by Daniel Caet
While she was talking to me, I could not stop looking at her face and, no matter how hard I tried, I could not avoid returning again and again to her resemblance to Liliath. She, completely oblivious to that resemblance to an ancestress that she would never hear about, continued down the street until, suddenly, she turned off in a small alley leading to the backyard of a house. There, an ageing man awaited us with dark cloth cloaks similar to those worn by low-level slaves.
“My good Ahmet, thanks again,” she said, picking up the cloak and putting it on. “Put this on and follow me,” she said, holding out one to me. Then she climbed into a cart pulled by oxen and covered by an awning that waited on the other side of the patio. I followed her without questioning as she had indicated, but more and more nervous about the turn of events.
The cart rattled through the streets of the city without giving me chance to see where we were going.
“You have nothing to worry about,” she said seeing that I was becoming increasingly uncomfortable with the uncertainty. “We head to the temple of Amun in Karnak, a short distance from Thebes. Well, more specifically we're going to the slave village.”
“The slave village?” I asked, unable to understand how such a thing could exist.
“I am not in the habit of questioning my mother’s decisions, but I think that at this point it is evident that you are not a Hebrew slave if you did not know what I am talking about. But if she considers you the right person to watch over me, all right, for the moment, let's pretend I do not know anything,” she said with a smile that once again brought Liliath to my mind. “The pharaoh has planned to build a new hall of columns and a new avenue in the temple of Amun in gratitude to the God for his reign, although I believe that the gratitude is more towards the priests of the God. A work of this magnitude implies labour, slaves and they have to live somewhere. On the outskirts of the temple, Seti has established a shanty town where the slaves he needs for his project survive every day. And it's not the only one. There are towns like this scattered throughout Egypt, anywhere Seti has started some kind of construction there is a group of slaves, mostly Hebrews, watching their lives pass in deplorable conditions. If there is a place on earth similar to hell, that is where we are going.”
The passion with which Ankh referred to the place where we were going led me to understand that this was very important for her. I wanted to ask her why, why she risked her existence for the slaves, what could she give them that needed so much risk, but her serious and deep face made me understand that nothing I said would have any effect and that the reasons of all this would be shown to me at the right time.
The cart stopped suddenly and the old man who had received us in the alley in Thebes opened the awning so that we could go down. Ankh thanked him once again and promised not to take too long. The man smiled and nodded without uttering a word. Before me an image that I could never forget was shown. What Ankh had called a settlement was a true city in itself. Hundreds of adobe houses crowded together, forming dark lanes where the sun never entered. The pestilence in that place was indescribable. An acid stench of excrement, rust and death filled the streets. We entered the town covered with our cloaks without anyone paying any attention to us. Not even the soldiers who were patrolling the streets stopped to look at us, probably mistaking us for two more irrelevant slaves. We continued walking through the narrow, cold streets until suddenly Ankh stood in front of a wooden door in one of the houses and called softly. The door opened to reveal a middle-aged woman whose skin was darkened and tanned by the sun, white hair and deep blue eyes.
“Come in,” she said, looking at the street to see that no one had followed us.
Many more people were waiting for us inside. Around a ramshackle table sat a young man in his thirties and a boy about thirteen. At the back of the room there were two old cots and in one of them an old woman was breathing with difficulty. A girl took care of her by removing the sweat from her forehead with a damp cloth. As she turned to dip the cloth in a small clay bowl I could see that she was the girl I had seen in the palace entering Rameses' room the night before, but I said nothing.
“Iohebed, I'm so glad to see you,” Ankh said, hugging the woman that had welcomed us.
“And I am glad that you're here, my lady, you do not know how much I appreciate it,” the woman replied fondly.
“How is she?” Ankh asked, looking at the old woman.
“The fever has subsided slightly, but it is still very difficult for her to breathe.”
Ankh removed her cloak and approached the woman sitting on the cot next to her.
“Mariam, it's me, little Ankh. How are you today?” she said, stroking her face with infinite tenderness.
The woman tried to speak and sit up, but the air in her lungs was insufficient for such effort.
“No, no, do not make any effort! Now you must rest to be able to get well. My mother has given me this, they are herbs to prepare an infusion to be taken every night. They will help the fever go away completely and the lungs begin to cleanse.” she said as she handed a small bundle of linen to the girl.
“Thank you again, my lady, I do not know how we can pay you everything you do for us!”
“You have nothing to thank and you know, Iohebed, both my mother and I will always be by your side.”
Suddenly Ankh realised that she had not explained who I was and that the young boy did not stop staring at me with suspicion.
“Oh, forgive me! This is Helel, a man of confidence of my mother’s who is now at my service.”
“Welcome, Helel! This is your house as it is my mistress’, Ankhsemkepté. These are my sons, Aaron, Moses and Miriam,” the woman said with a sincere smile. “But sit down, I beg you, I have nothing to offer you except the possibility of resting from your journey.”
“We cannot stay long, I just wanted to make sure the medicine arrived on time. Have any of the camp doctors come to see you?”
“No, replied the young boy, nor will they come either. They do not care about anything, an old woman who cannot do any work will not be treated by any doctor, we are only cattle for the lords of Egypt.”
“Enough Moses!” said Iohebed. “Forgive my boy, anger controls his tongue and his brain!”
“No, I will not shut up! If father were alive he would not be here quiet, he would do something to change all this.”
“But father is not here,” replied his brother, “and in his absence I am the head of this house, so you will keep quiet and respect mother, or I will beat you to death.”
“We’ll see about that!” he replied, rising suddenly to strike his older brother.
An instant later and without anyone knowing how it happened Ankh was standing with one hand on each of the brothers and her voice was a whisper.
“Now you will calm down, nothing has happened here!”
The two boys immediately sat down and stayed in a kind of hypnotic trance where they could only follow her orders. Then Ankh decided it was better that we parted.
“I'm afraid we cannot stay anymore, Iohebed. If we delay, someone will come out in our search.”
“I understand, my lady, thank you once again for everything you always do for us. May Yahve bless you!” she said, kissing Ankh's forehead.
“Thank you, it's not that I'm not in need of God's blessings,” Ankh said, caressing her belly.
We left the house without saying a word as we had arrived, wrapped in our cloaks until the exit of the town where the old man of the cart was waiting for us. A moment later we were back inside, protected by the awning on the way to Thebes.
“Are you not going to ask me?” Ankh said suddenly staring at me.
“I do not know what my lady means,” I lied.
“We both know perfectly well that you do not understand why I came here today.”
“I'm not the one to question, my lady,” I said, feigning a humility I've never had.
Her response was the most delicious laugh I've ever heard and made somethi
ng inside me jump through the air.
“I do not know how my mother has come to know you, but seeing the tremendous efforts you have to do to obey without question is extremely funny. Iohebed and her family are old friends of my mother’s,” she continued. “About ten years ago, the plague devastated the town. Men, women and children died by the dozens every day. The doctors that the pharaoh had assigned to the town refused to enter for fear of contracting the disease that continued to devastate the town without mercy. Seti, for fear of losing his fundamental labour force, ordered all doctors and healers from the villages around Thebes to be moved to the village to take care of the sick, including my mother. That's where she met Iohebed and her husband, Amram. He had contracted the plague and was very ill. For her part Iohebed was pregnant with her daughter Miriam, and about to give birth. My mother stayed with them and helped them as much as she could; them and many others. Unfortunately, she could not do anything for Amram who died shortly afterwards, but when an extremely complicated delivery threatened to take Iohebed and her daughter too, my mother managed to save both. Since then my mother and Iohebed have been friends, my mother has never lost contact or love for her and her family, and has always done everything she could for them even after we moved to the palace.”
The explanation did not catch me by surprise. I knew that for many years that had happened, no matter how many sorrows she had suffered, Sadith had an immense heart and was not able to flee from the misfortune of others. Something that, without a doubt, Ankh had inherited. That thought made the face of the young Miriam come to my mind. For a second, I doubted whether I should say anything to Ankh about her visit to the palace, but I thought that if her presence there constituted any risk to herself or to Sadith, she could not forgive me for keeping silent.
“My lady…”
“Yes?”
“The girl named Miriam …”
“Yes, what about her?”
“I do not know if it's of any relevance or if it's just a slave gossip, but last night I saw two soldiers escort her to Prince Rameses’ rooms.”
Ankh's face suddenly turned pale and her concern was obvious.
“Are you sure it was her?”
“I have no doubt, I could see her face clearly.”
“If it's so, I'm very sorry for Miriam, but even more sorry for all of us.”
Seeing my incomprehension reflected in my face Ankh continued talking.
“Miriam has no option but to obey an order from Rameses. If his soldiers are ordered to look for the most beautiful young women in the village and bring them before him, Miriam must obey if elected or else her entire family will pay for it. But this is nothing new in the lives of the slaves, Helel. As you have heard from the mouth of Moses, they are nothing but cattle for Egypt. And it is not the first time that Rameses gives free rein to his lust among the Hebrew women. What worries me is that the last time this happened, the blood of the innocents flooded the streets of Thebes. One of the many women whom Rameses forced to satisfy his basest instincts conceived a son. The son of a prince of Egypt and a slave, an aberration in the eyes of Seti. If the child had been born of a concubine or a lady of the court, he would have been raised as a noble, with no possibility of accessing the throne, but he would have desired for nothing in his life that was not within his reach. Unfortunately, the Hebrew blood of that little boy condemned him to a single fate, death. Seti ordered Rameses to get rid of the mother and the child and he was willing to carry out his orders, but when his soldiers entered the village to capture them, the family of the woman had hidden and given the child to another family to take care of him thinking that, not being able to identify him, Rameses should desist in his effort. But Rameses is a hungry lion who does not respect anything or anyone. In his rage at having been deceived, he managed to convince his father that the risk of a Hebrew slave with royal blood jeopardised his throne and got him to authorise an act that Seti has been regretting for years. At dawn, Seti's army entered the village and killed all the boys under six months of age.” The emotion clung to her throat making her stop for a moment. “The abomination committed soon reached the ears of the city, but Rameses’s soldiers were in charge of silencing anyone who raised his voice to recriminate that horrible act. One more proof of the helplessness of the poor. Call me innocent, Helel, but I want to think that if I cannot change the world in which I have to live, at least I can help so that it is not so horrible.”
Listening to Ankh's words and seeing her sincere pain for what happened, I could only think how wrong I was the day that I believed that humans had not learned anything in the thousand years that I had been locked up. Humans had spent those years refining their ability to hate and their evil, and they had become true masters.
Loss
I spent the next few weeks becoming Ankh’s shadow as Sadith had asked me and far from implying any effort for me, being by her side filled my days with joy. I accompanied her on her trips to the market, her visits to the temples and her walks around the city. Every hour that passed by her side flew by and I, who had been one of the lords of the heavens, felt strangely complete being simply her slave. I never forgot anything that had happened, none of the many things I had lost, but all those things by her side weighed less, hurt less.
All that time Sadith stayed more or less apart from the two of us, leaving me the task of protecting Ankh as she had indicated. I had no doubt that her distance was only apparent and that she knew everything we did and what happened in our day to day, but she did not interfere at any time. A couple of times I heard in the palace that she was traveling, but I could never confirm if it was true or if she had simply locked herself in her rooms and the loose tongues of the slaves had done the rest; until one day, Ptehsure told me that Sadith was waiting for me in her rooms.
When the doors of her room opened, I was surprised by the austerity in which she lived. Yes, the rooms were large, much like Ankh’s, but the decoration was minimal, and the furniture was designed to be functional not to show opulence. Her bed, placed on a kind of low pedestal, was simple wood, without paintings, ornaments or carvings. In the center of the room, a large round table of unpolished wood was the only accompaniment to a pair of chairs like the one I had seen on her terrace some time ago. The table was covered in papyrus scrolls, some unrolled and others protected in leather covers to prevent them from losing their color due to the sunlight, and from my position I could see that there were others on the bed.
“It would be better that you come in, or someone will take you for the door’s frame” she said smiling.
I entered the room and approached her. Her face showed a tiredness that I had not seen before in her. Under her eyes, two large black-coloured marks denoted a distinct lack of sleep and the way her cheekbones were marked indicated that she had not been spending much time eating lately.
“You have nothing to worry about,” she said, and I knew she was reading my mind again. “It's a bad habit that I have, reading can take me, and it absorbs me to the point of making me forget even about myself.”
“Do you know that this new habit of getting into my head is getting annoying?”
Her laughter echoed in the room filling everything with momentary joy.
“Forgive me,” she said, still smiling. “As you said it has become a habit and I do not have many people with whom I can do it without them thinking they are crazy or that I am a witch.”
“I do not know what degree of sanity the people you're dealing with have, but the truth is that you fit quite well in the definition of a witch,” I replied, still jokingly.
“Compliments do not work with me, Helel,” she snapped, and we both burst out laughing.
That moment of relaxation, of affability was something we both needed, and I knew that it had brought back to both of us memories of a time when her worries were less, when she was just a child and I was nobody. But the moment passed quickly and Sadith was again the rock I had known.
“I understand that you have
adapted without problems to your work of watching over Ankh. She seems very happy with you.”
“I cannot thank you enough that you let me be by her side. Every moment that I can take care of her, protect her, I get a little closer to the children I lost, and, in a way, I feel reconciled with my past.”
She nodded with a slight smile and got up from the chair she was sitting in to approach the table.
“It is about your past precisely that I wanted to talk to you about. What do you know about what happened to you, about the reason why you are among men? And I want the truth, Helel.” she said directly, leaving no doubt as to the seriousness of her request.
For a moment I doubted if I should tell her the truth or if it was better to lie, and I know that she probably could see my doubt inside me, though her face remained unperturbed. But the doubts that I could have were dissipated with a single thought, family. I who had suffered so much for the treachery of those who I considered my family had in front of me one of the only two living people in the world who I could consider part of it. That thought made me feel a comforting warmth inside me and I told her what I knew. I told her about my fall, about what I could remember, about what Abbadon had told me and what Rafael had spat at me to hurt me just before killing her parents. When I spoke of Rafael I noticed how her hands twitched slightly, and I regretted bringing back a memory so painful for her, but I had no choice. If I decided to open my heart to Sadith it should be completely.
“As you see, it's more what I do not know than what I know. In fact, if I must believe the little information I have, most of my situation has been unexpected for many, something even the archangels could not foresee.”
“I understand. In fact, that's just what I expected,” she said turning to support his hands on the table with his back to me. After a brief silence, she continued. “A thousand years go a long way, you know? You have spent them locked in a prison, I have spent them counting every day, every hour and having to fill in all those hours, which, believe me, is not easy. Others would have given to fill their lives with lovers or embark on the pursuit of wealth or power. My only consolation has been the books. They taught me to read in the temple in Akkad, like all the priestesses and since then I have not stopped doing it. A thousand years have also given me time to learn many languages; so basically, I have ended up reading anything that fell into my hands. However, during all this time there has been a kind of reading that has obsessed me especially and I think you will understand why. These manuscripts,” she continued, “are an example of this type of reading. During all this time I have done everything possible to get any manuscript that spoke of immortality, either during my travels and changes of residence or through good friends.” Her words echoed slightly in the emptiness of the room and the echo repeated in my chest, but I did not say a word.