Chapter 2
DUEL NIGHT
Through the lavender and turquoise plies of earliest twilight, a southeast wind singed God-king Khufu stalking across his lakeshore. He hunted for an enemy. An enemy with bones to wrench and blood to wring. On his first venture outside his rooms since his first son Ka’ab’s death five days ago, the God-king prowled up the inlet, ducking under a eucalyptus tree and peering into the teal water. There, he divined his enemy. Beneath papyrus sedge and shuffling shadow, twelve feet of knobbed hide quivered the water. Only the beast’s eyes, vacant and dire, breached the surface.
“Don’t eye me as your dinner yet, devil.” Khufu’s voice struck him as strange. These were his first words since holding up a bloody thumb at the Heb-Sed and asking his dead son, “Is this your blood or mine?”
Khufu flung a willow’s drooping limb from his face. Crouching into a wrestler’s pose, he edged around the animal to his right and into the knee-high rushes. The crocodile slapped its snout on the water. “Mark your territory all you wish. Egypt is mine.”
Khufu feinted toward the beast. It erupted through the water, teeth sawing at him. Khufu drew back just beyond its snout. As it crashed down, the God-king poised and then timed a jump over its snapping jaws. He landed on the beast’s bony back and wheeled around, reaching for its throat and windpipe. Khufu squeezed into the bulk.
The crocodile whipped its head side-to-side, sour breath blasting, teeth clacking at Khufu. It thrashed to throw him off.
“Do you defend children too?”
He’d allowed disaster upon his Ka’ab, his first child, fathered when he and Queen Meritates still loved. Love shared by the children of Gods. The only two such beings on earth. That perfection they expressed in Ka’ab. Now love and Ka’ab had vanished.
When holed up in his rooms, Khufu had believed he could, by ceasing to move, slow Time itself and its rushing of him ever farther from his son; many such miracles took place in ancient stories. He would not again kiss Ka’ab’s cheek, share with him decisions of State or grow older with another being born to be king. Khufu questioned whether tears or blood weighed heavier in him.
But, at the year’s beginning, Egypt required Khufu not as a grieving father but as its God-king, to impress his magic upon the Nile so it would rise sufficiently high to again irrigate Egypt and preserve her from desert and chaos. For this, duly, Khufu had torn himself from his rooms like a crocodile ripping flesh from its kill.
The beast ran. Khufu held on. Across the shore tide, the animal’s webbed feet setting off sounds of suckling mud, Khufu’s arms pulsed with the animal’s heartbeats. By them, he better sensed his own speeding heartbeat. Once at full gallop, the crocodile keeled and pounded Khufu’s back against the shore. His spine drew whorls in the mud as his eyes turned up to see the sunset inflame with copper and gold.
Yes. My Egypt. Silk and honey.
At the reptile’s throat, Khufu’s fingers strained until they were shaking.
The crocodile righted itself and turned to scramble toward deep water. It would try to take Khufu underwater and drown him there.
His arms and thighs binding around the animal’s girth, Khufu slammed his feet into the shore, his last strength wresting the animal back. The crocodile’s snout angled up and its back bent. It twisted, tail slapping wildly. Sharpening his chokehold, Khufu dug in his brittle fingers, ache grinding up to his shoulders.
The beast’s bucking broke down. It slumped, ebbed, stilled.
Khufu whooped so loud his head stung.
The sting gave way to the animal’s death throes that shuddered into his bones. But for his fury, even as its final spasms sickened his gut, Khufu drew out of his tunic a dagger, bared the edge to the beast’s neck and sawed it down to the gurgling gullet.
He released the beast as lifeless as a log.
Rank with the crocodile’s scum, his heart and lungs smarting, Khufu saw not the beast floating away, but his son Ka’ab. Ka’ab’s blood spouted beneath him while the crimson sunset spewed down on him. Khufu couldn’t speak but his mind cried out. His fingers gripped and re-gripped empty air. If only he could strangle that part of himself that lived this father’s misery.
Khufu staggered onto firmer shore and then the granite quay. Twilight stained the air blue.
His killing the crocodile had been not a victory of man over beast, but a pathetic display of anger. A descent into mortality. His humanity trampling his divinity. That abandonment of Egypt he could not permit himself again. During his morning rituals, Khufu bowed before statues of Gods including one of himself as the God-king. As a mortal, he was the god’s lesser twin. As a god, he must submerge his human father’s emotions like red sharks under an azure sea. This was ma’at, the just order of things. Existence depended upon it. As God-king, he was the Lord of Ma’at. It was his covenant with the Gods.
When in view of his palace—the Per-O—God-king Khufu probed himself for magic. His magic to raise the Inundation. His God-king’s duty. In each of his reign’s seventeen years, he’d pictured his magic inside him as a blue lotus bursting through topsoil and opening as the sun.
Now, all that Khufu found were tears. A sodden salt.
He knelt and slapped the flat of his hand on the lake surface. “Erupt. Live again. Erupt.”
Only tears.
In the darkening lapis of late twilight, Khufu looked up the lake’s canal toward the Nile. His brow knotted. “Sun God Ra battles through every night to rise at every dawn. Why am I wallowing in this slack pond?”
The God-king jumped up. Fingers in spasms, he shouted, “We go to the pyramid.”
While Khufu stalked his lakeshore in earliest twilight, tepi m’sheru, Mehi wandered the Nile shoreline that was as dry as a mummy’s skin. He cast his memory for a time before Vizier Ka’ab’s death and his drop into the tomb-robber’s pit.
Last night, for the fifth time, Mehi had dreamt of scarlet firelight in which men struck copper chisels against granite walls. Breaking through, they blundered across the granite floor to the sarcophagus, shoved off its lid, snatched out the corpse and stripped away its gold scarabs. To further light the tomb and see other treasure, they set the corpse on fire. Gods, the horrid stink.
Why am I the responsible son?
Ma’at had placed Horemheb at the head of his family. Mehi was only a son. What could a son do? The robbers would complete the tunnel and break in to the tomb in as few as twenty days.
A breeze swished shoreline papyrus reeds as tall as three of him. Behind them, children giggled as they played in the water. He heard one shaking a sesheshet back and forth. Without thinking, Mehi parted stems in the papyrus tuft, wriggled through the gap and hopped into the water. As a group, the seven children paused only a moment at his sudden emergence. He immediately began splashing and laughing with them. Their whoops and handclaps embraced him as warmly as the water. When a child, Mehi had played like this with his friend Mu, swimming, splashing, floating in the Inundation’s rising waters.
Then, with an odd wobble in his heart, Mehi felt the water go cold. He heard claps of flesh against flesh—the sounds of his father beating his brother. In the bog, his feet stuck and his eyes clamped shut, Mehi sensed a slap against him, his face burning. Over the last several days, his father had slapped and slugged Sebek more than ever. During these beatings, Mehi would shut his eyes but couldn’t shut his ears. His bones seemed to petrify in place while his spirit spread out around Sebek to shield his brother from—
—children screamed, shrill and panicked.
Moments passed before Mehi could re-focus himself on where he stood in the water. Turning, he could just see, twenty yards out, a boy bobbing downstream. The children yelled that something had hit his head. Doubting he’d get to the boy, Mehi dove in.
Despite the low river, currents below the surface flung him, surprising him with their power, trussing his arms to his chest. He rotated to free them and pushed himself above the surface for a breath. Waves plowed into him. Through water lash
ing his face, he saw the boy. Bobbing doll-like. Ten yards ahead. Keeping his eye on the boy, Mehi paddled like a cow, drawing closer. Whitecaps spit into his mouth and his nose.
His heart pounding with the waves, Mehi swam harder. His shoulders strained, his arms weakened. Close now, he stretched for the boy. He missed once, twice. On the fifth try he grasped the boy’s hand. Mehi pulled the arm toward him like a rope and, when close enough, hugged the boy to him.
Lurching in the currents, he pushed up the boy so his mouth was above the waves. With the other arm, Mehi paddled toward shore, wrestling with the dark water. He and the boy barely inched toward shore as they swept down river. Face hot, shoulders aching, Mehi fought against panic. He began to sink.
Desperate for any forward motion, Mehi ducked his head under the rapids and kicked, stroking with one arm while still propping up the boy with the other. Dizzy, he surfaced, lungs mad for air. Then he plunged again and stroked, sucked breath, plunged and stroked. After some minutes, Mehi submerged with no control. His shoulders and arms had no strength, no will. He drifted. A strange warmth steeped through him. The Nile caressed him. Visions of days laughing with Mu in the Inundation tumbled in his mind. How easy to submit.
The long gasp of air that forced itself into his lungs seemed distant from him. Had he and the boy just nearly drowned? Mu’s frenzied voice told him, “Do something.” A fire set in his heart.
Holding the boy atop him, Mehi kicked like a frog. If he could just get a bit more out of himself. Bones in his face throbbed. His vision clouded.
He couldn’t give up.
On his knees, he felt the scrape of gravel. He looked up to see he’d closed on shore. Mehi tried to stand. His legs and back cramped. Still, his soles clamped on solid river bottom.
Hoisting the boy to his shoulders, he three times stumbled, gulping water, coughing. On his fourth try, he balanced on the riverbed and lumbered forward. Rigid as bricks, he yielded the boy to the shore and flopped down alongside him.
By their yelling he heard the children come toward him. His head weighed too much to lift. Then, someone—the mother he later understood—smacked at the boy’s limbs and chest. The boy came to, crying.
The mother said to Mehi, “You saved my boy. You’re a hero.”
Mehi waved his hand. “No, no.” He’d jumped in because he’d had no other choice.
“You are. You went in without hesitating. Thank you, thank you, thank you.” She put her palm atop her breast. “Oh, my heart’s beating so hard.” The mother stood with her child clinging to her. “Thank you.” Bouncing her son in her arms and nearly skipping, she ran off, the children following.
Mehi wasn’t a hero, but the mother’s admiration warmed him. His scarlet nightmare seemed to slough from his eyes and limbs. In its place, a sense of stability coursed through his. He began to wonder if he could prevent his father from completing his terrible sin against Egypt. Would Horemheb listen to his son?
More children ran by toward the water. Mehi realized something else he wanted. In the late twilight lapis, he stood and headed to Khufu’s pyramid.
“Ptah.”
Guards hadn’t let Anhur sleep since the Heb-Sed so many days ago. They hadn’t fed him. His stomach and mind gnarled, but he breathed joy. He had ravaged the royal family. And they wanted his secrets about High-priest Ptah-Du-Au. Anhur wouldn’t tell them anything.
“Ptah.”
They had restrained him to the limestone floor in Annu’s House of Justice. Leaving his broken right wrist to dangle, they’d roped his left forearm to his right thigh. Anhur was sure when they restarted tonight they’d yank off his fingernails, gouge out his eyes and scrape flesh from his bones. He’d be bright red in the dark blue night. He must tell them nothing. Not one thing.
A guard’s wooden rod cracked on Anhur’s forehead. His eyes must have closed.
“Ptah.” Nothing.
The two princes entered again. Anhur spit. The guard rapped his head twice. “Enough,” Hordedef, the one with the limp, told the guard. The princes came up.
“Ptah.”
Shaf, the nasty prince, folded his arms and sneered down. “Sesh. Just like all day and every day.”
Hordedef swung his hand back toward a guard and collected a plate of roasted beef. “You must care for something to eat?” The prince passed the dish under Anhur’s nose. It smelled of heaven. No. No taste must enter his mouth except “Ptah.” His spittle sprayed Hordedef’s face.
As the guard jerked his rod, Hordedef held him back. He wiped his face and squatted down to Anhur’s level. “Merely tell us what we need to—”
“Ptah.”
“We believe someone encouraged you to act against the royal family.”
“Ptah.”
“If you remain unfriendly—“
“Ptah, Ptah, Ptah, Ptah, Ptah, Ptah.”
Biting his lower lip, Hordedef wheeled away. Anhur grinned at the prince’s frustration.
Shaf thrust his face below his brother’s nose. “Let me at him.”
Hordedef shook his head.
Shaf said, “How many days will we listen to him yell ‘Ptah’ at us? It was you alone who supported Khufu’s mad arrogance to allow commoners into the temple.”
“This king, our father, is keen to be unprecedented.”
“Yes, and to reestablish order we must ensure this scorpion acted alone. You said it yourself.”
Hordedef tensed.
“It’s time for my method. What else is there?”
Standing up, Prince Hordedef smoothed his tunic. “Go.”
Shaf pivoted and grinned at Anhur.
Anhur shivered.
His smile curling, Shaf drew a silver knife from his waist cinch. He leveled its blade under his eyes to mirror his dark stare at the prisoner, then drawing closer until there was space between their eyes for only the blade. Shaf pressed the knife edge against the prisoner’s skin, enough to slice a thin streak of pain. “Feel how sharp, not like that crude tool you used against the vizier of Egypt. Without a nose, you won’t smell your stink. And,” Shaf flicked the knife’s point at Anhur’s right ear, “if slime like you don’t listen, no need for ears, correct?”
Anhur’s stomach rippled. Blood began to drip from his nose and ear. A sound like that of rushing water filled his ears. Anhur only squeaked “Ptah” this time.
At that, Hordedef stepped forward. “Wait, Shaf.”
Shaf grunted but moved to one side while twirling the blade for Anhur to continue watching.
Hordedef leaned down. He put his hand on Anhur’s shoulder and searched his eyes. “Won’t you at least tell us your name?”
Anhur looked up, wet his lips. “Amony.” Oh, no. He’d told them his real name. Not even the name Ptah-Du-Au gave him. He’d fouled his mission with his unclean family name. No, no, no. His heart seemed to squeal like a stuck pig. He saw Shaf’s knife. He opened his mouth.
Hordedef shouted, “The knife.”
Anhur rammed his tongue down on the blade, splitting it with a whip of his head. Hordedef pulled Anhur away who growled in pain. His tongue, dangling from his mouth, gushed blood and garbled his screams.
Two other princes, twins, ran in. “Djedi’s with the King at the palace. Bring him here.” One twin rushed out.
“Open his mouth.” Hordedef ripped a strip from his tunic. “He’ll drown.” When Shaf pried open Anhur’s jaws, Hordedef stuffed the linen around the bleeding. But blood still gushed.
“That won’t work,” Shaf said. “Here.” He removed the rag, grasped the end of Anhur’s tongue and ripped the last strands holding it. Anhur screamed again. “He wasn’t talking anyway.” Shaf tossed the tongue down. Anhur watched it scrawl red exclamations across the white limestone. Hordedef and Shaf clamped the rag on the spurting wound, blood up their forearms.
Anhur didn’t know he could hurt more than when his parents left him alone. But he’d brought on this pain himself. He was in control. Could the princes hear his God of Tongue’s p
assion flowing from his mouth?
Ptah-Du-Au was safe. Anhur laughed.
When Mehi entered the Giza site two hours later, the stars and first-quarter moon lustered him in the indigo night as it did the pyramid. A half-mile ahead, the pyramid’s present shape—top flat and sloping sides—resembled a mastaba tomb. Dread sank through Mehi; his father might be, at that moment, fouling the noble’s mastaba. Mehi fought the dread by focusing on this tomb, the pyramid. From the southeast, Mehi saw its earthen ramps entangling it as if nature meant to re-claim it. Nothing but the supernatural could. Eighteen years in construction—one-third its planned height at one hundred eighty feet—the God-king’s pyramid imposed its power like a God’s hammer. It would hammer here always. And always would.
The glory of Khufu my God-king.
It struck Mehi that only from the meager view of a moment could the quarter moon or half pyramid be seen as partial. When he allowed his mind to meld all moments into united Time, he accepted the pyramid and moon as continual progressions, proceeding as surely as the Nile and God Ra. For them, there were no moments. Their attaining mature glory was merely a facet of the ever-approaching future. Thinking this, Mehi began to realize that these royal processions suggested a path for him that would eventually repay for his father’s crime. First, he would join a pyramid crew. There he would sacrifice the love, sweat and exhaustion of his legs, back and heart and reach at the summit the redemption of his family.
For two years, one pyramid foreman after another had rejected Mehi as too small. To build up his legs and shoulders for this construction season, he had for several months tied larger and larger boulders to his waist and dragged them up and down desert dunes. This season, Mehi couldn’t let the foreman, tell him “No.”
To Mehi’s left stood the gate of a six-hundred-foot-long wall through which lucky workers passed into the sacred pyramid site. On this side of the wall stretched the pyramid’s support town of butchers, brewers, bakers, potters, fish gutters and craftsmen. Mehi stopped at the gate house and explained that he wanted to see a foreman about joining a crew. Though the guards often turned him away, this one seemed eager for Mehi to enter. Maybe Mehi could even join the same team his friends Kenna and Pabes worked on.
Mehi moved onto the main street, paved in clay. More workers than Mehi expected filled the meal galleries. Few if any of the year-round craftsmen had retired to the barracks. Most men carried unlit torches. Mehi didn’t stop to ask why.
He found a foreman, sitting with several others, slapping roasted beef on his tongue.
Mehi blurted, “I am ready to join your team.” Before the foreman could answer, Mehi rushed on, “When I see the pyramid, I see it finished with its gold capstone and polished limestone facing shining like heaven. Every one of its stones fit together like fingers in a fist but it depicts sunlight, sunlight angling through clouds, crystal-like and heavenly.” He closed his eyes to avoid seeing the foreman express any discouragement. “Compared to the pyramid, we are as frail as ants but we create it. Because it protects our God-king’s in eternity, it protects us forever. Our ecstasy is Egypt’s heart, the God-king’s tomb, Khufu’s and Egypt’s eternity. Mehi panted, but he had finished. “I’m strong and ready.”
The foreman and the others laughed. Mehi opened his eyes. He’d said foolishness.
“Slow down, boy. You can work here.”
Mehi wasn’t sure what he’d heard.
“You’ve come on the right night. You can start working straight away.”
Mehi would have jumped up and down if it wouldn’t have appeared childish in front of the foreman. I am on the God-king’s pyramid.
“Tonight we will cheer up the mourning King. Ever think about being a star?”
Mehi had no idea what the foreman meant, but cheering God-king Khufu was all he wanted.
From his felucca in the Nile’s midnight indigo, Khufu watched the Milky Way and the quarter moon reflect on his pyramid’s east face. He held out his arms at the angle of the pyramid’s faces and welcomed the heavenly light upon him. While the river buffeted the felucca, he imagined the flexing Inundation heft barley, onion and melon from deep in the ground. Feeding his people.
He laughed—nearly. Had his sorrow as a father depleted his God’s magic? Was the Nile rising suitably?
At the wharf, Prince Hordedef greeted his father by kissing the ground. When standing again, he clasped his hands to the outsides of Khufu’s shoulders. The now eldest prince possessed a melancholy pallor. The sweep of his face from overbite to high cheekbones suggested a feline delicacy. And, his leg. Hordedef had adapted to his defect so well that no one could be certain which leg he favored. Except Khufu. Like Osiris and Isis who created their perfect child Horus, Khufu and Meritates had created their one perfect child in Ka’ab. When their love died, hadn’t mangled Hordedef come?
The knowledge that he had caused his son’s imperfection gripped his heart like a sweating fist. So, he focused on Hordedef’s eyes that gleamed like black faience. Earlier today the prince had persisted in interrupting Khufu’s grieving to beg his father to inspect the pyramid site.
Khufu considered that his grief might be nullifying his magic. And no doubt further confounding his insides, to replace Ka’ab as vizier he had to choose between sons: Prince Hordedef, at twenty-four years of age, the elder and therefore the traditional heir, and Prince Shaf, the more physically suitable.
Hordedef’s bodyguard helped him down to kiss the earth. The thousands of workers knelt down with him and then rose to cheer prayers and wave to their God-king.
When carried on his palanquin from the felucca toward the pyramid, Khufu foresaw himself as his mummy united with his ka during its funeral procession, citizens from every province weeping on the stone. Khufu’s grin pushed his cheeks toward his ears.
At the pyramid’s base, father and son dismounted their palanquins. Hordedef held up a strip of satin. “Sire, will you indulge me?”
“You would blindfold the God-king?”
“While I escort him on an ascent to the stars.”
“Let’s ascend, son.”
Hordedef tied satin over his father’s eyes, setting him in darkness. Khufu felt his son put one arm in his.
Commencing up each level or course of stones in the pyramid like steps, Khufu winced at the sound of his son’s shamble of scrape, pause and step. They climbed toward the pyramid’s current summit, the ninety-fifth course—Khufu imagined it with its completed two hundred courses. Their linen gowns flapped in the northern breeze that carried up the workers’ chants of “Khufu, Khufu, Khufu.”
Hordedef halted them both. He removed the blindfold and then turned Khufu around. “Behold.”
The God-king opened his eyes to a bewildering panorama of stars. Like countless grains of salt tossed and sunlit before his eyes, he saw more stars than he thought were possible. As far north, east, south and west as he could scan, stars blazed above and, amazingly, below him. They glinted red, yellow, green. Heaven in pageant. Gods had elevated Khufu to the Celestial Nile.
“Khufu, Khufu, Khufu.”
Relieved of the Earth, the God-king streamed light from his limbs, eyes and phallus over all Egypt, horizon to horizon. This was the magic of the first Gods. The perfect ma’at of their thirteen thousand years on Earth now radiated from him.
Yes. Yes. Yes. The Inundation ... I feel it rising.
Sinews tingling, Khufu gradually made sense of the lights. Tens of thousands of workers carried flaming torches. The God-king said to Hordedef, “You arranged this.”
“They looked forward to it.”
“Khufu, Khufu, Khufu.”
Absorbing what lay before him, Khufu meditated: Hordedef is supreme in organizing this spectacle. Still, his body cannot summon the Inundation as the God-king for these good people must. He is not the promise that Ka’ab was.
Was.
Khufu’s resurging tears stung his eyes. He squeezed them back. He took the torch from Hordedef who retreated int
o shadow.
Prince Shaf might not possess Hordedef’s ideas for improving Egypt, but he was lively and shrewd. His body was not so broken as to spill the divine magic that Khufu would bequeath to him. How great must a God-king be to protect his million children of Egypt?
The workers’ cry of “Khufu” broke like thunder, stamping his name into the landscape.
Their God-king thrust his torch forward, saluting them.
“Khufu, Khufu, Khufu.”
He decided who must be vizier and become the next God-king.
Just past midnight, hours after joining in the privilege to help build Khufu’s pyramid, Mehi understood the foreman’s comment about his becoming a star. Like so many lights in the heavens, he and thousands of workers held up torchlight to his God-king perched upon the pyramid’s highest course. God-king Khufu reflected back from his place in the Celestial Nile of the infinite sky. Mehi’s body seemed buoyant as if in water. He chanted o cheer his God-king.
“Khufu, Khufu, Khufu.”
And as a pyramid builder, he was as responsible for Egypt as any Egyptian, even as much, in his way, as the God-king. Honoring Mehi this way, the Gods had elevated him. He could do something for Egypt. He’d do his part as an honorable citizen of the great God-king Khufu.
“Khufu, Khufu, Khufu.”
Like a granite block setting into place in the pyramid, a second step to redeem his family occurred to Mehi. He determined that he would stop his father.
Some small hour after midnight in the desert east of Annu, blackness swallowed the criminal Anhur. Face up, ropes tied to four stakes splayed each limb. Twenty yards away, the guard sat nodding before a dwindling fire. Out of the blackness, a figure in silken robes crawled toward the killer. The figure clamped a hand over Anhur’s mouth, waking him. His eyes shot open wide like those of a trapped cat. Cutting the binds with a knife, the figure then drew Anhur away on the scratching sand.