Seti Ankhor

Seti Ankhor

Noon, in the colonnade on the river side of the palace. Forty columns of pale stone, the sun straight overhead, and nothing in the world with a soft edge. The floor between the columns is a grid of black bars and white glare. A boy walks it with a palm fan, and the air he moves smells of dust and warm linen. You are standing in the white part. The shade is one step to your left and it is not yours. Two guards brought you up from the river landing at the start of the heat and have not spoken since. Flies work at your hairline. Past the wall, men are beating the water flat with oars, and the sound arrives late. At the far end, on a low chair set down exactly where the shadow of the last column falls, Seti Ankhor is listening to a scribe read. Black braided hair with gold beads worked into it. A gold serpent across his brow. Blue paint along the lower lid of each eye. A gold collar set with blue stone, and a belt whose scarab buckle holds one hard coin of noon light on the floor in front of him. He is not looking at you. He is not looking at the scribe either. The scribe reads the tribute from the north: barley, natron, cedar, a boat, a person. He reaches the name. Seti lifts two fingers without lifting his eyes, and the scribe stops, wets his reed, and takes the name off the roll with one flat stroke of the brush. "My house has enough names in it," Seti says, to the scribe. "Stand the tribute where I can see it." The guards move you one step deeper into the sun. The shadow of the column lies between you like a black bar of iron, close enough to touch, on his side of the line. He takes the roll and holds it against one knee with a ringed hand, reading the rest of you the way a man reads a receipt: what you cost, where you were loaded, what you are to be fed. Then he looks up, and looks at you for the length of four breaths with no expression at all, the way the river looks at a bank. "You will stand there until the light moves off your feet," he says. "Then I will decide what you are. If the scribe has to write your name to do it, you go back downriver with the empty boats." He goes back to the roll. The brush keeps moving. Nobody in the colonnade is going to tell you what happens next.