Ancient Evenings (104 page)

ONE

My mother, however, showed no sign of fear. Indeed, her manner was near to frivolous, and this displeased my Father. The end of Menenhetet’s recital lay heavily upon Him. He sighed with no small sound, the sorrows of these events passing through His lips, and even looked upon His fingers in curious contemplation, as though to measure how much His hand could hold.

Then, He and my great-grandfather began to gaze at one another with something shamefaced in their expressions. Neither man seemed pleased in this hour, nor yet ready to confess it. My great-grandfather certainly looked twice weary, once from the exhaustion of his story, and again from the doubt that the sum of all he had had to say on this long night would achieve his ends.

Nor was my Father satisfied. The last taste had failed to bring contentment. On the contrary, He was wishing for more. “I asked,” He said, “to be told of the Battle of Kadesh, and when that was done, I requested you to go on. You have been gracious, and have done so, and I believe you held nothing from Me.”

“It may be,” said Menenhetet, “that I told too much.”

“Only when you spoke,” remarked my mother with a mean and lively spite, “of your largest intentions.”

“No, you gave us all that must be told,” said Ptah-nem-hotep, “and I respect you for it.”

Menenhetet bowed his head gently.

“I would even meet your honesty. Your thoughts, revealed in their true shape, have taught Me much about My Kingdom. Yet now I long for you to make Me a little more familiar with your other lives.”

My great-grandfather looked most uneasy. “It would not be worth Your patience,” he said. “By the measure of my first life, they do not offer as much knowledge.”

“Oh, I will have none of this,” said my Father. “My ancestor, Usermare, left you Master of the Secrets of the Things that Only One Man Sees. That is a fine enough title for Me. I speak to you without concealment: In times of weakness, a Pharaoh must search for understanding that no one else can have. Otherwise how would His Reign survive?”

“I did not deserve the title. Others knew more.”

“You are tiresome,” said Hathfertiti. “Why do you not please the Pharaoh?”

“I would,” said Menenhetet, “if I knew how. I do not comprehend my second life, however, with the clarity of the first. My first mother saw Amon as I was conceived. But what was in the heart of Nefertiri? Sometimes I think the most powerful passion that a beautiful woman can feel, when she is proud and very spoiled, is to watch her lover die.”

His words were sent as directly to my mother as an arrow, and would, at another time, have agitated her, but she was keen in this hour. The evening had served her well. “What a cruel remark,” she said. “I think Nefertiri felt more love for you than was proper. And the consequences were dear for Her. To lose one’s navel and one’s oldest son …” She shuddered with no small effect.

“Yes,” said Menenhetet, and gave his own sigh. Again, I felt his fatigue. “I have spent many years,” he said, “pondering a matter I cannot comprehend. Who can say whether Nefertiri saw me on that last night with love, or merely paid too great a price for some curse from Honey-Ball, who, I promise you, had to feel most murderously betrayed by her poor seats on the Night of the Collation. I think such thoughts when there is little to cheer me. Yet I also know hours when I tell myself that the Gods thought well enough of Menenhetet to let him be carried in the womb of a Queen.”

“Oh, yes,” said Hathfertiti. “Your true wish is still to become a Pharaoh, even if you have always failed.”

My great-grandfather looked back at her carefully and shook his head. “You make too much of an hour when I saw that as my hope.”

“Why, you delight in such a thought,” said Ptah-nemhotep. “Dear Menenhetet, do not deny your desire. Even now, I saw the light leap into your eye when Hathfertiti spoke of such a wish.”

“It would be sacrilegious,” replied my great-grandfather, but I do not know if he had the strength to dispute his granddaughter and the Pharaoh at once.

In any case, Hathfertiti mocked him. “Sacrilegious?” she said. “How can you be this pious? Has the taste of bat shit left your mouth altogether?”

“At every moment,” replied Menenhetet, “you act more like a Queen.”

Yet when Ptah-nem-hotep only laughed with pleasure at this remark, as though to suggest it was not impossible, Menenhetet must have decided to retreat. “I would,” he said, “attempt to tell You of these other lives, for it is my pride to remain tireless in Your service, but the effort to bring back such memories has already proved exhausting. As soon shift the stones of one’s tomb! Indeed, I aspire to less than You think. To look backward is to weary oneself, and the task of remembering my former lives has become my true craft. I would even say that much of my fourth existence has been spent in debilitating trances.”

Here, my mother gave a passionate and furious laugh. “Not all of it was learned in misery,” she cried out.

“There were,” Menenhetet admitted, “other routes to my recollections. But they do not exist any longer.”

“No,” she said, “they do not.”

My Father’s annoyance was increasing. “It is near to dawn,” He said, “and we have stayed up for so long that we may as well wait for morning. I do not have an Eye of Maat in which to bathe and greet the appearance of Ra, nor is the Palace, I fear, nearly so grand as it must have been in Thebes before Usermare moved His Court here, but nonetheless, we have our baths. There we can relax from the agreeable labors of this night. Shall we move now, or wait a little longer?”

“I would prefer to stay,” said my mother, “on this patio. I love sitting with our son between us.”

“Well, then,” said Ptah-nem-hotep to Menenhetet, “I will say again that I appreciate the prodigious effort of your honesty, and can promise that it counts for much.”

“Indeed,” said Menenhetet, “for how much?”

“Oh, shame!” said my mother, except that she did not speak aloud. I only heard her thought.

“It would count for all,” said Ptah-nem-hotep, “if one question did not remain. When a man as capable as yourself becomes a Vizier, he also comes so near to the Double-Crown that he can capture it. Especially in times like these. How can I trust that is not your desire? I tell you I would be happier if I knew more of your second life, and your third. You are still a stranger, you see?”

“The echo of what I say,” said Menenhetet, “begins to weigh more than all I can say.”

“You are an old and stubborn man,” said Hathfertiti.

“Moreover,” said Ptah-nem-hotep, “you have no choice.”

“I have, as You say, no choice. So I must do my best,” said my great-grandfather, but his shame was not absent at how his pride had been snatched piece by piece, and his lips were thin with anger when he began to speak

TWO

Yet, if they would steal his pride so would he play with their patience. While he related matters of interest and gave some observations on what he had learned, all the same, he managed to speak of his second existence, and of his third, in hardly more time then it took to tell of Tyre and New Tyre, and, in every bend of his manner, was ready to suggest that he would seek to finish before the rise of the sun.

I cannot say why, but there was much in my great-grandfather’s reluctance that brought back my uneasy thoughts of Nef-khep-aukhem, and although I had never spent a night in the desert, now I felt as if we were gathered about the embers of a fire, while outside the circle of our light, beasts were gathering.

“In my second life,” said Menenhetet, “I grew up in the Gardens of the Secluded as the son of Honey-Ball, and slept in her bed every night. Yet I also had dreams of my true mother and saw Her poor face in many of these dreams and would wake up in terror for She had no nose. The revenge of Usermare was terrible. Before He banished Nefertiri, He cut off Her nostrils, and She lived the rest of Her life behind a veil and never came back to Thebes.”

“Aiiigh,” said Hathfertiti.

“Aiiigh,” said my great-grandfather, and observed a silence. “Since my dreams were not only frightful but true, Honey-Ball decided to tell the story of how I came to her, and I learned of these matters when I was six and much like our own Menenhetet the Second, a beautiful little boy, and wiser in my ways than most young men, for wisdom like perfume rises out of its own essence. So I understood, even before she told me, that Honey-Ball was not my mother, not at least by the cord that leads from one life to the next, although I always felt she was of the nearest flesh to myself. Indeed, after I was told the name of my true mother, I came to think that in the eyes of the Gods, Honey-Ball and Nefertiri must be like Great Sisters, even as Isis and Nephthys, and each with her own fearful scar.”

“Can you tell us,” asked Ptah-nem-hotep, “how you were sent from one to the other?”

“I was told that Nefertiri stayed in seclusion all the while She was pregnant, and so no one knew of this state but Her nearest servant. I would wish to think that She honored our hour or two of love sufficiently to take these many precautions and thereby keep me in Her belly. Afterward, but a few days old, I was sent to Honey-Ball by way of a eunuch and a wet-nurse. Stupefied by three drops of kolobi so that I would neither fret nor bawl, I was delivered by Pepti in a hamper of fruit through the Gates of the Secluded and passed under the eyes of Senedj. Pepti, after taking a prodigious bribe twice, once from Nefertiri, and again from Honey-Ball, stayed in the Gardens long enough on that day to make an addition to the records. So in the Ledger of the Coming-Forth of Usermare there was now an entry that He had known Honey-Ball on a day to confirm that it was His infant she now held in her arms. She was, of course, so heavy that no one could claim she was or was not pregnant in the time between.”

“I am amazed,” said Ptah-nem-hotep, “that Pepti would take such a chance for any amount of gold. He was the Vizier, after all.”

“He was nothing if not audacious,” said Menenhetet. “But then, to make up for his own loss by surgery, he ate the testicles of bulls every day to gain valor. Besides, he had an advantage he could count upon with the two women. If they wished to destroy him, they must destroy themselves as well. Given their concern for me, he could keep a grip on them. In truth, I think he saw them as most useful instruments for his future purposes. But he never had the opportunity. Given the excitements of his high office, he gorged too much on rich meat and drank volumes of spiced wine until he grew an ulcer. Long before I was old enough to hear the story, he was already gone, bled to death inside, and died in large fear of Khert-Neter despite the knowledge that Usermare was bound to give him a great funeral. It is my observation that none fear death more than the most clever of the scribes.”

He sighed. “Having been told this much about my true mother, I can say that I thought of Her often. There was a statue of Nefertiri in the Gardens of the Secluded. There She stood, naked, and without a navel. It was only when I was old enough to leave the Gardens that I came to understand how fine, in this situation, was the humor of Usermare. For now, I saw many statues of Her, all with the same blank belly, and all with Her name in a cartouche on the back to inform you that She was the Great Consort of the King, yes, He had statues made of Her after She was, for all purposes, His Consort no more, and lived alone in solitude in a small place in a foreign land, some said as far away as Byblos. That was the mother of whom I dreamed and I always saw Her face behind a veil. But that was all I saw of Her. I grew up in the Gardens as a Ramesside, as the son of Usermare by a little queen who was neither a favorite, nor young.”

“Did she teach her magic again?” asked my Father.

“Honey-Ball now practiced it less. The Invocation to Isis may have swallowed some of her gifts, and her exchange of curses with Heqat, Usermare, and Nefertiri must have consumed more. Besides, who can say what Rama-Nefru took from her? I still hear the body of Mer-mer crash into the wall. Say it was kindness enough for Honey-Ball to tell me about the Master of the Secrets who had been my father. Yet with all she knew, many recollections came to me more clearly than to her. I did not know why, not then, but when I was still very young, I was able to correct her about the color of the gown Nefertiri wore to the Collation, and when Honey-Ball recollected that she was wrong, and the linen had indeed been pale-gold, she did not say a word for three days but conducted many rites of purification.