Scroll of Saqqara(133)
“Hori, do you remember the earring you found in the tunnel leading out of the tomb?” she began. He nodded. “You showed it to Tbubui, didn’t you?”
A shadow passed over his face and he sighed. “What a day that was!” he said. “She was very taken with it.”
“I found one exactly like it in her jewel box. When I asked her about it she said that she had had the one you showed her copied as a pair, and then lost one of them. But …” She bit her lip and looked away, and he finished for her with his usual shrewdness.
“But you were afraid that she was lying, that in my passion I had lost all sense and had given her the original.” Sheritra blinked in assent. “Well, I certainly did no such thing,” Hori protested. “I may be besotted, but I am not insane enough to commit that sacrilege.”
“Oh.” Sheritra was only partially mollified. “What happened to it, then? Do you still have it?”
He did not answer directly. “Father has closed the tomb,” he said, but she leaned over him urgently.
“Hori! Answer me! You still have it, don’t you?”
“Yes!” he said loudly, sitting up in one sharp movement. “Yes I do. I am going to lay it on Ptah’s altar as an apology for keeping it, but Sheritra, it reminds me so strongly of Tbubui that I cannot part with it yet. It is not stealing, it is polite borrowing. Ptah will tell the ka of the woman that I meant no harm.”
“The only harm you are doing is to yourself, torturing yourself every time you look at it,” she said vehemently. “Well, at least you had the good sense not to hand it over to Tbubui. You know, Hori, I could have sworn the one I picked out of her jewel box was the original. Ah well.” She rubbed the sand from the elbow she had been resting on and flicked an ant from her calf. “Did you say that Father has closed the tomb already? Why? Was the work finished?”
“No.”
He began to talk of Sisenet’s visit, the translating of the scroll and Khaemwaset’s almost insane reaction to it, and as he spoke, his voice falling flat and almost inflectionless in the confined space, Sheritra felt a great foreboding begin to darken the day.
“Father believed it was the Scroll of Thoth?” she interrupted him. “And Sisenet ridiculed the idea and convinced him otherwise?”
He nodded and finished the story. “And that was it. The tomb has been sealed, rubble piled to fill in the stair and a huge rock rolled over the site. Father agrees with Sisenet that such a thing can only exist in legends. He must be just a trifle disappointed, seeing that he has carried the dream of finding it for many years.”
Sheritra’s foreboding was coalescing into a pulse of disquiet. She felt it as an amorphous mass that was rapidly acquiring a shape, as yet unrecognizable but one that might turn disquiet into black fear at any moment. “Hori, I haven’t told you everything,” she said. “Someone in Sisenet’s house conjured a death curse.” His head jerked around, and under his keen scrutiny her own glance dropped. “I feel silly even mentioning it,” she faltered, “but it left a bad taste in my mouth.”
“Tell me,” he ordered. So she did, her embarrassment and uneasiness growing side by side as she spoke. “It was not a protecting spell,” she ended. “I recognize the differences. I wondered at first if Tbubui had been trying to avert the anger of the woman whose earring she had—if you had indeed given her the earring—but I knew in my heart that it was not so. Someone was conjuring a violent death for an enemy.”
He did not suggest the servants, as Harmin had. He did not immediately present her with an acceptable explanation as she had hoped he would. Instead he sat brooding, one long finger stroking the side of his nose. It could be anything,” he said at last. “Tbubui fancying she had a rival for my father’s attentions, although I cannot imagine a woman as confident and self-sufficient as Tbubui being worried about any such thing. Harmin with a similar worry. Sisenet trying to rid himself of some enemy back in Koptos. Who knows? Or the things could have been already half-buried in the sand before the household debris was tossed in that spot.”
“No,” Sheritra denied emphatically. “The paraphernalia was mostly jutting out of the pile itself. Oh well.” She scrambled to her feet. “I expect I am making something out of nothing because I am upset. I am trapped at home until the mourning period is over, and I must dictate an apology to Tbubui and let her know why I cannot return to her house for a while,” she said. “I also want to send a letter to Harmin. Please come back to the house with me and get cleaned up. Don’t be so lonely. We have seventy days to fill, so let us spend them together, supporting each other.”