Scroll of Saqqara(164)

18

Behold the dwellings of the dead!

Their walls fall down;

their place is no more;

they are as though they never existed.


THE JOURNEY TO KOPTOS was a nightmare for Hori. Day after day he sat hunched and tense under the deck awning, desperate to reach the town, feeling the wind of terror at his back. Loneliness and a sense of his own inadequacy plagued him. He was keenly aware that the salvation of the family might well be resting on his shoulders alone. His father had ceased to be a calm, kindly man, and had let the administration of the country slide towards a chaos that could well ruin them all. His mother was imprisoned in an icy unhappiness. Sheritra’s response to his revelations about Tbubui had been instantly selfish and defensive of Harmin, and it was clear that her world had shrunk to the lineaments of his body. But all of it could be changed, not reversed perhaps but healed, and it was up to him, Hori, to effect that change. No one else saw the truth. No one else was capable of acting, and the awesome responsibility he had chosen to carry was almost too much for him to bear.

He was blind to the parched, brown beauty of Egypt as it slid by. Antef spent much time leaning on the rail exclaiming over the clouds of chaff cast up by a group of winnowers on the bank, or the piles of mud bricks guarded by naked boys who stared curiously at the barge, or the sudden green slash of a nobleman’s estate kept verdant by the constant action of the slaves manning the shadufs. Hori had no eyes for these things, yet he was aware of the deepening blue of the sky as they crept further south, and of a slight swelling of the Nile. Far away at the river’s source the Inundation had begun. Soon the current would grow faster, heavier, and the broadening flood would lap and spill over into the fields, drowning them, isolating the temples, washing silt and broken branches and dead animals up onto Egyptian earth.

In a confused way Hori saw the flood as taking place within him also, an inexorable tide of fear and danger in which he might well drown. His words to Tbubui had been mere bravado. He had never concerned himself over much with his father’s magic and had no idea how he might go about protecting himself from the words muttered in the darkness, the glint of copper pins sliding into the waxen doll, his other self. The belongings he had left behind were available to anyone wishing to steal a ring, a kilt linen, even a pot of kohl his hands had held. Part of himself was in everything he wore and regularly held, and that part would be used to kill him.

Pangs of anxiety came and went, and he wanted to stand up and shout to his captain, “Hurry! Oh hurry!” But his sailors were already labouring against the first intimations of the annual flood and could do no more. Nor would it do any good to stop at the temples and shrines along the way. It would waste precious hours, and Hori had the despairing feeling that the gods had withdrawn their favour from his family, why he did not know. All he knew was that the words he whispered as he sat with eyes squinting against the white eternity of the southern light were pushed back into his mouth, his throat, rebounding from the deaf ears of the immortals.

The day finally came when the barge backed clumsily towards the east bank, the ramp was out, and Hori stood on solid ground, surveying Koptos. There was not much to see. Desert traffic still began and ended here, and the markets, warehouses and bazaars were frantic with commerce, but beyond the desert track leading to the Eastern Sea the town itself dreamed, tiny, quiet and unchanged from one year to the next, sprinkled with thin palm plantations and watered by narrow, placid canals. This is where her house is, Hori thought to himself. My eyes are perhaps even now passing over it. “Antef,” he said. “Go and ask in the market where the mayor lives. Find his house and tell him to send a litter for me.”

He retired to the barge and sat listening to the activity along the riverfront, but gradually he became aware of another sound, or the lack of sound. It was as though Koptos was in alliance with the profound, burning silences of the desert. The noise of human industry did not reach far. It was deadened, foreshortened, a bleat against the inexorable nothingness, soon snatched away.

Before long he saw Antef returning, with four bearers carrying a folded litter at his heels. “The mayor is aghast at your coming!” the young man shouted. “He is turning his household upside down on your behalf!” Hori laughed, and for a moment the fear receded.

He got onto the litter, and with Antef and his two guards walking alongside was soon being borne past the porter’s hut and through the small garden of the mayor’s estate. The mayor was waiting in the shade of his front entrance, a tall man with the peaceful air of the totally contented. But his reverence was harried and his brow furrowed as Hori walked up and greeted him.