Huy bit into a piece of melon. “With my set of skittles he can play with the other gods if he gets lonely,” he announced.
“Indeed,” his father said dryly. “I had no idea that the skittles held such a place of importance in your heart, Huy. The god will doubtless be impressed by your selflessness.” He swallowed and set his cup back on the table. Huy could smell the shedeh-wine, heavy and sweet, that his father made from his own pomegranates.
“I expect he will,” Huy responded promptly. “Can I have some wine please, Father?”
“Pass me your water and I’ll add a little,” Itu said, lifting the jug. “And wipe your mouth, Huy. You have melon juice all over your chin. Don’t you like the stew? If you finish it, you may have some fresh figs.”
The sunlight had begun to fade only inches from Huy’s foot. Pushing away the dish of lentils, he emptied his cup, loving the sweet-tart tang of the wine. He rubbed his face with the square of linen by his hand and smiled at his mother. “Hapzefa has put a lot of coriander in the stew,” he remarked. “It makes my nose run. Figs will take the taste away.”
His father sighed. “Itu, you indulge him too much,” he said as his wife pushed the figs across the table towards Huy. “And this matter of the gift is certainly the last straw. Huy, we have decided to send you to school.”
“This is no way to tell him, Hapu!” Itu said hotly. “We were going to wait until after tomorrow, let him enjoy his Naming Day!”
Hapu leaned forward. “I would have waited, but Huy does not deserve such consideration. What gift has our son chosen to lay before the god of our city as a thanksgiving for his life?” He sat back. “And for health, a quick intelligence, people who love him, an existence untainted by any want. What gift? A thing he does not care to keep, that will cause him no pain when he bends his head. Everyone loves him,” he went on gently, seeing his wife grow pale. “Ptah created a miracle in your womb, Itu, and there he sits, with his huge dark eyes like yours, and his black hair and the sheen of perfection on his skin. Tomorrow my brother Ker will come, and Heruben, bringing a small mountain of gifts for him, not just because he is four but also because their affection for him has no bounds. And is he grateful? Not any longer. He is becoming selfish and greedy. He begins to accept everything as his right. That evil seed must not be allowed to grow.”
“You and your plants!” Itu choked. “Surely you exaggerate! It is natural for a baby to want to hold on to the things that make him happy. We have not explained to him the importance of the sacrifice he is expected to make, that’s all. Explain it and he will run to his room and prepare to give the god his paints or his big ball instead. He has a generous heart, my husband! He does!”
“No, I don’t think so,” Hapu said slowly. “How has it been possible for him to express this generosity? He is our only child. His world is made up of adoring adults and the creatures of the garden and the orchards. It is too late to change the gift. The choice has been made, and made from a self-centredness that bodes ill for his future. We have not raised him sensibly,” he finished, shaking his head. “However Khenti-kheti receives the skittles, whether to reward the outward act or punish the inward holding-back, the die is cast.”
Huy had been listening to this interchange with increasing dread. His glance flicked between his parents. His father had bitten into the fleshy fruit of a fig and was placing the stem on his plate. His mother’s hands had disappeared under the edge of the table. She looked mutinous.
“Am I really going to school, Father?” Huy demanded. “Ishat told me so, but I didn’t believe her.” Suddenly the wine was making his throat sting. “Father? I don’t want to go to school! The chief gardener’s little boys go to school and they get beaten all the time! School is for stupid children! I’m not stupid!” He had not understood most of the words his father had used, but his mother’s last outburst seemed clear enough. He had better exchange the skittles for something else. “If you think that the god won’t want my skittles, then he can have my toy dog,” he put in hopefully. “I don’t care.” His parents ignored him. Neither of them even looked his way.
He began to cry, crawling across the floor and clambering onto Itu’s lap. His arms went around her neck. “Mother, don’t make me go!” he sobbed. “Please don’t! I’ll be good, I promise! I won’t tease Hapzefa anymore and I won’t run away when you call me and I won’t keep asking for water at night when I don’t want to go to sleep!” Her arms tightened protectively around him.
“See what you’ve done, Hapu?” she said. “Surely there could have been a better way!”
Her husband got up and, coming around the table, squatted beside them. His hand went to his son’s head and he kissed the hot little cheek. “Many boys from poor families cannot go to school, Huy, and so they remain poor all their lives, hefting stone and making bricks. Their lives are shortened. Their bodies break. All because they cannot read and write. I am not sending you to the school in town. Your uncle Ker recognizes your aptitude and has offered to meet all your expenses at the temple school in Iunu. It is a great opportunity for you. The priests there are famous for their learning. There are many boys your own age who live together. You will make friends. You will do well.”
“But I don’t want to make friends!” Huy sobbed. “I don’t like other boys! Anyway, I have a friend already! I don’t need any more friends!” His father held a cup to his mouth and he drank in great gulps in spite of the ache in his throat, tasting a grain of the bitter lees before Hapu set the vessel back on the table. The shedeh-wine had been undiluted.
“You call Ishat your friend, but you are not kind to her,” Hapu went on. “You tease her. You hide from her when she comes to play with you. You throw spiders at her.”
“She tries to be my Overseer,” Huy protested. The strong wine had instantly begun to calm him. He felt a pleasant and wholly unique sensation of numbness stealing over his limbs. “She always wants her own way, but that is not fair because she is only the daughter of a servant. She should do what I say.” His words were interspersed with hiccups as the storm of crying receded.
Hapu rocked back on his heels. He regarded his son gravely. “I love you, Huy. But there are lessons about being a man that you must learn early, for if you do not, then no one will want to play with you at all, ever. You do not deserve Ishat.” He stood. “Itu, put him to bed. And Huy, I do not want to see the skittles exchanged for something else when you open that bag at the temple tomorrow.”
Huy let out a howl. “But I want my figs!”
For answer his father walked around the table, folded himself once more onto his cushion, and poured himself more wine. After a moment Itu also rose, Huy still in her arms. “I know you are right, my husband,” she said hoarsely. “But like every mother I wish that he could remain a little boy forever.”
When he was an old man, feared and worshipped by the whole of Egypt, wealthy beyond the dreams of any save the King himself, Huy would find himself pondering those words. But now he stood rebelliously while his mother washed and dried him. Then she laid him on his cot and drew the sheet up over him. “Little brother,” she said softly, using the greatest term of endearment possible, “you will learn to read and write at school. Think of it! I can do neither. You will be more clever than I! Won’t that be fun?” For answer he turned on his side and showed her his back. He heard her sigh then walk across the room and pull the wooden shutters closed. At once the dusky light of sunset dimmed. Coming back, she kissed his hair. “There is fresh water beside you,” she told him. “You may be thirsty in the night. Your father should not have given you strong wine, but it made you feel better, didn’t it? He always knows what is best for us, Huy. Sleep now. Tomorrow is your Naming Day. Think about that.”
He wanted her to go away. With one petulant gesture he deliberately brushed the kiss away, and at that she said no more. Hapzefa came in, picked up the basin of dirty water, bade him a good night, and presently he sensed that he was alone at last. Wriggling onto his back, he lay gazing up at the ceiling. The whitewashed mud bricks had several interesting cracks in them that snaked over his head. On most nights he imagined that one was the river and he was sailing north on it, through the Delta and out into the Great Green to have adventures with the Lycian pirates who often attacked the island of Alashia and were even impudent enough to make lightning raids on the coast of Egypt itself. He was the King’s Destroyer of Pirates, and with his crew of warriors he chased the Lycians, sinking their ships and dragging them back to Weset to be rewarded by a grateful monarch. “Huy, you are a good boy and have served me well,” the King would say. “This toy boat has a steering oar and ramming prow and you can really float it. It is my gift to you. Also some gold.”
Another crack could sometimes be sinister. It zigzagged from the door towards him and had a rough triangle at the end of it, like a snake, like Apep the evil one, so Huy preferred to pretend that it was a path leading to a swamp where there might be hippopotami, or pretty bird’s eggs to gather, pierce, empty, and sit on the shelf above his sycamore chest.
Tonight, in the gathering gloom, the cracks all looked like routes to Iunu, a city Huy knew of vaguely because the great god Ra had a temple there. He did not want to think of that.
Perhaps I should run away
, he mused.
Then Father would be frightened and sorry and let me stay home forever. But where would I go? To Uncle Ker’s house? But Uncle Ker is the one who is paying to send me to school. Maybe Ishat knows somewhere I could hide. She lives in the hut behind the garden with her parents, but she often goes out into Uncle’s fields with her father and she goes into the markets with Hapzefa to buy our fish and meat
. However, he remembered what his father had said about the way he treated Ishat. It was true that he could be kinder to her. Probably she would not help him out of spite because he enjoyed teasing her and hearing her shriek when he made her close her eyes, expecting some treat or other, and he put a lizard or a beetle in her hand.
The effects of the shedeh-wine were wearing off, and all of a sudden Huy felt miserable. He wanted his mother’s kiss replaced. He wanted her to lie beside him, the way she did when he had a bad dream, and say the prayer that kept the night demons away while she cuddled him against her warm body. “I don’t want to grow up,” he said aloud. “Not ever. And no one can make me.”
At dawn Hapzefa woke him with his breakfast of fruit, milk, and bread. He thanked her dutifully, and when she had gone he stared at it disconsolately, not cheered by the sight of the figs someone, his mother probably, had added to the dark grapes and little yellow persea hearts that always ripened when the river rose. The bread was still warm, studded with sesame seeds and dripping with butter. He was not hungry, but he knew that if he did not eat there would be a fuss, so he drank the milk and crunched up the grapes, but he pushed the figs to the side of the plate and laid the piece of bread over them.
He remained mute while once more he was washed, and dressed in his best stiff white kilt. His mother was wearing white linen that wrapped around her body and fell in many small pleats to her ankles, and she had braided her dark hair and wound it around her head. A Nefer amulet encircled her neck, and when she had finished fastening Huy’s sandals she shook a smaller one from her wrist and put it over his head so that it hung against his breastbone. “The clay has been baked and painted red in the correct manner,” she said. “May it bring you happiness on your Naming Day and continued good luck throughout your life. I love you.”
Huy fingered the representation of an animal’s windpipe wound around its heart and managed a smile. “Thank you, my mother,” he replied. “I suppose we have to go to the temple now, before it gets too hot.”
She looked at him anxiously. “Are you still upset? You can’t go to school until the flood has gone down in another two months, you know. Not until sometime in Tybi. You have plenty of time left to play with the frogs, so please do your best to enjoy yourself today. Now we must go. Your father will be waiting.”
Huy felt better. A lot could happen in two months. Isis might simply keep crying and the flood never shrink so that Hut-herib remained a series of islands. Father’s tiny fishing skiff could never brave the current out of the south, not all the way to Iunu, and Uncle Ker’s barge might hit a rock and be holed. The teachers at the temple school might fall ill of some horrible disease. Perhaps the temple itself might just fall down. But that blasphemous thought frightened him so that he slid his hand into his mother’s and trotted beside her into the passage.
The town of Hut-herib in the Delta had been built between two tributaries on a series of wide, flat mounds that became islands during the Inundation, and to the east lay one of the largest agricultural areas in the country. Although on higher ground that required irrigation with innumerable intersecting canals, it was lush with grazing land, shaded by cultivated date and doum palms and by the spreading evergreen sycamore fig, rich in crops of wheat, barley, and flax, its humid air fragrant with the scent of many blossoms, its trees and waterways alive with birds and creatures of every description. Hapu and his family lived on the western edge of this luxuriant profusion, with the bulk of the town between his house and the eastern tributary.
Huy had seldom seen the river traffic that flowed past, carrying goods and tribute south to the heart of power in Mennofer. Until now his father had considered him too young to go to the docks with his uncle’s retainers. There they oversaw the embarkation of the perfumes destined not only for the King’s court but also for nations far across the Great Green, or waited to unload the precious cinnamon and cassia, perfume ingredients that must come by sea. The docks were rough and noisy, and Huy might have enjoyed the constant bustle, but as yet he had no interest in Ker’s lucrative business other than, like Ker himself, as a source of rich gifts.
He and his parents walked slowly towards Khenti-kheti’s shrine, sometimes abreast, sometimes in single file as they crossed the flood on top of the dikes flung up every year to keep in the life-giving water and its equally vital silt. The day promised to be hot but as yet was merely pleasant. A breeze wafted out of the north. Huy, wanting to slip off the sandals whose thongs were already rubbing him between his toes, stared enviously at the naked children jumping in and out of the swollen canals while their mothers, coarse linen skirts bunched up around their knees, beat at their laundry with rocks and gossiped.