Seer of Egypt

by Pauline Gedge

  “Henna?”

  Merenra permitted himself a brief smile. “I have not brought details such as this to your attention. There is never a need to do so. Seshemnefer has your permission to keep a certain portion of the profits from the arouras for himself and his wife. Khnit persuaded him to plant henna. The flowers are very sweetly scented, but as you must know from the work your uncle does, the dried leaves mixed with sarson oil make dye for the hair and the skin. The seeds give their own oil. Seshemnefer sells both oils in the lull between the harvest and the sowings of the New Year. Do you wish to alter your arrangement with Seshemnefer?”

  “No,” Huy replied thoughtfully, “but Khnit seems to be an astute businesswoman as well as a fine cook. Watch her, Merenra. Perhaps in the future we should employ a new cook and make use of Khnit in some other way.”

  He ate a quiet evening meal with Thothhotep and Anhur, walked a little by the murky and sullen depths of a river still sinking, sat on his roof to watch the huge orange moon rise and shrink to a silver ball, and went to his couch feeling tired but oddly serene. The hyena was gone. He had discharged the duties his gift demanded for yet another day. His household was orderly. Those he loved were healthy. He promised himself a visit to his parents on the following day. His head was not paining him. He fell quickly asleep.

  Once more he opened his eyes onto darkness, immediately tensing for the wail of the hyena. It did not come. Words were pouring into his mind instead, not through his ears but rising from that place within himself that had lain dormant for many years. The Book of Thoth was demanding his attention. When Imhotep had asked him if he would read it, he had not considered the consequences, one of which was that on reading the words of those precious and holy scrolls they would become embedded in his ka and in his consciousness. Like a rock entrenched in the bed of a river, they lay quiet while the water of Huy’s everyday life flowed over them, but they rose to the surface of his awareness in complete totality whenever he chose to turn his attention to them. He had not done so for a long time. The ultimate meaning of the forty-two rolls of papyrus continued to elude him, so that in the end he had ceased to worry at them and had left them in the place where they had been so strongly implanted.

  Now they thundered through his head, the phrases majestic, ponderous, each syllable as clear and sweet as the sound of a single note played upon a flute by a master musician. Huy left the couch and stood still for a moment, fully awake and alert, aware that he was able to make his own thoughts over the undercurrent of the chanting voice. For the first time, he wondered whose voice it was. His own? Was it the voice of Atum himself? But he had heard Atum speak. The pitch of this voice was slightly higher than that of the mighty god, though just as melodious, and fraught with authority. It certainly did not belong to Anubis, whose jackal tones were throaty and harsh. Nor did it belong to the goddess Ma’at; Huy had heard her speak also. Was he hearing the voice of Thoth, who had written down the words at Atum’s command?

  The answer was not really important. He was powerless to stop the flood pouring through him like the water of the rising river streaming over the cataracts. Why now? he asked, but he knew. He knew. He had failed the creator. He had betrayed his gift. It did not matter that he himself had often hated and resented it since it had been thrust upon him. It was a grave responsibility, which he had done his best to carry regardless of his feelings. But he had failed the test of the King’s displeasure. He had put the fear of losing all he had before the will of Atum and his own uniqueness and, worse, he had already begun to reason away the guilt that had descended on him.

  He was suddenly sure that the hyena had slunk back into his garden, that the vile beast was sitting on the worn patch of earth close to the rear of the house, staring up at the roof with its hateful black eyes. Leaving his room, glancing to the left where Tetiankh was snoring on his pallet, he turned towards the window to the roof and was soon walking to the lip and peering down. The long recitation moved with him, the cadences singing in his blood, behind his eyes, shivering under his skin. The moon was still high, the sharpness of its outline beginning to soften as it started its slow wane, and the garden was flooded with its strange unlight. Huy’s eyes searched every corner and saw nothing. The water in the irrigation ditches lay smoothly silver.

  “What is it that you fear, Son of Hapu?” Huy felt the jackal’s moist breath on his cheek, as he had known he would. “Is it fur and teeth? Bristles and panting tongues? Is it the cruel heart of the desert in an animal’s cry? You do well to be afraid, Great Seer, oh yes. Atum the Neb-er-djer, Lord to the Limit, will punish you for your spinelessness before Amunhotep and his thieving son, but his discipline will be felt as the prick of a thorn beside the thrust of a dagger to your heart if you fail to understand the thing that ought to fill you with terror. Ungrateful child!” The god’s voice became a deep-throated growl. “He has opened his hands in generosity towards you and yet the Book lies idle in your marrow. Hear it and understand! Search it and understand! Lion and darkness, lion and darkness, lion and darkness!” The words ended on a howl so like that of the hyena that Huy jerked away from the brink of the roof with a shriek.

  “I have tried to understand!” he shouted. “Help me, Anubis!” But he no longer felt the presence of the god. You have not tried hard enough, his own thought whispered to him. The task is hard and tiring. You fill your days with scrying and healing and tell yourself that those things are enough. You hurry from your duties to warm yourself with those you love. You shamefully neglect your study of the Book. You are thirty-eight years old. It has been twenty-six years since Sennefer sent you tumbling into Ra’s entrance lake, since you agreed to read the Book, since you sat under the Ished Tree and unrolled the first scroll for the first time. Lion and darkness. Ra and Set. Amun and Set. What is the thing that ought to fill me with terror? The Book and Atum and the hyena. They are connected, all three, but it is only the hyena that fills me with an irrational fear. Irrational? Perhaps not. Lion and hyena. What does the hyena represent for me?

  Abruptly, the current of words ceased. Huy felt sweat break out along his spine. I have asked the right question, and the answer must lie within the mysteries of the Book. Hurrying back along the passage to his room, he snatched up a cushion, regained the roof, and, flinging down the cushion in his favourite place by the wind catcher, lowered himself onto it, drew up his knees, wrapped his arms around them, and closed his eyes. I must decipher the meaning of the hyena, he told himself. It is in the Book, that much is clear. Very well. I shall set aside one hour every night to call up the Book, remind myself of what I do know, bring my intellect to bear upon it. I tried to do so as a boy, but the task was too great for me. I must succeed as a man. I must avert the consequence of failure.

  The Book is set out in five stages. The first stage, contained in the scrolls kept at the temple of Ra in Iunu, is concerned with Atum’s will and his nature. I remember being in despair after I read them. They deal with Atum regarding himself. “How to describe the indescribable? How to show the unshowable? How to express the unutterable? How to seize the ungraspable instant?” For me the question was, how may anyone ever divine the nature of Atum the creator? In the first stage Atum wills change. He enters the Duat. I had believed that there was only one Duat, a place full of demons through which the dead had to pass to reach the Beautiful West, but the Book described Atum as entering the Second Duat. “Hail Atum, he who comes before himself! You culminate in this your name of ‘Hill.’ You become in this your name …”

  A chance remark by Mesta, Huy’s chariot instructor, had given Huy the answer. The Second Duat was the place of Metamorphosis, where Atum chose to become “Hill,” the mound, the source of all creation latent within him. The first birthing was that of magic, heka, first as a component of the god himself, unrealized outside himself, and then as the force of light. “Let us call Spirit pure energy—but it is known to us only through light. Let us call God consciousness—but it is known to us only through complemen
tation. Let us call Light first—but known only through darkness …”

  Here Huy stopped the flow of the Book. Something in the inflection of the anonymous voice reciting the words made him want to repeat them. “Let us call Light first—but known only through darkness.” The lion and the darkness. Only by knowing darkness can we recognize Light. Knowing darkness … Am I to embrace the hyena, try to fathom its nature, and thus know—what? Myself? A part of myself? Suddenly his heart constricted and he could not breathe. Yes! he shouted silently. Yes! Only by the hyena in me can I fully know, recognize, fathom, whatever, the true nature of Atum as Light, as Ra-Atum. Then what part of me is the hyena?

  Quickly he reviewed the components that made up a human being: the physical body, the shadow, the ka, the ba, the heart, the khu-spirit, the name. He spoke them quietly aloud, but his mind did not halt and stumble over any one of them. His heart gave a lurch and settled down again to its usual strong rhythm. He allowed the words to continue, but something of his excitement had been muted. Of course, it won’t be that easy, he told himself, but I won’t forget that line from the Book. I will worry it like a dog with a bone until it gives up its meaning to me. After Atum conceived magic, he predicted an end before a beginning. “All that will be created will return to the Nun. Myself alone, I persist, unknown, invisible to all …”

  The second stage was recorded on a thin scroll at the temple of Thoth at Khmun. Huy had been in a state of uneasiness from the time he stood before the double doors to the temple’s inner court. Thoth’s home was alive with heka, with a powerful, solemn magic. Thoth seemed to be watching him critically, waiting for him to commit some small act of blasphemy in order to punish him. To make matters worse, he had found the scroll entirely incomprehensible. “I am One that transforms into Two. I am Two that transforms into Four, I am Four that transforms into Eight. After this I am One.” The god’s cryptic words had eventually been explained. On becoming Light, Atum cast a shadow. Within the shadow, chaos reigned until Atum calmed it by ordering it into the four pairs of the Ocdoad, the male hypostases symbolized by frogs, the females by snakes. Water, Endless Space, Darkness, and What-Is-Hidden. But this was still only an inception, a potentiality making the conception of the eternal world possible.

  Huy returned to his school at Iunu and to the reading of the third stage, when inception became conception. Now the gods, the Ennead, could begin to exist as Ra-Atum the Creator, Shu the Air, Tefnut the Light, Geb the Earth, Nut the Sky, and Osiris, Isis, Set, and Nephthys. Atum says, “You are Eight who have made from your seed a germ, and you have instilled this seed in the Lotus, thus giving birth to Ra by pouring seminal fluid. You have deposited in the Nun, condensed into a single form, and your inheritor takes his radiant birth under the aspect of a child.” This has enabled Atum to change yet again, to become Ra-Atum, with the full power to create whatever he wishes. He says:

  “I am he who made heaven and earth, formed the mountains, and Created what is above.

  I am he who made the water and Created the celestial waves.

  I am he who made the bull for the cow.

  I am he who made the sky and the mysteries of the two horizons …

  I am he who opens his eyes, thus the light comes forth. I am he who closes his eyes, thus

  Comes forth obscurity …

  I am he who made the hours, thus the days were born…

  I am he who made the living fire …

  I am Khepri in the morning, Ra at his noontide, Atum in the evening.”

  Any triad represented divine truths, and any doubling represented the fleeting reality of created matter. This Huy had learned when discussing both the Ocdoad and the Ennead with High Priest Ramose. The concepts were not difficult to grasp. Nor was the creation of Osiris, son of Nut, the goddess representing the sky, and Geb, the god signifying the earth. Osiris symbolized the cycle of birth and rebirth, and Ra-Atum delegated authority to him when the world was created.

  O Osiris! The Inundation is coming; abundance rushes in. The flood season is coming,

  Arising from the torrent issuing from Osiris. O King, may Heaven give birth to thee as Orion. You are born in your months like the moon.

  Ra supports himself on you at the Horizon.

  You appear at the New Moon.

  Huy was forced to return to Khmun to read the fourth stage, the creation of time and of the material world. Everything about Thoth’s temple had made him feel as though he were walking on eggshells, and once again he had fled the precincts as soon as he could. He had read of the task Atum had set for Osiris—to organize and civilize the land of Egypt—and how Osiris had left the country’s care and governing to his sister Isis and had journeyed south so that he could teach to the savage people of those regions agriculture, the laws of Ma’at, and the correct ways in which to worship the divine powers.

  But when Osiris returned to Egypt, his brother Set ambushed him, enclosed him in a coffin, and flung him into one of the tributaries snaking through the Delta. The ocean had taken the coffin and deposited it on a beach in Rethennu, where a huge tree grew up around it. Isis, meanwhile, having been told by Shu, god of the air, where Osiris lay, went to look for him and, finding him, brought the coffin back to Egypt and hid it. But Set found it, cut Osiris’s body into fourteen pieces, and scattered them throughout the country. Isis and Nephthys, her sister, went searching for each piece, and buried it where they found it. But they could not find the penis of Osiris, and so Osiris became a god of the dead.

  Huy was aware of the cycle of mystery plays associated with the life, death, and resurrection of Osiris. There was the Feast of the Great Manifestation of Osiris on the twenty-second day of the month of Thoth. There was the Opening of the Tomb of Osiris on the twenty-first day of Khoiak, the Preparation of the Sacrificial Altar in the Tomb of Osiris on the twenty-third, the Exhibition of the Corpse of Sokar, Osiris’s name as Lord of the Dead, in the Midst of the Sacrifice on the twenty-fourth, not to mention the Feast of the Mourning Goddesses on the twenty-fifth. “It is all to do with the permanence of life, its continuation by a change of state after death,” Ramose, Ra’s High Priest, had told Huy when he complained that he saw no connection between the birth of the world and Osiris’s tale. “Everything, including Osiris, was created to pass from seed to shoot to maturity to death and then, having sown a new seed, to transfiguration. Make of it what you will, Huy. It is Atum’s way of telling us in what manner he conceived of our creation and the creation of everything living.”

  Huy had been glad to turn to the fifth and last set of scrolls. He had expected a great flood of understanding as he read the last words dictated by Atum to Thoth, but he was left with anger, disappointment, and a curious sense of loss. Thoth had prefaced each of Atum’s pronouncements with a list of some of his, Thoth’s, twenty-two titles. Huy had become used to finding them at the beginning of each scroll and, as usual, they were there. The last one said, “I Thoth, guide of heaven, earth, and the First Duat, am now the Bridge of Atum.” This was bad enough, but Atum’s final pronouncement, the one that should have united all the other forty-one scrolls, was utterly nonsensical. In part it said,

  … You will go around the entire Two Skies. You will circumambulate the Two Banks.

  You will become one with the perishable stars. You will become a ba.

  You will journey to the Land of the West. You will inhabit the Fields of Yaru in peace until Turnface carries you away.

  Free course is given to you by Horus. You flash as the lone star…

  And so on, for a few more incomprehensible lines. Atum had already made it clear that the end curved back to the beginning, but reciting the whole Book out loud again had not brought clarification. Besides, the ba was simply the spirit that animated the flesh. Freed at death, it stayed close to the body in the form of a bird with the features of the deceased. So, of course, part of a person would become a ba. The akh, or khuspirit, the eternal light in everyone that frees itself at death and is transfigured, was not m
entioned at all. Nor was the ka, that portion dealing with one’s appetites—physical, moral, and spiritual—the Setian part of a human being, where the akh is personified in Horus. Huy learned these things from his teachers, the temple priests, and even from Thothmes, during one of their late night discussions, when they lay in their cell in the dark after the lamp had been extinguished and talked until they became drowsy.

  Huy, alone at night on his rooftop, came to the end of the Book with the same sense of frustration he had felt all those years ago when he had let the last scroll roll up and had sat on under the Ished Tree, allowing every one of the forty-two portions to flow past his inner vision in the hope that understanding would burst upon him at last. He had left the sacred Tree not knowing whether to be angry or relieved, a depression settling on him as he made his way to return the box with its precious contents to the High Priest.

  But now he had an added reason to decipher the ultimate meaning of the Book. He must deflect the fate that would be his if he failed. Random snatches flitted through his mind.

  That which I illuminated in my heart was the plan of the universe which presented itself to me. I made every creature when I was alone. I planned in my heart, I created other metamorphoses. Very many were the transformations of Khepri …

  It is I who spat out Shu, I who expectorated Tefnut. I had come into being as one god and behold, there were three …

  Nun said to Atum, “Breathe in thy daughter Ma’at. Bring her to thy nose in order that thy heart may live, that she be not removed from thee, that thy daughter Ma’at be with thy son Shu whose name is Life …”

  Unity and multiplicity, Huy thought. Versa and vice versa. Why does it seem to me now that my anger, my frustration all those years ago, stemmed from an unconscious suspicion that the last scroll is unfinished? That Thoth’s final declaration, that he has written the Book as Atum has instructed him, sounds like a justification for its incompleteness? Physically exhausted but mentally alert, Huy sat up. Not so, he tried to contradict himself. There has never been the slightest whisper that the Book exists as anything but the forty-two scrolls that reside in Ra’s temple and live in my head. But what if the forty-second scroll was supposed to be longer, hold more? Or what if Thoth was commanded to deliberately omit something so vital that it might change the beliefs of every pious Egyptian? “Oh, don’t be ridiculous,” he said aloud. “You’re allowing fantasy to provide an excuse for your own inability to fathom a meaning from the Book.”