Ancient Evenings (20 page)

“Fool,” he shouted. To which Hathfertiti gave a chill laugh. “I think he’s charming,” she said.

“If the horse tripped, he could send the arrow in our direction,” said my father.

The captain, having circled away from us, returned in a leisurely trot, came to a halt, leaped out of his vehicle and touched his forehead to the dust. He and Menenhetet began to speak to each other in a strange language, strange as the language of the Sherdens I soon guessed, and after a minute or two—with a last phrase in Egyptian: “As you say, General”—the soldier raised his arm in salute, smiled at all of us, at my mother most particularly, remounted, and walked off slowly with his horse in order not to raise the dust.

“I told him I’d watch maneuvers later,” said my great-grandfather.

“Thank you,” said Hathfertiti.

Now we came to a smaller gate. A sentry let us through without a word. We had reached another courtyard.

“It is splendid how they use their reins,” said Hathfertiti.

“But it is our grandfather who developed the style,” said my father.

“Not really,” she exclaimed.

“Certainly,” said Menenhetet. “In the years before the Battle of Kadesh. That is why we triumphed on that day.”

He said this with such pleasure that my mother could not resist saying, “I thought Ramses the Second was the victor at Kadesh, not your charioteers.”

“The Pharaoh always wins the battle,” said Menenhetet.

We were passing through another courtyard, immense perhaps as the first, but I did not know how large since it was divided by walls of trees into more than a few courts and enclosures. Wading pools were surrounded by gardens. To our left was a brightly painted wooden building, and I could see women pass from time to time along its covered balcony on the second story, while a murmur of curious laughter came back to us from their sight of Hathfertiti. We were carried now to a white wooden wall on which were painted enormous portraits of a hawk, a scorpion, a bee, a lotus, and a papyrus plant, all so lifelike that I was afraid to pass through, indeed I trembled at the nearness of the scorpion.

We dismounted from the sedan chairs, and the bearers, after a nod from Menenhetet, gave a quick kiss to the seat (whose leather was marked with nothing less than the hieroglyph—
—which represents the Land of the Dead). My father, having handed the sedan-chair leader a copper utnu, and the officer at the door having recognized us—I could see by the look of relief on his face that he had been expecting his distinguished guest for half the morning—we passed with many a bow by the attendants into the green and verdant garden of the Pharaoh’s Court of Honor. There, trees with fruit I had never seen before grew at the edge of an oblong pool whose tiles were covered with gold.

“When these trees were young,” my mother whispered to me, “their feet were set in pots, and they were put on boats and carried across many a storm until they reached our land.”

“How does it look?” I asked, “where the river comes to the open waters?”

“There are more birds,” she said, “than you have ever seen.”

I was thinking of the squalling of those birds above that wet land, and how different they must be from the birds of this garden. Here, one flamingo had colors orange and pink and gold, and there was a black ibis, and plovers that raced from branch to branch showing feathers as brilliant as the tail of an ostrich. I remember when I was two, and still new to the thought of expressing myself, I had asked my mother why we put the heads of birds on so many of our Gods. (Having seen, long before I could read, how many of the sacred sticks our scribes drew on papyrus were of birds, I had assumed such hieroglyphs were given to us by the Gods as pictures of Themselves.) My mother had smiled then. “The child asks questions that bring peace to my mind,” she said, “I feel the feather when he speaks.” That was a reference to Maat I would understand only later—we had a saying that the edge of a feather was the closest you could come to touching the truth. Then, out of whatever composure my thought had given her, my mother said, “Birds are most respected—they fly.”

Fly they did, and in this grove, they whipped and laced from branch to branch, and seemed to dart in delight at the reflection of themselves in the gold tile of the pool where their colors flew along the shallow bottom like rainbow-colored fish, yet even in their gaiety that rollicked through the shade of these foreign trees, I could hear the distant echo of panic. The sounds of these birds were stranger to me than the grunts of animals hard at work, for in those, at least, I could hear the sound of the earth—I suppose I mean to speak of that unheard sound that connects one’s feet to the earth. Birds, however, always twittered of some unrest that was in the agitation of their flesh forever fearful of our ground, no, the earth was not a place where a bird could rest.

Nonetheless, this garden—after the glare of the courtyard—was a grove. Every smell of loam, and some I never smelled before, was in my nose, damp and mysterious as the cool I once discovered at the edge of a cave, and in this air, I felt the nearness of the Pharaoh. At the end of our walk, near to obscured by the foliage, was a small wooden villa painted in every bright color of the flowers of the garden, a peculiar building, on stilts perhaps, yet, like a house, built around all four sides of a patio, so that, walking beneath, we passed into deep shadow, then came out of the shadow to a place in the open center where the sun was shining.

I had always dreamed that the Pharaoh would rest on a throne at the end of a great hall, and visitors would approach by crawling forward on their knees, and indeed Menenhetet had told us how Ramses Two used to give vast audiences at festival time in the middle of an immense place in the old city of Thebes, but then, even as I was trying to think of how large that could have been—was it larger than where we had seen the charioteers at their drill?—we entered the patio and I felt the Pharaoh, or certainly felt His force as the sun blinded my eyes on our sudden emergence into its glare. A weight came down upon the back of my head heavy as the sun, and before I knew it, had me prostrating myself on the ground in the way I had been instructed, my hips in the air, my knees and face to the earth—was there a smell of incense to this sacred earth?—and had no idea whether it was a force from the Pharaoh on the balcony above that had laid me low, or only the hand of my father kneeling next to me on the one side and my mother on the other. In front of us, honored by his rank, Menenhetet had merely lowered himself to one knee.

In a moment, my mother and father rose with Menenhetet, their knees still to the ground, their arms extended—a position natural to my father (I could feel his happiness) and demeaning to my mother (I could sense now she detested it) but I, to my surprise, did not wish to move, as if, with mouth and nose pressed into the grit of the dirt, and my eyes not a finger’s width above, I felt the heavy peace of that great circle in which we revolve before we sleep. Not daring to look up at the Pharaoh (Who had, by His Presence, forced my mouth to kiss the ground) I did not know if the weight on my back still came from His eyes, the full heat of the sun, or both (and very much the same) since I had been told from the day I heard the name, Son of the Sun, that no man on earth was nearer to Ra than our Monarch, Si-Ra Ramses Ninth in all of His great titles: Nefer-Ka-Ra Setpenere Ramses Kham-uese Meriamon (for Ptah-nem-hotep was only the name of His boyhood by which old friends and high officials could call Him).

Then, I do not know whether I passed through vertigo or bliss, but circles of color vibrated right up from the earth into my eyes, and I felt another force summoning me to rise until I lifted my eyes high enough to look up to the balcony for the face of the Pharaoh.

He was seated between two columns, and leaned with His elbows upon a gold railing protected by a red embroidered cushion. I could see no more of His body than a collar of gold that covered His chest, and above was His great Double-Crown, high and full as two sails, and with the small jeweled body of a gold snake above His right eye. It was more like looking at a large shield than at a man, the tall white crown of the Pharaoh forming the upper arch, and His collar, the lower. Or, so I might have thought but for His beautiful face between. He had eyes that were very large, and the black lines of the cosmetic made them more prominent. As my mother had told me, His eyes were famous for change of color: now bright and clear as the sky, they would yet reflect the dark of a moonless night. He had a long sad nose, not at all like other noses. It was very thin, and His nostrils were narrow as a cat’s. As He turned His head I could see that the shape of this nose was curious, for the curve, by one view, gave to His elegant and aquiline face a fine scimitar, but from the other side, looked as mournful as a drop of water about to fall from a down-turned leaf. Beneath that narrow nose was a beautiful mouth, full and splendidly curved, and it lived in intimacy with the nose above, a most peculiar way to describe it, except it made me think of my nurse Eyaseyab standing next to me, since we did not look the least alike, and she was a slave, although I was never so comfortable as when I found myself with her, short fat Eyaseyab. As I looked at His mouth and nose, I could also see my nose against the thick skirt of Eyaseyab’s upper thigh, and recollected the smell of earth and fish and riverbank that came off her. That seemed kin to the care with which Ptah-nem-hotep’s narrow nostrils seemed to curl in the breath that came from His mouth, and I felt a strong desire to kiss Him. I wished to bury my sweet mouth—everyone assured me my mouth was sweet—on the lips of the Son of Ra, and this desire having come to me, gave permission to the next desire—and I saw myself straining at the tip of my toes to kiss the divine finger between the legs of the Pharaoh, an impulse I could hardly take in before my next thought was to do the same to my great-grandfather. There, beneath the spell of the Pharaoh’s nose, as bewitching to me as the powdered navel of my mother, I had a vision of myself in the future, and I was a young man in a dark room within a dark mountain, there on my knees before the Ka of my great-grandfather, and I do not know if all I now saw at the age of six was only a gift given back to me from the Ka of myself remembering, at last, a day of my life, or whether I was not, in truth, on the patio of Ptah-nem-hotep (for so I called Him at once in my heart as if we were old friends) and therefore I was more alive here than in my Ka on its knees at the tomb of Khufu. Then—as if I rose from a night of awful dreams into the day—I became certain I was alive and six years old when, still kneeling with my arms before me, I looked up again to the face of the Pharaoh, and He spoke in a clear and ringing voice of the most distinguished tones, indeed a voice—I most certainly heard it—that, phrase for phrase, was equal to my great-grandfather at teasing a truth with quiet mockery.

“Menenhetet,” said the Pharaoh, “can it be a small motive that encourages you to honor My invitation?”

“Matters of the greatest concern for myself would seem of small import to Your Majesty,” said Menenhetet in a voice that floated forth like a leaf laid on water.

“You could not have a small reason. Only a modest explanation,” said our Pharaoh, and pleased with this answer, added, “Rise, great Menenhetet. Take your family and join Me here.” He patted the cushion beside Him.

An attendant led us to a painted stairway, and from there it was ten steps to the balcony. Ptah-nem-hotep embraced my great-grandfather and kissed my mother on the cheek. She bowed and kissed His toe, but demurely, like a cat, and my father, solemnly—he was received solemnly—knelt and gave an embrace to the other toe. “Tell me the name of Hathfertiti’s son,” said Ptah-nem-hotep.

“It is Menenhetet the Second,” said Hathfertiti.

“Menenhetet-Ka,” said the Pharaoh. “An ogre’s name for a lovely face.” He looked at me carefully and gave an exclamation. “Only the beauty of Hathfertiti could give birth to so perfect a face.”

“Do not stand unmoving, my son,” said my father.

“Yes,” said Ptah-nem-hotep tenderly, “you had better kiss My foot.”

So I knelt, and saw that His toenails were painted blue, and His foot, when I kissed it, was perfumed, and like my mother’s scent, gave the odor of a dark red rose, or that I thought was the odor of His foot until I realized the floor had been washed in perfume. Kissing the space between the big toe and the next, my nose was pinched for an instant—the Pharaoh’s toes were fingering me—and I felt a flash of pain, not pain so much as a white light within my body, a light that must have come from the Pharaoh; its intensity made me feel like a flower plucked up from its roots—did a flower see this same white light? As if I lived again in more than one place at once, so did I know what it would be like to come forth into a woman, my flesh emblazoned in the white light of the God who came to meet me.

Much stimulated by this power of living in two houses, my tongue began to lick the crotch of the Pharaoh’s foot, and I came away with more than an odor of rose. The faintest smell of earth and river and fish, all kin to the smell between Eyaseyab’s thighs, was also there, and even a remote hint of the fierce manly odor of urine that could often reek from the height above Menenhetet’s knees. I even felt full of the same kind of bemusement I used to know when smelling my wet fingers after tickling a little saliva over Sweet Finger or my hips and my navel. Living in the pocket of these odors, I felt the power once more of the Pharaoh’s presence and understood, as if never before instructed, that the Pharaoh was indeed the nearest of men to the Gods, yet I also knew He was a man who smelled a little like a woman, and His smells were near my own.