‘You are lovely to me as you are,’ said Khaemhet, his eyes soft with desire. ‘As you were, painted and scented, with gold on your fingers and toes, you would be too beautiful, and I would be too much in awe of you.’
Surere felt a strong arm round his waist, pulling him into the secrecy of the reeds, and then rough lips and a passionate tongue bruising his own.
Later, as they lay side by side watching a light breeze, herald of the dawn, ruffle the surface of the River, Khaemhet said, ‘There is one thing I must ask you to promise me.’
‘Yes?’
The mason was embarrassed. ‘It is that you must not try to escape. If you do, they will kill me.’
Surere was silent.
‘Promise me,’ said Khaemhet, rolling on to one elbow to look at his face.
‘Of course,’ said Surere.
She had gone. He told himself that he had known this would happen; that he had seen the signs; that in any case it had been a dream; but none of that helped. Instead of bowing to the will of whichever minor god it was who dealt with such things as love – perhaps the dwarf-lion, Bes; or Min, with his rearing penis and his whip – Huy felt like a man who has a itch he is unable to scratch; or like one whose scalp burns so much that to tear it off would be a relief. For weeks he had been as restless as a corralled lion. She had gone and she no longer cared. Long before she had told him that she no longer wanted him, her decision had been made. Perhaps weeks, perhaps months earlier, he had ceased to exist for her as a lover. That was the worst. To have gone on dancing so long after the music had stopped.
Now he was chasing a ghost. He thought of writing more letters, he thought of going to her house again. But he knew it would be futile. His only course of action was inaction. He had to accept the most unpalatable truth of alclass="underline" that the object of your love no longer needs you; you are no longer wanted; your part in the play of that person’s life has ended. It was, Huy thought, a searing thing to make your exit gracefully, but there was no alternative. Appeals would be received at best with affectionate embarrassment.
It was the season of drought, shemu, and from dawn to dusk all the Black Land endured the dreary, unchanging mildness of the sun. By the end of the year, in midsummer, the heat would be pitiless; but then the River would flood, and restore its green banks. Now was a time of long siestas and – to Huy’s frustration – monotonous inactivity.
He had just turned thirty. A year earlier, he had been living alone in a little house in a side street in the collapsing City of the Horizon, contemplating not only the wreck of his marriage but also the ruin of his career. He had been a scribe in the court of Akhenaten, and since that king’s fall, no longer allowed to practise his profession but not important enough to punish, he had scraped along as an investigator, a solver of other people’s problems. Now he looked around the similar little house in which he presently lived, still alone, in a run-down quarter near the port of the Southern Capital. The one big case he had come close to solving had ended in disaster; and now the single good thing to have come out of it was gone.
He said her name. Aset. He brought her image into his heart and tried to condemn her, but he could not. There had never been any hope of their being together for good; he had known that from the start. The sister of his friend Amotju, and now, after Amotju’s death, heiress to half a fortune – the other half, after a protracted legal battle, having been retained by Amotju’s widow, Taheb – Aset had never been within his reach, and was as far from it now as the moon.
He tried to push the memory of their last meeting away, but it kept returning to his heart – a painful and unnecessary event, caused only by his having been unable to accept her letter. He wished now, in a spirit of self-torture, that he had not destroyed the papyrus on which her firm hand had spelt out their situation with such merciless exactness. The trouble with the end of an affair, whether it has lasted one year or twenty, Huy reflected for the hundredth time, retracing the barren ground of his life like a dog which has lost the scent, is that the partner who leaves has already left in the heart.
Humiliated and miserable, he had subjected Aset to a series of wretched deaths in his imagination, before regretting each; just as he had envisaged a sudden change in his fortunes, making her accessible to him – but in his thoughts coming at a time when he no longer wanted her, however bitter her penitence might be at having thrust him aside. At his core, though, was a seed which would grow and grow, finally blossoming as the rank flower of acceptance, the harbinger of cure.
By the time Aset had married Neferweben, the former nomarch at Hu and now a gold dealer in the Northern Capital, six months after her brother’s death and three since her letter of dismissal to Huy, the scribe was beginning to be able to thank his guardian Ka for small blessings: that she was no longer living in the same city, and that Neferweben may have been rich, but was also fat and fifty, and missing an ear from a skirmish against desert raiders in his youth. Aset, just turned nineteen, had explained to Huy that she needed to consolidate her fortune and business. For his part Huy, who might have entertained hopes of joining Aset in the shipping business and helping her to expand, in competition with Taheb, her former sister-in-law, now told himself that marriage to such a venal woman would have been doomed from the start in any case. All these new, righteous, male thoughts helped for short periods. In time, however, they had become a poor substitute for an empty bed and no work.
The empty bed could be remedied with ease; living as he did near the port, the whorehouses were close by, and they were maintained to a fairly high standard of cleanliness by the city authorities. But a body paid to be there is no substitute for a heart that wants to be.
Work was another matter. Certain people with influence knew the major part Huy had played in solving the mystery which had ended so tragically; but none of them were friends now. He was tolerated by the authorities, though still kept under occasional surveillance by General Horemheb’s police, the Medjays. His ambition – to be allowed to work as a scribe once more – was as far off as ever. Discreetly, he advertised for the work fate had given him. Former colleagues would mention his name as a problem solver at the foot of information papyri, and he made sure that in court and palace circles those whose matrimonial and business interests and difficulties might put them in need of him should not forget his services and his whereabouts. After that, it was a question of sitting, waiting, and growing thinner, together with his dwindling supplies.
Amid shouts of warning and panic from the sailors on the foredeck, the huge barge, sunk to the waterline by the weight of the massive red obelisk in its cradle, wrenched free of the helmsmen’s control and, pushed by a vigorous undercurrent of the River, hurled itself against a jetty wall of the Southern Capital. Several men were thrown on to the deck by the impact, and in the brief pandemonium which followed, it seemed as if the boat had split, and might sink, there and then, at the end of its journey. But the groaning timbers held, though a plank in the half-decking astern snapped with a noise like a lightning crack, and one of the derricks on shore swayed dangerously, threatening to fall.
Surere, released from his bonds by Khaemhet, along with the other prisoner-quarrymen brought to augment the crew, cast a quick glance fore and aft. The barge wallowed to such a degree that it was hard to maintain his footing, and river water washed over the deck, making it slippery. Overhead, the obelisk swung in its cradle, as the helmsmen fought to bring the barge under control and sailors threw ropes to those ashore who, catching them, hauled on them in teams in an attempt to wrestle the boat alongside. Taut copper backs glistened in the sun as the huge barge bucked and reared like a living thing.