Seer of Egypt (34 page)

“No.” Huy stirred, worry making him restless. “As far as I know from Ramose’s letters, there’s no sickness in the divine family. The Horus-in-the-Nest Prince Amunhotep is well. The King’s second son, Thothmes, and his wife the Princess Neferatiri produced the baby Amunemhat, and Thothmes and Second Wife Mutemwia produced another Amunhotep. Thothmes is only seventeen. Neferatiri is sixteen. Mutemwia is comparatively ancient at nineteen.” He forced a laugh. “Yet none of them have expressed a need for me. I did See for the King a long time ago, as you know. I also saw for the Noble Heqareshu, Prince Thothmes’ Nurse. Since then, apart from the odd Governor or two, the nobility has left me alone.” He rubbed his eyes with the heels of his hands and, placing his elbows on the desk, rested his cheeks in his palms. “If the One left Mi-wer on the fifteenth of this month and the herald with this scroll left at the same time, the King would have arrived at Mennofer on the seventeenth. The herald, having to take the desert track to Iunu and then a boat to Hut-herib, came here yesterday, the eighteenth. I suppose we should go back to Mennofer at once, but in spite of the urgency of the summons I need a day or two at home to prepare myself for whatever the King might say. This distresses me, Thothhotep. I’m not sure why.”

“Do you want to dictate an answer?”

“No. We’ll just have Tetiankh and Iny repack a few things and leave early on the twenty-first.” He let his forearms drop onto the polished surface of the desk. “Let us eat quickly, and then I must sleep. I’m very tired.”
I wanted to savour being home,
he thought as they walked to the reception hall, where dishes steamed and Amunmose waited to serve them.
I wanted to go and watch the harvest continuing on my land, perhaps even winnow a little myself. I wanted to relish the wait for word of the latest incense caravan.
His appetite had left him, but he forced himself to eat, knowing that he needed the nourishment. In spite of the panoply of stars blazing above him as he lay on the roof, and a welcome quiet after the noise of Heby’s street, he did not fall asleep for a long time.

Tetiankh did not question Huy’s order to pack for a return to Mennofer. He asked how long the visit would be. Huy had no answer.
I should stay with Heby and Iupia, but I don’t want to,
Huy thought dismally as he sat staring moodily at the brilliant shaft of morning light falling through the one clerestory window in his office and forming an irregular square on the tiled floor.
Young Amunhotep-Huy is a disruptive influence at the best of times, and I shrink from having to help Heby deal with him when I am preoccupied. Inns are usually rooms above beer houses, noisy and cramped. I suppose we can sleep aboard the barge. It’s warm enough to spend the night on the deck. Or nights.
Irritably, he shouted for Amunmose and, when his under steward’s lively face appeared in the doorway, told him to make sure Tetiankh included cushions and blankets among the possessions that would be hauled aboard the vessel.
I wish I could talk to Henenu about this,
his thoughts ran on.
She would calm these irrational fears of mine, give me confidence to face His Majesty. Are you not a Great Seer? she would say, the cowrie shells festooning her hair clicking together as she leaned towards me. Is your name not known in every Egyptian household? Are you not a lesser lord of time? How can you be afraid?
He smiled grimly into the quiet room.
I miss you, Rekhet, and I can be afraid because everything in me, ka, heart, khu-spirit, is shouting a warning. My life has been too regular, too predictable, for many years. Once more Atum requires a change, and I am not ready.

He lingered on his estate for another day, out of an uncharacteristic pride determined to show his power by keeping Amunhotep waiting but also in a deep reluctance to discover what the King desired of him. He even considered sending excuses south—I have fallen ill, my mother is sick, my barge has been holed—but finally he recognized his cowardice. In the cool of the following dawn, he stepped unwillingly onto the boat’s ramp, Thothhotep behind him, and gave the order to cast off.

Leaning on the deck rail and watching the riverbank slide by, it seemed to him that the water was at a level considerably lower than it had been a scant three days before, giving off a rank odour of slimed reeds and mud that underpinned the tributary’s usual scent of lush green growth even in the weeks before the Inundation.
It’s my own inner disturbance that I smell,
he thought. Behind him, Tetiankh was attaching the awning to the wall of the cabin, stepping around Thothhotep, who was already ensconced on cushions, sipping water from the cup Iny had handed her and contentedly watching the sky, where a falcon swooped above them. This time Huy’s rowers were at work, fighting the slow current. The sound of his captain calling the beat was soothing. The journey to Mennofer would be a few hours longer than usual.

They put in at sunset, and the tired rowers left the barge to sit or lie on the grass of the bank while Khnit and her assistants lit a fire and prepared an evening meal of fried fish and cabbage stew. Huy and Thothhotep waited together in silence for the food to be brought. Huy’s abstracted mood seemed to have infected his scribe. He knew that she loved being on the river as much as Ishat had. Her enjoyment was less exuberant than Ishat’s had been, gentler but no less deep; her observations of the scenery floating past were made calmly, but her language was rich. So far she had said little, in spite of the clouds of dust hanging over the groups of reapers plying their sickles while the golden crops collapsed before them, and the steady stream of other craft heading to nearby Iunu or the cities far to the south.

After they had eaten in a wordless companionship, she summoned Iny and disappeared, the body servant laden with natron, cloths, and oils. Later, returning clean-faced, her short hair slicked back with oil, she bade Huy a solemn good night and lay down at the foot of the cabin. Iny covered her and, bowing to Huy, retreated to the sailors’ fires beginning to twinkle in the deepening dusk. Huy himself was too restless to sleep. Taking Anhur, he wandered along the tributary’s path. They were very close to the fork of the Delta where the river branched into several arms. Iunu itself sat almost upon that spot. Huy, pacing beside the comforting bulk of his soldier, remembered his despairing walk along this same rutted road on his way north from Iunu to an unknown fate in his hometown. The memory did not soothe him.

In the late afternoon of the following day, having passed Iunu in the morning, they went by the northern mouth of the drainage canal that ran behind Mennofer, and the northern suburbs of the city began. The watersteps of the nobles broke the line of palms and other trees overhanging the river path at regular intervals. The houses lying beyond them were seldom glimpsed. Huy knew that behind the meticulously tended lawns and gardens, with their sheltering mud-brick walls, lay a maze of narrow streets and tiny row houses, markets, beer houses, and simple shrines. Behind this teeming hive lay the Ankh-tawy district, stretching in a wide arc to the southern canal—a place of respectable artisans who cultivated a few cramped arouras to augment their rations of bread, beer, onions, and garlic received from the overseers who directed their work in the place of the dead across the canal and out onto the desert.

East of the Ankh-tawy lay the heart of Mennofer, first the temples of past kings, then the District of Ptah, with its mighty temple and sculpture-lined avenues leading north to the famous White Walls, the ancient Citadel, and the temple of Neith, goddess sister to Osiris; and south to another small canal, the South District, and the temple of Hathor of the Sycamore. Then the south suburbs began, mirroring those of the north. A short way farther east, running all the way from the Citadel south to where the avenue from the temple of Ptah became the canal, a high wall protected the Fine District of Pharaoh, with its palace, harem, and gardens. South of this wall, hard up against it, the buildings of the arsenal and the homes of the sailors and soldiers stationed in the holy city, crowded against the great Peru-nefer dockyards and piers and the Amun shrine.

Between the Fine District of Pharaoh and the river lay the centre of Mennofer, busy and wealthy with commerce, and the wide watersteps where dozens of craft of every description jostled against each other. Two canals ran through it. The southern canal ran straight to the temple of Ptah, but the northern waterway, heavily guarded all along its length, led directly to the palace itself; and it was close to this canal that Huy’s captain found a narrow berth and the helmsman expertly jockeyed the barge into it. Even before the ramp was run out, a phalanx of soldiers, their short kilts sporting the blue and white of royalty, had gathered above the watersteps. Their captain stepped forward and bowed. “This way is restricted,” he called to Huy, who was facing him on the deck. “If you have business with the ministers of the Horus Throne, state it now. Otherwise you must move south to the public watersteps.”

“I am the Seer Huy son of Hapu,” Huy called back. “The One has summoned me.”

He was surprised when the man nodded rather than sending away for confirmation. “His Majesty is temporarily in residence, Great Seer. My orders are to have you, and you alone, escorted to the palace when you arrive. Food and drink can be provided for your entourage if you so wish.”

“I go nowhere without my scribe and the captain of my guard,” Huy protested, indicating a painted and perfumed Thothhotep hovering at his elbow.

Even before he had finished speaking, the other was shaking his head. “The command is absolute,” he said tersely. “You are to present yourself alone. You will be poled along the canal and met at the concourse.”

Huy hesitated, one thought in his mind. What if the sense of foreboding that had dogged him ever since Thothhotep read him the scroll was a warning that Amunhotep wished to harm him? Perhaps even have him quietly killed?
But that’s ridiculous,
he told himself.
You’ve done nothing to incur the King’s displeasure, and besides, you are too well known throughout the country to suddenly vanish.
Nevertheless, visions of his bloated body being pulled from the river, or bloodied with stab wounds and found out on the desert, half eaten by jackals, or even headless and unidentified in some city ditch, flashed across his inner eye.

“Master, you need to decide, and really there is no decision to be made,” Thothhotep murmured, handing him the scroll. “This is a direct summons.”

For answer, Huy stepped onto the ramp. “Make sure that my people are given whatever sustenance they require,” he said brusquely to the soldier, very aware of Anhur glowering in disapproval at his back. Reaching the end of the ramp, he took the few steps to one of the waiting skiffs and got into it. At once the waiting sailor bowed to him and, lifting his pole, shoved off. The skiff began to drift towards the towering wall, with its shadowed mouth into which the canal seemed to disappear. Huy sat tensely on the cushion provided. He had never felt more vulnerable.

Soon the little boat reached the wall and slid under it, coming to a bumpy halt before a long stone concourse that ran away to a series of pillars fronting the imposing palace which had been the northern centre of power in Egypt for many hentis. Blue and white flags rippled from tall poles set in the hands of massive stone figures seated to either side of the building’s entrance. Double doors of beaten copper had been folded back, the golden brown metal blindingly reflecting the westering sun, whose strength was still white-hot. Guards stood ranged along the length of the palace, impassively watching the few well-dressed people who were hurrying across the concourse. Most were accompanied by servants holding linen sunshades over their heads. Huy got out of the skiff and, feeling the hot stone burn beneath his sandals, began to walk forward. It seemed to take him a long time to reach the blessed shadow cast by the building, but at last he stepped from heat to coolness and came to a halt.

At once one of the guards approached him, a man in a short blue and white kilt, his broad chest hidden under a leather jerkin, a sheathed sword hanging from his sturdy belt. A plain white linen helmet edged in blue framed a brown face out of which two dark eyes scanned Huy shrewdly. Huy, staring back with the vague certainty that he had met this soldier before, noted the golden Supreme Commander’s arm bands gripping the well-muscled upper arms, and scoured his mind for a name.

The man smiled slightly and bowed. “Great Seer, you are expected, although His Majesty did not know how long it would be before you were free to answer his summons. Perhaps you do not remember me. I was little more than a lad when I accompanied His Majesty to your town, before he marched into Rethennu. At that time I was Commander-in-Chief of His Majesty’s ground forces. Now I have the honour of controlling the navy as well.”

Huy’s brow cleared. “Wesersatet! Of course! The last time I saw you, you were clad in a cloth-of-gold kilt and decked in jaspers!”

“And you were anxious and a little afraid of us painted and perfumed courtiers. Believe me, your presence aboard
Kha-em-Ma’at
had us agog with curiosity about you under our nonchalance!”

“
Kha-em-Ma’at
,” Huy repeated. “‘Living in Truth.’ The name of the royal barge. I had forgotten that, but not how I saw a great victory for the King in Rethennu. It was a long time ago, Commander.”

Wesersatet gestured to one of the guards. “Tell a servant to fetch Maani-nekhtef at once. Tell him that the Great Seer is waiting.” The man passed beyond the entrance just far enough to speak to someone hovering inside. Wesersatet turned back to Huy. “Please take the stool. The Chief Herald will be here presently and will take you to the Throne Room. I believe that His Majesty has risen from the sleep and is consulting his ministers there. Shall I summon Men? Are you hungry or thirsty?”

Men,
Huy thought swiftly.
The chief steward. He gave me my first taste of the carob drink, and a dose of poppy so strong that I could hardly walk out of the King’s presence in the cabin without stumbling.
A wave of desire for the drug washed over him. Grimly, he pushed it away.