The King's Man (59 page)

“The ministers and ambassadors and boon-seekers in the audience hall will be restless,” he said. “Get on with it, Uncle, and tell Nubti on your way out that I’m hungry now. You can bring anything that needs my seal to my quarters this evening.”

“Were you able to hear everything, Paneb?” Huy asked once the heavy doors were closed behind them and they were hurrying along the corridor.

Paneb nodded. “Every word, Master,” he replied. “May I suggest that you obtain the royal seal on the papyrus?”

You are no fool, my dear scribe. This time I definitely need insurance against whatever vagaries might be in my own future
. He swept into the audience hall and took the empty seat on the dais, looking down at the sea of bowed heads. “Mahu, who should be dealt with first?” he said.

The Mitanni ambassador presented a long letter full of wordy praise from his King to Amunhotep, but as always, Huy thought as he listened to the seemingly endless phrases extolling Amunhotep’s virtues, Mitanni wanted gold and plenty of it. Surprisingly, this time the King of Mitanni was offering a few horses and chariots in exchange. Huy cut the recitation short and referred the matter to the Overseer of Foreign Affairs. Merimose, Viceroy of Kush and Wawat and also the Overseer of the Gold Lands of Amun, sent his humble greetings to Amunhotep and a request for more soldiers to protect the gold routes. That letter required an investigation by the Chancellor together with Wesersatet as Commander-in-Chief. Huy would be required to approve any decision.

Once the hall had emptied, Huy and Mahu began their tour of the administrators. Mahu remained silent. Only Nebmerut, Royal Scribe and Seal Bearer, was his superior. Huy had always enjoyed working with Mahu. Like Paneb, he knew how to keep his thoughts to himself unless his opinion was required, in which case his replies were succinct and to the point. His load was heavy, noting down the details of each day’s discussions and decisions and making copies of every encounter for the palace archives, but he did not complain. Today Huy was reflecting on his meeting with the King as he and Mahu approached the large office shared by Hori and Suti, Architect Kha’s undoubtedly accomplished twin sons. Huy did not expect them to be present; architects and stonemasons did much of their outdoor work in the cool early hours of the morning. But one of their assistants and probably a couple of scribes would be busy inside, and Huy simply wanted to make sure that the two young men would be there to speak with him the following day.

Amunhotep has made it plain that he doesn’t doubt my visions
, Huy mused as he and Mahu paced easily along the paved path fronting the row of administrative cells to their left. On their right a well-watered lawn ended in a section of the towering wall that encircled the palace precincts. The sun had not yet reached its zenith. Huy’s shadow, though truncated, lay on the grass beside him. Deliberately he refused to glance at it, knowing that the hyena was there in its shade, keeping pace with him. Grimly he forced his mind away from it.
Mutemwia often used to tell Amunhotep the story of what I Saw the first time I inadvertently touched him, when no route to the Horus Throne seemed possible. He surely knows it all by heart. But I have no such history with Tiye. I Saw for her first when she was already a girl on the verge of womanhood, and I lied by omission when I recounted it to her. Now she’s read all of it. I’ve given her good reason to mistrust me, and like any mother her instinct is to shield her son from harm no matter what. Coupled with an excuse to label me a sham, she will want me as far away from the Prince as possible. Given the power she wields as Empress, and her undoubted fury at her husband but most especially at me, she will look for a way to see me dead and Amunhotep’s edict rescinded. No matter what Mutemwia said, I’ll make sure that my estate and all of us in it are protected. Will Atum help me, even though I’ve fulfilled my agreement to decipher the meaning of the Book and my only use to him now is as a Seer? Will Anubis?
He could hear the hyena panting, and in a spasm of disgust he swung round and aimed a kick at it, aware even as his foot shot out that the action was futile.

“Master?” Mahu said.

Huy exhaled noisily. “It’s nothing. I thought I saw a scorpion,” he replied. “Let’s finish our business quickly. I’m hungry.”

They had arrived at the open cell door. Huy could hear a casual conversation going on inside. The interior was pleasantly dim. Two men were bending over a scroll that had been unrolled and spread out across the surface of a wide table. As Mahu stood aside to let Huy enter first, they bowed courteously.

“Let us call light First—but it is known only through darkness,” one of the men said, and all at once Huy could not see his face. The room was much more murky than it had appeared to be. He turned, but there was no door behind him, no sun-drenched grass, no sliver of intensely blue sky.

“Mahu?” he called, and at the sound of his voice utter blackness suddenly descended. It was so thick that Huy experienced it as a suffocating weight, and for one panic-stricken moment he could not breathe.

“The ponderous inevitability of consequence,” another voice intoned. In spite of his disorientation Huy heard something in its quality that he recognized. It woke faint echoes in him from long ago. A High Priest? Of Ra or Thoth’s temple? What had it meant? He couldn’t remember.

“Anubis, are you here?” he whispered, his words muffled by the impenetrable gloom that seemed to have bulk as well as depth. “Have you come to lead me into the Judgment Hall?”

There was no reply. Instead the first voice shouted, “Only through darkness, darkness, darkness! The Light cast a shadow, grim and terrible, like restless water with spume like smoke! Peril in the water and menace in the smoke!” It began to wail.

Huy broke out in a cold sweat. The sound was unearthly, a series of chilling howls without a hint of human breath, but he remembered where he had seen those words. He had gone to Thoth’s temple at Iunu to read the second part of the Book of Thoth. Anhur and a young Amunmose had gone with him. Amunmose had used the time to visit his family. Huy, intimidated by everything and everyone at Thoth’s home, continuously aware of the god’s strong magic, had clung to Anhur and forged a bond with the soldier that had only been broken by Anhur’s death. The portion of the Book he had been expected to untangle had made no sense to him at all, not until he and Thoth’s High Priest had begun to talk of frogs. He began to repeat the mysterious stanza aloud. The whole of the Book was there, lodged faultlessly in his mind. “I am One that transforms into Two. I am Two that transforms into Four. I am Four that transforms into Eight. After this I am One.”

Immediately the moaning stopped and Huy’s recitation was taken up and repeated by a chorus that slowly grew from several guttural voices to the deafening clamour of a multitude. Huy covered his ears. Still he could see nothing. Then his right hand was pulled roughly away from his head, forced to grip what felt like a portion of a metal rod, and he found himself towed backward. He struggled to keep his balance. His other hand slid along a wall, caught against the edge of a door jamb, and without warning he was outside. The cacophony ceased. The silence made his head ring. He realized that he was clutching a tall golden Staff of Office halfway down its length. It was topped with the face of a jackal, and Anubis was holding it just under the talisman. Hastily Huy let it go and looked about.

He was standing on the grass opposite Hori and Suti’s cell, but the door was closed. So was every other door along the block of administrative offices. Nothing stirred. No insect moved in the grey lawn. No wind lifted the hem of Huy’s kilt. No bird troubled the leaden grey sky. The lack of sound was absolute, and everything Huy’s eyes rested upon was the colour of death except his own shadow. Pitch-black, it snaked across the lawn, crawled up the side of the grey wall, and continued to climb into the sky until Huy had to crane his neck to see the enormous, misshapen head. He did not look at it for long. Not far from his feet the hyena squatted, inky dark within the blurred outline of the shadow. It was not staring at him. Its attention was fixed on Anubis.

“What did Mighty Atum do when he saw his shadow, Great Seer?” Anubis said harshly. “I am ashamed to be here, asking this question, and you should be ashamed to be standing in the place of No-Time without an answer.” His lips lifted in scorn. “How often have I warned you to look to your house? How many words of caution have I wasted on such a pathetically weak ka as yours?” Stepping close to Huy, he snarled, his wet white teeth bared. His skin gleamed. The golden ankh resting on his black chest glittered. The pleats of his golden kilt swung shimmering against the perfect musculature of his legs as he moved. He was the only vibrant, living thing in all that tomblike drabness, and Huy, glancing down at himself, saw his own dusty greyness. “Tell me,” Anubis growled, “what does a triad represent?”

“It represents eternal and unchanging truths.”

“And what of a doubling?” Huy watched the long furred nose, the pink tongue, those lethal jaws, form the words. The god’s breath was warm and smelled of the sacred kyphi perfume reserved for temple rites.

“A doubling is all fleeting, earthly wisdom.”

“Tell me, then, what is the heb sed?”

Huy stared at him. Anubis waited, black eyes half closed, majestic ears stiffly raised. “I have discovered, Most Dread God of the Judgment Hall, that the heb sed takes the King and transcends his doubling. He becomes eternal, infinite. He enters the mathematical certainty of the triad. His nature is changed. Thus the heb sed is the mathematics of eternity.”

“You have discovered this, and yet you do not remember what Mighty Atum did when he became Light and saw his shadow? Frogs, Son of Hapu. Frogs. Look!”

He stretched out his Staff over Huy’s distorted shadow and to Huy’s horror the hyena crouching within it began to grow. It swelled, lengthened, began to fill the contours of the shadow, until the shape of the head high against the slate-grey sky was not Huy’s anymore but a huge, grotesque thing of tuft and snout. Within the darkness flowing across the grass from Huy’s feet there was movement, seething on the wall, churning into the sky, and with it came a stench Huy recalled. It was not the whiff of a wild animal. It was putrefaction, rotting flesh,
but that was only half the odour emanating from the Ished Tree in Ra’s temple
, Huy thought with a jolt of recognition.
Honey and garlic and orchard blossoms as well …
The creatures trapped inside his shadow were struggling towards him. Frogs. With a shriek he stumbled backward, but his shadow went with him, attached to him, part of him, and so did the frogs.

“Stop it, Anubis! Please stop it!” he begged.

The god shrugged his broad shoulders. “Stop it? How can I? You and your shadow are one, foolish Seer, even as Atum’s shadow belonged to him.”

“But Atum saw the chaos within his shadow and calmed it! He commanded the harmony of pairs, two, four, eight, male and female, frogs, Anubis, oh yes, of course! Frogs! I remember all of it now! Water, endless space, darkness, and what is hidden, and so the cosmos was conceived, before creation could take place. But I’m not a god! I can’t command concord inside my shadow!”

“So you recollect the meaning of the second scroll at last.” Anubis’s grating tone was caustic. “All these years Atum has waited, Thoth has waited, I have waited, for you to understand. No human being is able to bring order into his darkness. He may try. He may succeed for a little while. But his shadow will always shelter a hyena.” With a flick of one beringed finger, the frogs vanished and Huy’s shadow returned to an ordinary size. The hyena had also disappeared. “It’s still there,” Anubis said. “It has been there all your life. You were no more than thirteen when you read the substance of the second Book and you and Thoth’s High Priest unravelled its meaning together. Why did you forget it so soon?”

Huy shook his head. Excuses flashed through his mind—
I was very young, I was uneasy in Thoth’s temple, I didn’t concentrate on the task because I was aware all the time of Sennefer’s presence in the temple’s school
—but they would be unacceptable to the jackal god who had taunted and goaded him for years. It came to him that perhaps Anubis had been instructed purposely to provoke him, to force a return to obedience when the path of rebellion beckoned.

Anubis sighed, an exaggerated gush of scented breath. “Fear, proud Huy,” he said, his animal throat making the word an inadvertent growl. “Fear that the future you saw in your visions was flawed. Fear that the wounds and diseases you treated under my instructions would eventually be transferred elsewhere. And you saw it happen, didn’t you? Not often, but often enough to trouble your sleep. Were you forced to think of yourself as infallible so that blame could be placed somewhere else? I am infallible, human, but you are not. The answer was deep within your ka, but you refused to face it for fear that you would have to admit your shortcoming to those who sought your help.” Rapidly he passed his tongue over the soft fur of his lips. “The insurmountable disorder in your shadow, the insurmountable disorder in the shadows of those for whom you Scryed, warped the truths that Atum gave you through me. Not always, and usually insignificantly, but often enough to cause you, and them, distress.” To Huy’s alarm, Anubis leaned forward and, putting an arm around Huy’s neck, licked his cheek. The god’s nose was damp and cool. “You carry needless guilt, dear human,” he purred. “Only the merest fraction of responsibility for Egypt’s destiny lies with you. The King has behaved correctly, and Ma’at is pleased. She sees into your heart also. Get about your business, mer kat. Govern this blessed country and Scry for its people.”

He stood away and, taking his Staff in both black hands, spoke in a language Huy did not know. At once the heavy rings on his fingers sparkled in new sunlight, the grass flushed green, and a flock of birds piped as they flew by. Beyond the open cell door two men looked up, saw him, and bowed. Beside him Mahu waited politely. Huy glanced about. Anubis had gone, but a faint trace of kyphi perfume lingered in the warm air. Huy nodded at Mahu, smiled, drew a deep breath, and stepped past him into the office.