Going Forth By Day

by Mary R Woldering

  “So that’s what he gave me to drink? Sweet Horizon? I thought it was ‘Ben’, the ‘What then is it’?” Marai sat back and shivered. He still felt weak and out of focus. He wondered why he couldn’t keep his thoughts on his wives or any other particular subject for more than an instant. Across the room from him was a man who had begun as a foe and who in the last minute had become a friend. Now he was a rival over Naibe, but Marai sensed that even that relationship had changed. She was gone. The Inspector of the Ways didn’t covet the young woman. He had simply become awe-struck and now his astonishment bordered on the verge of worship for both of them. Rather than curse the man for his deed or beat him into the earth, Marai knew he needed to calm Wserkaf and to dig through his thoughts. In some way he needed to force the priest to speak about everything that had happened while he lay entombed. That would take time neither of them were willing to spend, unless Marai could somehow stop the passage of the night itself.

  “It was ‘Ben’. Great One just mixed it with the Sweet Horizon. That’s much stronger and can be varied according to need. Purple cone flower seeds, Nefer Nebty and Hul Gil fruit…” Wserkaf sighed bitterly. “A very small amount put in the drink quiets fear and eases pain. Change the mixture’s proportions and death can be either swift and painless or prolonged and filled with suffering. It’s his choice. Still, I’ve never seen so much dumped into a cup. I truly thought it would murder you before you drank it all.”

  Marai shrugged. He’d heard of Hul Gil. These plants had pretty red flowers with black centers that dropped their petals to grow a deadly seed-filled fruit. His journeys into the future while he slept were part of his deep memory but somehow he knew more about the Hul Gil: Kingdoms will be built and wars fought over that stuff, in the name of needful bliss. Nefer Nebty is Beautiful Lady …it flushes the face, brightens the eye, but too much gives haunted visions and then purple cone: wolf-bane. He shuddered to think his poor body had been wracked with such a dreadful potion. Nothing about the ingredients could be construed as a mistake or an accident. The elder’s sole intent had been his death. “But, why kill me? Because of what is locked inside? Why not leave it locked and send me on my way, not a bit wiser?” he shook his still-aching head.

  “I asked him that myself,” the inspector sighed once more, even more disgusted at how ultimately trapped he felt. “Great One explained to me that you’re not as locked as you want us to think. It’s the thing placed in your head at the site of your inner eye… the Ta-Ntr crystal or Kernel of Wisdom he calls it. You call it your Child Stone. Every hour you’re alive, it whispers more and more to your heart. You grow, you change, you evolve and you learn. We saw that when you were writing for us. It wasn’t what you wrote that worried and offended him, it was your capacity to write too many truths—to reveal too much! We’ve seen your wives learned as eagerly too. In so many years, nothing would be able to touch any of you or hold you back. You say you are no god, but I say I am witnessing the birth of one from a man. I think he wanted to stop all of you while the power to do so was still in his grasp.”

  Marai felt Wserkaf’s words again, and savored the deeper meaning:

  ‘You say you are no god, but I am witnessing the birth of one from a man.’

  As the sojourner stared at Wserkaf, he knew there was more to discover and that each layer added to what he already knew would be increasingly hard to bear.

  “Great Hordjedtef felt he was pruning the garden of knowledge; protecting it,” the inspector continued. “One nips the odd growth between the strong shoots before it saps the whole of the plant so that nothing bears fruit. “Can I fault him either, for trying to save our way of life from being overtaken, stolen, or polluted by the outsider?” he shook his head again, then looked beseechingly into the sojourner’s eyes. “It’s all changed now, though. With the king dead, my wife now becomes the matriarch of the new king’s house. Everything we have built in this house is lost unless I beg it. I had thought I would be so much older, perhaps dead myself, when the gods called her to fulfill her sacred agreement.”

  Marai frowned. “Her half-brother, Shepseskaf, is now king, isn’t he?”

  “Exactly…” the inspector lamented. “It’s something you wouldn’t understand… a fidelity marriage and often it’s nothing more than that. His chief wife and other wives usually bear the children of his body, unless the gods dictate otherwise through word of prophetesses.”

  Wserkaf was now on his feet in the little room. He paced in agitation. “Shepseskaf is up against it. He has but one child, already promised to the rising high priest of Ptah, a cousin of ours. He won’t even be able to work on his own Akh until his father’s is finished. On top of it, he has so many enemies including Prince Hordjedtef. My senior never liked him being the chosen one because he is only fully royal by his marriage to Khentie. His mother was a commoner, so he is also considered one. There were other more royal choices, but the wise women and queens dictated this pairing after young Kuenre was lost.”

  “So, she has divorced you?” Marai drank in the inspector’s absolute misery. He had seen, in the memories pulled from the veil, how the princess had reacted to his liaison with Naibe, and recalled how she shunned him as she left that early morning.

  “No. She will merely bless and ensure the fertility of his house. She will be “wife” by name for him, but wife of my heart the same,” Wserkaf stared into the lamp-lit, but empty plaza from the window in the guest room. “She will live in her brother’s house. I will not. After the Grand Mourning of so many months, when he is elevated, I will petition that we might be together again; so that she may return to live at my house.”

  Marai fell silent for a long time. After what he had sensed from Naibe’s veil, he knew Khentie might not want her husband to return if sweet Brown Eyes was in the same city. He was almost afraid to ask about his other wives. It would be too much salt in either of their wounds.

  When the two men made eye contact again, Marai saw a flash of the priest’s last moments with Naibe as he moved her to Shepseskaf’s house. They clung to each other like lost children, then let go and turned away from each other. The Children of Stone, perhaps understanding a little more of human disappointment had etched that sorrow in their crystalline souls.

  “Your place is not with us… not yet…” Naibe had sighed sweetly, gently bringing his head down to kiss his lips and then his eyes.

  “She was so lovely, Marai. I just…” the priest stopped mid-sentence, too overwhelmed to continue. “Couldn’t refuse her a thing, and she missed you so, even to the last day with me. She was sent to try to bear a child for Shepseskaf and Bunefer because it has been feared she as Wife of the Body cannot.” Then the inspector then remembered something else. “There’s more, you can guess. You know Naibe cursed us for what happened to you when she first came to us,” Wse sighed. A distraught Naibe’s words when she first arrived played through his eyes. Marai sensed the moment. It was as familiar, as if he had already seen that moment when he lay suffering. Having the inspector talk to him had created a link. He thought about the passing time again and wondered if he could somehow stop its advance to learn what he needed to learn.

  “A curse is on all of you!” Naibe snarled. “You knew it was wrong, but you did nothing to save my beloved… Death is in your house!”

  The two men thought the same thing, suddenly: had Naibe pulled the secret of the king’s untimely death into the light, or had she brought his death on him for his indifference in her beloved’s death?

  Marai knew Naibe was powerful. He’d seen the strange flash of fire and dark under her innocent golden eyes and told himself it was a joke. She was beauty and love. The dark or destructive qualities of Inanna and Ashera had somehow missed her. He wanted to think her temper was even and that she still merely cried when she was afraid or upset. He sensed that any rage coming from her would be slow and deliberate, and then decided he would never to make her that angry. Marai balanced his foot on the edge of the couch where he rested a
nd embraced his knee. He quietly contemplated everything that Wserkaf said, including the sense that Hordjedtef had begun to blame the women for the death of the king when the inspector had met him at the palace today. He sent the priest a thought to see if his ability to do so had been harmed by the poison.

  The royal family certainly knows how to lie. Jealousy and nothing more is what I’m seeing.

  “True…” Wserkaf admitted as if he had heard the sojourner’s thoughts aloud, “but I was leaving Ineb Hedj for Khmenu temple for two circuits of Iah. I knew I needed to end it with her or come up against the king as well,” he fidgeted, not entirely comfortable with looking the sojourner in the eye. “Khentie, of course, is completely disciplined in these matters of state. She crafted young Naibe’s future for her and told her that, should she bear a child for her brother, she would then be allowed to suckle it and indeed be a part of her child’s upbringing, as perhaps a nurse. It wouldn’t have been a bad life, all told. She was even going to have the company of your other wife ArreNu who was already in that house as a concubine.

  “But…?” Marai frowned. He looked for something to drink. His residual burning thirst had become an issue again.

  Wserkaf looked out of the guest window and signaled one of his idling bearers to go to the storeroom and pull out a jar of beer for them.

  “Ari takes sport in men…” Marai cautioned, almost amused by the witless decision someone had made to put her in a house and expect her to be some kind of a brood cow. He remembered in a flash all of the mocking and teasing the tall woman with the russet colored hair had given him throughout their time together. He thought of her skulking around in alleys for a quick one with any number of men, and laughingly erasing her face and form from their memory. “When she was changed, she re-formed herself barren, but appearing ripe because she had tired of being unable to raise any child she brought forth. She isn’t a woman to be tethered…not even by a prince.”

  “Princess… Queen Bunefer is a seer and a prophetess in the house of Hethrt,” the inspector went on. “She is intensely gifted. It didn’t take her long to know Lady ArreNu’s truth. Rather than ask for her dishonesty to be punished, she sent her to the king’s harem. He already has his heirs, but had recently needed a healer… so it was,” he shaded his eyes again about to weep as the jar of beer was brought. “No one knew he was so sick. Great One claims Lady ArreNu knew it and willfully kept his curing wine from him, charming into consuming medicine of inferior quality.”

  Marai nodded, politely. He took the jar from the man when he brought it in, tipped it to his parched lips, then handed it to the prince. He shook his head, knowing the prince was rambling.

  “And I let Naibe go! Maybe something was trying to tell me you weren’t really gone, or that it just couldn’t ever work for us. Something told me I was losing my wits over her and poised on the brink of madness. I just wanted more than anything for her to somehow be safe. Being in another royal house would give her safety, or so I thought,” Wserkaf’s head was in one hand. “But then…”

  “Damn…” Marai felt a different coldness creep through his chest. “Stop…” he whispered to the priest. “I know you’re holding something back. Just stop and look at me. Look at my eyes.” Marai seized the inspector’s hand and sought his eyes. Wserkaf wanted to struggle, but felt a voice that sounded like her voice rise inside him.

  You must stay, but in Per-A-at.

  There, you will ascend like the sun.

  We will be together again

  when your work is done

  and this priesthood purified

  of the wrongs in it.

  “No,” the inspector protested, but then felt the comfort of Marai’s oddly calm but powerful energy sweep up his arm and into his heart. It lifted him into a trance state as sublime as if he had prepared and meditated for hours. He nodded drowsily, then spoke just above a whisper. “I did not see what you will see. I do not know what we will now learn. I temper my will and open my thoughts to the ghosts of their memory. I place and I submit to the god Maat. I will speak the truth as it comes forth within me.”

  Releasing himself to the heightened trance, Wserkaf thought of everything that had happened. He remembered the way the women were taken from their apartment in Little Kina Ahna and of all of the misery he helped cause. Silently, he thought of the good times; the way Naibe sent tender thoughts into his heart through her golden-starred brown eyes. She had been so sweet to him each early morning when he lay resting in her arms. As he sank deeper into the trance, he sensed a white flash beyond his consciousness. Marai had draped the little white veil around both of their necks. He sank deeper. The last sensation the inspector felt was Marai’s huge hand on his shoulder.

  The priest remembered the way he fell asleep cuddling Naibe the week they had been intimate. Her graceful fingers smoothed his brow. Because Marai had touched and kissed her hands so tenderly, the touch of the sojourner’s hand on his own reopened the sweetest memories of her sitting at his pool, arms raised up to the sun in an attitude of worship. The light had blurred her face as it lifted up and the magic of the light as it bounced on her breasts implanted itself again and again. It woke new memory, as if the image had been hiding in Marai’s own heart all along. Time moved so slowly now. There had been wondrous glimmers of hope in the inspector’s heart when he held the woman of the evening star in his arms. Through him, he remembered all of the sighs and the pleasure growing through each other until they wanted to die. She was his star of mercy in a hopeless life.

  Oh Wseriri! Help me forget the aching my soul has. Touch

  me until you heal the tears in my heart for my Marai.

  She had begged that of him the first night they were together and he had caressed her with every gentle healing touch he knew. She had kissed his hands and made them glow with the glimmers in her own eyes. For her, he had pulled all of the stars in the sky down to heal and touch her glowing goddess body. He disappeared into those eyes and into every pore of her flesh until for so many moments that stretched into hours, he was no longer himself, but part of her.

  Those nights, too, became ghosts as he released them. From that point, even though the priest knew nothing of the events, the link between the men Naibe had loved and the stones in hers and the sojourner’s heads became a window into the world of Sweet Naibe-Ellit, Marai’s Ashera.

  CHAPTER 18: THE SACRED COW

  Naibe-Ellit wondered how she could ever bring herself to accept the loss of two men so close together. She clung to Wserkaf’s arm as they were whisked away to Crown Prince Shepseskaf’s estate. The only comfort for her was the knowledge that Ari would be there.

  Wserkaf let his last tender moments with Naibe flow out into the universe. As they did, Marai relived them. Wse stood beside the litter in which his porters had carried him and Naibe to Shepseskaf’s royal palace. They both clung to each other like souls lost in a swarm of emotion. At first, Naibe didn’t appear greatly changed. Through the inspector’s link, Marai sensed that she was ever tender and sweet, even though she was sad beyond telling. He wanted to reach through those months into the past to console her. Although he knew he could slow the illusion of current time, he could never reverse it so that none of the women’s pain would take place. The memories he saw through the priest served as spacers between the past and the present, as clues in the design of the next steps he would take.

  No… sweet Iri-Maat Wser, my ever strong truth seeker, she whispered those words to the inspector. Her lips trembled. That made Marai’s vision of the memory even more painful. She spoke with the power of her Ashera voice, but she was still just a pretty young woman in desperate fear of her future. Despite her own terror of the unknown, she tried to give the inspector the strength to leave her to the uncertain future that had been set out for her. Your place is not with us, not yet. She sighed sweetly and gently, then brought his head down so she could kiss his lips and his eyes. You must stay, but be in Per-A-At soon and not in Ineb Hedj. It is there you
will ascend like the sun. We will be together one day when your work is done and this priesthood has been purified of the wrongs in it. She turned away then, unable to look at him any longer.

  In the next dismal moment he witnessed, the two women met at the back entrance to the women’s quarters. Ariennu embraced her, but then Naibe realized the elder woman had her own basket of goods packed. Wserkaf was picking her up. It had been a trick, a lie, and a trade. Ari was being transferred to the palace of the king. They would not be together after all.

  It’ll be alright, baby, rust-haired Ariennu breathed out, tired and almost irritated. Just do what they tell you to do and keep a good smile on it. I’m still working on something to get us all back together, even bring Deka back to us. Swear I am. Ariennu took her own things to Wserkaf’s litter for their shared ride out to the grandest of palaces. It was the estate where King Menkaure lived. She climbed up with Wserkaf and tucked her legs in so they could be whisked down the winding, walled alleys.

  Today Naibe would become part of Shepseskaf’s household instead of Wserkaf’s. She would replace elder Ariennu, who was being sent to do feminine counsel, a kind of nursemaid for the youthful concubines, at the royal palace.

  Once the inspector had released her, Naibe had refused to watch the bearers carry Ari and him to the palace of the king. At any moment, she knew she would lose control and chase after both of them. Her Wseriri was not truly hers. He never had been. Theirs had been a moment of comfort in time. She understood that now, albeit painfully, but didn’t want to accept any of it as truth. He loved his wife and he understood his duty to his royal family. It was as simple as that. She could seduce and empower him to love only her, she knew, but it wouldn’t be right. She didn’t want to enslave his soul. She wanted him to come to her cleanly as she had asked Marai to come to her once, by the well on the road to Kemet. The answer was to walk away, despite her loneliness and her needs.