IT TOOK SHERITRA a long time to find her brother. She searched the house and grounds, growing hotter and more irritated. She wanted to sit quietly under a tree and absorb the news of her disappointment while a servant ran after him, but did not want Hori to feel that he had been summoned.
At last she had an idea. Ordering Bakmut back to her rooms she set off for the watersteps. This time she skirted the northern end of the house, picking her way through the building debris, to her, new and alarming, when she rounded a corner and almost tripped over a pile of sun-dried bricks. The shape of the addition could be clearly seen. Her father’s architect stood under a canopy in the middle of what had once been the spacious and peaceful north garden, a table before him, his head bent over his blueprints. Beside him Sheritra recognized several master craftsmen who waited for him to speak.
A moment of pure hatred for Tbubui shook Sheritra as she paused, hand raised against the glare, surveying the dismal mess, but she waved the feeling off with a rueful smile and a shake of the head. The men under the canopy sensed her passing and looked up, bowing to her, but she ignored them and was soon walking along the shrub-lined path to the watersteps.
Just before she reached them she veered, pushing through the stiff, summer-withered twigs and into the tangled bushes and small trees of the riverbank. They gave way to rushes and soggy ground but she went on, for a little farther, out of sight of both the steps and the river, was a clear space where she and Hori used to crouch together to watch the arrivals and departures of guests, or to while away lazy afternoons out of reach of their guards and nurses. Neither she nor Hori had used the place for years but she was certain that it had not become overgrown, and that he would be there, arms about his raised knees, eyes on the patches of river to be glimpsed through the sheltering reeds.
Sure enough, as she fought her way forward she saw a flicker of white. In another moment she was lowering herself beside him. He was sitting on a mat, a jug of beer and a half-eaten slice of black bread smeared with butter beside him. Ants were already at work on the bread but Hori obviously had not noticed. He glanced at Sheritra as she squatted, and she was hard pressed to still her shocked reaction at the sight of him. He was gaunt, with grooves of deep-violet shadow under his eyes. His hair was unkempt, his linen filthy. “Hori” she blurted unthinkingly. “Haven’t you bathed today?”
“Welcome home, Sheritra,” he said mockingly. “I presume you’ve been told the news. And no, I have not bathed today. I was out all night partying at the house of Huy’s son. I crept into the kitchens for some bread and beer and brought them here. I think I went to sleep.” He smiled then, a wan, quick quirk of the lips that to Sheritra was somehow more ghoulish than if he had scowled at her. “I suppose I should go into the house and have someone clean me up. I must look terrible.” He passed a weary hand across his face.
“How did you know about Grandmother and Penbuy?” she asked curiously.
“I heard a couple of the kitchen servants gossiping as I grabbed my victuals. Is that why you came home?”
Tentatively she touched his knee. “No. I was anxious about you, Hori, and angry that you had not come to see me or sent me any word.” She hesitated, then went on. “Also there are certain things I must discuss with you. I am sorry to see you in such anguish. I love you.”
Clumsily he put an arm around her shoulders and hugged her tightly, then he withdrew. “I love you too,” he responded, a tremor in his voice. “I hate myself for this cowardly giving in, Sheritra, this relinquishing of everything strong in myself, but somehow I cannot help it. I am tortured by thoughts of Tbubui every waking moment. The times I have spent with her are repeated over and over in my mind with the most horrible clarity. I have never been so exquisitely hurt in all my life.”
“Do you talk to Antef?”
He flinched away from her. “No. I have betrayed our friendship. Antef is also hurt and bewildered, and I carry guilt for that on top of everything else. But Antef would not understand and could offer me no comfort, I know. And talking to Father is out of the question.”
Oh Hori, she thought, shrinking from the thing she must tell him. How right you are! “Do you know why Father is having an addition built on the house?” she asked after a moment, and he shook his head.
“No one has told me and I have not asked,” he said. “You don’t know what it is like, Sheritra. I don’t care why the house is being expanded. I simply don’t care. I am consumed by Tbubui and nothing else has any reality at all.”
Sheritra shivered. She knew his feeling well. “The addition is for Tbubui,” she said gently. “He is going to marry her. In fact, they have already signed the contract. Penbuy was in Koptos investigating her family when he died.”
He made a mewling sound, like a blind kitten pawing for its mother, but he did not move. His face was turned to the river where a fishing boat, its white, triangular sail flapping idly in the slight noon breeze, was slowly tacking by. No stirring of air, however, could penetrate the thick river growth that surrounded the pair, and the view of the Nile from the clearing was crisscrossed by twisted branches and stiffly upright reeds. Sheritra brushed at a fly that was hovering to seek the salt around her eyes. She wanted to speak, to have wise and sympathetic things to say, but the enormity of Hori’s involvement and the bleakness of his future overwhelmed her and she remained silent. His voice, when it came, startled her.
“No wonder she would have nothing to do with me,” he croaked. “Why consider a stripling son when you can have the father, wealthy, influential, handsome? Knowing how I felt about her, she should have told me. She should have told me!” Sheritra was helpless against the bitterness in his voice. “I feel like a fool,” he went on in a low tone. “A stupid, ignorant, childish fool. How she must be laughing at me!”
“No!” Sheritra managed. “She would not do that. And how could she say anything to you, Hori, when at the time she was not sure of Father’s feelings? It would have been wrong.”
“I suppose so,” he agreed grudgingly. “But why are you telling me, Little Sun? Did Father lack the guts to do so?”
Sheritra thought of Khaemwaset’s embarrassed, sheepish face, his pathetic eagerness when she offered to break the news to Hori. “Yes,” she answered, “but not because he suspects that you love her also. He is so embroiled in his own emotion that I don’t think he could see past it if he tried. He has always been such a strong, quiet, predictable man, Hori, in control of himself and satisfied with his life. He has been violently disrupted, and is ashamed of it.”
Now Hori turned to study her. Some of the pain went out of his eyes. “You have changed,” he said softly. “I hear a new wisdom in you, Sheritra, a knowledge of others that was not there before. You have grown.”
Sheritra took a deep breath and felt the old, familiar flush of colour begin to seep up her neck. “I have been making love with Harmin,” she said frankly, and waited for a reaction, but there was none. Hori continued to examine her. “I know what you are going through, dear brother, because the same wound plagues me. Yet I am more fortunate. I have gained the object of my desire.”
“You are indeed more fortunate,” he said slowly, “and that fortune will increase with father’s m … marriage.” He stumbled on the words, and then recovered. “With Tbubui in residence here, Harmin will either move in also or be a constant visitor. Whereas I …” He swallowed, then burst out, “Forgive me, Sheritra! I am brimming with a most distasteful self-pity.” Then suddenly, shockingly, he was crying, loud, harsh sobs made more agonizing by his efforts to subdue them.
Sheritra knelt and pulled his head down onto her breast, not saying anything, her eyes travelling the surrounding growth, the broken glimpses of the river, the parade of ants still swarming over the forgotten bread and streaming away into the sand. Presently Hori sat back, wiping his face on his dirty and wilted kilt. “I feel better,” he said. “We always did help each other, didn’t we, Sheritra? Forgive me for ignoring you lately, for not even se
nding a herald to inquire how you were.”
“It doesn’t matter,” she replied. “Hori, what will you do now?”
He shrugged. “I don’t know. To stay here with her actually in the house would be more than I could bear. Perhaps I will consider taking up residence with Grandfather at Pi-Ramses and applying for some government post. I am, after all, a prince of the blood.” He shot her an impish grin that was a pale copy of his former gentle humour, but nevertheless filled her with relief. “Or I may decide to become a full-time priest of Ptah instead of fulfilling my duty to the god for only three months out of the year.”
“Please, Hori,” she begged. “Make no irrevocable decisions just yet, no matter how anguished you are.”
“Little Sun,” he replied, stroking her hair. “I will wait, as I said, but I will not prolong my pain.”
They fell silent. Sheritra almost drowsed. Reaction from the events of the morning was setting in and she thought of her couch with longing. But before she could sleep there was the matter of the earring, a prick of unease under everything else. Hori had unfolded and was lying back, his hands behind his head, his ankles crossed. She shifted so that she was looking down on him.
“Hori, do you remember the earring you found in the tunnel leading out of the tomb?” she began. He nodded. “You showed it to Tbubui, didn’t you?”
A shadow passed over his face and he sighed. “What a day that was!” he said. “She was very taken with it.”
“I found one exactly like it in her jewel box. When I asked her about it she said that she had had the one you showed her copied as a pair, and then lost one of them. But …” She bit her lip and looked away, and he finished for her with his usual shrewdness.
“But you were afraid that she was lying, that in my passion I had lost all sense and had given her the original.” Sheritra blinked in assent. “Well, I certainly did no such thing,” Hori protested. “I may be besotted, but I am not insane enough to commit that sacrilege.”
“Oh.” Sheritra was only partially mollified. “What happened to it, then? Do you still have it?”
He did not answer directly. “Father has closed the tomb,” he said, but she leaned over him urgently.
“Hori! Answer me! You still have it, don’t you?”
“Yes!” he said loudly, sitting up in one sharp movement. “Yes I do. I am going to lay it on Ptah’s altar as an apology for keeping it, but Sheritra, it reminds me so strongly of Tbubui that I cannot part with it yet. It is not stealing, it is polite borrowing. Ptah will tell the ka of the woman that I meant no harm.”
“The only harm you are doing is to yourself, torturing yourself every time you look at it,” she said vehemently. “Well, at least you had the good sense not to hand it over to Tbubui. You know, Hori, I could have sworn the one I picked out of her jewel box was the original. Ah well.” She rubbed the sand from the elbow she had been resting on and flicked an ant from her calf. “Did you say that Father has closed the tomb already? Why? Was the work finished?”
“No.”
He began to talk of Sisenet’s visit, the translating of the scroll and Khaemwaset’s almost insane reaction to it, and as he spoke, his voice falling flat and almost inflectionless in the confined space, Sheritra felt a great foreboding begin to darken the day.
“Father believed it was the Scroll of Thoth?” she interrupted him. “And Sisenet ridiculed the idea and convinced him otherwise?”
He nodded and finished the story. “And that was it. The tomb has been sealed, rubble piled to fill in the stair and a huge rock rolled over the site. Father agrees with Sisenet that such a thing can only exist in legends. He must be just a trifle disappointed, seeing that he has carried the dream of finding it for many years.”
Sheritra’s foreboding was coalescing into a pulse of disquiet. She felt it as an amorphous mass that was rapidly acquiring a shape, as yet unrecognizable but one that might turn disquiet into black fear at any moment. “Hori, I haven’t told you everything,” she said. “Someone in Sisenet’s house conjured a death curse.” His head jerked around, and under his keen scrutiny her own glance dropped. “I feel silly even mentioning it,” she faltered, “but it left a bad taste in my mouth.”
“Tell me,” he ordered. So she did, her embarrassment and uneasiness growing side by side as she spoke. “It was not a protecting spell,” she ended. “I recognize the differences. I wondered at first if Tbubui had been trying to avert the anger of the woman whose earring she had—if you had indeed given her the earring—but I knew in my heart that it was not so. Someone was conjuring a violent death for an enemy.”
He did not suggest the servants, as Harmin had. He did not immediately present her with an acceptable explanation as she had hoped he would. Instead he sat brooding, one long finger stroking the side of his nose. It could be anything,” he said at last. “Tbubui fancying she had a rival for my father’s attentions, although I cannot imagine a woman as confident and self-sufficient as Tbubui being worried about any such thing. Harmin with a similar worry. Sisenet trying to rid himself of some enemy back in Koptos. Who knows? Or the things could have been already half-buried in the sand before the household debris was tossed in that spot.”
“No,” Sheritra denied emphatically. “The paraphernalia was mostly jutting out of the pile itself. Oh well.” She scrambled to her feet. “I expect I am making something out of nothing because I am upset. I am trapped at home until the mourning period is over, and I must dictate an apology to Tbubui and let her know why I cannot return to her house for a while,” she said. “I also want to send a letter to Harmin. Please come back to the house with me and get cleaned up. Don’t be so lonely. We have seventy days to fill, so let us spend them together, supporting each other.”
He rose reluctantly. “I will try,” he said. “But do not ask me to face Father. I might be tempted to kill him.”
She almost laughed, but seeing his face the urge quickly died. “Hori …” she whispered, but he impatiently indicated the path and she obeyed. He followed, and they walked back to the house in silence.
FOUR DAYS LATER, having already sent a message warning Khaemwaset that she was coming, Tbubui alighted at the watersteps and was met and escorted to the Prince’s quarters by a deferential Ib. Word of his Highness’s impending second marriage had spread rapidly among the staff, and as Tbubui paced the gardens and made her way through the house she was greeted with bows and murmured words of respect.
She looked every inch a royal Second Wife. Her white sheath was shot through with glimmering silver thread, her sandals laced with silver thongs. Silver and electrum bracelets, heavy with jasper and carnelian ornaments, tinkled as she moved. Her gleaming, straight black hair was imprisoned to her head by a triple-banded silver circlet, with one jasper droplet trembling on her forehead. Her eyelids glittered with silver dust above the thick kohl that rimmed her eyes, and her firm, pouting mouth shone with red henna like her large palms. An electrum pectoral of intertwining ankhs and half-moons covered her upper breasts like an exotic mat, and its pendant, resting between her naked shoulder-blades to repel any supernatural attack from behind, was a large, golden, squatting baboon. Ib announced her and withdrew, and Khaemwaset advanced with a smile.
“Tbubui, welcome to what will be your home,” he said heartily. She reverenced him, then raised her cheek for his kiss. “You look wonderful, dear sister.”
“Thank you, Khaemwaset.” She waved away the two servants who had immediately appeared at her elbow with trays of assorted sweetmeats and wine. “I am really here to spend some time with Nubnofret. I told you I would do that, didn’t I? The last thing I want is for her to feel slighted, and I know we are going to become great friends.”
Khaemwaset was suffused with a protective affection. “You are tactful and kind as well as beautiful,” he complimented her. “How strange life is, Tbubui! Who would have thought, the first time I saw you threading your way through the city crowd with such regal hauteur, that one day you would be my
wife?”
She laughed sweetly. “Life is indeed remarkable, or rather, it is fate that makes one hold one’s breath, wondering what is to come next,” she answered. “You have made me very happy, Highness.”
They smiled at one another for a moment. It was Tbubui who broke their gaze. “Khaemwaset, I have a favour to ask of you before I visit Nubnofret,” she said. “I must dictate a very detailed set of instructions to my steward in Koptos to do with the disposition of the coming harvest and the arrangements to be made for Pharaoh’s tax assessors. The scribe Sisenet hired is a good and simple man but just out of the temple school. I do not think he would be able to understand and make a faithful rendering of my words. It will take me no more than an hour.” She faltered. “I do not like to trespass on your good nature …”
He held up a hand. “But you would like to use the services of one of my scribes,” he finished for her. “Say no more.”
“The responsibility to hear and transcribe my words will be great,” she went on. “They must be exactly recorded …”
“You want my best,” Khaemwaset beamed, pleased that he could do something, anything for her “Penbuy’s son Ptah-Seankh has taken up residence here. Oddly enough he came this morning. Will he do?”
Scroll of Saqqara Page 36