Ahmose felt sure she could not trust Mutnofret’s denial. But she doubted she would get any more information from her sister. “Still, I wish I knew what to expect.”
“Well, from what I’ve heard, it hurts terribly the first time. And you bleed like a cut calf. But after the first time, it gets more bearable. Sometimes.”
“Then why does anybody do it?”
“Oh, to make children, I suppose. A wife’s duty is to give her husband heirs, after all.”
“Yes, but…but I’ve heard some of the women talk as if they like it.”
“I’m sure every woman pretends that she likes it to her friends. It is a woman’s duty. But who could really like all that pain and bleeding?”
The plucking-woman packed away her tweezers and jars. “You are finished, Great Lady.”
Ahmose sat up, suddenly weak and dizzy. “Oh, Nofret. How will I get through this?”
Mutnofret sank onto the bench beside Ahmose, pulling her close in a quick, tight hug. “I will be here for you. Always sisters, remember? For now it’s best to forget about it. It is days away, and we have so much to do before the wedding feast. Stand up; let me have a look at you.”
Ahmose stood unsteadily. The place between her legs smarted from the plucking; she felt tender and raw, and especially vulnerable. Her hands shook, aching to cover up her trembling body. Instead she put her hands on her hips, and hoped the gesture made her look more confident, more womanly.
“Positively beautiful for one so young,” Mutnofret said, although at sixteen she was barely older than Ahmose. “How proud I am of my little sister, soon to be the Great Royal Wife. Now let’s get you dressed.”
As Mutnofret helped her back into her gown, cooing and fussing, Ahmose had never before felt so young, so insignificant. She wanted to cry. Instead, she made herself smile.
CHAPTER SIX
ONLY THREE DAYS REMAINED BEFORE her wedding. Soon Ahmose would move to the apartments of the Great Royal Wife in Waset’s great palace. It was a lovely place, even better than the harem house. She could visit her friends in the House of Women any time she pleased. Yet once she moved she would be the Great Wife. Everything would change. Could she look on the House, on the women, with the same eyes?
Restless and sad, she left her apartment and paced through the halls, staring all about as if she could ingrain every feature of the House of Women in her memory. Her feet carried her with no logical path. She visited the leisure room, strangely empty at this afternoon hour, with its thick red rugs on the floor, its soft hair-stuffed couches, its copper vessels in the corners spilling armfuls of fresh lotus and iris. The smell of the blooms lifted in the still air, combined with the ever-present traces of exotic perfumes: spathe and labdanum, earthy cyprinum. Ahmose breathed in the leisure room, tasted it, and it seemed to her that the taste of the air had the savor of laughter and music. Will I find the same in the palace?
A senet board was laid out on a nearby table, its red and blue stone pawns were frozen in the midst of an abandoned game. She touched one, gently. It was cool and smooth, and here – undeniably a part of the House of Women. She was a pawn, too. She would be moved about the game-board as a toss of the throwing-sticks dictated, but she was made of feeling flesh, not of stone. She could be taken from her home and displaced as it suited the players of the game. None would speak to defend her.
Angry, Ahmose flattened a palm against the senet board. The cool stone pawns pressed into her hand. She slid the game pieces of out alignment; they hissed and squealed against the gold and jet squares of the board’s surface. But she felt guilty, looking at the mess she had made of the players' game. One by one, he put the pieces back on their squares, hoping she remembered the pattern correctly.
In the kitchens she watched servants mix bread dough and drizzle cakes with honey. They smiled at her, and bowed, and asked if they could give her anything to eat, any juice or beer to drink; but she shook her head, and sent them back to their tasks. They were so comforting in their plainness, these simple women in their simple wigs and frocks, smelling of flour and sweat and onions. Soon enough she hurried away from the kitchen, too, when her eyes began to sting.
In the courtyard she found some relief from her sorrow. The sun soothed her; the sight of furry bees touching the throats of flowers brought her a fragile kind of cheer. But soon enough she could see only the image of Thutmose driving away on that first day they’d met – the day her life became a tangled skein. She turned her face away from the courtyard and the memory of rattling wheels.
Ahmose found the common bath empty, its wide pool drained. The tiled mural of fishes shone in the bright light streaming in through the windcatchers. A few servants sat on the benches along the walls, folding towels, refilling pretty jars of ointment. Ahmose greeted them, but did not stay long. Without the company of her friends, the bath held nothing to interest her.
In the children’s quarters where she grew up, Ahmose had to pinch the insides of her elbows to keep the tears from her eyes. Here was the room where she had played with Mutnofret and the other children, sharing their dolls and learning their simple songs. Here was the worn old chair carved with Hathor’s face where Ahmose’s nurse had often held her, whispering stories of the gods, her arms as warm and strong as a tree’s branches in the sun.
In time her restless steps took her out into the open expanse of the garden. Shemu was the time for harvesting crops and repairing the irrigation canals; the sky was white with dust from labor in the fields surrounding Waset. Under the oddly pale sky the women’s garden transformed into a place of alien ripeness. The boughs of fruit trees were weighed to the ground by their sweet burdens. Figs split and rotted on the ground, giving off a cloying smell that attracted insects. Their humming was like the voices of women at work. Birds shrieked in the trees. Late flowers were everywhere, splayed open and staring in stunned disbelief at the mindless fertility of the season.
The otherworld of the Shemu garden calmed Ahmose’s heart. It was pleasant to walk along the gravel paths, trailing her fingers against waxy yellow blooms. In the afternoon sun, the warm, rich aroma of leaves yielding their moisture to the air filled the yard. She found a particularly wide and neat path and walked aimlessly, thinking of nothing, allowing her dark thoughts to flee. The benches beneath the boughs of a shade-tree grove were inviting, but she moved on. Vaguely, she wondered why no women sat spinning or sewing in the grove. It was such a lovely place to work.
Her stroll took her past the garden lake, where rowing skiffs bobbed, tied to the retaining wall. On the hottest days of the year, the Pharaoh’s women stripped off wigs and gowns, splashed in the lake’s green water – heavenly shore-birds, long of leg, pale of body, rounded breasts and thighs, their high, shouting laughter mingling like the piping of avocets on the river. The women were transformed by the water to creatures of another, more graceful world. Ahmose loved to watch them while she perched on the lake’s wall, kicking her feet in the cool shallows. But today the lake was quiet, though the air was hot.
Now her thoughts gathered once more and she glanced around sharply, taking in the emptiness of the garden. Where were all the women? The royal harem was the home of thirty women and nearly two dozen children. Even the children were absent. They should have been gathered under the shade trees with their tutors, learning their figures and sums, or playing in noisy packs up and down the paths, the little ones riding on the backs of the bigger, tossing balls back and forth as they charged headlong through the flowering rows. The garden was silent.
Here and there a servant scuttled by, head down, more intent on their errands than Ahmose had ever known them to be. There was, despite the birdsong and the placid heat, an air of – danger? Was it danger she sensed? Some worrying tension lay thick and heavy across the rows and paths.
She moved steadily toward the heart of the garden. A figure was coming toward her, rounding a bend in the path: a female servant, head completely shaven, breasts bare. She carried something red and white in her arms.
Ahmose stopped and stood to one side, straining to make out the shape of the bundle as the servant rushed past. She recognized strips of linen soaked with blood. Her hand flew to her mouth in shock. Long after the servant had fled, Ahmose remained rooted to the spot, staring. What in the blessed name of Mut can be bleeding so in the women's garden?
“Ahmose!”
Her head snapped around. Mutnofret loomed in the center of the path, legs apart, shoulders tense. She raised one hand, a tense beckoning. Ahmose hurried toward her.
“Did you see the blood? What is happening?”
“Shh.” Mutnofret took Ahmose by the elbow, steered her between rows of flowers.
Among a grove of myrrh trees a small pavilion stood, stone lotus pillars roofed with thin cedar. Walls of heavy cloth were tied down between each pillar, blocking the outside world from whatever lay within. Someone held a lamp inside, and as the lamp moved past the nearest wall Ahmose just made out the reverse image of Tawaret, the big-bellied river-horse goddess, painted on the inner side of the cloth. The lamp moved away. Tawaret’s silhouette faded into linen again.
"The birthing pavilion." In a hot rush of fear, Ahmose recalled Aiya. Her knees turned to water. She shook off Mutnofret’s hand, pushed forward. The voices of many women hummed like flies inside the pavilion, subdued, confused, urgent. Ahmose scrambled around a myrrh trunk, tripped over a root, and nearly collided with another servant laden with linens as she ran from the pavilion's farthest side.
"Move, move," the servant snapped, not even seeing in her haste that it was the king's daughter to whom she spoke. Ahmose did not stop to reprimand her.
She righted herself, ducked around the pavilion’s corner. One panel of cloth was rolled halfway up and tied, creating a small door. Ahmose peered around the column. Inside was chaos. The terrible stench of blood and feces gusted from the room whenever a person passed the door. Several women moved back and forth with lamps and linens. She recognized women of the harem, including her stout cousin Renenet, her plump cheeks streaked with tears. Two servants knelt around a wooden stool with a large hole in the seat. They used sheets of linen to soak up a great puddle of dark wetness beneath the stool – a very large amount of blood. Her legs and belly trembled. She stood aside for another servant to pass.
Just as she made to look inside once more, a rough hand took her by the shoulder and pulled her back. Too startled to say a word, she glanced up at the face of Wahibra, the harem physician. He carried his rolled leather kit in his arms. She stood aside for him as she had for the servant, but Wahibra made no move to enter. He clapped his hands for permission.
At once an old midwife approached, carrying a tiny brazier on a padding of thick cloth. Green, acrid smoke lifted from the bowl. The old woman waved one hand toward Wahibra, wafting the harsh incense over his face and shoulders. "In the name of Tawaret," she said somberly, "be purified, and enter the place of birth."
At once the crowd of women parted. At the heart of the pavilion, pale, golden Aiya lay on a bed of cushions soaked in red. Her face was as white as milk, eyes closed. Her arm lay limp across the floor of the pavilion, damming a pool of blood that darkened the bed and floor.
The old midwife spoke. "It is too late for the girl, I fear. Her hips are not wide enough. The door is too small. The baby cannot come on his own. She has lost too much blood, despite all we could do. She will not live."
"Yes," Wahibra said. "I can see that you are right."
"We have called you here to cut the child out."
Wahibra nodded. His face was pale and sober. He gestured toward the birthing stool. A servant leapt to obey him, positioning it near Aiya's limp body. Wahibra unrolled his leather kit, stretched it across the hole in the seat. Ahmose watched, horrified, as he selected a long copper blade from among the kit’s strange instruments. Her mind screamed at her to look away, to run away, but she was powerless to do anything but stand, numbly, detached, and watch Wahibra bend toward Aiya.
The knife in Wahibra’s hand caught the light of a brazier, sending a red flash into Ahmose’s eyes. The spell broke.
“Wait,” she called out.
Wahibra looked around, his brows furrowed. The hesitation gave her just enough time. She was at Aiya’s side in two heartbeats, kneeling at the girl's shoulder. She took Aiya's face in her hands.
Aiya opened her eyes. “Ahmose.” Her voice was thick and low with pain, rasped from hours of crying.
“Aiya. I am so sorry. If I could change this, if I could stop it….”
“Take care of my son. Make him a good man. Tell him of Aiya, his mother who loved him best. He is best of all the great men.”
“Hatshepsu,” Ahmose said, grieving, regretting. “I will, Aiya, my sweet one, the best of my friends.” She bent to kiss Aiya’s forehead, pressed her lips to the girl’s sweat-beaded brow and held them there, tasting the salt of her skin, as Wahibra raised his knife.
The pain of the blade roused the last strength in Aiya's body. She jerked, her pale limbs convulsing, her eyes opening wide in shock. "No," she cried in a feeble voice, in the tongue of her homeland. "No!" The midwives bent to hold her down. They pinioned all her limbs against the cushions, while Ahmose stroked her hair, murmuring useless apologies.
"You will be with Hathor soon, little mother," the old midwife said. Aiya’s cries were an agony in Ahmose's belly, an accusation in her heart.
At last they faded. Aiya lay still. Ahmose looked up at the midwife. The old woman shook her head. Slowly, the women removed their hands from Aiya's limbs. From one corner of the pavilion, a harem woman began to sing a prayer of supplication to Anupu, the taker of the dead; and Renenet, fists pressed to her mouth, moaned.
Wahibra made a horror of Aiya's proud, round belly. Layer after layer of flesh split beneath his blade. Ahmose stared at the bands of red and yellow, exposed in the dim light of the oil lamps. Something a sick shade of blue lay within the slit in Aiya's middle. Two of the midwives grasped it and pulled it free of the surrounding flesh, tore at its outer skin. Ahmose lurched to her feet, staggered against a lotus pillar, held it hard, willing down the bubble of nausea rising in her throat. They are like scavengers at a carcass.
And then she understood. It was the baby's caul they ripped away. One midwife inserted a slender reed into its throat, sucking and spitting the fluid from its lungs. The child’s skin was a terrible color, the blue-grey of death. Wet, red-gold hair clung to its scalp. Its little eyes were closed. The midwives rubbed and patted the child, turned it upside down by its feet and watched as cloudy water dripped from its nostrils, but still the baby did not cry, did not move. One by one they stopped their work, until finally the baby was laid at its mother's cold breast.
The song of Anupu rose again, begging mercy for this unnamed boychild who had never lived at all.
“Hatshepsu,” Ahmose whispered. “His name is Hatshepsu.”
No one heard her.
Wahibra rose slowly from the ground. His hands were darkened by thick gore. Aiya's blood had spread around the hem of his kilt. "I am sorry, my ladies," he said to the midwives. "Even had you called me sooner, I doubt this child could have been saved. The mother was just too small, too young. It is a great sadness that both were lost."
Too young, Ahmose thought. Panic seized her. She took two steps toward Aiya and her baby, then the ground slid sideways beneath her feet. She fell in a heap, head spinning, dimly aware that the harem women were leaping to her side, crowding around her.
"Let me take her," she heard Renenet say. "She knows me well."
Her arm was pulled upward painfully, laid around a plump shoulder, her wrist gripped in a firm hand. Renenet lifted her to her feet and pulled her from the horror of the pavilion. Ahmose's legs refused to do their work. She stumbled and swayed.
"That's right, my lady," Renenet said, dragging her along the path. The heat of the sun beat down; Ahmose retched, emptying her stomach into a nearby flower bed. Renenet clucked in sympathy.
After several minu
tes Ahmose could at least support her own weight, although she made no move to take her arm from her cousin’s shoulders. They continued to walk silently together. Round a bend in the path they found Mutnofret. Her arms were folded, her head high, her face a blank stone, like Meritamun’s on the throne, like a queen’s.
As they passed, Ahmose’s eyes locked with her sister’s. She stopped, forcing Renenet to halt as well. For a long moment she stood staring into Mutnofret’s deep black eyes. The First King's Daughter looked fearlessly at Ahmose, wordless and triumphant.
Chilled, afraid, wounded, Ahmose choked on her words and staggered away.
CHAPTER SEVEN
“SHE COULD HAVE SPARED ME,” Ahmose said. “She did not have to bring me to the birthing pavilion.”
“Calm, calm. If you upset yourself you’ll only cry, and smear your eyes.” Renenet shook out Ahmose’s plain green gown. She said doubtfully, “Perhaps Mutnofret thought you would want to be with your friend when she went to the gods.”
Ahmose shook her head, at once denying her cousin’s words and trying to push the image of Aiya bleeding, Aiya dying, from her mind. All through the morning’s marriage, making offerings at the Temple of Amun, receiving the blessings from the High Priest, she had seen only Aiya. While she stood back to watch Thutmose place the salt of marriage on Mutnofret’s tongue, tasting the salt sharp and thick on her own, she had heard Aiya’s dying words, and had tasted too the sweat on her friend's cold brow. As their litter carried them back to the palace through a throng of cheering rekhet, Ahmose could think only of planning Aiya’s tomb. Her wedding day had been one long blur of sadness, with Mutnofret’s radiant smile and coy laugh the only things of real clarity.
“She did it on purpose, Reni, to throw me. She planned to break my spirit so Thutmose would only love her today.”
Reni sighed. “I know Mutnofret is jealous and angry. But you cannot let her win. Don’t allow her to ruin your wedding feast for you, Ahmose.”
The She-King: The Complete Saga Page 5