The King's Man (39 page)

Angry with himself, Huy resolved not to wake Kenofer. He took one determined step towards the shrine, and as he did so he caught a movement out of the corner of his eye. He knew that his couch had been empty a moment before, but now an animal sat on his sheets staring at him imperturbably, its yellow eyes slitted, its pink tongue hanging motionless from its wide black snout. The fur covering its hide was stiffly bristled, ugly, and doubtless sharp to the touch, Huy thought in the second of shock before he recognized it.
But you touched it, didn’t you, Imhotep?
he said to himself.
You stroked its spine as it sat beside you, tame and contented, while those yellow eyes regarded me with solemn self-containment. This is no ordinary hyena. This creature has come to me from the Beautiful West. Why?

He took another step. The hyena did not move. “What are you doing here?” Huy whispered. “Did Imhotep send you? Is there a message from Anubis?” At the sound of his voice it blinked, and rising on its thin haunches, it stretched. Then, to Huy’s dismay, it jumped to the floor, shambled towards him, and began to rub its body against his leg. The feel of it, rough and coarse, filled him with such revulsion that he cried out and stumbled away, and almost at once Kenofer’s tall form filled the doorway, already winding a crumpled kilt around his waist.

“Master, what’s wrong?” he asked, coming swiftly to Huy. “You’re trembling! A dream? No. I see your couch is undisturbed. Are you ill?”

Huy scanned the room, hysteria not far away. There was no sign of the hyena, but he fancied he could smell its breath, a stench of warm, rotting offal.
But that’s wrong?
his thoughts ran on.
The celestial hyena had no odour, gave off no evidence of animality. The earthly hyenas become imbued with the stink of what they eat
. Going to the couch, he bent. His sheets still bore the imprint of its forepaws and its narrow buttocks.

“Come here, Kenofer,” he ordered tersely. “Look down. What do you see?”

Kenofer’s hands went automatically to smooth the already uncreased white linen. “Nothing, Master. At least, nothing but the sheet. What am I supposed to see? Did the washerman leave a stain?”

“No. What do you smell?”

Kenofer’s dark eyebrows rose. He inhaled noisily. “Stale incense and your perfume,” he told Huy. “I can have the room washed down with vinegar if those odours are beginning to bother you.”

Huy could still see the indentations. They seemed to mock him, and the skin of his bare calf was crawling with the feel of that abrasive pelt. “Have my couch stripped and the bedding washed again. I need to be thoroughly bathed at once, please, Kenofer. While you’re attending to me, your assistant can be making up the couch in one of the guest rooms and I’ll take what’s left of the afternoon sleep there. I’ll want poppy. Meet me in the bathhouse.”

The body servant nodded and vanished quickly into the passage. Huy followed him almost at a run, turning right and hurrying along the wide hallway to the head of the stairs leading down to the privacy of Huy’s sumptuous bathhouse. Ahead was the guarded entry onto the roof.
Soldiers everywhere
, Huy thought as he fled down the steps,
but no human being could have prevented what just happened to me. Gods, I feel dirty, besmirched inside and out! If I could vomit up the filth I can almost taste as well as smell, I would, and then drink nothing but water and vinegar until I was cleansed
. Reaching the damp floor of the bathhouse, he tore off his clothes, jewels, and sandals and flung them away, tripping over himself in his haste to get onto one of the bathing slabs. There were several in the large, enclosed space. A generous seat ran around walls alive with depictions of naked men and women raising their arms to cascades of water, sailing in reed skiffs on a river choked with silvery fish, drinking from brimming cups offered to them by Hapi, god of the Nile, himself. Bowls of natron, flagons of scented oil, piles of linen towels, ivory combs, even ribbons and hair ornaments for needy guests, rested neatly about. Beyond the doorway opposite the stairs leading up into the house, a secluded area contained a firepit for heating the washing water, and benches high enough for Huy’s masseuses to knead the maltreated bodies of overindulgent guests. The luxuries and comforts of Huy’s estate rivalled those of the King’s palace itself, but today Huy stood alone with his eyes closed and his teeth clenched, as nude and defenceless as the most destitute of Amunhotep’s subjects.

Tensely, he waited for Kenofer and the purifying water.
Purifying, yes
, his thoughts ran on under the chaos of his fear.
I have been sullied and I don’t know why. I sensed no taint in the hyena Imhotep was caressing. Everything in that blessed place was free of pollution. Yet today its touch contaminated me, as though it had come to give me some terrible ukhedu and if I look down at my leg I will see a suppurating wound. Why? Those steady yellow eyes were full of intelligence. Did they hold a message I was unable to decipher?
In spite of the humid warmth of the bathhouse, he began to shiver.

Kenofer entered briskly, clean linen over his arm, and fetching hot water and a generous amount of natron, he proceeded to douse Huy, scrubbing him expertly from the waist-length ropes of his hair to the soles of his feet and then rinsing off the salts several times. Huy watched the grimy water splash from the stone slab onto the slanted tiles and disappear through the drainage hole in the floor. Wrapping him in linen, Kenofer picked up a jar of oil and led him outside to one of the empty stone massage tables. Huy did not resist.

Lying under the man’s firm control, eyes closed, he felt the panic leave him.
Atum is merely using the hyena to drive home my obligation to deal with the Empress’s unborn son
, he told himself calmly.
There is a perversion I must correct so that Ma’at may remain whole, so that my spinelessness will not make her bleed as it did when I stood before the King’s grandfather and my courage failed me. But surely the mere sight of the beast would have been enough. Why was it allowed to wipe the filth of a mortal being against me? Why not a moment of encouragement from the Blessed Realm? Do the hyenas in the Beautiful West need food, and if so, what do they eat?
An answer so outrageous formed in his mind that he grunted aloud, and Kenofer’s hands were stilled.
They eat the fruit of the Ished Tree
.

No!
his mind clamoured.
Surely not possible, even in Paradise! No living person, not even Ra’s successive High Priests who guard and tend the Tree, is allowed to consume the crop that falls to the ground. It’s gathered and burned every year. But those humans and sacred animals who have passed through the Judgment Hall, those who are justified, what new rules and laws apply to them? A hyena in the kingdom of the undying might very well be an unblemished object of veneration, whereas here they are fattened for food by the poor and regarded as necessary scavengers by the rest of us. But if venerated, why? If free to eat the fruit of the Ished Tree, why?
No instant response came to him. Kenofer had resumed his task, and Huy did his best to give himself up to the man’s healing touch.

That evening, he slept in his own room on freshly washed sheets. By now he was used to the one acute disadvantage of his long years of addiction to the opium, an almost constant nagging discomfort in his belly that often prevented him from eating, but after the massage his appetite had returned and he was able to consume a large evening meal. Milk and date wine or date juice ordinarily served to give him some relief, and Steward Amunmose made sure that those liquids went with him as he hurried from morning audiences to administrative offices to building sites, but for once he closed his eyes with appetite sated and stomach at peace. Nor did he dream.

On the following day, when he, Hori, Suti, and Men stood on the western bank of the river, under the thin protection of their white linen sunshades, looking towards the King’s embryonic funerary temple, Huy saw the hyena again. Beside the men was a churned hole where a landing stage would be erected and a canal dug for Amun, who would cross the water in his Divine Barque from Ipet-isut in order to visit the temples of the Osiris-kings during the Beautiful Feast of the Valley in Payni. Amunhotep had requested an avenue of jackal statues in honour of Anubis to run on either side of the waterway to the concourse before the as yet unbuilt entrance to his great funerary temple. The whole area seethed with busy workmen.

“How many statues are finished?” Huy asked Men. “These foundations are ready. And what about the draft your father submitted to you regarding the layout of the temple, Hori? Is it final, or has the King been meddling with it again?”

“The sculptors at Swenet tell me that they have almost completed their charge, and I’ve sent a flotilla of barges south to collect the statues,” Men replied. “My son Bek will supervise the loading. I’m not happy with this canal, though, Huy. I don’t think it’s deep enough.”

“The major plan is finished, mer kat.” The higher voice was Suti’s. Huy could still not tell them apart until one of them spoke.

Hori was squinting at his brother, kohled eyes narrowed against the sun. “The King can play with the details all he wants. It’ll be some time before the interior begins to take shape. The One wants the design to make sure that all but the innermost sanctuary will be flooded during the Inundation. Father isn’t happy with the strain such an annual occurrence will put on the building’s foundations, let alone the numerous royal statues.”

Huy blew out his cheeks. “Kha must simply find a way to cope with Amunhotep’s wishes.” Huy peered ahead at the lively anthill. Between the chaos that was the birth of the King’s funerary temple and the hot beige cliffs shimmering beyond it, the temples of other dead pharaohs rose out of the churned sand as though the desert had spewed them up an eternity ago. A little to the left, the temple of the Osiris-one Thothmes the First sat a distance apart from that of his unfortunate son Thothmes the Second, husband to the upstart Queen Hatshepsut, whose far more glorious monument lay tightly against the Cliff of Gurn, far to Huy’s right. Almost directly ahead was Thothmes the Fourth’s sacred structure, looking as ancient as the others although it had barely been finished before that King met his end, a death Huy did not grieve in the least. He wondered whether anyone brought prayers and offerings to the priests caring for him or for his father Osiris Amunhotep the Second, with his small edifice to the north. However, Huy smiled as his gaze moved over the large temple that followed. Many times his dear friend Thothmes had made the long voyage from Iunu to present gifts and petitions to his hero and namesake Thothmes the Third, warrior and empire builder. After Ishat’s death Thothmes had turned over most of the chores of the sepat’s government to his elder son Huy and had become something of a recluse, although he and Huy corresponded regularly as they had always done. Looking at the Osiris-one’s funerary shrine gave Huy a swift pang of longing for his friend’s face, and he was about to turn away when he saw a familiar shape sitting beside one of the foundation pits for the jackal statues halfway between himself and the King’s future forecourt. It was motionless, its blunt head turned towards him. There was a threat in its very stillness.

Hori pointed. “Look at that!” he exclaimed. “A hyena, right where one of the avenue’s statues will be placed! This is an undesirable omen. Perhaps the gods do not approve of our designs for the King’s temple, Suti!”

So the others can see it also
, Huy thought.
Therefore it belongs to this world, a creature of the desert with perfectly ordinary black eyes
. Yet the relief he ought to have felt was missing. He knew with a dull certainty that it was not here as a sign of the gods’ favour.
Its presence is for me alone
, his thoughts ran on.
A warning, and a reminder of what must be done. But gods, I cannot, I absolutely will not, murder the Empress in order to destroy the child within her
. Just the word
murder
, lucid and pedestrian, caused him to break out in a nervous sweat.
Must I pray for a miscarriage, an event that would surely distress Amunhotep and drive Tiye into despair?

“Oh, look!” Hori repeated. “It’s washing its face as though it were a cat!”

Huy watched as the pink tongue caressed one of its forepaws and the limb passed up the coarse fur of its cheek and over its ear.
Even this gesture is a message
, Huy realized.
I must cleanse my craven soul—but how?
The hyena got up and shambled away towards the narrow shade of the temple’s foundation blocks, and Men turned to toss the scroll in his hand towards the basket his servant held.

“We’d better go south and inspect the latest progress on the King’s new palace,” he said. “It’s not far, but I don’t fancy walking in this heat.” He signalled to the group of litter-bearers. “I want the canal to the river finished before the Inundation so that all my men and equipment can be floated to the site. Carts and donkeys trudging through the sand slows everything down.”

The men got into their litters and immediately drew the curtains against the ferocity of the sun. Huy did so unconsciously, blind to the discomforts of the day. The Empress’s son would be born sometime in the middle of Phamenoth.
I’ll be sixty-four by then
, he reflected grimly as his bearers laboured to keep a steady footing,
and Atum is still not finished with me. Neither is the King. Do I dare to approach Mutemwia with the grim knowledge I possess? To whom may I turn for guidance regarding the damning decision I must make?

In the end, he kept his own counsel. What he was contemplating was outright treason. Mutemwia would hear him, understand, and absolutely forbid him to take any action. Worse, she would no longer trust him. To unburden himself to the King was simply unthinkable. Amunhotep was already delighted that a second son would ensure the continuation of his royal line. Neither Thothmes nor Nasha, both of them old and partially infirm, could offer him a way out of his dilemma. A mer kat had no friends. The totality of his power set him irrevocably apart from every other citizen. His relationships with the country’s many ministers and governors were cordial but bounded by the reserve inherent in his vastly superior station. His word was law, and he dared not undermine his position. He was sufficiently in control of Egypt’s welfare that to endanger his status would be to endanger the country itself. The perceptions of those relying on his judgment must not change.