-she. He was a native of Aabtu. His father was a merchant who also served in the temple of Osiris during the three-month rotation of minor clerics, but Pa-she had an interest in ancient tombs and after qualifying as a scribe had applied for admittance to the temple of Amun at Weset so that he would be close to the City of the Dead on the western bank. He and Yuf had struck up a friendship, but Aahmes-nefertari knew that a recommendation to such an important post as Royal Tutor would not be based on friendship alone.

  Pa-she entered the audience hall bearing several samples of his writing, a letter from the High Priest, another from his master in Osiris’s temple at Aabtu, and a small history of several of the older tombs that he was compiling in his spare time. He waited patiently until the more vital business of the day was concluded and the ministers had scattered to their temporary offices. Then Ahmose beckoned him forward, holding out a hand for his references and reading them quickly before passing them to his wife. Aahmes-nefertari smiled at him encouragingly. “The letters you bring are very complimentary,” she said. “But a Royal Tutor must have more than intelligence. He must be able to earn the trust and respect of his pupils. Have you had much to do with children, Pa-she?”