Praise for Volume One, The Twice Born
“Gedge is meticulous in her research … If you want to be immersed in the life of ancient Egypt, this novel will delight you.”
—Calgary Herald
“Readers looking to immerse themselves in a strange and ancient culture will find much to savour in The Twice Born, [which] wears its scrupulous research proudly. From daily life in boarding schools and the homes of rich and poor alike to sacred rituals and courtly protocols, Gedge paints a completely convincing portrait of an utterly alien world … Reading this book will delight newcomers to ancient Egypt and satisfy ardent amateur Egyptologists.”
—Edmonton Journal
“Gedge has a great talent for building atmosphere. Her description of the buildings and people along the Nile are evocative, and details such as food and clothing are meticulously researched and integrated into the story … Most vivid of all in The Twice Born is the texture and substance of ancient Egyptian religion and theology. Gedge fuses the remnants of sacred texts neatly with imagined interpretation and priestly analysis … Gedge’s research and descriptive writing are the stars of The Twice Born.”
—Winnipeg Free Press
“Gedge brings history to life with a tale inspired by the curious story of a peasant-born boy who gained a reputation as an infallible fortune teller and healer and died a more powerful man than the pharaoh himself … The Twice Born is another dramatic portrait of a fabled time and civilization along the Nile.”
—The StarPhoenix (Saskatoon)
Praise for Pauline Gedge
“[Gedge] paints prose poems of astonishing beauty that fill House of Dreams with Egypt’s glorious sunlight, crystalline air, cool fragrant breezes, turquoise skies …”
—Toronto Star for House of Dreams
“Gedge makes the past so accessible. You can imagine walking between the pillars into a magnificent hall and watching it come alive with the smell of the fresh paint on the frescoes.”
—The Globe and Mail for The Horus Road
“Simply magnificent.”
—Huddersfield Daily Examiner, for The Oasis
“Rich with characters whose destinies are entwined in love and hate, peace and war, hope and despair, this giant story sweeps on at an unflagging pace to its dramatic and haunting conclusion.”
—Cambridge Evening News (U.K.)
for The Eagle and the Raven
“A compelling and human story without a single dramatic lapse.”
—San Francisco Examiner for Child of the Morning
“Gedge’s strengths—imagination, ingenuity in plotting, and convincing characterization—are here in abundance.”
—Books in Canada for House of Illusions
“Gedge has brought Egypt alive … Laid over a complex plot, well-crafted characters, and the shining splendour that was Egypt, Scroll of Saqqara is a simple and heartrending story of human frailty.”
—Quill & Quire for Scroll of Saqqara
“A definite winner … The fast-moving and thrilling action carries us along effortlessly … With its firm, confident control, light easy style, and strong characterization, this is perhaps the best piece Pauline Gedge has written.”
—Edmonton Journal for Hippopotamus Marsh
PENGUIN CANADA
SEER OF EGYPT
PAULINE GEDGE is the award-winning and bestselling author of twelve previous novels, nine of which are inspired by Egyptian history. Her first historical novel, Child of the Morning, won the Alberta Search-for-a-New-Novelist Competition. In France, her second novel, The Eagle and the Raven, received the Jeanne Boujassy award from the Société des Gens de Lettres, and The Twelfth Transforming, the second of her Egyptian novels, won the Writers Guild of Alberta Best Novel of the Year Award. Her books have sold more than 250,000 copies in Canada alone; worldwide, they have sold more than six million copies and have been translated into eighteen languages.
The Twice Born and Seer of Egypt, the first two novels of Gedge’s new trilogy, have been placed for publication in French, German, Spanish, and Hungarian. The final novel, The King’s Man, will appear in 2010. Gedge lives in Alberta.
Visit her website at www.paulinegedge.com.
Also by Pauline Gedge
Child of the Morning
The Eagle and the Raven
Stargate
The Twelfth Transforming
Scroll of Saqqara
The Covenant
House of Dreams
House of Illusions
LORDS OF THE TWO LANDS
Volume One: The Hippopotamus Marsh
Volume Two: The Oasis
Volume Three: The Horus Road
THE KING’S MAN
Volume One: The Twice Born
SEER
OF
EGYPT
PAULINE
GEDGE
PENGUIN CANADA
Published by the Penguin Group
Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4P 2Y3 (a division of Pearson Canada Inc.)
Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, U.S.A.
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Penguin Group (Australia), 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty Ltd) Penguin Books India Pvt Ltd, 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi – 110 017, India
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Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England
First published in Penguin Canada paperback by Penguin Group (Canada), a division of Pearson Canada Inc., 2008
Published in this edition, 2009
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 (OPM)
Copyright © Pauline Gedge, 2008
All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.
Publisher’s note: This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Manufactured in the U.S.A.
LIBRARY AND ARCHIVES CANADA CATALOGUING IN PUBLICATION
Gedge, Pauline, 1945–
Seer of Egypt / Pauline Gedge.
(The King’s man trilogy ; v. 2)
Sequel to: The twice born.
ISBN 978-0-14-305294-4
I. Title. II. Series: Gedge, Pauline, 1945– . King’s man ; v. 2
PS8563.E33S44 2009 C813'.54 C2009-904640-7
Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
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AUTHOR’S NOTE
Huy, S
on of Hapu, later known as Amunhotep, Son of Hapu, was born of a peasant family in the modest Delta town of Hut-herib, where he lived until he was middle-aged. Yet between his late forties and late fifties he had become more powerful than Egypt’s Pharaoh Amunhotep the Third, and by the time he died in his eighties, he was already worshipped as a god of prescience and healing. How did such a man, a commoner, acquire so much authority so quickly? Ability alone, even genius, would not have been enough in an age full of well-educated, highly capable men. Something extraordinary must have singled him out.
In The Twice Born, my novel concerning Huy’s early years, I attempted to delve to the roots of this puzzle, in particular to examine his remarkable relationship with the mysteries of the fabled Book of Thoth and his ultimate reputation as an infallible fortune teller and healer. I described his boyhood as a self-centred only child adored by his mother, Itu, and his father, Hapu. I related how his uncle Ker, a maker of perfumes, was able to send him away to the temple school at the city of Iunu, where he and a fellow student, the young aristocrat Thothmes, became firm friends. Also studying at the school was Sennefer, a bully who took an instant dislike to Huy and on one fateful day, when Huy was twelve, attacked him with a throwing stick, the hunting weapon of the noble, knocking him into the water of the temple’s lake where he drowned. Huy’s body was returned to his home town of Hut-herib. After five days he came to himself in Hut-herib’s House of the Dead having believed that he had been in the Paradise of Osiris where he had been given the choice of reading and understanding the Book of Thoth, a task to which he agreed. He soon discovered that he had been given the gift of scrying, an ability he subsequently used to diagnose the illnesses of his fellow peasants and relate their futures to them. But he paid a high price for this ability. The god Atum, originator of the Book of Thoth and bestower of the gift, had rendered him sexually impotent, and every scrying resulted in a blinding headache that only responded to increasing doses of opium. Gradually Huy’s fame began to spread. So did his dependence on the drug.
Huy scryed so accurately for the King that he was rewarded with gold and a small estate outside Hutherib, which he shared with another lifelong friend Ishat, a peasant like himself, a girl who became his scribe and who had been in love with him since they were children. Having completed his reading of the forty-two scrolls comprising the Book of Thoth, Huy found himself no closer to solving their meaning, and began to realize that his future and the solution to the book’s mystery were irrevocably bound together.
Other characters come and go throughout The Twice Born. There is Anuket, sister to Huy’s friend Thothmes, who coldly manipulates Huy’s boyhood passion for her. There is Methen, priest of Hut-herib’s totem god Khenti-kheti, who carries Huy home from the House of the Dead, and Henenu the Rekhet, female exorcist and sorcerer, who guides Huy and protects him. There is Ramose, the High Priest of Ra at Iunu, who wants to keep Huy and his uncanny gift close by once Huy’s school days are over, but fails. And always there is the King to whom Huy is beholden and the jackal god, Anubis, who conveys Atum’s desires to Huy, who is often angry and resentful at the psychic responsibilities thrust upon him.
The Twice Born ends with Huy and Ishat having just moved from the poverty-stricken hovel they had occupied in Hut-herib to the estate deeded to Huy by the King. Their future seems safely predictable.
The Book of Thoth was purported to contain all knowledge regarding the creation of the cosmos, gods, and men as well as the laws relating to magic, nature, and the afterlife. It was dictated by Atum, the creator god, to Thoth, god of Writing, the Sciences, and Time, who set down the information on forty-two scrolls which were divided between the temples of Ra at Iunu and Thoth at Khmun.
It survives in fragmented form as the so-called Pyramid Texts, found on the walls of the burial chambers of pyramids of the Fifth and Sixth Dynasties, at the temples of Esna and Edfu, and in certain coffins where it is called, of course, the Coffin Texts. Pieces of it also appear in The Book of Knowing the Modes of Existence of Ra and of Overthrowing the Serpent Apophis, and The Book of Coming Forth by Day, commonly known as The Book of the Dead.
According to Egyptian legend, before the reign of King Menes of the Protodynastic Period, the country was ruled for 13,420 years by the Servitors of Horus, the Shemsu-Hor. The Book of Thoth was said to predate the Shemsu-Hor by over twenty thousand years.
The Greeks identified Thoth with their god Hermes, hence the Hermetica, a collection of modernized writings attributed to Thoth.
PART ONE
1
When Huy was an old man, looking into his extraordinary past with awe and a measure of resignation, he admitted to himself that the time spent with Ishat on the small but entrancing estate Pharaoh Amunhotep the Second had deeded to him had been the happiest of his life. He knew that, in accepting the King’s generosity, he had become a virtual prisoner of the Horus Throne, and it was true that he was obliged to See for any court official requesting the use of his peculiar gifts, but between their visits he continued to help whoever came to his gate. Although Ishat had pointed out that allowing an indiscriminate number of townsfolk to wander through the garden and mill about the fountain was dangerous, Huy was reluctant to put any limit on the numbers slipping past Kar, his gate guard. After all, the walk from Hut-herib itself to the privacy of his arouras was long. Those in need arrived hot, tired, and thirsty, and many were ill. Some came on behalf of relatives too sick to leave their houses, begging Huy to return to the town with them and place his hands on their loved ones.
They began to gather before dawn. Huy would wake to the murmur of their voices rising to his bedchamber upstairs. He would hurry through the fresh bread, milk, and fruit his body servant Tetiankh set beside him on the gilded couch, take a cursory wash in the bathhouse downstairs, and carry a stool outside to be faced with the eager horde of petitioners. Usually Ishat would be waiting for him in her capacity as his scribe, her palette held loosely in her arms, her sleep-swollen eyes travelling the motley crowd with disapproval. Each case was documented by her—name, malady, and whatever cure Huy’s vision demanded—and the scrolls were filed in Huy’s office. By late afternoon the crowd would have thinned, those still waiting would be told to return the next day, and Huy and Ishat would escape into the house, themselves hot, tired, and thirsty, Ishat to stand in the bathhouse while her own body servant, Iput, scrubbed and then oiled her, and Huy to take a draft of poppy and lie on his couch until the drug took effect against the inevitable stabbing in his head and he felt able to go down to the reception hall for the evening meal.
This went on for several months, until both Ishat and Merenra, their chief steward, protested.
“I do pity them, Huy,” Ishat said one evening as they sat picking over a meal of ox stew and cold lentil salad they were too exhausted to finish. “But they will never stop coming. There will always be disease and accidents, let alone the people who just want you to tell them about their future.” She took a gulp of her palm wine, then set the goblet back on her table with a click. “We talked about getting a skiff and perhaps a barge with a cabin. The litter Merenra bought for us sits idle beside the house, and the bearers sleep all day and gamble all night out of boredom. Shouldn’t we be the ones at leisure?” Lifting the long black hair away from her ears, she flicked at her lobes. “You were going to order jewellery for me—and what about you? You are still wearing the same earring day after day, and you make poor Tetiankh launder and starch your one spare kilt that is falling apart. You’ll soon find yourself reduced to Seeing in nothing but your loincloth unless you take a little time to at least meet your need for new linen. Besides, the townsfolk trample on Seshemnefer’s flowers and vegetables. They urinate against the outer wall and defecate behind the grain silo. We can’t keep doing this!”
Behind her, Merenra stepped into the soft light of the alabaster lamps. “May I speak, Master?”
Huy nodded uncomfortably. He did not think he would ever become used to the care of ser
vants who not only kept the house clean and cooked the food, as Hapzefa, Ishat’s mother, still did for his parents and his brother, Heby, but who were responsible as well for making his life as easy and free as possible.
“Your scribe speaks good sense,” the steward went on. “Khnit cannot continue to provide water and juices to the multitudes, let alone the bread and honey they demand. The King sends you gold every month, but even his coffers in Mennofer could not feed the whole of Hut-herib indefinitely. Your gate guard, Kar, has been jostled and threatened. It is time to seek a solution to this problem.”
Huy did not want to agree with them. Did he not have a duty to the god who had given him this onerous gift, to use it to the limit of his strength? Both Ishat and Merenra were watching him expectantly.
“The first thing we need is a contingent of soldiers stationed in front of the gate,” Ishat pressed him. “The second is some sort of restriction on the days you will be available and the numbers of people you will allow to come. Huy, I have not seen my mother since we moved in here!” she burst out. “And you need to visit your family. What good are you to anyone if you are dead from all this confusion?”
Huy knew rebellion when he saw it, and indeed he was secretly relieved that this decision had been taken from him. “Very well,” he said. “Let us reorganize our life. Merenra, is there any more wine?”
He remembered Anhur, the soldier who had guarded and befriended him on his visits to the temple of Thoth at Khmun, where he had read the portions of the Book of Thoth stored there. Anhur now served in the King’s army; he had become one of the elite Shock Troops. But perhaps Pharaoh would release him into my service, Huy reflected as the golden palm wine cascaded into his cup and Merenra stood back. Amunhotep values my gifts. Already I have Seen for his Vizier and namesake, Amunhotep, and his chief scribe, Seti-en. We would all be safe if Anhur came here with a small detachment. I will petition High Priest Ramose for the release of Amunmose also. He came with me to Khmun carrying scrolls for Thoth’s High Priest. He was cheerful and begged me to remember him if I ever needed a good cook. At the time I could not imagine the turn my fortunes have taken, not in my wildest dreams of success and vindication, yet here we are, Ishat and I, living like the aristocrats we are not. He smiled and raised the silver cup to his mouth, knowing that the flavour of palms would bring to mind a picture of the river in spring and the faint aroma of damp foliage along its banks. He had given up hoping for inebriation a very long time before.
Seer of Egypt Page 1