The Hippopotamus Marsh by Pauline Gedge Read Free Book Online Page A

wheel into sight, wings outstretched and motionless, a black speck in the vastness. He heard the helmsman give a sharp order, answered by one of the sailors. His gaze dropped slowly to Isis and Kares, leaning over the side and talking quietly together with that air of permanent alertness that all good servants developed. Bending, he kissed Aahotep’s full, hennaed lips, brushing her tousled black hair away from her cheek as he did so.
    “You are right,” he admitted. “I am happy for them both and yet …”
    “And yet you wish that Kamose could be persuaded to wed Tani and give you grandchildren also, in order that your inheritance might be doubly secure.” He drew away grim-faced, sitting with one leg extended, his arms clasping the other bent knee as a guest in his own garden might sit. Aahotep waited, and when he did not speak she continued in a low voice, “You are the rightful King of this land by blood and birth. You would have married your sister if she had not died so young. That is why you feel so naked. I was given to you because my family is also ancient though it carries no royal blood. True Ma’at in Egypt hangs by a thread. Kamose resists all your efforts to push him towards a union with Tani when she comes of age next year so that you wonder whether you will be forced to command him. Yet life that seems so bright and strong may at any time flicker and vanish, dear brother. Si-Amun’s child will be fully royal. Kamose might be dead tomorrow, next month, next year.” She fingered the silver ankh at her neck and theamulet of Sekhmet on her arm to negate the doom of her words. “We know nothing. Rejoice for your son. If Kamose decides to see reason and he and Tani have children, that is fine. If not, there is still Ahmose.”
    “You are right,” he broke in harshly. “I grieve for myself, for my father, for a wounded Ma’at. I mourn because I will go to my tomb and Si-Amun to his, yes and Kamose too, as lowly governors. I will never touch the Crook and the Flail, Aahotep.”
    “Yet you have always done right in the sight of the gods,” she reminded him. “When your heart is weighed, nothing else will matter. Isis!” The woman left the view and came bowing. “Bring the sennet. Look, Seqenenra.” She pointed to the bank. “This village seems to be inhabited solely by little boys and oxen. I suppose they have driven them into the river to cool them. Do you want to play the cones or shall I?”
    They played several games, ate and drank, and played again, Aahotep being careful not to force Seqenenra’s piece into the square that denoted the cold, black water of the underworld where the dead wailed for the light of Ra, and Seqenenra’s mood soon lifted. He was not a man given often to self-pity and like everyone he knew he was addicted to the magical tussle between the cones and the spools. As the afternoon heat intensified, Aahotep took Isis to fan her and went away to rest.
    Seqenenra rose, stretched, and made his way to the side of the barge, first hypnotized by the steady running of the wake the craft was making and then fixing his eyes on the bank gliding past. Villages, stiff palms, canals mirroring a bronze sky, sometimes a nearly-naked peasant leading adonkey, all appeared, imprinted themselves briefly on his consciousness tinged with a haze of heat, and slid away like waking dreams. He knew them all. Since the time of his youth he had travelled up and down the Nile, from Weset south to Swenet and north to Qes, the boundaries of the portion of Egypt he and his fathers before him were allowed to administer. Year by year he had seen the apparent changelessness of his domain. Changelessness was a part of the rightness of Ma’at, the eternal order that had been laid down by the gods when Egypt rose from Nun, the primeval waters, and Osiris had still been a god of the living.
    When he was younger, travelling with Senakhtenra, such familiarity had been reassuring. Yet now he knew that the