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

changelessness of the villages was the only part of Ma’at that remained. The barge was passing a shrine, crumbling and overgrown, and even as he had to turn his head to keep it in view he saw a pack of dogs come running from its gaping entrance and head towards the water. The Setiu who ruled Egypt now had brought their own gods with them, uncivilized deities with hard names, and the homes of the gods of Egypt were turning to dust. How is it that I never noticed before? he asked himself, deeply disturbed. Khentiamentiu, jackal of Aabtu, your temple and a hundred others, not changeless, no. Falling down, falling apart as I sailed by year after year, while Set and Sutekh slowly became one and Hathor and Ishtar blended. Horus and Horon … He shivered. My body lives in the shadow of the old palace. My ka inhabits the past so that I keep the present comfortably at bay. And why not? Wearily he left the barge’s side and cast himself down on the cushions. Uni padded to him immediately, but with one arm over his eyesSeqenenra waved him away. Let Kamose marry whom and when he will. Let Ahmose continue to run wild and laughing through his life. In five hentis or ten there might be change but not in my lifetime or the lives of my children. That is the Ma’at of today. That is the law of the One, Apepa, Beloved of Set, foreign usurper in Het-Uart. He felt no anger, only surprise that today the full force of his country’s situation was brought home to him, today during a small voyage of no great import. He considered, but the heat brought him a welcome lassitude and he slept.
    At Khemennu they were guests of Aahotep’s cousin Teti, a wealthy man who had secured from the King the position of Inspector and Administrator of Dykes and Canals. In addition to travelling through the nomes of his jurisdiction after the Inundation had receded in order to see to the reconstituting of the dykes and the repair of the major irrigation canals in Upper Egypt, he held much property. His wife was a priestess in the temple of Thoth, a deity revered not only as the god of wisdom and writing and therefore every scribe’s patron but also as the essence of the moon. Khemennu was his city and Aahotep, a lover of Thoth all her life, spent much of her time in the temple there when she was not visiting relatives. Khemennu was a pretty place surrounded by dense fig trees, its mud streets lined with date palms and its docks busy. Teti’s estate lay on the northern limit beside the temple of Set that had been built fifty years before. He had many minor officials under him and his watersteps were often crowded. Seqenenra, walking with him through the town, taking a skiff with him as he was poled to some dispute or other over a field boundary that the winter flood had washed away, and sittingbeside him at the evening meal when his reception hall was full of the dignitaries of Khemennu and noisy with musicians and acrobats, felt out of place. It was not so much the faster pace of the life of his relative by marriage. It was Teti’s quite unselfconscious air of cheerful fulfilment. He worshipped Thoth as his nome’s totem and Set as the lord of the King. He organized his family and his staff, received the frequent heralds from the Delta with assurance and warmth, even talked to Seqenenra with just the correct balance of comradeship and deference that Seqenenra’s superior blood but inferior relationship with the One demanded. Teti, Seqenenra decided, was a man without dark dreams or stabs of remorse. He envied him.
    With Seqenenra’s permission, Teti had placed Tani in the care of his son Ramose, a sixteen-year-old who loved fowling and who promised to care for his second cousin as though she were Hathor herself. Tani, to her father’s surprise and secret amusement, blushed at the young man’s earnest words and the pair of them had gathered up servants and throwing sticks and disappeared into the swamps.
    “They get along very well together, those two,”