Ancient Evenings (17 page)

Now, as I looked over the gardens and saw the light of the moon on the pool, and the lanes that led to the servant and slave houses, saw the glow of fire to melt the pitch in the boat builder’s shop where workmen for some reason were still busy this night, as I looked on the very last of the guests sauntering down the lanes and disappearing in the turns of a clever maze, so I also knew what was now passing between my mother and her grandfather, and I shivered at the mad cry of a monkey who called out from his cage in a near-human if sadly demented voice. How the moon was shining. In the heat, it seemed as heavy as the earth beneath my toes this afternoon. A gazelle gave its small cry.

Some fear was arising in Hathfertiti, some gathering of apprehension she could not locate. Even as the monkey gave his cry at the oncoming shift in the air, I felt a bolt of terror fly from my mother to me just before she screamed. Not aware that I was near, her horror was pure in its panic—I do not think I had ever heard my mother scream before. Then she began to weep like a child. “Take it off. Take it off me,” she begged, and grasped Menenhetet’s hand, pulling his fingers to her head, while whimpering with fury at the unmistakable knowledge that something was certainly crawling in the luxuriant bush of her coiffure.

He found the louse in an instant, cracked it between his thumbnails in another, while Hathfertiti was racing her fingers through her hair, crying out with a frantic petulance, “Are there more? Will you look?”

He soothed her as if she were an animal in fright, stroking her hair like a mane, holding her chin, murmuring to her in a language of meaningless words so soft they could have served for the intimate babble a man gives his horse or his dog, and she calmed a little as he drew her to the light of a torch, ignoring the servants still there, one to each torch, standing unmoving through the night—no reason why Menenhetet would have hesitated to do anything in front of them, but now, by the flare of the torch, he searched her scalp and assured Hathfertiti it was clean. At last, she calmed and he led her back to their couch.

“Are you sure there was only one?” she asked.

He smiled. The wickedness of his smile was complete. Now Menenhetet kissed her, but so adroitly, with such a lingering intimation that she leaned toward him for another. “Not yet,” he told her and gave one more of his little smiles so that I could not know if he referred to the insects or the kiss. I felt again a bolt of terror spring from her to me. But then I was already frightened. I did not wish to listen to what they might say next. I knew it would be close to what I could hear on many a night in the voice of my nurse with either of her two friends, the Nubian slave who worked in the stables, and the Hebrew slave from the metal shops who sharpened the knives and the swords. One or the other was always with her in the room next to mine at night, and from there came the sounds of the barnyard and the birds’ cries of the marsh and the swamp. My nurse and her companion grunted each night like pigs or roared like lions, and sometimes they came forth with high whinnying sounds full of every muscle in their belly. Through all of my father’s estate would such cries come up in the night, the long sighs of one couple seeming to start the growl of another only to bring forth a third roaring with pleasure, thereby encouraging the animals to join with their barks and screams and lowing sounds.

Now, my mother stood up and would have left Menenhetet, but she looked instead into his eyes and their expressions were locked again. They did not speak, but the power of the attraction which had kept them looking into one another’s eyes for all of an evening was here again, as if each pressed with the power of his will against the other, and I felt ill. Except I was not sick so much as thrown about by two winds that came howling at that instant over all of my childhood, and I heard him say to her, although indeed I do not know if it was his voice that entered my ear or his thought (for just as some are deaf, so had they begun to say of me that I was the opposite of those who cannot hear since even what was unsaid could come into my mind). Whether he spoke it, therefore, or thought it only to himself, I certainly heard my great-grandfather say, “Your best opportunity with the Pharaoh is tomorrow.”

My mother replied, “What if I find what I want and you do not?”

“Then you must remain loyal to me,” said my great-grandfather.

I did not dare to look and it was just as well, since even as my eyes were closing, so did Menenhetet push my mother to her knees before his short white skirt. I felt the force of their thoughts like one chariot running full amok into another, and again I saw into his mind. She must have seen it too, for all strength broke in her, and she cried out. My great-grandfather said, “Set’s cock is in your mouth.”

I had a true sense of poison then, like a vindictiveness brooding in the intestines of the wind, and do not know if I swooned but I was living in darkness, not six, nor twelve, not twenty-one, nor even dead—was I dead?—but in the alcove off the grand gallery of the Pyramid, Menenhetet’s cock was certainly in my mouth. My jaws froze. I felt helpless in every muscle, and a rage at the core of my will. I had only to bite and he, too, would scream. I knew at that instant I was equal to my mother, and could not separate myself from her, could not say I was Menenhetet Two, the young and noble warrior, too soon dead, and feeling no fall from the heights of my own pride, for the mouth which sucked on him was not my own mouth but my mother’s in all the windings of her thought and the currents of her senses, and I knew the cock of Set as she knew it on the roof garden of my great-grandfather’s house above the banks of the Nile and his flesh was hot as the smelting pits of a sulphur mine to scorch the flesh of her palate. My mind resting in hers, so was my mouth living in her mouth, and I tasted a curse deep as the virulence in the seed of Set, and Menenhetet’s hand was still holding mine, while the fingers of his other hand clasped the back of my head. Through my mother’s ears I could hear the unspoken voice of my great-grandfather as he had spoken once to her while her mouth was engorged, and with a throbbing upon her face (my face) like the quivering of lightning in the heavy load of a murderous sky, so did something come up out of the bile of existence, some noxious marrow of the corruptions of the dead, and Menenhetet came forth into her mouth, so into my mouth, out of the loins of the dead Menenhetet, in the alcove of the Pyramid where I knelt so did his discharge come like a bolt and by the light of its flash I knew how he held her head on the garden of that roof, the iron of his last shuddering pulse dripping its salt onto the back of her tongue, and those thoughts passing from his head into hers, so was a cock withdrawn from my mouth in the dark, and I in the Land of the Dead began to feel a little happy expectation for what might be waiting next, even as Hathfertiti, lips bruised and perfumes turned by the onslaught of his carnal aroma, had a happiness nonetheless in her limbs and a scent of a rose in the finest folds of her meat since she, too, had an expectation now for the morning. On that thought, there still on my knees, I was transported with her, as by one breath of my mind, to the golden light of our trip downriver in all the splendid anticipation of an audience with our Pharaoh, Ramses Nine, while I dreamed of Him in all the morning effulgence of the Nile.

TWO

Just as we can stare into the depth of a golden goblet and find the reverberation of a thought in the last drop, so did I comprehend that the last treasure of this day on the river would be found in the private rooms of the Pharaoh. Sitting on my cushion of silver filigree, the cheeks of my buttocks in subtle tumult, I curved my body into the soft reception of Hathfertiti’s arm, and felt new heats in my thighs to bring back the memory of my mother and Menenhetet from the night before. What a transformation! Last night I had nearly cried out with my mother. Today I sat in the boat lulled with heat.

Of course, I had had an unexpected reward. For Menenhetet had gone on to make love to my mother. Or, as I saw it then, he moved with her in an act I could not recognize as grappling or a dance, nor yet as prayer, and it even looked at moments like the couplings of animals except that they did not present the stupid look that animals offer when they are joined.

About the time they were licking at each other with many an aristocratic growl, more like birds than hogs, I slipped away in a quandary of heat and humiliation, descended the stairs, found the room with my bed, and being obliged to sob at the thought of my mother naked with my great-grandfather, was for the first time pacified in a special way by my nurse, Eyaseyab. The part of my body that grew between my legs, fierce until then only with the need to urinate, was christened Sweet Finger by her in the dark, and Eyaseyab put her Syrian lips on it and gave me sensations I would not otherwise have known. Even this morning when I looked across the water at her (for Eyaseyab was in the barge that followed with the servants) I would bring my hand to my nose and it would still smell of her mouth, a nice round odor of onions, oil and fish (since my palm had certainly held onto Sweet Finger long after Eyaseyab was gone) and so her lips left a pull on my memory equal to the lap of soft waves on our hull as barges rowed by in the other direction, and I laughed, to the astonishment of the others, when my father, hoping to enter the mood of his wife and her great-grandfather, if by no more than the bite of his teeth on the silence, now was heard to say, “This year, we’re well rid of the stink.”

“No, its odor is fascinating, I confess,” said Menenhetet after the pause that followed my laughter.

“Well, I find it curious,” said my mother, “on occasion.”

And I was reminded of them licking each other. Of course, nothing was equal to our river when it began to rise and each old slime on the flats began to stir with its last odors as the water reached higher into the caked mud and old reeds while feasts of insects floated down on the foliage—a terrible smell for a week as if our earth was shucking its filthiest skin, each village, now an island with its own high ground offering the new stench of sheep and cattle pressed together for these few weeks close enough to sleep in the huts of their peasant masters, an atrocious condition but for nights of full moon when the villages would look like dark islands on a silver lake, and the poorest boat, not big enough for two men, just a tying and twisting of long dry reeds coated with pitch would appear as elegant in such light as the skiffs of papyrus on which my great-grandfather, my father, and their friends would now and then embark on a hunt.

But on this fine morning when my father made his comment, the stench was gone, and the river was no longer green from the first sludge of the fields but high and red with the mud of the earth it had washed from cliffs upriver—a golden-red usually near to brown in color except on this exceptional morning when the sun was so brilliant that the gleam coming off the river was equal to a hundred suns, an emblazoning of gold upon red waters that lit up every passing bark until the meanest barge full of cabbages or jugs of oil, pots of grain, or near awash with a load of fine stone shimmered nonetheless in the light like a royal galley, and I remember one scow floating down beside us, its decks heaped with bales of papyrus that looked as white in their reflection as the best of treated linen. Try then to look into the blinding light that came from the gold and silver hull of a state barge of the King being rowed upstream with a group of royal officials to take on Pharaoh’s duties in towns to the South. They stood beside a huge altar of gold in the stern, larger than five men kneeling side by side, a gift no doubt from Ramses Nine to one of His temples, and the officials cheered as they saw the pennants on the golden falcon in the bow of Menenhetet’s ship and we nodded in our turn to the coiled cobras of gold on the raised cabin of this state barge. The royal ship was rowed by sixty oarsmen (for there was no wind) thirty in a row on either side, and with the speed they raised, no breeze could have taken them upriver as quickly. Their mast stood alone, its great red mainsail furled, the mast straight as Sweet Finger last night, but covered with gold: there was not anything on the boat that did not shine of gold or silver but for the straw matting on the decks, and the carved purple bulwarks of the oarlocks and the rail. In pace with its progress, a troop of charioteers guarded the treasures of the barge by marching down the road that led along the higher bank of the river, and an infantry of archers jogged with them in a trot to keep even with the pace of the oarsmen, their equipment jiggling, then a squadron of lances with colored flags and plumed Babylonian horses I saw, and two-man chariots. Purple, orange, red, and a yellow as saffron as the color of my own robes, were on the plumes and ribbons of the horses, and the painted medallions of the chariots. Naked children ran after them for as long as they could keep up—naked but for a bracelet or an armband. I saw a few stare at my yellow robes in awe, and when one boy my age looked at me, and I at him across the water, he bowed and kissed the ground. Meanwhile, every sound was going back and forth between the soldiers and the women they passed, a merriment as happy as the washing of the river, and greetings and even applause kept passing between our boat and the soldiers as though today were a festival, and open salutations were permitted. Just before we drew away from them around a bend in the river, so we came on some blacks by the bank playing tambourines in such a frenzy that my mother murmured, “The passing of the Pharaoh’s barge is what has excited them so.” Two beautiful black girls were also in this frolic, and squealed with delight when one of the mercenaries, a Mede with amazing blond hair, took off his helmet and bowed flirtatiously as his chariot pulled by. Even the harper on our boat, a sour priest who wore a leopard skin (of which he was very proud) over the white linen of his ceremonial dress, condescended to pluck a string of his lyre, and the Negroes whistled at the clarity of the tone. Red as the mud of the banks were the dates ripening on the trees, and I thought the state barge looked like the golden bark of Ra being rowed across the sky even as it went by the bend in the glare of the sun. It was the grandest sight I had ever seen on the river, but I was to witness a greater one in the next hour when we came to the outskirts of Memphi.