13
When the messenger of death comes to take thee away,
let him find thee prepared.
Alas! thou wilt have no opportunity for speech,
for verily his terror will be before thee.
ONCE SHERITRA HAD ADJUSTED to the strange ways of the house, she forgot her earlier misgiv ings. She was happy, perhaps happier than she had ever been. Bakmut remained uneasy, and served her mistress with an increased vigilance Sheritra found touching, but the Princess herself grew in confidence.
She became accustomed to waking, not to the bustle of a large estate, but to the quiet Sisenet and Tbubui demanded. She would eat her breakfast on her couch in a state of tousled disorder, her thoughts slow and mellow. Away from the constant tension of her mother’s nagging judgments, her body relaxed, and her mind found new and freer avenues to explore under Tbubui’s tutelage.
The woman would come to her while she was standing on the bathing block, greet her affably and accompany her back to her room. At first Sheritra was self-conscious. It was one thing to have the eyes of servants on one’s naked body, for servants were more like household appendages than people. It was quite another to stand, inwardly cringing, while Tbubui’s knowing glance travelled her tiny breasts, stick-thin legs and bony hips. Sheritra knew she could have requested privacy, but in a perverse way she regarded Tbubui’s scrutiny as the last test of their friendship. Fiercely, she watched for the slightest indication of contempt, distaste or pity in the woman’s eyes or attitude, and mercifully found none.
After a couple of days Sheritra welcomed the moment when Tbubui would appear, fresh and smiling, to kiss her on the cheek and chatter while the perfumed water cascaded over Sheritra’s skin. “Rub the Princess down with that oil,” Tbubui would say, indicating one of the alabaster jars that lined the stone lip of the small bath house. “It has balsam in it, Sheritra, and will soften you and make you more supple. The sun is so bad for the skin.” Or she would arrive holding a tiny pot of some balm or other to protect the lips. Several times she waved the servant who was washing Sheritra away, and her own hands rubbed the girl, moving briskly over her back and buttocks and sliding more gently along her inner thighs. “Forgive me, Highness, but I know several good exercises for the development of the legs and the strengthening of the spine. Let me teach them to you,” she offered. “Also, if I might be permitted, I would like to change your diet. You need some weight.” Sheritra was not in the least offended. Intrigued she submitted to the oil that gleamingly caressed her skin and then sank without a trace, leaving her to run her fingers over herself and feel velvet.
Her mother had often suggested such treatments but Sheritra, in rebellion, had always refused them. With Tbubui it was different, it was close companionship, it was fun, and there was no hint of superiority on the one hand or inadequacy on the other. “It is not right that she should touch a princess’s flesh,” Bakmut had objected a trifle sourly, but Sheritra had ignored her body servant. Tbubui had treatments for everything—a fragrant, thick wrap of herbs to thicken the hair and make it shine, a sticky mixture to strengthen the nails, a mask to preserve the face from aging.
If it were simply a matter of retreating into the indolence of physical indulgence, Sheritra might have become bored, but after the bath, Tbubui—in between advice on dress and cosmetics while she combed Sheritra’s increasingly luxurious tresses or bent close to flick her eyelids with colour—would talk on any subject that came to mind. Freely the arguments would flow back and forth, but Sheritra most loved Tbubui’s stories about Egypt’s past, her ancient heroes, the tenor and pace of lives lived hentis ago. The mornings flew by. Very occasionally Tbubui did not come to the bath house with her knowing, expert hands, and on those occasions Sheritra, unconsciously, felt deprived of the contact.
Tbubui vanished during most afternoons and Sheritra— washed and perfumed, her hair imprisoned in gold-andenamel flower clips or waving loose under a circlet of silver, her face, scarcely recognizable to herself, exquisitely painted, her increasingly nubile body displayed in white or scarlet or yellow sheaths—would hurry to where Harmin waited for her in the garden, or in the coolness of the reception hall. Then they would talk, tease each other, play board games and exchange glances while the wine jug emptied and the breathless, stultifying hours went gliding into copper sunsets and the lengthening shadows of warm twilights.
Evenings were taken up with quiet family dinners. The harpist would play softly and the little tables would be piled with perfumed flowers from the garden, whose petals would lie in pastel drifts over the tiled floor. The lamps would be lit, and they would sit in the slight breeze coming in through the open door from the night beyond while Sisenet read to them from his library of scrolls. His voice was deep and even, the stories somehow both vivid and lulling to Sheritra. They were like the anecdotes Tbubui would tell her in the mornings, but at night they had a hypnotic quality to them, so that her mind filled with bright images. When he had finished they would drink some more of his marvellous wine and gossip a little. She would tell them of her family, of Pharaoh, of her opinions and dreams, and they would listen and ask questions, smile and nod. Only later did she realize that in spite of the many evenings spent in this way she had learned almost nothing about them. Finally Bakmut and a soldier would escort her to her room to be undressed and washed, and she would lie on her couch, watching the friendly shadows her night lamp cast on the ceiling, and pass effortlessly into unconsciousness. She did not think that she would ever want to go home.
Her father came to visit her twice in the three weeks that followed, but Sheritra observed and listened to him as though from a far distance. He was clearly pleased with her contentment, her flowering body, and always embraced her with his usual affection, but something about the feel of his arms now made her cringe.
On his second visit, as he was leaving, she saw Tbubui hand him a scroll and supposed it was something from Sisenet’s collection. His fingers closed around Tbubui’s, giving Sheritra a flash of her old anxiety. But events outside Sisenet’s house seemed less significant now and, with a shrug, Sheritra retreated into fatalism. Her father’s infatuation would doubtless burn itself out and was, in any case, none of her business. She had thought that he looked haggard and pale. “Is there any news?” Tbubui asked him, and he had shaken his head. “Not yet,” he had replied, and they had both turned after a second and smiled at Sheritra as though in apology.
Nubnofret had sent several cheerful notes but had not visited herself. Sheritra was glad. Her mother’s presence would have struck a jarring note in the peaceful harmony of Sisenet’s household. Sheritra did not miss her.
But one jarring note came from within. On the night of Khaemwaset’s second visit, Sheritra decided to take a short walk before bed. The air was still hot and she was unaccountably restless. She wandered with a compliant Bakmut and one of her ever-present guards under the shrouded palms for a while, then made her way to the river. It was very low, the water flowing almost imperceptibly, torn to silver under the new moon’s light. She sat for some time on the watersteps, allowing the calm darkness to soothe her, then made her way back to the house.
Skirting it, she approached the side door, she and her escort almost invisible in the darkness, but before she reached it she saw two figures standing just within the passage. Their voices came to her faintly, and there was something so private, so exclusive about their stance that she came to a halt. Now she could hear the words. It was Tbubui and her brother.
“… and you know that it is time,” Tbubui was saying harshly. “Why do you hesitate?”
“Yes, I know it is time,” Sisenet’s voice replied, “but I am reluctant to begin. Such a thing is beneath us. Once we would have considered it reprehensible.”
“That was a very long time ago, when we were innocents,” Tbubui retorted bitterly. “Now it is necessary. Besides, what is a common servant to us? What is his …” She broke off as Sheritra, unwilling to eavesdrop on purpos
e, moved forward. For a moment, Sheritra saw Tbubui’s face as she turned towards the footsteps, twisted, angry—then her expression smoothed. “Princess,” she said. Sisenet had bowed and was already gone.
“I decided to walk a little before bed,” Sheritra explained. “The night is so fine and besides, I ate too much at dinner!”
Tbubui smiled back and stepped aside. “Sleep well, Highness,” she said kindly, and Sheritra nodded and walked past her.
Reaching the bedchamber she was obscurely relieved when her guard took up his station outside the door and Bakmut closed it firmly. Sheritra suffered the ministrations of the girl and slid between the sheets in an abstracted mood. It was not so much the words she had heard but the emotions behind them—Tbubui forceful, Sisenet cold. The atmosphere that had surrounded them was turbulent, completely alien to the prevailing mood of the house. What on earth were they talking about? she wondered. Who is the “common servant”? She herself had quickly fallen into the household habit of snapping out orders to the staff without even looking at them, so much a part of the furnishings did they seem, and the voices of those she had brought with her were doubly appreciated after Sisenet’s utterly responseless staff.
On impulse she sat up. “Bakmut, fetch me my horoscope for Phamenoth,” she ordered, and the girl got up from her mat and went to one of the chests against the wall. I never did look at it, Sheritra thought. Father said it was not good, but as the month is running soon into Pharmuti it doesn’t matter. Yet she took it from Bakmut and unrolled it with trepidation. As Khaemwaset said, it was uniformly bad. “Do not rise from your couch today…. Eat no meat this evening…. Spend the afternoon in prayer and do not sleep, that the anger of the gods may be averted…. Remember that the Nile is your refuge…. Turn from love as though from disease …”
Sheritra let it roll shut and tossed it back to the waiting servant. “Put it away,” she said, and lay down again. How is the Nile my refuge? she asked herself, and why on earth should I turn from love? Whose love? Father’s? Tbubui’s? Harmin’s? She fell asleep wondering, still with that pinprick of unease Sisenet and Tbubui’s conversation had caused her, and for the first time her rest was interrupted. Several times she woke, thinking that she had heard something, but each time the house remained sunk in its bottomless peace.
The following morning saw Tbubui coming into her chamber to inquire if she was ill, for the sun was high and the hour of breakfast long gone. She was her usual graceful self, attentive and cheerful, and Sheritra grimly ignored the headache lurking behind her eyes and dragged herself from the couch to the bath house.
“Were you up late last night, Highness?” Tbubui asked her. She was kneeling at Sheritra’s feet, working oil into the girl’s calves. “You do not look rested, in fact you look quite jaded, and there are knots in your muscles.”
Sheritra did not reply. Eyes closed, she was all at once preternaturally aware of every sensation: the dull pounding in her head, the sweet, cloying aroma of the oil, the feel of her wet hair sticking to her shoulder blades, the tinkle of water draining through the slanted floor of the bath house, but most of all, the firm, inflammatory touch of Tbubui’s fingers on her flesh. A little higher, Tbubui, she thought lazily. Caress my thighs with those long, probing fingers of yours, and as though the woman had heard her, she felt soft movement stroking upward. Her disturbed thoughts and sense of dislocation faded into sensation.
The rest of the morning passed uneventfully. She and Tbubui lounged in Sheritra’s bedchamber talking of nothing in particular, but behind Tbubui’s words Sheritra sensed an absence. The woman’s mind was on something else, though she hid it well, and as soon as the noon meal was over she excused herself and vanished towards her own room.
After the noon sleep Harmin, Sheritra, a guard and Bakmut made their way through the palm grove to a spot out of sight of the house. The guard took up his post by the path, just out of sight. Bakmut unrolled the mat, set down various games and retired to just within earshot.
Sheritra made herself comfortable. Her senses were still sending her messages of exquisite clarity: every drop of her sweat on this flaming afternoon, the dry rustle of the dusty palms above, the crackle of dead leaves under the mat. A twig pressed against her buttock. Harmin leaned in front of her to pull the games over and a gush of his perfume made her dizzy.
He had tied back his hair with a white ribbon that now lay ribbed across his bare shoulder, and the juxtaposition of blackest black and the dazzling white of the strip of linen made her feel slightly ill. He glanced sideways at her, his eyes smiling.
“What would you like to play today, Princess?” he asked. “Or would you rather lie here and drowse the hours away?”
She watched, bemused, the motions of his fine mouth, the working of his throat as he spoke. “I want to kiss you,” she said.
He chuckled and jerked a ring finger at Bakmut. “Dogs and Jackals perhaps, Highness? Dice? Are you quite well, Sheritra?”
“Yes. No. I feel a little strange, Harmin. Let us play sennet.”
He hesitated, then set the board between their knees, opening a box and shaking out the spools and cones. “Very well. Does your Highness wish to be a spool?”
“No, a cone.” Together they set out the pieces and began throwing the sticks to see who would begin. “Your mother seemed preoccupied this morning,” Sheritra went on. “I do hope there are no family problems looming, Harmin. Is it time for me to go home?”
The question was not serious and he laughed. “Look, you have thrown a one,” he said. “Throw again and begin. There are no family problems, I assure you. Perhaps Mother is affected by this heat.”
“But she loves the heat,” Sheritra objected. “Oh Harmin, a five, a five, a four! You are doing very well. No, I think it is probably my imagination. The heat is getting to me. I need to swim. I wish you had a pool big enough, for I do not fancy the Nile at this time of the year. Excuse me.” She bent and moved one of his pieces forward. “You did not count correctly.”
“I did not want to land on the House of the Net,” he said thickly, and Sheritra glanced up, surprised at his tone. He was swallowing and staring at the board where the god-fisherman had spread his web. “It is an unlucky house.”
“It is more unlucky to cheat!” she teased him, but he did not respond. She took her turn, throwing four ones and a two, and she knew that he was praying to the god of the house on which he wanted to land with an inner intensity that kept her tongue still. Gathering up the sticks he threw, also a one and a two.
“You can move this piece two,” she pointed, “but this one must go to the House of the Fishing Implements.”
Harmin ran a finger along his upper lip. Sheritra saw that he was sweating lightly. “No,” he said in a low voice. “I will move you forward, Sheritra, but I will not move from one unlucky House to another.”
“As you wish,” she replied, “but you will be putting me right on the Beautiful House and all I have to do is jump the water.”
He did not answer. Deftly he exchanged his piece for hers and the game went on, but now he replied to her sallies with grunts, or did not reply at all. He seemed tense, and when, with a stroke of pure good fortune, she threw a number that would allow her to tumble him into the House of the Water, he gave an agonized cry. Her hand paused in mid air, clutching his piece, and his own closed over it. His fingers were cold and slick with sweat. “Not in the Water,” he said huskily. “It is cold and dark there, and hopeless. Please, Sheritra.”
“Harmin, it is only a game,” she said kindly. “We do not play it with spells today, only for amusement. If I do not tip you into the Water I might lose.”
He managed a weak smile. “And you are a very bad loser. I will concede to you, Princess, but do not put me there.”
She shrugged, puzzled and annoyed. “Oh very well. Put it all away and I will dice with you. What stakes do you propose?”
Soon afterwards they left the mat. Sheritra had won at the dicing and Harmin promise
d to take her on the river after dinner. They parted to sleep away the hottest part of the day, and Sheritra lay on her couch wondering why he had taken the game so much to heart. They had whiled away many hours at sennet, everyone did, but this was the first time it had upset him.
The house did not seem so quiet today. It was full of little whisperings and scutterings, as though it had been suddenly invaded by an army of mice. Although she was both physically exhausted from her broken night and emotionally drained by her desire for Harmin, heightened but not satisfied, she could not sleep.
Waking Bakmut, she asked for cooling water to be rubbed into her skin. But Bakmut, who had massaged and washed her mistress for years, seemed clumsy and inexperienced after Tbubui’s touch, and in the end Sheritra told her to go back to her sleeping mat. I will drink a lot of wine tonight, she told herself pettishly, and I will bring the harpist into my chamber and I will dance to his music, all alone. I wonder how Hori is faring? Why has he not been to see me? I will write him a message tomorrow.
She and Harmin went on the river in the red sunset, floating north for several miles. Contentedly they stood by the barge’s rail, watching the northern outskirts give way rapidly to ripening fields and the pink mirrors of palm-lined irrigation canals. When torches began to spring up on the watersteps of the estates they passed and the vegetation lining the Nile became indistinct, Harmin gave the order to turn about, and he and Sheritra retired to the small cabin. Bakmut sat outside it, her back to the heavy curtains that had not been closed. Silently, in the dusk of the approaching night, Sheritra and Harmin lay on the cushions and embraced, breath hot, mouths eager, hands roving in an agony of need.
“Oh Harmin,” Sheritra murmured. “I did not know that I could be so happy. How scornful I was of love! How wrongly pitying of those who had found it, out of my own refusal to admit that I yearned for it too.”
He placed his fingers over her lips. “Hush,” he whispered. “Do not look back, dearest sister. That Sheritra no longer exists. I love you, and the future will be full of nights like this.”
Scroll of Saqqara Page 32