The Ravens of Falkenau & Other Stories (16 page)

However, Egypt has endured.
 
Battered and humbled, the Black Land stands still, temples and libraries, palaces and fields less than they were in Gull's time, but not destroyed either.
 
New peoples have settled there, melting into its rich tapestry.
 
One of them is a girl named Kadis, and with her the soul that was Gull's returns to Egypt as she promised.

The gods walk the earth among men when they will, and from time to time take a hand in the game of jackals and hounds that they play; we know this in Nubia, though they have forgotten it in Egypt. Perhaps they do it only for sport, or perhaps it is because of some terrible compassion. Either way, it is little comfort to the pieces, moved or knocked down by their whims, like markers on a board.

I am the wrong person to tell a story of gods and kings. I am not a scholar or a general, not a prince or a magician or even a priest. I am an animal trainer, like my father before me. If I had not been, I would have never left the Black Land, never met Baalthasar or Marah or Jonathan. And whether that would have been better or worse, only the gods can tell.

For three generations my family were archers in the service of Pharaoh, in his border wars, before my father took a different path. His brothers were archers, but his eyesight was too dim to shoot a falcon on the wing, and so he was apprenticed to one of the trainers of the great hunting cats that the lords of the Black Land love.

Thus I was born in the city of Elephantine, in Upper Egypt, where the Black Land borders Nubia and the river rushes out of the gorges and cataracts on its way to the sea. It is from Elephantine that the great cats come, and they are trained there before they go north to hunt beside lords and kings. I was my father’s first child, and he was only half there when I was born. I was born the same day that his finest cheetah whelped.

It is a rare thing for a cheetah to whelp in captivity. They do not mate well when they are under the leash, because the female will lead the male a race across the desert or plains, only capitulating at the end, when he has pursued her day and night without water. In captivity, they often do not mate at all. And if you release a female in heat, usually she will never return.

Sakah did. She escaped when her time had come, but three days later she returned to my father, tired and footsore, her business accomplished. Her kittens were born the same day I was. They were infinitely more valuable, for even though I am freeborn the worth of a girl child is much less than even a single starred kitten of one of the great cats.

My father ran back and forth between the house of his mother, where we lived, and the kennels, where Sakah was. She bore four kittens, three female and a male, and my mother bore only me. It was because of this that they named me Kadis, Little Cat, in the language of Nubia, joking that I was the fifth kitten, the lucky one.

They had three days to laugh, because on the fourth day my mother took ill with a milk fever, and she died on the tenth day. I do not remember her at all. I wish sometimes that I did, but perhaps it is better so. You cannot miss what you have never known.

What I do remember of my childhood is good. Motherless, my aunts and grandmother doted on me. My uncles were older than my father, and they did not live with us, though four of my cousins did. My eldest uncle had died in a skirmish with the
Melawesh
in the far off Delta, and my aunt and her children lived with my grandmother as well. They were all four boys, the oldest nine years my senior, and the youngest the same age as me to the season, so I did not lack for family or love.

Gahiji, the youngest, was more like my twin brother than anything else, so alike were we in looks and temper. Like me, he was tall and clean limbed. We children of the desert tower over the men of the delta, and like the animals we prize, we can run day and night under the sun and the stars of heaven. Like mine, his skin was dark and fine, his eyes tilted and almond shaped. But where his eyes were dark brown, mine were almost golden, the color of honey or
Sakah’s
dappled pelt.

It was Gahiji and I who were always in trouble. Once, when we were six or so, we stowed away on a river boat bound down the Nile to Thebes and then to Memphis. The sailors discovered us in a few hours and put us ashore at
Tati
, where angry and worried my father found us the next day. In the meantime, however, we had had a scare of our own, and decided that being without dinner and without a place to sleep was perhaps not so much fun as it might seem. By the time we were hauled back to Elephantine, striped from my father’s belt, we were very sorry indeed.

It was then that my father decided that Gahiji needed something to occupy him during the day. He was sent to the school at the Temple of Thoth. Each morning he would leave with his bit of pottery and chalk, his lunch tied up in a linen cloth, to spend all day sitting with the other boys and learning how to write. In Egypt it is not only the children of the nobles who do so. Most freeborn boys learn at least a little for a few years, enough to keep accounts and understand contracts and sales. But girls do not go to the Temple of Thoth.

I was jealous, lonely, and wild to learn. Also, I imagine my grandmother found me a nuisance in the house, bored all day and missing Gahiji. Before the season ended she had convinced the scribe who taught Gahiji to let me join his class. I was five years there. I loved it and would have stayed if it had not been for Pharaoh.

My father was summoned to Thebes to bring his hunting cats and serve the throne. It was a very great honor, and a marvelous chance for him, so I did not doubt that he should take it. I was sorry to leave the temple, my friends and my grandmother, but I was also excited.

Gahiji was angry that I was going. “You will never come back, cousin,” he said. “You will forget us in the North.”

I shrugged. “I will not forget you. It is you who will forget me. Someday when you come North as an archer and a soldier you will walk past me in the street and not know me.”

At this he brightened considerably. “That’s true,” he said. “I will have my turn. I’ll be an archer, and you will still be a girl!”

My father and I left Elephantine immediately, walking along the Nile on the way north. We did not take a barge for the same reason we did not use horses or donkeys – the cheetahs do not like boats, and horses do not like them. We had two cats with us, both females about a year old, sisters from the same litter. They were fairly well trained, but to sit quietly on a barge was beyond them. It took us two weeks upon the road before at last we saw the capital.

I was born and bred in a city, but not such a city as Thebes. It stretched as far as the eye could see on the eastern bank of the river, temples and palaces and great markets crowding for attention, houses of two or even three stories built of mud and brick, fields green with the harvest and the water gleaming sharply in all the irrigation canals. The palace came right down to the water, and rows of shapely trees along a stone embankment showed where there were pleasure gardens. At the flood the river must come right up to the top of the embankment, but now, at the harvest, there was a drop fully a man’s height to the water.

Across the river, on the western shore, the docks of the temples on the riverbank gave to the red hills and the valleys of tombs. Ancient and white, the temple of some long dead Pharaoh glimmered. The sun sank beyond the hills, leaving the riverbank in shadow beneath a sky of purest blue.

We had quarters waiting for us in one of the alleys behind the palace. We did not go there, however, but instead directly to the menagerie at the palace where we would settle the cats. It was a neatly build brick building inside a courtyard with a high wall. My father nodded approvingly at the wall, which was twice his height and too high even for our nimble hunters to leap. Inside, there were three big box stalls and two enclosures. Clearly this had formerly been a stable for breeding. At some time past bars had been affixed to the windows. Some of them, like the walls, showed claw marks. There were no other animals there any more, however.

We settled the cats in as night fell. They were restless. I thought that no matter how well cleaned the place had been it still smelled of other cats to them. And perhaps we were also still in scent of the royal stables.

“We shall stay here tonight,” my father said. “I do not like to leave them alone this way.”

I nodded. “I’ll get some bedding for us to put in one of the stalls.” It would be too chilly otherwise.

One of the local trainers was hanging around. “I’ll send a slave to bring you some food from the kitchens. There is meat for the cats, but you will want something for yourselves.”

The slave brought not only bread, but a pot of beer and some fried fish crispy with breadcrumbs and savory with spices. My father and I sat back against the wall and had our dinner while the cats snarled and purred over a big sack of pig guts that had been provided for them. Outside, it grew dark.

“My daughter,” he said, “our life is good.”

I grinned and leaned back against the sun warmed wall. “It is. And I can’t wait to explore Thebes and see the great temples, even the palace itself!”

He nodded mildly. “You will be careful, for Thebes is a great city, not a glorified provincial town like our Elephantine. And you will be careful in the palace, for palaces are always beds of intrigue.”

“That sounds exciting,” I said.

“You think so now. But you have not seen the power of kings to punish and destroy,” he said. “Go sometime to the place of public execution and you will see what I mean and learn caution. It is best to serve kings well, but not closely.”

I shrugged. I would have liked to have seen the king at least. Pharaoh Menkheperre was an old man, and Nubian like us. He was the grandson of that Piankh who had restored order to Upper Egypt in the wake of great disturbances, and his dynasty had held the throne for seventy years now, first his son
Pinedjem
, then his elder grandson Masaherta and now his younger grandson. Menkheperre had reigned both as High Priest of Amon and Pharaoh for forty years, and he had sons and grandsons aplenty to follow him. The royal family was huge, and the nursery that had in some times past had held only a single frail heir was now full with the grandchildren and great grandchildren of Pharaoh. After trials, the Black Land prospered. As it should.

I saw Pharaoh once, at one of the great festivals in the year after we came to Thebes. He was carried through the streets to the Great Temple of Amon at Karnak, and I went to watch, standing with the other children in the crowds along the street. He was an old man. I could not tell, as he was sitting in a litter decorated with gold and with palm leaves, how tall he was, but the skin of his face was wrinkled, and he held the crook and flail stiffly, as though his joints hurt.

And yet people cheered him. Menkheperre was loved. In his youth he had forged a treaty with the Other Pharaoh,
Psusennes
who claimed the throne in the North, in Lower Egypt. For fifty years Upper and Lower Egypt had struggled, each claiming that their Pharaoh was the legitimate ruler, each claiming the entirety of the Black Land. Menkheperre had agreed to a treaty line, and each Pharaoh had married the other’s sister. Now they were brothers in law, and their heirs were twice kin. If we were not one kingdom as we had been in the old days, we were not a kingdom torn by war.

Each year the river rose and fell. Each year brought a new kitten or two for training. I worked with them at some length, pacing them and training them to go after decoys with teeth and claw, teaching them to stand on a lead and to wait. Much of what our cats must do was wait. They were to stand beside Pharaoh’s throne at audiences and look fierce, the very soul of the Black Land.

I also learned to shoot a bow.

This was the fault of one of the young Nubians in Pharaoh’s guard. He was a distant relation by marriage, and so when he was posted to Thebes my father invited him to dine with us. His name was Zuka, and he was sixteen.

I wondered at the time that he should volunteer to take me to the edge of the desert to shoot. I did not expect young men to waste time with me. I had forgotten that I was growing older. At thirteen I was tall and slender, small breasted and light on my feet, the sort of girl he would marry in a year or two, when he could support a wife. Of course he was thinking ahead, eating with my father and spending time with me. I understand that now.

What I knew at the time was that he praised my aim. My arms grew strong from drawing his compound bow, and it was not long before I could shoot well and swiftly. “It is in your blood,” Zuka said, finding a reason to put his arm around my shoulders to correct my draw a little. “You are the daughter of many fine warriors.”

“If I were a boy I should be a soldier,” I said. “I would like to go to the lands of the Meshwesh, and north to Ashkelon.”

“I have been to Ashkelon,” he said. “And it is not so fine. And it is not ours anymore. The Peleset hold it, and if we come we must come as envoys. They took it with great burning and looting a long time ago.”

“Not so long,” I said. “I have seen the inscriptions. That was in the Second Ramses’ day, and not even two centuries have passed since then.”

“That is a long time,” Zuka said. “When you compare it to the length of a summer’s day. There are days that should last forever.”

I laughed. “Maybe there are.”

He was handsome, with his shaven head and fine body, but I was not moved. Though I was tall, my body was still the body of a child, and my heart was not ready to call any man my brother. And so I did not understand why he sulked a little when we returned to my father’s house, and did not smile at me.