FOUR DAYS AFTER the family’s return from Thebes, Ptah-Seankh was announced to Khaemwaset as he was attempting to fulfil his promise to Ramses by attending to the backlog of official correspondence that he had neglected of late. Glancing up with relief from yet another missive of protest from yet another minor minister awash in his own tangle of bureaucracy, Khaemwaset dismissed his junior scribe and strode across the office floor to welcome the young man.
Ptah-Seankh advanced and bowed. He was deeply tanned, almost black, the whites of his eyes bluish against the startling hue of his skin, and his lips were peeling. To Khaemwaset he looked tired and strained, and his first thought was for the miles that had been covered with only the dead Penbuy and a few guards and servants for company. He embraced Ptah-Seankh.
“Welcome home!” he exclaimed, drawing his Chief Scribe towards the desk and thrusting a cup of beer into his hands. “I trust all went well with your father’s beautification, Ptah-Seankh. The sem-priests and the High Priest of Ptah himself are waiting to bury him with every honour.”
Ptah-Seankh gulped down the beer and set the cup carefully on the desk. “Thank you, Highness,” he said. “My father’s body is now resting in the House of the Dead. I inspected the work of beautification myself and I am satisfied.”
That must have been hard, Khaemwaset thought with pity. He waved Ptah-Seankh to a chair, but the man hesitated. “With regard to the work you set me,” he went on shyly, “I have completed it. Here are the results of my labours.” He held out a scroll. Khaemwaset took it eagerly, then glanced at the scribe, who was standing with eyes downcast.
“What is the matter?” he asked impatiently, with a twinge of anxiety. “Is there bad news for me in this,” he tapped the papyrus against his thigh, “or has the journey made you ill?”
Ptah-Seankh appeared to rally. His head came up and he met Khaemwaset’s scrutiny with a smile. “The journey has left me dazed, Highness,” he said. “That is all.”
Khaemwaset had already broken Ptah-Seankh’s personal seal and was unrolling the scroll. “Then you had better spend the rest of the day sleeping in your quarters. I will send word to the priests that Penbuy’s funeral can now take place three days hence. Is that agreeable to you?”
Ptah-Seankh bowed his assent. Khaemwaset temporarily forgot him. He was frowning over the contents of the scroll. Then his face gradually cleared until he was beaming. “You did very well, Ptah-Seankh,” he said. “Very well indeed. You may go.”
When he was alone, Khaemwaset slumped into the chair behind the desk and closed his eyes. The last obstacle to his marriage had been removed and he was conscious of a deep relaxation. Tbubui had told the truth. Not that he had ever doubted her, but there had been a slight, a very slight suspicion that she might have exaggerated the age of her family’s lineage. But here it was, black and emphatic in Ptah-Seankh’s neat hand on the beige papyrus. A small estate but reasonably prosperous. A small but legitimate noble title. A small but functioning house he and she might use sometimes during the winter, when Koptos was merely a fire and not a raging furnace and he wanted to take her away from Nubnofret’s accusing gaze. No duties to engage him, no demands on his time, just he and she together in the timeless hiatus of the country of the south. She would belong there, blending in in a way that was not possible here in busy Memphis. He remembered the south very well. The silence, the sudden, not unpleasant moments of loneliness the desert wind could conjure as it whipped and gusted over sand too hot for a naked foot, the Nile wandering into infinity through an indifferent, elemental landscape of vast blue sky and shimmering dunes, “Tbubui,” he whispered. “You can come now.”
He rose, feeling light and empty, and shouted for a scribe. When the man arrived, Khaemwaset dictated a short note to Tbubui and then went in search of Nubnofret. Penbuy’s funeral was in three days’ time. Tbubui could move in on the fourth. Then it would be Pakhons, the month of the harvest, the beginning of the Inundation. The beginning, he thought happily, of my new life.
HIS OLD FRIEND, the man who had been his constant companion, his advisor and sometimes his disgruntled judge, was buried with quiet dignity in the tomb he had laboriously prepared for himself on the Saqqara plain. The walls of his resting place were bright with the best-loved scenes from his life. Here he sat, straight-backed, head bent over his palette, while his master dictated. Here he stood in his hunting skiff, Ptah-Seankh as a boy, still adorned with the youth lock, kneeling beside him as he raised the throwing stick at a flock of marsh ducks frozen forever in their flight overhead. Here he made offerings to his patron, Thoth, holding out the smoking censer while the god turned his sharp ibis beak towards him with benevolent approval. Khaemwaset, looking at these things, felt a peace and joyous satisfaction emanating from the paintings and from Penbuy’s personal belongings. The man had lived a fruitful life. He had been justly proud of his accomplishments. He had been honest, and had nothing to fear from the weighing of his heart in the Judgment Hall. It was true that he had been relatively young, not much older than Khaemwaset himself, and the circumstances of his death were most unfortunate, but Khaemwaset was positive that Penbuy had died with nothing to regret, nothing to wish changed.