The Red Tent (29 page)

He took an exquisite little box from a niche in the wall. It was unadorned but perfect, made of ebony—wood that was used almost exclusively for the tombs of kings—and it had been burnished until it shone like a black moon. “For your midwife’s kit,” he said, and held it out to me.

I stared at it for a moment, overwhelmed by his generosity and tenderness. “I have nothing to give you by way of a token,” I said. He shrugged with one shoulder, in a gesture I soon came to know as well as I knew my own hands. “You don’t have to give me anything. If you take this from my hands freely, your choice will be your token.”

Thus I became a married woman in Egypt.

Benia laid out a meal of bread and onions and fruit for us, and we sat in the kitchen and ate and drank in nervous silence. I had been a girl the last time I had lain with a man. Benia had been thinking of me since that day in the market, two years earlier. We were shy as two virgins who had been matched by their parents.

After we ate, he took my hand and led me to the main hall, where the fine bed stood, piled with clean linen. It reminded me of Re-nefer’s bed in Nakht-re’s house. It reminded me of Shalem’s bed, in his father’s house. But then Benia turned me toward him and put his hands on my face and I forgot every bed I had ever seen before that moment.

Lying together was a tender surprise. From our very first night, Benia took great care of my pleasure and seemed to discover his own in mine. My shyness vanished in the course of that night, and as the weeks passed, I found wells of desire and passion that I had never suspected in myself. When Benia lay with me, the past vanished and I was a new soul, reborn in the taste of his mouth, the touch of his fingers. His huge hands cupped my body and untied secret knots created by years of loneliness and silence. The sight of his naked legs, thick and ropy with sinew, aroused me so much that Benia would tease me as he left in the morning, lifting his skirt to reveal the top of his thigh, making me blush and laugh.

My husband went to his workshop every morning, but unlike the stonecutters and painters, he did not have to work in the tombs, so he returned to me in the evening, where he and I discovered greater pleasure in each other—and the sorry fact that I did not know how to cook.

During my years in Nakht-re’s house, I rarely strayed into the kitchen, much less prepared a meal. I had never learned how to make bread in an Egyptian oven or to gut fish or pluck fowl. We ate unripe fruit from Benia’s neglected garden and I begged bread from Menna. Shamefaced, I asked Shif-re for a cooking lesson, which Meryt attended only to tease me.

I tried to recreate my mother’s recipes, but I lacked the ingredients and I forgot the proportions. I felt sheepish and ashamed, but Benia only laughed. “We won’t starve,” he said. “I have kept myself alive for years on borrowed bread and fruit and the occasional feast at the house of my fellows and family. I did not marry you to be my cook.”

But while I was a stranger in the kitchen, I found great joy in keeping my own house. There was such sweetness in deciding where to place a chair, and in choosing what to plant in the garden. I relished creating my own order and hummed whenever I swept the floor or folded blankets. I spent hours arranging pots in the kitchen first in order of size, then according to color.

My house was a world of my own possession, a country in which I was ruler and citizen, where I chose and where I served. One night, when I returned home very late, exhausted after attending at the birth of healthy twins, I thought I had lost my way. Standing in the middle of the street in the dead of night, I recognized my home by its smell—a mixture of coriander, clover, and Benia’s cedary scent.

A few months after I moved to my own house, Menna prepared a small banquet for me and Benia. My husband’s workmen sang songs of their workshop. Meryt’s sons sang of bread. And then all the men, together with their wives and children, joined voices for love songs, of which there seemed to be an endless number. I was bashful at the attention showered upon us, the cups raised, the broad smiles and kisses. Even though Benia and I were really too old for such nonsense, we were giddy with delight in each other. When Meryt leaned over and told me to stop grudging people the chance to bask in the light of our shared happiness, I put aside all shyness in gratitude and smiled into the faces of my friends.

I had been right to trust Benia, who was the soul of kindness. One night we lay on our backs staring up at the heavens. There was only a sliver of moon and the stars danced above when he told me his life. His words came slowly, for many of the memories were sad ones.

“I have only one memory of my father,” said Benia. “The sight of his back, which I saw as he walked away from me in a field where I sat behind the plow breaking up clods. I was six years old when he died, leaving Ma with four children. I was the third son.

“She had no brothers, and my father’s people were not generous. She had to find places for us, so my mother took me to the city and showed my hands to the stonecutters. They took me on as an apprentice, and taught me and worked me until my back was strong and my hands callused. But I became a joke in the workshops. Marble would crack if I walked into a room and granite would weep if I raised a chisel to it.

“Wandering in the market one day, I watched as a carpenter repaired an old stool for a poor woman. He saw my belt and bowed low, for even though I was only an apprentice, stonecutters who work in immortal materials are considered far greater than woodworkers, whose greatest achievements decay like a man’s body.

“I told the carpenter that his respect was misplaced and that mere sandstone defeated me. I confessed that I was in danger of being turned into the street.

“The woodworker took my hand in his, turning it this way and that. He handed me a knife and a scrap of wood and asked me to carve a toy for his grandson.

“The wood seemed warm and alive, and a doll took shape in my hands without effort. The very grain of the pine seemed to smile at me.

“The carpenter nodded at the thing I made and took me to the workshop of his teacher, presenting me as a likely apprentice. And there I discovered my life’s work.”

Here my husband sighed. “There, too, I met my wife, who was a servant in the house of my master. We were so young,” he said softly, and in the silence that followed I understood that he had loved the wife of his youth with his whole heart.

After a long pause he said, “We had two sons.” Again he stopped, and in the silence I heard the voices of little boys, Benia’s doting laughter, a woman singing a lullaby.

“They died of river fever,” Benia said. “I had taken them from the city to see my brother, who had married into a farming family. But when we arrived at the house, we found my brother dying and the rest of his family stricken. My wife cared for them all,” he whispered. “We should have left,” he said, with self-reproach still raw after many years.

“After that,” he said, “I lived only in my work and loved only my work. I visited the prostitutes once,” he confessed sheepishly. “But they were too sad.

“Until the day I saw you in the marketplace, I did not bother to hope for anything. When I first recognized you as my beloved, my heart came to life,” he said. “But when you disappeared and seemed to scorn me, I grew angry. For the first time in my life, I raged against heaven for stealing my family and then for dangling you before my eyes and snatching you away. I was furious and frightened of my own loneliness.

“So I took a wife.”

I had been perfectly still until then, but that announcement made me sit up.

“Yes, yes,” he said, embarrassed. “My sister found me a marriageable girl, a servant in the house of a painter, and I brought her here with me. It was a disaster. I was too old for her; she was too silly for me.

“Oh Den-ner,” he said, in a misery of apology. “We were so mismatched it could have been funny. We never spoke. We tried sharing my bed, twice, and even that was awful.

“Finally, she was braver than I, poor girl. After two weeks, she left. Walked out of the house while I was at work, down to the ferry and back to the painter’s house, where she remains.

“I was resigned to making strong drink my regular companion until Meryt sought me out. She visited me three times before I would agree to see you. I am lucky that your friend does not understand the meaning of ‘no.’ “

I turned to my husband and said, “And my luck is measured by your kindness, which is boundless.”

We made love very slowly that night, as though for the last time, weeping. One of his tears fell in my mouth, where it became a blue sapphire, source of strength and eternal hope.

Benia did not ask for my story in return. His eyes would fill with questions when I mentioned my mother’s way of making beer, or my aunt’s skill as a midwife, but he stepped back from his need to know. I think he feared that I might vanish if he so much as asked me the meaning of my name or the word for “water” in my native tongue.

On another moonless night, I told him as much of my truth as I could: that Re-mose’s father was the son of Re-nefer, sister of Nakht-re, and that I came to Thebes after the murder of my husband, in our own bed. When he heard that, Benia shuddered, took me into his arms as though I was a child, and stroked my hair, and said nothing but “Poor thing.” Which was everything I had longed to hear.

Neither of us ever gave voice to the names of our beloved dead ones, and for this act of respect, they permitted us to live in peace with our new mates and never haunted our thoughts by day or visited our dreams at night.

Life was sweet in the Valley of the Kings, on the west bank of the river. Benia and I had everything we needed in each other. Indeed, we were rich in all ways but one, for we lacked children.

I was barren, or perhaps only too old to bear. Although I had already lived a full life—close to twoscore years—my back was strong and my body still obeyed the pull of the moon. I was certain that my womb was cold, but even so I could never root out all hope from my heart, and I grieved with the flux of every new moon.

Still we were not completely childless, for Meryt often sat in our doorstep, trailing her grandchildren, who treated us as uncle and aunt—especially little Kiya, who liked to sleep in our house so much that her mother sometimes sent her to stay with us, to help me in the garden and to brighten our days.

Benia and I shared stories in the evenings. I told him of the babies that I caught and of the mothers who died, though they were blessedly few. He spoke of his commissions—each one a new challenge, based not only upon the desires of the buyer and builders, but also upon the wishes of the wood in his hand.

The days passed peacefully, and the fact that there was little to mark one from the next seemed a great gift to me. I had Benia’s hands, Meryt’s friendship, the feel of newborn flesh, the smiles of new mothers, a little girl who laughed in my kitchen, a house of my own.

It was more than enough.

CHAPTER FOUR

I
KNEW ABOUT RE-MOSE’s message even before the messenger arrived at my house. Kiya ran to the door with the news that a scribe had come to Menna’s house seeking Den-ner the midwife and was on his way to Benia’s door.

I was delighted at the prospect of another letter from my son. It had been more than a year since the last one, and I imagined myself showing Benia my son’s own writing on the limestone tablet when he arrived home that evening.

I stood in the doorway, anxious to discover the contents of this letter. But when the man turned the corner, surrounded by a pack of excited little children, I realized that the messenger brought his own message.

Re-mose and I stared at each other. I saw a man I did not know—the image of Nakht-re except for his eyes, which were set like his father’s. I saw nothing of myself in the prince of Egypt who stood before me, dressed in fine linen, with a gold pectoral gleaming on his chest and new sandals on his manicured feet.

I did not know what he saw as he looked at me. I thought I detected disdain in his eye, but perhaps that was only my own fear. I wondered if he could see that I stood taller now that I carried less grief on my back. Whatever he saw or thought, we were strangers.

“Forgive my manners,” I said finally. “Come inside the house of Benia, and let me give you some cool beer and fruit. I know the journey from Thebes is dusty.”

Re-mose recovered too, and said, “Forgive me, Mother. It is so long since I saw your dear face.” His words were cool and his embrace a quick, awkward hug. “I would gladly take a drink,” he said, and followed me into the house.

I saw each room through his eyes, which were accustomed to the spacious beauties of palaces and temples. The front room, my room, which I treasured for the colorful wall painting, suddenly looked small and bare, and I was glad when he hurried through it. Benia’s hall was larger and furnished with pieces seen only in great houses and tombs. The quality of the chairs and bed found approval in my son’s eyes, and I left him there to fetch food and drink. Kiya had followed us in and stared at the beautifully dressed man in my house.

“Is this my sister?” asked Re-mose, pointing to the silent child. “No,” I said. “This is the niece of a friend, and like a niece to me.” My answer seemed to relieve him. “The gods seem to have ordained that you remain my only child,” I added.

“I am glad to see you healthy and successful. Tell me, are you married yet? Am I a grandmother?”

“No,” said Re-mose. “My duties keep me too busy for my own family,” he said, with a tight little wave of his hand. “Perhaps someday my situation will improve and I can give you little ones to dandle on your knee.”

But this was nothing more than polite conversation, which hung in the air and smelled of falsehood. The gulf between us was far too wide for any such familiarity. If and when I became a grandmother, I would know my grandchildren only through messages sent on limestone slabs meant to be discarded after they are read.

“Ma,” he said, after drinking from his cup, “I am here not only for my own pleasure. My master sends me to fetch the finest midwife in Egypt to attend his wife’s labor.

“No, it is true,” he said, dismissing my shrug. “Say nothing to diminish your repute, for no one has taken your place in Thebes. The lady of my master has miscarried twice and nearly died from a stillbirth. The physicians and necromancers have done her no good, and now the midwives fear to attend a princess who has had so much bad luck in childbed. Her own mother is dead, and she is afraid.

“My master dotes on this wife and wishes nothing more than to have sons by her. As-naat heard of your skills from her servants and asked her husband to search out the foreign-born woman with the golden hands who once served the women of Thebes. My lord depends upon me for all things and called upon me in this matter as well,” said Re-mose, his mouth growing smaller and more pursed at every mention of his master.

“Imagine my surprise when I learned that he sought none but my own mother. He was suddenly impressed by my lineage when he learned that you were a countryman of his,” Re-mose added ironically. “The vizier charged me to put aside duties of state, to walk into the Valley of the Kings and accompany you to his house. He ordered me not to return without you.”

“You do not like this man,” I said mildly.

“Zafenat Paneh-ah is vizier in Thebes at the king’s pleasure,” said my son, in formal but damning tones. “He is said to be a great diviner who sees into the future and reads dreams as easily as a master scribe perusing the glyphs of a schoolboy. But he is illiterate,” said Re-mose bitterly. “He cannot cipher or write or read, which is why the king assigned me, the best of Kar’s students, to be his right hand. And that is where I am now, wifeless, childless, second to a barbarian.”

I stiffened at the word. Re-mose noticed my reaction and colored in shame. “Oh Ma, not you,” he said quickly. “You are not like the rest of them, or else my father and grandmother would never have chosen you. You are fine,” he said. “There is no mother in Egypt better than you.” His flattery made me smile in spite of myself. He embraced me, and for a moment I regained the loving boy who had been my son.

We drank our beer in silence for a moment, then I said, “Of course I will follow you to Thebes. If the king’s vizier commands you to bring me, I will come. But first I must speak with my friend, Meryt, who is my right hand in the birth chamber and should come with me.

“I must talk with my husband, Benia, the master carpenter, so that he knows where I go and when I might return.”

Re-mose pursed his lips again. “There is no time for this, Ma. We must leave now, for the lady is in travail and my lord expects me every hour. Send the girl here to inform the others. I cannot tarry.”

“I’m afraid you must,” I said, and I left the room. Re-mose followed me to the kitchen and grabbed me by the elbow, like a master about to strike a disobedient servant.

I pulled away and looked into his face. “Nakht-re would sooner die than treat a relative—much less a mother—in this fashion. Is this how you honor the memory of the only father you ever knew? I remember him as a noble man to whom you owe everything, and whose name you dishonor.”

Re-mose stopped and hung his head. His ambition and his heart were at war, and his face showed the division in his soul. He fell to the ground and bowed low, his brow at my feet.

“I forgive you,” I said. “It will only take me a moment to prepare, and we will find my friend and husband on our path to Thebes.”

Re-mose raised himself from the ground again and waited outside while I prepared for a journey I hated to make. As I gathered my kit and a few herbs, I smiled at my own brazenness, shaming my powerful son for his rudeness, insisting on my farewells. Where was the meek woman who lived in Nakht-re’s house all those years?

Meryt waited for me at her son’s door, hungry for the news. Her eyes grew large when I introduced her to Re-mose, whom she had not seen since he was a boy. She covered her mouth in awe at the invitation to wait upon the wife of the king’s vizier, but Meryt could not accompany me. Three women in the town were due to give birth at any moment, and one of them was kin, the daughter of Shif-re’s brother. We embraced, and she wished me the touch of Isis and the luck of Bes. She stood at her door and waved gaily. “Bring me back some good stories,” she shouted, and her laughter followed me down the street.

Benia did not send me away with laughter. He and my son looked at each other coolly; Benia dipped his head in recognition of the scribe’s position, and Re-mose nodded at the carpenter’s authority over so important a workshop. There was no way for my husband and me to take a proper leave of each other. We exchanged our parting vows with our eyes. I would return. He would not be content until I did.

Re-mose and I walked out of the valley, saying little to each other. Before we began the descent from the valley to the riverbank, I put my hand on his arm, signaling him to stop. Turning to face home, I dropped a twist of rue from my garden and a piece of bread from my oven to ensure a speedy return.

It was dark by the time we reached the river, but we had no need to wait for the morning ferry. The king’s barque, lit with a hundred lamps, waited for us. Many oars rowed us, and in no time we were hurrying through the sleeping streets of the city and into the great palace, where Re-mose left me at the door to the women’s quarters. I was taken to a chamber where a pale young woman sat perched on her great bed, alone.

“You are Den-ner?” she asked.

“Yes, As-naat,” I replied gently, placing my bricks on the floor. “Let me see what the gods have in store for us.”

“I fear this one is dead, too,” she whispered. “And if it is so, let me die with him.”

I put my ear to her belly and touched the womb. “This baby is alive,” I said. “Fear not. He is just resting for the journey.”

At daylight, her pains began in earnest. As-naat tried to be quiet as befits a royal lady, but nature had made her a screamer, and she soon filled the air with roars at every pang.

I called for fresh water to bathe the mother’s face, for fresh straw, for lotus cones to freshen the room, and for five serving women, who gathered around their mistress to offer encouragement. Sometimes it is easier for the poor, I thought. Even those without family live in such close quarters to their neighbors that the cries of a laboring mother bring out other women like geese responding to the call of a leader in flight. But the rich are surrounded by servants too fearful of their mistresses to act as sisters.

As-naat did not have an easy time, but it was nowhere near the worst labor I’d seen. She pushed for long hours, supported by women who became her sisters, at least for that day. Just after sunset, she produced a skinny but healthy son, who roared for the breast as soon as he was held upright.

As-naat kissed my hands, covering them with joyful tears, and sent one of her servants to tell Zafenat Paneh-ah that he was the father of a fine son. I was taken to a quiet room, where I fell into a dark, dreamless sleep.

I awoke the following morning drenched in sweat, my head throbbing, my throat on fire. Lying on the pallet, I squinted at the light pouring through the high windows and tried to remember the last time I had been ill. My head pounded, and I closed my eyes again. When next they opened, the light was draining from the room.

A girl sitting by the wall noticed I was awake and brought me a drink and placed a cool towel on my brow. Two days passed, or maybe it was three, in a blur of fevered sleep and compresses. When my head finally cooled and the pain subsided, I found myself too weak to stand.

By then a woman called Shery had been sent to attend me. I stared with an open mouth when she introduced herself, for her name, which means “little one,” sat oddly upon the fattest woman I’d ever seen.

Shery washed the sour smell from my body and brought me broth and fruit and offered to fetch anything else I might wish. I had never been waited upon like that, and while I did not enjoy her hovering over me, I was grateful for her help.

After a few days my strength began to return, and I asked Shery to tell me the news of the baby I had delivered. She was delighted by my question and settled her weight about her on a stool, for Shery loved an audience.

The baby was well, she reported. “He is ravenous, and has nearly worn off his mother’s nipples with constant feeding,” said Shery with a wicked grin. She had pitied her mistress’s childlessness, but found As-naat an arrogant snip of a mistress. “Motherhood will teach her everything,” my new friend confided.

“The father has named the boy Menashe, an awful name that must mean something fine in his native tongue. Menashe. It sounds like chewing, does it not? But you are of Canaan as well, are you not?”

I shrugged. “It was so long ago,” I said. “Please, continue with the story, Shery. It is almost magical, the way your words make me forget my aches and pains.”

She gave me a sharp look to let me know that flattery did not hide my reticence. But she continued anyway.

“Zafenat Paneh-ah is truly an arrogant son of a bitch,” she said, proving her trust in me by swearing about the master. “He likes to talk of his lowly beginnings as though this makes his powerful position even greater due to his rise. But this is no great thing in Egypt. Many great men—statesmen and craftsmen, warriors and artisans—are born of the lowly. Such is the case with your own husband, eh, Den-ner?” she asked, letting me know that my history was not entirely closed to her. But I only smiled.

“The Canaanite is handsome, no doubt about that. Women swoon at the sight of him—or at least they did when he was younger.

Men are drawn to him as well, and not only the ones who prefer boys.

“Of course, that beauty did not serve him well when he was young. His own brothers hated him so much they sold him to a pack of slavers—can you imagine an Egyptian doing such a thing? Every day I thank the gods that I was born in the valley of the great river.” “No doubt,” I said, surveying her girth, for there was no other land that could support such excess. Shery caught my meaning and grabbed at her midsection with both hands. “Ha, ha! I am a creature of amazing proportions, am I not? The king once pinched me and said that only dwarves please him more than the sight of someone as large and round as me. You would not believe how many men find this desirable,” Shery said. “In my own youth,” she began in a conspiratorial whisper, “I gave pleasure to the old king, until his wife grew jealous and had me packed off to Thebes.

“But that”—she winked—“is another story for another time. You want the history of this house, which is juicy enough,” she confided.

“Zafenat Paneh-ah was sold into slavery, as I said, and his new masters were swine, the most Canaanite of the Canaanites. I don’t doubt that he was beaten and raped and forced to do the dirtiest work. Of course, his majesty does not speak of that anymore.

“Zafenat Paneh-ah did not acquire that pompous name until recently. ‘The God Speaks and He Lives,’ indeed! They used to call him Stick, for when he first came to Egypt he was as skinny as his newborn son.