The Hippopotamus Marsh

by Pauline Gedge

  “I think I remember,” Tani said doubtfully. “Did he have a beard?”

  “Yes. A small one. I believe he did not keep it long.”

  “Oh. Father, look up! A falcon!” Seqenenra followed her pointing finger. He shaved off the beard, he thought, but there was nothing he could do about his eyes, set too close together, or the clumsiness of his hands as he held the Crook and the Flail. “Go on, Behek!” Tani was urging the dog. “Jump in and swim! Call him, Hor-Aha!” Seqenenra dismissed his own pettiness and gave himself up to the pleasures of the afternoon.

  KAMOSE STARED at the scuffed, baking dirt of the practice ground now inches from his nose. He flexed his shoulders slightly, testing Si-Amun’s lock on his throat, and felt his brother’s elbow tighten against his neck. Si-Amun’s spare hand gripped Kamose’s wrists like a vise behind his back. Both young men were pouring sweat and breathing hard. Si-Amun’s harsh breath rasped in Kamose’s ear. “You still must put me on the ground,” Kamose croaked with difficulty. “My feet are firm.” If I can make him shift his centre of balance, he thought, I can throw him. Si-Amun was bent over Kamose’s slick back. Kamose let himself go slightly limp, felt his brother move imperceptibly to automatically adjust his hold, and in the second when Si-Amun’s balance was disturbed Kamose spread his legs and leaned forward. With a shout Si-Amun dove into the dust. In a flash Kamose was on him, kneeling well back on his chest so as not to be toppled forward. “Last throw,” he panted, grinning and rising, holding down a grimy hand to his brother. “I can’t believe I actually won this time.” Si-Amun pulled himself to his feet and they embraced.

  “Make the most of your victory,” Si-Amun teased him. “It will not be repeated. You won because I am not in top form today. I drank too much wine last night.”

  “Excuses.” Kamose walked to where their kilts lay in a white pile on the hot earth. “I think I am going to be the better wrestler in the end, Si-Amun. I spend a lot more time training with Hor-Aha than you do. You’re getting lazy.” He flung Si-Amun’s kilt at him and wound his own around his waist.

  “You’re right,” Si-Amun agreed good-naturedly. “I like to keep fit but I don’t want to attain the physical perfection of the soldier. I can’t see why you bother either.” He waved an arm towards the far end of the training ground where a large number of men were being drilled. The sunlight glinted on the tips of their spears and their sun-blackened, muscular bodies gleamed with oil. The sharp commands of the officer in charge came echoing to the two brothers as they watched the formation wheel smartly. “They are an expensive toy for Father,” Si-Amun went on, wiping his forehead vigorously with his kilt before fastening it in place. “Of course, the bodyguards are necessary, and a few retainers when we travel, and perhaps a spare contingent or two for the nomes when there’s trouble, but with the King’s whole army available for any serious defence, Father could send half his five hundred troops back to their homes. Supporting them drives Uni crazy.”

  “They may be needed one day,” Kamose replied, picking up his sandals and shaking them free of sand, and Si-Amun jumped on his words with an immediacy that betrayed his secret preoccupation.

  “To do what?” he snapped. “The only need Father might have for a true private army would be against the One himself and I know such thoughts are in his mind because of the way he reacted to the King’s scroll. No one is more aware than I that royal blood flows in our veins, which is why I do not understand our self-imposed exile in this lamentable burning backwater when we might be sitting beside Apepa in Het-Uart and enjoying his favour. Father has too much pride.”

  “It is the pride of a Prince who would rather govern his ancetral seat with authority than lick the King’s leather boots every day in a region of Egypt where he has no friends and no roots,” Kamose shot back irritably. “I wish I had been born before you, Si-Amun, for then you would be free to go north and fawn upon our King while I prepared to take upon myself the responsibilities of a Prince of Weset.”

  “How humourless you are!” Si-Amun mocked him gently. “How sober! Don’t you ever just have fun, Kamose, make love to a few serving girls, get drunk in your skiff at midnight on the river? You are so solemn most of the time!” Kamose bit back a stinging answer.

  “I take life a little more seriously than you, Si-Amun, that is all,” he said, beginning to walk towards the gate in the wall that gave onto the rear of the courtyard. Si-Amun hurried to keep pace with him.

  “I apologize,” he said. “If we were similar in more than our looks, our lives would be simpler. Yet I love you.” Kamose smiled across at him.

  “I love you also.”

  “All the same,” Si-Amun emphasized, always needing the last word, “if Father ever took it into his head to commit treason against Ma’at and march against the King I would not join him. I worry about that.”

  “So do I,” Kamose admitted, “but not out of loyalty to the King. I worry at the dissolution of the family and the destruction of the life we lead here at Weset. But we are foolish to make ourselves even more sweaty than we are already by arguing over a puff of cloud. Let’s bathe. I want to be oiled before my muscles stiffen into soreness. In any case,” and here he graced Si-Amun with one of his rare, dazzling full smiles, “Apepa is not Ma’at in Egypt. Father is.”

  To that, Si-Amun had no reply. They pushed through the gate, crossed the courtyard beyond in the sudden shade of the granaries, and headed for the bath house together.

  No reply to Seqenenra’s letter came from the King. Men returned from the Delta several weeks later and reported that he had not personally been received by Apepa. He had handed the scroll to Itju, the King’s Chief Scribe, and had been told the next day that he could go. He had toured his master’s cattle, which were growing fat and sleek on the lush pastures watered by an abundant Nile that branched out and meandered slowly through the Delta to the Great Green, and could tell Amunmose that Amun’s cattle likewise fared excellently. He had watched the King’s charioteers practising manoeuvres outside Het-Uart. On his way home he had spent a day admiring the marvels of Saqqara, the ancient city of the dead, and had climbed one of the lesser pyramids close by, as so many other travellers did.

  Seqenenra had few questions for him. In the days that followed, his anxiety lessened and finally disappeared as he watched royal craft ply the river on their way to Kush or from Kush to the Delta, passing Weset with oars flashing and flags afloat. Apepa’s quixotic demand and Seqenenra’s equally irrational reply were relegated to the back of Seqenenra’s mind and often forgotten altogether.

  2

  AS SPRING MOVED INTO SUMMER and the season of Shemu began, Seqenenra left Kamose to govern in his absence and took Aahotep and the rest of the family north to Khemennu where Teti, Aahotep’s relative by marriage, was governor. Tetisheri declined to go, preferring to order her time as she wished. Kamose was more than content to see to the affairs of the nomes, do a little hunting in the desert hills, and enjoy the peace of his own solitary routine. Seqenenra did not insist that Si-Amun fulfil the duties of an heir. He would get much more pleasure from the bustle of Teti’s estate than Kamose. Ahmose was content to make no choices. He was happy wherever he found himself. The crops had sprung up thick and promising in the little fields. The canals bordering them were full of the water imprisoned by mud dykes as the Nile sank after the last Inundation. In the gardens the leeks and onions, radishes, lettuce and melons were forming and flowers trembled, pink, blue and white, beside the pool. Monkeys perched in the palm trees that lined river and canal, gibbering at passersby, and in the thick papyrus beds young crocodiles lurked, watching with lazy greed the antics of the newly hatched fledglings.

  The Inundation had been generous. Isis had cried copiously, flooding Egypt with fecundity, and Seqenenra knew that the resultant crops would pay his taxes to the One and leave his personal treasury amply filled for another year. Si-Amun and his older daughter had come to him just before they were all due to leave, both solemn and full of importance,
with the news that Aahmes-nefertari was pregnant with their first child. Delighted, Seqenenra congratulated them. Aahotep gave Aahmes-nefertari a menat-amulet for special protection and the whole family burned incense before Taurt, who stood fat and smiling, her great hippopotamus’s body swollen with her own promise at the entrance to the women’s quarters. Tani had always treated the statue of the goddess with happy affection, rubbing the vast stomach as she ran to and from her room beside her mother’s, but now Aahmes-nefertari brought a flower or two daily to lay on the goddess’s feet and assiduously said her prayers there morning and evening.

  It was a cheerful group that waved farewell to Kamose and Tetisheri. Aahotep watched until the last glimpse of the tree-shrouded house and the glint of sun on the white watersteps had sunk from view. Behind her barge came the one carrying Si-Amun and Aahmes-nefertari. Ahmose and Tani shared the third craft. The servants who would set up quarters for the family on the bank each evening had gone on ahead. Aahotep signalled, going to the mats laid under the canopy against the small cabin where Seqenenra already sat, and as she went down beside him, Isis handed her a cup of water.

  Already Weset, with its clusters of whitewashed mud houses, narrow donkey-crowded streets and women squatting to slap their linen against the river’s surface, had receded and the Nile wound peacefully through reed marshes that opened on the east to fields in which peasants bent and on the west to uncultivated tangles of papyrus and then blinding sand that covered the feet of the western cliffs.

  “I wish Tetisheri had decided to come with us,” Aahotep remarked, sipping the water. “It would have done her good to get away from Weset for a while.”

  “Khemennu is under the One’s direct control,” Seqenenra reminded her. “My mother likes to foster the illusion that we are all free, or at least she does not like to have to swallow her words or bite her tongue. She and Kamose understand one another very well. They will enjoy the opportunity to tussle over minor matters of administration.”

  “I suppose you are right. And I know she will spend much time taking offerings to your father’s shrine and praying there. She speaks of him so little, yet I know she misses him a great deal. I shall go to my parents’ tomb in Khemennu also while we are there, and eat a memorial meal. Seqenenra, could you talk to their priest and make sure the endowment is being used correctly? Kares exchanges correspondence with him, but in these times one never knows … Seqenenra?” He came to himself with a start.

  “I am sorry, Aahotep. I was wondering whether I should visit my mayors and assistant governors on the way north or as we come home. It is good for them to talk with me and not an overseer sometimes.”

  “No, you were not.” She took his hand and her fingers closed around it. “You were thinking of Si-Amun’s unborn child.”

  Seqenenra stared up at the roof of the canopy, its yellow tassels bobbing in the wind, and then beyond it. The sky was densely blue and as he squinted against the sun he saw a hawk wheel into sight, wings outstretched and motionless, a black speck in the vastness. He heard the helmsman give a sharp order, answered by one of the sailors. His gaze dropped slowly to Isis and Kares, leaning over the side and talking quietly together with that air of permanent alertness that all good servants developed. Bending, he kissed Aahotep’s full, hennaed lips, brushing her tousled black hair away from her cheek as he did so.

  “You are right,” he admitted. “I am happy for them both and yet …”

  “And yet you wish that Kamose could be persuaded to wed Tani and give you grandchildren also, in order that your inheritance might be doubly secure.” He drew away grim-faced, sitting with one leg extended, his arms clasping the other bent knee as a guest in his own garden might sit. Aahotep waited, and when he did not speak she continued in a low voice, “You are the rightful King of this land by blood and birth. You would have married your sister if she had not died so young. That is why you feel so naked. I was given to you because my family is also ancient though it carries no royal blood. True Ma’at in Egypt hangs by a thread. Kamose resists all your efforts to push him towards a union with Tani when she comes of age next year so that you wonder whether you will be forced to command him. Yet life that seems so bright and strong may at any time flicker and vanish, dear brother. Si-Amun’s child will be fully royal. Kamose might be dead tomorrow, next month, next year.” She fingered the silver ankh at her neck and the amulet of Sekhmet on her arm to negate the doom of her words. “We know nothing. Rejoice for your son. If Kamose decides to see reason and he and Tani have children, that is fine. If not, there is still Ahmose.”

  “You are right,” he broke in harshly. “I grieve for myself, for my father, for a wounded Ma’at. I mourn because I will go to my tomb and Si-Amun to his, yes and Kamose too, as lowly governors. I will never touch the Crook and the Flail, Aahotep.”

  “Yet you have always done right in the sight of the gods,” she reminded him. “When your heart is weighed, nothing else will matter. Isis!” The woman left the view and came bowing. “Bring the sennet. Look, Seqenenra.” She pointed to the bank. “This village seems to be inhabited solely by little boys and oxen. I suppose they have driven them into the river to cool them. Do you want to play the cones or shall I?”

  They played several games, ate and drank, and played again, Aahotep being careful not to force Seqenenra’s piece into the square that denoted the cold, black water of the underworld where the dead wailed for the light of Ra, and Seqenenra’s mood soon lifted. He was not a man given often to self-pity and like everyone he knew he was addicted to the magical tussle between the cones and the spools. As the afternoon heat intensified, Aahotep took Isis to fan her and went away to rest.

  Seqenenra rose, stretched, and made his way to the side of the barge, first hypnotized by the steady running of the wake the craft was making and then fixing his eyes on the bank gliding past. Villages, stiff palms, canals mirroring a bronze sky, sometimes a nearly-naked peasant leading a donkey, all appeared, imprinted themselves briefly on his consciousness tinged with a haze of heat, and slid away like waking dreams. He knew them all. Since the time of his youth he had travelled up and down the Nile, from Weset south to Swenet and north to Qes, the boundaries of the portion of Egypt he and his fathers before him were allowed to administer. Year by year he had seen the apparent changelessness of his domain. Changelessness was a part of the rightness of Ma’at, the eternal order that had been laid down by the gods when Egypt rose from Nun, the primeval waters, and Osiris had still been a god of the living.

  When he was younger, travelling with Senakhtenra, such familiarity had been reassuring. Yet now he knew that the changelessness of the villages was the only part of Ma’at that remained. The barge was passing a shrine, crumbling and overgrown, and even as he had to turn his head to keep it in view he saw a pack of dogs come running from its gaping entrance and head towards the water. The Setiu who ruled Egypt now had brought their own gods with them, uncivilized deities with hard names, and the homes of the gods of Egypt were turning to dust. How is it that I never noticed before? he asked himself, deeply disturbed. Khentiamentiu, jackal of Aabtu, your temple and a hundred others, not changeless, no. Falling down, falling apart as I sailed by year after year, while Set and Sutekh slowly became one and Hathor and Ishtar blended. Horus and Horon … He shivered. My body lives in the shadow of the old palace. My ka inhabits the past so that I keep the present comfortably at bay. And why not? Wearily he left the barge’s side and cast himself down on the cushions. Uni padded to him immediately, but with one arm over his eyes Seqenenra waved him away. Let Kamose marry whom and when he will. Let Ahmose continue to run wild and laughing through his life. In five hentis or ten there might be change but not in my lifetime or the lives of my children. That is the Ma’at of today. That is the law of the One, Apepa, Beloved of Set, foreign usurper in Het-Uart. He felt no anger, only surprise that today the full force of his country’s situation was brought home to him, today during a small voyage of no great import. He considered, but t
he heat brought him a welcome lassitude and he slept.

  At Khemennu they were guests of Aahotep’s cousin Teti, a wealthy man who had secured from the King the position of Inspector and Administrator of Dykes and Canals. In addition to travelling through the nomes of his jurisdiction after the Inundation had receded in order to see to the reconstituting of the dykes and the repair of the major irrigation canals in Upper Egypt, he held much property. His wife was a priestess in the temple of Thoth, a deity revered not only as the god of wisdom and writing and therefore every scribe’s patron but also as the essence of the moon. Khemennu was his city and Aahotep, a lover of Thoth all her life, spent much of her time in the temple there when she was not visiting relatives. Khemennu was a pretty place surrounded by dense fig trees, its mud streets lined with date palms and its docks busy. Teti’s estate lay on the northern limit beside the temple of Set that had been built fifty years before. He had many minor officials under him and his watersteps were often crowded. Seqenenra, walking with him through the town, taking a skiff with him as he was poled to some dispute or other over a field boundary that the winter flood had washed away, and sitting beside him at the evening meal when his reception hall was full of the dignitaries of Khemennu and noisy with musicians and acrobats, felt out of place. It was not so much the faster pace of the life of his relative by marriage. It was Teti’s quite unselfconscious air of cheerful fulfilment. He worshipped Thoth as his nome’s totem and Set as the lord of the King. He organized his family and his staff, received the frequent heralds from the Delta with assurance and warmth, even talked to Seqenenra with just the correct balance of comradeship and deference that Seqenenra’s superior blood but inferior relationship with the One demanded. Teti, Seqenenra decided, was a man without dark dreams or stabs of remorse. He envied him.