House of Illusions (53 page)

There would be neighbours, pleasant people with whom we might feast occasionally, inviting them into our small but beautiful reception room where we would all sit on cushions before our little blossom-strewn tables and sip wine and eat the delicious food our cook would prepare and gossip happily of local people and affairs. Perhaps Prince Ramses, no longer Heir but Mighty Bull, would honour us with a visit, causing a stir of excitement and envy among those neighbours. Men and Shesira would come, and Kamen’s stepmother and I would share anecdotes about the son we shared, while Kamen himself traded light-hearted jokes with his stepsisters.

I would practise medicine again but not every day, for there would be my overseer of cattle and crops to consult with and accounts of yields and profits to be kept. Besides, there might be grandchildren, babies with Takhuru’s delicate patrician features and Kamen’s intelligent gaze, who would grip my hands in their chubby brown fingers and totter about the lawns after butterflies and blown leaves.

Yet under this pleasant, wine-induced daydream into which I plunged with the relief of a hounded rabbit chased by a pack of dogs was the disquieting throb of a present reality.

Hui was out there somewhere.

And tomorrow was the seventh day.

16

IN SPITE OF THE WINE
I had drunk, I did not sleep well and woke with a jolt of anxiety to the cacophony of the dawn chorus and the first cool rays of sun on the glittering grass beyond my door. I had tossed and sweated in the night. My sheets were plastered to my body and I had a raging thirst. Leaning over to the bedside table, I picked up the jug of water that was always kept full and emptied it down my throat, then I lay back and watched the quality of light change on my ceiling.

How many thousands of times has Ra lifted himself from the womb of Nut since Egypt rose from the primordial darkness? I mused. How many people down through the ages have lain on their couches or pallets, as I am doing, and heard the birds greet the day, and felt the air heat around them, and thought—today I will labour, I will eat and drink, I will swim in the Nile, I will make love to my wife, I will return to my couch when Ra is again swallowed? Surely they should be saying—today I breathe, I hear, I see, I am alive, and tomorrow if the gods wish it to be so I will again open my eyes to life.

And how few have known the hour of their death? Have opened their eyes, still half-drowned in dreams, and gazed drowsily into the swiftly growing dawn with the thought— I will do this today, I will do that—until the fragile moment of half-consciousness receded before the onslaught of terror. I am to die today. I must count the number of breaths I have left, for they are fleeting. Tomorrow will not exist for me. I will not wake to another sunrise.

The courtyard was stirring now. Servants pattered along the path bearing the first meal of the day to their sleepy mistresses and the aroma of fresh bread wafted with them. Their voices were cheerful as they called to one another. Would Hunro eat this morning? I wondered. Had the horror of her waking faded and been replaced by the hope that even now a reprieve might come? And what of Paiis? He had told me that he would wait until the last possible moment before ending his life. How would he spend his final day? In eating, drinking and whoring? Probably.

Isis darkened the doorway, greeting me brightly and setting my food across my knees. While I picked at it, she busied herself in tidying the room, chattering all the while. When I could bear the flurry of activity no longer, I sent her to prepare my bath, and pushing away the remains of the meal, I left the couch and went to stand by the open door.

The sun was already bright and warm. A few of the women were wandering on the grass in their sleeping shifts, yawning and blinking up at the deep azure sky. The clatter of dishes came from many of the cells, together with an occasional sharp word of reproof or a burst of laughter, and I sucked it all up like a famished beggar. I would not relinquish one moment of this until the last drop of water had run through the clock, I said to myself passionately. Neither will Hunro, even though she sits in prison. If Amunnakht is wise, he will not approach her until after night has fallen, for as long as the sun shines today she will refuse to drink.

When Isis returned, I went with her to the crowded bath house, but after I had been washed and massaged, I refused paint and jewellery. I was not sure why. Certainly such a gesture did nothing for either Paiis or Hunro but it seemed impertinent, even insulting to the dark solemnity of death to indulge in such frippery. I could feel its approach in an unrest that took hold of me as the morning progressed, invading me and seeming to spill over into the courtyard until a brooding apprehension gradually hushed the women’s conversations and made the children quarrelsome.

In the middle of an afternoon imbued with a peculiar quality of timelessness a servant delivered to me the list of properties available for sale that I had requested from the surveyor. I received the scroll with surprise, having forgotten all about him, and quickly skimmed the contents. But the words and numbers passing under my eyes seemed to have nothing to do with me. They belonged to a different world, where one hour followed another and led into a future as foreign to me as the barbaric lands beyond the western desert, and I let the papyrus roll up and put it away. My world contained only Paiis, Hunro and myself, all of us consumed in the fire of waiting.

I could not sleep away the noon heat. The courtyard emptied as the women sought their couches, but the weight of unease followed them and I heard them mutter and toss as I too lay wide awake under a thickening miasma of foreboding. One by one they emerged again to sit under their canopies and I rose with them, setting a cushion at the foot of the outside wall of my cell and lowering myself onto it. A kind of reverential stillness fell on us until the thought of any movement became impious. The peace it brought was not tranquil. It was the immobility of creatures threatened by a sensed but nebulous danger and in the end I closed my eyes and surrendered to it.

At sunset the atmosphere lightened a little with the arrival of the evening meal. Isis set the tray beside me but I could not eat. My heart, my mind, everything in me was concentrated on the moments slipping by for Hunro and Paiis. It no longer mattered that they were criminals. Nor was I regretting that they must die.

My ka was remembering the agony of my own dying, the anger, the confident belief that a mistake had been made and I would be rescued, then the panic turning into a sullen acceptance punctuated by bouts of hysterical denial when I would fling myself against the door of my cell and scream to be released.

Later, when I was too weak to rise, I begged for water, for light to drive away the nightmare-infested darkness, for the touch of a human hand to ease the awful loneliness of death. That touch had come at the eleventh hour, and Amunnakht had pulled me back from the brink of eternity. But the eleventh hour would be the last for Paiis, and the Keeper would hold out to Hunro not the water he had held out to me but a cup of oblivion.

Dusk crept into the courtyard, and before Isis removed the stale food on my tray she lit my lamp. Other lights were springing up, twinkling fitfully through the soft darkness, but as I leaned against my doorpost and watched them blur through the translucent curtain of the fountain, I became aware that the usual evening bustle was absent. If there was to be feasting in the palace, the women did not know it. I could see their shapes moving quietly beyond the open doors, but their servants sat or squatted idly outside.

How many hours before Ra passes the halfway point between the jaws of Nut and the moment when her body expels him as the dawn, I wondered, listening to the unaccustomed stillness. The moment when tomorrow begins. Five? Six? What shall I do? I am too distressed to read or even to pray. This is not revenge. The satisfaction of which I dreamed, the fantasies on which I fed, are ashes in my mouth, and if it were possible I would rush to the prison and let the doomed go free. But that is simply another fantasy. Freeing them would not change their natures. And why not? a voice whispered inside me. It changed yours, for are you not speaking of mercy where once there was only greed and fear?

Leaving my doorway, I began to pace, arms folded tight against my chest and my eyes on my feet. I did not want to attract the attention of the other women by passing their cells and risking conversation, so I left the courtyard and turned onto the deserted path that ran between the walls of the palace and the harem. High above, in the narrow strip where the sky opened out, the stars blazed white, but the blackness where I walked was so complete that I could hardly see my bare feet moving on the cool paving. I met no one coming from the other courtyards or entering them. Even the Children’s Quarters were quiet.

I do not know how long I glided up and down that long passage, a sense of unreality growing in me, until drugged by the measured regularity of my movement, I felt as light and insubstantial as a phantom. But I was not soothed by the counting of my steps, the tiny ache that began in my ankles, the darkness surrounding me. The very formality of motion served to accentuate the relentless elapsing of time so that each step I took became a moment gone for Paiis and Hunro, minutes decaying with their life.

But at last, having come yet again to the gate leading into the servants’ courtyard and turning, I saw a shadow glimmer at the far end of the path and stood still. He came on steadily, an indistinct blur of fluttering linen, a faint whisper of sandals, the dim plains and hollows of his face gaining definition as he approached, and I put a hand gone suddenly numb against the wall next to me.

He halted and bowed. His expression was grave, strained, and when I lifted my eyes to his, I found that my throat had gone dry and I could not speak. “It is done,” he said. “All day she waited for a reprieve. I went to her two hours ago but she would not drink until the time had run out and there was no more hope. By then she was so exhausted that she did not protest. You chose the ingredients of the potion well, Thu. There was no struggle.” I tried to swallow.

“And Paiis?” I whispered. Amunnakht smiled grimly.

“He was drunk all day yesterday and slept for most of this morning. But then he had himself bathed and painted and his priest summoned. In the last hour he cut his wrists and bled to death before his shrine to Khonsu. It was a fitting ending.”

A fitting ending. All at once my mouth filled with bile, and turning to the rough stone of the wall I laid my forehead against it and let the tears come. For a while I cried soundlessly, but then I felt Amunnakht’s arm go around my shoulders and he drew me to him. He said nothing. He did not murmur calming words or stroke my hair. He simply held me until the pity and the grief and the strange pain of loss had all spilled over and trickled down my cheeks and been lost in the weave of his garment, then he set me away. “You will be able to sleep now,” he said. “And tomorrow your son is coming to remove you from my care. The Prince has released you. I will miss you, Thu.”

“And I you, Amunnakht,” I replied shakily. “It has been as though the last seventeen years did not exist. I would like to see Pharaoh once more before I leave. Can you arrange it?” He shook his head.

“Ramses has only a few days of life left,” he said. “Already the palace is preparing to mourn him and the sem-priests are readying their instruments of embalming. Let him depart in peace. It is a time of endings.” That word again. I wiped my burning face on the sleeve of my shift, and as I did so a wave of healthy tiredness swept over me. I took a deep, ragged breath.

“Thank you for your care of me, Keeper,” I said huskily. “I wish you much life and continued prosperity.” Swiftly I leaned forward and kissed him on the cheek, then walking quickly over the long stretch of pavement sunk in gloom, I left him. I felt his eyes on me as I went, and as I turned into the entrance of my courtyard I glanced back, but he was gone.

I fell onto my couch and into a dreamless sleep almost simultaneously, awaking sprawled in the same position I had taken when my head found the pillow. Yawning and then stretching until my limbs cracked, I swung my legs onto the floor. “Isis?” I called, and before I had shrugged off my crumpled shift, she was beside me, a question in her eyes, her brow furrowed.

“Is it well, Lady Thu?” she asked hesitantly. I nodded.

“It is very well,” I answered. “Today you will be assigned another mistress. I am leaving the harem forever. I will go to the bath house by myself while you find me food, for I am lamentably hungry, but hurry.” She did not follow my order, however. Picking up my sleeping robe she stood there bunching it absently and biting her lip. “Is there something else?” I urged impatiently.

“I had not thought that you would be going so soon,” she blurted. “Forgive my impertinence, Lady Thu, but I have enjoyed serving you and with your permission I would like to go on doing so. If you have no body servant awaiting your pleasure, then please take me with you.” I stared at her, taken aback.

“But, Isis, I have no home yet. I do not know where I am going. You might find yourself isolated on some arid farm in the wastes of Nubia. Here in the harem you reside at the centre of power. Your duties are few and gentle. You come and go about the city. You would be bored and unhappy with me.” She shook her head violently and gripped the linen even tighter.