by Gill, Anton
As Huy walked along its shore he startled a flock of egrets which rose white in the sun on silent wings, only mildly irritated by the disturbance, to settle again a handful of paces further on. From this new position they paid no more attention to him.
On the distant west bank it was just possible to make out the dun forms of herons, but only when one of them abandoned its still-as-stone posture to dart at a fish, or rose in unhurried flight to curl above the implacable rocks of the valley beyond. Near the shores, duck and geese swam, scooping the surface of the River for food, and farther downstream, where smooth rocks shelved to the water’s edge, crocodiles basked in the sun, warming themselves for the evening’s hunt. Near them, coots scuttled through the current in nervous teams.
A handful of villages, thatched mud buildings the colour of the land, clutched the ground in tight clusters on either bank, and there was a number of isolated farms which lay closer to the protection of the town. Wrapping his scarf around his head to protect himself from the heat, Huy kicked the dust out of his sandals and set off for the nearest one.
The furious barking of dogs which heralded his approach worried him, but the animals - two large black brutes of a kind he did not recognise - were tied to a hefty stake in the middle of the farmyard. There was no one about, which was not surprising in view of the time of day, so Huy, skirting the buildings — a simple low house flanked by a barn -in order to keep out of the dogs’ range, made his way to the nearest door and knocked. The dogs, aware that further action was impossible, retired to their patch of shade after loping around for a minute, and from there glared at him threateningly before giving up the whole idea, and lowering their heads on to their paws.
The farmer was a brittle stick of a man, the colour of sweet wood and fuddled with sleep. He had been up since four, preparing his land for the coming flood, after which the country would swelter, sweating and harassed by mosquitoes, until Hapy passed on his way and the season of growth could begin. Huy had noticed the complicated system of irrigation ditches and slender canals which linked them, now dry and neglected, as he had left the city, and imagined the activity that would animate this countryside five months later, when the waters would have withdrawn, and planting could begin, following a frenzied cleaning and redigging of the veins and arteries of the country’s body.
Aahetep’s parents’ farm lay further out from the city, but Huy was just able to discern it through the heat haze by squinting in the direction the farmer pointed.
‘But you can’t go now. Look where the sun is,’ said the farmer; and indeed the heat had suspended all life. The birds had disappeared from the shore, the crocodiles had withdrawn into deep shade or slunk into the water, where the tiny blisters made on the surface by their eyes were all that betrayed their presence. The farm dogs had become metamorphosed into low dark rocks.
Huy shook his head. ‘I must.’
‘The heat will be too much.’
‘There is no time to wait. And I think they will not be sleeping.’
‘The parents perhaps. Raia and Tutu have as much to do as we have; but the daughter...’ he broke off. ‘There has been a tragedy.’
‘What sort of tragedy?’ asked Huy.
The farmer regarded him coolly. ‘I thought you city folk knew everything. A death in the family. She’s got their little boy with her.’
‘Can I hire your donkey?’
The walnut face looked at him, and the farmer spat. ‘Not in this heat, you can’t. But have some water before you set out.’
Huy walked slowly, forcing himself not to hurry, knowing that the faster he went, the less chance he stood of making it, though the two farmsteads were not more than a thousand paces apart. He had spread his shawl to cover his back and neck as well as his head, and he had wet it in one of the farmer’s water jars, so that the going was not too bad, though the heat of the soil scorched his feet through his sandals. Long before he reached the other farm his shawl was dry and his lips and mouth were losing their moisture. Squinting against the sun as he approached the other farmhouse, Huy saw a pair of vultures wheeling high and far away to the north east. Specks that vanished and reappeared as they flew in and out of the sunlight. What dying thing out there had caught their attention?
Raia’s dogs raised their heads at his approach and managed an exhausted growl, but allowed him to approach the house door without any other challenge. This farm was larger than the first, and small numbers of livestock were corralled in pens under palm leaf umbrellas about the yard. A slim white pig lay in the corner of one, fast asleep, its ears over its eyes. In another, five geese started up, staring at him with beady, intelligent eyes. It was a long time before anyone answered his knock, but at last the door opened a crack to reveal a pale face framed in ragged, undressed hair. The woman held a small child of about three on one arm.
‘Aahetep?’
‘Who are you?’
‘Huy. A friend of Nehesy.’
Her eyes flickered into life and pain at the mention of her husband’s name, but she must have picked something up from Huy’s tone for no suspicion or enmity appeared in them, and she stood back, opening the door a fraction wider. Closing it behind him, the child staring at him inquisitively, she led the way through an inner courtyard hung about with farm implements to a long low room facing north on the other side of the house. From a gallery half in shadow came the noise of snoring from one end and the rustle of straw as a body resting on it shifted its position in sleep.
‘My parents are there.’
‘I know.’
The child burbled. Fearful that he might speak, or cry out, the girl took him to a small bed set against the wall, where he settled down, though from it he continued to gaze at Huy with the bright, frank eyes of his father. Then she returned to sit opposite her visitor, her own eyes tired, and their expression dull.
‘I am Nehesy’s friend,’ said Huy again.
She shifted her position. ‘He spoke of you.’
‘I s he in trouble?’
‘What have you come for?’
‘To find out what has happened to him.’
An expression of great bitterness crossed her face, which Huy did not understand, if you do not know, you are either a very good friend, or no friend at all.’
‘We were working together. I went to the stables and they told me he had been arrested. So I came here to find out more.’
She continued to look at him bleakly, as if gathering the energy to speak. When she finally did, it was in a low, toneless voice, wrung dry of feeling.
‘Four days ago they came to our house at dawn. Three Medjays. They took my husband away. Then at noon one of the officers returned and told me that Nehesy was being relieved of his duties. I would have to get out of the house by evening. I didn’t know where to go. When something like that happens with things as they are at the moment, none of your friends wants to know you. So I came home here. They knew where I’d gone at the stables so I supposed that sooner or later Nehesy would be released, and would join me - I knew he couldn’t have done any harm — or that I’d be given news. I waited a day and then I went to the city, but no one could tell me anything.’
All the time she spoke in a voice of quiet bewilderment, as if she could not believe that such a thing could have happened to her secure little family.
‘And then,’ she continued after a pause in which she had taken several deep breaths, ‘yesterday they brought him home.’ She stopped speaking again, and looked with dead eyes at a point in the room behind Huy.
‘Where is he now?’
‘In the stable.Below the loft.’
‘How is he? Is he sleeping?’
Her eyes met his again. ‘Yes. He is sleeping.’
Suddenly a cold fear gripped Huy’s heart. ‘What did they do to him?’
‘They told me he fell from a gallery in the prison. He was being escorted to an interview with one of the investigators and he slipped and fell.’
‘Did they tell y
ou what he was accused of?’
Aahetep hung her head. ‘I was afraid to ask. They never look into your eyes. They look at your forehead and talk to you as if your existence was something which they can’t bring themselves to acknowledge. They told me that as a servant of the state, he was entitled to a funeral at the expense of the palace. I told them I preferred to keep him.’
‘What will you do?’
She looked at him with tired pride. ‘We cannot all lie in stone vaults for eternity. This evening my father will dig a pit in the fields, above the floodline. We will line it with stone and my mother and I will weave a wicker roof for it, which we will seal with pitch and cover with sand. Under it Nehesy will lie, curled as he was in his mother, with food and utensils for the great journey. We have no need of embalmers, for the sand will dry him. Geb will take him in his arms and from above Nut will watch over him. Little Itet and I will always be near him, and this house will harbour his Ka. It is better than a tomb, and less lonely.’
Huy looked at her. ‘Can I see him?’
Without another word she rose, and after a glance at the child, now sleeping, led the way out of the room and across the yard. As she pushed open the stable door, the smell met them and Huy felt his throat tighten. An image came to him before he could repress it of the grey worms seething in eye sockets, but as he approached his friend’s body he saw that Nehesy had been spared that.
He lay on his side in an oval wicker basket, his hands cupped under his head and his knees drawn up to his chest. They had sprinkled natron over him, and the big earthenware water jars which stood about him like sentinels kept the temperature in the stable cool. The light was dim, but there was enough for Huy to see what had been done to Nehesy before he died. He stole a glance at Aahetep, looking down at the corpse with moist eyes which still would not acknowledge the truth of what they saw, and wondered if she really believed what they had told her.
‘It must have been a very bad fall,’ he said.
She looked at him with eyes blazing. ‘If you were his friend, may Horus help you avenge him,’ she said; and he knew that there was nothing at all he could tell her, even if he had wanted to.
Huy spent that evening at his house with Senseneb. The dinner he had planned had been arranged much earlier, but their anticipation of it had dwindled. They sat near one another after they had eaten, but they spoke little, so preoccupied with their own thoughts that they were not curious about each other’s. Huy, glad that after so long there was a woman here again, and one who warmed the little rooms by her presence, still weighed on the scales of his heart the element of risk he would take in confiding in her completely. It seemed to him that he would have to commit himself. There was no progress without risk; his one sure ally had been removed from the field; and Senseneb had done nothing - apparently - to betray him, or they would not have taken Nehesy and tortured him to death.
There was something more: within him he felt the love bond with a woman more strongly than he had since the first years of his long-dead marriage. He still tried to suppress it. There was no time for love now, or so he told himself. But another part of his heart longed for Horaha’s daughter, and it would not be quiet.
Senseneb was aware of the distance the present silence had put between them, but she was trying to summon up the courage to share the thoughts which were preoccupying her. She had drunk enough of the Kharga wine he had served to feel confident, but not enough to feel reckless. She did not know what his reaction would be to the truth about her own Past. But she reflected that she knew little of his, and was therefore not inhibited in her feelings for him. He did not Seem to be a narrow-hearted man, and in any case she would have to gamble to stand any chance of winning.
Both knew that if they parted, or moved on to lovemaking, before they had spoken to each other, an important moment would have been missed forever; but it was difficult to arrive at it. It seemed, they both thought, foolish for two adults who no longer had the excuse of youthful inexperience still to be so much at the mercy of the mischief of Hathor. But they continued to fence, each refusing to begin, discontentedly throwing scraps of small talk into the silence.
The lamp began to flicker and die on the table. Huy dressed the wick, refilling the bowl with linseed oil. The dying light was a reminder of passing time, and the activity it demanded triggered the conversation which had been waiting with increasing impatience to begin.
‘More wine?’ asked Huy.
‘Yes.’
He fetched a fresh jar and broached it, and they drank in continued silence for a moment longer; but both were tired of it now.
‘I want to tell you about my past,’ said Senseneb. ‘I do not need to hear yours in return, though I would like to.’
‘I will tell you everything. There is nothing particularly evil, daring or adventurous in it, though. It has been part battle, part assault course, like everyone else’s.’
Senseneb smiled. ‘I like your house.’
‘You honour it.’
She sighed, already thinking that it would be good to live with him; but unsure if there would ever be a time when they could.
‘If we are to know each other properly, you must also know my past,’ she insisted. ‘My parents are now both dead; but there is nothing I have to say to harm their reputations here or in the Fields of Aarru.’ As she spoke she looked into the shadows of the room, as if seeking Horaha’s Ba there, perched on a shelf or clinging bat-like to the wall near the ceiling, listening to his orphan daughter. She knew that he had liked Huy.
‘I am twenty-eight,’ she said, looking at the lamp. ‘My husband sent me back to my parents because I was barren. But that was not the real reason. I had slept with another man; I had slept with several others.’
She looked at Huy’s face; but if it was wearing any expression at all that she could read, it was one of kindness.
‘I am not barren. We never made love. We slept first with our backs turned to one another, then in separate beds, and at last in separate rooms. But I had a need. And it was not a marriage.’
‘When did it end?’
‘Two years ago. But it lasted seven.’
‘That is long.’
She smiled. ‘I have become a middle-aged woman.’
‘No.’
‘Do you have children?’
‘I have a boy. Heby. But it is long since I have seen him.’ They were silent once more, but it was a different kind of silence now.
‘Have you thought about what you will do?’ asked Huy.
It might depend on you, said her heart, but her voice replied, ‘No. There is the house in Napata, in the south, which my father has left me. Perhaps I will go there. I have had enough of this city.’
Huy nodded. Outside the window the waning moon filled the street with grey light. Some small animal, probably a dog, clicked by, its paws tapping out a regular rhythm on the hard ground. Nothing else stirred.
‘What will you do in Napata?’
Senseneb smiled. ‘I may be a doctor there. I am not leaving all my father’s drugs and instruments and papers for his successor.’ Her voice became hard, and her eyes turned inwards.
‘Why? Who is he?’
‘Merinakhte.’
Huy paused before speaking again, trying to read her face. She let him do it, pretending to study the little statue of Bes which stood guard on a shelf. ‘Will you help me?’
She turned her eyes to his. ‘How?’
‘I must get the queen away from here.’
She reached out her hands to him and he took them.
‘Yes, I will help you. I will live and die for you.’
‘And I for you.’
A ferry had crossed between them. They talked more; he told her about Nehesy, about Ay. He told her almost all that he had discovered, but at the back of his heart he knew that from now on they would have to be careful. He could not allow himself to imagine what would happen if Kenamun found out that she knew him. Huy told her about his life, a
nd the City of the Horizon, and how above all he wanted to be a scribe again, and about Heby, and how he still missed him, even though he had no idea what his son must look like now.
When later they made love, it was no longer as strangers.
Nezemmut had gone to her cold bed long ago, though not without an assurance from her husband that he would visit her later, for the getting of an heir formed an important part of his busy schedule. In another part of the palace, in a large dark room overlooking the river on one side and the city to the north on the other, General Horemheb sat crouched at a black wood table on whose surface a number of scrolls were scattered.
Many were old, plundered long since from the archive at the City of the Horizon, because Horemheb was tracing his lineage. Before long, he thought, a time would come when his own historian would have to rewrite the annals of the Black Land in such a way as to make him the direct heir and successor of Nebmare Amenophis. Thus the difficult years of Akhenaten and his immediate successors would be erased for posterity, and even his own wife would cease to exist in the records. By then, if the gods were good, she would have served her purpose. For the moment, however, it was too soon to strike for the final goal. Patience had always been Horemheb’s great ally; and he would not abandon his faith in it now, though age and time were not patient, and were beginning to nudge him.
For weeks he had not left the palace, brooding over the past, imagining the future, and leaving his men to control the present.
The reports he received were good, and he had no reason to think that their work was patchy. His belief in his own destiny had grown so hard that he could not imagine anything with the power to break it.
Kenamun stood near the table, half in the light cast by the lamps and half out of it. He bit his lip in impatience as he waited for his master to come down from the sky. They had got nothing out of Nehesy before they had killed him, and yet Horemheb’s reaction to this news - Kenamun’s chief dread -had been mild. Knowing the general’s aversion to unnecessary torture, he had played down that part of the interrogation. In fear of betrayal, he had had the Medjay sergeant who had been present transferred to the Northern Capital — a move to which the sergeant himself had no objection. The vizir there was a quiet man who obeyed orders from the south. The place was no centre of power but merely the northern arm of the administration. It was a peaceful town, mainly concerned with trade and troop movements to and from the Delta.