Authors: Pauline Gedge
“Is that all you want to bring?” he asked incredulously. I nodded.
“It is all I have.”
“Gods!” he exclaimed. “Is it clean? I want no lice or fleas in here. Oh for Set’s sake don’t start crying again. If you wish to watch Aswat disappear into the dawn you had better go onto the deck. We are at this moment sliding down the canal and will turn north immediately. I am going to sleep.”
I did not want to see Aswat vanish. I could not have borne the pain or the excitement. The Seer had shed his cloak and hood and was untying his white hair. I thought for one dreadful second that he was going to order me onto his cot with him but he pulled a shirt over his head, tugged off an ankle-length skirt, and unbound his feet. My head was spinning with weariness.
“Well,” he said impatiently, lying down and pulling a sheet over himself. “Are you going?”
“No,” I whispered. It was an effort to speak. “I want to sleep, Master.”
“Good! There are plenty of cushions on the floor and you will find more sheets folded beside the chest. I hope you rest peacefully.”
I did not think that he was bidding me sleep soundly. He was hoping that I did not snore. Clumsily I gathered up the cushions to make myself a bed against the far wall. I fetched a sheet, and winding it around me, collapsed in a huddle of nervous exhaustion. Faint light was beginning to filter through the few cracks in the curtains, bringing the contents of the cabin into focus. I glanced down the length of the room at the Seer. His eyes were open. He was watching me. I did not want to see a glint of red in his gaze so I turned over and was asleep almost at once.
I awoke in the same position in which I had fallen asleep, after a deep and incoherent dream that I forgot as soon as consciousness returned. Dazed, I reached for the edge of my pallet but felt softness instead. The room was stiflingly hot and diffused sunlight burned around me. I had overslept and Mother would be furious at my neglected chores. Then I saw the cot at the far end, neatly made, and the figure sitting writing at the table, a scribe’s palette beside his colourless fingers. He was wearing a knee-length kilt of many pleats that fell softly towards the floor. A necklace of intricately detailed blue and green enamelled scarabs lay against his throat and its counterpoise, a black Eye of Horus ringed in gold, sat in the cleft between his shoulder-blades. The snake ring glittered as his fingers moved. Through half-closed eyes I studied him. Last night he had been mysterious, frightening, ageless, a thing not quite human. Today, as Ra raged beyond the drapery, he was still mysterious but not so frightening, and he was definitely human. Sweat trickled from his white-haired armpits. He had a small bruise on his upper arm, blue-black and threatening on that bleached skin, and he had slipped off one leather sandal and hooked one foot behind the other as he worked. I could only see one-half of his face but the chin line was clean and firm.
“I have turned the sand clock seven times since you fell asleep,” he said without looking up. His hand continued to stab at the papyrus. “We have eaten, the rowers have rested, we have slipped past the accursed city, and two crocodiles were sighted on the bank. They are a good omen. There is food and drink beside you.”
I sat up. The tray held water, which I drained at once, and beer, and a plate of bread piled with chick peas and slices of duck drizzled with garlic oil. Although the cabin was unbearably hot I fell upon the food with a will. “What is the accursed city?” I wanted to know.
“Do not speak with food in your mouth,” he replied absently. “The accursed city is a place of great loneliness and heat and tumbled stone ruins. None will live there although the peasants are allowed to take away the blocks to make grindstones for their grain and to shore up their irrigation canals. A doomed Pharaoh built it and lived there, flouting the gods, but they had their revenge, and now only the hawks and jackals inhabit Akhetaten. Your hands are greasy. There is washing water in the bowl by the wall.” Awkwardly tying the sheet around me I rose and dabbled my fingers, then I picked up the beer.
“What are you doing, Master?” I wanted to know. He sat back, placed his pen carefully on the palette, and turned his gaze to me. There were tiny tracks around the blood-filled eyes and a deeply grooved line running from one side of his nose to a corner of his mouth, giving a cynical cast to an otherwise intriguing face.
“You are never to ask me that question,” he said coolly, “in fact, Thu, you are to ask permission to speak if you have a question. I examined your belongings while you slept. Put on the sheath. The tattered thing you wore when you returned to the barge with your father has been tossed overboard. When we tie up for the night you can bathe properly in the river. Until then you must go dirty. Go on deck and amuse yourself, but do not gossip and chatter with any of my servants. I have ordered an awning erected against the cabin wall where you may take the shade.” I glanced about quickly. My precious box, my link with my family and my childhood, was nowhere in sight but my basket was still propped where I had left it.
“Master!” I blurted. “May I ask a question?” He nodded. “My box …”
“Your box,” he said with quiet scorn, “is in the basket. I thought it would be safer there. Now clothe yourself and go.” I drew my best and now only sheath out of the basket then hesitated, embarrassed at the idea of being naked before him in daylight. He turned on me impatiently. “If I had wanted to rape you, you stupid girl, I could have done it a dozen times over by now, though what makes you think you are so enticing is beyond me. I made it quite clear last night, when you pranced about without your clothes, that I have no interest whatsoever in your skinny little body. Go!” Mutinously I dropped the sheet and pulled the sheath on over my head.
“I did not prance,” I retorted, and sweeping the curtain aside, went out into the blinding sunshine.
The side of the barge was four steps away and I paused, blinking and taking in what I saw. We were moving ponderously but at a good pace in the middle of the river. Sand-banks dotted with ragged palms slid by, and beyond them a collection of mud houses huddled on the edge of dry, cracked fields. A brown ox, knee-deep in the murky shallows, had its head down and was drinking. A naked peasant boy with a stick in his grasp, as dun-coloured as his beast, stared at us as we glided past him. In the distance the desert hills shimmered golden in the heat haze. The sky was white-hot. As I turned rather shyly forward to where the oarsmen moved to and fro and the captain sang the rhythm, the village dropped away to be replaced by empty land cut by a path that meandered beside the Nile. I was disappointed. I might have been looking at Aswat and its environs from my father’s fishing boat.
The deck was hot under my bare feet. The oarsmen ignored my progress but the captain on his stool, under his canopy, favoured me with a brisk nod. I walked to where the graceful prow curved up and inward, over my head, and leaned out. Crystal wavelets folded back from the barge’s assault, and above my head the flag bearing the imperial colours, blue and white, cracked in the prevailing north wind of summer. The breeze, hot though it was, felt good on my skin after the close confines of the cabin. Ahead, the river made a slow curve and vanished out of my sight so I retreated to the wall of the cabin where, as Hui had said, a white linen awning had been erected for me. Cushions had been strewn on the deck under it. I lowered myself into the shade with a sigh of satisfaction. Now was not the time to think of Aswat, to allow homesickness to invade me. Better to consider how desperately I had wanted to leave, how the gods had answered my prayers. I examined the vague guilt that stole over me as I relaxed, and realized that it was due to unaccustomed idleness. My mother would not have approved of me lolling here on plump satin like a pampered noblewoman while the oarsmen heaved and grunted under my eyes. Soon I will go aft and look at the helmsman on his perch in the stern, I told myself, but indolence had me in its gentle grip and I surrendered to it happily.
Perhaps I dozed, for it seemed that the sun had moved swiftly towards the west when my master called me sharply from beyond the curtain. I hurried to obey his summons, noticing as I did so that the placid, dreamlike shoals and banks of the river were changing. We were slipping by a house the like of which I had never seen before. It had its own watersteps as though the inhabitant was a god, and the tree-dotted land around it was a startling green. That meant many servants to haul water from the shrinking Nile. I glimpsed pillars, white as washed bones, and a portion of stone wall. Casting a glance further forward I saw another estate in the distance. Suddenly I was a foreigner in my own country, an uncouth peasant girl with dirt under her fingernails and not the slightest conception of how life might be lived by the people in those ethereal mansions. This time, as I came into Hui’s presence, I bowed.
He was lying on the cot draped in a sheet, and I could see that the linen under him was soaked with his sweat. I could hardly breathe for the thickness of the air and the stench of his odour under which was a faint hint of jasmine. Fleetingly I was reminded of the lyings-in I had attended with my mother. Many of the cramped mud rooms had smelled like this.
“Master, why do you not come outside?” I blurted without thought. “Ra is sinking towards the mouth of Nut, and soon the breeze will freshen.”
“Thu, you have no manners,” he muttered. “I told you not to question me. Nor may you give me advice unless, the gods forbid, I decide to ask you for it. I cannot go outside while Ra still rides across the sky. The merest touch of his rays upon my flesh causes me untold agony, as though he had bent down and put his mouth against my skin.” He saw the shame of my presumption on my face and smiled. “If I had been born a fellahin like you, my father would have slaughtered me or Ra himself would have taken my life. Sometimes, particularly when I am forced to travel in primitive conditions like this, I wish it had been so. The moon is more to my taste than mighty Ra, and I bear alliegance to Thoth, the god to whom he belongs. We will tie up tonight on the outskirts of his city, Khmun, and perhaps you would like to see the sacred burial place of all the ibis birds brought there to lie under his protection. However.” He pointed to the table. “Sit on the floor beside me and read me those scrolls. They are unimportant accounts from my Treasurer and letters from my friend in Nubia and I know their contents. Attempt the words you do not recognize.” I picked up the bundle and surveyed him.
“Master, may I say something?”
“I suppose so.”
“Let me bathe you. There is water in the bowl, and cloths, and I have much experience seeing to the comfort of women in labour. I could make you feel better.” His smile broadened and he laughed aloud.
“That is the first time I have been compared to a broody female,” he choked. “Sit, Thu, and do as you are told.”
So I sat and spelled out the scrolls, sometimes with ease but more often with a humiliating difficulty. Pa-ari’s lessons had not taken me as far as I, in my vanity, had believed. Hui corrected me brusquely but not unkindly, and as we worked the light in the room mellowed slowly to a friendly pink and the barge ceased to rock. At length I heard the ramp run out and we were interrupted.
“Permission to enter, Master. It is I, Kenna.”
“Come.”
The man who presented himself and bowed wore a simple white kilt with a border embroidered in yellow. A yellow ribbon cut across his forehead and trailed down his naked back. He was shod in straw sandals, wore a silver armband, and smelled gloriously of saffron oil. I presumed that the servants’ boat had also been moored, and surely this creature with the loftily aristocratic nose and haughty gaze was none other than Hui’s High Steward.
“Speak,” Hui ordered.
“The sun is even now almost below the horizon and the cooking fires have been lit. Will you be dressed and come to the river so that I may bathe you? An acolyte from the temple of Nun awaits your pleasure on the bank. The High Priest wishes you to dine with him tonight, if you so desire.”
So Kenna was nothing more than my Master’s body servant. Then in what clouds of luxury would the High Steward appear? I felt myself shrink into insignificance. Hui jerked his head at me. It was a dismissal.
“Find a secluded spot and bathe yourself,” he told me, “then go to the servants’ barge and they will feed you. Kenna, see that she has what she needs after you’re done with me. You can wander about Khmun for as long as you want, Thu, and after that you will be travelling on the servants’ barge. Kenna will resume his customary place here in my cabin.” The body servant shot me a look of sheer malice. I rose, placed the scrolls back on the table, bowed to Hui, and pushed past the supercilious Kenna. So I was to be relegated to the servants’ quarters. Well what did you expect? I asked myself furiously as I swung down the ramp. Instant recognition, my Libu Lady Thu? Respect and deference and indulgence? Wake up! If you want those things you will have to work for them. Very well, my thoughts ran on as I breathed deeply of the evening air and looked about me. I will work and I will have them.
What I saw drove all irritation from my mind. The barge rested lightly just within the tip of a wide bay fringed with acacia and sycamore trees. A little way off, the beach was cheerful with the twinkle of fires and chatter of the servants beside their own craft. I supposed that the oarsemen had joined them, for the oars of Hui’s barge had been shipped and now hung high above the waterline. Beyond both boats, strung out along the bay, bathed in the afterglow of a red sunset, lay the largest town I had ever seen. Watersteps led to hidden gardens whose trees leaned over mud walls. Light craft of all descriptions rocked at their moorings. Here and there a road appeared, diving into a palm grove and reappearing only to run past a collection of huts and disappear once more. Behind the houses, the huts and the trees I could just make out the beige pylons and lofty pillars of several temples. Somewhere here, I knew, enshrined in a Holiest of Holiest, was the sacred mound which had arisen first from the primeval floodwaters of Nun, the original Chaos, the place where Thoth, god of wisdom and writing and every scribe’s patron, had begat himself and risen upon a lotus flower. I thought of my favourite scribe, my own dear Pa-ari, at that moment, and wished fervently that he could see the home of his god.