Chapter 3
ASSASSINATIONS IN SUNSHINE
Twenty-five days after Mehi determined to stop his father, dawn scalded his will. Hot ache had chased him from his original post at the head of the alley to just outside his home since he began his vigil at first light an hour ago. Because his father and the others would, according to Sebek, break into the tomb any day, Mehi couldn’t back up any farther.
Steadying his back on his home’s courtyard wall, Mehi felt two of his mother’s lessons from the “Instructions of Wisdom” clash in his heart like warring insects. “Do not quarrel with the hot-headed man because a fire starts there as in straw” and “Truth and justice are inherited from one’s father” had not clashed when he’d first learned them, repeating the lessons with which his mother had prompted him so that he’d “gain success and esteem in Egyptian society.” But if Mehi didn’t owe to his God-king the stopping of his father, he would have exited the battlefield.
Sunlight skewered Mehi when he saw his father tramping through the alley shadows. He was caked in black mud as if the night itself had spit him out. When but a body length away, Horemheb finally slapped eyes on his son. Mehi reminded himself to breathe. He coughed up the sentence he’d rehearsed for hours, “You and I … must talk.”
“I’m for bed.”
Mehi thought of his mother’s loneliness. “The marriage bed.”
“What? I don’t want to talk.”
You never want to talk. “I know why you’re tired. It’s not from gambling.”
“Get out of my way.”
Mehi knew that tone. He feared his father’s hand in the next second cracking against his jaw. But he spurred himself to keep talking; he had his duty to a larger father. “I was there, Father. In the hole—the tunnel. You have to stop.”
Horemheb stiffened for a second. Then his hand flashed out and snatched his son by the throat. He slammed back Mehi’s head against the courtyard wall. Mehi saw light sparks as numerous as stars, just like his God-king had ten evenings before. When he opened his eyes, his father’s face loomed up close but out of focus. Horemheb was finishing a sentence Mehi hadn’t heard begin.
“—you’re man enough?”
Mehi smelled rotting clay and old sweat on his father. “If you stopped the others from actually breaking into the tomb, the Per-O officials will take pity on you.”
“Pity?” His father pushed his nose to Mehi’s. “You think I need their pity?”
“I mean, they’ll be lenient. They won’t cut off your nose or ears.”
“I reared a fool.”
“If you’re caught, what will happen to Mother?”
“Horemheb!” Mehi’s mother stood outside their gate, clutching her shawl around her.
His father dropped his clamp on Mehi’s throat. The fingers’ impressions remained. Horemheb grunted and turned heel.
From atop the roof, Sebek yelled, loud enough for neighbors up and down the alley to hear, “Father, there will be a reward for you. You don’t know who will turn you in.”
Horemheb glared and struck out his finger at his eldest son. “You’ll pay for that, boy. You know it.” He then tramped away.
Khety questioned Mehi with her large black eyes. He couldn’t tell her that her husband was a tomb-robber.
“Mehi.” When he looked up, his brother hissed, “He’s after you now too. How’s it feel?”
Mehi’s knees wobbled. Would he be his father’s target? Would he harden and darken like his brother? Mehi’s meager attempt to stop his father had resulted in nothing. He braced his knees and straightened his back. He needed to clear his mind and regain his strength before he returned to the pyramid to work.
Mehi knew of one place to do that.
Foot on the lead punt’s bow, God-king Khufu inhaled the marsh-at-dawn perfume of wild lotus and wet roots in the Nile delta. He hunted with select nobles, harem women and seven of his eight children. Only Princess Hentusen had refused his invitation—she favored the Queen’s company. Her refusal was merely the most recent occasion that his heart had shuddered at the gulf between himself and his eldest daughter.
The group’s punts rustled through fifteen-foot high papyrus. Blue lotus mantled the water surface. Sure in his magic—despite last season’s low Inundation and this year’s slow beginning—Khufu sensed what the infant God Ra might have felt when He created himself inside the first blue lotus. For the eighteenth year, Khufu’s magic had certainly raised the Nile like the moon raises a lively woman’s menses.
“My children,” he called behind him to the others, “this, our first gathering since the decree announcing the new vizier, join together and congratulate your brother.” He flourished a hand toward Shaf.
“Shaf,” Hordedef addressed his younger brother from a separate punt, “your elder brother accords you his love, and he anticipates working arm in arm with his beloved younger brother in the nation’s governing. You may expect from him his complete cooperation especially through what might prove discordant for brothers of lesser affection.”
Khufu said, “Be plain, prince.”
“I refer to the selection of vizier,” Hordedef said.
“Brother,” Shaf said with a smirk, “you’re not saying much to me.” One or two of the brothers skittered laughter.
“Indeed, Shaf ... Vizier Shaf. I merely want you to know that your duties will not be discomfited should it be in my power to prevent it.”
“Hordedef, I thank you, yet I doubt I shall require your aid. Nor is your blessing well considered. I planned for our father to select me—the proper prince.” Shaf smiled to his younger brothers. But while they fell silent, Khufu snorted a laugh. He cut it short when he saw the pain in Hordedef’s eyes. The prince’s mouth opened but words only gurgled in his throat.
The God-king remembered a second tribute. “Tu, and give congratulations to your brother Merhet as well. He has claimed a wife. He is the last prince to give his God-king grandchildren.”
The other princes, eyes wide, turned to their brother. The two on Merhet’s punt hooted and clapped his back, rocking the shallow boat. “Who is the unlucky woman?”
Merhet’s little smile curled his little mouth. “Pebatma is from Hituptah.”
Khufu saw Merhet’s twin Heru scarcely managing to speak his congratulations. When Heru married, he had settled his wife into the palace’s family wing but maintained his suite adjacent to Merhet’s. His twin brother’s secret engagement must seem to him like a betrayal.
“About Hituptah,” Shaf said, “has anyone else heard that High-priest Ptah-Du-Au is dying?”
Hordedef waved a hand. “Rumors about the High-priest are forever in the air.”
“It’s no rumor. He’s ready for the embalmer.”
“You seem certain, Shaf. We’ve received no word from the Ptah Temple.”
Shaf’s eyes shifted. Then a smug smile creased his face. “A vizier naturally comprehends such matters. You, Hordedef, no vizier yourself, would not.”
Hordedef scowled.
“Ptah-Du-Au has been a thorn in our side,” said Prince Khemtatef.
Prince Dedephor said, “Or to be more precise, he’s been a goose with fangs.”
Jaw gritted, Hordedef predicted, “He’ll bestow his hate on the next High-priest. Doubtless Siptah.”
Vizier Shaf’s face sparked. “Hordedef, so pessimistic. Your inability to prove that the regicide attempt and killing of Ka’ab—not to mention the assassin’s later escape—was the doing of Ptah-Du-Au’s sticks in your throat, doesn’t it?” Shaf grinned.
Hordedef squared his shoulders toward his brother.
“Enough, sons,” said Khufu.
The men returned to spearing the water for mullet and barbel while the women plucked lotus flowers or speared for whiskered catfish. Khufu’s hawk-like eyes darted to his right where orange butterflies around the papyrus dodged purple swamp hens. Before him, an eagle sliced like a spear into the water, sprang out of the splash, catfish wriggling in its beak, and soared int
o clouds that resembled white elephants diving across the sky. Seeing an approaching flock of ducks, Khufu cocked his right arm and hurled his throw-stick. It whirred in the air and caught a duck at its neck. After downing another, he aimed not to strike but to watch his throw-sticks arcing as another flyer in the flock.
“Delicious,” Khufu said, slapping his belly. “Princes, let’s hunt.”
The royal men fetched bows and arrows, and then dropped like seeds into the warm water. Hordedef’s bodyguard and friend Hartese paused in his whistling to assist the prince.
In water up to their thighs, the men ducked beneath the starburst tops of papyrus. They lost sight of one another and fell quiet.
“Hippo!” Merhet cried out.
The others cheered as they splashed through the water toward the lumbering beast. Khufu remained apart, listening to his sons’ howls, each eager to bring down the animal.
Their bellows dwindled across the glade, abandoning Khufu to calm.
Upon Khufu’s legs, water stilled. Doves and pigeons nestled again in the thicket, murmuring with smaller life. He listened to his lungs’ easy undulation and settled his legs and feet into the bog. His toes kneaded the velvety moss. Solitary in the wild, Khufu welcomed the muted world around him as he occupied his portion of it. No longer God-king but a human animal, wet and vital, robust and silent, he reposed in a moment that lengthened like the stride of an antelope loping across a plain. The sun arched on without him. Past and future drifted away like clouds freed by a breeze. He sensed no difference in the temperature of his thighs and the water slipping upon them. He felt that his body had dispersed into the Inundation itself. He connected to his Egypt.
Behind God-king Khufu, a shadowed figure eased between papyrus clumps. First left, then right, it glided. Water barely purled. The figure crouched and halted ten feet from the God-king. Inside a ring of papyrus tufts, Khufu stood, silent, alone. The figure brought up a bow and set an arrow. Between the green flowers on the papyrus stems, the arrow pointed. It pointed at God-king Khufu. The bow drew back.
The reeds surrounding the God-king began to hiss, chilly and hollow—a crocodile’s hiss? A warrior’s delight rose in Khufu’s muscles; he was eager to battle beast against beast.
He re-scanned his senses. No ... No animal could stalk here without more sound. Something lurks here. Someone.
The water now lapped cold along Khufu’s thighs. The air idled. Silence enclosed him like a net. Too quiet.
What is this stealing my reverie? Come at me.
Khufu’s face inflamed. He glowered at the rushes imposing themselves, billowing at him.
The twang of a bowstring cracked the silence.
An arrow zipped past Khufu’s ear. He bolted backward, twisting, almost falling. In that instant, he saw in the water an image of a gray face plastered on a gray skull. His image. Staring empty-eyed back at him. He wrenched away from his death mask.
The God-king crouched, awaiting a second arrow. None came.
“Enemy.” Khufu charged the reeds and ripped at them with his hands. He puffed and kicked up water like a wounded bull. “Where is my peace? Where?”
In the distance, the hunting party shouted alarm. They signaled their return to Khufu.
“Who are you, Enemy?” How do I save ma’at when you wreak chaos? “Show yourself.” Khufu’s voice broke in its violence. “Fight me body to body.” Are you immortal too?
Hordedef located Khufu. “Father? Your face. Are you hurt?
“An arrow. Find it.”
As the other princes arrived, the story of the incident repeated in increasing detail.
“After the pass at the animal,” Vizier Shaf said, “I realized that Khufu was not with us.”
Added Prince Merhet, “Your voice brought us here.”
When Hordedef found the arrow—ebony with cemented agate—it proved to belong to the royal party. Hordedef questioned everyone. Accusations about who had left the God-king unguarded flew back and forth.
Khufu didn’t expect that his sons would expose the enemy. No matter who pulled the bow, Gods had cast that arrow. They cast it to warn me: Peace is not for the God-king. Not even in this green heaven. I exist only for my nation. I must not separate myself.
Like setting pyramid stones in place, Khufu adjusted his muscles and mind to re-erect his guise of God-king.
Whenever in doubt, Mehi sought the Nile. Two days after confronting his father, he required a particular spot along the river, a cove he’d deemed his secret sanctuary since he played here as a child, especially with Mu. Named for the purr of a cat, Mu left Mer with her family when he and Mehi were nine. But the cove continued for him as his haven, his temple. The line of acacias along the bank were the obelisks, the two palms that crossed trunks served as the pylon and the river itself figured as his courtyard, shrine and sacred lake.
Before dawn, he saw at the top of the riverbank beneath the crossing palms a monitor lizard, probably hunting for crocodile eggs, on its hind legs looking out to the Nile. As Mehi walked up the six feet, it scurried away under papyrus sedge.
Beneath the pylon palms, Mehi looked out to the Nile. In the spot he had come to enjoy beyond the sedge and low-slung shore, a young woman gazed back at him. Muddy water slipped her tunic up and down her thighs. Sunlight sparkled on the mist lifting about her, blurring her body and chin-length hair. He recognized the woman by her eyes, recessed and dark—his childhood friend Mu. After nine years was her appearance a trick of dawnlight, a devil, or God Set Himself, god of chaos and desert. Maybe Mehi had created her with his need for a memory free of doubt.
Mu motioned for Mehi to join her.
The depth in Mu’s eyes drew him in as if he might find shelter there. As children, they had spent whole days tumbling in the Inundation’s waves. How easy to submit to the Nile’s motions and to Mu. Mehi’s name meant “drowned man,”as his father liked to remind him.
He jumped into the water.
Mud squeezed between his toes as he waded toward Mu. In her deep-set eyes, Mehi caught a glimmer. Of recognition, mischief, more? And then he was beside her. The river flowed around and between their knees. Her delicate perfume of myrrh mixed with the river’s fragrance of blue lotus and sandstone. Amethyst bracelets clacked on her wrists; she was still a wealthy man’s daughter. This drew Mehi’s alarm. Rich families knew the names of local criminals.
With more words than breath, Mu said, “Do you believe the new year promises blossoms? The waters are mighty at floodtime.”
Mehi had forgotten her raspy voice. Its volume dropped at the ends of her sentences like stones skimming then sinking below the river’s surface. His mother often recited to him the poem Mu quoted.
The waters are mighty at floodtime
My lover is on yonder side
Though a crocodile waits in the shadows,
I enter the water and brave the waves
The crocodile seems like a mouse to me
“We don’t fear the crocodile,” Mehi agreed.
Their eyes aligned. Her smile shaped a dimple in one cheek. She angled the dimple from Mehi. He resisted the urge to trace his fingers there. “If you’re trying to hide your dimple from me, don’t bother. I know you’re Mu.”
She turned to him and laughed.
Mehi shivered. Did she already know his family’s crime? No, of course not.
“Oh, if you hadn’t remembered me, the fun I would have had. But I expect I’ll get some. My formal name is An-khi by the way. An, for—”
“—for the antelope God who beautifies the dead, and khi, to rise like the Nile.”
“You know all about Egypt’s stories, I suppose. I chose the name myself.”
“It fits you.” Embarrassed that his parents hadn’t given him a formal name—his mother liked “Mehi” as a title for God Osiris and his father didn’t care—he almost didn’t say, “My name is still Mehi.”
“Didn’t you just have a birthday? New Year’s Day? The God-king’s anniversary too.”
Mehi grinned. She remembered. She remembered him.
She—An-khi—turned to look south up the river. “It’s good to be home again.”
“You’re living here again?” She wasn’t just visiting. Mehi could barely keep himself still.
“The Per-O instructed my father to return as province governor.”
Governor? A governor would report a tomb-robber to the Per-O. And he’d forbid his daughter from befriending a tomb-robber’s son. But Mehi wouldn’t, couldn’t stay away from An-khi knowing she’s living here. How could he prevent her from learning the truth? This world was as often cold as it was warm. “Welcome home.”
“Mer is so perfect. The fragrance of its bay laurel, the honeycomb hives—“
“Yellow mums among the jacaranda.”
“Exactly. The Nile is never so enthralling as it is here, in Mer, especially in this cove. Don’t you think so? I love the feeling of flowing between my legs.”
Eyes cast down, he pointed at her muddy legs. “I love the mud too.”
This time, her laugh caused Mehi’s legs to settle into the riverbed mud. “I came to wade in before heading to the pyramid.”
“Oh, tell me you work there. You’re privileged. What’s it like? Please.”
Mehi’s chest puffed up. “It’s art, with thousands of artists. The pyramid is art and the creation of it is art. We workers draw strength from each other.”
“I understand that,” An-khi said. “I adore that power. All that force.”
His eagerness to speak—especially to a rich woman—shocked Mehi. He released the flood of a nine-year dam. “To me, it’s cooperation. It’s a beacon of Egypt’s perfection. The way a family should be.”
“You used to say that God-king Khufu was your real father.”
“Tu. That was ... well.” He swiped at a mosquito. “Mostly, I was wanting to work on his pyramid.” Mehi was about to boast that he’d witnessed Khufu’s Heb-Sed, but stopped himself, considering the way it ended?
“Oh, remember when we went to the Per-O together?”
“We met Djedi there.”
“Yes.” An-khi clapped, knees bending like she was about to spring up, smile showing every tooth and eyes glinting through their recess.
“He’s the royal magician now and Pese’shet is a doctor too.”
“Oh my. I’ll visit them as soon as I can. I must. Are they still in the home outside Annu?”
Mehi nodded.
Orange hues slipped into the sky, violet skirting the wisps of clouds. Hoopoes in the acacias sang out their “oop oop oop.”
An-khi said, “When I came here this morning, I had a feeling you’d be coming over the bank as you did when we met here as children. And just as I turned, there you were.”
Her words doused Mehi like warm water.
An-khi picked up her feet from the mud, a task after this length of time. Slipping past Mehi, she brushed him with her thigh and stomach. Mehi felt not only her caress but was also aware of the riverbed’s loam, the breeze through his hair and the sunlight on his face.
She told him, “I’ll be out here every day during the Inundation.”
“Yes, well, maybe we’ll see each other.”
“Maybe.”
Two days after the delta attack, Khufu willed the dawn to strike. Beside his lake, its surface darkly mirroring clouds spun from the night, he cocked his body and fixed his black eyes on the eastern horizon. Above the hills, slowly, softly, a blush rose like scarlet wheat. The horizon ignited. His breath caught. As if from a womb, Khufu emerged in sunlight. He soaked up the gold light, his breaths pumping his chest. “Awake!”
At the God-king’s shout, black-and-white striped hoopoes hooted in sycamores to his right. Shimmering mist ascended from the lake. Ra blazed His flawless line up the sky. Khufu, the god on earth, spread his legs to take the heat on his genitals. He then stooped and grabbed fistfuls of the low lake’s sludge, slapped it on his heated torso and rolled it along his hips. His flesh shivered like that of a newborn touching air for the first time.
Egypt is all around me yet too distant to touch. She’s in everything yet reveals herself to me only with words too quiet to hear. Khufu reached out and swirled his middle finger in the lake’s warm water. If I teased her oval ’round and ’round, would she scream her name to me?
Khufu dabbed wet fingers to his nostrils, inhaling the aroma of Egypt’s barley, limestone and blue lotus.
In a sycamore grove to his right, he saw a woman too intent upon the sunrise’s gold to notice her God-king squatting at the water’s edge. While her left side shone with dawnlight, a sycamore’s trunk shadowed her right half. Light and shadow upon her abutted so precisely that, to Khufu, she belonged in both day and night. He took in her one sunny ear, one fiery eye and her lips in half-moon crescent. Her eclipsed half offered mystery.
Her eyes still on the horizon, the woman began to run from the sycamores toward the lake. She smiled as if unable to run without smiling, sparkling her face like sba nu mu, stars on water. Watching her, Khufu thought of the time years before when his father Seneferu showed him an opened beehive. There, a scout bee signaled in a dance the direction to nectar that his brethren bees learned by brushing against him.
Khufu’s blood quickened. He rose. His heels tipped from the ground, inclining him toward her. He wanted this woman close enough to dance with her.
Just then, the woman realized the God-king’s presence and stopped running. In the way of a lotus flower closing at dusk, she tucked her hands to her breast and bowed. “Make glad the heart, Majesty.”
He waved for her to approach.
Theormi’s stomach slithered.
Since arriving at the Per-O two weeks before, Theormi had worried over how to greet the God-king should she encounter him. Other harem women said they’d come to tears when first meeting his divinity. An-khi thought this a curious reaction and not one she’d undergo. But now, here he stood; the god on earth eyed her. His fists jammed into his hips and his eyes glared from a massive head. Theormi’s heartbeat thudded in her everywhere at once. Her legs and hips seemed to lock up as she neared him.
She swallowed her heart back into place.
As the others had primed her, Theormi expected to see a divine being. Instead, she saw a man. Majestic, but a man. In fact, she saw that mud splotched Khufu’s chest and arms. His muddy loincloth sucked back onto his genitals. Was he about to take a private bath? Should she withdraw?
As a servant, Theormi had learned to avoid whippings by analyzing her masters to anticipate their needs. Studying Khufu, he seemed to study her in return. None of her previous masters would have bothered.
Khufu’s rough-hewn nose and cheeks presented him as an unfinished sculpture. He stood upon the ground more heavily than other men as if his ankles bore a more concentrated weight. Was this the grief of losing a son? Or was this the stance required of a God-king? From her recent reading, Theormi compared the word shetshet, tear and rend, to sheshti, king. Perhaps the opposing forces of mortality and divinity required such an anchoring stance. Theormi had to resist her instincts to reach for and massage his surely aching legs.
When Theormi was five feet from the God-king, she bent down and kissed the earth. Even from that distance, his body heat wafted over her.
“Do you fear me, maiden?”
“No, Khufu.” Theormi clutched inside. “Aak, I was told not to say your name.”
Khufu yawped a laugh, slapping his belly. “Maiden, finding you here performs Hathor’s surprise.”
“Oh, you mean when Goddess Hathor cheered God Ra out of an eclipse by, uh—
“—uncovering her pudendum before him.” He continued his laugh.
Theormi’s nervousness released from her. She let loose her own laughter, but quickly tamped it down into a more proper “Your Majesty.”
“You know the story. Very well. Before you try not to say my name again, I grant you permission. Your name, maiden?”
“
Theormi, your Majesty, new to the palace.”
It sounds like “She or me.” Well, Theormi, new to the palace, do you know the tale of the waterbuck, the sitatunga that can die of sheer fright? Be at ease with me.” He swung out an arm. “Enthrall Khufu again. Move.”
“Move? How, Sire?”
“As you lilted toward me just before.”
Theormi told her feet to move. She began walking. As Khufu’s smile widened her stride smoothed. The sky’s gold and silver deepened into lapis lazuli.
“Maiden, you embody a woman’s liveliness. I needed that just now. I conjure such liveliness into the Nile each year. That is my purpose, to restore all things to the first moment of Creation. Pristine, perfect. Ma’at.”
Theormi couldn’t massage his feet, kiss his heavy brow or discuss with him the stars in heaven. “Yes, Majesty.”
“When Goddess Isis wept over her husband, dismembered by his brother God Set, her tears created the Nile’s first yearly flood—the Inundation.” Khufu swept his view up to the lake’s inlet that led to the Nile. His hand rose up.
As if she were dancing with the God-king, Theormi felt her limbs match movements with his.
“Maiden, I know the perfect moment: quivering atop the river’s banks, floodwater breaks like a pregnancy sack, depositing silt as black as God Osiris. Only the God-king’s magic raises the Inundation. If it doesn’t rise, all will die.”
Dear majesty, your son ... the world will brighten again one day.
“Lady, your appearance tells me the Inundation this year will flow as gloriously as your blood flows this lunar cycle.”
How did he know she was in her monthly time? She searched his face again and he stared back at her through thick lashes. Then, behind them, Khufu’s hawk-like eyes lost focus.
Quietly, he said, “The monthly river in a woman centers her in the way the Nile centers Egypt. We hug ourselves to her in terror of desert and death, even though her every flank is naked against easy takeover. She is who I care for—day and night.”
Khufu’s eyes re-focused as he returned their view onto Theormi. “Excuse the reverie, maiden. Accept a God-king’s gratitude for your elegance and foretelling.” He nodded or, Theormi wondered, had it been a bow? “My Theormi, enjoy the morning.”
As the God-king turned and headed toward the horizon, Theormi tingled head to toe. Running back under the sycamores, Theormi wondered what she’d do the next time she encountered the God-king.
After meeting Mehi the day before, An-khi entered the courtyard of the Royal Magician Djedi and wife Pesh’shet at noon. The couple reclined on a bench in front of their two-story townhouse. Before An-khi’s family moved away to satisfy her father’s ambitions, this scene was exactly how she remembered the couple, clothed in fine white linen and as fresh as the violets, coriander and catnip they gathered daily. One by one, An-khi was restoring the elements of her life to perfection of her childhood. “Djedi. Pese’shet.”
Only seconds passed before Djedi recognized her. “Wife, it’s little Mu.”
She rushed into the magician’s arms and nuzzled his dense white beard. An-khi had forgotten his fragrance of wild onion and honey. They drew back. But she remembered his eyes—right socket set a half-eye lower than the left. From their two levels, his eyes searched her face and misted as if with remembrance.
An-khi and Pese’shet embraced. “Child, we heard through our Per-O friends that you and your family had returned.”
Djedi said, “Now here you are grown up with a grown up name. An-khi, isn’t it?”
She nodded. “I met Mehi yesterday and I had to visit you before another day passed. I understand you’re a doctor too Pese’shet.”
Pese’shet smiled and nodded.
“My wife: The first female doctor in Egypt.”
Pese’shet poured water from a pitcher into a goblet and then handed it to An-khi. “You saw Mehi? How did he seem?”
“Fine.” Catching Pese’shet’s tone, An-khi thought there might be more in her question. “What do you mean?”
Djedi and Pese’shet exchanged glances. He reached for An-khi’s wrist. “Come inside with us.”
An-khi wondered at the couple’s sudden tension. She stepped into their front room onto a smooth floor. An amethyst vase, silken rug, Eye of Horus and ankh talismans on the walls, books, and about one hundred identical ceramic vases filled with herbs and plants in a corner niche decorated the room. The trio sat on pillows.
Djedi said, “I was at the Per-O the last night.”
“Oh yes, Mehi said you were the Royal Magician. Congratulations.”
“Mehi’s father was there—under interrogation. For a significant crime.”
“Oh my.”
“We haven’t seen Mehi since. As you may recall, he closes down when hurting.”
Pese’shet said, “When you and your family left, he didn’t visit us for three months when he had visited us every before.”
“You see,” Djedi said, “shame weighs heavily on someone like Mehi. He does not need neighbors to tell him wrong from right.” The magician’s hands flashed in the air with his words, each thick finger waving. “I hadn’t thought of this before, but Khufu and Mehi share this quality. They take the universe on their shoulders.”
An-khi knew Djedi was correct about Mehi and shame. “I’ll get him to visit you.” That would help at least with the first problem. The bigger problem was that her governor father must not learn that Mehi’s father was a tomb-robber. How long could she keep that secret from him? To put her life back together like it was before her family moved away, she’d have to fix these problems.
Two hours into the afternoon, sweat rolled like hot oil down Mehi’s ribs. The sun stung his back like a burning whip.
“Pull,” yelled the foremen.
Mehi smacked his right foot down and his leg wavered as if becoming water.
“You pull.”
Left foot.
Across the pyramid’s thirteen acres, eight hundred foremen urged workers in eight hundred teams. The twenty thousand workers groaned in chorus like cattle in a God’s herd. Up the center ramp, Mehi’s Virile Team of two dozen men including friends Kenna and Pabes dragged its four-ton stone.
“Pull, you pull.”
Behind and below them on the work site, sounds of wooden mallets knocking copper chisels against granite fell behind into the distance. In his mind, each step elevated him farther from his father’s grip. He breathed fully and freely. Eyes on the pyramid’s crown, he also thought of An-khi and the future. Meeting her again had in one moment restored to him his perfect childhood. It had the same effect for him personally as for Egypt collectively when God-king Khufu raised the annual Inundation and restored the country’s future to ma’at’s perfection in the First Moment of Creation.
“Pull, you pull.”
The Virile Team’s dark amber skin set off their white loincloths and the sun’s white glare on their backs. Forty-eight callused palms wrung sweat into their ropes sawing across their shoulders. The stone’s sled creaked and shuddered.
Rising nearly two hundred feet, each corner of the ramp around the pyramid presented Mehi with a new vista and new weather. When he scraped across the north face, breezes blowing at him, he saw the Nile rushing past stately Annu; on the west, the red desert sucked him dry; on the south, calm and bright, he looked for his village Mer; and on the east, the Nile and its moisture revived them all.
While Mehi worked for God-king, he viewed all of Egypt, much like Khufu must.
He hadn’t stopped his father. But wasn’t that his father’s failing? And, Mu—An-khi—had returned to him. He pictured the eddies of her eyes. At that, Mehi slipped, his right foot and leg sliding sideways. Gravel shot off the ramp and cascaded over the edge. Mehi’s momentum spun him to ground on his rump and toward the ramp edge. He tried to slow himself but only scraped his palms.
Behind him, Kenna yelled, “Hold.” Kenna seized Mehi’s shoulder and stopped him. “Heh there.”
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Mehi’s stomach turned over. Though his body was still, inside he felt himself spiraling down the two hundred feet of pyramid.
The foreman ran up and shouted in his face, “Pull, you pull!” The chain of eight hundred teams had stopped behind them.
Mehi stood, trembling. Strength drained from him as through a cracked vase. His bones were weak as straw. Lofty vistas and holy fathers were not for him. He should keep his heart on the ground.