by Jerry Dubs
“I will go with you,” Amtes said, standing now by Bata’s side.
“What of your duties?”
“There are others. I am certain that Hetephernebti would want me to help Tarset if I could.”
Bata leaned back and looked at Amtes. She was wearing only a white belt, its ends frayed.
“What?” she asked.
“Do you have any official robes?”
Amtes cocked her head. “I have a robe that I wear during festivals.”
Bata nodded. “Yes that will be good. And I kept one of Imhotep’s royal kilts. We need to look official. Now, let us think, Amtes. Many times I came upon Imhotep sitting on the roof with an empty papyrus by his side. He often told me that most of his real work happened when he simply sat and thought.”
Bata leaned against the wall by the window. Outside the goose honked and the girls laughed.
Amtes leaned against the wall on the other side of the window. She felt the heat from the garden rolling into her room. Turning she glanced at Bata, his face tight as he concentrated.
He is such a good man, she thought.
“I don’t know what to do,” Bata said angrily. “You saw a hunchback, yet it was not Ptah-Shepses and I don’t know where to find another hunchback. I don’t know where Tarset could be. I don’t know anything about her. Yes,” he said, his face lighting with excitement, “we must learn more about her. Imhotep always says that the answer to a problem lies within the problem.”
“I don’t know what that means,” Amtes said, “but I know where Tarset used to live. She is from Weprehwy.”
“Where is that?”
“Deep in the delta, in Tehut,” she said, unsure of how they would find the distant nome.
“What god do they worship?”
“She said that there was a temple to Thoth.”
Bata nodded. “Good. Thoth is good. I was worried that it might be Sobek or Seth.” He crossed his arms and looked out the window at the girls. A second goose, larger than the first, had joined the fight and the girls’ laughter had become more nervous.
“Tarset, she was about their age?” he asked.
“No, she was a little older.”
“Was she a woman, yet?
“No, Bata. Her breasts had started to form but she was still just a girl. She had small hands and a long scar on her right arm. She said she had fallen against a sharp stone when she was little. And one of her eyes looked away from you when she spoke.”
“She had a cast eye?” Bata said. Meryt’s one eye also wandered.
“Yes.”
Bata closed his eyes and saw Meryt as she was when he first met her, barely a teenager, her face alive with enthusiasm, her mouth moving easily from a carefree smile to a tight frown when she studied something new and then relaxing once more as she understood it.
We must find her,” he said.
- 0 -
Bata noticed two things: They had been on the river for two days and every time the river forked it seemed as if they took the stream that encountered more tangled tree limbs and roots, and that the deeper they ventured into the delta the bigger the insects were.
“I can see why Tarset wanted to leave her village. In fact,” he complained as he slapped at the back of his neck, “I’m surprised that she wasn’t carried off by one of these mosquitoes.” He examined his hand to find a mixture of insect fragments and blood.
“Bata,” Amtes said from the front of the small reed boat they were using, “I told you to use the cedar oil.”
Although she couldn’t see him, she knew that he was shaking his head.
“We use castor oil in the civilized world,” he said, rinsing his hand in the water and returning to paddling the boat.
“I guess the insects here aren’t as civilized as yours are in Ineb-Hedj,” Amtes teased.
“And Waset,” Bata insisted. “King Djoser used castor oil. In his bedchambers he had bowls of it. Some were lit and others were just there to keep the insects away.”
Ahead of him, Amtes ducked under the hanging branches of a cypress.
“Cedar oil also repels crocodiles and hippos,” she said, smiling to herself.
“Did I ever tell you about Hetephernebti and Ipy?” Bata asked, ignoring her taunt.
“No,” Amtes said.
It was late afternoon and sunlight filtered through a canopy of cypress, sycamore, and date palm trees. The water, Bata thought, was as still as beer in a jar, nearly as brown, too. It was almost impossible to tell if they were going with or against the current.
When they had first left Iunu they had been able to catch glimpses of the tan desert through the trees. But here, deeper in the delta, there didn’t seem to be any earth at all, just slow moving water with lotus plants poking through in clusters and gatherings of trees that marked the channels of the splintered river.
“She told Imhotep the story and he told it to me,” Bata said, swatting another mosquito and mentally cursing his stubborn loyalty to castor oil. He didn’t like the smell of it, so he reasoned that insects wouldn’t like it either.
But then scarab beetles like to push around balls of dung, he thought.
He pulled his paddle into the reed boat and asked Amtes to pass him the jar of cedar oil.
As he applied the oil, he said, “Hetephernebti fled Waset when she was just a girl. Imhotep didn’t go into details, so I assume it involved sex. He refuses to talk about sex. I know he practices it, he and Meryt had two children, but he pretends sex doesn’t happen. Anyhow, Hetephernebti fled toward the delta to seek refuge in the Temple of Re.
“What was that?” he interrupted himself, looking around for the source of a splashing sound.
“An ibis,” she said, pointing off to the right.
He turned to see another ibis swoop down from the sky. Its black fringed wings gracefully extended as it descended. Its dark eyes, peering from its black head behind a long curving beak, seemed to calmly examine Bata and Amtes as it landed.
“Thoth,” Bata declared. “We must be near his temple.”
Suddenly he heard a loud snort and he swiveled around looking for the source. He had never seen or heard a hippopotamus before, but he was sure that was what one would sound like. He also was sure that his mention of Ipy had drawn the hippopotamus goddess to them.
“Paddle,” Amtes said, ignoring the sound. “We’ll never get to Weprehwy if you just sit there looking around every time there’s a noise.”
They paddled in silence for a few minutes and then Amtes said, “You were going to tell me about Hetephernebti and Ipy,” she said.
“Let’s wait until we get away from here.”
- 0 -
Arms aching, Bata and Amtes arrived at Weprehwy on the morning of their third day of travel.
After they pulled their boat onto the muddy shore beside a half dozen other fishing boats, Bata stretched his back and then began to stamp his feet.
“Just testing,” he told Amtes as she shook her head. “I want to be sure it really is solid.”
“If you are kicking at snakes, stop,” an old man called as he walked toward them. “You’ll just make them angry.”
“Hello,” Bata shouted back, laughing. “I was just dancing to celebrate being on dry land.”
“I’ve done that dance,” the man said, coming closer. “My name is Pepy-Nakht.”
The man was smeared in mud and dragging a weighted net.
He looked at Bata’s red blotched skin and said, “They ate you alive, didn’t they? Try mud. Nothing keeps the bugs away better.”
Bata glanced at Amtes. The cedar oil had protected her, but it had seemed to attract the mosquitoes to Bata. “Mud,” he said. Then turning to Pepy-Nakht he said, “My name is Bata. This is my friend Amtes. We’re here on business from Lord Imhotep.”
“Lord Imhotep?” Pepy-Nakht said, squeezing his eyes shut for a moment and then opening them with a frown. “I thought he was dead.”
“No, he is alive.”
“No, I’m sure he’s dead,” Pepy-Nakht said.
“Yes,” Bata conceded. “He was dead. But now he is alive.”
Pepy-Nakht considered this for a moment and then looked at Amtes. “Is this true?” he asked her.
“I saw him myself,” she said.
Pepy-Nakht shook his head. “Didn’t he die once before?”
“No, just the one time,” Bata said, trying to figure out how to get the conversation on a better track.
“No, I’m pretty sure he was dead before. And then he came back. Then he was put in the tomb. I’m sure about that. Hmmm, and now you say he’s back again?”
“Yes,” Amtes said, deciding that the more times Imhotep had been resurrected, the more respect he would have. “And now he has sent us to find Tarset.”
“Tarset? Is she dead, too?” the old man asked.
“I hope not,” Bata said. Then he shrugged. “That is what we are trying to find out.”
“Well,” Pepy-Nakht said, “she’s not here. She went to Iunu to the Temple of Re.” He stood a little straighter, proud of his villager. “She’s going to be a priestess.”
“That is wonderful,” Amtes said before Bata could speak. “Is her family here?”
Pepy-Nakht nodded. “Bunch of them. Mother, four sisters, two brothers, no, three brothers, and a mess of aunts and uncles. Everyone here is related.” He shrugged and smiled.
“Her family, especially her mother, Nemathap, are very fertile.” He started to say more and then stopped. He looked around the gathering of wooden huts, many of the tree limbs that made up the walls of the huts had brown, dying leaves on them.
Bata was amazed at the amount of wood that was used. In Ineb-Hedj and in Waset the homes were made of dried mud bricks, but then, he realized, there were fewer trees upriver and mud bricks wouldn’t stay very dry here in the delta.
“Well, I should get going. The fish aren’t going to catch themselves,” Pepy-Nakht said after a moment.
“Of course,” Amtes said. “Could you point us toward Nemathap’s home?”
Pepy-Nakht wiped his face with a brown hand and then shrugged. He waved toward the village. “You could try most any home,” he said. “As I said she’s very fertile.”
- 0 -
“I take care of my man myself,” a haggard woman shouted at them when they asked if Nemathap lived in the first hut they approached.
Bata backed away from the hut and turned to Amtes.
“Maybe we should ask for Tarset instead,” he suggested. “Or we could go to the temple. Aren’t records kept there? It is a temple of Thoth, so there should be a list of names.”
At the next hut they found half of the front wall was gone and a pile of tree limbs lay in front of the opening. A boy, young enough to still be wearing a sidelock of hair, was carefully standing the branches against the wall and then tying them in place.
“Hello,” Amtes said. “We’re looking for Nemathap.”
The boy looked around and squinted at them. His mouth hung open and his eyes were covered with a thin white skim. “You are new,” he said slowly.
Amtes nodded. “Yes, we just arrived from Iunu. We’re looking for Tarset’s mother.”
“She’s my sister,” the boy said.
Bata shook his head in confusion.
“You mean Tarset?” Amtes asked.
The boy nodded.
“She went to Iunu.” He suddenly gasped. “Did something happen to her? Is that why you are here?”
“No, no,” Amtes said before Bata could speak.
“We’re just looking for her,” Bata added reassuringly.
Amtes looked back and frowned at him.
The boy looked confused. “She isn’t here. She’s in Iunu.”
“No, she’s ... ” Bata began.
“If she wasn’t in Iunu,” Amtes said quickly, “then would there be anywhere else she would go? Does she have any family in another village?”
“Other villages?” the boy said, bewildered.
“Let the boy alone,” a woman’s tired voice said from behind them.
Bata and Amtes turned to see a short, wide woman who was carrying a clay pot. Her face was a mirror of her body; the head round as her belly, her cheeks were loose and sagged like her large breasts, her eyes were dark, the pupils tiny sunken points, like the black areola that surrounded her inverted nipples.
“He barely knows his own name,” the woman said dismissively.
“We were just asking about ... ” Amtes started to say.
“Tarset,” the woman said. “Yes, I heard. What has she done, gotten herself with child?”
Bata wrinkled his nose. He didn’t like this woman.
“Who are you?” he asked.
“Who are you?” she said. “Coming here asking about Tarset?”
Bata frowned. In their excitement at finally arriving at Weprehwy they had forgotten to put on their formal clothes.
“I am Bata,” he said, trying to mimic Imhotep’s accent. “I am here on behalf of Lord Imhotep, royal vizier, chief physician and architect to King Huni and to King Djoser before him.”
“Uh-huh,” the woman said.
“Please,” Amtes said, “we’ve come from Iunu. My name is Amtes. I am a friend of Tarset’s. We’re here because we are worried about her. She’s disappeared.”
“Humm,” the woman said with a chuckle. “I wouldn’t worry about Tarset. She is probably somewhere on her back with someone else’s husband riding her.”
“She’s just a little girl,” Bata said.
The woman looked at him as if he was an idiot.
“She hasn’t come here?” Amtes pressed. “Or sent any messages?”
The woman raised the clay pot and drank deeply. She belched loudly and then turned to Amtes.
“You seem nice enough,” she said. “Look around here. We have a market that doesn’t have anything, we have a temple with two priests and one of them can’t walk, he just sits around and complains about his feet being swollen. We have a half a dozen fishing boats and barely enough men to take them out every day. The only reason anyone ever comes here is because we have a cemetery for birds.”
She tilted her head past the village. “Over there by the temple. A cemetery for ibises because Thoth walks around with an ibis head sometimes. Sometimes he’s a baboon, so there’s probably a village somewhere with a cemetery for baboons, I don’t know.”
“You shouldn’t speak like that about Thoth,” Bata said.
The woman shook her head sadly and then continued, “If you were lucky enough to find your way out of here, like Tarset did, all because Hetephernebti came here one day and saw her, was taken by her cast eye and thought she had some special link to the gods. If you were lucky enough to get out of here, would you run away from a temple with plenty of food and oil and salt and real festivals?”
She pressed a finger against the side of her nose and snorted. A green string of snot slid from her nose. She shook her head to loosen it and watched it fall to the ground.
“If Tarset ran away, she ran away with some man and she didn’t run away to come back here.”
Bata pursed his lips, unsure how to answer the woman.
Amtes shook her head. “Tarset was sweet and dedicated to Re. She didn’t run off with some man.”
The woman shrugged.
“But Tarset is gone, is she?” she asked.
“Yes,” Bata said.
“So there might be room for another girl at the temple,” the woman said, a smile growing on her face. “I have other daughters.”
Autopsy
A linen scarf tied around his shaved head to protect him from the sun, Imhotep sat silently by the mast of the ship as it neared Ineb-Hedj. During his five-year exile in modern Egypt he had worn a hat and now he found the ancient sun was too powerful for his skin. The sensitivity only added to his weariness and anger.
Kewab and the sailors, sensing his mood, had left him alone during the trip and he had discovered that he di
dn’t want to be alone with his thoughts. They were dark and disorganized.
When he had overseen the construction of King Djoser’s pyramid, he had seen the structure clearly in his mind. When he put paint to papyrus his mind’s eye already saw the image he would produce.
Now he was lost.
He had never thought about philosophy, he had been too busy living. He had never needed to find a direction in his life, there always seemed to be something to do. And now, with King Huni asking him to solve a murder, he had a chance to mold himself to a new role. But all he did was worry about the weakness of his leg and feel angry that he was being asked to do more.
He didn’t like what he was becoming. He needed a new beginning. He needed to change.
“Lord Imhotep,” Kewab said, kneeling by Imhotep. “Ineb-Hedj lies beyond the next bend in the river.” The soldier, although not subservient, had been much more aware of Imhotep’s rank since the visit to King Huni.
“Thank you,” Imhotep said, sliding the linen from his head. He tilted his head toward a sack that had slid away from his stool. “Could you please hand that to me?”
Kewab picked up the cloth bag and gave it to Imhotep.
He pulled out a ball of dirtied linen. Carefully he unwrapped an unpainted clay jug plugged with a cork made from the soft inner wood of a palm branch. Turning on the bench, Imhotep braced his feet against the side of the boat, uncorked the jug and poured a small amount of jasmine scented olive oil into his hand. He rubbed the oil over his bare head and face, then added more to his hand to oil his chest and stomach.
Then standing, Imhotep poured a small amount of oil into Kewab’s cupped hand and turned to allow the guard to oil his back.
“Thank you,” Imhotep said.
“Yes, Lord Imhotep,” Kewab said, sniffing at the scent in his hand.
“Would you like some?” Imhotep asked, holding out the jar.
Kewab’s eyes widened.
Imhotep nodded to show he was sincere. “Put out your hand.” He poured oil into the reluctant guard’s hand. “Do you have a wife?” Imhotep asked as Kewab rubbed the oil onto his own head and chest.