Suzanne Robinson (2 page)

Anqet shook her head. The life Oubainer described might suit his idea of what a woman desired, but it filled her with disgust. She couldn’t think of anything more deadening to the spirit than hour after hour, day after day, spent in trivial occupations and self-indulgence.

Oubainer continued with a smirk. “And I will allow you to keep this house.”

“Allow?” Anqet’s patience began to evaporate.

“My only requirement of you is that you give me a son.”

“Oh.”

Oubainer nodded, his oiled face registering solemn regret. “You see, my wife gave me three daughters, but no sons.” The man put his hand on Anqet’s bare arm. “My dear, I must have a son to provide for my ka in the afterlife. Surely that is obvious.”

“I understand your concerns, but I don’t wish to be the one to provide you with a son.”

Anqet pulled her arm from Oubainer’s grasp and walked to a bronze stand that held the wine ewer. She poured herself a drink in an eggshell-thin pottery goblet. She gasped as she felt Oubainer come up behind her and pull her into a clumsy embrace. She twisted to face him. With her free hand, she pushed at his sagging chest.

Oubainer thrust his face at her and mumbled, “You’re so lovely. I can make you happy. I may not have the form of a young man, but I know what pleases a woman. Let me teach you.”

Anqet dropped her goblet. Wine splashed across the mat and onto Oubainer’s toes. But he didn’t notice, for his hands were busy running down her throat to her breast. Anqet growled, balled her fist, and shot it deep into the man’s stomach.

“Uf!”
Oubainer backed away from her and gripped his middle.

“Fruit, my lord?”

Bastis had appeared with a tray of candied fruits. She thrust it at the man.

His lordship puffed and heaved for a few moments before snarling at Bastis. The nurse bent low with humility and spilled the sticky contents of the tray onto his wine-drenched feet.

By this time Anqet had recovered from her outrage
and stood trying not to howl with laughter. She went to the chair where Oubainer’s enameled fly whisk lay. She handed the object to her visitor.

“Please forgive me, my lord,” she said innocently. “I was quite startled.” Anqet took Oubainer’s arm and led him to the sunlit portico at the front of the house. “You’re discomforted. Perhaps it is best if you seek the advice of your physician.”

“But you haven’t agreed yet,” Oubainer said. He stepped into his waiting chariot.

“And I won’t. Again, thank you for the honor and the offer.”

Anqet stepped away from the chariot. Oubainer’s servants took their positions behind him. Left with no choice, the man took up the reins.

You’re a stubborn girl,” he said. His eyes traveled from her head to her feet, taking in the full breasts and small waist. “But you’re worth the trouble it will take to amend your manners. I will speak to your uncle when he arrives. May thy ka find contentment, lovely Anqet.”

She watched Oubainer disappear down the avenue of sycamores that lined the approach to Nefer. His threat to speak with her uncle Hauron brought back the grief and anxiety she had controlled all morning. Seeking peace for her troubled ka, Anqet turned back to the house and let her glance take in the beauty of the only home she had ever known.

Built of white-plastered mud brick, Nefer was surrounded by a high enclosure wall. Gardens rich in sycamore, acacia, and tamarisk trees stretched to either side of the main house. The front loggia of the house rose two stories and was supported by fluted wooden columns with capitals designed in the shape of a lotus bud. The whole structure gleamed white, except for the borders of red and blue at the top of the house. Inside, the reception chambers, master’s suite, guest rooms, and servants quarters boasted murals showing scenes of wildlife and the cool refuge of the gardens.

Anqet started toward the house but hesitated. Bastis
would be waiting for her. She turned aside and took the path to the artificial pond at the back of the house. The smell of fresh water drew her to the edge of the papyrus-fringed pool. Lotus blossoms floated on its surface, and fish swam in its depths. Anqet nodded at the slave who swung the counterweighted water bucket to irrigate beds of oleander and jasmine.

She found a shaded spot under a sycamore and propped her back against its trunk. No one would disturb her here. She closed her eyes and let her mind flow back to her past, to the home her father had left her and how to keep it. All her life Anqet had lived at Nefer under the loving protection of her parents, Rahotep and Taia. It seemed an enchanted life, now that she looked back on it. The family rarely left: their modest estate south of Memphis, preferring the peaceful, unpretentious life of the countryside to the cosmopolitan bustle of the great city of the god Ptah to the north.

Unlike many girls, she learned to read and write the sacred hieroglyphs, to go hunting and fowling, and to manage a large household and its dependents. She could supervise a banquet for the landowning friends of her parents and yet was equally at home in the marshes on a papyrus-reed skiff using her throwing sticks to bring down wild ducks for the household larder. And through all the years of her childhood beat the cyclical pattern of life on the Nile: Inundation, the time of life-giving flood that brought a new coat of silt for the land; Emergence, when the fields emerged from the water ready for planting; and Drought, the season of harvest.

Yes, her life at Nefer was good, but she knew now that there was some mystery about it. For she and her parents lived far away from her father’s family and never saw them. Unlike her friends, whose families were large and closely dependent upon one another, her own seemed a single water lily in a pond with no buds or branches. That isolation had been brought home to her when the first letter from Hauron arrived.

She was eight years old when Rahotep brought the
folded and sealed bundle to her mother. Lying with her head cradled in Taia’s lap, Anqet listened while the two adults spoke.

“She sleeps?” Rahotep asked.

“Yes.”

“This is from Hauron.”

Anqet heard the crack of the seal on the letter. Rahotep and Taia were quiet.

“He wants to see me,” Rahotep said. “It’s hard to believe, after all this time. He says he’s forgiven us.”

“He has forgiven us!”

“shhh.”

“My love,” Taia said, “it was Hauron who took offense. You both courted me. I chose you, and he acted as if I had questioned his virility.”

“He was hurt. And anyway, Hauron was always difficult. He turned night into day and day into night at the slightest provocation. I could never be sure of him.”

Taia laughed. “Then I don’t see how you can be sure of his intentions now. It was he who asked us to leave the Delta. I remember that evening. He was full of three jugs of beer, staggered into our chamber and ordered us off his land, the land of your own father and mother.”

“I know,” Rahotep said. “Drink turns Hauron into a scorpion, but he says in the letter that he regrets his cruelty, and after all, we’re well off here at Nefer. Taia, I must see him.”

“Of course. I won’t try to stop you. It’s only that …”

“Say what you mean.”

“I can’t, because I’m not sure. Hauron always made me uncomfortable, and at the last, I was afraid of him.”

Anqet shook her head clear of the memory of that night. Neither parent would ever answer the questions she later asked about that whispered conversation. They allowed it to fade from her mind, replacing it with dolls and lessons and outings. Life resumed its peaceful cycle, and Anqet forgot to ask what happened when her father made his trip to the Delta to see his brother.

Not even the great events taking place in Thebes had disturbed the tranquillity of Nefer. Far to the south, when Anqet was eleven, Pharoah joined the gods. There was rejoicing throughout the land. Rahotep said it was because the heretical pharoah had cast down the old gods in favor of Aten, the sun god, and persecuted the ancient ones who had protected the Two Lands since the beginning of time.

Now the young king Tutankhamun had brought back the old ways. No longer did the priests of Ptah, Osiris, and Amun-Ra go in fear of their lives. The humble man was free to worship whatever god he chose. The Living Horus, Tutankhamun, protected the Two Lands. After years of neglect, Egypt’s empire had a pharoah who stood against the incursions of northern barbarians and who prayed to the chief god, Amun-Ra, his father. But these great events touched Anqet not at all. Her world was Nefer.

A deep breath of air scented with water called Anqet back to the garden. Order and regularity. She loved the order and regularity of her life at Nefer. Crops were sown, tended, and reaped. Linens were made; gardens were cultivated—all according to ancient practice. She could depend upon the unchangeable character of these activities. They gave structure to life, just as hieroglyphs could give structure to thoughts.

This beloved, structured world had changed three years ago when Mother conceived the child for whom they had all prayed to the gods. For a long time Anqet had wanted brothers and sisters like those of her friends. Big families were exciting; there was always someone to talk to, someone to do chores with, someone to fight with. Yet not until Anqet was on her way to becoming a young woman were the family’s prayers answered.

Then one day she returned to the house from a ride in the desert to find the female servants wailing and Nebre waiting at the door, his wrinkled face pale. Ignoring her anxious questions, he led her to her father’s chambers.

Rahotep was on his balcony staring down at the gardens below. Anqet called to him. He turned, and she
saw tears streaming from his eyes. He held out a hand. When she came to him, he gathered her in his arms.

“Little Heron,” he said in a broken voice, “your mother is dead. She miscarried the child and—there was bleeding. So much blood, so much.”

Rahotep’s arms trembled, and Anqet felt his body shake as she braced herself to accept his weight. Rahotep leaned on her, and they wept.

After Taia was gone, Rahotep’s life-force had faded. Where once he was as steady as the prevailing north wind, now he fluttered and faltered like the sail on a becalmed vessel. Anqet tried to comfort him, to take her mother’s place in some small way. Gradually Rahotep responded, taking pleasure in her company. But six months ago he began to grow weak, although he was only thirty-four. He wasted away before Anqet’s eyes. A permanent cough took hold of his body, and he suffered from fevers.

When he could no longer leave his bed, Rahotep sent for several of his friends, including a priest of the god Ptah, and put his seal and name to his will. Anqet was to have Nefer and rule it in his place. At the same time, he sent for his brother. Anqet couldn’t see that Hauron was needed. He had never bothered to visit in all the years she’d been alive. There wasn’t anything he could do, and she secretly harbored a resentment of him from her childhood. He’d been unkind to her father and mother.

“Be patient, Little Heron,” Rahotep told her. “I wish to bid farewell to him, no more. He will come and be gone quickly.”

Hauron sent word that he was coming. His letter reached Nefer three days before Rahotep died and sparked a bout of worry that took badly needed strength from him.

Anqet sat beside her father after reading Hauron’s letter. Rahotep was in one of his fevers. Anqet dabbed at his brow with a wet cloth.

“I don’t know. I don’t know,” Rahotep said. “Read the last few sentences again.”

“‘I grieve for you, my brother. I will come as swiftly
as the Nile can carry me, and I will atone for my neglect. Have no fear for your daughter. May Osiris welcome you.’”

Rahotep moved his head restlessly. “I don’t like this atonement. I shouldn’t have written. Shouldn’t have. But he was so contrite.”

“What’s wrong?”

“I don’t know. Nothing perhaps.” Rahotep was stopped by a fit of coughing. When he resumed, his voice was thin and weak. “Your mother didn’t trust Hauron. It may be that her ba spirit warns me. You don’t know Hauron. Strange notions come to roost in his heart. I fear for you.”

“Fear?” Anqet put a wet cloth to her father’s brow and shook her head.

“I should have foreseen.”

Anqet had to lean down to catch her father’s words.

“Marriage. That will be protection.”

“I don’t understand,” Anqet said.

“For protection. Marry, Little Heron. In the Two Lands young girls are under the protection of the men of their family. No judge of pharaoh would leave you by yourself if Hauron were to challenge your right to govern Nefer.”

“Don’t worry so, Father.”

Rahotep caught Anqet’s hand and lifted his head, his eyes burning with the intensity of his fever. “There is need for worry. I should have remembered what Hauron is like. I should have prepared, chosen for you. Too late.” Rahotep gasped, then coughed, long, throat-tearing seizures that ended only when he lost consciousness.

Anqet’s eyes filled with tears as she remembered the way her father had suffered from fear for her yet longed to find his beloved Taia. In the end, she had promised to marry so that Rahotep could let go of life peacefully. She drew her knees up, rested her arms on them, and lowered her head. An ache rose in her throat, and her body shook with sobs. She had loved her father, and he had left her—almost gladly—for the shadowy world where her mother dwelt. She was alone.

*    *    *

On the eighth day following the visit of Lord Oubainer, Anqet was out in the fields watching the last of the wheat harvest being winnowed. Lines of tenant farmers stretched before her, heads covered against the dust. She watched, mesmerized by the rhythm of the workers as they bent, scooped a load of heavy grain and light chaff into wooden troughs, and tossed it in the air where the two components separated in the wind. It had been a good harvest. None of her people would go hungry. The house of Rahotep fed its own, down to the last and lowest slave. Only in a lame year did her people suffer. Then, if the flood came late, or too little, all suffered.

“Mistress, mistress!”

The son of the cook trotted up to her. He was covered with sweat and breathed heavily. Anqet caught his arm and laughed.