“You speak of the discharging of debts,” Thoth replied, seemingly unperturbed. “My debt to you for your service, your debt to Set for ridding you of the curse I laid upon you. Yet I see that you are still proud, Prince Khaemwaset, still unrepentant. For under all these things lies a greater sin, your sin, and after all these years of suffering you still can neither see it nor be humbled by it. Hori was sacrificed to it. Ahura, her husband and her son were pawns to it.” He leaned over Khaemwaset and, in spite of himself, Khaemwaset felt a thrill of terror. “If you can name it, magician, even now, you might be forgiven.”
The god drew back. Khaemwaset concentrated on his breathing. Pull the air in, hold it, let it out, while all the time the baboons snuffled and fidgeted in the dimness, and Khaemwaset searched frantically for the answer Thoth expected. What sin? What sin? I have served, he thought resentfully. I have suffered. What else can be expected of me? “I cannot name it,” he said at last, “for I do not believe that it exists. I have fulfilled that which the gods exact, and I have tried to do right in their sight. What more could be asked?”
Thoth nodded, his long beak moving thoughtfully over Khaemwaset’s face, and behind him the baboons chittered in a sudden flurry of discontent before subsiding into lassitude. “Debts and owing, services rendered and spells to compel,” the god said softly. “None of them touches the vast dark lake of spiritual pride lying undisturbed in the essence of your being. Duty has not touched it. Your suffering has not put a ripple on its surface. You still believe that as long as you discharge your spiritual obligations there should be a reward, whether of the cancelling of a debt or the cessation of a suffering you still regard as unjust. You have learned nothing but resentment over the years, Prince.”
There was a silence. Khaemwaset, still angry, stared into the darkness. Then the god stirred. “Tell me, Khaemwaset,” he said conversationally, “if I gave you a chance to undo all the havoc you have caused, to change your memories, to wipe those things that happened from your past, would you take it? Think carefully. Will you learn the lesson, or erase it away?”
Khaemwaset stared at him, The god stood patiently, his white cresting feathers quivering in the night air, his tiny black eyes alert, yet full of an odd humour. The offer was not as guileless as it seemed, Khaemwaset knew. There was something else, something pitiless, in Thoth’s steady gaze. He is laughing at me, Khaemwaset thought in despair. There is something here that I ought to be able to see, something that would save me, but I do not know what it is. “This is another torment,” he retorted after a while. “You are trapping me yet again.” But he lay back and closed his eyes. To go back … to undo that moment when he held the knife poised over the Scroll sewn to that anonymous, dead hand. To obliterate his memories and reform them so that Hori was now a mighty prince, married, fulfilled, enjoying his rightful place under a Ramses who grew older but did not die, so that Sheritra had found a man who would love her and appreciate her unique qualities, so that he and Nubnofret might grow old together in mutual respect … His chest began to tighten again and he nodded. “I will hear,” he said.
He opened his eyes, and now Thoth was holding the Scroll, the curse, the evil thing that had lain all these long years in his chest, untouched.
“I will give you strength for one hour,” the god said. “Take the Scroll, Khaemwaset, to the time when your younger self was in Pi-Ramses, at dinner in Pharaoh’s great hall, talking to your friend Wennufer. You remember that, don’t you? Take it back, and see what happens. I will wait for you. There is no time in the Judgment Hall.”
Khaemwaset took the Scroll. It was the first time in more than twenty years that he had handled it, but it felt familiar, familiar and terrible. The memories came flooding back, of Tbubui, his lust, his blindness, the disintegration of his integrity. “I am not strong enough,” he whispered. “My body …” But all at once he heard the drunken shouts, the singing, the clash of music over the pandemonium in the great feasting hall at Pi-Ramses, and his nostrils were filled with the reek of wine, of hot bodies, of mountainous banks of flowers. It was all far away and faint, but as he concentrated on it, clutching at its vitality in his last extremity, it rapidly grew louder, more immediate, and all at once he found himself standing just inside one of the doors of the hall, the Scroll tucked into the belt of his kilt. One hour, the god had said.
Anxiously he scanned the naked, weaving dancers, the laughing revellers, the servants threading their way through the crowds with trays of steaming food held high. Where am I? he thought Where was I? What was I doing? All at once he spotted Wennufer by the far entrance, his slightly pompous face solemn. He was talking earnestly to a well-built, tall, handsome man with an arrogant, dark face, heavily painted and sparkling with jewels. Is that me? he thought, amazed. Was I ever that commanding of presence, that good-looking?
He began to make his way across the room. No one seemed to notice him, though he knew he was clad in nothing but his kilt and the belt. Before long he was standing beside this perfumed, dark stranger. And in that moment, when the man held out his cup negligently for a slave to fill it, and Khaemwaset touched his arm, he knew the trap the god had laid for him, knew it and was horrified, but his younger self was already turning and it was too late.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The verses at the beginning of each chapter are taken variously from Margaret Murray’s Egyptian Religious Poetry (Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1980) and Life Under the Pharaohs by Leonard Cottrell (London: Pan Books, 1955).
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PAULINE GEDGE
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THE HIPPOPOTAMUS MARSH
ISBN-13: 978-0-14-316745-7 Volume One of the Lords of the Two Lands Triology
THE OASIS
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THE HORUS ROAD
ISBN-13: 978-0-14-316747-1 Volume Three of the Lords of the Two Lands Triology
HOUSE OF DREAMS
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HOUSE OF ILLUSIONS
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SCROLL of SAQQARA
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Table of Contents
Cover
About The Author
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Glossary of Egyptian Gods
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
Epilogue
Acknowledgments
Scroll of Saqqara Page 56
