Read Mara, Daughter of the Nile Online
Authors: Eloise Jarvis McGraw
Tags: #Juvenile Fiction, #Historical, #General, #Royalty
Mara, Daughter of the Nile
Mara, Daughter of the Nile
Eloise Jarvis McGraw
TO ALICE TORREY
who is my idea of all an editor should be
Part I—Menfe
The Mysterious Passenger
NEKONKH, captain of the Nile boat
Silver Beetle
, paused for the fiftieth time beside his vessel’s high beaked prow and shaded his eyes to peer anxiously across the wharfs.
The city that rose beyond them shimmered, almost drained of color, in the glare of Egyptian noon. Doorways were blue-black in white buildings, alleys were plunged in shadow; the gay colors of the sails and hulls that crowded the harbor seemed faded and indistinct, and even the green of the Nile was overlaid by a blinding surface glitter. Only the sky was vivid, curving in a high blue arch over ancient Menfe.
The wharf itself seethed with activity. Sweating porters hurried in and out among groups of merchants haggling over stacks of cargo yet to be loaded; sailors, both foreign and Egyptian, swarmed everywhere, talking in a babble of tongues. A donkey drover pushed through a cluster of pale-faced Libyans, shouting at his laden beasts; three Mitanni traders in the fringed garments of Babel laid wagers on a dogfight at one end of the wharf, while a ring of yelling urchins surrounded a cage of monkeys at the other. Over all rose the rank smell of the river—an odor compounded of fish, mud, water-soaked rope, pitch and crocodiles.
But nowhere in that tangle was the one tall figure for which the captain searched.
Nekonkh chewed his lip and drummed upon the gunwale with his big, blunt fingers. An hour ago he had been uneasy; now he was so tense that when his helmsman strolled across the deck and touched his elbow, he leaped as if he had been burned.
“By Set and all the devils!” he roared, whirling about savagely. “Fool! Coming upon me from behind like that! What do you want?”
The helmsman took a hasty step back. “The cargo,” he mumbled. “Everything is stowed, master. We’re ready to sail.”
“Well?”
“The—er—we await orders.”
“Then await them!”
The helmsman laid his right hand on his left shoulder in the attitude of submission, and escaped, casting puzzled glances backward as he did so.
Nekonkh sighed explosively and mopped the sweat off his upper lip with a hairy wrist. He was a burly man with a fierce jaw contradicted by mild brown eyes, and just now he looked and felt a good deal older than his forty years. For a moment he leaned wearily against the gunwale, staring upriver, where the luxurious barge of some noble moved over the sparkling water like a gigantic water bug, twelve oars on each side dipping rhythmically. Then he straightened, shoved his square-cut black wig askew in order to scratch under it, and adjusted it again with an irritable slap.
Automatically his eye checked the
Silver Beetle
, moving about her trim scrubbed confines from the two great sweeps at the stern to the tall masts with their horizontally furled sails; past the tiny cabin to the bales of wool and hides stacked on the deck, the oarsmen lounging at their posts.
Yes, all was ready to sail, so far as cargo and crew were
concerned. But the passenger? The puzzling, unpredictable, portentous passenger whose very charm set alarm bells ringing loudly in Nekonkh’s mind—what of him?
Nekonkh swore under his breath, wishing fervently that cargo and crew were all he had to worry about—wishing he knew either more or less. It was dangerous to have brains these days in the land of Kemt.
He took a restless turn about the deck, his joined hands flapping impatiently at his back, and reviewed once more his brief acquaintance with the missing passenger. It was an acquaintance only ten days old; he had seen the young man for the first time the morning he set sail from Thebes on this trip to Menfe. Since the youth—Sheftu, he had said his name was—had paid his passage promptly, there seemed no reason to give him a second thought. He was pleasant but unobtrusive—tall, somewhere around twenty years old, with an attractively homely face and a common white
shenti
and headcloth like a thousand others. Except for a certain odd, lazy grace in the way he moved, the captain found nothing unusual about him.
That was at first.
Later, during the long, sun-drenched days of the
Beetle’s
journey down the river, Nekonkh had good reason to study his passenger more attentively. Only then did he become aware of other details—for instance, the areas of slightly paler skin on Sheftu’s upper arms, which indicated that he habitually wore bracelets, though his sole ornament now was a curious amulet on his left wrist; also the absent, brooding expression which sat so often and so oddly on his young face, and the suave charm which covered this instantly if he knew he was being watched. The charm itself was a little odd, once you thought of it. Since when did a scribe’s apprentice—for so Sheftu had described himself—possess the smooth and subtle manners of a courtier? The captain grew surer and surer that his passenger was no ordinary nobody. Breeding was written in every line of his long, well-muscled
body, and his voice had the careless authority of one accustomed to being obeyed.
However, Nekonkh might have noticed none of this, had it not been for a conversation which suddenly focused his attention on the young man. It took place early one morning, about five days out of Thebes. The
Silver Beetle
was sailing past an ancient temple surrounded by scaffolding and piles of stone, around which workmen swarmed busily. Nekonkh, standing alone at the door of his cabin, scowled across the river and shook his head.
“
Ai!
There it is again!” he muttered sourly to himself.
“What do you mean, Captain?”
Nekonkh jumped. He had not heard his passenger come up beside him. “Why, the rebuilding of the old temple yonder,” he answered, pointing. “If I’ve seen that sight once I’ve seen it forty times in the past few years. Our good queen Hatshepsut evidently thinks gold grows on papyrus stalks! Does she mean to restore every ancient building up and down the Nile?” Nekonkh grunted as scaffolds and workmen slipped upstream past the
Beetle’s
stern sweeps. “It’s not only the old ruins. Amon himself knows what her new temple at Thebes is costing poor folk like me in sweat and taxes!”
“The new temple is a beautiful one, though,” remarked Sheftu. “They say every wall of the inner room is covered with handsomely carved reliefs.”
“Reliefs depicting Her Majesty’s sacred birth, no doubt?” inquired the captain sardonically.
“Of course. What better subject could there be? Hatshepsut was fathered by the Sun himself, nursed by goddesses, and named Pharaoh in her cradle.”
“Aye, so she claims, so she claims!” snorted Nekonkh incautiously. “As for me, I would rather see a man on the throne of Egypt! That young Thutmose, her half-brother—when is he to grow up? For fifteen years now she’s been acting as his regent, spending gold and silver like water,
sending ships—mine among them!—to the edge of the world for her own amusement, letting the empire foul its rudder for want of trained soldiers. And still the king does not come of age! Why? It’s obvious, friend! He’s not allowed to, nor will he ever be! Hatshepsut is pharaoh, and Egypt must put up with it!”
“You do not admire the queen, Captain?”
It was the very blandness of the voice that caused the alarm bells to clang suddenly in Nekonkh’s mind. He swung around and really looked at his passenger for the first time; noted the cleverness of the irregular dark face, the odd little smile hovering about the mouth, the dangerous alertness of the long black eyes. Nekonkh went cold all over. What had he been saying! It was treason to speak against the queen—near treason even to mention the young king’s name above a whisper, much less actually complain …
Full of a sudden clear picture of himself impaled on the torturer’s stake in the midst of some desert, he sagged back against the cabin door. “May the queen live forever!” he exclaimed. “May my tongue be clipped if it utters a word against Hatshepsut, the Daughter of the Sun!”
“Pray rest easy, Captain.” Sheftu’s voice was like a purr. “You but stated an opinion. But you are somewhat indiscreet. There are those who might haul you off to the palace dungeons at once if they heard what I just heard.” He gave Nekonkh a moment to absorb that thought, then added casually, “So you would overthrow the queen?”
“By the Feather of Truth, I said no such thing!” gasped Nekonkh. He darted an agonized glance up and down the deck, then strode to a deserted spot in the bows.
Sheftu followed, his face amused. “A wise precaution,” he commented, arranging himself comfortably against the gunwale. “They say the queen’s spies are everywhere.”
“No doubt!” Nekonkh was convinced he was talking to one that minute. He wiped the sweat from his forehead and attempted to change the subject, but Sheftu overrode him.
“She has grounds for her constant suspicions. There’s a group of reckless fools in Thebes—no doubt you’ve heard of them—who have organized in secret to topple Hatshepsut off her throne and set young Thutmose there instead.”
“I know nothing of them, nothing! Such movements have started before, and been squashed like beetles. They must be fools indeed who would try again!”
“Perhaps.” Sheftu shrugged expressively. He had lowered his voice, moving a little closer to Nekonkh. “But one must give them credit, Captain: they have courage. And they insist they are fighting for what all Egypt really wants. They say it’s monstrous that a woman should wear the double crown, and call herself not Royal Wife and Consort, but King and Pharaoh. They say the backs of the people are breaking under her taxes, that the children’s ribs show plainer with every statue of herself she erects in the new temple, while Count Senmut the Architect, the favorite, the Lord-High-Everything-In-Egypt, grows mysteriously richer each time a porch is built or a terrace paved … Captain, they say—I but quote, you understand—they say she grows so arrogant that the gods themselves will soon rise up to strike her down, and Egypt with her! Should we permit …”
Nekonkh’s brain was spinning. What was this young rogue up to, talking like a spy one minute, a firebrand the next? But no, of course he was but quoting. Yet the captain found himself responding fiercely to the forbidden words. Aye, it was true, it was all true, and everyone knew it! Count Senmut had a finger in every pot in Egypt, and as for the queen, that usurper …
Beware
, clanged the alarm bells.
You’re walking into a trap
.
Sheftu was still talking, softly, insistently. “Should we permit these crimes, they ask? Can we risk the anger of the gods? Is not this woman a peril to all the Black Land?”