Seer of Egypt (39 page)

“I expect he will. And this”—she held out the half-naked baby—“this is my son Amunhotep. He is only three weeks younger than Amunemhat, Chief Wife Neferatiri’s son, also by our husband Prince Thothmes.”

“Amunemhat is not as healthy as your child, Princess,” Heqareshu remarked.

Mutemwia laughed. “Everyone knows that you favour my brother-in-law over my husband, and me over the Chief Wife. Thothmes thinks it’s funny. He does not take offence even though he received far more slaps from you when he was little than Amunhotep did.”

Huy glanced at the baby to find his black eyes fixed solemnly on Huy’s own face. Suddenly a wide, toothless smile split the chubby cheeks and two fat arms flailed the air. Huy responded to the innocent delight in the movements. Reaching out, he allowed the diminutive fingers to find and curl about one of his own. At once he found himself and little Amunhotep standing in a rain of gold dust so thick that he could barely see the baby’s face. He could hear him chuckling, a sound of pleasure. As the gold cascaded through a ray of sunlight, it burst into a brief, brilliant shower of glittering specks before sifting to lie against Huy’s feet. The baby was soon covered in it, as though he lay under a blanket of cloth of gold. He let Huy’s finger go and began to bat at the dust, making eddies that swirled and danced between them. Then the gold was gone, the baby had begun to wriggle against his mother’s breast, and Heqareshu was crooking one imperious finger at the girls who had congregated farther along the passage and were watching.

“One of you useless geese go and find wet nurse Senay! The Prince is hungry!”

“I will remember you in my prayers to holy Mut, Great Seer,” Mutemwia said quietly, handing the baby to Heqareshu. “And when I make my next pilgrimage to her temple within the bounds of Ipet-isut, I shall offer her a gift so that she may ease your suffering. You saw something when my son grasped your fingers, didn’t you? May I know whether …” She paused, her hands clenching and unclenching. “May I … Will my baby grow to be healthy and strong?”

Heqareshu was already walking away. Huy felt as though he was about to collapse with the renewal of pain. He swayed. At once Mutemwia rapped out an order to the guard, who caught Huy and lowered him carefully to the tiles. “Go and fetch a litter and three more soldiers,” she told the man. “I will stay here until you return.” Huy had slumped against the wall and closed his eyes. The slap-slap of the guard’s sandals as he went away slowly faded. Huy felt her palm pressed lightly on his forehead. “You should stay here in the palace until tomorrow,” she said, and Huy realized by the nearness of her voice that she was either squatting or kneeling beside him. “My physician is very good. There are many quiet rooms where you will not be disturbed. Soldiers from Prince Amunhotep’s Division of Amun patrol these corridors.”

“Highness, you are very kind, but I would like to lie in the cabin of my own barge,” Huy answered, hearing the uncontrollable slurring of his words. Forcing his eyes open, he saw her worried face distorted by the dance of black and white patterns belonging to the worst of his headaches. “Your son … You need not fret about him, I think. He and I were enveloped in a storm of gold. He was laughing, playing with it. We were both so happy.” He felt the nausea begin to roil in his belly and he closed both his mouth and his eyes. There was a moment of silence. He felt her rise.

“Thank you, Son of Hapu,” she said. “I am glad that his destiny will be linked with yours.” Huy was too wretched to be surprised at her astuteness. The knowledge merely seeped into his consciousness to be lost under the hot deluge of his agony. She did not speak again.

Later, he heard the soldiers coming along the passage, heard the litter being set down, heard her instruct the men to accompany him right to his barge, then he was lifted gently onto soft cushions. He was able to keep the sickness inside him until the bearers stepped outside. He felt the heat of the sun strike the litter’s curtains. Pushing them back, he leaned out and vomited on the stone of the concourse.

11

H
uy remembered little of the journey home. He lay curled up on his travelling cot inside the barge’s cabin, forehead to knees, trying not to move for the stab of pain it would bring. He knew that they were sailing north with the sluggish current of a river nearing its lowest level, but the strong summer wind always blew south, forcing the sailors to reef the sail and get out the oars. The motion of the boat lulled him into periods of an uneasy sleep where the throbbing of his head pursued him, bringing with it nonsensical, fragmented dreams. He was vaguely aware of someone lifting him gently and placing a vial against his lips. He drank the poppy and slept, waking when the boards beneath him became still and the familiar voices of his sailors echoed across the dusk. They had tied up somewhere just north of Iunu, he surmised dully. Footsteps approached the cabin. He felt himself surveyed but was too tired to open his eyes. “We can’t give him any more poppy,” Tetiankh said. “It would kill him.”

“I’d like to help you to wash him, though,” Thothhotep replied. “Is there clean linen for the cot? He’s drenched in sweat.”

“I think so.” There was a pause. Huy wanted to tell them to leave him alone but could only grunt. “If we both try to lift him, we’ll cause him distress,” Tetiankh went on.

Then Anhur spoke from farther away. “I’ll lift him and hold him until you’re done. Change the linen and wash him while he’s in my arms. He needs a physician, but I suppose we’ll be home before one could be sent for. We should have put in at Iunu and sent word to the Governor. He and Ishat would have taken proper care of him.” The man’s forthright, rough tones had been drawing closer. Huy found himself in Anhur’s careful embrace. Anhur smelled of woodsmoke and security. Huy relaxed against him.

He slept through the night, aware that his dreams were becoming more coherent as both the pain and the poppy ebbed away. By the time the barge nudged his watersteps not long after dawn, he was able to walk shakily along the ramp and up the steps, and negotiate the short path to his own little entrance hall with Anhur and Tetiankh’s support. “Why was this attack so bad, Huy?” Anhur wanted to know as he and the body servant lowered Huy onto his couch.

Huy looked up slowly. The residual pangs only struck him now if he moved too fast. “I gave a Seeing to Prince Amunhotep,” he said, aware that he sounded as hoarse and weak as an old man. “Then I met the Princess Mutemwia on my way out of the palace. She was cuddling her son. When he grasped my fingers, a Seeing came to me without my will. Both visions were very powerful. One immediately after the other was too much. Tetiankh, bring me water and then I must sleep again. Was I holding a leather bag full of gold when the guards brought me aboard the barge?”

Tetiankh nodded. “Thothhotep took it. She will have given it to Merenra to store.”

“Tell Merenra to dole it out to the next crowd of petitioners and to give the bag away also. I don’t want anything more to do with it.” He felt his eyelids begin to close, but it was good, it was healthy. The couch smelled of rinsing vinegar, and the voices of his lame gardener Anab and of Amunmose, his under steward, came drifting through the slats of the blind on the window. “Tell Thothhotep to be ready to take a dictation this afternoon,” he murmured. “Thank you both. Water, Tetiankh.” He was already half asleep by the time the man returned with the cup. He drank deeply, turned his cheek into his pillow, and let the room slide away.

He woke to darkness and a momentary disorientation, knowing that something had brought him to an abrupt consciousness and that it was night. He had slept through the whole of the day and, judging by the deep silence of the house, much of the night as well. He sat up, aware that every trace of pain had gone and his strength had been restored. Only the dryness in his mouth and a bitterness at the back of his throat caused by the poppy reminded him that he had been viciously attacked. He was reaching for the water jug and the cup that Tetiankh always left beside the couch when he heard a sound he instantly recognized as the reason why he had woken. It could have been the sudden howl of a desert wind, and for a moment Huy believed it to be so, but then he remembered that he was in the centre of Ta-Mehu, the Delta, and the desert was far away. Besides, there was an element of life, of blood, in the cry. It came again, nearer this time, rising mournfully and ending with a series of moans, and something answered it, far away.

Huy left the couch, grabbed up his kilt of the day, and tied it around his waist as he made his way cautiously to the door. Outside in the passage, there was more light. The moon, although full, was setting, its pallid rays diffusing through the wide aperture leading onto the roof. Huy had the sensation of wading through them as he came to the sill, stepped over it, and emerged beside the wind catcher that funnelled the northern breezes down into the reception room below. Walking to the roof’s edge, he peered out and down. The garden was drowned in darkness. Only the tips of the palms he and Ishat had seen Seshemnefer plant were visible. As his eyes adjusted to the dimness, he could just make out the bulk of the kitchen below and to the right, and, farther along, the cells where his soldiers and lesser servants slept. To the rear, the clay dome of his small granary could be seen as a black curve against the equally dense blackness of the estate’s sheltering wall.

With a suddenness that shocked him, the wail came again, surely from something hiding between the house and the wall. Huy’s heart began to pound. The spirits of the dead roamed about sadly at night, those whose tombs were neglected by relatives who ought to have been bringing flowers and food to them at the Beautiful Feast of the Valley each year. Sometimes the spirits became vengeful, tormenting their kin with evil luck. But after a moment of panic, when Huy searched his mind for anyone who might haunt him and came up with no name, he realized for the second time that the sounds, though eerie, were being made by a living being of some kind.

Retracing his steps, he hurried along the passage. Tetiankh was still asleep on his pallet just beyond Huy’s door. With the long practice of the well-trained servant, he came awake at once when Huy touched his shoulder. “Something strange is in the garden,” Huy told him as they descended the stairs. “Go and wake Anhur, but don’t shout for the guard posted at the rear wall.”

The air outside was hot and stale. It was now the beginning of Epophi, the third of the four months of the season Shemu, a time when the heat became progressively more intense until well after Isis had cried and her tears had flooded the fields. Tetiankh disappeared in the direction of Anhur’s cell, his kilt a receding smudge of grey in the gloom, and as he went, Huy heard a curious snuffling coming from the vegetable plots, now verdant with the spears of lettuce, leeks, and garlic, fronds of onion, fat cabbages, and the low, snaking stems of melons in which the fruit rested. That sound was even more sinister to Huy than the howls, and he halted, able now to see a glint of moonlight on the narrow irrigation channels Seshemnefer had dug, which joined the wider canal the soldiers had made from the river to water the new palms. The channels were rippling almost imperceptibly. Something had disturbed the water.
An animal is feeding amongst the vegetables,
Huy thought with a gush of relief.
But what animal can make those terrible cries and snorts?

The answer came at once, as though he had asked the question aloud. A shape appeared, wide-shouldered, skinny-haunched, loping across the grass into the small patch of worn earth where he stood by the rear entrance. He could see it quite clearly as it squatted on the lighter ground and stared at him, its black eyes like pebbles, its pink tongue hanging over razor-sharp teeth. For several heartbeats Huy was paralyzed with fear. He wanted to turn and flee into the house, but he could not will his feet to lift. The animal had become as motionless as he, its gaze unblinking. He could hear it panting. He thought he could smell it, a rank, meaty odour wafted to his nostrils by the breeze, but there was no breeze. The air was still. At last he found his voice.

“What do you want?” he croaked. “What are you doing here? Did Imhotep send you? Did Anubis?”

Its stare did not waver at the sound of his voice, and gradually Huy became convinced that there was reproach behind those dark beads, a judgment coupled with a latent ferocity directed at him and straining to be released.
It’s going to kill me.
The thought came clearly and calmly into his mind.
Atum has sent it to destroy me because of my cowardice before the King, because I have failed the god. It will leap upon me in a moment and tear at my throat with those pointed teeth, and I shall feel its stiff bristles graze my cheeks as I fall with it fastened to my flesh.

Footsteps pounded in the darkness and then Anhur was skirting the beast and its gaze was broken. It rose and shambled away unhurriedly, and Huy found that he was trembling. “A hyena!” Anhur exclaimed. He was naked but for a loincloth, his brown, muscled body so full of vitality and reassuring health that Huy felt his perceptions return to a semblance of normality. “What is it doing so far from the desert? And how did it get into the garden? From the path by the watersteps, I expect.”

“It will have made a mess of Anab’s work in its hunt for mice. Anhur, it had black eyes and a pink tongue. I thought hyenas were yellow-eyed, with black tongues.”
That was what I saw in the Beautiful West when I stood before the blessed Imhotep and the creature dozing beside him,
Huy told himself.
I was uneasy then. I am doubly so now, wondering what this means.
“I don’t want it anywhere near me!” he burst out. “Catch it and take it away!”

Anhur glanced at him curiously. “Easier to kill it.”

“No! No. Just … get rid of it.”
It must not be destroyed,
Huy knew with certainty.
If I kill it, I will not be forgiven. But why? Why?

Tetiankh came into sight with Khnit the cook behind him, bleary-eyed and bare-footed, a sheath pulled carelessly over her head. She bowed to Huy. “Master, I’m sorry the animal got free. I thought I’d penned it securely. Perhaps Anhur would help me catch it and put it back.”