The Twice Born (53 page)

“Yes,” she answered, unabashed. “You fell asleep so early and I wasn’t tired, but I lay on the cot anyway and the mattress was too rough for comfort. I decided to go out.” She brought another square of linen from the basket and dropped it into the water. “I went along the alleys behind the nobles’ compounds. That’s where the interesting garbage is, because the servants throw all the waste over the walls. The lamp was half buried under a pile of rotting nebes leaves. It has a chip missing from its base. Otherwise it’s perfectly good to use.”

“And the sheets?”

“Them I did steal. Some stupid servant had left them draped over a wall, just asking for a needy peasant to take them away.” She looked appealingly at Huy. “Please don’t make me return them. They feel so soft against my skin. I swear I won’t ever steal anything else. Ever.” She gestured at the hot water. “Let’s wash ourselves and then start work.”

She’s happy
, Huy reflected,
her eyes sparkling, her movements light and swift. Is it because I Saw a great future for you, Ishat
, he wondered silently,
or is it because you have me all to yourself at last?

He nodded. “The nights will soon become cooler. I’ll ask Methen for another blanket, one for you,” was all he said.

The day passed rapidly in whitewashing every inner and outer wall of the house, and the ceiling as well. The gardener had lent them brushes and a huge clay bowl in which to mix the whitewash. Many times Huy pushed through the cheerful crowds milling about on the bank of the tributary in order to fill the bowl with water and staggered back to his little house. He thought of Anuket as the garlanded people streamed past and around him, of her deft fingers weaving the offerings that would be thrown onto the surface of the river in thanksgiving to Hapi. He remembered with what joyful solemnity he and she, Thothmes and Nasha and Nakht and his wife, stood on Nakht’s watersteps and recited the prayers and then watched the circles of quivering flowers go floating slowly towards the Great Green, together with hundreds of other offerings both humble and magnificent. There was always a party afterwards, a feast with music and plenty of wine and many guests, and then there was the peace and comfort of the room he had believed was his, with its wide couch and its lamps full of scented oils and a servant ready to remove his soiled clothing and freshen the water beside the bed before bidding him a safe night.

There will be many days like this
, he told himself grimly as the weight of the water grew and the sweat ran into his eyes.
Moments when I must make the experiences of my new life overlay the memories of the old until eventually there is no sight, no odour, no sudden strain of music that can toss me back to Iunu
. He and Ishat spoke little as they laboured. At noon she walked the short distance to the temple kitchen with the soiled dishes of the morning and returned with garlic soup and bread, which they ate quickly and quietly before picking up their brushes again. By sunset they had finished. The house now reeked of powdered lime.

Huy went to Methen’s quarters where, with a silent apology to his employer, he took a length of wick for the alabaster lamp and a small flagon of stakte, knowing that the blend of balan oil and bruised myrrh leaves would at last dissipate the old stench of mice and the newer smell of the whitewash. Ishat filled the lamp and took it to the beer house to be lit. Coming back, she set it on the table. At once its gentle glow filled the space. She collapsed on the chair next to Huy. “The inside of the lamp has been painted with butterflies,” she said. “Look, Huy! You can see their colours! And how well the light reflects off the white walls.”

“Yes.”

“We need mats for the floors,” she added presently. “I can weave them from reeds if you will go to the marshes and pick some.”

“Yes.”

“You are tired and sad.” She swivelled to face him, her hair hanging in strings around features as exhausted as his. “Let’s leave the lamp burning and take some natron and go to the river for a proper wash. If we walk upstream, out of the town, we can find a place away from the revellers.” She had already emptied the basket. Now she rose, filled it with the jar of natron and cloths, and beckoned. Unwillingly, he followed, taking the basket from her and joining the noisy swarm of citizens in the street.

By the time they had found a quiet stretch of the river, the moon had risen, an orange sliver just above the horizon, its light too faint to colour the water. Both of them were too tired to care about propriety. Stripping off their limp clothes, they waded into the shallows and, once wet, returned to the bank to scour themselves with natron. “We need oil for our hair,” Huy remarked. “Oh, Ishat, I promise to work hard for Methen. It occurs to me that I can sit in the marketplace in the afternoons and hire myself out to write letters. Then we can have oil, and anything else we might need.”

She tossed back her hair and stretched unselfconsciously, her lithe body bending away from him, before dropping her arms and giving him an odd, speculative stare. “You refuse to face the truth, don’t you, Huy? This is the truth—that your gift has woken, and even though no word of it will leave my mouth, yet the rumour of it will spread. People will remember you. They will start coming to your house and you will not be able to run away.” She turned back to the river. “I must get the natron salts out of my hair.” Her tone and actions were abrupt.

Huy glanced to where the moon had moved upward and become bone white.
I hate you, Thoth of the Book, Thoth of the moon
, he spoke savagely to the thin disc above.
I will worship no one but the totem of this town and nothing but the skills my school has taught me
. Ishat was a darker silhouette against the murky river. Huy plunged in after her.

The house welcomed them with the steady glow of the lamp and the delicate aroma of balan oil and myrrh. “It’s beginning to feel like a home already,” Ishat said above the clamour from the beer house. “How many more days will the festival run? Well, no matter. We will get used to our neighbours. I’ll fetch us an evening meal.”

Huy sat with both arms limp on the table, feeling his hair spring into curls as it dried. All at once he longed to join the drunken throng next door, or at least take a stool and sit out on the street where he could watch the patrons come and go. It seemed to him that he had never been more outside the ordinary stream of events, not even when he lay in his father’s house after returning to life in the House of the Dead. Yet he had never been closer to the commonplace ebb and flow that made up the existence of the majority of the country’s people. He was one with the brick makers who trod straw into the mud beside the river, with the potters who spun the thousands of unadorned flagons and pots needed in every home, with the farmers who set up their stalls in the marketplace and called their wares to the passersby. He was one with the servants also, for had he not become a servant to a servant of Khenti-kheti? Yet he knew that if he were to venture into the beer house and open his mouth, the laughter and conversation would stop. A general unease would spread at the sound of his educated accent, the words he chose to use, even the aristocratic language of his body. He smiled wryly to himself.
You are a fish out of water or a desert lizard tossed into a swamp, Huy son of Hapu. You do not wholly belong anywhere
.

He thanked Ishat for the food and ate without tasting it. Afterwards he bade her a good night, took one of the leaking oil lamps into his room, stripped off his soiled linen, and lowered himself gratefully onto his couch. Tomorrow he would have to dress in one of Nasha’s kilts; he had nothing cheaper to wear. He wondered if he might go to a sandal maker and trade one of them for a pair of sandals for Ishat. Not reed or papyrus—leather, which would last and wear slowly. He heard her putting the dirty dishes in the basket. The light suddenly dimmed; she had blown out the alabaster lamp. A tiny glimmer of moving light told him that she was taking the other oil lamp into her room. Leaning down, he blew his out and presently she did the same. The clamour coming through the wall was a steady sound, not rising and falling, and Huy thought that eventually it might act as a sort of lullaby.

He woke suddenly sometime deep in the night. Silence reigned, but something, some sound, had pulled him from sleep. As he lay listening it came again, a muffled sobbing, and he realized with a lurch to his heart that Ishat was weeping. He quelled the impulse to rise and go to her.
I cannot help you
, he told her sadly in his mind.
We know each other well, you and I. Our friendship is old. It has survived much, it has grown so that we are like open scrolls to one another. I love you, but not in the way you long to be loved. You have grown beautiful, my Ishat, and if there was any justice in the kingdom of the gods I would desire you as you desire me. But I do not. I wish with all I am that it were not so
. He lay, tense and miserable, until the sound of her agony died away and the house slept once more.

The last day of the festival of Hapi did not take place until the twelfth of Athyr. After a full twenty-four days of praying and carousing, the exhausted citizens of Hut-herib were glad to return to the sane and simple routines of their lives. The river had now almost reached its highest point, turning the town into a series of small islands connected by banked earthen paths, and the fields into lakes that mirrored a winter sky.

On the twenty-fourth day of Paophi, long before the festival was over, Huy had reported to Methen for work. He and Ishat had already fallen into the pattern that would govern their lives for some months to come. Ishat took charge of tidying and cleaning the house, bringing food from the temple kitchen, and carrying their laundry to the river where, together with a bevy of other women, she rubbed their linens with natron and beat them against the rocks tumbled at the edge of the flood. She did not make friends with her fellow labourers. “They are ignorant and full of frivolous gossip,” she had told Huy as she dragged their two chairs into the street, draped them with wet kilts and sheaths, and planted herself watchfully on a stool next to them. “All they care about is who is pregnant and whose husband is unkind and who might be unfaithful. Sometimes they share remedies for various ailments, or what spells and curses will destroy a rival for some other peasant’s affections, or a better recipe for lentil stew, but when I ask them for news of the King, or what our own governor is doing, they look at me blankly. They care for nothing outside the confines of their own streets. They bore me.” It was just as well, Huy thought with humour, that Ishat had plenty to do. Otherwise her impetuous nature would surely lead her into mischief.

He himself had managed to trade two of his precious kilts for leather sandals and a serviceable sheath for Ishat. She had been grateful but not effusive as she slipped her feet into the sandals. “Thank you, Huy, but I prefer my feet bare,” she had protested.

Huy had been firm. “The streets are full of filth. Let others cut themselves and end up with the swelling of ukhedu. Besides, Ishat, the hard-packed earth will give you soles as tough as the leather you wear, and you don’t want that, do you?” He had touched her vanity. She grunted a denial. The sheath was similar to the two she already owned, a slim dress of sturdy, thick linen slit on either side to allow her long legs to stride out and with wide shoulder straps holding it up. It met with her full approval.

“I should have an arm band with your name on it, like other servants,” she said. “Then the other women would stop asking me who I am.”
But some of them might remember the scandal I caused all those years ago
, Huy told himself.
Better to protect my anonymity for as long as possible
.

Aloud he said, “We are friends before we are master and servant, Ishat. Besides, if I could afford an arm band for you, we would not be living where we are.”

She turned a pensive face to him. “I’m beginning to like our tiny hovel. It makes me feel safe.”

At the end of each week they walked to Hapu’s house. Ishat would disappear to spend time with her parents while Huy struggled to find common ground with his father and fend off his mother’s worried questions regarding his welfare. Only with Heby was he relaxed, as they poked about the garden together. Huy taught the boy to play sennet and paint animals on Hapu’s dazzlingly white walls. He told him stories as he fell asleep. He listened as Heby solemnly and proudly recited the lessons he had learned at school, and, remembering his own unhappy and tumultuous first year at Iunu, he questioned Heby closely about his teacher and his fellow pupils. It was evident that Heby was a cheerful, intelligent child without the character traits that had made life so difficult for Huy. “I shall soon begin work with the High Priest,” Huy told him. “His quarters are within the same compound as your school. Perhaps when you are finished your lessons and I my dictation, we could spend a few afternoons together.”

Heby shook his head. “Hapzefa waits to bring me home every noontime, and besides, Father has told me not to bother you at the temple. He says you are too busy to see me there.” It was on the tip of Huy’s tongue to angrily refute Hapu’s crude attempt to keep him from this lovable child, but he kept his own counsel. Their father did not want Huy’s history known to Heby.

He enjoyed his time with Methen. The High Priest dictated slowly, and because the work was simple, mostly lists of needed provisions and offerings, with an occasional letter to a fellow priest stationed at one of the other temples scattered thickly throughout the country, Huy was able to let his brush ink the words while his mind wandered. They ate together at noon, sharing the small items of news each had, then Methen took to his couch for the afternoon sleep and Huy made his way home to Ishat and his own dilapidated but welcoming bed. In the evening hours he and Ishat ambled through the town, watching craftsmen of every kind work their trades outside their doorways, dodging the flocks of children who quickly formed and just as quickly scattered like noisy sparrows in the narrow streets, sharing polite greetings with the clusters of women who sat with their backs against their walls or squatted on stools to gossip in the precious moments before it was time to prepare the final meal of the day.