Ancient Evenings (63 page)

“So soon as I was away from Him, I began to pray. ‘Let there be a plot against Him,’ I begged, ‘and I will lead it myself!’ ”

V
 
T
HE
B
OOK OF
Q
UEENS

ONE

“In the Gardens of the Secluded, I learned what I could not have been taught in other places, and was introduced to beguilements as different from war as the rose from the axe. While I cannot speak of how it may look today, a hundred women lived there then and it was the loveliest part of the Palace. Behind its walls were many fine houses, and from each kitchen you could hear much gaiety for many of the little queens loved to eat and were merry when there was food before them. And of course they loved to drink. Each day, after all, was like the one before. The little queens arose long after sounds from the Palace beyond their walls had awakened everyone but themselves, and through the morning they would dress each other and hold long conversations over what they would borrow, and told odd tales of what they had lost to one another. For if the Pharaoh happened to visit a little queen while she was wearing a borrowed necklace, it became her own necklace. Since the King had seen it on her, there was no question of giving it back. Of course, His gifts were never loaned so lightly. Any adornment that came from Usermare was not to be touched by anyone else. Once, a little queen broke this rule, but she was obliged to pay a fearful penalty. Her small toe was severed from her left foot. As quickly destroy the first column of a temple built by Ramses the Great as lend one of His gifts. Afterward, this little queen did not dance, in fact, she hardly moved, and she ate tidbits like the candied wings of birds to restore the ache left by the stump of her little toe, and became so fat that everyone called her Honey-Ball. I was told of her when first I entered the harem.

“In those days—was I more weary of my old command than I knew?—I would kneel to study the flowers at the edge of each royal pond. There was one bloom, an orchid I would suppose, but of an orange hue, and I spoke to it many times, which is to say I would utter my thoughts aloud and the flower knew to reply, although I could not tell for certain what it said. With no breeze passing over us, it would still stir when I came near and sometimes it swayed on its stem as undulantly as one of the little queens in a dance, indeed its petals trembled in my presence like a girl who cannot conceal her love. Yet this would happen when none of the other flowers were moving at all in the still air. It was as if the stem of this orchid had roots as deep as the thoughts of my heart, and I could breathe with the same God we knew tonight when He brought together those two pieces of black-copper-from-heaven. What spirit was in the flower I do not know, but the filaments would curl beneath my eyes, and its tiny anthers would grow larger under the power of my gaze until I could see the pollen gather.

“Like those anthers were the eyes of the little queens when they chose to adore the sight of you. I do not suppose there was one who was not ready to look at me in such a way before the year was out. But then, any man who was not a eunuch would have found it unnatural to serve in the Gardens of the Secluded and know the nearness of so many female bodies. Since they belonged to Usermare, one would no more breathe their perfume too closely than drink from His golden cup. Death to be caught in the act with any one of these hundred women. While I had looked at death two hundred times already, and often with a shout of happiness, I had been at war. Death, in the moment you know your glory, can seem like an embrace by the arms of the sun, but now I was weak with the knowledge that I wished to live, and so had no desire to be dispatched with the Pharaoh’s curse on my back.

“I spoke to the little queens, therefore, as if they were flowers by the edge of the pond, and did my best to show a General who cultivated a face of stone. Each of the scars on my cheeks might have been shaped by a chisel.

“Of course, such fear did not please me. Each morning I awoke in the House of the Secluded with more desire to learn the ways of these beautiful women. I saw that my peasant beginnings, no matter how they had been dignified by the achievements of a soldier, would be of no use for comprehending the airs and silly disputes of this harem where I was now the Overseer, especially when I did not know if their arts of cosmetic and story-telling, of music and dance and kingly seduction, were as common here as an ass and a plow to a peasant, or partook of magic itself. Nor could I decide if the passing quarrels I witnessed each day were as important to the Gods as any battle between two men. Indeed they seemed to be fought as fiercely in some God’s service! I was such a stranger to the House of the Secluded that in the beginning I did not even know how the little queens were chosen nor how many were daughters of the noblest families in each of the forty-two nomes. But then the woman who could have told me much about them, the ancient matron who was their supervisor, had just died.”

“I do not like the way you tell us of the harem,” said Hathfertiti. “Since I have never been in the House of the Secluded, I cannot picture for myself how it looks. Indeed,” said my mother, with every sign of annoyance, “there are no faces in your thoughts, nor anything for us to look upon.”

My great-grandfather shrugged.

“Surely, you are not tired,” said Ptah-nem-hotep, “now that we are near to these stories of love so much more curious to relate than the encounters of war?”

“No, I would not say to You-of-the-Two-Great-Houses that my thoughts are weary, but still I hesitate. It is not easy to describe. I think it was the most curious year of my life. Do you know, I had never had a home before? I had one now—in the Gardens—and servants to keep it for me. I was free to leave whenever I wished. I could, if I desired, have gone to visit any one of several women I knew on the outside, and yet I was like a creature in the grip of black-copper-from-heaven. I did not dare to move from the Gardens. It was as if all I was now trying to learn would disappear the moment I stepped out through the gates and struck the clatter of the streets of Thebes. Besides, I was not so free. There was the unspoken command of Usermare-Setpenere. He would not wish His Governor to be away from the Secluded on any undeclared hour when He might arrive.

“Moreover, I had all the years of my life until this hour to contemplate.” My great-grandfather looked sad. “Ah,” he said with a sigh, “the tiny birds need stirring,” and he waved his hand at the nearest cage. The fireflies remained somnolent. Behind the fine and transparent linen that confined them, I could hardly see them stir.

My great-grandfather did not speak anymore, and we sat in silence. This night, I had listened to his voice so many times that I did not need to hear it any longer. I could imagine virtually all about which he spoke. Indeed, what he had to say became clearer than his voice, which is to confess that I began to have many pictures of the gardens in the House of the Secluded and saw the women as their likeness appeared in his thoughts. I could have stood upon a small bridge over one of the ponds in these gardens, and heard the little queens speak to one another. And I could see my great-grandfather’s face as it must have been then (which was certainly as stern and as marked with the cuts of swords as he had told us) but now I needed to keep my eyes open no longer, for so powerful became his thoughts that I could not only hear the voices of the little queens but his voice as well, and it vibrated inside me like the heaviest string on a lute.

As I lay there on my cushions, asleep for all, my body feeling as agreeable as sleep itself, my eyes closed but for the veil of my eyelashes, I could see as I never had before. Even as I had wondered at the paintings of Gods on the walls of many a temple and tomb my mother had taken me to, because such people never appeared on the street, nobody, for instance, with a long bird beak like Thoth, nor Sebek, the God with jaws like a crocodile, so could I understand that there were hours like this when you could see more than one face on a single person’s head, and my great-grandfather became one by one, as I looked at him, the people of whom he thought, and I began to witness his story as if these people were in the room, and would even have been ready to walk among them if I had not been enjoying more the composure of my limbs. These thoughts no longer seemed to belong to my childhood so much as to what must be the wisdom, I supposed, of a man of twenty, but such enrichment was due, I believe, to my great-grandfather’s reveries as they passed through others before drifting on to me. The patio of the Pharaoh soon became, thereby, many rooms, and no part of it was of any certain size. Where before I could have been looking at a couch, now I saw a road, and the arch between two columns became like the great doors Menenhetet saw at the entrance to the House of the Secluded. I even saw the two stone lions on either side of the Gates of Morning and Evening, and knew (my understanding of these Gardens of the Secluded as rich as Menenhetet’s in his first days there) that these lions were a gift to the Pharaoh from a place called the City of the Lions down the river, and I was taken past these marble beasts and went into the Gardens. I could even see the splendid bodies of the four black eunuchs who stood guard at the gate, and they wore helmets of gold. Their teeth were as white as the linen of the Pharaoh.

Then we were in the harem, and the trees were so many, and the grounds that full with flowers I could recognize and others I had never glimpsed before I thought there must be more blooms here than grew in all of Egypt, such reds and oranges and lemons and golds and golden greens and flowers of many colors with violet and rose and cream and scarlet and petals so soft as they came into Menenhetet’s thoughts that the sweet lips of the little queens might have been whispering on my cheek, never had I seen such color before, nor these black-and-yellow bridges with silver balustrades and golden posts crossing the ponds which wandered through. A green moss covered the banks, as brilliant in the soft light as any emerald. It was the most beautiful place through which I ever wandered, and a perfume came from the flowers and the fruit trees until even the blue lotus had a sweetness of odor. Since it usually had none, I did not know why I could sniff it until I saw black eunuchs on their knees painting the blue lotus with scented oils, perfuming the carob trees, and the sycamores, even the roots of the date-palms whose fronds, above, deepened the shade of the garden. One could not even see the sky for the branches and leaves of the low fruit trees and the lattice of the grape arbors, and this shade gave back the lavender light of evening as one sits within a cave.

Everywhere, birds flew from tree to tree and glided above the royal palms. There were ducks of every color in the ponds, bronze-hued ducks with wings of saffron and garnet, and a black swan with a bright red beak who was called Kadima, the same as the name of one tall black Princess, Kadima-from-Nubia, one of the little queens.

Never had I seen so many birds. Flying above our deserts and our river, they must have glimpsed the green eye of these gardens from a heaven away, and they came in such a splendor and confusion and outright gabble of voices that I could not have heard Menenhetet if he had still been speaking, for all of them, the geese and the cranes, the flamingos and the pelicans, the sparrows, the doves, the swallows, the nightingales and the birds of Arabia (faster than arrows but no larger than butterflies) covered the lawns and the swamps and the branches. One breathed in the hum and flutter and drumbeat of birds’ wings until their power to speak tore out of my chest like a breath I could hold no longer, and flocks of them flew up in a cloud of wings while others settled to the ground. Overhead, above the palms, other birds were fighting, and the cry of these battles also came down to us. Kingfishers soared, falcons soared, ravens went through their turns, while below were all the flights of smaller birds, full of messages for one another, as if all that would yet happen in our harem and our city was being told by one bird to another. There were hours when the Gardens were as noisy as a marketplace.