Imhotep (33 page)

Brian
stopped walking.  The donkey took a few more steps before reaching the end
of the tether.  It shook its head and snorted.

“I
understand,” Brian said.  “He thought I was coming between him and the
people.”

Tama
nodded her head.  “Yes, that is part of it.  But people are willing
to follow a leader, even if they do not love the leader.  They want the
order a leader brings.  So even if you have come between Djefi and the
people at To-She, they would always follow him.  What Djefi hates, the
reason he wants to kill you, is that you make him see himself through your
eyes.  You do not see him the way he wants to view himself.  You
reveal a truth about him that he cannot bear to see. 

“He
cannot live with that, Brian.”

They
walked in silence for a few minutes.

Tama
laid a hand on Brian’s arm.

“We
will be in Waset in a few more days,” she said.

“I
know.”

“Djefi
will be there.”

W
aset is a true city, Djefi thought, as his
boat slid smoothly toward the riverbank where dozens of other boats were
moored.  All along the waterfront there was activity - small reed fishing
boats coming and going, flat barges being pushed away from shore, others being
loaded or unloaded.

He
looked along the harbor for the king’s boat, but there was nothing there
approaching the size of the king’s gilded vessel.  As his boat slowed beside
the wooden wharf, Djefi saw Kanakht’s boat tied up to a post near him. 
Bobbing beside it was a larger boat decorated with paintings of lotus plants,
its furled sail trimmed in deep blue.  Djefi guessed that it belonged to
Prince Teti.

The
conveniently injured Prince Teti, Djefi thought, as the other two boats in his
retinue followed him to the water’s edge.

Although
Djefi was eager to meet with Kanakht and find out what news the vizier had, he
was more eager to take on supplies and continue his trip to Kom Ombo.  His
new temple was six more days' journey upriver.  He hadn’t heard from
Siamun since he had sent him to Kom Ombo to hurry along construction of the
temple. The lack of communication hadn’t surprised Djefi.  Siamun didn’t
write and he didn’t trust scribes, so he would have had no way to send a
message except with a courier, and Djefi knew that there was no one Siamun
would entrust with a message.

A
guard was waiting on the riverbank, standing beside a sedan chair and six
carriers.

After
Djefi was helped from his boat, the guard greeted him: “Kanakht, administrator
of the great mansion, royal chancellor of the Two Lands, sends his greetings,
First Prophet of Sobek.”

This
is how a man of prominence welcomes another of his rank, Djefi thought with a
self-important smile.  This is how it should be.

“Please
come with us, First Prophet.  Kanakht has prepared a table to welcome you
to Waset.”

Djefi
nodded, his face as impassive as he imagined the guard would expect from a man
of his rank.  He waddled to the sedan and then turning his back to it,
looked sideways impatiently, waiting for the carriers to take his hands and
lower him to the seat.  He heard a grunt from the guard and two of the
carriers hurried to assist Djefi.

He
settled back into the cushions and breathed deeply, sighing at the luxury of it
all and anticipating the meal Kanakht would have prepared for him.  Then
they would discuss how they would shape the future of the Two Lands.

“T
ell me about Diane,” Tama said.  “She
is why you are traveling to Waset, yes?”

They
were resting under a tree along the bank of the river directly across from
Waset.  No flat-bottomed barges were on the west bank, so Tama had sent a
boatman across the river to retain one so they could board the donkey and take
it with them into Waset.

“You
are lovers?” she asked as Brian tried to find the words to explain why he was
following Diane.  It didn’t seem so clear to him anymore.

He
flushed at her question, then seeing the openness in her face, he reminded
himself that Tama viewed the physical side of a relationship in more casual
terms than women from his time.  He remembered Pahket and her offer to
touch him when she gave him a massage.

Tama
and he had made love, or had sex, that is a better description, he thought, every
night.  She was energetic, completely uninhibited and playfully
curious.  He had never laughed so much as when they had sex, or afterward
as they held each other. 

Sex
with Diane had been exciting, but sometimes filled with an almost grim
determination, an act to complete so they could say that they had.  He
worried if she was comfortable, if she was enjoying it, if she really wanted to
be with him or she was just trying to please him.  He had been with other
women and usually felt that their attitudes had been the same.  If he
closed his eyes while he was with one of them, he could have been with any of
them. 

Tama
had been a completely different experience.  She played with the rhythm
and intensity of their lovemaking, sometimes teasing and playful, sometimes
grunting and wild, sometimes quiet and languid, but always centered on the
moment.  He never wondered if she was enjoying the act, and so his
attention was focused on the feeling and pleasure it brought.

Brian
realized that Tama was waiting for him to reply, giving him time to gather his
thoughts.

“Yes,”
he answered.  “We were lovers.  She is fragile.  No, that isn’t
exactly right.” He sighed deeply and tried to think of Diane in the new way he
had come to view people, applying what he had learned from Tama.

“I
have known Diane for three years.  We went to college together, that’s a
kind of school,” he explained.  “Her daddy picked the school for
her.  She said he made a lot of decisions for her, so when she got to
school she was going to make her own decisions.  That’s what she told me
later, after we got to know each other.  It was something that mattered to
her.

“But
then she got a boyfriend.  He was a big guy, like me.  Her daddy’s a
big guy, too, now that I think about it.  So, she got this boyfriend and
she let him make all the decisions, where they went to eat, what concerts they
went to, who their friends were.  Just everything.  She said she
realized that so she broke up with him.”

“And
you were different?” Tama asked.

Brian
shrugged.  “I guess.  Except lately she quit talking to me.  I
mean, this trip was her idea.  But then on the way here, we had a
fight.  She said I didn’t care about anything because I never said what I
wanted to do.  She said she could have picked a trip to Death Valley or
Antarctica and I would have gone along just to please her.”

“Would
you?” Tama asked, putting aside her other questions - what was this Death
Valley and Antarctica?

Brian
smiled.  “Sure.  I did want to please her.  And I’d go
anywhere.  I like to find new things.” He pulled out a blade of grass,
tossed it into the still air and watched it flutter back to earth. 
“Everything gets so complicated.  That’s why I like sports.  You have
rules, you know what you’re supposed to do, after it's over, you shake hands
and say ‘good game.’ ” He lay back and stared up at the sky.

Tama
leaned on her elbow and looked down at Brian.  “I understand.  I
think sometimes that that is why people like gods or the king.  They like
rules.  The rules supply order - ma’at.  If you have to decide
about everything every day, you would never get anything done.  So you
have rules, or sometimes just customs.  You eat food at this time, you
bathe at this time, and you put on your kohl just so. 

“How
could you live if every day you had to discover all of this anew?  What if
you had to decide about the sun every day?  It is better to say it is Re
and to learn the stories about him.  The same with Isis and Osiris, Thoth,
Nut, all the gods.

“So
Diane wants order in her life.  She wants ma’at, yes?  Her father was
her order, then this other boyfriend.  Then she decided to create the
order from within.  That is a hard thing to do, Brian.  I believe it
is the right thing to do, but it can be very hard.  So now Diane finds
herself removed from the order of her world and she turns to you for that
order, but she is angry because you do not supply it and she is angrier because
she feels weak.”

Brian
looked up at the sky and realized that there were no clouds floating there,
nothing to make shapes of with his imagination.

“So,
am I supposed to supply this order for her?” he asked.

“I
don’t know,” Tama answered. 

“I
know that I am different from other people.  For myself, each morning I
exercise, you’ve seen me, and then I sit quietly.  I try to let ma’at
settle in me.  If I think about it, then it isn’t there.  No, it’s
always there, just out of reach.  So I don’t reach for it and then ma’at
comes to me.

“I
learned that exercise because I am in service to Ma’at.  I know that most
people do not welcome ma’at that way; they haven’t been taught or they do not
take the time.  I don’t know how they follow ma’at.  Some lucky
people seem to live within ma’at without effort.  You are that way most of
the time.  Truly. 

“I
have seen women at the loom, their hands and minds focused on their task. 
Bakers, acrobats and dancers, musicians, children at play, fishermen, almost
everyone has those moments when they are doing what they love to do, when they
are at peace, when they are living within ma’at.

“If
Diane is not living in ma’at, you should try to help her.  But she must
help herself. 

“Each
of us thinks we are the most important person, because we are inside
ourselves.  Does this make sense?  We see the world from our eyes and
hear it with our ears.  I look past the branches and leaves of the trees
to the sky and I see the colors I call brown and green and blue.  But
think, Brian, are they the same colors that you see?  We may call them by
the same name, but they may look different to you.

“The
taste of an onion, the song of a bird, the strum of the harp, the grit of
sand.  I know what they feel like and taste like and sound like to
me.  But I cannot know what they are to you.  So how can I truly know
your thoughts or feel your fears? 

“I can
listen to you and comfort you, but only you can overcome your fears, only you
can bring yourself into balance with ma’at.

“When
you find Diane, you can listen to her and help her with her fears, but she must
enter ma’at herself.”

She
watched him as he looked at the sky, his face composed and rested, but his eyes
sad.

“Our
boat is here,” she said, sitting up.  “Come, you must meet Hetephernebti.”

H
e waited in a small room near the chambers
used by Hetephernebti.  A window opened onto a garden, bringing a scent of
blossoms and water into the room.  Brian leaned against the window and
thought about Diane.

There
were no malls here, no restaurants nor movie theaters, so he wondered what she
was doing.  The Diane he knew shopped and complained and never seemed
satisfied.  The one Tama described was empty and searching for meaning and
balance.  He saw now that they were two views of the same woman, the same
actions.

He
wondered if being removed from the distractions of life would help her look
within herself, if the idleness here would force her to confront the emptiness
of her life.

It was
late afternoon and the angle of the sun, or Re, he thought, was casting long
shadows from the palm trees in the garden.  The shadows, falling across
smaller trees and shrubs, were broken, their straight geometric lines bending
over arching leaves and skipping from plant to plant.

There
were splashes of colored blossoms amid the green leaves and the sandy garden
floor.  Small dun-colored birds darted from tree to tree, finches, he
thought.  The birds made him think of orioles and then his thoughts turned
to baseball.

He
realized that during the two-week trip with Tama he hadn’t thought about his
old world except to contrast it with the world he was in now.  And those
comparisons had not been favorable for his old world.

There
was so much to do and see in his world - amusement parks, zoos, baseball
and football games, television and movies, restaurants, plays, concerts, NASCAR
races - that he had once found fulfilling, but now he viewed it all as a
distraction.

My
god, he thought, I even watched golf and bass fishing for entertainment.

And
now I’m watching plants and birds.  He chuckled at himself.  It
wasn’t what he was watching or doing, he knew, it was the way he viewed it and
how it affected him.  When he had watched a sporting event or listened to
a band, his mind was pulled and overwhelmed by the action and sound.  Here
in the quiet room by a garden, his mind was open and calm.

He
heard voices in the hallway, one of them curiously high-pitched.  At first
he thought it was a woman’s voice, but then he recognized it as Djefi’s.

A
flush of anger swept through him overwhelming the contentment he had
felt.  He crossed the room, looking to confront the priest.

He was
halfway across the room when he saw Djefi’ fat form waddle past the
doorway.  He lengthened his stride, unconsciously tightening his hands
into fists, his mind turning into a screen of white noise.  He was unsure
what he would do when he reached Djefi, all he felt was the anger - at
being abandoned in the desert; at being assaulted at Khmunu; at the resulting
death of the attacker, his blood streaming from his neck onto the dark street.

Suddenly
a smaller form darted into the room in front of him, moving toward him quickly.

“No,
Brian.  Not now, not here,” Tama said in a forced whisper, placing both
hands on his chest and gently pushing him away from the doorway.

She
felt the exaggerated rise and fall of his chest, the heat of anger on his skin.