by N. L. Holmes
“He’s your brother-in-law, son.”
“Then Pa-kiki is here all the time, and we have to feed that bottomless pit. Now Neferet. She’s a one-girl sandstorm wherever she goes.” Aha held out his hands in a pleading gesture. “I want to help, but by the Dazzling Sun Disk—we don’t have any more bedrooms.”
Hani swallowed his annoyance and said contritely, “I’m sorry, Aha. It was thoughtless. And I know it was last-minute.”
“Why don’t you and Mother just build yourselves a little place here? You must spend more time on the River than in your office.”
Truer than you know, Hani thought. “You won’t have to worry about me and Maya, at least. A friend has offered to put us up when we’re in Akhet-Aten. Maybe Neferet can use that room.”
Aha pressed his lips together with bad grace, forced to a compromise he didn’t want. “All right.”
Aha is strangely ungenerous in some ways, but he knows he owes the family something. Hani remembered—and Aha had to as well—how Aha had desecrated his father’s tomb in his zeal for the king’s religious reforms. Hani had stricken him from the family, and the boy had seen the error of his ways and come back—and had been forgiven.
“‘What is given small returns augmented,’ son. You won’t be sorry.” Hani smiled warmly and clapped Aha on the upper arms. Under the ample snow-white linen of his son’s sleeves, his fingers touched armlets. “I hope Khentet-ka and the children are well. Your mother will make the offerings to the Great One to help her carry the baby.”
Aha rolled his eyes with affectionate tolerance. “Those old superstitions?” But he didn’t engage his father in a theological discussion. It hadn’t ended well last time. “Thank her for us both, Father. And I’m sorry to sound so niggardly, but I have to think of my own family first.” He gave a forced smile.
“Of course, my boy. You’re looking well. Eating well, eh?” He patted Aha on his solid belly. “Despite all the hungry adolescents draining your larder. Everything going smoothly at work?”
Aha’s smile grew genuine. “Yes, Father. In fact, I’ve been promoted. I’m second overseer of cattle in the House of the Aten now.”
“Congratulations, my son! You always make us proud. Now, if Neferet is set up, I’ll take her on to her first session with Djefat-nebty. You know, if the doctor doesn’t find her worthy of an apprenticeship, all this may have been for nothing, and you’ll have your bedroom back.”
As if on command, Neferet’s footsteps could be heard galloping down the stairs, and she burst into the room, beaming and eager. “Isn’t it time to go see Lady Djefat-nebty yet, Papa?”
He seized her hand. “I suspect it’s exactly time. Let’s go.” They turned toward the door, and Hani shot his son a complicit look over his shoulder. “I’ll bring her back soon.”
As they walked, Neferet was so full of nervous excitement that she alternately skipped around Hani and danced on her tiptoes at his side. He shook his head affectionately. I hope she’s this excited coming back.
“How should I act, Papa? You said she’s very severe looking. Should I keep a straight face?” She pulled a long, grim expression with fierce eyebrows.
Hani laughed. “No, no, my duckling. Just be yourself. Only”—he remembered that the doctor’s husband was a priest of the Aten—“don’t talk about the Hidden One or the king or how we feel about things. Can you do that for me?”
“Absolutely, Papa.” She slapped herself on the mouth as if to seal it shut. “I will never, ever, even under torture, say anything about the Hidden One or the king or how we feel. May Meret-seger the Lover of Silence put thorns between my toes if I say a word. May my eyelashes fall out and my... my knees turn green. May—”
“I believe you, my dear.” He thought in amusement that, at the very least, studying medicine would give her a whole new gamut of curses to call down.
They were in the southeastern outskirts of the city now. Here and there, a walled enclosure, its massive shoulders hunched against the encroaching desert, marked some grandee’s villa. Still farther south stood Pa-maru-en-pa-aten, where Lady Kiya awaited some word of her blackmailer. For all that they were entering the third month of the Flood season—the Inundation—the morning was already hot, with humidity hazing the sky over the River to their right.
“There it is,” he said finally.
“How will I get here every day when you’re not here, Papa?” Her little brown eyes had suddenly started squinting anxiously under their unaccustomed kohl.
“Pa-kiki can bring you before work.”
They passed through the gate with its brightly painted frame and the titles of its master carved above—God’s Father of the Sun Disk, seal-bearer of the king, king’s scribe, chief of physicians, and chamberlain. The gatekeeper led them through the formal garden and into the tall doors. Neferet, usually so fearless, was staring around her with the intensity of a trapped animal.
When the servant reached the inner door, he bade them wait and entered alone. A moment later, he said blandly, “The mistress of the house will receive you.”
Neferet fingered the little ankh amulet on her wrist, took a deep breath, and set out at her father’s side, striding across the salon as if into battle. Together, they made a respectful bow before the lady Djefat-nebty, who sat—alone this time—upon her tall chair on the dais.
“Lord Hani,” she said in her sharp, mannish voice. “This is your daughter?”
“Yes, my lady,” he and Neferet said simultaneously.
“My name is Neferet,” she finished alone, her voice starting to tremble at the end without her father’s to back it up.
There was a stomach-churning moment of silence while the doctor stared at her with her cold eyes. Oh dear, thought Hani. She may be one of those who expect precise and absolute obedience and will hold it against Neferet for answering when she called upon me.
But Djefat-nebty said firmly, “I like a girl who speaks for herself. How old are you, Neferet?”
“Thirteen, my lady.”
“Your father tells me you’re learning to read and write. True?”
“Yes, my lady.” Neferet seemed to have found her self-confidence. Eyes bright, she launched into a wordy explanation of how she’d just started but could already read quite a few things. And in many hands, too, because her father, her brothers, her grandfather, her uncle, and her brother-in-law were all teaching her.
Hani, his face growing hot, wanted to calm her down, but she wasn’t looking at him. Her eyes were fixed on the doctor, and her hands flew with excited description. Just don’t let her start stalking around like a heron, her father thought. It was all he could do not to burst out laughing. She was indeed being herself.
Finally, Djefat-nebty interrupted. Hani couldn’t tell what reaction her severe, expressionless face masked. “I understand you’ve studied with a village healer. What have you learned?”
“I’ve learned about a lot of herbs that can be used for things like fever or pain or keeping wounds from going sour. And what to take for a stomach ache and for a sore throat and how to make compresses and extracts and how to splint a broken arm and pull out a tick and—oh, but she also told me things like put a mouse’s bones in a bag around a woman’s neck if her baby has teething pains and things like that, and I really don’t know whether a real doctor would do that. Some things seemed more like a magician would do, and I don’t want to be a magician; I want to be a sunet. That’s why I didn’t want to study with her anymore.”
Silence.
“Why do you want to practice medicine?”
“Because... because I have a sister who is paralyzed and will be for the rest of her life because she broke her back falling off a boat. There must be lots of people who are sick or injured like that. I want to help them.”
Hani stared at his daughter, touched and amazed. He’d never heard her advance any particular reason for her ambition. He had, frankly, assumed it was just a whim that would pass. That this compassion had been ferment
ing inside his youngest child brought a burn of tears to his nose.
“I see,” said the doctor. “Come tomorrow at daybreak.” She stood up, a lean, exceptionally tall woman who was nearly as flat chested as a man.
Neferet and Hani looked at each other uncertainly.
“You’ll teach me, then?” Neferet cried excitedly, clasping her hands.
“I didn’t tell you to come back to beat my rugs.” Djefat-nebty’s stony face cracked a smile.
⸎
Hani said a proud goodbye to his little girl at Aha’s door. “Study hard, my duckling, and we’ll see you the next time there’s a holiday long enough to get home and back. If you want to practice writing, send us a letter.” Pa-kiki appeared in the door behind his sister and yanked her braids. She turned, saw him, and fell on him in a rib-cracking hug, the two of them laughing like hyenas.
“You’d better mind your manners,” he threatened, “or I’ll sell you to slavers bound for Sangar!”
Hani was reassured that with her two brothers around, Neferet wouldn’t be too homesick. He just hoped that she would stay busy enough with her studies that she wouldn’t get on Aha and Khentet-ka’s nerves. The girl loved her little niece and nephew, though. She might even be of some help to their mother.
A bittersweet mixture of loss and joy swirling inside him like clouds of incense, Hani headed toward the River, near which Lord Ptah-mes had said his “modest place” stood. As he strode along, he thought about his family—about the children growing up and finding their way in life. They were each so different yet still so connected to one another. He thought of his Nub-nefer—his pure gold—and their twenty-eight years of marriage and how they had weathered even the shuttering of the Ipet-isut. Nub-nefer still sang every day, determined to keep in practice so that when the Greatest of Shrines reopened, she could take up her sistrum and lift her voice in praise once more. When. If only. At least he was here for his loved ones once more.
After asking at the riverbank, Hani directed himself toward the row of fine large houses, more or less next to one another, that backed up onto the greengrocers’ fields. From the front, one had the sense of being in a proper city, with a street and close-packed walled gardens. Apparently, the bureaucrats thronging to the new capital had snatched up these choice plots straightaway.
Ptah-mes’s house was far from modest. Only a man of old wealth such as Ptah-mes’s would think to call it that, although no doubt his ancestral mansion in Waset was much grander. The garden was formal and impeccably groomed, like its master. Hani had no sooner been introduced by the doorman than Ptah-mes himself appeared, dressed in his usual simple elegance with no concession made to being at home—none of the shirtless, shoeless, wigless comfort that ruled at Hani’s house. But he was smiling broadly, arms extended.
“Hani, what a pleasure. I was afraid you wouldn’t take me up on my offer.”
“I can’t thank you enough, my lord. I’ve been staying with my son when I’m in town, but suddenly, he has two of my other children under his roof. He has small ones of his own, and his wife is expecting another. I’m afraid it’s straining his filial goodwill.” Hani raised a guilty eyebrow.
“Your secretary isn’t with you?”
“Not this trip. His wife—my daughter—is expecting. I thought he might like some time at home.”
Ptah-mes laughed, a sound Hani had not heard frequently. “Come, my friend. Let’s have a drink in the garden. We can talk business or not, as we choose.”
Ptah-mes guided Hani through the lofty salon with its cool, understated colors, and into a colonnaded court surrounded on all four sides by grapevine-sheltered porches. A narrow rectangular pool, set into a sunken garden of bushes and flowers, ran along the center of the court. Lettuce was planted between each of the shrubs, a little mound of tender green like a bead on a strand that encircled the pool.
“Your lettuce hasn’t bolted. I’m amazed, with this heat. The garden is certainly lovely,” Hani said, staring around him appreciatively. “This is quite original.”
“I spend most of my time here now. Alas, my wife is not particularly interested in joining me in the City of the Horizon.”
I do believe he’s lonely, Hani thought in surprise.
“You may not be aware that she is—was—the weret khener of the Ipet-isut in Waset.” Lord Ptah-mes looked meaningfully at Hani, who widened his eyes in genuine astonishment. Ptah-mes’s wife was the leader of the entire musical establishment of the Ipet-isut, ruling over men and women alike. It was a post reserved for women of the highest nobility and was mostly administrative, not actually presupposing any musical talent. So this was how Ptah-mes had been aware of Nub-nefer’s position and the dangerous recalcitrance of her brother—Ptah-mes’s wife had been her superior! And it made Ptah-mes’s conscientious decision to serve the heretical king even more poignant. In fact, Hani remembered, Ptah-mes himself had been some sort of important priest. But all that seemed to have stopped at the same time he ceased to be vizier.
“I had no idea, my lord. Even when I was moaning about my own woes, you never breathed a word. It must have been... difficult.” Hani’s brows contracted in genuine empathy.
“How long have we worked together? Nearly twenty years? Fifteen, perhaps?” Ptah-mes indicated one of two chairs to Hani, and he swept his long caftan neatly behind his legs and seated himself. “Here, Hani, let me pour you some of this wine. It’s nice and cold.”
Ptah-mes leaned over to the little table at his side and poured from a tall, slender ewer beaded with condensation into the two bronze cups that sat beside it. He handed one to Hani and lifted his own. “Life, prosperity, and health to our king, Nefer-khepru-ra Wa-en-ra,” he said in a loud voice.
Hani nodded, not quite able to bring himself to echo those words, and downed a swallow. “This is wonderful. From your own grapes?”
“No, no. From Djahy. One of the perquisites of office.” Ptah-mes smiled dryly. “How is our friend Aziru doing?”
“He’s impatient and suspicious, my lord. He and his men play Hounds and Jackals by the hour, and then he stomps into the salon to ask me how long he’s going to cool his heels in gilded captivity. I wish I knew. I’ve promised to take them hunting as soon as I get home. I’m trying to think of other things to do with them to keep him from going completely mad.”
“Don’t feel obligated to entertain him, Hani. You have your own life to live. Surely, the king won’t keep him dangling much longer.” Ptah-mes sipped from his cup. “What sort of man is he?”
“Not much like his father, although they share more or less the same goals. Aziru is sharper, harder, less benevolent, I think. Or at least more ruthless in achieving that benevolence.”
“Ruthless benevolence, eh.” Ptah-mes, cradling his cup in his hand, seemed to savor the idea.
“He’s less mellow than Abdi-ashirta, more easily pushed to lose his temper. He can be quite sarcastic. But I’m sure this waiting is legitimately hard on him. After all, he fought for three years to be granted vassal status—”
“And then the king wrote him a bruisingly harsh letter of rebuke for delaying his vassal visit.”
“Indeed,” Hani said, the old bitterness rising in him. He found himself quite sympathetic to Aziru. “And now this. He’s very eager to be away and at work being a king for the first time. He must feel we’re testing him.”
“As we are.”
Hani leaned forward and said regretfully, “I’m just afraid he won’t pass the test, Lord Ptah-mes. That he’ll go over to Kheta Land after all.”
Ptah-mes looked up at him. His dark eyes were humorless. “I’ve stopped caring, Hani. You should give it a try.” He patted the golden penknife at his hip, the gift of the king.
Hani heaved a deep breath. “I am trying. But it doesn’t come naturally.”
Ptah-mes was silent, then he smiled aridly. “No. You’re not made for compromise like some of us.”
“Although I pass for a compromiser in my family. We have
some very hard heads.” Hani grinned, hoping to disarm the seriousness he saw suddenly in his host. “Oh, my lord, I just remembered something unrelated. I happened to be at the workshop of Djehuty-mes, one of the royal sculptors, and I saw a plaster study of you. It was the most amazing likeness I’ve ever seen. I felt like there was a living person hiding beneath the plaster. Truly uncanny.”
Ptah-mes’s face brightened. “Yes. That Kha-em-something fellow who does the plaster heads is a real craftsman. I must say, the new style the king is pushing is very attractive—although I’m not sure I want to be remembered for eternity with wrinkles. It certainly holds more charm than the earlier style.”
Hani recalled—still with a shiver—the shocking images at the Gem-pa-aten, a temple the king had constructed in Waset when he was coregent. “Are you commissioning statues, then?”
“For my tomb. In Waset. Compromise goes only so far. To be buried on the east bank... I can’t. No matter what it costs.” Ptah-mes’s eyes were opaque with some sorrow his pleasant expression tried in vain to dissemble. Hani observed him with compassion. Finally, Ptah-mes said quietly, “Did I ever tell you why I was removed from the office of vizier?”
“No, my lord.”
“I opposed the coregent. Not once or twice but habitually. I felt myself secure in the intimacy of the late king, with whom I had grown up and who, I believed, was my friend. I assumed my honest advice was what he wanted, as he had always been an honest man. But it soon became clear that Neb-ma’at-ra was depending more and more on the counsel of his son.” Ptah-mes looked Hani in the eye, and even his bronze self-control couldn’t completely conceal the bitterness. “I was deposed, Hani. And I was stripped of the high priesthood of the Hidden One. For what cause? No one ever told me. The world was left to imagine the worst. I doubt if I would have remained even in the post of high commissioner of northern vassals had the king not retained enough memory of our long association to protect me from an ultimate disgrace.”