House of Illusions (48 page)

“Highness, I do not deserve such generosity,” he protested. “Yet if in your omnipotent mercy you deign to let me live, then in that same mercy consider my sister. She …” He got no further.

“I have spoken!” Ramses shouted, coming to the edge of the dais. “Hunro dies! I am the Hawk-in-the-Nest, the Heir of my father the God! My voice is the voice of Ma’at! Remove his armbands! And take the condemned away. I am sick of the sight of them.” He strode back to his chair and flung himself into it.

Banemus surrendered his armbands, and then Hunro hurled herself at him, screaming unintelligibly. He staggered, holding and trying to soothe her, but she was past all reason. A captain barked an order and two soldiers tore her away from him. She was struggling maniacally as she was dragged down the hall.

“I have not lived! I have not lived!” she was shrieking. “Banemus, save me!” He stood looking after her, arms hanging at his sides, then at a touch from Paiis who was passing with his own escort he turned and walked unsteadily away. The Herald faced us as the doors closed and the suffocating atmosphere in the room seemed to lighten.

“This Court of Examination is now completed,” he called. “Do reverence to your Prince.” Those of us who were left straggled to our feet and made our obeisances. The rear door was opened for Ramses to pass through, but on its threshold he paused and turned.

“Men, I wish to see you at once in my apartments,” he said. “And Lady Thu, you may not accompany your son tonight. You are to go back to your cell in the harem and wait for my summons in the morning.”

What now? I thought resignedly. I had hoped to slip away with Kamen, ask Men for a room in his house until my future became clear to me. I wanted to have done with this place. Hunro’s frenzy had clawed at my heart, reminding me vividly of the day the judges had come to my cell to tell me that I was to die of starvation and thirst. I too had momentarily lost control. I had shrieked and cried while servants stripped my cell of everything. They had even torn the sheath from my body. I had descended into the pit Hunro saw yawning before her, but just as the hand of death closed about me I had been resurrected. There would be no such miracle for her. My hatred seemed a hot and ignoble thing to harbour in the face of such suffering, and exploring myself I found that it had vanished.

We straggled out of the Throne Room into a peaceful, star-strewn night. Pausing before the pillars of the palace’s public entrance, I sucked in deep breaths of the sweet, cool air. I am alive, I thought deliriously. My flesh is warm. My skin feels the brush of this breeze, the touch of my son’s kilt as it stirs against my thigh. I see the shadows of the trees lying still on the damp grass and the faint pattern of starlight on the surface of the canal. And seven days from now these things will still delight me. Thank you, Wepwawet.

Men bade us a subdued good night and disappeared back in the direction of the Prince’s private quarters. Nesiamun took my hand, smiling into my eyes. “Congratulations, Lady Thu,” he said kindly. “Your triumph will become an example of the impartiality and sure implacability of Egyptian justice for our children long after you and I are in our tombs. Come to my house when the Prince releases you and we will celebrate together, all of us.” I thanked him and watched him stride away.

“Everyone seems to forget that I too am a criminal, having committed blasphemy by trying to murder a god,” I murmured, Hunro’s distorted face before me.

“No,” Kamen said. “You have already paid for that blasphemy with seventeen years of exile. But you are an enigma, Thu, a criminal blessed by the gods. No one knows quite what to make of you.” He kissed me on the cheek. “I will wait for my father and go home with him. Send to me as soon as the Prince gives you leave. Go and sleep now.” I had presumed that he would come to my cell and talk to me for a while. I wanted to speak of Paiis and Hunro, of the Prince and of the past, but most of all I wanted to hear Hui’s name passing between Kamen’s mouth and mine. Instead I nodded, returned his kiss, and joined the Herald waiting to walk with me back into my courtyard.

Isis was waiting to wash off my paint and see me to my couch. I submitted to her attention absently, and when she had dowsed the lamp and gone away, I lay on my back and stared up at the ceiling. The night was so still that the monotonous sound of the fountain came to me clearly, and occasionally a brief puff of air from the open door brushed over my face, but that was all. My body was weary but my mind was fully alert, racing over the events of the day and slowing only to contemplate the present.

The sentence on Paibekamun and the other palace dignitaries would have been carried out by now and the dusty expanse of the parade ground outside the detention cells would be dark with their freshly spilled blood. Had they been executed before Paiis and Hunro had been returned to their cells, so that Hunro’s tiny feet were compelled to step around the carnage? Or did they kneel on the hard ground under the flare of torches while Hunro’s horrified face was pressed to the bars of her door? Poor woman. Better not to think of that, or of the grim fact that criminals were not embalmed. Their bodies were buried anonymously in the desert without even a stone inscribed with their names so that the gods could not find them.

My mind and my body turned from such a ghastly fate and I closed my eyes to reflect on safer things. Why had the Prince summoned Men to his apartments? What did he wish to say to me tomorrow? What were the prisoners doing at this hour, alone in their cells? Was Paiis dictating a last letter to his sister Kawit, and perhaps a missive to Hui also, to be delivered by her secretly? And Hunro. I hoped that Banemus was with her, giving her comfort, trying to infuse her with courage. I did not think that the terror of dying had precipitated her painful outburst, but the insupportable awareness that her life was over before it had really begun. “I have not lived!” she had screamed, and I shuddered at the torment in those words.

I slept at last, deeply and dreamlessly, and woke to full sunlight and a sense of joyous well-being. The courtyard was full of happy noise. Children released from their quarters ran about beside their gossiping mothers or plunged in and out of the fountain’s basin with shrieks of delight. Servants moved to and fro across the grass carrying cushions and sweetmeats or adjusting the canopies that fluttered like captured birds of every hue over the heads of the women clustered beneath them. Here and there a lone woman sat beside her scribe and her steward, dictating letters or conducting business.

The bath house too was echoing with feminine activity, cool and dark and redolent with the moist fragrances of scented water and precious oils. Several of the women engaged me in conversation. Word of the trial and its outcome had spread rapidly and mysteriously during the night, as all such news does, and they were curious and eager for any details I might choose to supply. I talked to them freely while I was scrubbed, massaged and oiled. One even asked me if I would return to my practice of physician to the women now that I was back among them. I told her frankly that although Pharaoh had given me my freedom and I had been allowed to select medicinal herbs for my personal use, he had not lifted that particular ban, and in any case, I planned to settle somewhere quiet with my son.

Back in my cell I ate with full appetite, reflecting that when I had first taken up residence in the harem, I had kept myself aloof from the other inhabitants. I had treated their various small complaints, but I had regarded them as enemies, competitors for Pharaoh’s attention, potential challengers in the pitiless combat between jealous and ambitious concubines. Such tensions had been absent from the Children’s Quarters when I had given birth to Kamen and been banished permanently to that section of the harem, but I had been so angry and despairing that even there I had kept the others at arm’s length, regarding them as has-beens, docile and accepting as sheep. Fear, arrogance and the insecurity of a peasant in the company of her betters had been the source of my disdain. I supposed that I was still arrogant and always would be. Vanity and pride had dogged me since my childhood. But I no longer feared what life or my fellows could do to me, and as for insecurity, their titles and bloodlines had not saved Paiis and the rest of the condemned from disaster.

I was not summoned until the evening. In the meantime I had dictated another letter to my brother, and asking for one of the land surveyors attached to the palace, I had questioned him closely about available farms and estates throughout Egypt. There were several in the vicinity of Thebes to the south, but I did not want to live in close proximity to Amun and his powerful priests. Middle Egypt also offered a few estates with large houses and prosperous fields, but again, I did not want to feel Aswat close by.

There was some khato-land and, of course, all Paiis’s vast arouras had already reverted to the Double Crown, but I would crouch in another hovel before I would ever approach Pharaoh in order to benefit from the General’s downfall. Let other vultures pick the meat from his bones. I thought with longing of my pleasant little estate in the Fayum. Someone else owned it now. Its fertile soil nurtured strangers, and its house, the house I had planned to restore with such love and care, now sheltered other dreams than mine. I requested a list of all properties from the surveyor, together with their costs, and sent him away. I felt discouraged. Perhaps I would show Kamen the list and ask him where he would like to live.

I retired for the afternoon sleep, ate again, and had Isis bring me the cosmetician and the dresser with his array of sheaths and sandals. It was while I was holding out my arms so that Isis could tie the golden plaited belt around the blue sheath I had chosen that the Prince’s Herald darkened my door and bowed. I was ready, my hair wound with golden streamers, my eyes blue-shadowed and black-kohled, my mouth and palms and the soles of my feet hennaed.

I followed the Herald along the path beside the lawns, out of the courtyard, and across the paving that ran all the way from the main harem gate to the servants’ quarters in the rear. The guard on the gate leading into the palace let us through and we angled right, away from the double doors of Pharaoh’s bedroom to the stairs that hugged the outside wall of the Throne Room and led up to where the Prince lived. We mounted, turned in at the first door, crossed the narrow passage that used to lead left to Ramses’ brother’s rooms, and the Herald knocked on the inner door. I wondered briefly whether the far apartments were still occupied. A servant opened for us. The Herald went in and I heard him calling my title and name. He beckoned and I entered.

The Prince glanced up as I halted just inside the door and made my reverence. He had been conversing with two men beside a table littered with scrolls and now he motioned them away. They bowed to me as they passed, murmuring greetings before slipping out the door with the Herald and closing it behind them. Ramses and I were alone.

I looked around apprehensively. The room had not changed. It was still sparsely furnished although the furnishings themselves were of the highest quality, and it still held a peculiar atmosphere of impermanence, as though it was merely the setting for some obscure play while the Prince’s real life was lived elsewhere. I supposed that now it was, for Pharaoh could no longer attend to matters of government and Ramses as his Heir was shouldering much of the responsibility weighing down the Double Crown.

He gestured me forward, looking me up and down with a thoroughly masculine appraisal. He himself seemed rested, his eyes clear. Coming around the table he leaned against its edge, then folded his braceleted arms across his broad chest. “Well, my Lady Thu?” he said peremptorily. “Are you satisfied at last?”

“A strange question, Highness,” I replied. “Perhaps. Although the consequences of my persistence to have the truth revealed are more horrifying than the imagination could ever make them.” His black eyebrows rose.

“The accused were sacrilegious, treasonous god-killers,” he said flatly. “So were you, but theirs is the more heinous sin. I am amazed that you can pity them. They used you with a coldness and deliberation I find utterly abhorrent.”

“You tried to use me too,” I pointed out impulsively, my damnable tendency to blurt out the first thing that comes into my mind betraying me yet again. “You promised me a queen’s crown if I would keep the scent of your virtues under your father’s nose.”

“Ah yes.” He came back at me so swiftly that I knew he had been expecting this accusation. “But I was honest regarding a need that had only Egypt’s welfare as its end. You were deceived as well as used for an evil purpose.” I wanted to tell him that his self-righteousness was as delusory as mine had been but this time I bit my tongue. After all, he would soon be a god.

“I daresay you are right, Highness,” I sighed, “and anyway, it is all behind us now. May I ask you a question?” He nodded once. “Why was Hui not indicted with the rest? He was not mentioned in the charges at all and yet he and his brother were equally guilty. Even though he has managed to evade capture he should have been awarded his sentence. It seems …” I hesitated, wanting to tell him that I was still a little afraid, that Hui was entirely capable of effecting some strange punishment on me if he was still at large, that I was both relieved and incensed that he had in some mysterious way slipped through the net, but all I could do was finish lamely, “It seems unfair.”

Ramses stared at me for a moment before turning behind him to the table where two goblets and a jug of wine sat. Carefully he raised the jug and poured, then held out a cup to me, his rings clinking against its golden curve. “So your vengeance is not complete,” he said. “Not even the blood that was spilled last night, that will be spilled sooner or later by the end of the next six days, can fully slake your thirst. Your wounded rage has not been directed at Paiis, who tried to have you murdered together with your son. No. It has always been the Seer, hasn’t it, Thu? The man who took away your innocence and filled all your world with himself while playing you for a fool. Do not forget that I have read your account of those years. I know to what extent your heart was engaged by him as well as that thing in you that can hate so efficiently.” His words were sympathetic, yet his eyes had narrowed and held no warmth and his wide mouth curved upward shrewdly. “What an irony, that only he has evaded the judgement. Of such is the incomprehensible humour of the gods. All the same, let us drink to vengeance, yours and the Horus Throne’s. May it one day be fully accomplished.”