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tonight?”
    “I do not know but I can ask.”
    I sighed. “Never mind. He could serve stewed mice on chopped grass and it would be more toothsome than a soldier’s fare. Don’t forget the hot water. At once.” He nodded and turned away and I took the few steps to the third door and knocked sharply.
    “Enter!” my father’s voice commanded and I did so, closing the door behind me as he rose from behind his desk and came around it, arms outstretched. “Kamen! Welcome home! The southern sun has burned you to the colour of cinnamon, my son! How was your journey? Kaha, I think we have done enough for now, thank you.” My father’s scribe rose from his position on the floor, gave me a quick but very warm smile, and went out, his palette in one hand and his pen and scroll in the other. Indicating that I should take the chair facing the desk, my father regained his own and beamed across at me.
    His office was dim and always pleasantly cool as the only light came from a row of small clerestory windows up near the ceiling. As a child I had often been allowed to sit under his desk with my toys while he conducted his business and I had been fascinated by the squares of pure white light they cast on the opposite wall, light that gradually elongated as the morning progressed and slid down the jumbled shelves until those uniform but fluid shapes began to creep towards me across the floor. Sometimes Kaha would be sitting crosslegged in their path, his palette across his knees and his reed pen busy as my father dictated, and the light would slither up his back and seep into his tight black wig. Then I knew I was safe and could return to my wooden goose and the little cart with real wheels that turned and in which I loaded my collection of pretty stones, brightly painted clay scarabs and my great pride, a little horse with flared nostrils and wild eyes and a tail of real horsehair protruding from its rump. But if Kaha chose to take up his position slightly closer to my father’s chair, then my toys would be forgotten and I would watch, tranced with something akin to fear, as the healthy bright squares slowly became distorted rectangles that oozed down the shelves and began to seek me out with blind purpose. They never quite reached me before my mother called me for the noon meal and, of course, I realized as I grew older that it would have been impossible for them to do so once the sun stood over the house. Later I spent my mornings at school, not under my father’s desk, but even as a man full grown, sixteen years old and an officer of the King, I could not laugh at that childish fear.
    Today it was an early afternoon light that diffused gently through the room, and I sat and regarded my father in its soft glow. His hands and face were heavily lined and toughened with years of travelling the caravan routes in blazing heat, but the runnels of his face had set in their own routes of humour and warmth and the blotching and coarseness of his hands only served to accentuate their strength. He was an honest man, bluff and straightforward, a masterful bargainer in the hard market-place of medicinal herbs and exotica but fair in his dealings and he had made a fortune doing what he loved. He spoke several languages including that of the Ha-nebu and the peculiar tongue of the Sabaeans and insisted that the men who led his caravans, though citizens of Egypt, shared a common nationality with those with whom he traded. Like the priests he belonged to no class and so was accepted into all circles of society, but he was in fact a minor noble, a distinction he did not particularly value, as, he said, he did not earn the title. Yet he was ambitious for me and proud of the convoluted negotiations that had netted the daughter of a great noble for my future wife. Now he sat back, running a beringed hand over his bald scalp to where the last of his grey hair clung in a semicircle between his large ears, and raised a pair of bushy eyebrows at