Ancient Evenings (67 page)

“They anointed Usermare. On this night, as on others when I had not been there, He would sit like the God Amon, while the little queens would serve Him in the manner of Tongue and Pure, by which I mean that they would wipe His face most carefully and apply new cosmetic to His eyes. They would take off His garments, and dress Him in fresh linen, then speak verses over the jewelry they laid on Him. Each piece removed was kissed by one of the little queens, as well as each garment they laid on Him. Since in those days I did not fully understand the difference between kissing and eating—which peasant could?—I thought they were making these small sounds with their lips to show that the taste of the linen of the Pharaoh was good.

“Now, on this night as on others, they sprinkled perfumes on His brow, and into their mouths, each one of these queens, one by one took His sword while the others murmured, ‘The Gods adorn Themselves and Thy name is Adornment.’

“To my astonishment He gave Himself up to the little queens as if He were a woman. He lay on His back with His powerful thighs in the air, His knees farther apart than the width of His great shoulders, and my hand was held in His with such force I could hardly have freed myself. Yet that was only at the commencement. I was still full of fear and expected the house of Nubty to roar up around us in flames, yet the walls only staggered, as from shock, and still were standing; indeed, it could have been my own body that was quivering. I still lived then as I say in fear of catastrophe, but when it did not happen, my terror grew less, and so, too, did His grip relax.

“Toward the end, He held my hand softly and I could feel His pleasures as they swelled into Him out of the cunning mouths of the little queens, indeed, even now, I can tell You, great Ptah-nem-hotep, of all that was in Usermare as He grew ready to come forth. I was able to know Him in those moments as none who is not a Pharaoh can ever know so Good and Great a God. In that pleasure when the four little queens knelt before the great and beautiful body of Usermare, I came to know Him. Heqat had taken His feet in her mouth and licked between His toes like a silver snake that winds through golden roots, and Oasis, with the skill of long practice, had given light licks and long kisses to the sword of Usermare even as Nubty knew His ears and His nose and the lids of His eyes with the tip of her tongue, yes, all of these caresses from Heqat, Oasis and Nubty had passed through His fingers into me and I felt more beautiful than all the flowers in the Gardens of the Secluded and lived in the air of a rainbow while there He lay, legs apart, His knees bent. It was then that Honey-Ball brought her lips to that mouth of Usermare which lived between His buttocks and she kissed Him there, her tongue coming forth into His gates, and she knew the entrance to His passage. He lay there, and with my hand, I was with Him. So I knew what it was to be in the Boat of Ra going up the river of the Duad in the Land of the Dead, and that was a wondrous place from such a boat with serpents and scorpions at every turn, flames in the mouths of beasts more terrible than I had ever seen, and Blessed Fields whose grass was sweet even in the night. Usermare floated through the Land of the Dead, and I with Him, the pig at my vitals. He saw the Sun and the Moon as His cousins. Then the river began to rise into the ruby of His sword there in the sweet lips of Oasis, and I heard Him shout, ‘I am, I am all that will be,’ and even as the women cried out, He came forth and the ghost of the kolobi was like a fire with red and emerald light in me.

“So did I come forth at His side, all the powers of His own rising having surged through His fingers into mine, but then my coming forth was blasted back by the snout of that pig and thereby I felt owned from mouth to anus, great Monarch and curious pig owned the two ends of the river that ran through me, even as Osiris commands the entrance and exit to the Land of the Dead.

“I found no cause for celebration. Usermare had no sooner recovered from coming forth as a woman than He was ready to stand as a man and now was interested in none of the mouths that lived between the thighs of His four little queens, but took my poor cheeks, rooted in all night by the snout of the pig, and before the women, made a woman again of me. ‘Aiiigh, Kazama,’ they cried with many giggles, and it was then I learned that Kazama was their name for me. Slave-Driver was the thought they held when they spoke the name to each other, but now the slave-driver had become the slave. ‘Aiiigh, Kazama,’ they cried in their laughter. But I did not. Holding His hand, I had lived in the waters of paradise. Not so with His sword. That gave me pain. I saw no vision. I swore that if this was the second time He had penetrated my bowels, there would not be a third even if He cut off all I had and left me in the compound of the eunuchs.”

At this, Menenhetet’s voice fell silent, and I, who had been listening with all my attention, eyes shut, now opened them to see my mother across the room, and on her knees before Ptah-nem-hotep, and I thought His sword was in her mouth. Yet, whatever passed between them ceased so soon as I sat up. My mother, however, still purred like a cat. My father slept. At least, he did not move, and his eyes were closed. He snored openly and in misery. The fireflies glowed so brightly that I thought I could witness the expression on my great-grandfather’s face, and he was far from us. That was certainly true. In the next instant, he began to speak in the voice of Honey-Ball.

THREE

I knew they were her tones. All the while I had lived in my great-grandfather’s thoughts, I had heard her speaking. Now, his eyes rolled up like the eyes of the dead, and out of his throat came the voice of Honey-Ball.

“Kazama, I did not see you leave,” she said. “But I laughed with the others for He made a woman of you. You jerked like a worm on the hook of His strength. Yet, now, I do not think of Sesusi, but of the injury to your proud heart. You feel soft like the earth when the river flows over. Tell me it is not so.”

“It is so,” said my great-grandfather speaking in his own voice out of the very heart of this spell, and yet, by the diminishing light of the fireflies, I knew he was calm once more, his voice older than any I had heard and looked one hundred years old, more than a hundred. The patio smelled like old stone. I was trying to remember some opening of my own jaws in a vault so dank I could not breathe. The voice of Honey-Ball spoke again, however, and I was back in every murmur of the night. Through the mouth of Menenhetet, I heard her say, “How I felt the pain of your thoughts. They suffered the convulsions of a belly when a child is born. Is it so, Kazama?”

“It is so,” said Menenhetet.

“In that hour, you could not say if you were a man or a woman. You could only wonder why men pass over into women, and women into men.”

When the last echo of her voice was gone, Menenhetet’s head came forward, and he looked at all of us as if he had slept for a hundred years. His face came back from the old age that had lain upon it, and I never saw him look so young, a man of sixty who could have stood among us for forty and stronger than a charioteer. My father ceased his snoring to come awake, and my mother had a look of satisfaction on her lips, as if she had tasted nothing so much as the center of a secret.

“Yes,” said Ptah-nem-hotep, “tell us more of this Honey-Ball for she sounds nearly so curious as My great ancestor, may I be welcomed by Him in the Blessed Fields,” and He made a loud smacking sound with His mouth to remind us that it was still the Night of the Pig, and piety might offer less protection than sacrilege. “Yes,” He said, “tell us before the dawn burns our eyes. Soon Hathfertiti and I may wish to find our sleep.” With a laugh of great gaiety—in the first true sound of real happiness I had heard from Him, our Pharaoh came to His feet and kissed my father on the brow.

“It is so,” said my father.

“Speak again in the voice of Honey-Ball,” cried Ptah-nem-hotep to my great-grandfather, as if He, too, had been drinking kolobi.

“Divine Two-House, I slept for a moment and feel well-rested. Did You hear her voice?”

Ptah-nem-hotep laughed.

“It must be true,” said Menenhetet. “I think of her now.”

“Yes, go on,” said our Pharaoh. “I would enjoy it.”

“If I remember,” said my great-grandfather, “the night was without a moon when I left the house of Nubty, and, to my unhappy eyes, as dark as the most awful of my thoughts. I found the pond where the black swan liked to stay at night and tried to speak to her, yet I could think of nothing but my shame. It was then I took a second vow. Shame, like any other poison, needs its own outrageous cure. I decided to seek the courage of madness itself. I would dare what no one else was ready to dare, and put myself in the bed of one of the little queens.

“It was bravery itself to breathe twice on one thought such as this. For it is on the second breath that others hear what you think. Yet I knew I must speak the vow clearly. So I told myself, but I was shaking so much the swan began to shudder as well. Her wings clapped, and little waves went out from her body to set the water of the pond to frothing loudly. I was certain every house in the Gardens of the Secluded would awaken. Then the pond was still again. I began to think of Honey-Ball. Out of the breasts of that round woman rose a tenderness for me that was like the rise of the river when the earth is dry, and the pig’s snout came up behind me then and nuzzled my thigh.

“Let me not speak of the days it took until I made my first visit, nor of each fear I managed to conquer only to lose my footing on the next fear. All such tales are the same. I do not know that I could have entered her house if in my dreams, I was not always walking toward it. How I wished to lie on my back like Usermare and know her mouth at the lower gates.

“Say that I was drawn as one bar of black-copper-from-heaven is seduced toward another, for on a night when Usermare did not visit the Gardens of the Secluded, I presented myself at her door. Although on that visit I did not even try to sit beside her, I asked on leaving if I could come tomorrow, and she agreed but said, ‘No one must see you here again at night,’ and she led me out to a tree by her own garden wall over whose branches I might climb. That way I could enter without awakening her maidservants or eunuchs. Touching the branch, I remembered a night when I sat with my back against another tree on the way to Kadesh, and I nodded, and she put her hand to my neck and rubbed it slowly. A strength came to me from her plump fingers like the force I once received from the Lebanese wood.

“After I left, I could not sleep again. In the night the power of her attraction was upon me. I had never liked women so heavy as herself, and yet the thought of such plumpness stirred like a sweet wind in my belly. I confess I felt all but equal to one of those eggs in the middle of a ball of dung that our scarab beetle pushes up the riverbank, for in the midst of trying to sleep, I was as rich as Khepera Himself, and warm, and full of earth, and knew again the smells of our Egyptian dung so replete with all that rots and dies and still reeks of the old greed, and wondered if this were the odor of Honey-Ball’s flesh when her perfume was gone. Yet I also felt full of gold, and saw a golden sky beneath my closed eyes and heard its thunder as though the light of Ra, not content with offering light to corn, to the reeds, to the glint of the river, and to that richest ore of earth, gold itself, had also to warm all filth and penetrate to the very center of this oven of dung that was my pleasure. With that, I sat up, hating the foul attraction I might find in her arms, yet determined to know her, for I was worse than dead. My shame, carried for so many years, was now inflamed.

“So I got up and walked through the gardens, and climbed the tree outside her walls, crossed the branch and dropped within her garden. She was waiting for me in her room, but I fell into her arms with such fear that my sword was like a mouse. She felt larger than the earth. I thought I embraced a mountain. On that night, I did not have the strength to enter a lamb. The trickle drawn forth from me had none of the serpent’s flame or the radiance of Ra, I flew on the wings of no bird, but was dragged out of myself, and indeed, she pulled me forth, her hand plucking me up and down until the waters were lifted to the end of my belly and beyond. I knew what it was to come forth in fear. I did not even feel shame when we were done, but much relief. Soon I could be gone.

“She was not in the same haste, however, to see me leave. By my side, she gave a heavy sigh, heavy as the shadow of a large bird when it crosses your shadow, and said, ‘I will lead you out to the tree.’ But even as I was putting on my sandals, she took me in another direction, and we passed through a door into a room that had many odors from the powders of beasts and animals long dead, and in a corner by a niche was a small bowl of alabaster with oil in it, and a burning wick. By its light, she took three fingers of powder from a jar, stirred that in wine, drank half and gave me the other half. I knew a taste older than a coffin.

“She laughed at my face. It was a laugh loud enough to wake others, but she put a heavy hand on my shoulders, as if to tell me that her servants would not be surprised by any noise she might make in the night, and I knew, since she was speaking to me with barely a word, that the drink we had taken together was a bridge from her throat to mine. Over it would pass my thoughts. So I knew also that this room next to the chamber where she slept was her abode on any night when she could not close her eyes, and then, indeed, my nose told me as quickly of little sacrifices performed in here. I could see the altar, a table of granite, and sniff the old blood of many a small animal who had given up its last fears to her. Then I knew that even as I had lain in my bed and felt the beetle of Khepera stirring my bowels, so was the powder in this wine come from a beetle she had captured and dried (after its head had been removed). She must have pounded it, sifted it, then spoken the words of power. Now, together, we had drunk that wine, and that caused me to think again of our dung beetle. We are so in awe of its strength that we do not study its subtler habits. But I, as a boy, had spent many afternoons on the riverbank with no more for amusement than the beetle to watch, and I had seen them push the ball up the bank to the hole where they would bury it. That dung would serve as food for the eggs laid within. Yet if you confused two beetles and changed their balls, they still strained to the task and did it for the other’s eggs. I tell you this because I understood, standing next to Honey-Ball, that she had been putting our purposes together and mixing our thoughts until Usermare would never envision us side by side. Before I left on this night, as if she would own more of me than He did, she cut off the ends of my fingernails with a sharp little knife, collected these parings and minced them small with her knife. Then she ate them in front of me. I did not know if I was with a woman, a Goddess, or a beast. ‘If you are here for love of me,’ she said, ‘your hands will learn caresses. But if you were sent by Usermare, your fingers will share the pain of the leper before they fall off.’ Again, she smiled at the expression on my face. ‘Come,’ she said, ‘I trust you—a little bit,’ and she kissed my lips. I say ‘kiss’ because that was the first night I could truly try it. I had known the secret whore of Kadesh and my woman in Eshuranib and many a peasant girl and I had known the sharing of our breath which is agreeable. Peasants tell each other, ‘Nobles eat from plates of gold so they also know how to touch each other’s mouth.’ Here, she lay her lips on mine, and kept them there. I felt swathed like a mummy, only it was in wrapping of a cloth finer than I had ever felt. Her tongue was sweeter than any finger, and yet like a small sword when it pressed into my mouth. No, say it was like a little serpent that undulated in honey.