Scroll of Saqqara(111)

She bowed with exaggerated reverence, stepped around him and glided back into her chamber. “The woman is not worthy of you,” her voice floated back to him. “Penbuy will bring you bad news, Khaemwaset, whether you demand that I do my duty or not. Please do not come back into the house through my rooms. I have a bad head.”

With a grunt of exasperation, Khaemwaset spun on his heel and turned down into the bright garden. He would see to the problem of a new physician for Pharaoh’s harem. He would diligently answer the messages from the Delta. Nubnofret would get over her scorn and rage and accept Tbubui, and all would be as it should. I should feel relieved, he told himself as he left the grass and his feet found the burning paving of the path that circled the house. It is all out in the open. Hori and Sheritra will not mind. They will not be too affected. Sheritra might even be pleased, for Harmin will be as close to her as her brother. Do I want a great celebration, a city holiday for this, my second marriage after so many years? He pondered with a mixture of happiness and anxiety, a frown on his face, forcing his mind to fill with feverish thoughts so that he did not have to consider, along with Nubnofret’s scorn and rage, her hurt.

A FEW DAYS AFTERWARDS Sisenet paid his visit to examine the scroll. Ib received him in the still-cool vastness of the reception hall that was cluttered with the foreign knickknacks Nubnofret had acquired. The steward set wine and pastries before him, and Khaemwaset soon sat down next to him.

The time between had been strained but uneventful. Nubnofret had retired behind a rigid politeness, seeing to his needs with her usual efficiency and speaking to him mildly, but the embryo of a fragile girlishness in her was gone. Khaemwaset had seen little of Hori. That was an ordeal he still shrank from undergoing. Sheritra could be told on the next visit to Tbubui to retrieve the sealed contract, but Hori was an increasing, worrying mystery. Khaemwaset put all of them out of his mind with a supreme effort of will and sat beside Sisenet, talking lightly of the intensifying heat of summer and the level of the Nile. The man responded in kind and once the social amenities were discharged, Khaemwaset rose and led him to the office. The room enfolded them in its purposeful atmosphere of repose. Khaemwaset indicated the chair behind the desk, and bowing, Sisenet accepted it, drawing it up to the table where Khaemwaset had already spread his notes. The scroll itself lay to one side, stirring faintly in a hidden draught.

Khaemwaset sank onto a stool. He did not expect any real assistance from this spare, quiet man who was giving him a quick smile and reaching for the soft cylinder. Khaemwaset knew his own status in Egypt’s academic community very well, and it came to him that he was probably going through this charade to please Tbubui. He wanted to ask if Sisenet had all he required—pens, palette, something to drink—but Sisenet’s head had gone down over the gleaming surface of the desk and his immediate absorption in the task precluded interruption. Khaemwaset forced his attention back to the litter under the man’s tanned, sinewy fingers. Sisenet was wearing several thick gold-and-turquoise rings of a design Nubnofret would have disdainfully labelled crude and bulky, but Khaemwaset rather liked them. He watched their tiny movements as Sisenet read.

Presently the man pulled Khaemwaset’s notes towards him and glanced over them. His scrutiny seemed slightly scornful to Khaemwaset, who then acknowledged to himself that his imagination was already at work, as it always was when he had anything to do with the scroll. The level of his anxiety was rising. Find nothing, he begged Sisenet dumbly. Declare the task too great and your scholarship inadequate, so that I may be cleansed of this obsession in good conscience. Sisenet cleared his throat, a small completely polite sound, and a faint smile moved his ascetic lips. He looked up, pulling the scribe’s palette forward, and took up a pen. Then he unrolled the scroll again. His handling of it was almost ritualistic, although his steady gaze remained fixed on Khaemwaset.

“This is a difficult form of very ancient Egyptian writing,” he said. “I am not surprised that it has mystified you, Prince. Very few scrolls of this age have survived, but I have had the privilege of examining a couple of them in Koptos, where life has gone on unchanged from generation to generation, untouched by the fevers and fervours of the north.”

Khaemwaset was not tempted to smile at the man’s somewhat quaint language. He was forcibly aware that Sisenet’s odd accent had intensified, become more broad. He still could not place it. He was so used to it issuing out of Tbubui’s mouth that he had ceased to notice it, but he spoke to Sisenet much less frequently and now it rang in his ears, a pleasant, courtly lilt.