Ancient Evenings (66 page)

“ ‘What will happen in Nubia?’ asked the Pharaoh.

“ ‘My people will see You on Your knees.’

“ ‘Then I will never go,’ said the Pharaoh.

“ ‘Perish.’

“In great fear, all waited for Horus of the North. He was pale, but the color of his eyes turned to silver, and he smiled under the shadow of the great stone roof that hid the sun. With a cry, he, too, threw his stick into the air. As they watched, it turned into a barge which rose upward until it came to rest beneath the great roof of stone, and then it heaved and groaned until it was able to raise the stone roof back into the sky.

“Horus of the South now said three strange words. On the instant, he was invisible. It proved of no protection. At once, Horus of the North repeated the three words backwards, and Horus of the South was obliged to come forth again. Now, he was a black cock, his wings clipped. In such a situation, he could only utter the most terrible howls of lamentation.”

“How did they bury him?” asked Usermare.

“Oh, not yet, great Sesusi. Horus of the North called forth a soldier to cut off the part that lives between a cock’s legs. At this, Horus of the South made much commotion. He begged the Pharaoh to save the life between his legs.

“ ‘I will save you,’ said the Pharaoh, ‘if by the balance of Maat, you agree to let me make eunuchs out of all Nubians I capture. Do you assign such rights to Me, and to the sons of My sons for a thousand years?’

“Horus of the South wept. ‘I am lost,’ he cried out, ‘so all of Nubia is lost. Do what You will. I promise not to come back to Egypt for a thousand years.’ When the Pharaoh nodded, Horus of the North gave a sign. The cock grew feathers and flew away. But the leg between the legs of all captured Nubians was lost, and they learned to serve in the House of the Secluded for all Pharaohs to come.”

“That is the truth,” said the eunuchs of the little queens, “that must be the true tale of how we are here,” and a sigh came up from them.

“Is this the last of your story?” asked Usermare.

“All but the last.” As if to show that many Gods were with her this night, whatever light could be found in the waning of the moon lay on her face, and the eyes and nose and mouth of Honey-Ball were beautiful, or at least would have been, if not surrounded by the full circle of her face, round as the moon. Within that face, however, her eyes were large and dark, her nose was most delicate, and her mouth was curved and very soft for so strong a woman.

“What is the end?” asked Usermare.

“Oh, great Sesusi,” said Honey-Ball, “since the time of which I speak, more than a thousand years have passed. Horus of the South may now be ready to return.”

“If that is so, how can I find Horus of the North?” asked Usermare. He spoke lightly, but His voice was heavy with the kolobi.

She shrugged. In the dark, the force of her gesture was felt in the air. “Let me offer a prayer to the Ka of Horus of the North. The great magician may wish to find his successor.”

Now, it was no longer Honey-Ball’s voice I heard in my ear but Menenhetet’s. I sat up straight as if tugged by the hair. So deeply had I been listening to his thoughts, that his voice was now as startling as the cry of an animal next to your tent. “So soon as she spoke of a successor,” my great-grandfather most certainly said, “I began to shiver. In the warmth of the night, I was trembling. One little queen pointed to me, and cried out, ‘Why do you fear the story?’ I told her that I was not afraid, only cold. But I was afraid. Honey-Ball had looked at me more than once, and I had dared to look back into her eyes. A thought had come then from her to me. It said: ‘I will teach you a little of these arts of magic.’ ”

TWO

Now that his voice had, however, risen again to the surface of his thoughts, my great-grandfather looked much refreshed, and began to muse aloud on several subtle matters.

“In this hour of His drunkenness,” said my great-grandfather, “I think Usermare was much disturbed by that tale of two magicians. For, as You know, it was His belief He was going to be killed in the Gardens of the Secluded. Now to speak of how He was right about such a suspicion when it was not true, must prove confusing. He was never assassinated. Yet, by another measure I would say He was all-but-killed in this year, and I was the one to do it, even though, as we all know, He lived until He was very old, old-as-Ra-is-Ramses-the-Second, we used to say, and I was even a High Priest in the late years of His Reign. Indeed He died only a few years before my second life was lost. I still remember children saying at His funeral: ‘God is dead,’ and they wondered how the sun could shine. He was a Pharaoh for sixty-seven years. Yet after this night, even though He would reign for another thirty-four, I still do not think there was a season when Usermare did not fear the return of Horus of the South.

“Of course, I did not know it that night. He showed no fear. To the contrary. If the story told by Honey-Ball had immediate power over my Monarch, it was to arouse His desire. One could almost feel the glow of His belly. It rose in my great Pharaoh like a fire beneath the fumes of kolobi. The eunuchs began to chant. Their hands struck their thighs with many little taps in a rhythm so quick I could hear the chirping of the crickets and the hooves of horses. One of these eunuchs even had a way of running his fingertips over his knees with a slipping sound to give you the patter of a brook or the slap of the smallest waves. To this accompaniment came forth many moths and butterflies from the dark and they flew in and out of our ears as if we were water-grass and they as numerous as little fish. Honey-Ball began to hum, and her voice was so resonant that once again I could not recognize the woman I saw. Other times, she had seemed without shape in her clothes, yet from the moment she came out of the water tonight, her body looked firm, and she was not without beauty. Like some who are fat, her flesh was slack in dejection, but could fill with blood when she was happy.

“Tonight, she sang a ballad of the love of a farmgirl for a shepherd, a sweet and innocent song, and Usermare drank kolobi to the sound of it, and wiped His eyes. Like many powerful men, he liked to weep a little on hearing tender sentiments. But not for too long. Soon Honey-Ball sang the next verse. The melody was the same but now the shepherd had no interest in the girl, and looked instead at the buttocks of his sheep, a wicked ballad. Honey-Ball began to cry out in the pleasurable cries of the beast as it was taken. ‘Oh,’ she groaned, in a voice to wake us all, ‘Oh,’ and the air throbbed.

“Usermare was now ready. ‘Come,’ He said to her. ‘You, Heqat, Nubty, Oasis!’ With a voice that did not bother to conceal the heat of His slow fires on this night, He added, ‘Let it be in the house of Nubty.’ Then as if a thought had come to His hand, even as Hera-Ra used to stand by His side and lick His fingers, Usermare said, ‘Meni, you are to come with Me,’ and He took my hand, and that way, we walked together.

“It is curious, but in His eyes, I had become Hera-Ra. It was to the lion, not myself, that He offered friendship. To myself, therefore, I now became absurd. Beneath all my vows that I would know revenge, I had been so starved through these years for one sign of His affection, that I was ready, doubtless, to roar like a lion if it would only keep His hand in mine a little longer.

“Yet, now, as we walked, strange events occurred. If I was like Hera-Ra to Him, I can only say that beside me, I could feel the hoofbeat, quick, of a wild pig. What a companion! If my first thought was that this pig had to be a gift from Honey-Ball, I do not know that I was wrong, and I can say that after the night which was to follow in the house of Nubty, the wild pig was often at my side until it was killed, about which I will also tell You, but that is later. Certainly on the next day when I walked along the lawn where the black swan sailed by at twilight, so was the wild pig with me, and when I would stop at the house of a little queen to watch one dress the hair of another, then, too, was the pig at my side. I came to know his face and know it well, but no one else could see the creature. Everywhere he walked with me, yet I could not summon him. While to think of his face was enough to make the pig appear, sometimes he would not, and on those nights when I was alone, I could not bear the sounds of the beer-house. The noises made by the little queens proved offensive to me. Indeed, once accustomed to the companionship of this silent creature, I became most censorious without him.

“I already knew that these hundred little queens did not always wait for an offering of pleasure from our divine Ramses, but sometimes ended by making love to each other. This discovery was objectionable to me, even if it should have been familiar. I grew up in a crowd of boys who were always on each other. Our expression for a powerful friend was ‘he-who-is-on-my-back.’ So as a boy, there was nothing I did not know of being on the others’ bodies, although my pride, since I was strong, had been that nobody was on mine. Still I could not bear to think of these women with one another, nor the way by which the most powerful of the little queens often treated the gentler ones as if they were slaves. On those nights when His Chariot did not enter the gates, and you would not hear the thunder of His fornication, there would rise up instead the sweeter cries and harsher screeches, the moans and music of many a woman in many a room. It was common whenever women were at such play that one would pluck a harp to accompany the others. And I, hearing such sounds, could not, in my mind, forswear the sights. To see a little queen at the sweet-meat of another was to gorge my blood. But then I did not have the royal disregard of my Monarch. We all knew that He liked to watch His little queens romp with one another. ‘Oh, yes,’ He would say, ‘they are the strings of My lute and must learn to quiver together.’

“I, however, especially when I was without the pig, used to think of this as part of the filth that rose on the flood, a pestilence out of these women, and I sometimes dared to wonder if they loved Him as much as they came to love each other. Sometimes two little queens would virtually live in one house like husband and wife, or brother and sister, and their children would speak equally of either little queen as their parent. It seemed to me that for a woman to love another woman more than her Pharaoh was equal to praying for the plague. So marched the legions of all those thoughts in me that were loyal to Usermare, but when I walked through the gardens with the pig, I became another man and was tolerant to their games and coveted the little queens for myself. Indeed, I even liked to observe their eating and their dancing, the songs they sang as they brushed each other’s hair, or searched through each other’s chests for finery to wear. Indeed, there was a time when I, like Nef-khep-aukhem, could name every cosmetic they used.”

“Are there any I do not know?” asked Hathfertiti.

“There is no oil of a flower you have not decanted,” he replied.

“But what of the herbs?” she insisted.

“Only the finest and sweetest perfumes were chosen. They had no need of the bitterness of galbanum or cassis.”

“Yes,” said my mother, “but what of the ointment of spikenard?”

“That they used, and saffron and cinnamon and the sweet wine that leaves the very odor of love when it is rubbed into the thighs with oil and a little of the gravy of roast meat.”

Now, Ptah-nem-hotep stirred with annoyance. “To tell too little,” He said, “is becoming your sin. I wish to know: What was done in the house of Nubty?”

“I have no way to inform You,” said Menenhetet, “without presenting myself as a fool.”

“That is hardly possible,” said Ptah-nem-hotep. “If I listen to you for so long, it is because you are not. But I can hardly expect that you were the master each night of your four lives. Even a Pharaoh may play the fool. There, I have made the most intolerable remark.”

“If I tell it, well then, it will be done quickly,” said my great-grandfather, and he leaned forward, as if, even to begin this unwilling engagement, he must go in at a gallop.

“The little queen, Nubty, had a statue of Amon whose belly was no larger than my hand. Yet the staff that rose between His golden legs was not hidden, no, to the contrary, it was half as long as the God Himself was high, and Usermare knelt before this little God, and raised His own hands as if to say that all of Him, Himself and each Ka of His Fourteen, were in service to Amon. Then, He put His mouth around the gold member, the very staff of the God Amon.

“ ‘No man has ever penetrated My mouth,’ said Usermare, ‘but I am happy to kiss the sword of Amon, and know the taste of gold and rubies.’ Indeed, on the tip of this gold member, on the knob itself, was a large ruby.

“Then, He rose, and Heqat and Oasis removed His chestplate and His skirt of linen. ‘Here, Meni,’ He said to me, ‘pray to Me as if I am the sword of the Hidden One,’ and His phallus was in my face, and I swallowed it, and felt the flood of the Nile rise in Him. My head was bobbing like a boat and the little queens giggled as the heat of His kolobi rushed into my throat and down the inside of my chest. Through it all, down to my navel, I knew now why the pig was with me. None of the little queens would have dared to touch one of their painted nails to my skin, but the pig had his thick nose between my cheeks and would have liked to swallow the semen of my King if it could have passed through me so fast. So I was not scorched by the heat of Usermare’s loins, only the contempt. There, I have told you the worst,” my great-grandfather said, “the first of the humiliations I was to know on this night before my Pharaoh, and that after I swore He would never shame me again. It is this which has delayed me, this which is difficult to tell. Yet now I feel as if a stone is lifted. So I will tell you the rest. For much was done.