Out of the Black Land (15 page)

‘He told them that my orders were his orders, and if they got someone killed because they were being snobbish about rank, then he would personally flay them alive and leave their skins drying over a memorial stone that said,
Here lies a moron rightfully executed by his captain. His name is forgotten
.’

‘Did he mean it?’

‘With Horemheb it is always safer to believe that he does mean it. Can I have some more wine?’

I filled his cup and my own. I was getting used to the sound of his voice again. He had a sweet voice, my Kheperren, very pleasant to the ear.

‘So we poured down the cliffs after the Kush, and they were caught between a hammer and an anvil, and they were all killed. You know how we used to read accounts of battles, ’Hotep, where each move is described and the storyteller knows what is happening all over the field? It’s not like that. You can see maybe an arm’s length around you and it’s all dust and yelling and weapons appearing out of nowhere.

‘The only thing to do is try to stay alive and the only way to do that is to kill the man who is trying to kill you and I am no good at it, no good at all. The man who gave me this, he was young, strong, I looked into his fierce eyes and knew that he was a man like me. When he raised his weapon he saw the same and missed my heart, perhaps on purpose. Then he struck at Horemheb and I deflected the blow on my shield. I didn’t see what happened to him but he must have been killed, they were all killed, all of them. We despoiled the bodies and buried them all in a great pit in the sand, killing the wounded with a blow to the back of the neck. I made a note of them and their numbers. There were eighty-three corpses; only nine of us were killed.’ His eyes were filling with tears. They ran down his face and dripped into the wine, and I took away the cup and gathered him into my arms.

‘I’m not brave as the captain says,’ he said desolately. ‘I didn’t run away because there was nowhere to run. I fought because I was attacked.’

‘There, my brother,’ I held him close. ‘You need not go back, I can keep you here. No scandal can touch us while Meryt lies with me.’

‘No,’ he said, lifting his wet face to mine. ‘If I stay I will have to marry. I cannot marry. I tried to lie with a woman in a border wine-shop and I could not. I only desire men. I must go back with Horemheb, my brother. But it is you I love, and one day…’

‘One day, I replied as steadily as I could, for what he said was both true and painful. ‘We will draw the latch on our hut in the reeds, leave the dog Wolf on guard, and sleep together all night in peace.’

I could not see that it would ever be so, but it comforted him, and presently we went to bed and slept and made love and slept again.

Chapter Twelve

Mutnodjme

We sat at our teacher’s feet and construed the
Satire of Trades
, written years ago by Dua-Khety for the instruction of his son.

‘This was quoted to me so often by my father when I was a child that I loathed it, but it is nevertheless good literature,’ said Teacher Khons, giving Merope the scroll. She began to read:

It is miserable for the carpenter when he planes the beams of a roof. It is the roof of a room measuring ten by six cubits.

‘What’s a cubit?’ she asked.

‘The length of my forearm,’ said Khons. ‘A digit is the width of my finger. There are six digits in a palm, and there are six palms in a cubit.
The measure of the world is the measure of a human
,’ he added, quoting another wise scribe.

Merope continued:

He spends a month in laying the beams and spreading the roofing material. All his work is done, but his wife and children are hungry while he is away.

The bricklayer is in pain. He works outside in the wind with no garment but a cord for his back and a string for his buttocks. He is so exhausted by his labour that he can hardly see, and he eats with his filthy hands.

But I have seen the bricklayers, Teacher. They seem happy enough, even if they are naked. They sing. And at night they get drunk and sing more. Just under our window, where they are building the new rooms,’ commented Merope, puzzled.

‘That is true, my pupil, but this is a satire. It exaggerates for the purpose of making a point.’

‘The point being that Dua-Khety wants to make his son decide that a scribe’s life is the best?’ I reasoned. Teacher Khons nodded.

‘But he’s lying,’ I said. ‘I mean, exaggerating. That is not the way to make a proper argument.
The Maxims of Ptah-hotep
which you made us read last decan say:

Truth is great and its effectiveness endures forever; it has not been confounded since the time of Osiris.

Khons sighed. ‘A little colouring is necessary even for truth,’ he told me. ‘Do you not remember the
Tale of Truth and Falsehood
?’

‘No,’ we said, hoping to escape more of the
Satire of Trades
. Khons obliged:

Truth came home one day, naked and wounded, having been beaten and cursed by the people who did not wish to hear, while his brother Falsehood went dressed in the brightest garments and feasted with every household.

‘What shall I do?’ cried Truth to the gods. ‘No man wishes to hear me and all beat me and throw things at me; look, I am covered with dung.’

‘You are naked,’ said the goddess Maat, sympathetically. ‘No naked one can command respect. Therefore take these robes and you will walk without fear and all men will sit at your feet to hear your stories.’ And she dressed Truth in Fable’s garments, and he was welcome at every house.

‘What’s a fable?’ asked Merope, who also did not like the
Satire of Trades
. Khons smiled and began:

The lion summoned all beasts to come to his court.

All animals attended, except for the desert fox, the clever, sand-coloured slinker who steals rather than fights. The lion waited, and still the fox did not come to offer obeisance.

At last the lion left his cave and came to the fox saying, ‘Why have you not come to offer your obeisance to me?’

The Fox replied, ‘I judged that it would not have been good for my health. I have seen many tracks going into your cave, Lord, but none coming out.’

‘And that is a fable about…what?’ I asked.

‘The nature of government,’ replied Khons shortly. ‘The
Satire of Trades
, Princess Merope, if you please.’

The message-carrier leaves on his journey after giving his property to his children, as he does not know if he will return. He is always afraid of lions and ambushes. He only relaxes his vigilance when he returns to Egypt, and by then his house is only a tent. He does not come home to a feast.

Why not?’ asked Merope. ‘Even if he did give his property to his children, wouldn’t they be pleased to see him again?’

‘Perhaps we should read something else,’ said our Teacher. ‘The satire might be too sophisticated an art-form for you literal young women.’

‘
Good speech is as rare as malachite, yet can be heard in the conversation of slave women at the millstone
,
’ I quoted from the
Maxims of Ptah-hotep
, and Khons laughed.

‘On second thought, we will write,’ he ordered, and we took our writing boards and opened the pot of ink. I found my favourite stylus in the bunch and Merope sanded away her previous essay with pumice.

‘What shall we write about?’

‘The festival of the new year,’ said Khons. ‘Did you have a good feast, little Princesses?’

‘Wonderful,’ declared Merope. ‘I love roasted duck and I had a whole one to myself. But I didn’t get to see it as well as my sister, because she had enough wisdom to be swept away by the crowd and lifted up by the Nubian of the Great Royal Scribe Ptah-hotep may he live. Why are we having lessons, anyway, teacher? It’s only the third day of the holiday, which is twelve days long. Amen-Re lies in the arms of his wife Mut. No one else is working. The commoners are all sleeping to store up energy for tonight’s feasts. Why are you working?’

‘As a favour to your mother, to keep you occupied while she arranges the move to the palace on the lake. You will have visitors today, my pupils, and she wants to keep you occupied. But we can tell stories if you would like.’

‘Take us for a walk?’ we coaxed.

‘Where would you like to go?’

‘Down into the village,’ suggested my sister.

‘Out onto the water,’ I asked. I had never got over my fascination with the river, even though it had tried to eat me.

‘Sorry,’ said Khons. ‘Neither. The village is full of drunken people and the river is rising fast. You remember what happened to you on the day that the river was rising, Mutnodjme.’

‘Then to a temple,’ we said.

‘Which one?’ asked Khons warily.

‘Basht,’ said Merope. Basht the cat came to her name and walked delicately over the tiled floor and onto Merope’s lap.

‘That is in the village, and we cannot go to the village.’

‘Story, then,’ I said, for we were clearly not going to join the interesting crowds and noises which we could hear outside the walls. At least we were not going back to the
Satire of Trades
.

Khons nodded and began:

Isis and Osiris were brother and sister and loved each other with a love greater than death.

Isis was the most wise of all the daughters of Geb and Nut, and she said to Osiris, ‘Be my lover, oh most beautiful of all men, and I will lie in your arms and I will never leave you.’

And Osiris beheld her and replied, ‘Most lovely of all women, I will lie with you, and love you, and I will never leave you.’

But Set their brother was jealous and said, ‘Why did she not choose me? I am as strong as Osiris, and I am good at lovemaking, yet she has chosen my brother and not me.’

Therefore he decided to kill Osiris, hoping that Isis would love him after her husband was dead. So he had a sarcophagus made, exact to the measurements of his brother, taken from the print he had left sleeping in the sand, and he challenged the gods, that whoever fitted into the valuable goldwork should have it for his own.

Osiris climbed in, and lo! Set clapped the lid down, and welded it shut. He flung Osiris into the Nile, and so he perished miserably, suffocating in the dark.

And Set said to Isis, smiling,‘You shall be my wife.’

‘Wicked!’ cried my sister Merope. ‘What happened? Did Isis take Set as her husband?’

‘Of course not,’ I argued. ‘Isis is the lady of wisdom, she wouldn’t do something so stupid.’

Khons raised a finger for silence, and I subsided.

Not only did Set fail with Isis, who scorned him saying he was a scorpion among brothers, but his own wife Nepthys, disgusted by this murder, left him also, taking with her their son Anubis.

Isis and her sisters lamented for Osiris, then turned themselves into birds; and Isis and Nepthys and the Divine Huntress Neith flew low over the Nile, seeking the coffin, crying to lost Osiris, ‘Come to thy house!’

And many people saw the birds and wondered, for they called with human voices to the dead man, ‘Come to thy lover!’

But they could not find him, until a bird told them that the tamarisk tree had found the coffin and grown lovingly around it to preserve it from destruction, and that the tree had been cut down and made into the pillar of a King’s house. That tree has ever since been sacred to Osiris.

Isis came in the form of a woman to the King’s house and offered to suckle his child if she could ask for anything in his house. The baby was sickly and not likely to live, and they had no other children. So she nursed the child, dipping him each day into the fire to make him immortal, and at night changing herself into a swallow which mourned around the pillar, crying for lost Osiris.

Thus it went, until one night the Queen found the woman putting her child on the fire, and cried out, so that the child lost his chance of immortality, and the nurse was transformed into a mourning swallow.

The swallow then spoke with human voice, saying, ‘Take your child, he is strong though now he will not live forever, and give me the pillar of your house.’

And greatly wondering they obeyed, and the pillar was replaced and a woodman split it open with his axe to reveal the marvellous sarcophagus inside.

Then Isis was a woman again, and opened the coffin and wept over the dead Osiris inside, and all who heard her weeping were afraid, for it contained all the sorrow in the world. Then she took the coffin with her and rowed it down the Nile and placed it in a thicket while she slept. But while she slept Set came, and found the body; and, in his malice and misery,hacked it into pieces and flung the pieces into the air, and they scattered all over Egypt.

Then Isis called her sisters and Anubis the black dog, son of Set, who came to her and mourned with her afresh.

Then they collected the pieces, crying, ‘Come, holy one, be one, be alive, for Isis has thine hand and Nepthys thine arm.’ But they did not find the phallus, for the fish of the river had eaten it.

Then Isis assembled her husband and made her magic, drawing down time and the moon, even Khons himself as her ally. And making a phallus out of the mud of the river, she descended onto the phallus as a woman, her thighs wrapping his hips, and he entered into her and seeded her body with the divine child, even Horus the Revenger, born to contend with his uncle Set.

‘But what happened to Osiris?’ I asked. ‘He did not come alive in the world again, did he?’

‘He rules the otherworld, my pupil,’ Teacher Khons said.

He reigns over the Field of Reeds, a pleasant place of feasting and little waterways, of lotus and canals, where no sunlight blisters or cold bites; where no sandfly stings or crocodile threatens. No hot winds blow there, where the happy dead live in their houses, attended by their shabti, the answerers who are buried with them.

There each family has its own fig tree and grape vine, and all live in peace with one another. And in the centre of this pleasant place is the House of Osiris, where Kings and Queens dwell and feast and laugh forever.