Watching them made me wonder if Mena came to Aniba for reasons of his own, perhaps to see if the place is so uncivilized that even a prince could not assure his daughter’s safety. Or did he come to make sure that Senmut’s wife is chosen for him? If so, I would not fault him, for I cannot say what I would not do to see my daughter safe.
After Senmut left, Pagosh, Mena, and I sat talking while Aset and Nebet went to another part of the house. I was eager for news from Waset, but Mena jumped in ahead of me. “What of your latest experiment, or does instructing Senmut’s recruits eat all your time?”
“Senmut builds on his experience with you, so instructing and investigation are one and the same. Each student spends three months assisting me. But you will see for yourself tomorrow, at the House of Life.” I wanted to save the rest until I could show him Aset’s new map. so I inquired about Khary and the Eye of Horus.
“He let supplies fall too low for a time, which brought a lot of grumbling when he could not fill all the orders, but he begins to catch up.”
“An infestation of insects devastated our herbs?”
Mena shook his head and glanced at Pagosh. “Pharaoh’s police finally caught up with his father. Also his friend Pepi. You remember him?” I am not likely to forget the woman who died to keep from betraying her family to Pharaoh’s Aten police. “Tamin and Khary have taken Pepi’s children, since the followers of Aten are sent north when they are apprehended, for Ramses to use in building a new store city within the fortress at Zarw. That way the labor costs nothing but the gruel to keep them alive.”
“How does Khary take it?”
“He and some others sailed down the river under cover of night and smuggled two hundred sacks of oats and wheat into the camp where the prisoners are held.”
“Is Ramses a man who finds satisfaction in rubbing their noses in the dirt from whence Akhenaten came?” I asked. Mena shrugged. “What need has your General to be so miserly that he dispatches workmen to scavenge the Heretic’s city for stone?”
“I will speak plainly, Tenre, though Pharaoh instructed me to keep it to myself. My real purpose here is to leam why the flow of gold from Pharaoh’s mines is less this year than last, and less last year than the year before and the year before that.”
“Your General grows feeble indeed if he sends a physician to oversee the extraction of gold,” I chided. The Nubians rule at Pharaoh’s pleasure only so long as they hold their people to a steady flow of gold from their lands to his, so it made more sense to me that Horemheb communicate his concern to Hiknefer.
“He trusts few men to tell him the truth.”
“Who can afford to speak the truth if he risks being accused of treason should Pharaoh not like what he hears?”
“I do not tell him only what he wants to hear, Tenre, and never have,” Mena protested, indignant that I should suggest it.
“Nor do you go against him without good reason,” I pointed out. “But Horemheb does not expect dishonesty from you. Your history with him was built on trust from the time when you saved his arm, if not his life.”
Mena softened his words with a smile. “We have had this discussion before, and I still think you mistake Horemheb’s intent. He sends a message to Khai along with the flail of office, instructing him to give Senmut what he needs to continue his Per Ankh, and his full cooperation. Do you assign Pharaoh an ulterior motive for that, too?”
“He pleases you as well,” I pointed out, “since he is aware that you look on Senmut with fondness.”
I did not want to confirm Mena’s opinion that I find a sel-serving motive in all Horemheb does or does not do, but I find my old friend too gullible by far where his General is concerned. Horemheb knows it is not with Hiknefer but in Senmut that the seeds of unrest lie, which is the real reason he moves to assure that the prince is otherwise occupied.
Year Eight in the Reign of Horemheb
(1340 B.C.)
DAY 21, FOURTH MONTH OF PLANTING
I stopped on the threshold to our garden to watch my daughter step from shrub to shrub, holding on to a branch here and there. At ten months she is wobbly on uneven terrain, but I find watching her infinitely fascinating, especially the way her face lights up with each new discovery. I was trying to imagine what it is to smell a flower for the first time when the leaves she grasped stripped off in her hand. Before I could move, she plopped down on her bottom and let out an indignant howl.
“Just get back up. Men,” Aset told her from somewhere nearby, hidden from me by a row of shrubs. “Tuli will help you.” Poor old Tuli nudged Men’s thigh with his nose until she bent forward and pushed to get her bottom in the air, then grabbed his ear so she could straighten up and find her balance. He still follows wherever she goes—first crawling and now walking—though his joints ache with age.
“Are you so helpless that you must stand by and wait for what may never happen?” Aset asked. I thought she spoke to me, so I started toward the shady arbor where she often sits, then stopped when Senmut answered.
“What more can I do? She has tried everything Tenre suggested and still does not conceive, until Hiknefer complains that she is too demanding. Most nights now he lies with one of his other women.”
Since Nebet returned to Waset, nothing pleases Senmut, and everyone displeases him, until his colleagues at the Per Ankh grow weary of his unpredictable moods. But I know what it is to want one particular woman and only one, so I cannot help pitying him.
“I cannot put off writing to Nebet much longer,” Aset told him, “and she asked especially for news of you.”
“She did?” He drew the words out, relishing them on his tongue.
“Has your brother gotten any of his other women with child?” I suppose Senmut shook his head, since she murmured, ‘Then he is the reason, not her. Could you not go to your brother’s aid?”
“Me? How?”
“Lie with her yourself. The child would still carry the blood of your father, and it cannot make much difference which woman you lie with, given how you have been spending your nights. Or does it take more than one now?”
“What can you know of how I spend my nights?” he muttered, more embarrassed than angry.
“Everyone in Aniba knows,” she replied. “Surely you do not expect a woman who lies with the next king of Aniba not to brag of it to her friends! Or do you not care?”
“You will not tell Nebet?”
“My ka does not like having to choose between you, brother.” It came to me then that I was spying on my own wife, but before I could creep away in shame, my daughter pitched forward and hit her nose on the hard ground. She let out a howl that brought all of us running.
It wasn’t until later, when Aset told me of Senmut’s visit, that she mentioned he was having the walls of his great room whitewashed in preparation for Nebet’s next visit. It seems he has become so obsessed with the scene she painted on the wall of Meri’s room—a windstorm on the desert with all manner of sprites and fairies tumbling head over heels across the endless sand—that he wants to fill his private quarters with her visions of the river, hills and swirling sand dunes that surround us. Senmut believes it is how we learn to see that determines what we see, but I took it as an opportunity to ask Aset if she knows the source of Nebet’s unique visions.
“There was a time,” she replied, “when Nebet would not allow herself to sleep for fear that the evil spirits who lived behind her eyes might steal her ka in the night.”
“Mena never told me.”
“I doubt he knew. But Sheri did. That is why Mena began to bring her along on the days when he came to see you. Remember?” I nodded. “By then Nebet refused even to speak of it, afraid the demons would strike her dumb. I pretended not to notice how scared she was, and drew pictures as fast as I could while I talked on and on about how my ka guides my eyes to see what they do and then speaks through my hands.” Aset lifted a hand to my cheek. “You are the one who taught me that.” For her simply to touch me has always been
enough to bring my body alive, driving all else from my thoughts, and tonight was no different.
Thinking back on it now, though, it is not what she said that concerns me but what she did not say. For I remember another conversation we never had, about why she persisted with her story-scrolls. Had she done otherwise, though, she would not now be my wife. So who am I to question how the gods direct our fate?
DAY 3, SECOND MONTH OF HARVEST
I rose early and was at my writing table when I heard Aset cry out. I ran first to the nursery, then to our sleeping room, and found her sitting on the floor with tears streaming down her cheeks. She held Tuli to her breast, rocking his lifeless body back and forth, begging the gods to let him stay.
When I put a hand on her shoulder and she looked up at me, I saw the haunted look I had glimpsed only once before—the night her beloved Ankhes died at the hands of her own mother. A mother they shared.
“He did not open his eyes wh-when I rose from our couch, s-so I thought to let him know I—” She stopped for breath. “H-he was already cold.”
“His aching joints gave him little peace these past few months,” I whispered, trying to console her. “Sixteen years is an advanced age for a dog.”
“But it is not like Tuli to go without waking me, to—to at least bid me farewell.” The anguish in her voice sent cold terror rippling through my flesh, born of the fear that I was losing her to a desolation so deep she might never return. Surely Tuli had loved her beyond life itself, nor did she hide from him the secrets in her heart as she does from me. She would deny that, but then he knew her better than she knows herself.
“His ka slipped away in the night so as not to cause you sorrow,” I murmured, and was relieved when she gave in to great racking sobs that shook her whole body.
Afterward she bathed him with her own hands, wrapped him in fine linen, and carried him to the House of Beautification, but not before she sent word to Senmut, asking him to counter the priests’ objections so I could be the one to gut her beloved friend. Together we packed his body with crushed spices and herbs, laid him out with his legs positioned as if he were chasing a cat, and covered him with natron. But nothing I say or do lightens her sense of abandonment, and she has withdrawn to a place where no one can reach her. Not even Meri.
DAY 11, FOURTH MONTH OF HARVEST
Aset helped the sent priest place him in the special box she had made of fragrant wood, the top bearing a painting of Tuli’s heart being weighed against the feather of truth, with the scale tilted in his favor. Afterward she carried her faithful companion to our garden, where Senmut and I placed him in the ground under his favorite tree, a drooping old willow. Kiki held Meri’s hand while I spoke the verses Aset had chosen from the Book of Coming Forth by Day, then we settled ourselves near his eternal home to break our fast. As we lifted our cups of wine to speed him on his journey, I could not help wondering—if I still miss him baring his teeth in a smile whenever I return to the our rooms—what it can it be like for her?
Year Ten in the Reign of Horemheb
(1555 B.C.)
DAY 10, THIRD MONTH OF PLANTING
Hiknefer’s wife brought forth a son, and Senmut has sailed for Waset with the rising sun. While Aset waits to learn the outcome of his campaign, she begins the drawings for a medical text I am writing about problems that beset women, something she has urged me to do for some time. She already has illustrated my other medical scrolls, one set for Senmut’s archives and another for Mena’s personal library, which Senmut carries with him.
DAY 14. FOURTH MONTH OF PLANTING
Sleep did not come easily to either of us tonight. “You hold my body so tenderly,” she whispered against my chest. “Do you fear I will tear?”
“I thought only to enhance what you feel. Next time, if you like—”
“Do you know why I have not conceived again?” In that instant I saw the blood gush from her vagina, but I shook my head. “Do you not long for a son to carry on what you have begun?” she persisted. “And to praise your name after you are gone?”
“Surely you know I am happy with my daughter, except when she gets into one of her stubborn moods. Do you encourage her to shed her sandals the minute I leave the house?” I teased, though I am pleased beyond measure that my daughter wants to find her own way. “Why does conception happen one time and not another,” I went on, “though a man and woman lie together on the same days, month after month—or does not happen at all, even when there is no apparent sickness or injury to the genitalia or womb? You are twenty-one, a flower in full bloom, while I—” I felt her stir. “No, let me finish. More likely it is my forty-three years than anything to do with you.”
She stayed silent for a while, but I knew she did not sleep. “How did you come to call Nebet ‘little lotus bud’?”
“No reason that I remember. Why?”
“I used to wonder why you never called me a pet name—‘dusty toes’ or ‘funny monkey’ or something. Nor do you now.”
“I served at the pleasure of your father while hers was my dearest friend. It is only natural that our history influences how we deal with each other.”
“Because it would not be proper—is that what you mean? Must I always do without just because the blood of the Magnificent Amenhotep flows in my veins?”
Perhaps she only revealed to me what she said to no one before, except Tuli—how deeply she still hurts—reminding me of how little her childhood resembled mine. Though she occupied an entire wing of a grand white villa, with servants and all manner of fancy foods, toys, and clothes, she did not know the steadying love of a generous mother, or the freedom to roam at will without every man, woman, and child deferring to who she was.
I pulled her closer and put my lips to the corner of her eye. “I have always found words inadequate to express my feelings for you. though I tried in my verses. As for a pet name, I love you too much to find satisfaction in naming you anything but what you are to me, and always have been—my reason for living, what I care most for in this world. You and Meri.”
She sighed as if she had been holding her breath, and turned her head away. “If you and I cannot overcome out history, Tenre, what hope do I have of escaping the destiny demanded by my blood?”
Year Eleven in the Reign of Horemheb
(1337 B.C.)
DAY 16, FOURTH MONTH OF INUNDATION
Aset’s feast day always brings back the night she came into this world—the sudden pounding on my door, Pagosh ordering me to come at once “or the lady who kneels on the bricks this night surely will die.” But this one—when I am twice Aset’s age instead of thrice—has been the happiest day I can remember since Tuli passed through the reeds. Nebet chattered on and on about their new home, while Senmut and I took our satisfaction in watching and listening to our wives.
“Do you still feel you made a wise choice then?” I asked, though it is obvious.
“I am no fool, Tenre. I know the choice was hers, as it was with her mother before her.” He sent me a crooked smile. “As it will be with your daughter as well.”
DAY 9, THIRD MONTH OF PLANTING
Pagosh arrived earlier than usual with news that Ramose sickens with a malady his physicians can neither name nor heal, and we are to leave for Waset within the week. This time we sail on Hiknefer’s royal felucca, not under the tattered banner of a lowly fisherman to hide our true identity.
So our sojourn in Aniba comes to an end, five years of tranquillity and happiness born of the freedom to be true to myself, thanks to Senmut’s generosity of spirit. It is here, too, that Aset and I learned to know each other anew, as lovers and then husband and wife—and, finally, as mother and father—without the encumbrance of who Aset is and I am not. For that and more I shall be eternally grateful to the man who is both brother and son to me, a man I not only honor but love.
23
From the elevated pedestrian walkway above Tahrir Square, they could look down on the melee of converging cars, buses, and donk
eys hauling refuse carts to garbage dumps on the edge of town. The stench of exhaust fumes coupled with the constant blast of horns pushed Kate to a running walk, until Max pulled on her hand and yelled, “Slow down, Katie, we’ve got plenty of time.”
Kate felt disoriented, partly because her internal clock was still on Houston time. Everything had happened so fast. Arriving in Cairo on Sunday, meeting with Seti Abdalla on Monday, trekking out to the pyramids Tuesday morning and that evening to the medical school, where Max and Dr. Mahmoud Hamid performed another scan, this time on the headless physician from the Egyptian Museum. Since they were meeting Seti at the museum, it had to be Wednesday.
Winter was high season for tourists, when daytime temperatures in Cairo rarely rose above seventy-five or eighty degrees compared with the torrid heat of summer, and they found hordes of tour groups milling around the entrance to the big yellow building. Just inside the door they came face-to-face with a recumbent Anubis, the first thing Howard Carter had seen when he broke open Tutankhamen’s tomb—still on guard. Beside him stood their Cairo University contact, looking nothing like his ancient ancestors in a tweed Norfolk jacket. So British, Kate thought, yet his English smacked more of the Sorbonne than Oxford. And his mother, as he put it, was a force majeure in the Egyptian antiquities organization.
“You rested well?” Seti inquired solicitously. Kate and Max both nodded and smiled. “And the pyramids—you found your guide adequate?”
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