House of Dreams (32 page)

“I am very well, Mother,” I answered her smilingly. “As you can see, I have been treated with more than kindness. It is wonderful to see you also.” Her hands went to her hips.

“And what is this about the Great One inviting you to live in the palace? You would do better to come home and work with me, Thu. The harem is not a nice place, or so I’ve heard, and you will come to grief, an innocent country girl like you. Your father can find you a respectable husband right here! How did you come to the attention of the Great One anyway?” The question dripped with suspicion and I laughed aloud.

“Oh, Mother, I went to the palace with my Master to treat Pharaoh for a minor ailment. As for the harem, I’m sure that the House of Women is a perfectly safe and morally reproachless place to be!” I said. “After all, it is a serious thing, to be the wife of a God!”

“A wife maybe,” she muttered darkly, “but what about a concubine?”

“That is enough!” my father said to her sharply. “Go and bring the wine and cakes!” She grimaced, muttered something under her breath, then gave me a brilliant smile before disappearing. I sank onto a mat on the floor and Father went down to face me, crossing his legs and fixing me with a speculative stare.

“None of it is quite as I remember,” I said, glancing about the room to break the fleeting awkwardness that had overtaken me. I did not add that its clean poverty as well as its size appalled me. Had I really lived in such surroundings and been unaware of their poverty? My father raised his eyebrows.

“That is because you are so much older,” he mocked me gently. “I have missed you, Thu, and I have often thought of the day you came stumbling across the field and clung to my thigh and begged to be allowed to go to school. I could not afford to send you, of course, but I made a mistake in thinking that it did not matter. I underestimated both your intelligence and your dissatisfaction. If I had been able to raise the necessary goods with which to pay for your education perhaps you would have been content to stay here with us in Aswat.” Then he shook his head. “No, you would not!”

“Do not reproach yourself,” I chided him. “You understand me, my father, and that is why you let me go north with my Master. I love you all, but I would have been desperately unhappy if I had stayed.”

“And are you happy now? Will you be happy in Pharaoh’s arms? Do you want to be a concubine, Thu? The decision is yours, not mine, and I will support you in whatever direction you wish to go.” I looked into that calm, weather-beaten face and knew the sincerity of his love.

“I am happy now,” I answered slowly, “and as for happiness in Pharaoh’s arms, who knows? Perhaps he will be so happy in mine that he will make me one of his wives.”

“That cannot be,” my father said abruptly. “Rarely has a King married the daughter of a commoner, let alone a peasant, and then only for passionate love. Besides, what do you know about pleasing a man, Thu? There are women in the harem who have devoted their whole lives to that subject and yet are still discarded. Do not let your dreams of the future interfere with the realities of the present!” He was momentarily angry, why I did not know. And I was angry too, for his words had touched me on the tender quick of my secret fantasies.

“I do not see the end of my road,” I said, “but I must walk it. I cannot stand in one place, no matter how delightful that may be. I want to look around the next bend, oh, my father!” He sighed.

“Then that is settled. Have you asked your Master if he will continue to house you if you change your mind? Will he find you a suitable husband, perhaps?” I could not disguise the slight shudder that took me.

“I do not want an ordinary husband. It is more glorious to belong to the Living God!”

My mother had returned and was quietly setting out the wine cups and a platter of her best sweetmeats. Several times she had drawn breath to break into my conversation with my father but thought better of it. Her dark eyes darted between us. I could see that she was bursting with comments but she sat down beside me and drank in a silence that must have been very difficult for her to maintain.

There was little more to say. The wine was strong and bitter and I drank it gladly. We spoke desultorily of this and that and my mother became animated as she described the latest antics of the long-suffering mayor’s saucy daughters, but a constraint grew among the three of us. I tried to answer their few questions about my life with Hui but found myself unable to do so in language that did not emphasize the wide gulf that existed between his world and theirs, and they surely sensed that the village gossip did not interest me any more. Blood and family affection bound us, but little more. In the achingly uncomfortable silences we drank our wine and nibbled at the cakes my mother had so painstakingly prepared, and at length my father rose, indicating that I should rise also. “I will receive the Seer now,” he said. “You can wait outside, Thu.” His smile took the bite out of his command and I obeyed, walking into the deepening flush of the sunset. Father spoke to a guard, who went to the litter. The curtains twitched and Hui emerged, imprisoned in his linens. We looked at each other. Then with a nod for Ani to accompany him he approached my father who was once more standing in his doorway.

I wandered in the direction of the river, taking the way I had so often fled as a child. The villagers were still grouped in the square, staring at me like mindless sheep. I was unaccountably weary with the strain of this homecoming that was not a homecoming at all. Dimly I was aware of the guard who had fallen in behind me. My sandals had become clogged with grit and I stooped to remove them, and when I straightened Pa-ari was there. He was panting and his kilt had been tucked up around his hips.

“I ran from the temple,” he explained, releasing his linen as he fell into step beside me and took my sandals from my hand. “There was some dictation that could not wait. I am sorry. What did Father say? Will he sign the contract? Where were you going?”

“To the river,” I replied, and at the catch in my voice he grasped my fingers and together we found ourselves on the bank of the Nile, its muddy depths flowing just below. The gaunt trees behind us threw long shadows across the water as Ra lipped the horizon and we sat in their shelter and began to talk. The guard took up his station some way away and we forgot his presence. We shared our childhood and spoke of the years we had been apart. Pa-ari told me how he had fallen in love with Isis. I described Disenk and Hui and Harshira and General Paiis, but of Prince Ramses and Pharaoh himself I did not speak. Pa-ari wanted to know what the Delta was like, and the mighty city of Pi-Ramses, and I gave him my impressions as best I could.

The dusk turned into evening and the guard became politely restless until I turned to him and said, “I will be spending the night with my family but I will be back on board the barge for the dawn sailing. Please tell the Master, and ask him to send another soldier to stand by me.” He bowed and left and Pa-ari chuckled.

“You give orders very confidently, my Libu princess,” he teased, and I laughed with him. Our eyes turned to the gathering darkness on the farther bank and the gradually fading colours of the sky. The deep peace of the south was beginning to fall on this changeless backwater and I felt a corresponding loosening in my body. I leaned back against a tree. “Only here is there such a sense of the meaning of eternity,” I half-whispered. “It is a clean, sane feeling, Pa-ari, and I miss it very much.” He did not answer, but his fingers tightened on mine and I knew that he had understood.

By the time we walked back to the square, a new guard trailing behind us, full dark had fallen and the dull yellow glow of lamplight flickered from the doorway of the house. Hui and his entourage had gone. The welcoming smell of lentil and onion soup and the fragrance of freshly baked bread greeted me as I crossed the threshold. The meal had been set out on spotless linen on the floor of the reception room and I sank onto the mat before my dish as I had always done. Father said the evening prayers before the shrine, his naked, bent back, the sound of his deep voice and the rather rank odour of the lamp oil all serving to pull me back to a time long gone. The experience was bewildering. It was as though I had dreamed a childhood here while growing up in Hui’s house, dreamed that I was a peasant girl in a small southern village with a soldiering father and a midwife for a mother and a brother who was studying to be a scribe.

As we were dipping our bread into the soup a man came in, grunted an absent greeting, and settled himself beside me, reaching for the food. My father did not introduce us. I presumed that this was the Maxyes slave, for he was heavily bearded and his thick black hair matched the matting on his chest. He ate quickly, and when he was finished he rose, murmured a good-night, drew a jug of beer from the flagon beside the soup, and went out into the night. No one remarked upon his behaviour.

After the meal was over I helped my mother remove and wash the empty bowls, then we all sat in the reception room and talked. The conversation was light. There was love in the smiles, in the old family jokes, but a restraint was on us that could not be broken. Before the oil in the single crude lamp was exhausted we stood by unspoken, common consent and I said goodbye to my parents, holding them to me tightly in a paroxysm of affection and guilt. I promised to send them regular scrolls from the harem and my father bade me be honest and trustworthy in all my dealings. Then they were gone and Pa-ari and I made our way to the room I had happily shared with him for so many years.

My mother had placed clean linen on my pallet, but its coarse texture irritated my skin as I curled up beneath it. The pallet itself seemed hard. I could feel the unyielding mud floor digging into my hipbones. My parents’ voices came to me faintly, a reassuring susurration, and then became intermittent and died away. I could not see my brother in the pressing blackness, but as always I was able to feel his presence and I put out my hand to clasp his own. We lay there in a companionable silence for a while until he said, “I suppose I shall have to travel to Pi-Ramses if I want to see you again, Thu. What a nuisance! And will I be required to obtain permission from every petty harem official before I am allowed to at last prostrate myself before your august Highness?” I laughed and corrected him, and all at once the strangeness was gone and the night was close and warm and secret as it used to be when we emptied our hearts to each other. Words flowed easily, perhaps because we could not see one another and whispers are ageless. The hours passed unremarked while the invisible bond that held us together grew tight and firm again. Yet I did not speak of the reason for Kenna’s death though the need to do so became almost irresistible. I did not want to be lessened in my brother’s eyes and I knew that he would not understand.

He fell asleep just before dawn, and when I heard his steady breathing I rose, bent down to kiss him, and quietly let myself out of the house. The air was still stale with the night’s heat and a promise of the scorching morning to come. A delicate, pale light was gradually flooding the deserted village square and the motionless ragged shrubbery that bordered the river. My guard detached himself from the thin shadow of the house wall and fell in behind me as I walked away quickly, my sandals dangling from my hand. I did not look back. They would wake soon, and yawn, and sleepily look out upon another day filled with their simple routines of work and rest, prayer and gossip, village affairs and neighbours’ concerns. But by the time my mother had collected up her washing and gone to the river to stand knee-deep in the water and slap the linen against the stones, I would be resting under the awning of the barge, watching Egypt slide by while Disenk prepared the fruit for my first meal. I would have escaped.

She was sitting on the ramp waiting for me, and as I rounded the last bend in the path and came in sight of the watersteps she rose and hurried forward, her matchless little face lighting with pleasure. But at the sight of my soiled and rumpled sheath, my disordered hair and dusty limbs she stopped short, her tiny fingers fluttering in distress.

“Disenk!” I called out, suddenly wanting to embrace her with the relief of seeing the barge still at its mooring. “Am I late?” The helmsman was already mounting to his great steering oar in the stern and there was a flurry of purposeful activity around the ramp and the ropes that held us to the mooring poles.

“Your feet!” Disenk wailed. “Look at them! And the soil is so dry, it will ruin your skin and you are covered in it! Oh, Thu!”

“But you are a magician, Disenk,” I retorted gaily as I ran up the ramp. “You will perform your spells and everything will be all right!” I left her hurrying aft and calling for water and I slipped into the cabin. As I did so I heard the captain give a short command, his voice echoing against the temple pylon ahead, and the barge lurched. We were underway.

The scent of jasmine, Hui’s perfume, hung thick and sweet in the cabin as I let the curtain fall and stepped up to the travelling cot. Neferhotep was already busy. He nodded to me and then turned back to his preparations for Hui’s morning ablutions. I lowered myself onto the sheets. Hui was not yet fully awake. He eyed me drowsily as I planted a swift kiss on his mouth, then he smiled slowly. “Well?” he said.

“I love you, Hui,” I replied. “I am ready to go home.”

13

MY ARRIVAL
back at Hui’s estate was the true homecoming. This time the sight of Harshira’s regal figure before the entrance pylon filled me with joy and I ran down the ramp and hugged him. He detached himself with aplomb and smiled at me gravely.