The late afternoons and evenings were more bearable. Harmin would come, and after sitting in the garden with his mother for a while, would disappear to some deserted spot on the grounds in the company of Sheritra, Bakmut and a guard. Then Khaemwaset and Tbubui could retire to the concubines’ house and make love in her silent bedchamber, where the filtered sunlight trickling through the closed shutters diffused into a dull gold over her sweat-damp body, and he could forget, for a while, his recalcitrant family. He and she would be bathed together, standing side by side on the bathing stone while the servants washed them. Often Khaemwaset himself liked to clean Tbubui’s hair, passing the ropes of thick, wet tresses through his hands in a deliberate, sensual ecstasy.
There were usually official guests at the evening meal, and these Tbubui charmed with her intelligence and wit. Khaemwaset would watch Nubnofret anxiously, knowing that she had the power to forbid Tbubui to such feasts if she chose, but his Chief Wife forced no arguments and their visitors went away envying Khaemwaset the two women, so different and yet so accomplished, who shared his life.
Thus the pulse of Khaemwaset’s life had become more erratic, but not unpleasantly so. He had begun to think that all would be well, when one day Tbubui laid aside the fly whisk with which she had been lashing herself, in a vain effort to disperse the clouds of hovering pests, and turned to him solemnly. They were reclining side by side on a mat and a scattering of cushions in the shade of the line of trees bordering the north garden. The addition was finished, the debris gone, and gardeners were labouring to dig flower beds against the smooth white walls of the new suite. The rooms inside still stood empty, but a host of craftsmen and artists was due to arrive the next day to hear Tbubui’s wishes for her permanent residence. Khaemwaset had told her to order whatever she desired, confident in the knowledge that the simple good taste she had shown in furnishing her old home would be evident here also. She had warned him with laughing coquetry that simple did not mean inexpensive, but he had shrugged good-naturedly and waved away her hesitation. Now he put down the half-demolished bunch of black grapes he had been feeding her and prepared to have yet another discussion of her plans. “Do not tell me!” he smiled. “I recognize that expression, dear sister. You want acacia wood for your couch instead of cedar.”
She briefly caressed his bare thigh. “No, Khaemwaset, this has nothing to do with my quarters. I have been unwilling to bring up the subject. It is hard for me to admit that I am unable to solve it by myself, but I am mystified and a little hurt …” Her voice trailed away and she dropped her gaze. Immediately he was concerned.
“Tell me,” he urged. “I would do anything for you, Tbubui, you know that! Are you not happy?”
“Of course I am happy!” she answered swiftly. “I am the most fortunate, the most loved woman in Egypt. It is my servants, Highness.”
He frowned, puzzled. “Your servants? Are they lazy? Rude? I cannot believe that any servants trained by Nubnofret could be either!”
She was obviously casting about for the right words, her full lips parted, eyes restless. “Their training is excellent,” she began with a delightful hesitancy, “but they seem noisy and talkative to me. Indeed, they often want to talk back. My cosmetician natters on while she paints my face. My body servants make comments on the gowns I choose, the jewellery I order removed from the boxes. My steward asks me what I would like to eat or drink.”
Khaemwaset’s bewilderment deepened. “Beloved, are you saying that they are impolite?”
She flapped her gold-ringed fingers impatiently. “No, no! But I am used to servants who do not speak at all, who do what they are told and nothing more. I miss my own staff, Khaemwaset.”
“Then ask Nubnofret if you may dismiss her servants and send for those you want,” Khaemwaset urged. “This is a trifling matter, Tbubui, not worth discussing.”
She bit her lip; her hands had fallen, bunched, into her white lap. “I have already approached Nubnofret,” she said in a low voice. “The Princess refused my request without an explanation. She merely pointed out that the household servants are the most efficient in the country and perhaps I was not handling them correctly. I am sorry, Khaemwaset. I know I should not be worrying you with something that properly belongs to Nubnofret and myself to solve. I do not want to offend her by appealing to your final authority or by simply taking the initiative in this matter, but I feel I have a right to surround myself with my own people if I choose.”
“Of course you do.” Khaemwaset was astounded by Nubnofret’s refusal. In spite of her feeling towards Tbubui, such pettiness was not in her nature, and he too was mystified. “I will speak to her about it today.”
Tbubui put out an appealing hand. “Oh no, my love. Please! The route to peace in this household cannot be through the thorns of disloyalty. Nubnofret must not be made to feel that her authority can be undermined whenever I wish. I have more respect for her than that. Just tell me how to broach the subject to her again.”
“You are wise, tactful and kind,” Khaemwaset said, “but I think that you must leave this to me. I know her. I can inquire into her motives without letting her guess that you have made a complaint to me. I apologize on her behalf, Tbubui.”
“There is no need, Highness,” she protested. “And thank you.”
The conversation turned into other channels before petering out under the onslaught of a rapidly increasing heat. Tbubui’s head gradually nodded until she fell asleep, limbs sprawled amid the cushions, hair disordered in the grass. Khaemwaset sat for a long time and watched her. Her mouth was slightly parted. Her dark lashes quivered on her brown cheeks. There was something so waxen, so death-like about her immobility that a stab of fear went through him, but then a tiny rivulet of sweat inched between her loosely covered breasts and he leaned down and tongued it away. What bliss, he thought, to be able at last to freely make that gesture. I would do anything for you, my heart, anything at all, and the fact that you hesitate to make a request of me makes me want to please you even more. Carefully, so that he did not wake her, he eased down until his face was on a level with hers. Closing his eyes he inhaled her perfume and her breath, the myrrh and that other scent, indescribable yet tantalizing, and as his imagination began to drift he told himself that he was the most fortunate man in Egypt.
He approached Nubnofret that evening, going to her apartment and allowing himself to be announced by Wernuro. Nubnofret came to him equably enough, offered him a stool, then returned to her place by the couch where her servants were stripping her. One stood by, a pleated blue froth of linen over her arm. Nubnofret stepped out of the green-beaded sheath she had worn at dinner, and without a trace of self-consciousness, snapped her fingers. Her body is all soft rounds and curves, Khaemwaset thought as he watched the blue cloak being wrapped around her and tied with a wide ribbon. She is still beautiful, but not to me. How I wish it were not so! I grieve for her, my proud, unhappy Nubnofret, but there is nothing I can do.
“How can I help you, Khaemwaset?” she asked, arms extended for the blue lapis bracelets being pushed over her hands. “Is something on your mind?”
“Not really,” he lied. “We have not talked much lately, and today I have missed you.”
She cast him a shrewd look. “Is it Sheritra’s infatuation with that boy?”
Khaemwaset sighed inwardly. “No, although I suppose that soon we must decide what we are going to do about her. Have you received any word from your farm stewards, Nubnofret? Has the harvest begun yet in your Delta holdings?”
She crossed to her cosmetic table and sat, picking up a mirror. “My lips are dry,” she said to her cosmetician. “Do not henna them again. Anoint them with a little castor oil. I received a scroll yesterday with regard to my few grapevines,” she said in answer to his question. “I think this year I will have the grapes dried and stored. We ran out of raisins last year and we certainly need no more wine put down.”
He agreed and they talked idly for a while. Some of the stiffness
went out of her, and she began to grin at him with something of her old cheerfulness when he complained that the birds were attempting to steal the food for the fish in their pond. But she quickly withdrew into herself when he at last dared to say, “I think Tbubui is missing her servants, my dear. She has not said so directly, but it must be hard for her, not only trying to adjust to a strange household but attempting to adapt to strange staff as well. Why don’t you suggest to her that she dismiss those she has and send for some familiar faces?”
Nubnofret went very still, then she waved her cosmetician away with one savage, imperious gesture and rose. “I hate what you have become, Prince,” she said coldly and deliberately. “So meekly pliant, so anxious to please, so deceitful in a petty, altogether reprehensible way. At one time you would have come to me full of a royal confidence and you would have said, ‘Tbubui wants to know why you refused her request and I want to know too.’ You are fast earning my contempt, husband.”
Khaemwaset left the stool. “I did not know that she had approached you,” he lied hotly, desperately, and she laughed with derision.
“Did you not? Well now you do. She wants her own staff. My servants are not good enough for her. I turned her down.”
“But why?” he asked, coming to a halt before her fiery eyes, her white, dilated nostrils. “The request was reasonable, Nubnofret. It would have cost you nothing to grant it. Is your jealousy so cruel?”
“No,” she snapped. “You may not believe me, Khaemwaset, but I am not jealous of Tbubui. I dislike her intensely because she is a crude, common woman without a shred of the morality that has made Egypt a great nation and kept its rulers and nobility safe from the excesses and disastrous weaknesses of foreign kingdoms. She is a sham. The children sense it, I think, but you are blind. I do not blame you for that.” She smiled without warmth. “I blame you for slowly allowing her to gain ascendency over you.”
The tide of rage rose in Khaemwaset so fast that his face was burning and his throat acrid before she was even halfway through her speech. He clasped his hands tightly behind his back to keep from shaking her. “The matter of the servants,” he reminded her from between clenched teeth. She swung away and threw herself back onto the chair. The cosmetician began to braid her hair. “I do not like them,” she said in a low voice. “They unnerve me, and I cannot bear the thought of them permanently in my house. The captain of her barge, the personal maid who is always with her, the ones who have escorted her and Sisenet from our house in the past—there is something menacing in their movements and their utter silence and the way they never seem to have eyes.” Suddenly she tugged her head away from the girl’s ministrations. “They never seem to look at you, Khaemwaset! And when they are in a room with you it is as though they are not only invisible but not there at all.” She grasped the blue linen frothing over her knees and began to pull at it unconsciously. Astounded, Khaemwaset saw that she was near to tears. “Servants are always with you. You are doing something, thinking something, and you have a need, and you are aware that Ib is standing by the door and Kasa is sitting in that corner, you are aware, Khaemwaset. But with Tbubui’s servants you not only forget that they are there, it is as though they really aren’t there. I feel the same strange not-being in Sisenet. I will not have them here, Khaemwaset! It is my prerogative to refuse Tbubui’s request, and for my own peace of mind I do so. I will not have them here!”
He had not realized, had not bothered to realize, how deeply his second marriage had affected her. She sounded perilously close to a total loss of self-control, and for Nubnofret, that would be a failure of the greatest kind. He hurried over to her and pulled her head into his stomach, stroking her gently. “Oh Nubnofret,” he murmured. “Oh my poor sister. Tbubui’s servants are indeed strange, and she has trained them to meet her somewhat peculiar needs, but they are still only servants.”
She clutched at his kilt. “Promise me you will not override my decision on this!” she cried. “Promise me, Khaemwaset.”
He squatted, and taking her wet face between his hands he kissed her softly, overwhelmed with concern. “I promise,” he said. “Tell Tbubui that she may select whatever staff she likes from the house. Perhaps when you feel better you may change your mind, but I swear I will not force this issue on you.”
She sat back and was already composing herself. “Thank you, Highness,” she said formally. “I may be foolish but this is my home, and I cannot be made to feel an outcast here.”
It was an odd choice of words. After a while Khaemwaset changed the subject, and he and she chatted amicably while her cosmetician went back to braiding her hair. But the knowledge that soon he would have to confront Tbubui with his support of Nubnofret was an undercurrent of unease in his mind, and before long he excused himself. Retreating to his quarters he ordered wine. He lay on his couch, morosely drinking, until the alcohol took its effect and he dropped his cup on the floor and slept.
In a brief return to his former decisive self, he told Tbubui the next day of his agreement with Nubnofret to let her ruling stand. Tbubui hardly reacted. She stared at him for a long time, mouth pursed, then began to talk about the harvest that had begun on Sisenet’s estate. Khaemwaset listened with relief. Women in a household, and to a greater degree in a large harem, have their own mysterious methods for solving the problems of precedence. There would be tears and sulks. There would be subtle manipulations, deceits and tests until the stronger women emerged in the positions of power and prominence. Occasionally, in the harems of royalty, where hundreds of women from every kingdom vied for the attention of Pharaoh and more often those men set in authority over them, there would be physical violence and even murder. Khaemwaset was certainly not ignorant of these things, but his own establishment had been free of such turbulence.
A pale reflection of the chaos that could happen in harems was taking place now, he told himself as he studied Tbubui’s outwardly phlegmatic behaviour. The thought reassured him, in fact he was almost flattered. Tbubui was no weakling, but neither, in her own way, was Nubnofret. They would struggle towards a compromise, perhaps even to a position of mutual respect, and he did not think he would need to intervene again. Tbubui would feel less insecure once she had taken her rightful place within the house, and Nubnofret would understand the unfortunate results of her gentle bullying on the inhabitants of the home and would bite her tongue. Khaemwaset believed that the small storm would blow over.
But an even greater one was brewing. For a week all was well. Tbubui did indeed dismiss the servants Nubnofret had designated for her and selected more from the household staff. For the sake of her pride, Khaemwaset surmised, more than for comfort. She went twice to her old home, bringing back trinkets and ornaments forgotten when she moved. She spent several hours with the craftsmen and artists, giving her orders for the new suite. But Khaemwaset was totally unprepared for the news with which she greeted him one night during the last few days of Pakhons.
He had gone to her late, buoyed by a message that had arrived telling him his harvest was complete and bountiful. He wanted to share his happiness with her, to make love to her, and expected to find her on her couch but not yet asleep. He had taken to visiting her at the same hour every few evenings. He would walk into a room flowing with the soft flickers of four night lamps, redolent with her perfume, freshly applied and mingling with whatever flowers she had ordered set about the walls. She would be reclining on the couch, loose linen draped across her body, her skin gleaming with oils and her face newly painted. But on this night she was not on the couch. She was sitting listlessly hunched on a stool against the wall, her hair in disorder, staring into a dimness relieved by only one alabaster lamp. Concerned and disappointed, Khaemwaset went straight to her.
“Tbubui!” he exclaimed, taking her cold hand in his. “What is wrong?”
She looked up and gave him a bleak smile. With alarm he saw that she was sallow, her eyes pouched, and for the first time he noticed. tiny lines inching around her mouth and
fanning out across her temples. She was unpainted.
“Forgive me, Khaemwaset,” she said wearily. “It is so hot and even the drinking water tastes brackish at this time of the year. I was unable to sleep this afternoon.” She shrugged. “I am merely out of sorts tonight.”
He kissed her tenderly. “Then we will sit quietly and talk, and play at Dogs and Jackals. Would you like that? Yes?” He sent a servant for the gaming board and led her to the couch, making her sit against the cushions he hastily rearranged. He himself sank cross-legged before her. She was silent until the girl returned, placed the board between them, and went away again. Khaemwaset had the feeling that Tbubui was debating with herself whether or not to say something. She would draw in a quick breath, glance at him, then glance away. He shook out the ivory gaining pieces. “We need more light,” he said, but she shook her head, a sharp gesture, and he merely leaned over the couch and pulled the night lamp closer. Its spasmodic flickering cast fluid shadows over her face, draining it of life, and Khaemwaset thought that she looked her age, older and very tired. She had played upon almost every emotion he had, but tonight she touched one he had not known was in her domain. Pity engulfed him. She was making no attempt to set her Dogs up for the game. She was rolling one piece between her fingers, head down.
“I am full of good news tonight,” he said presently. “My acres have all been safely harvested and I am a little richer than I was last year. But, Tbubui, I …”
She cut him off, a bitter smile growing. “I too have similar news,” she said huskily. “You have planted a crop of a different kind, my husband. I pray its harvest may bring you as much joy.”
For a moment he stared at her, uncomprehending, then a dawning happiness welled up and he reached for her shoulders. “Tbubui! You are pregnant! And so soon!”
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