The Hippopotamus Marsh (30 page)

Two days later Amunmose returned. Si-Amun, leaning against one of the pillars that gave out from his father’s office to the portico steps and listening to Hor-Aha’s dry voice accounting the disposition of the remaining soldiers, watched the High Priest make his way through the garden. He was dressed in an ankle-length white kilt, stiffly starched, its pleats rustling. His sandals were red leather, the pectoral lying against his brown chest was gold and jasper, and his eyes were ringed in black kohl. The leopard skin lay over one shoulder, the beast’s snout almost brushing the ground. Two acolytes flanked him, one carrying his white staff with the gold plumes of Amun and one bearing a small wooden box.

Si-Amun held a hand up and Hor-Aha stopped speaking. “We will resume later,” he said to the General.
“Amunmose is here in an official capacity, I think with the name of my son. Send to Aahmes-nefertari. Tell her to prepare for a visit from the High Priest.” He scarcely heard Hor-Aha take his leave. His eyes were fixed on the innocent-seeming box in the hands of the small boy as Amunmose came to a halt below him and bowed, and it was all he could do to greet the priest and invite him in under the relative coolness of the portico roof.

Amunmose mounted the steps, sweat beading on his forehead. “Courage, my friend!” Si-Amun smiled, waving him within. “Only a few more days to the Inundation. Have you brought a name for my son?” But as he spoke, his glance kept straying to the acolyte standing obediently outside in the sun. Amunmose bowed again, seeing his abstraction.

“Indeed I have, Prince. I have also brought the thing you requested. Be careful how you handle it. A drop on the skin will burn.” Si-Amun wrenched his attention back to the priest.

“Let us first discuss life,” he requested quietly, although a thrill of horror shot down his spine. “What do the astrologers say?” He waited anxiously, thinking of his first child, the little boy he had been unable to get to know and who now lay in an unfinished tomb. Amunmose smiled.

“I think you will be satisfied,” he said. “They have chosen the name Ahmose-onkh.” Ahmose-onkh. Si-Amun felt his heart lighten. It was a good, solid name, conservative and reassuring, familiar and comfortable as the passing of dreaming time in Weset. It was right that the child should bear the name of Ahmose, who alone among the male members of the family had remained sunny and untouched directly by war and destruction, and the suffix
“onkh,” a derivative of the ankh, the sign of life itself, reinforced the name’s vitality. Si-Amun returned the High Priest’s smile.

“It is entirely acceptable,” he said. “Go to Aahmesnefertari now and tell her.” But first Amunmose clicked his fingers and the little acolyte came running up the steps. Bowing to Si-Amun he presented the box.

“A gift for your son, from me,” Amunmose said for the benefit of the acolyte and with a warning glance at Si-Amun. “It has great value, Prince. Guard it well.”

Si-Amun took it, placed a hand on the acolyte’s black head, managed to dismiss the priest, and turned into the empty office. The wood was warm in his fingers and a scent of cedar drifted to his nostrils. Trembling, he lifted the lid. An alabaster pot lay within, its stopper sealed tight with wax. Si-Amun stared at it, then resolutely closed the lid. Tucking it under his arm, he made his way to his rooms and thrust the box under his couch. Then he went in search of Aahmes-nefertari.

He found his wife on the roof sitting under a canopy on her cushions, the baby asleep in a basket beside her. Raa was dripping lotus essence into a bowl of water in which a cloth was soaking. On seeing the Prince come walking across the roof, she bowed and withdrew. Aahmes-nefertari smiled and held out her arms. She was naked, her sheath crumpled on the mat. “Are you pleased?” she smiled. “I think it is a lovely name. Amunmose has just gone and I decided to come up here and have Raa bathe me. How hot it is this afternoon!” Si-Amun knelt to be enfolded. Her skin was hot and dry, smelling faintly of persimmons. The hair that drifted against his face was also warm, as soft and
light as river mist. He pulled back a little and kissed her unpainted lips.

“I think it is a lovely name too,” he smiled. “Ahmose will be delighted.” He turned his attention to the child. Ahmose-onkh slept in the abandon of utter bliss. Surfeited with milk, he lay with his tiny brown limbs splayed on the sheet, his black eyelashes fluttering against his chubby cheeks, his mouth, like an early lotus bud, slightly open. Si-Amun stroked his satiny skin with one wondering finger. “How perfect he is!” he exclaimed, and with the emotion came a heightened awareness of all around him.

The baby’s skin was dewy, the sheet under him dazzling white. Si-Amun, bemused, could count every intricate warp and woof. One of Aahmes-nefertari’s hands lay relaxed on a blue cushion. Enthralled, Si-Amun noted with a kind of passion the faintly paler patches on her fingers where she usually wore her rings, the ridges of her tendons, the tiny almost invisible hairs between her knuckles. His eyes travelled the brown, glowing journey of her naked leg, the ankle turned, the toes sturdy and calloused, and then lifted to the view beyond. He felt breathless, as though he had run a long way.

The tassels lining the edge of the canopy stirred red against the profound, strong aquamarine of the summer sky. Past them the outlines of desert and temple, the complex rise and fall of Weset’s buildings, the complicated arrangement of bare shrubs beside the river’s silver curves smote Si-Amun forcefully as something foreign and exotic, something already apart from him, to which he did not belong. A channel had opened between his eyes and his heart, carrying exquisite though unintelligible messages that bypassed his
consciousness. The summer colours, all beige, silver, tan, imposed against a vivid blue, burned him like a hot sword.

“Aahmes-nefertari,” he said, hardly recognizing his own voice, “let’s stay up here for the rest of the day. Send Raa away. I will bathe you. We can talk. We can have food sent up at sunset instead of going to the hall.” She turned to him astonished, ready to tease, but something in his expression gave her pause.

“Very well,” she agreed. “Raa can take the baby with her.” But he prevented her.

“No. We can take care of him.” She settled back on the cushions and grinned at him.

“The sun has turned your head, Si-Amun! So we shall be lazy? Good! Bathe me!”

They ordered Raa inside the house and as the sun slowly arced towards the west they talked. Si-Amun adjusted the canopy accordingly. Twice they dozed, slumped against each other on the disordered cushions. Si-Amun trickled the scented water over Aahmes-nefertari’s dark supple body. He watched her suckle their son. They spoke together of their father, of their childhood, but by unspoken agreement they did not mention the future. Si-Amun would have liked to make love to her there on the roof under the softening sunlight, but she was still healing from Ahmoseonkh’s birth.

Towards evening servants appeared with barley beer and red wine, raisins and figs, pomegranates, bread and honey cakes. As Ra was slowly swallowed and the red tide of his struggle flooded the land, they at last fell silent, lying side by side in a companionable embrace and watching him disappear.

When the light had faded and the stars began to flutter in a sky that still held a hint of the palest of blues, Si-Amun took his son in his arms and walked Aahmes-nefertari to her quarters. Once there she turned to face him. Behind them Raa was lighting the lamps, setting out fresh water for the night, and turning down the sheets on the couch. “It has been a glorious afternoon,” she sighed, reaching to kiss him. “If we were not mourning for Father, if there was no sadness, it would have been perfect. But you are not yourself, Si-Amun.” He returned her kiss, feeling the small weight of his son leave his arms as Raa took the boy away towards the nursery.

“None of us are ourselves,” he said. “Perhaps we will never again be as we were. How can we be? The future is very dark, Aahmes-nefertari. I love you, and nothing else is worthwhile but that.” For a moment his gaze travelled her face, the tight skin tanned almost black, the brown eyes clear and soft without paint, the well-formed, mobile mouth only slightly paler than the rest of her. “Sleep well,” he finished. She smiled, nodded, and closed her door behind him.

The passages were empty of all save the guards as Si-Amun made his way to his quarters, and the house was quiet, the inhabitants exhausted by a day of heat. He wondered, as he listened to the slap slap of his sandals on the tiling, what the members of the family were doing. The impulse to turn aside to investigate was strong but he resisted it, seeing it as an attempt of his ka to divert him from his purpose. Nothing would be served by it. He knew where they were. They were his flesh and blood, their characters, their habits, grooved beside his own in this shabby old house.
Tetisheri would be praying or listening to stories in her room. His mother would be talking with Isis, recalling all her memories with Seqenenra. Aahmes-nefertari … Better not to think of her holding up her arms so that Raa could pull the diaphanous sleeping gown over her head and then walking through into the nursery to bend one last time over the loose form of the sleeping baby. Kamose, now on his feet but still stiff, would be sitting alone and without light in the garden, thinking the thoughts that no one in the family shared, reluctant to go to his couch, and Ahmose was probably wandering by the river with a guard. Tani would be asleep.

Si-Amun answered the grave salute of the guard on his door and stepped inside. The room was empty, but his servant had left a light on the table by the couch, opened his small Amun shrine, and placed grains of fresh incense in the holder beside it. Si-Amun went to the shrine, ignited the charcoal, tossed some grains onto it, and passing the holder over the shrine, began his evening prayers. Before his father’s death he had seldom bothered to perform this ritual, but lately, feeling the responsibilities Seqenenra had laid upon him, he had begun to approach the god each night as part of his duty to the family and the governorship he now held. He prayed carefully, then closed the shrine. He did not know whether what he was about to do was within the laws of the gods who had ruled Egypt or if the terrible monster Sebek, always waiting by the scales, would annihilate him. But this is the only way I can make myself clean, he thought grimly as he pulled the box out from under his couch and placed it on the table. I must spare them all the misery of my trial.

Going to the door he sent a servant for a palette. When the man returned, Si-Amun took it, and sinking crosslegged in the correct pose, placed it across his knees. He murmured the prayer to Thoth, picked up a reed brush and began.

It did not take him long to explain to his family, in neat black hieratic script, his guilt and his shame. He resisted the urge to justify himself, for here at the last he knew that any justification was false. He had done wrong and he must pay. He signed himself Si-Amun, Prince and Governor of Weset. The papyrus quickly absorbed the black paint. Si-Amun rolled up the scroll, and going to his chest he selected his favourite knife, a bronze dagger with an ivory hilt his father had given him years ago. He drew it slowly across the back of his hand and saw blood spring up like a boat’s wake in its path. It was sharp enough. He opened the box, removed the stone vial, and let himself out into the passage. He handed the scroll to the soldier. “Give this to Prince Kamose when you have finished your watch,” he said, and without waiting for a reply he set off along the passage.

Mersu’s cell was close to the women’s quarters. Si-Amun went steadily, eyes fixed unseeing on his feet, allowing his mind to fill with a succession of images from his short life that he deliberately did not imbue with any emotion save the futility of it all.

He was almost outside Mersu’s door when someone touched his arm. He started, coming to a halt, and Tani materialized before him. She was barefoot and holding a cloak against her. Si-Amun fumbled and almost dropped the alabaster container. His heart gave a bound. “Tani!” he exclaimed. “What are you doing wandering about alone?”

“I cannot sleep,” she confessed. “Heket is already snoring on her mat and my other servants are in their quarters. I talked to the guard on my door for a while but I made the poor man uncomfortable so I decided to walk a little.” She bit her lip. “I am lonely, Si-Amun. I have no one to share with. Grandmother relishes her isolation. Mother withdraws into her own grief and I do not want to trouble her with mine. Kamose is still wounded and you know what he’s like. Even though he talks to you, you get the feeling that he’s in some other world. I need Ramose.”

All at once she noticed what he was carrying. Her eyes darted from the knife and vial to his face and back again. “What on earth are you doing with those?” Si-Amun could find no ready answer. Her appearance had shocked him and he felt disoriented. As he cast about for a light reply, she stepped closer, a frown on her face. “Where are you going, Si-Amun?” she asked sharply, a hint of fear in her voice. “Why do you need a dagger inside the house!”’ Suddenly he felt himself gripped. She had both hands around his wrist. “You’re going to kill Mersu, aren’t you?” she hissed. “Aren’t you?” He was about to tell her to mind her own business and send her back to her rooms, but there was nothing childish about her expression, intense and fiercely questioning. She is not a child, he thought with shock. She is fifteen. Only two years younger than Aahmes-nefertari. How self-absorbed I have been!

“Yes,” he said, still feeling her little nails biting into his wrist. “I am going to kill Mersu. It is cleaner and less agonizing than a trial, Tani, and Amun knows he deserves to die.” He expected her to gasp, recoil, let loose a spate of argument and indignation, but she stared at him calmly.
Gradually an odd light dawned in her eyes, something cool and accepting. She let him go.

“You are right,” she said. “Let him pay for Father’s death, not us. Strike well, Si-Amun.” With a dignity he had never seen in her before, she turned and retraced her steps, disappearing around the corner in a flurry of floating linen. She had not glanced back.