“Something else is troubling you,” Khaemwaset insisted. “I will cast the horoscopes for Phamenoth, I promise, but will you not talk to me, Hori? Let me help you.”
Now Hori’s glance came to rest on his father and he smiled. “There is nothing wrong believe me, Prince. I will take your advice and fast. I think that Antef and I have been imbibing too freely, eating too recklessly and falling into bed too often. with the dawn.”
Khaemwaset, remembering his moment of unease on Tbubui’s path the previous night, shivered a little. “Antef is due to return today.”
“Yes.” Hori pulled himself straighter. He had not yet been painted and Khaemwaset was relieved to see that already some colour was flushing his cheeks and his eyes were regaining their translucent glitter. “Father, have you taken another look at the scroll yet?”
Khaemwaset did not need to ask which scroll. For the past three months there had only been one scroll, throbbing on the edge of his consciousness like a tooth beginning to rot. “No I have not,” he answered. “Why do you ask?”
Hori’s eyes once more left his and were fastened on the far wall. “Because yesterday I paid a visit to Tbubui. I had hoped to see Sisenet but he was not at home. He is an erudite man and I thought I might discuss the tomb with him again.”
A formless anxiety blended with jealousy shook Khaemwaset. “You spent time with Tbubui?” he asked sharply. “You went there without telling me? You were alone with her?”
Hori blinked. “Yes. We think that it would help to have the scroll deciphered. She offered her brother’s assistance. She told me that he has had some success in translating ancient writings and, with your permission, I would like to invite him here to inspect it.”
“She is coming here this afternoon to visit Nubnofret,” Khaemwaset said with a curious reluctance. “I will speak to her about it then. I suppose that Sisenet can do the scroll no harm.” But will it do him harm? came the irrational thought.
“Coming today?” Hori exclaimed. “How do you know? She said nothing of it to me yesterday.”
Something is definitely straining Hori, Khaemwaset thought. I wonder what it is.” Your mother keeps expressing a wish to see her again and so I sent a message to her house in the evening,” Khaemwaset explained. “She did not reply, therefore she is coming.” I have never lied to my son before, he thought gloomily, but I have the feeling that it will not be the last time. Is he, in his deliberate silence, lying to me by omission?
“Oh,” was all Hori said. “In that case I will not go out today. The scroll interests me greatly.” He struggled out of the chair, suddenly kissed his father in an uncharacteristic, swift gesture and hobbled out of the room.
Tbubui arrived just after the noon sleep, when the greatest heat of the day still permeated the house. Khaemwaset had told a delighted Nubnofret that she was coming specifically to spend an hour or two in gossip; therefore it was Wernuro, Nubnofret’s female servant and companion, who waited at the watersteps to greet and escort her.
Nubnofret had just risen when her guest was announced and was sitting at her cosmetic table, mirror in hand, naked but for a piece of thin linen tied loosely about her waist. Her cosmetician was touching up her kohl but at her word he immediately withdrew. Nubnofret swept to embrace her guest.
“Tbubui, how lovely that you decided to come and see me,” she exclaimed, enveloping the other woman in perfumed musk. “I knew that we would become friends. It is important to have friends, is it not, when one is married to a man who in turn is married to his many duties? Come. Sit down. Forgive my unmade couch, but I have only been out of it a short while.” She sighed. “The heat is becoming unbearable and it does make my eyelids swell so. I must say that you look very fresh!”
Tbubui had not taken the chair. She had settled herself cross-legged on the couch, pillows at her back. Nubnofret noted that today she had abandoned the very old-fashioned tight sheaths she usually wore and was dressed in a charming, ankle-length white gown gathered into an embroidered yellow yoke high on her neck. The garment was sleeveless and looked very cool. A band of gold gripped her upper arm and long gold droplets swung from her ears. Though she was finely painted, her hair was wound on top of her head and completely unadorned. She wriggled into her position and smiled brightly at Nubnofret.
“I like the heat,” she said. “I sleep well in it, Highness, though I am not silly enough to walk out under the sun at this time of year. Would your Highness like to join me on the couch?” Nubnofret collapsed onto it with a sigh and lay on her side, propping up her head with its tumble of curls on one hand.
“Wernuro will bring drinks and pastries shortly,” she said. “I decided that we should stay indoors. My bedchamber is a little cooler than the furnace of the garden. There is not even a wind to funnel down the wind-catcher. Tell me, Tbubui, are you becoming acquainted with any of our Memphis nobles? How do you like life here?”
Tbubui laughed. It was a spontaneous, free sound, but Nubnofret thought that it revealed too much the feral quality of her small teeth. “We receive numerous invitations from the inhabitants of the northern suburb,” she said. “I am sure that they are curious about us in a kindly way. But we accept few of them. We like our life to be quiet and well ordered. Memphis is beautiful and exciting, but it is usually enough to know that the pleasures it offers are set out like food on a plate for us to taste when we wish.”
“Do you not find life dull, then?” Nubnofret asked. “Running your household cannot take up too much of your time.”
“No it does not,” Tbubui agreed. “But I am at present dictating a history of Egypt’s relations with the rest of the world during the time of Osiris Hatshepsut, she who gave my ancestor the caravan route from Koptos to the Eastern Sea, and when I am not doing that I am walking the city. I like to walk.”
I am not sure what to make of you, Nubnofret thought with a twinge of envy. Your responsibilities are few, unlike mine. You are free to do exactly as you please. Your roots are deep in Koptos. Then why are you here?
“That is an odd occupation for a woman,” she said, more tartly than she had intended. “Writing history, I mean. As for the walking, I can see what it does for your body. You are tightly made, Tbubui!”
“Highness, you should not underestimate your own beauty,” Tbubui protested, and Nubnofret realized that the woman had correctly interpreted the mild bitterness behind her own words. “Men do not always like a woman’s body to be thin and muscled. Your breasts surely embody the essence of womanhood, being full and so large-nippled. Your hips swell with a most pleasing roundness, and the slight pouch of your belly speaks to a man of fecundity and sensuality. You were made for love.”
Nubnofret was taken aback by Tbubui’s directness and made even more uncomfortable by the minute brush of the woman’s hand on her calf; but the touch was reassuring, a gesture of sympathy. “I wish Khaemwaset agreed with you,” she laughed. “I do not think that he even sees me anymore. To him I am the organizer of his household, the mother of his children and the hostess to his many official guests.” She made a small grimace. “My time is over-full with those duties, so that often even I feel sexless. But that is the way of life, is it not, Tbubui? Romance is for one’s first youth, not for the hard glare of a long marriage.”
“It does not have to be that way,” the other woman responded gently. “Does Khaemwaset seek his concubines sometimes?”
Nubnofret privately considered the question. Was it a breach of good manners or the natural query of one adult woman to another? She decided, watching her guest’s open, warm expression, that it was the latter. She shook her head and pushed her hair, sticky with heat, away from her forehead. “He never goes near them. I myself have not seen them for a long time. They come and go freely from their house, see their relatives, take journeys with permission and sometimes come to help entertain dignitaries. They are lovely women but not, of course, the kind one can befriend. No, Tbubui. If Khaemwaset needs a body he comes to me.”
&nb
sp; “I know that he loves you a great deal,” Tbubui said. “He may appear to take you for granted but he values you highly.”
“That may be,” Nubnofret sighed again, “but his love is for a companion, a friend. It is not the delight one takes in a lover. Still I do not complain. I am happy.” For the first time the words she used in her inward self so often suddenly sounded hollow. Am I indeed happy? she wondered. Am I? “And you,” she countered. “Your husband has been dead for a long time. Are you not lonely?”
“Yes, I am,” Tbubui answered frankly. “But I would rather remain a widow than marry just to alleviate my loneliness. I do not need another’s wealth and I have dear Sisenet to care for me. I need love, Highness, but not at any price. The terms must be mine.”
Nubnofret found herself liking Tbubui very much. “We know many great men all over Egypt,” she said. “Would you like to meet some of them? I am a good matchmaker, my dear!” They both dissolved into howls of laughter. Nubnofret sat up and wiped her eyes on her waist linen, and at that moment Wernuro came in, bowed, and proceeded to set out water, wine and beer, and dishes of pastries and sweetmeats.
“Thank you for your offer, Highness,” Tbubui gasped, “but I think I prefer to bore myself than have others bore me. I will have wine,” she continued in answer to Nubnofret’s silent invitation. Wernuro withdrew quietly.
“But what of Harmin?” Nubnofret pressed. With her highly developed sense of precedence on the social scale and the importance of one’s place in it, she could not imagine a family with noble blood that did not want to advance. “Does he not desire a post at court or at least a priestly appointment?”
“I do not think so,” Tbubui replied, sipping her wine. “He will of course inherit my personal estate, small though it is, and he already has the disposition of his father’s wealth. He likes to be comfortable but he is not much inclined to rub shoulders with the powerful and mighty.”
Nubnofret was pleased. Sheritra’s obvious interest in the young man had caused her mother some anxiety, lest he should be merely attempting to get closer to the seat of power in Egypt. “I do hope he and Sheritra are enjoying their day,” she said cautiously. “They have gone up river, I believe, to observe the wild life of the marshes and, if they are lucky, glimpse a crocodile. I do not envy them the heat.”
Tbubui held her wine cup in both brown hands. “I have been meaning to speak to you about the Princess,” she began hesitantly. “I understand that she is very shy and suspicious of people.”
“Yes she is,” Nubnofret said. Her thirst had been great and half her wine was already gone. A pleasant inner warmth was making her languorous. “Sheritra has no confidence in herself at all. She is intelligent and of course a great prize for any aspiring young nobleman, but she will look at none of them. I was greatly surprised when she accepted you so readily.”
“She senses perhaps that I enjoy her company.” Tbubui uncrossed her legs, stretched them out and leaned further into the pillows. “I have a favour to ask you, Princess.”
What a pity, Nubnofret thought lazily. I am always happy to do favours for my old friends, or women of my own standing, but this woman is not yet either. And I had begun to like her. She waited.
“Allow Sheritra to come and stay at my house for a while. I often feel the lack of feminine company, living as I do with two men, and she and I could have much to say to each other. I think I can help her with her appearance and her confidence and she can make me laugh.”
Laugh? Nubnofret thought. Sheritra able to make someone laugh? I suppose the invitation is not so foolish. Khaemwaset was talking some time ago about sending Sheritra to the Fayum to stay with Sunero’s family if I did not stop nagging the girl. Well, she needs nagging. The familiar feeling of mild exasperation Sheritra could always conjure began to itch at Nubnofret. “But Tbubui, what of the blossoming relationship between my daughter and your son?” she objected. “It is not acceptable to put them under the same roof.”
“It is my roof, Highness,” Tbubui reminded her, “and my ethical standards are high. The Princess would of course have her servants with her, and such guards as Khaemwaset saw fit to include in her entourage. We are a somewhat staid household,” she finished, smiling. “We need livening.” Nubnofret capitulated with wine-induced speed. Life without Sheritra for a month or two would be so peaceful, and perhaps she and Khaemwaset might find a new closeness without the barb of her daughter’s personality to come between them.
“She is not just any princess,” she reminded the other woman. “The blood of the gods flows in her veins and as such she must be treated with reverence and guarded well at all times. But …” She smiled. “We will ask her when she returns home and then consult my husband for a final word on the matter. Gods! This heat! Would you like to bathe?”
Tbubui nodded and thanked her hostess. Nubnofret summoned her sweating servants, and the two women were soon standing naked side by side on the bathing slabs, drenched in cool lotus water, wine still in hand and chattering gaily about the latest treatment for softening the hair.
When Sheritra arrived home at sunset, flushed and animated from her day, she found them still deep in conversation, now reclining on reed mats by the pool. The heat was over for the day, and lawn, flower beds and her mother and guest were all saturated in a copper glow from the last of the sun. Both women looked up with a smile as she came to them across the dry grass, and Nubnofret patted the mat by her ample hip.
“Have you had a good day?” she asked, and Sheritra, sinking beside her under the deepening shade of the blueand-white-striped awning, noted the two empty wine jars lying between them and her mother’s pleasant, slurred speech. She was taken aback, for she seldom saw Nubnofret the worse for wine, but she was also secretly amused. The folds of her mother’s face, already, at age thirty-five, freezing into a permanently preoccupied, stern expression, had softened, and her lustrous eyes were full of a contented laziness.
“I have indeed,” Sheritra answered, returning Tbubui’s half-obeisance with a nod. “Harmin and I found a little bay on the west bank about five miles upstream from the city where a neglected old canal emptied into the Nile. It was quite choked up with growth and nests and wildlife and we poked about in it for ages. But we didn’t see a crocodile. We ate in the barge’s cabin because of the heat. Harmin has gone home.” She turned to Tbubui. “I do apologize, Tbubui. If I had known you were here I could have invited him to join you and you could have left together.”
“It does not matter, Princess,” Tbubui replied. “Your mother and I have spent a delightful afternoon free of all male company and I am sure that Harmin’s presence would have spoiled it!”
Sheritra regarded the two of them curiously. They seemed to exude an essence of indolent femininity, an aura of purely womanly shared confidences, that made her slightly uncomfortable. She did not have any close friends of her own sex. She had always scorned the frivolous conversations of the daughters of her father’s acquaintances, silly giggling girls who thought and talked of nothing but fashion, cosmetics, what hairstyles were currently in vogue in the Delta and which young men had the most attractive bodies. She felt, looking from her mother’s somnolent, amused face to Tbubui’s sensuously sprawling limbs that all those subjects had been thoroughly covered by them today. Nubnofret confirmed her suspicion.
“We have done nothing all day but sip wine and talk about completely inconsequential things,” she explained. “It has done me good.”
“I have enjoyed it also,” Tbubui put in. “I have no female company and I do not talk to my servants.” She glanced at Nubnofret as though something else was expected, and Nubnofret grunted.
“Tbubui has kindly invited you to stay at her home for a while “ she said. “I think that the change might be good for you, Sheritra, if you want to go. What do you think?”
Sheritra studied her mother’s face and analyzed her tone. Sometimes a similar question held the expected answer within it and the girl knew that she was not real
ly being given a choice. But this time she could hear no unstated coercion, nor could her over-sensitivity detect an eagerness to have her out of the way. Nubnofret was smiling at her with kohl-smudged eyes slitted against the sun. Time with Harmin, Sheritra thought. Hour after hour in his company, talking, drinking him in with my eyes, perhaps kissing him, perhaps … But it was not entirely proper, not quite the accepted thing. She pondered, frowning unconsciously, and her mother added, “Of course Bakmut would go with you, and a scribe and your body servant. Your father would provide suitable guards.” And someone to report to him on my every move, Sheritra added ruefully. But that is how it should be. “What does Father say?” she asked.
“I have not spoken to him about it,” Nubnofret confessed. “I decided to see how you felt first. Well?”
“Do come, Princess!” Tbubui urged. “I would be so honoured by your company and would have someone to talk to. Harmin will also be overjoyed, I’m sure.” She cast a sidelong glance at Nubnofret that plainly said “Have I gone too far?” But Nubnofret was working lotus oil into her fingers and merely nodded.
“I daresay he would,” she responded drily. “But I do not object to that, providing he is never alone with my daughter.” She looked up suddenly. “You do not have to go, Sheritra.”
But you want me to, Sheritra thought angrily. I can see that you do. If I decided to spite you I would simply decline the invitation, but you know, don’t you Mother, that I cannot pass up this chance to be with Harmin. “On the contrary,” she said. “I would love to go. Thank you, Tbubui.”
The woman smiled warmly. “Good! I shall have a room prepared for you, in fact I shall give you my bedchamber as it is the largest in the house. We have several empty rooms.” Sheritra did not protest. As a princess it was her right to occupy the best accommodation. “When would you like to come?” Tbubui pressed.
Sheritra regarded her mother levelly. “Tomorrow,” she said.
Scroll of Saqqara Page 26