by Hank Lawson
Chapter 11
EBB LIKE DAWN
Twelve days later at his vanity’s full-length silver mirror, the God-king plucked gray hairs from his scalp. “She loves me, she loves me not. I grow older but the pyramid grows no higher.”
Prior to their joining an afternoon reception for Chief Piye of the Wawat, Khufu met with Egypt’s royal officers, attending him on pillows set on the turquoise tiles, to debate invasion of Piye’s chiefdom south of Egypt. Wawat gold would secure pyramid construction when the inundation season resumed seven long months away. The pyramid would secure endless life for Khufu; Khufu’s afterlife in the pyramid would secure Egypt’s prosperity. Pyramid construction required copper chisels, chisels required constant sharpening, sharpening required continual fires, fires required trade for Keben timber, and that required gold.
Khufu addressed his six officers’ reflection in the mirror. “Each Egyptian tree felled for these blasted blast fires is like yanking out one of my teeth.” He tugged down his lower lip and exposed gold wires securing the otherwise loose teeth. “But Egypt requires perfection of its King. In our years, we have expanded the mining of turquoise, red jasper, soft gypsum and purple bekhenu, but no gold. What do you say, Prince Hordedef?”
Standing, Hordedef said, “If we conquer Wawat, conquer with dispatch, and post our men across the vast desert—a necessity if we conquer—we will parse too thin Egypt’s men and wealth. Fabled treasures of the rich lands south of the Wawat such as Punt would remain fabled.”
Remaining on his pillow, Vizier Shaf lazily waved a hand. “Hordedef has lectured us well, Majesty. Then again, he’s performed this speech countless times before this council.” Chuckling passed among the officers. Shaf cast his hand above his head and pitched his voice. “Gentlemen, Wawat gold is in heat for God-king Khufu, her destined mate. She secretes love’s scent, swoons at his touch, and yields to his invasions. Her plea is, ‘Take me.’”
Khufu grinned. Then he pinched his cheeks.
“I want,” Hordedef said amid the princes’ laughter, “to thank my brother for his poem ‘Rutting with My Favorite Metal.’ Allow me to point out that Egypt alone possesses the organization to mine Wawat’s gold, and Piye knows this. Egypt alone maintains the might to invade his realm, and Piye knows this. So, rather than waste lives in war, we gain Wawat gold by simply negotiating with Piye.”
“Negotiate? With the Wild Man, you say?” Shaf once more coaxed laughter from the officers. “Instead, brother, negotiate the cataracts.”
The second prince thrust his hands forward. “Don’t allow hate to win us. Hate fouls our dearest relations. If we allow it here it will putrefy us.”
“Anyone feel the need for a bath?” Dedephor’s jest drew a cackle even from Khufu while the keeper painted kohl around the God-king’s eyes.
“Loss of ma’at,” Hordjedef said, his eyes wide, “drought, storm, invasion, Gods abandoning man, men abandoning land. Don’t you comprehend that’s what we debate?”
“Hordedef,” Shaf said, “we invade merely a land of barbarians and claim Khufu his ordained gold that has always belonged to the realm of his magnificence.”
“Are they barbarians simply for living outside our borders?”
“Reason enough.”
“Madness.”
“Enough, then,” Khufu said. Vestment, wig and complexion primed, he arose, feeling himself again the image of God-king in the long line of God-kings. “On to our guests. And the Wild Man.”
With his officers, God-king Khufu entered the Hall of Pillars. The seventy guests gathered on the pool mural bowed to kiss the floor. They passed through sunrays streaming from high windows on their way to Chief Piye, lounging underneath the twenty-foot, falcon-headed statue of God Ra. The chief’s belly bulged across ten pillows under him. He rolled over to slurp up grapes a harem woman offered to him upon her palm. Four cornflower wreaths draped his neck. Khufu’s gifts of gold breast plates, clasps and girdles were scattered about him amid vases of wine and bowls of figs, beef and dark honey.
Khufu asked, “Are my ladies treating you well, my good King?”
“Great Khufu, your women are the lushest in ten lands.” Piye’s opened mouth displayed mashed grapes and catfish. “Perhaps a few you snatched from other lands, eh? Certainly, Khufu isn’t satisfied with the best in only his own nation, is he?”
Khufu responded only with a short laugh.
“Possibly one or two will return to Wawat with me to remind me of the Great God-king Khufu’s might ... and mercy.” Focused on Khufu’s eyes, Piye said, “For who predicts what will be retained after a night’s surrender, eh?”
“Beautiful dawns await you, King, to the end of your days.”
“In some year far ahead of us, we hope—and by natural means.” Piye tipped his wine goblet toward Khufu before slugging down its contents.
Khufu’s gut coiled; the Per-O worm had leaked word to Piye of the invasion debate. “Naturally, great King.”
To the two leaders, younger princess Merysankh padded as softly as her smile. Yellow silks clasping her body except at her shoulders, she bowed to Khufu and Piye before heading on to other guests.
Piye’s eyes followed her. “Her footfalls purr like a turtledove. Conceive it—a noiseless woman. And as Khufu’s daughter? A larger impossibility.” Piye sprang up and started his stomach jiggling. “Bring the gifts.”
Piye and an entourage of thirteen trailed Merysankh. As she offered to shake the hand of a guest, Chief Piye intruded upon her, his belly less than a foot away. She twirled around to him. “Sweet, precious princess,” he proclaimed, “you are sunlight on water.”
Every guest broke off conversations to watch.
King Piye stripped the wreaths one after another from his neck and piled them around her neck. Shifting her eyes, Merysankh pleaded for help from Khufu and her brothers. Piye presented to her a three-inch ivory figurine of Khufu.
“See that,” said Khufu to his princes, “he seduces my daughter—with my gifts.”
Piye said, “You bear the grace of a rose, the softness of moss.” Tilting back his head to apparently continue his praise, Piye flourished his arm but accidentally threw open his robe. He wore no loincloth underneath. Merysankh’s eyes widened on the King’s uncovered flesh before she could avert her attention to the Hall’s ceiling. Guests followed her lead. Soon, seventy pairs of eyes found fascination in the previously neglected ceiling.
His robe and genitals swaying, Piye slapped a hand on the robe to secure it while punctuating his remarks with the other hand. “Stars envy your eyes, gold envies your skin.”
Merysankh, now facing away from him, tried to balance the gifts wobbling in her arms that the chief’s entourage continued to load on her.
“I believe we have a problem,” Hordedef whispered to Khufu.
Khufu stretched a grin. “You think negatively, son. We have a solution.”
“Majesty?”
“It is your wish to negotiate. Now, we have something with which to bargain. Meet with me tomorrow.”
Mid-afternoon the next day, the enthroned God-king eyed Prince Hordedef kissing the white floor in the Throne Room. Khufu as father welcomed a son he loved while Khufu as God-king considered that this was the Per-O worm he detested. Hordedef stood and peered through the chamber’s faint light as if seeking Khufu’s eyes. The act of a concerned son or a spy? “Your sister caught the eye of the Wild Man.”
“So it would appear, my Lord.”
“Capable of much, she shows us how to serve a certain need. Do you understand?”
“A moment, your Majesty.” Fingers to his lips, Hordedef strode closer to his father. “Consider a moment what it would mean to Merysankh to marry the foreign chief, a man she does not love?”
Heat streaked up Khufu’s spine. “Can you believe I don’t? Can you think Khufu does not know loneliness?” His hands flexed into fists. “I did not … The princess … There are many ways to move Piye short of her marrying him. Perhaps your own shadowed heart
might dredge up such a horror.”
Hordedef recoiled as if scalded.
“Your duty,” said the God-king, aiming a meaty finger at the prince, “is to be true to your idealism. Must I call upon my adopted son Mehi to find a prince who backs up his words? Until then, words are just shadows.”
Hordedef slowly closed his eyes.
The God-king turned from the prince. He listened to Hordedef exit the chamber.
From the moment that Sebek lurched out of his first sleep into the black tomb of the goldmine, any feeling for time passing had flittered away. Dawn, noon, sunset? None of them existed. The shaft’s heat, as from fired iron, had replaced the sun; shadows replaced the night. In this tiny space, loss of time loomed like a malevolence as large as a universe.
How could he survive another breath?
Sebek dreamt of water—water to fill him from toes to chin—and getting out. He took only a pig, and only from the real thieves. These guards didn’t even know about the man he killed.
After another awakening, still roped to the others huddled on the dirt, he began to rub something on his forearm. He rubbed it hard before he realized he was rubbing away his skin. He kept rubbing.
Life for the one named Sebek had ended. He was a scorpion now. A desert survivor.
His chain of prisoners moved forward into shadows. Like the clouds on the night Sebek left home, shadows in the cave glided on hot currents. They veiled other shadows that sometimes turned into men. Men with clubs.
The clubbing resumed. Voices barked orders. To Sebek, it was the many ghosts of his father that beat and cursed him. In reply, Sebek hammered the stone.
One day or night, Sebek heard the rustling of rock chips at his feet. A child, shorter than is knees, was there gathering them. How could someone so small be caught in this hell? The boy didn’t return Sebek’s gaze. Wrinkles on his face crossed leathery skin. Aged, his eyes were dull as sand. Would Sebek become like that? Old and dead before his time?
His urine trickled down his leg.
A week—perhaps two—into his imprisonment, the rope jerked Sebek to the ground. Near him, in dust clouds, several prisoners heaped together. The foreman snatched them up one by one by their throats. Underneath, a smallish slave lay flat, his legs and arms crumped under him. His body settled into the dirt. Sebek knew the man had just died.
The foreman’s club cracked fast, driving away those near the dead stranger. He cut the corpse from the chain, then dragged it by its limp hand. Its eyes open, the head plowed up dirt on the cave floor like the bow of a captainless ship. The guard discarded the body in a wide area in the passage and returned to strike each prisoner’s back before tying them back together.
Sebek glanced over his shoulder at the dead man, earning him a second clubbing. A guard’s gray outline emerged from a shadow. He snatched the slave’s wrist with one hand, already dragging a second corpse by his other hand. The eyes of the second corpse were open too. They looked at Sebek. They belonged to the boy who had gathered chips from the floor. In the boy’s eyes, Sebek saw himself as they saw him—a meek, feeble cow of a slave. Not a scorpion.
The God-king tortured the people who enriched him. They died for the God-king’s gold.
Cold anger fired Sebek. He began to plan.
First he’d disguise himself with a slave’s show of fear. Behind his nakedness, he’d hide his plan from these guards.
Sebek’s plan depended upon quick, strong wrists—like a scorpion’s pincers. Adopting the prisoners’ slack stroke, he wobbled the hammer over his head and allowed the head’s weight to fall. At the last instant he added a snap of his wrists to crack the blade into the wall as, in his mind, he chanted, Crawling like a bug on a pig is the KING, crawling like a bug on a pig is the KING, ... KING ...
He also began to pretend that he did not understand the foreman’s orders. The foreman should forget Sebek knew the Egyptian language. Even though each moment floated into slow-moving shadows and smoldering torchlight, Sebek measured out his own time.
... KING ... KING ...
Corpses went and prisoners came. Corpse and prisoner wore the same mask of fear. Sebek’s gouges blasted enough gold for the tyrant God-king to choke on. Still, his health dwindled. He must strike before he lost the strength to hate.
... KING ... KING ...
An hour or a month later, Sebek watched out of the corner of his eye a slave struggle to lift his hammer above his shoulder. The slave wheezed with each failed strike. After he managed to strike the wall once more, encouraged by a clubbing, he teetered on his feet. That led to many more failed strikes and more clubbings. Finally, nothing the slave could do brought up his hammer higher than his waist. He wheezed like a dying duck. His knees wavered and his shoulders sagged. The hammer dropped from his hands.
That brought out the foreman’s whip. It snapped on the slave’s back, then his hip, then around his neck. The slave collapsed. Sebek and the others in the chain fell toward him. The foreman clubbed them all. Each staggered up. The foreman cut the man loose then began dragging him away.
Sebek seized his moment. Did he have enough strength left?
Placing one hand against the wall, Sebek hammered the rope from both wrists. Unbound, he stepped toward the foreman who was rolling the corpse into the passage. Sebek yelled, “Avalanche!”
The foreman cringed, looking above his head before seeing Sebek, hammer in hand. The foreman turned. Sebek hadn’t planned where to aim. The head. He jerked the hammer down like a scorpion’s stinger. ... is the KING.
The stone hammer pitched into the foreman’s forehead with a gratifying crunch. He didn’t protest with as much as a whisper, but crumpled like dried papyrus. Still, Sebek struck the man twice more.
Sebek turned back to the slaves. They were numbly hacking at the wall, blind to his scorpion attack. He spat.
He still had to escape the shaft. He took hold of the foreman’s right leg and tugged him back near the slave chain and propped him against the wall, placing the club into the fist as if he were about to beat one of them. “Please don’t hit me, good god Khufu.”
Sebek hurried to the passage, and lay down to match how dead man lay. He played dead. Though tantalized by this sleep position, Sebek remained alert. His wait wasn’t long. A guard grumbled, “Two tem bodies.” Sebek’s ankle lifted and he was dragged away. Twice during the fifty yards, passing two other crews, the guard stopped to take a deep breath and re-grip. Sebek’s back cut against the rough rock and dirt. His genitals ground under his body. He was dead, he told himself; he couldn’t feel.
Sebek smelled fresher air. Sunlight smacked his body and stung his eyes through his closed eyelids. He tried not to squint. More grunting. He felt himself lifted, then tossed through the air. He landed against sandy ground, cramming his shoulder, and tumbled twenty feet before ramming another slack body. He kept his eyes shut. He heard the second body hit down, slide and come to rest over his legs.
Sebek waited. He heard no sound, but smelled rotting flesh. Worse than pig smell.
Yet, he was nearly free. He slit open his eyes. Sunlight slashed them. He had trouble seeing at all. Angling his head, he could just make out three corpses around him. He was in a pit. Sebek saw no one above the pit. He sat up, glanced about again—dirt and sky—and pulled himself to his feet. He tripped, nearly tripping over a body. Everything hurt, including his eyes. He began to run up the side of the pit before falling to his hands and feet, digging with all four in the pale dirt. His legs dragged, but panic drove him.
At the top of the rise, he peeked over. To his right, he saw just three guards, near the mine shaft. To his right, at a wooden trough, an old man and woman with dead faces poured water over mine diggings. Ducking down, Sebek again checked the guards whose faces were turned away. Wild as a hyena, he ran to the man and woman, elbowed them away and gulped twice from the water. Then Sebek dashed away, snickering because he expected that bits of gold had washed down his throat with the water.
Even
if the guards had seen him, they wouldn’t follow him into the desert. That way was death. But they didn’t know he was scorpion.
Sebek scurried down an incline. His knees buckled. He righted himself and ducked around an outcrop and kept galloping. He laughed at the fools he’d left behind. Laughing and running. He was alone.
Weak and parched, Sebek wandered. Dirt and heat. The sun lashed him. He ached head to toe. Distant mountains waved behind heat vapors. Hours passed before he realized he’d lost the way back to the Bekhan Trail. He laughed. Tomorrow he would wake with the flogging sun and know which direction to make for the Travel Sea again.
A mountain, dark and squat, loomed ahead of him. He’d rest there in its shade. Sebek staggered toward it. Although it seemed not to come closer, he kept on toward its blackness.
Deep in the afternoon, sun low—there’s the west—lions or leopards roared in the distance. The dark mountain listed above him finally at its base. Sebek imagined the mountain was frothy loam, the loam that lapped up at the Inundation’s edge. This froth piled high upon itself into so many layers upon layers and intricate crevices, recesses and curls. The longer Sebek plumbed the mountain’s face, the deeper its blackness seemed to coil through it. He wished the peak would swallow him. How could he not have seen ever before the staggering majesty of pointed pyramids? Sebek threw back his head and laughed. The mountain and the sun bore down over him. He ached. The world spun around and around. He tripped. Headlong, Sebek tumbled down a crevice.
After a fall of ten feet, he landed against a rock floor. The world fell silent.
Mehi waited for his lover on the river shoreline. Overhead honked a gaggle of geese. He followed their retreat into clouds set aflame by the falling sun.
Two weeks after Snebtisi’s funeral, An-khi often came late to their meetings though perhaps not this late; when she arrived, the ground would warm and Mehi’s spirit would lighten.
Sails knocked on a mast in the harbor, and he twisted toward it. Disappointed it wasn’t something more, he straightened.
Mehi awaited for An-khi to again tie knots in his hair or drum her fingers on his lips. He’d stroke her arm and breathe her clean perfume. They’d talk of stars, families, poetry or nothing.
Mehi stood, telling himself he needed to stretch. Into the darkening, he scanned as far as he could in all directions. Running from the water, four giggling children chased each other home.
He sat again, crossing his legs. He tugged his ear lobe that An-khi might kiss before stroking his cheek. He imagined her warm breath and his body alerting for it. He would give himself again. Mehi picked up the cornflower he’d brought for her. Idly, he plucked its blue petals, counting each as the moment An-khi would arrive.
He bared the flower.
Mehi dropped his back to the ground and pinned his hands under his head to gaze at the birdless day. He waited for his lover on the river shoreline.
Dawn had sloughed off night for a new flesh of violet when An-khi gave up her disturbed sleep. She stepped onto a footstool for some fresh air from her window. Beyond the estate’s palms, a dark figure on a ridge stared back. “Mehi.”
An-khi hurried to the front room but her father was there at his morning meal. Once more at her window, she balled her hands into fists. In the half-hour Paser dawdled before leaving the front room, Mehi remained on the ridge like a scarecrow. When she could, An-khi lunged out the doorway, through a gate in the rear fence, up the ridge and stood before Mehi. “What are you doing here?”
“I want to know one thing,” he said, his eyes red and swollen.
“You look terrible. When did you last sleep?”
“Everything we planned, everything we said to each other … I hoped ... I expected we would set up a home. What does all that mean now?”
“I don’t know.”
“Lies are a dam.”
“I honestly don’t know.”
“Do you know what it is to hold back?”
“You need sleep.”
“Do you love me?”
After a pause, An-khi said, “Wildly.”
Mehi’s face relaxed into his grin. “That’s what I wanted to hear.” He stretched his neck, the first movement An-khi saw him make that morning.
An-khi’s eyes narrowed on him. How could he think that he’d resolve this so easily? “This isn’t between just you and me. It’s not me you need to convince.”
“Who is it between? Who do I go to but you?”
“That should be obvious.”
“An-khi, you said to me, ‘Do something.’ I worked out why that burnt me; I didn’t want to do that ‘something’ alone. It’s why I love working the pyramid, why I hate Sebek going away.” Mehi squeezed out a tiny laugh. “I know what to do, something we can do together. The way we used to do everything together.”
“Tu?”
“An-khi,” said her betrothed, his hands reaching for her, “let’s elope. Let’s forget about your father and property and let’s run. Let’s run, An-khi. Anywhere. Sebek is gone off on his dream. Let’s run after our dream.”
An-khi whipped up her hands in two huge arcs. Her anger burnt such that her words might have been flames. “You expect me to give up the estate? Give up my family? That just can’t be. I deserve property and to be in love. All your solution does is avoid my father. You’re afraid. You want me to sacrifice myself the way you do.”
“Because I ask questions, you think I have no answers. Eloping would work.”
Breathing hard, An-khi stared at Mehi, partly in an attempt to convey how unrealistic he was thinking and partly to realize that fully herself. Lowering her head, An-khi spoke to the ground. “Maybe the answer is not what we do but how we react to this.”
“You mean we should just accept it?”
An-khi realized she meant exactly that. Her shoulders dropped. Trying to redirect the conversation, she said the first words that came to her. “What happened in the past can happen again.” Only after saying this did An-khi realize that she was referring to Mehi and her reuniting after their childhood separation. It was the one hope she could hold out. “You should go home now, darling. Find some rest.”
Mehi didn’t budge. An-khi waved her hands, almost shooing him home like a pet hound. “I’ve got to go.” She made off gradually, eager to hear him walk away too. But she heard nothing.
Once in her bedroom, An-khi ignored the window. She reviewed herself in her bronze hand-mirror. Her face reflected more worry than she’d ever noticed.
From her sister’s room she retrieved a jar from the vanity. Returning to her mirror, An-khi drew Snebtisi’s black-green kohl around her eyes. She judged her new self in the mirror. “Have I grown up now?”
