Chapter 19
BROKEN MORNINGS
Wrapped around with rags in the freezing dawn, Mehi lay unsleeping in his parents’ front room listening to his mother’s wet, labored breathing from the back room. On each breath, she choked. Between every gasp that followed, a desolate silence ached. Khety’s choking chopped Mehi’s sleep into jagged dreams of falling from pyramids, hanging from oars and the whipping of pigs. While the dawn through the high windows was still too weak to light the talismans on the opposite wall, fresh sweat slickened him where dried sweat didn’t chill him.
Mehi rose with his wrappings and stepped over his father, snoring on the floor, then into his mother’s room. He sat on the floor beside her. Khety’s thin face fought for a softer rest. Cheeks, chin and brow jutted sharp and hard. She darkened as if lights inside her failed, spilling shadows into the room. That she had lost so much weight and still survived showed how much fight she had.
She’ll beat this.
The night before, neighbors spoke with Horemheb about funeral preparation; they hadn’t heard his mother’s promise to Mehi that she’d get well. She will waken any minute with a bright face, smile for Mehi, and call him “Darling.” And he would slide into her hand the wooden carving of the God Bes he had recovered from the prostitute.
Horemheb tiptoed inside the room just enough to lean on its wall. He sighed. Mehi wouldn’t look at him. His father had caused Khety’s illness. Then he danced.
Father, mother and son waited together.
Horemheb said, “It’s almost time.”
Mehi glowered at him with a rage he was proud to have. How could his father be ready for this? Mehi swore he could hear the whir of a simoom inside him. It hallowed him of any substance.
“I wish your brother was here,” Horemheb mumbled. “He should be here.”
“My brother?”
“He’s doing good, though. On the King’s caravans.”
Mehi nearly laughed. He’d forgotten ... Sebek. “Sebek ran away.”
“He must be too important to come home right now.”
Mehi’s need to scream knotted in his gut. Sebek hated his father and he‘d left, but he’s still the hero.
Mehi stood in Djedi’s courtyard. He couldn’t recall his path getting there.
The home was calm. Calm as people walking by a river where below the surface a drowning man called out. The feeling of water filling his mouth, his lungs—
Mehi heard a scream echo against the courtyard’s walls. But no one else was nearby. Was that my scream?
“Mehi,” said Djedi from his doorway, eyes wide. The magician came up to his friend, cuddling him in his arms and chest. He pulled back to inspect Mehi’s eyes. “The shesm-t is better, a little.” He eased Mehi into his home. “How is your mother?”
The question churned in Mehi’s gut. Djedi should know the answer; he said she’d die.
Pese’shet sat down and smoothed the pillow beside her. “Come. Sit with us.”
Mehi stayed on his feet. “What are you doing?”
“What, Mehi?”
“I mean, you were just sleeping.”
Pese’shet reached out and patted his hand. To Mehi, it felt like a slap. “I just want to know ... I can’t sleep ... like I’m cut loose, but you are ... undisturbed.”
“Your mother is special,” said Djedi, eyeing his friend. “We grieve with you.”
It took a few moments for Mehi to hear what Djedi had said. “Are you? Grieving? Do you even know what it is?”
Pese’shet reached out to rub Mehi’s back. His back stung where she touched it. He jerked away from her reach.
“Sit, Mehi, please. We’re hurting for you.”
“What? What?”
“We grieve for the loss of your smile.”
“My smile. That’s always said. ‘There’s that boy Mehi with that boy’s smile.’ I hate it. What good is it?”
“You want to argue, is that it?”
“You’re a magician. The God-king’s magician. What did you do? Nothing. You’re a fake. Who believes in anything?”
Pese’shet said, “Sit with us.”
Mehi shook his head.
Djedi spread his huge hands toward his friend. “Mehi, try to grieve. Don’t let this anger take root in you.”
Mehi sensed something tear in him, like a bone breaking and ripping into his gut. His arms whipped out—to balance himself or to strike something. “You’re not upset. You’re not upset at all.”
“We are.” Djedi touched Mehi on the arm. “Be upset with me. We’ll work that out. But anger at the world will dry you up like the desert.”
Mehi didn’t know what had been just said. It was as if he were listening through mummy wrappings. He ran from the house.
Numb as death, Mehi lumbered back to his mother’s home. In the alley, he halted—neighbors, bowed and silent, walked inside. Mehi rapped his fists on his thighs. He tried to run but stumbled. His heels thudded into the dirt.
Mehi shuffled into the front room, avoiding the neighbors’ faces. Their condolences floated in the air. He disregarded them. He wanted to sit again by the side of his dark mother.
When in her room, he saw that Khety wasn’t in her bed. She’s awake? She’s well?
Horemheb stood in the room, back turned to his son. Mehi peeked around him. His fixed feet prevented him from seeing his mother—certainly smiling for him—as Horemheb covered her on the floor with a blanket.
Horemheb revolved around to Mehi. “Oh, son ...” His father glided the two steps to him and bent down as if to a child. “No sound comes from her.”
Not wanting to understand those words, Mehi moved away so Horemheb wouldn’t repeat them.
More neighbors and relatives crowded into the front room. Someone fetched a donkey. Things would have to proceed quickly even in the cool season.
Mehi moved as if submerged in dark water.
Horemheb said, rubbing his head, “These people here—reminds me of the party when Sebek was born. Your mother loved parties. She loved the bustle and chatter. We should’ve had more.”
“Were there neighbors at my birth?”
Horemheb frowned. “Yes. Yes.”
Mehi was sure his father didn’t remember.
Horemheb held his son’s eyes with his own. “You must be both you and your brother today.”
Yes, Father, I’m here, but you want me to be him. What if I had run off?
“We should greet our guests now.”
Mehi hated facing those people. “I’ll be out.” Alone with his mother, he had little to do except look upon her—but he didn’t. He stared at the wall.
When Mehi went into the front room, all heads turned to him. His father, leaning in a corner with arms folded, kept to himself. Mehi sat in the one open place on the floor. Khety’s cat, a gift from An-khi, sauntered to him. It caused him to realize he was in his dead mother’s place, where she sat making amulets following the evening meal. Guests had probably left it in respect for her. The cat jumped onto his lap. It pricked his thighs, then curled down, satisfied it had recaptured Khety’s lap. His heart strained as if weighted down under rocks.
Guests visited Mehi with well wishes. They even made him smile. One told him that Khety “woke in the morning reaching for a hoe to help in the fields and to be with friends. A good woman.”
As much as each story brought her to life, each reminded Mehi that she was dead.
One older neighbor that Mehi hardly knew waved away someone to take his place next to Mehi. “The body is preserved naturally,” the old man said with a soothing tone and bright eye. “In the hot sand, the fluids drain fast, keeping the body from—well, from what it would do otherwise.”
Mehi barely heard. What mattered?
The neighbors rose and filed through the front door. Men carrying Khety followed. Horemheb carried his wife’s robe. “Are you going to bring something?” Horemheb could remember things like the custom of burying prized possessions with the dead. Mehi returned from Khe
ty’s room with the God Bes carving. He’d return it to his mother after all.
Horemheb paused for his son so they could walk outside together.
Encircling the grave in the bright desert, several neighbors offered praise. Khety “loved her sons, honored her husband, and never diverted a neighbor’s water for her own use.” Mehi listened as if from a distance. His senses fled from him like a sleeper flees the world. Time with its burying of mothers passed like a wind outside of him. He couldn’t feel his feet or hands. Was his heart beating? Did he have language? His love for his vanishing mother wasted with nowhere to go. His mind weighed an image of the Nile turned to stone. He forgot when it and he were alive.
They lowered Khety. A red shadow of the desert crossed her face.
When alone again in his parents’ doorway, Mehi thought he saw Khety’s shadow in the back room. He peered into the shadows.
Can I run away? Escape. Sleep. Some rest.
The simoom seeming to blow at him from three directions, Mehi arrived at his hut in the gloaming. Inside, he scanned the rooms. Wabt was not home. How can she be gone now—the first time I need her?
About to pound his fist against a wall, Mehi found a message from his wife on a piece of pottery near the doorway. He didn’t know she could write. It read: “Mehi, husband. I am not here anymore. Find a woman to please you. Wabt.”
Mehi ran out into the wind yelling for her, his sound dissolving around him. He returned and re-read the message. Someone must’ve written it for her. She’d never say that. Yet she wasn’t home. How long had she been gone? He hadn’t been home for ... a week? Did Wabt even know his mother was dead?
Through gaps in the hut’s thatch roof, the simoom forked into the room. The day darkened. Sick weight like a rotting pig sunk in Mehi. He squatted on the floor. He guessed it was dinnertime.
Mehi waited—for anything.
Khety’s cat darted in from the wind. No one had fed it at Khety’s house since ... Dismissing Mehi with a toss of its head, the cat minced past and looked for his wife. Mehi chuckled knowing the cat would not locate Wabt or food in this dark hut. Its tail in the air, this animal pranced like a noble. Like it was better than anything else. Like it couldn’t feel pain. Untouchable.
The cat sauntered toward Mehi and eyed him with cool contempt. It would tolerate Mehi if he gave it food. Rage fired Mehi’s heart; he aroused himself by it. He hated that cat. An-khi’s cat. She had given it to his mother, like he had given the necklace—that she rejected—to An-khi. The cat should hurt like he hurt.
Quicker than Mehi could react, the cat turned, hitched its tail in the air and aimed its anus at Mehi. He suddenly felt—anguished to feel—longing. Anger and longing. He mustn’t feel this.
Mehi wanted to caress. Needed to stroke his aching fingers along warm skin. Only that would bridge him to himself.
I can do something.
Mehi stood. At the cat, he took dead aim.
Two months after her exile, dawn lighting only the left side of her face, Theormi sat on her donkey bloodied and homeless but free. She overlooked a wadi, a dry riverbed, at Egypt’s southern border. Behind her—beyond the dirt, sand and scrub—was the home she’d always hoped for and had come to love; ahead was the unknown. She blamed Khufu for sending her here. She blamed him for leading her to believe she could become a queen.
Love of you mixes in me
like flour in bread
Yet my heart burns like the South,
Black and deserted
Oh, be like armies charging in battle
To defend your love
She blamed him.
Theormi kicked the donkey west, setting out at a run. She’d straddle the border by following the wadi west to the Nile for its food and water. She guessed it was twenty, thirty miles.
Nomads also might be moving along it.
But throughout the day seeing nothing but light-gray sand, scurrying lizards and an empty sky, Theormi began to long for another human, even a nomad. Lions roared, vultures cawed, the donkey whined. Through her torn tunic, the sun puckered her skin. Her swollen tongue throbbed, but she wouldn’t need a tongue if she never saw a human again.
The next morning, the sun blazed so hot, Theormi felt her hair was shriveling back into her head.
She’d laid in dry weeds, using them to wipe off her sweat and blood. Cheetahs, hyenas and jackals in the surrounding wild might have caught her scent and come for her. Their growls and the cries of desert hares had split the night—life and death sorting out themselves. Throughout, orange eyes flickered. She hadn’t slept.
By high afternoon, the first cataract’s black granite cliffs came into view. Palm trees dotted the intervening hills. The donkey brayed. It must smell the water. To reach it required circling the cliffs to the south and leaving Egypt. Theormi sighed and turned the donkey south.
Three hours later, she and the donkey, which she’d begun to call “Little Queen,” climbed down a rocky hill to a quiet spilling of the river. She grinned for its plashing sounds, careful not to surprise any creature that might be at drink. At the water’s edge, Theormi flopped facedown into the water, gulping as fast as she could, looking up for a crocodile, then gulped again, little Queen alike beside her.
Calmed by the sloshing in her stomach, Theormi waded in and soothed her feet in the Nile mud. She rolled water down her arms and legs.
Once she was clean, hunger twisted in her. Little Queen munched on papyrus sedge while Theormi stepped into deeper water. She spread her legs, waiting for fish to swim between them. She crouched for an hour, two. The first fish, a catfish, wiggled through her stabbing hands. Then another. Her feet numbed, thighs cramped and back creaked. Skin on her shoulders began to bubble red. Twilight was falling when Theormi finally snagged a tiny silversides by the tail and heaved it up onto shore. She shouted and clapped. She would live another day.
Theormi started a fire. Some months before on an excursion miles from Annu, she sat side by side with Khufu in the night, blowing sparks from smoldering sticks onto dry weeds. The two of them alone. Tonight, she felt as lonely as the blackness between stars.
The next day, clomping south along the river, she ventured into Ta Sety where Egypt’s God-kings originated. Mid-morning, she came to a settlement—of the Wawat she learned. Several women beat bloody hides with rocks. Theormi showed her open hand to them. They squinted over her, then squalled something in their language and pointed south. She guessed they meant that something waited for her there or that she wasn’t wanted here.
When she got the same reception at the next settlement, she yelled back. One woman shoved her. Theormi wrestled her into the water.
The next people she came to were the Medja. Their name, similar to Khufu’s sacred one, had appeared in one of her dreams. That had caused her to investigate the Medja by interviewing Egyptian traders who had dealt with the tribe. She’d learned little. Except, when in their province, she concluded she shouldn’t address anyone but quietly join their workings.
In exchange for scraps of food, Theormi caught catfish, cut and threshed barley, scooped up and removed cattle manure into the barley fields. When the Medja removed ticks from their cattle, she noticed that they pinched off just the body. Her studies in Egypt had informed her that infection often resulted when the head remained in the cow. So, as others watched, Theormi struck a heated rock she held with a thick hide at a still-imbedded tick. It jumped out whole. She stomped on it. By late afternoon, two Medja women worked with Theormi, preventing the cattle from seeing her approach.
Nevertheless, she was a “strange woman.” The Medja wouldn’t let her sleep near them. Theormi made a bed of grass outside the village and listened to the nocturnal animals move in the desert. She also heard Khufu’s sacred name—Medjau—repeating in her head. Possibly a blessing of her new home.
As night finally relinquished its grip on the Giza plateau, An-khi welcomed God-king Khufu and his entourage to his pyramid. This was her first ceremonial dut
y as Governor of the First Province. Khufu’s entourage included Prince Hordedef, who had endorsed her petition to succeed her father as governor. Also, Hordedef had invited her here. His papyrus invitation read that God-king Khufu would come to “witness the dawn on his pyramid’s faces that would renew him like the waves of floodtime.”
Indeed, a few days before, Vizier Shaf had visited An-khi in the treasury building and relayed to her the scything effects upon Khufu of his recent tragedies. The number of times, seven, that the vizier cautioned her against repeating his report to anyone suggested to her that he meant for her to do just the opposite. An-khi understood that Shaf was taking the same message to all forty-one governors to, no doubt, promote his fame by spreading suspicion regarding his father. Still, Shaf’s report wasn’t inaccurate. Watching the God-king borne ashore on his palanquin, she thought he was scythed to the bone. Almost gaunt. How much was left for the scythe to reap?
From the quay and toward the pyramid up the granite avenue, Governor An-khi proceeded beside the God-king, Hordedef and Vizier Shaf as well as sixteen spear-carrying bodyguards and sixteen servants holding bowl-shaped lamps. They approached the initial work area where, during the day, year-round crews refined stone blocks. As the lamps rose and fell in the servants’ strides, their light cast the blocks into wavering and watery images. After a few steps more, An-khi noticed an odor souring the air. Then, without order, the God-king’s carriers halted. Khufu huffed for this breach.
Just within the lamplight, twenty feet ahead and ten feet up on an oar stuck in the ground, a dead man hung. Arms roped straight up and mouth fallen open, the corpse appeared to be yelling. The face was stripped of nose, tongue, lips and ears. Only its eyes remained in its mutilation to glower down on the wicked.
The lamp attendants backed away. “It speaks a demon’s oath.” “Hide your face before it sees you.”
“Stay where you are,” Shaf charged them. “You superstitious insects.”
Most continued to draw backward. Others whined, “Evil.”
“Guards.” The guards lowered spears at the faltering attendants who fell to their knees rather than move nearer the hanged man.
Shaf directed two guards forward with him, holding out a lamp toward the corpse. A sign dangled from its neck.
“Report, vizier,” demanded Khufu. “Does the sign say ‘Determined’?”
Sebek paused. “Yes, Sire. How did you—“
“I first met this face at my Heb-Sed.”
Shaf yelled, “The tem Ptah priests.” He stomped about, apparently looking for more signs of the priests.
“Considering our guest’s comfort,” called Hordedef, sweeping his hand in An-khi’s direction, “we might conclude our tour for today.”
An-khi expected that Hordedef meant to limit further public comment about conflict between the Per-O and the Hituptah priests.
Shaf glanced at An-khi. “Very well.”
Khufu returned to his barque without seeing the dawn illuminate his pyramid.
Mid-morning a week later, Khufu sat stiff on his gold throne in the Throne Room while the royal officers awaited him on the facing bench. Vizier Shaf stood idly before his brothers, papyrus report drooping in his hand. Instead of signaling the meeting to begin, Khufu moored on the horrid face of the hanging man. At the Heb-Sed, before the man’s chisel struck down, the God-king had assumed his magical immortality. But, by the hate glinting in its eye and chisel, Khufu had doubted it. Does the warrior yet dwell in me; do I yet possess Egypt’s Netri?
That face, now mutilated, had revived his doubt.
Surely, the Ptah priests had kept the man alive—until they were ready to hang him from that oar. Yet, they did not send the “Determined” packages. Body parts had arrived in a steady stream twice a month. The last contained a thumb, arriving just before Prince Merhet began his exile. At that boundary stone, the packages stopped arriving. Khufu concluded that Merhet had been in league with the Ptah priests and they had allowed him his grotesqueries on the young man’s person.
How much longer would the Gods plague him for his not creating children in perfect love? He measured it by the cataract water’s ever-deepening plunge, like a chisel, into his ear.
Chamberlain Ramose rushed into the suite, pale and trembling. “Dear Majesty, princes, bad reports. Terrible.”
Khufu closed his eyes. He feared the worst—Merhet and Theormi. Drought season.
Hordedef rose up. Shaf said, “Out with it.”
“The caravan that escorted Prince Merhet ... awful. The foreman a few minutes ago returned to the Per-O.”
“Not the dragoman?”
Ramose’s voice choked. “He succumbed in the attack.”
Faces white, the officers gaped at the chamberlain. The God-king dropped his head.
When the royal officers had re-gathered in the Throne Room, Khufu on his gold throne and the princes on the facing bench, Ramose dragged into the chamber. Behind him, the caravan’s foreman strutted onto the whitewashed floor and smiled grandly. Hordedef peered at him.
Khufu squinted at the foreman. “We recognize you, don’t we, foreman?”
“Truly you do, Majesty,” he said. “In the southern desert, I enjoyed the extreme pleasure of helping in a modest way the great and good God-king Khufu.”
“The goldmine. You uncovered Theormi’s goldmine.” The God-king thought he saw the foreman flinch at hearing Theormi’s name before bowing to the floor.
“Sebek, by name, Sire,” Hordedef said.
“So you are a foreman. Good. You bring more gold for your King?”
Sebek pressed back his shoulders. “Great God-king Khufu, I trust I will bring fair tidings to you in the future, but, tragically, not, I fear, in this instance.”
Hordedef stepped forward. “Should you please, Majesty, I’ll speak with the foreman and prepare him, for brevity’s sake. He’s new to the court and—”
“I want his words now. Continue foreman. And speak more loudly for your God-king to hear.”
Sebek began by telling how Prince Merhet had spoken with reverence for his God-king and father. Memorably, the prince said that he “mourned that he didn’t have five lives to redeem his every wrong.” The foreman relayed how the prince had suspected the nomads’ ambush in the pass, created a procedure that saved the riders and, when the dragoman perished, assumed command to become their champion.
Khufu felt himself set adrift in desert waste.
Sebek said, “Though I begged him to flee for the good of Egypt, good Prince Merhet refused. The hero prince valiantly and single-handedly fended off three nomads, then four more. Those nomads roused a tiger when they latched onto this grand prince.”
Upon each detail, Khufu darkened inside like sand was clotting in his veins.
The second prince said, “Speak more rapidly. Omit these dramatic points.”
“As you wish,” Sebek said, “but the end is most grim to recount regardless. I witnessed Prince Merhet’s final stand as tragic finales await every hero. For don’t heroes prove their distinction from mere mortals at that very boundary that divides life from death?”
Khufu nodded.
“For pity’s sake,” said Hordedef to the foreman, glancing at his father.
“The prince vanquished another five of the vile barbarians before he joined them on the wet sand.”
“Wet sand?”
“Wet with his blood, Sire.” Sebek paused. “This marked the end of great, heroic Prince Merhet.”
Khufu no longer felt Merhet’s steps resound in his feet. He heard the desert song. Hordedef’s mouth moved without sound as Shaf buried his face in his hands.
“Once honoring the prince’s body,” Sebek continued, “I made way to rescue the woman Theormi taken from us. When I located her, she was enduring that severest cruelty perpetuated against woman by the hands and bodies of the wicked nomads. God-king, your Majesty, I am by Theormi’s promise bound to relay that her final words regarded the great God-king Khufu.”
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Khufu dismissed Sebek’s small smile and leaned toward him. “What words? What words?”
“At first, I should mention the manner in which the lady came to her last breath.”
“Quick!”
“I caught the eye of this noble, heroic lady. She nodded to me her wish to end her misery. Such was the suffering of this poor woman that I immediately grabbed up my knife and ran like a wind through the camp for her. When I drew up the instrument of her mercy, she steadied her chest, nay, even propelled it, and thrust up her heart, in its final pulses on earth, into the path of the downward arcing blade. The nomads could not even grunt a protest at my incursion before Theormi relayed her loving, last words.”
“The words!”
Sebek drew a longer pause. “Even with breath as thin as air, she expressed her passion so boldly that it all but overpowered her heavenly words, words of the most dazzling sentiment I could ever dream of hearing. She conveyed to my ear upon her lips a supreme sweetness available only to one completely abandoned to love. One who deserved a better fate.”
The bottom of darkness reached for Khufu, red sand packing over his eyes. “What words, tem you.”
Sebek took a long, slow breath. “She said, ‘I was content.’”
Through red strain, Khufu’s eyes stared at the floor without seeing. He’d put his loves at a distance as he always had. In exile. He’d permitted Queen Meritates to triumph. The needs of Khufu the man bowed before the needs of Khufu the God-king. Because of the Gods’ blood.
Would his magic endure the deaths of his lover and a second son?
With a weak wave, Khufu said, “I declare you dragoman. Off to your business.”
Sebek clapped his hands to his cheeks before lunging toward Khufu with arms out as if to embrace him. Guards restrained the new dragoman. “Thank you, vast Sire. Thank you, Khufu, thank you.”
Guards escorted Dragoman Sebek from the chamber.
As the other officers moaned and wiped eyes, Hordedef hissed, “That Sebek should be flogged for his embellishments.”
On his throne, Khufu surveyed his hands, flipping them back to front. “What a merry fiction the foreman has delivered to us.”
Shaf said, “You don’t believe his story?”
Hordedef said, “But, Sire, you granted the man such tribute.”
God-king Khufu’s eyes slung low. “Sons,” he started, glancing up, “I now have the measure of my cruelty. If I had been the father my sons deserve, this story of hero Prince Merhet could have been true.”
The princes stilled.
After a minute, Khufu said, “Send for Heru. I want to tell him the tale of his hero twin.”