Going Forth By Day

by Mary R Woldering

  “If she’s blameless, then she is unaware of her strength,” Khentie suggested.

  Naibe already knew what the women were thinking and what would come next. She wondered if keeping silent would even make a difference.

  “It’s clear to me, sister dear…” Princess Bunefer continued to whisper, still overheard by Naibe. “It’s sad, too, because you can’t help but love her. Even when she casts that …spell… the way she does on our men, you want to hold and hug her. It would be more right to have her head on a plate and her body fed to the dogs. If she had only done what was asked of her without the spell! I have to get myself back. She has to go.”

  “I know, Bu, I know,” Khentie sighed. “I felt that too when she was in my house. That’s the heka. She pulls out your energy and then she makes you love her. Maybe it is time for her to go to our father after all, to make him feel better again. Every year about this time he’s so sad. It happened around this time six years ago. This year I’m especially worried for him, with the Buto prophesy timing out.” Khentie mentioned with deep concern. “He already hasn’t been doing well.”

  Bunefer’s hand extended to Princess Khentkawes shoulder to console her, but the gesture became a warning because Naibe could bear no more silence. With a coy but pretended stumble, she stepped into the group of women again and took her seat. They knew at once she had been listening to them for quite a while.

  It doesn’t matter, Naibe thought to herself, trying to hide her disappointment as she silently added a few more stitches. I didn’t much like it here anyway. At least I know I’ll be with Ari this time. I mean, where else could they send her?

  CHAPTER 20: ARIENNU AND THE KING

  Wserkaf grimly pursed his lips, breaking contact with Marai’s hand for a moment. He needed to catch his breath and sip some beer.

  “Are you well?” Marai asked, amazed at how weak he still felt after sharing memories through the veil. Spirit journeys during his training and even before he encountered Prince Hordjedtef had always energized him. Wonder if the old bastard damaged my link with my stone permanently. For an instant he worried that he would suddenly regain his actual age and wither away as he sat on his couch in the guest room. Maybe not, he patted his face and felt it was still smooth and tight-skinned. Wserkaf would have mentioned that.

  “Let me get Anre to fetch some beer for us. I’m a little achy, but I’ll be well if I stand up and stretch. I need to see what hour it is,” Wserkaf eased into standing. “As I said earlier, Hordjedtef let me come to get my own purification tools. If I am back by sunrise… You have to be hidden by then. If he knows of you, it’ll be bad.”

  Marai watched as the inspector moved through a very brief stretching and breathing routine, then trotted outside to look at the sky. He returned quickly and sat again.

  “Still early. Like you did get time to slow down,” Wserkaf frowned. “Not even Great One can do that.”

  Marai stared dully, the immobile expression on his face told Wserkaf the big man was already in the process of bending the hours so all of the missing information could be revealed even if neither man had been present. There was so much more. “Do you know what thoughts came through your heart?” Marai took a vague breath which turned into a weary sigh.

  “Some,” Wserkaf continued extending his arms over his head and stretching with a yawn. “It was about what became of pretty Naibe after I went on my duty,” he took a slight breath and sat as soon as the manservant brought cups of beer.

  Both men sipped, quietly reflecting on everything they had seen. Marai shook his head. Part of him wanted to get up and go to Prince Hordjedtef with murder in his heart, but he knew he had to stay, heal himself fully, and get more of the hidden truths revealed.

  “I can tell you that Bunefer told my senior of these things and that he told her Naibe-Ellit had truly cast a rather clumsy spell on her husband and that she would try to seize control of the two lands through a child by him. Then, Khentie confided to him that she felt Naibe had already used heka on me. So, within days and without me there to intervene, Naibe was sent to the king to join Lady ArreNu. With Dede a constant fixture at our father’s house, he felt he was in a position of prevent any more of the growing strife. He even told her he had been especially instructed in the handling of the sojourners by his own master Great Djedi when it came to the sum of the Children of Stone.”

  Marai shook his head, gasping at the revelation. “No… What? He actually said that? His wickedness and lies know no limit, and I’m still sitting here waiting for more jewels to drop.” The big man shifted as if he was about to rise and go storming all the way to the royal palace to pull the old man’s head from its stump with his bare hands and murder anyone who got in his way. He paused, though, as he heard something else.

  Listen to truth

  In truth revealed

  Decide the wiser course.

  “Little voices. I think I heard…” Wserkaf gasped with a start, his eyes growing wide.

  Marai froze. He knew the inspector’s senses were heightened enough that he heard the voices of the Children of Stone speaking through his thoughts at the same time Marai heard them. Suddenly after hours of near silence, the Children of Stone reminded him that Wserkaf was indeed “someone new” and was the true descendent of wise Djedi. Hordjedtef’s ridiculous claim that Djedi had given him control over the Children was such an outrageous lie that it must have elicited a response that even the younger priest would hear.

  “So. You heard?” Marai’s brow arched in wonder. Wserkaf nodded.

  Listen to the Truth

  In the passage of moments

  all things are possible

  to a peaceful heart,

  even if it wants to break

  The stone in Marai’s brow lulled and then paused with a gentle tweak.

  “Mmm. Beautiful,” Wserkaf nodded.

  “Just means I can’t go kill him until you tell me more… that this Child-Stone will help me with the passage of time. Damn it!” Marai groaned, aching again. He winced, then tapped his forehead. “One day, with all of this peaceful talk, they’ll find I won’t listen to them at all. Tonight, because I don’t feel too strong, I will,” he put his cup down and extended his hands to Wserkaf’s temples again. The inspector centered himself and drifted to the quiet place in his thoughts. “I know she’s not connected through this veil, but I need to know about Ari. Can you tell me about her?”

  The inspector breathed out slowly once more and then nodded. In a jolt that left both men giddy and nearly senseless with bliss, another vision, powered by some unknown link, began to form.

  In the vision, Marai saw Ariennu seated in a large open-air room decorated with a lovely tiles and a ceiling painted with golden stars. A very slight breeze issued past the window and door drapes, made from the sheerest of linens. The glass-bead ropes draped over the linen tinkled gently. Behind her was a wider-than-standard sleeping couch. She worked wonderful scented oil into the tired, tense shoulders of a man who was seated on a fine ebony and gold chair in front. She hummed a soft melody, repeating the tune a distant harpist played. A large raised metal brazier in the center of the room smoldered with lumps of calming incense.

  Goddess, she is beautiful! Marai thought as he studied the way the image of her dark red-highlighted hair glimmered in the lamplight. At first, he saw everything in the room as if he had become a shadow. Knowing she might sense him and suddenly startle, he quietly entered into and merged his thoughts with her opalescent Child Stone so that he experienced all of her actions back through time as if they were happening at the present moment. This is so simple! he thought. I can speak through the Children this way and old Hordjedtef can’t keep me from it. Marai felt a small bit of comfort until he realized that he wasn’t seeing things in the present. What he saw showed Ariennu giving comfort to a king who was very much alive.

  In his vision, the sojourner saw King Menkaure as a big, deep-copper-skinned, black-eyed man with close trimmed, graying hair. Th
e monarch of the Two Lands had become a little heavy-set with age, but he still appeared physically fit. Ariennu sat with him as if there was nothing astonishing at all about her being in his bedchamber. Marai sensed she was at ease, the way he would imagine a seasoned queen might behave. Either through her own skill or the magic of the Children’s gifts, his eldest wife had come so far in what must have been a short time, Marai mused. Even though the sojourner had heard this king was much more approachable than his predecessors, most people had never seen him, or any other high ranking noble, bare-headed as a peasant. That this king allowed Ariennu to not only touch him but also to see his real hair, meant they had been intimate.

  That’s my Ari… Good girl! Marai thought to himself. He knew the king enjoyed her touch and now he missed her soothing hands too. He bowed his head, aching in spirit that seeing through time was all he could do. Three months… Marai thought as he settled into receiving the sequence of events through his Child Stone. And not a hint his death would be in so little time.

  From there, the vision unfolded before him as if his elder wife was telling the story herself.

  Ari greeted Shepseskaf courteously each day when he visited the king’s palace. She learned from other servants that Shepseskaf had been selected to be the heir after he was a grown man. Now he was being intensively trained for the role he would assume one day far in his future. She had settled in the royal palace, joining ten other women who were either concubines or handmaidens. A large open plaza and a narrow tube-like alcove from the nearby common area separated the women’s living quarters from the King’s guarded sleeping and lounging area. His wife, affectionately known as “Khammie”, lived on another estate with her mother and grandmother. She seldom visited, even though there was no animosity between them. Despite that, there was an elegantly furnished stateroom prepared for her in case she should come to spend a late evening visiting her husband.

  Ari quickly learned that none of the ladies who shared the women’s apartment with her had served the king longer than a year or two. The King must get bored as easily as I do if he doesn’t settle or take another wife. Might also be why old Hordjedtef got him and his son to come see us that first night – if they need to change women so often.

  These women, she discovered, were little more than pretty servants to the king, and were highly competitive. Networks of loose lips, eager for personal advancement, were always available to report anything another young woman did which might be frowned upon. They were petty youngsters who alternately sided with each other in varying factions, vying for the king’s attention and generally spoiling him to improve their own positions. Being eons older than these girls, even though she appeared only a dozen years older, Ariennu decided to play the role of a displaced healer and seer from the Kina coast.

  When each of the women had arrived at the palace, the elder woman learned the king spent time with them for a day or two. He was gentle with them, but reserved. Once he was satisfied with each new addition, he would dispatch them to the women’s rooms. When he wanted company, he would pick one or two of them. He was such a fair man that he tried not to show favorites, because he knew doing so could cause fighting or discord in the women’s area.

  Ari wasn’t surprised to hear instant whispers when she came in.

  This foreign woman, they whispered, Majesty wishes to see her again?

  This is four evenings now.

  I hear she cast a spell on his Highness Prince Shepseskaf and his wife.

  Look how tall like a man she is, and what bony pale-skinned shoulders she has!

  Such a wretched, unhealthy color and hair the color of dry blood too!

  You can tell she is older, they would say.

  She has to be from a sojourner’s camp. She’s not one of us.

  The Great Uncle has said we should watch…

  Ari heard the catcalls and saw the girls hush each other as she walked by. She wanted to cause some kind of trouble, but knew this wasn’t part of the wise and calm image she wanted to present. And the Great Uncle fed them with lies? she thought to herself. I should go ahead and cast a spell on the bastard. He’s got some skills though. I might just end up making a fool of myself. For now, she would bide her time and wait for a better opportunity to take her craftily planned revenge on the lot of them.

  On this fourth night, the night Marai had first seen Ari in this part of his vision, she continued massaging the king’s shoulders and back, gently turning him and lovingly rubbing his chest the way she used to soothe her Marai’s stiff shoulders and neck after a hot and dusty day of work in the market.

  Ari quietly and obediently listened to the king as she provided him comfort, then she boldly gave a little sign – an open palm in front of her mouth – indicating that she wanted to speak. The king nodded to allow this.

  “There, your majesty should sleep well now. I have managed the worst of the knots.”

  “Oh, not too long. Just a little while. You will lie down beside your king and hold him. Then, go. My man will see that I rise before day…”

  Ari gasped a little. The king was exhausted. He had almost fallen unconscious while she worked on him. He needs to sleep all night and maybe the rest of tomorrow. Obediently, she shut her eyes and settled on the couch with her back to him. His heavy, but tightly-muscled, arms gripped her gently. Although it was only the fourth night the king had asked for her to come to his bedchamber, he relaxed enough to speak candidly.

  “It’s nothing a sojourner as you would understand. I rise in the middle of the night to do a devotion to the sun, to Horus before his birth. Perhaps I might rest again before my other work begins, dear lady. I’ve been so weary,” he sighed into her hair. “It’s as if this feeling descends from another realm. I’ve consulted oracles and some of my best interpreters as to the cause, but they have given me nothing to understand,” he sighed. Ariennu smiled inwardly, knowing her skilled hands had opened his thoughts and gained his trust. She knew, by all accounts, that the king was considered elderly. He was in his early fifties, but he appeared to be healthy and in excellent physical condition. His only lament was that despite his mighty physical training and prowess in battle when needed, he had begun to put on a little weight around the middle.

  You just need sleep. Lots of it, she reflected. His body may have been well, but his spirit and will were shrouded in feelings of despair and exhaustion. That mood worsened day in and day out. I understand, you have to be strong for your people here – fearless too – but I can feel the tired man hiding inside you like your own secret, she snickered to herself. Look at hard old me acting like I care, but that’s what Marai did for me: got me to care again, she gently stroked his fingers as they locked around hers. I used men. Since him, though, it’s been different.

  The king did drink a lot of expensive fruit and palm wine, she mused as he drifted a little more. He had even imported “hard boiled and reduced” grape wine from the northern and western coast of the Green Sea. It tasted fiery and had an even greater power to make one drunk. Ari recalled that bad wine and worse beer had been her own downfall in her days as a raider on the Copper Road. Maybe, she thought, he took in too much of it because he wanted to drown some other kind of demon that burdened him. He didn’t speak of it to her that night, even though she sensed that the king knew she might understand.

  The following day, she gently suggested he try a warm and salty duck broth or some warm honeyed milk before he slept instead of the wine. After he accepted it from her, he delighted that his sleep was better. He began to ask that she bring it each night and lie with him again, after he consumed it, until he slept. Ariennu served the king the nighttime broth for two more days, until he woke quite suddenly and almost in a shouting panic, after what had been a sound sleep. Ari had been making her way down the steps to go to the women’s apartments when she heard him shriek in some kind of horror. He called out to his manservant, jabbering a frantic question about the lamps.

  Ari turned and headed back up the
steps, but the guards prevented her from reentering the royal bedchamber. As she stood outside on the landing with the on-duty officials and physicians pushing past her to enter and tend to him, she heard the poor man ordering an immediate inspection of all quarters to see if any of the lamps in the other rooms of the palace had begun to sputter or go out. Ari knew this wasn’t a child’s terror of the dark. It was something far more insidious.

  From that night on, Ariennu became more and more worried about him. Each night he needed her to hold him tightly and soothe him as he sweated from something like a fever, then shivered with chills. He whispered for her to “take away the pain” and told her that it was “too much for him to bear his sadness another hour”. She began to think about death. Is he dying? Is it possible?

  He told her the legends of his people and of how magnificent he had been as a young warrior and a statesman, with so many campaigns into the Tjemehu lands and even to the Copper Road and down to the Sin-Ai. He was dearly loved by his people rather than dreaded the way his father and grandfather had been. Above all, he had loved his children and loved to have other nobles visit just to bring their children to play and study. They had left him now. There had been far too much sadness in the palace. Often, there were no sounds at all.

  Concubines brought him temporary joy, yet he never desired to impregnate them to gain more children even though it was a necessary symbol of the fertility of the land. Instead, he fasted and prayed continually that the Two Lands exceed him in that fertility and that the darkness sent to him might be lifted.

  Ari learned his routine by the end of the week. He woke himself at night, to tend to some bit of reading or planning by lamplight. Devotion to god Horus? It’s a brief incantation and a blessing. It doesn’t take that long. At dawn, exhausted but content that his household had stirred enough to manage life there without his constant care, he slept fitfully for a few hours. Later each day, he would conduct meetings, pray more, make offerings at various temples, and entertain nobility – especially those with young children. Their presence reminded him of when all of his children had been young and playing with their friends in his beautiful palace gardens and orchards.