The Dance He Did Not See
Kian had filled a Cretan clay jar—vividly painted with olive trees and cattle—brimful of wine, set chives to steep in it, and was waiting for Pesejet.
"Sit down."
"All right..."
Pesejet lowered herself into the acacia chair with its plump cushion, and Kian, who had been dipping a scrap of linen into the honey in a bronze bowl, went still.
"Do you want this neck treated, or don't you?"
"What?"
She had let her guard down. His scolding burst out of him, and she startled so hard that tears spilled in a rush down her cheeks. One heavy thing after another had fallen on her; she had been near weeping even sitting still.
"Use your head. You walk in with your hair hanging loose like that—where's the medicine going to stick, your neck or your hair?"
"...My hair, I suppose."
"Then stop crying. Stop!"
Kian went on saying it, gently smoothing the hair of Pesejet where she sat before him.
"We'll move in the dark, dressed as a priestess. Even if we run into a patrol, they won't find it easy to check so far as the color of your eyes."
There was a terrible tale: that any foolish man who met a priestess's gaze with lust in his heart found fire kindling in his own eyes and was reduced to ash in an instant, leaving no mummy behind, and so was barred forever from the eternal world. No one would readily stare straight into a priestess's eyes.
"What if they ask to see papers?"
"Show them the certificate I was given at the temple of Neith."
"Then what will you do?"
"I'll dress as a woman. I'll say I'm Iuni's wife."
Reality had grown so crushing that tears came over nothing at all, yet the picture of Kian in women's clothes startled a bright laugh out of Pesejet—the first in a long while.
"You're right. You are pretty. Dress you up even a little, and you'd look every bit a woman."
"Prettier than you, I'd bet."
Even as they teased, Kian combed her hair and pinned it up with more care than any hairdresser.
"I came to Sebua without a scrap of shame, but I never thought she'd go this far for us. Didn't she hate Iuni?"
"I don't know about those two. Even when they were on good terms, every night she'd truss Iuni up tight, choke him to the very threshold of the underworld, and beat him with a whip made from an ox's tail—"
Pesejet stopped. Only now did it seem she might truly understand the things Sebua had said. After the Night of Hathor, the world was different.
"Oh? So they were never close to begin with?"
Kian still looked upon the world with innocent eyes, and he still did not understand.
"You're the one who surprises me most."
"How?"
"I never thought you'd help me this far. Thank you. And I'm sorry—for making you lose so much."
She said it because she had never imagined that Kian, whose future as a physician had been bright and assured, would cast all of it aside and leave the village. She had expected him to preen. He gave no answer. The hands wrapping her hair in a linen cloth and twisting it up seemed to tremble, just a little.
He had been silent. Now he took an ivory pestle to the chives steeped in wine, pounded them, and pressed the mash to the nape of her neck as he spoke.
"I haven't lost anything."
"If you hadn't been there, the wound might have festered and killed me. I was lying in a natron bath crammed full of corpses."
"What? A bath with corpses in it? Honestly—I ought to start writing down every time I treat you. I do it for nothing, so you turn up endlessly hurt, and I can't keep treating you for free. You need to learn how expensive these hands are—"
Gratitude lasted only a moment. The instant Kian's nagging began, endless as ever, drowsiness washed over her.
"It's linen soaked in honey, so leave it on even if it's uncomfortable. That's what lets the scab form without any inflam—"
Halfway through the long explanation, he gave up fighting the sleep pouring over her. Her head had sunk, and he gathered her up in his arms.
"Why are you this heavy?"
"You're just weak. He lifted me as if I weighed nothing."
"He?"
Half asleep, Pesejet realized she had let something slip, and she came down out of Kian's arms at once.
"Why? You liked that he was strong? You like strong men? Who is he? Someone from our village?"
Regretting her careless tongue, she scurried into the room and drove the bolt firmly home.
"Don't tell me it's Nebunenef, that ox of a man who's so good at cutting galleries? Or Dapur the stonemason, the one who can split any stone there is? Or else—"
Outside the door, the name of every man in the village with a reputation for strength passed through Kian's mouth. Inside, worn thin with fatigue, Pesejet lay down on the soft bed that breathed of cedar and slept as though she had fainted.
There was scarcely room to set a foot before the mansion of Akh, Grand Vizier of Upper Egypt—the King's Friend, the King's Scribe, a man who attended Pharaoh himself. Chariots crowded in procession, all of them bearing guests come for the banquet in honor of his birthday.
Egyptian nobles believed a banquet was a way of tasting the life of the underworld while one still walked the earth, and they would hold one over the slightest cause. Wine and food were laid out in overflowing plenty; dance and song were a luxury of the senses; the pleasures of the body went on, so long as they stopped short of adultery. To taste happiness at such a feast, they held, was to secure an eternal happiness that would follow them even beyond death.
Setheph stepped into the hall, where a soft flute melody lingered, and a maid came toward him with a small cone of hardened scented unguent in her hand.
"Welcome."
Set atop a wig, the solidified perfume would melt, granting fragrance and driving insects away. No banquet ever omitted the cone.
"There's no need."
Setheph refused the cone and took only the single white lotus the maid offered him. Eight enormous columns, crowned with lotus capitals as lovely as the flower in his hand, held up a hall so vast it felt less like a private house than a palace. Murals of flowers, birds, and grapevines, painted with exquisite care, made the room striking, and low tables stood everywhere among plump cushions.
Son of Vizier Ramose, who ruled the people of Lower Egypt in Pharaoh's place. Supreme Commander of Lower Egypt. The cruel one who bore the might of Seth. The man who had never known a woman. Whispers of that sort—every one of them meaning him—rustled all around, and the heated stares of women fixed upon him. Setheph paid them no mind.
To live unmarried in Egypt was much the same as refusing to let olive oil touch one's lips in Greece. Senenmut, loyal servant of Queen Hatshepsut, had remained single all his life, but that had been possible only because he was the queen's hidden lover. For a man risen to high office to live in strict celibacy was a rare thing. Besides Setheph, one other high official at this banquet kept to an unmarried life. Vizier Akh, far older than he, was unmarried as well.
"The first performance of the evening will now begin. Please enjoy the opening piece, on the theme of the four seasons of Egypt."
At the master of ceremonies' word, Setheph turned his eyes toward the stage, looking away from the burning gazes of the women seated opposite.
A harp of deep tone rang out, and the splendid curtain that had shut the stage away was drawn open.
"Oh!"
"How beautiful!"
Cries of wonder spilled from those who saw the six dancers seated in a circle. When flute joined harp, the dancers shaped themselves into papyrus swaying in the wind. Soon they were racing across the stage in imitation of a sunlight fierce enough to lay waste, then whirling their bodies with violent grace, like the Nile coming from far off, laden with rich soil, and flooding its banks.
Drums entered. To a beat like the pulse of hot blood, the dancers became the inundation, and when the excitement of everyone present had climbed to its height, they finished beautifully, opening into the shape of a flower in full bloom. The brilliantly colored curtain fell once more.
It was a dance worthy of the applause that crashed over it. In truth, Setheph had not watched it at all. The portraits would not leave his eyes: the blue-eyed woman he had met in the desert, and the Nubian man who had shattered her shackles.
He tried to stop the thoughts, and they only ran further. Whoever danced, and however they danced, none of it reached him.
Servants set fresh bowls of fig purée and roast goose swiftly upon the guests' low tables and were gone, and the next piece began. Following the mysterious notes drawn from a lute, dancers came forth wearing nothing but girdles of pearls and anklets of shells. Their gestures grew steadily more sensual. The clink of shells quickened, heating the blood of the crowd, but all that rose in Setheph's mind were the man and woman who had aided a flight across the desert.
They had been in shackles, and still he had thought they might be not criminals but someone's slaves. No—he had wanted to believe it. He had watched the shackles broken and had not taken them. He had even drawn the time out, so they might slip free of the Medjay. And yet they were the very subjects of those portraits, captioned as suspects in tomb desecration and in murder.
He had set his weight on a chance so thin it hardly existed—that they might be slaves—and with his own hands had sent them on through the desert. He found it hard to forgive himself.
But why had the two of them been together? Were they fleeing side by side only by chance? Or were they close?
While Setheph was lost in the thought, applause broke over the hall. The performance, it seemed, had ended. Afterward a trio of women—pipe, harp, and lute—played a clear, light tune and lifted the air, and talk and laughter followed, the sounds of people in excellent spirits.
"General, was the performance to your liking?"
"It was excellent."
Vizier Akh had smiled, on the point of answering him, when a courier of urgent official dispatches came running up.
"An urgent message from the temple of Ptah in Memphis."
Akh read the papyrus. An expression no one could have named crossed his face, and then he glared at Nakhtla—his younger sister, and Chief Steward of the Royal Harem. Her looks were so impossible to place in years that rumor called her a witch. She tilted her head, arranged her face into perfect ignorance, and turned to speak with her husband, Treasurer Zefa.
The treasurer's charge was to gather the taxes, keep them in the royal storehouses, and portion them out wherever they were required—a vital office, one that sent scribes hurrying to every corner of Egypt to confirm that a reported harvest matched the true quantity of grain.