SIX

Not only could I still feel my mother’s presence, but she was not far away, and I knew our Pharaoh was with her. Since my great-grandfather, however, had no one now but myself to listen, he no longer offered his voice. Instead, his thoughts were given to the silence of the night, out to the Gods and spirits in the darkness beyond the light of the fireflies. I knew that in whatever room, or on whichever path of the garden my mother might be, the story of my great-grandfather and Honey-Ball was visiting her by every silent path of the night, by the scent of flowers and in the breeze through the palms. I even knew that as much as my mother had desired to leave, my great-grandfather was not that much displeased for he could still feel our Pharaoh’s attention, quick with thirst to hear the story. Indeed, the night had never been more alert.

Once again I began to lose all sense of my own age, even as the echo of a sound may wonder whether it is the sound itself. So I sat in all the power of his silence, and heard the murmur of long-gone voices, even the whisper of little queens as they passed through the royal palms on their way to the lake, yet I felt so close to my great-grandfather while he sat staring silently at me, that his meditations rose like water from a spring and I was wiser in knowledge than when he spoke aloud, and saw him on the night he crossed the gardens to ask Honey-Ball if she would flee with him to New Tyre. It was then he remembered the story Heqat told of the ugly woman who kept her husband free of every disease, and he laughed aloud. Honey-Ball’s face was beautiful as he held her, and her body was as great as the wealth of Usermare, yet he knew she must be the ugly woman of whom Heqat had spoken. He would never suffer any ill while he lived with her, nor would their children. She would protect them all. So he loved her for these riches, and when, late at night, he slipped back to his own house, he could not sleep for the clarity of the sentiments he felt. He could smell the keen air of every morning they would know in the mountains on the long road from Megiddo to Tyre, and even the perils appealed to him as pleasures. He could show Ma-Khrut the resources of his courage once they were in the forests. More than ever before, he felt bold as a God.

On the next night, therefore, in the sweet silence that followed love, full of honor, and most content that they had embraced without a ceremony of magic on this night nor the night before, but had come forth in all the quiet yearning of a brother and sister, he held her face between his hands, much aware of the great sky above her house where the Gods might be listening, and whispered of how they would yet be wed and live with many children. And as he spoke, he knew the perils of the journey, for he perceived how much they would need her magic to reach any other land.

She answered, “It is better here.”

He had a clear view through her eyes of all she would give up: the jars and boxes that held her amulets, her powders, and her animal skins. She saw them as equal to a city, even as the fortress of her powers, but so soon as he was ready to tell her that she would have all of that again in another place, she asked, “How dear will children be to you?”

“We must have many.”

“Then you do not want to run away with me,” she said. Her eye had no tears, and her voice no sorrow as she told the story, yet when she finished, she began to weep. The child of Usermare had been in her belly, she said. And she had lost that child, her first child, on the night Usermare cut off her toe.

“I do not believe that,” he said.

“It is true. I lost the child, and I lost what was in me to make other children.” Her voice was as firm as the roots of the largest tree in the Gardens of the Secluded. “That,” she said, “is the true reason I grew fat.”

In the pain of listening to her, his thoughts ran past like riderless horses.

She got up from the bed and lit a pot of incense. With every smoke he took into his throat, he had the certainty that his life was shorter by each one of these scents, and the hour of his most unlucky hour was coming in, even as his breath was going out. On the inside of her belly would his last seed expire.

Unable to bear the misery of their silence, he began to make love to her again, but he felt thick with stupor. He might as well have been asleep in a swamp and lay beside her, wondering whether the power of the circle drawn forty-two times around his head might keep her from knowing how foul were the pits of his mood.

She did not speak, but upon them, sour as the odor of old blood, was the weight of her purposes. No love would ever be so near as the triumph of her craft. Lying silently by her side, he spent the night waiting for that hour before the dawn when he must leave. He did not wish to stay, but the depth of her thoughts (which he could not enter) lay upon him like the carcass of a beast, and indeed they passed the night like two much-wounded animals.

Yet, in the last interval before he left, she allowed him to come close once more to her thoughts. As a traveler on a barge can listen to the murmurings of the Nile and know the spirit of the water, so did he perceive that she was searching through her wisdom for a ritual that could strike Usermare with force.

Nor was he surprised in the morning when he returned to her house and saw, by the nature of her preparations, that she would make an Address to Isis.

Honey-Ball had spoken of how dangerous this ceremony could be. Her choice was as bold as his own plan to escape, and a breath of love returned. His daring might have inspired hers. So, Menenhetet refused all food offered to him this day, touching neither melon nor beans nor goose, and went early to the house of Honey-Ball. It was common for Menenhetet to take his dinner with one or another little queen, even a good omen. The appearance of the Governor might induce a visit by Sesusi Himself. On this evening, however, neither he nor Honey-Ball took more than a dish of cooked wheat on a plate made of papyrus. Then, in full view of her eunuchs, and of any little queens strolling by the house, he left. He even lingered in the lane outside her walls and spoke to other little queens and waited for the darkness. There would be no moon tonight, and a visit by Sesusi was unlikely. So soon as the eunuchs of Honey-Ball were dismissed, he came back over the wall.

Honey-Ball was wearing white sandals and a gown of transparent linen. Her perfume spoke of white roses and her breath was sweeter than her perfume. He wondered if it was the presence of Isis rising from the wheat they had eaten. Honey-Ball had a breath that could come forth like a blossom, or reek of foul curses, and on many a night, he knew the stench of the Duad. On this evening, however, her breath was calm, and the red amulet of Isis about her waist gave composure.

Now, she entered upon the invocation. Honey-Ball would call upon Isis in the voice of Seti the First. Ma-Khrut might be esteemed by many powers and spirits, but only a Pharaoh would be admitted to those elevations where Isis dwelled. Indeed, Honey-Ball had found a spell in the Royal Library of Usermare that would call forth the full powers of Isis if spoken by a dead Pharaoh. So she must summon such a Ka. Enveloped in His presence, she could speak like a King.

She stepped outside the circle, therefore, to remove her gown, and took out a white skirt, golden sandals, and a golden chestplate large enough to cover her breasts. Then, to the astonishment of Menenhetet, she opened another chest and withdrew a Double-Crown of fine stiff linen made, he realized, by her own hands, and it was more than a cubit in height. She placed this upon her head, with a chin-beard to her mouth, and by the time she stepped into the circle and laid the red amulet on the altar, her full mouth was now altered into the stern lips of Seti—at least as Menenhetet knew him by many a temple drawing.

Then in a voice of much authority she began the invocation that would bring the Ka of that Pharaoh forth.

While Menenhetet lay on his back, his head against the altar, and her foot upon his chest (so that he looked up at a body and face as fierce and massive as the great Pharaoh who had been the Father of Usermare) Honey-Ball began to recite a poem:

She said it, and Menenhetet, lying beneath her, repeated it, their voices in unison, and the lines were said many times. As she spoke, she lay pinches of incense on the burning pots beside his body until the room was heavy with smoke, and the heat of her heart rose higher. Her voice moved through air so thick her breath shifted the smoke like clouds.

“O You,” she said, “Who were the greatest of Pharaohs and the Father of the Great Usermare, and are twice the greatness of this Pharaoh, Your Son, Who is called Ramses the Great, know, then, the sound of my voice that calls to You for I am Ma-Khrut, the daughter of my father, Ahmose of Sais, who was born in Your Reign.

“Great Seti, Greatest of all Pharaohs, let Yourself be known by Your Power, by Your Rage, and by the Glories of Your Reign. For Your Son, Usermare-Setpenere, has torn down Your Temple in Thebes. He has turned to the wall all the great words that are spoken of His Father Seti. In these Temples, praise for His Father is silent. The stones have been choked. If You hear me, may Your First Ka descend upon me like a tent.” She was silent. Then she said: “O Seti, come to me.”

She spoke in the clear and perfect tongue of a Pharaoh, her left hand pointing out before her North to the altar, North to the lands of Sais on the Delta, and Menenhetet felt the Ka of the dead Monarch descend upon her like a tent of the lightest linen, and she-in-the-Ka-of-Seti stood with her foot upon him. He saw the green circle on the floor, and it burned with the red of the amulet on the altar. The cries of birds came across the silence of the sky from the time of Seti, and Menenhetet sat up so that the hand of the Father of Usermare could grasp his hair, and indeed his hair was seized, and he felt the great force of the Father of Usermare in the hand that was on his hair, and it lay like the weight of a bronze statue upon him.

Then Menenhetet heard the voice of the Ka of Seti speaking to Isis: “O Great Goddess,” said this voice, “You are the mother of our grain, and the Lady of our bread. You are the Goddess of all that is Green. You govern all clouds, swamps, fields of wheat and every meadow of flowers. So, You are stronger than all the Temples of Amon.” Now a mist arose from the altar, and a smell of the sweetness of the fields was in the air.

“Great Goddess, hear the shame of Seti the First. For His Son moves the stones of His Temple. The blocks of marble are turned. The glories of Seti are turned to the wall. What has been to the front is now to the back.”

“It is true,” said Menenhetet.

“Old odors stir from these stones. They speak from the earth that has buried them. Let these stones fall upon Ramses. Let His Heart be crushed by the stones of Seti.”

Waves went out from the Ka of Seti and passed through Menenhetet. Waves went out through the wind and through the water, waves of flame, and great contortions of the flesh, and all of it was in the hand above his head.

“Your mouth commands Ra. The Moon is Your Temple. All mountains come down to You.”

On the altar, the amulet was glowing with a molten light white as the fires of metal. Now, Menenhetet could not breathe. The altar trembled and tottered and crashed like the stones of the temple of Seti. The cry of a captured bird shrieked in his ears. Now, Menenhetet was shaken by a great fury and the Ka of Seti passed from her to him, even as the altar had fallen, and although he had been told by every one of her instructions that he must remain motionless at the end to aid her in thanking Isis (and thereby assisting Her departure) and then must stand up to thank the Ka of Seti, Menenhetet made a sound instead like a beast, and the Ka of Seti that was in him became as fierce as a wild boar. There, beside the shattered altar, he mounted Honey-Ball and made love as he never had before, and she was sweet beneath him even as Menenhetet came forth in a voice loud enough to wake Horus of the South (so that in the morning, more than one little queen would say the serpent of all evil must have traversed the Gardens last night) and Menenhetet knew that the hands of the thousand and one Gods Who surrounded Usermare were no longer joined. For in the sound of his own great roar was the voice of Seti thundering in wrath at the overturning of the stones in His Temple, and again Menenhetet made love in a fury to Ma-Khrut, and turned her about so as to know her by each mouth, the Mouth of her Flower, the Mouth of her Fish, the Mouth of the Pit, and gave both of his two mouths to her so that she knew him well. Beyond the walls of the Secluded, in the great plazas and gardens of the High Palace and the Little Palace, out to the city of Thebes itself, and down to the river, he could feel the wrath of Seti enter the mutilated stones of the new temples, and Menenhetet knew that Usermare was disturbed in His calm, like the water of the sea before a storm.

Yet when all was done, Honey-Ball said, “I do not know what happened. The Ka of Seti the First was not supposed to pass from me to you.”

Through the night, she was much agitated by the unforeseen turn of the ceremony and greatly depressed through all of the following morning.