The Sekhmet Bed (7 page)

“
But how can he? He only has one to use.”

Nofret and the plucking-lady laughed aloud, as if Ahmose had made a wonderful joke.

“
I wonder which of us he’ll want first,” Mutnofret said, a dreamy look on her face. “I can almost forget the shame of being a second wife when I can look forward to that man in my bed.”

Ahmose wrinkled her nose. The prickles of the plucking twinged at her nerves. Maybe Nofret wasn’t putting the disappointment behind her as well as she’d hoped. To keep Nofret’s mood light, she asked, “What’s it like?”

Mutnofret’s eyes glittered. “I’m sure
I
don’t know.”

The plucking-lady stopped her work and turned away, snorting back a laugh. Ahmose stared at her sister in combined horror and admiration.

“
You’ve done it already? With whom?”

“
Of course not, Ahmoset! What a wicked idea. That’s for common women. I was raised to be the queen. What if I’d gotten a child in my belly and it wasn’t the son of a Pharaoh? Our friends in the harem would all go hoarse for weeks from the gossiping they’d do. I could never do that to them.”

Ahmose was sure she couldn’t trust Mutnofret’s denial, but she doubted she’d get any more information from her sister. “Still, I wish I knew what to expect.”

“
Well, from what I’ve
heard
, it hurts terribly the first time. And you bleed like a cut calf. But after the first time, it gets more bearable. Sometimes.”

“
Then why does
anybody
do it?”

“
Oh, to make children, I suppose. A wife’s duty is to give her husband heirs, after all.”

“
Yes, but…but I’ve heard some of the women talk as if they like it.”

“
Oh, I’m sure every woman pretends that she likes it to her friends. It’s a woman’s duty. But who could really like all that hurting and bleeding?”

“
You’re finished, Great Lady,” the plucking-woman said, packing away her tweezers and jars.

Ahmose sat up, feeling weak and dizzy. “Oh, Nofret. How will I get through this?”

Mutnofret sat on the bench beside her, pulling her close in a quick, tight hug. “Don’t worry, Ahmoset. I’ll be here for you. Always sisters, remember? For now, it’s best to forget about it. It’s days away, and we have so much to do before the wedding feast. Stand up; let’s have a look at you.”

Ahmose stood unsteadily. The place between her legs smarted from the plucking. She felt especially vulnerable. She wanted to cover up her trembling body, but instead she put her hands on her hips, hoping the gesture made her look more confident, more womanly.

“
Positively beautiful for one so young,” Mutnofret said, although at sixteen she was barely older than Ahmose. “How proud I am of my little sister, soon to be the queen. Now let’s get you dressed.”

As Mutnofret helped her back into her gown, cooing and fussing, Ahmose had never felt less like a queen. She wanted to cry. Instead, she made herself smile.

six

With three days left before the wedding, Ahmose began to grow nostalgic for the House of Women. Soon she would move to the queen’s apartments in Waset’s great palace. It was a lovely building, even better than the harem house. And it was only minutes away. She could visit her friends in the House of Women any time she pleased. Yet once she moved she would be the queen. Everything would change. Could she look on the House, on the women, with the same eyes?

Restless and sad, she left her apartment and paced through the halls, staring all about as if she could ingrain every feature of the House of Women in her memory. Her feet carried her with no logical path. She visited the leisure room, strangely empty at this afternoon hour, with its thick red rugs on the floor, its soft hair-stuffed couches, its copper vessels in the corners spilling armfuls of fresh lotus and iris. The smell of the blooms lifted in the still air, combined with the ever-present traces of the harem women’s exotic perfumes: spathe and labdanum, earthy cyprinum. Ahmose breathed in the leisure room, tasted it, and it seemed to her that the taste of the air had the savor of laughter and music.
Will I find the same in the palace?

A senet board was laid out on a nearby table. The red and blue stone pawns were frozen in the midst of an abandoned game. She touched one, gently. It was cool and smooth, and
here
– undeniably a part of the House of Women. She was a pawn, too. She would be moved about the game-board as a toss of the throwing-sticks dictated, but she was made of feeling flesh, not stone. She could be taken from her home and displaced, as it suited the players of the game.

Angry, Ahmose flattened a palm against the senet board. The cool stone pawns pressed into her hand. She slid the game pieces of out alignment; they hissed and squealed against the gold and jet squares of the board’s surface. But she felt guilty, looking at the mess she’d made of the women’s game. One by one, he put the pieces back on their squares, hoping she remembered the pattern correctly and apologizing in her heart to her friends.

She hurried out of the leisure room, wandered to the kitchens. Servants were there, mixing bread dough and drizzling cakes with honey. They smiled at her, and bowed, and asked if they could give her anything to eat, any juice or beer to drink; but she shook her head, and sent them back to their tasks. They were so comforting in their plainness, these simple women in their simple wigs and frocks, smelling of flour and sweat and onions. Soon enough she hurried away from here, too, when her eyes began to sting from wondering whether the palace’s cooks were as sweet and kind as the harem’s.

In the courtyard she found some relief from her sorrow. The sun soothed her, the sight of furry bees touching the throats of flowers. But soon enough she could see only the image of Thutmose driving away on that first day they’d met – the day her life became a tangled skein. She turned her face away from the courtyard and the memory of rattling wheels.

Ahmose found the common bath empty, its wide pool drained now so the tiled mural of fishes shone in the bright light streaming in through the wind catchers. A few servants sat on the benches along the walls, folding towels, refilling pretty jars of ointment. Ahmose greeted them, but didn’t stay long. Without the company of her friends, the bath held nothing to interest her.

In the children’s quarters, where she grew up, Ahmose had to pinch the insides of her elbows to keep the tears out of her eyes. Here was the room where she’d played with Mutnofret and the other children, sharing their dolls and learning their songs. Here was the worn old chair carved with Hathor’s face where Ahmose’s nurse had often held her, whispering stories of the gods, her arms as warm and strong as a tree’s branches in the sun.

In time her restless steps took her out into the open expanse of the garden. Shemu was the time for harvesting crops and repairing the irrigation canals, and the sky was white with dust from labor in the fields around Waset. Under the oddly pale sky, the women’s garden was transformed into a place of alien ripeness. The boughs of fruit trees were weighed to the ground by their sweet burdens. Figs split and rotted on the ground, giving off a cloying smell that attracted insects. Their humming was like the voices of women at work. Birds shrieked in the trees. Late flowers were everywhere, splayed open and staring in stunned disbelief at the mindless fertility of the season.

The otherworld of the Shemu garden calmed Ahmose’s heart. It was pleasant to walk along the gravel paths, trailing her fingers against waxy yellow blooms. In the afternoon sun, the warm, rich aroma of leaves yielding their moisture to the air filled the yard. She found a particularly wide and neat path and walked aimlessly, thinking of nothing, allowing her dark thoughts to flee. The benches beneath the boughs of a shade-tree grove were inviting, but she moved on. Vaguely, she wondered why no women were spinning or sewing in the grove. It was such a lovely place to work.

Her stroll took her past the garden lake, where rowing skiffs were tied to the retaining wall. On the hottest days of the year, the Pharaoh’s women stripped off wigs and gowns, splashed in the lake’s green water – heavenly shore-birds, long of leg, pale of body, rounded breasts and thighs, their high, shouting laughter mingling like the piping of avocets on the river. The women were transformed by the water to creatures of another, more graceful world. Ahmose loved to watch them while she perched on the lake’s wall, kicking her feet in the cool shallows. But today the lake was quiet, though the air was hot.

Now her thoughts gathered once more and she glanced around sharply, taking in the emptiness of the garden. Where were all the women? The royal harem was the home of thirty women and nearly two dozen children. Even the children were absent. They should have been gathered under the shade trees with their tutors, learning their figures and sums, or playing in noisy packs up and down the paths, the little ones riding on the backs of the bigger ones, tossing balls back and forth as they charged headlong through the flowering rows. The garden was silent.

Here and there a servant scuttled by, head down, more intent on their errands than Ahmose had ever known them to be. There was, despite the birdsong and the placid heat, an air of – danger? Was it danger she sensed? Some worrying tension lay thick and heavy across the garden paths.

She moved steadily toward the heart of the garden. A figure was coming toward her, rounding a bend in the path. It was a female servant, head completely shaven, breasts bare. She carried something red and white in her arms. Ahmose stopped and stood to one side, straining to make out the shape of the bundle as the servant rushed past. When she realized what the woman carried, her hand flew to her mouth in horror. Strips of linen, soaked with blood.

Long after the servant had passed, Ahmose remained rooted to the spot, staring after her. What in the blessed name of Mut could be bleeding so in the women's garden?

“
Ahmose!”

Her head snapped around. Mutnofret stood in the center of the path, legs apart, shoulders tense. She raised one hand and beckoned. Ahmose hurried toward her.

“
What’s going on? Did you see that blood?”

“
Shh,” Mutnofret said. She took Ahmose by the elbow and steered her between rows of flowers.

Among a grove of myrrh trees was a small pavilion, stone lotus pillars roofed with wood. Walls of heavy cloth had been tied down between each pillar, blocking the outside world from whatever lay within. Someone held a lamp inside, and as the lamp moved past the nearest wall Ahmose just made out the reverse image of Tawaret, the big-bellied hippopotamus goddess, painted on the inner side of the cloth. The lamp moved away. Tawaret’s silhouette faded into linen again.

"The birthing pavilion," Ahmose said. Then she recalled Aiya, and her knees turned to water.

She shook off Mutnofret’s hand and pushed forward. The voices of many women hummed like flies inside the pavilion. They were subdued, hushed, urgent. Ahmose scrambled around a myrrh trunk, tripped over a root, and nearly collided with another servant laden with linens as she ran from the pavilion's farthest side.

"Move, move," the servant snapped, not even seeing in her haste that it was the Second Princess to whom she spoke. Ahmose did not stop to reprimand her. She righted herself, ducked around the pavilion’s corner.

One panel of cloth was rolled halfway up and tied, creating a small door. Ahmose peered around the column. The scene inside was chaotic, and the terrible stench of blood and feces gusted from the room whenever a person passed the door. Several women moved back and forth with lamps and linens. She recognized women of the harem, including her stout cousin Renenet, whose plump cheeks were streaked by tears. Two servants kneeled around a wooden stool with a large hole in the seat. They were using sheets of linen to soak up a great puddle of dark wetness beneath the stool – a very large amount of blood. Her knees trembled. She stood aside for another servant to pass.

Just as she made to look inside once more, a rough hand took her by the shoulder and pulled her back. Too startled to say a word, she glanced up at the face of Wahibra, the harem physician. He carried his rolled leather kit in his arms. She stood aside for him as she had for the servant, but Wahibra made no move to enter. He clapped his hands for permission.

At once an old midwife approached, carrying a tiny brazier on a padding of thick cloth. Green smoke lifted from the bowl. The old woman waved one hand toward Wahibra, wafting the incense over his face and shoulders. "In the name of Tawaret," she said somberly, "be purified, and enter the place of birth."

At once the crowd of women parted. Ahmose saw into the heart of the pavilion. Pale, golden Aiya lay on a bed of cushions soaked in red. Her face was as white as milk, eyes closed. Her arm lay limply across the floor of the pavilion, damming the pool of blood that darkened the bed and floor.

The old midwife spoke. "It is too late for Aiya, I fear. Her hips are not wide enough. The door is too small. The baby cannot come on his own. She has lost too much blood, despite all we could do. She will not live."