Pillar of Fire

by Judith Tarr

  But she was on the boat, in the tent, lit by the faintest flicker of a lamp that after the black night was as bright as day. Ankhesenamon lay soft on heaped rugs and cushions, the bed that had been prepared for her. Leah sat beside her, upright under the low ceiling of the tent, hands folded in her lap, as serene as ever.

  There was just room for Nofret in the tiny space, if she sat on her heels and did not jostle the sleeping woman. For she did sleep: her breast rose and fell, and her face had the flush of life.

  “She drank most of the bottle,” Nofret said by way of greeting. “By herself, without my urging. I don’t even know how she found it.”

  “The god directed her,” Leah said. “Oh, child, how you tremble! Were you so afraid?”

  “I’m furious,” Nofret gritted. “I imagined—gods, horrible things. You can’t tell me she knew exactly where to look, and what to do with what she found.”

  “And yet it seems she did.”

  “Unless there was a spy, and he—or she—led her, and will lead an army to capture us.”

  “That could be,” said Leah. “There were spies, certainly, and soldiers hunting for us. But she had no part in that. Sometimes the mad see what the sane can perceive only dimly, and hear the gods full and clear.”

  “But if a god guided her away from Egypt,” said Nofret, “she would resist him. She’s queen first and always.”

  “I would wager that the god said nothing of going away, and something of going down to the river, where she would find what she had been seeking.”

  Nofret pondered that. “Yes,” she said at length. “Yes, that would be like a god. Gods always speak the truth, but they never speak it plain.”

  “On the contrary, child, their truth is the plainest of all. So plain that no mortal can understand it. Mortals always lie. To themselves, to each other, to the gods. It’s the gods who never tell anything but the truth.”

  “Truth so perfect it’s a lie.” The taste on Nofret’s tongue was bitter. “I told Johanan as plain a truth as a woman can tell. I didn’t mean to come here. I followed my lady, and found her by the river just as the drug took her. I wasn’t going to do it at all.”

  “Of course you were,” said Leah. “You simply wouldn’t admit it.”

  “I wasn’t,” Nofret said fiercely. “I couldn’t do it. I didn’t want to.”

  “You did it as you were meant to.” Leah’s voice was tranquil. “Lie down now and sleep.”

  “I can’t sleep. If we’ve been spied on, if there are troops waiting for us—”

  “The god will guard us,” Leah said.

  She sounded so like the old king that Nofret could have hit her. Rather than do such a fearful thing, she crawled back out of the tent, into the dark and the stars and the surprising comfort of Johanan’s presence. She sat on the deck where he had made her sit while he cast off, clasped her knees and rocked with the slow rocking of the boat on the river.

  Maybe she slept. Maybe she dreamed. Maybe the whole of it was a dream, and when she woke she would be in her own bed in Memphis, with the queen rousing for the sunrise rite.

  But the dream went on and on. Darkness, stars. Scent of water. Boat skimming over it, riding the current, guided lightly by Johanan’s oar. The walls of Memphis fell slowly behind. Ahead was the broad black gleam of the river, and the night, and freedom.

  Freedom. She had never even let herself think the word. Not for herself. Freedom only to die, most likely, as one who had stolen away the queen of Egypt.

  But as she huddled on the deck of that boat in the night, with long hours yet to dawn and the dread of discovery, she knew a sudden, irresistible elation. Free, however briefly. Free as she had not been—sweet heaven, as she had not been since she was a child, hunting oryx in the hills of Hatti.

  Even if she died come morning. Even if she died in pain. It was worth it after all, to remember what she had so long forgotten. To be free.

  Forty-Eight

  Nofret must have slept at last, for she dreamed that there were troops waiting downriver of Memphis, a whole flotilla of them, and armies lining the banks, waiting to seize the queen. But when she started up, tensed to warn Johanan before he sailed right into the fleet, the river was empty of anything but a flock of wild geese.

  She could see them clearly. The light was the pale clear light that comes just before sunrise, when the shadows are long still and black, but water turns bright silver, and the sky is blood-scarlet in the east, deep luminous blue in the farthest west.

  Everything was water and sky. From where she crouched she could see no land nor any human thing. The river had carried them far down from Memphis. The air seemed richer here and warmer. Its weight even in the cool of morning was heavy, as if there would be heat later, humid and oppressive.

  “Are we going all the way to the ocean?” she asked Johanan.

  He was still at the oar. Guilt smote her, hours too late, as he answered her question. “We’re going where it’s safe to go.”

  “The sea is safe?”

  He stared at her for a moment, maybe incredulous, maybe only too tired to gather the words together. “We’re not going to the sea. There’s a landing—a village, but it’s safe, some of our people are in it. They’ll be waiting for us.”

  “Nothing is safe,” Nofret said.

  He did not seem to hear her. She straightened stiffly, feeling bruises where she had slept on the hard planking. When her knees had unlocked and her back unkinked, she crawled through the flap of the deck-tent.

  Leah was asleep, sitting upright with her chin on her breast. Ankhesenamon had not moved all night long. She lay still as Johanan had laid her, on her back with her arms at her sides. She was alive; she breathed as before. Nothing at all had changed.

  Nor did anything change while they made their way down the river in the rising heat of morning. It was strange; Lower Egypt was quite a populous country, at least in the region of Memphis; but that morning no one was minded to set sail on the river. They were all alone in what seemed an endless sea, no company but the water birds, no pursuit but a lone crocodile that drew its wake after them till a flurry of ducks distracted it.

  Near noon Johanan bent the boat away from the middle of the stream. So broad as it was there, it seemed to have no shore, but as they curved eastward Nofret saw a line of green that must be land, and red beyond that that must be desert. In the middle of the green was a cluster of brown, the houses of the village that Johanan had spoken of.

  It was a mere speck of a village, so small that it did not even boast a temple, though it had its rich man in his house of six whole rooms with a garden in back of it. He was not Apiru but his wife was, and some of her kin had settled in the village. They were not stonecutters like the Apiru of the tombs, but something closer to their world of the desert: herders of goats and sheep, shearers and weavers of wool, makers of a sharp pungent cheese that went surprisingly well with the eternal Egyptian bread and beer.

  Nofret never learned what the village was called. It must have had a name—no place in Egypt could be without one—but no one spoke it where she could hear. It was simply here, the place where she had come, where she was fed and offered bath and bed.

  She took food and bath but refused the chance to sleep. The others took it. Ankhesenamon, who had not roused even when she was carried from the boat into the rich man’s house, slept as she had since Nofret found her. They had got a little water into her, and a bite or two of bread, which she chewed and swallowed in her dream; but she never woke.

  Nofret had nothing to say to the people who lived in this house. They had little to say to her. It was clear that the husband thought her less than nothing, since she was a slave. The wife seemed shy to speechlessness, a little brown mouse of a woman who would not meet Nofret’s eyes.

  Neither appeared to know who slept in the best bed with Leah beside her, nor overmuch to care. Johanan had mumbled something about a cousin and a sleeping sickness before he tumbled headlong into sleep himself.
That seemed to be enough.

  Nofret felt as if she should stand guard. Once or twice she wandered as far as the door, but she did not go out. Mostly she stayed with Leah and her lady, watching them sleep, shutting away vision after vision of lovely horror. All of them had to do with being caught, named, condemned for the highest of high treason.

  Maybe the god did protect them. No soldiers burst in, no official came to denounce her. No one came at all. It was as if she was alone and perfectly unknown, perfectly safe.

  oOo

  “It’s the garrisons we have to worry about,” Johanan said. He had roused near sunset, eaten voraciously, and announced that they were leaving as soon as it was full dark. Their hosts uttered weak protests, but Nofret could see the depth of their relief. Unsuspicious they might be, but they were inconvenienced by the presence of so many guests.

  Johanan bought from them a donkey that might have been near kin to the one that carried the old king away from Akhetaten. It was just as small, just as motheaten, and just as cantankerous. It came laden with waterskins and carrying a substantial sack, but even so burdened it managed to support the slack weight of Ankhesenamon. She was wrapped in robes that must have been Leah’s, and veiled as an Apiru woman preferred to be when she went abroad, a faceless, shapeless bundle of black wool amid the other bundles on the donkey’s back.

  Nofret must have cut a similar figure herself, but afoot, dressed in an old robe that had belonged to the rich man’s wife. It reeked of the musky scent that the woman preferred, but it was decently woven and not too threadbare, and it was voluminous: it covered her from head to foot. With a veil over her face she was well concealed, like a taller, broader shadow of the swaddled bundle that was Leah.

  There was no one to bid them farewell, no gawkers, not even a child lingering in a doorway. As they had been on the river, they were alone in the world under the vastness of heaven.

  From Black Land to Red Land was a single step, from rich earth to bleak desert, sand and stones and sky. Johanan took the lead with a staff in his hand and the donkey on its rope beside him. Leah walked as strongly as Nofret, and maybe with more ease in the shifting landscape of sand and rock. Their pace was steady, set as much by the donkey as by anything else, middling slow walking pace that paused rarely to rest or drink or eat.

  They went by the stars, tracking east toward Sinai. Johanan walked as if he knew the land well, marking the path by means invisible to Nofret. She was a creature of the mountains and the plains of Hatti, and then of cities. Desert was all strange to her. Its landmarks shifted eternally as sand will. In deepening night it was simply a shadow lit by stars, but a shadow that to Johanan must be as distinct as the streets of Memphis in the dusk.

  She had to trust that he would lead them well, and not cast them far out of the way or else stumble into a guard-post full of soldiers who answered to Horemheb. Her own instincts were useless here. Those all cried to her to wait for daylight, take the roads, follow the well-marked ways into the hands of the enemy.

  She prayed a great deal as she trudged through the night, following the others more by scent and sound than by sight. Leah was just ahead of her, a waft of sandalwood, a whisper of feet in sand. The donkey’s four-footed step-and-glide shifted to a soft clatter on stone, but Leah’s footfalls then were all but silent.

  Nofret prayed to no god in particular. Egypt’s gods held power here, for this was still Egypt, but they were changed as the land was changed, no longer gentle, no longer propitious, but fierce and cold and strange. Amon was the hammer of the sun. Horus was the blind eye of the moon and the soar of the falcon at sunrise, beautiful but unreachably remote. Nut, whose domain was the night, whose body was the arc of heaven set with stars, arched higher and farther than ever she had above the Black Land.

  Nofret prayed to all of them and none, blind wordless prayers compounded of fear and hope and desperation. She did not feel free here as she had on the river. She felt terribly trapped, lost in a land that was all alien to her, bound in the company of people so foreign that they worshipped but one incalculable god, drawn along with them by no will of her own. But for her lady she would have dug in her heels and refused the whole of it, demanded to be taken back to places she knew, no matter how she suffered for it.

  This was not even the world of the living. Egyptians set the abode of the dead in the west beyond the horizon of the Red Land, but who was to say that it had not extended itself into the eastern desert? Except for the lone falcon in the sunrise, she saw no bird, no animal, and certainly no human creature. Sometimes, far off, she heard the howling of jackals. But jackals were the guides of the dead, servants of Anubis whose body was a man’s but whose head was a jackal’s.

  oOo

  Soon after sunrise of that first long night, Nofret stumbled into an obstacle that yielded and turned, catching her when she tried to push on. She stared blankly into Leah’s face. It looked as haggard as she felt. Dust was thick on it. She scrubbed at her own face, grimacing at the grittiness of sand on skin.

  Over Leah’s shoulder she saw that Johanan had stopped and was lowering Ankhesenamon to the ground. One of the donkey’s bundles was a tent, no more than an outsize cloak or blanket of woven goat’s hair, with Johanan’s walking-staff for its tentpole. It was cramped beneath, but it was shelter. Nofret was glad of it in the cold of dawn, and would be gladder of it, no doubt, in the full fierce heat of the day.

  They ate in silence, barley bread and goat cheese and an onion each, and water from the donkey’s burden. Nofret coaxed a little water into Ankhesenamon. Much of it dribbled out, but some went down: her throat worked as she swallowed.

  “Will she ever wake?” asked Nofret. Her voice was rough with dryness and disuse. None of them had said a word since they left the village; strange to know that now, and for the first time. Silence and the desert were inextricably a part of one another.

  “She’ll wake when the god wills,” Leah said.

  “You mean you don’t know.” Nofret was too tired to be angry. But dismayed—yes, she was that. “What if she dies out here? If a physician could save her—”

  “The god guards her,” said Leah.

  Nofret turned her back on Leah, lay down beside her lady and covered her eyes with her arm and set her teeth. She wanted to cry, loud and long and utterly useless. She had come to this place as if driven, without will or wit to resist. There was no going back. Only going forward.

  Johanan was outside: on guard, she supposed. There was no room for him in the tent. She wished him well of the donkey’s company.

  Sleep was slow in coming. Ankhesenamon lay unmoving beside her. Leah slept, snoring softly. The sun came up, and with it the heat. The tent kept out the worst of it, and most of the flies that rose with the day.

  Both struck her with breathtaking force when she crawled out. She had to relieve herself; and she could not sleep. Johanan had set up a smaller tent beside the larger one: his mantle propped on a bit of bush. The donkey, hobbled, grazed in a patch of thorny scrub.

  The sun’s light was blinding, stunningly strong. She rested briefly in the shade of a rock. A flicker of movement made her start: a lizard on the track of a beetle. The lizard blurred into motion, but the beetle darted into a crevice too narrow for the lizard to enter. The lizard paused, mouth open. It seemed to be panting as a dog does; or maybe it was a silent scream, frustration as complete as Nofret’s own.

  She crawled back into the tent. It was hot and still and redolent of musk and goat and human sweat, but it was shade. She sipped a mouthful of still-cool water, held it for a long while on her tongue, let it sink in as water seeps into sand.

  oOo

  Night found them on their way again, taking advantage of the cool and the darkness. Nofret had slept a little after all, enough to go on with. Her eyes were gritty, her mind blurred and slow, but it took no great power of intellect to follow Leah, who followed the donkey, who followed Johanan eastward by the stars.

  She had made no great study of
maps or journeys. The tribute-train from Mitanni had come to Akhetaten by the royal road and then on the river of Egypt. Nofret remembered little but heat and dust, endless walking and too-brief pauses.

  There had been a garrison, she remembered that. And when they came to Egypt they had kept pausing in this city or that so that the envoy could worship in every temple there was time for. He had been a religious man, and superstitious. Everything he saw or heard or fancied was an omen for good or ill. He had worn so many amulets about his neck that he seemed to be wearing a huge clashing collar.

  She still had her amulets of Amon and of Sobek. She took to touching them as she walked, stroking the smooth carved surfaces. She sensed no power in them, no spark of divinity. They were only stone. But they comforted her in their small way.

  oOo

  She was clutching them in her hand in the deep night, the fourth from the village north of Memphis, when Johanan led them straight to a camp of soldiers. He had not lost his bearings, surely not, and he was as remote from any garrison as his craft could take him, but there were soldiers in that wadi in the deep desert.

  What they were doing there, Nofret could not begin to guess. Hunting, maybe: lion or gazelle or some beast more fabulous than either. Prospecting for copper, or for turquoise—did they not mine turquoise at least in Sinai? Or else, and worst of all, they were lying in wait for an escaped queen and her accomplices.

  Ankhesenamon by this time was conscious enough to sit up on the donkey’s back for an hour or two at a time, though she seemed tranced or spelled. Her eyes though open were blurred as if with sleep, and her face wore no expression. In the days she lay so, open-eyed, barely blinking, neither speaking nor seeming to notice where she was. She would eat if fed, and drink, and relieve herself when she was led apart.