by Hank Lawson
Chapter 4
AWAKENED IN MOONLIGHT
Beside his suite’s ten-foot high cedar door inlaid with silver cartouches of his name, Khufu rocked two infant grandchildren, each warm along a forearm. With a finger, he opened their hands clenched in sleep.
Khufu had interrupted a State meeting with his royal officers in the Per-O’s Throne Room to play with the children before they were set into bed. Or perhaps it was to escape the officers’ reports. Not only had they reported a tomb-robbing—the thieves apprehended—but also that the Inundation, now at its midpoint, would apparently repeat or even compound last year’s danger. He began to see images of the Nile like a detached tongue licking the desert for water.
Queen Mother Hetefares removed the children from Khufu’s arms. “It’s time, son.”
“So soon?” Khufu lingered at the doorway, watching his darlings whisked away.
Carrying the Double Crown into the suite on a silver tray, Chamberlain Ramose passed Khufu who bowed to it. When he returned from storing the crown in the God-king’s wardrobe, the chamberlain announced, “Good god Khufu, her majesty Queen Meritates desires admission.”
Prickles flared up Khufu’s spine. “Acht, the queen’s requests disgorge every bowel of her passions. Veritable volcanoes erupting from her lips. I should detain you, Ramose. Such a refined queen will know she is being rebuffed. It may even kindle her blood enough to warm me a little.” Khufu turned to his chamberlain. “Also, as you admit her, call a woman for me.”
When alone, Khufu walked across the turquoise tiles to the stone pond at the suite’s center. Around him, a mural on the walls depicted fields of ready-for-harvest barley, leeks, melons, grape vines, fig sycamores and date palms. Wiggling his fingers in the pond water—gold and maroon jewelfish darting—he gazed up the fifteen feet to the painted stars on the lazuli ceiling, considering what might have been. He waited for the Queen of Egypt.
Meanwhile a melody of poetry played in his head: Queen or me? She or me?
Escorted by four servants, glittering Queen Meritates minced into the suite, face gripped against her skull. Too, a grid of amethyst studs across her pale ankle-length gown disdained any ruffle. The Queen halted, erecting herself.
Even when they were children, his sister Meritates’ divine blood had aroused Khufu. Her blood was passed down to her from the Gods. Since creation as keeper of the lineage, she served as the true monarch. He who married Egypt’s eldest princess became Egypt’s heir apparent. Meritates was that vessel now. Her veins flowed with perpetual sunrise, a mystery more profound even than pregnancy.
Still, maddeningly, Meritates had suppressed her monthly inundation as if with a dam of ice. Khufu searched past her stiff cosmetics for the robust face he once loved. Even tonight when heat blazed with such force that his blood threatened to boil out of his veins, he found no warmth in her. Not a flicker. To the God-king, she was the Nile gone to failure, disgrace, death.
Khufu scowled at the Queen’s smugly smiling and foreign servants. “Your vanity deceives you into believing these foreigners render you exotic. No. They mark you as common.”
“They serve the Queen. Artists among them re-created the three estates with fabulous distinction, wouldn’t you agree?”
“They defiled the estates’ Egyptian identity. Then, you renamed the estates after yourself even though our father had named them for our mother. I can’t stomach them now.” Turning from the Queen his eyes, catching on the servants, sharpened like those of a raptor. Khufu charged them, waving his arms. “Out!”
With an “eek” and a shriek or two, the servants jumped like open-mouthed tilapia bobbing up for mosquitoes. They then scurried out the door in a taint, bumping into each other. Meritates flicked a wrist to excuse them, regardless that it was too tardy for them to see. She then dispersed to Khufu a voice as cool and calm as perfume. “By your detaining the Queen in the hallway, we recognize your intention to slight her.”
Meritates’ voice breathed a vestige of their loving past. He refused the urge to heave himself to her and cling his mouth to her lips, her teeth, her tongue, her breath. How many years would it be before his instincts learned that he’d find there only perch gasping in a riverbed? “Rebuff, dear.”
“Be that as it may, in precisely fifteen days, half of the four months of inundation season will have passed. On that day denoting the height of the Inundation—”
Khufu’s gut clutched. “Is this your reminder that the Inundation is low?” He took the slightest flaring of her nostrils as indication that the question was beneath her vast grace.
“In any event,” she said, “on that day denoting the Inundation’s rising, protocol dictates that the King cohabitate within the same bedchamber as the Queen. I am reminding you at this time to allow you whatever period you may require to certify it to your schedule.”
Khufu clapped his hands once. “My dear warmheart, you fulfill my dreams. Crown a God-king’s magic with the ecstasy of sleeping with a Goddess?” He paused. “But I must refuse. Two recent attempts nearly claimed the God-king’s life. Your offensive just might succeed.”
“The Queen recognizes the second occasion of your employing a slight. Under no circumstances does she suggest that God-king and Queen engage in the love act. They should lie side by side, not quite touching, purely and properly.”
Khufu flung up his arms. “There it is. Our symbol for all these years: two mates unmated, unmoving and unmoved, stone to stone.” Khufu snarled, “Protocol dictates ... Sesh.”
The God-king began to circle Meritates. In a hushed voice he said, “Long ago when we loved, I knew you best by your movement—your lips’ dance when you spoke, your body’s spring when you walked, your thoughts spiriting in your eyes. Time stilled when you moved.” Khufu closed his eyes and offered out a hand, fingers curling in imagined caress. “When I moved in you, what I sensed of life. The world was a sluice and I was the white water in it.” His hand seized into a fist. “You were Egypt to me.”
“The Queen has heard this before.”
Khufu’s eyes opened. “It began when you carried Ka’ab. Shunning the bliss of any expectant mother, you exploited the future king in your belly to crown yourself the consummate queen of all queens. A replica of previous queens, not an original. In this stew of queens, you lost yourself, the unique Meritates. A woman like no other. You moved no longer—no warmth, no spark, no passion. Not the Egypt I loved—no longer.”
“Your tongue is a chisel, Majesty.”
Khufu flinched. Did she mean the chisel at the Heb-Sed? “Oh, if chisels could humanize your form, our tongues would again be flesh and do more than speak.”
Meritates jutted out her chin. “The truth is that the King demanded too exceedingly of the Queen. Further and further he expected.”
Khufu turned away, suddenly exhausted.
“The King expected—no, I’m obliged to say—demanded perfection. The Queen cleaved to her dignity rather than ruin her spirit by acceding to the King’s unreasonable demands. She endured.”
Khufu jerked back toward her. “I desired only that you be complete.”
“No. You wanted more. All the time more.”
Feeling again the creep of tears for the perfect son they had lost, Khufu looked out at his Queen as if through red air.
The Queen retrieved her crisp voice. “Should you be quite finished with your tirade, we say again: God-king Khufu and Queen Meritates must unite symbolically as Egypt unites. This is our mandate. We will say no more.”
Khufu tasted on his tongue something like sour milk. “How romantic, dear. Your love-call contains the romance of a duck spitting rocks. I may love you again, but then I’ve loved you before. Your kind request to join with me and to sleep with me is hereby declined by me.”
Meritates drew herself up before bowing. “At your will, your Majesty.” She swept out.
Khufu watched his Queen depart. He slumped. His scowl slid away, fatigue weighing him down. “Meritates, we were twins. We were Egypt.�
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Khufu dispatched an attendant to cancel his request for a woman. He desired a queen. Can I not remain with a woman as perfect as my pyramid?
As An-khi approached Mehi’s home an hour after sunset, heat struck so fierce that she felt her own blood lashing at her insides. In the courtyard, Sebek slept on a mastaba bench, his back to her. She’d met him once briefly and Mehi had told her about some of Sebek’s adventures. She lifted her lamp to him. Thick and taut, Sebek’s body was not unlike his Crocodile God namesake. A sheen of sweat glistened his bare legs, arms and shoulders. In Sebek, An-khi detected no likeness to his brother.
Sebek rolled over, facing her. An-khi’s lamplight caught his eyes. He squinted.
She said, “You’re active even when asleep.”
“What?”
“I’m sorry to have wakened you.”
Mehi’s brother wiped his forehead and yawned. “Gods, it’s hot. Four hours in this and you’re dead.” From a vase, he slapped water onto his face and neck. “Mehi’s not home yet.”
“He must have gone to Djedi’s. I’ll come back.”
“No. Sit.” Sebek yanked at An-khi’s elbow and plunked her down next to him.
“Umph.”
Sebek scanned her top to bottom. An-khi fidgeted under his inspection. She said, “You don’t work at the pyramid?”
“That’s Mehi’s fantasy. He comes home gushing about how exalted he is on the pyramid. Father could kill him. Mehi never notices.” Sebek spat onto the ground. “I should be grateful. The conscriptors let me alone ’cause they already got one of the family’s sons killing himself on it.”
“What do you do then? You don’t seem like a farmer either.”
“I’m going to lead caravans. Be a dragoman. See something besides this land. Ta Sety and Ta Neter ... and Keben to the north.”
“You’re a bit of a rebel, aren’t you?”
“I won’t waste my life like Mehi, scraping on that stone, ‘on and on, up and up.’”
An-khi recognized that Sebek was mocking Mehi, and then realized the edges of her lips had tipped up into a smile. She lowered them. Sebek smirked. Had he seen her smile?
“When Mehi talks about the pyramid,” Sebek said, “he’s like those giant birds that don’t fly. Those ostriches.” He flailed his arms.
An-khi bit her lip to prevent her laughter.
“No matter how fast it flaps it doesn’t take off.”
“You mock your own brother.”
“He’s good for mocking. Like why has he got the rich girl?”
An-khi flinched. “He hasn’t got me.”
Sebek shrugged and eyed her. “Well, mocking isn’t enough for Mehi. He isn’t beaten enough.”
“That’s cruel.”
“Father should beat him from sunup to sun—”
An-khi tried to cover his mouth with her hand but missed. Instead, her fingers skimmed his cheek. Their eyes caught.
Sebek clamped her hand to his jaw and gestured with his eyes toward something behind her. “Are you sure he hasn’t got you?”
An-khi twisted back. Mehi stood there. His eyes narrowed on An-khi’s fingers touching his brother’s face. She plucked her hand off Sebek.
“Little brother, are you angry that your girl was stroking me?”
Mehi’s brow wedged between his eyes and his shoulders shuddered. But his feet didn’t move.
Sebek hissed. He rose, walked toward Mehi and, without breaking step, cracked the back of his hand across his brother’s mouth—Mehi recoiling—and sauntered through the courtyard gate and away.
Eyes redder than the mark his brother left, Mehi stared at his brother walking away. An-khi put an arm around him. He shook it off.
An-khi said, “We were only talking.”
“Friendly talking.”
“Stop that.”
An owl hooted in the distance. In the night now deep blue, Mehi’s skin took on a pale green pallor. He bent over and grasped his knees, taking huge breaths.
“Mehi? “I’m sorry. Honestly, I was just trying to stop Sebek from talking and he trapped my hand.”
Voice hoarse, Mehi said, “I was getting you a gift.”
“For me?” An-khi perked up the enthusiasm in her voice to encourage Mehi from his pout.
“While you held his hand.”
An-khi stepped back. She’d heard enough of Mehi’s complaint. If he was so mad, why hadn’t he stopped Sebek from holding her hand or fought back against Sebek’s slap. “What were you getting?”
“It’s a secret.” With a final wheeze, Mehi straightened. “It’s not the right time.” His eye glinted.
“Now you’re punishing me for before.”
Mehi grinned his smile that egg-shaped his face. “I like that wanting in your eyes.”
Calming herself, An-khi took her own deep breath. “Mehi, you’re invited to a celebration at my parents.”
“At the governor’s?”
“Our Hathor festival. Late next month. It’ll be a chance for you to show—” An-khi stopped herself from saying, to show your more man self, and instead said, “to show my parents why I like you so much.”
Sometime before midnight, curses shattered Mehi’s sleep. His eyes opened onto the full moon. It seemed to drip with sweat like the face of a frantic, fat man. A moment later Mehi realized that Horemheb, gone for ten days since choking his son, had returned home. Wanting to sleep again and dream of his swim in the Nile that evening with An-khi, he instead slipped from snoring Sebek on the roof in case his mother needed protection. By the time he stepped into the front room, sweat ringed his neck.
On his stomach, Horemheb writhed on the dirt floor, cursing the officials who had whipped him. Blood striped his hands, feet while his back appeared torn by falcons. The Per-O stigma. Khety pressed a damp rag to her husband’s wounds that mixed blood with sweat. On his face, it mixed with tears. Mehi had never before seen his father cry. He stared, trying to understand this new person, someone Mehi thought he knew, someone he’d seen every day, but had disgorged inside out. This person more closely resembled Khety’s rag—blood and cloth.
Had his father turned himself in to the Per-O judgment? Or had Sebek or a neighbor turned him in?
Horemheb craned his neck to see his son. “There! There’s the assassin.” He slung a hand at Mehi that splattered blood and sweat on Mehi’s face. Mehi’s stomach turned. “Come to finish me? Want to stick a knife in?”
“Sssush now,” Khety said. “Or I can’t clean you up.”
“My son the sah. Neferui sah.” Horemheb spat on the wall. “See what you get for doing the right thing?”
“Sssush.”
“You forced me to confess,” Horemheb said. “You and that brother of yours. Do you know they’re coming to take my tools? I can’t work anymore. And the animals. My animals.” Horemheb stopped himself. Darkness glittered in his eye. He took his feet from Khety and, onto their sides, he reeled up. He made for Mehi.
“Horemheb!” Khety stood, reaching for her husband.
As Horemheb closed on his son, Mehi backed away, his heart thumping hard enough to bruise his chest. In the next instant, his father shouldered past him and staggered outside.
Khety went after him. Mehi trailed.
Horemheb picked up a slab of wood and teetered to the family’s leashed sheep. Eyeing the animals, he cocked the stick above his head. The four animals edged away. He swung at one and struck flesh. The sheep bleated. All four bucked. They tried to run but their leashes jerked them back.
Khety dashed up behind him. “No, Horemheb.”
Horemheb hacked again. He missed. That maddened him all the more. Raving curses, he slashed out again and again, sweating, bleeding, blowing mucus out his nose. He bled onto the beating stick. The sheep’ eyes so swelled with black color they might have burst. The animals hurtled, slamming into each other, the stick and Khety. She grasped Horemheb’s arm. He shook her off and cracked an animal’s head. The sheep cried out so close to Khety that
she cried out with it.
Neighbors came out from their homes, peering over the courtyard wall at the family.
Khety clasped her arms around her husband and rocked him on his unsure feet toward the hut.
“Leave me. They’re mine. They’re mine to kill.”
Khety steered Horemheb away from the animals. He collapsed to his knees in front of Mehi, wheezing between curses, his hands dripping blood into the dirt. “My life’s over. My son killed me. He had me confess.”
Mehi didn’t believe he could sway his father. More likely, Horemheb had weighed Sebek’s warning about a neighbor turning him in for a reward, so he turned himself in. Doing it before the break-in itself saved his nose, ears and probably his life. Horemheb must have taken witness against the other tomb-robbers.
“I’m killed and my own son’s done it.”
Khety whispered into her husband’s ear. “Sssush, Amen, no.”
Horemheb slapped away his wife’s hands and glared at his son. “Doing the right thing gets you a beating. You tem sha, I’ll flay you.”
Mehi’s stomach coiled. His feet seemed to stick to the ground like those terrible minutes when Sebek was beaten.
Horemheb tried to stand up but, with his injured feet and Khety holding him down, he gave up trying with several more curses. Instead, he said to his son, “Here’s another right thing I’m going to do. Something we’ve been keeping secret from you. You have a sister, boy. No, no. You had a sister. She’s dead.”
Khety shot up straight and stiff. Her eyes too racked up taut.
Mehi said, “What sister? I have a sister?”
Horemheb spat again.
Khety’s eyes glazed over, staring at nothing. Her silence incited Mehi all the more. “My sister? Where is my sister? Where?”
Horemheb shouted, “She’s in the tem desert. Dead. Like you killed me.”
Khety bolted into the hut, her wretched sob trailing her.
“Are you happy? Killing your mother too?” Horemheb snarled just like the night serpents he had told his sons about in bedtime stories.
Mehi’s stomach twisted like Khety’s rag. He knew he’d better get away and right now. All he could think about was finding and losing his sister in the same moment—the same moment he lost his father.
At midnight near Princess Merysankh’s suite in the God-king’s palace, six harem women including Theormi walked toward the Hall of Pillars. They bowed as they passed Prince Merhet standing idly before a mural of three antelope. Torchlight played on the mural so that the antelope seemed to be dashing behind him. Three locks of his hair arched like a claw over his forehead. As usual whenever Theormi saw him, the prince was pressing his hands to one ear. He appeared to be listening to something as if he held a seashell.
The prince glanced up. Immediately his eyes fixed in tiny points on Theormi.
The older harem woman pulled her aside and whispered, “Come away, child. You don’t want to interest that one.”
Theormi knew little of the six princes except the eldest, Hordedef, whose pyramid spectacle sparked for him flattery throughout the harem. The two women hurried ahead, having fallen behind the others.
“Wait,” Merhet croaked after them.
The pair halted, faced the prince, and bowed once more.
Merhet greeted neither lady. He shuffled straight to Theormi. His eyes flitted as if following the path of a fly before settling between her legs. He giggled. “I have a body part I want you to see.” He giggled again.
Theormi’s companion snorted. Theormi accepted that she should take caution, and wondered how to tell a prince “No”?
“Dear prince,” said the older woman, “I apologize, for we are directed to the God-king’s reception in the Hall. We abide upon an occasion when the God-king has not previously engaged us so that we might have the pleasure of serving you.”
At this, Merhet peeked up—for an instant.
The older woman seized Theormi’s shoulders, turning her. “We do apologize, your Honor, but we are late for the King. Excuse us.” They rushed away.
When out of the prince’s earshot the woman said, “Imagine him saying such a thing, and he’s betrothed. I doubt his body part is big enough to see.”
Theormi said, “But we’re not engaged by the God-king’s reception. You lied to a prince.”
“Won’t be the first or the last time. You’re off for the garden?”
“Are you sure you won’t join me?”
“Still too hot for this big swan.” The woman winked and walked off.
Theormi looked over her shoulder. Merhet hadn’t budged. He crammed a fist against each ear. She didn’t know what to make of him.
An hour past midnight, when sleep seduces everyone but the dying, High-priest Ptah-Du-Au lay deep in bed in his Hituptah mansion, breathing in shallow hisses. His eldest daughter set a steaming cup of honey and palm juice beside his prone body. Before moving out of the shadowy bedchamber, she glanced at his white-clad wa-eb priest Siptah sitting beside her father. A single lamp near Ptah-Du-Au’s shaved pate made him appear embossed in the whitewashed room. The salty odor of natron used to cleanse the priests’ flesh intruded upon the air.
Siptah whispered, “You look improved.”
Ptah-Du-Au waved off the remark. “The doctors offer no hope.”
Siptah’s small eyes darted left then right.
The High-priest coughed, his loose throat shaking. “I swear to you that we will cease the appropriation of the state religion of the great God Ptah by the mongrel religion of God Ra.”
Siptah’s eyes darted faster.“Do we dare, Ptah-Du-Au? Do we? Give me a moment to think.”
“My dear priest, as Ptah created the world with his tongue of words, each man is created with a fatal flaw.”
“Every man? Surely not you.”
The High-priest chuckled. “My flaw is knowing the flaws of others.” He placed his hands flat before him. “Each man contends with his flaw all his life. Most do so by denying it. I saw in Khufu’s face his fatal flaw when our brave young Anhur swung at him. I saw fear.”
“Surely, it was fear. The very face of fear.” Siptah’s eyes stopped shifting. “But all would show fear in that place, wouldn’t they?”
“All mortals would. Yet, Khufu must appear to be a god. This is his fatal flaw.”
“But the dislike between the temples’ priests, even between the priests in our own temple, will assert itself without your direction.”
“For the reason I must continue as if I never departed, our leader must be you.”
“Me? You joke, priest.”
“Stop that old way. You are not the mousy Siptah now. Not just my assistant all these years but ... a son to me.” The High-priest stopped for a breath, more of a gasp. “You learned my ways over these years.”
“It would never work.”
Ptah-Du-Au glared at his assistant until his eyes teared.
Siptah shivered. “But priest, someone with property will inherit the High-priest position. This is not me.”
“My property will go to you, and so too will go the Temple’s control. My eldest daughter assumes my property.”
“To possess your estate I would have to marry—your daughter?” Astonished, Siptah stared at the High-priest. “Your daughter, my priest?”
“All will be yours.”
“Priest, do you believe I can do this?”
Ptah-Du-Au nodded. “When you have doubt, do as you have learned I would do.”
Siptah’s brow lowered. His eyes sharpened. “We will come together.” He gripped hands and forearms with his mentor.
Then, Ptah-Du-Au said, “And … God Ptah has an ally.”
“Do you refer to young Anhur?”
Ptah-Du-Au shook his head and beckoned for his assistant to lean to him. Pushing out his lips to Siptah’s ear, he whispered, “I refer to a personage who currently dwells in the very palace of the God-King.”
Siptah bolted up. “The palace?”
&nb
sp; “I met with our ally this very day. Ambition is our ally’s flaw and our weapon. With judicious encouragement, I believe our ally will act directly against the God-king.”
“Priest.”
“Until then, we will remind Khufu of his fatal flaw to convince his subjects to turn their backs on him and his religion. Yes, the fatal flaw, priest. Know your enemy—what brings him joy, what brings misery.”
Siptah pulled back. “Do you know what that sounds like? It sounds like love.”
“Indeed.”
