Ancient Evenings
Page 47
“Yes, it is one hundred and thirty years ago,” he replied, “that I became Governor in the House of the Secluded.”
“And were you pleased at this great change in your career?”
“I was appalled. I remember I had just celebrated my fiftieth birthday. I do not know for what I had saved myself but my body was powerful to behold and more beautiful to me than a home. I was General-of-all-the-Armies, yet felt as if my life had hardly begun. I still lived in barracks, but now thought I was ready to make a splendid marriage—I need only choose the lady. All was before me.
“Yet, like the cloud that crossed the sun, so did the shadow of Usermare’s life come between me and any easeful wealth. For my Pharaoh had a fear in His heart that was like the gloom that came to me from the myrrh trees of the Temple of Hat-shep-sut. Except, it was not the Hittites of whom I thought today, but His own wife, Nefertiri, and there was reason for such gloom. He had taken a Hittite Princess for His new Queen. Now, while it was true that even before Kadesh, He had married another Queen, she was not to be compared to Nefertiri. Although a daughter of the last High Priest of Amon before Bak-ne-khon-su, and of a sublime family, so that the marriage wed the Temple of Amon to the Son of Ra, still this second Queen, Esonefret, was ugly, and Usermare soon ceased to give Her any place beside Nefertiri. He chose instead to build a palace for Her down the river at a small town named Sba-Khut Esonefret, the Concealed Doors of Esonefret, and it was a good name. He bothered to visit just long enough to make a child from time to time. Nefertiri sat as the only Queen in Thebes. It was said for many years that Usermare would dare the displeasure of the Temple of Amon in preference to the rage of His First Consort.
“Yet, when Usermare dared at last to marry a third Queen, the choice was as bold as the manner in which He drove His Chariot. For the new wife was the daughter of Khetasar, and young and beautiful. Her mother, the Queen Pudekhipa, was an Aryan from Mede, and it was said by all who saw her daughter that the pale blonde hair of the Hittite Princess was more luminous than the moon.”
“Here, I must interrupt,” said Ptah-nem-hotep. “How long had you been General-of-all-the-Armies when this third marriage took place?”
“For five years. The Princess Mernafrure arrived in the Thirty-Third Year of the Reign of Usermare, twenty-eight years after Kadesh and thirteen after the treaty. I know these dates well, for I became General-of-all-the-Armies eight years after the signing of the treaty.”
“One matter,” said Ptah-nem-hotep, “still confuses Me. You speak of the furies of Nefertiri. Yet, at the time of the treaty, thirteen years before, it was already arranged that this Hittite Princess would become His wife.”
“Your knowledge of such matters is close indeed,” said my great-grandfather.
“Not close enough. I do not understand why Nefertiri agreed to this third marriage,” said our Pharaoh.
“The Hittite Princess was only seven years old then, and not all matters in a treaty are equally honored. In those years, moreover, Nefertiri could not count as yet on the power of Her oldest son. But by the time that Usermare married the Hittite, the Prince Amen-khepshu-ef had become a great General, and could prove a hazard to the throne. Besides, there was nothing now to be gained from marrying this Princess, indeed there was not even wealth enough at Kadesh to pay back loans Khetasar had taken on signing the treaty. Khetasar sent Mernafrure as tribute, no more. Usermare did not even receive Her. She arrived after a difficult journey, and as a gesture of contempt, was put into His harem at Fayum. There He met Her. No one in Thebes ceased speaking of it. For so soon as Usermare encountered this lady, He was overcome by Her beauty—so I heard—and removed Her from His harem, married Her, brought Her to Thebes. Worse. Her name being Mernafrure, all called Her Nefrure, which, being too close to Nefertiri, our Pharaoh changed Her name to Rama-Nefru so that it be near His own. Those who knew Nefertiri said no insult could be worse.”
Menenhetet brought his hands together, and lay his face into the cup they formed as if to drink from the past.
“This then was our situation: a Queen on either side of Usermare. Many changes were upon us. I did not expect, however, that the first would fall on me. Usermare had come to the decision to send Amen-khep-shu-ef far from the Palace. His First Queen and oldest son must be separated. Yet He did not dare to send Him off to new wars in Libya without promoting Him. Since my rank was higher than the Prince’s, Usermare decided to give it to Him.”
“Without a word to you?”
“I should have taken the measure of His distress. He was making great plans for His Third Festival of Festivals which was nearly a year away, but would be the greatest of such festivals in His Reign. So He lived in terror that He would die in this year for He knew great uneasiness at His own deeds. He was building a grand chamber for the festival—The Hall of King Unas—but to His wrath, He discovered it would take two years to quarry the stone upriver and bring it in. So He made the decision to pull down our Temple of Thutmose in Thebes, and worse, the Temple of Seti at Abydos. He would use His Father’s stones! These, and the stones of Thutmose, were the only marble suitable. I cannot tell You how many priests had to be present at these works of demolition each day the stones were removed, and their curses—by way of the priests’ prayers—dispelled. Sometimes, the old inscriptions were chipped away. More prayers! Sometimes, the writings on these stones were turned to the wall, and so were hidden from sight. How many great names were thereby buried in the Festival Hall of King Unas.
“To the fear He knew of Nefertiri, therefore, was added the terror of shifting these great blocks. I remember that on the day He brought me with Him out to the stone works, He took me later into the room where He slept in the Little Palace, a great honor, for no one but His First Queen and His Second were usually invited there. Yet before He came to the purpose of our conversation, He talked for a long time of plots and intrigues.
“Now, my Pharaoh had a heart that was not like others. If our hearts were made of rope, none would have knots so great as His. His anger, and His fear, His breath, and His pleasure, were all wrapped around one another so closely He never knew the reason for what He did, yet He did all things with great force. The strength of all that passed through His heart had force enough to bruise the air itself. I do not think He even felt a whisper of His true fear of Nefertiri or Amen-khep-shu-ef, yet He felt, nonetheless, a terrible fear. It was so great, He even spoke to me. ‘There will come a day,’ He said, ‘of fearful bad luck in all three parts of the day. In those hours, someone will try to kill Me.’ It was His belief that some of the women in His House of the Secluded might know the assassin.
“I felt His terror. It did not attack His chest like the sharp point of a sword, but more like a poison in His thoughts. Over and over on this day, He talked of plots, and while I did not understand it then, I can speak now of His fear. It is because so many come before a Pharaoh that His memory can never be good. To remember, one must be able to look backward. Yet the Pharaoh is pushed forward by those who think of Him at every moment. Their thoughts are always shining into the darkness ahead for they wish to give Him the power to see truly into what is still to come. Only a Pharaoh can be our guide. Yet Usermare lived in so much fear that He was like a man who looks at a field glistening in the sun and thinks it is a river. Indeed, it is a river, but of light, not water. So did Usermare have an ear for treacherous voices and a nose to sniff out any plot against His glory, but He obtained His whiff of burning meat before the fire was lit. So did Usermare see so far ahead that He even glimpsed the plot that was going to arise more than a hundred years later against Your Father. To a God, one hundred years is like the interval between two breaths. So He saw the blow falling on Himself.
“Therefore, He distrusted the House of the Secluded. After many a pause, He told me that He had decided to place me there. I was the only man in the Two-Lands who was wise enough to discover whether there was a true plot or none. ‘Yes,’ He said, ‘at Kadesh, who else but you could k
now the mind of Metella?’ He took my arm. ‘No task,’ He said, ‘is more important than caring for Me. That is noble work for any General,’ and He began to tell of great Generals of the past who had become Pharaohs. Powerful was His breath!
“Yet, He was sending me into a place where there would be none but women. When I did not dare to refuse, I knew that the warrior in Him—even if it was His own order—must despise me.
“So, I had to wonder if my new title—Governor of the Gardens of the Secluded—was also His way of telling me that thirty years might have passed, but He had not forgotten how I bled like a woman on the day He separated my buttocks. I might be a General to others, but from His exalted view, I was a little queen. Grand Nanny of the harem. Could this be His humor? I nearly choked on the rage in my throat.
“So soon as I was away from Him, I began to pray. ‘Let there be a plot against Him,’ I begged, ‘and I will lead it myself!’ ”
V
THE BOOK OF QUEENS
ONE
“In the Gardens of the Secluded, I learned what I could not have been taught in other places, and was introduced to beguilements as different from war as the rose from the axe. While I cannot speak of how it may look today, a hundred women lived there then and it was the loveliest part of the Palace. Behind its walls were many fine houses, and from each kitchen you could hear much gaiety for many of the little queens loved to eat and were merry when there was food before them. And of course they loved to drink. Each day, after all, was like the one before. The little queens arose long after sounds from the Palace beyond their walls had awakened everyone but themselves, and through the morning they would dress each other and hold long conversations over what they would borrow, and told odd tales of what they had lost to one another. For if the Pharaoh happened to visit a little queen while she was wearing a borrowed necklace, it became her own necklace. Since the King had seen it on her, there was no question of giving it back. Of course, His gifts were never loaned so lightly. Any adornment that came from Usermare was not to be touched by anyone else. Once, a little queen broke this rule, but she was obliged to pay a fearful penalty. Her small toe was severed from her left foot. As quickly destroy the first column of a temple built by Ramses the Great as lend one of His gifts. Afterward, this little queen did not dance, in fact, she hardly moved, and she ate tidbits like the candied wings of birds to restore the ache left by the stump of her little toe, and became so fat that everyone called her Honey-Ball. I was told of her when first I entered the harem.
“In those days—was I more weary of my old command than I knew?—I would kneel to study the flowers at the edge of each royal pond. There was one bloom, an orchid I would suppose, but of an orange hue, and I spoke to it many times, which is to say I would utter my thoughts aloud and the flower knew to reply, although I could not tell for certain what it said. With no breeze passing over us, it would still stir when I came near and sometimes it swayed on its stem as undulantly as one of the little queens in a dance, indeed its petals trembled in my presence like a girl who cannot conceal her love. Yet this would happen when none of the other flowers were moving at all in the still air. It was as if the stem of this orchid had roots as deep as the thoughts of my heart, and I could breathe with the same God we knew tonight when He brought together those two pieces of black-copper-from-heaven. What spirit was in the flower I do not know, but the filaments would curl beneath my eyes, and its tiny anthers would grow larger under the power of my gaze until I could see the pollen gather.
“Like those anthers were the eyes of the little queens when they chose to adore the sight of you. I do not suppose there was one who was not ready to look at me in such a way before the year was out. But then, any man who was not a eunuch would have found it unnatural to serve in the Gardens of the Secluded and know the nearness of so many female bodies. Since they belonged to Usermare, one would no more breathe their perfume too closely than drink from His golden cup. Death to be caught in the act with any one of these hundred women. While I had looked at death two hundred times already, and often with a shout of happiness, I had been at war. Death, in the moment you know your glory, can seem like an embrace by the arms of the sun, but now I was weak with the knowledge that I wished to live, and so had no desire to be dispatched with the Pharaoh’s curse on my back.
“I spoke to the little queens, therefore, as if they were flowers by the edge of the pond, and did my best to show a General who cultivated a face of stone. Each of the scars on my cheeks might have been shaped by a chisel.
“Of course, such fear did not please me. Each morning I awoke in the House of the Secluded with more desire to learn the ways of these beautiful women. I saw that my peasant beginnings, no matter how they had been dignified by the achievements of a soldier, would be of no use for comprehending the airs and silly disputes of this harem where I was now the Overseer, especially when I did not know if their arts of cosmetic and story-telling, of music and dance and kingly seduction, were as common here as an ass and a plow to a peasant, or partook of magic itself. Nor could I decide if the passing quarrels I witnessed each day were as important to the Gods as any battle between two men. Indeed they seemed to be fought as fiercely in some God’s service! I was such a stranger to the House of the Secluded that in the beginning I did not even know how the little queens were chosen nor how many were daughters of the noblest families in each of the forty-two nomes. But then the woman who could have told me much about them, the ancient matron who was their supervisor, had just died.”
“I do not like the way you tell us of the harem,” said Hathfertiti. “Since I have never been in the House of the Secluded, I cannot picture for myself how it looks. Indeed,” said my mother, with every sign of annoyance, “there are no faces in your thoughts, nor anything for us to look upon.”
My great-grandfather shrugged.
“Surely, you are not tired,” said Ptah-nem-hotep, “now that we are near to these stories of love so much more curious to relate than the encounters of war?”
“No, I would not say to You-of-the-Two-Great-Houses that my thoughts are weary, but still I hesitate. It is not easy to describe. I think it was the most curious year of my life. Do you know, I had never had a home before? I had one now—in the Gardens—and servants to keep it for me. I was free to leave whenever I wished. I could, if I desired, have gone to visit any one of several women I knew on the outside, and yet I was like a creature in the grip of black-copper-from-heaven. I did not dare to move from the Gardens. It was as if all I was now trying to learn would disappear the moment I stepped out through the gates and struck the clatter of the streets of Thebes. Besides, I was not so free. There was the unspoken command of Usermare-Setpenere. He would not wish His Governor to be away from the Secluded on any undeclared hour when He might arrive.
“Moreover, I had all the years of my life until this hour to contemplate.” My great-grandfather looked sad. “Ah,” he said with a sigh, “the tiny birds need stirring,” and he waved his hand at the nearest cage. The fireflies remained somnolent. Behind the fine and transparent linen that confined them, I could hardly see them stir.
My great-grandfather did not speak anymore, and we sat in silence. This night, I had listened to his voice so many times that I did not need to hear it any longer. I could imagine virtually all about which he spoke. Indeed, what he had to say became clearer than his voice, which is to confess that I began to have many pictures of the gardens in the House of the Secluded and saw the women as their likeness appeared in his thoughts. I could have stood upon a small bridge over one of the ponds in these gardens, and heard the little queens speak to one another. And I could see my great-grandfather’s face as it must have been then (which was certainly as stern and as marked with the cuts of swords as he had told us) but now I needed to keep my eyes open no longer, for so powerful became his thoughts that I could not only hear the voices of the little queens but his voice as well, and it vibrated inside me like the heaviest string on a lute.