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dwell contentedly in the Field of
Offerings, my lord, my father, and none shall ever dishonor your name, nor
pollute your house of eternity."
He turns away from Ankhtifi to gesture at the painted plaster on the western
wall. "You are forever young, and your beloved wife stands here, and your
beloved daughters, and your beloved sons, my brothers, here and here and
here and I! Since the days of our forefather Sobekhotep, no one here has ever
seen the like of this tomb or its owner."
"Since?" Ankhtifi rasps. Is this doubt in his son's voice? Could it be?
Ankhtifi's next breath catches in his throat.
But Idy says, "Not even then not ever, before or after! Did Sobekhotep call
himself Great Overlord?
Did the god Horus plan out his tomb? Did the god Hemen dictate a spell to
guard it? Did any god ever proclaim anyone other than Ankhtifi to be
peerless, whose like has never before been seen nor ever will be seen? Who
else has ever called himself the hero, the brave?"
With his staff Ankhtifi strikes a pillar with such force that a little yellow
paint scrapes away. It does not matter. The relief carved upon its face will
endure for a million years.
There are murmurs in the dark. Sasobek comes forward with his broom and sweeps
the imperceptible flecks from the floor. Sand has come along on Ankhtifi's
sandals, and Sasobek discreetly attends to that, too.
The falcon stirs in the shadows, rasping claws along the standard upon which
he perches when at rest.
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None sees him, none hears him, but Ankhtifi, and none but he and the
falcon is party to the agreement between them.
Ankhtifi walks to the edge of the burial shaft cut into the center of the
floor, like a black pool that gives no reflection, that refuses the light. His
staff prods its darkness. "Do you remember Khuu, the wretch of Edfu?"
"Yes!" the workmen cry, and Idy says, "I do."
"Men killed their neighbors, the fields of Edfu were left untended like
marshland. This is the state of affairs that those in Thebes would
wish upon the entire countryside. They deny our rightful King
Neferkare, a child of the House of Khety, and would place their
own line of wretches upon the
Horus-throne. Horus himself summoned me, Ankhtifi, to sail upstream and free
knives from men's palms and make men embrace those who had slain their
brothers."
"We remember that day," says Idy. The others echo him. "You spoke when all of
us were silent, when the other lords had lost their speech and could not raise
their arms."
"I led you to the river," Ankhtifi says. "It was a little higher in those
days." A little, he thinks, just a little.
"Do you remember?"
"We remember!" the men cry, and, as the falcon it is full daylight; why is he
still here? will the King in his Residence sleep the day through? makes
a noise like the bending of a copper saw, Ankhtifi remembers.
People were less hungry in those days. Boats were sailed upstream and rowed
downstream, rudders set at sterns or quarters with less concern for
sandbars and stones. There had been even better years with abundant
harvests and fatted cattle and nets burdened with fish of all kinds, but those
were all lost to living memory and known only through tales of the days of
kings named Khufu and Unas and Pepy, when men were called northward to labor
on great pyramids.
One day
that day a boat came downstream. Its spars were laid across its beams, but
there was no sail or rigging. Eight men manned its oars, a ninth kept his hand
at the tiller, and women and many children huddled in its wet bottom, for most
of the deck planking had been taken up.
"Where is the Great Overlord? We have sworn not to take our hands from looms
and tiller until we have come to the city where the Great Overlord lives! Our
hands bleed! We have passed by Nekhen because he was not there! Is he here in
Hefat?" cried the helmsman as the rowers pulled in their oars. Two of them
leapt into the river and drove the boat ashore as the children dumped
themselves overboard and splashed in the water until their mothers joined them
and herded them to land. They crouched in a place of a little shade of a tree,
where they looked like twigs broken from its branches. The helmsman said,
"Where is the Great
Overlord of this district?"
"The Great Overlord is where he should be, attending to trouble
when it comes to his shore," said
Ankhtifi. These were not fit men: like the women and children,
their limbs were thin, their stomachs distended, and they wore cloaks of
bruises and welts. "Where are you from? Are you people of mine?"
"Would that we were," said the helmsman, "or else we would not have trouble to
bring to your shore, my lord. We come from Edfu in this old boat that we took
from a boatwright before he could break it up for timber."
"If the boatwright should come in search of his craft, you might be punished.
I may punish you for theft anyway."
"He won't come after it, my lord. He's dead, but not by our hands. His brother
killed him, because he would not pledge his heart to Khuu's new lord."
"New lord!" Ankhtifi exclaimed. "Our lord, Neferkare, still wears the
crowns in the Residence at
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Neni-Nesut, so the administrator of Edfu has no new lord. I, the
King's Seal-bearer, would have been informed if he had flown to heaven."
"Neferkare is king in Neni-Nesut and Lower Egypt, and here in the District of
Nekhen if you say so, but he is not the king of Edfu any longer," said the
helmsman. "Khuu has declared it."
"What manner of abomination is this? Has some vile Lower Nubian
sorcerer laid a spell on Khuu's heart?"
The helmsman did not know; he had spoken all that he could of the matters of
big men, and he, a little man, was tired and hungry and his wife and
children were crying on the shore. Ankhtifi learned the helmsman was
in fact a potter and, although Hefat had potters already, Ankhtifi
appointed him a place where he might build a little house and workshop
beside the rest.
That evening Ankhtifi laid a banquet for these people on the river-bank and
another in his pillared hall,
where he summoned his sons and his council. They ate choice cuts of beef,
drank good beer, ate white bread, and spoke of what the potter had told
them.
The Overseer of Troops of Hefat, Minnefer, said, "The District of Edfu lies at [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]