It was a long time before he recovered sufficiently to stand up and set off along the path towards the clinic. As he came out on to the beach he saw another disturbance taking place near the middle of the lake.
This time he could be certain that it was physical reality he was witnessing. He saw the scaly backs of a pack of crocodiles breaking the
surface, their tails slashing in the air. They seemed to be feeding on carrion, fighting over it in a frenzy of greed. He stopped to watch them, and saw a bull crocodile breach clear out of the water. With a shake of its head, it tossed a chunk of raw meat high into the air. As it fell back, the beast seized it once more and, with a swirl, disappeared below the surface.
Taita watched until it was almost dark then, deeply troubled, walked back across the lawns.
Meren woke as soon as he entered the room. He seemed refreshed and unaffected by Taita's sombre mood. As they shared the evening meal, he joked with morbid humour about the operation Hannah was planning for the following day. He referred to himself as 'the cyclops, about to be given an eye of glass'.
Hannah and Gibba came to their room early the next morning with their team of assistants. After they had examined Meren's eye socket, they pronounced him ready to take the next step.
Gibba prepared a draught of the herbal opiate while Hannah laid out her tray of instruments, then came to sit on the mat beside Meren. From time to time she drew up the lid of his good eye and studied the dilation of the pupil. At last she was satisfied that the drug had taken effect and he was resting peacefully. She nodded to Gibba.
He rose and left the room, to return a short while later with a tiny alabaster pot. He carried it as though it were the holiest of relics. He waited until the four attendants had restrained Meren by his ankles and wrists, then set down the pot close to Hannah's right hand. Once again he took Meren's head between his knees, opened the lids of his missing eye and set the silver dilators in place.
'Thank you, Dr Gibba,' Hannah said, and began to rock lightly and rhythmically on her haunches. In time to her movements, she and Gibba began a chanted incantation. Taita recognized a few words, which seemed to have the same root as some verbs in the Tenmass. He guessed that it might be a higher, more evolved form of the language.
When they reached the end, Hannah took up a scalpel from her tray, passed the blade through the flame of the oil lamp, then made a quick hatching of shallow parallel incisions in the inner lining of the eye cavity. Taita was reminded of a plasterer preparing the surface of a wall to receive an application of wet clay. There was a weeping of blood from
the light cuts but she sprinkled on a few drops, from a phial, which stopped it at once. Gibba swabbed away the clotted blood.
'Not only does this salve staunch the bleeding, but it provides a bonding glue for the seeding,' Hannah explained.
With the same deferential care as Gibba had shown earlier, Hannah lifted the lid off the alabaster pot. Craning for a better view, Taita saw that the pot contained a minute amount of pale yellow translucent jelly, hardly enough to cover his little fingernail. With a small silver spoon Hannah scooped it up and, with infinite care, applied it to the incisions in Meren's eye socket.
'We are ready to close the eye, Dr Gibba,' she said softly. Gibba withdrew the dilators, then pinched the lids shut between thumb and forefinger. Hannah took up a thin silver needle threaded with a fine strand prepared from a sheep's intestine. With deft fingers she placed three stitches in the lids. While Gibba held Meren's head she bandaged it with the same intricate pattern of intertwined linen strips that was used by the embalmers at the Egyptian funereal temples. She left openings for Meren's nostrils and mouth. Then she sat back on her haunches with an air of satisfaction. 'Thank you, Dr Gibba. As usual your assistance has been invaluable.'
'Is that all?' Taita asked. 'Is the operation complete?'
'If there is no mortification or other complication, I will remove the stitches in twelve days' time,' Hannah replied. 'Our main concern until then will be to protect the eye from light and interference by the patient.
He will experience a great deal of discomfort during this period. There will be sensations of burning and itching so intense that they cannot be readily alleviated by sedatives. Although he might control himself while he is awake, in his sleep he will try to rub the eye. He must be watched day and night by trained attendants, and his hands will be bound. He must be moved to a windowless, dark cell to avoid light aggravating the pain and preventing the seeding from germinating. It will be a difficult time for your protege and he will need your help to come through it.'
'Why is it necessary to close both his eyes, even the one that is unharmed?'
'If he moves the healthy eye to focus on objects it perceives, the new one will respond in sympathy. We must keep it as quiescent as possible.'
Despite Hannah's warning, Meren experienced little discomfort for the first three days after the seeding of his eye. His greatest hardship was being deprived of sight, and the subsequent boredom.
Taita tried to entertain him with reminiscences of the many adventures they had shared over the years, the places they had visited and the men and women they had known. They discussed what effect the drought of the Nile was having on their homeland, the suffering inflicted on the people and how Nefer Seti and the queen were dealing with the calamity. They spoke about their home at Gallala and what they might find there when they returned from their odyssey. These were all subjects they had covered many times before, but the sound of Taita's voice soothed Meren.
He was woken on the fourth day by sharp pains lancing through the socket. They were as regular as the beat of his heart and so painful that he gasped with each stab and reached instinctively to his eye with both hands. Taita sent the attendant to find Hannah. She came at once and unwound the bandage, 'No mortification,' she said immediately, and began to replace the old bandage with a fresh one. 'This is the result we hoped for. The seeding has grafted and is beginning to take root.'
'You use the same terms as a gardener,' Taita said.
'That is what we are: gardeners of men,' she replied.
Meren did not sleep for the next three days. As the pain intensified he moaned and tossed on his mattress. He would not eat, and was able to drink only a few bowlfuls of water each day. When at last sleep overcame him he lay on his back, arms strapped to his sides with strips of leather, and snored through the mouth hole in his bandages. He slept for a night and a day.
When he awoke the itching began. 'It feels as though fire ants are crawling in my eye.' He groaned and tried to rub his face against the rough stone wall of the cell. The attendant had to call two of his colleagues to restrain him, for Meren was a powerful man. With lack of food and sleep, though, the flesh seemed to melt from his body. His ribs showed clearly through the skin of his chest, and his belly shrank until it seemed to rest against his backbone.
Over the years he and Taita had become so close that Taita suffered with him. The only time he could escape from the cell was when Meren fell into short and restless bouts of sleep. Then he could leave him in the care of an attendant and wander in the botanical gardens.
282 I
Taita found a peculiar quality of peace in these gardens that drew him back time after time. They were not laid out in any particular order: rather, they were a maze of avenues and pathways, some of which were heavily overgrown. Each twist or turning led to fresh vistas of delight. In the warm sweet airs, the mingled scents of the blooms were heady and intoxicating. The grounds were so extensive that he encountered only a few of the gardeners who tended this paradise. At his appearance they slipped away, more like wraiths than humans. On each visit he discovered delightful new arbours and shaded walks that he had overlooked before, but when he tried to find his way back to them on his next visit they had disappeared and been replaced with others no less lovely and enticing. It was a garden of exquisite surprises.