His reception hall, where guests were greeted and entertained, was spacious and cool, the floor tiled in plain black and white, the walls plastered and painted with scenes of himself and his family fowling in the marshes, fishing, or relaxing in the garden under their sunshades. The colours he had insisted be used when the house was built were the traditional whites, blacks, yellows, blues and reds of antiquity, and the few pieces of furniture set about for his guests were equally simple in design, made from Lebanon cedar inlaid with gold, ivory and lapis.
He had managed to override his wife’s protestations here. She had not wanted to give their guests the impression that the mighty Prince and sem-priest Khaemwaset, son of Pharaoh and virtual unofficial ruler of Egypt, had poor taste, but after a violent argument she had for once been defeated.
“I am a royal son of Egypt,” Khaemwaset had finally and uncharacteristically shouted at her, “and Egypt led the world in all matters of fashion, government and diplomacy for uncounted hentis! My servants are pure Egyptian, and my family is guarded by Egyptian troops, not foreign mercenaries! My home is an Egyptian sanctuary, not a Semitic brothel!”
“Your home is an Egyptian mausoleum,” Nubnofret had responded coolly, unperturbed by her husband’s startling loss of temper, “and I do not like being known as the wife of Khaemwaset the Mummy. The impression we give to foreign dignitaries is quaint and perhaps even insulting.” She had shrugged her robe higher on her broad shoulders, and one hand had gone to the massive gold and yellow enamelled flowers at her throat.
“And I do not like my wife to be seen flaunting the polyglot sewer that Egypt has become!” Khaemwaset had flared back. “Look at you Nubnofret! You are a Princess of the purest noble blood, yet you mince about in so many frills and flounces that you look like one of the poppies everyone is rushing to grow in their gardens just because they come from Syria. And that colour! Purple! An abomination!”
“You,” Nubnofret had said pointedly, “are an ancient, croaking toad. I will wear what I like. Someone must keep up appearances. And before you say that we are royal and above such petty considerations, let me remind you that it is I who must entertain the wives of the Khatti, the Syrians, the Lybians, while you do business with their husbands. Egypt is an international power, not a provincial backwater. These wives leave my house knowing that you are a force to be reckoned with.”
“They know that already,” Khaemwaset had snapped back, his temper receding. “They cannot function without my breath upon their backs.”
“And you cannot function without my superb organization.” As usual, Nubnofret had had the last word. She had sailed out of the room, her ample hips swaying regally, her magnificent breasts high, and Khaemwaset had listened to the swish of her many-pleated robe and the click of her gold sandals with frustrated amusement. She was formidable, loving, and the most stubborn woman he had ever known, he mused as he quickly left the gloom of the reception hall behind and took the right-hand passage to his quarters. She had mutely acquiesced in the matter of the hall but had had her revenge with the rest of the house, so that sometimes Khaemwaset felt as though he lived in a trader’s shop. Treasures, knick-knacks and strange, useless things from all over the world littered the rooms, tastefully arranged of course, for Nubnofret had been raised in the best of households herself, but claustrophobic to her husband, who dreamed of the quiet internal spaces and the jewelled emptinesses of the past.
Only his private office escaped her. It was full of his own messiness, though the adjoining library of scrolls was kept scrupulously tidy by Penbuy. Here Khaemwaset could escape and be at peace.
He strode beyond the closed doors to his sleeping apartments, where a drowsy servant squatted on his little stool, and went on to enter the office. Here, several lamps of finest honey alabaster glowed golden. His chair waited, drawn out from the desk, and he was about to sit down with an audible sigh of release when Ib knocked, followed him in, and bowed. He set a tray on the desk, lifting the linen cloth to expose steaming stuffed goose, fried inet-fish, fresh cucumbers and a flagon of wine sealed by Khaemwaset’s own vintner from his vineyard outside Memphis. Khaemwaset waved him out and fell to with relish. He had almost completed the meal when Penbuy was announced. With a sinking heart, Khaemwaset watched the scribe place several scrolls on the desk. “Do not tell me,” he groaned. “The marriage negotiations have broken down again.”
Penbuy managed to nod in the middle of his bow. Quickly he went to the floor, crossed his legs and laid his palette across his knees. “I am afraid so, Prince. Shall I read you the scrolls while you finish your meal?” Khaemwaset thrust one at him by way of an answer and went back to the pile of warm shat cakes.
“Begin,” he ordered.
Penbuy unrolled one. “From the Mighty Bull of Ma’at, Son of Set, User-Ma’at-Ra, Setep-en-Ra Ramses, greetings to his favoured son Khaemwaset. Your presence in the palace at Pi-Ramses is required as soon as possible. The matter of the Khatti tribute, including the dispatch of the Khatti bride for the Mighty Bull, needs your immediate attention following a letter from our envoy, Huy, even now at the court of Hattusil. Speed north on wings of Shu.” Penbuy looked up. “It is sealed with the royal seal,” he added, letting the scroll roll up with a slight rustle. He laid it aside and took up his pen. “Do you wish to reply, Prince?”
Khaemwaset dabbled his fingers in the water bowl and sat back, folding his arms. The war between the Khatti and Egypt had been over for twenty-eight years and the official treaty had been signed twelve years ago. The final battle, fought at Kadesh, had nearly meant the end of Egypt as an independent nation. It had been a series of small but mounting disasters of misinformed spies, misplaced military divisions and inept commanders, but Ramses still insisted on portraying it on all his monuments and flagrantly on all his temples as a brilliant success for Egypt and a crushing blow for the Khatti. In fact, the Khatti had brilliantly ambushed the full might of the Egyptian army and had almost effected a rout. The battle had been a stalemate. Neither side had gamed an inch.
When tempers had cooled fourteen years later, the Great Treaty was signed and sealed and exhibited in Karnak. Still, Ramses persisted in regarding Kadesh as an Egyptian victory and a Khatti rout, and the treaty as an act of desperate submission on Muwattalis’s part.
Now Muwattalis’s son Hattusil was offering one of his daughters to Ramses to cement friendly relations between the two great powers, but haughty Ramses, ever unwilling to admit anything even close to weakness on the part of a ruler who was also a god, saw the gesture as one of appeasement and submission. The Khatti had recently suffered a disastrous drought. They were weakened. They were afraid that Egypt would take advantage of their temporary situation and begin to despoil their countryside. Therefore they were more than eager to tie Ramses to the treaty with a diplomatic marriage.
Worse, Khaemwaset pondered as he began to compose a reply to his father in his head, Hattusil, in his rush to hold out his arms to his kingly brother, had promised Ramses an amazingly large dowry of gold, silver, many ores, horses without limit, cattle, goats and sheep by the tens of thousands. Indeed, it had seemed to Khaemwaset and a sniggering Egyptian court that Hattusil was prepared to move the whole of Khatti into Egypt with his beautiful daughter. Ramses had approved. This was a tribute for the father’s defeat at Kadesh.
“Prince?” Penbuy said softly.
Khaemwaset came to himself and apologized. “Forgive me, Penbuy. You may begin. The usual greeting, for I can’t be bothered to list all my father’s titles correctly. Then, ‘In the matter of my gracious Lord’s summons, I shall be in Pi-Ramses with all speed to aid in the expedition of Your Majesty’s intended nuptials. If Your Majesty would leave the official exchanges of mutual trust and the dowry negotiations to me, your unworthy son, and not continue to heat the gruel with your own holy but undoubtedly contentious opinions, a passable soup might soon be served. My love and reverence go to you, Son of Set, with this scroll.’” Khaemwaset sat back. “Give it to Ra
mose to hand to a messenger. Preferably a slow and inept one.” Penbuy smiled frostily, his pen still scratching the papyrus. “Really Prince, do you think it necessary to be quite so … so …”
“Forthright?” Khaemwaset finished for him. “You are not paid to criticize the tone of my letters, impudent one, only to write them and get the spelling correct. Now let me seal it.”
Penbuy rose, bowed stiffly, and placed the scroll on the desk.
Khaemwaset had just lifted his ring from the wax seal when the door opened without announcement and Nubnofret swept into the room. Instantly Penbuy bowed himself out. Nubnofret ignored him, coming to her husband and placing a noncommittal kiss on his cheek. Wernuro, her body servant, remained meekly in the background with head bowed. Nubnofret, Khaemwaset thought for the hundredth time as he hid a smile and rose, knew how to keep the members of her staff firmly in their places.
“I see that you have eaten,” his wife remarked. She was dressed in one of the loose, informal robes she liked to wear in the evenings when there were no guests, the voluminously folded scarlet linen draped around her lush curves and tied to one side with a gold-tasselled girdle. A heavy red jasper-and-gold ankh hung from her right earlobe and bumped gently against her exquisitely painted face as she looked up at Khaemwaset. She had shed her wig, and her reddish-brown, chin-length hair formed a perfect frame for her wide, orange-hennaed mouth and green-dusted eyelids.
She was thirty-five years old, still ripely beautiful in spite of the fine lines Khaemwaset knew were fanning across her temples under the black kohl and the slight grooves to either side of those inviting lips. But her voluptuousness was something she would have dismissed had she been aware of it. Brisk, efficient and full of common sense, Nubnofret sailed through the reefs and shoals of household accounts, training of servants, entertaining for her husband and rearing her children with the consummate ease of the woman addicted to duty. She was intensely loyal to Khaemwaset, and for that he was grateful. He knew that, in spite of her need to keep him safely moving in the family dance she had choreographed, in spite of her sharp tongue, she loved him dearly. They had been married for twenty-one years, securely and comfortably.
“Did you have good fortune today, Khaemwaset?”
He shook his head, knowing that she asked out of politeness, not interest. She regarded his hobby as a demeaning pastime for a blood prince. Not at all,” he replied, touching the place where she had kissed him and finding it damp with the freshly applied henna. “The tomb was ancient but damaged both by water and the depredations of robbers. It was impossible to tell how long ago both disasters occurred. Penbuy examined a couple of scrolls and has doubtless filed them in the library by now, but my store of knowledge remains the same.”
“I am sorry,” she replied with genuine regret, her gaze dropping to the scrolls under Khaemwaset’s hand. “Is there a message from the Delta? Trouble in marital paradise?” They grinned at each other. “Perhaps we should move to Pi-Ramses until Pharaoh’s plans are consummated. You have almost worn out our barge with your to-ing and fro-ing.”
Khaemwaset was suddenly full of tenderness for her. He had not missed the faintly discernible note of longing in her voice. “You would like that, wouldn’t you?” he said gently. “Why don’t you take Hori and Sheritra north for a month or two? My father does not need my attendance all the time, Nubnofret. The affairs of Egypt are at the moment purely routine, apart from the marriage negotiations, and I am free to continue a few of the projects I have begun at Saqqara.” He indicated his chair and she sank into it and began to pick over the remains of the food. He recognized the expression of stubbornness on her face. “My architects and I are working on new plans for the burial ground of the Apis bulls,” he went on, “and I have two restorations in progress, one on Osiris Sahura’s pyramid and the other at the sun temple of Neuser-Ra. I …”
She held up a hand containing a piece of now cold goose, waved it at him and popped it into her mouth. “I have long since ceased to feel affronted by your insistence on putting dead stones before your living family,” she said coolly. “If you will not go to Pi-Ramses, then we will stay here with you. You know you would be very lonely if we left you to the care of servants.”
It was true. Khaemwaset moved to perch on the edge of his desk. He folded his arms. “Then have the servants pack a few things, and come with me tomorrow. Father needs another diplomat to undo the trouble he has undoubtedly caused. He will also undoubtedly ask me to examine and prescribe for him, and anyone else he fancies might need my services. Besides, I would like to visit Mother.”
Nubnofret chewed thoughtfully. “Very well,” she said at last. “Hori will want to come too, but Sheritra will not wish to mingle at court. What are we going to do about her, Khaemwaset?”
“She is just shy,” he answered her. She will grow out of it. We must give her time and treat her gently.”
“Gently,” Nubnofret snorted. “She is already indulged too much, by Hori as well as by you. Even now she waits to say goodnight to you but I have told her she must not count on your coming tonight.” She licked her fingers then snapped them. Wernuro immediately came to life, glided to the desk, dipped the linen that had covered the food into the finger bowl, and began to carefully mop her mistress’s greasy hand.
“Why not?”
“Because a message has come from Pharaoh’s harem here. One of the concubines is sick and requests your attention.” She left the chair and approached the door. “Goodnight, my husband.”
“Goodnight, Nubnofret. Sleep well.” At a sharp word from her the door swung open, the door slave bowed her out with Wernuro three paces behind her, and Khaemwaset was alone.
Unwillingly he left the office and walked through into his library. Coming up to a large chest he reached to his belt, extracted a key and unlocked it. A pleasant smell of dried herbs wafted into the room as he lifted the lid. He carried a small box back into the office and called for Kasa and Penbuy. “Ramose,” he reminded the Chief Herald who had appeared at his summons, “send my apologies to Amek if he has retired to his barracks, but I need two bodyguards immediately. I must go into the city.”
An hour later he was being bowed deferentially into Pharaoh’s Memphis harem. It was large but well appointed, with airy suites of rooms for the many women Ramses had taken a fancy to and had acquired, and had as often forgotten. They lived for the most part indolent lives, waited on hand and foot and with nothing to do but gossip, quarrel, care for their superb bodies and compare notes on their distant master, but a few of them conducted their own businesses in Memphis and the outlying farmland. They were allowed outside the harem if properly escorted and could administer their own estates or small industries. Some oversaw the weaving of flax into linen, some owned vineyards or farms and a few carried on a flourishing trade in foreign exotica by caravan and sea.
Khaemwaset had no interest in any of them apart from their illnesses. He had written a work on the diseases particular to women that had become something of a handbook for other physicians, but women as vehicles of pleasure left him largely unmoved. The passions of the past and the mind were much more heady to him.
He greeted the Keeper of the Harem Door more brusquely than he had intended and the man immediately went to the floor, his forehead pressed to Khaemwaset’s sandalled feet in the age-old gesture of supreme submission as he apologized profusely for inconveniencing the great Prince. Khaemwaset impatiently waved him to his feet.
“Pharaoh would not want an apprentice examining one of his women,” he said as they walked along a passage off which, at regular intervals, dainty wooden doors of intricate design were firmly closed. “Who is my patient?” The Keeper stopped outside the last door and Khaemwaset came to a halt, Penbuy and Kasa behind him. Amek’s two soldiers had separated, one to watch each end of the long hallway.
“She is a young Hurrian dancer. The Mighty Bull saw her perform a year ago and invited her to take up residence here. She is a quiet little thing, very b
eautiful, and has been teaching the other women some of her steps.” He did not knock, but pushed open the door and stood back respectfully. “It keeps them amused and it also gives them some exercise. Most of them are very lazy.”
Khaemwaset dismissed him and walked into the room. It was cosy without being restricting, with a good couch, a few chairs and a scattering of cushions, a shrine, now closed, several tiring boxes no doubt holding a dancer’s gaudy clothing, and a door that obviously led out into the communal gardens. A slave was sitting on a stool by the couch, telling a story in some foreign tongue—Hurrian, Khaemwaset surmised—in a high, sing-song monotone, and the little patient was listening raptly beneath her linen sheets, her black eyes reflecting the light of the oil lamp beside her.
At Khaemwaset’s approach she spoke a sharp word to the girl and struggled to rise, but Khaemwaset waved her down. “Formality is not necessary in the sick room unless petitions to the gods are involved,” he said kindly as the slave retired to a corner and Penbuy and Kasa took up their stations ‘Now what is the matter?”
The girl stared at him for a long moment as though she had not understood, and Khaemwaset wondered how fluent her Egyptian was, but then, with a sidelong glance at his companions, she pulled back the sheets. Her delicate little body was covered in an angry red rash from neck to exquisitely turned ankles. After an intent look, Khaemwaset relaxed both in relief and disappointment—relief that he would not have to spend much time in the harem at this hour and disappointment because the case was not in the least unusual or interesting. With a nod he summoned the Keeper of the Door. “Have any of the other women exhibited this rash?”
The man shook his head. “No, Highness.”
So the problem was not communicable. “What about her diet? Does she eat the same food as the others?”
Scroll of Saqqara Page 3
