Out of the Black Land - By Kerry Greenwood Page 0,149
so. I will serve you faithfully.’
‘I accept your service.’ Horemheb put his hand on my head. ‘I will reward your fidelity with love and your loyalty with gold. You are a remarkable woman, Lady Mutnodjme. I do not require your body if you do not wish to give it, and if you wish to lie with my scribe Kheperren then it shall be consummation of this contract as if you were lying with me.’
This was doubly gentle of my husband Horemheb. He knew that marriages have to be consummated or they can be annulled. He knew that I could not have borne the touch of a new lover with anything but cold jaw-clenching endurance.
But Ptah-hotep had loved Kheperren and they were sufficiently similar that I could lie with the scribe almost as though I was lying once again with my heart’s love. I hoped that Ptah-hotep, who should have got past the various doorkeepers by now, would understand. I was sure that he would.
‘Tonight, husband, we have a ceremony to perform, and I cannot eat or make love before that is done,’ I told General Horemheb. ‘But tomorrow, if it pleases you, I will consummate this marriage with your scribe in your place.’
‘That will please me,’ he said. ‘In four days we will be gone and I will not trouble your household or your manner of ruling it. This marriage does me honour, Mistress of the House. Now sit down again, if you will. There is a knot in those neck muscles which I still have not smoothed out.’
***
Kheperren and I laid the pitiful collection of dust and charcoal which had been our lover Ptah-hotep in a niche in the tomb which would one day contain a royal body. The ashes were in a mummiform case. We poured the libations and made the sacrifice, a lamb made out of pastry for we dared not risk a bleat being heard, and a vessel of the best wine. Four soldiers stood impassively on guard as we whispered all the prayers, consecrating our lover to the trial of the weighing of the heart in the name of the abandoned gods, Osiris and Isis and Maat who is truth. Then, because blood was required, we cut our wrists and sprinkled our blood over the tiny casket as we bade farewell to Ptah-hotep and wailed for him as Isis and Nepthys had called to Osiris, ‘Come to thy house!’
Then the soldiers escorted us back to the City of the Sun. I tightened a bandage around my wounded flesh and stemmed Kheperren’s bleeding with another. We could not die yet.
‘He will wait for us,’ I comforted my scribe and brother. ‘He will build for us a little hut amongst the reeds.’
‘He will miss us, even in the Field of Offerings,’ he responded. That was true. The sand crunched beneath our feet. The stars blazed.
‘You are the only woman I have ever lain with,’ he told me as we came close to the city. ‘I had thought myself impotent with women.’
‘You are not,’ I assured him. ‘Let doubters ask Mutnodjme, if you need references.’
‘This consummation will not be against your will, then?’
I took his hand. If I had to lie with a man again, better it should be with this my brother, who loved the same man as I loved.
‘It is with my will,’ I said.
And the next day I lay down against Horemheb’s thigh in the general’s bed, in the manner required of any substitute consummation. In such a way had the King Akhnaten watched the violation of his daughter by Divine Father Ay.
I dismissed the thought from my mind. This was a willing sacrifice. If I closed my eyes, Kheperren felt like Ptah-hotep; the same long muscles, slim body, hard hip-bones, the same scent of cinnamon oil, the same soft hair tickling my face. Washed clean of the ashes and thirst of our mourning, slaked of our fasting and half-drunk on the last of the wine, I caressed Kheperren and he caressed me. I tasted tears on his lips. With a sudden, almost desperate movement, his phallus was inside me, eased in its passage by the oil with which I had been anointed. Horemheb stroked my breasts which were pressed against his body, pinching the nipples which were engorged and hard. I had not expected a climax, but when I felt seed spring inside me, it came. Fast and hard, a joy close to pain, instantly extinguished in remembered grief.