Ancient Evenings (96 page)

Next day, no one knew who had been chosen as the King’s substitute. Indeed, he did not declare himself until the hour when Usermare asked for a Hittite to meet Him on the field. Then the fellow stepped forward. He was the First Charioteer and a great swordsman.

“Was he,” asked Usermare, “the Hittite with the crazy eye?”

“I do not know of whom You speak,” She said, “but I would ask: Is his eye like the cast in the eye of Amen-khep-shu-ef?” Usermare gave a low moan. “They are alike,” He said, “but never in my meditations have I seen them together.”

She nodded.

“Now, I will never see them apart,” He said. He must have squeezed Her hand for She gave a small cry of pain. When He apologized, She said in the sweetest voice, “I had forgotten how Your people feel much enthusiasm for the fingers of the slain.” My Pharaoh laughed uneasily as if He did not know whether to approve of what She said, but then She added, “Our Hittite men are vain and very fierce. They say that what the Egyptians did on the night after the battle was effeminate.”

“Effeminate?”

“I used to hear them say that if Metella had been with them, and they won the battle, they would not have collected hands, but heads. They would have cut off the head and neck of the little man who lives between the legs. Egyptians treated in such manner make a good soup, they used to say.”

Usermare sighed. “I do not know the Hittites,” He told Her. “I would not wish to sit in My garden with the head of My enemy on a tree.”

“But You do not have to live with the evil fortunes of My people,” She said. “Metella’s headache was gone by the following night, and he wished to come out from the gates and destroy You. Yet, he could not. The night that came after the day of battle had a full moon. So the next day was Sappattu.”

Gloom came to Usermare. As I listened to Her words, I knew they were like vines that would grow into His pride.

“When You left in the morning,” She said, “My people watched from our parapets. We saw great disorder but could not move. We were in the Day of Sappattu. Our only consolation was that the Egyptians were so ignorant of our weakness on this day that they did not know enough to attack our walls. So we watched You march away. I was not to be born for seven more years, but I heard the story many times. In My sleep, I still watch the Egyptians leave.

“When You were all gone, My people came out and hunted through the fields for our dead and we brought them back. That night, we wailed inside our city. We gave voice to great laments in the hope that would enable us to reach into the true darkness of the night. The moon was still full, so we could see the terrible fields on the other side of the river, and because of that sight, we had to descend, each of us, into the deepest caves of our heart where no moonlight can ever reach. There we wept for the despair of all the Gods who are imprisoned in each mountain. If even one of Them as great as Marduk could hear our sorrow, He would no longer feel bound by the indifference of the other Gods. He would know our pity was for Him. So the wailing of the people who walked through the streets of Kadesh on this night was full of suffering in order that the stone hearts of the Gods might be touched.

“Yet to weep with such force called for more lamentation than can be known from a day of battle. We cried, therefore, for those ills which continue through the years. We wailed for those who were far away, and for gardens that were barren. We wailed for empty furrows and for all our children who had died too young, and for dead wives and husbands. We wailed for the suffering of the old, and for the dry rivers and the scorched fields, for the marshes that choke the fish, and the forests that never saw the sun, the desert that knows no shade. We wept for the shame of the vineyard whose grapes are bitter, and we wailed out of all those hours that are heavy with oppression because of all the ills that are near to us, but unknown.

“Here, in this land,” She said, “you Egyptians do not wail. You celebrate. You feast with your Gods. We cry for ours. We know how They suffer. We wail at how They are blasphemed by us, and we wail for the wives whose husbands know other women, and the mothers who give birth to monsters. Sometimes we wail for those who do not know how to weep.” She began to sing to Herself, but in a dirge of such misery, so strange to Usermare that He did not know how to reply, and He put on His Double-Crown and went out silently. Nor did He give me a sign to follow.

Being left without a word, I was reduced to the ranks of those menials whose most serious duty is to wait. I lay, therefore, on a couch in the anteroom while She paced about and, at last, lay down, and after a time, was asleep. That, I discovered, was more than I could ask for myself. The woes of Usermare weighed heavily on my own until I began to question the value of the powers Honey-Ball had bestowed, for now I lived in the same dread as my Pharaoh. I even knew that He was alone and stood in water up to His knees in the great wading pool that was the Eye of Maat. Small insects hovered about Him in the dark as He brooded on what Rama-Nefru had said, and tears came to His eyes. Her hair had fallen out. He did not know if the loss had come from shifting the stones of Seti and Thutmose, but He had prayed for the return of Her hair, and it did not return. He thought of the convulsions that had been loosed in Her while She slept and how, as He held Her, She snored in much fury, a desperate sound to come from a young throat. It was like the grunt of wild boars in the mountains of Syria. She had snored again last night, and He had found Himself longing for the perfumes of Nefertiri. Now, He did not know how to make amends. Rama-Nefru had said that Egyptians do not wail.

He thought of the ceremonies in the Temple of Osiris at Abydos. Thirty-five years gone by, back in the year of His ascension to the throne, He had attended such ceremonies, and no one had ever heard sounds to compare to the terrible wails that came out of the men and women who stood outside the gates of the Temple at Abydos. Their cries could have come from the earth itself, out of the rocks and roots and uncut stones of temples not yet built. And so He sighed, and stepped out of the water of the Eye of Maat and returned at last to Her room and lay beside Her through the night. But She did not stir, and in the darkness He had many thoughts of the Temple of Osiris at Abydos for when He was a young man in the first months of the year He was awaiting His coronation while the body of His Father, Seti, was being prepared for burial and lay its seventy days in a sacred bath of natron, He thought often of the God Osiris even as the flesh of His own Father turned to stone, and having traveled up and down the Nile to visit the sacred cities at Ombos and On, and the Temple of Ptah at Memphi, He had come at last with fear and expectation to Abydos, the most sacred of all cities, the first, in truth, of the sacred places for the head of Osiris had been buried here by Isis.

“I know of this” said my Father most suddenly, and I could see how ready He was to speak for His thoughts had stirred as suddenly as we catch a stick that is thrown to us in a dream. “Yes,” said my Father. “When He came back to the bed of Rama-Nefru indeed He listened again to the wails of the multitude at Abydos, but, in the darkness, I think He ceased to brood on Her and remembered instead His visit to His Father’s small temple at Abydos. Is that true?”

“It is exact,” said Menenhetet.

“Yes, I know His thoughts,” said Ptah-nem-hotep. “The temple to His Father was not finished, but abandoned by the river, and Usermare brooded upon the last years of His Father’s illness, for Seti had been too weak to supervise His works, and died in gloom. Seti may have been a strong man, but He died in great fear of the ignorance of His Father, the first Ramses, Who would not know how to welcome Seti when He came to join the body of Osiris in the Land of the Dead. So, Seti knew a terrible fear of His own death, and when He spoke of Osiris it was always with the greatest veneration, indeed, no one was more devoted to the Temple of Osiris than Seti. Before so great a God, Seti even hesitated to say His own name. He was afraid that its likeness to the name of Set would prove offensive. When He began the new Temple at Abydos (that Usermare now found unfinished) those priests who would serve as His architects had informed Seti with much trembling that a house of worship dedicated to Osiris could not allow Set to have a place among the Gods inscribed on the walls. These priests could hardly speak after this for they were next obliged to tell Seti that His Name could only be written here as Osiris the First. Seti did not raise His sword, His club, nor His flail. Instead, He gave assent. Just so great was His fear. Usermare, sitting in His Father’s unfinished temple, was moved by the death of His Father and made a vow to finish the temple.

“Now, thinking of that vow He had never fulfilled (and later so abused as to transport some of these stones upriver from Abydos to His own Festival Hall of King Unas) He rose from the bed of Rama-Nefru in much uneasiness, and returned to the wading pool to greet the rising of the sun on this, the Fourth Day. After which He made His way to the Throne Room. There, while in the Seat, He hoped to meditate upon the ceremony that would greet the Day of Osiris to be celebrated here this morning in Thebes, instead of at Abydos, this year of the Godly Triumph.

“Yet, even as He sat in the embrace of Isis and knew Her as His Seat, so did the name of Set come into His meditation, and disturb His calm, and He could not contemplate the ceremonies He must perform today. He thought instead of the first year of His marriage to Nefertiri when, to please His father, He named Their first son Set-khep-shu-ef, and spoke the name of this son often to Seti. Yet so little had He fulfilled His vows to His Father, that even as Seti had been obliged to honor the name of Osiris more than His own, so did Usermare, after His Father’s death, change the name of Set-khep-shu-ef to Amen-khep-shu-ef. Now, He shivered in the embrace of Isis and His thoughts were unsettled. Even when the High Priest said: ‘You are upon Your Throne, Great King, and Her name is Isis: The body and blood of Your Throne is Isis,’ the incantation did not compose Him. He grew mournful on the Throne of Isis. With His death, Horus would no longer live in Him, nor would He live in Horus. He would enter the Land of the Dead and dwell in the Lord Osiris. But would the love of Isis belong to Him? Who could say that His own women loved Him like Isis?

“Full of the unhappiness of these thoughts, He left the Throne Room and mounted His palanquin. On this day, Rama-Nefru would ride with Him. Even as He saw the pallor of Her skin in the sunlight against the brilliance of Her golden wig, He knew that She was ill. When She sat beside Him and did not offer Her hand, but only looked with no smile on the cheers of those who had been invited this morning into the Court of the Great Ones, so did He shiver, and was most morose as He stepped down from the Golden Belly and knelt before the shrine of Osiris. He tried to think of the grain that would come from the earth, but He could only brood upon the God Osiris trapped beneath.

“Yet, as the priests sang, He remembered how the women used to call forth the name of Isis in the fields before the first ear of corn was cut. They would thresh the corn and in the winnowing, Isis would rise to heaven.

“Before the shrine of Osiris, He listened to the priests sing:

“ ‘Osiris is Unas in the chaff.

“ ‘He has loathing of the earth.

“ ‘Oh, dry His wounds.

“ ‘Cleanse Him with the Eye of Horus

“ ‘For Unas is up and away

“ ‘To heaven!

“ ‘To heaven!’

“Now, Usermare saw the Pharaoh Unas rising to heaven and in His heart, He tried to remember how in His dreams, He and Unas used to eat the flesh of the Gods.”

It was here my Father ceased to speak. “I would go on,” He said, “but now there are too many ceremonies to follow and much din before Me, and I do not want to risk the headache of Metella. Tell Me, therefore, of what you did on that day, and if you were with Nefertiri. That is what I cannot see.”

Again, my great-grandfather nodded. “It is so,” he said. “I was with Nefertiri.”

ELEVEN

“In truth,” said Menenhetet, and his tone was measured (as if, by the balance of Maat, it was proper that now he should speak and Ptah-nem-hotep rest) “I felt close in my thoughts to Nefertiri all the while I stood in the retinue of Usermare as He knelt before the shrine of Osiris, but it was only after He returned to the palanquin and was carried with Rama-Nefru back to the Throne Room to dress for another ceremony that I began to feel Nefertiri was not only thinking of me—and for the first time in these four days!—but that She wanted me. So, I left my place in the retinue, which, by now, offered no difficulty. Visiting Notables were everywhere eager to slip in. I slipped out, therefore, and left the gate of the Palace to wander through the crowds of Thebes, drunk already this morning from the night before, and again I could feel Nefertiri as if She were about, such certainty, however, much bespattered in the din, the dust and smoke, not to speak of the fearful number of interruptions from all too many of the crowd, who, seeing my fine dress, knew I belonged in the Court of the Great Ones, and therefore wished to be of service, or merely wished to talk to me—if only to be able to say they had spoken to a Notable. I returned to the Court of the Great Ones swearing to myself that I would never go out in fine dress again without a chariot to separate me from the people! So soon as I was back in the Columns of the White Goddess, therefore, I rummaged in the room of a carpenter and took up his oldest rags to leave again by the servants’ gate wearing no more than a breechcloth and a headband.