“Dismissed, both of you,” he repeated. Huy and Paneb bowed themselves to the door. Tiye’s hostile eyes stayed on Huy, but Amunhotep’s gaze had returned to the scrolls he continued to hold firmly against his linen-draped thighs.
As soon as Huy stepped out into the passage, he knew the hyena was there. Its odour assailed his nostrils, a foul miasma far stronger than the tang that had invaded his bedchamber and more pungent than that of any wild animal. Resisting the urge to cover his mouth and nose, drained and on edge, he spoke quickly to Nubti and Tiawi, then started along the statue-lined way to the palace entrance, Paneb behind him. He could not think. He hardly saw the deferential comings and goings around him or heard any greeting. His ears were full of the soft, sinister footfalls only he could hear, and the slow panting of hot breath over a wet black tongue. Grimly, he prayed that in the sunlight flooding the vast stone concourse before the pillars of the reception hall the apparition would dissolve away or at least become invisible.
At first it seemed as though his prayer had been answered. The bearers saw him and came hurrying with the litters. He and Paneb got in, were lifted, and began the ride home, but one glance beyond the open curtains showed Huy the beast padding in the shadow abreast of his litter. When the bearers changed direction and the shadow moved, the hyena moved also, staying within its reach. Huy drew the curtains, closing himself in, and his head sank onto his raised knees. I am being haunted by a demon, he thought dully. Anubis has unleashed a member of his Khatyu against me—but for what reason? I have solved the riddle of the Book of Thoth. In spite of knowing that Tiye will do her best to ruin me or even have me killed, I have finally released the details of both Seeings. Atum is allowing me to age at last, I feel it; therefore he has no more use for me. Unless I’m required to go further, sacrifice myself, fill my heart so full of the heavy stones of evil that the scales will not balance and Ma’at will condemn me to annihilation. Huy groaned aloud. Murder a child and save Egypt, but destroy myself. Let him live and destroy Egypt, but in disobeying Anubis’s direct command to undo the damage my arrogance has already caused, condemn myself anyway. There is no choice at all—I am damned whatever I do. I used to hate you, Atum, for treating me as though, with the gift of Seeing you bestowed on me and the permission to read the Book of Thoth you granted me, you purchased my soul to do with as you pleased. As I grew, I came to understand and accept the uniqueness with which you compensated me. But now I will return to hating you. You and your mouthpiece Anubis are more cruel than any of us mortals. Huy knew that the clarity and venom of the words passing through his mind were largely a reaction against the tension of the morning, interspersed as they were with images of Tiye’s furious face and the King’s puzzlement. But the naked facts of Huy’s dilemma were undeniable. The presence of the hyena dogging his steps was also undeniable. Nauseated and oddly cold, Huy hugged his knees and gave himself up to despair.
Amunmose and Kenofer were waiting for him as he entered his house. Paneb left him to file away the record of the meeting with the King and Tiye, and his steward and body servant approached him, but suddenly Huy could not move. A paralysis of mind and body had seized him so that the faces of his servants and the details of his surroundings were all at once unfamiliar. Only the hyena had substance. It squatted beside him, so close to his naked calf that he could feel the heat of its body. A need to look down at it grew in him, a conviction that reality would quickly warp out of all recognition unless he did so. With a flicker of rebellion and fear, he compelled his head to turn, his gaze to drop. The creature was peering up at him, and as their eyes met, the room and the people in it regained perspective.
Both men were watching him cautiously. “Rakhaka is keeping the noon meal hot for you, Master,” Amunmose said. “Will you eat?”
“No.” With an effort of the will Huy thrust the instant of distortion away. “Kenofer, bring me poppy, and you, Amunmose, find Perti. I want to see both of you immediately.” Amunhotep would never harm me, Huy thought as he walked through the hall towards the stairs, but Tiye would not hesitate to have me assassinated if she believed that my death would somehow change her son’s destiny. In spite of her bluster, she knows that my visions do not lie. Reaching his bedchamber, he shook off his sandals and exchanged the blue shirt and kilt for a white shift. Lifting the lid of one of his cedar tiring chests, he felt past the neatly folded clothes to the boxes beneath. Most of them held jewellery and treasured mementoes from the past. Huy drew out one of them, slightly longer and less ornate than the others, and untying the cord that kept it closed, he took out a dagger. He had not held it for many years. Thothmes had given it to him on a Naming Day long gone, partly as a joke but mainly so that he might carry a weapon at his waist during one of his official journeys away from Egypt. The blade was of plain iron, but the haft was of gold inlaid with buttons of red carnelian, crafted so that a hand might grasp it smoothly. Huy hefted it briefly, aware that the hyena was watching him from a corner of the room, then replaced it in its box and carried it to the chair beside his couch.
Kenofer knocked and entered. Huy had just passed the empty opium vial back to him when Perti swung through the doorway, followed by Amunmose. Perti bowed briskly, bringing with him an odour of worn leather and dust that momentarily overlaid the hyena’s stench. Huy regarded him carefully. Pharaoh’s Commander-in-Chief Wesersatet had occasionally approached Huy with a request for Perti’s service in the army and the promise to Perti himself of a division to administer, but Perti had always refused. “With you I travel the empire, Master,” he had explained to Huy. “I learn of new weapons and tactics, I have the opportunity to observe the great of many lands, and best of all you give me full authority to organize the defence of your household and the activities of your spies. I answer to no one but you. Where else would I enjoy such freedom and responsibility?” Now he stood waiting, his eyes on Huy, Amunmose beside him.
“Kenofer, close the door,” Huy said. “Perti, how many soldiers are in my employ?”
“Fifty at present,” Perti replied promptly. “Wesersatet approved an increase from the usual twenty when your partner Prince Amunnefer needed your guards to assist his in the protection of the poppy fields. The arouras are completely open, as you know. Ten men are away in Punt with the myrrh caravan. Thirty stand watch in the house and grounds and accompany you when you go to the palace or into the city. Master, why do you ask?”
Perti had earned the right to question him. So had Kenofer and Amunmose, although Kenofer seldom did so. Huy cast about for a way to tell them that his life might be in danger without having to provide clarification, but before he could do so, Amunmose spoke up.
“You’re afraid, aren’t you, Huy? We’ve known each other for hentis and I can interpret your moods almost as well as Anhur could. In the few days since you returned from Iunu you’ve been distraught, not sleeping or eating, and standing in the hall a while ago after your visit to the palace I saw you completely lost. If an angry ghost was seeking revenge on you, you would be sending for an exorcist, not for us.” He made a wide gesture that included the other two. “We’re not asking why, only what we must do.”
“Thank you, Amunmose. All I may say is this: I have made Their Majesties very distressed, so much so that one or both of them might try to kill me. Amunmose, let no food into the kitchens that you haven’t procured yourself from the market or the garden, and warn Rakhaka to stop sampling the meals as he cooks.” Perti’s black eyebrows rose. He opened his mouth to protest, but Huy forestalled him. “No one is to risk death on my behalf. Perti, delegate a soldier to be with Amunmose at all times and have guards appointed to keep watch in the kitchens. Kenofer, the only water I’ll drink will be carried from the river by you and there’ll be another soldier to help you. No wine or beer to come from open containers. Perti, have this knife sharpened for me and bring it back. Impress on your men that no one is to be allowed onto the estate or into the house, and if there are messages for me, they must be left at the gate. P
erti, I want you outside my door day and night. Kenofer can bring a pallet and bedding for you.” He handed Perti the dagger.
“Master, do you really believe that our Horus or the Goddess would deliberately break a law of Ma’at because you have distressed them?” The voice was Kenofer’s. “The balance of Ma’at is not disturbed by the condemnation of a criminal justly tried before the judges, but a secret murder by the One who stands in the Holiest of Holiest on our behalf will be seen by the gods as a transgression committed by all of us—every Egyptian.”
Only until the One enters into the transforming ritual of the heb sed, Huy thought, moved by the innocent perplexity suffusing his body servant’s face. Then he truly becomes a god in the flesh, no longer accountable for anything he has done. Few down the ages have really believed this. In fact, only a tiny handful of those who have followed the Book of Thoth to its end have been aware that it is more than an account of creation or a series of manuals explaining how to acquire the skills of magic or read the stars. “I have grieved them greatly, particularly the Empress,” Huy told him. “I expect to be summoned back to the palace, but in the meantime I need you all to keep me safe.” I no longer trust Anubis to do that, Huy’s bitter thoughts ran on. He glanced to the corner beyond the shrine to Khenti-kheti. The hyena was staring back at him. With an effort, he pulled himself out of the chair. “You’re dismissed. Kenofer, I’ll take my afternoon sleep now. Please take the mourning clothes away.”
It did no good to appear in blue today, he told himself as the servants filed out and the door was closed. Neither Amunhotep nor Tiye recognized or shared the grief for Egypt herself that imbued my vision with such horror and sadness. “Stay or go, I don’t care,” Huy said to the creature crouching in the dimness. Crawling onto his couch, he pulled the sheet up over himself and determinedly closed his eyes.
He began to dream of frogs, dozens of them, crawling over each other at his feet. They were all black. A strong light shone from somewhere behind him and he was casting an elongated shadow so deep that it was difficult to see one creature divided from another, but he could feel their cold sliminess against his skin. He half turned in order to see them more clearly, kicking at them as he did so. The light moved with him, settling at his back again. Plunging both hands into the seething mass of tiny bodies, Huy began to fling them away, but the more feverishly he dug into the repulsive pile, the faster their number increased. Waking with a cry, he fought himself free of his sweat-soaked sheet and hastily left the couch, expecting to see it and the floor around him alive with frogs; but there was nothing, only the hyena engaged in delicately licking its paws. For once it was not staring at him. All its attention appeared to be fixed on cleaning itself. I wish you were still alive, Henenu, Huy whispered to himself, standing watching it. From the time you came to Hut-herib to exorcise me and found no demon, you became my protector from the evil forces wanting to ruin me and the gift of Seeing. I grew to love you, to trust your judgment. If you were here, you could tell me why that bau haunts me, why it takes the form of an offal eater, why it is blacker than any moonless night, who sent it to torment me. There’s no one left alive to confide in—only Thothmes, who would listen but could offer no help. I dare not approach any priest with this, not even the archivist at Mennofer, particularly now, when my position as mer kat is threatened, let alone my life, and I must betray no weakness. More than anything, I wish that I might stare into my copper mirror and be given a vision of my own future! The animal had finished washing itself and had resumed its steady but oddly indifferent gaze at him, and Huy shouted for Kenofer, wanting to sluice away not only his own rank smell but the repugnant feel of the frogs’ cold scum lingering on his feet.
Over Perti’s objections, Huy had an awning erected on the grass by the garden, where he dictated a letter to Thothmes and Nasha and then lay on his back, hands behind his head, and tried to think of nothing at all. The estate was quiet, the heat slowly intensifying. A letter had come from the steward of Huy’s holdings in the north. Henenu had left her estate in the oasis to him. The soil around the lake of Ta-she was particularly fertile, and the abundant crops grown there added to Huy’s wealth year by year. He was careful to take the steward’s advice regarding what to plant, but now the scroll lay unread, rustling in the breeze where Paneb had left it, inches from the hyena sitting motionless beside Huy. Perti and several of his soldiers were standing guard within earshot. The quiet conversation of two passing servants seemed to embody the timelessness of the season. But Huy, outwardly relaxed, knew that unless he kept his eyes closed and his mind distracted, he would leap up screaming and run to the gate, through the opium fields, into the muddy depths of the dwindling river, and embrace at last a welcome oblivion where his ghostly shadow could not follow.
Many times in the days when he and Ishat had lived together in the slums of Hut-herib and he was driving himself to exhaustion in Atum’s service, they had answered an urgent request for a Seeing only to enter some poverty-stricken hut and find a child already drowned. Huy, kneeling helplessly beside the pallid grey flesh and colourless eyes of the little corpse, would feel the desperation of the parents and, even worse, their frantic hope. Lay your hands on my baby and bring her back to life. You have the power. The gods gave it to you when they made you live again and granted you the gift of Seeing and healing. Were your parents more deserving than us? Were you? Why you and not my baby? Why will you not help us? The accusation would hang unspoken in the air. He had heard it before. He had tried to explain something that even he did not understand, and in the end he had given up. Now he clung to the memories of those times, allowing them to blend with a desire for his own death so that the noisy street on which they had lived, the food they had eaten, even the vibrant personality of Ishat herself, became part of a losing struggle against the relentless omnipresence of the flood itself.
All the rest of the afternoon, he managed to keep himself in the gloom of a Hut-herib of distorted invention so that by the time Amunmose came to summon him to the evening meal he had almost forgotten the curse that now followed him everywhere. By the time he unwillingly entered his bedchamber for the night, there had still been no message from the palace.
17
THAT NIGHT HE DREAMED OF FROGS again, but this time he was struggling for breath in the deep waters of the lake fronting the wide forecourt to Ra’s temple while the ugly creatures swarmed over and around him, trying to hold him down. He and Thothmes had been walking past the entrance to Ra’s outer court on their way to the practice ground, Thothmes gauntleted in preparation for a lesson with the chariot master and Huy with his bow slung over one shoulder. I’ve been attacked, Huy thought, lungs bursting, arms and legs flailing as he struggled to free himself from the smothering mass of bodies. Sennefer knocked me into the lake with his throwing stick. Where have all these frogs come from? Why are they trying to drown me? Thothmes, help me! Help me! Where are you? He felt his consciousness begin to fade. Unable to hold his breath any longer, he exhaled. Panic overtook him as his mouth filled with water and something more, something worse. Frogs were sitting on his tongue, grazing the back of his throat. He retched, and then the panic turned to madness. Thothmes’ hand gripped his shoulder, but it was too late—he was dead.
“Master, you must wake up! Wake up! The Queen is here!”
Huy opened his eyes onto darkness. In a moment of confusion he expected to find himself in the Judgment Hall facing Ma’at and her scales, but instead he was on his couch, entangled in his sheet, and Perti was bending over him. He struggled to sit up. His head was thick and aching and his throat was sore.
“Perti,” he croaked. “I was a student again, twelve years old and dying in Ra’s lake. What’s happening?”
Perti stepped away to make room for Kenofer, who was carrying a bowl of water that he set on the bedside table. Swiftly he pulled Huy’s twisted sheet away and, tossing it on the floor, urged Huy to his feet. “The Queen is in your office, Huy. She walked here from the palace
with only Wesersatet to guard her. She must see you at once.” Perti had gone out into the passage while he was speaking and returned with a lamp.
Huy’s wits had come back. He glanced sharply at his captain’s drawn features. “She’s in my office alone? You left her alone?”
“No. Two of your soldiers are with her. I’ve woken Paneb.”
Whatever she has to say won’t be recorded, Huy thought, shivering briefly as Kenofer’s wet cloth moved over him. Otherwise she’d have summoned me to the palace. This matter is entirely secret.
“I’m sorry that the water is cold,” Kenofer said. “I was unable to—”
“It doesn’t matter. Get me a clean kilt. Wake Paroi and have him bring date wine and something to eat to the office. And Kenofer, make sure the wine is unopened and the food’s been under the guard’s eye since it was sent back to the kitchens after the evening meal. Tell Paroi not to offer any of it before I arrive. Perti, come with me, but I want you to stand outside the office where Wesersatet will be.”
Kenofer had finished his cursory wash and had gone to one of Huy’s chests, extracting a kilt and coming to wrap it around Huy’s waist before hurrying away. I won’t wear sandals, Huy thought as he followed Kenofer into the passage, Perti behind him. I can run better in bare feet. Then he laughed aloud, an abrupt bark without humour. If Tiye has already conceived of a way to put an end to me and this is her first move, then no escape as crude as physical flight will succeed, he acknowledged to himself, not even if I take the long journey into a self-imposed exile somewhere on the edge of the empire.
Paneb and the customary household guard at the foot of the stairs both looked up as he and Perti descended. Apart from slightly swollen eyelids and an unpainted face, Paneb gave no indication that he had been roused from a deep sleep. He was fully dressed and shod. A droplet of gold hung from one lobe and the red carnelian sweret bead inscribed with Thoth’s hieroglyph and Paneb’s name hung as usual on his chest. He bowed to Huy, his palette tucked comfortably under his arm, and for the hundredth time Huy blessed the day when the scribe had entered his employ. “Be as unobtrusive as you can,” he told Paneb as together they turned away from the front of the house and started along the gloomy corridor lined with closed doors leading to the rear gardens. Huy could see the vague shape of Pharaoh’s Commander-in-Chief standing outside the office. Perti moved deftly ahead, his hand going to the hilt of his sword. As they came up to Wesersatet, he bowed.
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