Imhotep (15 page)

“She
wants this ‘goddess’ because she can’t hold a man,” Siamun had sneered after
Yunet had gone.

Djefi
thought there was some truth in what Siamun said, but he also trusted
Yunet.  If she could calm this strange goddess, then perhaps Djefi would
find a way to use her.  Perhaps she had come to The Two Lands to aid him
in the conspiracy that Kanakht and Waja-Hur were spinning.

“I
want to see her,” Brian repeated, taking another step toward Djefi. “I want to
know where she is.”

“She
is my guest,” Djefi repeated.  “As are you.  You are both in my
safe-keeping.”

Brian
lapsed into English.  “I want to go to the American embassy.  I am an
American.  I have rights.  You can’t just keep us here.  I
demand  . . . ”  He stopped as Pahket put her hand on his arm and he
realized that he had begun to shout.

“Our
god gets angry,” Djefi said quietly.

Turning
to the guard, Djefi spoke in a hushed whisper. “Siamun, I leave in the morning
for Iunu.  I will take Yunet and the goddess Diane with me.  The god
Brian will stay here.  I don’t want him to disrupt my journey or to follow
me. So take him into the desert, on one of your hunting trips.  Keep him
there for a few days so he doesn’t see me leaving.”

Djefi
turned back to Brian and Pahket.

“Pahket,
tell him that Siamun will take him hunting in the desert.  When they
return, he can see the goddess.”

She
nodded and turned to Brian to explain what Djefi had said in words she knew he
would understand, but Djefi interrupted her.

“You
can explain later, Pahket, just take him and prepare him for a trip.  Tell
him I have to, oh, I don’t know, just calm him down.” He stopped speaking and
no one moved for a moment.  “Well, you can go now,” Djefi squeaked, waving
a hand in dismissal.

Pahket
reached out a hand to take Brian’s arm to lead him to his room.

“I’m
not leaving until I see Diane,” Brian said, refusing to move.

Djefi
ignored him and turned to Siamun, speaking softly so that no one else could
hear.

“Take
him into the desert.  Test him, watch him.  I want to know what he
truly is.  I want  . . . ” Djefi stopped as he saw Siamun tense and reach
for his knife.

“I
said, I want to see Diane,” Brian said louder, pulling his arm away from
Pahket’s grip.  He took a third step toward Djefi.  “I want some
answers.”

Pahket
pulled urgently on his arm, her eyes on Siamun who had drawn the knife from his
belt.

Brian
saw the guard, the knife held casually in his hand, but his eyes alive and
eager.

“Now
just hold on,” Brian said, holding out a placating hand.  “I don’t want
any trouble.  No one has to get excited here.” He realized he was speaking
in English.  He wanted to switch to Egyptian, but suddenly he couldn’t
remember any of the words.  He looked at Pahket for help.

She
read the confusion in his eyes.

“Brian,”
she said soothingly, reaching up and turning his head away from the
confrontation with Siamun, “Djefi said Diane is safe, and so she is.  He
has arranged a trip for you.  When you return, you will see Diane.”

Brian
looked back at Siamun.  The disfigured guard still held the knife ready
and was watching Brian and Pahket closely.

“I
could take you,” Brian said softly in English.  “But then what?  I’m
still stuck here without Diane and no way to get back to Cairo.”

He
looked down at Pahket and nodded.

Then
he addressed Djefi.  “I leave now,” he said in Egyptian, the words
returning as he calmed.  “I see Diane tomorrow.”

Djefi
smiled sweetly.

“As
you wish, honored guest.”

“T
omorrow we leave for Iunu and The Feast of
Re in His Barge.  I have no idea what that means.  Paneb has never
been to the town of Iunu or to the celebration, so he can’t describe it. 
But he says that Djefi should be there, so I’m hoping that I’ll catch up with
Diane and Brian.”

Tim
put down his pencil and ran a hand over his newly shaved head.

He
knew that there would be fewer questions when he traveled with Paneb and his
family if he looked like one of them.  So this morning he had asked Taki
to shave his head.  She insisted that he call her by nickname since the
night he had treated Hapu for a scorpion sting.  His naturally dark
complexion was growing duskier every day and he was dressed like Paneb, wearing
a short kilt, although he wore his boxer briefs underneath.  He looked
like he could be Paneb’s cousin, his tall cousin.

W
ith his sketchbook on his lap, he sat
cross-legged on the roof of Paneb’s home.  There was a little shade from
the ragged fronds of a palm tree that grew beside the house.  The morning
sun was starting to push the shade off the roof.  When it disappeared, the
only shelter would be under the overhang that shielded the front porch, but Tim
was reluctant to go there because of the flies, drawn there by the lingering
aroma of food and, despite frequent baths in the river, the pungent smell of
bodies sweating to alleviate the desert heat.

Although
much of the heat and smells were vented through the arched openings on the roof
that he had wondered about when he first saw Paneb’s house, the inside of the
home remained heavy and thick.

And so
Tim sat on the roof sketching.  Paneb and Ahmes were working at Kanakht’s
tomb.  Hapu, the scorpion sting already forgotten, was playing with some
friends a few houses away. Taki and her eldest daughter Dedi were at the market
picking up food and portable goods to be used to make trades. 

As
chief artist, Paneb earned a generous allotment of food, salt and precious
oils, enough to take care of his family and the two households of in-laws who
lived near him. 

Taki
had taken some of the surplus salt cones and some homemade linens to the market
to trade for fruit and dried meat for their trip.  She also wanted to get
some smaller valuables - gold rings and precious stones - that she
could easily trade for food at Iunu.

Money
didn’t exist here in the Egypt of King Djoser.  Instead of seeing it as an
inconvenience, Tim saw the system of bartering as one of the things he liked about
this ancient time.

Another
was the Egyptian sense of time.

They
lived at a slower tempo and if they were aware of time, it was in the sense
that its passage formed a hazy backdrop to their life.  It was a measure,
not a master.

They
lived amid an endlessly repeating cycle of days, each one sunny and dry like
the day before it.  They watched the regular rising and falling of the
ceaselessly flowing river, and were surrounded by a desert unchanged by weather
or seasons. 

They
didn’t slice time into a series of individual moments and then stitch them back
together with anxious anticipation.  They didn’t keep appointment books to
make themselves accountable for each minute.  There was neither tick nor
tock.

For
them, time was the seamless background of a comfortably familiar setting. 
Marked by the daily journey of the sun god Re arcing through the sky on the
celestial river Nun, each day was a repetition of his circular journey, which
began with his rebirth each morning.

Re was
not expected to arrive at six a.m. or to depart at eight p.m. Instead, his
arrival brought the start of the day and his departure ended it.  Events
defined time, they were not ordered by it.

It was
true that Paneb made plans each day, but he did not watch a clock.  The
tasks he set for himself were completed in the time they demanded, they didn’t
expand to fill a schedule or contract to squeeze into a slotted time.

Tim,
who never wore a wristwatch, thought this view of time seemed more right than
the frenetic pace of his world, his time.  For him, the slower tempo meant
there was more time for each new experience.

He
remembered when he and Addy had taken walks she always ended up shifting her
weight from one foot to the other, eager to reach their destination but forced
to wait as Tim paused to test the rubbery sturdiness of a fan-shaped tree
fungus or to sketch the jagged edge of a broken tree stump.

Her
mind always had been on the destination, Tim’s on the journey.

And
what a strange journey he was on, he thought.  The wall in the tomb of
Kanakht had opened into a world that had existed almost five thousand years
before he had been born.  It was hard to accept or understand.

But he
was positive that the Step Pyramid didn’t exist in this here and now; he had
seen the empty plateau.  Paneb had told him that Djoser had been king for
seven years now, something he easily remembered because of the lack of flooding
and the diminished harvests that followed.

Tim
knew about the famine.  It was recorded on a famous stele from Setet
Island.  The stone inscription had been ordered by Djoser to record his
anguish over the pain the long famine caused the people of Kemet and to remind
them of how he had ended it through a sacrifice to the ram-headed god Khnum.

There
wasn’t much else that Tim knew about Djoser’s era.  The king had lived
long before the huge pyramids at Giza had been built and more than a thousand
years before King Tut.  The only other name Tim recalled from Djoser’s era
was that of the famous architect Imhotep, but Paneb hadn’t heard of him.

When
Tim had asked him about Imhotep, the artist had frowned and shrugged. 
Seeing Tim’s disappointment, Paneb tried to cheer him up by telling him about
someone famous who would be at the ceremony: the high priestess of Re, a wise
and beautiful woman named Hetephernebti.

T
hey began walking to Iunu just after
daylight.

Tim,
Paneb and his family traveled with a small group of villagers who also had
decided to go to the festival.  Paneb told Tim the journey would take from
three to six days, depending on the heat, on how fast the oldest cared to walk
and on how many diversions they encountered.

Tim’s
modern map was little help, but from Paneb’s description of the trip, gathered
from neighbors who had been at Iunu before, the temple was not far inside the
delta of the Nile, or Iteru, as Paneb called it.  Tim estimated the trip
was no more than thirty or forty miles, less than an hour’s drive in his time.

But by
mid-morning he understood why Paneb had allowed so much time for the trip.

At the
outskirts of Ineb-Hedj, even before the trip had begun properly, two of the men
began a debate about the best place to cross the river.  There were many
small boats and barges by the city that the younger man, a father with three
little children with him, wanted to use.

The
other man, named Jarha, was older and had no children in his group.  He
argued that the trail was easier to follow on this bank.

“But
the boats are here,” the young man said.  “We should use them.”

“No,
no, no.  There is less shade over there.  You’ll burn your feet off.”

“It
looks fine to me,” the father said, shielding his eyes as he looked across the
slow moving water.

Jarha
shook his head.  “Here, sure, it looks fine right here, but, trust me,
this side is better once we get away from the city.”

“But
we need to cross.”

“They
have boats at Iunu.  Do you think there are only boats at Ineb-Hedj? 
And see, we don’t cross the whole river.  It splits apart.  Iunu is
in between.  So, if we cross here, we’ll have to get back in boats, and
barter with the ferrymen again once we’re there.”

Jarha’s
wife joined in the argument now.

“But I
think they ask for more at Iunu,” she said.

“That
doesn’t matter,” her husband answered.  “Either way you have to cross half
the river up there.”

“Not
if we cross it here,” the young man said.

“We
don’t have to cross all of it at Iunu, because it breaks apart,” the woman
said, talking to her husband.  “So it should be closer.  But I think
the boatmen there are greedy, not like our boatmen.”

“Either
way,” Jarha said, shrugging as if that ended the conversation.

Paneb
touched Tim’s arm and led him into the shade where the rest of the family was
patiently waiting with some friends.  While the two men continued to
argue, one of the men in Paneb’s group opened a jar of beer and began to pass
it around.

“What
are they arguing about?” Tim asked Paneb.  “I understand that it was about
the river, but I didn’t understand.  Why do we wait while they
argue?  Why don’t we move on and let them catch up?”

Paneb
scrunched his face and frowned as if Tim’s question raised an idea that had
never been considered before.

“Why
would we want to separate when we could stay together?” Paneb answered.

“Together
for safety?” Tim asked.

“Safety?
Safe from what?” Paneb said.  “No, we want to be together.  We’re
friends, why should we separate?”

“We go
faster if we don’t wait for them.”

Paneb
smiled at Tim’s foolishness.

“But
we’re going to the same place.”

Tim
nodded his understanding.  “And no one is in a hurry.”

Tim
wanted to ask more, but his limited command of the ancient language made it too
frustrating, so he accepted a cup of beer and leaned back in the shade feeling
very Egyptian.

T
he villagers walked on in fits and
starts.  If someone tired, they all stopped and rested, everyone making a
show of acting as tired as the one who had stopped. 

On the
second day one of the men caught sight of a herd of gazelles along the
riverbank so they formed a hunting party.  Although the travelers waited
most of the day for the hunters’ empty-handed return, the time wasn’t
wasted.  The older men who had stayed behind took the children fishing,
using a wide net, its edges weighted with stones.  When the hunters
returned, laughing and blaming each other for their futile chase, they found
freshly roasted fish and flat emmer wheat bread waiting for them.

They
walked in the mornings and again in the evenings, taking long breaks in the
afternoons when the day was hottest.  During the breaks the children
played and swam, the adults sat and talked or napped in the open air under the
shade of trees along the riverbank.

They
found that Jarha had been right about the trees.  Across the river the
thin line of growth along the bank quickly gave way to scrubby grass and then
bright sand.

On the
fourth night they camped along the river overlooking a long, green
island.  They had walked past several smaller islands near the end of the
day’s hike.  Looking at his map, Tim decided that they were camping where
Cairo would eventually lie. 

The
large island upstream was Roda, where the Meridien Hotel would be built. 
The longer island to the north, just across from the group's encampment, would
eventually hold the Nile Sheraton and the Cairo Tower.  On the other bank
of the river, the Egyptian Museum would some day display four-thousand-year-old
mummies of pharaohs who had not yet ruled the ancient land where Tim found
himself.  The New Palace Hotel where he had been staying was just a block
away from the museum and five thousand years distant.

According
to his map, the river, which was growing wider, divided into two main branches
just north of the islands.  The east branch flowed toward the area where
the Suez Canal would be built.  The left branch turned northwest, flowing
in the general direction of Alexandria.

The
next evening they decided to move away from the expanding river to camp.

“The
ground is too wet there,” Paneb explained as he and Taki pulled dried food from
the sling he carried.

“Jarha
said there would be crocodiles there.  And hippos,” Ahmes said
excitedly.  Hapu’s eyes grew wide and Taki protectively put her arm around
her young daughter.

“That
Jarha,” Paneb said, “he tells big stories, Ahmes.  Why he once told us he
had ridden a hippo that it took him under the river and he saw a whole city of
hippos living there, with a king hippo that had a golden necklace.”

“Was
there a queen?” Hapu asked.

Paneb
nodded.  “A queen, servant hippos and even dancing hippos.”

Taki
held her hand over her mouth to hide her laughter.

“Did
they sing?” Hapu asked.

Ahmes
understood that his father was trying to distract his little sister. “I heard a
hippo sing once, Hapu,” he said.  He arched his arms and blowing out his
cheeks he waddled toward his little sister.  “He sounded like this, ‘Blub,
blub, blub, roar, roar,’ “