Seer of Egypt (30 page)

“I do not want to lie.” Huy felt as though he was uttering a foreign language. “I do this for Amunnefer, as a f—”

Anubis laughed. There was no mirth in the sound. “So be it. I wish you the satisfaction you secretly crave, proud Huy. As you step into the street, are you walking towards a future truth? Will it satisfy your thirst for revenge? Why are you waiting?” The icy fingers now bit into his shoulder, propelling him forward, then all at once Huy felt the god’s presence leave him. He heard the faint slap of his sandals against the beaten earth of the street. His hair lifted as the breeze gusted into his face, and the huddle of linen lifted also, collapsing back into the dust.

There was something lying beside the linen, a darker smudge against the barely seen roughness of a wall, and even before Huy recognized it as a naked female body, his ka knew, and it dried his mouth and cut off his breath. Coming up to it, he squatted, pulling the pile of filthy linen away and reaching out with the other trembling hand to turn the face towards him. The figure groaned, the eyes opened lazily, and Huy found himself staring into Anuket’s ravaged features. She licked her cracked lips and smiled faintly up at him. “I hope you’ve brought a big litter, Amunnefer,” she slurred, her words only half formed and seeming to slide with impossible slowness into his ears. “I don’t think I can even sit up, let alone walk. Help me.” He wanted to pound his fist against that swollen mouth, press his palms to either side of that shaven skull and bash her head against the hard ground beneath her, yet under the terrible urge to violence was an even more horrifying maelstrom of love, pity, and impotence. Huy, imprisoned in Amunnefer’s body, powerless against the other man’s painfully racing heartbeat and the wild tumult of his emotions, could only watch and listen with numb shock.

“You are a disgrace to my house and an embarrassment to the Horus Throne, Anuket,” Amunnefer said hoarsely while his arm went around her shoulders and lifted her to a sitting position. “Here, put on your sheath. The bearers—”

“The bearers have seen me naked countless times,” she croaked as he pushed the sheath over her head and lifted one loose arm, trying to force it under a shoulder strap. “Why do you bother to come looking for me night after night, Amunnefer? Don’t you know that our destinies are written in the symbols that make up our names? Amun is Beautiful.” She laughed, a throaty, painful sound. “Well, aren’t you lucky, my husband, to carry such a pretty sentiment with you every moment of every day. I am only fulfilling the worship of my namesake when I get drunk and spread myself naked on the beer house tables for the pleasure of any man who wants to take me.” The bearers behind Amunnefer murmured.

“Be quiet!” he begged her on a note of hysteria. He drew her other arm through the linen and tugged the sheath down over her breasts. “Look at you! A bite mark by your nipple and bruises on your thighs. Why, Anuket? I have given you everything any wife could want. I have loved you, been faithful to you, made excuses for you, and defended you before Pharaoh himself. He tells me to divorce you and send you home to your brother, but I cannot! I still love you and pray to Amun for you. I—”

“Oh, be quiet yourself,” she said perfectly clearly, then bent to the side and vomited a stream of beer and sour wine onto the dust beside him. “We’ve been over all this before,” she went on, wiping her mouth on the sheath now bunched around her waist. “If you were a real man, you’d have me whipped and confined to my quarters and guarded all the time. You would hunt down my lovers and flay them too. Why don’t you?” Ridding herself of the contents of her stomach seemed to have revived her a little. Her speech had become more intelligible and her eyes beneath their inflamed lids were losing some of their vagueness. “Even now you cannot strike me!”

Wearily, Amunnefer came to his feet, lifting her with him. Huy could smell the sourness of her and something else, something of which he did not think her husband was aware. The odour of tears clung to her skin, a scent both acrid and full of desolation, as if anguish could be inhaled like a fragrance.
Save me,
her ka was screaming soundlessly,
rescue me from this pit into which I have so willingly crawled.
But Huy knew, as he felt himself lifting her and carrying her to the waiting litter, that Amunnefer had neither the level of empathy nor the strength of purpose to stand against the complex power of her character. He was a good and honest man, but his love for Anuket was as diffused as the miasma of incense that hung about a temple’s inner court. Only a man who was able to see the fissures in her soul and understand them could control her and thus keep her respect.
Thothmes can!
Huy cried out to Amunnefer as Anuket was lowered clumsily onto the cushions of the litter.
Send her back to her brother, noble one! End her pain, and yours!
Amunnefer was bending to draw a sheet up over his wife’s polluted body, and Huy bent with him. To his surprise he smelled fresh perfume and a faint tang of vinegar.

Opening his eyes, he found himself on his feet, clutching Anuket’s fingers in both hands while his cheek rested by her hip on the white cleanliness of the couch. He straightened carefully and sank onto the stool, letting go of her fingers. Already the hammer inside his head was thudding rhythmically against his skull. He reached for the water on the table, but Anuket forestalled him, lifting the ewer and pouring before passing him the cup. He drank all of it, feeling her eyes on him inquiringly, but he would not meet her gaze. He gestured to Thothhotep. “Write,” he said huskily. “A vision of the future for the Lady Anuket …” And he began to recount everything he had heard, seen, and felt, omitting only the words Anubis had meant for him alone.
Revenge?
he thought as he narrated and Thothhotep’s brush worked busily on the papyrus.
Yes, revenge. But it will not be sweet, Anubis.
He sensed Anuket’s increasing agitation, but not until he had finished and Thothhotep had bowed herself out to make the copy that would be filed at home in Hut-herib did he swivel on the stool and look at her.

She had gone very pale, but there was a glint of rebellion in her eyes. “I drink much wine, it is true, and it makes me happy. But Huy, I shall never descend to the whorish depths you have described! Never! Your vision is … is… ” It was obvious that she did not want to accuse either him or, worse, the god of lying.

Huy resisted the need to touch his paining head. “You wanted me to See for you,” he said roughly. “I have done so. What you make of what I have Seen is up to you, but beware, Anuket! The god does not lie. I pray that what I saw is not fixed, that you can alter your future if you want to …” He closed his mouth abruptly.
Nasha,
he thought.
Nasha and her mother. Stay away from the Street of the Basket Sellers, I told Nasha after the Seeing had come upon me without my volition, and she obeyed me, but it was her mother who died in the Street of the Basket Sellers, and I still do not know why. If Anuket decides to become the perfect wife, will Amunnefer lie drunk and besmirched in the arms of some whore?
His mind shied away from the question as though he had been stung.
I have pondered this before to no avail
.
All I can do is tell what I See.

Another silence fell between them. Huy sat very still, vainly willing the beating of his heart to stop reverberating behind his eyes. Anuket was staring at him expressionlessly. He was gathering himself up to stand and take his leave, desperate for the dose of poppy Tetiankh would bring him, when she spoke. “Sometimes I dream that I am copulating with a pig. According to the Purified, it is an omen of foreboding. What do you think, Huy?”

“I am not an interpreter of dreams,” he answered her stiffly, “but if I were one of the Purified and if I had been told the vision of your future, I would warn you to go to the nearest temple, fast and pray, and then go home and amend your life.”

“How cold you are,” she protested softly. “How formal and faraway, as though you are a stranger and not a man I have known since we were both little more than children! How have I angered you?”

By treating my love for you as a plaything,
he answered her dumbly.
By making a game out of teasing a defenceless boy and then pushing him away.

“I’m not angry with you anymore, Anuket,” he said aloud. “All my school years were coloured by my love for you, and when you refused to run away with me, I was almost destroyed. Until now I have kept an image of you entirely separate from all else in my mind, but I thank the gods you came to Thothmes’ wedding. Seeing you again has cured me of that youthful malady.” He did not know whether or not he had intended to offend her, but at his words her eyes narrowed briefly and her full mouth turned down.

“It’s true that I toyed with you. I tried out my new power as a woman on you, as though I was a baby cutting its teeth on a sliver of reed. That was wicked of me, especially seeing that I loved you as though you were blood kin to me.” She cleared her throat, a sound that could have signalled embarrassment or genuine shame, Huy thought. He doubted if it meant either. “I often look at Amunnefer and wonder what my life would have been like if I had crept out of the garden with you on the night my father refused your request. I think I really was half in love with you then, but I was already becoming very adept at the game of manipulation.”

Huy had had enough. Rising, he bowed to her. “Stop playing it, Anuket, or it will lead you to the degradation I saw,” he managed hoarsely. “Amunnefer deserves better. So does the memory of your illustrious mother. Find some respect for yourself.”

She waved one languid hand as if to dismiss him and his words, but Huy could see the rage beneath the whitening of her face. “Say what you like, but my name is a curse that must be fulfilled. No one can fight the destiny of his name.”

He had been turning to the door, but now he paused and looked back at her. “Then change it,” he forced out through a blur of pain. “Go to Amun’s temple at Ipet-isut and beg one of his priest-astrologers to make a new chart for you based on the name you have chosen. It is sometimes permitted. You know this! Bring back the chaste and fragile maker of garlands who so captured my heart!”

She began to cry, the tears welling up and overflowing down her painted cheeks. “And will you love me again then, Huy?” she choked. “Will you?”

He shook his head. She had spared no thought for her husband at all, and her tears were for herself alone. Walking to the door, he bowed once more to her superior station and went out into the passage. It was not far to his own room. Thankfully, Tetiankh was there, folding kilts that had obviously just been starched. The servant took one look at Huy and then went to the window, lowered the slatted hanging, and came to him, gently removing his jewellery and his clothing.

“I packed plenty of poppy, Master. I’ll prepare a draft at once and bring cool water for your forehead.” Huy let Tetiankh’s arm lower him onto the couch.

“Keep everyone away but Ishat if she wants to see me,” he murmured. “Find Merenra and tell him to prepare for our return to Hut-herib tomorrow. I want to go home, Tetiankh.”

The man made soothing noises and left. Now Huy was free to put both palms against his temples and close his eyes. Every muscle in his body had tensed against the knife point jabbing inside his skull, but woven into the pain, like some harsh, discordant harmony for which his heart was providing the rhythm, the images Atum had fed to him of a naked, befouled Anuket paraded through his mind. Unable to banish them, he groaned. “The ponderous inevitability of consequence,” the High Priest’s voice cut in suddenly. “The ponderous … inevitability … of… consequence. The … ponderous … inevitability …” Huy, his arms, Amunnefer’s arms, going around Anuket once more, inhaling that odd, terrible odour of her inner hopelessness, knew the futility of his words to her.
She may change her life, busy herself on their estate, give up her adulteries, but her doom will fall anyway,
he told himself, hugging his knees under the sheet, trying to cradle the pain.
The goddess Anuket herself was not able to remain the pure water creature of the past. Did she become the licentious whore some now worship from choice or by decree? Whose decree? Atum’s? Does she exist at all, or is High Priest Ramose right and every god, every goddess, is only an expression of the eternal energies of the mighty Neb-er-djer, Lord to the Limit, the Great He-She? Oh Tetiankh, hurry or I must scream out this agony!

As if in answer, the servant came in. Huy struggled up and, taking the cup, drained the contents eagerly. “Find my oil of lemon grass,” he asked. “This mixture is very strong and bitter, Tetiankh, and I need the oil on my tongue.” He opened his mouth for the drop then lay down thankfully. The opium was already doing its blessed work, warming his blood, numbing his limbs, flowing around the loud visions and voices in his mind and encapsulating them, making them fade. “I can sleep now,” he whispered, and fell into the drug’s embrace.

He woke to full darkness. A lamp was burning on the table beside his couch, and as he struggled to sit up, its light wavered. Ishat rose from the chair by the window and came quietly to sit on the couch by Huy’s knees. Rubbing his cheeks, he accepted the goblet of water she was holding out and drank quickly. “Tetiankh knew you would need me,” she said, taking the cup when he had finished and setting it back beside the jug. “He asked me to watch over you while he ate with the other servants. Who did this to you, Huy?”

“You make it sound as if I was attacked in some way,” he responded. His lips still felt numb and his limbs only loosely coordinated. Tetiankh’s dose of the poppy had been unusually powerful. “Amunnefer asked me to See for Anuket. Actually, he begged me.”

“And of course you couldn’t refuse.” Her tone was waspish, and Huy was able to smile to himself. Even though she was now married to Thothmes, her long jealousy of Anuket could still prick her. “Well, because of it you’ve missed your last chance to feast with me and Thothmes and the rest of the family. Tetiankh told me that you’ll be leaving in the morning. We had lotus seeds in purple juniper oil, and sedge roots and cumin, and roast goose and leeks and celery. Fig cakes. Beer flavoured with mint. Nasha made sure that there was plenty left for you. Are you hungry?”