Imhotep

by Jerry Dubs

  “Why?”

  Tama thought for a moment, looking for words that they shared that would explain Djefi.

  “Waja-Hur is loved. He speaks the truth. He has been high priest for Thoth for many, many years. Now many people regard him as Thoth. Sometimes I think he does, too. He always speaks what he believes Thoth would say. Perhaps he is Thoth at those times. He is always true to Thoth, to the god’s devotion to balance.

  “Hetephernebti is loved also. She doesn’t speak as if she were Re. Instead she praises him. She gives him all credit for life and love. She reflects the love she feels from Re. She is always true to Re, always living and speaking in his spirit. The people see this, they see the way she loves and worships Re.

  “I serve Ma’at, both the goddess and the idea. I do it because I love the goddess and everything she represents: truth, justice and the rightness of all things. They are the base on which The Two Lands rests. Every man and woman must follow them, beer brewers, bakers, and scribes, even King Djoser.

  “Djefi is First Prophet of the god Sobek. But there are stories about him. I do not know if he truly serves Sobek or if he tries to make Sobek serve him. He says the words he wants Sobek to say, not the words Sobek wants him to say. It is hard to explain, Brian. But the people see this, they hear him, they understand that. Djefi is not stupid. He understands also. So he makes the people fear him. He says it is because Sobek is fearful, but it is because Djefi does not have the love of the people.”

  Brian stopped walking. The donkey took a few more steps before reaching the end of the tether. It shook its head and snorted.

  “I understand,” Brian said. “He thought I was coming between him and the people.”

  Tama nodded her head. “Yes, that is part of it. But people are willing to follow a leader, even if they do not love the leader. They want the order a leader brings. So you even if you have come between Djefi and the people at To-She, they would always follow him. What Djefi hates, the reason he wants to kill you, is that you make him see himself through your eyes. You do not see him the way he wants to view himself. You reveal a truth about him that he cannot bear to see.

  “He cannot live with that, Brian.”

  They walked in silence for a few minutes.

  Tama laid a hand on Brian’s arm.

  “We will be in Waset in a few more days,” she said.

  “I know.”

  “Djefi will be there.”

  Ma'at Disturbed

  Waset is a true city, Djefi thought, as his boat slid smoothly toward the riverbank where dozens of other boats were moored. All along the waterfront there was activity - small reed fishing boats coming and going, flat barges being pushed away from shore, others being loaded or unloaded.

  He looked along the harbor for the king’s boat, but there was nothing there approaching the size of the king’s gilded vessel. As his boat slowed beside the wooden wharf, Djefi saw Kanakht’s boat tied up to a post near him. Bobbing beside it was a larger boat decorated with paintings of lotus plants, its furled sail trimmed in deep blue. Djefi guessed that it belonged to Prince Teti.

  The conveniently injured Prince Teti, Djefi thought as the other two boats in his retinue followed him to the water’s edge.

  Although Djefi was eager to meet with Kanakht and find out what news the vizier had, he was more eager to take on supplies and continue his trip to Kom Ombo. His new temple was six more days journey upriver. He hadn’t heard from Siamun since he had sent him to Kom Ombo to hurry along construction of the temple. The lack of communication hadn’t surprised Djefi. Siamun didn’t write and he didn’t trust scribes, so he would have had no way to send a message except with a courier, and Djefi knew that there was no one Siamun would entrust with a message.

  A guard was waiting on the riverbank, standing beside a sedan chair and six carriers.

  After Djefi was helped from his boat, the guard greeted him: “Kanakht, administrator of the great mansion, royal chancellor of the Two Lands, sends his greetings, First Prophet of Sobek.”

  This is how a man of prominence welcomes another of his rank, Djefi thought with a self-important smile. This is how it should be.

  “Please come with us, First Prophet. Kanakht has prepared a table to welcome you to Waset.”

  Djefi nodded, his face as impassive as he imagined the guard would expect from a man of his rank. He waddled to the sedan and then turning his back to it, looked sideways impatiently, waiting for the carriers to take his hands and lower him to the seat. He heard a grunt from the guard and two of the carriers hurried to assist Djefi.

  He settled back into the cushions and breathed deeply, sighing at the luxury of it all and anticipating the meal Kanakht would have prepared for him. Then they would discuss how they would shape the future of the Two Lands.

  “Tell me about Diane,” Tama said. “She is why you are traveling to Waset, yes?”

  They were resting under a tree along the bank of the river directly across from Waset. No flat-bottomed barges were on the west bank, so Tama had sent a boatman across the river to retain one so they could board the donkey and take it with them into Waset.

  “You are lovers?” she asked as Brian tried to find the words to explain why he was following Diane. It didn’t seem so clear to him anymore.

  He flushed at her question, then seeing the openness in her face, he reminded himself that Tama viewed the physical side of a relationship in more casual terms than women from his time. He remembered Pahket and her offer to touch him when she gave him a massage.

  Tama and he had made love, or had sex, that is a better description, he thought, every night. She was energetic, completely uninhibited and playfully curious. He had never laughed so much as when they had sex, or afterward as they held each other.

  Sex with Diane had been exciting, but sometimes filled with an almost grim determination, an act to complete so they could say that they had. He worried if she was comfortable, if she was enjoying it, if she really wanted to be with him or she was just trying to please him. He had been with other women and usually felt that their attitudes had been the same. If he closed his eyes while he was with one of them, he could have been with any of them.

  Tama had been a completely different experience. She played with the rhythm and intensity of their lovemaking, sometimes teasing and playful, sometimes grunting and wild, sometimes quiet and languid, but always centered on the moment. He never wondered if she was enjoying the act, and so his attention was focused on the feeling and pleasure it brought.

  Brian realized that Tama was waiting for him to reply, giving him time to gather his thoughts.

  “Yes,” he answered. “We were lovers. She is fragile. No, that’s isn’t exactly right.” He sighed deeply and tried to think of Diane in the new way he had come to view people, applying what he had learned from Tama.

  “I have known Diane for three years. We went to college together, that’s a kind of school,” he explained. “Her daddy picked the school for her. She said he made a lot of decisions for her, so when she got to school she was going to make her own decisions. That’s what she told me later, after we got to know each other. It was something that mattered to her.

  “But then she got a boyfriend. He was a big guy, like me. Her daddy’s a big guy, too, now that I think about it. So, she got this boyfriend and she let him make all the decisions, where they went to eat, what concerts they went to, who their friends were. Just everything. She said she realized that so she broke up with him.”

  “And you were different?” Tama asked.

  Brian shrugged. “I guess. Except lately she quit talking to me. I mean, this trip was her idea. But then on the way here, we had a fight. She said I didn’t care about anything because I never said what I wanted to do. She said she could have picked a trip to Death Valley or Antarctica and I would have gone along just to please her.”

  “Would you?” Tama asked, putting aside her other questions - what was this Death Valley and Antarctica?

&nbs
p; Brian smiled. “Sure. I did want to please her. And I’d go anywhere. I like to find new things.” He pulled out a blade of grass, tossed it into the still air and watched it flutter back to earth. “Everything gets so complicated. That’s why I like sports. You have rules, you know what you’re supposed to do, after its over, you shake hands and say ‘good game.’ “ He lay back and stared up at the sky.

  Tama leaned on her elbow and looked down at Brian. “I understand. I think sometimes that that is why people like gods or the king. They like rules. The rules supply order - ma’at. If you have to decide about everything everyday, you would never get anything done. So you have rules, or sometimes just customs. You eat food at this time, you bathe at this time, and you put on your kohl just so.

  “How could you live if every day you had to discover all of this anew? What if you had to decide about the sun everyday? It is better to say it is Re and to learn the stories about him. The same with Isis and Osiris, Thoth, Nut, all the gods.

  “So Diane wants order in her life. She wants ma’at, yes? Her father was her order, then this other boyfriend. Then she decided to create the order from within. That is a hard thing to do, Brian. I believe it is the right thing to do, but it can be very hard. So now Diane finds herself removed from the order of her world and she turns to you for that order, but she is angry because you do not supply it and she is angrier because she feels weak.”

  Brian looked up at the sky and realized that there were no clouds floating there, nothing to make shapes of with his imagination.

  “So, am I supposed to supply this order for her?” he asked.

  “I don’t know,” Tama answered.

  “I know that I am different from other people. For myself, each morning I exercise, you’ve seen me, and then I sit quietly. I try to let ma’at settle in me. If I think about it, then it isn’t there. No, it’s always there, just out of reach. So I don’t reach for it and then ma’at comes to me.

  “I learned that exercise because I am in service to Ma’at. I know that most people do not welcome ma’at that way; they haven’t been taught or they do not take the time. I don’t know how they follow ma’at. Some lucky people seem to live within ma’at without effort. You are that way most of the time. Truly.

  “I have seen women at the loom, their hands and minds focused on their task. Bakers, acrobats and dancers, musicians, children at play, fishermen, almost everyone has those moments when they are doing what they love to do, when they are at peace, when they are living within ma’at.

  “If Diane is not living in ma’at, you should try to help her. But she must help herself.

  “Each of us thinks we are the most important person, because we are inside ourselves. Does this make sense? We see the world from our eyes and hear it with our ears. I look past the branches and leaves of the trees to the sky and I see the colors I call brown and green and blue. But think, Brian, are they the same colors that you see? We may call them by the same name, but they may look different to you.

  “The taste of an onion, the song of a bird, the strum of the harp, the grit of sand. I know what they feel like and taste like and sound like to me. But I can not know what they are to you. So how can I truly know your thoughts or feel your fears?

  “I can listen to you and comfort you, but only you can overcome your fears, only you can bring yourself into balance with ma’at.

  “When you find Diane, you can listen to her and help her with her fears, but she must enter ma’at herself.”

  She watched him as he looked at the sky, his face composed and rested, but his eyes sad.

  “Our boat is here,” she said, sitting up. “Come, you must meet Hetephernebti.”

  He waited in a small room near the chambers used by Hetephernebti. A window opened onto a garden, bringing a scent of blossoms and water into the room. Brian leaned against the window and thought about Diane.

  There were no malls here, no restaurants nor movie theaters, so he wondered what she was doing. The Diane he knew shopped and complained and never seemed satisfied. The one Tama described was empty and searching for meaning and balance. He saw now that they were two views of the same woman, the same actions.

  He wondered if being removed from the distractions of life would help her look within herself, if the idleness here would force her to confront the emptiness of her life.

  It was late afternoon and the angle of the sun, or Re, he thought, was casting long shadows from the palm trees in the garden. The shadows, falling across smaller trees and shrubs, were broken, their straight geometric lines bending over arching leaves and skipping from plant to plant.

  There were splashes of colored blossoms amid the green leaves and the sandy garden floor. Small dun-colored birds darted from tree to tree, finches, he thought. The birds made him think of orioles and then his thoughts turned to baseball.

  He realized that during the two-week trip with Tama he hadn’t thought about his old world except to contrast it with the world he was in now. And those comparisons had not been favorable for his old world.

  There was so much to do and see in his world - amusement parks, zoos, baseball and football games, television and movies, restaurants, plays, concerts, NASCAR races - that he had once found fulfilling, but now he viewed it all as a distraction.

  My god, he thought, I even watched golf and bass fishing for entertainment.

  And now I’m watching plants and birds. He chuckled at himself. It wasn’t what he was watching or doing, he knew, it was the way he viewed it and how it affected him. When he had watched a sporting event or listened to a band, his mind was pulled and overwhelmed by the action and sound. Here in the quiet room by a garden, his mind was open and calm.

  He heard voices in the hallway, one of them curiously high-pitched. At first he thought it was a woman’s voice, but then he recognized it as Djefi’s.

  A flush of anger swept through him overwhelming the contentment he had felt. He crossed the room, looking to confront the priest.

  He was halfway across the room when he saw Djefi’ fat form waddle past the doorway. He lengthened his stride, unconsciously tightening his hands into fists, his mind turning into a screen of white noise. He was unsure what he would do when he reached Djefi, all he felt was the anger - at being abandoned in the desert; at being assaulted at Khmunu; at the resulting death of the attacker, his blood streaming from his neck onto the dark street.

  Suddenly a smaller form darted into the room in front of him, moving toward him quickly.

  “No, Brian. Not now, not here,” Tama said in a forced whisper, placing both hands on his chest and gently pushing him away from the doorway.

  She felt the exaggerated rise and fall of his chest, the heat of anger on his skin.

  He allowed himself to be stopped.

  Out in the hallway, Djefi paused at the soft sound that came from the doorway behind him. He turned his head to look there, decided that his curiosity wasn’t worth the effort and continued his plodding passage away from Hetephernebti’s chambers.

  The words from Hetephernebti were fresh in his mind. He wanted to turn them over and study them, contrast them with what Kanakht had told him earlier. And he needed to find a bathroom and settle himself on the cold limestone seat. His bowels had been in disarray since he had gotten word that Nimaasted had failed to dispose of the outlander Brian.

  Despite the excellent meal and honey-flavored beer - he must get the recipe for his brewers - his visit with Kanakht yesterday had been unsettling. The old vizier was worried about this and that: a gift of land to the temple of Khnum would make the royal guard more alert…the outlander Tim had gained favor with King Djoser, so much favor that he’d been given a new name and had been asked to accompany King Djoser on his trip to Abu… Prince Teti was not seriously injured and one of his guards was suspected of trying to kill him, but now another guard was also suspected… Ma’at had disappeared at the same time Brian had escaped.

  Well she’d re-appeared. She had been sitting bes
ide Hetephernebti just now. Never uttering a word, just smiling and watching him. He should have asked her about Brian, but he couldn’t think of a way to raise the topic. If she was here, did that mean the outlander was here too?

  Now Hetephernebti was hinting that there were rumors of a plot against King Djoser and asking him if he knew anything. In his head he heard her voice, so smooth and taunting. He stopped at the intersection of two hallways. Which way would lead to a toilet? From the rumbling in his gut he didn’t have much time.

  Tama stood in front of Brian, her hands flat against his heaving chest, watching him closely. There was anger in his face she had not seen before, his eyes staring off in the distance. She knew that his mind was elsewhere, stalking Djefi, no doubt.

  “You are a wanted man here, Brian.”

  His eyes finally moved from the doorway and she felt the chest muscles under her hands swell up as he took a deep breath.

  “Kanakht received word from Nimaasted that you killed a man in Khmunu. It is Kanakht’s duty to capture you if he sees you. Then you would be returned to Khmunu where Nimaasted would have the power to decide your guilt and punishment.”

  “I didn’t kill him,” Brian answered. “You know that.”

  She nodded in agreement as he backed away. “I believe you, Brian. But that doesn’t matter. Kanakht is vizier to King Djoser. If he decides that you are to be sent to Khmunu and given to Nimaasted for justice, then that is what will happen.”

  Brian looked down at the stone floor. The peace and contentment he had felt a few minutes ago while looking into the garden was gone. He realized that whatever new understanding he thought he had about himself was shallow. He had gone from tranquility to rage in the time it took him to take three steps.

  He breathed deeply and tried to re-center his emotions, to see the reality of where he was, not his hopes. Djefi, Kanakht and Nimaasted were his enemies now. Whether they were right, whatever their motives, they would try to stop him and punish him.