City of the Sea

by Anton Gill

  He wondered if Meten suffered because Meritre was gone. He thought it unlikely that his late wife enjoyed even that dignity. He watched as Meten moved into the sunlight. Nofretka had disappeared. There was a smirk on Meten’s face. Duaf drew back. His vision was dim. He made his way to his work table, and summoned a house servant to fetch his scribe. He would give Meten work - plenty of work. Meten was as deeply involved in the conspiracy as anyone. Duaf shuffled papers, forced himself to read, to make sense of the figures lined up in neat rows of red and black ink before his dancing eyes. Anything to cool his scalding heart.

  *

  Huy could not believe that ten days – a whole week – had passed since he had arrived in the city. He found that he was not getting used to it, and that his desire to leave it was undiminished. There were consolations: he discovered that he missed Senseneb – though how far this was simply a case of comparisons – finding her company better than that offered here – he did not inquire too deeply within himself. The other consolation was that the more he saw of Aahmes – they had had three conversations, with dwindling hope on both sides, about the whereabouts of their son – the less he regretted their divorce. When he had first seen her again, there had been something familiar and reassuring about her which, with all the uncertainties in his life, he had welcomed. Now he realised what a self-indulgence that welcome had been – a kind of giving-in to the past. In truth he had to accept his own rootlessness. What he could cling to was his pursuit of an answer to what had happened to Heby, what had happened to Ipur. He was not sure that he would like the answers when he found them, but finding them was all he had. A corner of his heart acknowledged that the quest for these little answers simply put off the real quest in his life – the quest to retrieve the truth of his own heart. Huy had, in the turmoil of the years, lost himself, lost all direction, like a rudderless ship on the River, and he could no longer cling to temporary beliefs and temporary goals. Spars keep a shipwrecked man afloat, but only for a while. Finally he has to reach land if he is to survive.

  He hated the humidity. It was rare, this wet heat. Psaro bathed him, and he changed, four, five times a day, and still it was not enough. His head pounded when he walked and when he lay down to rest in the unrelieved nights. But he continued his search. He knew he could not leave until something had been resolved, but he also knew that by now he was going on as much for himself as for anyone. He had never known Ipur, and what he had learnt about the man he did not like. And Heby? He had known a small child, fourteen years earlier. Heby, too, was an abstraction – someone who did not really exist – a quarry in a hunt – someone who, even if found alive, might not exist. Certainly the Heby he would finally encounter – if he ever did – would not be the Heby he saw in his heart.

  He felt uncomfortable at the visit he was now making. He felt uncomfortable that he had virtually had to request Senofer’s permission to make it. As if to encourage himself, he held the udjat amulet he wore around his neck tightly between the first finger and thumb of his left hand. His father, long dead, had given him the amulet. It was worn smooth. It had protected five generations of his family.

  Senofer had told Huy that his mother, Ipur’s widow, would be no help to him, that she was paralyzed with grief at the death of her husband. That meant that she was either a very weak woman, or a good actress. Perhaps a combination of the two.

  He had come here alone, walking despite the heat, trying to pace himself so as not to sweat too much. He had wanted to think, but physical discomfort had driven all constructive thoughts from his heart. The grinding noise of the sea, like the breathing of Apophis, massive, regular, inexorable, played on his nerves like needles. Its rhythm marked the hideous passing of time. He tried to concentrate on the task before him, but he was tired, and sweat ran from his forehead into his eyes.

  At length he reached the house. It was a tall building, set back slightly from the road, but having no garden in front of it. The facade was newly-painted, and gleamed in contrast to its neighbours, peeling and sea-stained. The door was freshly varnished, and its bronze fittings shone harshly in the sun. Before the door he hesitated. But he knew that he was expected – was that a disadvantage? – and that there was no profit in delaying, or turning away, now.

  He raised his stick and knocked lightly on the door. Instead of a doorkeeper, the person who opened it was a plain young woman who silently ushered him into a dark, cool hall. In the gloom he could see the images of the household gods staring balefully down at him from their perches. He followed the woman through a narrow corridor which snaked its way through the depth of the house to open onto a long room whose north wall was dominated by a broad arch opening onto a terrace which overlooked the sea. The churning, sunspangled green vista darted and plunged before Huy’s eyes, hurting them after the darkness of the house. On a blackwood table, cracked and dried in the sea air, a jug of wine and a golden platter of white bread and dates were laid out. A tall woman rose to greet him.

  He took her hand, feeling its moisture and its flaccid muscles, and inclined his head. Iutenheb had a long face, with the aquiline nose and broad lips which Huy recognised from her son Senofer. The eyes were set wide apart and held a mournful, vacant expression. The wig was expensive, braided with gold and silver beads, and made of two colours of hair, though it sat slightly awry on her head. She wore a long plain dress of aquamarine, with a broad golden collar of simple design. Her ears, hands and arms were bare of jewellery. The arms hung limply and Huy noticed a dew of sweat on her shoulders. The eyes watched him all the time.

  She had composed her features into an expression of resigned welcome. Huy could tell that she hoped the interview would be a short one.

  He hoped so too.

  They exchanged courtesies, each regretting the other’s loss politely. When Huy expressed the hope that she would find consolation for her husband’s death in her sons, he noticed her expression cloud. She answered him disjointedly. She poured wine and drained her cup, waiting impatiently while he finished his so that she could refill both. The house-servant who had been in attendance in the room when he arrived had been sent away with the woman who had answered the door.

  ‘Company irritates me,’ she explained.

  ‘Lady Iutenheb, I will impose mine on you only for as long as is necessary.’

  She waved a long, bony hand. ‘At least you are fresh. You are from somewhere. I did not think I would end here. I once lived in the Southern Capital. But our dreams leave us almost before our looks.’ She gave him a wan smile. ‘Forgive me. That sounds as if I were encouraging compliments.’

  ‘You have no need of them.’

  She looked at him carefully. ‘Are you a courtier?’

  ‘No. You know who I am.’

  ‘Yes.’ She sighed, filled with lassitude again. ‘Kamose wants you to find out who killed Ipur. I am sure you would far rather spend all your time looking for your son.’

  ‘I must do my duty. I am here on sufferance from the king.’

  ‘Indeed you are. We are all here on sufferance from somebody.’ She looked at him, gauging his expression, then the ghost of a smile appeared on her lips, transforming her face into that of an intelligent, attractive woman; one who once had had a keen sense of irony – that person was not quite dead; but it was clear that most of the life had been squeezed out of her.

  ‘I will help you as best I can by being as frank as I can,’ she said. ‘I can see from your looks that you are already beginning to answer several questions about me for yourself. Let me anticipate you.’ She seemed to have collected herself within herself. With a graceful movement of an arm she motioned him to be seated and then rang a minute bell, upon which the female house-servant reappeared and poured wine, offered food. The wine was cold and sharp.

  ‘From Kharga,’ said Iutenheb. ‘Where I come from. Where I am returning.’

  Huy looked at her interrogatively.

  ‘There is nothing to hold me here, now that my husband is dead.’
/>
  ‘What of your sons?’

  She looked at him as if she did not deem the question worth answering, but after reflection she said. ‘I think they will be able to manage without me. They have rarely needed me. Not since childhood, and even then they were taken away from me after three cycles of the seasons. At least I can console myself with the thought that the way they have turned out is not entirely my fault.’

  ‘What is wrong with them?’

  ‘You are an intelligent man, Chief Scribe Huy. You surely do not need me to elaborate. Besides, it is unseemly in a mother to do down her children.’

  She paused to drink, her gestures lazy, but sustaining the elegance that had come into her since she had decided to like Huy. Her look, when she turned her eye on him again, was almost flirtatious. ‘You are a well-made man, Huy. I have spent my life with a spindle.’

  Huy inclined his head, but he was uneasy. ‘You do me too much honour; and your husband too little.’

  She smiled. ‘No-one could do Ipur too little honour.’

  ‘Yet you spent long with him.’

  She sighed. ‘Too long. Twenty-five years. And I was a rich woman. My parents were rich. My father owns vineyards. I brought money to Ipur.’

  ‘Why did you stay?’

  She gave him a weary glance, but could not hold his eye. ‘Habit. Laziness. Cowardice. Time passed.’

  ‘But now you are free.’

  ‘Yes. But who will have me? I am a husk.’

  ‘Nonsense!’

  ‘Would you have me?’

  Huy was taken aback at the question. ‘I am married.’

  ‘Ah.’ She turned to her wine and took another delicate sip. ‘For years I wanted to leave, and felt guilty at wanting to. I once encountered a story about a battle and one of the generals in it said, talking of tactics, better a mistake than hesitation, because you can always regain territory; but the one thing you cannot reconquer is time. I carried that thought in my heart for years, though I did not take the advice. But the gods have taken pity on me at last.’

  ‘Who is your god?’

  She was surprised at the question, but her expression quickly cleared. ‘Seshat, now. The goddess of writing. You should be pleased. Before, I worshipped the Aten.’

  ‘You can tell me that?’

  She made a small gesture of impatience. ‘Come, I know your background. It is for form’s sake that the Aten is still outlawed. No-one cares any more. The cult is dead. Driven into the desert.’

  ‘The desert is not dead.’

  She smiled archly. ‘Careful Huy. That is seditious talk. I could still report you.’

  ‘Did you know Heby?’

  ‘Slightly. For a time he seemed very friendly with my sons, but they were men, they met by themselves.’

  ‘Did Heby know Ipur?’

  ‘As a man knows his friends’ father. I do not think they exchanged more than formal views.’

  Huy gestured about the room. ‘Have you lived here long?’

  ‘Since my husband’s death. After it, my sons took over our house with their presence. But it had never been a home to me. This place really is mine. I am not selling it when I go to Kharga. The servants will stay here. I would like to think that I might return one day, that I have not been beaten by this city. Though I doubt if I will, because I expect I have. You see? I at least continue to delude myself. Perhaps delusion is all I have left.’

  He sat back, feeling curiously at ease with her. The room they were in was plain – there was no frieze – but there were green plants in plenty, and well-tended. Senseneb would have approved. The furniture, too, was simple but expensive, made of good wood, somewhat ruined by the sea air, but sturdy still. Iutenheb’s face was lined, weathered, engraved with a thousand tiny wrinkles, which made her look older than she must have been and at the same time disguised her age. She was probably the same age as Huy.

  ‘Why did you marry a priest?’

  ‘I don’t know. There is something repulsive about a man who is shaved clean of hair all over his body. Ipur had himself shaved twice a day. Even when we still shared a bed, this ritual intervened between retiring and sleeping. My husband never committed a single spontaneous action. His life flowed along lines where each moment of the day was an ordered article, set in its place in advance, to be encountered without fear or surprise when it came.’ She looked at him, gesturing for the house-servant to pour more wine. ‘I am not answering your question. He was intelligent, he had prospects. His family was a good one. I had completed my education in the Southern Capital – my father sent me to learn writing and mathematics there because I was his only child and would inherit the vineyards.’

  ‘And still will.’

  ‘Oh yes,’ she replied drily. ‘You may be sure of that.’

  Huy wondered, but did not ask, whether in turn Senofer and Meten would get them. It did not seem like a foregone conclusion.

  ‘Were you attracted to him when you first met?’

  ‘I suppose I was. We produced two sons. I have slept with nobody but him. That is something I do regret.’

  Huy ignored the remark. ‘Are you sad that he is dead?’

  ‘Does it sound as if I am?’ She leant forward to take food, but thought better of it and abandoned the movement halfway, resting her white arm on the black arm of the chair. Huy saw where the flesh gave way to the wood. ‘I am sad that I did not leave him. I am sad that I still lived with him after I had learnt what he had become. That is a nightmare I will always live with.’

  ‘What had he become?’

  ‘A monster. It was not always like that. For the first year, perhaps two years, of our marriage we were happy. He was attentive. He was not interested in sex, but I was in love, I suppose, and I told myself he would overcome what I thought was shyness and became a full man to me in every sense. But it was not shyness. There was nothing there. You cannot imagine how many years it took me to find that out, and how many more to accept it.’

  Huy could not, for the moment, find words to reply to her. He was calculating, from the ages of her sons, how many years she had endured. Had they passed, as his long years had done, as unremarked as the flow of the River, except when you realised with a shock that they had passed? A man gets used even to his own unhappiness, and comes to an accommodation with it. It becomes so much a part of his life that it sits within him; he would be ill at ease without it; its familiarity comforts him. Did she know that feeling? He suspected that she must do. But he also suspected that he had been wrong about her. Deep within her, the embers of her real self, though buried under cold ash, still contained enough heat to rekindle a fire.

  ‘What kind of monster was he?’

  She looked at him interrogatively, as if her thoughts had wandered elsewhere in the silence.

  ‘You said he was a monster,’ repeated Huy. Her eyes remained vague. Perhaps it had just been a figure of speech – she had meant nothing more by it than that they had been ill-matched. Not that that necessarily devalued the description. Did the mass of the people experience such social agony? Or was it education that brought suffering of this sort in its wake? Was suffering, was grief, at least of this kind, a form of indulgence after all?

  ‘Yes,’ she said, weighing her words, and still paying out her time, as if she was as yet still undecided about how much to reveal to the scribe. There remained perhaps a certain loyalty to her husband, or to herself, or to the bond that had made them a couple and bestowed respectability and position upon them, which, she might feel, she was now about to betray, if not destroy, by taking this stranger into her confidence. Huy knew what she was thinking. It is the easiest thing in the world to be disloyal to oneself in order to be comfortable. The mistake is in thinking that the comfort thus bought is in any way real; it is, thought Huy, comfort in the same measure as taking powdered ibis feather to induce sleep: sleep is sometimes bought by this method, but how real is a sleep that must be summoned, rather than a sleep which comes as naturally as the night whic
h cloaks it? Waking to dawn after such sleep is waking refreshed, even optimistic. Otherwise it is to the grey and weary realisation that you have only evaded your troubles for a few hours: you wake to find them still there, standing by your bedside, waiting to reoccupy you. Nothing tires a man more than misery, and there is no misery more tiring than that which is self-made, inflicted on oneself and those one loves – or wants to love.

  ‘I am leaving for Kharga soon,’ said Iutenheb, half to herself. ‘It will not matter if I tell you. I will be away from the consequences of what I say. If there are any. But I would ask you not to reveal that it was I who told you the things which you are about to hear.’

  Huy bowed, wondering to himself how, if he were to speak of matters of such apparent intimacy to any third party, they would imagine he came by such information, except through her. But of these objections he did not speak. He composed his face into its most sympathetic, doctorly, expression, and folded his hands in his lap, leaning forward slightly: everybody’s friend, the longed-for confidant.

  ‘Ipur was a rigid man: he liked his life to run along the narrow track imposed by the priesthood, but he reckoned without the Seth within him,’ began Iutenheb. Although he looked down, only occasionally glancing at her, Huy felt her eyes steadily upon him. ‘Our sons were born in the early days of our marriage. I think even their arrival was part of a plan he had in his heart. There had to be two: the second to take over if the first died. I was always surprised that he did not want two daughters as well, but the sex of our children is in the hands of Hathor and Hekmet the shaper-in-the-birth-cave, and perhaps Ipur could not bring himself to couple with me for any longer than he decided was strictly necessary. However it may be, after the healers announced that Meten was growing inside me, he left my bed. I had thought that he would come back to it after Meten’s birth, but even when I had returned from the birth-arbour he kept to his own room. He was always polite, and he made sure his family had everything it could wish for. We had standing in the town and we went everywhere together, a loving family in public; but at home love was the one thing we lacked. I think I would have accepted anger, infidelity, ordinary selfishness, if I could have been hugged once in a while, cuddled, spoken to softly. I was alone in my own home. We were two strangers living side-by-side with our children, neither having the confidence to get out. It is only since my husband’s death that a desperate feeling of solitude has left me. I am sorry that he died so cruelly; but I am grateful that he is dead. I only wish that I had not needed so drastic a means of release.’