by Anton Gill
‘Urgently,’ replied Psaro. ‘And secretly.’ His eyes shone.
‘Then we had better go there now,’ said Huy.
‘Not at her house,’ said Psaro, who had clearly been well briefed by whomever had delivered the message. ‘I have been told where we must go.’
‘Then I will follow you,’ said Huy. He wondered if they themselves would be followed. ‘We had better keep our eyes open.’
Psaro grinned. ‘With your permission, Deputy Chief Scribe Huy, I have taken note of that. Parenefer will watch for anyone following us.’
‘Parenefer?’
‘Yes. The man is worthy of greater trust than perhaps we gave him credit for.’
Huy grunted. He knew that Psaro only addressed him by his formal title when he knew that he was sailing close to the wind. And Huy didn’t want to signal too much approval. Psaro was his body-servant, not his associate.
‘Was this well done?’ persisted Psaro.
‘Yes.’
Psaro grinned.
They set off down the dusty street that led south, bathed red in the late sun, the street loud with carousers, for the news of the war’s end was being celebrated still, and the wine shops stayed open during the whole of the Seqtet boat’s voyage, even during the Hour of Sleep. Conscripted soldiers held each other up, singing, soon to be soldiers no more, come home ready to work their farms again, to prepare them for the next Flood. Horemheb’s regular troops, Huy knew, remained in the garrison. There would be no return to the land for them.
Dodging the revellers, Huy and Psaro dived down a narrow street which led off the main boulevard and followed its twisting course between high blank white walls, stumbling over stones, for the floor of the street was as uncared for as a dried up river bed, until it ended in a small square. They had already crossed three such squares, each with its own wine shop, eating house and selection of market stalls. From each other narrow roads had snaked, and after each they had paused in the shadow of a doorway, but had surprised no follower. Perhaps Huy had been overly cautious. Perhaps Parenefer had done his job. There was no time to reflect on such things now.
At the last square they stopped again. Psaro cast about among the stallholders, finally selecting a woman selling earthenware jugs and crude painted glass from the Land of the Two Rivers. A mangy ape half-heartedly guarded the stall, but it was more interested in a small basket of dried dates which had been set down for it, and into which it dipped, after reflection, an occasional fastidious paw. He crossed over to her, sidestepping two or three drunken soldiers who had drifted this far south in the town, and exchanged a brief word or two. He glanced at Huy who took the instruction in his eye and followed him to a grimy building with a recessed entrance between two blind columns which had once been grand. They climbed to the second floor.
‘If we were followed, they will still not know whom we are visiting.’
‘They will guess,’ said Huy. ‘If they don’t take that stallholder and squeeze the information out of her.’
‘We were not followed,’ said Psaro. ‘Trust Parenefer.’
‘Why?’ asked Huy.
Psaro knocked on a door black and hard as metal with age. Nofretka herself opened it.
They found themselves in a large plain room furnished only with a simple table and two stools. Another door led to somewhere beyond it and stood slightly ajar. On the table were a flask of wine and four or five cups. There was also a wooden dish of fresh figs, and a plate of ordinary wheat bread. Huy saw that two of the cups contained wine.
‘Thank you for coming,’ said Nofretka.
‘This is a great risk,’ said Huy. ‘What is your need for secrecy?’
‘You will see,’ replied the girl. ‘Will you take wine?’
‘Yes.’
Psaro moved forward to pour it, refusing any for himself. He hesitated, seeing the two full cups, but as Nofretka took one, he poured a fresh measure for Huy.
‘There is much to tell you, and there is little time,’ she said, holding her wine cup close to her and moving to stand close to the window. ‘I am assuming that I have your trust.’
‘Yes,’ said Huy, wondering why she should find it necessary to ask such a question.
‘Good. The first thing you must know is what kind of man Ipur was. I knew him all my life. He was a close business associate of my father. I do not know if they were also friends, but neither of them was a man to whom friendship meant much. Alliances were what they understood, as stepping stones to wealth and power. Even when I was a child I understood that. I was never able to see what the attraction of those things were. You saw my father. Was his the face of a happy or even a contented man? His stomach rotted inside him because he worried about all that he had and all that he might yet gain. His death has moved no-one, changed nothing. His own passage from the east to the west has affected no-one but himself. His monument is built of nothing but personal gain; it is a monument built on sand.’
‘You were telling me about Ipur,’ said Huy, who was thinking that Nofretka, after all, was about to inherit all the wealth she apparently so despised. But perhaps it was not the wealth, but the spirit in which it had been amassed, that appalled her.
‘Do not interrupt me again, Scribe Huy,’ said the girl. ‘It is hard to tell anyone what I must, let alone a stranger; but you are not as much of a stranger as you may think, and you are more closely involved with my story than you may wish to be.’ She seemed to become aware of the cup in her hands for the first time, and set it down impatiently. ‘Ipur was my first lover,’ she said. Into the silence that followed she added. ‘My only one, until recently. He was not welcome. I did not understand what he was doing. In my memory the first caresses were kind, almost flattering, if a child can understand such a thing. I felt reassured by him. I even liked his smell.’ She broke off, looking out of the window, though its view was of nothing but the peeling wall opposite.
‘But then he became more insistent, demanded more. I was scared. His sons were my playmates. He told me what demons did to little girls who refused to honour the wishes of their elders. In the end he became my lover. It lasted from my fifth birthday to my seventh. Then he lost interest. Either that or he became scared himself.’
‘Did you speak to your parents?’
‘I couldn’t. I felt I was in league with him, that I was betraying them. He told me my father depended on him for his livelihood. How could I know that was not true?’
‘What about your mother?’
Nofretka looked at him coldly. ‘My mother was learning to live alone. My father was blind to anything but his work room and the ships that came laden from the south, exchanging their cargoes with the ships that came laden from the Great Green.’
There was silence in the room. Huy said, finally, ‘Where do you think your mother is now?’
‘I think she is dead,’ replied Nofretka. ‘I have thought about it now hard and long. She would never have run away. I wished it for her, but she did not have the spirit for such a great adventure. Death would have been easier to accept than the challenge of the unknown here. And yet she risked much. She knew that Duaf looked on her as a possession; and he was jealous of everything he possessed. He was not a man to make loans; he was not a man to share.’
‘Would any man share his wife?’ snapped Huy.
‘It is not as simple as that,’ she replied disdainfully. ‘You are too literal. He owned my mother and he took that ownership to be the same as love. She had the means but not the stomach to escape him. So she took a more dangerous course: she deceived him. And now she is dead.’
‘Who was her lover?’
‘Meten. The man my father had singled out for marriage to me. At least his death has brought me a reprieve from that. Not that Meten seems to have realised as much.’
‘Did your father suspect him?’
‘No. He suspected your son.’
Huy involuntarily exchanged a look with Psaro. ‘Is that why Heby has disappeared?’
&nb
sp; ‘Heby has not disappeared.’
Huy passed a hand over his face. He took the buckle out of the purse on his kilt belt. ‘Psaro found this in the alley near where his mother thought she saw him. Is he in the city?’
‘Yes.’
‘Have you any proof?’
‘Yes,’ she smiled. It was a curiously warm smile – almost a smile of relief.
‘What is it?’ asked Huy. For some reason his heart was in his mouth.
‘He is here.’
‘Where?’
‘In the next room.’
Huy turned to the partially open door. His head was pounding. Among the confused thoughts that came to him was one that suggested that the girl was mad, that in some way all that she had told him was an invention and that he had been led into a trap. He even felt for the small flat-bladed bronze knife with the bone haft he carried at his back. It was old and worn, but it was sharper than flint and he knew how to use it. He dared not look at Psaro, but he could imagine the man’s reaction was no less astonished than his own. He looked at the buckle he had placed on the table. It seemed larger than it was. Images of the room flocked to his eye like the pictures in a dream. He saw himself as an actor in some crude melodrama like the ones the travelling players put on in the villages downriver from the decks of their gaudy barges. For some reason he found himself having to fight down a kind of fury. Heby had thought this up. Heby had led him to this meeting by the nose. His son had already seen him, watching silently through the crack in the door. He even had that advantage over him. He remembered tiny, strong arms clasped round his neck. The warmth of a little cheek against his. Soft hair that tickled as the child nuzzled his father. He remembered so well that he could feel them. Now it was not only fury he had to fight, but tears. And he was scared. But there was one last thing he could do, one last initiative he could take, even at the risk of making a fool of himself. After all, if it was an ambush, he would go down fighting; and Psaro was armed, and stronger and younger than Huy. Huy almost wished that it would be an ambush. He almost wished that he would die.
‘Heby!’ he cried. ‘Come out, if it is you. I am your father. I am your Horus-Protector-by-Blood. You must not make a mockery of me.’
Heby pushed the door open, and stepped into the room.
Chapter Nine
Once again it seemed to Huy that he was entering a dream. He was glad Psaro was there. He felt closer to his body-servant than he did to anyone else in the world at that moment.
He didn’t know what he had expected, but he tried to keep his expression veiled. Perhaps to his disappointment, it was not hard to conceal his feelings, though the blood continued to pound in his head and his stomach was hollow: in place of what he had expected – a rush of affection, a sense of disappointment, simple fear, even aggression – his heart told him nothing.
Perhaps Heby sensed something of this, for he only held his father’s eyes for a moment with his own before dropping his gaze, perhaps, or did Huy imagine it, with disappointment in his face. He glanced at Psaro and then his look settled on Nofretka. He went over to her and took her hand. There was something in the way that he did it which Huy did not like: what was it Nofretka had said about her own father confusing ownership with love?
Heby turned again to face his father. Huy returned his look with a detachment of feeling which surprised him. But he knew that he was nervous. More so than his son. He reminded himself that he had done all he could after he and Aahmes had parted: he had nothing to feel guilty about. Or had he?
Aahmes had spoken the truth: Heby had inherited Huy’s build. He was in truth taller, but his body was powerful and his muscles taut. He wore a heavy linen kilt with a plain leather belt and apron, and leather sandals that were of fine quality and certainly not military issue. Two broad plain gold bands covered his wrists, and he wore a broad gold and turquoise collar. Hardly the apparel of a deserter, or even that of a man forced to live in hiding. If he was nothing else, thought Huy, Heby was clever. His face was stronger than Huy’s, with firmer features that reminded the scribe of his own father: a firm chin below full but determined lips; a prominent but cleanly-sculpted nose, and grey eyes set a little too widely apart below a clear suntanned brow. He wore his own hair, long, fine and black, which hung in a severe military cut to his shoulders. The cast of his face was that of a much older man’s.
Squeezing Nofretka’s hand, he released it and took two hesitant steps towards Huy.
‘Father,’ he said, meeting the scribe’s eyes firmly at last.
‘Heby. You know how to make an entrance. I have never had much talent for drama.’
‘It was difficult to meet you other than by such an arrangement. And I was impatient to meet you.’
‘Yet you have curbed your impatience successfully until now. I have been here for some time seeking you.’
‘Yes.’
An awkward silence followed. Each man knew that he was addressing a stranger. If it were not for the tie of blood, which in itself refused to work any magic, they would have been nothing to one another. Were they not, after all, nothing to one another, in truth?
‘You are a deserter,’ said Huy, though he wished that his voice did not sound so harsh. Had he not deserted Heby?
‘In appearance only,’ replied Heby. ‘I have nothing to repent. I am not a coward.’
‘Yet you left your unit.’
‘Yes. But there was business here to be attended to which would not await my return from action. The war is over now; when I was ordered to leave, my presence or absence – the presence or absence of one charioteer – would have made no difference to the outcome. Whereas here it would have been crucial.’
‘It was you that Aahmes saw?’
‘Yes.’
‘Why did you do that? Why did you go to see her and not speak to her?’
Heby lowered his eyes. ‘I had to reassure her somehow. She has misfortunes enough.’
‘She might have thought you were a ghost.’
‘That is why I left the buckle. I knew you would find it. I had heard of your work after the fall of the Great Criminal.’
‘Psaro found the buckle. It could have belonged to any soldier.’
Heby was silent.
‘Nevertheless, it was found, and I was sure somehow that you were here.’ Huy spoke more gently and was surprised to find within himself that he was trembling. This was, after all, his son. The little boy whose ghost had clung to him so often in his dreams, the part of him he had never known. He knew that what he wanted to do most was the thing he found himself least able to do: to go forward and embrace his son.
But many questions stopped him. Something hard too, perhaps, in Heby’s eyes. They had not yet cleared enough ground to embrace.
‘There is much to tell you, father,’ said the young man, and Huy noticed how he stumbled over the word father. ‘But I have not been a coward and I have not forgotten the interests of my family. Indeed, it was Menuhotep’s misfortune that fired my plan to begin with.’
‘Where have you been? How have you lived?’
Heby smiled. ‘They told me you were a man of many questions. But I will explain everything now. It is a long story. Perhaps you would care to sit down, and take wine.’
‘I will take no more,’ said Huy; but he did sit on one of the stools and rested his left arm on the table. Heby remained where he was, standing like a soldier about to deliver a report. Nofretka, after a glance at him, turned to the window and looked out. Psaro, looking from one to the other, unsure of his role in this and given no clue, remained by the door.
‘Very well,’ said Huy. ‘I am listening.’
‘I have been living in a room in the harbour quarter where no-one asks questions and no-one bothers about anyone else. I saw you looking at the way I am dressed today. This was as a mark of respect to you. I would not, until now, have wanted to risk being noticed. But I am well protected. My ally is Cheruiri. I know I can trust him, though he has never known my lodgings. If
they had caught him and tortured him, I would not have wanted him to have information useful to them.’
Huy contented himself for the moment with not asking who ‘they’ were, and said instead: ‘Why does he help you?’ He reflected that Heby spoke like a soldier in battle, like a man behind enemy lines.
‘Because he believes in what I believe. Because he is tired of the dominance of corruption in this town.’
Huy thought about Cheruiri’s request to leave for the Southern Capital with him. Had the man been planning a bolthole in case Heby’s plans went wrong? He decided to say nothing about it now. Whatever Cheruiri was considering, he had certainly kept Heby’s whereabouts and even presence to himself.
‘What corruption?’
Heby’s eyes darkened. ‘Pharaoh Ay didn’t simply give you leave of absence to come and look for me. His arm is long. His look is deep. But the hole here is too dark for him to see into, and he would not wish to reach his arm into an unknown space – what might be lurking within it to bite him? So he sent you.’
‘You are well informed. But I have seen nothing here to alarm him.’ Huy thought back to the foreign ship he had seen at the military jetty when he had first visited Userhet. He hoped that, if he had been shadowed here, Parenefer would have done his work well. But the outcome of this was still a secret held by the gods.
‘I think you are pretending to be less clever than you are. I know that Kamose asked you to find Ipur’s killers.’
‘Khabiri terrorists. How they got away with it I don’t understand.’
Heby made a gesture of impatience. ‘You know, you must know – and if you do not, then you must prepare yourself to accept – that Ipur’s death was arranged by me. It was not Khabiri who did it, but Alasan seamen. The punishment was fitting. They were men who had worked for Ipur and the others in taking the prisoners-of-war as slaves to their own country.’
‘But why would they kill Ipur?’