Out of the Black Land - By Kerry Greenwood Page 0,43

for the feast of the Victory-of-Horus-Over-Set and roasted, after which sausages and smoked meats were made from the remains and many a poor household fed for the summer on this cursed beast.

Khons had agreed that this was not logical but stated that Egypt had so many interesting local customs that visitors never made sense of them and that, anyway, if I wanted to taste swine he would take me and Merope to the Victory-of-Horus feast in the village of Thebes and we could eat it there. He emphasised that all meat from pigs must be cooked thoroughly, and that it was unsafe to eat it raw.

Merope and I had had no difficulty in promising faithfully not to make a meal of raw swine.

I realised that I was considering the swine problem because I did not want to think about the soft flesh of my sweet sister pressed and impregnated by that old man. It seemed wrong, cruel. Youth goes to youth, that was the way it had always been. I was very angry with my mother and father for marrying the one beautiful daughter to an impotent fanatic, and lost my train of thought.

‘What shall we do with this thieving baker?’ asked the Queen. Tey gave her invariable answer to all problems involving humans.

‘Flog him,’ she said, shutting her mouth with a snap.

Ptah-hotep

Things went more easily for me and my office once the approbation of the high priest was known—and it was known with amazing speed. Palaces have very efficient gossip-networks and the gifts-of-welcome, which had been conspicuously absent, began to pour in.

I had to purchase two more slaves to open and catalogue them and hire another scribe to send thank-you notes. On Meryt’s advice, I bought Nubians, and that caused some murmuring. People said that I had a taste for black flesh, or that I was secretly part-Nubian. This might have been true. My father was always cagey about who my mother’s family had been and where he had acquired her. But what I needed was a household which would get along with Meryt, my chief slave and housekeeper, and she naturally preferred her fellow countrymen. Hani, Tani and Teti were pleasant people, cheerful enough, though showing marks of cruel usage, and seemed to be happy with their change of occupation. It never once occurred to me, as someone suggested, that the Nubians might mutiny and massacre me during the night. The people who were trying to kill me had all been pure-bred Egyptians.

I was delighted to find that my principal scribes were attentive and intelligent, and by balancing Khety’s account against Hanufer’s, I could arrive at a reasonable view of any situation.

My office was complete when the Master of Scribes brought me Bakhenmut, returned from the feast of Apis.

They found me listening to Hanufer’s account of the depredations of a landlord, who was demanding higher taxes than the Inspectors had assessed, in return for what he said was a spell for conferring magic fertility on seed, direct from Isis herself. The farmers who had not bought it had found their promising fields of barley and spelt-wheat withered overnight. This might, of course, have been supernatural but it seemed suspicious.

‘A letter to the Chief Watcher of that village, Hanufer,’ I dictated:

‘To the Chief of the Watchers of the village of the Son of Horus, Greetings. May your eyes never grow dim and your vigilance be maintained. Find out the movements of men around the stricken fields at night, and taste the soil of the fields where the crop has died. If you have reason to think that they may have been spread with salt, arrest the landlord and bring him before the court of the Nomarch.

‘Call also the Principal Priestess from the Temple of Isis and ask her to perform an apology to her goddess, who will have been affronted by this fraud—this to be paid for by the landlord.

‘If you find nothing to suggest fraud but instead divine intervention, then divert the debts of the farmers to the Temple of Isis, who presumably had a reason in bespelling some fields and blighting others. Convey this to the priestess also. Know that if you are virtuous and diligent, Pharaoh and the gods are well aware of what you do and you will be rewarded. Report the result to me so that I may instruct the temple to adjust the taxes. The Lord Ptah-hotep, usual titles.

‘How is it that you know of that trick about the salt, my lord Ptah-hotep