Huy stood up.
‘There is no need for you to go,’ said Taheb.
‘Yes.’
She shrugged, standing too, taking the papers and nodding dismissal at the scribe. She came a little closer to Huy. ‘If only I could find you a job here.’
‘Long ago I wanted to be a boatman. Now I know I shall never have the skill. I cannot work as a scribe, and I am beginning to enjoy being free. How could I be useful to you?’
Taheb embraced him with her eyes again, but said nothing. Huy could not interpret the nature of that look. ‘I must ask you one more question. You knew Iritnefert a little?’
‘Yes, a little.’
‘What was she like?’
There was a pause before she answered. ‘A fire in the wind,’ Taheb said.
FOUR
It was a slow process, needing the kind of patience he did not have, but at least Huy was spared the tedium of the cutters, whose sole job was to trim the reeds to a regular length, about the same as a man’s forearm. The next step was for the peelers to strip the reeds of their rind, cutting it off with sharp double-bladed knives made of flint. These two tasks completed, the exposed pith was cut into narrow strips like ribbons, which were then placed side by side on a large, perfectly-flat slab of limestone which was kept permanently damp by boys scattering water on it, ever-moving fingers flicking across from earthenware pots.
The slices were perfectly aligned, and then a second layer was placed across them at right angles. Huy’s job was to tamp this second layer down on to the first. With two other men he worked his way rhythmically across the sheet, beating the second layer gently with rounded mallets until the starches produced from the pith welded all the strips together to form a sheet, the size of the stone, of white papyrus. Once the process was completed, older boys, apprentice papermakers, came and dislodged the sheet, taking it away to the drying trestles, where it had to be carefully watched and removed after it had dried but before it began to turn yellow in the sun. In another part of the factory, the sheets were glued together to make large rolls, or cut into smaller pieces for letters and shorter documents.
Huy had taken the job after ten days of waiting hopefully for word from Merymose. Then, the emptiness of his purse and the bareness of his kitchen had forced him to find work of any kind. Confronting Nubenehem with his problem, she had introduced him to another customer of the City of Dreams, an elderly papermaster with flaccid skin and a bald pate ringed with long, dank hair. This man, who told Huy that he only went to the place to drink, never having had a problem when it came to finding a girl, was looking urgently for somebody to work on his paperbeating team as one of his men had died suddenly from river fever. Huy knew something about papyrus, having spent most of his life writing on it, and had managed to convince the man that he knew how to make it, without giving away too much of his true background. He had been taken on.
At first, as he worked, he had reminisced pleasantly to himself about the smells and the texture of paper and ink, and about the pleasure of opening a new roll of papyrus, laid out as far as there was need on soft leather spread over a wooden writing desk; then mixing the ink powder with water, and the nervous moment of dipping the brush to make the first signs – to load the brush just so, in order that the ink would be absorbed by the paper before it could run down it. He remembered the floggings which, when he was a student, had followed the botching of a papyrus. Now, after thirty days at this backbreaking and endless task, he realised why. But his fellow workers were happy and prosperous. Demand for their product was unceasing, and their labour was steady and safe.
Its dullness stifled Huy’s heart, and he began to question the sense of feeding his belly at the expense of his mind, though such noble sentiments could hardly be his to indulge. He thought of Merymose, and wondered how he was progressing, with time running out as the embalmers pressed on with their task. He had not returned to see Taheb, partly out of pride, partly out of uncertainty. At their last meeting a line had been reached, and despite the urgings of his senses at the time, he was not sure that they wanted to cross it. At the same time he was puzzled by her silence, after such friendliness. Was she thinking as he was? Was each of them waiting for the other to make the next move?
Ten more days were to pass before the longed for interruption to Huy’s humdrum existence occurred. For some time now he had not been aware of being followed, and he knew, too, that no one had searched his house in his absence. Every day when he left for work, he would leave objects such as a scroll or a limestone flake, or his kohl-pot, a certain measured distance from the edge of the table on which they lay, and from each other. However carefully the house might have been searched, those distances would have changed. They never did. Huy put it all down to his regular job. Perhaps the authorities thought that he had finally knuckled under. It occurred to him that a full belly was not all he had his tedious employment to thank for.
One evening, however, as the never-failing north wind freshened, rustling the tops of the dom palms as he walked back to the harbour quarter, he had the impression that someone was dogging his steps. To make sure, he altered his usual route, ducking down alleys no wider than a donkey’s girth, slipping across little squares where five ways met. The streets of the harbour quarter were quite unlike the regular, broad thoroughfares of the rest of the city. This part of town had grown up organically, defying and outgrowing any order the town planners may once have tried to impose, and Huy knew it intimately. Yet he was unable to shake off his pursuer. Finally he gave up the attempt, and took the most direct way back to his house. He was almost there when he heard the sound of running feet behind him, and turned to see Merymose coming towards him.
‘Thank you for the guided tour,’ said the Medjay. He looked tired and drawn, but his mouth was still a determined line.
‘It was you? I’d have thought you’d have made a better job of it.’
‘I wanted you to know someone was following you, so that I could be sure you’d lead me a dance. That was the only way I could check that no one else was on your tail.’
‘Why?’
‘I’ll tell you inside. I shouldn’t be here, and I certainly shouldn’t be talking to you, but I have no option.’
Once seated in Huy’s living room, Merymose relaxed, but only a little, and he could not remain in his chair long, but kept getting up and pacing the narrow space between the front door and the rear wall.
‘First of all, I should explain why you heard no more from me after you came to see Iritnefert’s body. Somebody must have reported the meeting, because I was summoned to the priest-administrator’s room at the palace the next day for a tongue lashing. Something along the lines of loss of professional dignity, enlisting the aid of socially undesirable persons in official business. I was lucky to keep the case.’
‘Have you made any progress?’
‘I haven’t been allowed to move. I wasn’t able to talk to Ipuky myself. I wonder if that would have helped. All I have been able to find out is that he was a remote father. After the mother’s departure, he lost interest in the girl, turned over her upbringing to one of the house matrons. She was severe, used to have Iritnefert whipped for the slightest misconduct. The girl grew up without love.’
‘That is much.’
‘That is all. There is no clue to follow. And now I am no longer in charge.’
Huy looked at him. ‘Who is?’
‘Kenamun.’
Huy knew the man by sight and reputation. In temperament he was not unlike Surere, a career official who had dedicated himself to climbing to the top of the power structure, though he had chosen the priesthood as his channel. He was as inflexible in his allegiance to Amun and the old gods as Surere was to the Aten, and during the reign of Akhenaten he had fled to the oasis of Kharga to escape death. His loyalty had stood him in good stead after the restoration, and he was now a commissioner of police for religious conformity – a post which did not prevent him from working in any other area which Horemheb, through the king, saw fit to appoint him to.