Scroll of Saqqara(95)
“Yes she is,” Nubnofret said. Her thirst had been great and half her wine was already gone. A pleasant inner warmth was making her languorous. “Sheritra has no confidence in herself at all. She is intelligent and of course a great prize for any aspiring young nobleman, but she will look at none of them. I was greatly surprised when she accepted you so readily.”
“She senses perhaps that I enjoy her company.” Tbubui uncrossed her legs, stretched them out and leaned further into the pillows. “I have a favour to ask you, Princess.”
What a pity, Nubnofret thought lazily. I am always happy to do favours for my old friends, or women of my own standing, but this woman is not yet either. And I had begun to like her. She waited.
“Allow Sheritra to come and stay at my house for a while. I often feel the lack of feminine company, living as I do with two men, and she and I could have much to say to each other. I think I can help her with her appearance and her confidence and she can make me laugh.”
Laugh? Nubnofret thought. Sheritra able to make someone laugh? I suppose the invitation is not so foolish. Khaemwaset was talking some time ago about sending Sheritra to the Fayum to stay with Sunero’s family if I did not stop nagging the girl. Well, she needs nagging. The familiar feeling of mild exasperation Sheritra could always conjure began to itch at Nubnofret. “But Tbubui, what of the blossoming relationship between my daughter and your son?” she objected. “It is not acceptable to put them under the same roof.”
“It is my roof, Highness,” Tbubui reminded her, “and my ethical standards are high. The Princess would of course have her servants with her, and such guards as Khaemwaset saw fit to include in her entourage. We are a somewhat staid household,” she finished, smiling. “We need livening.” Nubnofret capitulated with wine-induced speed. Life without Sheritra for a month or two would be so peaceful, and perhaps she and Khaemwaset might find a new closeness without the barb of her daughter’s personality to come between them.
“She is not just any princess,” she reminded the other woman. “The blood of the gods flows in her veins and as such she must be treated with reverence and guarded well at all times. But …” She smiled. “We will ask her when she returns home and then consult my husband for a final word on the matter. Gods! This heat! Would you like to bathe?”
Tbubui nodded and thanked her hostess. Nubnofret summoned her sweating servants, and the two women were soon standing naked side by side on the bathing slabs, drenched in cool lotus water, wine still in hand and chattering gaily about the latest treatment for softening the hair.
When Sheritra arrived home at sunset, flushed and animated from her day, she found them still deep in conversation, now reclining on reed mats by the pool. The heat was over for the day, and lawn, flower beds and her mother and guest were all saturated in a copper glow from the last of the sun. Both women looked up with a smile as she came to them across the dry grass, and Nubnofret patted the mat by her ample hip.
“Have you had a good day?” she asked, and Sheritra, sinking beside her under the deepening shade of the blueand-white-striped awning, noted the two empty wine jars lying between them and her mother’s pleasant, slurred speech. She was taken aback, for she seldom saw Nubnofret the worse for wine, but she was also secretly amused. The folds of her mother’s face, already, at age thirty-five, freezing into a permanently preoccupied, stern expression, had softened, and her lustrous eyes were full of a contented laziness.
“I have indeed,” Sheritra answered, returning Tbubui’s half-obeisance with a nod. “Harmin and I found a little bay on the west bank about five miles upstream from the city where a neglected old canal emptied into the Nile. It was quite choked up with growth and nests and wildlife and we poked about in it for ages. But we didn’t see a crocodile. We ate in the barge’s cabin because of the heat. Harmin has gone home.” She turned to Tbubui. “I do apologize, Tbubui. If I had known you were here I could have invited him to join you and you could have left together.”
“It does not matter, Princess,” Tbubui replied. “Your mother and I have spent a delightful afternoon free of all male company and I am sure that Harmin’s presence would have spoiled it!”
Sheritra regarded the two of them curiously. They seemed to exude an essence of indolent femininity, an aura of purely womanly shared confidences, that made her slightly uncomfortable. She did not have any close friends of her own sex. She had always scorned the frivolous conversations of the daughters of her father’s acquaintances, silly giggling girls who thought and talked of nothing but fashion, cosmetics, what hairstyles were currently in vogue in the Delta and which young men had the most attractive bodies. She felt, looking from her mother’s somnolent, amused face to Tbubui’s sensuously sprawling limbs that all those subjects had been thoroughly covered by them today. Nubnofret confirmed her suspicion.