The Hippopotamus Marsh (27 page)

He trudged for over an hour, aware of nothing but his thirst and the protesting of his abused muscles, stumbling over sharp stones, slipping on shelves of gravel, until at last he heard the braying of a donkey far ahead. Before long he saw a flicker of yellow light off to his left, deep in a tributary path. Too tired to be cautious he half-ran, half-fell up it, almost into the arms of one of the soldiers
left to guard the supplies. The man challenged him and at his answer drew back. “I need food, litters and the physician,” Si-Amun managed. “Is he here? Have you water with you?” The man held out a bottle and Si-Amun snatched it and drank. It was the sweetest water he had ever tasted.

“The physician arrived last evening,” the soldier told him. “He said the battle was lost. I will find him and bring you supplies.” Refreshed, Si-Amun sank onto a rock.

“Keep the donkeys hidden here,” he commanded. “We need a light also.” The man went away and Si-Amun sat listening to the night silence, aware of the weight of stone around him, the black funnel of sky above. Suddenly, with a shock of horror, he thought of his father lying with the spear thrust through his skull. I am the governor of Weset now, he said to himself. Great Amun! I am the Prince. And I am also the rightful King of Egypt. As soon as I return to Weset I must send a message to Apepa, an apology, an expression of obedience. This family must not suffer any more.

At the thought of the estate he was reminded of Mersu, of Teti and the courageous Ramose, and he squirmed and closed his eyes. I did not see Teti or Ramose in the battle, he went on in his mind, but I am sure they were there. May the gods have dealt Teti a swift death! How can I go home and have Mersu killed without a trial? For he must die. He opened his eyes. No. It must not begin again, the lies, the deceit, the shame. There on the battlefield I felt clean for the first time in months. I will tell Kamose everything and accept his judgement.

He led the physician and servants carrying litters and food back along the track to the place where the wounded
men huddled. The physician immediately set to work, loosing the strings on his pack and unfolding his herbs. One of the servants lit a fire so that he could have hot water. Another set a lamp on the sand. Si-Amun withdrew and watched, feeling normality creep back with the sure, absorbed movements of the physician, the quiet efficiency of the servant’s movements, the steady beam of the lamp. Hor-Aha’s shoulder was washed and immobilized. Kamose had his side packed with herbs, bound, and his cheek sewn shut. Both men were soon drowsing on a poppy sea. The physician sighed, sat back on his heels, and turned to Si-Amun. “Where is my greatest charge, Prince?” he asked. Si-Amun looked away.

“My father is dead,” he replied tonelessly. “He fell in the battle. We will find his body in the morning.” The physician fell silent and presently returned his attention to his charges. The lamp was extinguished and the stars became visible, flaming stronger as the moon waned. Si-Amun left his rock and, wrapping himself in a cloak, fell asleep.

As soon as they could see each other, Si-Amun took two servants and a litter and went down onto the plain. For a long time he paced the churned floor, trying desperately to remember exactly where the chariot had lain. Pezedkhu had removed them all and there was not a wandering horse to be seen. Si-Amun and his men stumbled over broken spears, stained axe heads, ripped and useless pieces of linen that had been kilts, scored leather harnesses. Occasionally they averted their eyes from a dismembered limb, black and grotesque in the grey dust. Dismally Si-Amun thought that they might be compelled to open the mounds that marked the mass graves of the combatants, but find his father they
would. It was terrible enough that he had been maimed and then slaughtered while he lay helpless. Was he to be denied a place in the paradise of Osiris because his body could not be beautified?

Then a servant shouted and Si-Amun hurried to where the man stood over a depression in the ground close to where they had left the cliff. The man was flinging clods of earth at a hyena who now slunk away, whimpering. Furious and terrified at the damage the beast might have done to his father’s corpse, Si-Amun raced forward. Seqenenra lay as Si-Amun had seen him last. The soldiers that had hauled the chariot upright and dragged it away had ignored him. There had been nothing to distinguish him as the lord of Weset. Somehow the spear that had pierced him had broken off near the tip and the corpse had slid down into the depression and been overlooked by the men taking hands for the tally.

Si-Amun knelt and carefully withdrew the remains of the spear. Seqenenra’s eyes were full of sand. His lips were drawn back over his teeth in his final agony. With one loving finger Si-Amun reverently traced the mutilated face, then emotion overcame him. Sitting, he drew his father’s body into his arms and wept, rocking to and fro in his grief. His men stood in silence, looking away.

The morning heat began to intensify. Vultures began to congregate on the cliffs behind, their mighty wings sending shafts of shadow over the plain. At last Si-Amun laid the body down and rose awkwardly. “He is putrefying already,” he said unevenly. “How are we to return him to Weset for burial?” He gestured, and the litter was lowered. Seqenenra was laid on it and covered with linen. “Take him to the
supply train,” Si-Amun decided. “Find a box long enough for a temporary coffin. Fill it with dry sand and place him in the middle. We must hurry home.” The thought of his mother, his grandmother, was too dreadful to contemplate. With an oath he began to run towards the cliffs.

After a hasty meal Si-Amun had the donkeys brought to the edge of the river and Kamose and Hor-Aha were placed on litters and carried to join them. They set off for home in the long, coloured evening. Seqenenra’s makeshift coffin went first, guarded by Si-Amun, who strode beside it. As they moved slowly away from Dashlut, following the river road, other survivors joined them, soldiers who had fled to the cliffs as they did when all was lost. Si-Amun scarcely acknowledged their salutes as they took up positions in the rear, but Hor-Aha’s black eyes followed them as they paced dejectedly past his litter. By the time the accursed plain of Dashlut had disappeared from view, he had counted more than two hundred of them.

It took the preoccupied and miserable cavalcade a night and almost all the next day to reach Qes. Many of the soldiers had minor wounds, and those carrying Kamose and Hor-Aha had to go carefully for fear of jolting their charges. Si-Amun, his thoughts on his father’s slowly rotting body, was feverish to keep going. While the servants made camp and the physician examined his patients, he scouted the riverbank for boats. The donkeys, laden with all the supplies Seqenenra had painstakingly gathered for the march north, could be returned at leisure to Weset, but Seqenenra himself must be properly embalmed so that both the gods and his ka might recognize the Prince and give him life in the next world. His father’s death weighed insupportably on
Si-Amun’s conscience. He knew he would go mad if Seqenenra arrived at the House of the Dead too late. But Qes had nothing to offer but a few tiny reed fishing boats and Si-Amun had to wait, gnawing his lips impatiently, while the men ate and slept the following night away.

In the morning Hor-Aha refused to lie on his litter. “It is my shoulder that is injured, not my legs,” he snapped at the physician. “I am sufficiently rested now. I will walk.” He joined Si-Amun at the head of the column as they set off once more, and there was some comfort for the Prince in Hor-Aha’s long stride, his black braids moving rhythmically against the grubby folds of his woollen cloak, the occasional dart of his clear, dark eyes when they exchanged a word or two.

Three days later, at the town of Djawati, Si-Amun found what he was looking for. While the dignitaries of the place came out to gather around Kamose, shocked and unbelieving, and many sank to the ground by Seqenenra’s coffin and began to grieve, Si-Amun went to the quay and commandeered two flat barges used for the transport of grain to the Delta, ordering helmsmen and rowers at the same time. He had Kamose and his father carried aboard one, and the rest of the soldiers and necessary supplies loaded on the other. The river was nearing its lowest level and scarcely flowed.

Leaving a couple of officers to oversee the donkeys’ slow progress on the river road, Si-Amun settled with relief onto the floor of the barge and gave orders for canopies to be erected as it swung out from the shore. Only then did fatigue overtake him. He lay back. Servants had begun to distribute the afternoon’s water. Si-Amun
watched them draw nearer but before the cup was offered to him he was asleep.

At noon on the tenth day they rounded the familiar bend and Weset slipped into view. Si-Amun and Kamose, reclining side by side, watched silently. Boats of every description still clustered against the town’s straggling wharves. The huts and houses still jostled each other haphazardly among the palms where stray dogs lolled in the shade and naked brown children squatted in the dirt. The temple pylon, its smooth sides gleaming under a sun that stood at its zenith, still sported tall flagstaffs upon which the triangular flags rippled, and beyond it the temple rose, its lines sharp against the blue of the sky. On the west bank the tumbled rise and fall of the cliffs, an uneven horizon as well-known and dear to Si-Amun as the angles of his own body, shook in the dust haze.

The barge slowed and at the helmsman’s shout began to veer towards the family’s watersteps. The old palace still bulked sleepily and mysteriously behind its crumbling walls and beside it, so dear, so achingly, poignantly precious, were the groups of flowering shrubs, now bare, the sycamore trees and trellised grape vines that provided an arboured walk through from the river to the garden and the pond and the unseen portico of Seqenenra’s low, rambling haven of peace. Si-Amun, his eyes drinking in every shabby, cheerful detail, felt his throat swell with emotion. “It is as if we have been away for years and have aged beyond imagining,” Kamose said beside him. Si-Amun nodded, overcome.

Now he could see a figure on the paving at the top of the steps, someone doing a dance of frantic, panic-stricken welcome. It was Tani, her bronze bracelets sliding up and
down her bare arms, her long white sheath pressed to her legs in the wind. Si-Amun wished that he might die immediately and never have to look into his sister’s questioning eyes.

The barge bumped the steps. Servants appeared from behind Tani and ran to tether it. The ramp was run out. Si-Amun rose and Tani flung herself into his arms. “I have been watching here every day since the scrolls stopped coming,” she cried out. “Grandmother took to the roof where she could see the river better. Mother spent her afternoons praying. Oh, Si-Amun!” She hugged him tightly, still oblivious to all else. After a moment he disengaged himself.

“Tani,” he said, “where is Ahmose?” At his tone she sobered. Her glance took in the rest of the barge, halted at Kamose, and she walked to kneel beside him. Her hand went to the bloody bandage under his arm and the swollen stitches on his cheek. She paled.

“We lost, didn’t we?” she whispered. “Where is Father?”

“Yes, we lost,” Kamose said steadily. “I think we would have lost in any case, dear Tani, but we were betrayed very early. Father is dead. His body is over there.” Her gaze flew to the crude wooden box and she would have rushed to it but Kamose gripped her hand. “No,” he said. “It is not a sight for you. Go and find Ahmose.” Numbly she got to her feet and left the barge, walking as if in a trance. Si-Amun knew that the shock had not yet hit her. He shouted to one of the servants waiting for orders on the bank.

“Run to the House of the Dead and bring sem-priests! The rest of you, help your Prince onto the steps.”

By the time Kamose had been laid gently in the shade above the watersteps and Hor-Aha, after a brief word with
Si-Amun, had gone to see to the dispersal and settling of the surviving soldiers, Ahmose, Tetisheri and Aahotep had arrived. Si-Amun did not notice them at first. They stood back on the path under the grape arbour, Ahmose watching, Tetisheri standing regally, Aahotep close to her, both hands clutching a robe under her chin.

Si-Amun helped the servants to unload the coffin and place it reverently under a tree, then he gave an order. The barge was untied. The helmsman clambered up to grasp the steering oar and the boat swung ponderously towards the west bank. Only then did Si-Amun turn and meet his family’s hesitant gaze. He ran towards them, and their arms opened. For a moment he was enveloped in the familiar touch, the soft flesh and the smell of them that carried him back vividly to the days of his early boyhood, then he stepped away. “You must be brave,” he said. Ahmose blinked.

“It was doomed from the start,” he said unsteadily. “We all knew that. But I had hoped Father’s life might be spared. We have prayed so hard …” He swallowed convulsively. “I have done my best to keep all in order for him.”

“Open the coffin,” Tetisheri said tonelessly. Si-Amun hesitated.

“He was grievously wounded about the head,” he warned, but she brushed him aside. Aahotep took her arm and together they walked out under the blinding sun. At a nod from him, the man guarding the coffin took out his knife and prised off the lid. Ahmose joined the women, but Si-Amun went to Kamose, squatting beside the litter, head hanging. When next he looked, his mother was on her knees brushing sand away from the corpse. She did not cry
out at what she saw as Si-Amun thought she would. When Seqenenra’s face with its terrible gaping wounds was revealed, her hands were stilled. It was Ahmose who uttered a moan.

For many seconds Aahotep knelt, her fingertips light on the swollen, black flesh, Tetisheri’s motionless shadow over her, then she rose and bending, pressed her lips to Seqenenra’s open, agonized mouth. She straightened. Her shaking hands went to the low neck of her sheath and in a gesture of ancient grief she tore it from neck to waist, then she sank in the dust beside the paving and began to trickle the dry soil over her head.

Tetisheri turned on her heel and stalked towards the two young men, Ahmose behind her. Her face was stony with rage. Beyond her Si-Amun could see two sem-priests hurrying from the direction of the House of the Dead, their heads down and their robes held tight to their bodies for fear they might contaminate anyone unwary enough to brush by them. “Are your wounds serious?” Tetisheri asked Kamose through stiff lips.