Out of the Black Land - By Kerry Greenwood Page 0,164
face, a thin body, long limbs. I clad him in my mind in a priests’ gown, added a decade or so, and now I knew him.
The last time I had seen this man, he had been a priest in the temple on the night that the terrifying old man Userkhepesh, Chief Priest of the Good God Amen-Re, had attempted to frighten me out of my wits and then decided not to poison me.
I had played many games of senet with Userkhepesh in the palace of Amen-Re in Karnak before the mad king moved the court to Amarna. He always won. We had almost become friends. I had enquired after his fate when the temple was disestablished, but no one could tell me where he had gone and I had assumed that he was dead. Perhaps he was.
‘Rise and sit next to me,’ I told the young man. ‘Have some beer and a bite of this good bread, then tell me what brings you to me, face out of my past.’
He drank a mouthful and ate a token crumb of bread which was required of him by courtesy. Then he said, ‘Lord, I have a request from a dying man.’
‘Speak,’ I said. I guessed who this dying man might be. So the old man had not moved from Karnak after all—I should have known that he would not go far from his temple.
‘It is the man who was once Chief Servant of Amen-Re,’ whispered the priest.
‘I thought that it might be. What else could bring you into this dangerous place, and who else would be bound to know where I could be found?’
‘Lord, he is very old now, and dying, but he always knows where people are and what is happening in the Black Land.’
‘Yes,’ I agreed. ‘I will come.’
‘Then you must come now, Lord Ptah-hotep, and secretly.’
What had I to lose? If this was some trap devised by the palace, it was so clever that it deserved to succeed. And what could Pharaoh do to me now that I had not done to myself? I had been stripped of all titles and wealth. I was just Ptah-hotep. I was completely without influence and valueless.
‘Very well. I will leave my refuge and come with you. But you will tell the Princess Sitamen’s guard where we are going and when I will be back—I will not listen—and if I am not returned by my hour, they will tear Thebes apart looking for me. If you are wishing to encompass my death, you can kill me now with a lot less trouble by just pushing me off this wall.’
He said gravely, ‘Lord, that is not my intention or the intention of my master,’ and I believed him well enough.
We went through the alleys and lanes of Thebes. The condition of the people was parlous. By the rubbish through which I had to wade, they were living mostly on dried fish, which is not good for humans. Their beehive ovens were cool. No one had enough grain to bake bread every day and the palace was no longer handing out rations of grain when the season was poor.
It was not lightly that the gods who invented writing, Isis and Thoth, made the same character for ‘bread’ and ‘life.’ For what was the Black Land without bread?
Swollen-bellied children played in the detritus, throwing fish-spines at each other and quarrelling over scraps. I was almost bowled over by a foraging pig which snapped at me, its jaws clumping shut just short of my shin as I hit it a sharp blow on the snout. It snorted and ploughed on through the stinking midden.
‘The animals are growing bolder,’ commented the priest. ‘In the country the desert wolves are creeping into the villages and taking children, now that the Watchers and the army have been diverted to carve out the name of Amen-Re from monuments made a thousand years ago. Masons make scaffolds to climb up and deface our history instead of repairing what we have.’
‘Truly the state of Egypt is bitter,’ I agreed. He led me into a space between two houses just wide enough for me to traverse and knocked at a door.
It opened inwards, which was a mercy, and I bent under the lintel. Lying on a pallet in a small room whitewashed all over like the inside of a clam-shell, was indeed the old man Userkhepesh, wrapped in a linen sheet.
The only light came from a small oil-lamp. He had aged far beyond age.