House of Illusions (17 page)

Yet I knew I would not run. Not because I was too weak of character to deny her but because her words were true and I did not relish having her die after all the trouble I had gone to in order to preserve her life. I still had choices, though she had none. I would read her manuscript. If I was unconvinced by her story, I would turn her over to the proper authorities in Pi-Ramses where she would be charged with violating her exile. I would not give her to Paiis, however, and he would not dare to admit that he had already given a command for her secret arrest on his own recognisance. I thought of the body beneath my feet and surrendered to the inevitable.

She was gone for a long time and I was ready to abandon her after all when she appeared, silhouetted against the hot sky, and beckoned me outside. Thankfully I left that dim, airless room and stepped, blinking, into the glare of midmorning. She had washed and tied back her hair. Over one arm she carried a hooded cloak and in the other hand a leather bag which she thrust at me. “It was at my brother’s house for safe keeping,” she explained. “He has agreed to put about the rumour that I am ill and living with him and his family until I can resume my duties. My parents will be concerned and my mother will want to treat me, although she has retired as the village physician and midwife, but my brother will dissuade her somehow. I have seen little of her over the years. She has always disapproved of me. But my father will have to be told the truth eventually.” She shrugged but her voice was thick. “I love my brother dearly. He has cheered and supported me through every foolish adventure and if harm comes to him as a result of this I will have one more burden of guilt to carry, but I can think of nothing else to do.” She swung the cloak around her shoulders and pulled up the hood. “Let us go.”

“Is there nothing you want to take with you?” I asked, indicating her hut, and for answer she made a gesture, part violent repudiation and part regret, before turning away.

“I have lived two lives already,” she said bitterly. “I left Aswat all those years ago with nothing and I was sent back with nothing. I begin again from this arid womb and once more take nothing.” To that there was no answer.

Together we made our way under the shadow of the temple wall and followed the path as it ran between the trees and the river. The fields were empty, and the path, much to my relief, also deserted, though I could faintly hear the chanting of the priests as we passed the temple’s small canal and veered left. The ship could not be seen but I took her elbow, and pushing through the undergrowth, we came to the bay. I was all at once conscious of my filthy appearance. I was streaked with sand and soil that had stuck to my sweat, and I stank. While she waited just out of sight of the sailors whose desultory conversation drifted clearly on the limpid air, I submerged myself in the blessed coolness of the river and rubbed myself clean as best I could. Then we approached the craft. I called for the ramp to be run out and ushered her onto the deck.

A brief silence fell before I nodded to the waiting helmsman to mount to the helm, and the sailors busied themselves drawing in the ramp and preparing to push off. The boat quivered beneath me as it strained to free itself from the sand, and then we were swinging out into the north-flowing current and the lateen sails bellied with the breeze. We were free. We were going home, and elated and exhausted I lowered myself under the awning and the woman sank beside me. My captain approached, a question in his eyes, and I forestalled him.

“The mercenary had further business to attend to on behalf of General Paiis,” I said. “He will be returning to Pi-Ramses on his own. Tell the cook to bring food and beer for the prisoner and myself and have the cabin aired and cleaned for this woman.” He bowed and pattered away across the deck and I leaned back, closing my eyes. “I will eat and drink and then I must sleep,” I sighed. “When the cabin is ready you may occupy it.”

“Thank you,” she said tartly. “I did not expect to spend the next ten days or so sprawling here in the sight of your crew.” I smiled inwardly.

“You would if I ordered you to,” I responded, still with my eyes shut. “I am the master aboard this vessel and you are my prisoner.” She did not reply. I felt a tray being set by my thigh and caught a whiff of the beer that waited, dark and quenching, but for some time I did not move. Neither did she. When I finally opened my eyes and sat forward, I found her watching me, those clear blue eyes narrowed, her full mouth curved. “It is good,” she said.

As the miles lengthened between us and Aswat, I began to relax. No soldiers appeared on the bank, shouting and waving for us to stop, as I had vaguely feared. No vessel pursued us. With a northerly current and a following wind we sailed steadily on, putting in at sunset each evening for fire and food. We no longer went warily. There was no need. While the sailors built a cooking fire, the woman would dive from the deck and swim vigorously up and down, her black hair trailing, her arms appearing and disappearing like brown fish. She did so with a purpose that reminded me of the exercises my training officer prescribed for improving the drawing power of the muscles that bent my bow.

I had begun to read her story and was immediately ensnared by it. The flowing hieratic script in which she wrote was confident and beautiful, her power of self-expression compelling. These were not the painful scratchings of a village woman but the assured phrasings of a well-educated scribe.

I read of how she had been born in Aswat of a father who had been a Libu mercenary for Pharaoh in his early wars and had been rewarded with the usual three arouras of arable land. Her mother served the village as midwife. She told of her early years, of her longing to learn to read and her father’s refusal to allow her to enter the temple school, of how her brother had taught her secretly. She did not want to follow in her mother’s footsteps, as was the custom. Restless and dissatisfied, she longed for more, and that longing was assuaged when a great Seer came to Aswat to consult with the priests of Wepwawet. The girl had fled to the Seer’s barge in the middle of the night to beg him to tell her what the future held for her, and instead he had offered to take her away from Aswat. Here I had laid the manuscript aside in wonderment and hope, for the Seer’s name was Hui.

I approached her one early evening when the sun had just begun to tinge the sky with the orange of its setting and the water foaming by beneath our hull had already become opaque. She was leaning on the rail with her arms folded and her face raised to the light breeze. Egypt was sliding by in a peaceful panorama of palm-lined fields behind which the bare dun hills sprawled, and white herons stood and stared at us amid a scattering of stiff rushes. She smiled at me as I came up, the coppery light blushing her skin, and held back her hair against the fingers of the evening air. “I still cannot believe that I am not at home on my cot in Aswat, dreaming of this freedom,” she said. “It is a fragile thing, I know, and it may not last, but for these precious days I am spellbound with delight.” I looked into her face with a shiver of anticipation.

“In all this time I have not asked you your name,” I said levelly. “But I have begun to read the account of your life and I find that it is Thu.” She laughed.

“Oh, Kamen, please forgive me for my rudeness!” she exclaimed. “Yes, my name is Thu, short, common, and entirely Egyptian, although my father is a Libu. I should have offered it before.”

“You say in your manuscript,” I went on carefully, “that the great Seer Hui took you away from Aswat. You told me when we first met that you were a physician once. Did the Seer train you?” Her smile faded to be replaced by a peculiar expression, of sadness perhaps.

“Yes,” she replied simply. “He was, he probably still is, the most cunning and able physician in Egypt. He taught me well.” I swallowed, eager and yet terrified to ask the question burning on my tongue. Do not form the words, some cautious self warned. Leave all as it is. Keep your fantasies. I ignored it.

“A short while ago I consulted him regarding a disturbing dream I could not shed,” I said. “I am an adopted child. This dream had to do with my mother, my real mother. I had believed that she died giving birth to me. That is what I had always been told. In the course of his reading the Seer told me that my mother was a commoner and that my grandfather was a Libu mercenary. He also said that she was dead, but that he had known her slightly. According to him, she was beautiful and rich.” I hesitated. My chest felt tight and I drew a deep breath. “I was pleased to accept this assignment from my General because it meant that I could come to Aswat and ask you if you could recall ever meeting a woman like that. Perhaps even treating her. But it may be that I am looking at her now. Are you my mother, Thu? It is not so unlikely, is it? Your father is Libu. Your son would be as old as I am now, wouldn’t he?” Her expression became one of earnest sympathy and she laid a hand against my cheek.

“Oh poor Kamen,” she exclaimed. “I am so sorry. It is true that there are certain coincidences that appear to join my early circumstances with your own but they are nothing more than that. Coincidences. Pharaoh employed thousands of foreign mercenaries in his early wars and gave them Egyptian citizenship afterwards. They dispersed throughout Egypt, settling on the arouras that were their reward for service and marrying village girls. I was beautiful once and rich, but all I had belonged to Hui or was a gift from the King, and as for nobility, I was granted a title and lost it. I was born a peasant. Dreams of a rich and beautiful mother must be a common longing among those such as yourself, orphans without a history. I am truly sorry that I cannot help you, Kamen,” she went on gently. “The matter of your original parentage troubles you a great deal, I can see. I wish with all my heart that I had been able to bring you peace, but nothing links us save a few coincidences. Unfortunately there is no tangible evidence joining your blood to mine. I wish there were. I would be proud to call you my son.”

“But it is not impossible, is it?” I persisted. “Many coincidences may weigh against a lack of evidence. Supposing it is true? Supposing that you are indeed my mother and for reasons of their own the gods caused us to meet in the manner we did, to right some great wrong perhaps …” She looked at me quizzically and my voice trailed away.

“That is a leap we may not take, dear Kamen,” she said softly. “If you are right, then the gods will unveil the truth to us in their own good time. Until then I think that for the sake of your sanity you must presume that your mother is dead.” The Seer’s words to me had been almost identical, and I felt immediately the same flash of rebellion.

“No, I cannot,” I said emphatically. “She is already alive and breathing in my dreams and my imagination. I would like to question Hui further.” She did not reply.

After a moment she turned back to her contemplation of the evening and I joined the captain who was ready to put in for the night. As I walked across the deck, I remembered, as though it had happened in another life, the message Takhuru had sent to me just before I left the city. She had discovered something important among her father’s scrolls and so, I told myself resolutely, I may go on hoping, at least for a little while.

By the time we reached the mouth of the Fayum, I had finished reading the manuscript. Intriguing and horrifying, it nevertheless had the ring of truth about it and I put it back in the leather bag knowing that I would not give the woman over to the authorities. Young and innocent in spite of her ambition, used by unscrupulous men to advance a plot against the King, deserted by them when she failed, she was more sinned against than sinning, and her betrayal by the Seer, someone she both loved and trusted, had been a final and most bitter blow. For several hours I sat under the awning and pondered a tale of lust, treason and murder before turning my thoughts to the problem of what to do with her. I wished with all my heart that I might simply take her home and present her to the household as my mother, but she had spoken the truth when she said that nothing linked us but a series of vague coincidences and my own great need.

I knocked on the cabin wall and presently she appeared, tousled and sleepy, just as the canal leading to the wide Lake of the Fayum drifted past. She stood wrapped in a blanket, watching it, before lowering herself beside me. “Ramses gave me an estate on that Lake,” she said. “I was a good concubine. He was pleased with me. After I tried to kill him, he took it all away from me. My land, my title, my child.” She spoke without emotion. “I deserved death for trying to murder him but he relented and gave me exile instead. Those who used me in the attempt to rid themselves of a Pharaoh they despised went free. Paiis, Hui, Hunro, Banemus, Paibekamun.”

“I know,” I said. “I have read it all.”

“And do you believe my words?” It was the question she asked the most, her tone always urgent, and in that question she betrayed her own defencelessness. I clasped my hands around my knees and looked up to where the white triangles of the sails billowed and flapped against the blue of the sky.

“If General Paiis had not hired the assassin, I would doubt you,” I said. “Your story is compelling, but without the corroboration of an attempted murder I would not have believed.” Now I looked at her. “As it is, I must ask you how you intend to bring the plotters to justice after all this time. Do you have any friends in Pi-Ramses?”

“Friends?” she repeated. “No. There is Great Royal Wife Ast-Amasereth, if she still lives and still controls the King through her web of spies and her political acumen. She was no friend to me, but her interest lay in keeping Ramses secure on his throne, so perhaps she may listen to me.” She sighed. “But it was all too long ago. She may have died, or lost her authority. A royal court is an intricate game of move and countermove where everyone schemes openly or in secret to influence and thus share the power emanating from the Horus Throne. The dancers come and go, sway forward and swirl back. Old faces vanish. New ones take their place.” She pressed one finger to her temple and leaned against it in a gesture of both thought and defeat. “Pharaoh’s present malady is nothing more sinister than old age and he has suffered no accident or serious illness in years, therefore I presume that the plotters have relinquished their plan to destroy him. They still live and prosper. The only evidence against them was my word, is still my word, and I think that no one now will remember me. I want them to pay for what they have done to me, but I don’t know how to accomplish that end. All I can do is somehow bring myself to the feet of Ramses and beg to have my exile rescinded. Any revenge I take on Hui I must contrive myself.” She shot me a keen glance. “You wonder what to do with me when we reach the city,” she said. “But look at me, Kamen. I no longer resemble the pampered Lady I once was. I can sit in the market-place and hire myself out as a servant while I ponder what to do. I owe you my life. I do not intend to embarrass or endanger yours any further.”