King and Goddess (39 page)

This time when he woke it was still night, though late.
The moon rode high. The stars shone beyond the ports of his cabin, that lay
open to the breezes. They were cool but not cold, and he was warm under a
blanket he did not remember wrapping himself in, with the same double warmth
beside him that he remembered, dimly, from the morning before.

Tama again, and Bastet beyond her. Tama’s face was a shadow
in the moonlight. Bastet’s he saw clearly, its lines carved clean, limned in
silver. The hair that he had never seen, hidden as it was under headscarf or
wig, was uncovered. She wore it cut shoulder-long, a riot of midnight curls.
Pity, he thought, to conceal it. Plaited and weighed down with beads, it would
make an admirable imitation of a wig.

He rubbed his own close-cropped skull and grimaced. Ah,
well; but what he grew was as thick as a fleece, and beastly hard to keep in
order. Egyptian fashion suited him well enough.

He folded his hands under his head and gazed up at the moon,
the blind eye of Horus as Egyptians called it. What it was called in Nubia he
did not remember. He was a Nubian by blood but never by upbringing. In that he
was all Egyptian.

He deliberately did not think of the woman lying so close
beside him. He had brought no woman with him. It was a singular omission, but
one that he had not thought to remedy. A lord who dragged his women behind him
wherever he went had always struck Nehsi as a bit of a fool. Had he no
self-discipline? Could he not find ample consolation wherever he was?

Besides, none of his maidservants had been eager to go. All
of those who had been willing were men. There were women on one or two of the
other ships, companions to his noble companions. Sailors did not bring their
wives or their lovers. It was ill luck, they said.

And here was the lordling’s daughter from Bubastis, named
after that city’s goddess, sound asleep and perfectly innocent, with his
daughter in her arms. That she was beautiful he never forgot. That she was
female was unmistakable.

A man could ease himself over the side. Sailors never
minded, though they might grin and offer commentary. Nehsi was too proud to
resort to that. He remained where he was, while the moon sank from its zenith
and the boat rocked gently on the breast of the sea. He was amused, rather.
Wry. A little embarrassed.

None of which he would ever admit to Bastet. She was young
enough to be his daughter. Clearly she had no interest in him, except that he
was Tama’s father. To her he would be an old man. He had six-and-thirty years
by his closest reckoning: well into middle age. She must have had fifteen, if
she had so many. An infant; a child.

Not that that had ever stopped or even slowed him with a
maidservant, but she was well born. Her father had trusted him to keep her safe
on this journey.

So he would do, then, though his manly parts ached with
restraint. They had seldom been denied before.

It would do them good, he thought, even as he slipped out to
cool them, and the rest of him, in seawater.

Rather fortunately for Nehsi’s peace of mind and body, the
storm had brought the fleet almost to the borders of Punt. They had yet a
narrow mouth of the sea to pass through, dangerous with reefs; and the storm
had shifted them. They picked their way through, gauging depth with line and
oar, and more than once levering a boat off a reef that had not been there when
its captain sailed these waters before. But they passed through, if slowly.

Then Nehsi saw that, as wide as the sea had seemed, it was
but a narrow thing beside this vast and sighing expanse of water. Here was the
Great Green itself—and yet, the mariners told him, it was nothing to the ocean
beyond. There the land dropped out of sight altogether, and any who sailed
there must travel by sun and stars.

No one of Egypt ever had, that anyone knew of. This was as
far as sane men went, along this sandy shore with its fringes of reef.

It was hot here, even compared with Egypt in summer; and
damp, a heat as heavy as the worst of the Delta. The breezes that wafted from
the land were pungent with spices.

“This whole country smells like a temple,” Nehsi observed as
they sailed in close to the land. When he drew a breath, he grew dizzy.

“Wait till you’re actually in it,” the captain said. “You’ll
think there must be a priest under every bush and stone, waiting to chant this
rite or that.”

Nehsi grinned, leaning on the rail of the lookout’s post.
Spray bathed him as the ship breasted the sea. He licked the salt from his lips
and peered under his hand at the sandy anonymity of the shore. Far inland, he
thought he could see the rise of hills or mountains, though perhaps they were
only clouds.

“Oh, no, that’s mountains,” Sinuhe said when he asked. “It’s
desert in there, and mountains rearing over it. Makes our Black Land look soft
and lush, it does, though our Red Land gives it a fair contest for horrors.”

“So where do they live?” Nehsi asked. “What do they live
on?”

Sinuhe’s glance hinted that he should know that, and to be
sure he did, but he wanted to hear it now, in sight of this country. It made it
real somehow; turned dry and wordy knowledge into living substance.

In any case he received the answer he wanted. “There’s
rivers enough,” Sinuhe said, “which gives them water to drink and to feed their
crops and herds, and fine defense against invaders. And they trade. Incense, of
course. Ivory. Ebony, gold, unguents. Terebinth, kohl. Monkeys. Hounds.
Panthers and slaves.”

Nehsi whistled between his teeth. “They’re rich.”

Sinuhe nodded. “Gloriously rich. And eager to trade for our
bits of linen and mirrors, and a sword or two or a spear, and a few barrels of
our blue glass beads.”

“Foreigners,” said Nehsi the Nubian, not meaning to dismiss
them; trying to explain them.

Bastet heard him. She did not, as he had half expected,
upbraid him for false judgment. She went silent, that was all.

Silence seemed to be her way of letting a man know when he
had displeased her. She was taciturn at dinner that night, speaking, if she
spoke at all, in monosyllables.

Nehsi refused to humble himself with an apology. She had not
told him that he had offended her, or explained why. Until she did, she could
sulk in solitude.

That night when he went to his bed on the deck, she was
nowhere near it. She had taken Tama to her old place in the corner by the
water-barrels, spread her pallet there and gone to sleep.

~~~

They came to Punt on a hot and breathless morning, when
the sea was like grey-green glass, rolling softly as it neared the shore. The
sailors sweated at the oars, rowing to the beat of the drum, and chanting what
from its tune should have been a hymn of praise to the Egyptian river-god, but
its words extolled the charms of a certain famous lady who lived and loved in
Memphis.

It heartened them immeasurably, though Nehsi would have
preferred that Tama not take up the words and the tune. She perched on one of
the huge hawsers, as thick as a man’s waist, that ran the length of the ship on
either side, and made her own ditty of the sailors’ song.

As she celebrated the breasts of Neferneferure, which
swelled like pomegranates, Bastet swooped on her and carried her off. Nehsi
laughed to himself and turned back to the lookout’s post. They were coming in
to the land now, rocking hard on the swell. The shore curved deeply there into
harbor with a narrow mouth.

High above the harbor stood a rocky promontory. Something
moved up there, a figure shrunken with distance but moving and calling out like
a man: a high, wailing cry that echoed inland.

That, Nehsi had been told to expect: the watchman of Punt,
set there to look for ships that came to trade in his country. As they rowed
into the harbor’s mouth, they saw him running down along the rim, into the
sandy bowl. There in the quiet water stood the strangest city Nehsi had ever
seen.

In Egypt people built in mudbrick, or in reeds along the
river’s bank. Here they built in reeds, or something like them, but not on the
undefended shore. They built in the harbor itself, on pilings above the water.
Skiffs ran from house to house, or ramps that stretched to the land, with
people running along them, calling to one another.

They were handsome enough people, like dark Egyptians. The
men were as tall, which made them small in Nubia, broad in the shoulder, well-muscled
and strong. Their beards were striking in their familiarity: grown long and
wound into a thick plait suspended from the chin. Just so was the king’s beard
in Egypt, but that was never grown on the king’s chin, even when the king was
not a woman; he wore it for state occasions, and took it off to be at ease.

As strangely familiar as the men were, the women were truly
odd. Some were slender enough, but many were gone exuberantly to fat:
great-breasted, huge-bellied, wobblingly vast in the rump. Such rumps as these,
Nehsi had never imagined among the slender women of Egypt or the strong tall
women of Nubia. He did not know whether to be fascinated or appalled.

The children were as children everywhere, lissome and quick,
tugging at the hands of mother or father, begging them to hurry. Some broke
free and ran down to the water, hopping from foot to foot, calling out in their
language. It sounded like the crying of birds.

“They say,” said Bastet, appearing suddenly beside Nehsi, “‘Welcome!
Welcome to the Sun-god’s land! Who are you? Where do you come from? Are you
gods out of heaven? Have you brought gifts for us? Come and talk to us!’”

“Tell them,” said Nehsi, “that we come in the name of
Amon-Re, who is god over all gods, and in the name of his daughter, the king,
who rules in Egypt.”

She seemed to think little of wasting such courtly words on
children, but she spoke in the same language they were speaking—he hoped in the
words that he had told her to speak.

He had to leave the prow and consider the duties of an
ambassador. His bodyservant was waiting in the cabin, looking more than
slightly impatient, with his bath all drawn and the razors ready, and
everything prepared to make him fit to stand in front of a foreign king. He
submitted to it without protest. He did like to look well. It honored his king,
whose voice he was in this country.

~~~

From the expressions of the sailors as he emerged again
into the sun, and from the evidence of his own mirror, he looked well indeed.
He happened to catch a glimpse of Bastet’s face: she looked whitely shocked, as
if the sun had grown too much for her. He spared a moment’s worry, and nor only
because he needed her to speak for him. Illness in this remote and barbarous
country could be a deadly thing.

She seemed well enough when she came to his side, standing
on the deck while the ship finished mooring just offshore. She had taken care
for her appearance, too: put on her best gown and her wig, and painted her face
becomingly, and donned a collar he had not known she had: beads of lapis and
ivory and gold, and a broad disk of beaten gold, such as, he took note, some of
the men wore who waited on the shore. Others of them wore disks of ivory or
black ebony or what seemed to be shell, gleaming softly in the sun.

She had had her own disk worked into a pectoral in the
Egyptian fashion, and splendid it was, too. She looked, he thought, like a
princess, erect and proud, and—he could not help thanking the gods for
that—slender as Egyptian women were. No billows of flesh; no huge shelf of
rump, only a sweet womanly curve that begged a man’s hand to stroke it.

He whipped his thoughts back to their proper course. The
crowd on the shore flurried briefly, then parted, opening a path in the sand.

These were the chieftains, the lords and princes. They rode
on donkeys, with an air that proclaimed their pride in the privilege. Last of
them all came a handsome man of early middle years, with a beard longer and
more richly plaited than any of the rest, and a disk of gold on his breast, so
broad and so resplendent that it rivaled the sun.

But he paled beside the woman who rode with him. Her donkey
was of surpassing smallness and delicacy, a beautiful silvery creature with
ears like the fronds of a palm-tree. She sat on its back like a mountain atop
an obelisk.

She was the pattern from which the rest of the women were
cut, the sun to the moon of their strangeness. Her flesh swelled in rolls and
folds on arms and belly, thighs and knees. Her breasts hung vast and pendulous,
their huge nipples clear to see under the garment that she wore: white Egyptian
linen of the finest quality, girdled beneath the swell of her middle, sewn to
circle the vastness of each thigh, cut to the knee below. Round her vast neck
lay a collar of golden disks bound together with rods of gold. On her head,
tied with fastidious neatness, was a golden ribbon, a diadem, for she was a
queen, the queen of this country, which her people called the God’s Land.

Nehsi took great care to determine that no one laughed. No
one even grinned, though he saw lips tightened and jaws clenched. Nothing like
it had ever shown itself to Egyptian eyes: this vast grotesquerie of a woman on
her tiny donkey. The young scribe who never stopped scribbling had dropped to
his favored corner of the deck and begun to draw furiously, eyes fixed on the
procession that approached across the sand.

Nehsi was forgetting his duty in the fascination of so much
strangeness. He recalled himself abruptly, and descended into the boat that
waited, where Bastet and a pair of scribes were already sitting, and rowed in
princely state to the shore of Punt.

~~~

The people of this country, diligent in their courtesies,
had pitched a pavilion some distance from the water. It had an Egyptian look to
it, but with oddities: poles tipped with ivory, and golden embroidery along its
edges, depicting in a strange style, half Egyptian, half foreign, a procession
of beasts and birds. There in the cool shade were people who must be servants,
offering jars of water, beer, and something fierce that was, Bastet said, a
kind of barley spirit. A sip or two of that was enough to convince Nehsi that
he should smile and pretend to drink the rest, but refrain from draining the
cup.