Scroll of Saqqara(7)
Khaemwaset dabbled his fingers in the water bowl and sat back, folding his arms. The war between the Khatti and Egypt had been over for twenty-eight years and the official treaty had been signed twelve years ago. The final battle, fought at Kadesh, had nearly meant the end of Egypt as an independent nation. It had been a series of small but mounting disasters of misinformed spies, misplaced military divisions and inept commanders, but Ramses still insisted on portraying it on all his monuments and flagrantly on all his temples as a brilliant success for Egypt and a crushing blow for the Khatti. In fact, the Khatti had brilliantly ambushed the full might of the Egyptian army and had almost effected a rout. The battle had been a stalemate. Neither side had gamed an inch.
When tempers had cooled fourteen years later, the Great Treaty was signed and sealed and exhibited in Karnak. Still, Ramses persisted in regarding Kadesh as an Egyptian victory and a Khatti rout, and the treaty as an act of desperate submission on Muwattalis’s part.
Now Muwattalis’s son Hattusil was offering one of his daughters to Ramses to cement friendly relations between the two great powers, but haughty Ramses, ever unwilling to admit anything even close to weakness on the part of a ruler who was also a god, saw the gesture as one of appeasement and submission. The Khatti had recently suffered a disastrous drought. They were weakened. They were afraid that Egypt would take advantage of their temporary situation and begin to despoil their countryside. Therefore they were more than eager to tie Ramses to the treaty with a diplomatic marriage.
Worse, Khaemwaset pondered as he began to compose a reply to his father in his head, Hattusil, in his rush to hold out his arms to his kingly brother, had promised Ramses an amazingly large dowry of gold, silver, many ores, horses without limit, cattle, goats and sheep by the tens of thousands. Indeed, it had seemed to Khaemwaset and a sniggering Egyptian court that Hattusil was prepared to move the whole of Khatti into Egypt with his beautiful daughter. Ramses had approved. This was a tribute for the father’s defeat at Kadesh.
“Prince?” Penbuy said softly.
Khaemwaset came to himself and apologized. “Forgive me, Penbuy. You may begin. The usual greeting, for I can’t be bothered to list all my father’s titles correctly. Then, ‘In the matter of my gracious Lord’s summons, I shall be in Pi-Ramses with all speed to aid in the expedition of Your Majesty’s intended nuptials. If Your Majesty would leave the official exchanges of mutual trust and the dowry negotiations to me, your unworthy son, and not continue to heat the gruel with your own holy but undoubtedly contentious opinions, a passable soup might soon be served. My love and reverence go to you, Son of Set, with this scroll.’” Khaemwaset sat back. “Give it to Ramose to hand to a messenger. Preferably a slow and inept one.” Penbuy smiled frostily, his pen still scratching the papyrus. “Really Prince, do you think it necessary to be quite so … so …”
“Forthright?” Khaemwaset finished for him. “You are not paid to criticize the tone of my letters, impudent one, only to write them and get the spelling correct. Now let me seal it.”
Penbuy rose, bowed stiffly, and placed the scroll on the desk.
Khaemwaset had just lifted his ring from the wax seal when the door opened without announcement and Nubnofret swept into the room. Instantly Penbuy bowed himself out. Nubnofret ignored him, coming to her husband and placing a noncommittal kiss on his cheek. Wernuro, her body servant, remained meekly in the background with head bowed. Nubnofret, Khaemwaset thought for the hundredth time as he hid a smile and rose, knew how to keep the members of her staff firmly in their places.
“I see that you have eaten,” his wife remarked. She was dressed in one of the loose, informal robes she liked to wear in the evenings when there were no guests, the voluminously folded scarlet linen draped around her lush curves and tied to one side with a gold-tasselled girdle. A heavy red jasper-and-gold ankh hung from her right earlobe and bumped gently against her exquisitely painted face as she looked up at Khaemwaset. She had shed her wig, and her reddish-brown, chin-length hair formed a perfect frame for her wide, orange-hennaed mouth and green-dusted eyelids.
She was thirty-five years old, still ripely beautiful in spite of the fine lines Khaemwaset knew were fanning across her temples under the black kohl and the slight grooves to either side of those inviting lips. But her voluptuousness was something she would have dismissed had she been aware of it. Brisk, efficient and full of common sense, Nubnofret sailed through the reefs and shoals of household accounts, training of servants, entertaining for her husband and rearing her children with the consummate ease of the woman addicted to duty. She was intensely loyal to Khaemwaset, and for that he was grateful. He knew that, in spite of her need to keep him safely moving in the family dance she had choreographed, in spite of her sharp tongue, she loved him dearly. They had been married for twenty-one years, securely and comfortably.