It was not Kenofer who woke him but a dishevelled Amunmose, shaking him unceremoniously until he opened his eyes and batted the man’s arm away. “Chief Royal Herald Senu is here, Huy,” Amunmose said. “He was ordered to deliver an official summons to you at dawn. There’s a confirmation. The scroll is signed by the King himself.”
“I was expecting it.” Struggling to clear his mind, Huy left the couch. “How long have I slept?”
“Not long. Kenofer’s gone to heat your water in the bathhouse. I’ll send Senu away, get Rakhaka up to prepare you some food, then I’ll wash myself. Do you remember how difficult it used to be to persuade young Amunhotep to get off his couch in time for the noon meal? Not any more, apparently. I’m too old for any of this.” He paused at the door and turned. “There’s no trouble from the Empress already, is there, Huy? Is that why Her Majesty the Queen came to see you in the night? Should I be packing up the household for a flight into Rethennu or Zahi?”
“No, I don’t think so. I’ll take an escort, though. Please tell Perti.”
“He’s on his pallet outside the door. He’s awake.”
Mutemwia said that I have nothing to fear from Tiye, Huy’s thoughts ran on as the last vestiges of sleep blew away under Kenofer’s scrubbing. She’s very eager to see Tiye returned to an inferior place in Egypt’s day-to-day governmental affairs, and I understand why, but would she minimize the danger to me in her keenness to have me take up my duties as mer kat again? I’d have done so soon in any case. According to her, Tiye has shut herself up with her son and is screaming at everyone, but it’s only a matter of time before she calms down and appears in the audience hall again. Mutemwia wants me to return to the palace before the Empress’s rage is spent and she regains control of herself. Mutemwia adores her son. Does she fear that one day Tiye will have him assassinated and so wield the total authority of a Regent on behalf of the one Prince who is destined to survive? If so, it means that in spite of her sneers she believes my vision. Goddess as Regent, not as wife? Mutemwia knows what it’s like to be a Regent, the stresses and temptations of the position. She and I have been friends since the King was a baby. She is an extremely astute woman who sees the crevices in Amunhotep through which an ambitious wife might creep. But Tiye loves Amunhotep. Of that I have no doubt.
“Electrum or the purple gold, Master?” Kenofer asked, and Huy sighed and came to himself. The sun had risen fully by now but still hung low in the east, its first rays sending thin morning shadows snaking across Huy’s fields, and he knew that he must hurry. Dressed in a kilt woven of gold-wrapped linen threads, his face meticulously painted, his waist-length hair braided and entwined with thick gold bands each portraying the feather of Ma’at, and shod in leather sandals studded with golden ankhs, he was frowning at the display of jewellery laid out on his couch.
“I really don’t care,” he snapped, “but I suppose that, seeing I may be going straight to the audiences once the King has finished with me, it had better be the purple gold.” He held out his arms for the wide bracelets shot through with traces of purple and bent his head so that Kenofer could hang the linked double plumes of Amun on his chest. Purple gold was too expensive for any but the wealthiest Egyptians to own. The native craftsmen, brilliant though they were, had never been able to reproduce whatever composed the reddish tinge in the jewellery. Kenofer was handling it with reverence, but Huy’s eyes rested on the two rings he had not removed since Henenu the Rekhet, controller of demons, had made them for his protection. Perhaps they are what’s keeping the hyena at a distance—the Soul Protector and the Frog of Resurrection. Now why didn’t I remember that I wear the Frog on my finger, and wonder why it allowed the nightmares? Because the hyena is indeed Habyu, not Khatyu? Kenofer had finished setting the cascade of tiny scarabs into Huy’s earlobe and was holding up the copper mirror. Huy waved it away and left the room.
He and Paneb were carried to the palace in separate litters as before, Paneb with the scrolls the Queen had left tucked into his battered leather pouch. Perti and twenty of Huy’s soldiers surrounded them both, and Huy’s Chief Herald Ba-en-Ra strode in front to keep the way clear. There were not many people about to hear the herald’s warning. Huy kept his curtain closed against the early sun, his mind as much as possible on what Mutemwia had told him so that he might remain unruffled by any thought of the coming interview. If the King ordered his arrest, there would be nothing Perti and his men could do. Of course Perti knew it, but the sound of his cheerful voice as he chatted with one of his officers gave Huy a fragile sense of security.
At the entrance to the palace, Wesersatet and a contingent of royal guards were waiting. Wesersatet bowed as Huy left his litter. “Greetings, mer kat. You are expected. Please order your escort to wait. Refreshment will be provided for them.” His words and features were politely impersonal. Nothing in his manner betrayed the escapade of the night before. He strode towards the forest of pillars fronting the reception hall and at once the guards surrounded Huy and Paneb as they followed him. Huy did not need to be shown the way to the King’s apartments. Usually a guide would be summoned for a newcomer and the Commander-in-Chief would disappear to attend to other duties. It had been a long time since Huy had become lost in the maze of the palace, but today Wesersatet did not even slow his pace and the soldiers gave no sign of dispersing. The small groups of courtiers already drifting along the corridors quickly gave way as Wesersatet swept past them. A few recognized Huy between the sturdy bodies around him and bowed hesitantly. Huy knew what was in their minds, and in his also. Am I a prisoner or not?
At the wide double doors to the royal quarters, Nubti left his stool. He smiled and reverenced Huy, and Wesersatet and his men moved to either side of the passage, but they did not disband. Huy glanced at Paneb. The scribe’s demeanour was as imperturbable as ever. Nubti opened one of the doors, called Huy’s name, and waved the pair of them inside. The door closed behind them with an echo.
Amunhotep was still in his nightshirt, sitting slumped in a chair, his head covered with the white cap of strict custom. Both hands were resting in large bowls of water, one to either side of him on small tables. A servant was busily massaging one bare foot. The other, still bearing traces of henna, was stretched out on a stool. The King’s face was slightly swollen. Kohl was smeared across one temple, but his other eye was clean although bloodshot. To Huy he looked as though one of his eyes was missing. A man Huy had not seen before stood patiently off to one side, a large jug in his grasp. The air in the huge room was heavy with the scent of rosemary and a haze of myrrh smoke. Huy and Paneb went to the floor in a full prostration, and immediately Amunhotep grunted that they should get up. “Paneb, go over there and be quiet,” he said. “Uncle, you’re late. Come closer so that I don’t have to shout. My head is threatening to burst and every part of my body aches. I should not have left my couch, but before the festivities last night my Mother the Queen requested that I speak to you before the hour of audience this morning.”
Huy stepped up to him. “I’m sorry you’re ill, Majesty,” he offered.
Amunhotep grunted again. “I’m more hungover than ill,” he acknowledged surprisingly. “Nubti, get rid of everyone except Huy and Paneb, and send Nebmerut in. He should be hovering outside in the passage. And you, Neferronpet,” he snapped at the man Huy did not recognize, “what kind of a butler are you? The last thing I need is sweet date wine. Bring me sermet.” He turned back to Huy. “Nothing really helps but cold water on my wrists and myrrh smoke,” he said as the room promptly emptied. “Often sermet takes the headache away, but I don’t particularly like beer. Sometimes a massage to my feet makes magic. But not today.” He lifted his hands from the bowls of water. Huy picked up a linen towel and, wrapping the King’s hands, carefully dried each finger. Amunhotep watched him. “You’ve always loved me, haven’t you?” he said quietly after a while. “Ever since I spent the flood months with you and Anhur when I was a young boy. I love you too, and I trust you. In fact, I think
that you and my Mother the Queen are the only two people I trust completely.”
There was a knock on the door that reverberated throughout the vast space and Nubti entered followed by a man Huy identified as Seal Bearer and Chief Royal Scribe Nebmerut. Without being told to do so, Nebmerut joined Paneb on the floor, greeted him, and set his palette across his thighs.
Amunhotep ignored the small disturbance. “I have no doubts at all that your gift is from Atum himself and your visions speak true,” he went on. “The things you saw in my little son’s future filled me with fear and despair. How does any Incarnation dare to repudiate the god who is his father, and moreover send masons to every temple and monument and stela in Egypt, and even beyond, to hack out his name and thus make it as though he never existed? I had a terrible fight with Tiye. She accused you of wanting the Horus Throne for yourself and your nephews. She called you a charlatan and vowed to have you arrested and imprisoned to starve until you were dead. Then she ran into the nursery.”
Another knock on the door boomed. Amunhotep winced in pain. Butler Neferronpet advanced with a clay jug and a silver cup. Pouring a draft and bowing, he passed it to Amunhotep, who drank thirstily. Huy took the jug, set it on one of the tables, and curtly dismissed Neferronpet. After a swift glance at the King, the man went away. Huy dropped the linen he had been absently holding into the water and sat back on the stool.
“I went to talk to my Mother the Queen and then I drank all night,” the King continued. “I wanted oblivion, Huy. I cannot kill my little son, but neither can I pretend that I did not hear the prediction. To imagine Tiye actually marrying our Prince goes far beyond the borders of sanity, let alone the edicts of Ma’at, but your voice followed me into one jug of wine after another. I couldn’t escape it. If Ma’at is wounded, Egypt will be unprotected from drought and famine and disease and—who knows?—maybe even from invasion and military defeat.” He pressed the tip of a finger against his right eye, where he was obviously in pain. “Therefore I have given the one command open to me,” he said miserably. “Prince Amunhotep is now confined to the harem. He may not leave its precinct for any reason at all. Ever. Chief Harem Steward Userhet and his successors will answer with their lives if he goes free. My royal seal is on the injunction and the grounds for it. I have also ordered that Tiye be removed from the harem and only allowed to visit the Prince with my permission. It has all been so hard and so horrible, Uncle. Have I done the right thing?”
Huy longed to take him in his arms, to cuddle and rock him as he used to do when Amunhotep was young. Instead, he gathered the King’s hands into his own once more. “You did the right thing, the only thing possible without breaking a law of Ma’at,” he said quietly. “You were wise. Tiye will eventually accept your decision. I’ll return to my duties as your mer kat at once if you are agreeable. And Amunhotep, never doubt that you may trust me with your life.” Huy felt his fingers squeezed and then released. Amunhotep nodded.
“The ministers and ambassadors and boon-seekers in the audience hall will be restless,” he said. “Get on with it, Uncle, and tell Nubti on your way out that I’m hungry now. You can bring anything that needs my seal to my quarters this evening.”
“Were you able to hear everything, Paneb?” Huy asked once the heavy doors were closed behind them and they were hurrying along the corridor.
Paneb nodded. “Every word, Master,” he replied. “May I suggest that you obtain the royal seal on the papyrus?”
You are no fool, my dear scribe. This time I definitely need insurance against whatever vagaries might be in my own future. He swept into the audience hall and took the empty seat on the dais, looking down at the sea of bowed heads. “Mahu, who should be dealt with first?” he said.
The Mitanni ambassador presented a long letter full of wordy praise from his King to Amunhotep, but as always, Huy thought as he listened to the seemingly endless phrases extolling Amunhotep’s virtues, Mitanni wanted gold and plenty of it. Surprisingly, this time the King of Mitanni was offering a few horses and chariots in exchange. Huy cut the recitation short and referred the matter to the Overseer of Foreign Affairs. Merimose, Viceroy of Kush and Wawat and also the Overseer of the Gold Lands of Amun, sent his humble greetings to Amunhotep and a request for more soldiers to protect the gold routes. That letter required an investigation by the Chancellor together with Wesersatet as Commander-in-Chief. Huy would be required to approve any decision.
Once the hall had emptied, Huy and Mahu began their tour of the administrators. Mahu remained silent. Only Nebmerut, Royal Scribe and Seal Bearer, was his superior. Huy had always enjoyed working with Mahu. Like Paneb, he knew how to keep his thoughts to himself unless his opinion was required, in which case his replies were succinct and to the point. His load was heavy, noting down the details of each day’s discussions and decisions and making copies of every encounter for the palace archives, but he did not complain. Today Huy was reflecting on his meeting with the King as he and Mahu approached the large office shared by Hori and Suti, Architect Kha’s undoubtedly accomplished twin sons. Huy did not expect them to be present; architects and stonemasons did much of their outdoor work in the cool early hours of the morning. But one of their assistants and probably a couple of scribes would be busy inside, and Huy simply wanted to make sure that the two young men would be there to speak with him the following day.
Amunhotep has made it plain that he doesn’t doubt my visions, Huy mused as he and Mahu paced easily along the paved path fronting the row of administrative cells to their left. On their right a well-watered lawn ended in a section of the towering wall that encircled the palace precincts. The sun had not yet reached its zenith. Huy’s shadow, though truncated, lay on the grass beside him. Deliberately he refused to glance at it, knowing that the hyena was there in its shade, keeping pace with him. Grimly he forced his mind away from it. Mutemwia often used to tell Amunhotep the story of what I Saw the first time I inadvertently touched him, when no route to the Horus Throne seemed possible. He surely knows it all by heart. But I have no such history with Tiye. I Saw for her first when she was already a girl on the verge of womanhood, and I lied by omission when I recounted it to her. Now she’s read all of it. I’ve given her good reason to mistrust me, and like any mother her instinct is to shield her son from harm no matter what. Coupled with an excuse to label me a sham, she will want me as far away from the Prince as possible. Given the power she wields as Empress, and her undoubted fury at her husband but most especially at me, she will look for a way to see me dead and Amunhotep’s edict rescinded. No matter what Mutemwia said, I’ll make sure that my estate and all of us in it are protected. Will Atum help me, even though I’ve fulfilled my agreement to decipher the meaning of the Book and my only use to him now is as a Seer? Will Anubis? He could hear the hyena panting, and in a spasm of disgust he swung round and aimed a kick at it, aware even as his foot shot out that the action was futile.
“Master?” Mahu said.
Huy exhaled noisily. “It’s nothing. I thought I saw a scorpion,” he replied. “Let’s finish our business quickly. I’m hungry.”
They had arrived at the open cell door. Huy could hear a casual conversation going on inside. The interior was pleasantly dim. Two men were bending over a scroll that had been unrolled and spread out across the surface of a wide table. As Mahu stood aside to let Huy enter first, they bowed courteously.
“Let us call light First—but it is known only through darkness,” one of the men said, and all at once Huy could not see his face. The room was much more murky than it had appeared to be. He turned, but there was no door behind him, no sun-drenched grass, no sliver of intensely blue sky.
“Mahu?” he called, and at the sound of his voice utter blackness suddenly descended. It was so thick that Huy experienced it as a suffocating weight, and for one panic-stricken moment he could not breathe.
“The ponderous inevitability of consequence,” another voice intoned. In spite of his disorientation Huy heard something
in its quality that he recognized. It woke faint echoes in him from long ago. A High Priest? Of Ra or Thoth’s temple? What had it meant? He couldn’t remember.
“Anubis, are you here?” he whispered, his words muffled by the impenetrable gloom that seemed to have bulk as well as depth. “Have you come to lead me into the Judgment Hall?”
There was no reply. Instead the first voice shouted, “Only through darkness, darkness, darkness! The Light cast a shadow, grim and terrible, like restless water with spume like smoke! Peril in the water and menace in the smoke!” It began to wail.
Huy broke out in a cold sweat. The sound was unearthly, a series of chilling howls without a hint of human breath, but he remembered where he had seen those words. He had gone to Thoth’s temple at Iunu to read the second part of the Book of Thoth. Anhur and a young Amunmose had gone with him. Amunmose had used the time to visit his family. Huy, intimidated by everything and everyone at Thoth’s home, continuously aware of the god’s strong magic, had clung to Anhur and forged a bond with the soldier that had only been broken by Anhur’s death. The portion of the Book he had been expected to untangle had made no sense to him at all, not until he and Thoth’s High Priest had begun to talk of frogs. He began to repeat the mysterious stanza aloud. The whole of the Book was there, lodged faultlessly in his mind. “I am One that transforms into Two. I am Two that transforms into Four. I am Four that transforms into Eight. After this I am One.”
Immediately the moaning stopped and Huy’s recitation was taken up and repeated by a chorus that slowly grew from several guttural voices to the deafening clamour of a multitude. Huy covered his ears. Still he could see nothing. Then his right hand was pulled roughly away from his head, forced to grip what felt like a portion of a metal rod, and he found himself towed backward. He struggled to keep his balance. His other hand slid along a wall, caught against the edge of a door jamb, and without warning he was outside. The cacophony ceased. The silence made his head ring. He realized that he was clutching a tall golden Staff of Office halfway down its length. It was topped with the face of a jackal, and Anubis was holding it just under the talisman. Hastily Huy let it go and looked about.
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