“You know that I do not,” Khaemwaset answered truthfully. “I love her as far as I am capable of loving …”
“As far as you see love,” Si-Montu broke in, “which is only as far as you deem it safe. And who is to say which of us is happier or wiser? Look at it sensibly, Khaemwaset. You have a loving wife and good family You are feverishly desperate, probably for the first time in your life, to sleep with a woman you keep seeing on the streets. Well what of it?” Khaemwaset held his cup to be refilled and Si-Montu hesitated. Khaemwaset nodded curtly. Si-Montu sighed and filled it to the brim. Then he went on speaking. “Many men have suffered through the same affliction. It is called lust, my bookish brother. Lust. That is all. You agonize over it as though it represents the destruction of everything, including yourself, but of course it does not. You have two choices.” He wiped a few droplets of the blood-red liquid from his moustache, his blunt, calloused fingers moving thoughtfully. “You can either keep searching for her—and you know, don’t you, that you will eventually find her?—and then keep offering a variety of good things to her until you find the key to unlock her virtue, at which time you take your fill of her. Or you can push her away each time she sneaks into your vitals and in six months you will be wondering what all the fuss was about.” He cocked an eye at Khaemwaset. “Of course, you might also be wondering what you missed, but that, dear brother, is not in your nature.”
It was not at one time in my nature, Khaemwaset thought, but I am changing. I do not like it and perhaps I cannot make you understand it, Si-Montu, but I don’t think that I can control it any longer. “What would you do?” he asked aloud.
“I would tell Ben-Anath,” Si-Montu answered promptly, “and she would say, ‘Scurvy son of a dessicated pharaoh, if I am not woman enough for you go and take your fill of the street. When you come crawling back to admit to me that there is no woman like me in the world, you can sleep in the kitchens among the little female slaves who by then you will be accustomed to calling your equals.’ But then,” Si-Montu finished simply, “I still desire no other woman the way I desire my wife. Do you want my advice?” Khaemwaset nodded mutely. “Stop chasing this phantom, start giving Nubnofret her due as a beauty and a most accommodating wife, and close that tomb.”
Khaemwaset blinked. Even through the gentle wine fumes floating pleasingly in his brain he was conscious of shock. Si-Montu was staring at him steadily. “The tomb? I have told you my anxieties over it but it has nothing to do with my present dilemma.”
“No?” Si-Montu said. “I am not so sure You treat the dead very arrogantly in your polite but nonetheless ruthless quest for knowledge, Khaemwaset. You fancy yourself safe because you restore, you make offerings, but did it never occur to you that the dead might merely wish to be left alone, or that what you take is not in fact equal to what you imagine that you give? I am not easy about this latest endeavour of yours. Close it.”
Khaemwaset felt dread clutch at his heart. Si-Montu, with his usual facility for unconsciously striking the nail on the head, had voiced Khaemwaset’s own fears with a lucidity he himself had lacked. “I do not believe in any connection,” he replied, forming the words carefully because he was getting drunk, and because they were a lie.
Si-Montu shrugged. “You are probably right,” he agreed indifferently. “Now it is time for dinner. You will stay, of course? I have no boring guests tonight, unlike the many dinners at your house I am forced to yawn through!”
They got up and walked in the dusk towards the house. Khaemwaset felt a great deal better, but there was a seed of mutiny in him. Si-Montu had no right to accuse him of a kind of rape—Si-Montu, who knew nothing of history or the preciousness of rare things, and who had never held a priestly office. He, Khaemwaset, did not rape. As for the woman … He entered his brother’s dining room to BenAnath’s smile and took his place before the little table prepared for him. As for the woman, he would find her, even as his brother had said. Lust or not, she conjured in him a feeling he had never known before and he was determined to explore it. He had no intention of telling Nubnofret. She would not understand. And the gods? He succumbed at last to the inviting effects of the wine. If the gods had wished to punish him or indicate that his studies were insulting to them, they would have let him know a long time ago. For was he not their friend? He lifted his cup for more wine and fell upon the first course of the excellent dinner Ben-Anath’s cooks had provided. A harpist began to play. Khaemwaset was enjoying the evening, enjoying himself fully, for the first time in months.