House of Illusions (51 page)

“I will not fall on my sword until the last moment of the last hour before the eighth day,” he said as he poured wine into two wide-mouthed silver goblets, “and until then I intend to indulge myself. To your remarkable good health, my Lady. May you enjoy it in safety.” He drank, his kohled eyes fixed on me over the rim of the cup, but I did not raise my wine. Was his gaiety a kind of derangement or a genuine acceptance of his end? I decided that it was the latter. His will had temporarily wavered in the Throne Room when his attempt to subvert the judges had failed and been unmasked, but he had recovered his self-control and would not weaken again. Lusty and cynical, crafty and intelligent, he was nevertheless a disciplined soldier and an aristocratic Egyptian. When the time came, he would run the weapon through his belly with dispassion.

Putting down his cup, he sat back and crossed his legs, his expression sobering. “She cries and sobs all night,” he said. “I hear her through the wall. I would comfort her if I could but I am not allowed to leave my cell. She was a thing of loveliness once, with her restless dancer’s body and her independence. Who knows what she might have become if our scheme to unseat the King had succeeded?”

“You are completely unrepentant,” I remarked, and he smiled at me, his handsome face lightening.

“Completely,” he replied promptly. “If Ramses had died of the arsenic you gave Hentmira to so innocently slather over him, and Banemus had done what he was supposed to do and ready the army in the south to march in revolt, we would have been in control of Egypt. Able to put the priests in their place, re-establish true pharonic authority under someone of our own choosing, begin to recover something of the empire our forebears ruled.” He sighed. “It was a glorious dream, but like most dreams it did not have enough substance to coalesce into reality. A pity. Why should I repent, dear Thu? I am an Egyptian patriot.”

“Did it never occur to you that if Ma’at was indeed corrupt and needed healing you would have succeeded? That it has a way of using us to further its righteous ends, and if such a thing is not necessary and we try to compel it to change, it simply abandons us to the consequences of our vanity?”

“Thu the philosopher,” he mocked me gently. “Thu, defender of the right. Such words ring slightly hollow in the mouth of an ambitious and unscrupulous woman like you. Oh, do not mistake me.” He held up a hand as I was about to make a quick rejoinder. “I do not mean to insult you. When you were young, your ambition was a capricious force, dangerous and unpredictable and entirely selfish. How else were we able to use you? But now it is channelled, purified, directed towards the righting of a wrong and the furthering of good order, in your life as well as the life of Egypt. So was mine. This is wholesome ambition, Thu. But it is still ambition. How then are we different? Here we sit, two people whom the gods have fashioned to be alike. Even our motives have been similar. Why, then, are our fates so different?” I could not answer him. To cover my disquiet I leaned forward, picked up my wine, and sipped it slowly. I had an ominous feeling that he was right. “I do not know,” he went on. “Perhaps it is simply because the gods have decided to favour a courage in you that I do not have.” I met his eye, wanting to express the sudden burst of sympathy I felt for him, but all I could say was, “Such humility does not suit you, Paiis. I think I prefer you arrogant and full of self-confidence.” He laughed and the moment of closeness was gone.

“I tried very hard to have you silenced,” he said. “I am glad now that killing you proved impossible. You have been often in my thoughts since I first saw you at that feast Hui gave to enable the rest of us to judge your potential as a royal concubine.”

“I saw you long before that evening,” I said sadly. “I had not been long in Hui’s house. I used to sit on the floor of my room and gaze out of the window after Disenk had extinguished my lamp and gone to her mat outside my door. One night, very late, after one of Hui’s feasts, I watched his guests leave. You came out of the house and stood in the courtyard. A drunken princess was trying to persuade you to take her home with you but you refused. You kissed her. You were wearing red. I did not know who you were, but you were so handsome, Paiis, so godlike, laughing in the glare of the torches! And I was so young, so full of naïve, girlish fantasies. I will never forget it.”

I had not intended to tell him that. The memory, so clear and unsullied by events still in the future that should have muddied and besmirched it but did not, was somehow precious to me and I dreaded a trite, lascivious response that might destroy its purity. But he went very still. I kept my gaze on the table before me as the silence grew between us. After a long time he stirred.

“Damn you,” he said huskily. “Why must you remind me that I too was once young, a boy full of that same fresh simplicity that can take such a sordid little incident and transform it through sheer ignorance and innocence into the stuff of a romantic dream. That child had gone, buried under the gradual accumulation of need, necessity, the distasteful decisions and experiences of soldiering, the insidious lure of self-indulgence. I did not want to see him resurrected now. Not now! It is too late!” I remained still, and after a struggle I sensed rather than saw, he mastered himself and turned again to me. “I am so sorry, Thu,” he said. “Sorry that I did not measure up to the image you created for me, sorry for having had a hand in your corruption. I think that is my only regret. Come. Finish the wine and we will part.”

Shaken, I lifted the goblet to my lips. Paiis did the same, and all at once we were enveloped in an atmosphere of solemn ritual. It was as though his confession had altered the very air of that squalid room, giving it a majestic peace. A serenity descended on me so that I forgot the repugnant task I had shouldered for Hunro, forgot that I had wanted to drink myself into a stupor. We drained the wine and rose with one accord in a strange and fleeting companionship. Paiis put a hand against my neck, and bending he kissed me firmly, the gesture warm and oddly familiar. “If you ever find Hui, greet him for me,” he said as he released me, and I realized that my mouth had recognized his because of his brother’s. “Oh yes,” he went on. “I know that he is alive, but not where he is. His threat to the stability of Egypt is not as great as mine, you see. I have a feeling that you and he are not done with each other yet.”

We had moved to the door. I turned to my escort, and in that moment Paiis put both palms and his forehead against the sturdy wood. “Ah freedom,” he murmured, his voice catching, and I saw his fingers curl inward with the intensity of his emotion. “Pray for me, Thu, at the Beautiful Feast of the Valley. Shout my name. Then perhaps the gods will find me.” There was nothing left to say. I touched his shoulder, still round and firm and hot with life, and he retreated. The door swung open. This time Isis was there and I walked away at once. I did not look back.

I drank deeply when I had regained the sweet security of my cell, but it was water, not wine that I poured down my throat. Then I lay on my couch and wept, quietly and without any storm of sentiment. I did not cry for Hunro or Paiis or even for myself. The tears came because life was the way it was, dull and hard for some, full of promise and ease for others, a journey fraught with unfulfilled dreams and broken hopes for many. When I was spent, I slept without agitation and woke simply and naturally to a westering sun and the aroma of the hot broth and fresh bread Isis had brought.

While I ate, I thought about what poison to give Hunro. I did so with as much calmness and deliberation as I could, forcing a separation between the tumult of hurt and anger that threatened to revive and the purely reasonable processes of my mind. At the time of my own arrest the box containing the medicines Hui had given me, together with the scrolls listing various ailments and their prescriptions, had been taken away, and during my exile I had been forbidden to practice the craft I had been so expertly and disastrously taught. Lately, in the storehouses of the harem, I had filled a chest with physics but I had taken nothing that might prove harmful. Now, as I placed the food slowly into my mouth and concentrated on chewing it carefully, I allowed myself to try to remember those things I had shied away from for so long.

It was not easy, for I had to recall the circumstances under which I had learned them, and that in itself brought forth exquisite pain. Hui’s large office and the tiny herb room adjoining it, its shelves crowded with row upon row of clay pots and jars, stone phials, flaxen bags stiff with dried leaves and roots. Myself beside him, pen poised over papyrus as he wielded his mortar and pestle, his deep, quiet voice explaining what he was doing and why. The aroma of the ingredients themselves, some powerful enough to make my head ache, some no more than a delicate whiff of severed petals that mingled pleasantly with Hui’s own perfume, jasmine.

Jasmine. I pushed my empty dish away and laid my arms upon the table, staring at the way the golden lamplight caught in the fine hairs on my skin. Yellow jasmine would kill. Every part of it, flowers, leaves, roots, stem, was deadly. A high dose worked quickly but it brought on unpleasant symptoms including anxiety and convulsions. The mandrake, too, would be efficient, but amounts large enough to end Hunro’s life would also bring acute distress. I knew this from experience. With a jolt to my heart that could have ended my contemplative state I remembered Kenna, Hui’s body servant, whom I had murdered with an infusion of beer and mandrake out of nothing more than a jealous panic. He had died amid the horrifying stench of his own vomit and the sick effusion of his bowels.

Then what of the passion flower? I exhaled and the flame in the lamp quivered, making my hunched shadow gyrate briefly against the wall. It was used in bait to destroy hyenas, and something in me woke and assented to the irony its use would mean before sinking once more beneath the rigid steadiness of my will. No matter that its symptoms were kind, leading from drowsiness to paralysis to death. That stab of glee must be denied for the sake of any peace I might be able to achieve afterwards.

My thoughts moved on. The dog button was very effective. It could be swallowed, inhaled as powder, or rubbed on the skin. But like so many other toxic substances it caused spasms and then convulsions so extreme that the victim ended his life as stiffly arched as a bow.

I laid my cheek against my outstretched arm and gazed into the gently lighted room, considering and then rejecting one possibility after another, and with the increasing anxiety came a gradual lessening of my control. Whispers and echoes seeped through the cracks, coiling up from the darkness where my soul was howling in self-loathing and despair at its daunting changelessness. When I knew that the sound of its keening was about to reach my mouth, I got up, pulled on my sandals, and flinging a cloak around my shoulders, I went out.

I was praying that the Keeper of the Door was still in his office as I strode quickly past the adjoining courtyard and the Children’s Quarters and pushed through the small gate at the end of the path leading to the servants’ crowded cells. The night was still young and the area before their rooms was noisy with activity and full of the smells of cooking from the nearby kitchens. Those who noticed me bowed uncertainly, doubtless wondering what I was doing in their domain, but I ignored them.

A turn to the right and a few steps brought me to another gate, this one guarded, for it led into the palace grounds themselves. Asking one of the soldiers to go and see if the Keeper was in his office and would grant me an audience, I waited, my back to the happy tumult behind me. Presently the man returned and waved me through. I was in luck. The Keeper was indeed still working.

The offices of Pharaoh’s ministers backed at right angles onto the two walls dividing the palace from servants and official guests, and it was a short walk from them to the King’s own office and the Banqueting Hall. Leaving the gate, I went forward, swung left, and paced steadily until I came to the open door which sheltered the man whose hand lay over every aspect of harem life. I could see him within, piling scrolls into a chest, and as I paused in the doorway, he looked up and saw me. He bowed, closed the lid of the chest, and spoke to his scribe. “These can go to the records room now,” he said. And to me, “Come in, Lady Thu. How can I help you?” The scribe hefted the chest and edged past me, sketching a reverence as he did so. I watched him walk away for a moment, the gathering darkness soon engulfing him, then turned and entered the office.

Amunnakht stood smiling expectantly, one hand resting on his desk, and all at once I did not know what to say. Seeing my hesitation he gestured to a chair and then to the wine jug beside him but I shook my head. Swallowing, I found my voice. “Amunnakht,” I said, the words thin and high in my own ears, “Hunro has asked me to help her end her life.” His smile vanished and he looked at me solemnly.

“That was cruel of her,” he commented. “Cruel and unnecessary. I am so sorry, Thu. Such a request must be causing you great distress. If I had known of her cowardice, I could have provided her with one of the palace physicians.”

“She is insane with grief and terror,” I went on, impelled for some reason to defend Hunro. “She will not call a palace servant for fear that out of spite he will cause her to die in agony. She is not able to imagine any emotions but her own any more.”

“She never could.” Amunnakht came to me, and taking my arm he drew me to the chair. “Do not pity her Thu. And for your own sake you must not comply with her ridiculous request.” I lowered myself into the chair and glanced up at him.

“I have already agreed to help her,” I said. “What else could I do? Prince Ramses left the decision up to me, and when I saw her dishevelled and wild and crying I knew that I could not be reasonable. Her nerve has gone. Tomorrow is the sixth day. If I do nothing, she will die in blood and disgrace.” He looked down on me thoughtfully and then he sighed.

“Some might say that you are both reaping the harvest you sowed in the past,” he commented. “Hunro will die at the hands of the woman she used to murder another and you will have your revenge on her entirely legitimately. Thus the circle of your fates is closed at last. Hunro has learned the law of consequence too late, and you, dear Thu, no longer harbour the heart of a killer. I know this. The King knows it. Only you are still in doubt. What do you want me to do in this matter?”