Sarah: Women of Genesis: 1 (Women of Genesis (Forge)) (18 page)

“And yet you keep us here!”

“Because I know what is good for Egypt. The land is weak and decaying. The gods have dried up all the lands around us, and the Nile floods grow weaker over time, giving us lean harvests in too many years. Why? Because we have become corrupt and ignorant. We have lost the ancient knowledge that once gave us power to unite and rule this land. We need to go back to our roots in the east and reinvigorate Egypt from the house of Pharaoh on down to the poorest farmer and the humblest beggar. Of course those who love the weakness of Egypt, who profit from her corruption, of course
they
resent what I’m doing, and of course they mean to oppose me. I would have to be blind not to know that, and a fool not to make sure I know who is plotting against me. When the time comes, I will destroy them completely. But in the meantime, I will continue to do what is needful to bring back the vigor and wisdom that once made Egypt great.”

His eyes flashed and for the first time, Sarai understood that this man was not weak at all, that he was a bold man with the courage to try to change the kingdom he had inherited.

The trouble was, he was utterly, hopelessly wrong about one key fact. “Neb-Towi-Re,” she said. “Your love of Egypt is clear, and your plans for Egypt are good. But you cannot do this if the people do not follow you.”

“The people? They care only for their families and their farms, for bread and beer and babies.”

“All power in this kingdom comes from the obedience of the people.”

“Which comes from the granary and the whip,” said Pharaoh. “I control the supply of grain, and I have the power to punish those who rebel.”

“Mighty Pharaoh, you have that control and that power only as long as you are obeyed. But when the people—from the highest to the lowest—come to wonder whether the gods have left you and chosen someone else, how quick will be their obedience? How energetically will they act to defend you, to obey you?”

“Which is why I have so carefully built up an army of Fenekhu soldiers,” said Pharaoh. “Their loyalty is to me alone, and Sehtepibre’s little show of miracles will have no effect on them.”

“A whole army? Of foreigners? Outsiders?” Sarai was horrified.

“Not one of whom will pay the slightest attention to Sehtepibre.”

“But . . . if it comes to war, that means that
you
are the one who will be sending foreign soldiers to kill Egyptians, and Sehtepibre is the one who will be defended by true Egyptians!”

Pharaoh glared at her. “Why are you concerning yourself with such things?”

“Neb-Towi-Re, I believe you are a good man who means well. But you have set yourself up to be destroyed, and everything you’re trying to do will come to nothing.”

“I am not a good man,” said Neb-Towi-Re. “I am a god, the god who rules Egypt, and I will restore this kingdom to its ancient greatness.”

“You can still save yourself,” said Sarai. “Send me and my brother away. Repudiate what Abram has taught you. Declare that you were merely trying to find out what lies the Hsy were telling about the gods, and now you are expelling them from Egypt. Disperse your Fenekhu army, disarm them, and declare that only true Egyptians will be your soldiers from now on.”

“Are you insane?” said Pharaoh. “Do you think that
I’m
insane? There’s not an Egyptian soldier I can trust!”

“You can trust them if you become the Pharaoh Sehtepibre has been teaching them to want.”

“In other words, I should become the kind of Pharaoh Sehtepibre would be.”

“You can’t do anything for Egypt when you’re dead.”

“When Pharaoh dies, he rises again.”

“Only if his son comes after him, like Osiris, to raise him up,” said Sarai.

“I know you’re lying to me because Abram has told me that neither he nor you believes that story.
You
believe that it is the father who raises up the son, though of course that makes no sense at all. If you would lie to me about that, why should I believe anything you say?”

Sarai despaired. “I have told you the truth—I have told you the only path you can take that will keep you alive with the double crown upon your head. The path you’re following will lead to your death. Your name will be stricken from the history of Egypt as if you had never lived. Your body will not be in a sarcophagus, it will be fed to the dogs of the street.”

“To prophesy against Pharaoh is treason,” he said, his face growing dark with anger.

“I’m not prophesying, I’m telling you the natural consequence of making your own people hate you. Everything you’re doing is playing into the hands of Sehtepibre. And the fact that he now openly claims these omens for himself as signs of the gods’ favor, while you do nothing to punish him or stop him, only makes you seem helpless and his victory seem inevitable to his supporters.”

Neb-Towi-Re looked away from her, his body tense with rage, his fists clenched tight. “By law I should have you killed on the spot for what you’ve dared to say to me.”

Sarai trembled with fear, and yet the fear was nothing compared to the white-hot certainty that burned within her. “If you did, it might save your life,” said Sarai. “Certainly you should send me away. Me and my brother. Expel us from Egypt. Do it. Don’t you see that my brother and I have been sent by God to warn you? To show you how to save yourself?”

“Since when do the gods speak to Pharaoh through a woman?”

“Ask my brother if the things I’ve said are true! He’ll tell you just what I’ve told you.”

“I wouldn’t waste his time with such foolish womanly concerns. Leave these matters to men. What can a shepherd girl know of affairs of state?” Pharaoh turned from her and stalked away. His soldiers jumped into action, following him, surrounding him.

Hagar rushed to Sarai. “What did you say to make him so angry?”

“As if you didn’t hear, with our voices raised like that.”

“But you as much as invited him to kill you!”

“God will protect
me
if he wishes. But who will protect poor Neb-Towi-Re?”

“Poor Pharaoh? You say
poor
Pharaoh?”

“He has such good intentions.”

“Let his gods take care of him as your God takes care of you.”

“That’s the trouble,” said Sarai. “Only the one God is real. Gods that don’t exist can’t give much help to the men who serve them. Sehtepibre knows that—why else would he manufacture omens instead of waiting for the gods to show him real ones? My fear is that when Neb-Towi-Re Montuhotpe falls, he’ll drag me and Abram down with him.”

“I promise I’ll kill you myself before I let Sehtepibre’s men have you,” said Hagar.

Sarai looked at her, appalled. “You’ll do no such thing! What a terrible thought!”

“Don’t you know what they would do to you?” said Hagar. “You’d die from it in the end, but you’d wish a thousand times for death before it finally came.”

“What happens to me is in God’s hands.”

“Then why is God keeping you here so long? And why hasn’t God given you the babies you want so much? As far as I can tell, your God isn’t helping you any more than his gods are helping him.”

Hagar’s words stabbed at Sarai’s soul. Yet she knew that Hagar was wrong. Knew it because . . . because . . . ”No,” said Sarai. “While I was talking to Pharaoh, I felt the power of God within me. I hadn’t planned to say all that I said. Once I gave him the warning about Sehtepibre, I was finished with my message. But new words came into my heart, into my mouth. I was on fire with those words. Yes, some of it came from things I had learned in my father’s house, growing up. But if I were speaking only as my father’s daughter, I would have kept my mouth shut because to speak was so dangerous to me. But along with the words that came to my mind there came also a certainty that I must speak, that it was right for me to speak.”

“You mean your God promised to keep you safe?”

“No, there was no promise. God doesn’t take away fear. Pharaoh might have ordered one of his soldiers to strike me down on the spot. What I knew was that if I did
not
speak, I would be in the wrong. That to serve God in that moment, I had to open my mouth.”

“Well, you certainly did open it.”

“And yet Pharaoh did not hear me.”

“Oh, he heard you. And he didn’t kill you, either.”

“Yet.”

“If he didn’t kill you then, he never will, Mistress,” said Hagar.

“All these years that I’ve been praying for myself, let me bear a child, and the weeks and months that I’ve been praying, free me from this captivity and reunite me with my husband, I’ve received not a single breath of a response from God. But in this moment, when I hadn’t prayed at all, God fills me with words in order to tell
Pharaoh
what he needs to hear?”

“Maybe God cares more about kings than mere women.”

“Abram says God cares about all his children the same.”

“Look around,” said Hagar. “If he did, why are there slaves? Why is there such hunger? No, the gods have favorites. And if there’s only one god, then all the blame for this misery is his.”

“No, no,” said Sarai. “The misery is nothing, in the end. The scars on your back, my barren womb—”

“They are not nothing,” said Hagar hotly.

“They are what we make them,” said Sarai. “We make them good or bad depending on how we respond to them. Your pain has hurt you, but you refused to let it destroy you. My barrenness—I have been tormented by doubts and fears, but in the end, God was still able to use my mouth to speak through. Oh, Hagar, he knows that I exist!”

Unable to contain the joy she felt, Sarai threw her arms around Hagar.

“He wouldn’t be much of a god if he didn’t know
that,
” said Hagar. And then she added, “Pharaoh knows that you exist, too.”

Sarai pulled away, laughing now. “Yes, I suppose so,” said Sarai. “After that little scene, you don’t suppose he still wants to marry me, do you?”

Hagar laughed, too, and with light steps they took a walk along the river, deeming it wiser to let plenty of time pass before they returned to the House of Women. Sarai did not see Pharaoh again before he left the House of Women and returned upriver.

The days and weeks now passed more lightly for Sarai, which should have made no sense to her, for if anything her situation was even more dangerous than before. But having felt that spark of God’s fire within her, she faced each day with greater confidence. And now, at last, she did go among the other women and talk to them and join in their gossip. They were shy with her at first, for of course they had all been talking about her for weeks and they feared and resented the possibility that she might be raised above them and made queen. But in due time many of them—the Fenekhu among them, especially, but some Egyptians, too—began to speak more candidly with her, and in time she came to know their stories, their hopes and fears. She also came to know their children, and though her heart sometimes seemed about to break with her own yearning, she still took joy in watching their little ones play and quarrel and cry and laugh and, above all, learn more with each moment that passed in their headlong lives.

But as months passed, she began to hear something else, as well—the worries of women who had been visited by Pharaoh, but had not conceived children. At first she scoffed at their fears—it had been such a short time, not
every
visit from Pharaoh had to have results, did it? Because she was supposedly not married, she could hardly tell them that if they wanted to see
barren,
they should look at
her,
but she still found it difficult to take their misery seriously.

Then came the flood season, and Sarai joined in the move to higher ground while the river rose and covered the land in mud. Hagar told her then that several times the flood rose high enough to cover the floor of the House of Women with mud. “And they couldn’t clean it out until the planting was done,” she said. Which made sense to Sarai—the survival of Egypt depended on planting seeds in the fresh mud, so the plants could grow roots that would keep finding ever deeper moisture until the grain was ripe. This year, though, the flood was a scant one, and they moved back into the palace sooner than anyone had hoped. “It will be a poor harvest this year,” said Hagar.

A poor harvest. In the year that Pharaoh had taken to spending so much time with Abram and courting Sarai. For he did return, every few weeks, and without ever referring back to their argument in the garden, he made it a point to speak to her genially and it was plain that he still wanted to make a queen of her, despite all she had said to him, despite all the dangers that it would pose. This was no secret to anyone, of course, and so the weakness of the Nile flood would be used as proof that the gods were outraged at the supposed influence of this desert prophet and his sister over Pharaoh. Sehtepibre would have to be a fool not to make his move soon.

Now Sarai began to take the complaints of the women seriously. She had been here almost a year, and the last of the women who had already been pregnant when she arrived had given birth. Not one woman in the house of Pharaoh was with child. Their barrenness was complete.