by Hank Lawson
Chapter 17
TWILIGHT LIKE A BLUE FOG
Although the first day of drought season had begun to warm, Mehi shivered when he stepped into his parents’ home. Something had changed. The floor hadn’t been swept, the fragrance of clay soap was gone, and the wall talismans hung at odd angles. What had happened to his mother?
Horemheb, exiting the back room with his head down, was a step from his son before noticing him. Each man squared up to the other. “Your mother is sick,” Horemheb blurted, his face drawn. “She has the fluke.”
Mehi’s gut clenched. “You let her eat fluke?”
“What d’you mean, ‘let her’? It’s a change from them tem papyrus roots.”
Fear like an icy wind swept into Mehi’s heart. His mother shouldn’t be, needn’t be, so poor as to rely on the wormy fluke fish. He glared at his father. Mehi pushed past him.
“Try to get her to eat.”
“It won’t be fluke.”
In the back room doorway, Mehi paused for a sour odor he didn’t at first recognize. Khety’s bird-like frame lay stiff on the mattress. Except when she saw her son, a smile at the corners of her mouth lifted like a swallow’s wings.
Mehi grinned for her as he sat down with folded legs beside her. “It’s not like you to go against the priests’ rules with the fluke.”
“Tu, I pay for it now.”
“This would not happen with me living here. I wouldn’t let you eat fluke.”
“Ah, we’d still have to eat.”
Mehi’s eyes dropped to look at his hands. From his mother, this was a scolding. She must have heard his angry words to his father.
When Mehi again looked at his mother, Khety was casting worried eyes across her son’s face. “Mehi, I’ve heard an upsetting story. There’s gossip you’ve been to a strange woman.” Her eyebrows flicked.
Mehi’s eyes shifted away, this time toward the doorway and outdoors. He’d visit Aatet again that night.
Khety closed her eyes. To Mehi, her body seemed to shrink into the mattress.
His hands shook. He longed to be clean of guilt so he could blame his father without holding back. Both of Khety’s men hurt her.
“My boy, a strange woman you can never have.”
“You don’t know this woman, Mother.”
“Oh, yes. Such a woman offers everything but gives nothing. She hates you for coming to a barren market.”
Mehi didn’t want to talk about this. He took up a bowl of porridge on the floor. “Here, try some of this.” He dipped his fingers into the bowl and presented them to her.
Khety turned away her head. When Mehi lowered his hand, she faced him again. “I know you. You cannot go halfway. Since there’s nothing in this woman, you’ll reach for her farther and farther until ... It’s only the—the act she offers you while you think it’s something else.”
Mehi pushed his fingers into his mother’s mouth. Forced to take the food, Khety maintained an accusing expression on him as she swallowed.
“My life with Wabt is empty, Mother.”
Khety tried to speak but winced. Her face blanched. Mehi reached a hand to her. Recovering, yet her voice turning husky, Khety said, “I’m not telling you to stay with Wabt if you don’t love—” Khety coughed three times. Her eyes watered. Turning from Mehi, she struggled to rise onto her side. She vomited, wet and coarse.
Without an idea what to do, Mehi touched his mother’s shoulder.
Khety swabbed her face with a cloth. She then sipped water from a ladle beside her.
Mehi waited on his mother, his eyebrows quivering.
Khety turned to him. A spot of vomit clung to her chin. Mehi averted his eyes. She said, “I’m sorry for that woman. Truly. I’m sorry for a woman who thinks all she has is her body.”
Mehi looked back to his mother, hoping the rot on her face was gone. It wasn’t. He wanted to indicate her chin to her but just as much he didn’t want to think about it. Unclean and prone, the mother he knew was drifting away from him.
Khety noticed his glances. She wiped the spot and blushed. “You don’t love Wabt. I see that in your eyes. But what you build with a strange woman is hate. There’re other women than Wabt or a prostitute.”
“Hate?”
Khety paused. “Your father went to such a woman.”
“He what?!” Bile rose from Mehi’s gut. What crime hadn’t his father committed?
“It was horrible days for him.”
“For him? Mother, horrible for you.”
Khety’s voice softened to a sigh. “I won’t lie to you. Those days were hard. But he injured himself more than me.”
Mehi almost shouted. “Hurt himself?”
“Mehi,” she insisted, her voice hoarse, “he lost himself. He hated everything, but mostly himself. Each night he came home later with greater hatred. Some men take a prostitute without losing themselves, but not your father and not you.”
“Mother, it’s not like that.” He kissed her forehead and got up to leave.
Khety examined her son. “Make glad the heart.” She coughed, her color draining.
As Mehi passed through the front room to leave the hut, he said nothing to his father.
Under the sun’s climbing the sky, black silence hung about Mehi, his head and eyes low. His mother’s words wailed like the blue women’s dirges at Snebtisi’s funeral. He walked without feel for the ground. No smell alerted him. His breathing chafed his chest but he failed to hear it or any sound distinctly.
He was not as content with Aatet as he had been with An-khi, but not dead as he was with Wabt.
I want someone to know ... I’m trying—to do right. I thought I would be different than this.
Mehi broke off his plodding to watch three pigs work a muddy field in the dark. A farmer whipped them on the rumps so they’d trample seed into the bare ground in a vain attempt to grow a second crop. Pigs’ squat bodies clashed with Egypt’s concept of grace and their meat fouled in Egypt’s beloved heat. Yet, Egyptians used pigs for this most vital of Egypt’s tasks. The animals bore the beating; they clomped on.
Mehi pushed on to Aatet.
Aatet’s laugh squealed up in its mindless whoop. “You don’t do anything. You just wait for me. Every visit’s the same thing.”
In her lean-to of straw and daub, a major chunk of which was obviously dung, separated in places wide enough for prying eyes, Mehi felt that the prostitute whipped him as he plodded through mud. Her tongue-lashings felt right and just.
“Don’t be so sad, my little shi. Come to your Aatet. I make it better, don’t I? You’re such a little sweeting. You got a gift for me right now, don’t you?”
From his bag, he produced for her the one item his mother had saved from their life before the tomb-robbery, an heirloom she had carved, and that she’d created to protect her three children. Mehi offered up his mother’s God Bes statue.
“Aw, let me see.” Aatet snatched it. Her eyes widened in appraising the carving. “You’re a fool.”
Throughout their noontime act, Mehi moved with strange bones. They felt like those of another man. When it was over, sickness surged in him. He put his hand on his mouth and leaned from Aatet. He retched. Over and over. Without vomiting. The sickness soured in him.
“Has my little husband drunk a little much?”
Mehi had one choice. Really, he had no choice.
The next day at dawn, Mehi paced the corridor outside the royal schoolroom. He kept his eyes off the many-colored murals in the hallways depicting Egypt and her God-king. He didn’t know what he’d tell the prince. Other boys passed by not bothering to scorn him anymore. He deserved their scorn now.
The schoolmaster arrived and scolded Mehi for not being at his place inside. Mehi told him he waited for Prince Hordedef. “Dear me,” the master said, nostrils flaring, “we certainly had ought to wait for that, hadn’t we?”
When the prince finally approached from the corridor’s far end with his elegant gait, if perhaps a bit more slowly than
usual, he seemed lost in thought and all but collided with Mehi before noticing him. “Why, Mehi. Why are you out here? You’re usually first in your place.”
“Uh, Prince Hordedef, your Majesty, son of the great God Khufu.”
“Your eyes are deep cast. Mehi, are you not well? Shall I call a doctor?”
“This is my last day—I—I, will you pardon, uh ...”
“Slow down, Mehi. Say what you mean, one word at a time.”
“Prince, I can’t come to class any more. I can’t.”
Hordedef started. “Mehi, no. Whatever the problem, problems can be solved.”
Mehi’s wickedness couldn’t be solved. “School’ll take too long. I’ll be too old.”
“You’ll be just as old either way.”
“Uhm ...” Mehi peeked down the corridor, edgy to be gone.
“Dear boy,” the prince said, drawing a sigh. Mehi saw worry in his face. “Recent situations distract me; I’ve neglected you and the other students. I don’t wish for you to quit and I don’t believe you wish to quit. Rather than inform me of your decision in person, you might have simply stopped attending.”
“I owed it to you. You’re a prince.”
“Perhaps. But school is dear to you. Am I wrong in that, Mehi? Isn’t it your future?”
I have no future. “My future is with commoners like my father.” Mehi fidgeted, about to run off.
Hordedef rested his palm on Mehi’s chest. The prince’s eyes sparkled. “Don’t make your final decision today. Attend one day more and we’ll talk tomorrow.”
Mehi didn’t want to listen.
“Do me this favor, brother Mehi.”
Mehi hesitated. To stay in school he’d have to believe he was Hordedef’s brother? No, that was too terrible a sacrilege to consider. “I’m sorry, your Honor.”
Hordedef sagged. “I’ll not stop hoping for you. You’ve been the one bright face I speak to at these classes. I’ll miss you, Mehi.”
Horemheb’s son mumbled that he’d miss Hordedef too. Mehi ran three steps before he remembered to bow.
Writing the monthly report for the Per-O at the governor’s low table in the treasury building, An-khi was putting into practice her months of observing Paser during his provincial duties. She had judged for herself what to do and not do were she to become governor: Do report to Annu timely and accurately; do not funnel taxes to one’s own storehouse. Do work long hours; do not favor friends in their lawsuits. Do meet as many citizens as possible; do not whip those delinquent in their taxes to pay for your opulent tomb.
At the time, the judgment had been merely a game to occupy her long hours at the treasury building. But two weeks ago, a white scorpion stung her father. Paser didn’t recover. Stunned but enduring, An-khi and Heria quietly buried him in his tomb, although without the imprecise inscriptions he had planned for it.
Finished with the report, An-khi called for a scribe. “See that the runner takes this out today,” she said, handing to him a bundle of papyrus rolls.
The scribe bowed. “Excuse me, Lady An-khi, but when did you say that Governor Paser will be returning to work?”
“Any day.”
Theormi, Sebek and the caravan riders on their bellies encircled the rise’s slope like a fallen fence. Minute by minute, they scanned the ridge for the nomads. Theormi saw nothing but their own shadows shifting side to side as the sun arched above them. Sand clogged her nostrils, chafed her eyes and grinded in every fold of skin. The edges of her tongue parched crisp, its pain spreading inward. She fancied their mounts sprouting wings and flying them away from all of this.
Merhet muttered about black suns. His wife had stopped sobbing.
When Theormi and Sebek touched, their flesh burnt. When twilight cooled, they inched toward each other’s warmth. When the sun rose on their second day in the bowl, none had rest from fright. Sebek ordered every third rider to close his eyes. After an hour, he wakened them for another third to sleep.
Riders began questioning whether the nomads were still waiting. Sebek quelled them with his own question: “Who wants to volunteer to go up to the top of the rise and tell us what they see on the other side?”
By noon, the men let go of their donkeys’ reins. The animals remained where they stood. The men began to pant as during a fight. Sunlight delivered the blows.
Topel jeered, “Aw, they’ve gone off.” Several riders stared at Sebek.
Another said, “No one would wait this long.”
“They’re gone.”
Sebek swept out his hand toward the ridge as if offering it to Topel.
The riders looked back at Topel. One said, “Go on, Topel. You’re right. Go on.” Many others nodded. All waited for him.
Topel looked up the incline. Then looked at the men. He flattened himself and began to crawl up the sand. After a few feet he stopped, looked back, face red, eyes dark, and then crawled a few feet more. Two body lengths from the top of the rise, he stopped and cocked his head as if listening. Placing his arms at his sides, he wriggled like a snake up to the ridge top. Topel took two deep breaths and then nudged up his head, turning it to expose above the ridge only one eye.
With a “whoosh” and a “crack,” a spear broke through the back of his skull. He sunk down. The spear had pierced the exposed eye. Neither he nor spear-thrower made a sound.
When the siege’s third day smoldered around them, the riders slipped in and out of dream whether or not it was their turn to sleep. Theormi’s mind clouded. The whole of her tongue ached and swelled. She couldn’t stop it from scraping against her teeth. For hours the same words repeatedly spurt from her mouth at Foreman Sebek. “There has to be more we can do.”
Each time, Sebek either shrugged, shook his head or did nothing.
Finally, when the sun was hacking its path down the sky, she turned to the foreman. “How did you escape the goldmines?”
Sebek looked away.
“It may be important.”
“I spat my venom at your fiend who created that hell.”
Theormi stared him down.
“I played dead,” Sebek obliged. “Tricked a guard—who paid for his stupidity.”
“Could we do that here? Play dead? Then surprise the nomads when they come?”
“These men don’t have the hatred I have.”
“Make them do it. If you wanted to, you’d convince them.”
“If the nomads wait much longer, we won’t have to play dead.”
“Have you given up?”
He shrugged.
“Remember that man and his donkey giving up? How you hated that?”
No reaction.
“We have to try something.”
Sebek looked at her and a devilish gleam came to his eye. “I’d tell the great God-king that the prince he sent out here, this rat-child, died a great hero. It’d kill him to know he exiled a hero.”
Theormi sank back. “We need one now.”
“Attack, attack.” A rider cried the alarm. All jumped into position.
The nomads weren’t there.
Riders jeered the one who had called the false alarm. But more false sightings followed. Several times, Theormi flinched for the nomads, red murder in their eyes, clawing at her. Once, she thought she saw Sebek about to sound an alarm before he shrugged and relaxed again.
Near sundown, the foreman instructed the men to punch any other rider on watch who hung his head. This became a pleasure pastime. But on one watch, a prone rider didn’t respond even after a second punch. His partner bent to him and then mouthed to Sebek, “Nothing.” Water splashed on the rider’s face revived him enough that he lifted his head before it flopped down again.
Soon, Theormi could not tell who slept. Her eyes, crisp with strain and glare, found no rider with his head up. Stiff, their bodies littered the sand. She and Sebek were alone in watching the rise.
While dusk blessed them from the heat, Theormi embedded in the sand as if she were beneath it. Sebek stopped fighting the
riders’ need to sleep and dream. Everyone but Sebek slept.
Theormi suggested to him that she should remain awake to help keep him awake. He told her, “I won’t lose control.”
On the fourth dawn, the Egyptians, in postures of stillbirth, finally believed their eyes. They wakened to screams and nomads squalling out of the eastern sunrise and down the rise at them. Clubs, shouts, donkeys and nomads crossed in every direction. Most Egyptians had time only to stagger to their knees. They were clubbed back down. Heads were favorite targets.
Theormi stood. She and Sebek swung clubs. Merhet ran off shrieking. In his frenzy, he upended two nomads, broke free of the battle, and leapt onto a donkey. A spear flew past his ear as he disappeared beyond the rise. One nomad commanded ten mounted nomads to chase down the prince. They lit out.
Theormi saw Sebek dodge attackers as he ran to a donkey. She met his eyes just she was hauled up and slammed across the lap of a nomad on a donkey who then galloped off. The nomad’s eyes glinted gray. Theormi threw her fists and knees at him. He laughed. She wrenched her neck to find Sebek. He had vanished.
Sebek was chiseling in memory the face of the nomad who had snatched Theormi. Like goldmine ore, his mind glinted with the gray of the nomad’s eyes. Yet first, mad or not, Merhet was his duty. The nomads had come for the prince; that was clear. From out of the flying dust, a club cracked Sebek’s shoulder. He countered with a stinging of his club that rammed the attacker’s ear deep into his skull.
Once free of the melee, Sebek saw a mile ahead the dust of the nomad’s donkeys chasing Prince Merhet. Hiding his pursuit, Sebek sidled behind sand dunes. Within an hour, the dust trail was replaced by a thin line of smoke that seemed to drop like a rope from a hole in the sky.
By the time Sebek found the smoke’s source, all nomads had ridden out. The burning mass on the sand must have been Prince Merhet, but Sebek waited for it to cool so he could be sure. The burnt flesh odors of boiled fat, copper and sulfur clung to him. He cursed the prince.
Three Egyptians straggled to the smoke. Each pinched his nose.
Sebek confronted them. “Did anyone go after the harem woman?”
“Hapu did for a while. He’s behind us.”
“Foreman,” said the other, “do you want to know who died?”
“Will that change anything?”
Others from the caravan, seven in all including Hapu, wandered in.
“Did you find the woman?”
“The nomads went south with her.”
Another laughed. “They’ll have their reward.”
“You didn’t follow her?” Sebek charged the men. “You left her? Cowards.”
“It’s only a woman. We were exiling her anyway.”
“Hem-ts.”
Hapu shrugged.
Sebek returned to the black remains. He knelt down and pushed ash off what was left of the prince’s face. Merhet’s lower jaw fell open, ash dribbling from where the lips had been. As Sebek brushed away more ash, arms, hands and fingers lost shape and crumbled. He found what he was looking for—the garnet ring. Sebek could now go after Theormi.
He jumped onto his donkey, kicking his heels into it. It honked. Sebek slapped its head. They raced away.
Three hours later, twilight falling, Sebek crept up on the nomad camp. A gray plume of campfire smoke rose like a flag. He crawled behind a dune’s crest, then peeked over. In the center, around the campfire, two nomads snored. Four others passed around a jug, chuckling. One had the ore-glint gray eyes. On the fire’s far side, Theormi lay unmoving, a heap of legs, arms and torso twisted at cruel angles. Her torn tunic rode up her thighs. Blood and dirt smeared everywhere on her skin. Her grimy hair wrapped like twine around her face.
Sebek knew the marauders would come at her again when they’d rested. What a prize this woman was. They clutched a God-king’s woman without grasping who she was. Not as Sebek knew her.
All Sebek had was his club. Pointless. The nomads had ruined the woman with their foul bodies. Nothing was left of the woman he knew. Tu, pointless.
God-king Khufu had done this. He exiled the woman to this fate. He made Sebek a foreman to get Sebek closer to Theormi than he had to any woman. And made him watch her slaughter. The Hituptah Ptah priests. They’d sent these nomads. The Ptah priests must possess the power to exact revenge against Khufu.
Sebek slipped away on the sand.
The barque’s stern and prow steeples, painted like lotus stems, thrust twenty-feet out of the white water were topped by lotus flower spires that opened onto the God-king enthroned amidships. To mirror the prow of his one-hundred foot barque slashing into the Nile current, God-king Khufu set his plow-like profile for his citizens gathered on both shores. They must see their future preserved by the gold he sailed into Ta Sety to secure. The ship’s red and gold spirals, silky banners and flourishing ribbons might not be enough to reassure them. The citizens faced another drought season in a second drought year.
“Hordedef.”
“Yes, Sire.”
“Prince, the citizens lost entertainment with the temple closing, but the Per-O can provide its own. Set up a tour of music and dance. Several, in fact.”
“Yes, King. Excellent.”
Ahead on the west bank, Khufu witnessed four men wading up to their loin clothes and unraveling a thirty-foot circular net, struggling to remain upright in knots of slack and slimy lotus. They leaned onto the net, driving it down, finally submerging themselves. They leapt up together, muddy water streaming off their heads and shoulders, boosting the net above the surface, looking for their catch. There was none. Their shoulders slumped, and then they saw their God-king.
Khufu turned his eyes to the eastern shore, seeing a family of six sitting on their haunches sorting melons. A little daughter wearing a red bandana began to gnaw at a melon. The father took it from her. No matter how hungry the child might be, they had melons only for trade to a passing barge, not to eat. The girl began to cry.
Cry Isis’s tears, sweet daughter. Over sate the river. Khufu called, “Captain, make the sails shake.”
“Yes, Majesty.” The captain turned. “Luff! Luff there. Get her into the wind.” The six oarsmen on both port and starboard caught their blades into the water and drove their strokes, leaning back nearly parallel to the deck. Boatmen ran the sails. They billowed and cracked. The barque shuddered.
These tem rapids bucked against Khufu’s chasing of Merhet and Theormi, his body shaking with their steps out of Egypt, mind cascading with the tiny fury of Merhet’s infant heart, purling with Merhet’s child laughter, rumbling with Merhet’s juvenile brooding, rippling with Theormi’s poetry, agitating with her arguments, and undulating with her muscle and bone climaxes.
Near the outpost town of Abu loomed the first cataract. Polished black by sun and river, its sheer granite cliffs towered six to eight hundred feet. They enwalled the river. Also, its granite roots rifted up through the sandstone riverbed, creating rapids as long as six miles. These shielded Egypt against quick invasions from the south, or into the south.
In front of the Abu fort’s stonewalls, a thousand conscripts waved and sang “Khufu” to the warrior-king who would soon lead them to plunder Ta Sety. Recruiters had rounded them up from nearby provinces to be soldiers. The royal company planned to stop at the fort, unload the barque, and the next day head into Ta Sety on foot.
Instead, the conscripts’ song inspired Khufu. He would exploit the cataract to inspire his subjects. Their deathless God-king Khufu ordered, “Continue through.”
Each man on deck stopped moving.
“Sir,” said Vizier Shaf, “do you mean for us to take the barque over the cataract?”
Khufu did not answer. He remained in profile.
Shaf cast his eyes to the sky. Boatmen looked to each other, eyes wide. After a last glance at the God-king, Shaf flicked his fingers at the captain. The captain gulped, but swung up his arm. “All right there. Watch the rocks below, watch the rocks to shore. Stea
dy the oars.”
Khufu’s decision pleased him. Speed. The cliffs’ defiance rivaled his own. Up the granite faces, his Inundations had etched whorls and hollows in the shape of various beasts. Future Inundations would further enliven these monuments as alive and eternal as his pyramid’s stone would maintain him.
Currents shook under Khufu. His barque sped up as if shifting into a chute. The roar of rapids drowned out the conscript’s chants. Shadows of the black granite lowered over the company’s heads.
Immediately, granite underwater slammed into the barque. Its cedar planks crunched and snapped. The ship shunted port. Khufu sickened. He gripped his throne. Men shouted. White water leapt over the bow. The captain yelled an order, swallowed by the roar, repeated it. Princes ran to starboard, grabbed spare oars and plied them against the river. Deckhands held onto masts. Many fell. Some screamed. Port oarsmen prodded oars or their hands, against the stone scaling over the barque. The oars broke.
The granite whorls Khufu had admired now branded the hull. A long, deep shudder of ripping wood tore through the hull. The barque reared up, tilting queasily starboard. Princes spilled across the deck. That moment proved that he faced the wrong direction. Egypt—his charge—was behind him.
Stern to bow—the barque lurched. Khufu hurtled from his throne. He hit the cedar deck and flew up again. He saw the black cliff and black sky whirling.
Khufu plummeted into the water. Hard and deep.
Cut off from the world and knowing he’d fallen by will of the Gods, he felt every earthly concern and duty float away. How distant he might be from any other living thing or even whether he faced up or down, he didn’t know. He didn’t care. He made no effort to right himself but let the water do with him what it would. He submitted. Here he drifted in the lovely muffled world under water. Quiet as a dream. Isolated, Khufu didn’t feel alone, but caressed, supported fully without any effort of his own. His muscles fell long, limp and liquid. He didn’t sense the water. He was water. He dispersed across the universe. This was a God-king’s death.
An hour later, the boatmen had righted the barque. It was a shambles. The prow’s and stern’s lotus spires had broken off and were presumably floating back home. Sails, banners and ribbons were ripped or missing. Gouges and lacerations had erased much of the painted designs. On the riverbank, Khufu sat at a fire, fingering at stubborn water clogging his right ear. Conscripts lined the banks and cliffs behind, shaking their heads and whispering.
A royal runner in a simple tunic ran up behind the God-king. He kissed the ground. Khufu didn’t acknowledge him. The runner turned to the second prince. Hordedef flung his hand out, indicating that the runner should get on with his report. “Sire,” the young man said. “Tehnu nomads attack Demit-en-Hor in the northwest province. Many perish. Much plunder. Raids continue.”
Khufu’s head shot up, eyes latching onto the runner. The God-king spat question after question before dismissing him.
“Good, good.” Khufu stood and paced, slapping his hands together. His face flushed and his eyes lit up. “Time to show myself. Yes, yes, a real defense of my country. To war.”
Prince Hordedef slumped.