1997 - The Red Tent (30 page)

The men who tended the garden did not object to having a woman among them. I worked hard, and they appreciated my knack with the flowers and fruit, which I supplied to the cooks. I did not want company and rebuffed the attentions of men so often that they stopped seeking me out. When I saw my son’s family enjoying the shade of the garden, we nodded and exchanged nothing more than polite greetings.

When there was word of Re-mose from Memphis, Nakht-re himself brought me the news sent by Kar, the master teacher who had been his own instructor. Thus I learned that Re-mose had mastered something called keymt in only two years—a feat of memorization that proved my son would rise high, and perhaps even serve the king himself.

There was never any word of his coming home. Re-mose was invited to go hunting with the governor’s sons, and it would not do to reject such an auspicious offer. Then my son was chosen as an apprentice and aid to Kar when the master was called to rule upon a case of law, which took up the weeks during which other boys visited their families.

Once, Nakht-re and Re-nefer visited Re-mose in Memphis, making pilgrimage to their father’s tomb there. They returned with fond greetings to me and news of his growth; after four years away he was taller than Nakht-re, well spoken and self-assured. They also brought proofs of his education—shards of pottery that were covered with writing. “Look,” said Nakht-re, pointing a finger at the image of a falcon. “See how strong he makes the shoulders of Horus.” They made me a gift of this treasure from my son’s hand. I marveled over it and showed it to Meryt, who was duly impressed at the regularity and beauty of his images. I was awed by the fact that my son could discern meaning from scratchings on broken clay bits, and took comfort in the knowledge that he would be a great man someday. He could be scribe to the priests of Amun or perhaps even vizier to a governor. Had Nakht-re himself not said that Re-mose might even aspire to the king’s service? But of course, none of these dreams filled my arms or comforted my eyes. I knew my son was growing to manhood and feared that the next time I saw him, we would be strangers.

I might have vanished during those long years without anyone taking more than passing notice except for Meryt. But Meryt was always there, unfailing in kindness even when I turned away from her and gave her no reason to love me.

The midwife had come to see me every day in the weeks after Re-mose’s birth. She tended my bandages and brought broth made of ox bones for strength, and sweet beer for my milk. She rubbed my shoulders where they were stiff from cradling the baby, and she helped me to my feet for my first real bath as a mother, pouring cool, scented water over my back, wrapping me in a fresh towel.

Long after my confinement was over, Meryt continued her visits. She fussed over my health and delighted in the baby; she examined him closely and gave him slow, sensuous massages that helped him sleep for hours. On the day he was weaned, Meryt even brought me a gift—a small obsidian statue of a nursing mother. I was confused by her generosity, but when I tried to refuse any of her attentions or gifts, she insisted. “The midwife’s life is not easy, but that is no reason for it to be unlovely,” she said.

Meryt always spoke to me as one midwife to another. No matter that I had not seen the inside of a birthing room since my own son was born; she continued to honor the skill I had shown at Re-mose’s birth. When she returned to her own house after my son was born, she asked her mistress to learn what she could about me; her lady, Ruddedit, had sought out the story from Re-nefer, who provided only a few details. Meryt took these and wove them into a fabulous tale.

As Meryt told it, I was the daughter and granddaughter of mid-wives who knew the ways of herbs and barks even better than the necromancers of On, where the healing arts of Egypt are taught. She believed me a princess of Canaan, the descendant of a great queen who had been overthrown by an evil king.

I did not correct her, fearing that if I named my mothers or Inna the whole of my history would come pouring out of me and I would be thrown out of the house and my son cast out for bearing the blood of murderers in his veins. So Meryt embroidered my history, which she repeated to the women that she met, and they were many, as she attended most of the births of the northern precincts, noble and lowborn alike. She told the tale of how I had saved my son’s life with my own hands, always leaving out her own part in it. She spoke of my skill with herbs and of the renown I had earned in the western wilderness as a healer. These things she imagined entirely on her own. And when I helped one of Nakht-re’s servants deliver her first baby, Meryt spread the news of how I turned it inside the womb in the sixth month. Thanks to Meryt, I became a legend among the local women without once venturing out of Nakht-re’s garden.

Meryt had her own story to tell. Though she had been born in Thebes, her mother’s blood was mingled with that of the distant south and her skin showed the color of Nubia. But unlike Bilhah, whose face would appear to me while Meryt chattered on, she was tall and stately. “Had I not become a midwife,” she said, “I should have liked to be a dancing girl, hired for grand parties in the great houses and even the king’s own palace.

“But that life goes too fast,” she said, with a mock sigh. “I am already too fat to dance for princes,” slapping at the skin beneath her skinny arm, which did not budge, and breaking into a laugh I could not resist.

Meryt could make anyone laugh. Even women deep in travail forgot their agony to smile at her jokes. When he was little, Re-mose called her “Ma’s friend” even before I realized that she was truly my friend, and a blessing.

I knew everything there was to know about Meryt, for she loved to talk. Her mother was a cook married to a baker, and known as a singer, too. She was often called upon to entertain at the parties of her master. Her voice caused audiences to shudder with pleasure at its deep resonance. “Had she not been bare-breasted, they would have doubted she was a woman at all,” Meryt said.

But the mother died when her daughter was still a girl and the household had no use for her, so Meryt was sent to the place where she lived even to the days when I knew her. As a child, she carried water for Ruddedit, a daughter of On, where the priests are famous as magicians and healers. The lady looked kindly upon Meryt, and when she saw that Meryt was clever, Ruddedit sent her to learn from the local granny midwife, a woman with uncommonly long fingers who brought luck to her mothers, Meryt grew to womanhood in that house and, like her mother, married a baker there. He was a good man who treated her well. But Meryt was barren, and nothing could induce her womb to bear fruit. After many years, Meryt and her man adopted two boys whose parents had been felled by river fever. The sons were now grown to manhood and baked bread for the workers in the village of the tomb-makers, on the west bank of the river.

Her husband was long dead, and Meryt, though she saw her sons rarely, often boasted of their skills and health. “My boys have the most beautiful teeth you’ve ever seen,” she would say solemnly, for her own mouth was a pit of decay and she chewed marjoram all day to ease the pain.

For years, Meryt spared me no detail of her life in hope that I would share some hint of mine. Finally, she gave up asking me about myself, but never ceased inviting me to attend upon birthing women with her. She would stop at Nakht-re’s house and request of Herya or Re-nefer that I be permitted to accompany her. The ladies deferred to me, but I always declined. I had no wish to stray from Re-mose, nor had I any desire to see the world. I had not stepped outside the grounds since I arrived, and as the months became years, I came to fear the very thought. I was certain I would be lost, or worse, somehow discovered. I imagined that someone would recognize the sin of my family upon my face and I would be torn apart on the spot. My son would discover the truth about his mother and about her brothers, his uncles. He would be exiled from the good life that he seemed destined to inherit, and he would curse my memory.

I was ashamed of these secret fears, which made me turn my back on the lessons taught to me by Rachel and Inna, and thus upon their memory. My worthlessness imprisoned me; still I could not do what I knew I should.

Meryt never gave up. Sometimes, if a birth went badly, she returned afterward, even in the dead of night, waking me from my pallet in the garden shed to tell the story and ask how she might have done better. Often I could reassure her that she had done the best anyone could do, and we would sit silently together. But sometimes I would hear a story and my heart would sink. Once, when a woman had died very suddenly giving birth, Meryt did not think to take up a knife to try to free the baby in the womb, so both of them perished. I did not shield my dismay well enough, and Meryt saw my face.

“Tell me, then,” she demanded, grabbing me by the shoulders. “Do not curl your lip when you might have saved the baby. Teach me at least, that I might try.”

Shamed by Meryt’s tears, I began to speak of Inna’s methods, her way with a knife, her tricks at manipulation. I tried to explain her use of herbs, but I lacked the Egyptian names for plants and roots. So Meryt brought her herbal kit, and we began to translate. I described my mothers’ ways with nettle, fennel, and coriander, and she scoured the markets searching out leaves and seeds I had not seen since childhood.

Meryt brought me samples of every flower and stem sold at the wharf. Some of it was familiar but some of it stank, especially the local concoctions which depended upon dead things: bits of dried animals, ground rocks and shells, and excrement of every description. Egyptian healers applied the dung of water horses and alligators and the urine of horses and children to various parts of the body in different seasons. There were times that the most odious preparations appeared to help, but I was always amazed that a people so concerned with bodily cleanliness would accept such foul remedies.

Although Egyptian herbal lore was deep and old, I was pleased to find methods and plants of which they knew little. Meryt found cumin seed in the marketplace, and she was surprised to learn that it aided the healing of wounds. She bought hyssop and mint with their roots still intact, and they flourished in the pungent black soil of Egypt. No one suffered from a sour stomach in the house of Nakhtre again. Thus Meryt became famous for “her” exotic herbal cures, and I had the satisfaction of knowing that my mothers’ wisdom was being put to good use.

My quiet life ended during the fourth year after Re-mose left the house of Nakht-re, when Ruddedit’s daughter came to stand upon the bricks.

Her name was Hatnuf, and she was in a bad way. Her first baby had been born dead—full-sized and perfect in every feature, but lifeless. After years of miscarrying, another child had finally taken root, but she faced this labor in terror, and after a full day of travail, the pains had not advanced the baby’s progress. Meryt was in attendance, and the lady of the house had sent for a physician-priest, who chanted prayers and hung the room with amulets and set a pile of herbs and goat dung to smoking while Hatnuf crouched over it.

But the smell had caused the mother to faint, and in falling, the girl cut her forehead and bled. After that, Ruddedit banished the doctor from the room and had him wait outside the front door, where he recited incantations in the nasal drone of a priest. Day turned to night again, and night began to brighten to another dawn, and still the pains did not abate, nor did the baby move. Hatnuf, the lady’s only daughter, was nearly dead with fear and pain when Meryt suggested I be summoned.

This time, it was not a matter of being asked. Meryt appeared at the doorway of my garden hut with Ruddedit standing in the dawn’s light behind her. Weariness barely dimmed the beauty in a face no longer young. “Den-ner,” she said, in the accents of Egypt, “you must come and do what you can for my child. We have nothing left to try. The smell of Anubis is in the birth chamber already. Bring your kit and follow me.”

Meryt quickly told me the story, and I grabbed a few herbs I’d been drying in the rafters of my shed. The lady was nearly running. I barely had time to realize that I was out of the garden. We walked past the front of Nakht-re’s house, and I remembered the day I first saw the place, a lifetime earlier. Sunlight caught the gold-tipped flagpoles in front of the great temple, where banners hung lifeless in the still of the dawn. Ruddedit’s house was just on the other side of the temple, so it took no time to reach the antechamber where Hatnuf lay whimpering on the floor, surrounded by the servants of the house, who were nearly as exhausted as the laboring mother.

Death was in the room. I caught sight of him in the shadows beneath a statue of Bes, the friendly-grotesque guardian of children, who seemed to grimace at his own powerlessness here.

Ruddedit introduced me to her daughter, who looked up at me with empty eyes, but did as I asked. She moved to her side so I could reach an oiled hand up to the womb, but I felt no sign of the baby’s head. The room was very still as the women waited to see what I would do or ask of them.

The dog-shaped shadow of death stirred, sensing my dismay. But his eagerness only made me angry. I cursed at his bark and his tail and his very mother. I did this in my native tongue, which sounded harsh even to me after so many years of Egyptian words in my ears. Meryt and the others thought I uttered a secret charm, and murmured approval. Even Hatnuf stirred and looked around.

I called for oil and a mortar and mixed the strongest herbs I had at hand: birthwort and an extraction of hemp, both of which sometimes cause the womb to expel its contents early in pregnancy. I did not know if they would work, and worried that the combination might cause damage, but I knew there was nothing else to be tried, for she was dying. The baby was already dead, but there was no reason to give up on the mother.

I applied the mixture, and soon strong pains seized the girl. I had the women help Hatnuf back up to the bricks, where I massaged her belly and tried to push the baby downward. HatnuFs legs could not hold her, and soon Meryt had to take Ruddedit’s place behind her, where she whispered encouragement as I reached in again to feel the baby’s head, which was now near the door.