Black Ships (20 page)

Great Lady, protect these men I love.

ON LAND AND SEA

T
hree days later ten bearers arrived from the palace, bringing things for the People, part of the price of our lives and ships. They had copper pots for frying fish, heavy clay pots for cooking stews and pottages, a bag of salt and other foodstuffs, and ten bolts of linen. Most of it was white and of a moderate weight, but there were two bolts that were printed, one with a green pattern of fish, and one in brown with a pattern of lotus flowers. There was also one small bolt that was black, and I knew it was meant for me.

I was with the women in the courtyard beside the empty docks, watching as they divided up the foodstuffs and cloth, some seventy women and forty children, with five men who had remained because of age or infirmity.

Suddenly Lide’s son came running along the riverbank, yelling at the top of his voice. “Look! Look!”

I ran to the dock.

Coming down the river from the south was a great fleet. Egyptian galleys painted red and green crowded the river, their oars sweeping in perfect time. In their midst, painted with blue and gilded with gold, swept the largest ship I had ever seen, a great galley of sixty oars. Her sails were of white linen, and on her decks Nubian bowmen stood as though they were carved of wood. The sound of the drums came over the water, and the high sweet wailing of flutes. All along the shores of the river, people had run out to watch. As the ship came even with the city a great cheer went up.

Lide’s son bounced up and down beside me. “Who is it?” he said. “Is it a god?”

“Almost,” I said, my hand on his shoulder. “It’s Pharaoh.”

By now a procession had hastily assembled on the palace docks, nobles vying with one another for the best places. When the great galley came alongside the docks I could just make out the figure of Princess Basetamon before the press of the crowd intervened.

Ramses himself was impossible to mistake. A painted plank descended to the dock, and a dozen Nubian archers came down in single file, making a space between them at the bottom. I saw the sun flash on the golden serpent he wore bound to his brow, the uraeus, the symbol of kingship. Beneath the circlet that held the uraeus he wore a gold and blue head cloth rather than the twin crowns, a warrior king, like the second Ramses, or the legendary Thutmosis. The crowd cheered wildly.

Princess Basetamon came forward and bowed deeply. He raised her by the hand, and together, surrounded by the archers, they made their way into the palace, followed by all the multitude that had traveled on the king’s ship.

Beside me someone sniffed. I looked and saw that it was Anchises.

“Aeneas was meant to be such a king as this,” he said quietly.

“He does not wish to be a king,” I said.

Anchises gave me a long look. “He was born to be king,” he said. “It doesn’t matter whether he wants it or not. The gods chose it for him, and chose him for us. Sybil, do not tell me that you of all people do not see it.”

I looked away, out toward the river and the city. “I do,” I said.

“I know that you do not like me. But remember this,” he said. “All that I have done, I have done to make him king, for without him the People will die. And before I cross the River I would know that it has not been in vain.”

The sunlight made streaks of fire on the river, glancing off ripples and flashing like flying sparks, as though one could strike sparks from water, cold and warm at once.

“He will be king,” I said. “He will found a mighty house. A son yet unborn will rule a great city, and out of his line will come kings of men and nations. Many years will pass before these things happen, but it is so.”

“It will not happen in Egypt?” Anchises said.

“No,” I replied. The light on the water made my eyes tear, and Her hand was cold on my back. I could see the sparks flying upward, souls rising from the bottom of a deep well, rising into a golden sunbeam plunging through the dark. “It will be far from here, in a different land. He will carry the gods of Wilusa to a new home, and in that place they will bless him. He will plant young olive trees and plow fields that are fallow.”

I staggered and almost fell. There is a reason why Sybil is supposed to sit.

Anchises caught my arm. When I looked in his face there was for the first time respect there. “Sit,” he said gruffly. “Sit on the railing here.”

I did. He brought me a cup of water. I looked at it. So simple, really. Fired clay, holding plain river water, a bit of sediment swirling in the bottom. The light flashed off the surface in the sun.

“You will not see this place,” I said. “You will die on the sea.”

“I don’t need to see it,” he said quietly. “I have seen it in your eyes.”

I looked up at him, and saw for a moment what Lysisippa must have seen, a man fit to consort with the Lady of the Sea. It was not entirely from his mother’s kin that Neas got his kingship.

“Thank you,” I said.

He shrugged. His eyes were blue, and when he looked away from me for a moment he looked like Neas. “I’m too old to fear a prophecy about being lost at sea. Such things happen. It is my son and my grandson I fear for. You said that a son unborn would found this city.”

I thought for a second, listening, though Her voice was faint to me again. “I do not think anything ill will happen to Wilos,” I said carefully. “I don’t see that. But I do see a brother. And what will come of that I do not know.”

“That is in the hands of the gods,” Anchises said piously, tipping out some water into the dust in libation.

T
HE NEXT DAY
Pharaoh and all his fleet sailed northward, and the Princess Basetamon accompanied her brother. With them went all the soldiers in Memphis. If they did not engage the enemy, if Neoptolemos and his men won through and came upriver, they would meet little resistance. All the great lords had gone, the Nomes with their chariots and their spearmen running beside. In the few days that followed we saw them marching hastily along, spending one night in Memphis with their men and then going northward, southern lords coming after their king from distant estates, late to the battle that was surely by now joined in Ashkelon or on the sea. For ten days they passed, company after company, and then they were gone. All the men who would answer Pharaoh’s summons already had.

And the days passed.

It was spring, and the sailing season was begun. The days grew longer, lengthening toward high summer. It grew hotter still.

In the lands of Achaia or Wilusa the Feast of the Descent was past, and the Lady dwelled beneath the earth with Her dark Lord. The olives would be ripening, the grain would be cut.

Here, in Egypt, the harvest was over. It was the heat of the year, and the fields were empty, baking in the sun. The river ran low and sluggish. A hush lay over the city. The white houses baked in the sun. Whatever was happening, whatever would decide their fates, happened far away on the great green sea I knew so well. And I abided in Memphis.

Hry found me distracted at our lessons. One morning he put down his tablet and said, “Let us go into the garden and drink melon water.”

Gratefully, I got up and went with him. We sat under the trees sipping water with slices of sweet melon in it, water from the cisterns below the temple, where deep in the earth they stayed cool even in summer.

There was some sound in the street outside and I started up.

Hry put his hand on my arm. “It is nothing,” he said.

I listened. He was right. It was only the porters letting in a kitchen slave whose arms were laden with pots.

“We wait,” I said, “and can do nothing.”

“That is often the way of it,” Hry said. “Why don’t you tell me a story?”

“I tell you?” I asked. “But you are the teacher and I am the student.”

Hry took a sip of his melon water. “You have traveled on the sea and seen islands I have not. You know stories I do not. Tell me a new one as I have told you, for thus is knowledge accumulated.”

I thought for a moment. There was something about the stillness, about the hush of waiting that reminded me of Neas’ eyes when he stood on the haunted island, speaking of a great green wave rising and rising. “Let me tell you then of the Island of the Dead,” I said. And I told him.

Hry listened and did not ask questions until I came to the end. He leaned forward and his eyes were very bright.

“How long ago was this?” he asked.

“Neas said that the island was lost in his great-great-grandfather’s day. That it burned for many days and the sea was littered with bones and pieces of trees.”

Hry smiled, which seemed incongruous. “You have told me a wonderful story indeed, Maiden of Isis,” he said. “As the pieces of a broken pot fit together, so does the tale of our lives. You have given me a piece that fits perfectly.”

“I don’t understand,” I said.

“Come,” Hry said, and led me inside with great excitement. We went through one corridor and then another until we came to the vast archives, where scrolls lined the walls from floor to ceiling, each tied with linen with seals upon them. He puttered up and down the rows, examining one seal after another. “Just a moment, my dear. I will find the right one.”

At last he found the one he sought and, sitting upon a stool, spread it upon his knees. I looked over his shoulder, but I still could not read most of the words.

“This happened,” Hry said, “in the reign of Ramses the Great, the second of that name, in the twenty-second year of his rule.” He began to read. “And there appeared in the north, clearly visible from Gizeh, a vast pillar of smoke. Along the Sea of Reeds the water rushed out, so that fish lay flopping on solid ground, and the seabed was exposed to its foundations. It was a very great wonder, and many came to see. Pharaoh ordered a body of his men to investigate, and they rode in their chariots on the bottom of the sea as if they had been on land. And then at once the sea rushed back in with a great green wave as high as the roofs of a mighty city, and all those who had ventured out on the sea bottom perished. The sea returned to where it had been. Yet for many days the conflagration in the north remained, a pillar of smoke by day and a pillar of fire by night.”

“It’s the same story!” I exclaimed.

“It is indeed,” Hry said. “And now it seems to me that the pillar of smoke and fire that they saw must have been from the island, even though it was far away across the sea. But such a great calamity must have been visible even over the distance, if the smoke stretched deep into the sky.”

I looked up, as though I could see the sky even though we were indoors. “How high is the sky?” I asked.

“How deep is the sea?” Hry replied. “I have lived in lands where it rained often. I think the sky must be very deep indeed, because great clouds float on it like ships on the sea. And like fish, they swim at different depths and at different speeds. Sometimes they move very quickly, and sometimes not. Sometimes you may see two clouds passing, one below the other.”

“The sky is the opposite of the sea,” I said.

“Not the opposite,” Hry said. “The inverse. It follows many of the same rules, but depth is from here up, not from here down. One goes deeper as one goes higher, until one reaches the place where the moon and sun are. And then beyond that much farther are the stars, like shells on the sea bottom.”

“...and if the darkness around them was just another ocean,” I whispered. Something pushed at my mind, like a dream I had almost forgotten.

“What?” Hry asked.

“That was what a man I met in Byblos said,” I explained, coloring. I was not sure it sounded well, to hear that I had thought that I talked to a god.

“A scholar?” Hry asked.

“A warrior,” I said carefully. “A warrior named Mikel, who had once lived in the Black Land.”

“Ah!” Hry sounded pleased. “Then he had some learning, clearly.”

“Yes,” I said. “I think He was curious.” I thought of the slow channels of the Delta, of the great crocodiles along the banks, of the young warrior with His shabby leather and bronze, His dusty folded wings. “He has all the time in the world to learn.”

Hry looked at me and smiled. “And that is what you want, Daughter of Wilusa. But only the gods have all the time in the world.”

“I know,” I said. One life could hold so little compared to all there was in the world.

F
IFTY-SIX DAYS
had passed since Neas and the People went to war. I was doing some little thing when Tia came to me, the baby in a sling across her chest. “Look,” she said.

On the river there was a white sail, one scout ship beating hard against the current, sail spread as well, making upriver with all possible speed. As she came nearer I saw as Tia had seen the smudges and smoke on her prow, the burned spot on her rail where a fire arrow had hit and been extinguished. Tia’s hand went to her mouth.

“It’s an Egyptian ship,” I said. “A messenger.”

“But the news...” she said. “Bai...”

“She’s coming into the palace dock,” I said, watching her turn in the water, the right-side oars coming out of the water as one. There were eight ports, but only six oars sweeping on each side. She had lost men as well.

“I am going to see,” I said, and ran from the courtyard toward the palace as fast as my foot would allow me. I waited for no one. Half the city would try to get there.