City of Dreams Read Free

strong, burning hand, and his vanity regretted his broken fingernails and rough skin.
    ‘I am surprised that you can like me…as I am,’ he murmured.
    ‘You are lovely to me as you are,’ said Khaemhet, his eyes soft with desire. ‘As you were, painted and scented, with gold on your fingers and toes, you would be too beautiful, and I would be too much in awe of you.’ 
    Surere felt a strong arm round his waist, pulling him into the secrecy of the reeds, and then rough lips and a passionate tongue bruising his own.
    Later, as they lay side by side watching a light breeze, herald of the dawn, ruffle the surface of the River, Khaemhet said, ‘There is one thing I must ask you to promise me.’
    ‘Yes?’
    The mason was embarrassed. ‘It is that you must not try to escape. If you do, they will kill me.’
    Surere was silent.
    ‘Promise me,’ said Khaemhet, rolling on to one elbow to look at his face.
    ‘Of course,’ said Surere.
    She had gone. He told himself that he had known this would happen; that he had seen the signs; that in any case it had been a dream; but none of that helped. Instead of bowing to the will of whichever minor god it was who dealt with such things as love — perhaps the dwarf-lion, Bes; or Min, with his rearing penis and his whip — Huy felt like a man who has a itch he is unable to scratch; or like one whose scalp burns so much that to tear it off would be a relief. For weeks he had been as restless as a corralled lion. She had gone and she no longer cared. Long before she had told him that she no longer wanted him, her decision had been made. Perhaps weeks, perhaps months earlier, he had ceased to exist for her as a lover. That was the worst. To have gone on dancing so long after the music had stopped.
    Now he was chasing a ghost. He thought of writing more letters, he thought of going to her house again. But he knew it would be futile. His only course of action was inaction. He had to accept the most unpalatable truth of all: that the object of your love no longer needs you; you are no longer wanted; your part in the play of that person’s life has ended. It was, Huy thought, a searing thing to make your exit gracefully, but there was no alternative. Appeals would be received at best with affectionate embarrassment.
    It was the season of drought, shemu , and from dawn to dusk all the Black Land endured the dreary, unchanging mildness of the sun. By the end of the year, in midsummer, the heat would be pitiless; but then the River would flood, and restore its green banks. Now was a time of long siestas and — to Huy’s frustration — monotonous inactivity.
    He had just turned thirty. A year earlier, he had been living alone in a little house in a side street in the collapsing City of the Horizon, contemplating not only the wreck of his marriage but also the ruin of his career. He had been a scribe in the court of Akhenaten, and since that king’s fall, no longer allowed to practise his profession but not important enough to punish, he had scraped along as an investigator, a solver of other people’s problems. Now he looked around the similar little house in which he presently lived, still alone, in a run-down quarter near the port of the Southern Capital. The one big case he had come close to solving had ended in disaster; and now the single good thing to have come out of it was gone.
    He said her name. Aset. He brought her image into his heart and tried to condemn her, but he could not. There had never been any hope of their being together for good; he had known that from the start. The sister of his friend Amotju, and now, after Amotju’s death, heiress to half a fortune — the other half, after a protracted legal battle, having been retained by Amotju’s widow, Taheb — Aset had never been within his reach, and was as far from it now as the moon.
    He tried to push the memory of their last meeting away, but it kept returning to his heart — a painful and unnecessary event,