by T. L. Higley
Sen seemed to mask a smile that implied there was something I was not saying. “We would be happy to have you again, my lord. We gather again a few nights from now.”
I chewed my lip. “I do not like to wait.”
“Is that so?”
Sen’s sarcasm was noted, and I smiled. “Perhaps there were a few with whom she spent her time. Would it be possible for me to call on them tonight?”
Sen deferred to Neferet.
“They seemed pleased to speak with the grand vizier the other night,” she said. “They would welcome him again.”
Neferet offered to guide me to the home of her friends, and soon thereafter we were in their courtyard, the woman Layla guiding me to the best chair and offering food and wine. And behind the kindness, I knew she also was offering me friendship. We sat in a close circle in their courtyard. A fire burned in the center, warding off the night chill and lighting faces with an orange warmth. In the corner, a young boy played a flute softly.
“We will help you in whatever we can, Grand Vizier,” the husband, Hanif, said. “But she did not share much of herself with us.” He smiled. “Especially at the beginning, when she believed we did not know who she was.”
“Did she ever speak of fear?”
Hanif looked to Neferet and she gave a slight nod. “She feared her own heart,” he said. “And the changes that were happening there.”
“Changes?”
“She wanted to cease her daily offerings to Egypt’s gods. She wanted to join us in our sacrifices, which are of a different sort and not in your temples.”
I looked around the fire, at the family’s glowing faces. “What kind of sacrifices?” I had heard of tribes in distant lands offering their children to the gods. Surely, these people—
“Do you bring offerings to the gods, Grand Vizier?” Hanif asked.
“Of course.”
“Why?”
“Because they demand it. Because I wish to appease them, to earn their favor and have them bestow blessings on me.”
“The One True God cannot be appeased, and his favor cannot be earned. He sits in judgment of all men who have gone their own way.”
I spread my hands on my knees. “Then you are to be pitied, for to fall under the wrath of any god is fearsome.”
Hanif seemed to grow bold. “There is only one God. Your gods are stone and wood, no different than the chair upon which you sit or the pyramid you build.”
I swallowed and fingered Merit’s ankh at my throat, suddenly unsure of the wisdom of speaking with these people. Did the gods care enough to listen to the words of those who did not believe in them?
“What use is there in worshiping a god who has only judgment for you and nothing more?”
Hanif patted Layla’s arm, whose face was alight with joy. “I did not say that he has only judgment. Besides, what kind of God would he be if we only worshiped him because we had a use for it? He is God. There is no other. He must be worshiped simply for that reason.”
I leaned back in the chair and studied his face, then Neferet’s. There was a different sort of peace there.
“So if not to appease or earn favor, why do you sacrifice?”
“To atone.”
I shrugged. “It is all the same.”
“But it is not!” Hanif leaned forward, his fingers pressed together. “His creatures have turned their backs on his holy face, and we can never appease his righteous anger nor do enough to earn his favor. His favor must be imparted to us, and it can only be imparted through the shedding of blood.”
A dung block in the fire popped, and the flame surged.
“When you die,” Hanif said, “you hope to have done enough good, to have kept yourself pure enough, to be found worthy to enter the afterlife. Am I correct?”
“I hope to, yes.”
“But what is ‘good enough’? What is ‘pure enough’? Either something is pure or it is not.” He smiled kindly. “Are you pure, Grand Vizier?”
I shifted in my chair. “If I am not, I do not see that the blood of an ox will make me so.”
“No, that is only temporary. But the One Who Comes will change that.”
I watched the boy with the flute. His fingers danced over the instrument.
“You said the Great Wife feared her own changing beliefs. Did she feel that her life would be in danger because of this?”
Layla spoke. “She was unhappy about Pharaoh’s declaration of himself as Ra on earth. She felt it was wrong, and it bothered her that he had been convinced of it by … those closest to him.” She looked at her hands. “She planned to speak to him about it. But I do not think she feared him.”
I stood. “Thank you for your thoughts, and your hospitality. It is time I left, however.”
Hanif stood with me. “Please come again to our gathering, if you like. We do not turn away anyone who sincerely looks for truth.”
I bowed. “Then the importance of truth is something we both agree upon.”
Layla squeezed my arm, as she had in their hidden chamber the day we met. I looked into her wide smile and wondered why this stranger seemed to care deeply about me.
Neferet led me out in silence. I accompanied her back to her home through the dark village and prepared to leave her at her door.
“Will you stay?” she asked.
“I cannot. I must leave early in the morning for Tura.”
“Tura!” Her eyes lit up. “May I come with you?”
I laughed. “Are you thinking of applying your paints to the white cliffs of the limestone quarry?”
She smiled and hit me playfully on the arm. “My brother is a stonemason in Tura. I have not seen him in many months. I would love to visit him, to take him some things!”
I frowned and looked into the night.
“Please, Hemi! I promise I will not cause any problems. I will be as silent as a sleeping cat.”
“You must be at the harbor at dawn. I cannot wait.”
“Agreed!” She stood on her toes and kissed me lightly on the cheek. “Thank you!” she said and disappeared into her home.
It was not safe to wander home slowly through the desert, but I found my straying thoughts made it difficult for me to maintain a swift pace. The night had given me much to ponder, but I was certain not a bit of it would help me solve the murders of Merit and Mentu, nor help me to restore ma’at in the land I loved.
* * *
The harbor at dawn is like a sandstorm in the desert, with man and ship like grains of sand swirling in a frantic rush to get somewhere, anywhere. Supply ships, barges, and ferries clogged the dock, and shouted orders from pilots and crewmen pierced the morning air.
Neferet stood on the quay when I arrived, part of the chaos, in her dress with the red stitching and all those jingling bells sewn to the bottom. At her feet were overflowing baskets of bananas and tomatoes.
Her smile was as big as the blue sky. “I have never been here this early!” she said without greeting as I approached. “Isn’t it magnificent?”
I grunted. It seemed to me every craft in the greenish water was in danger of foundering unless someone took control of the disorder, and the baskets and crates of rations stacked on the quay may very well tumble into the water before reaching the village.
A crewman bumped me as he passed, sending me into Neferet. I could smell her perfume, even among the ripening bananas.
She laughed and threw her hands between us. “Grand Vizier!”
I stared at the laborer’s back, but he was oblivious.
“Our accommodations will not be luxurious, I’m afraid. The fastest way to get there is the next barge departing for the quarry.” I pointed to the black and yellow ship in the water, its prow towering over us.
Neferet grabbed a tomato from the basket beside her, tossed it into the air, and caught it with one hand. “I do not care. It is a glorious morning!” She scooped up a large pouch. “Shall we go?”
She needed some assistance crossing to the barge,
as her hands were full with her pouch and her tomato. I wondered briefly what she planned to do with the fruit.
I noticed several overturned empty barrels in the center of the barge, and I righted them as we passed. Neferet stopped to watch me and laughed.
We sailed from the harbor, only narrowly missing two ferries and a supply ship, which Neferet also thought quite funny.
When we were finally on the river, I watched the coast slide by and tried to let the slow passage calm me, like sand blown smooth over crevices in bedrock.
But Neferet had brought the chaos with us.
When she had finally settled enough to allow a moment of silence between observations, and had eaten her tomato, its juice dripping down her arm, she asked about the murders. “Have you learned anything?”
“Nothing.” I slapped my palm against the side of the barge where we stood. “No one knew of any danger to Merit or Mentu. They seem to have been meeting to discuss building plans and nothing more. There is nothing else to discover on the bodies or from where they were found. The masks were made by an artist now dead who did not speak of his work. I can find no other connection between Merit and Mentu.”
“What will you do now?”
I watched the water ahead. “What I must. I will sail to Tura and speak my mind to a certain overseer of the quarry.”
SEVENTEEN
Tura limestone is the best in Egypt. Gleaming white when dressed, fine-grained, and not as porous as that found in Giza, the limestone is soft and easily cut while in the earth, but, after exposure to air for some time, it hardens.
The quarry lay a half day south of Giza, on the opposite side of the Nile, and the barge reached the quarry harbor before noon. We waited while a ferry unloaded its stones onto a departing barge. We passed the time watching the fascinating process of transferring stone from the sledges that brought it from the quarry, to the ferry boats and rafts pulled into the harbor’s narrow dock, then out to the barges. The levers that pried and lifted the stone into place had been wrapped in straw to protect the delicate finish of the stone.
From the quay it was a few minutes’ walk to the lip of the quarry, where the gaping hole in the earth spread before us in a blinding display. If one squinted, the smooth white cliffs of the gorge could be mistaken for the future wall of the pyramid itself. Everywhere a fine white dust hung in the air.
Ako, the overseer I had come to speak with, hailed me over the ringing of hammer and chisel, as though I were expected. He and I had been friends many years ago, before the will of the gods had taken us in different directions. He walked toward us, a measuring rod in his hand.
“Grand Vizier,” he said, nodding to Neferet, “I did not think you would ever take a wife.”
I grasped his outstretched arm in greeting. “This is Neferet, daughter of Senosiris. A friend.”
He bowed to Neferet. “I apologize. Now that I see you from a cubit, I realize that a woman as fine as yourself would not be attached to this baboon.”
She laughed. “I like him, Hemi.”
Ako lifted his eyebrows at her use of my little name and inclined his head toward me. “Hmm,” he said.
“Neferet has come to see her brother, a stonecutter here in Tura.”
“Yes, I know the son of Senosiris. He works with the Kemet Gang. A good man.” Ako pointed down into the quarry, a hundred cubits north of us. “There.”
“I think I see him!”
“I will have someone take you down.”
“No need. Thank you.” Neferet fairly skipped away and quickly found the start of the rubble path that would take her down into the earth.
“Interesting,” Ako said, watching her go.
“She is … independent.”
Ako chuckled. “She needs a husband, perhaps?”
“Tell me about the stone. You must get it to us faster, Ako. You know this.”
Ako sliced the air with his measuring rod. “You have no idea what goes on here, Hemi. That is always the way with those who lead. They make demands without knowledge of what the laborers must do.”
“Do not subject me once again to your complaints about the laborers’ working conditions, Ako. I only want the stone.”
The white dust had already begun to settle itself on my body, changing my skin color to that of a foreigner.
“The problem is the cornerstones,” he said. “Come, I will show you.”
Ako led me to a space cleared above the quarry, where a dozen or so stonemasons worked to cut the casing stones to shape. They would be dressed with more precision on the pyramid site, but here at the quarry while they could still be addressed from all sides, the majority of the cutting was performed. Whenever possible, stones that would lay beside each other on the pyramid were cut from the earth side-by-side, so that they could be fitted together tightly at the line of breakage. Each of the casing stones was rectangular in shape, longer and thicker than a man. Except for the cornerstones.
We passed to the opposite side of the work site, where two men labored over a single massive cornerstone with its complicated angles and proportions. Rather than rectangular, the cornerstone was a squat block, with a notch cut to fit it to the corner.
“The current design is insufficient,” Ako said. “Each cornerstone, from base to top, must bear and absorb the tremendous weight sliding down upon it from all the layers above.”
“The design is no different than it has always been.”
One of the stonemasons looked up from his work. “Exactly,” he said. “And Sneferu’s pyramid at Meidum already shows signs of eventual collapse. It will not stand for eternity.”
“So make it stronger.” I glanced over my shoulder at some noise in the quarry behind and below us. The men were shouting at something.
“You know quite well it is not so simple, Hemi,” Ako said. “Changing the angles, redistributing the weight—it requires careful design. And until we find the answer, we will not simply churn out our quota to make you happy!”
The disturbance below us had grown, and even Ako seemed concerned now. We walked to the entrance to the path and peered over the edge.
Several work gangs had come to a standstill and were alternating between laughter and hooting calls. I could not make out the shouted words, but the implication was clear. The calls were directed to one petite woman who jingled when she walked.
Ako grunted beside me. “Akhet can be a long season. It has been many weeks since they have seen their wives.”
“They would do better to remember their mothers and sisters,” I said, starting down the path.
“She will be fine,” he called, but I waved him off.
Neferet was not close enough for me to determine her expression. But the hurried way in which she moved—not her usual languid walk that was more like dancing—told me all I needed to know.
She watched her feet as she tread the ledge that snaked up the quarry wall. Several times laborers stopped her and would not move aside to let her pass. I did not take my eyes from her as I descended. Where is her brother? Why did he not escort her up the cliff? I felt a spark of anger toward the man I’d never met.
I had almost reached her when I saw her circle around one laughing stonecutter, then lose her footing on the rubble path. With a yelp, she slid down the face of the cliff.
The one who had caused her to fall reached for her, but I shoved him aside and caught her arm myself.
“Hemi!” she cried up at me, fear in her eyes. Dusty gravel floated down around her and she bent her head.
I pulled her up, over the top of the ledge, until she sat beside me. Her leg bled.
I reached for her leg, but there it was again—my infuriating weakness. Something about the way the blood ran red down to the whiteness of the limestone path caused my head to …
* * *
I became aware of myself again and found my head resting on Neferet’s shoulder, her warm hand against my cheek. Cursing, I reached for her leg again.
“I am well, H
emi. Don’t look at it. Get me back up this path, and I will wrap it in rags. Do not worry.”
It was as close as we had ever been, sitting there together, and I felt the danger of disorder once more.
She would not let me carry her and whispered that she had already drawn more attention than she desired. “Tell me about the problem here,” she said as we climbed, my arm bracing her. “Distract me.”
“Cornerstones,” I said. “They require precision and a structural integrity not required of the rest of the stones. Ako believes our current design is faulty and will not stand.”
She slowed and looked to me. “You must call my brother,” she said and pointed below us. “He is a mason, not a cutter, you know. He works at the removal site, not at the top yet. But he was just telling me this very thing. That the cornerstones will not hold. He has a better design, he says.” She gripped my arm. “Call him, Hemi. Promise me you will bring him up.”
“We will bring him up, Neferet. But first we must get you out of this pit.”
I had her settled at the top within minutes. The physician who treated the men was summoned and he tended to her leg. Meanwhile, I had Ako send for Neferet’s brother.
His anxious face appeared above the edge of the quarry faster than I would have thought possible.
“What has happened?” he said, running for Neferet.
“Just a scratch, brother,” she said. “Nothing more.”
“I should have brought you up myself,” he said, then looked at me. “I should have brought her up. My foreman would not allow it. I should have done it anyway.”
I held out an arm. “I am Hemiunu.”
He dipped his head. “Grand Vizier. Thank you for seeing to my sister.”
Neferet called to us from her place on the ground. “You two must like each other,” she said. To her brother she said, “Hemi is a good friend.” Her brother’s eyes widened a bit, and he brought his attention back to me.
“Neferet tells me you may have a solution to our cornerstone problem.”