Out of the Black Land (6 page)

Chapter Five

Mutnodjme

We opened the basket and it was full of treasures. Nefertiti exclaimed as we spread out cloth worth half a Nome—finest gauze, the sort which we call ‘woven air,’ which takes a skilled spinner and weaver half a season to make and for which barbarian kings pay their weight in silver.

My mother doubled and redoubled a length and found that even folded ten times it would still go through a finger ring. It was beyond price.

Under it were well-made lengths of printed material, a handful of silver bracelets and jewellery made by some Theban craftsman, delicate beaten gold and small bright stones. There were also several heavy arm-rings.

In the midst of this a nurse was announced and came in pushing a reluctant miserable child before her. This, it appeared, was my new companion.

She had hair the same silvery brown as sycamore bark and eyes like good beer. She was dressed in a tunic of strange fashion, covering her shoulders instead of knotting around the waist. Her skin was milk white, like the Great Queen Tiye.

‘This is the Lady Merope the Klepht, Princess of Kriti in the Islanded Sea, Royal Wife of Amenhotep may he live. On the orders of Queen Tiye, Favourite of the Two Lands, she is to be the companion of your daughter the lady Mutnodjme,’ said the nurse, gesturing to a slave who was carrying a clothes-case and a basket to set them down. The basket yowled and something struggled within it, almost tipping it over.

‘Please send my thanks to the Great Royal Lady and convey our understanding of her condescension,’ said Tey.

The Lady Merope looked into my face with her strange brown eyes. I put out my hand and she took it. Her palm was damp with sweat. I could see that she was lonely and frightened and her loneliness matched my own. I smiled. So did she.

‘Where is Kriti?’ I asked. ‘And why are you a Royal Wife?’

‘I was sent as wife to the Pharaoh to seal a treaty, I mean, to the Lord Amenhotep may he live to ensure peace between Kriti and the Black Land,’ she corrected herself hastily.

I was shocked. Egyptian princesses are never sent to another country, for in them resides the succession. Merope was continuing, ‘And I will lie with the King when I am old enough, that is after my woman-blood begins. But now all I do is teach a slave how to speak the language of my home and learn Egyptian and wait. The lady the Queen Tiye may she live sent me here because she told me that you were in need of a companion. Is that true?’

‘Yes,’ I answered, suddenly made aware of how much I needed someone to talk to, preferably someone with something interesting to say in reply. ‘And we are to have a scribe to teach us.’

‘I have yet to learn to write,’ said Merope. ‘At home we do not use writing for anything important, only for lists.’

‘Lists?’

‘Of tribute to the temple and palace,’ she explained. I knew about this.

‘We do that here, as well, but there are many other things written down, the wisdom of our ancestors. “If you do not write it down, the words of wise ones will be lost.”’ I quoted Ani, my father’s scribe.

‘We do not need to write it down. We remember. Bards can recount the story of a man dead a hundred years,’ returned Merope with spirit.

‘Here we know what words were said a thousand years ago,’ I boasted. Tey my mother broke up the promising argument.

‘Lady Merope, choose a gift to celebrate your arrival,’ she said, gesturing at the array of treasure on the floor.

Merope smiled shyly, lifted aside the cloths, and pounced on the jewellery. She laid it out gently: pectoral and counterweight, elaborate earrings and chiming bracelets such as temple-dancers wear, and solid gold arm-rings.

‘I like these,’ she said, and my mother gave her an armband of thick gold, inlaid with little ibises for Thoth.

‘Thoth is the protector of scribes, little daughter, and that should be worn while you are being instructed. I am glad that you are not greedy of gain, daughter Merope. Now my daughter will show you where to sleep and we will all lie down. And be quiet. The wind has given me a headache.’

Nefertiti had gone to lie down with her husband, my mother had lain down on her saddle-strung bed in the coolest corner, and I took Merope and the vociferous basket into the next room, where there were no windows and the air came up coldly from the staircase down to the cellars.

‘This is Basht,’ she said, undoing the basket. A striped cat shot out swearing, landed in a remote corner, glared wildly around to make sure that there was no threat in her immediate surroundings, then sat down to make an elaborate toilet, licking every ruffled hair into place deliberately and slowly. She was anxious to make perfectly sure that we didn’t think that we had disturbed her at all by stuffing her into a nasty smelly basket and dragging her halfway across the palace without her leave.

‘She is very beautiful,’ I commented. Our own animals had been left at our house, and the palace cats had not seemed interested in our apartments.

‘She is a gift from the King may he live. She sleeps on my mat, when she feels like it.’

‘You have seen the King?’ I asked.

‘Yes, they brought me to him when I came, and he patted my cheek and told me to try to learn Egyptian, and gave me Basht to be company for me. He is a nice man and I will not mind in the least when I can lie with him, even if he is old. He has kind eyes.’

‘I know,’ I agreed, remembering that shaft of understanding and fellow-feeling he had sent me at the coronation.

Basht finished her wash, stood up, yawned, and walked over to Merope, indicating that it was time for a rest. Merope had a sleeping mat of clean reeds, and we unrolled it and lay down, still too new in our acquaintance to sleep.

‘Are you a wife of the Pharaoh, too?’ asked Merope, settling her neck on a headrest and pulling out an errant strand of hair as it caught and pulled.

‘No, I am just a daughter of Divine Father Aye and the Great Royal Nurse Tey. My half-sister is Nefertiti the Divine Spouse of Akhnamen may he live.’

‘Oh,’ she murmured. ‘Not King Amenhotep, then.’

‘No.’ There was something pointed about the way she made no further comment, but it was too soon to talk about that dangerous subject. I did not know if I could trust her yet, this barbarian princess. What was always a safe subject?

‘Tell me of the island of Kriti,’ I urged.

‘It’s a fertile and green place, an island ruled by Minos the King, a nation of sea farers. Our ships go all over the Islanded Sea, as far as the river Oceanos extends, half across the world.’

‘Is it a peaceful place?’ I had heard that barbarians spent all their time fighting.

‘Certainly,’ she seemed offended. ‘I don’t know why Egyptians always think that their ways are superior to all others!’

‘Divine Amenhotep says:
Go around the world, speak to all peoples, and you will not find one who will change his country’s customs for another’s
. And he is right. I beg your pardon, sister, but don’t be so touchy. I wish only to know.’

‘I’m sorry, I’ve been so lonely and everyone thinks I’m a savage. But that is what the men of my island would say about Egypt, I expect. Is it always this hot here?’

‘No, this is Ephipi, the hottest month. That’s when the lion-wind blows, the poison-breath of the Eastern Snake. Soon it will be Mesoré, and the grapes will ripen and we will have the harvest festivals.’

‘I don’t understand your year,’ she said plaintively. ‘At home we had four seasons, but here there are only three.’

‘That is because we are the gift of the river. The Nile is our mother. We have three seasons of four months each, made of three decans of ten days,’ I instructed my foreign sister.

‘Shemu, which is harvest, that’s now; Akhet, which is flood; and Peret, which is sprouting, the time of plants. Every time has its festival and every day its god, and over all of them is Amen-Re, Lord of Lords.’

‘It is well known that Gaia Mistress of Animals is the head of the gods!’ objected the foreign princess.

‘Not in Egypt. But we will ask the scribe about gods; Mother says that they are not fit subjects for humans.’

‘I know.’

She might have been about to say something more, but Basht walked off her chest and onto mine, dipping her head to sniff delicately at my neck and settling down with her pin tipped feet folded under her richly-patterned body.

‘We were meant to be friends,’ concluded Merope. ‘Basht is never wrong about people.’

‘Of course not. She’s the avatar of Basht the Lady, Goddess of love and motherhood.’

‘She couldn’t be just a cat, then?’ asked Merope slyly.

‘No more than a crocodile is not the avatar of Sobek or a hippopotamus of Set the Destroyer.’

‘But the crocodile will still bite and the hippopotamus break boats,’ she argued. ‘Acting like animals, not gods.’

‘It’s a mystery,’ I replied, thinking about it for the first time and taking refuge in the scribe Ani’s invariable response to such questions.

‘Egypt is a strange place,’ concluded my new sister, and we drowsed into sleep.

For the first time I had met someone who asked more questions than I did, and I thought the Queen Tiye wise to put us together. It might even preserve my own mother’s temper.

***

The Kriti princess was equally pleased, it seemed, with me as a companion. Though she refused to abandon her tunic, which covered her chest, for a proper knotted cloth, and would not have her head shaved to a sidelock, as we did for cleanliness and convenience, she adapted to life in her new country well. She had learned the language very quickly, though some words still eluded her, and some of the grammatical constructions which I had learned before I knew that I was learning them gave her trouble. She could not differentiate between the three levels of formal address, so spoke to all persons as though they were Pharaoh or a High Priest, which gave her a reputation for humility. And she asked me why my mother had commended her for lack of greed when she had asked for a solid gold bracelet.

‘Because you did not ask for silver, the most precious metal in the Black Land,’ I explained.

‘In Kriti the most precious metal is gold,’ she protested.

‘Here gold is as sand,’ I replied, beginning to laugh. After a moment she joined in. ‘Whole shiploads of it come from Nubia in Upper Egypt every day. Whereas silver has to come from barbarian lands and is traded for three times its weight in gold.’

‘Come, then you shall learn some Kritian, if I must learn Egyptian,’ she said.

‘Why should I do that?’ I teased.

‘Because it would be sweet to speak again in my own tongue, and I shall never see my home again,’ she responded, and burst into tears.

I was shocked at my insensitivity. I would never be sent away from my country, never have to learn difficult words in another tongue to speak to my captors. I tried to imagine how much she must miss the green island and the sound of her own language, and thought how I would miss the land of the Nile, the speech of the women, the scent of dung fires which kept off mosquitoes, the taste of plum and melon. I imagined it so well that I made myself cry and hugged her close and she wept into my neck, strong sobs which hurt her slim body. When the tears had died down a little, we kissed, I mopped her face with a linen cloth and we began to learn Kritian as I re-drew the kohl around her strange brown eyes.

‘Adelphemou,’ she taught me as my first words, which means, my sister.

Ptah-hotep

The summons from the High Priest of Amen-Re came for dinner the next day, when I had settled my scribes into my office and instructed them in their duties. It was basic record keeping, really, as the master had said. Not difficult, but requiring steady attention and some skill. Few actual orders issued from the office of the Great Royal Scribe, but he acted as auditor for the whole of the nation, expected to uncover fraud and misreporting, to protect the common people from over-zealous officials and extortion, and to oversee the administration of the kingdom.

He was—
I
was—also responsible for receiving the Nomarch’s accounts, the Chief Watcher’s report on the state of lawlessness in Egypt, and for recording the Lord Akhnamen’s thoughts and orders.