The Bull of Min (11 page)

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

S
TARLIGHT BRIGHTER THAN ELECTRUM FLOODED through the pillared wall of Meryet’s bed chamber. The night was young and fresh, the air heavy and rich with the promising fragrance of water to come. She pulled a heavy robe close about her shoulders and made her way out into the garden. A tinge of blue still clung to the sky, the deep, dark blue of wet lapis stone. She saw a brilliant white fire amid the black branches of her tall old sycamore, that dear friend who had provided her shade and a refuge from the pressures of duty more times than she could count. A breeze stirred the tree, clearing her view of the sky for one heartbeat. There it was: the full, glimmering orb of the star Sopdet. A new year had come.

Two sets of light
footsteps sounded on the path behind her. Meryet did not need to look around to know that her twin shadows had followed her here, as they did everywhere. Batiret, slender and pretty and thoughtful in her duties, and Nehesi. The guardsman was advanced in age now. His untrimmed hair often peeked from beneath his wig, grizzled and thin. The lines of his face were deep now, but rather than giving him the softness of old age, they only made him sterner, more imposing. He was still as strong as a bull, and always would be, for all Meryet could tell.

Both servants had passed to her from Hatshepsut’s keeping.
In their comfortable presence Meryet still could feel the departed Pharaoh’s many kas watching and, she hoped, approving.

“I’m all right,” she called to them softly, automatically.

They were beside her now, following her gaze up into the sky. The stars were so numerous they seemed to shout a glad, clamoring chant among the branches of the sycamore. But Sopdet was brightest, and it burned like a temple fire.

“A new year,” Bat
iret said. “Festival time. Nehesi will drink too much again and ask me to marry him.”

Nehesi coughed to clear his throat.

“You had better not accept,” Meryet teased. “He asks all the pretty girls to marry him when he’s drunk.”

“Well do I know
it.”

“If a man never asks,
” Nehesi said good-naturedly, “he can never expect to receive.”

Batiret sniffed.
“Women might prefer to be asked by a
sober
man. And anyway, you know I have a husband.”

“That scribe you never see?
Bah! He has arms like twigs. I’ve got much more to hold onto. Here…” Nehesi flexed his arm to show Batiret his muscles, “and here…” he made as if to grab for whatever he had beneath his kilt, but Meryet stopped him with a hand on his wrist.

“Gods have mercy on me,
” she laughed, “but you are in the presence of the Great Royal Wife, Nehesi. Show
some
decorum, please.”

“Apologies, Great Lady.”

“I swear by Mut, the two of you quarrel like you’re married; you may as well be.”

“You ought to come back inside
, Great Lady,” Batiret said. “The night is chill, and you need sleep for the festival tomorrow.”

“She i
s right,” Nehesi murmured. “The first day of the new year is always a long one. Plenty of sleep would suit you well tonight.”

Meryet hooked her arm thr
ough Nehesi’s elbow, pulled Batiret close with her other arm, clutching the woman in an affectionate hug. “Quarrel like an old married couple, and order me about like two overprotective parents. Oh, very well. Take me to my bed and tuck me in.”

They did just that, Batiret marshaling the usual small army of body servants to take Meryet’s wig and jewels, wash the paint from her face and soothe her skin with a cool cream.
They dressed her in a fine silk night-robe – a gift from Thutmose, from his store of costly foreign fabrics – and eased her into her bed with soft voices, quiet music, the low flicker of a single wick burning in her brass lamp.

Meryet, though, could not sleep.
Rest evaded her, slipping beyond her grasp no matter how she turned on the mattress, no matter how she tilted the ivory cradle of her head-rest. After a time, the gentle, monotonous tones of the harpist became annoying, yet the thought of dismissing the woman seemed somehow cruel. She closed her eyes and lay quite still, feigning sleep until the harpist dismissed herself and the last of her body servants snuffed the lamp’s wick. When she withdrew through the servants’ door, Meryet was left alone with the sound of her own breathing and the faint, desultory crackle of the wick settling back into the oil.

A new year,
she mused, shifting against her head-rest.
And a new battle for Thutmose. I have no reason to think it’s so, and yet I do. Why?

She opened her eyes,
watched through the pillars of the wall as the sycamore swayed in the wind. It painted a shifting web of starlight and shadow over the gaps between the pillars. Sopdet, dominating the deep blue of the heavens, seemed to catch sight of her between the mobile black branches. Its stare was direct and forcefully bright.

M
eryet raised her arms before the great statue of Waser. The golden discs sewn along the edge of her fine white winter shawl chimed with the movement.

“O Waser, holy one, originator, thou who make the dead live again!
O Waser, Lord of Silence, thou who art forever kind and young! Thy wife Iset comes to thee in love. She has reassembled thee; she has raised thee up; she has opened thy mouth, that the breath of life might fill thy nostrils again. Exhale the breath of life across our land!”

The god gazed over her head, smiling impassively at the crowd of nobles gathered at her back.
The statue was more than twice the height of a man, his skin painted as green as a fertile field. The black jut of a conical beard pointed outward from his stern face, but his smile was benign, nearly loving, and his eyes were, Meryet thought, as warm as stone eyes could be.

Beside her, Thutmose bore the offering tray, a great silver platter heaped with green offerings of every kind: bundles of herbs, the pliant branches of young trees, sheaves of still-unripe wheat, and a pyramid of several kinds of fruit, which Thutmose took the greatest care not to upset.
It would never do to have the New Year’s offerings go tumbling down the steps and into the crowd.

Sleep had evaded Meryet the night before the ceremonies.
Eventually she had risen to walk again in her garden, but the chill had soon driven her back beneath the blankets. She had drifted in and out of consciousness, her body sometimes giving an involuntary jerk of exhaustion that pulled her cruelly back from the verge of true restful sleep. When the dawn broke and the birds chorused outside, she was relieved to rise from the bed and cast all hope of sleep aside. It was futile, and Meryet did not enjoy pursuing futility.

She had at least been spared walking the long road to the temples at Ipet-Isut.
A litter had carried her, and she had ridden it uncomfortably, fighting the urge to rub at her stinging, tired eyes. She pushed her way through the ceremonies of the Opening of the Year with dogged focus, promising herself that there would be time for a nap between ceremony and feast. Strange, that the surety of returning to her bed, the very site of her night-long torment, should be all that kept her from breaking into hysterical laughter or sobs of frustration now, before the eyes of the gods and the court.

The invocation of Waser was the final phase of the Opening of the Year.
Only a few moments more, and I will be on my litter returning to Waset. Gods, but I’m tired!

She reached for the bundle of herbs on Thutmose’s tray, held it aloft for Waser to inspect.

There was an abrupt sound in the crowd behind her, a stifled exclamation of surprise.
Meryet ignored it, and went on with her intonations to the god.

As she lifted the sheaf of wheat over her head, a wider murmur came from the crowd, and something that sounded like a whimper of fear.
Meryet glanced quickly over her shoulder. Her eyes went immediately, instinctively, to where Amunhotep’s nurse stood. The woman was there, and the prince too. In fact, the nurse held him clutched tightly to her breast, though at nearly four years of age, Amunhotep was old enough to stand on his own at the front of the crowd. In that brief moment, as Meryet glimpsed the nurse’s face, she saw in the woman’s dark eyes and compressed lips the trace of fear, as well as ferocious determination.

What in the name of the gods…?

As Meryet turned
back to Waser, her eye passed swiftly over another woman’s face – Amenemhat’s nurse, pale, eyes wide, mouth open in an expression of panic. Her arms were empty.

Meryet paused with the sheaf of wheat raised above her head.
“Thutmose,” she whispered urgently. Her voice barely carried beyond the braids of the wig that framed her face, hiding it at this angle from the eyes of the nobles. “Something is wrong.”

Thutmose’s eyes shifted,
but he did not upset his pyramid of fruits. “What is it?”

“The boys’ nurses.”

Thutmose, too, glanced quickly over his shoulder. When he returned his eyes to the god, Meryet could see grim understanding paling his features. “Where is Amenemhat?”

Meryet gave the dedication of the wheat as quickly as propriety would allow, and, in the act of turning to the tray to lift the sapling branches, she allowed her eyes to run over the crowd.
Nehesi was ushering Amenemhat’s nurse from the temple, steering her with a firm hand.

“Just get through the ceremony,” Meryet whispered.
“Then we will know.”

Meryet walked calmly back to her litter, her path strewn with bunches of herbs to
ssed by the watching crowd. She seized Batiret’s hand as she mounted onto her chair, pulled the woman onto the litter’s platform with her. The bearers lifted the platform into the air, and Batiret, unused to riding on the shoulders of men, squeaked where she crouched at Meryet’s feet. She gripped the legs of the chair in white-knuckled fists.

Meryet leaned close.
“What in Amun’s name happened back there?”

“
Gods preserve me, Great Lady. Satiah’s boy – Amenemhat – he’s gone.”

“What?”

Scores of nobles, to say nothing of the crowds of rekhet in their festival best, lined the long road from Ipet-Isut to Waset’s palace.
Meryet struggled to keep her face calm.

“His nurse lost sight of him, and he…he vanished.
Nehesi took her out of the temple before she could scream, and he set all his guards to work searching for the boy.”

Meryet glanced about her.
For the first time in over three years, Nehesi was not slinking along beside her. She had lost her shadow. Her eyes went unbidden to the scars on Batiret’s arm, and Meryet shuddered. She willed panic out of her heart, pressing it away with the deliberate hand of her ka. She
ordered
it away.

“I am sure Nehesi’s men will find the boy.”

“Oh, gods,” Batiret moaned. “It’s Satiah – you know it is!”

“Stop this at once,” Meryet hissed.
“You are too sensible to behave this way.”

Batiret breathed deeply, fighting against her own memories, her own terrors.

Meryet
dropped her hand to the woman’s shoulder and gave a quick, reassuring squeeze. “It will be well, Batiret. But you must keep your wits about you. I need you now.”