Authors: Pauline Gedge
Huy took a mouthful of the rich, dark beer.
This is reality
, he told himself as he put it down on the tray and began to tear apart a large piece of flatbread.
These pleasant odours and the clink of Penbui’s spoon against his bowl and the murmurs of idle servants’ conversation drifting through the door with the shaft of golden evening light imperceptibly lengthening across the tiled floor and being lost in the cool dimness. These things are sanity. These things are everything
. “Thank you, Penbui,” he replied. “If you have formed an opinion of all that you’ve heard, are you willing to discuss it after our meal, or shall we resume this meeting tomorrow?”
The archivist nodded. “I’m eager to proceed with the matter, Seer Huy. We must pray to Thoth and to Atum himself for enlightenment, and believe as we speak that we are correctly stripping the protective concealment from the kernel of an immeasurable and very sacred truth. I am most honoured by your trust.”
I feel the weight of this in a way you cannot possibly understand, Penbui, although I wish with all my heart that I could share it with you
, Huy mutely addressed the man sitting opposite.
My prayer will not be to either Thoth or Atum. It’s Anubis, my guide, my tormentor, from whom I shall beg both his pity and his enlightenment. Surely I deserve a reprieve from a lifetime of his taunts and condescension
.
The three men finished their meal without conversation.
Any polite talk would be frivolous now, even blasphemous
, Huy reflected.
I’d like to go away and be alone, immerse myself in the heka that has always isolated the Book’s contents from the ravages of passing time, but magic will not confirm the conclusion Imhotep came to regarding its ultimate meaning. Archivists are steeped in many areas of knowledge. They are expected to understand the value of the information stored in their care. Every citizen is familiar with the ceremony of the heb sed. It usually accompanies a King’s jubilee when he celebrates his first thirty years on the Horus Throne and is meant to renew his potency. A fortunate King might celebrate two or even three jubilees. Often the necessity might arise for him to prepare a jubilee long before the stipulated thirty years have passed if there is unrest in Egypt or a dispute to do with the legitimacy of his right to rule. Atum chose to dictate an account of his divine actions from the moment when he metamorphosed himself from the nothingness of the Nun and began the intricate process of creation. Would he have done so for no other reason than to end it with a commonplace ceremony to return full might to whichever Horus is at the pinnacle of Egypt’s ongoing existence? Only priests and Pharaoh himself take part in the heb sed. The rest of us cheer an occasion to hold feasts, get happily drunk, and complain about the temporary absence of servants who are also taking the chance to carouse. Imhotep knew better, and the knowing turned him into a god.
A word of command from Penbui roused Huy and he watched as two servants obediently cleared away the meal’s debris. The door closed behind them. Penbui looked across at Huy. There was a pause during which Huy could hear the small sounds of Paneb mixing his ink and applying his scraper to the papyrus. At last Penbui said hesitantly, “Great Seer, what do you want of me?”
“I want us to discuss any passages neither you nor I understand,” Huy replied. “They will differ, of course. For example, when I first read the second part of the Book, containing the lines
I am One that transforms into Two,
I am Two that transforms into Four,
I am Four that transforms into Eight,
After this I am One,
I was too ignorant to know that Atum was speaking of bringing order to the chaos of his shadow by means of the pairing of male and female archetypes before he embarked upon the creation of the material world.” As Huy spoke of the shadow, he was aware of a growing uneasiness. Imhotep’s commentary on Atum’s state when he became Light and thus cast the first shadow had always filled Huy with a rootless anxiety that returned each time the words formed in his mind, and today was no different.
Yet the Light cast a shadow,
grim and terrible,
which, passing downwards,
became like restless water,
chaotically casting forth spume like smoke.
He did not utter them aloud.
“Water, endless space, darkness, and what is hidden,” Penbui said. “The archetypes coming together in pairs to form the foundation upon which Atum made everything that is. I heard a wealth of similar beauty in the Book as you recited it, and many pronouncements I only partly grasped before you moved on. The rudiments of the creation account are usually taught to our children before they enter the schoolroom.”
“Unless one’s parents have no particular interest in such esoteric things,” Huy said. “I loved Hapu and Itu, my parents, but like many peasants too occupied with the necessities of survival, they had no time for the luxury of religious edification.”
Penbui nodded. “One cannot blame them. Khanun and I were born with a desire for such knowledge and we spent most of our meagre leisure time in the company of our local totem’s priest. Fortunately, he did not dismiss us as the children of Pharaoh’s cattle!”
Huy smiled across at the old archivist. “Over the years, I’ve been able to interpret each section of the Book to my satisfaction, but the suspicion that it lacked a final chapter grew in me because its meaning as a whole continued to escape me. Now that you’ve heard it all, can you hazard a guess as to its ultimate conclusion? Why did Atum trouble himself to dictate it all to Thoth for our benefit? Is it more than a marvellous account of Egypt’s formation? Does it describe a journey to be taken, a formula of hitherto unknown heka to be followed, a set of arcane laws, a series of images showing us the Beautiful West? What?” His smile disappeared. He was aware that his voice had risen, his body had become taut; the urgency slowly fermenting in him was at last spilling over, and he could not control it. “I don’t want to fill my mind with these things,” he went on loudly. “My days and too often my nights also are crammed so full of governmental responsibilities that I fear I will wake some morning and find myself unable to face them. Yet the obligation to grasp the Book’s conclusion, to see the purpose of Atum made clear, has oppressed me since I was twelve years old. Fate has led me here, to you,” he managed more calmly. “Surely now I may hear a new source of wisdom and so resolve this dire predicament. I am in the Second Duat, trying to keep my head above water, and the darkness around me seems absolute!”
Penbui’s look of alarm had gradually given way to one of cautious sympathy under Huy’s vehemence. He set his beer down on the table beside him and sat back. “I think you should take the risk of confiding in me completely, Great Seer. If we have come together through the hand of fate, then the result of our meeting must be foreordained. I am only Ptah’s archivist. You are Pharaoh’s mer kat and I am well aware that your word is law throughout Egypt, yet the gods have laid a burden on you much greater than the weight of the King’s cloak around your shoulders. I ask in all humility—let me help you if I can.”
“Then tell me what you think.” There was a moment of silence during which the man’s head went down, and Huy realized that he was praying. Huy waited.
I will not call upon you for enlightenment or anything else, Anubis
, he said mutely to the god who had often taken a malicious delight in answering his questions with riddles. If he was Scrying to determine a cure for some illness or the result of some horrible accident, Anubis would immediately provide a medical procedure, but any other inquiry Huy had would be met with an insult to his intelligence or an even more complicated enigma.
I owe you nothing
, Huy’s sour thoughts ran on.
Time and again you have left me desperate for answers, expecting me to reason through to conclusions only a god might understand. I am not your toy. And if this good man and I are able to succeed in our task, I shall take great pleasure in telling you so
.
Penbui looked up, cleared his throat, and settled himself further into his chair. “With respect to your own great erudition, mer kat, I can say that I am more familiar with the rites and origins of the heb sed festival than any other temple official in Egypt. After all, by custom those rites must be enacted here, in Mennofer. Our kings have almost always ruled from the ancient palace close by, and Mennofer’s founding as the country’s sacred capital took place so long ago that very few scrolls from that age survive. One of them contains the oldest instructions in existence for the procedure of the festival. The information is here in Ptah’s House of Life, but no minister of protocol has asked to study it since the time of the Osiris-one Hatshepsut, she who usurped the Horus Throne from her ultimate successor, our mighty Thothmes the Third, grandfather of our present King. It was after her Myriad of Years, a jubilee celebration she had commanded far in advance of the customary thirty years of rule, that she caused these words to be inscribed on the walls of her admittedly beautiful temple on the west bank opposite Weset: ‘I am God, the Beginning of Existence.’”
“What are you saying?” Huy demanded sharply. “That in your opinion a King’s transmutation into godhead doesn’t truly take place until he performs the rites of the heb sed? That without ever reading the Book, Hatshepsut’s minister of protocol deduced as much from the earliest account of the heb sed we have, and that his belief somehow allowed her to have such an unequivocal declaration of her own godhead chiselled on her temple?” A fume of excitement began to uncurl inside him. He felt it as a heat in his belly not unlike the first welcome indication that the poppy had begun its blessed journey through his body.
“We Egyptians are unique in the unquestioned belief that our kings are not only men but gods,” Penbui replied. “That through their divinity Egypt continues fertile and prosperous, and that the heb sed renews their divine power to maintain our country’s strength. Since the beginning this has been so, and we take every ruler’s dual nature for granted—we don’t even think about it. But truthfully, mer kat, how many of us really believe in such a thing?” He leaned forward. “We accept the omnipotence of the gods without thought. We pay respectful lip service to Pharaoh as Horus, as Amun, but the usage of hentis has rendered his uniqueness commonplace. If we are naive enough to raise the subject seriously in aristocratic company, we create a moment of mild embarrassment and our fellows politely turn to other subjects of conversation. Do succeeding kings themselves truly believe in their divinity as something other than a nod to Ma’at at best and a foundation for their sense of superiority at the least? The Queen Hatshepsut came to truly believe.” He had grown progressively more hoarse with the intensity of his words. Pausing, he quickly drained his beer, dabbed his mouth on the linen laid ready by his now empty plate, pursed his lips in a gesture of apology, and gazed across at Huy. “I’m close to blasphemy, I know, but you asked me for my honesty.”
“Yes, I did. The great Imhotep agrees with you. I’m assuming by your answer that you didn’t unroll the scroll to its end.”
Penbui’s eyebrows rose. “No. The script remained consistent for as far as I tried to read it. Are you implying that Imhotep added something to it in his own hand?”
“Someone of erudition added an explanation to almost every chapter of the Book, and I believe that person to have been Imhotep. See for yourself. He writes, ‘The heb sed not only renews the King’s strength, it transmutes him … This is the way the King truly becomes a god.’” They stared at one another in a silence that seemed to reverberate with Huy’s last few words.
The King truly becomes a god … a god … a god …
At last Penbui stirred. “This gives the rites of the heb sed a new interpretation,” he mused aloud. “Already I see them differently in my mind. I shall give you the ancient scroll I mentioned earlier to take back to your quarters and study, and if you agree with me that its contents support Imhotep’s conclusion, then we Egyptians are uniquely blessed. How Khanun would have loved to discuss these things with us!” He rose with difficulty and bowed. “Be pleased to dismiss me, mer kat. My joints are a little stiff and I need to rest.”
Huy also stood and Paneb rose from the floor, sliding the lid of his palette closed with a click as he did so. Huy bowed back. “Thank you for this enlightenment, Penbui. The scroll you lend me will be returned as soon as possible.”
“And perhaps you might require my presence again once you have read its contents?”
“Perhaps.” The archivist’s eyes were shining with anticipation.
How many scholars come to Ptah’s House of Life in order to study the vast wisdom accumulated here?
Huy wondered, touched by the man’s eagerness.
Surely Penbui doesn’t lack for stimulation! But of course this situation is different—a scroll worth more than every other scroll stored in the library, and we two following in the steps of the greatest architect, physician, and magician this country has ever seen. Son of Ptah, Imhotep is often called. Son of Atum also? Is he worshipped as a god because he became one? Did he use the heb sed for himself? Is such a thing even possible for anyone but an anointed King?
“Master?” Paneb said softly at his elbow, and Huy came to himself, following Penbui out into the last ephemeral vestiges of twilight. He felt suddenly drained and thin, as though some invisible bau had been sent to weaken him, and although the distance to his quarters in the palace was short, he wished that he had asked Perti to have his litter brought. He waited outside the library while Penbui went inside to fetch the document. Perti and the accompanying soldiers waited with him quietly. To Huy it seemed that he, Paneb, Perti, all of them, had battled some mighty storm together and had emerged safe but exhausted.
Responding to Penbui as he returned clutching a cedar box took all the strength Huy could muster. He held out a hand and, after an instant of reluctance immediately quelled, Penbui passed it to him. “Of course, I have made several copies of it,” the archivist said hopefully.