Authors: Pauline Gedge
“What news of Pharaoh?” I asked under the cover of the priests’ loud singing.
“The physician’s assistant has been commanded to join his master at Pharaoh’s bedside as soon as you have taken charge here,” she told me. “Hui cannot come, as you must know by now. There is talk of rotten food. Pharaoh’s symptoms are the same as Hentmira’s and they shared a dish of candied figs last night. Or so it is said.”
“How ill is he?” She cast a sidelong glance at the group around Hentmira’s couch.
“I do not know.” I turned away then and joined the palace physician’s assistant, touching his shoulder gently. He made way for me, and I approached Hentmira.
She was close to death. Already she was deep in the coma that would lead her ultimately to the gates of the Judgement Hall, and as I bent over her I had a moment of inexpressible relief that I would not have to look into eyes brimming with anguish or hear her soft, hesitant voice distorted as she fought to take breath and speak. Her skin was cold and clammy under my hands, her parted lips blue, and I noticed as I surreptitiously inspected her palms that they and her forearms were angry with a thick, raised rash. Her eyes were only half-closed. They glittered dully. Her face was streaked with the tears of her torment. The sheets were foul with her bloody excretions. I stood back.
“There is nothing to be done,” the assistant said. “Thank the gods the convulsions are over. The Keeper has sent for her family, but what can we tell them? She will die before they arrive.”
“Were you able to give her anything?” I managed to ask. I wanted to fly at the priests who were filling the room with their choking incense and their senseless drone, but the words they sang were no longer for healing. They were for an easy separation of ka from body and Hentmira needed them.
“I tried to dose her with poppy but she could not keep it down,” he said. “If this was caused by rotten food then I must begin my apprenticeship all over again. It seems more like the work of a poison to me.” He began to put away his phials and instruments. “I must now attend Pharaoh, and I fervently hope that he has been spared the ravages that overtook this poor young woman. I leave her to you, my Lady.”
I hardly noticed him go. Pulling up a stool I sat beside Hentmira. I knew better than anyone that there was nothing left to do but wait for the inevitable. I ordered her linen to be changed and a bowl of warm water to be brought, and I forced myself to carefully wash the flaccid limbs, the thin trunk, even the ashen face of the girl who had prompted such jealousy in me. The action was a self-imposed penance, a gesture of guilt and sadness, but I did not know if it was an evidence of regret. I did not think so.
Laying my hand over her ribs I felt the irregular, faint flutterings of a heart that could not go on beating for much longer. Oh, Hentmira, forgive me, I pleaded mutely. Your heart struggles valiantly for life and it will lose, but at its weighing in the Judgement Hall, under the eyes of Anubis and Thoth, it will be victorious, whereas mine will accuse me when my time comes, and will the gods understand? Do you? And will you plead for me before the Divine Ones, out of your mercy and generosity of spirit? As though she had heard me, she sighed. Her breath hitched, hitched again, and I withdrew. My punishment is to watch you die, I thought. I could have sat by Ramses’ couch to view his death throes without a qualm, but you tear me to the quick.
Some time later I became vaguely aware that the light in the room had changed. The day was advancing. People entered the room, a short, grey-haired man, an older woman with such a disturbing likeness to Hentmira that it seemed as though the body on the couch was suddenly a mistake.
I spoke to them, watched them touch their daughter with distressed, uncertain hands, and heard their cries when at last, towards sunset, the last breath left Hentmira as modestly and quietly as the girl herself had been. Signalling to the priests to cease their chanting I rose stiffly from my stool and slipped away, sending a harem runner to tell the Keeper that the sem-priests must be summoned. I wondered, as I crossed the crushed grass and narrowed my tired eyes against the red onslaught of the sunset, whether a tomb for Hentmira had even been begun, and whether any funerary equipment lay stored for her. Probably not, for who would have thought that someone so young could die so soon?
As I turned out of the courtyard towards my own quarters I saw Hunro coming from the direction of the front gardens. She had been swimming. Her hair was plastered to her head and hung in wet ropes below her naked shoulders, and she had tied a piece of linen carelessly around her waist. “She’s dead,” I said without preamble as my friend came up to me. “I am sorry for that, Hunro.” Hunro made a face.
“I am sorry too,” she said. “Hentmira was a most agreeable room-mate.” Something in her manner, a coolness, a small distance, alerted me.
“You have word of Pharaoh,” I said.
“Yes.” She bent her head, and gathering up her thick hair she squeezed it vigorously. A trickle of water pattered into the dust of the path and formed a tiny puddle. “They are saying that he is vomiting and weak, and complaining of a bad headache, but there is no sign of convulsions and his condition does not worsen.” She would not look at me. “I think he will live.”
And who are you to be the judge of that? I wanted to shout at her. Are you a physician, Hunro? I have taken all the risks for you, for you and Hui and your brother and all the others! I have endangered myself, I have imperilled the fate of my soul, while you all sat back and watched! Even if I have failed I do not deserve the disdain I see in your averted face! “Perhaps he will,” I said coldly to the cheek and shell-like ear presented to my view, “and then again, perhaps he will not. We must wait and see.”
I was the first to walk away. I did so with squared shoulders and a brisk gait that hid the resentment and uncertainty I felt, and as I went it came to me that I could keep going. I could stride past the entrance to the Children’s Quarters, go through into the servants’ compound, and thus into the palace grounds. I could present myself at the door of the Keeper’s office. I could tell Amunnakht that the King and Hentmira had been poisoned, that Hui and Paiis, Banemus and Paibekamun and the rest of them had hatched a plot to murder Ramses and Hunro had agreed to make Hentmira the unwitting tool. They had approached me but I had refused. I had, of course, taken the oil and various other preparations to Hunro and Hentmira, but my action had been innocent. It was only now, with Hentmira dead and Pharaoh ailing, that I realized what had probably happened. As a physician, I recognized the symptoms. Hunro had obtained poison from the Seer. Hunro had put it in the massage oil. They were traitors, all of them, plotters against the God and against Egypt herself.
At the doorway to my own courtyard I paused. But what if Pharaoh died? Then we would all be safe. Then I would hold the Prince to his promise and I would be elevated to royal status. I would be free. It did not matter that Hui had taken steps to protect himself. I would have done the same thing. Better to wait just a little longer, and see what transpired. I turned towards my door.
Since Hui was not available to attend Pharaoh, I wondered if I would be summoned to add my ministrations to those of the palace physician. Ramses had been impressed with my healing skills and not once in all the time I shared his couch did he consult another doctor. In the week that followed I sent Disenk to Amunnakht, offering my services, because it would have seemed strange had I not done so and because I burned to know in what state the Lord of All Life lay, but my submission was politely declined and indeed I heard a few days after Hentmira’s death that the Master had returned and had gone immediately to examine the King and consult with his personal physician. He made no move to visit me and sent me no message. I began to be afraid.
Hentmira was taken to the House of the Dead, but no wails of mourning for her filled the harem, although for a few days a sober quiet infected every building. I tried not to imagine the shock and grief her family must be enduring, or the necessary but horrifying indignities being perpetrated on her beautiful young body as the embalmers prepared her for her burial. No official decree to observe the formal seventy days of mourning came from the palace, either because Pharaoh was too ill to think about it, as I hoped, or because it was not the custom.
I began to have curious dreams in which I left my cell and instead of walking over the grass my feet left the ground and I flew, sailing over the wall of the harem and swooping high above the palace complex. The mirage was extremely vivid. I saw the whole royal estate laid out below me in an oasis of tossing green trees, and then the dust and cacophony of the city trailing along the Waters of Avaris. I saw Hui’s house. Drifting west I found the Nile, a wide rope of silver that wandered away south in a haze of searing heat, but then the true nature of my position would come to me and the exaltation would fade to be replaced by a fear that sent me plummeting and screaming back towards my courtyard, and I would land on the grass from whence I left with such force that my ankles would break and the pain would wake me, sweating and crying.
I had to fight a desire to camp outside the door of Pharaoh’s bedchamber. I did not want to eat or drink or sleep, attend to my son, be dressed or painted. I did not want to do anything until I knew what was happening behind those forbidding cedar panels through which I had so often gone in light-hearted anticipation.
Time after time I went over the events of the past few days in my mind. Had Hui given me enough arsenic? Why was it that Hentmira had died with only her hands polluted while the King, who had doubtless been slathered in the oil, was surviving? Had his divinity saved him? Had the gods, recognizing one of their own, stepped in to lessen the effect of the poison?
But after pondering the problem in the feverish, obsessive way I was beginning to think about everything, I decided that of the two, Hentmira had received the larger dose. Her hands had been repeatedly covered in oil whereas the parts of Pharaoh’s body that she massaged would have the arsenic ground into them but once. I should have thought of that. So should Hui. I cursed myself for my crass stupidity, but as no word came from the palace I still believed that the King would ultimately die.
The mood in the harem was solemn. The women spoke of nothing but the precarious state of Pharaoh’s health. Wisps of incense smoke wafted from the doors of the cells as the inmates prayed before their private shrines. Groups still gathered on the lawn but the conversation was hushed and earnest. I ordered Disenk to spend as much time as possible with the King’s personal staff. They were of course a close-mouthed group of servants, tactful and well-trained, but they surely talked among themselves and besides, was not Paibekamun one of them?
For three days Disenk returned with only the vaguest news. Hui and the physician had consulted. The King was still vomiting and clutching his head. Prayers were being said for him in every temple. But on the fourth day she was able to tell me something more definite.
“I managed to converse with the Butler who was commanded to examine all the food and drink served to the One on the day he fell ill,” she informed me as she deftly set out my evening meal. “A slave was summoned to taste every dish and sample every jar from which the King’s wine was poured. He showed no symptoms of any kind.” She cast a sidelong glance at me. “Poison is now suspected, and the movements of everyone who came into Ramses’ presence are being examined. His clothes, utensils and cosmetics are also being scrutinized.” I stared down at the plates being laid before me with their burden of lettuce and celery, the steaming delight of leeks and freshly grilled fish, the oily gleam of dates steeped in honey. A pink lotus flower was floating delicately in the scented water of the fingerbowl and its fragrance came to me faintly. I could not imagine putting any of the food into my mouth.
“Suspicion cannot fall on Hentmira,” I half-whispered. “She is dead. Therefore I am safe.”
“Perhaps.” Disenk bowed and retreated behind my chair, the position she always took as she prepared to serve me. “But Pharaoh is recovering, Thu. He slept soundly this afternoon and was able to drink some milk.” I sat there numbly, unable to lift a hand to the salad that lay quivering before me.
“Speak to Paibekamun,” I said, my voice thin and insubstantial in my ears. “Ask him what he has done with the jar of oil.”
“I would have done so,” she answered, “but I cannot find him.” I was unable to see her face.
For two more days I suffered through a weight of impending dread that only grew heavier as the hours dragged by. Disenk and I wove our pattern of routine around each other with the precision of long familiarity, and perhaps I only imagined that she spoke to me less than she used to do.
Word of Pharaoh’s continued recovery was announced publicly by the Heralds who called the news in every courtyard of the harem, and the women went back to their idle gossiping with obvious relief. I also tried to return to the small pursuits that had filled my time before but I found them numinous with a kind of horror. Each word, each action, acquired an aura of profound but unintelligible meaning, as though they did not belong to me at all. Even Pentauru, as I held him in my arms, and kissed and cuddled his plump warmth, seemed to be the possession of another woman, in another time, and the more I pressed him to my body in an increasing panic the more intangible I felt myself become.
I knew, in some sane corner of my mind, that every moment passing placed me further away from the threat of discovery, knew that I should be relaxing into a progressive safety, but instead the terror grew, and with it the odd certainty that a doom had already overtaken me, that each hour was borrowed from a life of peace and promise I had known hentis ago.
Often, sitting tensely by my couch or pacing just inside the shelter of my doorway, I was seized by a mad urge to flee, to walk out of the harem and lose myself in the orchards and fields beyond the city. Ramses, Hentmira, Kenna, Hui, Disenk, even my son, I would shed them all as I went, until naked, innocent and free my feet would find the searing cleanliness of the Western Desert and I would be a child again with all my life before me.