Sunrise on the Mediterranean (29 page)

“Your brother’s house,” Meryaten said.

“Aye. Now go, no long faces.”

Meryaten smiled tearfully, her voice barely above a whisper. “Perhaps tonight when you return we could … try again?”

RaEm looked over her head. “Perhaps. May the Aten bless your day.”

Her wife ducked her head and left the room. Thank the gods, RaEm thought.

Once loaded in her palanquin, RaEm opened the scrolls that were delivered in the dead of night while Meryaten slept off the
drug that she drank each time she and “Smenkhare” made love. What a nuisance she was, RaEm thought.

For a moment she paused, seeing the seal on the papyrus. Hatshepsut, my dear friend, how I miss you, she thought. Then RaEm
cracked it with her nail and unrolled it, squinting at the scribe’s small, perfect writing.

The former priest had kept immaculate records of where things were kept, such as grain for a country that would soon be starving.
Field after field lay fallow, with no one to plow them, seed them, for always this had been the job of the priests. The masses
kept their plot of vegetables. In exchange for their taxes, in payment for their faithfulness to the gods and their shrines,
they received flour to make bread.

Save there was no flour, no grain, and eventually no bread.

RaEm’s finger followed the scribe’s line drawing. It showed several underground silos of grain. In the intervening reigns—RaEm
didn’t know how many or for how long—the priests had followed this layout. Therefore grain should be awaiting RaEm.

She beckoned a slave. “Go to Queen Tiye,” she instructed him. “Tell her that her son Smenkhare has left the city on urgent
business and won’t return till week’s end. Ask her if she would share this information with his wife, the princess Meryaten.”

The slave ducked his head and RaEm dismissed him, gesturing for another. After instructing him, she leaned forward to the
palanquin carrier. “Take me to the stables, then arrange for a boat to meet me on the Nile. A small skiff, nothing large.”

She didn’t have a lot of power yet, but she was learning to use it.

The trip had taken twice as long as she’d thought. “Stop!” she called out to the oarsmen. Once again she looked at the map,
then looked around them. She waved away more mosquitoes as she was assisted out of the rowboat. Her feet immediately sank
into the marshy ground, submerged to her lower calves.

Leaving her sandals behind, RaEm squelched through what had once been a field. “The Inundation was poor, why is this field
rotting?” she asked the hapless farmer they’d stumbled upon a few fields back.

“The corvée, my lord,” the man said. “It broke about two Inundations ago, and there is no one to fix it.”

“What do you require for the repairs?” RaEm asked, picking her way carefully. Snakes were rumored to live in places like this.

“Stone, my lord. We don’t have stone, just mud brick.” He sighed. “The mud brick is what we kept using to hold it, since it
was better than nothing. Then one night, must have been about this time last year, old Ma’a—atenum,” the man stumbled, making
the name religiously acceptable, “was out here.
Aii
, he was repairing the corvée when the gods took him.”

RaEm turned to face the man. “He died?”

“Aye, my lord. Never found him, because when he fell, he bashed out the overly dry mud brick, and
whoosh!
the waters came rushing in and washed the whole mess, Ma’atenum, the corvée, and the river, right into this pasture. Drowned
a few animals, too.”

RaEm was stepping gingerly now. She didn’t want to find the remains of Ma’atenum.

“Is this it, my lord?” one of the oarsmen called. He was standing by a stone stake, more than half submerged. RaEm didn’t
need to consult the diagram because she knew it by heart. She nodded once as they continued plodding toward him.

Looking around, RaEm tried to picture what these fields had been like before they became a mosquito-infested pond. “Is there
any way to open the silo without getting water inside?” she asked the men in general.

“You could dredge the field,” the old farmer suggested. “Then you could do anything, open it as wide as you please.”

And you will have your field back at the cost of Pharaoh doing it for you, RaEm thought. Still, she admired his wiliness.
“How many slaves for how many days?” she asked him.

He looked like a raisin, bald, brown, and shriveled. The people were quite unattractive by adulthood, she thought dispassionately.
“Twenty workers out here, from dawn to dusk, should take a week, fifteen days at most.” His squinty dark eyes sized her up.
“I know about twenty men who would do it, probably cheaper than slaves.”

RaEm crossed her arms, feeling sweat roll over the bumps on her arms and legs from mosquitoes in this marshland. “Cheaper
than slaves?”

He picked his teeth—the few still in his head, then adjusted his kilt, a grimy, coarse cloth. “Slaves have to be fed,
haii
? A few cucumbers, bread, salted fish, that is what they are due according to contract, am I right?”

“You are.”

“Seeing how food is what Pharaoh, living forever!—”

“Glorious Pharaoh, living in the light of Aten forever!” RaEm corrected him automatically.

“Exactly. Seeing how food is what he doesn’t have, wouldn’t it be better to hire some men who can feed their own bellies,
then pay them in something Egypt isn’t running out of?”

“Like?” RaEm asked, swatting another mosquito. “Stone, mayhap?”

She threw back her head and laughed. “You’ll get your stone, old man. I’ll be back here in seven days—”

“Seven days! Do you think I am a pagan’s god to reclaim land from the waters in seven days?”

“Seven, old man, or we have no deal.”

He crossed his breast in respect, an antique gesture that warmed RaEm to him even more.

“It had best be done by then, or I will use the stone to bury you.”

He wiped his nose with the back of his hand, speaking slowly. “If you can’t get to the grain, my lord, then no stones will
be needed. Hunger will weigh us down.”

Suddenly weary, desirous of a bath, a change of clothing, and a young boy, RaEm ordered the oarsmen to carry her back to the
Nile.

Seven days. It was the final hope, a giant silo beneath the earth filled with grain to feed a hungry people. Seven days.

T
HAT NIGHT AT DINNER the
tzadik
N’tan stood up as we slaves sat down, grateful for the break. It was
Yom Rishon
dinner, which actually took place the evening after the Sabbath, since the holy day went from dusk to dusk. People stopped
talking to each other and reclined, as N’tan adjusted his white robe.

They were used to being entertained like this, by N’tan’s sermonizing. Every week,
Yom Rishon
dinner was filled with laughter and dancing—and stories. The tribesmen would have made great subjects for a focus group on
television programs; they were good spectators.

“We are to be like sheep,” N’tan said, and the crowd groaned.

“If it weren’t for your lovely bride, we would worry about you!” some
gibori
shouted at him.

N’tan’s very pregnant, very red-faced bride threw a loaf of bread at the heckler. “He has to talk to you of sheep, so that
you, Dov ben Hamah, understand!” Everyone laughed.

The
tzadik
continued speaking. “We are to have a sole shepherd to guide us, one voice to follow.” He twisted his sidelocks, appearing
to be in thought. “We tribes are not to worship other gods, as other peoples do. We are a nation set apart. To us,
el ha
Shaday is not part of the process of nature. He is not a season, or a weather condition, or any one thing we can touch or
see. He is not the land.”

He looked out at his audience. “What is this land? What did Shaday give us?”

“
Chalev oo’d’vash
, the Sages said,” a young
gibori
repeated proudly.

My lexicon showed me a carton of Borden’s, then a honeycomb. Milk and honey. Got it.

I was no longer amazed when what I heard jelled with what I’d been taught about the Bible. I hoped that somewhere in the darkness
beyond this shelter, Cheftu listened. Standing there in the dark, beneath the stars scattered like sand on the seashore, he
must be rejoicing in his heart. God was real. The Bible was true.

His faith was deep, mine less so, but then we’d always had differing levels of conviction. I know it saddened him that I didn’t
believe more, or more fiercely. But if I said I trusted so that he would be comfortable, it wouldn’t be genuine.

He was almost in a contented awe to be here in David’s Israel. I kept waiting for the proverbial other shoe to drop, but the
waiting was convincing my left-brained, well-educated, totally Western mind that all the Hebrew mythology I’d ever heard was
true.

“
Nachon!”
N’tan said. “We are not Pelesti, or Mizri; we do not have gods for the seasons. Shaday gave us fertile land, did he not?”

“
Sela!”
the people shouted. I’d learned that the closest equivalent to
sela
was a gospel church crying out, “Amen, brother!” It could also be used as a benediction.

“
Sela
,” N’tan said. “The fertility of the soil is within the land. We, we are the ones who control how it is received. We control
the productivity of the earth, the frequency of the rains, by how we behave.

“We are chastened to remember, which is why our branches are tied with red thread.”

Huh?

N’tan tugged at his beard for a moment, focused elsewhere while we watched him. “All of our traditions focus on remember.
Remember what Shaday did for us, leading us up out of Egypt.”

Oh yeah, I remembered that. Vividly.

We all said, “
Sela.
”

“Remember how he provided for us in the desert.”

“Sela!”

“Remember how he passed over us as the death angel.”

I shivered, recalling that horrifically beautiful face, the claw marks in its wake, the screams in the night as it took yet
another victim.

“Sela!”

“Remember how he destroyed the Egyptians in the sea.” Gold and bodies afloat in white water, then the mighty rushing wind
that calmed and cleaned the waters.

“Sela!”

“Remember, remember, remember!”

They knuckled the ground with enthusiasm. N’tan did know how to get the blood pumping. He turned to the crowd. “For generations,
since we entered this land beneath the leadership of Y’shua and Ka’lib, the
tzadikim
and
kohanim
have returned to the Mount of God in Midian to give legs to their remembering. There we see the place where
ha
Moshe and the
zekenim
sat with Yahwe and ate for the
b’rith.
”

I almost dropped my jug. N’tan had just said that the leaders of the tribesmen—the prophets, the priests, and the individual
tribes’ rulers—sat down and ate a covenantal meal with God? This was in the
Bible
? They knew where this meeting took place?

“To remember the
b’rith
, our forefathers climbed the mountain to sit, eating in remembrance of our fathers and Yahwe.”

Obviously I had been listening to the wrong Bible. “So: Because it is tradition, because it is necessary for remembrance,
I will be leaving with a group of
kohanim
to make this pilgrimage, after Shavu’ot. Those who wish to join me, to sit where their forefathers and fathers have sat,
to see the mountain of our God, you are bidden to walk with me. Come to remember!”

The mental image I had was of a picnic with God on a mountain. My brain, even my useful lexicon, was having a hard time wrapping
itself around this one!

“Wine!” I heard in a voice that sounded as though it had been calling for it for a while. I hustled over, poured distractedly
from my jar, and actually spilled a little on the ground. The glance I received was displeased, but I didn’t care. I stumbled
back to slave’s row, where we all stood, waiting to serve.

I was blown away. I’d grown used to knowing what to expect in this day and time. No one else seemed shocked by this pronouncement,
however. This was something they all knew? Dadua sang another psalm, we all said, “
Sela
,” then I was cleaning again.

By the time I got back to our watchtower, the sun was creeping across the horizon and Cheftu was walking out the door. We
kissed. “Did you hear?” I asked sleepily. “Last night. Were you there?”

“
Lo
, what happened?” He glanced out at the dawn, harried. “Beloved, tell me tonight. We harvest in the far fields today.” He
kissed me again and left.

My dreams were bizarre, a cross between Alice in Wonderland and what I’d heard about the
zekenim—the seventy
, my lexicon added—sitting down with God. Only this time God was sipping tea, the seventy were white rabbits, and RaEm stood
in the Queen’s outfit screeching, “Off with her head!”

I woke to the sound of Shana screaming for me.