Seer of Egypt

by Pauline Gedge

  She responded politely and easily, and the conversation flowed once more.

  Huy was surprised to see Ishat coming aboard Thothmes’ barge in the morning, followed closely by an Iput loaded down with cosmetics boxes, a fly whisk, a linen cloak, a stool, and a spare pair of her mistress’s sandals. While the body servant unburdened herself under the awning’s shade, Ishat approached the two men, who had been watching the last of the evening’s chaos disappear into the other boats. She kissed Huy briefly on the cheek and smiled at Thothmes with what Huy recognized as a most uncharacteristic awkwardness. “I know I’m breaking some sort of betrothment rule,” she confessed to Huy, “but I asked Thothmes last night if I could travel the rest of the way with you and him. To tell you the truth, I’m a little reluctant to see Iunu for the first time in the company of strangers from whom I must keep my reactions hidden. I need both of you to describe for me what I’m seeing, and I need both your hands to hold. I’m not afraid!” she finished with a reassuring spurt of indignation as she saw Huy’s expression. “I’m just slightly anxious.” Iput had come up behind her and was hovering with the stool. Ishat waved it down and sat.

  “It will be some time before we reach the city, beloved,” Thothmes said. “You shouldn’t expose yourself to the sun. There are cushions under the awning. I will call you when the city is visible.”

  Ishat’s mouth opened at once, and Huy knew exactly what words of derisive argument were forming in her mind. She would have used them on Huy without a doubt. But their eyes met, and that full mouth formed a brilliant smile for Thothmes instead.

  “I do not fear the sun,” she said, “but I must not allow it to tire me today. I will do as you suggest. Iput! See if Ptahhotep has any fruit juice on board. Then come and sit with me.” She cast a sidelong look at the awning, where Thothhotep was already enjoying the shade, raised one yellow-clad shoulder, and left them, kicking off her sandals as she crossed the deck.

  Thothmes sighed. “If I lift up my kilt, will I see my manhood beginning to shrivel?” he said wryly. “We are embarking on a tumultuous adventure, she and I, but oh, Huy! I love the fire in her!”

  Just before noon, the three of them gathered at the rail and Thothmes pointed downstream. “The three obelisks. You can just see the tips of them above the forest of palms. Two of them are fairly new. The Osirisone Thothmes the Third, the King after whom I was named and who will always have my reverence, erected two of them. The pink granite one of such great power and beauty was ordered by the Osiris-King Senwosret the First of that name, many, many hentis ago. The tombs of Ra’s High Priests lie to the southeast of the obelisks. See, Ishat! Now the walls are coming into view. The palms hide much of them, but there are two, built of mud bricks. They encircle the oldest part of Iunu, the centre, but of course the city has grown vast and now spills all along the riverbank and back to the western tributary.”

  For a long moment the barge continued to move quietly against the north-flowing current and nothing more was said. Ishat’s eyes remained fixed on the three fingers to the heavens as they seemed to creep closer and the double wall grew larger. Huy could feel her tension. Then Thothmes’ captain shouted an order, the sailors hurried to man the oars, and all at once the noise of the city reached out towards them. Now the roofs and upper pylons of several temples could be glimpsed, all partially hidden by the profusion of trees. Between the walls and the long sweep of the watersteps was an ungainly sprawl of buildings of every description.

  “They are warehouses and merchants’ stalls and the shacks of the poor,” Thothmes went on, “and see how the steps are crowded with citizens resting and gossiping and visiting with each other. Well, you would be able to see them better if so many different kinds of craft were not moored at the foot of the steps,” he amended himself. “Iunu is not only an important religious centre; much trade goes on here, because Iunu is the largest city before the Great Green. Goods come in from Keftiu and Alashia and our dependencies in Rethennu and beyond, and they are unloaded here and shipped south, to cities along the river and in the end to Weset and beyond.”

  “Are we going to disembark at these watersteps?” Ishat asked. Huy felt her hand creep into his and was sure that Thothmes was holding her other fingers.

  “No, no,” Thothmes assured her, “although I would love to take a litter with you and show you the centre of the city, where the streets are wide and lined with palms and the markets are full of everything one could desire and the air is full of the scent of flowering shrubs in the spring and hazed with the incense that rises from the temples. But for now we are moving past the happy confusion of these watersteps in order to come to my father’s estate, a little further south, where the nobles and administrators also have their holdings. The house I am building for us is beside my father’s. It isn’t quite finished, so we will live with my family for a while.”

  Sensing Ishat’s unspoken fear, Huy tightened his grip on her fingers, his own mind full of the first time he had seen Iunu. He had been four years old, frightened and rebellious, on his way with his uncle Ker to a school he had no wish to attend. The future had loomed before him as a dark threat, and he had been sick with longing for the safety and familiarity of his home. But gradually he had adapted to and then grown to love the school, his fellow pupils, and especially Thothmes and his family, and for several years life had been very good. Then he had fallen in love with Anuket and been knocked into the lake that fronted Ra’s temple with a death-dealing wound, two disasters that often seemed linked in his mind, for the invisible injury Anuket had inflicted on him was no less painful than the stunning blow from Sennefer’s throwing stick. Both attacks had changed the pleasant course of his life forever, and with his nostrils full of the various odours of Iunu, his ears assaulted by its busy cacophony, his eyes lighting on a rapid succession of well-known silhouettes as the sailors laboured to jockey the barge through the choking mass of other boats of every size and description, he found himself overwhelmed with emotion. Today I am a ghost haunting my own past. My broken heart lies here, invisible on the floor of Nakht’s office. The drowned body of a twelve-year-old boy still rocks just beneath the surface of Ra’s water, although the worshippers walking past, the boats beating slowly up the sacred canal towards the entrance lake and the vast stone concourse before the outer court, the schoolboys practising their swimming strokes, cannot see it. And within the temple walls, guarded and mysterious, the Ished Tree fills the space around it with the peculiar scent of both beauty and corruption. I’ve hardly thought about it since I turned my back on the High Priest and the Rekhet and began the long walk back to Hut-herib, but now I fancy I can smell its strange aroma, and the feel of the Book of Thoth is smooth in my fingers.

  “So, Huy, does this feel like a homecoming?” Thothmes asked. He was craning out past Ishat, his face alight with excitement.

  Huy tore himself loose from his reverie. “Yes, it does,” he answered slowly. “There are many good memories here.” Ishat had begun to lean against him and, relinquishing her hand, he put his arm around her.

  The sounds of the city had receded to a not unpleasant background against which the songs of nesting birds along the riverbank were clear and sweet. The barge was passing tangles of tall reeds and, beyond them, the shrubs and sparse grass that ran between the river and the clusters of palms. Now and then a set of watersteps appeared, usually with a couple of brightly painted barges and a skiff tied to the posts at their feet and a guard standing above them where paved paths ran away to be lost in the exuberant spring growth. Sometimes the flash of a white wall could be seen beyond, and once they passed a raft hung with garlands and crowded with people holding dishes and cups in their hands. Lute music drifted on the air. At the sight of Thothmes’ barge many bowed, and someone called out, “Congratulations on your marriage, Assistant Governor Thothmes! Long life and health to you and your blessed wife!” The words echoed across the water.

  Thothmes waved back in response. “The Noble Khawi,” he sai
d. “He and his family will be at our party tomorrow evening, Ishat. He’s a very nice man, but his wife is overfull of her own importance. She spends all her time trying to prove that her family is older than mine, not that any of us care. Nasha told her once that she certainly looked as though her ancestors predated ours. I don’t think she understood the insult.”

  Suddenly, abruptly, Ishat’s laugh pealed out, and Huy felt her muscles relax before she pulled away from the comfort of his embrace.

  “I think I’m going to enjoy your sister, Thothmes,” she said. “I see all this”—she gesticulated at yet another guarded entrance as it glided past—“and I am struck with a terror of displaying my peasant blood before the aristocrats of Iunu. Yet you, Thothmes my dear, and your sister remind me that this is Egypt, where the laws of Ma’at fill everything with an awareness of justice and mercy and right-thinking, and a man is not judged solely on the purity of his heritage. Huy has told me how frightened he was to come here as a child, and how he learned to belong. Then so will I.”

  For answer, Thothmes took her face between his palms and kissed her gently on the lips. “We have arrived,” he said.

  With much shouting and jostling, the other barges slid to the watersteps to either side of Thothmes’ and all the ramps were run out, disgorging a mass of servants who disappeared in the direction of the house and of guards who ranged themselves at the beginning of the path. Thothmes’ steward Ptahhotep was the first to disembark, vanishing quickly between the palms and spring-heavy green growth of Nakht’s carefully cultivated shrubs, now riotous with the fragrant white and pink blossoms of the season. Huy’s tension was so great that he started when a laden Iput, coming up behind her mistress, dropped a fly whisk to the deck with a clatter. I don’t want to see him, he thought. I don’t want to have to look into his eyes for fear that I might see regret. Then I would be forced to forgive him.

  But his first sight of Nakht, with Nasha beside him, coming slowly along the path towards the watersteps, drove all gloomy speculation from his mind. Nakht’s once broad chest had hollowed under the wealth of gold and electrum chains. His shoulders curved inward. Although a sturdy belt had been cinched tightly around the top of his impeccably clean, starched kilt, Huy could see the upper curves of both the man’s hip bones. The skin of Nakht’s face seemed stretched like thin papyrus between his ears, but on his neck it hung in loose folds. Huy was appalled. Quickly he turned his gaze to Nasha, who was already grinning at him, her red-hennaed lips wide, her large eyes, so like her brother’s, half closed against the strength of the sun. Resplendent in flowing silver-tissued linen, her luxuriant black hair imprisoned in a net of silver thread, her arms, now spreading in welcome as she and her father came to the edge of the ramp, heavy with thick silver bracelets, she sparked and glinted with every movement.

  “Nasha!” he called impulsively. “You look wonderful!”

  “And you look absolutely edible, my handsome Seer!” she shouted back gleefully. “I can’t wait to drag you around by that indecently long mane of yours!” Wrinkling her nose at him, she halted and stood aside.

  Nakht stepped up onto the ramp and approached the little group, and Huy did not fail to notice that his beringed fingers slid with him along the protecting rope as though he might need to grasp it suddenly. With a swift glance at his son, he stopped before Ishat. “I welcome you to my family and to this house, Ishat. Life, Health, and Prosperity to you. May you find safety and peace here, and a long and happy life with my son.” Ishat began to bow, but Nakht caught her into an embrace. Kissing her cheek, he set her gently away and turned to Huy. “Yes, dear Huy, I am dying,” he murmured. “I must speak with you soon alone, but first there will be feasting and laughter and a great celebration to mark this occasion. Come into the house. Thothmes, give me your arm.”

  As they left the barge, Huy expected Nasha to throw herself on him exuberantly as she used to do when he came to stay as a pupil of the temple school, but she fell into step with Ishat, behind him. “Thothmes has talked of nothing but you for months and months,” Huy heard her say as she slid her arm through Ishat’s. “He’s become as boring as a wilted leek. I thank all the gods most fervently that you’re here at last and, now that he’s got you, that he’ll go back to being an efficient Assistant Governor and fill his dinner conversation with equally boring but different information. There’s a small meal set out for us all, but then we’ll go into my quarters and have a good gossip. I’m excited to get to know you, my new sister-in-law.”

  Huy sensed rather than saw Ishat begin to relax. He wanted to interrupt Nasha, to ask her if Anuket had arrived with her husband, but his eyes were on the Governor’s bent spine ahead of him, and pity and anxiety quickly edged out any thought of Nakht’s younger daughter.

  Huy entered the house on a tide of vivid memories. The painted grapevines twining about the white pillars of the entrance hall, the ebony chairs with their intricate ivory inlays scattered about, the strong shafts of sunlight pouring down from the clerestory windows cut just beneath the blue ceiling and pooling on the green tiling underfoot, all spoke to him of his boyhood on this gracious yet comfortable estate. The voice of Nakht’s wife, long dead of an accident, whispered a greeting to him from the stair leading up to the women’s quarters, and he glanced up as he crossed the expanse, half expecting to see her face smiling down at him, but the sound was only the conversation of two servants, heads together, as they mounted out of his sight. He heard the clatter of Thothmes’ bow and arrows as the boy flung them onto the nearest chair before heading for the bathhouse. As they moved towards the dining hall, a strong whiff of drying herbs mingled with the aroma of freshly cut flowers came funnelling at him from a side passage, bringing with it Anuket’s tiny, solemn face as she sat cross-legged on the floor of the herb room, a half-woven wreath in her decorously clad lap, and looked up as he knelt beside her. He wanted to reach out and touch Thothmes between his shoulder blades, ground himself with the warmth of his friend’s living flesh, and as though Thothmes had divined the thought, he looked back and raised his eyebrows.

  “Is it good to be back here, Huy, or are you overwhelmed?” he asked.

  Before Huy could answer, the dining hall opened out and Nakht indicated a chair set down beside the cushions and flower-laden tables. “I can’t lower myself to the floor anymore,” he explained to Huy as Thothmes helped him to sit. “Nasha, tell Ptahhotep he may begin to serve. Ishat my dear, take this table by my knee so that we can talk.”

  Nasha had already pulled Huy down beside her. Thothhotep settled herself at his rear, the ever-present palette to hand. Huy wished uncomfortably that she was not close enough to hear whatever Nasha was going to say. He still did not know her well enough to feel at ease as she began to fill Ishat’s position as his scribe. Nasha clapped her hands sharply and nodded across the room at Ptahhotep. Then she plunged a hand into Huy’s hair and, dragging his head towards her, planted a kiss on his forehead.

  “You may be Egypt’s mighty Seer and all that,” she said as food-laden servants began to glide towards them, “but to me you’re just a brother I’ve missed. So tell me everything, Huy. Your letters have been a poor substitute for the sound of your voice.” Picking the flowers off the surface of her table, she tumbled them against his chest. “Ishat is as beautiful as Thothmes said,” she went on. “As soon as I saw her, I remembered seeing her when Father and Thothmes and I visited you in your parents’ house many years ago. She was all arms and legs then. She doesn’t say much, though, does she? Will I like her, Huy?”

  “She talks a great deal and always to the point,” Huy broke in, amused, “but how can she open her mouth when you natter on, Nasha? You’d better decide to win her over. As an enemy, she’d be as strong as you.”

  “Oh, good! I mean, someone as strong as me, not as an enemy. Anuket was never much of a friend even though she’s my sister, and of course Meri-Hathor got married and left home long ago. She’ll be back tomorrow with her husband for the feast. Abs
olutely everyone will fill this hall in honour of Thothmes and his new wife. Anuket and her husband, Amunnefer, arrive tomorrow as well. High Priest Ramose has been invited, and the Rekhet, and even Harmose, your school Overseer, will be here, not to mention every aristocrat in the sepat. Father is intensely proud of Thothmes and he obviously approves of Ishat. Look at them.” She waved a spoon to where Ishat and Nakht were deep in conversation, she kneeling up so that he need not bend down, while three servants with steaming trays waited patiently to fill their plates. “Oh, Huy, Thothmes is holding one of Ishat’s hands while she talks to Father! How sweet!” She sighed with pleasure and indicated that she was ready to eat.

  Huy sank willingly into his old, well-remembered habit of a teasing closeness with Nasha, speaking to her of his life under the King’s generosity with the ease of a returning familiarity once she had exhausted her own excitement and was ready to listen. Around them the servants of Nakht’s well-trained staff wove their quiet pattern, refilling plates and pouring wine. Huy found his attention divided between Nasha’s happy conversation and the interaction between Nakht, Ishat, and Thothmes. Ishat looked suddenly tired, although she smiled and continued to talk to both men. Huy could not hear what was being said. She needs an hour or two on a couch all by herself, he thought worriedly. Thothmes, you surely must see how much of a strain all this has been for her!

  “She’s not your responsibility anymore,” Nasha said. “Yes, I can still interpret your expressions, Huy, whether sour or pleased or just bewildered. You used to be bewildered a lot in the old days, didn’t you? Father has asked me to take charge of her until after the contract is finally ratified tomorrow night. Look—he’s already signalling me. Spend the rest of the afternoon with Thothmes. He wants to show you the house he’s building for the two of them. I’ll look after your Ishat.” She patted his knee and rose.