The Twice Born (4 page)

Rapidly Huy looked her over. Nothing could possibly be hiding on that wiry little body. “I hate you, Ishat,” he hissed. “You are mocking me again.”

“No I’m not, but you can wait until I’ve finished eating,” she retorted. “Did Mother set out any date juice? She won’t let me drink wine.”

Huy grudgingly responded to the hint, passing her his cup. She drank greedily, wrinkled her nose, licked the purple rim from her lips, and pulling a lettuce leaf from under the remains of the chickpeas, set it on the grass by her hip and continued her meal.

Huy did his best to appear uninterested, but his curiosity was aroused, and by the time Ishat finally dabbled her fingers in the bowl of warm water already clouded from the hands of the adults and dried them on her kilt, he was preparing to be nasty. She seemed to sense that she had pushed him as far as she dared. Reaching beside her, she set something on the lettuce leaf and, balancing it carefully on her hand, held it out to him, eyes fixed steadily on his face. “I wish you happiness on your Naming Day,” she said solemnly.

Huy saw the gleam of it first, a sheen of bright colour that coalesced as it came closer into a golden scarab beetle, its smooth carapace as richly hued as the sunlight glancing off Aunt Heruben’s thick gold bracelet. With a gasp of wonder he took the leaf and stared down at the dead creature’s tiny golden head, its golden legs almost as thin as the whiskers on an ear of barley, the way in which other colours seemed to glint deep within it as he turned it to and fro.

“I found it floating on the flood,” Ishat said with a studied casualness. “My father told me that scarabs are very rare here in the Delta. They like to live in the desert. He said it would bring me good luck, but I said Huy needs it more than I do, seeing that he has to go away to school. I was right about that, wasn’t I?”

Huy looked across at her. “Thank you, Ishat,” he said thickly. “It is the most perfect present. I promise not to be mean to you ever again. Mother, look! See what Ishat has given me!” He held out the lettuce leaf for the admiration of the gathering.

Ker leaned close. “It is a great omen for both of you. Ishat for finding it and you, Huy, for receiving it on this special day. Keep it safe.”

“Be careful with it,” Hapu added. “It will dry out quickly and become brittle. Do not handle it too much.” Huy could not resist touching its warm silkiness, broken almost imperceptibly by the division down its back under which its wings lay invisibly folded.

“I did a very unselfish thing,” Ishat pointed out complacently. “The gods will reward me.” At any other time such a statement would have earned her a reprimand from whichever adult heard it, together with a vicious pinch from Huy, but today no one disagreed.

Huy nodded. “You can have the last bak seed pod,” he offered, and Ishat took it with all the lofty entitlement of a queen.

The gift-giving that followed was something of an anticlimax and Ishat knew it, watching smugly as one after another of Huy’s family produced the proofs of their homage. Hapu had made his son a sennet game, painting the squares on the board himself, gilding the cones and making the spools look as though they had been fashioned out of ebony. “This is an absorbing and magical game,” he told Huy, “and you are old enough to learn how to play it. There’s a drawer under the board itself where you can keep the pieces, together with the sticks that are tossed to determine each move. They resemble fingers. That was your mother’s idea.”

Huy thanked them dutifully. Indeed, his eye was caught by the vivid colours his father had painstakingly used, but all the time he was opening and closing the drawer experimentally and rolling the cones around on his palm he was aware of the scarab resting in the grass by his knee.

His aunt and uncle gave him an ivory monkey with a thin copper wire protruding from the top of its head. When it was pulled, the monkey clapped its paws together with a clinking sound over its smooth, rotund belly. Ishat exclaimed at it in awe, but Huy, although he expressed his gratitude, found it a little frightening. He did not think that he wanted it sitting beside his cot in the darkness, and the stuff from which it was carved felt cold as he held it. “Ivory comes from the land of Kush, far to the south,” Heruben offered. “It is taken from an enormous animal called an elephant.”

“Is it the bones?” Huy wanted to know. The idea was both distasteful and exciting.

“In a way,” Ker answered for his wife. “Ivory grows out of the animal’s head, to either side of its mouth. It has a long, long nose that reaches to the ground.”

Huy tried to imagine such a thing, and shuddered at the grotesque picture his mind had conjured. For politeness he tugged on the wire a few times and the monkey tinkled its response.

Itu sensed his distaste. “It is one of Thoth’s baboons, clapping to help the sun to rise,” she said. Huy set it down. Beside the scarab’s iridescence it looked sickly and dull.

Ker presented him with a small cedar box. On its lid, delicately inlaid in silver, was an image of the god of eternity, Heh, kneeling and holding in each hand the notched palm ribs that denoted millions of years. The subtle aroma of the wood filled Huy’s nostrils so that he put his face closer to it. His uncle’s ringed forefinger interposed. “See, just above the god’s head, the hieroglyphs strung between the palm ribs? That is your name, Huy. I and your aunt wish you many years of health and prosperity. If you lift the lid, you will see several small compartments. They are for the things you most want to keep safe and perhaps draw out in times to come to remind yourself of a person or an event in your past. As yet you have very little past,” he finished gently, “but when you are an old man like me, such objects will be precious to you.”

“Thank you, Uncle Ker,” Huy said fervently. “The first thing I will put in it will be my golden scarab. Hapzefa will give me a piece of linen to rest it on.” Ishat squirmed approvingly. The other adults laughed with indulgence. Huy stared down at the three symbols that meant his name and decided to get out his paintbox in the morning and practise writing them on the door of his room.
Then I will already be ahead of the other boys at school
, he thought happily,
and my teacher will be pleased with me
.

His aunt was yawning and his mother had sunk onto her elbow. Hapzefa hovered just out of earshot, vainly signalling at Ishat, who had rolled onto her stomach and was deliberately gazing into the shrubbery. “I am not supposed to ‘outstay my welcome’ as my mother says,” she muttered. “But seeing that no one has told me to go away, I will stay here.”

In truth Huy wanted all of them to go away so that he could examine the scarab again at his leisure. “She will want to put me to bed for the afternoon sleep and then clear the mess,” he responded hopefully. “But if you like, you can come back later and play with me, Ishat.”

She shot him a dark look. “I will if you don’t forget your promise never to be mean to me again.”

The party was breaking up. Ker and Heruben said their effusive goodbyes. Huy suffered himself to be kissed repeatedly before they made their way to where their litter-bearers drowsed just beyond Hapu’s main gate. Ishat rose reluctantly, waved dismissively at her mother, and disappeared in the direction of her hut.

“You look tired, Huy,” Itu said. “You will sleep well this afternoon. Have you enjoyed your celebration?” She scooped him up and hugged him, but he protested, getting down to retrieve his gifts, balancing the monkey on top of the sennet in one hand and the scarab on the box in the other as he walked carefully towards the house.

Hapzefa undressed him, grunted approvingly at the pristine state of his new shirt, stood the monkey on the table by his cot, slid the sennet game under it, and produced a square of soft folded linen. “It was left over from the shirt, Master Huy. It will make a good bed for your scarab. Perhaps you should place it upside down in the box so that its legs do not break off.” But Huy wanted to see the bright curve of its back whenever he lifted the lid, and once she had freshened the water in his cup and had closed his door behind her, he patted down the linen and reverently set the beetle on it. He fell asleep with the box clutched tightly against his chest.

He did not forget his promise to Ishat, and in the following days they spent much time together. As usual they had many fights, but Huy, mindful of the golden treasure that she had bestowed on him, was learning to control his urge to respond to her baiting with a slap or a pinch, and he missed her when she did not come prancing into the garden to while away the dead hours between the afternoon rest and the evening meal. She usually had good suggestions about what to play, although when he wanted her to be a Vizier and he the King, she seldom agreed. “Viziers are men,” she would say. “Anyway, being one is boring. I want to be Queen Meryet-Hatshepset. You can be Pharaoh Men-kheper-Ra Thothmes.” Eventually they took turns conceding to one another.

In a burst of affection he gave her his dog. He would have liked to make her a present of the ivory monkey, but his father indignantly refused to countenance the idea. “Your uncle gave gold for that toy,” he told Huy. “It was very expensive. What would he say if he came to visit and saw Ishat playing with it? Why don’t you like it, you foolish boy?” Huy could not say why. All he knew was that it frightened him more as time went by. At first he had simply turned away from its idiotic grin when he wanted to sleep, but the atmosphere of blind malevolence around it seemed to spread farther into his room each day, until he could no longer banish an awareness of its presence by showing it his back. He put it under his cot, not even liking the cool feel of it when he picked it up, but that was somehow worse than not being able to see it. What if it began to clap its paws together all by itself, there beneath him? He knew that he was being silly, that it was really only a lump of inanimate matter (although he was unable to use those words), yet he remembered being told that the kas of the gods lived in their likenesses, making the stone come alive, and his dread grew. What if one of Thoth’s holy baboons was bad-tempered and restless and did not like children? What if its ka had left its home and found this ivory toy in some craftsman’s workshop, and had sunk into it so that it could torment whatever little boy came to own it?

“Carry it around with you as if you love it,” Ishat advised him matter-of-factly when he told her of his fear. “Then, when no one is looking, find a big rock to drop on it. If you are lucky, its limbs will shatter instead of snapping off so it can’t be fixed and you can tell a lie and say it was an accident.” But Huy, although he had no scruples about lying occasionally, could not bear the thought of having it against his skin for any length of time. In the end he dropped it at the bottom of his clothes chest under his kilts and shirts. Of course, Hapzefa found it there, but she said nothing.
Perhaps
, Huy reasoned,
she did not like it either
.

So the weeks passed. The third week of Huy’s birth month, Paophi, was taken up with the universal celebration of the Amunfeast of Hapi, god of the river, whose banks had overflowed into a satisfying flood that promised another year of good harvests. The heat began to moderate as the river, together with the population of mosquitoes and flies, continued to rise. Paophi became Athyr, and still the water slowly lifted, lapping over the sunken fields and giving back to those who watched it the distorted reflections of the trees that stood isolated amid its calm expanse.

On the first of Khoiak the feast of Hathor, goddess of love and beauty, was observed by the whole country. It signalled a month of many religious observances, a flurry of activity within and without the temples that included three solemn and important rites of Osiris, but Hapu’s favourite, indeed the only one he cared to participate in actively, was the Feast of the Hoeing of the Earth, for it meant that the water was at last receding, the flower fields would be calf-deep in life-giving silt, and in a very short time he and the other peasants could begin the sowing.

Huy had pushed the knowledge of his impending departure to the back of his mind, content to catch frogs and play with Ishat, or sit with his father, the sennet board between them, and play the game that he had found easy to learn but difficult to master. Hapu made no concessions to his age. On many occasions Huy, reduced to tears of sheer rage, would see his spools ruthlessly tumbled onto the water square one by one and, losing, would sweep them onto the floor. Hapu remained indifferent, ordering his son to pick them up and replace them on the board, but on the day when Huy beat him for the first time he roared with laughter, pulled him from his cushion, swung him over his head, and hugged him fiercely. From then on Huy looked forward to their contests and behaved with a great deal more equanimity when he lost.

But the end of Khoiak saw Hapu out in the fields, breaking the dikes that had held in the precious water so that it could now flow away and leave the soil exposed, and miserably Huy remembered that Tybi was almost upon him and, with it, the time to leave his home for the first time. “How horrible!” Ishat had said when he told her how few days he had left. “I don’t ever want to go farther than the markets, and I certainly don’t want to learn to read or write. Why should I? I am perfectly content.” But seeing his expression, she relented. “Poor Huy!” she exclaimed. “I will pray every day that you finish school quickly and get sent home so that I won’t be lonely.” Huy did not think that learning to read and write was something you managed to do quickly. Suddenly jealous of her continued freedom, he refused to tell her how much he would miss her.

He saw little of his father in the days leading up to his departure. Hapu rose early, ate sparingly, and was gone to the fields before Hapzefa opened the shutters on Huy’s window. The mornings were chilly. Often Huy would run into his parents’ room, climbing onto their bed and snuggling up to Itu as she drowsed, herself unwilling to get up. Sometimes Huy went back to sleep curled into the crook of her arm and he did not know that she lay crying quietly, inhaling his warm child smell, aware that no matter how often she was privileged to hold him in the future it would never be the same. His childhood was almost over.