Scroll of Saqqara(16)
Khaemwaset liked the room but for the fact that voices echoed faintly, so that he felt he might be sleeping in a temple. But the whole of Pi-Ramses is a temple, he thought as he sank to the floor on a cushion and Ib drew a tiny table close to him. A temple to my father’s godhead, a burst of sustained praise for his military exploits, his infallibility. The bread was still warm from Pharaoh’s mighty kitchens. “It has all been tasted,” Ib commented. Khaemwaset set to with a will. Later he lowered himself onto the yielding mattress of his couch, pulled the smooth sheet to his chin and fell asleep without reflection.
Four hours later, freshly washed and clad in the long robe of a vizier, he was welcoming the kingdom’s Chief Treasurer, the High Priest of Amun and the chief of all temple scribes, and listening patiently to their monotonous figures regarding the apportionment of taxes to the gods, both foreign and indigenous. Before long the officials were wrangling over which temples deserved the greater subsidies, and with an inward sigh and a surreptitious glance at the waterclock Khaemwaset settled down to arbitrate their demands as tactfully as he could. The task was important, for the slighting of a foreign god could result in a diplomatic incident, and he did his best to give it his full attention, but he was relieved when at last his decisions were accepted and he was able to send the men away after a few moments of general conversation and wine sipping.
Walking through into his sleeping quarters he took a few grains of incense, lit the charcoal in the tall censer stand and sprinkled the myrrh onto the glowing blackness. Immediately a harsh, sweetish-grey smoke began to plume upwards. Khaemwaset opened the doors of the shrine, prostrated himself before Amun’s benign smile and, lying on the cool tiles, he began to pray.
At first his words were part of the formal evening litany spoken each night far away in Thebes, where Amun towered in the heart of the temple of Karnak and ruled that city as he had done for centuries, but before long the solemn lilt of ritual gave way to a few stumbling personal pleas, and then silence. Khaemwaset lay with eyes screwed shut, aware of the solid resistance of the floor at his knees, his thighs, his elbows, breathing in a minute film of dust and the smell of beeswax.
Amun, something is wrong with me, he half thought, half prayed. I do not know what it is, indeed, the stirrings of discontent and something else, something alien and alarming, are so faint in the deep recesses of my ka that I wonder if I am not mistaken. Is it the beginning of disease? Do I need a purge, a week of fasting, an elixir? Is it a lack of proper exercise? He remained very still while he probed himself. A reluctant distaste for his father, the palace, the showy arrogance of Pi-Ramses, the paper-shuffling important ministers, began to spread like the fiery rash on the little dancer’s body, and he let it grow. I am the greatest magician and physician in Egypt, he thought again bitterly, yet I am held in awe only because I in turn hold the reins of government in these hands, these hands that dig, that search, that would willingly relinquish the dry, dumb details of administration if they could hold just once the Scroll of Thoth, the key to all power and all life. Sometimes I think that I would even relinquish my ka itself for the opportunity to possess the two spells the Scroll is said to contain. One spell gives the power of bodily resurrection to the one who legitimately speaks it, and the other gives him the ability to understand the language of everything living under the sun. I command all people in the kingdom save my father, but I do not command the birds, the animals … or the dead. I am aging, my ways are becoming increasingly set, and I am afraid. I am running out of time while somewhere far down in the earth or entombed in rock or lying on the breast of a magician who was mightier than I are the words that would make me the most powerful man Egypt has ever known.
He groaned and sat up, crossing his legs, his eyes on Amun’s gold sandals. Once the quest was like a game, a young man’s ideal, full of excitement and pregnant with strong possibility. I played with it happily while I was learning medicine, beginning a family, working with my father, sure that I was the most favoured man in the world and the Scroll would fall into my lap as a gift from the admiring gods. Then I began my great labour of restoration and exploration and the game became the underlying cause of everything I did, a dark, constant pulse of waning hope and mounting frustration that gradually ceased to be a game. For seventeen years I have searched. I have grown mighty in knowledge but I have not found it.
His back had begun to ache, and he scrambled to his feet and stretched, reaching down to close the shrine. Thoth, god of the wisdom I worship, he thought angrily, why do you deny me this thing? I am the only man worthy of possessing it, yet you hide it from me as though I were an ignorant peasant who would do it harm.