By the time Huy had eaten, bathed, shaved, and dressed himself in Methen’s copious linens, the priest was back, hurrying into his house in a cloud of kyphi perfume. He laughed when he saw Huy emerge from the sleeping room. “All you need is a leopard skin draped across your shoulder and a sacred staff in your hand to play the part of a High Priest yourself,” he said, eyeing the folds of the sheath flowing against Huy’s ankles. “Never mind. Soon your kilts will be returned to you.” Going to the table, he sat, reaching for his morning meal. “The dawn song has been sung to Khenti-kheti,” he went on. “The rites of feeding, cleansing, and dressing the god have been accomplished. Now tell me everything while I eat.”
Huy took the chair opposite his friend and began to recount his shameful interview with Nakht, the encounter with Ramose and the Rekhet, and his long walk from Iunu. He did not speak of his desperate attempt to rid himself of both his gift and the wound of his humiliation at Nakht’s hands by engaging the whore; the memory of it was too raw for words. Methen listened attentively as he ate his bread and cheese. Then he sighed. “Perhaps you have been hasty. Your pride was wounded, Huy, your dreams shattered. Your letters were full of Anuket and her family and I was often troubled as I read them. But with your excellent school record and the blameless assessments of your tutors, you could have obtained a good post with any of a hundred needy nobles, merchants, and other businessmen in Iunu. There is no future for you here. You must know that.”
Huy shrugged. “I know. I don’t care. I just want anonymity, Methen. Small responsibilities, simple tasks.” He grimaced. “I fancied myself a noble. The arrogance that drove my parents to send me away in the first place has obviously not died. I am chastened.”
Methen shot him a keen look. “So you seek the other extreme out of a wounding anger? And how will you feel once your hurt and anger have died?”
“I don’t know.” Huy spread out his hands. “If you are worried that one day soon I’ll run away to some more lucrative post, we can have a contract drawn up between us. But I am so very tired, Methen. Tired in my soul from the forced learning of the past weeks, from loving Anuket in spite of a growing conviction in me that she will make no one a good wife, from the continual pressure to decipher the Book …”
“Ah. The Book.” Methen drained his cup of milk and dabbed his mouth on the square of linen beside his plate. “We do not need to speak of its mysteries unless you want to, Huy. As for Anuket, you are not the first man to love an unworthy woman, and you will not be the last. Why do you think thus of her?”
Carefully Huy told of her increasingly common behaviour, his sense of being manipulated by her, their final encounter in Nakht’s night-hung garden, and as he heard himself give audible voice to his misgivings it came to him that she was indeed unworthy of him. He had not dared to think of her in that way before, but with the attempt to describe her to Methen came a clarity of mind. He still loved her, he knew that, but the emotion could be placed behind other preoccupations in a way impossible before. A shift had taken place in his ka. Peace had suddenly become attainable.
“I would like to discuss my duties now, Methen,” he finished.
“Certainly. We will work together through the morning hours tallying gifts given to Khenti-kheti, preparing requisitions for his upkeep and that of his priests—all two of us—and keeping a record of the petitions made to him by the citizens of the town. The tasks are small and easily dealt with. So far I have simply hired a scribe from the marketplace.” He smiled. “It will be good to rely on one intelligence, let alone one style of writing, for this work. The afternoons will be yours. I’m afraid you must launder your own linen and prepare your own food, but you may use the temple’s kitchen and its modest stores if you wish. The temple will supply ink, brushes, and papyrus for you.” He rose. “I have been fortunate to find you a house close by. It belongs to the temple. I could have moved into it, but I prefer to be closer to the sanctuary and my sacerdotal duties. This house was occupied by a woman who recently died. It is bare and there is no garden with it, but that’s true of most homes in Hut-herib. There will be no remuneration with this position,” he told Huy. “But your needs will be supplied by the temple. You have enough linens and oils for the time being?”
Huy thought of his satchels and his chest, full of the gifts from Nakht and his family. “I have enough. I will not be prodigal in my wants, Methen, I promise you.”
“Good. Then bring your belongings and I will show you the house.”
Huy followed him out into the full glare of the morning sun. They crossed the square of grass, threading through the groups of gossiping townsfolk who had come to pay their respects to the god and stayed to share their news with each other, and passed through the gate, turning sharply left into a narrow earthen street where the small buildings crowded lopsidedly together. “These are all homes with one or two shops fronting them,” Methen explained. “Nothing very grand. A potter making wine jars, a woman selling brooms. Unfortunately, there is a beer house beside your dwelling. You share a wall with it. The nights may be noisy, but the few whores who loiter about outside take their customers farther along the street. It is a far cry from your quiet little cell or Nakht’s estate at Iunu.”
Huy thought of the Rekhet’s home on just such a street. What is good enough for her is surely good enough for me, he said to himself, and if I want to escape the noise and dirt I can go out into the fields. Stepping around a crowd of naked children playing knucklebones, he followed Methen through a low doorway halfway along what was almost an alley.
There were three tiny rooms smelling of mice and the peculiar mustiness that often clung to the skin of the elderly. The walls and floor were undressed. The room fronting the street was the largest but by no means copious. The right-hand wall was almost completely taken up with two doorless apertures leading to the remaining two rooms, identical in miniature size and divided by a wall. Methen pointed to the far wall. “The beer house is beyond that. There’s not much room, but it would be advisable to place your cot in the centre of the floor. And take the room farthest from the street to sleep in. Mud bricks are thick and keep most noise out, but not all.”
Privately, Huy was appalled. What in the name of Atum have I done? he wondered dismally. This is much worse than Henenu’s house. No rear door, no garden, and if I want to escape the dimness and sit in sunshine I must take a chair into the street. Dust and grit lay thickly under his sandals as he took the few paces from room to room. Methen was watching him anxiously. Huy managed a smile. It is what I deserve, he wanted to say. Instead, he summoned a joke. “Cleaning it should take me all of two moments,” he said. “I shall buy a broom from my neighbour and ply it with vigour. There will be no problem, Methen.”
The priest looked relieved. “Later you may want to look for something better, but you know this town, Huy—apart from the few nobles’ estates fronting the tributary, Hut-herib is ugly.” He turned back towards the square of light seeping in from the street. “Let’s return to the temple and take a look in the storehouse. We may find a cot and a table and a chair or two there. Then you should visit your family.”
“My family?” With a thrill of mortification Huy realized that not one thought of his parents had entered his head. He wondered what they would say when he told them he had come back to Hut-herib to work. His mother would simply be happy to have him close by, but his father would probably make some dry comment about peasants finally knowing their place, or young men with pompous ideas being humbled. Huy dreaded the encounter. “Of course you’re right,” he said to Methen’s back as he picked his way behind him down the street towards the blessed cleanliness of the temple courtyard. “What can I say to them, Methen? And especially to my uncle Ker, who relinquished the responsibility he had taken on for my education when you carried me from the environs of the House of the Dead? He favours my brother Heby now. It will be a difficult meeting.”
They were crossing the soft grass of the court. Methen glanced at hi
m. “Difficult but necessary,” he said crisply. “These people are your blood, Huy. Nakht could not take their place, nor did he ultimately want to. Remember that. It was not my place to tell them that you might be coming home. You are not expected. Do you want to send them a message first?”
“No,” Huy said slowly, coming to a halt. “I want to see their reactions. I want to know if I am still loved by any save my mother.”
Methen cocked an eye at him. “You chose to stay in Iunu on many occasions when you could have come home,” he reminded Huy. “If your parents are cool towards you, you cannot blame them. How prideful you still are! Go and see them. Accept their greeting, whether warm or aloof. Has it not occurred to you that your long absence might have hurt them?”
No, Huy thought dismally, it has not. My father removed his trust from me. Ker removed his affection. They were all happy to have me stay away, except when Nakht and Nasha and Thothmes visited me there and brought them gifts. Then they were happy enough with me. Rancour curdled in his mouth like soured milk. I will see them and take the medicine my father is bound to tip into my unwilling ears. I will show them the scrolls of excellence from my teachers, but not as though I were begging for their approval—I care nothing for that. Afterwards I will see them only when I am obliged to do so, on my brother’s Naming Day for instance. I can’t even remember when that is.
Suddenly he came to a halt. Ishat, he thought with a shock. I shall be seeing Ishat. What does she look like now? Gods, she must be fifteen! How has she grown? Will her sharp tongue sting me with truth, and shall I really not mind, the way it used to be? Methen had disappeared around the side of the temple and Huy hurried after him.
The storehouse yielded a rickety couch, obviously cast off from some noble’s household, judging by the gilt peeling from its frame and the carved likeness of the goddess Nut, she who swallowed Ra every evening, arching across the headboard, her colours still bright. Methen unearthed a plain wooden table scored with knife marks that had come from a kitchen, two chairs, two low stools, and two cracked clay oil lamps. “These can be mended with wet clay, I think,” he said. “I can let you have pillows and bed linen and a couple of blankets as well, but you will have to use the temple bathhouse. As for cups, plates, utensils, I will see what the kitchen offers.”
Huy shook his head. “I have the things Pabast gave me. They will suffice. I will need to borrow a bowl and some natron and rags and a broom to clean the house, and then perhaps some whitewash?” he ended hopefully.
Methen laughed. “The house is indeed dark. I will see if the man who takes care of the grass and the temple’s vegetable garden and animals can mix you whitewash and find you a brush. It’s time for the noon meal and then I sit just outside the sanctuary doors and wait for the petitioners. We’ll eat together, Huy, and I think you should sleep. You still look tired.”
Huy replied to him silently. It is not the state of my body you see, but the turmoil in my soul, dear friend. I am homesick for my school, for Thothmes, and, yes, for my quiet, clean cell. It was so easy to live as Nakht’s son, to learn to speak and behave like a noble, to take soft linen and sweet oils and kohl mixed with gold dust for granted, to converse easily with Nakht’s guests as an equal, to call for a servant whenever I needed something. Can I face this gritty new existence? Can I endure it for even one day? What have I done?
Inside Methen’s quarters he saw his linen piled neatly on the cot, starched and folded with a reverence, Huy knew, for Nasha’s gold and silver borders and the quality of the weave. Methen’s servant darkened the door bearing a tray from which the aromas of good hot food arose. There was beer as well. Both men sat and began to eat.
“I do not need more sleep,” Huy said. “I will change your voluminous linen for one of my own kilts and leave at once for my father’s house.”
“And face the inevitable as soon as possible,” Methen rejoined, seeing Huy’s gloomy expression.
Huy did not reply.
15
HUY DRESSED for his visit to his family in a mood of recklessness. He chose one of Nasha’s kilts, a piece of gold-bordered linen of the twelfth grade so fine that the outline of his thighs could be seen through its folds in spite of the starch. He strapped Nakht’s turquoise-studded belt around his waist. He did not regret giving Anuket’s earring to the whore, but he did miss its opulence swinging against his neck. The only other one he had was a simple ankh dropping from a short gold chain that Nakht’s wife had tired of and had tossed to him good-naturedly on a sunny morning long ago. It would have to suffice. He outlined his eyes carefully with the kohl Thothmes had given him. He had no bracelets, but the sa amulet shone on his shaved chest and the fingers of his left hand were heavy with the ring amulets, Soul and Frog. He would not go shamefaced to Hapu’s house, bereft of dignity like a chastened child. The odour of jasmine oil, the only oil he possessed, sickened him with the remembrance of his humiliation, but only the very poorest citizens had no oil with which to soften their skin against the harshness of Egypt’s climate and to perfume themselves; and Huy, as he rubbed jasmine over his torso and into his loose hair, reflected that the encounter with his parents was likely to be just as crushing as his interview with Nakht and his abortive attempt at intercourse with the whore. Combing and braiding his hair and fastening it with the frog clasp, he slipped his feet into his worn old sandals. It was unfortunate that he would have to walk through the town and arrive at his parents’ home with dusty feet and legs, but it could not be helped. At least, he thought grimly as he placed the scrolls containing his tutors’ evaluations into his small satchel, left Methen’s quarters, and struck out across the grass, at least I may be able to keep my kilt clean.
He remembered the way perfectly well although he had not trodden it for many years, not since he had come to the temple with Itu and Hapu to thank the god for his fourth Naming Day and to give Khenti-kheti his gift. Then as now, the town’s areas were islanded by deep dikes filled with the flood water in which naked children splashed and slung mud at each other and at passersby. Huy, knowing himself an attractive target, avoided the few groups of happy young scoundrels. The hottest hours of the day had begun and many families were resting in the coolness of their houses.
Reaching the outskirts seemed to take him a long time. He deliberately walked slowly, willing himself not to sweat. When the densely packed buildings became a straggle of private dwellings, away to his right, beneath the height of the Inundation, his uncle Ker’s precious arouras stretched to a line of truncated palms shimmering on the humid horizon. Huy found the path that ran in front of his father’s gate, and with the water lapping inches from his feet he turned onto it. Soon, all too soon, he saw the low mud-brick wall and the wooden gate and, beyond them, through the few trees of the garden, the whitewashed gleam of his father’s house. How small it all was, he marvelled as he paused, his hand on the gate. How tiny the garden with its miniature pool surrounded by his mother’s vegetable plots; how low the flat roof; how modest the house he had once thought as huge as Pharaoh’s palace! Off to the right was the hedge dividing garden from orchard and, beyond that, Ker’s fields where Huy’s father laboured, an abundance of rich dark soil even now being replenished with nourishing silt. In another six weeks or so Ker’s army of peasants, Huy’s father among them, would walk ankle-deep in the warm mud and strew the seeds of a hundred different perfume flowers to become garlands, wreaths, exotic perfumes, and fragrant oils for the wealthy. Yet my father lives in greater privacy than I shall, with my three rooms crammed between a beer house and fronting a dusty street. Consciously willing his hand to push the gate open, his feet to carry him through it, he walked the short distance to the open door.
The interior of the house was quiet but for a subdued snoring coming from the room Huy knew was his parents’. Quietly he slipped along the short hallway to the door of the room he still thought of as his. It was closed. Carefully he pushed it ajar and peered around it. Someone was sleeping on his cot. All Huy could s
ee was a head of tousled black hair and one small foot protruding from under a rumpled sheet. For a moment Huy was indignant. This was his room! He had painted those admittedly crude pictures of hectically green frogs and bushy yellow palm trees himself, and there was his name repeated several times over the white walls, the hieroglyphs clumsy but decipherable. He felt the paintbrush in his hand, the frown on his brow as he laboriously stroked the characters over the whitewash. Then his good sense reasserted itself. This was no longer his room. It belonged to his brother Heby, surely the child buried under the thick grey sheet.
He must have made some sound, an exhalation of breath, the creak of the door, for all at once the figure stirred, pushed the sheet away, and sat up. He and Huy regarded one another silently. Huy had time to remark to himself on the boy’s sturdy, even features, the glow of health on his brown skin, the large dark eyes shaped very like his own regarding him sombrely and without fear. “Who are you?” Heby asked at last. “Why are you staring at me?”
Huy stepped farther into the room. An expression of alarm crossed the boy’s features. “I’m your big brother, Huy,” Huy began to explain, but the child had pushed himself against the wall and bunched his fists.
“No you’re not,” he said loudly. “My brother Huy lives at Ra’s temple in Iunu, far far away. Mother! Come quickly! There is a strange man in the house!”
“Hush, Heby, don’t wake them,” Huy admonished in a moment of panic. I am not ready for this, he thought as he heard an immediate stirring from along the passage. It is not the slow and easy way I imagined it would be. I am not in control here. He stood irresolute, his satchel hanging forgotten from one hand.
“Hurry up, Mother!” Heby called. “And you had better bring Father as well. The man looks strong!” In spite of his position against the wall, shoulders hunched around his bony knees, there was no real fear in Heby’s eyes.
The Twice Born Page 41
