“No it is not,” Sheritra said impatiently, “but I have asked you, therefore you may respond without fear of my displeasure.”
“Very well,” Bakmut said coolly. “I do not like him, Highness. He is very beautiful, like your brother Prince Hori, but he lacks the Prince’s generosity of heart. I sense a meanness in him. And I think that his mother is a crafty woman with few scruples, even though you now call her your friend.”
“Thank you for your honesty, Bakmut,” Sheritra commented. “Now I order you to allow Harmin access to this room at any hour he chooses, and when he comes you are to leave us alone.”
Bakmut’s face registered loud disapproval. “Highness, your best interests are graven on my heart, and this is not good, not good at all,” she expostulated. “You are a royal princess. You …”
“I know all that,” Sheritra cut her off. “I am not asking you, I am giving you a direct command, so that in the future you may not be held responsible for my behaviour. Is that understood?”
“Indeed.” Bakmut gave a stiff bow.
“Furthermore, you are to say nothing of the arrangement to any other member of my staff. You are not to lie if you are asked, but neither are you to gossip.”
“Highness, I do not gossip. When do I have the time? Your mother the Princess Nubnofret trained us all more strictly than that. And as for the servants of this house gossiping …” She laughed harshly. “They are like the walking dead. I despise them.”
“Good. So we understand each other.”
“I have one more thing I would like to say,” Bakmut said stubbornly. “Many of the changes this house has wrought in you, dear Princess, have been marvellous. You have lost the awkwardness and shyness that used to plague you, and the bitterness you used to express to me many times. You bloom like a desert flower. But in the blooming is a hardening somehow. I beg your Highness to forgive me.”
“I forgive you,” Sheritra said evenly. “Go back to your work, Bakmut.” The servant retired and sank to the floor, picking up her rag.
Sheritra left the couch and began to wander about the room, absently touching the walls, the jumble of cosmetic pots on the dressing table, the roof of her portable shrine to Thoth. There was no going back, she knew. She thought of the self she had been with a kind of amused horror, yet Bakmut was correct. Under the changes was a new core of recklessness that threatened to turn her new-found confidence into a coarse bravado. Well, I deserve this madness, this recklessness, she thought mutinously. I have been a prisoner of my childish self too long. Let me explore these new limits, these new emotions, even if in doing so they drag me past the white winning post, like unruly horses pulling a chariot, and I have to wheel about.
She ate a frugal lunch, still in her own room, but gathering her courage she ventured out for the evening meal, sitting demurely before her tiny table. Sisenet was as polite but uncommunicative as always. Harmin, to her great relief, treated her with his usual gentle deference mixed with teasing warmth, and it was only Tbubui who caused the girl some anxiety. She was unusually animated, her seductive, wily hands darting and weaving over the food, among the flower garlands, keeping time to the harpist’s trills or emphasizing some point she was making. Yet Sheritra felt her eyes measuring, perhaps even calculating, and when their glances met she read an insulting complicity in them.
That night Harmin came to her as she had hoped and feared he would, bringing dewy blossoms to stroke across her face and a simple gold amulet for her neck. Bakmut obediently left them alone, and this time Sheritra let her sheath slip to the floor and rose to meet him freely. His lovemaking was slow and tender, his passion a smouldering thing that flamed and died, flamed and died, as the hours wore away.
For some days she waited in trepidation for word to come from her father, some cry of outrage that would demand her return home at once, but it did not come. Perhaps the scribe, the spy, was unaware of what was happening between herself and Harmin. Perhaps he was happy here with little to do and was lying to his master. But, perhaps, Sheritra thought sadly, Father is simply too wrapped up in his own affairs and does not care any longer what happens to me. That idea gave her a spurt of contradictory anger. I will go home and find out why he is silent, she vowed. I will seek out Hori and upbraid him for ignoring me. But the spell of timelessness Sisenet’s house cast over its inmates soaked her too and she dallied, unaware of how the days were slipping by.
Harmin began to invite her out onto the desert in the spurious cool of the evenings to hunt with him. He would take a guard, a runner and the hunting dog kept chained in the servants’ compound. Sometimes he walked, but more often he hitched a horse to his chariot and took one of the faint tracks that led towards the dunes.