“Why bother, if they’re going to drown her anyway?” Max asked, joining in.
“So she can’t run away again, even in the Afterworld. Look, let’s assume for a minute that Tashat was a nubile young woman married to a rich man, probably a good deal older and wealthy enough to have more than one wife. Say he’s spreading himself so thin sexually that she doesn’t get enough attention to satisfy her, even if she was partially circumcised. The question is, who would her wandering eye be likely to fall on? Servants, relatives, and friends of her husband, maybe an occasional business associate, that’s who. Wives, concubines, and children all lived together in the harem, the women’s quarters, but they weren’t locked up as they were later, in Turkey. Egyptian women could own property and walk freely about town. On social occasions the men ate with men while women ate with the other women, but in the same room.” She paused for effect. “Say her husband is cuckolded by someone he knows, an even greater betrayal. He makes sure the transgressor gets his just deserts, has his head put between her legs, and tosses the rest to the crocodiles.”
Phil shook his head. “Why not just throw him to the crocodiles, period?”
“Not the Egyptian way,” Cleo insisted. “Putting her lover where her husband found him but without the equipment to do anything about it—” she stopped and snapped her fingers. “That has to be what’s in his mouth—his genitals!—so he couldn’t lie his way into the Afterworld.”
“Talk about eternal damnation!” Phil muttered, shaking his head.
“How do you explain that judgment scene on her cartonnage, then?” Kate protested, still not ready to accept Cleo’s little scenario. Or the evidence before their eyes—Tashat’s slashed soles. “Surely a husband bent on such terrible vengeance would have insisted on the scale being tipped the other way, to let the gods and everyone else know she brought shame on his name.” A bemused smile played around Max’s lips, all the encouragement she needed. “Instead, he paid an exceptionally talented artist to paint a portrait so natural and vital that he gave her a different kind of eternity. To me that mask is the legacy of love, not betrayal and revenge.”
Max nodded, letting her know he agreed. “Didn’t the Egyptians believe that the head was the seat of reanimation, when they would come forth into the light of a new day? And in the Egyptian lexicon, wasn’t the open eye synonymous with knowing?” He looked at Cleo, waiting for her nod. “Well, maybe it’s my advanced age, but I just remembered something I forgot to mention earlier. Our anonymous friend’s eyelids were never closed. He’s traveling through eternity with his eyes wide open.”
My body is nourished by the things of earth, my spirit by the things of the heart…. What can be named can be known, what cannot be named must be lived, believed.
—Normandi Ellis, Awakening Osiris
6
Year Eight in the Reign of Tutankhamen
(1353 B.C.)
DAY 11, THIRD MONTH OF PLANTING
The basket maker’s son wore a rough tunic over his loincloth, which meant he was no longer hot with fever. Even so, the skin around his swollen ankle still oozed fluid, attracting a swarm of flies. “It hurts,” he whined.
“Then you know how the eeyore felt when you hit him with the stick,” I told him. By the time I finished placing the leeches where the flesh was engorged with blood, he had quieted, I thought because curiosity got the better of selfpity. I was wrong. It was the sight of the girl he knew to be the lord’s daughter.
“My name is Aset,” she told him with a shy smile, “and this is Tuli.” The dog beside her wagged his tail when he heard his name. “Would you like to see him do a trick?” Ipwet’s son could barely nod, let alone speak. They both were six years old, yet Ruka was twice her size, with broad, coarsened hands and feet. Aset touched Tuli’s muzzle, then drew three quick circles in the air. The dog flopped down on the hard dirt floor, rolled over three times, scrambled to his feet, and trotted back to nose her hand.
“How did you make him do that?” Ruka wanted to know.
“In the beginning I showed him how, and I always reward him.”
“I didn’t see you give him anything.”
She dropped a hand to Tuli’s back, pointed first to Ruka, then Ipwet, then to me, and finally to herself. “Count the people, Tuli. How many?”
Unlike most street dogs, Tuli can speak. And that is what he did, four times. Then he looked to Aset. When she nodded, he wagged his tail and sought her hand again. She hugged him and whispered in his ear.
“He understands that you promise him a bone,” Ruka decided.
“It is how I touch and speak to him that makes Tuli happy. That is the way it is between friends, and he is my dearest friend in this world … besides Tenre. Would you like to be my friend?” I understood then that she intended more than to teach him a lesson about animals, for her father denies her the company of other children, even of her own kind.
I removed the leeches, sponged Ruka’s ankle with sour wine, and covered it with goose grease laced with ground mandrake root to numb the pain. Too entranced by the girl and her dog, Ipwet hardly noticed what I did until I said I would return the next day.
“Must you go, too?” Ruka asked Aset.
“Yes, but we will come tomorrow, too, if your mother will allow it.” She glanced at Ipwet. “Couldn’t he teach me how to prepare the palm fronds for your baskets?”
“You are welcome anytime, but not to do my work.”
‘Tomorrow, then, Aset, don’t forget,” Ruka called after us.
As we set out for town, Tuli ran circles around us, lagging behind to sniff at the base of a doum palm, then running like the wind to catch up, only to be distracted again by a crumb of bread some bird had dropped. We encountered only two worshipers carrying offerings to the temple of Re-Horakhte, and I saw that the enclosure wall had cracked, exposing its mud-brick core. Even the paint flakes from the stone pylon where Nefertiti tromps over the nine enemies of the Two Lands, wielding a scimitar while her onetime husband favors the crook and flail, symbols of peace. But if Aset recognized the figure as her lady mother, she gave no sign, perhaps because she was too excited at the prospect of visiting Khary and his monkey.
Pagosh waited at the edge of town to put a rein on Tuli’s adventures. “Does he have to wear a leash?” Aset protested. “He always comes when I call.”
“How do you think his belly got torn?” he asked, and attached a length of twisted hide to Tuli’s collar. “Too many of his brothers roam the streets ahead. Because they belong to no one, they must find enough to eat wherever they can.”
As we passed along one side of the market, Pagosh had to restrain Tuli from attacking the red-eared baboons used by the police to patrol for thieves. When one bared his teeth at us, Aset slipped her hand into mine. “Did we do something to make him angry?”
“He warns us away because that is what he is trained to do. We need only keep our distance.”
“My uncle’s baboon steals food from the kitchen.”
“Then perhaps it takes a thief to catch one,” I replied.
Nofret awaited us with a basket of honey cakes made fresh that morning and took Aset to the garden while I went to my workroom. It was my day for checking the accounts and signing orders for what we do not grow ourselves—myrrh gum from Nubia, red sandalwood from Kush, olive oil from Mycenae, saffron and sage from Crete, and cinnamon and ginger from beyond the Red Sea. When I finished, I wandered out to the garden, relishing the sense of contentment I always find there, perhaps because I fashioned the place to suit myself. Khary and Aset sat cross-legged in the shade of an old acacia tree, forming bread dough into little balls, so they paid no attention when I stretched out on the grass nearby and crooked my arm over my eyes, to contemplate whether I should hire another man, perhaps to chop the raisins and dates Khary forms into medicine-laced sweets.
“How do you know which medicine the pills contain once they are baked?” Aset asked him.
“The ones for children with
worms I roll in sesame seeds. These I mark with a cross, like this.” He scored the top of a tiny ball with an ivory needle. “If in doubt, I can always taste one, but—” Before he knew what she was about, Aset had popped one into her mouth. An instant later she spit it back out. “Icckkkh!” She rubbed her mouth with the back of her hand. “Is it the bitter taste that drives the sickness away?”
“You are never to put any medicine in your mouth unless Tenre says so,” Khary warned. “And those are to be swallowed rather than chewed, because of the taste. I wish it were otherwise because most little ones gum them until they soften, then do just what you did—spit it out.”
Aset stopped what she was doing and sat blinking her eyes, a sure sign that she was thinking. “I have an idea.” That was nothing new, either, and I had been up half the night with an old man, holding his hand until he passed through the reeds, so I closed my eyes, intending only to doze a few minutes.
“—and I would like to become an outline scribe,” she was saying when I came awake, “but not if I have to make the eye of an eeyore like that.” She pointed at the ground with the stick she had used to draw something.
“Then do as I did,” Khary suggested. “I was taught to write by an old scribe, along with several other boys who took classes in his home. The charcoal seller fed his brazier in the winter, the weaver kept him in clothes, and mine supplied him with faience amulets and ushabti, to serve him in the Afterlife. But I did not wish to sit cross-legged in the dust all day, counting khars of wheat for Pharaoh’s tax collectors, so I decided to learn everything I could, to be ready when the day came to follow where my heart led me. I did not know it then, but that turned out to be here, with our friend.” I could feel his eyes on me and hoped he could not tell I was listening.
“But why did you have to learn to write if you wanted to be a gardener?” she asked.
“I wanted to be a healer, but my father followed Aten and believed, as did the Son of Horus who fled the Two Lands, that his god would heal all ills. I mean no disrespect, but I believe the gods—whether one or many—are too busy to care for each and every one of us. That is why I decided to learn all the old scribe could teach me, to keep faith with my ka. Perhaps you could do the same.”
I let a couple of minutes pass, then stretched to make a show of waking and shaded my eyes against the blinding blue sky as I slowly sat up—and saw that the rush sieve on the ground was filled with pills shaped like tiny birds and fish.
DAY 23, SECOND MONTH OF HARVEST
Mena’s throwing sticks are a wonder to behold, with brightly painted likenesses of crocodiles and hippos and other fierce beasts, as befits the chief physician to Pharaoh’s palace guards, while mine are the unadorned tools of a common laborer, fashioned by his own hands. But they came to me for services rendered, so I prize them as highly as Mena does his, and our friendship remains without envy because we live different lives by choice.
We drifted quietly instead of clapping our sticks together to flush the birds, preferring to pit our wits against theirs by watching and waiting. The world around us was blue, both above and below the black land from which we draw sustenance, as if Mother Sky had mated with the Netherworld, transforming that dark place into the twin of her heavenly abode. The river only mirrored the cloudless sky overhead, of course, and underneath was turgid with silt, but the daily reawakening of life always has a magical effect on me, renewing my spirit in a way I can neither explain nor understand. As the face of Re-Horakhte kissed the tip of Hatshepsut’s silvery needle, shooting a brilliant arrow of light across the placid water, Mena imitated the call of a cormorant to his mate on the nest. I crooked my arm to be ready for the first bird to take wing, and listened for the slap of feathers. In the instant I caught sight of a duck rising from the reeds, I felt our skiff tilt beneath my feet and knew Mena had bested me. Still, I let fly a moment later, heard my stick hit, and saw the bird falter before nosing into a dive.
Mena poled us through the reeds, each of us keeping an eye on where his bird had fallen while searching for his stick at the same time. With the need for quiet past, I decided to test whether he might still be persuaded to go with his General, who prepares another campaign. “Are you not worried that this young assistant you speak of so highly may displace you in Horemheb’s affections?”
“Senmut may lack experience on the battlefield, but he has an eye that cuts to the bone. Like you. As for how he gets on with the General—” Mena shrugged and let the skiff glide. “If you think I grow bored with besting you at fowling and wish to be away from here, it is because you cannot know the joy I find in Tetisheri and Nebet.”
In the nearly three years since he returned to Waset, Mena has had the good fortune to find a wife with the wit and charm to match her beauty. He also has fathered a daughter named Nebet, who shines like gold to his eye despite her deformed hip. “Our time in this world is short,” he warned me. “and twenty-eight years of it are gone already. Do not leave it too late to get any children of your own, Tenre.”
In appearance we are as two strangers, yet in other ways we are like twins, so I am never surprised to hear him voice my own thoughts. But he does not know that I have been visiting a young widow named Amenet, who I find pleasing in both face and disposition. Nor is she coy about offering me her body as well as a meal.
“How does Nebet fare with the new splint?” I inquired, since we have put our skills together to find some way to hold the ball of her thighbone in its socket yet still allow her to move. Now, since her second feast day, with Nebet able to take a few steps and needing more freedom, our latest device is lighter and more flexible than the one before it, to let her muscles grow strong enough to replace the brace.
“She tests herself on the steps leading to our sleeping room, so our privacy soon will come to an end.” He sent me a wry grin, since I know of his unorthodox habit of sharing his couch with his wife through the night. He reached into the water, grabbed his duck by the legs, and bound them with a cord, then tossed the bird into the bow of the boat with the others. “Anyway, the General is content for me to stay behind to look after his wife, should he leave her with child. Since the Queen lost another babe, he wants someone nearby he can trust. He believes the fault lies with her physicians, though I am not so sure.” I knew he alluded to Ankhesenamen having conceived her first child by her father, to the same end.
We paddled to where my bird should have been and in time found him thrashing about in the water, only stunned. I gave him his life and motioned for Mena to pole us into the backwash of the main channel, where we began another wait. “You know the Queen is with child again?” he asked after a minute, keeping his voice low so as not to warn off our prey. I nodded and watched the thicket of reeds ripple like ripening wheat in the cool morning breeze. “Perhaps it will go better with her this time. I hear Ramose has offered Pharaoh the services of his own physician, a man he swears can bring forth a live child if any can.”
“It is not for me to judge who Ramose chooses to—”
“He names the physician Senakhtenre. Did he not tell you?”
“Me, attend the Queen?” I stammered, not sure I understood him.
“Sheri says Ankhesenamen intended to ask for you even before the priest came forward, at the urging of her little sister.”
“Aset?” I must have sounded the village idiot, for he hooted with laughter, setting our reed skiff to rocking. It is ideal for skimming ponds and marshes, but lacks the stability provided by a keel. “The laugh will be on you if you dump our catch in the water,” I reminded him, knowing he would not want to lose his favorite meal.
“Sheri insists that you attend the banquet we plan for the General, to wish him well on his forthcoming campaign.”
Mena’s residence is near the palace, a place as foreign to me as the lands beyond the Red Sea. “I thank you, truly, but I am not at ease among people in high places, nor are they with me.”
“Then hide yourself in the crowd if you must, until th
e Queen and Tutankhamen grace us with their presence … unless you prefer greeting her for the first time from between her legs. Besides, you could do me a favor by speaking to my wife, who refuses to heed her father or me. She still believes Nebet’s hip, or worse, will be visited upon another child.”
“In his own house, even a wise man is green as a young shoot,” I said, then sat thinking for a minute. “All right, I will come to your fancy affair.” To make sure he did not feel too satisfied with himself, I added, “But there is little chance that Horemheb will leave Mutnodjme with child so long as she uses a pessary of ground acacia spikes.”
His face was reward enough for the teasing I suffer at his hands. “How in the name of Thoth could you know that?”
“She sends a servant to the Eye of Horus, the name Khary has given our dispensary. Every packet of powders and herbs now carries that mark.” I strung my tale out on purpose. “His sympathetic ear and helpful suggestions loosen many a servant’s tongue, so if I can be of assistance to you at any time”—I kept a straight face as a grin broke across his—“to uh, determine the proper treatment for one of your rich patients, I shall be more than happy to do so. For a price, of course.” It is only with Mena that the boy I once was, who still lives somewhere inside me, dares make himself known.
“Then pray Thoth you succeed with the Queen where others have failed, if you want to keep your little goddess from the claws of the vultures. It matters not if it is another girl, Tenre, only that the babe should live.”
DAY 14, FOURTH MONTH OF HARVEST
“The priest kept her,” Pagosh explained before I could ask why Aset was late coming home from her classes at the temple.
“What was it this time?”
He shrugged. “You will have to ask Tuli. But while I stood waiting for her in the temple courtyard, I saw some boys from her class playing a game. One had his left arm bound to his side while the others laughed and jeered at whatever it was he drew in the dirt with a stick.”
The Eye of Horus Page 9
