Then Anhur spoke from farther away. “I’ll lift him and hold him until you’re done. Change the linen and wash him while he’s in my arms. He needs a physician, but I suppose we’ll be home before one could be sent for. We should have put in at Iunu and sent word to the Governor. He and Ishat would have taken proper care of him.” The man’s forthright, rough tones had been drawing closer. Huy found himself in Anhur’s careful embrace. Anhur smelled of woodsmoke and security. Huy relaxed against him.
He slept through the night, aware that his dreams were becoming more coherent as both the pain and the poppy ebbed away. By the time the barge nudged his watersteps not long after dawn, he was able to walk shakily along the ramp and up the steps, and negotiate the short path to his own little entrance hall with Anhur and Tetiankh’s support. “Why was this attack so bad, Huy?” Anhur wanted to know as he and the body servant lowered Huy onto his couch.
Huy looked up slowly. The residual pangs only struck him now if he moved too fast. “I gave a Seeing to Prince Amunhotep,” he said, aware that he sounded as hoarse and weak as an old man. “Then I met the Princess Mutemwia on my way out of the palace. She was cuddling her son. When he grasped my fingers, a Seeing came to me without my will. Both visions were very powerful. One immediately after the other was too much. Tetiankh, bring me water and then I must sleep again. Was I holding a leather bag full of gold when the guards brought me aboard the barge?”
Tetiankh nodded. “Thothhotep took it. She will have given it to Merenra to store.”
“Tell Merenra to dole it out to the next crowd of petitioners and to give the bag away also. I don’t want anything more to do with it.” He felt his eyelids begin to close, but it was good, it was healthy. The couch smelled of rinsing vinegar, and the voices of his lame gardener Anab and of Amunmose, his under steward, came drifting through the slats of the blind on the window. “Tell Thothhotep to be ready to take a dictation this afternoon,” he murmured. “Thank you both. Water, Tetiankh.” He was already half asleep by the time the man returned with the cup. He drank deeply, turned his cheek into his pillow, and let the room slide away.
He woke to darkness and a momentary disorientation, knowing that something had brought him to an abrupt consciousness and that it was night. He had slept through the whole of the day and, judging by the deep silence of the house, much of the night as well. He sat up, aware that every trace of pain had gone and his strength had been restored. Only the dryness in his mouth and a bitterness at the back of his throat caused by the poppy reminded him that he had been viciously attacked. He was reaching for the water jug and the cup that Tetiankh always left beside the couch when he heard a sound he instantly recognized as the reason why he had woken. It could have been the sudden howl of a desert wind, and for a moment Huy believed it to be so, but then he remembered that he was in the centre of Ta-Mehu, the Delta, and the desert was far away. Besides, there was an element of life, of blood, in the cry. It came again, nearer this time, rising mournfully and ending with a series of moans, and something answered it, far away.
Huy left the couch, grabbed up his kilt of the day, and tied it around his waist as he made his way cautiously to the door. Outside in the passage, there was more light. The moon, although full, was setting, its pallid rays diffusing through the wide aperture leading onto the roof. Huy had the sensation of wading through them as he came to the sill, stepped over it, and emerged beside the wind catcher that funnelled the northern breezes down into the reception room below. Walking to the roof’s edge, he peered out and down. The garden was drowned in darkness. Only the tips of the palms he and Ishat had seen Seshemnefer plant were visible. As his eyes adjusted to the dimness, he could just make out the bulk of the kitchen below and to the right, and, farther along, the cells where his soldiers and lesser servants slept. To the rear, the clay dome of his small granary could be seen as a black curve against the equally dense blackness of the estate’s sheltering wall.
With a suddenness that shocked him, the wail came again, surely from something hiding between the house and the wall. Huy’s heart began to pound. The spirits of the dead roamed about sadly at night, those whose tombs were neglected by relatives who ought to have been bringing flowers and food to them at the Beautiful Feast of the Valley each year. Sometimes the spirits became vengeful, tormenting their kin with evil luck. But after a moment of panic, when Huy searched his mind for anyone who might haunt him and came up with no name, he realized for the second time that the sounds, though eerie, were being made by a living being of some kind.
Retracing his steps, he hurried along the passage. Tetiankh was still asleep on his pallet just beyond Huy’s door. With the long practice of the well-trained servant, he came awake at once when Huy touched his shoulder. “Something strange is in the garden,” Huy told him as they descended the stairs. “Go and wake Anhur, but don’t shout for the guard posted at the rear wall.”
The air outside was hot and stale. It was now the beginning of Epophi, the third of the four months of the season Shemu, a time when the heat became progressively more intense until well after Isis had cried and her tears had flooded the fields. Tetiankh disappeared in the direction of Anhur’s cell, his kilt a receding smudge of grey in the gloom, and as he went, Huy heard a curious snuffling coming from the vegetable plots, now verdant with the spears of lettuce, leeks, and garlic, fronds of onion, fat cabbages, and the low, snaking stems of melons in which the fruit rested. That sound was even more sinister to Huy than the howls, and he halted, able now to see a glint of moonlight on the narrow irrigation channels Seshemnefer had dug, which joined the wider canal the soldiers had made from the river to water the new palms. The channels were rippling almost imperceptibly. Something had disturbed the water. An animal is feeding amongst the vegetables, Huy thought with a gush of relief. But what animal can make those terrible cries and snorts?
The answer came at once, as though he had asked the question aloud. A shape appeared, wide-shouldered, skinny-haunched, loping across the grass into the small patch of worn earth where he stood by the rear entrance. He could see it quite clearly as it squatted on the lighter ground and stared at him, its black eyes like pebbles, its pink tongue hanging over razor-sharp teeth. For several heartbeats Huy was paralyzed with fear. He wanted to turn and flee into the house, but he could not will his feet to lift. The animal had become as motionless as he, its gaze unblinking. He could hear it panting. He thought he could smell it, a rank, meaty odour wafted to his nostrils by the breeze, but there was no breeze. The air was still. At last he found his voice.
“What do you want?” he croaked. “What are you doing here? Did Imhotep send you? Did Anubis?”
Its stare did not waver at the sound of his voice, and gradually Huy became convinced that there was reproach behind those dark beads, a judgment coupled with a latent ferocity directed at him and straining to be released. It’s going to kill me. The thought came clearly and calmly into his mind. Atum has sent it to destroy me because of my cowardice before the King, because I have failed the god. It will leap upon me in a moment and tear at my throat with those pointed teeth, and I shall feel its stiff bristles graze my cheeks as I fall with it fastened to my flesh.
Footsteps pounded in the darkness and then Anhur was skirting the beast and its gaze was broken. It rose and shambled away unhurriedly, and Huy found that he was trembling. “A hyena!” Anhur exclaimed. He was naked but for a loincloth, his brown, muscled body so full of vitality and reassuring health that Huy felt his perceptions return to a semblance of normality. “What is it doing so far from the desert? And how did it get into the garden? From the path by the watersteps, I expect.”
“It will have made a mess of Anab’s work in its hunt for mice. Anhur, it had black eyes and a pink tongue. I thought hyenas were yellow-eyed, with black tongues.” That was what I saw in the Beautiful West when I stood before the blessed Imhotep and the creature dozing beside him, Huy told himself. I was uneasy then. I am doubly so now, wondering what this means
. “I don’t want it anywhere near me!” he burst out. “Catch it and take it away!”
Anhur glanced at him curiously. “Easier to kill it.”
“No! No. Just … get rid of it.” It must not be destroyed, Huy knew with certainty. If I kill it, I will not be forgiven. But why? Why?
Tetiankh came into sight with Khnit the cook behind him, bleary-eyed and bare-footed, a sheath pulled carelessly over her head. She bowed to Huy. “Master, I’m sorry the animal got free. I thought I’d penned it securely. Perhaps Anhur would help me catch it and put it back.”
Huy stared at her stupidly. “Put it back? What are you talking about, Khnit?”
“I traded for it in the market while you were away. I had no intention of letting it rouse you from your couch!”
“Traded … What do you want a hyena for, woman?”
She looked at him as though he had lost his mind. “Why, to fatten up and then eat, of course! Hyenas themselves will eat almost anything. There’s always offal to be disposed of. Their meat is strong but tasty.” You really don’t know this? her tone implied. “We don’t often see them in the Delta. There was another one in the market. They like to live with their own kind. But the trader wouldn’t give me a good deal for the two of them.”
Huy’s panic was back, sourceless this time. He struggled to beat it down. “You meant well. I’m sorry, Khnit. I won’t eat hyena meat, and I don’t want them anywhere near this estate.”
“But, Master, perhaps for the servants—”
“No. Anhur’s men can take it back to the market and sell it for you if you like. Now go back to bed.” She sniffed, bowed, and stalked off. Huy turned to Anhur. “Do you know anything about hyenas?”
It was Amunmose who answered. He had come up behind the little group, a sheet clutched around his waist. “I do, Master. We see them often on the outskirts of Khmun, and my mother has a delicious recipe for their meat. They are mysterious creatures. They can change their sex from male to female and back again whenever they want to. They live in packs, and talk to each other with many different sounds. In the wild they hunt at night, and together they can even bring down a leopard, or so it’s said. Pharaoh has a leopard in his zoo, a gift from some southern tribal chief.”
“How do you know this?” Huy was becoming more and more repelled. Amunmose grinned. Huy realized that he could make out his under steward’s pert features, and the darkness around him was less dense. Ra was about to be born out of the vagina of Nut.
“I love gossip,” Amunmose said promptly. “I listen to everyone who comes here and encourage people to tell me their news and stories. They say that hyenas have a queen, not a king, and that they belong to Set and that lions hate them.”
Lions hate them. Those words, spoken so lightly by his servant, sank slowly into Huy’s consciousness and beyond, as though they carried with them a subtle poison that began to infect not only his ka but his blood and the marrow of his bones. When the rays of the sun strike the earth, they become lions, he thought. Ra, Aten, Amun. Light, light, light. And hyenas are in Set’s domain, a place of darkness and chaos. He looked up. A greyness was filling the garden, bringing with it the brief cool breeze that preceded the dawn. Suddenly cold, Huy shivered.
“Anhur, detail a couple of men and catch the thing,” he ordered. “Don’t let it escape them. They can take it to the market at once. And take heed, all of you: I never want to see a hyena in my garden again. Tetiankh, heat water for me in the bathhouse. And you, my gossiping steward, go and tell Khnit that I want something hot this morning. Soup, perhaps.”
They scattered, but Anhur looked back. “It’s only a filthy animal, Huy. Don’t let it upset you.”
I am no longer upset, Huy thought as he re-entered the drowsy half-light of the house. What I feel is deeper and colder and more threatening than mere alarm. I see the beast with the yellow eyes as I stood before Imhotep in the Beautiful West while my body lay lifeless in the House of the Dead. I see it watching me calmly, tamely, an aura of tranquility surrounding it, and yet I sensed something in its gaze, didn’t I? I was twelve years old. I had no name for it then, but I can name it now. Pity. The beast was staring at me with pity in those golden eyes. Lion, hyena. The sun and the darkness. Atum, what does all this mean for me? What is it that I really fear? Was the compassion in its eyes for my future state, as though the animal itself had the power of Seeing and was looking at what I was to become?
Entering his room, he removed the kilt, dropped it on the floor, and sat naked on the edge of his couch. His flaccid penis, resting loosely against his thigh, mocked him. Useless appendage, he thought savagely. I should cut you off and offer you to Atum of my own free will. “See!” I shall say. “Here is what’s left of my manhood. You took its essence without my consent when I was a boy. I throw the rest down before you, now that I am a man.”
The need to talk to Ishat rose up in him all at once. She would discuss the hyena and its meaning. She would understand his fear and confusion. So would Thothmes. Huy saw them frequently, often stopping in at Iunu on his way home from visiting Heby at Mennofer. Their rambling house was full of the noise and laughter of their three children, who called him Uncle Huy and hugged him with delight when he appeared. Thothmes was strict with them. They were not allowed to ask if Huy had brought them presents or sweetmeats. They must bow to him both as an adult and as Egypt’s Great Seer at least once when they were with him. Thothmes had named his eldest offspring Huy, and the astrologers had happily approved his choice. The boy was nine, attending the temple school at Iunu as both Huy and Thothmes had done. Intelligent as his mother and as agile and small as his father, he considered himself too old now to fling himself on Huy, and was proud simply to sit with him and talk.
Nakht, named after his grandfather, was eight. He also attended the temple school, a quiet child who enjoyed his own company. Sahura, a girl, much to Ishat’s joy, was six. Thothmes had hired a tutor for her so that she could learn at home. It was a highly unorthodox thing to do. Girls were taught to run households and care for their families. Noble daughters could write their names and a few simple sentences, and often became astute businesswomen. But Ishat, remembering her own early ignorance, was ambitious for Sahura. The tutor was instructed to follow the curriculum set down for the boys at school in the temple. In spite of the necessary strictures imposed on Thothmes’ household due to the public nature of his position, his estate was a happy place, full of laughter. Huy, having been subjected to his nephew’s scowls and tantrums in Heby’s house at Mennofer, would arrive at Thothmes’ gate with relief.
There was seldom a chance to speak to Ishat at length, however. Her household bustled with servants, feasts for dignitaries both important and minor, and the raising of her brood. Sometimes Huy and Thothmes were able to sit peacefully together in the evenings outside, and talk while dusk settled around them and the lights from the newly lit lamps inside the house ribboned thin and insubstantial, to be lost in the shrubbery crowding the walls. Huy’s need for Ishat had moderated in the years since her marriage. He had become content to see her happy with her husband and fulfilled by her children.
Besides, Thothhotep had proved to be an able scribe. Already she and he had formed memories, but she had not lived the years of childhood together, of poverty, of the early experiences he and Ishat had shared that bind one to another. He was fond of Thothhotep, and she of him. There was much about him and his gift that she understood, but she could never have Ishat’s intuition and insight when it came to his soul. Ishat had been in love with him all her life, a fact that used to fill him with guilt because he could not reciprocate. That guilt had died when she chose to wed his best friend. But now, waiting for Tetiankh to summon him to the bathhouse, his stomach empty, his mind full of confusion and a nagging certainty that he was missing something vitally important to do with the two hyenas—the one inhabiting the Beautiful West and the one even now being snared in his garden—he missed her desperately. He could write to her, he supp
osed, and she would reply, but without the language of eyes and body, the freedom to interpret every nuance of voice, the exchange would be unsatisfactory. Hearing Tetiankh’s tread in the passage, he rose, sighed, and went out.
After he had been bathed and dressed and had eaten, he sat behind the desk in his office and dictated to Thothhotep everything he could remember about the Seeings he had received for both Prince Amunhotep and the Princess’s baby. “Seal the scrolls,” he told her when she set down her brush and was massaging her fingers. “Then put them in a box by themselves and seal it shut also. You understand these visions, don’t you, Thothhotep?”
“I think so, Master.” She reached up and set her palette on the desk, then stood, laying the papyrus coils beside it. “It’s a terrible matter, the prospect of a forced exile for the Prince who should be our Hawk-in-the-Nest. The One has never officially declared an heir. Now we know why.” She tucked her short hair behind her ear, a gesture indicating either thoughtfulness or annoyance, Huy knew. “As for the little Prince and the gold, all it seems to mean so far is that he will be very rich and attract those things which bring security and ease with them. I will pray to Horus for Prince Amunhotep’s safe return to Egypt, as your vision promises.”
Huy laughed and she glanced at him, startled. “If you feel the need to pray for that event, you can’t have much faith in my visions!” he said. “Well, dear scribe, I suppose we must attend to the townsfolk who are waiting for their own visions and healings. Tetiankh will have prepared my drug for me. I would like one more day to recover, but they have been camping outside the gate since we left for the palace. Seal the scrolls first and put them in a niche until you can find a box. Ask Anab for one. At least there are no letters to be dealt with.”
When Kar, the gate guard, had ushered the last petitioner out of the gate, the household settled down for the afternoon sleep. Later, when Huy woke and went downstairs, Merenra told him that the hyena had been traded for a sack of chickpeas. “The soldiers were clever,” he added. “Seshemnefer did not grow them for you last year, Master. He turned over that portion of your arouras and planted broad beans, with a small corner devoted to henna.”
Seer of Egypt Page 31