Two Horizons

Chapter 10

  EVENING CURSES

  At nightfall, warmed for two weeks by An-khi’s skin but chilled by the close of pyramid season, Mehi walked for home through Mer’s honeycomb of alleys and huts. He worried, now that he no longer worked on the pyramid, whether An-khi would feel the same about him. Would he feel the same about himself? This was his actual fall from the pyramid. Like a sparrow chick from its nest.

  And, with the recession season, the Nile would begin to subside and the days begin to cool.

  As Mehi reached his hut, a neighbor stopped him to tell of a second parting. An-khi’s sister Snebtisi, that small woman with a huge cough, had died that day. Mehi’s chest immediately ached as if he’d been coughing for hours. But he wasn’t surprised. Recession meant change.

  The next evening outside Paser’s estate, the mourners’ drumming footfalls kicked up gray dust. In a matching rhythm of swinging arms and long strides beating their heavy gowns of beige and tan and dun, they swept by Mehi. His heart quickening in the presence of so many dignitaries—aware he should be more somber—he tried to recall his mother’s lessons about how to behave in such company. He nearly let the cortege pass before joining it at its tail, taking up the march next to Snebtisi on planks shouldered by four men.

  With An-khi’s family in a donkey cart at the front, the cortege wound toward the desert west of Mer. Arable land was too scarce for the dead; theirs was the desert. To Mehi, winding through the dunes to bury An-khi’s sister brought him closer to his own sister, a sister he never knew lying silent in sand somewhere near. What would she have been like? How would his life have been different? Too, he recalled Pabes’ eyes. What was death like? Sharing loss with An-khi, Mehi felt his steps drawing him closer to her as well.

  The wind picked up. It whirled sand into the mourners’ eyes. Mehi recalled Snebtisi’s “flying sand.” The mourners shielded their oil lamps.

  Trudging for a mile without road or word under a moonless night, the cortege circled a spot indicated by the cart’s halting. At their feet, the guests set their lamps that glowed shifting orange shadows onto them.

  Mehi made sure he stayed clear as the four pallbearers came to the circle’s center and eased down the planks. Scooping from the sand a shallow oval grave and placing at its bottom a mat of plaited rushes, two of the men slid the planks from beneath Snebtisi. Adorned in a white gown with a crystal necklace and bracelets, the corpse wriggled into the grave.

  Like Pabes, Snebtisi looked to be no more than asleep.

  The family, one by one, stepped from the cart. His lips drawn taut, Paser maneuvered his elder daughter onto her left side, stretched out—not the fetal position of peasants like Pabes—and oriented to the east to watch the rising sun forever. An-khi set into her sister’s hand an ivory container. Heria committed the small body of a cat wrapped in white linen. Paser arranged alabaster bowls of honey, melon and plum wine beside his daughter. Two pallbearers covered Snebtisi with sycamore branches and sand.

  As if on some signal that Mehi hadn’t seen, the guests hung their heads in unison. Four weeping women dressed in blue, whom Mehi hadn’t noticed before, formed four points of a square behind the guests’ circle. They began to drone a mournful song without words. Some in the crowd wept. The wind hissed.

  Mehi groped to understand the feelings of An-khi’s family. Their pain must be deeper than his, even when he discovered the death of a sister he never knew. When it’s someone whose face you can still see, whose eyes ... Mehi’s own emotions whirled like the wind. So much was happening: dignitaries, ritual manners, desolate beauty and staring east forever.

  An-khi and her parents lined up before their cart. Sand lashed at the guests as they approached to take Paser’s forearm and say a word to Heria and An-khi. Mehi struggled past them to get to his lover. Her eyes showed the pain he guessed they should show. He had nothing in mind to tell her until he took her hand. “An-khi, at least in all of this we share another thing. My sister is out here too.”

  An-khi took her hand from him. Her eyes seeming to blacken, she whispered, “We don’t share anything. I’m the only daughter now. I’ll marry who my father tells me to.” She climbed onto the cart and sat between Paser and Heria. They rode away.

  Mehi overlooked An-khi’s outburst. Of course, her grieving had caused it. So much had happened today.

  In thick heat two nights later, Mehi sat cross-legged in the front room while Khety baked the evening meal at the clay oven in the courtyard. Horemheb hadn’t been home all day, but she wasn’t waiting dinner for him. Mehi rolled in his hands several pomegranate seeds, his favorite, Khety had somehow gathered for him. He looked forward to eating alone with his mother.

  He heard An-khi greet his mother and, without calling at the door, dashed in. “Mehi,” she said, breathing hard. She pulled him up by the arm. “Come with me.”

  “Where?”

  “Just come.”

  An-khi hustled Mehi out and then due west between the village huts.

  Mehi asked, “What is it?”

  “Not yet. When we’re away from everyone.” She directed Mehi toward the desert. He followed her swinging lamp. This jaunt recreated his closeness with An-khi during the funeral march. In their shared solitude, he admitted to himself how uncertain of An-khi’s affections he’d been lately.

  At last alone in the heat and darkness on the west side of the desert’s first dune, An-khi clutched her intended’s arm. “What are we going to do?”

  “About what?”

  Theormi’s voice pitched. “About me being the only daughter. If my mother dies, the estate would belong to me and my husband.”

  “I don’t care about the estate.”

  “The property won’t go to you.”

  “I’m going to be your husband.”

  “Not if my father has his way. Gods, I can’t believe you don’t understand this.”

  The lamplight flickered on and off the two. Hunting for her eyes, Mehi’s brows crumpled. He tried not to panic. This couldn’t be real.

  An-khi grabbed her forehead and spun about. “It’s all I’ve thought about and you’re not even aware of it.” She dropped her hand. Turning back to Mehi, she said, “You must know that property hands down from mother to eldest daughter. A man secures property through marriage.” She drew a long breath. “My sister’s death scared Father. He guards over me like he used to with her. He’s afraid of losing the estate and his governorship. He may declare me his wife.”

  Mehi shook his head. “This kind of thing doesn’t happen with my people.”

  “Well, it happens with mine.”

  The sky seemed to cloud; Mehi’s view blackened. “Your father couldn’t mean it. We’re promised to each other. We started a house. It’s not right.”

  “What’s right doesn’t matter. Fairness is nothing to my father.”

  “Why are you angry with me? Are you exaggerating all this about your father?”

  “If you believed what I’m telling you’d have to do something about it. This is your chance not to be timid.”

  “Timid? You think I’m timid? Should I be more like my brother for you?”

  An-khi turned away. “This arguing—it’s not getting us anywhere. Do something, Mehi.”

  “Why is it up to me?”

  “Mehi! All you do is sacrifice. You’re just not there sometimes.”

  Mehi staggered as if from a blow across the jaw.

  An-khi inhaled a deep breath, arms extended. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry. It’s just that I’m upset.”

  “Tu, An-khi.”

  “I have to go. Father will find I’m gone. We’ll talk soon.” An-khi began to walk off, leaving Mehi in the dark.

  “When?”

  “I’m not going away,” she said behind her.

  Mehi watched her walk away behind a dune concealing her lower body when An-khi stopped and turned toward him. “Is this what it feels like to grow up?” An-khi then resumed walking and sank from sight.

  Alone in
the desert, Mehi fought off thoughts of An-khi’s father, someone with the power to devastate him. Shivering despite the feverish night, he assured himself everything would work out.

  Instead of heading for home, Mehi stalked into deeper desert onto hotter sand.

  Two weeks after leaving a man to die at his feet, something other than his dream to join a trading caravan directed Sebek: hunger. He’d fled Gebtu without waiting to gather food because the con man would have returned to discover his dead accomplice and notified the authorities or come hunting for Sebek himself. With only water, Sebek had scampered onto the Bekhan Trail, one hundred and twenty-five miles of a dead riverbed, stretching due east and banked by dark gray hills of crumbling sandstone and schist. Sebek knew he could join a caravan at the trail’s end, a port on the Travel Sea—he liked its promise of escape. But hunger frustrated his dream.

  Sebek’s nose had brought him to ten beetles scurrying their balls of dung from a fresh deposit of a hedgehog. He scooped up and plopped each beetle down his throat.

  Few towns existed on the trail. The only outposts were abandoned or manned by guards unsympathetic to beggars. Yet, at night, Sebek would bleed off some of their well water.

  He found food, like the beetles, as he could. But, for several days, desperate and cursing his hunger, Sebek had to leave the trail and stalk into the desert. He turned over rock after rock, finding on the third day a saw-scaled viper. Smashing and severing its head with the rock, he immediately bit into its dull red skin and ate it whole.

  A day or two later, he turned over a flat rock and a shiny orange scorpion charged out, brandishing its claws and tail at the intruder. Its fury fascinated Sebek. In his view, the scorpion’s shell and stinger—and considerable spite—created a perfect beast. In this hard desert, the scorpion lived well, needing only a rock for a home. Charmed, Sebek allowed it to storm off.

  The beetles squiggling in his stomach, Sebek finally came within sight of a town. He didn’t know its name. Didn’t care to know. As he watched, lamplight died one by one across the scattering of huts.

  Moving into the quiet town, he kept from the larger homes and made his way to a dense quarter. He was as good as these people; he wouldn’t beg for food here. He’d just take what he needed. But the animal pen and two storerooms he tried were locked. These people were suspicious.

  He wandered the dark alleys, guessing which family inside their huts would serve him.

  Sebek’s nose pricked up for a delicious flavor in the air. Following the scent to where desert sands began to encroach, he saw campfire smoke. He crept on his belly up a short embankment to discover two men sitting about the fire gnawing on bones. The roast’s fragrance crisped the air. His saliva pooled on his tongue. Then he saw that they ate pig.

  At home, a pig would never be eaten. Pig meat sickened in the sun, turned the stomach and even killed. It would only be buried far from town. In his family’s worst days they didn’t eat pig. These two scourges bit into the slimy flesh, gorging themselves. They had no honor.

  Sebek smelled their delicious dinner.

  He stood and was about to turn away to find real food. He tripped. Sebek skidded down the embankment. Before he could stop his slide, the men came at him.

  “What’s this, then?” said the burly one, his face greasy, picking up Sebek.

  “It’s a boy,” said the other, nose flattened and crooked.

  “I’m a man.” Sebek shook his shoulders without escaping the man’s grasp.

  The man holding Sebek hauled him into the firelight. “You ever see that face, Paneb?”

  Paneb shook his head.

  “You’re not from here, are you, boy?”

  Sebek didn’t answer. He glanced at the roasting meat. He licked his lips.

  “Are you hungry?”

  “I don’t eat pig.”

  “Then you’re not hungry like a man.” The burly one retrieved a slug of meat on a bone steaming in his hand. He waved it in front of Sebek’s face. “Sure you don’t want some, boy?”

  “Only pigs eat pig.”

  “You’re strong in the mouth, like some noble’s brat.” He jerked his head to his companion. “Here—you hold him. Let’s see how hungry he is.”

  Paneb clasped Sebek’s arms behind his back. Sebek could only wriggle as the first man swatted the pig meat across his face. Sebek thrashed his head back and forth, grease and bits of meat wiping on his chin and eyes and sticking up his nostrils. With the bone, the man pried open Sebek’s mouth. Sebek tasted the silky warm texture on his tongue. Its juices ran down his tongue and throat, coating his emptiness like balm.

  No matter how he gritted his teeth, delicious juices trickled in. Sebek cursed himself for surrendering to hunger. He bit, spit and growled.

  Honking with laughter and dropping to the ground, the men let him go. Sebek staggered away, exhausted.

  Two hours later, the men were snoring when Sebek snuck back into their camp. He seized the remains of their dinner, running with it from their snores. A half-mile away, he plopped down and feasted on the cold pig meat. Until he was stuffed. He fell asleep, without hunger or any other distraction.

  Sebek woke to a kick in the back. He jumped up. Night still black, seven villagers surrounded him, two with lamps. Two others threw him back to the ground next to the pig’s bones.

  “Look there,” said a gaunt man, “that’s what’s left of my property.”

  “Does anyone know him?”

  “He’s on the run already, sure. Take him.” The men thrust Sebek to his feet.

  “I didn’t steal it,” Sebek said. “Two thieves over by those dunes stole it.”

  “Bring him to the mayor.”

  “I didn’t do it.”

  A few minutes later outside his squat home, the squat mayor said, “Son, you came to town at the wrong time. There’s panic in Annu for gold. Royal conscriptors are here recruiting criminals for the gold mines. They’re looking for someone just like you.”

  At the mention of gold mines, Sebek shivered. His captors flinched. Manned by slaves and criminals, gold mining killed its captives before it released them.

  “We will go for a judgment from good God-king Khufu,” said the mayor. “We hope he finds you innocent.”

  Minutes later, outside the town’s Justice House, Sebek tried to kick one of the strangers holding him. Looking around him for some route of escape, he saw past low hills in the distance a stretch of blue water. “What’s that?” He nodded toward the blue color.

  “That, son, is the Travel Sea.”

  So Sebek had made it after all. But he saw it from these strangers’ hands. He twitched with the urge to run to the sea.

  The men tightened their grip. “Settle down, youngster.”

  Sebek was still turned toward the water when the God-king Khufu oracle, carried by four priests, emerged from the Justice House on a palanquin. Two following priests with ostrich feathers fanned burning frankincense smoke. Displaying a golden sash across his otherwise bare chest, a royal conscriptor skulked just behind. The priests stopped before the mayor’s group. One priest, decked in scarlet robes, rested his hand on the sacred stone image and nodded to the mayor.

  The pig’s gaunt owner stepped up. “Khufu, good god, I am an honest man who lives in this village. My valuable property has been stolen from me. Good god, is this the criminal who stole my property?”

  All heads turned to the oracle. After a long moment, the oracle nodded.

  A villager said, “That’s one fewer of our own boys dying in the mines.”

  Sebek screamed. “The priest did that. You know that. I didn’t steal that pig.”

  “Good God-king Khufu pronounces you guilty, young man. His is the final word.”

  Sebek spat. “This isn’t justice, you idiots. You tem, hem-t imbeciles. I’ll kill you. I’ll kill Khufu. All of you idiots.”

  The mayor handed Sebek to the conscriptors. Sebek glanced at the Travel Sea.

  Before the next dawn, Sebek fil
ed onto the Bekhan Trail not in the way he had dreamt. He headed west roped with foreigners. Pink pebble sand, pale brush and jagged hills for sixteen hours of walking under the hot, hotter sun. Sebek’s anger welled tears. He stopped them when he received but one gulp of water that night.

  Red spikes sprouted in Sebek for tem Egyptian law and the ignorant men who wielded it. Nak sesh Khufu. He would rot, rot, rot.

  No one spoke. Talk wasted moisture.

  Sometime during the second night, guards led them off the trail into the bare desert. An hour before they stopped walking to sleep on the sand, a man fell dead. Guards left him where he fell. Sebek couldn’t stop the vain impulse to lick his cracked lips.

  On the fourth day, the sun stopped moving. It braced itself at its peak to whip his back with all its might. Sebek hated the yellow gore of it. Two more fell and were left.

  At sundown, Sebek and the slaves arrived at the gold mine. In the red heat, burnt, dizzy and stripped naked, Sebek erected a scorpion shell over his nakedness. And claws. The stinger curled over his back.

  At several spots, slaves around water troughs picked at ore. None of them paid any notice to the new prisoners. Guards cracked clubs against the spines of Sebek and the others, driving them toward their new home: a shaft in a mountain. On the cave mouth were red ocher drawings of lions and gazelles. They ran free, taunting Sebek.

  The shaft quivered with heat. Quick as flint sparks sweat swabbed him. He licked at sweat on his shoulder but his swollen tongue nudged off the drops before he could taste them.

  Sebek shambled into the darkness and his future turned just as black.

  The cave’s darkness swallowed the chain of prisoners. Torches in the corridor cast irregular shadows on their path. Their foreman’s club on their backs prompted them. Whether the foreman knew it or not, he was no less a prisoner in this hellhole. The difference was the linen girdle he wore to Sebek’s nudity. But the foreman couldn’t see Sebek’s shell.

  The prisoners slogged on for fifty feet to a widened area where pan fires exposed the glimmer of a quartz vein in the wall. Something slammed Sebek’s chest—the side of a flint hammer. He snatched it from the foreman. About to strike back, another guard clubbed Sebek’s forehead. Sebek slumped to a knee. He shook his head. Clubs thudded against the other prisoners. A club pounded his back. He got the message and stood up.

  Guards removed the wall fires. Then they shoved the prisoners at the smoking, red-glowing wall. Sebek smacked against it, singeing his face and burning hairs on his arms, his nostrils stinging with the acrid smell. Each prisoner’s back cracked with a clubbing. The guards meant to convince the prisoners to fulfill their purpose here by striking the wall just as hard.

  The other guards drifted deeper into the cave. The foreman beat first one prisoner, then another in a steady rhythm. “Harder” or “Faster” he said with each clubbing. Sebek knew he’d be struck again if not when. Dizzied with the heat and dirty air that blew around him like a desert wind, he hammered the wall. Heat loaded his face, chest and legs. A wet chalk of dirt, stone and sweat caked on him. Even opening his eyes was a chore. Dirt and rock from the wall flew into his eyes. He coughed black spit. He glanced at the other prisoners to see if they understood this nightmare. Their faces showed only fear.

  How had he been here only minutes. Or had it been days?

  At an evening gathering in the Hall of Pillars, Khufu asked the dozen family and friends on pillows around his pavilion, “Can anyone tell us one of the ancient stories? About a man who travels through time? Or about an eternal romance? Which of you knows the secret words?”

  “I know them, Majesty,” stated Djedi, rising.

  “Magician, yes. Tell us.” With eager smile, Khufu scrunched down in his pavilion’s crimson silken divan, guards waving orange ostrich feathers over him and his guests.

  Djedi laid out his large hands and began the story of a young man who sought a magician to help unburden him of his words of love for a maiden in his village. The story’s magician, embittered by the loss of his own lost many years before, and taking all of the young man’s possessions as payment, provided not a love potion but one that prevented the maiden from hearing the young man’s words of love. For the lovers’ names, Djedi used “Mehi” and “An-khi.” After surviving great obstacles like those of God Ra conquering his night serpents, Mehi came close enough to An-khi to drop the potion into her ear. He whispered his long-suppressed and singular words of love. The story ended when she replied, “I’m sorry, but I could not hear what you said.”

  The God-king had Djedi repeat the ending. Then he asked, “What were Mehi’s words?”

  “Majesty, that would spoil the story,” Djedi said with a bow, re-seating himself.

  Khufu closed his eyes. He beckoned to recall the purest longing he’d ever evoked for Meritates. He recalled a moment six months before Ka’ab’s birth. Beside her in bed, palming her belly, he had luxuriated as glorious as a blood-orange sunrise. Yet, even that sublime sensation did not compare to those of Mehi for his An-khi. Since that moment, Khufu had distanced Meritates beyond the reach his love where it might as well be as silent as sunset. Still, his love with Theormi promised the light of dawn, marrying water with earth, and banishing darkness for elation.

  Khufu’s eyes opened. “In the story, “Two Lovers and the Evil Magician,” the character Mehi touches me as my children touch me. I adopt him, Mehi, a son of my choosing, an heir to the kingdom. Prince Mehi, born of love.”

  The princes applauded. “Credit for every citizen.” “A suitable prize for a hero.” Dedephor quipped, “I’d like one of those myself.”

  Djedi rose again. “Your Majesty, God-king Khufu, this adoption befits you and your legacy. I suggest you render it a legal act worthy of your noble sentiment.”

  Khufu wrote out and signed the proclamation. He called for his chamberlain to collect the document.

  Then, all in the Hall heard a tiny sob. They turned toward the Royal Chamberlain.

  His head bowed and voice only just audible, Ramose said, “Dear God-king, I request your tolerance.”

  Djedi and the princes stiffened. The King nodded.

  “Queen Meritates has been notified ...”

  “Yes?”

  “Queen Mother Hetefares, mother of the great God-king Khufu, has died.”

  The God-king slumped over his lap. Gray sand seemed to spill into his heart. He fought to breathe as he imagined his mother looking onto death from dead eyes. Through them, he witnessed a landscape of leaden, stagnant waste. Ramose hurried to steady him. The others bowed or cried.

  Later that night, Prince Khemtatef, the youngest grandchild and Hetefares’ darling, dragged into Khufu’s chamber. Some hours after, son and father exited pale and red-eyed. They embraced in the corridor.

  A ten-day national festival honored the Queen Mother. One hundred Gods and Goddesses including “The Forty-One” bestowed tribute at Annu’s Ra Temple. Crying citizens mobbed the streets. Khufu interred his mother in a mastaba tomb beside his father’s Daksar pyramid.

  Khufu withdrew to his suite. He paced there with a single thought: imperfection. Worms, shadows, Hituptah priests—all his inadequacy.

  The wake of Theormi’s dash to the palace gardens at midnight guttered torches in the dark Per-O hallway. She’d learned of the Queen Mother’s death and rushed to Khufu’s suite, but he would not admit her. Theormi knew he did not want distraction from his grief. But perhaps he’d visit the garden. As she placed her hand on the garden door, another hand clenched her wrist. It belonged to Prince Merhet.

  He whispered, “I hold something for you.”

  Not able to predict the prince’s reaction, Theormi resisted the impulse to yank back her hand. She simply scanned her eyes down to his fingers and he released her.

  His three curls of hair bouncing damp on his forehead, he said, “I want you to see the world as I do.”

  Theormi drew back in the tight space. “Prince, we are all in mourning.”
r />   “I have the truth. Since Father’s Heb-Sed. That night, I knew Mery’d be asleep, unable to cope with Ka’ab and our father being killed—nearly killed. My phallus swelled. I would display to my sister the body part that told me the truth. Do you see?”

  Theormi didn’t want to see.

  “The tongue. I fingered the very tongue of the assassin.” Merhet waited, seemingly for Theormi to be impressed. Sweat began to bead on his forehead. “The tongue of the assassin who attacked the God-king on his inauguration. That I saved from the interrogation floor. That tongue I held. It swore potent oaths. Rich with incarnadine blood. Then I saw you. I had been a twin, a mere half. We can be whole. When we are one, we can defy the God-king.”

  “Prince, this would seem to be a private matter of grief for the Queen Mother. I believe I should withdraw.”

  Without seeming to hear her, Merhet’s eyes lit up. “Gripping the tongue, I tiptoed into Mery’s room. A single flame illuminated her bed. The lace canopy glowed. Before me, yes, on her back, my lovely sister slept.” Peeking over his shoulder, Merhet jabbered on, his voice increasingly shrill. “I could not sleep, not after what I’d seen. First, that young man with the chisel changed fate and then his oath erupted in blood. Power. Passion. No, Merhet could not sleep.”

  Theormi’s eyes searched the hallway hoping anyone would rescue her.

  “The white linen coverlet on my baby sister was as soft and cool as a cloud. Face to the high window, her long hair swept behind her as if by a lunar wind. A new moon. Or was it? Within this concealed empire, this purdah, I had arrived at its mysteries; I pulled on Merysankh’s coverlet.”

  “Prince, I must take your leave.”

  “The coverlet unveiling down Mery’s neck, down her shoulders, down her silken bedclothes, her back, down her waist. Tender as moonlight, she lay like a plated jewel fish, submitting herself to me. At last, past her hips. Then, there, just there, between Merysankh’s legs, on her bedclothes, a circle of blood.”

  “Oh! Thank you for this story. It is important. Again, please, I must beg your leave—”

  “The circle, thick and fibrous, crawled outward as silently as a shadow, as if with spider legs beneath. This truth was my reward, as the tongue had said. My half-a-person broke through. Revealing the female mystery, I became whole.”

  Theormi rotated toward the door, turning fully from Merhet. He leaned around her, sticking his now sweating face next to hers. “I looked through the window to the supposedly moonless night and, fantastically, fantastically, the moon appeared full and white and round. In a single fell flash, I saw reality. I’d always known it but it had been held from me behind the purdah curtain. The veil of half-sight, of twinship, ripped from my eyes. The decrepit Merhet vacated me.”

  “Prince, please.”

  “I listened to the oracle in my hand. For the first moment in my life, I had direction. Then I saw you.”

  Theormi backed against the garden door and faced the prince, prepared to defend herself.

  Instantly Merhet drooped. “But the Sun-God is your lover.”

  From the outside the door opened, jamming Theormi against Merhet. The Royal Gardener apologized, and then bowed awkwardly in the cramped space and stepped back. Merhet turned and scooted away down the hall.

  Theormi hugged the gardener. “Thank you, Kani. Thank you.” She kissed his cheek and ran into the garden.

  Past midnight, two days after Hetefares’ death, the God-king slumped in his golden throne in the Throne Room. Across from him on the royal officers’ bench, Prince Hordedef hunched over rumpled papyrus sheets on his lap. “Sire, thank you for meeting with me at this hour.”

  Khufu’s face sagged. “Sleep ... is impossible.” Time is short for grief no matter how slowly the heart regains its previous pace. Duty demands me. He cast his eyes up at the repeated figure of the sun with eagles’ wings.

  “It pains me, especially at this juncture, to inform you that I discovered clandestine activity in the Per-O.”

  Khufu hardly heard his son. “Any worm cripples the best fruit.”

  “Sire? Yes, Sire.” Hordedef hesitated. “I’ve developed an accounting of substitution to compare Vizier Shaf’s incomes and expenses. His monthly numbers don’t calculate.”

  “This is evidence of your worm?”

  “Majesty, as you can see, we come to a single conclusion. Month after month, year after year, Shaf has been dispensing secret wages.”

  Khufu considered a minute. “Hasn’t Shaf’s promotion to vizier biased you into this conclusion?”

  Hordedef tightened his overbite on his lower lip.

  “What does the vizier say to this?”

  “At first, Shaf blanched. Then he admitted, ‘It is for assistants who served the vizier.’ When I suggested they were mercenaries, he said, ‘If you will.’ He portrayed my inquiry as only my manipulation to win the debate regarding the Wawat invasion.”

  “You know we resolve that question at our next council. I’ll speak to the vizier.”

  “But, Sire—”

  “I’ll speak to the vizier.” The father discerned his son’s sigh.