The Oasis (19 page)

After her exchange with Ankhmahor, Tetisheri felt more settled in her mind. She agreed with the Prince that Kamose’s reason, though threatened, would not collapse, and with that assurance she turned her attention to making sure that the healing of his interior wounds was not hindered by any physical want. Mindful of the oracle’s words, she quietly reminded Akhtoy that His Majesty’s food and drink must always be tasted, and she made sure that the finest and most varied selection of meats, dried fruits and vegetables was set before him.

With a deliberate calculation she decided that a female in his bed would bring him a healthful forgetfulness and accordingly she summoned Senehat, made her disrobe, examined her carefully, ordered Isis to wash, shave and perfume her, and sent her to Kamose’s quarters, after reminding her that no law in Egypt could compel her to comply with her mistress’s wishes in this matter and if she chose to decline the honour of sharing the King’s couch someone else would be eager to accept. Senehat complied, but soon returned to Tetisheri in tears. “I did nothing wrong!” she wailed. “But His Majesty would not have me! He sent me away! I am ashamed!”

“What for, you stupid girl?” Tetisheri said, not unkindly. “Be off to your cell and do not let your tongue waggle about this or I will cut it out.” Senehat retreated sniffling, and in the morning Kamose requested admittance to his grandmother’s domain. He kissed her but then stood back.

“I presume that it was you who sent Senehat to me, Tetisheri,” he said. “I am not ungrateful. I know how you fret over my welfare. But I am not interested in a sexual encounter, and even if I was I would choose someone more to my liking than a little servant, no matter how attractive she may be.”

“Then who is more to your liking?” Tetisheri asked him unrepentantly. He laughed, one of the few times she had seen his face relax into lines of mirth since his return, but then a curious expression, part sadness, part longing, filled his eyes.

“No one I have ever met,” he answered simply. “Not all men who sleep alone are fanatics or aberrants, Grandmother. I am perhaps close to the one but definitely not the other. Please stop trying to manipulate me.” He kissed her again and abruptly departed, leaving her disgruntled and puzzled.

In the weeks that followed both she and a worried Aahotep continued to watch him closely. His nature had always been a solitary one and he continued to prefer his own company, although he appeared regularly at the family’s feasts and performed the social duties relevant to his position as head of the household and Prince of Weset with faultless grace. There was a coldness about him, however, that did not abate, and when he was not engaged in necessary conversation, his face became like a closed door behind which he hid his true character.

He had rounded up those peasants who had not been conscripted into the army and put them to work on the construction of his prison out on the desert behind the city, and he could often be seen standing just out of reach of the dust stirred up by the swarms of toiling men, Behek lying in the shadow cast by his body and his guard beside him.

Only in the temple did he seem to melt, become fluid, his supple young spine bending easily in prostration to his god, his knees flexing as he went to the floor before the wide double doors of the sanctuary. The priest who measured the rising of the Nile calculated its full height that year as fourteen cubits, a magnificent outpouring of Isis’s tears, and the seven days of the Amun-feast of Hapi, god of the waters, that marked the middle of the month of Paophi, was a time of riotous celebration. Kamose remained in the temple for the full week, sleeping in a priest’s cell and joining Amunmose and the other priests in every ritual. It was as though proximity to the god offered him a peace he could not find outside the holy precinct, Tetisheri mused to Aahotep, as each day they met under a canopy in the garden or in the seclusion of Tetisheri’s shrouded bedchamber to share their anxiety. Somehow his demons are quietened in the presence of the god. He does not seem to be as driven as he was. There is flesh on his bones and his eyes are now clear. He speaks to me as affectionately as he used to do, yet there is now a place inside him that is completely inaccessible to everyone, including me. And I do not like the way he will sometimes sit and shiver and complain that he is chilled. He develops no outward illness. It is all inside him, in his soul, this icy darkness.

It seemed to her that her whole world had shrunk to the dimensions of Kamose’s mysterious ka. Nothing but Kamose filled her mind, no matter who she was with, but she knew that on such occasions her tongue spoke safely of other things. Aahotep’s cousin Nefer-Sakharu was spending less time with Ahmose-onkh as her grief began to subside, and under the pretext of allowing the woman to find peace in the retelling of her husband’s execution, Tetisheri was able to gain a clear picture of the events surrounding the sack of Khemmenu and the taking of Nefrusi. Doubtless Ankhmahor would have described other clashes if she had asked him to, but she felt that she had already stretched the limits of his loyalty to his King, and besides, she recognized the urge as an invitation to spawn a preoccupation as dangerous as her grandson’s.

News continued to arrive from the troops wintering in the north. Sometimes the information was from Ramose, but more often than not it was Hor-Aha who filled the papyrus with his dictation on the current state of the army. He always included respectful greetings to Tetisheri, who began to wonder if his words did not smack of a sycophantish insincerity. He was, after all, just a tribesman with a genius for military planning and the days of Seqenenra’s desperate campaign were long gone. Was Hor-Aha’s position going to his head? Kamose should not have made him an hereditary lord, Tetisheri decided. It would have been better to leave him a General and set one of the other Princes over him in a purely honorary capacity.

The month of Athyr began, always a time of boredom for Tetisheri, although the heat began to abate. Egypt had become a vast lake dotted with the upper halves of drowned palm trees. The fields lay under sheets of silvery water. The only building project was Kamose’s prison, an ugly thing, on which the peasants laboured when they were not sitting outside their huts gazing over their inaccessible arouras and calculating the amount of seed they would broadcast when the flood receded. Aahotep was presiding over the annual taking of inventory in the house. Even the temple was quiet. There were few festivals to relieve the interminable hours.

Ahmose was happy, however. Each morning he took his guards and his skiff, his throwing stick and his fishing gear, and disappeared into the marshes, to return in the late afternoon muddy and flushed, and fling his dead booty at the servants waiting to transform the limp ducks and gaping fish into that night’s fare. Aahmes-nefertari went with him sometimes, but as Athyr drew to a tedious close she goodnaturedly avowed that she could no longer keep up with him, preferring to spend her mornings in her mother’s company or playing board games with Raa.

On the evening of the last day of Athyr, when the family had eaten together and Tetisheri had retired to her quarters, she was surprised to learn that Ahmose was outside her door requesting admittance. Isis had just finished washing the cosmetics from her face and the henna from her hands and feet and was combing her hair. Tetisheri’s first impulse was to send him away until the morning when she might greet him fully painted, but she quashed the vanity of the thought and told Uni to let him come.

“Forgive me, Grandmother, I know it’s late,” he said as he crossed the tiled floor and came to a halt, bowing politely. “I wanted a few uninterrupted minutes with you. I have been selfish with my days, trying to crowd a year’s worth of hunting into these few months, and I have already been taken to task over it by my mother.” He smiled ruefully. “Even Aahmes-nefertari reminded me that I have not been giving my family the attention it deserves.”

“I am not in the least offended by your absences, Ahmose,” Tetisheri replied. “We see one another every evening at dinner. Your leisure time is yours to use as you see fit and as long as you have been doing your duty by your wife I will not complain. You do, however, choose an odd time to be remembering your obligation to me.” She waved Isis away and indicated the chair beside her couch. “You may sit.”

“Thank you.” He dragged the chair closer to where she was perched on the stool before her cosmetic table and collapsed into it with a gusty sigh. “To tell you the truth, I am becoming surfeited with killing wild things. Aahmes-nefertari says that I am growing up. She teases me.”

Tetisheri looked at him speculatively in the steady yellow glow of her lamps. Broad-shouldered and stocky, his skin gleaming with health, he filled the room with masculine vigour. His curly brown hair had been loosely tied back with a red ribbon, from which tendrils escaped to coil against his sturdy neck and frame an open, eager face. But his eyes were not smiling. They met hers gravely. She turned to Isis. “Leave the comb. You can go,” she said. “I will see myself to bed.” After the woman had closed the door quietly behind her, Tetisheri folded her arms. “You do not fool me, Prince,” she declared. “What do you want?”

“It is not a matter of wanting,” he said mildly. “I really do not want to consult you at all. I know that your heart belongs to Kamose and that you look out upon an Egypt coloured by his every breath. Do not deny it, Tetisheri. It does not hurt me, but it does make me wary of closing the distance between us.”

“I do not deny it,” she interjected. “But if you think for one moment that I would place my love for your brother above the good of Egypt, you are mistaken. To do so would dishonour your father’s memory and diminish me.”

“Perhaps. I have been hoping that you would summon me to discuss last season’s campaign or at least tell me what has been going on here, but no, you prefer to take your concerns to Ankhmahor and interrogate poor Nefer-Sakharu, seeing that Kamose will not talk to you. I am not blind. Are you afraid of me, Grandmother, or am I merely a witless trifle to be dismissed?” His tone did not change. It remained moderate. His hands lay loosely on the supports of the chair and there was no tension in his body, yet his very composure only served to accent the accusatory force of his words. Tetisheri struggled against the immediate flare of anger they lit in her. He is right, she thought bitterly. I should not have ignored him. I should have listened to the voice of my own intellect.

“I would have sought you out, Ahmose,” she said slowly, “but I did not want Kamose to imagine that he had forfeited my loyalty. That may seem to be a petty excuse, but Kamose is the King. He makes the decisions that will affect the progress of the war. I could not afford to close off the avenue between us.”

“So you took your concerns to Ankhmahor.” He uncrossed his legs and leaned back, linking his fingers together. “Why was that? Because he is older than I, more mature, hates hunting, what? And no, before you begin to protest, he has not approached me. I noticed that Kamose’s guard had been doubled, and when I asked Ankhmahor why, he told me that you had made the request. You must decide now, Grandmother, whether you will trust me or not. If not, then I will take my need for advice elsewhere.”

For a long time they sat motionless, staring at each other, Ahmose’s steady brown eyes meeting Tetisheri’s reflective gaze. The young whelp is challenging me, she thought, amazed. This is not jealousy, this is a demand to be accorded what he sees as his legitimate position at last. And he is right. If I attempt to justify my doubts about him now, he will judge me as weak and relegate me to the margins of his life. I must not even apologize. So be it. “I took one concern to Anhkmahor,” she began. “It was this.” She told him quickly of the omens and the oracle. “It may have nothing to do with the immediate future, but I deemed it wise to take every precaution,” she pointed out. “I also wanted Ankhmahor’s opinion of Kamose’s mental condition. If he breaks, the rebellion is doomed.” Ahmose’s eyebrows shot up.

“It is disconcerting to hear you move so rapidly from frigidity to complete surrender,” he commented. “You are a complex woman, Grandmother. I presume that the Prince assured you Kamose’s mind would remain whole, at least for the foreseeable future.”

“You speak of it so calmly,” Tetisheri almost shouted. “Have you lost your love for him already?”

“No!” He pounded the arm of the chair with one clenched fist. “But I have learned the hard habit of disconnecting myself from his agony! How else do you think I was able to stand beside him and watch what the orders that issued from his mouth did to his ka? He has no route of escape from his demons, Tetisheri. I am blessed. I can achieve forgetfulness in my wife’s embrace, in the flailing of a fish on my hook, in the second when my throwing stick flies upward and all my consciousness flies with it. These things snare my nightmares and smother them. Kamose is not so lucky. We killed all day, every day, for weeks on end. Kamose goes on killing even as he sits on the roof of the old palace and stares at the sky. It will be better for him to take up a real sword again.”

“So.” She was shaken and this time she could not hide it. “Tell me everything, Ahmose. I want to know it all.”

She sat very still while his voice filled the dim, warm air around them. He hid nothing from her, describing so calmly and vividly the stink of carnage, the conflagrations, the bewildered wails of the women, the restless nights often broken by the reports of scouts who moved up and down the river under the cover of darkness, that she did not even need to close her eyes to see it all unfold within her mind.

When he had finished recounting the details of Kamose’s sweep north, he turned to an assessment of each Prince’s position of responsibility, together with a conjecture regarding each one’s loyalty and attitude toward Kamose, himself and Hor-Aha. “Het-Uart will not fall this year unless Apepa can be lured out of his citadel,” he finished. “Kamose is determined to besiege the city again, but it will be time wasted. The Princes will remain with him for one more season, I think, but if there are no results by the next Inundation, they will begin to petition him to let them go home and see to their nomes and estates.”