House of Illusions (43 page)

But the moment the blue and white liveried Royal Under Steward appeared at my door, bowed, and delivered the command to stand before the Lord of All Life the same evening, all my doubts fled. Calmly I thanked the man, and when he had gone I sent for Isis. We discussed my apparel, perfume, jewellery, and when those things were decided upon I sent for a priest. Behind the closed door of my cell he lit incense, and while I prostrated myself before the small statue of Wepwawet I had managed to acquire from the harem storehouses, he intoned prayers of praise and supplication to my totem. I had an overwhelming sense of the god’s affectionate concern. Yes, I thought with my nose against the floor matting and my eyes tightly closed, I have always relied on you, Opener of the Ways, to get me out of every foolish predicament I put myself in and you come to my aid because from the time of my youth I have never failed to honour and sacrifice to you. You have allowed me to be disciplined but not destroyed, and for that I owe you everything. Be with me now as I make yet another atonement. And may Ramses pardon and release me, I added, but briefly, secretly. I apologized to the priest for having nothing of my own to give him, either for his services or for Wepwawet himself, but I promised to offer what I could whenever I was able to lay claim to more than my own body. He merely smiled accommodatingly and left. The priests of Wepwawet, I reflected as I stood at my door amid clouds of fragrant grey smoke wisping out into the courtyard, are not greedy. Unlike the mighty servants of Amun.

Just before sunset I ate a light meal, and then Isis dressed me. After much deliberation I had chosen to wear a simple white sheath which fell from a wide silver collar, crossed over my breasts, and was gathered to my waist by a silver belt before folding about my ankles. I was not attempting a seduction. Those days were long gone. There would be no games. I would approach Ramses as myself, as honestly and sincerely as possible. The cosmetician brushed blue shadow on my eyelids, painted black kohl around my eyes, and reddened my mouth with a little henna. Isis gathered my hair behind my head and braided it, winding a silver ribbon through the now gleaming tresses, and fastened one silver and blue enamelled lotus over my ear. Large silver ankhs hung from my lobes and I slipped onto my wrist one band of silver onto which a gold ankh had been soldered. I had rejected the heavy sensuality of myrrh in favour of lotus perfume, and I sat still while Isis pressed the oil to my neck and dabbed it on my braid. Then I carried a chair to my doorway, and seating myself and folding my hands in my lap, I waited while Ra slowly descended into the mouth of Nut and shadows began to seep across the grass before me.

When I saw the Under Steward approaching, I rose and went to meet him, following him through the courtyard and along the short, roofless passage to the narrow path that divided harem from palace. Quickly he crossed it, spoke to the guard on the small but very high gate set in the almost unbroken wall that formed one side of the path, and I found myself, for the first time in seventeen years, placing my feet on the avenue that led to the royal bedchamber. At its end were massive double doors of cedar chased in gold. Steadily, with only the merest flutter of my heart, I walked towards them, fiercely denying the flood of memories pouring into my mind and threatening to unhinge me. The Under Steward knocked. One of the doors swung open. The man bowed, gestured that I could proceed, and went back the way we had come. I was on my own. Taking a deep breath, I stepped inside.

Nothing had changed. Great wooden lamp stands still marched across the lapis-inlaid expanse of the floor, the yellow flames glinting where their flickering light found the flecks of pyrite in the dusky blue of the tiles. Chairs of silver and electrum still sat haphazardly between low ebony tables whose surfaces gleamed with gold. The far walls of the huge room were lost in dimness but as always the shapes of stolidly waiting servants could be seen, ranged against them. The royal couch still rested on its stepped dais, the small table beside it a jumble of medicinal pots and jars.

I heard the door thud shut behind me. At once I went to the floor, kneeling and then bending over so that my forehead met the coldly beautiful lapis, and as I did so my nostrils filled with an odour I recognized only too well from my days as a physician. Foul and yet thickly sweet, it sent a tremor of shock through me. There is death in this room, I thought. He is dying. Ramses is really going to die. Until that moment the reality of his final illness had not been brought home to me, but now, as a voice somewhere above me called out, “The concubine Thu,” and the echoes went rolling away to be lost in the gloom, my nerve almost failed me. He cannot die, I protested silently. He is Egypt, he is a god, he has been Ma’at for more years than I can count, his presence has brooded over everything from the smallest seed in my father’s fields to the flowing of the Nile into the Great Green. His shadow fell across every day of my exile. Ramses! Then my good sense reasserted itself.

“Is it her?” His voice, weak but oh so familiar, broke on my ears like a blow. “She may rise and approach.” I came to my feet, and slipping out of my sandals I paced to the dais, mounted it, and intended to kneel once more beside the couch. But as I looked down on it, I found myself paralyzed by a rush of such powerful emotion that I could not move.

He was lying propped up on many pillows, his shaved scalp covered, as was proper, by a linen cap. His barrel chest rose and fell, rose and fell under the welter of disordered sheets. One naked arm lay across the vast mound of his hidden belly. The other rested flaccidly against his thigh. In the glow of the one small lamp on the table beside him I saw that his face was puffy and sheened in sweat. His eyes, those brown eyes I remembered so well, always alive with a shrewd humour or cold with the sharp acuity of supreme authority, were now dully filmed with fever and exhaustion and I had the immediate and profound impression that here was a man not so much dying as used up. Nevertheless he was staring at me with full recognition and after a moment he lifted one hand. “The years of your exile have not taught you better manners, Thu,” he wheezed. “You always were a law unto yourself.” His words released me and I knelt, taking his cold fingers and pressing my lips to them.

“I am sorry, Your Majesty,” I said. “Forgive me. You are right. I was distressed to see you like this. Something overcame me, shock or sadness or memories, and I forgot to reverence you. May I?” I rose, and sitting on the edge of the couch, reached over and laid my palm against his forehead. His skin fed an immediate high heat into my hand. “Do you have competent physicians, Majesty?” I wanted to know. He smiled faintly as I withdrew.

“Competent or not, they are unable to cure what ails me,” he said. “They fuss and prattle, but they are all afraid to tell me the truth. That I am old and dying. I had always thought that you were a courageous girl who would rather brave my displeasure than lie to me, but I was wrong, wasn’t I?” He moved pettishly.

“Not altogether, Majesty,” I responded. “I did not lie to you when I spoke of Egypt’s plight under the rapaciousness of the Houses of Amun, but my motive for doing so was evil. I did not lie to you when I confessed my love for you, but it was not as strong as I pretended. I did not lie when I intended you to die.” Those swollen, rheumy eyes wandered over my face.

“It was all so long ago, my Thu,” he said. “Long ago and now so unimportant. I did not die. I believed I did not love you after you bore my son, but I was wrong. I sent you away and gave the boy to Men, but you troubled my dreams and it was I who felt the guilt, not you.”

“Not so,” I said swiftly, sudden tears pricking behind my own eyes. “For guilt became my bedfellow, Ramses, and I have waited for seventeen years to beg you for your forgiveness. Will you forgive me for what I did to you, the Holy One? I deserved the death you decreed for me.”

There was a silence, and then he began to cough. Groping for my hand, he held me tightly, struggling for air. There was a stirring behind me as servants came forward out of the shadows, but with his other hand he waved them back. “It will be better tomorrow,” he gasped finally. “This is not a prelude to death, not yet. I have some time left.” Mastering himself, he let go my hand to push himself higher on the pillows but when he had done so he took my hand again. “I note that you ask for forgiveness not pardon,” he whispered. “You have changed. My little scorpion would have wheedled a pardon out of me, but this woman, still lovely enough to stir me if I were able to be stirred, asks for nothing more than a word. Perhaps your exile taught you much after all, for I see no guile on your face, Thu.” His fingers clenched around mine. “I forgive you. I understand. I did not forget the names you gave to my son and lo, the wheel turns, Ma’at lifts her head, and the names become traitors even now awaiting my august judgement.” A sly little smile flitted across his ruined features. “You lusted after my son, didn’t you, Thu? You thought to hide it from me but I knew.”

“Yes, Lord.”

“Did you sleep with him?”

“No, Lord. Neither he nor I was so perfidious.”

“Good. Would you like me to command him to sign a marriage contract with you?”

I glanced at him sharply, all at once alert. Ill as he was, he was surely not above putting me to some kind of test. Or was it that with the door to the Judgement Hall slowly creaking open and the wind from the next world already soft on his cheek, he wished to bestow some last favour on me? Or had he discovered by some mysterious means that once I had forced the Prince to sign a document that would have made me one of his queens after his father’s death? The Prince had asked me to use my influence with Pharaoh to have him designated the royal Heir, for my star had been high and bright at the time and Pharaoh was refusing me nothing. After my arrest the document had disappeared, reclaimed and doubtless burned by the Prince who did not want to be associated, even by inference, with a murderess. Ramses was watching me, a gleam in his eye that reminded me forcefully and bleakly of the tremendous zest for life that used to fuel his every action. I shook my head.

“No thank you, Ramses,” I said. “I no longer desire your son. Nor do I wish to be a queen in Egypt.”

“You lie when you say you do not wish to be a queen,” he croaked, “but I congratulate you. That is the second time you have refused to take my bait. Oh, Thu, I did not realize until now how deep the wound of your sting had penetrated me. I not only forgive you, I pardon you also. And I will have Amunnakht draw up a declaration of manumission so that you may leave the harem a free woman. Is there any man you do desire?” The tone of his voice was heavy with sadness. It touched an answering grief in me and I felt the tears begin to slide soundlessly down my face. I was still young. I would live and be fulfilled if the gods willed it so, but he was dying, relinquishing his hold on all he had come to love. The curious, twisted cord that had bound us together would soon be broken, and he would exist only as a fading ghost in my memories that would grow dimmer as I myself moved towards my end.

“I thought it would be different,” I said huskily. “I dreamed for years of coming into this room and falling down before you and begging your forgiveness, and you would be the Ramses I remembered, and I would still be that impetuous, brazen child. Or better still, that one day you would come to Aswat and lift me out of the dirt and restore me to your bed and give me back my title and my pretty things. But it is not like that at all.” I found myself beginning to sob, great spasms that hurt my throat. “The past is really dead, isn’t it, Pharaoh? For you are ill beyond healing, and I am lost even in the midst of my vindication, and everything has changed.”

“Come here,” he rasped, and I crawled up onto the couch and laid my head against his shoulder. “I am not a fool, Thu,” he said. “Take your freedom. Take whatever pretty things you want from the harem when you go. Take back your title. I will make it so. For am I not a god, and do the gods not shower us with blessings whether we deserve them or not? I loved you, but not enough. And you loved me, but not enough. We cannot alter what has been. In a few days the trial you have waited for will begin. Sit with your son, hold up your head, speak out at last against those who used you so remorselessly. And when it is over, go where you will and put it all behind you. Ask Men to allow you to stay for a while on his estate in the Fayum, so that you may rest and recover. Go with the goodwill of this old god.” His voice trailed away and he sighed. With my ear against his chest I could hear the crepitation in his lungs as he breathed, yet under the rank odour of his sickness his skin gave off the faint aroma I remembered so well. Laughter and sex, fear and exultation, worship and betrayal, it all came back to me in waves and I cried until I was spent. Then raising myself, I looked down on him. His eyes were closed and I thought he was asleep. Bending, I kissed his half-open mouth.

“You are a good man, Ramses,” I whispered. “A good man and a great god. Thank you. Think of me when you take your place in the Heavenly Barque.” He opened one eye.

“What else will there be to do?” he murmured drowsily. “Go now, my Lady Thu. May the soles of your feet be firm.” Slipping off the couch, I touched his shoulder and turned. The distance to the door seemed to grow as I walked over the dark tiles but at last I reached my sandals. Putting them on, I turned again and knelt, prostrating myself. The lamps twinkled like tiny stars lost in that hushed vastness. No sound from the watchful servants disturbed its peace. I closed the door quietly behind me.

Once Isis had undressed and washed me, I lay on my couch thinking that I would be unable to sleep but I did, falling suddenly into a sodden unconsciousness from which I woke late with the aftermath of my tears still marking my face. It is a sign of aging, I said to myself as I held the copper mirror and critically inspected myself. When you are young you can laugh, cry for hours, drink yourself into a stupor, and still rise the next morning looking as fresh and unlined as you did the day before. Or the week before. Or even the year before. I sighed, considering that truth, and found in my mind no twinge of anxiety. Only yesterday I would have been thrown into a panic by the sight of my puffy eyes and irritated skin but now it did not matter at all, it was a trivial vanity beside the dreadful reality of the King’s slow dissolution.