Nasha and Thothmes were more than happy to have Huy in residence, Thothmes because Huy was his best friend and there were already eight years of close history between them, and Nasha because Huy provided a foil to the earnest young men who had begun to parade through the house at Nakht’s invitation to seek her hand. Without exception they bored her, and she turned to teasing and rough-and-tumble play with Huy after their visits as though physical and verbal aggression, no matter how mild, drove the boredom away. Her words and actions were entirely innocent, Huy knew. To her he was an adopted brother. She, he, and Thothmes spent many hours floating aimlessly on the calm flood waters, pulling up handfuls of reed grass, and later the ubiquitous pondweed that could choke the canals, and pelting each other, or searching for egret and ibis nests, or simply lying in the bottom of the skiff, somnolent with wine, while the servant poled them in the shallows under the thin, elongated shadows of the drowned palms lining the bank.
Anuket never joined them, though Huy begged her to do so. In spite of her name she had an aversion to water, and preferred to cool herself with modest dips in one of the pools on her father’s estate. Huy forced himself not to follow her about like a hungry dog. He loved being with Thothmes and Nasha, although Nasha’s horseplay tried his patience, and he did not want Nakht to see how truly lovesick he was. He knew that his attraction to Anuket had not gone unnoticed by either parent. He also knew that they trusted him to behave with decorum around her, and he would not betray that trust. Besides, Anuket, although she had lost much of her shyness with him, still held him at arm’s length so that much of the time he was unsure of her feelings for him, and he wondered often whether he had dreamed their peculiar conversation in the herb room.
On the twenty-sixth day of Khoiak, when the flood had reached its highest and had ceased to flow, Nakht gave a party to celebrate the Feast of Sokar. A massive raft was tethered to the mooring poles at the foot of his watersteps, decorated with banks of flowers, and laden with food and wine. Over a hundred of Nakht’s relatives, friends, and fellow nobles crowded onto it, ate, drank immoderately, and watched Anuket perform a stately dance in honour of the god, a wreath of ivy and blue lupines on her head and systra in her hands. With downcast eyes and bare feet, tiny bells on her ankles, she measured out the slow steps of the ritual, fingers twirling, the thin red linen of her sheath moving with her. Each time she passed one of the many lamps set around the perimeter of the raft, the contours of her slim body could be glimpsed and Huy, cold sober even after drinking four cups of wine, was forced to turn his gaze to the dark, placid water lapping below.
He knew that his chances of ever possessing the flesh he craved were practically non-existent. Notwithstanding her family’s affection for him, her father would never offer her to a commoner. She would go to a son of one of the perfumed and bejewelled guests surrounding him, with their kohled eyes, their gleaming skin, their hennaed palms and soles of their feet denoting their aristocratic station. Besides, he thought gloomily while Anuket sank to the deck and a storm of applause broke out, the High Priest did not answer my question regarding the preservation of my own virginity. Lifting his eyes, he found her looking directly at him, a faint smile on her lips. He smiled back, feeling cold and slightly sick.
When he was not at Nakht’s house or with the Book, he wandered freely through the temple complex, enjoying the empty courtyards, the silence of the schoolroom, the bare expanse of the training ground. He spent a few moments of every day with Lazy White Star, bringing slices of cucumber dipped in honey from the vast temple gardens. The horse would whinny at his approach, butting its long nose against his chest and nuzzling softly at his neck. Holding the sweetened vegetable on his flat palm, Huy would offer it respectfully, but most often the animal would take it, suck off the honey, then spit the cucumber onto the ground at Huy’s feet. There was something comforting about its warm smell and the feel of its coat under his fingers. Putting his head against the horse’s wide forehead, he would talk to it until with a snuffle and a nudge it backed away into the coolness of its stall.
Huy wrote dutifully to his parents, speaking of the small events making up his life during this hiatus, but he did not mention the Book or his attachment to Anuket. He reserved those privacies for his letters to Methen, who wrote back to him regularly, telling him of the state of his town before addressing both his sacred task and the purely secular tangle of his near worship of Anuket. “Your emotions in that regard are entirely natural for a young man of your age,” Methen replied in much the same vein as Ramose had done. “Enjoy them, but try not to take them too seriously. This is first love, Huy. It will die as rapidly as it sprang to life.” Huy doubted that it would, but the priest’s words comforted him.
He also paid a visit to the Rekhet. She, like Anuket, was seldom out of his thoughts, though for very different reasons. Thothmes had provided him with a willing ear after his hours spent poring over the Book, but his friend was not particularly interested in the concepts Huy was finding increasingly vital. He needed an experienced mind, and besides, he did not need to pretend with the Rekhet, to make himself appear less intelligent or less astute than he was to put his fellow students at their ease. He liked them, liked to be one of them, liked to join in their banter and share jokes with them, but he could not escape the foreign thing inside him that set him apart regardless of his efforts to be just another twelve-year-old schoolboy. It demanded company, and Huy needed understanding. Accordingly, he asked the High Priest for Henenu’s address and set off one bright morning to find her.
He was surprised, given her acknowledged wealth, to be drawn away from the river on Ramose’s instructions. He had imagined a home much like Nakht’s for her, something gracious set down amid groves of trees with a high wall paralleling the river road and a gate porter, but he had only followed the road a short distance, to the centre of the city’s vast watersteps, crowded as usual, before he was forced to turn into the heart of Iunu. He walked for a long time, at first striding along pleasant avenues lined with stately buildings, but gradually his route began to take him through narrowing, dusty streets that occasionally opened out into small shrines or untidy markets raucous with noise and full of the stench of garlic and unwashed bodies.
At last, when he was about to turn back in despair, he came to the one detached mud-brick house in the centre of a row of grey dwellings, but this one had a waist-high mud wall in front of it and was hung with cowrie shells. Tired and dirty, he pushed through the gate and approached the doorless porch. At once a man appeared, eyeing him watchfully although his words were polite. “Greetings. This is the house of the Rekhet. I am her steward. May I ask, what is your business with her?” Huy gave his name and was invited to take the stool the man had obviously just vacated. He could have sat there in the coolness for much longer than he did, but soon the man returned, this time gracing him with a deep bow. “My mistress is in her garden. She is eager to see you. Please follow me.”
Huy was led around the small building into an unexpectedly large, high-walled area of shade trees and grass. There was even a pool, its surface thick with lily pads. After the stark aridity through which he had passed, the sight of so much greenness was like a draft of cold water. Some of his fatigue left him as he walked towards the woman who was straightening as he came up to her. She was dressed in coarse peasant linen. Her feet were bare and both hands covered in wet soil. Smiling, she answered Huy’s obeisance.
“You look almost as disreputable as I do!” she chuckled. “Did you walk all the way from the temple? Ramose should have provided you with a litter. Isis!” At her call a woman came out of the house and stood waiting. “Bring us hot water and beer! And cushions! Come under the shade,” she went on, drawing Huy towards the cluster of sycamores. “I have been weeding the few vegetables I grow around the pool. My poor steward goes to the river every few days and hires men to keep the water level high. A foolishness, I think, but cultivating cabbage and leeks is a fine antidote to the strain of my w
ork.” Seeing Huy’s bewilderment, she laughed again. “I have an estate on the lake at Mi-wer. I have cattle at the oasis, and a grape arbour, and a huge vegetable garden. Food and wine is brought to me regularly while I am in the city. I am not poor, Huy. I live here where the common people can come to my door without fear to be freed of their demons, and when I need to rest I go home to Ta-she. Ah! Here is the beer and the cushions. Heating the water will take longer.” The servant set the cushions and a tray on the ground, poured two cups, and went away. Henenu waved Huy to the grass and lowered herself beside him with a groan. “My joints are becoming stiff. I think soon I will send for my masseuse. It’s good to see you, Huy. Tell me how you are faring.”
Huy began to talk of the mundane life of the school. He had forgotten how her eyes in their nest of deep wrinkles could fix on him with a disconcerting intensity, and he was momentarily shy. But the water arrived, hot and scented with jasmine, and by the time they had washed their hands and she had emptied the bowl over his dusty feet he had regained his confidence. His thirst slaked, he spoke of the Book, reciting faultlessly what he had read in it, telling her of his dream and the subsequent revelation, and when he passed to his passion for Anuket he did so without faltering.
Henenu placed a gnarled hand briefly on his knee. “Ramose may be wrong. There is much about you that cannot easily be put into the box labelled Young Man. You may love Anuket for the rest of your life.”
“Oh, I hope not!” Huy cried in dismay. “To love her for the rest of my life would put me in a perpetual prison. She will marry a nobleman. Nakht will see to it.”
“Perhaps.” Henenu pursed her lips thoughtfully. “And that may be a good thing. Otherwise you will be torn between your duty to the gods and the desires of your heart and body, and will do full justice to neither.”
Huy had not considered this. “So I may find myself in a place where no choice is possible,” he said angrily. “Well, at least apart from the Book the gods have left me alone. I wrestle with my friends, I inadvertently brush against a dozen people a day, yet the gift of Seeing remains quiet.”
“Make the most of that peace,” Henenu replied. “It will not last. You are not of much use to them yet, being confined in school. Do you know when you will be going south to Khmun to read the second part of the Book?”
Huy had been resolutely disregarding this necessity. His world so far had been Hut-herib, Iunu, and the stretch of river in between, and he admitted to himself that he was afraid to venture beyond what was familiar. He shook his head. “No, and I’m in no hurry to see Khmun.” He hesitated. “Rekhet, I have a question that the High Priest could not or would not answer.” Her grey eyebrows rose. “I learned that a Seer loses the gift of Sight if he or she loses his or her virginity.” The words were clumsily put together and he bit his lip. “Is it true?”
“For some it has been true. For others, the fortunate ones, not. Ramose does not know. Do you wish to take this chance?”
“If I could have Anuket, I would take the chance,” Huy said vehemently. “It is a serious matter, to defy the gods, but I would do it if it meant a life spent in her arms!”
“And then what?” The Rekhet leaned forward. “An eternity in the Duat? How do you imagine the gods would repay such perfidy? You cannot interfere with destiny and expect no retribution.” Her tone softened. “In any case, you need not concern yourself with such things yet. Put your energy into archery and chariotry and increasing your writing skills. We will talk of this matter again.” She shouted once more for Isis. “Now we will eat, and sleep for a while here in the shade. You are wearing your amulets, I see. Good. I am very aware of the aura of their protection all around you, Huy. The Khatyu hover outside it, but their malevolent craving to destroy you is being continuously turned aside. They are impotent.”
The meal they shared was simple, cabbage soup, bread, and goat’s cheese, and afterwards they both drowsed on the warm grass.
The sun was already sinking, turning the dust to red and casting long shadows over the streets, as Huy took his leave of Henenu and set off for the temple. The fruit and vegetable sellers were dismantling their stalls in the markets through which he passed. Laden donkeys choked the narrow lanes, and feeble lamplight already flickered in the depths of some of the beer shops. The brothels were not yet busy. Whores leaned apathetically against their walls, eyeing the passersby without interest, their elaborately curled wigs and thickly kohled eyes exotically parodying the appearance of young aristocrats. They would not begin to harass the men walking past them until full darkness fell, and although Huy saw their heads turning to follow his progress they remained silent.
One of them, however, briefly caught his attention. She was sitting on a stool, the folds of her yellow sheath draped about her calves, her chin resting in the palm of one hand. She seemed to be sunk in some distant thought, and did not look up as Huy strode by. There was something of Anuket’s daintiness about her, and it suddenly occurred to Huy that he might take a chance on deliberately destroying his Seeing gift by turning back and engaging her services. Then, with luck, he would be of no further use to the gods. He need not worry about the Book of Thoth, or what strange destiny awaited him. He would be free to submerge himself in the blessed anonymity of the crowd, work as a scribe, marry and raise a family, untroubled by dreams or premonitions. With luck.
He came to a halt and swung about, and the little whore took her chin out of her palm, stared at him, and rose. He took one step towards her, and as he did so she slid the band of her sheath off one shoulder, revealing an unexpectedly heavy breast, and began to smile shrewdly. The invitation was so blatant, so earthy, that a thrill of both disgust and attraction ran though Huy. It was not hard to imagine Anuket standing there in the guise of the goddess of lust after whom she had been named, her air of shy fastidiousness transformed into the artificial coyness of seduction. The young woman lifted her breast. Her smile widened, and Huy’s disgust won out. He walked briskly away.
On the ninth day of Paophi, his thirteenth Naming Day was marked by letters of congratulation from his parents and his aunt and uncle and by his own prostrations of gratitude before the sanctuary doors of the temple and his own statue of Khenti-kheti. He did not make an offering. With mild resentment, he decided that he did not want to thank the gods for burdening him with the weight of his uniqueness. His continued health he took for granted.
Once he had finished reading the three scrolls that made up the first part of the Book, he reread them several times, until beneath the sonorous words rolling through his mind whenever he called them up, he began to detect their incompleteness. Then he knew, with a sinking heart, that it was time for him to begin work on the second part. For several days he hesitated, both afraid and unwilling to see his safe routine of school work and exercise taken away from him, but at last he could delay no longer. On a stiflingly hot evening towards the end of his birth month he knocked on the High Priest’s door.
Ramose was at his desk, but his chair had been pushed back and his face was raised to the intermittent gusts of wind funnelling into the room from the wind catcher on the roof. He remained seated as Huy approached him and bowed. “I seem to feel the heat more acutely as I age,” he sighed. “I thank the gods that I do not live any farther south. Sit down, Huy. Pour yourself a little beer. Have you come to tell me that you are ready to travel to Khmun?”
“Yes,” Huy said reluctantly, taking the customary stool. “I can do no more with the first part of the Book. It is all here”—he tapped his temple—“in my head. I ponder it daily. Most of it I understand, but I have come to realize that it really is one piece of a whole.”
“The second part consists of only one scroll. Nevertheless, you will take as much time as you need in Thoth’s temple. Your teacher and instructors tell me that so far you are doing well, and Harmose reports that you are a tidy and responsible member of your courtyard.” He smiled. “Do you remember the rebellious and recalcitrant child you were when you first
came here? You have grown in self-control and diligence. I am proud of you.” For some reason the High Priest’s praise annoyed Huy. He shook his head and did not reply. “Well, no matter,” Ramose went on. “The river is still rising and the school will remain closed until next month. It is not far from Iunu to Khmun, but the land is flooded and the current still strong. Rest from the Book. Concentrate on your other pursuits. I have already warned Thoth’s High Priest that you will be coming, and I will dictate another letter for him that you will take with you.”
Huy felt weak with reprieve. “Am I to go alone, Master?”
“Certainly not! You are much too valuable to be allowed to wander about Egypt by yourself! I will choose a temple guard and a body servant to go with you. Now run along.” He got out of his chair. “I am going to the bathhouse to drench myself in cool water.” Coming around the desk, he laid a hand on Huy’s head. “You’ve done well,” he said quietly. “Enjoy your freedom from the demands of the Tree.” It was an odd thing to say, and Huy glanced up at him swiftly, but he was already moving towards his private door at the rear of the room. Huy returned to his cell with a lighter heart.
The Twice Born Page 27
