The Blood Star (37 page)

“And will he not petition the gods without
their asking?”

The prince laughed a short, bitter laugh and
shook his head.

“No, My Lord, he will not. Pharaoh is a god
and therefore, of course, pure, but the men who have his ear are
neither. They welcome these hard times, as they would welcome
anything that brings discredit upon me. They want only an excuse to
hang me by my heels from the city wall that Pharaoh might rule in
Memphis directly. They wish the old days of Egypt’s glory brought
back.”

“And you do not?”

“They will not come back, My Lord—they are
gone.”

He shrugged his shoulders, as if so easily
the weight of these troubles could slide from his back, and went on
with his dinner. Afterwards he spoke of his scarab collection,
justly famous among connoisseurs of such things, and of his delight
in a slave girl he had recently acquired from Nubia.

But if Prince Nekau saw only dimly, and
through the window of his own interests, his subjects among the
noble houses of Memphis saw not at all. The famine was merely a
nuisance, a temporary constraint upon their incomes, something
which would pass soon enough and leave their lives and fortunes
restored to what they had always been. They closed their eyes to
the suffering around them, and to what it might finally come to
mean.

“I hardly ever go into the city anymore,” I
once heard a woman lamenting. “There is hardly anything amusing to
be found in the marketplace these days, and the smell. . ! Of
course trade is bad, but who wants to take the trouble to visit the
bazaars when things are so unpleasant? All I have to say is that if
people are hungry then the prince should put them to work clearing
away the corpses.”

No one even laughed. It was as if they hadn’t
heard.

And no man embraces suffering willingly. So
my fashionable friends drew the curtains of their carrying chairs
as they passed through the city—what they did not see did not
exist. Thus it was still possible to be happy and to sleep soundly
at night.

The vogue for river parties had been
forgotten, perhaps because these days there were too many corpses
in the water, and thus for two winters in a row the desert was in
high favor. Fowling became something of a craze and expeditions
would be organized so that men and women could cast nets for birds
brought specially for the purpose, quail and partridge carried out
from the city in wooden cages, their wing feathers clipped so as
not to place too severe a strain upon anyone’s abilities—after all,
whatever would be the point of sport if it had to be taken
seriously?

This would all happen in the late afternoon,
when the sun was no longer so oppressively hot, and then, after we
had all chased around like children—and full half the birds had
escaped into the wilderness—our cooks would roast those even less
agile than their pursuers and we would lie about on carpets spread
over the sand and enjoy a lovely banquet by the light of huge,
picturesque bonfires. Usually we would even spend the night in
linen tents, and ladies would conveniently manage to lose their
way.

As he had told me more than once, Senefru was
not a man of the desert, so he rarely joined these entertainments.
I shared his distaste, for the hunting was poor stuff, but I never
failed to attend. I could put up with an afternoon of foolishness
if at the end of it I was sure of sleeping the night through with
Nodjmanefer in my arms.

“I do not like the desert,” she told me once,
while we took a walk through its long twilight. “It frightens me.
It is full of silence, like death.”

“Yet its silence allows us to be alone
together,” I said, smiling, trying to make her forget her mood. I
put my arm around her shoulders and drew her close.

“Yes, that is something. But it makes me
think of all the vast time when we will be alone separately.” Her
tiny hand pressed against my ribs. “I wish we were back in Memphis,
Tiglath—I do not desire to think of anything except the few hours
we can be together.”

“There is nothing in Memphis except
Senefru.”

I knew, even as I said it, that I had made a
mistake. I could feel her grow rigid within the circle of my arm,
as if she had suddenly felt a chill.

“Yes—death is everywhere, not simply here. I
have been talking like a simpleton. Forgive me.”

We lay together that night. Her thighs opened
to receive me and her mouth pressed against mine. The commerce of
the flesh happened as it always did, but only the flesh found any
happiness. She seemed to be there for me only as flesh, as if
somehow I had lost her. We seemed divided from one another, as if I
had been blinded and only she had eyes.

“
There is nothing in Memphis except
Senefru.”

There he was, sitting behind the long table
in his study, reading over the papyrus scrolls that appeared to
cover it. He was always there, and when he was not he was in Saïs
or Tanis, about some secret business which he never mentioned. The
years had make Senefru an important and powerful man.

Nodjmanefer was his wife, and he called me
his friend. When we returned he would rise from his chair and greet
us, and we would all three dine together, and he would listen in an
absent-minded way to whatever the news might be. He did not seem to
care. He seemed to have dismissed us from existence—or perhaps
merely to have forgotten that we were in the world.

It is difficult with such a man to remember
that you are wronging his bed. There were long periods when I did
not remember it, when the unnatural character of our relationship
did not appear to me. Yet I do not believe that Senefru ever lost
sight of it. Nor did Nodjmanefer. It was this knowledge, perhaps as
much as anything, which united husband and wife.

That last year the floods came late, and when
they had come and gone the old men in the villages were consulted,
and these pronounced that never in living memory had the watermarks
on the steep banks of the Nile stood so low. The temple records
which the priest kept said the same. For yet another year there
would be famine in Egypt, and worse than before.

One morning, at breakfast, Kephalos presented
himself to me. He did not seem particularly pleased.

“As you know, Lord, I do not often trouble
you with business,” he began, nervously fingering the hem of his
tunic and glancing about him as if he found the sight of food
oppressive. “Yet I wish you to consider whether it would not be for
the best if we began to think of leaving Memphis—of perhaps
returning to Naukratis, although I think it would be better if we
quit this nation altogether.”

I regarded him with frank astonishment, and
after a moment of silence he raised his hand in a dismissing
gesture.

“When there is trouble, Lord, foreigners are
never popular, and the trouble in Egypt becomes worse each month.
It is time to go. Two years ago, when prices were better and when
you were foolish enough to forgive some of your tenants their
rents, I saw the way of things, with Egypt and with you, and began
selling off your land and sending whatever I could convert into
gold and silver out of the country. Most of it is deposited with
merchants in Sidon. There is nothing now to hold us here.”

“Kephalos, I have made a life for myself
here,” I said, all at once seized with an absurd panic, as if I
feared there might be men waiting behind the door to carry me off
by force. “I cannot simply leave—I have attachments. . .”

“My Lord, be reasonable.” He smiled sadly,
apparently believing there was little enough chance of that. “Life
here is fast growing intolerable—I can hardly pass through the
front gate for the beggars who collect there, and all because you
have given orders that no one is to be turned away with nothing.
You are not hard enough to live in such a place in such a time.

“And besides, you and I both know you think
only of the Lady Nodjmanefer, and there is no reason why she should
be an obstacle. A woman is as easily carried downriver as a bushel
of wheat. If you ask it of her—and make it clear you will go in any
case—then she will come away with us. If she will not, then you
will know she is not worth the staying for.”

Yet he was right to doubt me, for I did not
wish to know which way she would answer. I had not the courage to
put her to such a test. Still, it would have been better for both
of us if I had, even if she had let me go.

“You must do as you think best,” I said, “but
for myself, since I must die in some strange land, this one will do
as well as any other.”

Kephalos, who understood but was ever my
friend, recognized the futility of argument. He withdrew in
silence. I did not see him again for several days.

Yet if his voice was not raised against me,
another’s was. That night, over the western desert, there was a
lightning storm such as the Egyptians had not witnessed in a
hundred years. It was visible from every rooftop in Memphis, and
people said that the very stars dripped bloody fire.

I did not see it—I would not see it, but
stayed in my rooms—but I believed then and do still that they spoke
the truth.

I could not hide from this warning, even if I
would not listen. The Lord Ashur must have me know that I did evil
under his very eyes.

XIV

The Night of the Bleeding Stars, as it came
to be called, marked the beginning to a season of calamity. The
gods had given warning of their displeasure—this was what the
priests said—and now all of the Land of Egypt lay under a curse.
Prophecies of fearful disaster were whispered about, and the people
of Memphis were not kept waiting long to see them fulfilled.

It is said by the Egyptians that if the sun
grows high enough it spawns vermin from the Nile mud, which splits
open to let them crawl out through the cracks. I do not doubt it,
for the sun was blinding that final summer, and even before the
long grass had withered yellow and brittle one had only to walk
down to the river to watch hoards of rats crawling over the banks
and each other, chattering in their high-pitched voices, loathsome
and rapacious. Soon after they reached the city, plague broke out
in the poor quarters. The people, weakened by famine, perished in
their own doorways.

There is no answer to plague except fire. The
prince ordered entire streets burned. Gangs of soldiers went about
torching rows of reed-mat hovels, sometimes with the corpses of
whole families still inside, and the smoke from these, mingled with
the ever-present smell of death, left a permanent stain upon the
air.

On the first day of the Feast of Opet, which
traditionally lasts for four and twenty days but which this year
the people of Memphis were too poor to celebrate for even one,
Prince Nekau led the procession of the god Amun and was cursed by
onlookers and pelted with cattle dung. Members of the crowd were
arrested, apparently at random, and these had their hands lopped
off and were then hanged, but the scandal did not end there. Such a
thing, such an insult to the god, as well as to the prince, had
never happened before. For a time people were hardly able to speak
of anything else.

Wild rumors floated about. Pharaoh, it was
reported, had fallen ill—I read in letters from Naukratis that he
had only turned his ankle while hunting—but soon everyone seemed to
believe that he must be dead. After all, to most people Tanis
probably seemed almost as far away as the Field of Offerings.

One man told me he had heard that Pharaoh had
been assassinated by foreigners, another that the gods had recalled
him to them that the Land of Egypt might be destroyed.

Not many days later Prince Nekau was forced
to issue a public denial that the city grain supplies had been
poisoned by the priests, who were now more unpopular than ever and
many of whom had been murdered in the streets. I do not know how
many believed this denial, but certainly many fewer cared; the
poor, if you offered them bread, would simply eat it, whether they
believed it was poisoned or not.

And then, of course, there were the riots,
which now took place every few days, almost as if someone had
established a schedule for them. Sometimes, when they were
dispatched to quell a disturbance, small contingents of soldiers
joined in the looting and had themselves to be put down. The
gardens of wealthy houses were ransacked and the trees stripped of
their fruit. Several people hired guards, which sometimes almost
amounted to inviting the thieves inside the walls, and no one
ventured into the city without an armed escort. This after a man I
knew slightly, a certain Pa’anuket, tempted the gods by visiting
the bazaar, which, in any case, was nearly empty, was cornered by
the mob and then torn to pieces. His wife did not get enough of him
back even to bury.

Thus the Egyptians, who only a few years
before had affected to despise such things, now openly carried
weapons.

I was not such a fool I could not see by now
that Kephalos had been right, that it was time to leave Memphis.
Things were safer in Naukratis, where the harvests had been better
and, in any case, foreign grain was easier to come by, so I thought
of withdrawing my household to that city and then deciding if
finally it might not be necessary to depart from Egypt altogether.
It required only the consent of my Lady Nodjmanefer, for I had no
intention of leaving without her. Yet in the end I never had to ask
her. My request was forestalled by a visit from her husband.

The Lord Senefru was as a rule quite
scrupulous in all matters of form. He gave the impression of
detesting surprises, or anything that suggested cunning. He
considered it only polite to give notice of his intentions. So I
was surprised when, late in the afternoon, an hour or so before I
was engaged to join him for dinner, I glanced out the window of my
study and watched him open the gate in the wall that separated our
two gardens and walk through.