Scroll of Saqqara(123)
Sheritra considered refusing his request that she accompany him. Standing in a chariot could be dangerous, and she had never cared for horses. Besides, Pharaoh would not take kindly to news of a granddaughter injured or even killed through foolhardiness.
But Sheritra was like an addict with one drug, Harmin’s presence, and she went with him, standing in the lurching vehicle between him and the sheltering guard while the horse struggled to pull them through the cloying sand. The yellow dog ran beside them, tongue lolling.
Harmin was always hopeful that he might sight and bring down a lion. More often than not he returned home empty-handed, but on several occasions he made a kill.
Once it was a gazelle that bounded from behind a small pile of rocks and started away, its thin, pretty legs pounding. Harmin, spear raised, rushed after it, sand spurting from his heels, and before Sheritra could recover her breath he had brought it down and was standing gleefully over its twitching body.
His lusty enjoyment of the pastime was both repulsive and mesmerizing. It showed her a side of him she had not suspected, and she found it difficult to reconcile the civilized, well-mannered man who read her inmost thoughts with such ease and the Harmin who could scream obscenities at an escaping prey, or shout with savage triumph as an animal fell with his spear in its shoulder.
On the evenings when he had made a kill his lovemaking was always forceful and passionate, even slightly brutal, as though she too were prey to be stalked, struggled with, gored through. More bewildering to her was her response. Something primitive in her answered his mild savagery with an equal abandonment, so that she looked back on the days of her virginity such a short time ago in amazement. Does my mother know the things that I know? she wondered. Does Father ever demand from her the acts Harmin demands from me? And even if he wants them does she respond? But the thought of her father brought shame, and she turned from it quickly.
One evening she had arranged to meet Harmin beyond the servants’ compound and the wall that separated the small estate from the desert beyond. She was late, having dictated yet another letter to an undeserving Hori, and she decided to cut through the servants’ domain directly to the rear gate. The wide yard was empty. Sparrows hopped about the compacted dirt, pecking at the remains of the debris that was carried from the house to be thrown onto the desert over the far wall. She and her guard quickly crossed to the gate, and Sheritra slipped through while he held it open.
She had never before taken notice of the mounds of refuse to either side. It did not lie for long. The purifying heat of the sun soon burned away odours, and the jackals and desert dogs dragged off all that was edible. But today she caught a glint of something unusual lying in the sand and paused to give it a second look. The light was glittering on a broken pen case. Sheritra picked it up. Its jagged edge was snared in a piece of coarse linen that unrolled as she tugged, spilling numerous pieces of smashed pottery at her feet. Something else remained hidden in the folds, and with a grimace of distaste she shook it out and let the cloth flutter onto the garbage.
It was a wax figurine, crudely fashioned but with a certain primeval strength to the square shoulders and thick neck. Both arms had broken off and one foot was missing, but uneasily Sheritra saw that the head had at one time been pierced several times. Tiny holes gritty with sand felt rough under her thumb. Holes also peppered the area of the heart. Rough hieroglyphs had been incised into the soft brown beeswax and she peered closer, trying to decipher them, her unease slowly mounting to a pang of fear. She was the daughter of a magician and she knew what she was seeing. It was a hex doll. Someone had made it, cut it with the name of an enemy, then, muttering spells of evil and malediction, had driven copper pins into the head and heart. The litter under which it had lain had scored and compressed it so that she could not make out the letters. “Do not touch it, Highness!” her guard warned, and at the sound of his voice she tossed it away with a cry.
The pen case was a fine piece of work, delicately ornamented with granulated goldwork and having a cloisonnéand-blue-faience likeness of the ibis-headed Thoth, god of scribes, along its length. Sheritra frowned over it for a moment. Somewhere she had seen it before, but try as she might she could not remember where or when.
In the end she laid it reverently in the sand by the refuse heap, and squatting, she fingered through the small sharp pieces of what had obviously been a large clay pot. She recognized its use also and she could even make out a few disconnected words of the death spell that would have been inked all over it before a hating hand had brought the hammer down. “His heart … burst … daggers … pain … neither day … terror …”