Ancient Evenings (106 page)

“Next I had the foresight to see that once our great Pharaoh was buried among us, a rich source of revenue would be ready for the Temple. We could emulate the City of the Dead in Abydos. I was even the priest who drew up the plans for the funerary plots of our own Necropolis. I can hardly tell You how successful they were. No wealthy man, no matter how remote his nome, could fail to understand that the eminence of his Ka in the Land of the Dead would be judged by the placement of his tomb in Thebes. I soon learned that any site so fortunate as to look out upon the mortuary temple of Ramses the Second was worth many times the price of a fine plot without such a view.

“By such enterprise, I was most successful in multiplying our revenues, and had the satisfaction of becoming High Priest at Karnak before the death of Honey-Ball. Be certain I had reserved for her the most splendid plot in the Necropolis at Thebes, but she made me promise that so soon as she was embalmed, I would take her down the river to her family tomb at Sais. It was then I understood how much she longed to go back to her swamps during all those years she remained in Thebes in order to be of aid to me. The nicest aspect of her death was the gentleness of it. She passed away in all her massive majesty like a ship drifting out cleanly on the rise of the tide.

“Without her, I was for the first time lost in the solitude that gives such fear of our tomb. The Temple was never wealthier, and my renown as a High Priest was not small, yet I knew terrible boredom. There was so much power, yet only small satisfaction in the exercise of it. The restlessness of the high Temple official came to me, and little matters became more important than large ones. I scolded the cooks for spoiling a meal as fiercely as I upbraided the priests for an error in prayer. To serve as the instrument of the Gods is a powerful vocation for a timid youth with a weak body and a fine mind, but it is not intoxicating for a grown man.

“Echoes of my past life, moreover, were returning. Now that Usermare and Honey-Ball were gone, those walls of the mind that kept me enclosed in the duties of my second life gave way. I had known from the time I was six how I had been conceived, yet for so long as Honey-Ball and Sesusi were alive, I did not seek to know any more of my first life—it was enough that I was different from others.

“Now, to alleviate my boredom, came intimations of the other man I had been. In the midst of conducting a high ceremony, I would see Honey-Ball before me, and she was young and her skin was red from the fires of her altar, and the excitement of her magic. Those great breasts swung before me.

“It was known among us that Set could disturb a prayer by sending lewd images, but these pictures came, I knew, from my memory, not my dreams. For they seemed natural to me, and that could not have been true if an unhappy God were attacking my ritual. Then I remembered how I used to feel in my young days when learning to write. At such times, a strong man seemed to stir within me and stare with yearning at symbols he could hardly decipher. Yet I could read them with ease. One day, fully awake, I felt as if I were in a dream for I found myself fighting at Kadesh, and knew the arms of Nefertiri. While I cannot say that my first life returned with clarity, still enough came to mind to leave me most unsatisfied. I felt superior to others. Now a High Priest, and in command of more wealth than any man could amass, I still did not have a gold cup I could call my own. Wealthy men became interesting to me, therefore. To have our Pharaoh reigning in one city but our great temples in another, was to open the gates to great wealth. Why, I cannot say, unless it is that rich men do not dare to show their gains so openly when they must remain in awe of the nearness of the Pharaoh. Now, however, in Thebes it was easier for the wealthy to purchase indulgences. It can be said that a thousand rich men near the Temple, while not equal to the Pharaoh, are a substitute. I became absorbed in their pleasures, and was a most improper High Priest, indeed, I could not sleep at night for thought of the wealth being buried every day in the Necropolis of Western Thebes. I not only knew of the protections taken for these tombs of the wealthiest men, but had a list in the most beautiful hand—the writing of our best Temple scribes was elegant!—of just which jewels and pieces of gilded furniture had been sealed in their crypts.

“I also knew some of the chief brigands of these parts. I had not forgotten the description of the thieves of Kurna that Usermare gave me and, when one of those fellows would be captured from time to time, I would send messages to his family before he was punished. There came a night when I rose from my sleepless bed and crossed the river on our Temple ferry, much to the amazement of our ferryman. That night, I walked all the way to Kurna by myself to make arrangements. Before these thieves would trust me, I had to arrange for one of their brothers, just captured, to be released from his shackles and made my servant. More than a few tombs were broken into, and some fine objects were brought forth. The courage of these thieves was increased by the exorcisms I could offer against the curses of each vault. What a scandal it would have been if I were discovered!

“Still, the hand of Pepti had not been on me for too little when I was an infant, and I grew more audacious. I remember one splendid gold chair plucked from the tomb of an old merchant that I sold through agents to a Nomarch from Abydos. When this fellow died, his mummy was sent to Thebes—from Abydos!—and he was entombed with his wealth, and soon robbed. Lo, I sold the same chair again!

“I can tell You that by the end of my second life, I had become an immensely wealthy man, and took care to conceal these treasures in the cliffs of the Eastern Desert. Since trips to my cave would often take me away from the Temple for all of a day, there was grumbling at my laziness in high office. Be assured I never worked so hard.”

“But what,” asked Ptah-nem-hotep, “was the reason for burying such wealth?”

“I had every intention,” said Menenhetet, “of enjoying this treasure in my third life.”

“You were thinking in such a manner? You have not told us.”

“There is more to tell, after all. You see, I had fallen in love—as only a priest can—with one of the leading whores of Thebes, a woman whose beauty was considerably greater than her charm, but then I hardly knew how to look for a woman. On the other hand, much had come back to me of my last hour with Nefertiri. The more I pondered this event, the more I became convinced (from what I could remember of the carnal knowledge of my first life) that my first rebirth should not have taken place. I began to think I had been most fortunate. If I had not been stabbed in that fear-filled instant when I came weakly forth, nothing would have happened. Without such a shock, I could never have conceived myself, not in such lustless fashion! So if I was going to live again, and enjoy my third life—which was now my aim—then I must not only learn the arts of making love, but penetrate these rigors of the coming-forth. Until now, as a priest, I knew them in no better way than by my hand, or in the confusion of priestly frolics. So I went to this most beautiful and expensive whore for my study. Nub-Utchat was how she was called, and if, by one meaning of her name, she was the golden eye of the Gods, she was the golden outcast by the other, and both names belonged to her just as much as the Two-Lands belong to Egypt, for she soon found out where I kept my wealth even if I never told her. Perhaps I gave the place away while talking in my sleep, or she may have known enough to spy upon my trips to the desert, but, by whichever route, my wager that I, in my third life, would remember where my treasures had been buried came to nothing, for so soon as I was dead she found the cave. By the time I was old enough to look about in my third life, be certain Nub-Utchat had spent it all.”

“One does not have to be told,” said Ptah-nem-hotep, “how a whore spends money, but is it clear how you performed your feat a second time?”

“I may lack the power to explain.”

“You will make the effort,” said Ptah-nem-hotep in a gentle voice.

“I will try.” Menenhetet closed his eyes in contemplation. “If I was conceived on the night my father knew he would be killed, be assured the same fear was present in every ceremony I performed as a priest. Indeed it was the essence of my piety. That may be why my ceremonies were so well ordered and so grave. I was sensitive to the tender presence of death in all I did. When I began to feel this greed in myself, therefore, for all that is carnal, do not be surprised if I could soon overcome my ignorance of the arts of love since that is also a ceremony calling for fine respect. So I learned again, as I had with Renpu-Rept, how to dally for hours and wander at the edge. I could draw into myself all that was rich and foul, splendid and nasty, groaning and glorious in Nub-Utchat, and yet not go spilling forth in misery at all the thefts and corruptions her blood would ask of me, could, yes, still absorb her seven souls and spirits far up into my loins and my heart until my life became not only faint, but more and more like a fine thread. All of me which was not in her grew ready to voyage out of my body and enter my Ka. At such moments I knew I had only to tear a thread between my body and my Ka, that silver thread—or so I saw it when my eyes were closed—and I would die. My heart would burst even as I came forth. I cannot tell you how many nights I hovered on such a brink. Yet, I always returned. I enjoyed these pleasures too much to give them up. So I never plucked the silver thread that connected my body to my seven souls and spirits, no, not until the night she betrayed me.

“I can say that this manner of making love, while most delicate, and steeped in many sweet turns, may have lacked the vigor that was more to her taste. For, be certain, this slow penetration, not only of our flesh but of our thoughts and spirits, depended on much gentleness in our movements during certain feats of balance I would perform on the very edge.”

“No way of making love is more divine,” said Hathfertiti, caressing Ptah-nem-hotep with a look to say how well she had known just such a pleasure tonight. Menenhetet, however, after a pause for the interruption, continued to speak.

“On this one night when all of me was much divided, my Ka exploring the very gates of the Duad, even as the head of my member must have been deep within her womb, so must she have seen at last that cave where my wealth was buried, for she gave an inescapable pull, and I was in the fall. I just had time to say goodbye to all of me, thread, Ka, and the rest of my souls—I knew I would never have a coming-forth again so tumultuous as this, and I went: No priest ever saw the Gods in more brilliance than myself. My longings and my greed flew out of me like a rainbow. Again, I knew the great pain in my upper back, just once this time, not seven strokes, and heard her last scream, although it was mine, and no knife I felt but the bursting of my heart in that whore’s arms. While we rested, I thought of the child I had just made in her, and only later, on awakening, as I stood to urinate, did I see myself on the ground.

“The eyes with which I saw my dead body belonged, of course, to my Ka, and he, poor fellow, was able to return into the belly of Nub-Utchat only on the next night while she was tremendously distracted with the ardors of making love to one of her favorite clients, a most powerful brigand from Kurna. But as, in the months to come, I grew in her belly, my Ka could not rest with the calm that is so essential for the term we live in the womb. On the contrary, my Ka and the rest of me came forth much wrenched and poked by the grossness of strangers who pounded upon my head for all the while I was in my new mother’s belly, and I think that many of the memories of my first and second existence were so nearly beaten out of me that it has taken all of my fourth life to recover them.”

FOUR

“I was raised by Nub-Utchat, and once again grew up in a harem, although here was no Pharaoh. Any male of Thebes was free to enter. Nor had I chosen my mother with good sense. While she had seized my wealth in the Eastern Desert and quickly gave up the brothel to purchase a great mansion for herself, she had the appetite of a Queen, and the itch to gamble of a charioteer, so the money was soon gone and she was a whore again. Before I was eighteen, she died of high fevers. Black water passed in her urine. I was then a big strong fellow with much congealed in my heart. I had few good sentiments, but I knew how to talk to people: I could, as our saying goes, ‘Sell a feather to a Pharaoh and charge Him for gold.’ I understood women as well as you could from living in a brothel, and men I appreciated by their manners or lack of them. Rude manners, after all, had belabored my unborn head.

“Let us say I knew how to find my way. I was making a living at the time in my mother’s trade: I had become a brothel-keeper and a good one. We were more than ever a city of priests, so by the balance of Maat, we had roistering brothels, and mine, I could say, was the best. With two lives in preparation for such a trade, why not?

“All the same, even in the pots of Thebes, I was aware of the chaos at the Court in Memphi. There was a new Pharaoh every few years and not one but two famines in that era. I may even have suffered some hunger myself. Still, I had the good fortune to trust my dreams, and they told me to go north to the Delta where the papyrus plant grows most profusely. There I must start a papyrus workshop and export the product to Syria and other lands. If I did so, why then this dream told me, I would recover the treasure my mother had spent.