House of Dreams (2 page)

Sometimes I daydreamed that my father had noble blood in his veins, that his father, my grandfather, was just such a prince who had quarrelled violently with my father and forced him into exile so that, wandering and friendless, he had at last found his way to the blessed soil of Egypt. One day a message would come, he would be forgiven, we would pack our few belongings onto the donkey, sell the cow and the ox, and travel to a far court where my father would be welcomed with open arms, with tears, by an old man weighed down in gold. Mother and I would be bathed in sweet oils, clad in shimmering linen, draped in amulets of turquoise and silver. All would bow to me, the long-lost princess. I would sit in the shade of our date palm and study my brown arms, my long, gangly legs to which the dust of the village always clung, thinking that perhaps the blood that pulsed almost imperceptibly through the bluish veins of my wrists might one day be the precious pass to wealth and position. My brother, Pa-ari, a year older than I was and much wiser, would scoff at me. “Little princess of the dust!” he would smile. “Queen of the reed beds! Do you really think that if Father was a prince he would have bothered with a few paltry arouras in the middle of nowhere, or married a midwife? Get up now and take the cow to the water. She is thirsty.” And I would wander to where Precious Sweet Eyes, our cow, was tethered. She and I would take the path to the river together, my hand on her soft, warm shoulder, and while she sucked up the life-giving liquid I would study my reflection, gazing into the Nile’s limpid depths. The slow eddies at my feet distorted the image, turning my waving black hair into an indistinct cloud around my face and making of my strange blue eyes a colourless glitter full of mysterious messages. A princess yes, perhaps. One never knew. I never dared to ask my father about the possibility. He was loving, he would sit me on his knee and tell me stories, he was approachable on every subject but his past. The barrier was unspoken but real. I think my mother, still loving him desperately, held him in awe. The villagers certainly did. They trusted him. They relied on him to take his share of the responsibilities of village administration. He helped the local Medjay to police the surrounding area. But they never treated him with the easy familiarity of a genuine villager. His long, golden hair and his steady, startling blue gaze always proclaimed him a foreigner.

I fared little better. I did not particularly like the village girls with their giggles, their simple games, their artless but boring gossip concerning nothing more than village affairs, and they did not like me. With a child’s suspicion for anyone different, they closed ranks against me. Perhaps they feared the evil eye. I, of course, did not make my life among them any easier. I was aloof, superior without intending to be, too full of the wrong kind of questions, my mind always ranging further than the boundaries they understood. Pa-ari was more easily accepted. Though he too was taller and more finely made than the other village children, he was not cursed with blue eyes. From my mother he had inherited the Egyptian brown eyes and black hair and from father an inborn authority that made him a leader amongst his schoolmates. Not that he chose to be a leader. His heart was in words. A mercenary’s land grant could be passed to his son providing the boy followed in his father’s profession, but Pa-ari wanted to be a scribe. “I am content with the farm and I like village life,” he told me once, “but a man who cannot read and write is forced to rely on the wisdom and knowledge of others. He can have no opinion of his own about anything that does not pertain to the physical details of his daily life. A scribe has access to libraries, his heart expands, he is able to judge the past and form the future.”

At the age of four, when I was three, Pa-ari was taken by Father to the temple school. Father himself could neither read nor write and had to rely on the village scribe to tally his crops for the annual taxing and tell him what he owed. We did not know what was in his mind when he took Pa-ari’s hand and led him along the sun-baked track to Wepwawet’s precincts. Perhaps he thought of nothing more than ensuring that his heir would not be cheated when it became his turn to plough the few fields supporting us. I remember standing in the doorway of our house and watching the two of them disappear into the white freshness of the early morning light. “Where is Father taking Pa-ari?” I asked my mother who was emerging behind me, a flax basket laden with washing in her arms. She paused, hefting the load onto her hip.

“To school,” she replied. “Run back and fetch the natron, Thu, there’s a good girl. We must get this done and then take the dough to the oven.” But I did not stir.

“I want to go too,” I said. She laughed.

“No, you do not,” she said. “For one thing, you are too young. For another, girls do not go to school. They learn at home. Now hurry with the natron. I will start for the river.”

By the time my mother had finished slapping the wash on the rocks beside the water, rubbing the coarse linen with natron while she gossiped with the other women who had gathered, my father had returned and gone back to the fields. I saw him bending, hoe in hand, green spears of wheat brushing his naked calves, as I trailed after my mother up the path from the river to the house. I helped her drape the washing over the line strung in our reception hall, open to the sky like all the others in the village, and then watched her fold and pound the dough for our evening meal. I was quiet, thinking, missing Pa-ari who had filled my days with games and small adventures among the papyrus fronds and weeds of the riverbank.

When my mother set off for the communal oven I ran in the opposite direction, left the track that meandered beside the river and followed the narrow irrigation canal that watered father’s few acres. As I drew near he straightened and smiled, shading his eyes with one broad, calloused hand. I came up to him, panting.

“Is something wrong?” he asked. I flung my arms around his solid thigh and hugged him. For some reason that memory has survived in me, bright and vivid after all these years. Often it is not the momentous occasions that cling, the times when we say to ourselves—I will remember this for as long as I live—but tiny, inconsequential happenings that flick past unremarked, only to surface time and again, becoming infused with greater reality as time draws us further from the original event. So it was for me then. I can still feel the soft mat of hair on his sun-blackened skin against my face, see the faintly stirring carpet of young crops so green against the further beige of a desert shimmering in the sun, smell his sweat, reassuring, safe. I stepped back and gazed up at him.

“I want to go to school with Pa-ari,” I said. He bent, and taking a corner of his short, soil-powdered kilt, wiped his forehead.

“No,” he replied.

“Next year, Father, when I am four?”

His slow smile widened. “No, Thu. Girls do not go to school.”

I studied his face. “Why not?”

“Because girls stay at home and learn from their mothers how to be good wives and tend babies. When you are older your mother will teach you how to help babies come into the world. That will be your work, here in the village.” I frowned, trying to understand. An idea occurred to me.

“Father, if I ask Pa-ari, could he stay home and learn to help babies come and I can go to school instead of him?”

My father seldom laughed, but on that day he threw back his head and his mirth echoed against the row of wilting palm trees that grew between his land and the village track. He squatted and enfolded my chin in his large fingers. “Already I pity the lad who sues for you in marriage!” he said. “You must learn your place, my little sweetheart. Patience, docility, humility, these are the virtues of a good woman. Now be a good girl and run home. Keep your mother company when she goes to fetch Pa-ari.” He planted a kiss on the top of my hot head and turned away. I did as I was told, scuffing the dirt as I went, obscurely insulted at his laughter, though I was too young to know why.

I found my mother peering anxiously down the path, a basket on her arm. She gestured to me impatiently as I came up to her. “Leave your father alone when he’s working!” she said sharply. “Gods, Thu, you are filthy and there is no time to wash you. Whatever will the priests think? Come.” She did not reach for my hand, but together we walked past our acres, past other fields, all thick with crops, the wandering line of palms on our left, the tangled river growth on our right, cool and inviting, with the wide reaches of the silver river glimpsed intermittently through it.

After some minutes the fields stopped abruptly, the shrubs to our right straggled into nothing, and Wepwawet’s temple was there, its sandstone pillars soaring to the unrelieved blue of the sky, the sun beating impotently on its walls. From the time of my birth I had come here on the God’s feast days, watching my father present our offerings, prostrating myself beside Pa-ari as the incense rose in shimmering columns above the closed inner court. I had watched the priests moving in solemn procession, their chants falling deep and awesome in the still air. I had seen the dancers swirl and dip, the systra in their delicate fingers tinkling to draw the God’s attention to our prayers. I had sat on the temple water-steps, my toes in the gently sucking Nile, my back to the paved forecourt while my parents were inside with their petitions. To me it was both a place of exotic mystery, forbidding in its secrecy, and the focus of Ma’at in our lives, the spiritual loom to which the various threads of our life were firmly attached. The rhythm of the God’s days was our rhythm, an invisible pulse that regulated the ebb and flow of village and family affairs.

During the time of the troubles a band of foreigners had come. They had camped in the outer court, set huge fires in the inner court. They drank and caroused in the temple, torturing and killing one of the priests who tried to protest, but they had not dared to violate the sanctuary, the place none of us had even seen, the place where the God lived, for Wepwawet was the Lord of War and they feared his displeasure. The village headman and all the adult men had armed themselves in righteous anger and had descended upon the brigands one night as they slept beneath Wepwawet’s beautiful pillars. The women spent the following morning washing the stones free of their blood and no man would ever tell where the bodies were buried. Our males were proud and brave, fit followers of the Lord of War. The High Priest had made a sacrifice of apology and restoration, reconsecrating the holy building. This was before my father and his troop camped beyond the village and went in search of beer.

I loved the temple. I loved the harmony of the pillars that led the eye up to Egypt’s vast heaven. I loved the formality of the rituals; the odour of flowers, dust and incense; the sheer luxury of space; the fine, floating linens of the priests. I did not realize it then, but my appreciation was not for the God himself but for the richness that surrounded him. Of course I was his loyal daughter, I have always been that, yet I cared less for him than for a glimpse of a different existence that set me to dreaming.

We turned onto the paving and made our way across it, my mother and I, passing between the pillars and into the outer court. Several other mothers waited there, some standing, some squatting on the stone, talking quietly. The outer perimeter of the court was honeycombed with small rooms, and from the dimness of one of them came the sound of boys’ voices raised in a sonorous chant that broke into an excited babble as my mother and I came to a halt. She greeted the women cheerfully and they nodded to her. Presently a tumble of children disgorged from the chamber. Each carried a drawstringed bag. Pa-ari came up to us panting, his eyes alight. Something clinked in the bag. “Mother, Thu!” he shouted. “It was fun! I liked it!” He collapsed onto the floor, folding his legs under him, and Mother and I settled beside him. Mother opened her basket, producing black bread and barley beer. Pa-ari accepted his meal gravely and we began to eat. Other mothers, sons and smaller children were doing the same. The court was alive with chatter.

As we were finishing, a lector priest approached, his shaven skull gleaming in the noon sun, the gold of his armband sparkling. His feet were impossibly clean in his white sandals. I stared at him, bemused. I had never been so close to one of the God’s servants before. It was some time before I recognized the scribe who farmed land on the eastern side of the village. I had seen him topped with curly brown hair, streaked with the mud of the Inundation, I had seen him weaving his way down the village street, drunk and singing. I knew later that the God’s men were also farmers like my father, giving three months out of every year to temple service, wearing fine linen, washing four times a day, shaving all body hair regularly, performing the rites and duties appointed by the High Priest. My mother scrambled to her feet and bowed to him, signalling to us to do the same. I managed to describe a clumsy little obeisance. I could not take my eyes off the black kohl around his eyes, the bony surface of his skull. He smelled very good. He greeted us kindly, and put a hand on Pa-ari’s shoulder.

“You have an intelligent son there,” he said to my mother. “He will be a good student. I am happy to be teaching him.”

My mother smiled. “Thank you,” she answered. “My husband will come tomorrow with the payment.”

The priest shrugged lightly. “There is no hurry,” he said. “None of us is going anywhere.”

For some reason his words touched me with cold. I reached up and tentatively drew a finger down the wide blue lector’s sash that enfolded his chest.

“I want to come to school,” I said timidly. He gave me a brief glance but ignored my words.

“I will see you tomorrow, Pa-ari,” he said and turned away. My mother gave me a little shake.

“You must learn not to put yourself forward, Thu,” she snapped. “Pick up the scraps now and put them in the basket. We must be getting home. Don’t forget your bag, Pa-ari.” We began to straggle out of the court, joining the thin stream of other families wending their way back to the village. I sidled close to my brother.

“What’s in the bag, Pa-ari?” I asked. He held it up and shook it.