“He is a fine young man,” Khaemwaset said, secretly hoping that Sheritra would soon get over her foolishness. “You have every reason to be proud of him.” He waved away a proffered dish and hitched closer to Tbubui. “I have not told you about Hori,” he said in a low voice. “He is heading for the Delta, doubtless to pour out to his mother his tale of woe. I am ashamed of my family, Tbubui. But at least you will be safe for a while.”
She smiled at him, a slow, speculative curling of her wide mouth, and her eyes narrowed. “Oh, I think I am very safe now,” she answered. “It was a pity that you were unable to feed him his gruel the other morning, but no harm has been done. I do not intend to worry about Hori anymore.”
In a rush of abject guilt he reached for her, but she lay back, signalled to a fan-bearer, and closed her eyes. Khaemwaset was left to sit, chin in hand, and brood, while the day became hotter and the rhythmic chanting of his servants treading grapes in the vat in the compound wafted to him intermittently, charged with a raucous triumph.
In spite of his theory that Hori was seeking Nubnofret’s broad bosom on which to cry out his vindictiveness, Khaemwaset spent an uneasy night. The evening had seemed to close in with an ominous grip, the hands of cataclysm, and mindful of Sheritra’s scornful words, he was unable to lift the mirror from its gilded case on his cosmetic table.
He went to his couch early, drank some wine and pressed Kasa into conversation. He thought of going to the concubines’ house and making love to Tbubui, but he was too anxious, too full of a vague presentiment of doom, to forget himself in that act.
One night lamp did not seem enough. Things moved in the shadows just out of his vision, and the small breeze became magnified into strange sighings and tiny sobbings in his room. Shouting to Kasa he ordered more light and felt reassured, but it was a long time before he could fall asleep. Even when he did, he kept waking up with a start and peering about, his dreams vivid and confusing and totally forgotten by the time he sat up on the couch.
The mood of dislocation followed him into the next day. Every word spoken to him seemed heavy with some arcane meaning he could not quite grasp, and each action took on the ponderous weight of ritual. The house was filled with an atmosphere he could not describe but that made him tense with the feeling of threat. He dreaded the night. In the afternoon he went to Tbubui, but even there he was not able to free himself of his inarticulate fear. Nor could he speak of it. It was too unformed.
Evening came, and he could not eat. He and Tbubui sat behind their small tables in the vast reception hall, waited upon by servants ranged all about the walls, entertained by the harpist whose graceful notes echoed in that empty place and reminded Khaemwaset suddenly of other evenings, of Nubnofret resplendent and formidable in blue and gold, reprimanding an indignant, squirming Sheritra while Hori grinned and looked on, Antef hovering behind him. The nights had been warm then, redolent with family closeness, with hallowed routine and blessed predictability, and on this night he missed it all with a blinding jolt of homesickness. Perhaps Harmin and Sisenet would move into the house, and sit behind their own flower-strewn dining tables, bolstered with cushions, merry with wine, talking carefully to whatever official guests graced the hall, but the air of sadness, of good times past, would never leave this gracious room. One family has disintegrated, but I am building another, he thought as a defence against that awful spasm of loneliness. There is Tbubui’s baby, after all. Sheritra can surely be talked out of her mysterious female mood and she and Harmin will fill the house with the happy chaos of my grandchildren. But the sense of the broken, of things gone that could never be mended, would not go away
“Khaemwaset, I have said the same thing to you three times,” Tbubui interrupted his musings, leaning across to kiss him perfunctorily. “Where are you?”
He gave her his attention with an effort of the will. “I am sorry, beloved,” he said. “What was it?”
“Your brother Si-Montu has sent a message wanting to know if he can come and dine next week. Is that acceptable?”
Acceptable. Khaemwaset suddenly gripped her arm. “Tbubui, sleep with me in my own quarters tonight, on my couch,” he begged. “I need you there.”
Her light-heartedness vanished and she regarded him with a worried frown. “Of course I will,” she agreed. “Whatever is the matter, Highness?”
But he could not tell her. The fragrance of the flowers, the deep mauve translucence of the wine, even the cascade of notes pouring from the harpist’s fingers, were all conspiring with the gloomy atmosphere of the house to plunge him into the past and torture him with tenors for the present. “The figs are sour,” was all he said.