King and Goddess (38 page)

After a fine roast duck, fresh-caught on the way, and one of
Merenptah’s famous cakes, Nehsi should have been free to rest as he pleased.
Instead he contemplated his scapegrace daughter and this oddity of an
interpreter, and sighed.

“To be sure,” Bastet said, echoing his thought with uncanny
accuracy, “it would be a great inconvenience to send the child home. If I agree
to look after her—since I have little else to do before we come to Punt—surely
she can stay.”

Nehsi did not like the shape or the taste of that at all.
And yet it was tempting. It was easy; it was simple. It put him out very
little.

Still. A child so young on a voyage so long, into countries
little known, but known to be dangerous . . .

“I’ll guard her,” said Bastet. “I’ll look after her, protect
her. I can shoot; I’m good at it. You just ate the duck I shot this morning.”

Nehsi’s eyes widened slightly. He had not seen the shot,
having been engrossed in something or other—probably a nap—at the time; only
heard the cry as the bird came down, and the scramble to fish it out of the
water before a crocodile found it.

Bastet must have taken his expression for incredulity. “Yes,
that was I,” she said with a flicker of temper. “I was trying to make myself
useful.”

“Clearly you need to be useful,” Nehsi said. “Very well,
then. Play the nurse if you will, but have a care. If she escapes again and is
hurt, I may remember that a traveler can find guides and interpreters in any
country he comes to. Punt is by no means unknown to Egypt—there may be
Egyptians there even now.”

“But none who speaks the language as one born there,” Bastet
said with a remarkable recovery of calm. “I won’t let your lion-cub escape.
Even,” she said, “if she bites me.”

“I won’t bite you,” Tama said. “I don’t do that.”

“Good,” said Bastet.

Bastet got on very well with Tama, kept her in order to an
impressive degree, and even kept her quiet when there was need of it A long
voyage was difficult for a child so young. Even a ship as large as this one was
still a small thing under the vault of heaven, with nowhere to run that was not
full of men or oars or baggage. She could not swim in the river: quite apart
from the fact that it was swollen with the flood, it was full of crocodiles.
Any one of them would have been delighted to dine on such a morsel as Tama was.

They sailed through Egypt as swiftly as they might go,
pausing only to take on water or provisions. It was a long way into Punt, and
the flood would not last forever; while it ran high, they must cross the
channel into the sea.

That was north of Memphis and then east on a narrow arm of
the river, wider now with flood. They had passed out of the humid marshes of
the Delta and into the Red Land again, across the bleak outer reach of Egypt.
The Bitter Lakes stretched in a chain with river between, harsh with salt,
curving south toward the arm of the eastern sea.

Here was the edge of Egypt. On the right hand as they worked
their way east and south was the outlier of the Red Land. On the left lay the
broad desert of Sinai, where servants of the king mined turquoise and malachite
and copper. There was danger here if they were delayed, if the passage was broken
or blocked, if they ran aground before they reached the sea.

Wild tribesmen lived in this desert, children of the sand,
who made their living leading caravans across the desert. They would raid ships
in the bitter lake and in the channel that the kings had dug, for anger at the
profit they were losing; for sailors paid them no tribute for crossing their
country, nor hired them to guard their passage.

Nor did Nehsi doubt that every tribe in Sinai knew what this
fleet of ships was, laden with gifts for the lords of Punt. He alone, as a
prince of Egypt, would fetch a splendid price, whether they offered him
unharmed to his king in the Two Lands or sold him gelded in the markets of
Asia.

He forbore to trouble his sleep with such terrors. His fleet
was superbly armed and guarded, and his sailors were fighting men, men who knew
well the art of defending their ship. As they passed under oar and sail through
the land of the tribes, they mounted strong guard by day and kept watch at
night. Tama he removed, much against her will, from her bed beside Bastet, and
took into his own, safe in the cabin within a circle of armed men.

Perhaps their show of armed force prevented attack; or maybe
the gods protected them. They passed the Bitter Lakes and came unmolested to
the kings’ channel. The flood, that had reached its height while they were in
the Delta, had begun to subside. But there was water enough, Nehsi hoped, to
carry them through to the sea.

Here was the worst danger of ambush. The channel was
clear—he had sent men ahead to be sure of it, men with strong backs and light
boats, who made certain that neither sand nor reeds encroached upon the passage
of a fleet of ships. They had built upon the labors that the king had decreed
in this past year and more, opening the passage and making it as wide as they
might, so that not only this fleet but many after it should make the passage.
Her ambitions were as noble as she herself was: she meant this to be but the
first of many such voyages, her greeting and welcome to the lords of Punt, who
thereafter would be her friends and allies.

All that shrank in his mind to simple fact: the sky
overhead, blue vault of heaven; the channel in its deep-dug banks; the beds of
reeds and the stretches of sand and stone, and the watch kept by day and night
against raids from the desert. His scribes kept count of the days, recorded the
length of each journey from sunrise to sunset. Nehsi let his own reckoning
slide into the long stream of days, each much like the one before: sailing ever
and ever on to the Great Green, as people in Egypt called the sea.

The scent of it grew stronger with every day. It seeped into
his bones: salt and seawrack, fish and weed and a sharpness that had no name
but sea-scent. And then at last, still early of a morning, the channel that had
been all his world for so long opened endlessly wide.

Then he heard the surge and sigh of the sea, the waves
washing the shore. It was narrow here as seas went, though broader than any
river; one could see both shores, and laugh at the small figures running on the
left hand, brandishing tiny sticks of weapons, even letting fly a shaft or two
over the water.

The tribes had come at last to raid his ships; but they had
come too late. “Surely,” Nehsi said to the wind that freshened, catching the
sail and lifting his boat till it leaped upon the waves, “the gods have held us
in their hands.”

~~~

They worked their way down the shores of the world. It was
wider than Nehsi had ever known, even knowing the length and breadth of Egypt.
This was vaster by far, full twice and thrice, four times, even five times the
length of his country that he had thought so great.

The crew of his ship were amused, though they tried to be
polite about it, since after all he was a great prince. They called themselves men
who had seen both earth and sky, who were wise to every wind that blew. It was
not an empty boast. Their hearts were wider than he had known before, their
eyes accustomed to horizons that made the edges of Egypt seem narrow and
circumscribed.

“And yet it is a great country,” he said to Bastet as they
sailed past a stretch of mountains that seemed to hold up the sky. “The
greatest in the world.”

“But the world is larger by far,” she said. She seemed more
at ease than he was. She had been born in Egypt, but she had grown up hearing
tales of Punt and all the lands between, speaking their languages, remembering
them as a child could whose mother told tales both vivid and richly wrought.
She told them to Nehsi on the long days of voyaging, when the wind bore them
without need of oars, and much of the crew could take its ease.

Her uncle had told the truth after all. Her crippling
shyness at the beginning, which she never either excused or explained, had
warmed and opened into a wonderful ease. Tama had wrought that. It was
impossible to maintain a polite distance with that child finding more mischief
to get into than one could possibly imagine, considering how small a ship was.

They had taken to dining together in the evenings. Nehsi was
careful to see that everyone knew the privilege of his table, inviting as many
as could fit in the cabin, and varying it every day; but Bastet was always
there. And sometimes, if he was so inclined, it was only the two of them and
Tama, and maybe the captain Sinuhe.

They ate what they could shoot or trade for, drank beer
brewed from their store of barley, and kept the wine for great occasions, since
some of it at least must come intact to the King of Punt. It was enough for
comfort: surprising, a little, as far from home as they were.

Comfort was rare enough else. The farther south they sailed,
the stranger land and water seemed. And they began to run into weather.

Nehsi had heard outlanders complaining that Egypt had no
weather. It could be hot or less hot or even almost cold. Clouds came, went.
Once in a rare while it rained. In certain seasons storms of sand roared out of
the Red Land, or a fierce wind that maddened men and beasts, and often brought
swarms of locusts, or stinging flies.

But honest weather as it was reckoned on the rest of the
world—which seemed mostly to be storms of rain—Egypt seldom had.

Not so here on the eastern sea. Calm they could contend
with: the oarsmen broke out oars and rowed. Storms of wind were frightening,
and in one the sail rent in two; they had to pull ashore for a day or two, on
guard against attack, and mend it. But when the clouds rolled in, so deep a
grey they seemed almost black, and the water roiled, laced with foam, and rain
began to lash their cheeks, the strong men of Egypt shivered and cursed.

The sailors laughed at them. “Call this a storm?” they said.
“Now when we sail the Great Green, the northern sea, when it’s winter and the
wind blows as keen as knives—that is a storm. This is a sea-goddess’ kiss.”

It was bitter enough for Nehsi’s taste, which no doubt
proved that he was soft. He lent a hand as he could, which was not much in a
ship as well manned as his. Mostly he huddled in the dim close air of the cabin
with Tama and her self-named nurse, and struggled to keep the child entertained.

She would have been out dancing in the rain, easy prey for
the waves that lashed up over the prow. He had to keep a solid grip on her and
tell her stories till his voice was hoarse; and then Bastet took up the task.
Thereafter they did turn and turn about, amusing Tama while the rain hammered
down and the boat heaved and rocked in the swell.

The storm lasted three days. Nehsi lost count early, but the
scribes kept the reckoning, and Sinuhe the captain appeared well able to tell
day from night, even such black and filthy days as these were.

They could not put in to shore while the storm ran. It drove
them ahead of it—a storm out of the north, so that they hastened into the south
at impossible speed. The sailors labored day and night to keep the ships afloat,
and to keep them together as they could. It seemed that the gods favored the
voyage, wished them all to come to Punt as soon as might be; but cared little
how they suffered in the doing of it.

Even the passengers did their turns at bailing-bucket and
steering oar. Nehsi, the strongest of them, left his daughter to her nurse and
took the longest watches. He had to be ordered to sleep by a shadow-eyed and
perpetually dripping captain: driven into his cabin, and knocked flat on the
bed there. It was already full of Tama and her nurse, a fact of which he did
not become aware until he woke with a double armful of warm and breathing
sleepers.

Tama curled in the middle, finger in mouth. Bastet had
folded her body about the child’s. The two of them fitted smoothly into his
side.

He loathed to move, but the sheer unwontedness of quiet
after the roar of the storm made him twitch. And light: it shone through the
ports, dazzling his dark-accustomed eyes.

He crept out as softly as he could, taking great care to
disturb neither of the sleepers. Sun half-blinded him. It was just risen,
riding low over the hills of Sinai. The sea surged and rolled under it,
agitated still but never as it had been.

The storm had passed. The sky was a clear and cloudless
blue. The waves were no higher than they might have been on a day of brisk
wind, as this was. Warm wind, soft wind, with a scent in it that made him think
of spices.

The ship’s timbers steamed with wet. He had forgotten what
dryness was; his whole body was sodden, heavy with water. He stripped off the
leaden weight of his kilt and left it lying, and went to lend a hand with the
last of the bailing.

Most of his sailors were naked, too, letting the sun bake
them dry. They rid the ship of its burden of rainwater, all but the brimful
barrels that would see them, the captain said, nigh as far as Punt. He was
pleased. They had water enough, their ship was undamaged, and the rest of the
fleet made its way back to them as the day wore on, all but one ship; and that
came in sight just at sundown. In the morning it would catch them.

Merenptah the master of cooks had somehow kept a fire going
through the storm. At evening he laid out a feast: fish of the sea, bread
fresh-baked, a cheese that had been aging in a secret barrel. He even produced
a prize, a jar of dates preserved in honey, such sweetness as Nehsi had not
tasted since he left Egypt.

Nehsi, exhausted with daylong labor, ate swiftly and in
silence, hardly aware of who ate with him. Tama was there, he knew that; but
she let him be. So did Bastet. He ate till his hunger was sated, and sought a
bed that was—for a miracle—dry.

~~~