The Red Hippopotamus

Send a craftsman wine of the Delta and salt of the oases, oils and honey, perfumed unguents, a haunch of beef and dried fish, barley loaves of every kind and nuts besides, and his hands will quicken of their own accord.

Even as they made ready to receive the Pharaoh, laughter never left the mouths of the villagers, drunk on joy. They had scrubbed their houses clean and then lavished them with flowers until they shone, and they threw the workshop doors wide so that Pharaoh, passing outside, might see the craftsmen in the full surge of their labor. They were praying, of course, that richer gifts would follow.

On the morning of the Pharaoh's visit, Pesejet's parents were busy from first light. Her father, Raherka, an officer of the village guard, set out early for the valley where the kings lay buried, and her mother, Tamit, chantress of the temple of Hathor, made ready to leave the house a beauty in a gown of red linen, silver bracelets flashing at her wrists.

"Go safely."

"I thought this time you would stand on the stage beside me..."

Grief seemed to rise in her and stop the words. Tamit paused, then hung about Pesejet's neck a jasper amulet carved with the ankh, the sign of life, and went on.

"See that the amulet does not leave your body."

"Please don't worry."

Even if it did, Pesejet could not imagine how her fortunes might sink any lower. But Tamit would not go until she had checked, and checked again, that the stone lay warm against her daughter's skin.

Every woman in the village was an artisan or a priestess of Hathor, and every man an artisan or a soldier, so the place was busy past all breathing. In a village scrambling to receive the Pharaoh's party, Pesejet seemed to be the only soul with no part to play and nothing to do.

And yet—was the true victor not the one who lay on the terrace and took the breeze while everyone else ran themselves ragged?

She climbed up there to pretend at leisure, to pretend that nothing was wrong, and to govern a heavy heart, and she lay down beneath the white linen awning. She had hoped a wind just warm enough, brushing soft across her skin and deepening her languor, might lift her spirits. It did not.

Lying still amid the clamor of the village, she only sank further. The man from the dream wavered near the sun and would not let her mind be still.

The words he had given her when they met again inside the nightmare circled her ear once more. She knew he could not last. She knew it was not real. Had he come looking for her even so, all the way into her dreams? Or was this only what came of failing to forget a partner of a single night—of longing for him even in sleep?

Not knowing so much as who he was: that was what choked her.

She was sinking into regret—she ought at least to have asked his name—when someone pounded the gate with a fist, bang after bang.

"I know you're in there! Open the door!"

It was Kian. Ever since she had barely shaken him off by the leatherworker's sudden appearance, he had gone on looking for her.

"You drank a lot that day, didn't you?"

She had not. That day she had not touched beer or wine. Astonishingly, the whole thing had happened without a drop of drink in her.

"Who is he? Who in the world is he? What does he do?"

She did not know who he was, nor what he did, nor whether he had come safely out of the whirlpool, nor where she might go to find him.

And she could not understand why Kian was so desperate to know what had passed on the Night of Hathor—a night that shamed her even to remember when she was alone.

"Pesejet! Are you going to see that man again?"

If only she could, she wanted to.

That was why she had slipped out by the far window and gone looking for the place where they had loved each other on the Night of Hathor.

Pesejet stood where she had stood with him on the day the goddess of love played her trick, and watched the Nile glide past in its pride. The river no longer wore its old clear color.

Rain and rough water had churned it to mud, and from that mud a rock with an unpleasant oily sheen thrust up. The strange stone shifted by inches, then surged high and broke the surface in white foam.

A strange rock. No—look closer, and it was not a rock at all. It was a hippopotamus!

The gray hippopotamus is the gentle beast of Taweret, the goddess who aids women in childbirth. But the creature that had shown itself was, of all things, a red hippopotamus. The red hippo inherits the madness of Seth, god of desert and sandstorm—a dangerous animal given over to destruction and to killing.

When it gaped its enormous mouth, saliva dripped from tusks a full cubit long, the span of a forearm from elbow to fingertip.

A furious debate began in her. Should she flee, or hold still until the beast was gone? Turn and run, and the thing would likely overtake her all the faster and crunch her to pieces. Draw the dagger at her thigh and strike first, and she might only provoke it. Choose to stand frozen, and she might lose her life without ever lifting a hand.

Before she could settle on an answer, the hippopotamus bellowed and charged straight for her. She felt the earth shudder under that huge body as it came, and she felt herself grow infinitely small.

Even so—if she was going to die, should she not at least swing a blade once before she did?

She took her courage and reached for the dagger at her thigh. In that instant something split the air and grazed her ear. A heartbeat later an arrow punched into the center of the hippo's gaping mouth with a hard, wet thud.

The beast shrieked in agony and sank its massive body into the river.

"You were in grave danger."

The man who had shot the hippo wore a black wig, neat and weighty, a pectoral of lapis lazuli, and a silver bracelet delicately worked with green feldspar. Silver was reckoned the bone of the gods and prized as highly as gold, the very flesh of the gods; a bracelet of that silver, and carved besides, declared his high station.

"Might you have come from elsewhere? This stretch of river is notorious for hippopotamuses."

"Not from elsewhere... No. I suppose I am from elsewhere, after all."

Deir el-Medina lay near the splendid city of Thebes, and yet it was so thoroughly sealed away that it was no different from a foreign land.

"Extraordinary eyes."

Only then, at the sound of his voice, did Pesejet notice the gaze boring straight into her own.

"The goddess Hathor has a way of planting her jewels in the most barren ground. And yet here is turquoise, set in a pair of eyes."

"Yes..."

"Astonishingly beautiful."

Praise for blue eyes was precisely what the men of the neighborhood had worn out saying. After the god's refusal, they had fallen into the delusion that they themselves would marry her, and they had said it until she was sick of the words. She had heard them as many times as there were stars set in the belly of Nut, and they stirred nothing in her at all.

"If you would not object, this evening—dine with me..."

"I'm grateful you saved me, but I have somewhere I must go."

As she refused him and turned away, the man's hard, callused hand closed around her wrist. Pesejet fought with all her strength to twist free of that grip. He did not so much as shift, and he opened his mouth.

"Your name?"

"Pesejet."

Displeasure at being seized swept over her. Still, he was the benefactor who had saved her from the hippo, and she tried to keep her manner as gentle as she could.

"I am Pinodjem."

Having given his name, he looked as though he expected some tremendous reaction. Pesejet had nothing further to say, and nothing she wished to know.

"Please let go. I belong to the temple, so I'll be going in."

"The temple? Are you a recluse?"

"...I am."

In truth she had wanted to seclude herself in the temple and had been refused, and she belonged nowhere at all. Surely even Maat, goddess of justice, would forgive a lie of this size, she thought—and she shook off the man's hand, gone slack, and walked on.

"No one enters here who is not king or queen, vizier, or a priest of the rank of Third Prophet. General Setheph is no exception."

That a common soldier should dare bar the way of Pharaoh Narmer, ruler of the Two Lands of Upper and Lower Egypt; of Akh, Grand Vizier of Upper Egypt, who attended the Pharaoh in person; and of Setheph, the Pharaoh's own guard and Supreme Commander of Lower Egypt—such a thing could be seen only in Deir el-Medina, the village of the craftsmen.

The captain of the guard, who kept outsiders under the strictest control, applied that same unbending standard even to the Pharaoh's party, and held his ground. He would not let Setheph through.

"So the general's infamy finds no purchase in this village."

Setheph had crossed the border alone, with not another soldier beside him, fallen upon the hideout of the Amorites who lived by plunder, and cut off every wrist among them. Pharaoh Narmer seemed to find it amusing that even that infamy failed here, and he laughed aloud, a rough, rolling laugh.

"Never have I been so honored to hold the vizierate that administers this village as I am today."

Akh, Grand Vizier of Upper Egypt, laughed as well, as if some entertaining spectacle had been laid before him. The captain of the guard still watched Setheph with a sour, wary face.

"Your faithfulness to duty is trustworthy enough. But General Setheph has been granted the office of Second Prophet."

"Even so, without papers proving he is Second Prophet, he cannot pass."

To the captain—who answered even the Pharaoh with not a scrap of flexibility—Setheph handed over the certificate, his expression unwilling. It declared that he belonged to the temple of Seth, god of darkness, in the cursed city of Avaris.

"This is..."

"Is there a problem?"

"Ah—no."

The captain thrust the certificate back in haste and retreated. Sensing the air gone rigid, Usir, overseer of the village works, stepped forward.

"I beg you, do not be angry. We only do our utmost to guard the eternal dwellings."

"The inspection at the main gate is flawless. But the men look far too few to protect the village as a whole. Aside from the main gate and a handful of tombs still under construction, the place is nearly empty. It looks defenseless against any intrusion from outside."

At Setheph's laying bare of the village's weakness, the overseer Usir said nothing.