The door finally opened, and I gasped with shock as the hugely obese man waddled in. Nekoptah! I had been led into a trap! My pulse thundered in my ears. I had left my sword, even my dagger, on the ship in Lukka’s care. All that I carried with me was the medallion of Amon around my neck and Nekoptah’s carnelian ring, tucked inside my belt.
He smiled at me. A pleasant, honest-seeming smile. Then I noticed that he wore no rings, no necklaces, no jewelry at all. His face was unpainted. His expression seemed friendly, open, and curious — as though he was meeting me for the first time, a stranger.
“I am Hetepamon, high priest of Amon,” he said. Even his voice sounded almost the same. But not quite.
“I am Orion,” I said, feeling almost numb with surprise and puzzlement. “I bring you greetings from Crown Prince Aramset.”
He was as fat as Nekoptah. He looked so much like the high priest of Ptah that they might be…
“Please make yourself comfortable,” said Hetepamon. “This is an informal meeting. No need for ceremony.”
“You…” I did not know how to say it without sounding foolish. “You resemble…”
“The high priest of Ptah. Yes, I know. I should. We are twins. I am the elder, by a few heartbeats.”
“Brothers?” And I saw the truth of it. The same face, the same features, the same hugely overweight body. But where Nekoptah exuded dark scheming evil, Hetepamon seemed at peace with himself, innocent, happy, almost jovial.
Hetepamon was smiling at me. But as I stepped closer to him, he peered at my face, squinting hard. His pleasant expression faded. He looked suddenly troubled, anxious.
“Please, move away from the sun so that I can see you better.” His voice trembled slightly.
I moved, and he came close to me. His eyes went round, and a single word sighed from his slack mouth.
“Osiris!”
Chapter 42
HETEPAMON dropped to his knees and pressed his forehead on the tiles of the floor. “Forgive me, great lord, for not recognizing you sooner. Your size alone should have been clue enough, but my eyes are failing me and I am not worthy to be in your divine presence…”
He babbled on for several minutes before I could get him to rise and take a chair. He looked faint: His face was ashen, his hands shaking.
“I am Orion, a traveler from a distant land. I serve the crown prince. I know nothing of a man named Osiris.”
“Osiris is a god,” Hetepamon panted, his chubby hands clutched to his heaving chest. “I have seen his likeness in the ancient carvings within Khufu’s tomb. It is your face!”
Gradually I calmed him down and made him realize that I was a human being, not a god come to punish him for some self-imagined shortcomings. His fear abated, little by little, as I insisted that if I resembled the portrait of Osiris, it was a sign from the gods that he should help me.
But he talked to me, too, and explained that Osiris is a god who takes human form, the personification of life, death, and renewal.
Osiris was the first king of humankind, Hetepamon told me, the one who raised humans from barbarism and taught them the arts of fire and agriculture. I felt old memories stirring and resonating within me: I saw a pitiful handful of men and women struggling against the perpetual cold of an age of ice; I saw a band of neolithic hunters painfully learning to plant crops. I had been there. I had given them fire and agriculture.
“Osiris, born of Earth and Sky, was treacherously murdered by Typhon, the lord of evil,” said Hetepamon, his voice flat and softly whispering, almost as if he were in a trance. “His wife Aset, who loved him beyond all measure, helped to bring him back to life.” Had I lived here in an earlier age? I had no memory of it, yet it might have happened.
Forcing myself to appear calm, I said to Hetepamon, “I serve the gods of my far-distant land, who may be the same gods you worship here in Egypt, under different names.”
The fat high priest closed his eyes, as if still afraid to look at my face. “The gods have powers and hold sway far beyond our ability to comprehend.”
“True enough,” I agreed, silently adding that I would one day comprehend them in their entirety — or die the final death.
Hetepamon opened his eyes and took a great, deep, massively sighing breath. “How may I help you, my lord?”
I looked into his dark, dark eyes and saw honest fear, real awe. He would not argue when I told him that I was mortal, but he remained convinced that he was being visited by the god Osiris.
Maybe he was.
“I must go into the great pyramid. I seek…” I hesitated. No sense giving him a heart attack, I thought. “I seek my destiny there.”
“Yes,” he said, acceptingly. “The pyramid is truly placed at the exact center of the world. It is the site of destiny for us all.”
“When can we enter the pyramid?”
He gnawed on his lower lip for a moment. His resemblance to Nekoptah still unsettled me, slightly.
“To go to the great pyramid would mean a formal ceremony, a procession, prayers and sacrifices that would take days or weeks to prepare.”
“Isn’t there a way we could get inside without such ceremony?”
He nodded slowly. “Yes, if you wish it.”
“I do wish it.”
Hetepamon bowed his head in acquiescence. “We will have to wait until after the sun sets,” he said.
We spent the day slowly gaining confidence in one another. I gradually got over the feeling that he was Nekoptah in disguise and, bit by bit, Hetepamon grew easier in the presence of a person whom he still suspected might be a god in disguise. He showed me through the vast temple of Amon, where the great columned halls soared higher than trees and the stories of creation and flood and the relationships between gods and men were carved on the walls in pictures and elaborate hieroglyphs.
One of the things that convinced me he actually was a twin of Nekoptah was his foolish habit of chewing on small dark nuts. He carried a small pouch on a belt around his ample waist and constantly dug his hamlike fists into it to feed himself. His teeth were badly stained by them. Nekoptah, despite his other shortcomings, was not a nibbler.
From Hetepamon I learned the history of Osiris and his beloved wife/sister Aset, whom the Achaians called Isis. Osiris had descended into the netherworld and returned from death itself to be with her, such was the love between them. Now the Egyptians saw Osiris in the disappearance of the sun at the end of each day and the turning of the seasons each year: the death that is followed inevitably by new life.
I had died many times, only to return to new life. Could I bring my Athene back to life? The legend said nothing about her death.
“These representations are not accurate portraits of the gods,” Hetepamon told me as we stood before a mammoth stone relief, carved into one entire wall of the main temple. His voice echoed through the vast shadows. “The human faces of the gods are merely idealized forms, not true portraits.”
I nodded as I gazed at the serene features of gods and — smaller — kings long dead.
Leaning close enough for me to smell the nuts on his breath, he whispered confidentially, “Some of the gods’ faces were actually drawn from the faces of kings. Today we would consider that blasphemy, but in the old days people believed the kings were themselves gods.”