The Twice Born (37 page)

“So is this,” Huy returned wryly. “So Atum becomes Light, and in doing so he casts the shadow of which you speak. And according to the commentary the shadow is like restless water, chaotic, black, smoking. Does it take Ra-Atum by surprise, do you think? Did he know what would happen if he transformed himself into Light? No matter.” He was frowning, eyes glazed in concentration. “He sees the dark turbulence of his shadow. What does he do? He calms it!” Huy’s expression cleared. He beamed up at the High Priest. “Of course! ‘I am One that transforms into Two,’ and so on and so on, but because the shadow is still a part of him, Ra-Atum can say at the end, ‘After this I am One.’ But the Two and Four and Eight, the way he calms and orders his shadow, what are they?”

“I know,” Mentuhotep said calmly. “He begins to conceive the cosmos, within the shadow. Frogs, Huy.”

Huy blinked. “Frogs?”

“Every priest and every pious Egyptian knows this. Four pairs. Two into Four into Eight. Each pair comprises a male and a female, to draw towards one another, to make harmony, to strengthen the ordering of the chaos within the shadow where one alone, or two males, would not. The male hypostasis is symbolized by a frog, the female by a snake. The Nun is the primeval waters and Naunet its female counterpart. Huh and Hauhet—endless space. Kuk and Kauket—darkness. Amun and Amaunet—what is hidden. So the shadow is put in order, and Atum remains One.”

Huy stared at him. “This is well known? You knew? Then why didn’t you tell me, Master?”

Mentuhotep came round the desk and lowered himself onto the stool. With his hands on his knees he bent over Huy. “The Book’s wholeness is a dangerous mystery. Thin rays of revelation will illuminate this passage for some, another passage for another, and some passages are known by all. But the completeness, the roundness, of the will of Ra-Atum has been shown to only one reader, the great Imhotep. That is why he is worshipped as a god himself. I believe that you have been chosen to understand as he did.” He sat back. “You see, Huy, I did not perceive how the shadow is a part of Ra-Atum, not until today. It makes other things clear. How the demons can bring harm or benefits. How the Khatyu demons, the fighters, can also be Habyu, emissaries. How every god is a force against us as well as to do us good. Look at Sekhmet, goddess of womanly joy, wife of Ptah. In her thirst for blood she would have utterly destroyed mankind if Ra had not given her red-coloured beer to drink and made her intoxicated—yet she is the mildest of deities!”

“Ramose told me that every god is nothing more than an outward manifestation of some aspect of Ra-Atum.”

“And that makes sense also.”

“So chaos is ordered into water, endless space, darkness, and what is hidden. But there is still no creation.” Huy scrambled up off the floor and rotated his shoulders. He felt as though he had not slept for a year.
That is why the frog tying my youth lock turned to gold as I entered Paradise
, he thought dimly.
Ra-Atum’s second transforming act repeated upon myself as I prepared all unknowingly to enter into my First Duat
. He yawned. “Oh, forgive my rudeness! May I now send to Amunmose and prepare to return to Iunu?”

Mentuhotep laughed ruefully. “Are you in such a hurry to see Khmun slide into the distance behind you? Very well, Huy. Your work here is over for the time being. Come into the sanctuary with me and receive Thoth’s blessing before you go.” The invitation was casual, but Huy was overwhelmed. Only a High Priest was ever allowed to face a god so directly. Exhausted and humbled, he bowed himself out.

Huy returned to Iunu with great relief. He embraced both Anhur and Amunmose before they disappeared into the labyrinth of the temple, Anhur to resume his guard duties and the servant to the kitchens. Huy knew that he would miss their company, particularly Anhur’s. The man had been both his protector and the provider of a brisk comfort, filling a need in Huy that no one since his uncle Ker had met. But Huy, watching Anhur’s broad back recede, had the feeling that their association would continue in the future. Amunmose had hugged him briefly. “If you ever become rich and want to eat the best meals in Egypt, remember me, Huy.” He had smiled and loped away, leaving Huy with a sense of nakedness.

11

 
THE REMAINDER
of the school year proceeded smoothly and peacefully for Huy. He approached his studies with a new enthusiasm born of the accumulating knowledge of the last ten years, which at last had begun to be more than a disconnected jumble of aphorisms and past events learned by enforced rote. His mastery over pen and papyrus was almost complete. He won more nods of approval than reprimands from his teachers. Dutifully he wrote to his parents, the task now a discipline rather than a pleasure, and dutifully his father replied. His brother Heby had become a healthy two-year-old, running about the house and garden as Huy himself had done. Huy occasionally tried to imagine this child, but gave up when his mind did no more than place his own features on his brother’s face and give the boy his own recalcitrant, spoiled nature. Hapu’s missives were short and entirely factual due, Huy knew, to his father’s poverty. Scribes were too expensive to hire for more than a few wellchosen words. Ishat was never mentioned, although Hapzefa was helping to raise Heby. Huy sometimes wondered idly how the fiery young girl was faring, but Ishat too had faded into the misty realm of what had been. Nakht and his wife Nefer-Mut had become Huy’s parents, Thothmes his beloved brother, and Meri-Hathor, Nasha, and Anuket his sisters.

His fourteenth birthday on the ninth day of Paophi was celebrated with a boating party for all his schoolmates given by Nakht, and Anuket, instead of making him the usual wreath, presented him with an earring of jasper and moonstone teardrops held in claws of gold. “You wear that hoop through your lobe all the time,” she complained gently while he bent, overcome, so that she could unscrew it. “It will not do for special parties like this one. The jasper is for the redness of your blood, warm and healthy with youth. The moonstone is for your gift. The moon belongs to Thoth.” So often both her words and her actions could be interpreted in several ways, and while her fingers moved over his ear, attaching the gift, Huy wondered yet again if he was being teased. His relationship with her had become ossified, unchanging, a peculiar dance composed of wariness and habit. He was the one who sought her out, instigated their conversations, tried to draw a more powerful response from her than the smiles and small caresses that in themselves could be interpreted either as encouragements or as mere evidences of sisterly affection.
She is behaving entirely correctly
, Huy would tell himself after returning emotionally exhausted from his visits to Nakht’s house.
I am not yet old enough to sue for her in marriage. She is showing me her love in the only ways permissible to her
. Yet gradually the flutter of her hands on his face, his shoulder, the way she leaned over him to pick up a flower or a morsel of food, the sidelong glances and smiles, began to take on a more manipulative cast in his mind, sometimes making him feel like a toy being pulled along behind her.

His work on the Book continued. The third part consisted of two very large scrolls that once he would have dreaded unrolling, but the first two parts were now clear and understood in his mind. At Khmun he had learned of the Ocdoad, the potential energy from which the Ennead is formed. Atum had brought order into the chaos of his shadow, creating the four pairs of complementariness. This was pre-creation, as yet intangible. The primeval waters, space, the darkness, all that is hidden, lay impotently bound to himself, waiting for the god’s word to become the forces that would create the world.

The core of the third part saw the inception of the eternal world, the empowering of water, space, darkness, the hidden, to become the Ennead, the Nine, with Atum himself the first followed by Shu the Air, Tefnut Light, Geb the Earth, Nut the Sky, and Osiris the son of Nut and Geb, Isis, Set, and Nephthys, all still motionless, all waiting for the onrush of Time that would be Atum’s next task.

But first Atum chooses yet another metamorphosis for himself. In a lyrical intensity that set Huy’s heart pounding and brought a sweat to his skin, Thoth bursts out on behalf of his master in a paroxysm of joy:

I am he who made heaven and earth, formed the mountains, and created what is above …

I am he who opens his eyes, thus the light comes forth. I am he who closes his eyes, thus comes forth obscurity …

I am he who made the living fire …

I am Khepri in the morning, Ra at his noontide, Atum in the evening …

The three forms of Ra
, Huy had thought when he read the words.
Of course! Ra is one yet three, yet is still always, only, Atum. Now he is Ra-Atum
.

The anonymous commentator whose work Huy had many occasions to bless presaged what Huy would discover in the fourth part of the Book at Khmun.

The Mind of the Cosmos created from fire and air the seven administrators who regulate destiny … These celestial powers, known by thought alone, are called the gods, and they preside over the world … Ra lets the Cosmos go on its way, but never lets it wander, for like a skilful chariot driver Ra has tied the Cosmos to him, preventing it rushing off in disorder—and his controlling reins are rays of light … The sun is an image of the Creator who is higher than the heavens …

Atum creates the Cosmic Mind. The Cosmic Mind creates the Cosmos. The Cosmos creates Time. Time creates Change …

The Cosmic Mind is permanently connected to Atum. The Cosmos is made up of thoughts in the Cosmic Mind. The Cosmic Mind is an image of Atum. The Cosmos is an image of the Cosmic Mind. The sun is an image of the Cosmos. Man is an image of the sun …

Enthralled, often almost drunk on what he was discovering, Huy had nevertheless learned that beneath the outpouring lay the simple, vital bones that would emerge in his mind if he gave them time. So he went about his studies, drew the bow, hurled the spear, and graduated from Lazy White Star to a more spirited and entirely disrespectful chariot horse without the anxiety that had plagued him during his first introduction to the Book. Ramose left him alone. Huy had no doubt that the High Priest was carefully monitoring his progress in every field of his endeavour, but as his gift remained blessedly dormant and his life followed the path of regularity and routine he had long ago learned to appreciate, he did not care.

He returned to Khmun at the beginning of Shemu to study the two scrolls that composed the fourth part of the Book, the creation of Time and the material world. Ramose had made no demur when Huy requested that Anhur and Amunmose accompany him. This time Huy gave himself over to the spell of an Egypt in full fecundity, leaning on the rail of his boat for hours to watch the rich fields of swiftly ripening crops slide by. In another two months the harvest would begin. Already the heat was becoming uncomfortable, and Huy looked forward each day to the time when he and all his travelling companions shed their limp linens and waded into the coolness of the river.

He found Thoth’s temple at Khmun no less forbidding, however, the undercurrent of constant heka weighing down an already solemn atmosphere. Anhur did not feel it. He looked at Huy blankly when the young man asked him if he felt threatened by a sense of impending retribution. “No,” the soldier had replied. “I just feel sleepy and bored. Until I remember that I’m not standing watch in some dark corridor of Ra’s House, that is. Thoth’s House is very beautiful, don’t you think, Huy?” Huy did think so, but his dreams were sombre and his appetite seemed to have deserted him.

He avoided the temple school, and after the first invitation he began to take his meals regularly with the archivist priest, Khanun, who inhabited a lone cell built beside the entrance to the House of Life. It seemed to be the one truly human, cheerful corner of the whole precinct. Khanun’s shrine held an image of the god, of course, but the cell walls had been painted, very inexpertly and garishly, with depictions of various native animals and birds, and even a few rather crooked trees. Huy liked the sheer exuberance of the work. “I did it myself,” the priest told him apologetically. “Being the archivist is a dusty task undertaken in dim rooms. I value the quiet and I’m happy working alone, but I was raised on a farm with cows and oxen and all the bird and animal life along the canals. Thoth’s formal gardens don’t quite fill the void my father’s arouras left in my soul.” Huy was glad to find much in common with this man whose origins were humble and who had raised himself by his own skill from scribe to priest to Overseer of the House of Life. He was easy to talk to, and Huy found himself saying much about himself that he later regretted, although he knew instinctively that Khanun was trustworthy.

He was also shrewd. On the third day, when they had finished their meal and Khanun was lighting the lamps against a deepening twilight, he suddenly said without turning, “Huy, why are you not sharing your company with the other priests, or with the students? They all know that you have returned. They must be wondering why you sequester yourself with me. Are you hiding? Is the Book frightening you?” He blew out the taper he was holding and set it carefully in a dish.

Huy reached for a cushion to place between his spine and the wall. “The Book is not frightening me, Master, but the temple is, and the grounds, and the sacred lake. So much magic here, soaking into everything, and I have the impression that if I say or do the wrong thing, if I laugh too loudly, if I even have an idle thought, Thoth will punish me.”

Khanun stared at him, astonished. “But Huy, Thoth blesses you! You read in his Book! You have been chosen to do so, and thus surely the god smiles on you with his divine approval. His magic is yours to command!”

“No, it is not,” Huy said heavily. “It waits to judge me, to condemn me for some mysterious reason. Every time I unroll one of the scrolls it is with the fear that I am a hair’s breadth away from a mistake that will plunge me into a Duat of which I know nothing. My confidence deserts me. Something is waiting for me here, something terrible. Each day I manage to avoid it, skirt its perimeter.” He held out both palms. “I have no idea what it is, but it does not follow me to my cell at Iunu. No one else seems to be aware of the maelstrom of heka that imbues these precincts, Master. Only me.”

“Of course you are sensitive to it,” Khanun said thoughtfully, “but I am appalled that you should feel it as a threat. Thoth is benign, Huy. He gave us language, he created eternity at Atum’s command, he orders our fate, particularly yours. You are surely in his care.”
But am I?
Huy wondered suddenly.
I do not wait for eternity. Eternity is within my power to See. And in Seeing—in not just predicting but actually Seeing—the fates of others, am I impinging in some way on the prerogative of Thoth himself?

“Thoth was not there, by the Ished Tree,” he said. “Anubis was. So was Ma’at. But not Thoth, the arbiter of fate, the author of Time. Why not, Master?”

“How can I answer you?” Khanun retorted, sinking onto his cushions with a sigh and a creak of his joints. “How can any man? Such a question cannot be answered except by you and the gods themselves. But how can you fear any error if you are doing the will of Atum?”
How indeed?
Huy repeated to himself.
But am I doing the will of Atum? Is it possible that what I am narrowly avoiding here, in the home of the god of eternity, is the true answer to the question? And the answer is a thing of terror? What ancient and cynical prophet said that ignorance is bliss!
With a sigh he changed the subject.

Before leaving Khmun, he endured the formal blessing of Thoth’s High Priest in front of the temple sanctuary. Afterwards, as he was putting his sandals back on in the outer court, Mentuhotep asked him, “Did your work here proceed satisfactorily, Huy? Did you comprehend the contents of the scrolls?”

Huy straightened guiltily. He had done his best to avoid the man. “They deal with the creation of the eternal elements, as you know, Master,” he said carefully. “They are not difficult to absorb. If I had needed your help I would not have hesitated to ask for it. You have been very kind,” he finished lamely.

Mentuhotep raised his eyebrows. “I am pleased that my assistance was not necessary. But I am sorry that we were not able to share a cup of beer together and talk of things less ethereal than the gods. Perhaps you will visit us in the future for no other reason.”

Huy met his gaze with an inner twist of desperation. “It is not you, Master,” he blurted. “This place oppresses me. I have been cowardly in hiding with Khanun. Forgive me.” Mentuhotep did not reply. He laid his hand lightly on Huy’s hot head, then strode into the shadow of the outer court’s vast pylon and was lost to sight.

Huy’s shame did not outlast the journey home. Once more he bade farewell to Anhur and Amunmose, and he was making his way contentedly towards his courtyard when Thothmes came racing along the path, his face white. Coming up to Huy, he grabbed both his arms and began to shake him. “They said you were back!” he shouted. “Thank the gods you are back! She was in the Street of the Basket Sellers and a donkey ran amok and overturned its cart and was kicking and shrieking and she took a blow from a hoof in the stomach and the physicians can’t stop the bleeding! Come now, Huy! At once!”