Scroll of Saqqara(117)
Skirting it, she approached the side door, she and her escort almost invisible in the darkness, but before she reached it she saw two figures standing just within the passage. Their voices came to her faintly, and there was something so private, so exclusive about their stance that she came to a halt. Now she could hear the words. It was Tbubui and her brother.
“… and you know that it is time,” Tbubui was saying harshly. “Why do you hesitate?”
“Yes, I know it is time,” Sisenet’s voice replied, “but I am reluctant to begin. Such a thing is beneath us. Once we would have considered it reprehensible.”
“That was a very long time ago, when we were innocents,” Tbubui retorted bitterly. “Now it is necessary. Besides, what is a common servant to us? What is his …” She broke off as Sheritra, unwilling to eavesdrop on purpose, moved forward. For a moment, Sheritra saw Tbubui’s face as she turned towards the footsteps, twisted, angry—then her expression smoothed. “Princess,” she said. Sisenet had bowed and was already gone.
“I decided to walk a little before bed,” Sheritra explained. “The night is so fine and besides, I ate too much at dinner!”
Tbubui smiled back and stepped aside. “Sleep well, Highness,” she said kindly, and Sheritra nodded and walked past her.
Reaching the bedchamber she was obscurely relieved when her guard took up his station outside the door and Bakmut closed it firmly. Sheritra suffered the ministrations of the girl and slid between the sheets in an abstracted mood. It was not so much the words she had heard but the emotions behind them—Tbubui forceful, Sisenet cold. The atmosphere that had surrounded them was turbulent, completely alien to the prevailing mood of the house. What on earth were they talking about? she wondered. Who is the “common servant”? She herself had quickly fallen into the household habit of snapping out orders to the staff without even looking at them, so much a part of the furnishings did they seem, and the voices of those she had brought with her were doubly appreciated after Sisenet’s utterly responseless staff.
On impulse she sat up. “Bakmut, fetch me my horoscope for Phamenoth,” she ordered, and the girl got up from her mat and went to one of the chests against the wall. I never did look at it, Sheritra thought. Father said it was not good, but as the month is running soon into Pharmuti it doesn’t matter. Yet she took it from Bakmut and unrolled it with trepidation. As Khaemwaset said, it was uniformly bad. “Do not rise from your couch today…. Eat no meat this evening…. Spend the afternoon in prayer and do not sleep, that the anger of the gods may be averted…. Remember that the Nile is your refuge…. Turn from love as though from disease …”
Sheritra let it roll shut and tossed it back to the waiting servant. “Put it away,” she said, and lay down again. How is the Nile my refuge? she asked herself, and why on earth should I turn from love? Whose love? Father’s? Tbubui’s? Harmin’s? She fell asleep wondering, still with that pinprick of unease Sisenet and Tbubui’s conversation had caused her, and for the first time her rest was interrupted. Several times she woke, thinking that she had heard something, but each time the house remained sunk in its bottomless peace.
The following morning saw Tbubui coming into her chamber to inquire if she was ill, for the sun was high and the hour of breakfast long gone. She was her usual graceful self, attentive and cheerful, and Sheritra grimly ignored the headache lurking behind her eyes and dragged herself from the couch to the bath house.
“Were you up late last night, Highness?” Tbubui asked her. She was kneeling at Sheritra’s feet, working oil into the girl’s calves. “You do not look rested, in fact you look quite jaded, and there are knots in your muscles.”
Sheritra did not reply. Eyes closed, she was all at once preternaturally aware of every sensation: the dull pounding in her head, the sweet, cloying aroma of the oil, the feel of her wet hair sticking to her shoulder blades, the tinkle of water draining through the slanted floor of the bath house, but most of all, the firm, inflammatory touch of Tbubui’s fingers on her flesh. A little higher, Tbubui, she thought lazily. Caress my thighs with those long, probing fingers of yours, and as though the woman had heard her, she felt soft movement stroking upward. Her disturbed thoughts and sense of dislocation faded into sensation.
The rest of the morning passed uneventfully. She and Tbubui lounged in Sheritra’s bedchamber talking of nothing in particular, but behind Tbubui’s words Sheritra sensed an absence. The woman’s mind was on something else, though she hid it well, and as soon as the noon meal was over she excused herself and vanished towards her own room.