The Oasis (52 page)

“Take the boats anyway,” Ahmose urged. “We can ride the river home once the Inundation begins to subside. I like this venture no more than you, Kamose. We will be far from home if there is trouble.” Silently Kamose agreed. Handing the maps back to Ipi, he signalled that the meeting was over.

In the two weeks remaining before the month of Mesore began Kamose did his best to give local matters his attention. He inspected the prison he had ordered rebuilt the previous year, the motive for which he could scarcely recall and which filled him now with a mixture of foreboding and anxiety. He listened to the crop assessments for the harvest that had just begun. It would be a bountiful year and he reminded Ipi, writing furiously at his feet while the various stewards made their reports, to carefully note the tithe that was to go to Amun.

He crossed the river to the west bank, ostensibly to see how work on his tomb was progressing. Like every other noble he had begun it as soon as he reached his majority. The masons and artists involved in its construction and decoration welcomed him effusively but the visit depressed him. He was still young, only twenty-five years old. There was no urgency to the tasks the brawny stoneworkers were performing, no need to hurry the smoothing and plastering of the still-jagged walls between which he descended to the dank coolness of the room where he would eventually lie.

How will the artists fill these voids? he wondered with despair. I have no wife or children. There will be no pretty scenes of family felicity, no peaceful accomplishments completed over a lifetime of service to my nome. Instead I have killed and burned and battled. The paint laid so brightly here will glow with the red of blood, the blue of tears, and that will be the story of my life. Do I dare to command the recording of such an account seeing that I have not freed Egypt and my deeds will probably not be redeemed by a King’s burial? With an effort he gave the artists his attention, looking at their sketches and answering their questions, assuring them that they need not hurry their work, when all he wanted was to tell them to put down their tools and go home.

Emerging half-blinded from the dimness of the passage, he stood gazing out over the sandy plain that lay between the cliff of Gurn behind him and the thin ribbon of green beyond which marked the Nile. To his right the pyramid of Osiris Mentuhotep-neb-hapet-Ra hugged the tumbled rocks and before him, scattered here and there in the baking aridity, other small pyramids jutted, each with its courtyard and low surrounding wall. Here his ancestors lay, beautified and justified, the royal Kings of his beloved country, in whose shadow he lurked like a dwarf. These were not the mighty gods of the beginning whose monuments reared in all their awesome immensity near the entrance to the Delta. They were closer to him in time and familiarity, men of strength and wisdom whose divine blood, though diluted, provided a tincture to his own. I need not be ashamed in your presence, he spoke in his mind to the stubby structures shimmering in the noon heat. I have done what I can and I will do more if Amun wills it. I envy you the ages in which you lived, no matter how turbulent they might have been, and the peace you now enjoy.

The astrologer priests, after consulting their charts and each other, decided that Aahmes-nefertari’s little baby should be called Hent-ta-Hent. It was a safe, noncommittal name with no negative connotations. They were equally conservative in their predictions for the child’s future, saying merely that she would enjoy good health in such years as the gods would give her. “It is not enough,” Aahmes-nefertari complained to Kamose on one of his frequent visits to the nursery where Raa was tending to both Tao children. “First they give her a name that is completely anonymous and then they fall over themselves in stepping delicately around any definite prognostication.” Leaning over the sleeping baby, she gently pressed the tip of one finger to a bead of sweat that had gathered on its temple. “If she is to die, then they should say so. I have lost one child. I do not want to pour my heart into this one if she is to be taken from me.” There were no tears in her voice. She spoke calmly, and her expression when she straightened up and regarded her brother was composed. “Besides,” she went on. “Ahmose wanted a son. The family needs another boy.” Kamose put his arm around her hot shoulders, his eyes on the tiny bundle so blissfully unconscious.

“The astrologers can be wrong,” he said. “You must not shut up your heart on the words of a few old men, Aahmes-nefertari. Hent-ta-Hent is innocent. She needs your love.”

“And I need Ahmose.” She shrugged out of his embrace and looked at him coolly. “Our marriage has been nothing but a series of farewells followed by periods of intense fear and interspersed with brief moments of joy. If you were taking him back to the Delta to attack Het-Uart, I would not feel as I do, but why must you drag him with you into Wawat?” She spread her hands. “Is this all I may look forward to? Boredom, child-rearing and a kind of widowhood? Let him stay home with me this time!”

“But I need him,” Kamose answered her. “I am taking all the Medjay and one thousand local troops into Wawat with me. The Princes and commanders have gone. I cannot control events in the south by myself.”

“You have Hor-Aha.” He did not respond at once and she pounced on the delay. “You no longer trust your General completely, do you, Kamose?” she said. “Why not? Did something happen during the last campaign season?” He shook his head, briefly unbalanced by her perception.

“No,” he said. “Nothing happened. I would certainly put my life in Hor-Aha’s hands and I know that he would defend me with his last breath. It’s …” He could not put what he felt into words. “It’s nothing more than a very faint uneasiness. Perhaps a reflection of the Princes’ antipathy towards him.”

“Perhaps. Does Ahmose share it?” The baby was stirring at the sound of their voices and they moved together to the door.

“I am not sure,” Kamose replied once they had gained the hallway. “It is often difficult to know what he is thinking.” She faced him squarely.

“No, it isn’t,” she said. “Not for me.” There was an angry glint in her eye. She swung away, and Kamose watched her stride towards the square of white light at the end of the passage. Even her walk is different, he thought. The seeds of Tetisheri’s character are beginning to sprout in her. Something of her vulnerability is gone and with it much of her modesty. She will be a formidable woman one day, yet I grieve a little for the tender girl who was so prone to nervous tears.

One task he performed with pleasure was the dictating of two texts to be carved on two stelae and set up within the sacred precincts of Amun’s temple. Pacing the floor of his father’s office with Ipi cross-legged on the floor by the desk, he did not mince his words, finding in them the cloak of pride that was becoming more and more difficult to draw around himself. On the first stela he described the first council he had held with the Princes in the dark and uncertain days before the Medjay had come and he had begun his desperate trek north. He spoke as a King, repeating the titles he longed to hear called out in his honour as he mounted the Horus Throne. “Horus Manifest on His Throne, Beloved of the Two Goddesses of the Repeating Monuments, the Horus of Gold, Making Content the Two Lands, King of Upper and Lower Egypt, Uaskheperra, Son of Ra, Kamose given life forever and ever, Beloved of Amun-Ra, Lord of Karnak.” In the formal language of official documents and pronouncements he went on to describe the words, decisions and events he remembered so well. “Men shall hail me as the mighty ruler in Weset,” he finished in a burst of desire that he knew was nothing but self-deception. “Kamose, the Protector of Egypt.”

The second stela began with his assault on Khemmenu and went on to chronicle the interception of the letter from Teti to Apepa, the march north, the bloodless destruction of the oasis, and the subsequent victory over Kethuna and his exhausted men. “Take the texts to Amunmose and have him appoint a temple stonemason to carve them,” he told his scribe. “They are to be erected within the bounds of the outer court so that all may know how I have tried to give Egypt back to the Egyptians.” Flinging himself into his father’s chair, he watched as Ipi wiped his pens, closed his ink, and scrambled to his feet, flexing his tired fingers. “It is really for the generations to come,” he said quietly. “I want to be remembered kindly, Ipi. I want the people to understand.”

“I know, Majesty,” Ipi replied. “I also know that you believe you will soon stand in the Judgement Hall. Your words cannot hide the things I see beneath them. Yet if Amun wills, it may not be so. I very much desire to sit at your feet beside the Horus Throne!” Kamose summoned a smile.

“Thank you, my friend,” he said. “Go about your business.” When Ipi had bowed himself out, palette under his arm, Kamose sat on, staring at the blurred reflection of his clasped hands on the gleaming surface of the table. I do not want to stand in the Judgement Hall, he thought wearily. I want to ride in the Heavenly Barque with the other Incarnations of the God, having laid aside the Double Crown and the Royal Regalia for my successor to a united country. Do not do this to me, Amun my Father. Let the oracle be deceived and in the years to come I will look back on my agonies and laugh.

With a deliberate act of the will he tried to allow the peace of high summer to enter him. It slowed the pace and speech of the inhabitants of house, temple and town, hung drowsily in the limp leaves of the trees, weighed heavy on the drooping, dusty vines from which the gardeners plucked the great purple grapes, but try as he might, it skirted him as though it had a consciousness and knew that he was no longer a child of stillness. He swam, stood in the temple to pray, ate the increasingly bountiful food placed before him as the harvest proceeded, he even played with a delighted Ahmose-onkh, but he was an impostor, an actor longing to live his part yet forced to count the minutes until his performance might be over.

It was with a guilty relief that he received word from his Overseer of Ships. The vessels going into Wawat had been inspected and repaired and were ready to sail. At once he ordered the Scribe of Recruits to the Medjay camp and his under-scribes into the town and the surrounding countryside to gather the thousand conscripts he needed to augment the tribesmen. Summoning the Scribe of Assemblage, he listed the provisions of food and beer to be loaded and the weapons to be cleaned, sharpened and distributed. There was no sense of excitement or even fear in these preparations, only a dull feeling of familiarity. Wawat would present no challenge. It was a punitive expedition and nothing more. Kamose sent word to his brother that they would sail at dawn the following morning, but he did not give him the news in person. He did not want to see his sister’s face.

He requested a meeting between himself, his mother and his grandmother in Tetisheri’s apartments following the afternoon sleep. Uni admitted him to a room full of eddies of hot air from the fans in the hands of two girls standing by the window. Tetisheri had obviously just left her couch. The sheets were rumpled and her headrest lay on the floor. She herself was sitting in a loose diaphanous tunic, her wiry grey hair dishevelled, her face paint smudged. She was drinking water from a large cup. Aahotep was leaning on the window sill, the ostrich plumes of the fans almost brushing her back as she surveyed the tired garden beyond. She turned as he entered and gave him a smile. “I heard all the activity on the river,” she said by way of a greeting. “I presume that it presages your departure, Kamose. I was not able to sleep this afternoon.” He came to her swiftly and kissed her smooth cheek. She smelled of lotus oil and acacia blossom essence.

“I am sorry the noise disturbed your rest,” he responded dutifully and she laughed.

“No you are not, for it is unavoidable. Besides, I was too restless to close my eyes.”

“Well I was not,” Tetisheri grumbled. “I slept as one dead. Look at me! You could have waited an hour to allow me time to bathe and dress, Kamose.”

“I am sorry,” Kamose repeated. “But you allowed Uni to admit me. Please dismiss your fanbearers, Grandmother.”

“Oh, it is to be like that is it?” She brightened and waved a hand at the young women, who immediately laid down the fans and bowed themselves out. “A council of war.” The atmosphere had become breathlessly still once the servants had left. Kamose felt sweat break out along his spine as he drew up a stool for his mother beside Tetisheri and positioned himself on the edge of the couch.

“Of a kind, I suppose,” he agreed. “I leave for Wawat early tomorrow and expect to beat the Inundation. But once I am in the south, I will be trapped by the water until it begins to sink. I intend to ride home on the remnants of the flood but that may not be until the end of Tybi.”

“Six months from now,” Tetisheri put in thoughtfully. “Quite enough time to subdue the savages who are preying on Wawat villages, inspect Buhen, find out what Teti-En is doing, and bring home a cargo of gold.”

“Why would I inspect Buhen?” Kamose enquired, testing her.

“Because Buhen repaired and refortified will secure your southern border against that renegade Egyptian,” she said slowly and distinctly as though speaking to a child. “Then you can come home and concentrate your energies on Het-Uart without worrying about a second front opening against you.” He nodded.

“I will send you both detailed reports on what is happening,” he said. “While I am gone, I leave you both in full control of my nome as I did before. When the harvest is over, I want you to instruct Ankhmahor’s son Harkhuf to command war games out on the desert. Use the remainder of the Weset troops. There are two thousand still here. They must not waste the Inundation in idleness. They must stay fit. Consult with him regularly.” He paused for their response and when there was none he went on. “I have been thinking about your suggestion to recruit spies for Het-Uart. It is a good one. Seeing that you are already acquainted with this particular stratagem of underground warfare, I will leave it also in your hands. Ramose can help you.”

“You are not taking him with you?” Aahotep interposed. “I wish you would, Kamose. For one thing he will be disappointed to be left and for another I do not like the amount of time he spends with his mother.” Kamose raised his eyebrows.