Scroll of Saqqara(198)

Antef stepped forward. There was no pity in the young man’s gaze, only acceptance and a contempt for Khaemwaset. “I loved your son,” he said matter-of-factly. “Now that he is dead my association with this accursed house is ended. I will not attend Hori’s funeral. Farewell, Highness.” He bowed and was gone. Come back, Khaemwaset thought he shouted, but the words stayed in his mind. Come back, I want to know how he died, what he said, what he felt, oh what is the truth, Hori, what is the truth?

Slowly he left the raft, and as soon as he was standing on the warm stone that still held the heat of the previous day, Ib sprang into action. Khaemwaset left the crumpled body of his son and walked slowly back to the house. It is still night, he thought dizzily. Nothing has changed. Hori is dead and nothing has changed. The passage before his quarters loomed silent and empty but for the guard on his door and the flaring torches. The house still slumbered, all unknowing. Hori is dead, Khaemwaset wanted to shriek at the top of his lungs. Instead he blundered into his quarters and sank onto the couch.

“Hori is dead,” he said, Tbubui shifted and groaned softly. For a moment he thought that she had gone back to sleep, but then she pushed back the sheets and sat up.

“What?” she said.

“Hori is dead,” he repeated like a litany. He began to sway in his extremity.

She stared at him indifferently, her eyes swollen with sleep. “Yes, I know,” she said.

He froze. “What do you mean?” he breathed. Suddenly his heart began to gallop in his chest.

“Just what I said,” she offered, running a hand over her face and yawning broadly. “Nenefer-ka-Ptah put a spell on him. Actually the spell was put on him earlier, because he dared to go to Koptos. Not that it would have mattered. I knew you wouldn’t believe him anyway.”

Khaemwaset felt the room begin to spin and recede. “What are you saying?” he managed. “What do you mean?”

She yawned again, and passed a pink tongue over her lips. “I mean, now that Hori is dead, and you refused to help him, your degradation is complete, Khaemwaset, and my task is done. I am not obliged to play my part anymore. I am thirsty,” she went on. “Is there any wine left?” She pulled herself to the edge of the couch and poured wine into a cup. Khaemwaset watched her, incredulous, as she drained it, then set the cup back on the table with a click. She regarded him impatiently. “Hori was right,” she said, shaking back her hair and sliding from the couch. Her naked body caught the faint light, which caressed it smoothly, licking along the stretch of her long thighs, curving around her swinging breasts. “The story he brought back is true. But what does it matter? I am here. I give you what you need. I am your wife.”

“True?” he stammered, not understanding, everything in him whirling sickeningly, a thousand voices, a thousand emotions, all at variance with one another. He clutched at the sheets to still the waves of sick dizziness breaking over him. “What story, Tbubui? If your lineage is less than pure I do not care.”

“You do not see it, do you?” she taunted him, stretching, and he was mesmerized as always by the flexing of those inviting muscles. All at once he was consumed with lust for her, as though in possessing her body yet again he could wipe out his grief, his guilt, his bewilderment. She passed a hand over her nipples and down across her taut stomach.

“I am a corpse, Khaemwaset” she said calmly. “Sisenet is not my brother, he is my dear husband Nenefer-ka-Ptah. You yourself raised us, as we had hoped someone would. We are the legitimate owners of the Scroll of Thoth, as far as any mortals may be legitimate owners of such a magical and precious and dangerous thing.” She gave him a winning smile. “I suppose you are the owner now through your thieving, and much good may it do you. Thoth does not take kindly to humans interfering in divine matters. Nenefer-ka-Ptah and I, yes and Merhu too, my son you call Harmin, paid dearly for our claim to the Scroll, but it was worth it. Yes it was.”

She glided close to him and now he could smell her perfume. It had tantalized him from the beginning, that blend of myrrh and something else, something he could not name. But now, in his numb horror and dawning realization of what he had done, he recognized the odour that underlay the pungent, troubling scent. The myrrh was underpinned by the odour of the charnel-house, a lingering stench of death and decay he had smelled a dozen times when he had lifted the lids of coffins to find the mouldering remains of the long dead beneath. Tbubui was drenched in it beneath the heavy myrrh, her body exuding it with every movement. Khaemwaset wanted to retch.