The Eye of Horus

THE EYE OF HORUS

CAROL THURSTON

Heaven and earth conspire that everything which has been, be rooted and reduced to dust. Only the dreamers, who dream while awake, call back the shadows of the past and braid nets from the unspun thread.

—Isaac Bashevis Singer

She sensed that the line she’d just drawn was somehow wrong. What she didn’t know was how to make it feel right. Too much was missing. Might always be missing. Rationally she knew that, too, yet she still couldn’t accept that no one would ever know how Tashat came to die so young. Or what that man’s head was doing between her legs.

Kate tossed her drawing crayon aside, got up, and walked over to the lighted viewbox, to trace the path of destruction again—from the linear fracture of the left humerus up to the comminuted clavicle, then down into the rib cage, where the fractures were not only multiple but displaced. In the end, though, it was Tashat’s left hand that drew her eyes. Something else that was missing. Only it wasn’t really, at least not in the same way. That hand appeared to be encased in something the X rays couldn’t penetrate, like the gold fingernail stalls found on the mummy of Tutankhamen. But if that’s what it was, why the entire hand? And why the left but not the right?

She stepped back from the head-to-toe X ray, hoping to find something “off” about the angle of the splintered ribs, or in the pattern of bone fragments scattered through the thoracic cavity—anything to suggest that the violence done to the young Egyptian had occurred after death rather than before. Otherwise, just trying to breathe would have been so excruciating it didn’t bear thinking about. No one would have considered opening the chest back then, to remove the fragments of bone or repair a punctured lung. They still hadn’t figured out that the blood flows through a closed system of veins and arteries, let alone how to control infection or shock. But they did know mandrake root and poppy juice—scopolamine and morphine—which raised the possibility that some ancient physician had given Tashat a drop too much, sending her central nervous system into the sleep of eternity.

Kate turned to glance at the tightly wrapped form lying on the workbench near the windows. For a minute the two images battled each other in her head—that painted face glowing with youthful vitality and the macabre death’s-head she knew lay beneath it. Then, as if through an open window, she caught a glimpse of Tashat peering into a polished bronze hand mirror, to tuck a blue lotus blossom into her riotous black curls. A moment later, with a jaunty wave to someone Kate couldn’t see, she disappeared from sight. Mesmerized by the image that had seemed so real, Kate continued to stare without seeing, willing the young woman to reappear—and was rewarded when Tashat came through the door of the whitewashed house into the bright sunlight of ancient Waset. As she started across the garden, Kate heard a muted click, like someone snapping their fingers. It wasn’t until she emerged from the gate in the mud-brick wall that Kate noticed the little white dog trotting at her heels.

Then, sensing that Tashat would come toward her, Kate turned and waited. As they passed in the narrow street—really only a dusty alleyway—the irrepressible Tashat’s luminous blue eyes lit up with a smile Kate thought she recognized. A smile so engaging it bordered on the mischievous.

A smile Kate couldn’t help but return.

The sudden noise startled me. Not that there was anything unusual about someone pounding on my door in the night. It was just that my thoughts were so far from the concerns of the living as I sat recording everything I had learned only a few hours before, in the House of Beautification. What did come as a surprise was to find a great hulk of a man standing between two Nubian torchbearers, flames leaping in his eyes like an angry Anubis, come to wreak vengeance on one who dared desecrate his dead. An impatient man, with his fist raised to beat on the door again.

“Fetch the physician, Senakhtenre, and be quick about it,” he ordered.

“I am Senakhtenre,” I replied, and lifted my lamp to lighten the shadows cast by his beaked nose and heavy brow. I knew then that I had seen him before, for his is a face to
remember with that white scar slashing across one bronze cheek to pluck at an unforgiving mouth.

“Then come with me at once. There is no time to waste.”

“First I must fetch my bag of medicines.”

“Just do not think to delay,
sunu,”
he warned me, “lest the lady who kneels on the bricks this night be taken by Osiris. Should that come to pass, I can promise, you will end by wishing the light of Amen had never fallen across your door.”

I held my tongue and left him standing outside, for it is always a lesser man who needs to sound important simply because he is not. I refilled the packets of herbs I would need to treat a woman who labors in vain, then extinguished all but the lamp in my shrine to Thoth before hurrying back to where he waited.

He set a fast pace, avoiding the streets and alleyways where people stood drinking and talking even after dark, celebrating the news that the young Horus on Earth has taken the Princess Ankhesenamen as his Great Royal Wife. It has been almost three years since the young boy who succeeded the Fallen One of Akhetaten changed his name and returned to the city of Amen, restoring Waset to its rightful place as capital of the empire. And where before there was only the fetid odor of starvation and decay, the city of my birth now bustles with commerce and hope. On the edge of town we took the path to the walled precinct of Amen, where my silent escort did not skirt the god’s great temple as I expected, but went between the twin towers of Osiris Amen-hotep’s massive gateway, then across the courtyard to the path beside the Sacred Lake, without once pausing to pay homage to the god on whose holy ground we trod.

From there we traveled a way known only to the priests, making me wonder what a rich master such as his could want of an ordinary physician like me when he could have any of the exalted priests from the House of Life. But I did not question the self-important jackass who had come for me, knowing he would welcome any chance to put me in my place. When we passed through a gate in the far wall of the
temple precinct, the darkness closed around us in earnest, until we came to still another wall and then a watchman’s lodge set into it. At a shout from my taciturn companion, the gate swung open to reveal a grand white villa, unlike anything I had seen in my entire twenty-two years. In the torchlight it seemed a shimmering white butterfly with its wings outstretched to hover over a bed of blossoms. As we approached the tall center section I saw that the double wood doors bore the likenesses of the animals representing the seven gods of creation, carved and inlaid with carnelian, ivory, and ebony.

Once inside, the servant led me through a shadowy antechamber, lit only by the many shrines to the family’s household gods, then down a long hallway that opened into a vast high-ceilinged chamber. Here the walls were pristine white. So were the six lotus-bud columns supporting the dark wood rafters overhead, where colorful figures of the entire pantheon of gods danced and played in their heavenly garden. A room of unmistakable elegance, but what I found most intriguing was how it bristled with life yet at the same time felt profoundly serene, a contrast that produced harmony rather than conflict or chaos.

I was still trying to uncover the secret of such a paradox when a man rose from the padded sitting shelf on the far side of the room and started toward me. He looked to be in his middle thirties, though his sleeveless white tunic revealed the muscled arms of a man ten years younger. But it was the way he carried himself rather than his house or fine linen and gold armlets that made me know there was far more than some twelve or thirteen years between us.

It wasn’t until he passed under the lamp hanging from one of the rafters that I realized his head was clean-shaven. Yet he wore red-leather sandals beneath his long white kilt—another paradox since it is a rare priest who covers his feet. “You are the physician Senakhtenre?”

I nodded and put my palms together without taking my eyes from his, which were the color of the afternoon sky.

“My lady’s midwife and two servingwomen remain with her,” he told me without ceremony. “All the others have been sent away.” I could hardly credit that such a man would allow any of his women, even the lowliest concubine, to go without the incantations of the priests, and I suppose it showed in my face. “Yes,
sunu,
your reputation travels ahead of you, even here. But do not stumble over your pride. If you have need of anything or anyone, you must say so. Other than that I ask only that you treat whatever happens here tonight as a vision that comes while you sleep, without substance in the light of Re.”

“As it is with all those I treat, my lord. Whatever you know of me came from their mouths, not mine.”

‘Then go to her. And may Amen guide you as well as my child.” He nodded to his man, who waited in the doorway. “Pagosh will show you the way.”

I followed the servant he named Pagosh up a stairway to the sleeping room of an apartment fit for a goddess, where the priest’s lady lay curled in upon herself as once she must have been inside her own mother. Two servingwomen hovered over a birthing stool to one side of the room while a white-haired grandmother sat beside the canopied couch, crooning a mournful lullaby.

As I approached, she broke off and turned to greet me. “Thank Amen you have come,
sunu.
I am Harwa, midwife to the Divine Consort to the God’s Father.”

It hit me like an unexpected blow from a throwing stick—the man who had greeted me below was the priest named Ramose, overseer of Amen-Re’s land and all it produces, not to mention the god’s growing treasure of gold.

“But I fear it is too late even for one such as you,” she added, “who knows the secrets of the great Imhotep himself, may his
ka
live in eternity.” The midwife cast a furtive glance at the bulging figure of the pregnant hippopotamus in the wall niche beside her, but the lady lying on the couch never stirred, even in the restless tossing of one whose
akh
sleeps while the demons of the Netherworld torture her
body. Only the babe within her moved, probably to protest his long confinement.

“I will undertake treatment,” I muttered, making no pretense of consulting my scrolls, though I was committing myself to a favorable outcome—a reportable offense should I fail. I laid my fingers to the vessel in the lady’s neck, then to the base of her throat. Even there I could feel no more than a faint flutter, like the whisper of moth wings on a warm summer night. I knew then that she would not deliver at all, let alone in a kneeling position, unless I could strengthen her heart.

I extracted a packet of dried hyena’s tongue from my bag and instructed one of the servingwomen to bring me a pitcher of beer. “And you,” I called to the other, pointing to the basin on a brazier in the corner of the room, “throw that out and fill it with clean water.” After that I spread a hand over the lady’s belly, to feel for the moment when it would begin to tighten. When a harsh growl rose from her throat, I looked her full in the face for the first time—and jerked my hand away as if from a flame.

For a moment I could only stare at the countenance I had believed gone from this life forever, except where she strides across the face of the pylon before the temple of Re-Horakhte. But the shadow of her royal father lay across her face, in her almond-shaped eyes and prominent jaw, and try as I might to doubt my eyes, I knew in my heart who she was. Nefertiti. Beautiful One. Daughter of the Magnificent Amenhotep. Great Royal Wife to the Heretic Akhenaten. Queen of the Two Lands. And then, near the end, Nefer-neferu-aten Smenkhkare, Horus on Earth.

Even now, without her majestic blue war crown, with her face pale as the linen she lay upon, she possessed the same ethereal beauty. But she was Queen no more, nor King, and I knew not how to address her even in the privacy of my own thoughts.

What I did know was that this babe was not her first, so that could not be the reason it refused to come. “Why is
there no incense burning to sweeten the air?” I inquired of the midwife, for the stench of the rituals performed by the priests who had been there before me was like smoke to my eyes.

“Majesty does not—” Harwa began, then caught herself. “My lady complains that the smoke burns her eyes.”

“Do it anyway,” I ordered, to let her know I was in charge there now. Then I poured beer into my bronze cup, added a measure of crushed hyena’s tongue, stirred it with a wooden stick, and set it aside to steep. After that I scrubbed my hands with the powder from Wadi Natron and positioned them again over the lady’s bulging belly, this time to search downward for the curve of the babe’s head.

It was not where I expected it to be. Nor were the babe’s buttocks there instead, which told me all I needed to know. I took a piece of hollow animal horn from my bag, slipped the narrow end between her lips, and poured a bit of the drugged beer into it. As the liquid trickled into her throat, she choked, then her eyes flew wide open.

“Rest easy, my lady. I am Senakhtenre, the physician.” She searched my face, then took the cup from my hand and drank it down. The next tightening brought her shoulders and knees curling up from the couch, yet still she made no sound. “It hurts nothing to cry out and might even help,” I told her, since I could do nothing to ease her pain lest I weaken her will to expel the child. As the knot slowly untied itself I slipped my fingers inside the birth canal and found her cervix wide enough to let the babe pass through. With one hand outside and the other in, I next determined that her babe lay side to side within her.

“How long has she been like this?” I inquired of Harwa, leaving one hand spread over the lady’s belly to learn how much the babe might move when another tightening began and ended.

The midwife glanced at the water clock. “Three, perhaps four hours. I would have sent for you sooner but for the priests having to consult their scrolls and mumble over their
smoldering ram’s hair, trying to call forth the Seven Hathors, until—” She broke off, worried that she already had said too much.

“Then surely Isis must be watching over him,” I murmured.

“Listen well to me,
sunu”
the onetime Queen whispered, struggling to rise on her elbows. “I have heard much of your skills with women who labor, and not from the mouths of peasants. So do not believe you can fail me and live to tell the tale. This child must live,
will
live.”

“Then you would do well to entreat Isis to watch over him a little longer, while I try to place his feet on the path into this world.”

“I have no need to ask the help of any other god!” So did the Beautiful One claim to be immortal even in the throes of an act she shared with every mortal woman.

I waited for her uterus to soften, instructed her to take a deep breath and, with one hand cupping the babe’s head and the other his buttocks, began to alternately stroke and push his head down. For a while then we worked as partners, me turning the babe little by little while each tightening grew stronger than the one before it. Still she never uttered the scream that must have clawed at her throat, until I stood in awe of her strength of will. At last a sudden sliding movement told me the babe had tumbled into a different position, and I placed one hand above the lady’s belly, ready to press down.

A few minutes later I held a tiny girl in my hands. I wiped the mucus from her nose, ran a finger inside her mouth to open the pathway for her to breathe, and felt her little chest expand, just before she let out a loud, angry cry.

“You have a daughter,” I told her mother, though that would come as no surprise after the six Nefertiti already had birthed, fathered by the Heretic.

I laid the infant across her mother’s stomach, tied off the cord with two lengths of linen thread, and waited for the pulsing blood to slow. Then, using the knife Harwa had
seared in the flames of the brazier, I severed the connection between them—the act I find most disconcerting of all those I perform as a physician, for in solitude do we all exist from that moment forward through all eternity. The little girl ceased crying and began kicking her legs, glorying in her newfound freedom. When I wiped her clean with a soft cloth she quieted and watched my face with the unblinking, unfocused eyes of a newborn. Then I handed her to Harwa and turned to attend to her mother.

“Leave me in peace,
sunu,”
the priest’s lady muttered, turning away from my hand. “My part of the bargain is finished.” It seemed an odd thing to say, though I could not fault her for wanting to rest.

“Not until you birth the after-membrane.”

She objected no more, leaving me to wonder why she turned her face from her new daughter as well. Perhaps she has become disillusioned, I thought, for the gods have not been kind to her as a mother. Her three youngest daughters by the Heretic were carried away by the same pestilence that had taken the last child of Queen Tiye, her mother by marriage. As if that were not enough, her eldest is said to have thrown herself into Mother River rather than bear her father another child, a story that gained credence after her eleven-year-old sister died giving birth. That left only one, Tutankhamen’s new Queen. And now this tiny daughter by a priest of Amen.