His sleep was troubled. He dreamed of high winds that whipped the surface of the desert into a howling maelstrom of sand, of the Nile in a flood that spilled over Egypt and kept on pooling, lapping, eating inexorably mile after mile of the cooking fires in his own kitchens that spread and grew until they towered, hungry and angry, over the whole city, lighting it with an ominous orange glow.
When the time came for the casting of his and the family’s horoscopes for the coming month, he performed the task fearfully, with more than his usual meticulous attention to every detail. The prognosis for himself was very bad. According to this, he thought as he wrote the results at his desk, I should take to my couch and not stir until the month of Hathor is over. I do not see death here, or physical accident, merely bad luck. Merely. He chuckled without a trace of humour. Nubnofret’s signs for the month were much as they always were—no more than slight tremors in an even flow that seldom changed—and Hori’s, always so strongly fortunate, showed a mild dip in the number of days. Sheritra’s horoscope was almost as bad as Khaemwaset’s own.
When he had finished the work, which had taken him a whole day, he pushed it hastily into a drawer and sat back with a kind of despair. I can send Sheritra to Sunero’s house at Ninsu if she would go, he thought. Nubnofret and I did discuss the possibility. But would that be pushing her into the place where her luck will be worse, or will keeping her at home precipitate the disasters that I see? There are no answers. We have lived through illness, dynastic deaths, royal intrigues, he thought again as he rose and left his office. All showed beforehand as unlucky days. The only surprises were the occurrences themselves. We will weather this month as we weather everything. But he knew, as he wandered down the passage and out into the fading daylight, that his confidence was spurious. Something alien was in the air, and he acknowledged it with great mistrust.
He was curiously reluctant to visit the tomb at Saqqara. Penbuy and his other scribes and artists were still at work there, and Hori spent several hours overseeing their efforts every day, but Khaemwaset stayed away. He wanted it closed and sealed. He wanted to give the scroll that he had cut so avidly from the bandaged fingers of the corpse to Penbuy to be copied so that the original might be returned, but so great was his distaste for it that he let it lie where the scribe had locked it away. Eventually, he knew, he must either continue the work of deciphering the enigmatic thing or put it back where it had come from, but he did not need to decide anything just yet. Daily, Hori laid before him the intricate, riotous scenes and hieroglyphs faithfully reproduced from the tomb’s plastered walls, eager to discuss them with his father, but Khaemwaset found excuses to simply disregard them. “They are beautiful but not particularly informative,” he told his son. “We can go over them once the tomb is closed but at the moment my attention is taken up with the Apis bulls.” It was a lie, and Hori knew it. Looking at his son perched on the edge of the desk, sandalled foot swinging, he had been going to say, “Leave me alone, Hori,” for Ib had come to him not an hour before with yet another shake of the head, but he restrained himself. “Just get Penbuy to file it away and I will find a few idle moments within the next day or so to go over it.” Hori, shooting him a keen glance, slid off the desk and went away.
Khaemwaset sat on blindly, staring into nothing. When did all this begin? he was thinking, but he was not even sure what “this” was. Slowly, he mentally girded himself for another family dinner, another evening in the cool of the garden or listening to Nubnofret’s not unpleasant observations, then blessed unconsciousness followed by yet another long, hot series of hours that he must fill or go mad. An obsession. Yes, it was nearly that. Then let the moment of meeting come, let it shatter me with furious disappointment, and then, O please Thoth, please Ptah, please Hathor, goddess of beauty, let my life return to its former sane state!
One week into the month of Hathor, Khaemwaset began to give up hope of tracing the woman. Reluctantly, he called in his soldiers. To his relief, he found that the moment of his admission of failure brought with it the first intimations of peace, and his mind began to calm. He returned to his studies, his few select patients, and his duties with the beginnings of an honest interest. His horoscope still made him anxious but he decided that he had been in such a restless condition that he had not done the casting properly.
On the third day of the second week of Hathor he set out to confer with Si-Montu regarding the promised grape harvest in the royal vineyards his brother oversaw on the outskirts of Memphis. Pharaoh had sent a request for figures on the expected yield and Si-Montu had in turn sent a message to Khaemwaset, worried about the appearance of blight on some of the vines but more than happy to have an excuse to while away a hot afternoon drinking beer and talking about nothing in particular. Khaemwaset had welcomed the invitation and had set off in his barge with Kasa, Amek and two bodyguards to have himself rowed beyond the northern limits of the city to where his father’s vines luxuriated, tended like spoiled children behind their high, sheltering walls