The Eye of Horus (21 page)

Before Pagosh could answer, Mena turned to me and blurted out, “How far do you trust this man? Aset’s eyes are blinded by love, but yours are not. Do not forget that he serves Ramose as well as his daughter.”

Pagosh refused to meet my eyes, as if he feared that all the years we have conspired to the same purpose counted for nothing with me now, in the presence of my boyhood friend. I took my time, searching for the right words, and remembered the first time Pagosh had come to my door, his heart eaten by grief over the loss of his son. The child of his loins. And then that day almost four years later, when we fought Osiris for Aset’s life—the child of his heart.

“I doubt there is anything Pagosh does not know about what I do or think,” I told Mena, “yet I sleep like a babe, as he himself can attest.”

“I only needed to be certain before I spoke.” Mena motioned Pagosh to the stool beside me and reached for the carafe of wine. “Nefertiti takes the advantage wherever she can find it, and used Ankhesenamen’s message to the Hittites to gain favor with Ay—to put him in her debt.”

“Aset tried to tell us what was going on,” I recalled, too
late. “Remember what Old Reliable said? ‘It is my time now, after years of watching the others come and go in their magnificent feluccas.’”

“Now Pharaoh eats the fruit of his own arrogance,” Pagosh put in, “for he has lost both Northwind and his chance to found a new royal family.” He let out a sigh. “The Sacred Council will wait no longer.”

“For what?” Mena inquired.

“To position themselves to claim the throne of Horus, what else?”

That brought Mena to his feet. “You can’t be serious!”

“Thanks to Ramose, Amen holds more land now than before the Heretic stripped them of their fields and gold. But that does not mean they can never again be thrown into the streets like so much dung. For that there is only one way—to hold the throne themselves. Why else would Ramose ally himself with the Heretic’s Queen?”

“But if Nefertiti already had what she was after with the priest,” Mena argued, “why try to strike a bargain with Old Reliable?”

Pagosh shrugged in that detached way, which I know to be a false front. “She may have scented something rotten in the air, for the priests do not trust her and never will. Not so long as Akhenaten lives.” That he evaded my eyes made me fearful that more disasters were yet to come. “That is why Ramose will put her away and take his own daughter for his wife.”

The words fell like pebbles on the surface of a quiet pond, plummeting to the bottom of my soul. I heard Aset’s voice as if from afar.
“Mahu says I am to be wife to a priest of Amen, even though I am not fully royal.”

“May Osiris turn a deaf ear to Thoth first!” Mena cursed. “If her mother gets wind of this—and you are right about what happened to Ankhesenamen—Aset will be next!”

“Not if, when,” Pagosh added. “The she-cat has more spies than Tuli has fleas.”

I felt like a man swept away by the Inundation. That
Ramose might actually desire his daughter warred with the realization that I would rather it be him than any other priest. He, at least, took pride in her love of learning. An idea came to me then, a possible way out of an impossible dilemma.

“I have a plan,” I said, “but we must act quickly.” I looked to Mena. “Are you sure that Ay has no child to succeed him, even by one of his other women?”

“I asked Sheri the same question. She says not.”

“Then we must give Nefertiti the weapon she needs to force Ramose to meet her demands, lest she reveal everything to Horemheb or the old Pharaoh.”

“But that would give her even more reason to be rid of Aset,” Mena objected.

“Not if we shape the weapon to our purpose,” I told him. “We know the priests had no part in the death of Tutankhamen’s son, or the Queen. Since Ankhesenamen was Nefertiti’s daughter, the Sacred Council probably sees Horemheb’s hand behind both deeds. So we must make sure Ramose learns the truth—that it was his wife who stole the breath from her own child and grandchild—and in that way come to realize that
his
daughter could be next.”

“The question is, will Ramose believe it?” Mena asked, still in doubt.

“If he is told by someone he trusts,” Pagosh assured him.

“Me,” I said. “Ramose is sure to hear that I was called to the palace tonight. He will expect to hear what I learned there from my own lips. I will suggest that he send Aset away for a time, perhaps down the river to the priestesses of Hathor. When he asks why—and he will—I will tell him.”

“And Nefertiti?” Mena asked. “Who will she believe?”

“Her servingwomen,” Pagosh volunteered. “They consider my wife to be simple and so do not guard their tongues in her presence. Nor would it occur to them that she uses them to her own purpose.”

Mena brought Senmut during the hours I receive the sick among Ramose’s workers, to tell me something that could not wait, he said.

“On the plain near Kadesh,” Senmut began, “I came upon a fight that ended with one man stopping the breath of another.” He glanced at Mena. “Has the General always distributed
kat
leaves to his men before a siege?”

Mena nodded. “A practice he learned from your people, who believe it gives them the strength of a god.”

“What it does is make them forget they cannot fly with the falcons, so they go into battle without the fear that makes men cautious. I suppose it could have been the
kat,
but his heart still spoke in the big vessel below his ear. I thought he might start breathing again, but after a few moments his heart slowed and then stopped.” Mena and I exchanged a look. “Are you going to tell me—” Senmut started, when a scream rent the quiet morning, followed by the furious yelping of a small dog.

Senmut rushed for the door with me right behind him. We followed our ears to the brewery, then through the narrow passageway between it and the breadmaker’s rising shed, where we came upon an old lean-to. A Nubian shaman stood before the rags draped across one end, jabbing at Tuli with a long stick. Barking and snarling all the while, the dog darted in and out, trying to sink his teeth into the black man’s leg.

Senmut sent the old man sprawling, scattering cowrie shells and animal teeth in every direction, and pushed his way through the rags. I signaled Tuli to stand guard over the shaman and followed Senmut inside, where a sputtering oil lamp cast flickering shadows across the face of an old Nubian hag. In her gnarled fist she held a sharpened piece of flint, which she waved at us in an eerie kind of greeting.

“Old Nanefer knows how to put her right, you’ll see,” she rasped, heedless of the blood dripping from her knife. “It is the worm disease that keeps her from becoming a woman.”
Two younger Nubians kneeled on Aset’s shoulders to capture her hands, while two other women held her legs spread wide.

“Please make her stop,” Aset pleaded in a pitiful voice. I knocked aside the two women who pinned her arms while Senmut pushed the Nubian hag out of the way and took her place between Aset legs. Rising as best she could, Aset clung to my neck as sobs shook her body. Torn between wanting to see what the old crone had done and the need to comfort her, I put my lips to her hair.

“Hush,
meri,
hush. She will not touch you ever again, I promise. And Senmut will make it right, whatever she has done.” I had no way to know if I spoke the truth except when I called her beloved.

Senmut lashed the old crone in her native tongue, his voice harsh with anger, while Mena drove the other women from the hut, cursing them and the man outside. When I slipped my arm under her knees Aset stiffened with pain, causing my entire body to shake with such rage that I almost dropped her.

Ruka came running as we crossed the courtyard, his face contorted with worry and fear. “Is she hurt bad? Please Amen, don’t let it be bad. Is it, Tenre?”

I ignored his question. “Have you seen Pagosh?”

“He takes the Consort to the God’s Father across the river.”

I saw it all then. When Nefertiti learned of the High Priest’s plan to set her aside, she knew the priests had beaten her at her own game—to use Ramose to regain the throne. They had used
her
instead, to beget a granddaughter of the Magnificent Amenhotep, intending all along to discard Nefertiti when the time was right. And knowing from experience what her husband desired most from a woman—that the fire in her body burn as hot as the one she lit in his—she had arranged his punishment to fit his crime.

“Stay by the watchman’s gate,” I told Ruka, as we passed
through the gate to my garden, “and send Pagosh to me the moment he returns.”

I laid Aset on my examining table and turned to Senmut. “Say what you need.”

“Water and the oldest wine you’ve got. Also some olive oil. Soft cloths that have been dried in the hot sun.”

“Anything else?” He would know what I meant.

“She is bleeding too much to tell for certain, but it appears the old crone sliced away only a piece of the inner labia.” I nodded and hurried to gather what he needed while Mena stood with one hand on her shoulder, stroking her tousled curls. Afterward I stood holding her hand, but try as I might, I could not blind myself to the visions that formed behind my eyes. With them came a desire for revenge so overwhelming that I could actually taste it—the sweet ambrosia that drives a man to maim or kill.

“All will be well,” Senmut murmured, so low I was not sure she heard him. “The wound will quickly heal. A few days of tenderness and some burning when she urinates, both easily treated. As for the other—” He glanced at me and shrugged.

“What does he mean?” Aset whispered, begging me with her eyes.

“If you want more than her body to heal,” I told him, “you must tell her everything, what you do and why.” He cocked an eyebrow, questioning the wisdom of that, but he does not know her as I do. To let what the old woman did to her stay hidden in darkness would allow it to fester like a putrid sore.

“I pour sour wine on the wound to clean it,” Senmut told her.

“I want to know what she did to me.”

“A woman is made like a flower, and little harm is done by taking only a petal away. It is the bud in the center that is the seat of pleasure for a woman.”

Aset turned her head toward me. “I read nothing of that in your scrolls.”

“Perhaps the physicians in the House of Life did not find it a seemly topic.”

Next Senmut described how she must treat her raw flesh. “The oil will keep it supple and also prevent the cut edges from growing together. A scar does not stretch, so you must clean yourself with warm water several times a day and apply more oil.” He paused. “Do you know why we want it to be able to stretch?”

“To allow a babe to pass through?” she guessed.

“Also, when the time comes, for your husband’s penis to penetrate your body without hurting you. There is little pleasure to be found in pain, for you or him, unless—”

“I know about men who take pleasure in causing pain, or in suffering it.” She showed no embarrassment in talking of what most women do not discuss even with their husbands. “But Tenre never told me—”

“Told you what?” I asked. She shrugged, avoiding my eyes.

I watched him sprinkle finely sieved wheat flour over her wound to stop the bleeding. Then he came to face Aset and squatted in order to bring his eyes level with hers. “In the land of Punt and also some places in my own country, it is the practice to cut the young girls before their monthly flow begins. Why?” He shrugged. “The reasons differ, but are passed from mother to daughter, generation after generation. In Kush, where that old woman is from, they say a girl who is small for her age cannot grow because of a worm, so they cut away her female parts to release the worm and make her able to conceive a child. But you are no ignorant tribeswoman to believe such rubbish.”

Aset searched his face. “Don’t the women in your country learn to read or write?” He shook his head. “Would
you
want a woman like that for your wife?”

He smiled for the first time. “Before a week was out I would be forced to banish such a woman from my house, bringing the wrath of her father down on my head.”

She returned his smile. “I begin to understand why Nebet
holds you in such high regard. She even insists you will be the equal of Tenre, one day, as a physician, I mean.” She brought my hand over her lips, perhaps to hide from him that she was teasing. “But you can never ever hope to rival the wisdom of her father.” I knew then that she was whole again, and glanced at Mena to find him grinning like a fool.

By then Senmut was, too. So his education continues, as does hers.

Re was sailing toward the western cliffs when I started back from the village of Ramose’s fellahin. It wasn’t until I encountered a line of pickers coming in from the orchard where the vines grow between the trees that I realized the wine making had begun. Soon I could hear the racket of clapping sticks mingled with singing and laughter, sounds of merriment that reminded me of the times I went to my grandfather’s vineyard as a child. There my cousins and I would jump into the big stone vats to tromp on the grapes while our mothers and fathers, aunts and uncles, clapped out the rhythm with wooden hands. I hurried my step, eager to relive those happy days even as a spectator, and was barely through the gate in the wall when I spotted Aset in one of the vats—holding to Ruka’s arm to keep from slipping down while she stomped to the beat.

The sight brought a smile to my heart, for she wore only a loincloth, like the boys, with the point pulled between her legs and tucked under at the waist. How much she has changed since her tenth feast day! Her hips and thighs grow rounder and softer while her face thins, bringing out her cheekbones and strong jaw. In that way she resembles her mother more every day. Only her eyes remain the same—so transparent a blue that the light of her
akh
shines forth from within.

I moved closer and joined in the clapping, to blend in with
the others who crowded around, and saw her look up at Ruka and laugh. I felt my heart swell with regret that this might be her last chance for such childish abandon. Then I happened to glance around at the crowd, and saw a figure on the roof of Ramose’s villa. My breath quickened with dread, for he has always denied her the company of his workers’ children. Yet now, when he saw her consorting with them in the lowest way, baring her budding breasts for all eyes to see, I stood like a dumb ox—until Pagosh nudged me.