Authors: Carol Thurston
“The first twenty hours are always the worst,” Senmut reminded me.
“It is not only the pain. She relives falling, again and again.”
“Two more men hang from Horemheb’s sacred gate.”
“Ramose is driven by revenge, but the trail will end as it
always does, at the river.” Senmut sent me a sharp look. “The deed is done. What harm can come now from speaking the truth?”
Still there is blood in her urine, nor does she eat, despite Merit’s efforts to tempt her with sweet cakes and bits of fruit. That could be the mandrake, yet during the night she is tormented by visions that make her cry out, despite her laboring lungs. Only when I bathe her hot cheeks and neck with a cool cloth does she appear to gain respite from the pain.
Nefertiti has convinced enough of the royal guard that their fortunes lie with her to form a force big enough to incarcerate the others in the palace barracks. So she holds not only the palace but the royal treasury, and has declared herself Horus on Earth, son of Amen and Lord of the Two Lands. Smenkhkare.
I apply dried honey to the cuts on Aset’s feet, then wash it away with water, but she complains now of pain in her left shoulder. I cannot dismiss the possibility that she senses what is wrong inside her, especially since I give her the drug that seers use to gain insight into the mysteries. I once listened to my father question an old priest who claimed that to smoke the fetid nightshade plant allowed him to see what before he could only hear. I would learn from Ramose what he knows of such things, except that I doubt he will return from the temple anytime soon—or that any priest will close his eyes this night.
She takes nothing but fruit juice or a little goat’s milk, but it has been a full week now. Surely that in itself is reason to hope. Senmut brought a letter from Mena, who wrote that “good physicians are too rare for any commander to risk throwing one to the crocodiles,” which means he succeeded in his mission. But I worry that he may bring Nefertiti’s wrath down on his own family, for Ramses is an ambitious man and it would not surprise me should he find his advantage in an arrangement with the one who styles herself Pharaoh.
Ramose is deposed and a cat’s-paw sits in his place, so as Re dropped behind the western cliffs, I went to find a captain about to sail down the river, who agreed to deliver my message to Mena. Now Ramose hides himself like a wounded lion, even from his daughter, who somehow senses something amiss. She grows more restless with each hour, forcing me to try to put an end to his self-indulgence. But his heart is so filled with self-loathing—for failing her—that he punishes himself by staying away. Even so I will try again tomorrow, for he needs her as much as she needs him.
It was just past midday when Aset motioned me closer, for she still cannot draw breath enough to speak with any strength. She refuses to take any more of the mandrake potion, saying she would rather know that she is still in this world.
“Shall I send a message for Senmut to bring Meri home?” I asked, anticipating what she wanted.
“Soon. Not yet.” She looked toward the doorway. “Garden … feel sun.”
I called to Merit to fix a pallet by the pool and also bring dates and persea fruit, hoping this meant she would begin to eat, as well. But when I lifted her from our couch, the flesh around her lips turned white, a sign that I caused her excruciating pain despite my attempt to be gentle.
“Where … my father?” she asked, watching my face to see if I spoke the truth.
I took her whole hand in mine and told her everything, ending with the message from Mena. She closed her eyes, I thought to sleep for a while, until I saw a tear seep from the corner of her eye. I leaped to my feet, determined to pull Ramose from his lair.
She stopped me with one shake of her head. “Get my … goatskin bag. I will … be all right. Not alone. Tuli … with me.” A chill came over me, but I did as she asked and hurried back, determined to cheer her spirits.
“Perhaps I should give your little papyrus-root lion a wash,” I teased as I opened the drawstring bag and pulled him out.
She reached her good hand in to feel for what it contained. “Bring … ram’s-head necklace,” she whispered. Overjoyed that she wanted it, since vanity in a woman is a sure sign of returning health, I fetched the necklace I had given her on the occasion of our daughter’s birth. But instead of letting me fasten it around her neck, she added it to her bag, then looked at me.
“Listen well, husband. This … my legacy … to Meri. Lion and … ivory necklace. Not gold one … from father. Scribe’s palette … given my grandfather. Amenhotep. Poems you gave me … first time we … came together … husband and wife. Nothing else. So no one … can learn … who she is. Now. Or in future. Give rest … to Merit.”
“The time to talk of such things is when you are well again,” I protested.
“Promise me. Please … my love.”
“Of course, only—”
She put the tips of her fingers to my mouth. “Not … finished.” I nodded but held her fingers to my lips, so starved am I for her touch. “You. Meri. Return … Aniba. So when … your time comes to join me—” She gasped for breath. “Pact with Nebet. I would care … for hers and … she mine.” She smiled at some memory. “Nebet had written … into marriage contract.”
“Surely your father—”
She rolled her head back and forth. “Throne of Horus … casts a long shadow. Make sure … does not fall across her … as it did me.”
“Senmut says Meri grows anxious. I will fetch her home in the morning. Then you can talk with her yourself.”
She shook her head again. “Better that she … remember me … as I was. Not like this.” Her eyes closed, then opened again. She looked straight at me. “This cannot be all there is for us, Tenre. It would not be …
maat”
Is it maat to leave me to walk toward the western horizon alone
? I wanted to shout, to stop her from the path she followed.
“Let the blood … on my lips … taste sweet … as berries,” she whispered between shallow breaths. “Give me magic. The spell of … living well.”
Whether she spoke to me or the gods I will never know.
Knowing his end. a man feels tomorrow’s sorrow, but today’s joy. He looks toward heaven and lives without regret. He grieves, therefore he is a man.
He becomes the heart and tongue of god.
He creates of mortality something immortal.
—Normandi Ellis,
Awakening Osiris
Seti Abdalla was waiting when they arrived at the museum Friday morning. He sat at the long table in the center of the room where Iskander had retrieved the scroll, bare now except for the stack of papers under his hand. Courtly as always, he rose to greet them and inquired about their trip to Luxor, though Kate could tell his heart wasn’t in it. Something was weighing on his mind.
“I am afraid I was not entirely truthful on the telephone,” he admitted to Max as soon as they sat down. “The papyrus was in such good condition that Hosni was able to unroll most of it in only a few hours. By the time you reached me I had the first photographs in hand and had already begun the translation. You must forgive my little deception, but I hoped by the time you returned at least to be able to say for sure if this is your man.” He smiled. “I told you there were two scrolls?”
Both Kate and Max were quick to nod.
“Perhaps it is easiest to simply show you the illustration.”
Seti began laying out several eight-by-ten photographs, edge to edge, two across and four down.
As a form began to take shape, Kate rose to avoid reflections off the glossy prints, and felt a shock of recognition that shook her to the bottom of her soul. It was an outline of the human body, with scriggly red and blue lines growing inside it like the bare branches of a tree. A tree Kate had seen before.
“Perhaps, Dr. Cavanaugh, you would be willing to render a professional opinion?” Seti suggested.
Max could hardly tear his eyes away, but he finally glanced at Kate, then Seti. “I’d say it’s a diagram of the circulatory system. A damn good one, considering.”
“Yes, considering that the whole world believes no one made any distinction between veins and arteries until
A.D.
three or four hundred, at least,” Kate agreed.
“That’s not all,” Max added. “This also shows the blood passing from one side of the heart to the other through the lungs, and no one came even close on that for—what?” He glanced at Kate. “Another thousand years?”
“Fifteen hundred. Vesalius,” she supplied, then glanced at Seti.
“So,” he breathed in his French way, “the history of medicine is being rewritten.” He smiled and began rubbing his hands together. “Then we have much work ahead of us to discover the path this knowledge may have taken from my ancestors to the Persians, perhaps, and the Greeks. If it was in the library at Alexandria, of course—”
“Was the other scroll a medical text like we thought?” Max inquired, impatient to learn the rest.
Seti shook his head. “I found no recipes or spells for treating an illness or injury, if that is what you mean. I would say it is more a kind of personal journal kept by the physician named Senakhtenre, this
sunu
who accompanies your Tashat on her journey through eternity.” He paused. “Except her name is Aset. Isis we would call her today.”
Kate and Max exchanged a look. “How can you be so sure he’s our man?”
“Many times in this journal he speaks of a dog—a small white dog named Tuli.”
Kate felt a rush of tears, of relief intermixed with a terrible sadness. So long as they didn’t know for sure she had been able to fend off the awful certainty of Aset’s death, despite the evidence before her eyes—the mummy itself. Which didn’t make much sense.
“I believe she is the reason he began to write such a journal.” Seti paused to give his next words the import they deserved. “There is no doubt now that your Tashat—his Aset—was the daughter of the Heretic’s Queen by a priest of Amen.”
“Nefertiti,” Kate murmured.
Seti nodded. “But there is more, much more.” He patted the stack of onionskin sheets under his hand.
“If it’s a journal it must be dated.” Max was looking for an explanation for the three dates on the coffin, but Seti put him off.
“It is best that you read it for yourself. I must be at the university soon, so I will leave these with you. But before I go I would like to ask you to be my guests for dinner this evening, at my home.” He looked at Kate. “My mother wishes to meet you. Already she knows all about this—” He waved a hand, meaning everything that had happened and what they had learned. “From the time I showed her your photographs and drawings she can talk of little but the book you must write.”
Max kept glancing at Kate with an “I told you so” smile, even while he was getting directions to Seti’s house. Then their linguist friend pointed to the rumpled sheets of paper. “Remember, it is all backwards. In the beginning is what appeared first as Hosni unrolled the papyrus—a section written in another hand he found attached to the end of the physician’s journal. Following that is the end of the journal itself, as much as I had time to translate till now.”
After the door closed behind him, Kate went back to the
table and sat down. “Why don’t you read it to me?” she suggested, wanting to hear it in a man’s voice, as if the ancient physician himself were speaking.
Max nodded, took the chair across from her, and picked up the top sheet. “It’s dated the eighth day, fourth month of planting in Year One of Ramses.” They looked at each other, both thinking the same thing—that
was
the most significant date on Tashat’s coffin.
I speak to the gods who judge Senakhtenre, Physician of Waset, friend and brother to me for forty years, that both Thoth and Osiris may know the compassion and honesty of the man who comes before you, and to make sure he is not held accountable for what others have done.
In Zarw I found Ramses skinnier and more impatient than I remembered him, but he greeted me as an old friend and conducted me on a tour of the city he builds. So it was not until evening that we could talk. Even then his son Seti was present, as he had been throughout the day, for his father has appointed him mayor as well as his deputy in the North. When I told them why I had come, Ramses informed me straightaway that his elite guard prepared to sail for Waset even as we spoke, to confront the High Priest and his Sacred Council, and that all his commanders already had pledged their support to him. So it did not take much to convince Horemheb’s old friend to move quickly, lest Nefertiti consolidate her position by gaining the support of the nomarchs, police, and judges who enforce the laws of the land.
I did not know then, of course, that she already had declared herself Horus on Earth. Or that Ramose was no longer High Priest of Amen. But by the time Tenre’s letter reached me, it no longer mattered. Akhenaten and his straggling band of followers were camped outside the main gate of the fortress, demanding not only entry but homage as rightful Lord of the Two Lands. Day after day he came to stand before the gate, ranting and waving his rod with the entwined serpents, the staff of kingship given to him by the
priests who initiated him into the rituals made known only to the son of Amen.
I suppose he would be there still had a block of stone not fallen from one of Ramses’ construction sites, crushing the overseer who stood below. That the stonemasons were forced to labor as punishment for worshiping Aten soon gave rise to rumors that the Heretic had caused the wrath of his god to topple the stone, a story that spread like fire in dry hay, growing ever more wondrous as it passed from one tongue to the next. Finally, as heavy black clouds began rolling across the sky, a crowd gathered in the market square, where other stories joined the first. It was said that the Heretic’s god visited a plague on the People of the Sun, causing their children to vomit everything they ate until they starved even in the presence of plenty. Surely that could only be the work of a vengeful god! In the end, the people of Zarw called on Ramses to send Akhenaten and his brethren back to the Sinai before all their children were taken. Yet he hesitated, torn between how to deal with this new rival for the throne and at the same time arrive in Waset to wrest power from the Heretic’s onetime Queen before it was too late.
It was Seti who finally ordered the Heretic and all his followers—rope stretchers, stonemasons, and lowly water bearers alike, along with their women and children—to be gone from sight when Re-Horakhte next showed his face on the eastern horizon. Otherwise, he promised, not even the thunder of their god would stay the hand of his father’s troops.
The following morning we climbed to the ramparts and found their striped tents gone, leaving only the dust stirred up by a hundred feet to show the direction they had taken. Seti declared it no great loss since those who left Zarw with Akhenaten numbered only fifty men, who long since had taught their skills to those who labored beside them. So it was done, and at first light the following day, we sailed for Waset.
When I arrived home I found the message Tenre left on the writing table in my library, a single sheet of papyrus weighted with the iron-bladed dagger given him by Osiris Tutankhamen—a sight that brought dread to my heart.
Osiris has won the game we played for twenty years. I only hastened their meeting when her eyes pleaded for me to release her from the unbearable pain. I have prepared her for eternity, as well, leaving the key to her whereabouts with the one who was conceived in the arms of the river god.
Know that I tried to stay, for Meri, though for me the sun is gone from the sky. But then perhaps it is better for her to live in peace without me than in fear with me. Know, too, friend and brother in my heart, that I would not be the man I am but for you. Whatever comes to pass, you have my love and trust, now and forever—if there is such a thing. If not, I am still the most fortunate of men.
As I read his words the chill of the tomb crept into my bones, and I felt a terrible sense of loss caused by the gaping hole in my heart. When Senmut came I saw at once by his face that a piece of him is missing as well. Even worse, he saw it happen.
Tenre would know that his only opportunity to get close enough would come at the mouth of Horemheb’s eternal home, when she stepped forward in the leopard skin of the new Pharaoh. How he found the will to look on the face of the woman who had given life to his beloved and then taken it away, I cannot say, but while all eyes were watching her touch the sacred adze to the once mighty General’s mouth, Tenre slipped unnoticed through the crowd—and with one quick thrust of his thin-bladed dissecting knife severed the big vessel in Nefertiti’s once-beautiful neck.
He would know exactly where to strike, too, and that such a wound always brings death. Only how long it takes the body to empty itself of blood differs from one man—or woman—to another. So that had to be what he intended. What he could not have expected was to die quicker than she did, while a hundred mourners stood by watching in disbelief. No one
could anticipate that the hot-blooded young commander of Nefertiti’s guards would swing around and with one stroke of his sword cleave Tenre’s head from his body.
That sight I thank Thoth every morning and night for sparing me, leaving my memories of him unsullied by blood and gore. Even now I catch myself glancing up from time to time, expecting to see his sober countenance break into a smile at something I said, or to find a jest brighten his warm brown eyes, usually at my expense.
No one could have saved him, though saying it does little to ease the guilt Senmut feels for standing by like all the others, stunned by what took place before their very eyes. At least he managed to save what was left of the man he loved as father and friend, kicked aside in the dust and left to rot in the sun. But it was not until after dark that he dared take Tenre’s body to the House of the Dead, where Nebet’s husband is as well-known as the man he carried. Nor is Senmut without the means to salt the palms of those who hold out their hands. Otherwise he would have been turned away from the place that is forbidden to any who kill. All, that is, but the mortal gods who sit on the throne of Horus.
So it came to pass that three Pharaohs claimed the throne of Horus in quick succession, almost, you might say, at the same time. To confuse any who would seek to destroy her a second time, Aset starts her journey through eternity in Year 4 of Smenkhkare, Year 18 of Akhenaten and Year 1 of Ramses. Since she also travels under a false name, as Tenre wished, Nebet has put her own hand to painting her beloved friend’s mask and bindings, to assure that Aset’s soul will recognize her body.
As for my part, just as my boyhood friend rid this world of evil to save his daughter, I have cleansed the hereafter of a mother who murdered at least two of her own daughters—by stealing Nefertiti’s body away in the night and carrying it to the bank of the river where the crocodiles lay their eggs. I confess, as well, that I did not act alone, though it is not for
me to reveal the identity of my accomplice. That I leave to him when his own time comes, though I willingly admit that we both found joy in what we did. And in knowing that she-cat has made her last kill, in this world or the next.
Tenre once said that without Aset he could never be whole. Nor, I believe, was she without him. So I arranged for the part of him he considered the true seat of our thoughts and feelings to make the journey in her company. He goes with his eyes wide-open, too, though he truly believed that the road to eternal life lies in what we are able to learn and leave for others to build on, not in our worn-out bodies which in time turn to dust. But who can know for sure? And what good is an open eye without the tools to record what we see? So I have seen to that, as well.
This message goes with his body, that Osiris and his judges will know the truth of how my friend lived. If Tenre was right, then his journal and her map will stand in place of his head, along with his heart. The map shows the location of the vessels that carry only blood. The ones Aset painted red carry blood away from the heart, in spurts, while it runs darker and not so fast in the vessels she painted blue. Which may be why it is not so dangerous to cut into one of those.
Tenre’s medical scroll remains with me, a gift copied out by the most talented scribe ever to inhabit the Two Lands, for it was Aset who embellished the papyrus with all manner of colorful animals who tell their own story—vignettes that add insight to what Tenre learned from his experiments.
Since Nebet and Aset arranged many things between them, Hapimere will sail for Aniba with Senmut and my daughter, as her parents wished. As will Merit, who I pray will come to love my grandson as she did his namesake.
Senakhtenre. Father, brother, and son to me all in one. Companion of my youth, the anchor on which my skiff dared to ride the rough currents of this life. Mirror image of my ka. How alien and empty the city of my birth feels without him. But not so empty as my heart.