The Hippopotamus Marsh (6 page)

“I am sorry, Aahotep. I was wondering whether I should visit my mayors and assistant governors on the way north or as we come home. It is good for them to talk with me and not an overseer sometimes.”

“No, you were not.” She took his hand and her fingers closed around it. “You were thinking of Si-Amun’s unborn child.”

Seqenenra stared up at the roof of the canopy, its yellow tassels bobbing in the wind, and then beyond it. The sky was densely blue and as he squinted against the sun he saw a hawk wheel into sight, wings outstretched and motionless, a black speck in the vastness. He heard the helmsman give a sharp order, answered by one of the sailors. His gaze dropped slowly to Isis and Kares, leaning over the side and talking quietly together with that air of permanent alertness that all good servants developed. Bending, he kissed Aahotep’s full, hennaed lips, brushing her tousled black hair away from her cheek as he did so.

“You are right,” he admitted. “I am happy for them both and yet …”

“And yet you wish that Kamose could be persuaded to wed Tani and give you grandchildren also, in order that your inheritance might be doubly secure.” He drew away grim-faced, sitting with one leg extended, his arms clasping the other bent knee as a guest in his own garden might sit. Aahotep waited, and when he did not speak she continued in a low voice, “You are the rightful King of this land by blood and birth. You would have married your sister if she had not died so young. That is why you feel so naked. I was given to you because my family is also ancient though it carries no royal blood. True Ma’at in Egypt hangs by a thread. Kamose resists all your efforts to push him towards a union with Tani when she comes of age next year so that you wonder whether you will be forced to command him. Yet life that seems so bright and strong may at any time flicker and vanish, dear brother. Si-Amun’s child will be fully royal. Kamose might be dead tomorrow, next month, next year.” She fingered the silver ankh at her neck and the
amulet of Sekhmet on her arm to negate the doom of her words. “We know nothing. Rejoice for your son. If Kamose decides to see reason and he and Tani have children, that is fine. If not, there is still Ahmose.”

“You are right,” he broke in harshly. “I grieve for myself, for my father, for a wounded Ma’at. I mourn because I will go to my tomb and Si-Amun to his, yes and Kamose too, as lowly governors. I will never touch the Crook and the Flail, Aahotep.”

“Yet you have always done right in the sight of the gods,” she reminded him. “When your heart is weighed, nothing else will matter. Isis!” The woman left the view and came bowing. “Bring the sennet. Look, Seqenenra.” She pointed to the bank. “This village seems to be inhabited solely by little boys and oxen. I suppose they have driven them into the river to cool them. Do you want to play the cones or shall I?”

They played several games, ate and drank, and played again, Aahotep being careful not to force Seqenenra’s piece into the square that denoted the cold, black water of the underworld where the dead wailed for the light of Ra, and Seqenenra’s mood soon lifted. He was not a man given often to self-pity and like everyone he knew he was addicted to the magical tussle between the cones and the spools. As the afternoon heat intensified, Aahotep took Isis to fan her and went away to rest.

Seqenenra rose, stretched, and made his way to the side of the barge, first hypnotized by the steady running of the wake the craft was making and then fixing his eyes on the bank gliding past. Villages, stiff palms, canals mirroring a bronze sky, sometimes a nearly-naked peasant leading a
donkey, all appeared, imprinted themselves briefly on his consciousness tinged with a haze of heat, and slid away like waking dreams. He knew them all. Since the time of his youth he had travelled up and down the Nile, from Weset south to Swenet and north to Qes, the boundaries of the portion of Egypt he and his fathers before him were allowed to administer. Year by year he had seen the apparent changelessness of his domain. Changelessness was a part of the rightness of Ma’at, the eternal order that had been laid down by the gods when Egypt rose from Nun, the primeval waters, and Osiris had still been a god of the living.

When he was younger, travelling with Senakhtenra, such familiarity had been reassuring. Yet now he knew that the changelessness of the villages was the only part of Ma’at that remained. The barge was passing a shrine, crumbling and overgrown, and even as he had to turn his head to keep it in view he saw a pack of dogs come running from its gaping entrance and head towards the water. The Setiu who ruled Egypt now had brought their own gods with them, uncivilized deities with hard names, and the homes of the gods of Egypt were turning to dust. How is it that I never noticed before? he asked himself, deeply disturbed. Khentiamentiu, jackal of Aabtu, your temple and a hundred others, not changeless, no. Falling down, falling apart as I sailed by year after year, while Set and Sutekh slowly became one and Hathor and Ishtar blended. Horus and Horon … He shivered. My body lives in the shadow of the old palace. My ka inhabits the past so that I keep the present comfortably at bay. And why not? Wearily he left the barge’s side and cast himself down on the cushions. Uni padded to him immediately, but with one arm over his eyes
Seqenenra waved him away. Let Kamose marry whom and when he will. Let Ahmose continue to run wild and laughing through his life. In five hentis or ten there might be change but not in my lifetime or the lives of my children. That is the Ma’at of today. That is the law of the One, Apepa, Beloved of Set, foreign usurper in Het-Uart. He felt no anger, only surprise that today the full force of his country’s situation was brought home to him, today during a small voyage of no great import. He considered, but the heat brought him a welcome lassitude and he slept.

At Khemennu they were guests of Aahotep’s cousin Teti, a wealthy man who had secured from the King the position of Inspector and Administrator of Dykes and Canals. In addition to travelling through the nomes of his jurisdiction after the Inundation had receded in order to see to the reconstituting of the dykes and the repair of the major irrigation canals in Upper Egypt, he held much property. His wife was a priestess in the temple of Thoth, a deity revered not only as the god of wisdom and writing and therefore every scribe’s patron but also as the essence of the moon. Khemennu was his city and Aahotep, a lover of Thoth all her life, spent much of her time in the temple there when she was not visiting relatives. Khemennu was a pretty place surrounded by dense fig trees, its mud streets lined with date palms and its docks busy. Teti’s estate lay on the northern limit beside the temple of Set that had been built fifty years before. He had many minor officials under him and his watersteps were often crowded. Seqenenra, walking with him through the town, taking a skiff with him as he was poled to some dispute or other over a field boundary that the winter flood had washed away, and sitting
beside him at the evening meal when his reception hall was full of the dignitaries of Khemennu and noisy with musicians and acrobats, felt out of place. It was not so much the faster pace of the life of his relative by marriage. It was Teti’s quite unselfconscious air of cheerful fulfilment. He worshipped Thoth as his nome’s totem and Set as the lord of the King. He organized his family and his staff, received the frequent heralds from the Delta with assurance and warmth, even talked to Seqenenra with just the correct balance of comradeship and deference that Seqenenra’s superior blood but inferior relationship with the One demanded. Teti, Seqenenra decided, was a man without dark dreams or stabs of remorse. He envied him.

With Seqenenra’s permission, Teti had placed Tani in the care of his son Ramose, a sixteen-year-old who loved fowling and who promised to care for his second cousin as though she were Hathor herself. Tani, to her father’s surprise and secret amusement, blushed at the young man’s earnest words and the pair of them had gathered up servants and throwing sticks and disappeared into the swamps.

“They get along very well together, those two,” Teti commented one evening. He and Seqenenra were sitting by Teti’s artificial lake, small but grandly ornamented with blue tiling, drinking pomegranate wine while Ra lowered himself towards the mouth of Nut beyond the western hills. “Ramose is a responsible son and Tani must surely be nearing the age of betrothal?” Seqenenra shot him a surprised glance and Teti chuckled. “Have you not considered it, Prince? We may be members of the minor nobility but I am a rich man, enjoying the favour of the One, and a further cementing of our families would be a blessed thing.”

“Perhaps,” Seqenenra responded slowly. “Yet Tani is still very young and I would not force her if she and Ramose felt nothing more for each other than friendship.” Besides, he thought, there is Kamose. He may change his mind. Tani may find her brother a safer and more familiar haven in the end than the prospect of Khemennu’s noise and bustle.

“Neither would I want to force her,” Teti retorted. “After all, it would not be a royal match of necessity.” He signalled for more wine to be poured for them, casting Seqenenra a shrewd look. “Si-Amun and Aahmes-nefertari’s children will keep your blood line pure. Tani could do a lot worse than my son.” Seqenenra leaned forward apologetically.

“Teti, I did not hesitate out of arrogance. I am sorry. The idea had not crossed my mind, that is all.”

“I don’t suppose it had,” Teti replied, eyes narrowed. “But give it some thought, Prince. The One would be more than pleased.” Seqenenra stiffened and looked him full in the face. He was lifting his gold cup and drinking, but his eyes were coolly fixed on Seqenenra.

“Is this match his idea?”

Teti lowered his cup and tossed the dregs into the water of the pool, now rippling red with the sun’s last lingering rays. Already servants were moving about the garden with lamps.

“Not directly. But lately on several occasions when I have been granted an audience with him at Het-Uart regarding new acres to be flooded, he has expressed an interest in my son and your daughter, separately in the conversation but with, I think, a hint of his new desire.”

“But why?” Seqenenra did not want to say the words himself. It was safer here, in a city where a Setiu governor’s
estate lay barely a stone’s throw away, to hear them from Teti’s lips.

“You know why,” Teti said shortly. “The One has your oaths of obedience and the scroll your grandfather signed, but Weset is a very long way from Het-Uart and the holy sleep is sometimes disturbed, I think, by the fear that Seqenenra Tao’s sons may both end up married to Seqenenra Tao’s daughters. A potential for treachery would have been created.”

Seqenenra laughed abruptly, though he felt cold. “But you know me, Teti. You know my sons. We live quietly, we serve Amun in peace, we administer our nomes with honesty. The One’s suspicions are unjust.”

“They are not yet suspicions,” Teti assured him. “Only moments of unease, I am sure. But quite apart from that, Seqenenra, wouldn’t Ramose and Tani make a good pair? Look at you and my cousin!”

Full dark had fallen. The hot night air was suddenly laden with the odours of lotus, pomegranate blossom and a waft of roast goose from the kitchens across the sandy courtyard. Lamps cast pools of yellow light on discarded cushions and the remains of the small greeting meal of fruit and wine the men had been picking at, but did not illumine their faces to each other. “You are right,” Seqenenra managed, fighting down the wave of reluctance the idea had stirred. “But let us wait and see what Tani and Ramose themselves have to say about it by the time we must go home.”

“That is fair.” Teti rose with a gesture and Seqenenra rose with him. “Now we will go inside and see what the women have been doing today. My wife ordered out the litters early this morning, so it is likely that they have been
visiting merchants! In any event, I am glad Aahotep and your daughters are here. I wish they would come more often. My wife loves them dearly. You know, I must adjudicate a terrible wrangle in the Delta between a group of peasants and the Overseer of Set’s Acres. It seems that one of the dykes between their adjoining fields was completely washed away in the Inundation this year and the Overseer is claiming more land than was originally the god’s, or so the peasants say. I must consult the land titles and the original survey and I hope I can find some wisdom there. The One says …”

Seqenenra listened to him politely but absently as they moved from the garden, between the pillars of the entrance hall, along the brightly painted passage. Danger snarled at him suddenly, and he felt anxious and alone. “Teti!” he blurted. The other man stopped talking and turned to him.

“Yes?”

“Your grandfather was once an erpa-ha Prince and governor of the Khemennu nomes, was he not?” Teti stepped closer and when he spoke his voice was scarcely above a whisper. “Yes, he was. What of it?”

Oh gods, Seqenenra thought in despair. What is the matter with me? Teti’s wounds, my wounds, scars now, dry and healed. Amun, prevent me from ripping at them any more! The lamp on the wall behind Seqenenra’s head was flickering and the tongues of light jerked spasmodically across Teti’s face, making his eyes glitter.

“Why are you not governor of Khemennu? An erpa-ha is an hereditary title.” He had overstepped the bounds of hospitality and family affection by a mile, yet he could not help himself. Teti bit his lip.

“I thought you knew, Prince,” he murmured huskily. “My grandfather led an insurrection against Osiris Sekerher, Apepa’s grandfather. It got no further than Henen-Nesut, south of Ta-she. My grandfather was pardoned but he had his tongue removed for treason and his title was taken away. Yet our King and his father were merciful. My father, Pepi, redeemed himself in the first Apepa’s army and I am grateful for what I have.” He drew away into deeper shadow but Seqenenra could still see his eyes, veiled and cautious. “I sway with the wind so as not to be broken,” he said with more confidence. “I suggest that you do the same, Seqenenra Tao. Indeed I had always thought you a mild and biddable man. There is no other way.”

They looked at each other in silence. At the end of the passage where the reception hall opened out and guests and other diners were already chattering and laughing, light blazed out but did not reach them. At length Seqenenra wet his lips. “Is there not?” he croaked. “You know about the letters, Teti?” Teti took one step forward, and grasping his friend’s arms shook him once, violently.