House of Illusions (56 page)

Through a blur of tears I unrolled the scroll. Sure enough, it was the same document the King had presented to me with such delight all those years ago. “Oh Ramses,” I choked, and could say no more. There it lay before me, peaceful and stately and vibrantly green. Mine. Mine forever this time. And he had done this knowing that he would not live to see my gratitude. I did not deserve such overwhelming and unselfish affection.

Kamen gestured and I sank onto the stool a sailor had brought. Isis thrust wine into my hand and steadied it while I drank. I was recovering. “As soon as possible I will travel back to Pi-Ramses and offer Men my heartfelt thanks,” I said shakily to Kamen. “I do not know what to say. I will dictate a letter to Pharaoh and hope it reaches him before …”

“I think it is already too late,” Kamen said. “But he would not want you to fret about it, Mother. It gave him pleasure to put a peasant back on her land, or so he said to the Prince. Besides, there is this.” He held up the other scroll. “When you are ready, you are to take it and go into the house. You are not to open it until you are told.”

“Told by whom? The Steward? There are servants within, Kamen?”

“Yes. If you do not like them you have Pharaoh’s permission to rid yourself of them.” I came slowly to my feet and regarded him thoughtfully.

“There is a trick here, isn’t there?” I said. “Will I lose the estate if I do not accept the staff? Is the Prince toying with me?”

“No!” I saw a flash of pity in his eyes. “The deed is in your hand. No one can take it away from you. Pharaoh is a very wise man, Mother, wise and compassionate. You are feeling better? Good. Go now. I will remain here on board until you send me word that all is well.” He handed me the second scroll. There was a message in his expression. Worry? Expectation? I could not decipher it. Wordlessly I walked to the ramp, took the sailor’s steadying hand, and set my feet upon my own piece of Egypt.

I had not gone far along the shady path when the house came into view, set in its shelter of tall trees, its pretty white-painted façade gleaming in the morning light. The last time I had seen it, approached it, its mud bricks had been crumbling and the stone beneath me had been cracked and heaved. Men had restored it all with a sensitivity I found remarkable in a wayfaring man, but then, I reflected, I did not know Kamen’s adoptive father well at all.

My thoughts had begun to race, and I slowed them with an effort, conscious that they were trying to scatter under the weight of tension growing in me. The house loomed nearer. The dappled light through which I moved gave place briefly to full sunshine as I passed the fish pond. Its surface, once scummed, was now clear and dotted with lotus and lily pads. To the left of the path, opposite the pool, the outdoor shrine cast a shadow over the grass. Its tiny doors stood open and the shrine itself was empty, waiting for me to install my dear Wepwawet.

Now the entrance to the house was directly before me, two white pillars between whose sturdy girth there was only dimness. No door guard rose to greet me. The silence was palpable. I hesitated, overcome suddenly by a wave of foreboding. Something was not right.

I peered into that cool opening, trying to interpret the instinct that told me to turn and run, back to the boat, back to Kamen’s protecting arms, back to safety. Sweat broke out along my spine, dampening the scrolls I was clutching. You are being ridiculous, Thu, I told myself. You know what is within. The reception room, wide and pleasant, with doorways in its far wall that will lead you to a bedchamber, guest quarters, Steward’s office, a passage to the rear garden where you will find the bath house and the kitchen and the servants’ quarters …

Servants.

The Steward.

Taking a deep breath, I gathered my courage, mur-mured a quick prayer to Wepwawet, and strode across the threshold.

In the moment that it took my eyes to adjust to the gloom I became aware of two things. First, the scent of jasmine, very faint but unmistakeable, insinuated itself into my nostrils and froze the blood in my veins. Second, I was not alone. There was a shape even now rising from the shadows.

Tall.

Grey-skinned.

Grey-skinned …

It came forward, halted, and one stray beam of light from the clerestory window struck its head in a halo of purest white. My heart stopped, and in that moment of shock and panic I fought to breathe.

He stood there staring at me with his red, kohl-rimmed eyes. He was naked from the waist up, his moon-kissed hair falling over one pale shoulder in a thick braid, the folds of a thin kilt brushing his ankles. A silver snake bracelet clung to his upper arm.

I rammed one fist against my ribs and with a jolt my heart began to race again.

“No,” I said. “No.”

Then my mind fled. I threw myself forward and beat at him clumsily, showering his face, his chest, his stomach with blows, raking him with my rings, reaching to tear out his hair. He fielded me silently, trying to grab hold of my wrists, grunting when I found a target, but at last he succeeded. Panting and sobbing, I found myself imprisoned against him, my arms locked behind me.

“This is my house!” I shouted. “Get out of my house!” I felt his grip relax and flung myself away from him. He spread his hands and raised his white shoulders. Blood from a cut I had made below his ear was trickling down his neck.

“I cannot,” he said apologetically. “I am afraid that the orders of Pharaoh and the Prince must supersede yours. You may read the scroll now.”

“Do not speak!” I croaked at him. I was trembling with shock and buffetted by a torrent of emotions: fury, fear of what he might do, relief that he was alive, anguish that he had somehow survived, and a gush of sweetness at the sound of his familiar voice. With clumsy, hot hands I tore open the scroll.

The words leaped out at me with horrifying clarity. “My dearest Thu,” I read. “Having been privately tried and found guilty of treason and extreme blasphemy, the Seer and Noble Hui has been condemned to take his own life. However, with a regard for the years in which he served as my personal physician and Egypt’s greatest visionary, and also, my lovely concubine, with the thought that you should be given a man worthy of your talents and your passions, I have decided to spare his life only if you will deign to have him as your debentured servant for as long as you wish. If you choose to send him away, he must award himself the punishment I have decreed. Be happy.” It was signed by Ramses himself and sealed with the royal imprint.

For a long time I gazed down at the papyrus, then I tossed it savagely away and lowered myself into the nearest chair. “This is madness,” I said tonelessly. “You are an evil man, Hui. How did you do it?” He came and squatted beside me, bringing with him a cloud of his perfume, jasmine. I closed my eyes.

“You must believe me when I tell you that I made no attempt to bring about this most quixotic judgement,” he said urgently. “On the night when you hid in my room and taunted me, warned me, I realized that we, Paiis and Hunro and the rest, we could not avert the hand of justice this time. I went at once to the palace and confessed everything. I expected Ramses to place me in a cell at once, which he did. I also expected to be hauled before a public tribunal with my brother and Hunro, but it did not happen.”

“It should have!” I cried out. “I was there, Hui! I waited in the harem until your brother and Hunro died! I know what they suffered. You were just as guilty as they. By what right do you still live? If you had any honour you would have killed yourself regardless of Pharaoh’s machinations!”

“Ah yes,” he said softly. “Honour. But we know that I have little of that dubious virtue, don’t we, Thu? What is honour compared to the vital satisfactions of life? You of all people are aware that the sheer joy of living outweighs every other consideration. After all, you were deprived of everything but the elementary tools of survival for seventeen years.”

“You made sure of that,” I whispered. “Go on.”

“I was brought to Pharaoh and the Prince shortly before the trial was due to begin. Ramses told me that he desired—that was the word he used. Desired. He desired to spare my life for your sake. He said he knew that although he had possessed your body, I was the one who held your heart in thrall and he did not want you to spend the rest of your life mourning me. Perhaps he knew your heart better than you knew it yourself.”

Abruptly I pushed myself out of the chair and began to pace. “You arrogant men,” I said bitterly. “Complacent, prideful, superior. You threw yourself on the King’s mercy, didn’t you? You offered all the evidence he could wish for in exchange for your life. And he was reluctant to see you destroyed. After all, you tended him in the most intimate ways as his physician. He liked and trusted you above his sense of justice. But he had to do something. He could not free you and execute the others. So he thrust the decision on me. The coward! I hate you both, and you most of all! Ramses is dying, without my help this time, and you can die too. I don’t want you here. Get out. Go and fulfil the terms of that stupid, wicked bargain!” I gestured at the scroll lying in a corner.

He had risen to his feet and was standing with his hands behind his back, watching me soberly. “It was not like that, Thu, I swear. You do Ramses an injustice. If your decision has been made already, I will honour it, but hear what I have to say before you condemn me. Will you let me speak?” I nodded grimly.

“Say what you like,” I retorted. “But I am no longer the innocent girl who hung on your every word, Hui. Remember that.”

“I remember much,” he said softly. “I remember the first time I saw you, stark naked and dripping wet in the cabin of my boat, your eyes huge with fear and determination. I remember the night you kissed me and I ached to respond, to take you in my arms and let my schemes wither. I remember the smell of you when you leaned close in my herb room, your whole attention fixed on the lesson I was trying to teach you.

“But most of all I remember the darkness in my garden when you came to me distraught and we planned Pharaoh’s murder, and we made love, not with tenderness as we should have but in greedy exaltation at what we were going to do.” He paused, and for the first time since I had known him I saw him falter, at a loss for words, awkward and unsure. Was it an act? I could not tell. “You have changed, Thu, but so have I,” he went on carefully. “My little plans came to nothing years ago, vanishing under the weight of time. Egypt survives, as I should have known she would. Ramses survives to die a natural death and his son will make a capable Pharaoh. Nothing is left to me but the bitter realization that I threw away the one thing that might have made me happy.

“I taught you to live only through me. I invaded and captured your mind and your heart, deliberately and callously, but I did not know that in the process you had also captured me. When you were banished to Aswat, I believed that you would also be banished from my thoughts, that the whole miserable affair was over and the memories of you would fade.” He smiled ruefully, and this time I thought I saw genuine pain behind his eyes. “For seventeen years I waited for that to happen, strove to make it happen. And when Paiis came to me with your manuscript in his hands, I saw a final chance to obliterate the past. We planned your deaths, yours and Kamen’s. Paiis pressed for such a solution because his security was threatened, but I saw it also as a way to exorcise a tormenting ghost. I continued to delude myself until I saw you on the night you confronted me in my bed chamber, the night I ran to the palace in the hope that Ramses would order me slaughtered on the spot. I knew then that I would never be free of you, that I was ensnared forever in the net of my own making. I did not want to live any more. And if you turn me away now, I shall die with an eagerness I would not have thought possible. I love you.”

“You are still trying to save your life,” I said drily. “It is too late to talk of love, Hui. You have always worshipped self-preservation.”

“I still do,” he replied straightforwardly. “But I no longer want it at any cost. We are two of a kind, Thu. We always were. I am not asking you for equality. According to the terms of Pharaoh’s edict I am to be your servant, quite literally. You may do with me what you like.”

Oh gods, I thought despairingly as we faced each other in the increasing heat of that charming little room. What should I do?

Well, what do you want to do?, a voice within mocked me. Do you want to exact your full revenge and call Kamen to arrest him so that he must endure what you have seen with Paiis? Hunro? Do you want him grovelling before you, ready to fulfil your every whim, afraid to disobey you in case you send him away to die? Or do you want to love him freely and joyously, the way it should have been from the beginning, before your greed and his cold ambition got in the way?

But is it possible to lay aside the past with all its lies and pain, its dead dreams and thwarted hopes? my thoughts ran on. Are protestations of love enough to silence the whispers of faithlessness and mistrust that sounded through all the days of my exile and filled the darkness of my tiny hut night after night? How can I still the cruel memories, so many more than happy ones, that even now crowd my mind and chill my heart? It would be like trying to regain my virginity. Is it too much to expect that he is speaking the truth at last? Can we learn to trust each other against all odds?

He was looking at me patiently, calmly, a sliver of moonlight in the middle of the morning, an exotic and still mysterious creation of the gods, a complex and beautiful man, and my love for him was a wound I could not cure. Ramses had been right. Right and astute. Out of his goodness he had given me the one gift beyond anything in his treasury. Walking to the scroll, I picked it up and tore it in two.

“You are free to go, Hui,” I said matter-of-factly. “You can leave Egypt if you want. I refuse to accept any of the terms of this so-called bargain. I will not alert the authorities. I will do nothing at all. I do not desire your death or your servitude.” I pointed at the door. “Freedom, Seer.”

He did not move. He did not so much as glance in the direction of my finger. “Freedom to do what?” he said huskily. “Return to my house in Pi-Ramses where my brother’s voice still echoes and the oil waits to show me dead visions and useless fantasies? Where my garden is filled with the scent of the lost years, yours as well as mine? I do not want that kind of freedom. Death would be preferable. I can hide from myself no longer, Thu. I need you. My heart, my soul is incomplete without you. You must believe me. You say you desire neither my death nor my servitude. But if you force me to walk out the door, you condemn me to both, for no one can live who only serves the time that has gone.”