Two Horizons

Chapter 22

  NIGHTMARE

  “Water!”

  In his nightmare, Khufu heard his wail for water as a knell. A godless sandstorm surrounded him. Threshing sand chased out the air. It milled Khufu’s skin until he bled from every pore. Ecstatic to produce any liquid for his dry Egypt, the God-king saw instead that he bled red sand. Withered corpses of citizens rolled like tumbleweeds down the dunes. From this mass burial, a male and a female with jagged bones stood up, wiped the sweat from under their arms and offered it to their God-king. The cyclone of sand foiled the effort of a young man trying to walk across the gray horizon. Static as a scarecrow, he grinned like a child. His head, hands and feet grayed, shriveled and stripped off his body like husks. Into the wind. Arms, legs and spine followed. The young man’s grin hung in the air ...

  “Twins,” Khufu howled.

  “He’s hot as a flame. How long can he suffer like this, Djedi?”

  “Prince, he’s fighting the infection.”

  “So many days now.”

  “If he’d reported it sooner ... Please open his mouth.”

  Loving fingers worked Khufu’s lips and jaw. The God-king dreamt of Hordedef performing the Opening of the Mouth ritual that would prime him for the afterworld.

  Then he fell calm.

  An hour before dawn, Khufu woke to the sound of a rushing Nile. For minutes, he dozed content: an oasis of soft breezes and floating lotus flowers. That lapsed when he alerted enough to remember that Egypt’s river was not rushing, but had hushed. Like the Queen’s blood. Like Theormi’s dance. Like Ka’ab’s future and Merhet’s laugh. Khufu’s nation was drought-stricken. In his room, heat weighed on him like a hot boulder. He sucked for breath. Khufu struggled up from bed, head aching, ear stinging. He took up and lit a lamp, illuminating his dark orange body inside the white sleeping gown. He rose and exited through his private door onto the gardens.

  Outside, even the full moon burnt hot. The air clung to him like mud. Khufu wondered whether he carried the heat with him in a fever. Or was the universe on fire? Down the knoll on the outsides of his feet, he tottered toward his waterless lake. If a baby were as parched as this ground, a mother’s kiss would crack its lips.

  Ten Nilometer rods stuck out of the lake’s sludge. Prior to his illness, Khufu had planted them here, reckoning with each one that it would measure new water. The God-king stepped onto the granite quay. In the harsh moonlight, the lake’s brackish slime quivered.

  Gods, send me water. Why send me dust? Prevent me from having lived in vain.

  At his knee, a pair of eyes, orange in the lamplight, wavered up at Khufu. He discerned the reddish-brown hair, pointed ears and short tail of a jackal. “Beast, does your trespass foretell of the deserts worming into my nation?” The jackal blinked, eyeholes gone black. It then leapt onto the lakebed. The God-king listened to its running on the muddy slick, receding from him into stillness.

  Khufu set the lamp on the dirt. He peered across his lake. Why does my magic desert me when I always gave it home? I am the lover with no love.

  Inside him, he sensed only hate and rage. He filled with the festering of many wounds, excreting boils, rotting lesions, frenzy, venom, fire and storm. The monstrous Ptah priests. Savage Meritates. Loss of Ka’ab and Merhet. Loss of youth. Loss of magic. The Gods. The Gods. The Gods.

  Whatever betrayal throughout his life that might justify his vengeance, Egypt instead commanded he be free of hate. Love, once returned to his body like sba nu mu, would deliver his nation from this drought, this lacking, this death. And to attract love, he must drain himself of hate. He invited the trenching away of that venom.

  A god forgives. A god is peace. I forgive the Gods for the low Inundations, the Ptah priests for their self-worship, and myself for my cruelty to Meritates, the children and Theormi.

  As Khufu pictured the horrors throughout his life fading from his mind, he drew down the anguish and inflammations. From his limbs and heart, he let loose of anger. Tension ran down him like a cloudburst down a monolith. Down from his temple. Down from his shoulders. Down his hips, thighs and toes. It drained into the ground. His muscles emptied and emptied.

  In this current’s wake, Khufu’s muscles began to repose like paper in water.

  Legs spread, the God-king stretched back with his chest thrust out. He struck out his arms and beckoned upwards. Again. Again. He struck them out to the Imperishable Stars.

  Let water come.

  Seven hundred miles away, leaves of date palm trees twirled in the updrafts of heat, Theormi intruded upon the hut of Chief Taharqa, who hadn’t emerged that day. He lay still on his bedmat. “Chief, you must get up.”

  “I do not.” Taharqa looked up at her with one opened eye. “There is someone else now.”

  Since their first formal meeting, Theormi had helped Chief Taharqa chart irrigation canals and wells using their local control of access to the Travel Sea, stockpile millet and dried dates as well as construct a greenhouse. With the Irtjet and Setju peoples to the south, she started a trade of the Medja women’s earthenware incised with figures of dancing women, galloping gazelles and sailing ships. The tribe began to funnel ebony, ivory, incense, leopard skins and ostrich feathers, even an occasional elephant or giraffe, to Egypt. As a result, the Medja amassed surpluses of olive oil, cedar and bronze.

  Taharqa rejected only one of Theormi’s suggestions—that, in the interest of peace, the chief might include the Wawat in the Medja’s progress. Much of her enterprise employed the Travel Sea from which the Medja land excluded the Wawat.

  And today he rejected a second suggestion. No matter how imaginatively Theormi argued, he refused to rise.

  Chief Piye gradually collapsed like a deserted wasp nest. He died the next night. Theormi beside him at his last breath, kissed his forehead and closed his eyes.

  For ten days, Theormi led the dirges of hum-chants and hide drums, circle dances on the dirt, and bonfire sacrifices of falcons and foxes. Their spirits carried Taharqa’s spirit wherever it wished to go.

  Taharqa had so long reigned, none among the Medja were prepared to succeed him. Theormi did not believe the tribesmen would accept Taharqa’s wishes to install her as their leader. But with no Medja leadership, would Chief Piye and the Wawat attempt invasion to capture the Medja land and possessions?

  Throughout the next three days, Theormi crept out to the tribe’s western boundary. She scouted what no other but the Medja sentries saw: Wawat moved on the borderline. On the fourth day, Theormi introduced her concern at the public square, newly laid out in striated granite. “Come with me to the borderland. You’ll see.”

  “No, no, no,” said many men, waving her off.

  “Won’t any of you go to the border? Talk to the sentries.”

  “We’ve had peace for sixty years,” said one man.

  “The first thing we should do is expand the grain storage,” said a woman.

  “We’ll have no grain without more canals,” said another man.

  “Choosing a new chief is what we should do first,” said a third. “I was the clear favorite of Chief Taharqa.”

  “Only in the realm of your mind,” said the fourth. “You are not fit to be chief of your rump.”

  “What? What was that?”

  “Is your rump asking that?”

  Three nights the debate wore on. The people’s chirping sounded like children’s songs. They enjoyed it like a game that blocked out Theormi’s attempts to get through. Her irritation led to exasperation that then to her shouting. “Shut your mouths and listen. Open your eyes.” To her words, the villagers might just as well have been deaf. That is, until the next night.

  Three of their children didn’t return home. Two girls, one boy. Now something besides squabbling concerned the tribe.

  On that night without cloud or wind, Theormi and five men vying to succeed Chie Taharqa tracked the children to the northeast. At first, their footprints displayed the disorder of frolicking children. This changed at a
point one hundred yards from the Wawat border. There, the prints had been scuffed over with the larger footprints of men that led from Wawat territory.

  Theormi and the men tracked these new prints, the children’s footprints now in straight, unvarying lines. The six edged as close as they dared to the boulders that marked the border. The bravest called out the children’s names. “Tabiry, Qalata, Kashta?” In return came not a child’s voice but a Wawat man’s drunken giggle. “Yes, hello. We are here waiting for you behind these rocks. Please rescue us.”

  Each of the Medja men and woman dropped his or her head. The children would not be coming home.

  At the square later that hot night, the whole of the five hundred villagers huddled together, linking arms, moaning, crying and singing laments. In turn, they clapped hands to Theormi’s head, face, arms, any part of her they could touch.

  The mother of missing Tabiry said, “You men should have listened to Theormi. You should.”

  “How could we know?” said one.

  “We were fools,” said another.

  “The Wawat will begin to attack us now.” Many nodded, many hung their heads and began to weep again, some screamed Chief Taharqa’s name.

  Theormi stood. She waved her arms as if to wave off their fears like so many flies. “We can defeat the Wawat if each of us remains linked to each other as we are now.”

  She opened debate over what the tribe might do. Eventually, with her encouragement, the villagers began to offer notions, schemes and ploys. Past midnight, discussion completed, they began crafting bows, arrows and bronze spears. They continued at this for days. Sentries, who had watched the borders since the wars, withdrew from their outposts. And each night, the villagers argued at the square. Or, rather, pretended to.

  On the fifth evening, several villagers rose one by one with a glint in each eye. Before the hundreds of assembled Medja, they offered ever more fanciful reasons why another, if not himself, should be the new chief. Cheers or jeers rose until they grated the ear. All the while, under blankets or behind legs, each man and woman concealed a weapon. Theormi had chosen a bow and arrow.

  When nearly midnight, the burning husk of an onion arced high over the meeting place—the sentry signal. As one, the Medja jumped up, shrieked and charged, letting fly arrows, spears and rocks at four hundred Wawat closing on them from the dark that was now lit up by twenty more onion flares. Theormi snapped off arrow after arrow. The tribe’s people scurried out in a widening semi-circle. The Wawat reeled. Concealed in the canals, the Medja sentries and a hundred others from holes dug in the millet fields, rushed at the Wawat from behind. The two Medja forces squashed the enemy between them. Wawat cries pierced their shambles. Some died at once. Some fell to the dirt, tossing away bows and maces, pleading for mercy. The Medja rooted out those hiding in the fields and wells, chasing the remainder out of Medja territory.

  Theormi’s tribe bore few injuries. She thought how proud Chief Taharqa—and Khufu—would have been.

  Within days, humiliated and conceding the Medja’s cleverness, surviving Wawat sacrificed their Chief Piye, the Wild Man. Many offered their allegiance to the Medja leader.

  But the Medja had no chief. Yet.

  Women began to chant, “Theormi, Theormi, Theormi.” Men joined them until the hundreds were chanting, “Kantake, Kantake, Kantake.” Or Warrior Mother.

  Theormi preferred “Queen.”

  Night sank over An-khi and her lamp’s light as she entered Horemheb’s courtyard. Before his doorway, she stopped and was about call out to announce herself when someone rushed out and bumped into her. She regained her balance as Sebek slid a smile across his face. He said, “It’s Mehi’s man-maker.”

  An-khi didn’t immediately hear what he’d said. “Sebek. You’re home. Has Horemheb seen you?”

  “He’s in there.”

  “His heart must be glad. He said you’d come home. This is wonderful.”

  “Wonderful.”

  An-khi might have judged Sebek’s tone was mocking if she hadn’t been distracted by his staring at her like a hawk sizing up a sparrow.

  “I’m off to the market,” he said. “Come with me.”

  An-khi saw Sebek had muscled through the chest and shoulders since she’d last seen him. “Oh—I came to say hello to your father.”

  Sebek frowned. “He wasn’t expecting you, was he?”

  “Not exactly, but ...”

  “Right.” He tugged An-khi by the elbow. She hesitated, glancing behind them at the hut. “He said he was very tired. He’s going to sleep. Besides, someone needs to welcome me to the village.”

  An-khi yielded to Sebek’s tugging.

  He walked fast. Trailing, An-khi viewed his body in the lamp glow. Muscles flared along his thighs and shoulders. To catch up with him, she resorted to a skip. “I thought you wanted me to show you around the village.”

  “We’ll go to the market. Get something to eat.”

  “I’ve just finished dinner.”

  “That’s all right, I’ll get something good.”

  Sebek led her not to the nearby market but to the large bazaar in Hituptah. They arrived two hours into the night. Many vendors had closed. “They’ll open for me,” Sebek told her. He surveyed the booths and sidled back to her. “Most of the food is pretty sorry but I see what I want. We’ll feast.” He reached into his sack and produced a bronze mirror with an ebony handle. The wood was ebony, sinewy and strange. He rotated it in An-khi’s lamplight. Its facets shone.

  She whistled. “That’s beautiful.”

  “I’m glad it impresses you. There’s none like it in this land. It sat for years on the bedroom hearth of the Chief of Wawat until he awarded it to me for meritorious actions.”

  She grinned. “You’re making that up.”

  He winked at her. “You’re not so simple as my brother.” An-khi was about to tell him she didn’t care for his insulting Mehi when Sebek added, “I’ll remember that. The merchants aren’t so smart as you. Watch me.” He strutted to the market’s center. Holding up the mirror for all to see, he shouted, “Who is worthy of this?”

  Many vendors cast scowls. But the several who caught sight of the mirror didn’t move their eyes from it.

  “I am Dragoman Sebek. One of God-king Khufu’s Friends.” After spouting his fiction of the mirror’s origin, he asked, “Who shall be first to speak for it?”

  “Bring it here,” said an aged merchant at one of the larger booths, his face grave as stone.

  He and Sebek eyed each other. Sebek said, “Ah, here is the most intelligent merchant in this market. You shall be rewarded, sir.” Swinging his mirror, the dragoman marched to the merchant, maintaining focus on himself. An-khi shuffled behind.

  His robes soiled and soggy under the arms, the pockmarked merchant regarded Sebek’s approach. He thrust out his palm. Rather than place the mirror on it, Sebek feinted and waved it again for the market to see—the merchant’s hand grasping air—before Sebek slapped it down. The merchant squinted sideways at the dragoman before bringing the mirror to his still asquint right eye, scrutinizing each inch. His helpers crowded around him and squealed for its beauty. The vendor jerked his fist at them. They shut up. He said, “Half a chicken and onions.”

  Without a word, Sebek snatched back the mirror and sauntered to the next booth. He presented it to the vendor there. “Oh my,” the vendor said. “Oh my.”

  The first merchant called out to Sebek, “A whole chicken.”

  “What’s that?” Sebek said, turning back with one hand cupping his ear. “Sir, your initial proposal was a jest, is that what you are now telling me? I thought it a good joke. I laughed. What is your actual proposal?”

  “Well ...”

  “Your fascination with the artifact is so overwhelming you find it difficult to speak. I understand.” Bystanders tittered. An-khi also.

  “A whole chicken, six onions,” the vendor said, sneaking glimpses at the other vendors observing them. “These are bad da
ys.”

  “Not for a man with the Wawat chief’s merchandise.” Sebek banged the mirror on the mudbrick wall behind the merchant who winced. “My friend, here’s the way we’ll do this. I name the exchange, you agree.”

  The merchant’s face twitched.

  Sebek turned his back on the merchant and recited for all the market to hear. “Three chickens, one roasted, two dried. Sack of onions, dates and figs, jar of honey, another of beer, two loaves of bread and,” he added, pointing at the merchant, “one goose, cleaned.”

  The merchant’s jowls shook. “Outrageous. I don’t sell all that. This is drought.”

  “Then, you’ll have to work it out with your good fellows, won’t you?” Sebek winked at An-khi. While the merchants began haggling, one voice rising over the other, he ambled to several booths, claiming his choices and then departed the market with An-khi and his bargain.

  Settled against an embankment along the Nile’s limp length, spoils strewn around them, Sebek chomped a hunk of black bread dripping with honey. The night at last cooled a little.

  “I have never been so full,” An-khi said. “But there’s plenty left for you to celebrate your homecoming with your father.”

  “I knew you’d like it.”

  “You’re rather sure of yourself.”

  “What’s to be sure about? It’s all good food.”

  “What did you think of Horemheb?”

  “What of him?”

  “He’s changed since losing his family. He misses all of you a great deal.”

  “I guess he’s amazed which son came back and which one won’t.”

  “What’s that?” An-khi said, facing Sebek. “You don’t think Mehi is coming back? Your father doesn’t believe that.”

  Sebek pricked up his eyebrows. “What’d you expect?”

  “He talks about how he’ll get his family back together. His two sons. He’s forever saying how lucky he is to have one fine son, and he has two.”

  “That old fish. He asked me to find Mehi, if you can believe that.”

  “Oh,” An-khi said, clenching his arm, “you could.”

  He looked at her hand on his arm and then grinned up at her. She withdrew it. “No. What’s it been, nearly a month? He’s gone. Somebody like him’d never survive on his own.”

  An-khi twisted away from him. Sebek had cast in her the first doubt whether Mehi might be alive. She looked up at the stars, imploring them to watch over her first lover. Minutes passed in silence but for Sebek’s chewing before An-khi said, “I think Mehi is alive.”

  Sebek sniffed. “You’re not an old man.”

  An-khi lowered her eyes. She didn’t know how to argue this with him. “What did you tell your father?”

  Sebek shrugged. “That I’d check. So he’d quiet down.”

  “Does that mean you’re going to stay a while?”

  Sebek locked eyes with her. “Would you like that?”

  An-khi knew she was blushing—and that Sebek saw it.

  Grinning broadly at her, he laid his hands behind his head and stretched out on the embankment.

  Sebek seemed unlike other men. Maybe something like her father. His travels to strange lands might account for it.

  That night An-khi dreamt of mirrors hanging from sycamore trees. She woke thinking she must have drunk Sebek’s plum wine without remembering to have.

  Three nights later, An-khi and Sebek glided along in a fifteen-foot punt. The boatman prodded his long pole into the depleted river. A southerly gust billowed the net canopy above their heads. An-khi mused on the slack river and the years she’d played in it with the boy who loved it with her. “I can’t accept that Mehi is gone.”

  Sebek’s eyes rolled before they shifted toward her. Dank smells of the low river oozed at them.

  Not certain what she was feeling, An-khi continued. “A lot what he says—used to say—come back to me. About cooperation, now that much of it has withered. It’s a marvel these twenty thousand people collect at the pyramid to invent, haul, chisel and polish such art.”

  Sebek grunted. “I heard this story before.”

  “I know, I know,” said An-khi with a smile. “What they construct isn’t the point.”

  “Is there a point?”

  “Their contact is everything.” An-khi’s eyes lost focus. “Mehi told me about a runaway stone at the pyramid that killed one of his friends.”

  “I must’ve gone by then.”

  “When his friend died, Mehi said he felt more isolated than afraid. Risking his life, two hundred feet up the pyramid, he straddled down its side to another friend and pulled him up. Mehi saved his life. He was a hero.”

  Sebek fidgeted.

  “Your brother said he was so focused on his friend that he didn’t fear any danger to himself. He’d fall to his death before he’d ever release his grip.” An-khi rubbed her cheek. “It terrified me that he’d risk himself without thinking. I realize now that it shouldn’t have.”

  “Mehi was too timid to know better.”

  An-khi considered that. “Sometimes, maybe, but not then. At that moment, he and his friend were not separate from each other. Mehi cooperated at a depth he—and I—misunderstood.”

  “The pyramid masters get cooperation with a whip.”

  “Well, the workers’ conditions can be horribly dangerous.”

  Sebek kicked a heel at the deck. “Nah, it’s best doing things on your own.”

  That was something her father would have said. The independence her father and Sebek possessed was vital for success. She agreed that Mehi had lacked it. And if his disappearance had proved that ... she didn’t want to think of that. “I visited your father yesterday. He didn’t mention the food you brought home.”

  “Brought home?”

  “Did he like the food from the market?”

  Sebek didn’t react for a moment, then puffed out his chest. “Oh, his eyes bulged out. He ate like a pig.” Sebek slouched again. “What would’ve happened to him if I hadn’t returned when I did?”

  “Timing is important.”

  “Definitely,” Sebek said, eyeing her.

  Certain she was blushing again and showing her dimple, An-khi lowered her head. When she turned to Dragoman Sebek again, he was still staring at her. She forgot what she been about to say.

  Sebek’s smile spread.

  In their next outings, Sebek told her the stories of the lion he slew with a stone, the mountain of gold he divined for Khufu, as well as his righteous killing of raping nomads. He also escorted An-khi to a secret ceremony of incense and chants at the Ptah Temple where she would have been otherwise barred. Sebek concealed her in priest’s robes. Even her father had not witnessed such a sight.

  Throughout their times together, An-khi was consistently aware that whenever Sebek squared himself to her, heat came over her as if she stood in a humid breeze.

  One evening, after an elegant dinner as well as entertainment of dancers and acrobats at a treasury official’s estate, Sebek and An-khi strolled onto the garden. Beneath a pergola, vine garlands above them, he seized her arm and turned her to him, inserting his feet inside hers. He snaked his arm around her waist and his dark hand crawled up her back. His palm posed on the roundness of her shoulder. Slowly, surely, he pressed his lips to hers. She didn’t help and she didn’t resist.

  Beginning that black midnight when the desert woman brought the blank young man with the childish grin to the Hituptah Temple, the Ptah priests fed him bread, water and purpose. Bare of past and future, he didn’t speak unless spoken to, and then only in a mumble. He usually kept his eyes shut. The young man heeded the drone in his mind.

  Because he gave no name, High-priest Siptah named him Anhur after the warrior god, the slayer of enemies.