Imhotep Read online

  The antelope twisted its head violently and bawled out at the pain. Brian held tightly, his face turned toward the antelope’s as he kept talking to it. “I’m sorry,” he whispered over and over again.

  Neswy pulled the spear out and raised it overhead for another thrust. The antelope kicked out with its rear legs and caught Neswy’s right knee. Brian heard the crack as the bone shattered and Neswy’s shocked cry at the same time. The antelope continued to twist in his arms; its movements more frantic but less powerful.

  Brian released his grip enough to turn his head. Neswy was on the ground, the spear at his side, his hands over his leg. Blood ran down his calf. When he saw Brian looking at him, the old man twisted on the ground, reaching for his spear to pass it to him.

  Brian saw Siamun and the others jogging toward them.

  The antelope shuddered suddenly, snorted loudly. Blood and mucous ran from it nostrils, its bladder emptied and it lay its head almost gently on the ground.

  Brian released it and scrambled to Neswy who was rocking on the ground, his bloodied leg stretched out on the ground, the lower half of it cocked at an unnatural angle. He was moaning softly.

  They gutted and butchered the still warm antelope, wrapping the meat in linen cloths they had brought with them. They put the heavy cuts in the slings to carry back to To-She, setting aside a small portion to roast over their fire that night.

  Siamun had glanced at Neswy’s injury with a strange, satisfied smile on his dark face, then, dismissing him, had turned his attention to the antelope. He hadn’t spoken to Brian.

  The other hunters had followed Siamun’s orders, gutting, skinning and cutting the antelope into manageable portions.

  Brian, coming down from the adrenaline high of facing down the antelope, was angry at the way Siamun ignored Neswy and confused by the way Neswy accepted it.

  The old man was unable to stand. The antelope’s kick had ripped the skin from his knee, tearing away the ligaments and shattering the kneecap. Brian had washed the grit from the wound and made a splint using the shaft of his broken spear, holding it in place with strips torn from his kilt.

  Neswy seemed grateful for Brian’s help, but seemed to have withdrawn.

  Brian thought of his useless cell phone, lying somewhere in his room at To-She, its battery exhausted from being turned on and off again as he unsuccessfully tried to find service. He hadn’t seen anything resembling a medical facility or a doctor. And, although he hadn’t thought the words consciously, he knew that he was some place, perhaps some time far away from everything he knew.

  This hunt was like something from the stone ages, he thought. He knew he couldn’t expect any help for Neswy from Siamun. The other two seemed less sinister, but Brian knew they wouldn’t provide any help unless Siamun ordered it.

  When morning came, Siamun and the other slung their heavy bags over their shoulders and prepared to return to To-She. As usual they ignored Brian, leaving him to scramble to catch up with them.

  Neswy was awake, watching from the same spot he had fallen the day before. He didn’t even try to stand today. His knee was red and swollen.

  Brian was only a little surprised when Siamun and the others started to walk away from the camp leaving Neswy behind.

  “Stop,” he shouted as the three turned to leave.

  Siamun turned to look at him.

  “Neswy,” Brian said, gesturing to the old man.

  Siamun shrugged. Then he looked to the old man who was dragging himself to the boulder so he could sit up. “Can you walk, old man?”

  Neswy continued to drag himself, his eyes pinched shut in pain.

  “We take,” Brian said, angry that he didn’t know enough Egyptian to argue or to call Siamun the names that were racing through his head.

  Siamun mimicked Brian’s poor Egyptian, “We take.” Looking down at Neswy, he said roughly, “Get up.”

  Neswy shook his head.

  “We can’t leave him, you don’t just leave someone behind,” Brian said in English.

  Siamun ignored him. He rejoined the other two hunters. “Go,” he said when he reached them.

  The three of them walked away.

  Brian’s temper rose. In a baseball game, if one of your teammates got hit by a pitch and charged the mound, you went with him; you didn’t leave him hanging out there alone. If someone got spiked at second base, you ran over and helped him, carried him off the field if he needed it.

  “Get back here,” he shouted at Siamun and the others.

  They continued to walk away, ignoring him.

  Brian took a few steps toward them. “Siamun, you fucker, get back here! You can’t leave him behind,” he shouted.

  Siamun paused briefly, but didn’t turn from his path.

  “Goddamn it! You son of a bitch! I’m not leaving him behind. You little fucker, you! I’ll bring him home and then I’m finding you. I don’t care who you are or how many friends you have backing you. I don’t care about your little fucking knife. You hear me, you little son of a bitch! Goddamn you!”

  Brian had never been this angry before.

  He wanted to charge after Siamun and break his leg, leave him behind to die in the desert. He knew the others would fight with Siamun, but he didn’t care. He was full of anger and confidence. He could take them.

  But, even infuriated, he tried to get his anger under control, to harness the energy rather than to waste it. He realized that even if he did defeat all three of them, he would still be in the middle of the desert with an injured man, unsure which way to go.

  He stood alone, halfway between Neswy and Siamun, his chest heaving, his hands clenched as he watched the three hunters walk away.

  Siamun walked with his eyes straight ahead.

  He didn’t want to admit it, but this “god” impressed him.

  Brian had easily kept up with them on a journey that even Siamun viewed as a difficult trek across the desert. He had stood unflinching before the horns of a charging antelope and moved with lightening speed to bring it down.

  Siamun had watched that with mixed feelings. He had never seen a man put himself directly in the path of a charging antelope. For all their delicate grace and beauty, their incredible speed and sharp horns made the animals dangerous. And, as Neswy had learned, their small, hard hooves were perilous as well.

  Up until the last moment when Brian seemed to bend like a tree in a storm, Siamun had thought he would be gored and trampled. But somehow, moving so quickly that it was a blur even in Siamun’s memory; Brian had swayed away from the charging animal and then attacked it all at the same time.

  Brian had been quiet and unassuming during the trek. The violence Siamun heard now in Brian’s voice made him wonder if he truly was a god. And what he would be like in a fight.

  “If he gets out of the desert alive, we shall see,” Siamun thought.

  Brian watched them disappear across the sand, noting that they were moving southeast, the sun angled off to their left.

  Neswy was propped against the rock, watching Brian.

  “Go,” the old man said softly, nodding in the direction the other three had gone.

  “You have a broken leg, you’re not dying. This is fucking ridiculous,” Brian said in English.

  He knelt by Neswy.

  “Do you know where To-She?” he asked.

  Neswy nodded.

  “Okay,” Brian said. He stood and looked toward the water hole. There were short scraggy scrubs, but no trees, nothing that he could use to make a platform to drag Neswy behind him across the desert.

  “What would MacGyver do?” he asked himself. “Take an inventory,” he answered himself.

  He reached down to pat his pockets and felt only the torn linen of the short kilt he wore. Unlike Siamun, he had no knife tucked in its waist. He knew that his sling contained a half-empty bladder of water and some flat bread cakes. Neswy had nothing except the narrow linen belt all the Egyptian men wore.

  He picked up his water bag, gau
ging its weight and looked at Neswy. At least he’s small. Well, Brian thought, everyone here is small. He probably weighs no more than a hundred twenty pounds.

  He picked up the water bag and walked to the water hole where he filled it, his mind on the journey ahead, trying to visualize how it could work. He would have the water bag in a sling over his shoulders. Neswy could ride on his back. Brian tried to see the old man there, one leg stiff, pushed out in front of them, unable to grip Brian’s waist.

  Walking back toward Neswy, he passed the antelope carcass, the bones and entrails lying in the sand, the animal’s skin beneath the bloody mess. Another sling, he thought, looking at the hide.

  He laid the water bag on the sand near Neswy, who watched him carefully. Returning to the carcass, Brian pulled the hide from under the bloody organs and bones.

  The skin had been stripped from the torso and thighs of the antelope, but the lower part of the legs, where there was little meat, was still inside the skin. Brian pictured the skin from legs tied together to form two straps, the back part of the hide serving as a sling in which Neswy could sit while Brian carried him.

  He dragged the hide down to the water hole and rinsed it clean, rubbing sand into it to help scrape away pieces of flesh that clung to it.

  He laid it to dry over the boulder they had hidden behind yesterday, then went back to the pile of offal and picked out a thighbone. Finding a hand-sized rock, he broke the bone, and then sharpened the edge of it against the boulder. Using the pointed bone he scraped along the bony lower legs of the skin and then pried it loose with his fingernails.

  As Brian worked on the hide, Neswy staggered up to stand on his good leg. He leaned against the boulder and watched Brian work.

  “I am Yunet’s uncle,” he said.

  Brian nodded without looking up.

  “Siamun and Yunet were together, you understand?”

  Brian stopped now and watched Neswy, focused on what he said, trying to catch enough words to understand.

  “They had a fight, she cut off his ear. He would have killed her, but I was there and I stopped him. Well,” Neswy looked away, “my brother and I stopped him. My brother died a little later, also while out on a hunting trip with Siamun. Now it is my turn. The other two, they are afraid of Siamun. They aren’t bad, just afraid.

  “If you go now, you can catch them,” Neswy said quietly, nodding in the direction Siamun had gone.

  Brian shook his head and returned to his scraping. He hadn’t understood everything Neswy had said, but he knew the old man was offering to let Brian go without him. That’s not going to happen.

  “You know where To-She,” he said awkwardly. “We go To-She together.”

  “Three days,” Neswy said. He nodded at the water skin. “Little water.”

  Brian shrugged.

  Gathering at To-She

  Kanakht sat under the white linen awning on his barge, his eyes on the slowly passing riverbank, his mind unfocused, drifting. He picked a spot along the river, a thick stand of papyrus plants, their thick triangular stems rising from the water, taller than a man. As his barge moved slowly down river headed for To-She, the plants came closer, but his attention drifted and when he looked again, the papyrus was past him.

  “I’m getting old,” he thought.

  He tried to refocus, pulling together the threads of his thoughts.

  Waja-Hur is fixated on the idea that King Djoser over-stepped his bounds when he declared himself a god. He blames the series of meager floods and the resulting famine on Djoser and the unbalance that the king’s declaration of godliness has brought to The Two Lands. In Waja-Hur’s mind, everything bad that happened in the past seven years is because of Djoser, anything good happens despite the king.

  Djefi is full of ambition, for himself and for his god Sobek. Although the young priest never would have come up on his own with the idea of removing Djoser, he will grasp at the plot as a way to advance himself and his crocodile god. Is his ambition strong enough?

  Although he needed Waja-Hur for religious legitimacy and Djefi would provide the means and setting for Kanakht’s plans, Makare was the key to the plot.

  Commander of the small garrison at Khmunu, Makare was ambitious, but cautious. Khmunu was several days down river from Waset, where Djoser and the court were centered, but Makare still reported directly to Sekhmire, who was head of the royal guard, defender of the House of Horus, and protector of King Djoser himself.

  Kanakht assumed that Sekhmire was loyal to Djoser. As much as he disliked the king, Kanakht knew the man was no fool. Djoser would have tested Sekhmire’s loyalty and found ways to bind the soldier to him - power, riches, luxury, and women.

  But Makare, stationed away from the center of power, hungered for the attention and riches that surrounded the king. So Kanakht had showered him with praise to drive a wedge between the young soldier and his commander.

  Kanakht had wondered aloud why Makare wasn’t at the royal court. When Makare had pointed out that here at Khmunu he was in charge of the garrison, even though it was small, Kanakht had agreed.

  “And you’ve done a wonderful job, Makare. You’ve proven that you are ready for something larger, something more important.”

  “Did Sekhmire say that?” the young soldier had asked.

  “He doesn’t need to. Everyone knows it.”

  “But what would I do in the royal guard? Sekhmire commands it.”

  Kanakht had agreed, then planted the seed. “Things change, Makare.”

  After this festival at To-She, Kanakht would visit with Makare again and invite him to serve in his personal guard. He would explain that even if Sekhmire wouldn’t promote him, that he, Kanakht, would find a way to help Makare rise to his deserved level.

  Kanakht needed him, his strength, and his willingness to kill.

  Tim had spent two weeks with Meryt and every day he was surprised and excited by her. He admired her curiosity and enthusiasm, her innocence, her intelligence, her energy and, even though he was reluctant to admit it, her beauty.

  His Egyptian had improved immensely. Unlike Paneb and his family, who had tried to use short, simple words and speak slowly, Meryt had refused to baby him. He had learned to pay close attention and had found that her normal conversational speed quickly had become comprehensible. Although he wasn’t fluent, he could hold a conversation.

  “Did Hetephernebti tell you to teach me your language?” he had asked during one of their early conversations after she had saved him from the guards during the night of the Festival of Re in His Barge.

  “How else could we talk to you?”

  “What else did she ask you to do?”

  “I am to learn everything about you and to tell you everything you want to know.”

  They were sitting quietly beside each other on the rough wooden deck of Hetephernebti’s barge as it floated slowly upriver toward To-She, pushed by the winds that the desert heat drew up river from the Mediterranean Sea, so many miles behind them.

  “Hetephernebti heard that you are a god. Are you?” Meryt asked in her direct manner.

  “No.”

  “They say you healed Paneb’s daughter with magic.”

  “It was just, I don’t know the words, it was just healing, not magic.”

  “They say you are an artist,” she said, starting to tease him now.

  “Yes.”

  “Draw something.”

  “What would you like?”

  “Draw me.”

  She stood. As always, she was naked except for her linen belt. She posed in stiff profile her arms outstretched to welcome a guest; in the formal style Tim had seen countless times in tombs. He reached over to gather his notebook and pencil from the backpack he had retrieved from Paneb before the kindly tomb artist and his family had left Iunu. When he looked up she had changed position and was standing like a hunter on a boat, an imaginary spear held overhead, her mouth turned down in a serious frown, her dark eyebrows gathered.

  He
looked down at his notebook to draw a horizon line, trying to refocus his mind to look at her as a model, not as a very young, very beautiful woman whom he was finding more and more attractive and intriguing.

  When he looked up, she had dropped to the deck and was sitting cross legged, pretending to be drawing in her own notebook, her face studious, as he supposed his had been. He shook his head, she shook hers, mimicking his movement.

  “You have to sit still,” he said.

  She leaned forward and crawled across the wood to him, suddenly serious.

  “Netjer Tim, life is not sitting still. Any artist can draw me sitting still. But that is not life. That is what they paint in tombs. I am not ready for a tomb, am I?” she said as she came closer. “If you are a god, you can draw me moving. That is life. ”

  He looked at the light lying softly across her silky skin, drawn tight across the smooth muscles of her arms and shoulders as she leaned toward him. He saw open trust in her eyes, a playful tug of a smile on her lips.

  “I’m not a god,” he answered.

  Neswy shook the water skin. Finding it empty, he tossed it aside, throwing off Brian’s stride as he carried the old man down another dune.

  “Over there,” Neswy said, pointing with one arm, the other draped loosely around Brian’s neck and chest.

  Brian looked where Neswy pointed. In the soft predawn light he saw an odd shape on the horizon, an irregular mound that broke up the flat line of the horizon.

  “Those are the rocks you can see from the edge of To-She. Once we get there, it’s only a half a day, no more. We’re almost home.”

  Neswy’s voice was just a whisper now, but it didn’t matter. Despite three days of the man’s constant talking, Brian understood little of what he said. He heard “To-She,” “sand,” and “walk.” The rest was just so much harsh whispering sounds, growing weaker each day.

  They walked at night. Or rather he walked at night. Neswy rode on Brian’s back, sitting in the sling Brian had made from the antelope’s hide. The straps, skin from the animal’s legs, had grown stiffer and stiffer as they dried. Now they cut into his shoulders, wearing away at his strength.