“No, not like this,” she said, struggling up and pushing back her hair, “for this is torment. To have and not have you …” Her voice trailed away and she was very glad that the dimness hid her sudden shyness.
“You will have me soon enough,” he replied. “We will marry, Sheritra. Do you doubt it?”
“No,” she answered, still in such a low voice that Bakmut could not hear. “But when, Harmin? I am a princess, and for a princess such things take time.”
He was silent. She could feel him pondering, and as the moments ticked by she began to cool, and then to shiver with dismay. He needs to form an answer, she thought unhappily. He is choosing what best to say. But when he did speak he took her by surprise.
“I know it takes time,” he said, “and if it were only a matter of royal protocol I would stick out my tongue at it and run away with you.” She smiled in the darkness, relieved. “But there is something else,” he went on. “Are you aware, Sheritra, that your father intends to marry my mother?”
Shock made her speechless, yet under it there was a dull recognition of the inevitability of the event. Her father was completely infatuated with Tbubui, that was clear. Sheritra had seen it, had chewed upon it, but had refused to consider the natural result of his obsession. I warned him many weeks ago, she thought. Tbubui is dangerous to men. I feel it. Yet he is entitled to as many wives as he wants. This marriage will make him happy. Oh Hori, my dear, dear Hori. What will this do to you? To Mother? Yet the idea titillated her, why she did not know. It seemed to add fuel to the fire of her physical need for Harmin, and the longing for his body surged back like nausea.
“No,” she said breathlessly. “I had no idea. Are you sure? How do you know?”
“I was looking through some scrolls on my uncle’s desk, trying to find the story he had read to us the night before,” Harmin explained. “The marriage contract was with them and I unrolled it by mistake. Your father has placed his seal on it, and so has my mother.”
“Have you approached her about it?” And has Father approached Mother, and Hori? If so, why has he not approached me?
“No,” Harmin replied. “She will tell me in due time, I expect. I am sorry, Sheritra. I believed that if things had gone so far as to produce a contract, your father must have told you all. I waited for you to mention it, but you said nothing.”
For one blind moment Sheritra trembled with pure rage. Until Tbubui was lodged in the new suite Khaemwaset would undoubtedly build for her, until all legal affairs regarding the marriage had been settled, she and Harmin must remain friends. He has jeopardized my happiness, the happiness he has always seemed to care so much about, she shouted in her mind. Damn you, Father, you and your stupid infatuation. Why couldn’t you just sleep with her until the fire is out of your system?
The intensity of her emotion appalled her, and she must have made some sound, for she heard Harmin light the lamp and all at once the cabin filled with a soft yellow glow.
“Are you all right?” he asked sharply. “You have gone white, Highness.”
Sheritra gulped. “Our own plans will have to wait,” she managed. “I am angry, Harmin, that is all. Father is doing nothing wrong.”
A sailor called a polite warning and Harmin scrambled up, pulling her with him. “We are home,” he said. “I am sorry to have given you this shock. Forgive me. Say nothing to your family, I beg. I have made a grave mistake.”
No, you have not, she thought grimly as she preceded him out of the cabin. This is my home now, beside you. I will marry you and live here and I will never return to the apartments in my father’s house. I long to talk to Hori. Oh why hasn’t he come?
She did not sleep well again that night. She dreamed of the House of the Water as a vast, dark lake on whose verge she stood. It was twilight, a dreary expanse of colourless sky meeting and misting the still surface of the water. There were things moving out there just beneath the top and she did not want to look at them, but she was unable to tear herself away. The shapes drifted closer as though drawn to her.
She woke at dawn with her heart thumping and her limbs aching, lying for some minutes weak with relief at the sound of the birds’ morning chorus in the palms. Then she slept again, to return to consciousness when Bakmut bowed her breakfast tray onto her lap.
She was inexpressibly relieved to see Tbubui, vibrant and lovely as ever, enter the bath house and stand with bare feet in the water cascading from Sheritra’s body to swirl down the drain. “I had a terrible dream last night,” she blurted, and Tbubui smiled.
“Perhaps your Highness ate heavy food too late in the day,” she said kindly. “I am sorry you were distressed.” Her critical eye scanned the girl’s nakedness: “You are tense from neck to knees,” she went on disapprovingly. “Come to my room and I will give you a full massage.” She picked up a tall alabaster jar and left. Sheritra followed, wringing the moisture out of her hair, and Bakmut trotted behind.
No guard watched outside Tbubui’s quarters, and as she went through the doorway Sheritra wondered fleetingly if she ought to summon the one that waited on her own door. Then she mentally shrugged. There was no danger to her here, and the house was so compact that one shout would bring a soldier running.
Bakmut slid into the room after her, closed the door and squatted to one side. Tbubui indicated the couch. “This is the oil I like to have massaged into my skin when I am tense,” she said, pulling the stopper on the alabaster container as Sheritra lowered herself onto her stomach with a sigh. “Your Highness will feel better in no time.”
Although her head was turned away, Sheritra could sense Bakmut’s disapproval. “Thank you, Tbubui,” she said. “Massaging is very hard work. Are you sure you would not prefer to let my body servant do it?”
“Nonsense, Highness,” Tbubui said briskly. “I would have to stand beside her and tell her exactly what to do, and that would be boring. Now close your eyes and please lower your elbows a trifle so that your shoulders are relaxed.”
Sheritra did as she was bid. The room was still redolent with sleep, and together with the suddenly blossoming aroma of the oil as it was poured onto her back she could detect a faint whiff of the extinguished night lamp.
Tbubui’s hands swirled in lazy circles on her skin and then began to move firmly up her spine and over her shoulders in a soothing rhythm. “You have impregnated the oil with your own perfume,” Sheritra commented, already loosening into the couch. “It smells good.” It did indeed smell good. The myrrh was heavy, cloying, and under it was the faint but pervasive odour neither Sheritra nor Khaemwaset had been able to identify. Sheritra found her nightmare evaporating, and the sweep of Tbubui’s knowing hands was inducing a pleasant languor.
For some time the woman concentrated on Sheritra’s back, shoulders and upper arms, then she moved to the buttocks and thighs, up and over the small, firm hills in an hypnotic, slow movement.
Sheritra’s flesh began to glow. Her thighs opened as Tbubui’s fingers brushed ever closer to the cleft between her legs. She moaned softly, unaware that she did so, and Tbubui murmured, “Am I hurting your Highness?”
“No,” Sheritra whispered, eyes still closed, a delicious warmth tingling in her breasts, her belly.
“It is delightful, is it not, to be thus relaxed and stimulated at the same time?” Tbubui commented huskily. “Is your Highness enjoying herself?”
But Sheritra could not answer. She clung to the sheets, mouth parted, waiting and longing for her hostess to finally touch the forbidden place.
For a moment Tbubui’s hands left her, but then they returned, the feel of them slightly harder than before, more insistent. Sheritra groaned again. All at once the woman’s fingers were sliding between Sheritra’s breasts and the sheet. They kneaded, squeezed, rubbed her hardening nipples, and with a start Sheritra opened her eyes and half turned.
Harmin was bending over her naked, and as she watched in drowsy astonishment he grasped her shoulder and hip and turned her onto her back.<
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“Your mother …” she began, but he lowered himself beside her and stopped her mouth with his own.
“I can provide a better treatment than she,” he whispered, “and do not worry about Bakmut. She will sleep for another hour.”
“You drugged her?” Sheritra whispered back urgently. “But Harmin …” He put a hand over her mouth and the gesture filled her with excitement.
“I want this and so do you,” he said. “Do not worry about your servant. She will wake believing she has never slept, and will not be harmed.”
I should worry, Sheritra told herself dimly. I should get up and run away. But her hand found his belly and began to trail downwards as though it had a will of its own, and he grunted and buried his face in her neck.
Sheritra saw nothing of Harmin for the rest of the day. “Turn from love as though from disease,” her horoscope had said, and yet she had given herself gladly, almost wildly, to the young man who now had her heart, and already she was looking forward to the night, when surely he would come to her and they would make love again. She avoided the family, lying on her couch with hands behind her head and pondering what she had done, her body still responding to Harmin’s every move as her mind played back to her their joyful struggle.
Behind the full-blown desire that had taken command of her once again, not long after he had kissed her and glided away, were the moral precepts under which she had been raised. A princess cannot risk giving birth to the child of a commoner. A princess may not confer even the suspicion of godhead on a commoner without permission. And a princess, she thought with a pang of anxiety, can be severely punished for giving up her virginity idly. But it is not as though I had a fling with a sailor behind a bazaar stall, she told herself. Harmin and I are as good as betrothed, and he is the son of a nobleman. There is no going back for me now, no hiding. If I am to enjoy his body again I must take Bakmut into my confidence and probably Father will know all within days.
Tbubui arranged my capitulation, that is clear, and that is what shocks me most of all. Is she not, then, as moral as she says? Or does she regard her son and me as already betrothed? Or is she seeking my support in her own negotiations with my father, a support that now will feel very like coercion?
She abhorred what Tbubui had done, and shrank from the image of mother and son calmly discussing her fall over a cup of wine in the garden, as though she were a commodity, something with no will of her own. Well, what will did you exhibit? she asked herself wryly. You wanted him desperately and you knew that the longer you stayed here the more inevitable your downfall would be. You were a silently acquiescent partner in their plan, and you have no one to blame but yourself. I shall have to brazen it out, she thought. Father will have no choice now but to announce our betrothal. Poor Father. Will he care so very much?
“Bakmut,” she called and the servant rose from the floor where she had been polishing jewellery and came to stand by the couch. “Are you the one who sends reports on my behaviour to my father?”
Bakmut’s eyebrows lifted. “No, Highness, I am not,” she said firmly.
“Then who is it?” Sheritra said thoughtfully. “Do you know?”
“I am not sure, but I fancy it is the scribe who wanders about with nothing much to do,” Bakmut responded tartly. “The sooner we return to the Prince’s house the sooner the idle members of your retinue can earn their keep.”
Sheritra unlocked her fingers and sat up. “You are my friend, are you not, Bakmut?” she began. The girl bowed. “You have been with me since the days when you and I played string games on the nursery floor, and you have always understood me. You would not betray me, would you?”
Bakmut met her eyes squarely. “I am in your exclusive service,” she said, “and I am answerable to no one but yourself, Princess. Of course I would not betray you. But along with my loyalty goes the right to tell without equivocation what is on my mind.”
Sheritra laughed. “You have always done that!” she retorted. Then she sobered. “I have never been one for many girlish attachments,” she went on. “Even though you are only a servant, you are the closest thing to a friend I have. What do you think of Harmin?”
Bakmut pursed her lips. “I know that your Highness cares for him, therefore he must have much worth,” she answered.
“But you do not like him.”
“Highness, it is not my place to pass judgment on my betters.”
“No it is not,” Sheritra said impatiently, “but I have asked you, therefore you may respond without fear of my displeasure.”
“Very well,” Bakmut said coolly. “I do not like him, Highness. He is very beautiful, like your brother Prince Hori, but he lacks the Prince’s generosity of heart. I sense a meanness in him. And I think that his mother is a crafty woman with few scruples, even though you now call her your friend.”
“Thank you for your honesty, Bakmut,” Sheritra commented. “Now I order you to allow Harmin access to this room at any hour he chooses, and when he comes you are to leave us alone.”
Bakmut’s face registered loud disapproval. “Highness, your best interests are graven on my heart, and this is not good, not good at all,” she expostulated. “You are a royal princess. You …”
“I know all that,” Sheritra cut her off. “I am not asking you, I am giving you a direct command, so that in the future you may not be held responsible for my behaviour. Is that understood?”
“Indeed.” Bakmut gave a stiff bow.
“Furthermore, you are to say nothing of the arrangement to any other member of my staff. You are not to lie if you are asked, but neither are you to gossip.”
“Highness, I do not gossip. When do I have the time? Your mother the Princess Nubnofret trained us all more strictly than that. And as for the servants of this house gossiping …” She laughed harshly. “They are like the walking dead. I despise them.”
“Good. So we understand each other.”
“I have one more thing I would like to say,” Bakmut said stubbornly. “Many of the changes this house has wrought in you, dear Princess, have been marvellous. You have lost the awkwardness and shyness that used to plague you, and the bitterness you used to express to me many times. You bloom like a desert flower. But in the blooming is a hardening somehow. I beg your Highness to forgive me.”
“I forgive you,” Sheritra said evenly. “Go back to your work, Bakmut.” The servant retired and sank to the floor, picking up her rag.
Sheritra left the couch and began to wander about the room, absently touching the walls, the jumble of cosmetic pots on the dressing table, the roof of her portable shrine to Thoth. There was no going back, she knew. She thought of the self she had been with a kind of amused horror, yet Bakmut was correct. Under the changes was a new core of recklessness that threatened to turn her new-found confidence into a coarse bravado. Well, I deserve this madness, this recklessness, she thought mutinously. I have been a prisoner of my childish self too long. Let me explore these new limits, these new emotions, even if in doing so they drag me past the white winning post, like unruly horses pulling a chariot, and I have to wheel about.
She ate a frugal lunch, still in her own room, but gathering her courage she ventured out for the evening meal, sitting demurely before her tiny table. Sisenet was as polite but uncommunicative as always. Harmin, to her great relief, treated her with his usual gentle deference mixed with teasing warmth, and it was only Tbubui who caused the girl some anxiety. She was unusually animated, her seductive, wily hands darting and weaving over the food, among the flower garlands, keeping time to the harpist’s trills or emphasizing some point she was making. Yet Sheritra felt her eyes measuring, perhaps even calculating, and when their glances met she read an insulting complicity in them.
That night Harmin came to her as she had hoped and feared he would, bringing dewy blossoms to stroke across her face and a simple gold amulet for her neck. Bakmut obediently left them alone, and this time Sheritra let her sheath slip to the floor and rose to m
eet him freely. His lovemaking was slow and tender, his passion a smouldering thing that flamed and died, flamed and died, as the hours wore away.
For some days she waited in trepidation for word to come from her father, some cry of outrage that would demand her return home at once, but it did not come. Perhaps the scribe, the spy, was unaware of what was happening between herself and Harmin. Perhaps he was happy here with little to do and was lying to his master. But, perhaps, Sheritra thought sadly, Father is simply too wrapped up in his own affairs and does not care any longer what happens to me. That idea gave her a spurt of contradictory anger. I will go home and find out why he is silent, she vowed. I will seek out Hori and upbraid him for ignoring me. But the spell of timelessness Sisenet’s house cast over its inmates soaked her too and she dallied, unaware of how the days were slipping by.
Harmin began to invite her out onto the desert in the spurious cool of the evenings to hunt with him. He would take a guard, a runner and the hunting dog kept chained in the servants’ compound. Sometimes he walked, but more often he hitched a horse to his chariot and took one of the faint tracks that led towards the dunes.
Sheritra considered refusing his request that she accompany him. Standing in a chariot could be dangerous, and she had never cared for horses. Besides, Pharaoh would not take kindly to news of a granddaughter injured or even killed through foolhardiness.
But Sheritra was like an addict with one drug, Harmin’s presence, and she went with him, standing in the lurching vehicle between him and the sheltering guard while the horse struggled to pull them through the cloying sand. The yellow dog ran beside them, tongue lolling.
Harmin was always hopeful that he might sight and bring down a lion. More often than not he returned home empty-handed, but on several occasions he made a kill.
Once it was a gazelle that bounded from behind a small pile of rocks and started away, its thin, pretty legs pounding. Harmin, spear raised, rushed after it, sand spurting from his heels, and before Sheritra could recover her breath he had brought it down and was standing gleefully over its twitching body.
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