Egypt

4

I slept badly. Perhaps it was the rotten wine. Perhaps it was the look on Khety’s face as I left him in that dark backstreet. It haunted me. But I had other, more pressing concerns. Usually I was the first to awaken in the household, but the light and the noises from the street beyond the walls told me I was late. The space next to me was empty but still warm. I laid my hand briefly on it, wishing Tanefert was still lying there. Some days it seemed we hardly saw each other. Suddenly I felt a deep sadness well up inside me from nowhere. I threw myself out of bed quickly to evade it. I rubbed my face with my hands, to persuade it back into life, and prepared myself to confront another day.

My three daughters-Sekhmet, Thuyu and Nedjmet-glanced at each other quickly, knowingly, as I entered the room.

‘Good morning, Father!’ they called out, obviously amused by my lateness. I swung my son, Amenmose, five years old, up on to my lap, where he sat, happy in the crook of my arm. The girls were enjoying the luxuries from Nakht’s food parcel.

‘Good morning, fair ladies.’

They giggled at my clumsy paternal attempt at breakfast banter. Tanefert kissed me lightly on the forehead. Her black hair, threaded with silver, was tied back, and as always she was cheerful; but I could see the weariness and worry in her face.

‘Be gentle with your father, girls.’ She placed a bowl of milk down beside me. I offered some to Amenmose, who shook his head, so I drank it myself.

The girls gazed at me as they ate their breakfast sweet rolls.

‘You look like Thoth in a bad temper,’ Thuyu laughed suddenly, unable to bear the silence any longer.

‘And do you know what baboons do when they’re in a bad mood?’ I asked.

‘They sulk,’ said Nedjmet, the youngest, and herself once prone to such moods.

‘They fight. It’s vicious,’ offered Sekhmet, at twenty-one, the oldest, and by general agreement wisest.

I shook my head.

‘They cry,’ I replied.

The girls looked surprised by this.

‘What’s the matter? Haven’t you ever seen a baboon cry?’ I asked.

‘No, show us,’ challenged Thuyu.

I pulled my face down in as pronounced a parody as I could accomplish of a depressed baboon.

‘There’s no difference. You always look like that,’ said Nedjmet.

‘It’ll stay like that if you’re not careful,’ warned Sekhmet.

‘It’s true, it doesn’t look all that different,’ added Tanefert, as she passed by. ‘Now leave your father in peace, and get on.’

The girls noisily kissed me farewell, and left to go about their day, while Amenmose and I remained sitting together contentedly in the quietness that had descended on the house.

‘Father,’ he said, seriously.

‘Yes,’ I answered, wondering what profound discussion of mortality or life was about to begin.

‘You know Grandfather’s dead?’

My father had died almost a year ago, peacefully, at home. It was what we call a good death. The children had become obsessed with his passing to the Otherworld, and the events that followed, worrying about his resurrection in the afterlife, observing all the rites with exact custom, learning about his ka, ba and akh spirits, and drawing the hieroglyphics for each of them: the two upstretched human arms for the ka, the life force; the human-headed bird of the ba, that part of us which is individual to ourselves, which could take any form it desired, and travel between the worlds of the living and the dead; and the ibis of the akh, the immortal part of us which returns to the stars after we die. I had of course not told them that the embalmer’s high charges, together with those of the priests, who would conduct regular rites, and the burial itself, had taken up all our meagre savings, and that we had had to borrow at an alarming rate of interest to complete and furnish the frankly very ordinary tomb in which my father’s body now lay, next to my mother’s, as he had wished. If my career had not lapsed into the doldrums, we could have afforded a far finer tomb for him, and I wished it could have been so.

‘So what is he doing now?’

‘Well, he’s finishing his breakfast, and thinking about what to do with the day. He’ll probably go fishing. There’s plenty of time to fish in the afterlife…’

My father had taken me fishing on his reed boat all through my youth, and had delighted in doing the same with my son; they would both sit for hours in a pleasure of patience. Patience was not one of my son’s virtues, but he had never been happier, it seemed, than when he was in a boat with his grandfather. Together, they would watch the busy life of the river, with its population of boats and fishermen, lines of poor women in bright robes washing clothes by the shore, animals grazing and lowering their heads to drink, and great flocks of birds flying overhead to their retreats in the reed marshes, diving down to catch fish. He missed the trips, and he missed my father.

‘Can we go fishing?’

His face was earnest and hopeful.

‘Not today. Soon.’

He wrestled himself out of my lap.

‘Why not?’ he demanded, his little fists and face suddenly clenched with anger.

‘Because I have to work today. We’ll go soon, I promise,’ I said.

‘You always say that, and we never do go!’ he shouted.

And then he ran out into the yard.

I rubbed my face. Tanefert just shook her head.

‘Go and tell him you’ll take him later.’

‘I can’t. I promised Nakht I would help him with something.’

She gazed at me.

‘He needs you…’

‘I know. And we need the payments I earn from Nakht. How else will we eat? What do you want me to do?’

We stared at each other for a tense moment.

‘You and that baboon deserve each other. You’re both turning into angry old men,’ she said, and disappeared with the basket of clean clothes she had been folding.

I made my presence known at Medjay headquarters, as I made sure I did every day. Accompanied by Thoth, I strode under the carved stone image of the Wolf, Opener of the Ways, our standard. The inner courtyard was quiet; just a few people-representatives and petitioners, and women waiting with food for their imprisoned sons or husbands, or bribes for the guards-stood or squatted in the shrinking shadows of the morning. The heat was already scorching. Nebamun’s office door was shut. A few Medjay colleagues nodded at me in passing, and Panehesy, the Nubian sergeant, raised his hand to invite me to join him in the morning conference of other officers. I respected Panehesy for his ability to protect his officers from the worst of the politics of the bureaucracy above us all, but these days he had to adhere strictly to the protocols, the deference and the grim compromises required in dealing with Nebamun.

‘Another day of fun and games,’ he said blithely, as he passed out the day’s duties. He handed me down what he could: usually street patrols. Today was the same. It was a long time since I had been given a good, solid murder to get my teeth into. I knew it wasn’t Panehesy’s fault. But I felt like a stranger to myself.

‘What about last night?’ I asked.

‘Five down, fifty-five thousand to go,’ joked a young officer, earning a brief laugh from the others. ‘No disrespect intended,’ he added, nodding at Panehesy.

‘I should hope not,’ he replied coolly.

‘Let the gangs kill each other off, it saves us the trouble of dealing with them,’ said another. The men nodded in agreement.

‘Do you have other ideas about last night?’ Panehesy asked me. The others waited for my reply.

‘No,’ I replied. ‘Except that one day the gangs are going to be running this city, if we keep ignoring what’s happening out there.’

‘And just what do you think we can do about that?’ asked the first officer.

I shrugged.

‘Our job?’ I said.

The other men looked annoyed by that.

‘Our job is to keep order on the streets of the city. Not to intervene in gang wars we can’t win,’ said Panehesy quickly. ‘And anyway, the culprits have been arrested. They confessed this morning.’

‘I bet they did,’ I said. ‘And presumably they’ve been executed, too?’

I gazed at Panehesy, and he had the decency to look away first.