There was nothing to do and not much to say. Disenk spoke occasionally of a Kenna I had never known, a man who loved dogs and who had captured and tried to tame one of the desert creatures, shy and harmless but traditionally impossible to domesticate; a man whose mother had abandoned him in the streets of Pi-Ramses when he was three years old and who had steadfastly revered Bes, god of motherhood and the family, in the hope that one day he might be reunited with the woman who had cared so little for him. I did not want to hear these things but I bit my lip and listened in a storm of confusion, guilt, relief and fear. In the long silences, when the heat of the season blended with the unaccustomed hush throughout the house so that it seemed to me as if time itself had died with Kenna and we were all suspended in an eternal limbo, I sat cross-legged on a cushion under the window, staring at the floor, and tried to recapture something of the person I had been. I did not want to examine the emotions that raged in my heart.
