Letters began to arrive, one from Thothmes, one from Hut-herib’s Mayor, Mery-neith, and one from Pharaoh’s Treasurer. Ishat broke the wax seal bearing the imprint of the sedge and the bee first, unrolling the slim scroll while Huy waited. Both of them had been sprawled deep under the shade of the sycamores that clustered close to the estate’s outer wall, trying without much success to escape the heat and idly watching Seshemnefer’s naked, bent back as he dug small irrigation hollows around his precious young palms.
Ishat scanned the papyrus quickly. “The King has agreed to allow you to buy into his incense monopoly,” she said as Huy hauled himself into a sitting position and reached for the water. “According to the Treasurer, you may either pay the gold directly into the Royal Treasury or have the amount deducted from our allowance.” She wrinkled her nose. “It’s a huge amount, Huy. What do you want to do?”
Huy considered. “The incense trade with Karoy is very secure,” he said after a while. “Either way, we won’t suffer a loss. Send a letter to the Treasurer and tell him to deduct the gold from our allowance. Also whatever tax is assessed from our profits before he sends them to us each year. What does our Mayor have to say?”
Ishat laid the royal scroll aside and took up another. “Apparently there is khato land available to the west of Hut-herib, across the tributary, in the Andjet sepat,” she said presently. “He will apply to the King for ownership on your behalf if you wish, and suggests offering His Majesty four deben’s worth of silver for it because it is very fertile.” She frowned down on the black lettering. “It is too much to pay, Huy, considering that once you have it, you must hire an overseer and labourers for it, and buy seed. And what if the crop fails or becomes diseased? Add that cost to the price of buying into the incense caravans and we will be poor again!”
“But Ishat, you won’t be here after the season of Peret,” he reminded her gently. “You will be living with Thothmes at Iunu. These problems will be mine alone.”
She flushed and bit her lip, glancing at him and then away. “I forgot for a moment. How could I forget? It seemed that as soon as Thothmes went home, he became like a dream in my mind. It has something to do with the aura of this place, Huy, something you exude and that fills the air around you.”
Huy’s hand jerked in shock, and tepid liquid from the cup he held dribbled onto his naked thigh. “You have never spoken like this before,” he said, privately wondering at this new avenue of perception opening in her. She had always been able to divine his moods, but, woman-like, her interest in his influence on what surrounded him, whether people or objects, had ceased at the limit of her own participation.
She grimaced. “You see into the future without effort,” she replied, still looking away, as though her own words were an embarrassment to her. “You are not bound by the passage of time like the rest of us, Huy, whether you realize it or not. Every time you touch a petitioner who asks for a reading, you enter eternity. Living with you, working beside you, is to inhabit a place where the hours slide by unremarked, and sometimes I must think hard to try to remember what day it is, even what month.”
“Ishat! I make you afraid? You have become afraid of me?” He was appalled.
“No!” Swiftly, she gripped his knee. “When we were almost destitute and living in that tiny house, and you had to haul water for us from the river every day and we fell onto our cots each night exhausted from tramping all over Hut-herib as you answered every plea for help, and I was trying to prepare food for us, and desperate to find some way of easing the terrible pain in your head—then, in spite of your gift, we were just two peasants struggling to survive. There was no time for an awareness of anything but the needs of the next moment.” Her nails were digging into him, the tendons of her wrist standing out under the brown skin. She was bending forward, the scrolls in her lap forgotten. “But it’s different now. There is poppy for your pain, oil for our bodies, good food set out by others on our pretty tables, fine linen for our couches, and time, Huy, so much time, in spite of the people you still treat. Time for me to wake in the night and know myself held in a place of such stillness, such otherness, that I can imagine neither birth nor death. Time to taste the air around us in idleness and find it … foreign.” She swallowed. “I see myself snared in it so that I will not age, the power of my love for you will not diminish but go on tormenting me, and in the end any reality outside your presence will not exist. That is what I fear.”
“Oh, my dearest sister.” Huy pulled her hand from his knee and held it loosely. The tension in her fingers did not relax. “These are nothing but foolish fantasies! Our whole life changed when the King moved to lift us out of the mud, and since then we have been faced with so many new faces, new challenges that have taken away the soil on which we used to plant our feet and put a very different ground under us. In spite of the luxuries we enjoy, there is still a strangeness to it all. We are still adjusting.”
She shook her head vigorously. “It’s more than that. I have the oddest feeling that you will not show your age, that the god will keep your body suspended in the aura of which I spoke until he has no further use for you.” She withdrew her hand. “I’ve told you before that I want to be loved, to enjoy a husband and children, to have a life where change is possible. To be chained to you by my unanswered desire is to be chained to your changelessness forever.”
Huy studied her face. Her words were insane, surely a wild justification for leaving him, a goad she had fabricated to use on herself so that she would be forced to tear herself away from him. I am tired of this guilt, my Ishat, and tired of my own selfishness in this matter.
For a long time neither of them spoke. Seshemnefer’s labours had taken him farther away. Huy could no longer see him. One of the soldiers appeared, walking briskly along the path leading from the servants’ quarters to the rear entrance of the house. He bowed to Huy as he passed. A change of shift, Huy thought. A sudden gust of burning air brought the fleeting aroma of roasting goose to his nostrils from the unseen kitchen. He gestured, and heard Amunmose scramble to his feet somewhere behind him. The young man approached, yawning, his sandals dangling from one hand.
“Bring beer, and a cup for yourself as well,” Huy ordered. He turned to Ishat, who had clasped her hands around her calves and was gazing into the blinding dazzle of the afternoon. “I can see that you believe what you say. I do understand, Ishat. Shall we hear what Thothmes has dictated?”
She sighed, nodded, and reached for the third scroll. “More good news,” she said after a moment. “Thothmes has talked to his sister’s husband, and he would be glad of your gold. He will plant more poppy fields this Tybi and so must hire many labourers and soldiers.”
“I presume that you are referring to Anuket’s husband, Amunnefer,” Huy broke in. “Why would he need to put soldiers in the fields, I wonder?”
“That’s obvious,” Ishat said tartly, and Huy was relieved to see that her disturbingly reflective mood had fled. “To prevent the peasants from stealing the young plants for their own gardens, and the city dwellers of Weset from planting them on their roofs. At least, I presume so. We don’t know anything about poppy cultivation, do we, Huy?”
“Only that the sale of the drug will bring me a good return. I must discuss the matter with Amunnefer when we go south for your wedding. Does Thothmes say anything else?”
“Not really. Amunnefer will take as much gold as you can offer him as soon as possible, and he will have papyrus for you to read and sign when he sees you. Thothmes sends both of us his love.” She looked up. “Gold for the poppy, for the khato land, and for the incense caravans,” she said, tapping Thothmes’ scroll against her palm. “How will you manage it all, Huy? We don’t know anything about how such agreements are concluded. Perhaps you should ask your uncle?”
“No. I want no favours from Ker,” Huy snapped. “He abandoned me when Methen brought me home from the House of the Dead. He was too cowardly to come near me when he thought I was possessed by a de
mon, and even after an exorcism was proved unnecessary he shunned me and removed his support at the school! Surely you remember how it was, Ishat.”
“Of course I remember. Only your mother and I would come close to you. I used to climb in your bedroom window at night.” She grinned across at Huy. “I was fascinated by the gruesome wound on your skull, and I did think I might see your eyes turn red with evil.” She sobered. “But seriously, Huy, can you rely on Merenra to help you?”
“He’s a good steward, and if he doesn’t know how to conduct this business, I can always go to the Mayor.”
“Thothmes would help you.”
“Thothmes has done enough. Here comes Amunmose with beer. Let’s hurry up and drink it in case I can’t afford to have Khnit make any more!”
Later, in the relative cool of the evening, Huy dictated letters of acceptance to the Royal Treasurer, to Mayor Mery-neith, and to Amunnefer, through Thothmes. Merenra had told Huy tactfully that the offer of a deposit of gold would be considered appropriate for all but the khato land, and Huy had instructed him to send an adequate amount south in the company of a couple of Anhur’s soldiers. Lying sleepless on his couch that night, staring up at the stars painted on his ceiling, he felt a rush of pride mingled with apprehension. I shall be far richer in the end than my uncle the perfume grower. In the end. After I have paid for my land. If the poppy harvest is good. If the incense caravans come through unscathed. I must go over the household accounts very carefully with Merenra.
Then another realization brought him upright, his breath coming fast in the stultifying air. Ishat would be gone as soon as the flood receded. He would need a new scribe. The idea was horrifying. Even a steward was not as close to his master as a scribe. Scribes became so intimate with their employers that no secrets existed between them. How can I make someone new understand my dealings with the god, the sometimes urgent necessities of my work for Atum, the often illogical, even frightening pronouncements that move through me to the petitioner and must be not only recorded but discussed with me afterwards in private, as Ishat helps me to dissect them to their meanings, their roots? How can I possibly trust these things, let alone my own needs, the cries of my own ka, to anyone other than Ishat? And I must choose a new scribe soon. He must be fully trained before Ishat and I go south for her marriage. He. Ishat is the only female scribe I have ever seen, and she became one because I taught her to read and write myself. This house will be full of men. Ishat’s body servant Iput will go with her to Iunu. No coloured linens floating half glimpsed along the passages, no smell of sweet perfume heated by a woman’s gleaming skin, no bursts of female laughter, no wealth of rich black hair falling into the small of a naked back as I am preceded into the dining hall. Ishat, have you considered these things yourself? Are you fully aware of what you will be taking away from me?
He left the couch and, wrapping a sheet around his waist, opened his shrine to Ra, god of the temple where he had spent so many years as a student, and taking up his censer, he lit the charcoal from the lamp beside his bed. When it was ashy, he sprinkled frankincense on it, and the light yet pungent smoke immediately began to fill the room. Kneeling, holding the censer carefully, he suddenly knew that he had no prayer for the god. He could not ask to keep Ishat. To do so would be so utterly self-serving that the god’s feathered ears would close. Yet there was nothing else he wished to say; not even a request for a good replacement. If I cannot keep Ishat, he vowed as he capped the incense holder and closed the doors of the shrine, then I don’t want anyone. I shall write every letter, keep every account, myself.
Making his way quietly along the dim passage, he stepped over the low sill at its end and went to stand in the middle of the flat roof. The moon was at the half. The Sopdet star hung like a chip of white fire above the dusky line of drowned growth dotting the flood, reflected in a marching succession of wind-stirred wavelets. Atum, Huy said silently, I know that I am your tool, yet I am more than that. If you love Egypt, if you love me at all, then help me. At that, his thoughts dried up. Folding his arms about himself in a gesture of self-protection, he sank onto the gritty surface of the roof, leaned his back against the sturdy arc of the wind catcher, and fell into a doze.
It took Huy another month to decide to at least go into Hut-herib’s marketplace and talk to the scribes who congregated there, waiting for business from the citizens who needed to send letters they were unable to write themselves. Such men were usually less well educated than their fellows who had obtained good positions in various households, and eked out a precarious living. Huy, watching how often Ishat sent for her palette to take down lists of supplies, inventory tallies for the coming planting season, weekly shift changes for Anhur, as well as his own directions or predictions for the people shepherded through his gate, came to the conclusion that, if he was not to drown in ink and papyrus himself, he must replace Ishat. He did not discuss the matter with her. It did occur to him that she might be more capable than himself of choosing someone suitable for the task, but, perversely, he did not wish to involve her. It was petty of him, he knew, but he told himself that the necessity of a replacement for her services ought to have crossed her mind. If it had, she had kept quiet about it. Watching her bent head as she worked over her palette at his knee, as she smiled at him before she raised her wine cup to her mouth at dinner, encountering her, tousled and sleepy-eyed, as she wandered along the upstairs passage on her way to the bathhouse in the mornings, he forced himself to imagine the house, the garden, without her.
As soon as the flood had receded at the beginning of Peret, they had spent every evening on the river, leaning side by side on the deck rail of Huy’s little barge to watch the view along the shore turn rosy and then scarlet before dusk had them turning around to glide to the watersteps, where Merenra with a lit torch would be waiting for them. Who will stand at my elbow exuding the scent of myrrh and cassia and henna flowers, and chatter about herons’ nests glimpsed in the reeds or the water dripping from the muzzles of tired oxen, their daily work in the fields now over? Who will take my arm as we walk from the watersteps to the welcoming aroma of hot food waiting for us in our own dining hall? Not a scribe or a servant, Huy thought repeatedly in a despair close to panic. Only a wife or a friend, Ishat. I can have no wife, and what friend exists as close to me as you? Thothmes, perhaps, but his life as Assistant Governor under his father at Iunu keeps him far away from me, and soon you will be joining him, my two dearest companions loving each other while I am left here alone.
He waited, irresolute, until the beginning of the month of Paophi, a time when the heat always became a burden so familiar that he almost ceased to be aware of the constant discomfort. In two weeks the Amunfeast of Hapi, god of the river, would lift Egyptians from their lassitude. The orgy of thanksgiving to Hapi for his promised gift of fecundity would continue until the twelfth day of the following month, Athyr. Few letters would be dictated, and Huy decided that he did not want to wait until the festival ended. A new scribe would need to be trained. Between Athyr and Tybi there was only the month of Khoiak, and then Ishat would be gone.
Grimly, Huy ordered out his litter, four sturdy soldiers to bear both him and the heat, and Anhur to guard him. He had instructed Merenra to tell Ishat when she emerged from her massage that he had gone into the town on a personal matter. Merenra had raised his carefully plucked eyebrows but had not questioned Huy. The early morning was already stale. Dawn had brought its usual brief whisper of wind without coolness that had died almost at once, and Huy felt his clean, starched kilt beginning to wilt as he strode towards his waiting men. Anhur greeted him with a nod.
“We are going into the central marketplace,” Huy told him as he bent and pushed the curtains aside. “Your men can walk on the edge of the flood if they like. It’s a long way, and the water will be cool on their ankles.” As he felt himself lifted at Anhur’s command, his hand went to the sa amulet on its gold chain around his neck. The metal was oddly cool, feeding the reassurance of
its protection into his fingers, and all at once the Rekhet’s face came clearly into his mind, the leathery skin wrinkled, the eyes sharply alert and friendly. The old exorcist had made the sa for him herself, as she had made the rings he wore: the Soul Amulet intended to prevent any unnatural separation of body from ka until the time of his Beautification, the frog amulet, symbol of resurrection. He had not written to her in a long time, yet she was one of the few people who understood and accepted his uniqueness as Twice Born without question.
What would she say to me now? he wondered as he heard the feet of his bearers begin to splash in the water. Would she tell me that it is necessary for Ishat to go so that I may be more open to the demands of Atum? I wish that she was beside me, the cowrie shells that festoon her clacking as she talked to me. She would make the choice for me, pick someone who will not bring the Khatyu into my house. At the thought of Ra’s legion of demons, he sighed. “They cannot touch you,” she had said. “You are immune by Atum’s will, and Ra himself honours you because you have bowed before the sacred Ished Tree.”
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