Seer of Egypt (49 page)

Athyr ended and Khoiak began, then Tybi. As usual, Thothhotep was careful to observe every god’s day during the month of Tybi, and Huy, out of the worrisome sense of something impending, took to accompanying her to Hut-herib’s shrines and temples so that his mind might be temporarily occupied. Petitioners were beginning to congregate outside his walls as the river path, muddy and slippery, became visible once more. Obedient to his gift, he dealt with them dutifully, the ensuing headaches either mild or debilitating, depending on the length and clarity of his visions. He gladly entertained Methen. He visited his parents, and on the nineteenth of Mekhir he ushered them aboard his barge for the journey south to Mennofer to mark Heby’s twenty-eighth Naming Day, on the twenty-first. His new nephew, Ramose, was thriving, and both Heby and Iupia were in fine health. Two months later, Heby was declared the Mayor of Mennofer and his letters to Huy became long missives dictated to his new scribe, Nanai, regarding the challenges and intricacies of the position. Huy sent congratulations.

The season of Shemu began with the month of Pakhons. The sun became gradually less kind as the crops attained their full height and began to turn from a lush green to the first tinges of beige. Thothhotep went home to Nekheb to visit her family, her absence adding to the ongoing feeling of vague uneasiness that had dogged Huy now through the four months of Peret and into Shemu. Mutemwia’s letters seemed to mirror his own mood. They were polite, short, and contained no new information. It seemed that Egypt was continuing to enjoy the state of peaceful changelessness every citizen valued.

Huy moved routinely through the days, and at night, after taking his poppy, he allowed the Book of Thoth to unroll through his mind while he lay on the roof under a blaze of summer stars. The harvest began. The air became full of dust motes as the labourers threshed and winnowed the grain. In the orchards, the fruit hung heavy on the laden boughs, ready to drop into waiting baskets. The grapes were trodden, the rich purple or golden liquid pouring into the jars full of promise. The perfume distilleries exuded such a heavy aroma that passersby could not bear it and drew their linen over their noses. Thothhotep returned from the south exhausted but happy, retiring to her quarters at once so that Iny could cut her hair and begin to repair the damage done to her hands and feet by the harsh, dry southern climate. “I ran about barefoot and unpainted the whole time I was there,” she told an amused Huy. “It would have been pointless to take Iny with me. My cousin, the one who wanted me to marry him, has finally married one of my sisters after all this time. They seem well suited to one another. My parents liked the gifts I took for them. I did enjoy myself, Huy, but I’m glad to be home again. Is there anything needing my attention? If not, I would like to see Anhur.”

I used to find these months appealing, even though they are hot,
Huy thought as he watched her stride away.
There’s a sense of the eternal about them in spite of the activities of the harvest. The days are long, the twilight lingers, time seems to be removed from our awareness. But this year the timelessness is simply bringing my internal agitation to the fore. It is as though I itch without any source for the inflammation. I will welcome the Inundation in spite of the new round of fevers and dead children it will bring. Anything is preferable to this feeling of imminence.

The letter from Princess Mutemwia arrived on the same morning as the annual supply of poppy and a report for Huy from Amunnefer. It was the fifteenth day of Thoth. The New Year had begun. Merenra delivered both scrolls to Huy as he had finished his morning meal and was making his way to the office. The fog shredded apart in his mind. Asking the steward to find Thothhotep, Huy entered his office and dropped into the chair behind the desk, sitting tensely with his hands flat on the table’s surface, both scrolls before him. “Something from Mutemwia,” he said to her as she came in. “Read it to me, Thothhotep.”

Stepping briskly forward, she quickly cracked the scroll open. “Her Highness’s skill has improved somewhat,” she remarked as she scanned the contents. “Oh, Huy!” She mastered herself immediately, her features falling into the properly noncommittal expression.

Huy found his shoulders hunching in anticipation. “Read!” he snapped.

She no longer reacted to his sharper tones. She nodded. “‘To the Great Seer Huy, greetings. Know that my father-in-law is very ill and is not expected to live. He refuses to send for you. If I am unable to write to you again regarding this matter, then Mayor Heby your brother will doubtless keep you informed. As always, I desire no answer. Written by my own hand this third day of Thoth in the year twenty-five of the King.’” Thothhotep looked up. “She no longer signs her name, but of course I recognize her hand.”

“I thought that he looked unwell when I last answered his summons,” Huy commented. “Naturally he will not send for me. Even on his deathbed he does not dare to have his subterfuge exposed. Well, let him die!”

“Will you have the news carried to Prince Amunhotep in Mitanni?”

“No.” Huy got up. “The Princess will do that. And in another ten years her husband will also be dead, if my Seeing for the Prince spoke true. Take a dictation to Heby. I’ll tell him that I’ve heard a rumour regarding the King’s health, and ask him to send me reports on the progress of whatever’s wrong with him.”
Why do I feel so vindictive towards Amunhotep?
he asked himself as Thothhotep sank to the mat beside the desk and opened the drawer of her palette.
Is it because I still take his gold, or because he and his younger son were the cause of my failure before Atum? I wonder if Thothmes will continue to supply my household once he takes the throne. But of course he will see it as buying my ongoing silence, and I must accept it as an implicit guarantee to him that I will keep my mouth closed.

Thothhotep was busily smoothing her piece of papyrus, a brush between her teeth. “How old is Prince Thothmes now?” Huy asked her.

Taking the brush, she began to mix her ink. “I’m not sure. About eighteen, I think.”

Huy sat on the edge of the desk and folded his arms. “And he will imagine a long reign, but ten years is all that the gods intend to give him,” he remarked with an inner pang of pure spite that he knew he should be directing at himself. “Poor Thothmes! Begin, Thothhotep. ‘To the illustrious Mayor of Mennofer, greetings …’”

But another year was to pass before Pharaoh finally expired. The letters Huy continued to receive from both Heby and the Princess during this time often guardedly referred to Amunhotep’s remarkable hold on life,
as if,
Huy mused grimly,
he is afraid to let go and face the ordinary fate that I believe awaits him. No Holy Barque to receive him—only the dim draftiness of the Judgment Hall and the accusing eyes of a maimed and weakened Ma’at.
Huy shied away from the responsibility of his own part in the King’s probable fate. That sense of imminence, of something rolling inexorably towards him, deepened as the year progressed, its advance smothering everything but the continuous unrest deep within him and the sonorous words of the Book of Thoth.

The harvest ended. The New Year had begun, but the Inundation was late. Egypt seethed with distress. Men spoke darkly of the inevitability of famine. But at last Isis began to cry and the usual gods’ feasts were celebrated with a relieved near-hysteria. Huy stood apart from the countrywide rejoicing. His Naming Day in the following month, Paophi, came and went with a visit and gifts from his parents, and it took all of Huy’s control to feign a cheerfulness he was far from feeling. Athyr, and his new nephew Ramose’s Naming Day, seemed to plod by like some huge, ponderous beast slowed by its own sheer size. Khoiak, Tybi, Mekhir—the months were all the same to Huy, who waited, a fly caught in a web that hung outside the sane and regular passage of days, and he knew that struggling to free himself would be useless. His crops grew and matured, and the harvest began.

Phamenoth and Pharmuthi crept by. Once again during Pakhons, Thothhotep made her annual journey south to visit her family, and Huy took to spending his nights supine on the roof of his house, staring up at the stars, hands clasped behind his head, as he waited. Waited for what? He did not know. The stars wheeled above him. Three more times the moon waxed and waned, and then once more it was the month of Thoth. The Sopdet star rose. Thothhotep, brown and healthy, came home. The Inundation began, and at last Huy’s long vigil, his wait for something indefinable, ended. The invisible web imprisoning him fluttered. Huy almost physically felt it loosen its hold, and he took the first deep breath of freedom he had been able to draw for a whole year.

Amunhotep died on the twenty-ninth day of Thoth. Isis had dutifully cried and the river had begun to swell. Heby wrote to tell Huy that Amunhotep had at first taken to his couch with complaints of a headache as well as the pains in his limbs, but had subsequently and suddenly lost the use of his right arm and leg and could not speak. Mutemwia’s letter was more formal. “The King died last night and is being Beautified for his seat with the other blessed Osirisones in the Sacred Barque,” she had dictated, for the letter’s script was exquisitely neat and the spelling faultless. “The court and the country will mourn him until the middle of Khoiak, when his body will be laid in his tomb. I and my son Amunhotep intend to visit you at the end of Paophi, as I require a Seeing. Long Life and Prosperity to you, Seer. Dictated to Scribe of the Harem Nefer-ka-Ra by Her Highness Princess Mutemwia, the thirtieth day of Thoth, year twenty-five of the King.”

“That’s the end of next month,” Thothhotep said with some agitation. “Do we have enough room for a royal entourage, Master? And the river will still be rising. Why would she brave the current?”

The end of Paophi
.
I shall be forty-one years old on the ninth. Forty-one. Where are my grey hairs, Atum? Why does my belly not sag? Where are the lines that should be appearing on my face? Your patience is a terrible thing, Great Neb-er-djer. I feel it infusing me, holding me up, steady and relentless. What will happen to me when I have at last fulfilled your task for me? Will you plunge me into an instant old age?
He shivered.

“Merenra is perfectly capable of organizing the household for a royal visit,” he answered her absently. “The Princess is not coming for a Seeing, Thothhotep. She is not in the least concerned with her own fate, and if her health was poor she would have sent for me. All her hopes and fears go towards little Amunhotep, her son, and whatever she has to say to me is not for the ears of palace servants or the courtiers constantly passing by her doors. Until she arrives, we must get about our ordinary business. This scroll need not be hidden.”
She has begun to deliberately forge a bond between herself and me,
his thoughts ran on as he stood immobile in his office while Thothhotep filed away the Princess’s scroll.
Her son is how old now? Three? She is coming so that he may begin to recognize me as … what? An uncle? An authority? What do you want of me, Mutemwia of the soft gazelle’s eyes and gentle manner?

There was no Naming Day celebration for him that year. His forty-first birthday passed in the gloom of an Egypt grieving for its dead god. Even the peasants, who cared very little what person sat on the Horus Throne and who had nothing to do while all building projects halted until after the King’s funeral, sat about and commiserated with one another. Huy and Thothhotep, fly whisks in hand, made their annual treks into Hut-herib with the curtains of their litter closed against the swarms of hungry mosquitoes. On the days when he did not heal or scry, Huy often found himself standing outside his gate on the edge of the flood, watching his watersteps gradually become submerged. There was little river traffic. Flotsam drifted by, dead tree branches, the occasional bloated body of a drowned cow or goat, sometimes a carelessly tethered raft or skiff. Almost the whole month of Paophi was taken up with festivals of thanksgiving to Hapi, god of the river, and even they were subdued.

He was not a great pharaoh,
Huy mused as his feet took him unchecked along his path and through the gate.
He triumphed against the rebellious eastern chiefs early in his reign. He started a small temple at Ipet-isut that was never finished. He repaired a few others, particularly in the far south, between the First and Second Cataracts. He will be remembered for his physical prowess and little else. I wonder if Kenamun, his foster brother and best friend, will now try to wriggle as close to Thothmes as he was to the father? I need not care. Thothmes will never allow me to See for him for the same reason that the King did not summon me when paralysis struck him. All I have to do is endure the nine years Atum predicted for Thothmes’ reign. Then Ma’at can be restored in all her purity.

Punctually at noon on the last day of the month, a series of barges all flying the royal colours of blue and white were skilfully eased out of the north-flowing current with a proficiency Huy wholeheartedly admired, and sailors splashed into the water to rope them to the poles at the foot of Huy’s watersteps. Ramps were run out and carefully positioned so that no aristocratic feet would become wet. Huy, Thothhotep, and the household staff were waiting halfway along the path, having been warned at sunrise that Her Highness’s vessel, tied up a little to the south of the town, would arrive within hours. Anhur and his soldiers, clean and polished from their sandals to the oiled leather caps on their heads, were ranged to either side. “I’m very nervous,” Thothhotep whispered to Huy as the first members of Mutemwia’s staff paraded onto the ramps.

“You look better than acceptable,” he whispered back. “You are quite lovely today. You will probably be dealing with any problems the Princess’s scribe may have while he’s here. Just remember that this is your domain, dear sister, and you are his equal.”

She turned a well-painted face to him in surprise and pleasure. “Huy! You have never called me your dear sister before!”

“Hush!” he responded sharply. “The herald is approaching.”