Sphinx's Princess (22 page)

The time of the Inundation had passed and we were well into the season of Emergence. From the rooftop I could see how far the sacred river’s waters had receded from the fields. The freshly fertile soil was thickly planted with new crops, and the tender growth turned the Black Land green.

“No lions,” I replied as I joined her under the vividly patterned cloth sunshade. Sitamun had already spread out
her scribe’s kit and was using the flat-edged burnisher to smooth the final rough spots from the blank piece of papyrus in front of her.

“Maybe no lions, but I’ll bet you were followed by our favorite cub,” she said.

At that very instant Berett’s head popped into view at the top of the steps. My little musician climbed up the rest of the way, carrying her harp with her. The past months of good food and peace in the royal palace had been very good to her. She’d grown taller and stronger, though she still clung to silence. She crossed the rooftop to kneel in her favorite shady corner and began to play.

I laid out my own set of palette, brushes, and pens, taking water from Sitamun’s small flask to make the red and black inks, then indicated the papyrus my friend was finishing. “Is that mine?”

“It is.” She gave it one last scrape with the burnisher and slid it over to me. “Are you sure you’re ready?”

“I’ve practiced enough,” I said. “I’m as ready as I’ll ever be.” I stretched my hands out over the papyrus and my tools and prayed aloud for Thoth to bless my task. Then I picked up a brush and began to write.

Sitamun watched me intently. “Very nice, Nefertiti. You have an elegant style, but I still don’t understand why you insisted on doing this yourself. Henenu could have done it for you, or any of the other scribes.”

“These words have to come from my own hand,” I replied. “It means a lot to me.”

“You’d think you were writing a love poem!”

“I wouldn’t know how.”

“That’s a shame. Thutmose should send you one.”

I frowned. “That wouldn’t be
dignified
enough for him.”

Sitamun laughed. “He
is
a stick! But a stick can become a roaring fire if it meets the right spark.” She turned to Berett. “Dear one, can you play us a love song? We need to put your mistress in the proper mood.” Berett tilted her head and gave Sitamun a doubtful look but did as she was asked.

I snorted. “
Stop
that, Berett,” I said. “Stop that and come here. I want you to see this. It’s almost done, and it’s very important for you.”

The girl put her harp aside, drew near, and squatted next to me, questioning me with her eyes.

“This is your freedom, Berett,” I said softly. “I’m sorry I couldn’t give it to you sooner, but I had to find out the right words to use so that after today, no one will be able to call you a slave ever again. This document also gives you some of my jewelry, so if you ever want to leave Thebes, you can take it with you and nobody can accuse you of theft.” My pen added a few more characters to the papyrus. “Once this is finished, carry it with you always and you can come and go as you like. No one will be able to hold you captive anymore.”

Berett heard me out, then pointed decisively at one group of characters on the papyrus. I stared, taken by surprise. “Look at that, Sitamun! She recognized her name!”

“Pooh. It’s a coincidence.” Sitamun waved away anything marvelous about it. “She just
happened
to point at it. How would she know—?”

“Hasn’t she been with me every time I come up here for
our lessons? Whether it’s just the two of us or if Henenu’s here as well to teach us some new characters or a better brush technique, month after month, she’s always close by.”

“It’s not as if she’s sharing our lessons,” Sitamun argued. “She plays her harp the whole time, and she’s usually over
there
.” She indicated Berett’s favorite spot.

“She starts out over there, but you know she always creeps closer and closer to us while we work. She’s interested in what we’re doing, Sitamun. She’s been watching,” I said. “
And
learning, I’ll bet. In fact, I
will
bet you that she knows more than you think.”

Sitamun’s eyes glittered. She loved to gamble, and she’d been known to wager a fortune on the outcome of a game of Hounds and Jackals. “I like those jade earrings of yours. I’ll bet my new gold and turquoise cuff bracelets against your earrings that Berett pointed to her name by pure accident.”

“Done.” I sat back on my heels. “How will we settle this?”

Sitamun studied the document I’d been crafting. “You’ve written her name more than once,” she said. “If she can show me every place that it appears, I’ll concede.”

I faced my little harper. “Do you understand what Princess Sitamun wants you to do, Berett?” I asked. “Do you want to try?”

The words were just out of my mouth when Berett began pointing at the papyrus here, there, there, and again until she had jabbed her small finger at five out of the six places I’d written her name. Then she looked from
Sitamun’s stunned face to mine and gave us both an impish smile.

“Uhhhh, I think you owe me a pair of bracelets,” I said.

“Not so fast. She missed one.” Sitamun was joking, but the joke bounced back at her when Berett pointed at the last repetition of her name in the document and then, very deliberately, put her first two fingers in her mouth.

It was the symbol for a child. It belonged next to the other characters that spelled out Berett’s name, to indicate that I wasn’t writing about a grown woman. I’d included it five times, but not the sixth.

Berett saw it, recognized it, understood it. Berett could read.

A little while later, when Henenu joined us, Sitamun and I nearly bowled the scribe off his feet in our eagerness to tell him all about the miracle. He thought we were playing a prank on him. Even when we got Berett to repeat what she’d done, he claimed we’d trained her to do it. The three of us were arguing about how we could prove the truth when Berett stuck her finger into the water for making paints and traced Sitamun’s name on the rooftop.

“Did she just—?” I began. As if to remove all doubt, Berett made a sweeping gesture from the fast-fading symbols to my cousin.

“By Thoth, how did she learn that?” It was Henenu’s turn to be astonished.

“Sitamun and I often practice by writing funny messages to each other,” I said. “Then we read them aloud. Berett probably knows what my name looks like, too.”
Berett nodded and tried to demonstrate, but she became confused partway through and slapped the floor in frustration.

“There, there, my girl,” Henenu said. “Nefertiti’s name is much longer than Sitamun’s, so it’s much harder to write. Would you like me to help you?” This time Berett nodded so vigorously that I thought her neck would snap.

As Sitamun and I looked on, Henenu sat cross-legged on the rooftop and began instructing the child. “Well,” I said with a gesture of surrender. “There goes our harp music.”

Later that day, while Berett napped, I sat beside the long pool just outside my door and marveled over the morning’s surprise.
Isis be praised, she
wants
to learn! Oh please, kind goddess, grant that someday she’ll be willing to write the words she still can’t bear to say. It’s so hard, not being able to talk to her, to know if I’m really taking good care of her or not. But if she can write—!

I jumped to my feet. I was so happy, I had to dance. I hummed an old song Mery used to sing to me, about fisher men casting their nets in the river. I stamped my feet, clapped my hands, twirled, swayed, leaped, and burst into full song out of the gladness of my heart.

“So pretty! So good!” An unfamiliar voice put a stop to my dance. A majestic-looking young woman with light brown skin and startling green eyes stood at the far end of the pool, clapping her hands.

During the past months in this part of the palace, I’d come to recognize the most important women—those few junior wives Pharaoh preferred over all the rest, either for
their looks, their youth, their importance as the daughters of his foreign allies, or for the sons they’d given him. This green-eyed beauty was one of the two Mitanni princesses, and though I’d often crossed her path, we’d never exchanged a single word.

Now she approached me, and though she hadn’t mastered our language, she managed to let me know that she admired my dance. “This is good to see. Again? Please?”

So I danced for her, and she praised me even more loudly, so loudly that she attracted a crowd of other women. I felt self-conscious, dancing and singing alone for all of them, but soon the Mitanni princess began to sing one of her own people’s songs and to share a dance from her homeland. Others took turns, bringing out their memories as music. Berett woke up and brought out her harp. Together we turned yet another ordinary day into a celebration.

That evening, a servant presented herself at the doorway to my rooms and asked if I would join the two Mitanni princesses for dinner. I was overjoyed. In the past six months, none of the other inhabitants of the women’s quarters had said more to me than a simple greeting when we crossed paths and it was unavoidable. My own attempts at making friends were always turned aside, politely but firmly. Even if I’d overheard one of the foreigners speaking our language fluently, the moment I tried to introduce myself, she acted as if she couldn’t understand a word I said. As for the women of the Black Land—the daughters of nobles whose fathers had given them to Pharaoh as a mark of respect or a bribe—they couldn’t avoid me by hiding behind
our different languages, but they always managed to remember someplace they had to be immediately. After two months of such rejections, I gave up.

Who would have guessed that a simple dance could have built such a strong bridge? The Mitanni princesses greeted me warmly, and though they weren’t fluent in our tongue, they still managed to share stories, jokes, and an invitation for me to return to see them as much as I liked.

“Next time, bring little girl who plays harp,” one said. “Very
good
little girl.”

“She looks like people from near our home,” the other said.

“She’s a Habiru,” I responded. The princesses nodded.

“You, too, look like us, some,” the first one remarked. She indicated my nose and my high cheekbones.

“My grandfather came from your land,” I said. “And my mother also had Mitanni blood.”

“So that is why you are so pretty!” the first princess exclaimed with satisfaction. “All Mitanni women are, much more than Black Land women.” Then she made a comically serious face and laughed, to let me know she was only teasing.

I returned to my rooms with a happy heart. Aside from my writing practice with Sitamun and Henenu, this was the most company I’d enjoyed since my arrival. There were some times that I was summoned to dine with the royal family, but they were formal occasions, often attended by foreign dignitaries. Pharaoh was the only one who dared to break the solemn atmosphere with a joke. Everyone laughed dutifully, but no one tried to tell another one.

As for my husband-to-be, the last time I’d seen Thutmose, apart from the formal dinners and our initial meeting, was a month ago when Aunt Tiye had the two of us brought back to that same garden to share a very awkward meal while servants filled the air with soft music and passionate love poetry. Thutmose ate without enjoyment, asked me a series of dull questions, and didn’t bother to listen to my answers. I prayed that I’d get a fish bone stuck in my throat to put an end to the torture.

The next morning, all of my joy at finally making new friends in the women’s quarters was snatched from my hands and shattered. Instead of Kepi’s murmured, “Mistress, it’s the hour you asked to be awakened,” I was roused from sleep by an anxious, “My lady, the queen wants you. Now.”

I sat up and rubbed my eyes. Kepi hovered by my bedside with a clay lamp in her hand, her broad, pleasant face transformed by apprehension. “At
this
hour?” I protested, shivering. The air still held the chill of night, the windows were still dark, the holy sun-disk still hidden below the horizon.

“Yes, my lady. At once. I have your dress waiting, and a robe. Her messenger said—she said that
all
of us must come with you.” Her fingers flew to her simple necklace and closed tightly around the amulet she wore to ward off evil. “Even the child.”

Even though the palace came to life very early every day, with slaves and servants hastening to stoke the cooking fires, bake the bread, and fetch all the things that their masters needed to start the morning, we walked through
deserted halls. I still had three maidservants looking after me—my efforts to make do with only Kepi had been countermanded by Aunt Tiye—and now I was glad to have them. I didn’t dare to be caught holding Berett’s hand when I presented myself to the queen. No matter how special the child was to me, Aunt Tiye could
not
be allowed to discover that. So Berett walked behind me, with the rest of my servants, and took comfort from the two who clasped her small hands and whispered for her not to be afraid.

We were taken to a part of the palace whose sumptuous rooms were decorated with scene after scene of Aunt Tiye receiving gifts from her husband. The flickering lamps that lit our way let me glimpse some of the writing on the walls, all praising the beauty, charm, and wisdom of the Great Royal Wife. The woman herself was waiting for us in a room that looked like a miniature version of Pharaoh’s principal reception hall, where he sat on a raised platform under a colorfully striped and gilded canopy and accepted the tribute of lesser kings.

Aunt Tiye was not seated. She stood with her fingertips just touching the arms of her chair and looked ready to spring straight down my throat. In spite of the hour, she had seen to it that her attendants dressed and adorned her to the point where she might have been mistaken for a goddess—a goddess of wrath.

“Are these
all
of your people?” she thundered when we all bowed before her. “I’ll know if you’re lying, Nefertiti. I know everything that happens under this roof.”

“Yes, Aunt Tiye,” I replied calmly. “This is everyone who serves me.”