The Egyptian Royals Collection (48 page)

Chapter Twenty-Five

1344 BCE

Akhet, Season of Overflow

MY HUSBAND DIDN’T
mention my promise on the river again, and before I knew it the seasons of Peret and Shemu passed and word arrived that Djedi’s ship had come into the harbor. I put on my wig and brightest linen belt.

Nakhtmin raised his brows. “You’d think it was the queen who was arriving.”

We rode to the port, where we found the ship to be as large and impressive as I remembered it. The scent of roasted cumin hung heavy in the air, and we pushed our way past the people who were packed like fish along the quay. Many of them had come to see their loved ones arrive. More than fifty sailors had left with Djedi that day in Thoth, and now their wives pressed against each other with flowers and lotus blossoms in their hair. When I spotted Ipu on the docks, I gaped. She was round with child!

“My lady!” Ipu made her way through the throng. “My lady!” She threw her arms around my neck, and I could barely reach mine around hers. “Look.” She grinned, and indicated her round stomach. “He waited for you.”

“How many months?” I gasped.

“Nearly nine.”

“Nine,” I repeated. It was impossible to believe. Ipu. My Ipu. With child.

She turned to Nakhtmin. “I thought about you when I was gone,” she admitted. “On the shores of Punt, the soldiers carry weapons unlike anything in Egypt. My husband brought you back examples of their weaponry. All kinds. In ebony and cedar. Even one in a metal they call iron.” She put her hand on her round stomach, looking healthier than I’d ever seen her.

Nakhtmin said gently, “Why don’t you two go home. I can help Djedi here, and the two of you can talk. This is no place for a woman nine months with child.”

I took Ipu back to the house she hadn’t seen in nearly a year. As we walked, she told me about a land where the people were darker than Egyptians and lighter than Nubians. “And they wear strange ornaments in their hair. Bronze and ivory. The wealthier the woman, the more charms in her hair.”

“And the herbs?” I pressed.

“Oh, my lady, herbs like you’ve never seen. Djedi has an entire chest of them for you.”

I clapped my hands. “Did you ask the local women what they were for?”

“I wrote down most of it,” she replied, but we had come upon her house and her footsteps slowed. She looked up in wonder at the two-story building, white with brown trim around the windows and doors. “I had forgotten how nice it is to be home,” she said, holding her stomach, and a strange feeling of envy washed over me.

There was a deep sense of stillness when we opened the door, a quiet I could only remember from the tombs in Thebes. Ipu looked around at the statues of Amun, all standing in the same places that she had left them. Besides a thin layer of dust, nothing had changed. Except her. I was the first to speak. “We should roll up these shades and let in some light.” I went about rolling up the reed mats while Ipu watched. Then I turned around. “What’s wrong?” I asked her.

She sank down on a bench, putting her hands on her stomach. “I feel so badly that I’ll be the one on the bricks. I wanted you to have a child so much.”

“Oh, Ipu,” I said tenderly, making her move over and embracing her. “It’s the will of the gods. There’s a reason for all of it.”

“But what?” she asked bitterly. “What can it be? I prayed for you while I was there,” she admitted. “To a local goddess.”

I sucked in my breath. “Ipu.”

“It couldn’t hurt,” she said firmly, and there was a seriousness in her tone I’d rarely heard before.

We looked at each other in the soft sunlight that filtered through the lowered mats, and I said, “You are a good friend to me, Ipu.”

“As are you, my lady.”

We talked and cleaned at the same time, dusting the wall hangings and scrubbing the tiles. She told me about all of her adventures on the Nile. They had begun by sailing upriver to Coptos, then, after leaving the ship in the care of a sailor, they traveled east by caravan through the Wadi Hammamat. When they arrived at the seacoast, Djedi bought three ships for all of the goods they intended to bring back, and then they hired more sailors and embarked on their voyage to the south. She recalled how one of the men was nearly killed by a crocodile when he went for a swim, and how the croaking of the hippos kept her up at night.

“Weren’t you ever afraid?”

“Djedi was there, and fifty armed sailors. There was nothing to fear on the water besides the animals, and as we sailed farther south there were animals like you’ve never seen.”

I lowered my dust linen. “Like?”

“Like snakes the length of this room and cats as big as …” Ipu searched her loggia. “As big as that table.”

My eyes went wide. “Bigger than our statues at the Temple of Amun?”

“Much bigger.”

Then she began to describe the magnificent herbs that she had found, and the cinnamon wood they had brought back by the chest-full. “We walked everywhere, my lady. There were no litters for women. Only donkeys to ride. And once I grew big, it was easier to walk than ride.” Djedi had allowed her into the foreign marketplaces, where women sold dark-colored pods with a gingery-lemon scent, used to flavor honey cakes and bread. Ipu had seen grown men the size of children, and tall spotted beasts that ate leaves from the tops of trees. Women sold dry spices and flavored tea, and the colors in the marketplace were bright saffron yellow, earthy basil, and flaming red. “Like their garments.”

“Do all of the people wear red?”

“Only the rich. It’s not like in Egypt,” she explained, where all classes wore white.

When Djedi returned from the quay with Nakhtmin, sailors trailed behind him carrying chests filled with goods. The smell of cedar filled the house, and we sat around the loggia looking through the exotic finds and listening to the stories each of them held. Some of the chests were gifts for us. There was an ivory box filled with the herbs that Ipu had searched out herself, and a wooden case with the weapons for Nakhtmin. Ipu brought back a dress in bright indigo for me as well. The rest were goods for the house and jewelry for the coming child. This would be its inheritance: ivory and gold from the land of Punt.

We ate well that night, and stayed up until morning listening to Djedi’s hearty laugh when he retold the tale of a sailor who ate a local dish and couldn’t leave his hole in the ground for a day, since in Punt, unlike Egypt, there was no such thing as toilets. Only Djedi could match Ipu’s full laughter, and when we left, carrying my box full of herbs and Nakhtmin’s new weapons, it was as if they had never been gone.

In Egypt, there is a saying: When good fortune looks down upon us, it does so in threes, one for each part of the Eye of Horus. His upper lid, his lower lid, and the eye itself. The morning after Ipu arrived nine months heavy with child, the drought ended. The rains came down in heavy torrents, splashing into the Nile and making puddles of mud across our fields. In the evening, while Nakhtmin took dinner by the brazier and I chatted with Ipu, a messenger from Amarna arrived, holding out a scroll with my family’s seal. Djedi, who had opened the door to our house, handed it to me with wide, interested eyes. I don’t think he had ever seen a vizier’s seal; heavy golden wax on the finest papyrus grown in the Delta. I opened it at once and read it aloud.

A new birth is weighing heavily with your sister and the priestesses of Aten hold hope it will be twins, or perhaps the sign of a prince. But she is sick often and summons you here. Nakhtmin is welcome.

Ipu gasped. “A
fifth
child?”

I knew what else she wanted to say. That only a queen blessed by the gods could be so fertile. Every year Nefertiti was with child no matter rain or drought. And suddenly, without warning, my eyes filled with tears.

Nakhtmin lowered his cup. “Oh,
miw-sher,”
he said tenderly.

I wiped the tears from my eyes, embarrassed. “You are to come,” I said. “My father wouldn’t let my mother send such a letter if he thought you were in danger. Will you come?” I asked him.

He hesitated, but when he saw the hope in my face he replied, “Of course I will. We will sail as soon as Ipu goes to the birthing pavilion.”

I wrote back at once, telling my mother we would sail as soon as Ipu had given birth. “It will not be for at least fifteen days,” I replied, and the letter that came swiftly in return five days later was in Nefertiti’s own hand.

You want to wait for the birth of your godchild when your nephews, the future Princes of Egypt, are about to be born? I am ill every morning and can’t sleep through the night, but you want to stay in Thebes when I could be dead by Aythyr?

I could hear the blame in her voice. If she died and I was not there to bless her, my
ka
would never be at rest. I finished her letter.

I know you would never abandon me, not with Anubis so close at my door, so I have sent a ship. When it arrives, it will take you with all speed to Amarna. And since I know you will not come without Nakhtmin, he is welcome, too. You may both stay in the guest rooms near the Audience Chamber.

I crushed the new scroll in my hand. “And so it begins again. She has sent a ship. But I’m not leaving,” I vowed, “not until I have seen my godchild blessed.”

Ipu shook her head. “This time your sister is right, my lady. When the ship comes, you must go. If she’s carrying twins …” She spread her hands in sympathy.

Nakhtmin nodded. “I do not need to tell you how my mother died,” he said softly. “And neither of my brothers survived.”

There was no choice but to go back to Amarna, to return to the city from which I had been banished.

“But what if Ipu’s birth ends badly?” I whispered, and Nakhtmin turned over in the darkness. The images of Tawaret that had been carved into the bedposts looked down at us benevolently in the moonlight.

“You know what the physicians say, Mutnodjmet.” He put his thumb on my forehead to smooth away the care.

“They think Ipu will give birth within the next seven days. But they could be wrong.” I worried my lip, thinking of Nefertiti’s ship approaching Thebes. “What if the ship comes and Ipu isn’t ready?”

I stayed up thinking of ways to stall the ship. Nefertiti wasn’t due for months. She could wait. If Ipu’s birth didn’t happen for days …

But I needn’t have worried. The next morning, Ipu went into the birthing pavilion that Djedi had built and attached to their home. All morning she pushed and screamed. Outside the carved door, Nakhtmin comforted Djedi, while Ipu gripped my hand and made me promise to look after the boy or girl, whichever it should be, if she should not survive.