Authors: Pauline Gedge
The herald stepped beyond, murmured something, and returned. He bowed. “It has been an honour to serve you, Great Seer. I leave you in the care of Chief Royal Steward Nubti. Should you need the services of a herald, feel free to send for me. If you wish, I can appoint one for your use alone.”
“Thank you, Maani-nekhtef,” Huy replied. “I shall do so.” The man smiled and strode away, and Huy turned to see Nubti in the doorway.
At once the steward bowed. “Great Seer, you are very welcome,” he said in the deep voice Huy remembered so well. “Their Majesties are eager to see you.”
“Nubti.” Huy, following his hunched back, found himself in a wide hallway that opened out almost at once into a large, brightly lit room whose walls were covered in paintings of giant, anonymous kings wearing the Double Crown and sitting on the Horus Throne or aiming an arrow at a confusing mass of enemies or standing in a skiff surrounded by reeds, throwing stick in hand. He had no time to do more than briefly notice the pretty ebony-and-ivory-inlaid tables, the gilt chairs with their inviting cushions, the gleaming lampstands bearing alabaster lotuses and furled lily petals in whose depths the oil wicks glowed and flickered. At the far end, a shrine stood open. From its interior Amun’s benign face and tall double plumes seemed to exude an air of peace. Someone had laid a small bouquet of tiny white narcissus blooms across the god’s feet. Huy could smell them together with the heavier scents of lotus and henna flowers and the almost undetectable tang of spiced satke oil. Mutemwia’s perfume. Huy inhaled and closed his eyes for a moment. When he opened them again, he saw Nubti’s oddly misshapen form gliding towards one of the wide doorways in the walls, but he had hardly reached it when he was forced to move aside. Amunhotep hurried past him towards Huy.
“You came!” he exclaimed. At once Huy went to his knees and then put his forehead on the floor. He could hear the patter of the King’s sandals slow and then stop. “You may rise,” the familiar voice commanded, and Huy scrambled up. Amunhotep was smiling at him. “Oh, Uncle Huy, it’s so very wonderful to have you here,” he said. “I wasn’t sure you’d come.”
Huy’s eyebrows shot up. “You sent me a direct command, Majesty. Of course I obeyed as quickly as I was able. You’ve grown a great deal since I saw you last.” Indeed, the creature standing before him was almost unrecognizable. In the months since Huy had seen him, Amunhotep had become taller and more slender, as though the remains of childhood fat had been used to impel his growth. His face was thinner also, although his cheeks remained pleasantly rounded. He was at the awkward stage when girls as well as boys suddenly become all arms and gangly legs, chests slightly concave, heads too large.
Why, he’s twelve
, Huy thought with shock.
He’s the same age I was when I came back to life in Hut-herib’s House of the Dead after being attacked at school in Iunu
.
The boy’s large brown eyes rimmed in black kohl were watching him with humour. “You are assessing the changes in my body and adjusting to them. Before you ask, I am exceedingly healthy. Is Anhur with you? I long to see him.” He indicated one of the two chairs drawn up to one of the opulent tables. “Let us sit.” He flung himself down. “You are more than my Personal Scribe,” he went on as Nubti and a white-kilted servant with a blue ribbon tied around his shaved skull appeared out of nowhere and silently placed wine, cups, and a dish of almonds by the royal hand. The slim fingers waved once. Nubti poured the wine. “I will not forget that you are Egypt’s Great Seer. I will always invite you to sit in my presence, an honour no one else but my Majesty Mother has, because I love you and because I must never insult Atum by showing you the slightest indignity. You may also touch me sometimes.”
Huy took the other chair at once. Amunhotep pushed a cup towards him. Huy lifted it and drank. The King laughed at his expression as he swallowed. “Year two of my Osiris grandfather Amunhotep, high quality, three times good, from the Food of Egypt. Our best. Now, is Anhur hovering beyond the doors?”
“No, Majesty. I wish he was.” Briefly, Huy described Anhur’s illness and the steps he himself had taken on his soldier’s behalf.
Amunhotep grimaced. “I shall dictate a letter to him at once. It will be your first task as my scribe. So you are now without a captain of your guard or a scribe. I’m sorry.” Huy expected the boy to continue, to say that he knew exactly the replacements Huy needed, but he did not. “Have an almond,” he said after a short pause. “I wanted to command a great feast in your honour the day you arrived, but my Majesty Mother advised me to wait until you had been here for some weeks. She said you would be utterly lost for a while. So the three of us will eat together here in my private quarters tonight.”
Nubti appeared again and bowed. “Majesty, the Seer’s servants and goods have all been unloaded and taken to his apartments. If you wish, I can guide him there.”
“No.” The King took a last hurried gulp of wine and rose. “I’ll take him myself, but you must come so that you can meet his steward Merenra.” Huy would have liked to sit over the excellent vintage for much longer, but Amunhotep was frowning impatiently.
“Merenra has remained behind to administer my estate,” Huy told him as they approached the double doors. “I have promoted Amunmose instead.”
“I remember him.” Another servant was suddenly and silently present, pushing open one of the doors, and a soldier on the other side at once held it open. “He used to prattle on at greater length than I did in those days. Have the passages cleared!” he barked at the guards. As he and Huy fell in behind the soldiers, Amunhotep slid his arm through Huy’s. His perfume, rosemary, wafted into Huy’s nostrils. “My uncle Amunhotep is on his way back from Mitanni,” the King continued as the five of them set off. “I have sent a contingent of soldiers from the Division of Ra to meet him at the border. To escort him safely home.” Huy repressed an urge to glance at the smoothly painted face. Out of the corner of his eye he saw that the hennaed mouth was faintly smiling. “I don’t remember him really. It will be good to welcome him back. Pa-shed is looking forward to serving him again.”
Huy filed both snippets of information away. The guards were already slowing after no more than two turns of the corridor. Ahead, a pair of tall cedar doors stood open. Two of Huy’s own soldiers were already standing guard outside. He greeted them and they returned his words with obvious relief at seeing him. As he stepped over the threshold, Amunmose came hurrying. At the sight of Huy’s companion, he fell to his knees and his forehead audibly bumped the tiles. Amunhotep told him to get up, which he did with alacrity, only then rubbing his forehead. Huy prayed that he would not speak first. The steward waited.
“I remember you very well, Amunmose,” the King told him. “You often brought me forbidden sweatmeats when I stayed in Huy’s guest room. Are you happy with the domain you will oversee?”
“Oh, Majesty, it’s wonderful. Wonderful! Master, there are more and bigger rooms than your house has at home, and several of them give out onto a huge lawn with trees and flowers and two ponds! On this side”—he pointed—“the apartment joins by a door to your servants’ quarters. There’s a door on the opposite wall beyond, but it won’t open.”
“It will open from the other side.” Amunhotep pulled his arm from Huy’s. “My Majesty Mother’s apartments are between yours and mine, Uncle Huy. If she wishes to speak with you, she will send a servant through. It is the same for me. I don’t spend much time in my quarters, though. I must continue my studies until my sixteenth Naming Day like every other Egyptian pupil, and as well as my lessons, I must give audience to any minister who needs to consult Mother and me. There are a lot of them, not to mention the ambassadors who come and go from barbaric foreign countries.” He turned to face Huy directly. “I must leave you here, but tonight you will be summoned to my rooms. I’ll send you an escort. After the three of us have eaten, I’ll dicate the letter to Anhur. Nubti, explain to Amunmose exactly where your quarters are, and how the stewards in the palace go about their duties. Stay here.”
Everyone bowed and Amunhotep left. Huy felt that the boy had taken his energy with him. He was all at once tired. A wave of homesickness for his house and Thothhotep’s light voice and Anhur’s lined face washed through him.
“Master, would you like to see the layout of this place, or would you rather sit quietly while the rest of your belongings are unpacked? Your sleeping room is ready for you now, and Tetiankh is there.”
Huy fought off his exhaustion. Nubti was waiting in the motionless patience of the good servant. “If Tetiankh is there, I’ll find it myself,” Huy replied. “Nubti, tell him everything he has to know.”
He wandered farther into the airy room with its white and blue tiles, its pretty red or yellow reed mats, its chairs and tables and lampstands, its cushions stuffed with goose down. The surface of one of the tables formed a sennet board, the figures inside the squares exquisitely painted on bone or ivory, the squares themselves formed of thin, criss-crossing strips of gold. Under the table was a drawer where, Huy surmised, the rods, spools, and sticks for the game were kept. The walls around him did not have much decoration on them. They were broken by rectangled doorways leading into other rooms and perhaps even to rooms beyond them, until there was a solid wall against which some noble lived. The layout was simple, pleasing, and easy to grasp.
Huy found his body servant folding linen in a large, dim room dominated by a capacious couch with its head pushed against the far wall. Over it on the ceiling the body of the goddess of the sky, Nut, was arched, surrounded by stars, the sun just about to disappear into her mouth. Pink light, the early light of sunset, dribbled down from the three clerestory windows cut high in the only wall clearly fronting the garden Amunmose had mentioned, and pooled weakly on the blue and white tiling of the floor. The table by the couch was gilded, and already held Huy’s night lamp. So was the chair resting against the right-hand wall, with two of his chests beside it. Tetiankh had already dressed the couch and placed Huy’s shrine with its likeness of Khenti-kheti against the last piece of free wall.
The air smelled faintly of vinegar and jasmine.
The jasmine must be flowering outside
, Huy thought. It had been years since he had worn that particular perfume, not since the disastrous evening at Nakht’s house when Nakht had refused him a position in his Governor’s office and Anuket had kissed him so deliberately and so coldly in the dark of her father’s garden. Huy hated this room at once, then silently reprimanded himself.
You are tired and a stranger here. Besides, you know there won’t be much time for sleeping, don’t you?
“I need a small dose of poppy and an hour on the couch, Tetiankh,” he said, stepping reluctantly forward. “Go and find out from Royal Steward Nubti where the palace physicians keep their mortars and pestles and whatever else you’ll need. Later, you and I and Amunmose must discuss the safety of our belongings, how to keep everything secure, but for now just let me rest.” He stripped off his kilt, sandals, and jewellery, placed his headrest on the couch, and lay down, watching the glow from the two standing lamps in the room gradually seem to brighten as the daylight waned.
When Tetiankh returned, Huy drank then dozed, listening as the man set up Huy’s cosmetics table, opened a chest to retrieve a clean kilt, brought out a piece of jewellery with a soft clink. There was sanity in the gentle sounds, and relief from heartache in the drug. He came to himself with a start when a hand descended on his naked shoulder.
“Master, I let you sleep for two hours, but I dare not make you late for the King,” Tetiankh said. “A servant from the nearest bathhouse is here with hot water. I will refresh you.”
Later, in white kilt and shirt, a plain gold chain hanging with the sa around his neck and golden ankhs in his earlobes, his eyes kohled and his hair newly braided, he sat in his new reception room, now full of shadows, glad to be away from the aroma of jasmine and feeling wholly unreal.
A herald came for him not long afterwards, and by the time he had followed the man the short distance to the King’s dully gleaming electrum doors, he was familiar with the way. He entered the royal apartments to a blaze of cheerful lamplight and the pleasant trills of a plucked harp. Nubti flowed towards him, reverenced him, and led him to where Amunhotep and Mutemwia were waiting, three little dining tables laden with fresh flowers behind them.
Huy made his obeisance to them, and Mutemwia held out both silver-hung arms. Astounded, Huy found himself loosely embraced, enveloped in her perfume, the blue enamel flowers surrounding her coronet brushing the middle of his chest. His own arms went around her automatically. It was like holding a child. She stepped back, but only a little. “I have missed you a great deal, Seer Huy.” She smiled. “Many times during the worries of the past months I have needed your counsel and gone without. I hope you will be happy here. I will do everything I can to make it so.” The tiny hands laden with rings flew apart in an expansive gesture. The beautiful black eyes were full of warmth.
Huy bowed profoundly. “Majesty, you are generous and kind,” he replied. “Know that I will serve my King and you for as long as my love and devotion are needed.”
“Let us eat together, then.” Still smiling, she indicated the floor, and once she and Amunhotep had settled themselves behind their tables, he joined them.
At once the room sprang to life with a file of servants carrying trays that filled Huy’s nostrils with appetizing aromas. He suddenly realized that he was hungry. He was offered date, palm, grape, shedeh, or fig wine. The choice of delicious salads at that time of the year was large. Ox liver with parsley and onions, roast duck in a cumin and marjoram sauce, grilled fresh inet fish, its skin crisp with thyme and coriander, were all paraded before him. The meal ended with a small bowl of dried figs and currants in a date syrup. Huy, leaning back replete, realized that nothing he had eaten had been tasted, and then decided that it did not matter. Their Majesties would have their own tasters, and any meal shared with them was safe—unless one or both of them might want to poison him in the days ahead. He stirred uneasily, dismissing the ridiculous thought.