Seer of Egypt (13 page)

“Bring beer, and a cup for yourself as well,” Huy ordered. He turned to Ishat, who had clasped her hands around her calves and was gazing into the blinding dazzle of the afternoon. “I can see that you believe what you say. I do understand, Ishat. Shall we hear what Thothmes has dictated?”

She sighed, nodded, and reached for the third scroll. “More good news,” she said after a moment. “Thothmes has talked to his sister’s husband, and he would be glad of your gold. He will plant more poppy fields this Tybi and so must hire many labourers and soldiers.”

“I presume that you are referring to Anuket’s husband, Amunnefer,” Huy broke in. “Why would he need to put soldiers in the fields, I wonder?”

“That’s obvious,” Ishat said tartly, and Huy was relieved to see that her disturbingly reflective mood had fled. “To prevent the peasants from stealing the young plants for their own gardens, and the city dwellers of Weset from planting them on their roofs. At least, I presume so. We don’t know anything about poppy cultivation, do we, Huy?”

“Only that the sale of the drug will bring me a good return. I must discuss the matter with Amunnefer when we go south for your wedding. Does Thothmes say anything else?”

“Not really. Amunnefer will take as much gold as you can offer him as soon as possible, and he will have papyrus for you to read and sign when he sees you. Thothmes sends both of us his love.” She looked up. “Gold for the poppy, for the khato land, and for the incense caravans,” she said, tapping Thothmes’ scroll against her palm. “How will you manage it all, Huy? We don’t know anything about how such agreements are concluded. Perhaps you should ask your uncle?”

“No. I want no favours from Ker,” Huy snapped. “He abandoned me when Methen brought me home from the House of the Dead. He was too cowardly to come near me when he thought I was possessed by a demon, and even after an exorcism was proved unnecessary he shunned me and removed his support at the school! Surely you remember how it was, Ishat.”

“Of course I remember. Only your mother and I would come close to you. I used to climb in your bedroom window at night.” She grinned across at Huy. “I was fascinated by the gruesome wound on your skull, and I did think I might see your eyes turn red with evil.” She sobered. “But seriously, Huy, can you rely on Merenra to help you?”

“He’s a good steward, and if he doesn’t know how to conduct this business, I can always go to the Mayor.”

“Thothmes would help you.”

“Thothmes has done enough. Here comes Amunmose with beer. Let’s hurry up and drink it in case I can’t afford to have Khnit make any more!”

Later, in the relative cool of the evening, Huy dictated letters of acceptance to the Royal Treasurer, to Mayor Mery-neith, and to Amunnefer, through Thothmes. Merenra had told Huy tactfully that the offer of a deposit of gold would be considered appropriate for all but the khato land, and Huy had instructed him to send an adequate amount south in the company of a couple of Anhur’s soldiers. Lying sleepless on his couch that night, staring up at the stars painted on his ceiling, he felt a rush of pride mingled with apprehension.
I shall be far richer in the end than my uncle the perfume grower
.
In the end. After I have paid for my land. If the poppy harvest is good. If the incense caravans come through unscathed. I must go over the household accounts very carefully with Merenra.

Then another realization brought him upright, his breath coming fast in the stultifying air. Ishat would be gone as soon as the flood receded. He would need a new scribe. The idea was horrifying. Even a steward was not as close to his master as a scribe. Scribes became so intimate with their employers that no secrets existed between them.
How can I make someone new understand my dealings with the god, the sometimes urgent necessities of my work for Atum, the often illogical, even frightening pronouncements that move through me to the petitioner and must be not only recorded but discussed with me afterwards in private, as Ishat helps me to dissect them to their meanings, their roots? How can I possibly trust these things, let alone my own needs, the cries of my own ka, to anyone other than Ishat? And I must choose a new scribe soon. He must be fully trained before Ishat and I go south for her marriage. He. Ishat is the only female scribe I have ever seen, and she became one because I taught her to read and write myself. This house will be full of men. Ishat’s body servant Iput will go with her to Iunu. No coloured linens floating half glimpsed along the passages, no smell of sweet perfume heated by a woman’s gleaming skin, no bursts of female laughter, no wealth of rich black hair falling into the small of a naked back as I am preceded into the dining hall. Ishat, have you considered these things yourself? Are you fully aware of what you will be taking away from me?

He left the couch and, wrapping a sheet around his waist, opened his shrine to Ra, god of the temple where he had spent so many years as a student, and taking up his censer, he lit the charcoal from the lamp beside his bed. When it was ashy, he sprinkled frankincense on it, and the light yet pungent smoke immediately began to fill the room. Kneeling, holding the censer carefully, he suddenly knew that he had no prayer for the god. He could not ask to keep Ishat. To do so would be so utterly self-serving that the god’s feathered ears would close. Yet there was nothing else he wished to say; not even a request for a good replacement.
If I cannot keep Ishat,
he vowed as he capped the incense holder and closed the doors of the shrine,
then I don’t want anyone. I shall write every letter, keep every account, myself
.

Making his way quietly along the dim passage, he stepped over the low sill at its end and went to stand in the middle of the flat roof. The moon was at the half. The Sopdet star hung like a chip of white fire above the dusky line of drowned growth dotting the flood, reflected in a marching succession of wind-stirred wavelets.
Atum,
Huy said silently,
I know that I am your tool, yet I am more than that. If you love Egypt, if you love me at all, then help me.
At that, his thoughts dried up. Folding his arms about himself in a gesture of self-protection, he sank onto the gritty surface of the roof, leaned his back against the sturdy arc of the wind catcher, and fell into a doze.

It took Huy another month to decide to at least go into Hut-herib’s marketplace and talk to the scribes who congregated there, waiting for business from the citizens who needed to send letters they were unable to write themselves. Such men were usually less well educated than their fellows who had obtained good positions in various households, and eked out a precarious living. Huy, watching how often Ishat sent for her palette to take down lists of supplies, inventory tallies for the coming planting season, weekly shift changes for Anhur, as well as his own directions or predictions for the people shepherded through his gate, came to the conclusion that, if he was not to drown in ink and papyrus himself, he must replace Ishat. He did not discuss the matter with her. It did occur to him that she might be more capable than himself of choosing someone suitable for the task, but, perversely, he did not wish to involve her. It was petty of him, he knew, but he told himself that the necessity of a replacement for her services ought to have crossed her mind. If it had, she had kept quiet about it. Watching her bent head as she worked over her palette at his knee, as she smiled at him before she raised her wine cup to her mouth at dinner, encountering her, tousled and sleepy-eyed, as she wandered along the upstairs passage on her way to the bathhouse in the mornings, he forced himself to imagine the house, the garden, without her.

As soon as the flood had receded at the beginning of Peret, they had spent every evening on the river, leaning side by side on the deck rail of Huy’s little barge to watch the view along the shore turn rosy and then scarlet before dusk had them turning around to glide to the watersteps, where Merenra with a lit torch would be waiting for them.
Who will stand at my elbow exuding the scent of myrrh and cassia and henna flowers, and chatter about herons’ nests glimpsed in the reeds or the water dripping from the muzzles of tired oxen, their daily work in the fields now over? Who will take my arm as we walk from the watersteps to the welcoming aroma of hot food waiting for us in our own dining hall? Not a scribe or a servant,
Huy thought repeatedly in a despair close to panic.
Only a wife or a friend, Ishat. I can have no wife, and what friend exists as close to me as you? Thothmes, perhaps, but his life as Assistant Governor under his father at Iunu keeps him far away from me, and soon you will be joining him, my two dearest companions loving each other while I am left here alone.

He waited, irresolute, until the beginning of the month of Paophi, a time when the heat always became a burden so familiar that he almost ceased to be aware of the constant discomfort. In two weeks the Amunfeast of Hapi, god of the river, would lift Egyptians from their lassitude. The orgy of thanksgiving to Hapi for his promised gift of fecundity would continue until the twelfth day of the following month, Athyr. Few letters would be dictated, and Huy decided that he did not want to wait until the festival ended. A new scribe would need to be trained. Between Athyr and Tybi there was only the month of Khoiak, and then Ishat would be gone.

Grimly, Huy ordered out his litter, four sturdy soldiers to bear both him and the heat, and Anhur to guard him. He had instructed Merenra to tell Ishat when she emerged from her massage that he had gone into the town on a personal matter. Merenra had raised his carefully plucked eyebrows but had not questioned Huy. The early morning was already stale. Dawn had brought its usual brief whisper of wind without coolness that had died almost at once, and Huy felt his clean, starched kilt beginning to wilt as he strode towards his waiting men. Anhur greeted him with a nod.

“We are going into the central marketplace,” Huy told him as he bent and pushed the curtains aside. “Your men can walk on the edge of the flood if they like. It’s a long way, and the water will be cool on their ankles.” As he felt himself lifted at Anhur’s command, his hand went to the sa amulet on its gold chain around his neck. The metal was oddly cool, feeding the reassurance of its protection into his fingers, and all at once the Rekhet’s face came clearly into his mind, the leathery skin wrinkled, the eyes sharply alert and friendly. The old exorcist had made the sa for him herself, as she had made the rings he wore: the Soul Amulet intended to prevent any unnatural separation of body from ka until the time of his Beautification, the frog amulet, symbol of resurrection. He had not written to her in a long time, yet she was one of the few people who understood and accepted his uniqueness as Twice Born without question.

What would she say to me now?
he wondered as he heard the feet of his bearers begin to splash in the water.
Would she tell me that it is necessary for Ishat to go so that I may be more open to the demands of Atum? I wish that she was beside me, the cowrie shells that festoon her clacking as she talked to me. She would make the choice for me, pick someone who will not bring the Khatyu into my house.
At the thought of Ra’s legion of demons, he sighed. “They cannot touch you,” she had said. “You are immune by Atum’s will, and Ra himself honours you because you have bowed before the sacred Ished Tree.”

Anhur had begun a conversation with one of his soldiers. Behind the drapery of the litter, Huy could not make out the words, but the timbre of Anhur’s deep voice was comforting.
The Ished Tree,
Huy thought, his thumb running absently over the surfaces of his rings.
I stumbled upon it first when I was still a child, fleeing from discovery in the temple because I had sneaked into forbidden places, and I was caught. The High Priest had me purified, then took me back into its presence. In answer to my childish question, he told me that the Ished was the Tree of Life, holding within itself the full knowledge of the mysteries of good and evil. I read half the Book of Thoth under those fragrant branches.

Suddenly a desire to be back there in the temple school seized Huy—to be sitting cross-legged on the floor of the cell he shared with Thothmes, in the evening lamplight, a sennet board between them, the sound of the stragglers returning to their cells after a game of stickball in the dusky compound; lessons prepared for the following day, a faint whiff of incense reaching him from the temple’s inner court, where Ra was enjoying the nightly ablutions and offerings; and, best of all, the promise of a few days’ holiday spent in the luxury and security of Nakht’s house.
Henenu, I need your guidance now,
he said silently to the Rekhet, using the secret name known only to those she trusted so that the demons could not appropriate it to her harm.
And yours also, Ramose, kindest and most ruthless taskmaster of my fate. I wrenched it from you, yet you still care for me. Would I indeed have been happier if I had stayed in the temple instead of running back to Hut-herib and ending up in that hovel with Ishat? Ishat!
Sweat had begun to trickle down his face. Impatiently, he pulled the curtains open, but the air held only an illusion of coolness.

The marketplace was crowded and noisy. Huy ordered the bearers to set him down on the edge of the dusty expanse, told them to go to the nearest beer house and refresh themselves, and he and a watchful Anhur walked into the confusion of shouting stall keepers, haggling buyers, and naked, dusty children. Huy looked about. The scribes for hire usually gathered together under the few scraggly acacia bushes, talking idly to one another or playing knucklebones while they waited for customers, and today was no exception. Huy saw them beyond the cheerful melee around him. A few of them were already employed, their customers squatting beside them as they wrote, but most of them sat staring impassively at the scene before them. Huy scanned them swiftly, wondering which of them had been hired by his father to take down the infrequent scrolls Hapu had been able to afford to send to his son, away at school. Those letters had been delicately inscribed.
But the matter of a permanent scribe, someone to be trusted, is another question entirely,
he thought anxiously.
Will I be able to make a judgment simply by looking into a man’s face, his eyes? Anubis, it is your voice I hear most often when the god speaks to me. I hear his directions in your harsh animal tones. Guide me now, I beg you, for I am soon to be lost, without rudder to steer me or anchor to hold me firm.