Khnumhotpe laughed at that, laughed without derision. He seemed genuinely to enjoy her company. But when Sarai glanced at Abram, she saw him roll his eyes. Apparently he did not take Khnumhotpe’s jovial disposition at face value. Sarai wondered if Abram was right. After all, they were no longer in the desert. They were with royal servants now, and that was something Sarai understood, having grown up in a house that, despite its poverty and lack of power, was nonetheless royal. Was it not possible that Abram was distrustful because he was on less familiar ground?
He had held his own in encounters with her father, Sarai remembered that, and Abram often did business in cities. Still, she had been raised in a king’s house, and it was to a king’s house they were going. She liked Khnumhotpe, and Khnumhotpe seemed to like her. Why was that a matter for suspicion? If Abram wanted to act the jealous husband, he might have declared her publicly to be his wife.
She smiled at Khnumhotpe. “Then again, we are the sort of people who work by thinking and speaking. So while our hands may do little labor at this moment, yet we are not at rest.”
Again she glanced at Abram, but now he was not looking at her at all. He was gazing out over the water, toward a large brightly painted building that opened onto a great sweep of steps leading down into the river. The boats were steering toward a jetty that flanked the stairs.
“So this is the king’s house,” she said to Khnumhotpe.
“One of them.”
“Will he see us, do you think?”
“Without question,” said Khnumhotpe. “He has a keen interest in your brother. His name is not unknown here.”
That set off a silent cry of alarm in Sarai’s heart. Khnumhotpe was a man who chose his words carefully. And he had carefully avoided saying whether Pharaoh’s “interest” in Abram was kindly or threatening. Yet Khnumhotpe gave no sign of any but the cheerfulest of attitudes. Perhaps Abram’s suspicions had been wiser than Sarai’s trust.
Khnumhotpe leapt to the jetty as soon as the boat drew near enough. He held out a hand as if to help Sarai, but while she was still gathering her skirts about her for the leap from bouncing boat to solid land, Abram bounded to the jetty with such force that, had she been in midstep, she would have plunged into the water. “Abram,” she said in consternation.
“I wanted to help my sister to shore myself,” Abram explained to Khnumhotpe.
In reply, Khnumhotpe clapped Abram on the shoulder. “Oh, no need of that! Milcah will be taken to the house of Pharaoh’s wives to be given a chance to rest and refresh herself in the company of women.”
Sure enough, the boat was drawing back from the jetty; it was already impossible for her to make the leap, and Sarai could not swim. Neither could Abram, though as he stood there on the dock, she could guess that he was furiously trying to decide just how hard swimming could be, since so many children of servants here by the Nile could do it. Khnumhotpe had outmaneuvered them. Abram had understood the Egyptian well enough to know not to trust him. But Khnumhotpe had understood Abram even better, well enough to manipulate him into allowing the separation he had so adamantly refused. And Sarai—clearly she had understood nothing at all.
“No, Abram, you go with Khnumhotpe,” Sarai called to him. “Pharaoh does not want to meet your sister covered with the dirt of travel.” She was warning him not to try to fight this right now. This was the moment of greatest danger. If they were going to kill him, they would do it now, the moment Sarai was out of sight. “Think nothing of me,” she insisted, her voice now echoing from the stone steps as she shouted over the growing expanse of water. “Let your thoughts be on your own imminent meeting with Suwertu’s master.” The name of the priest who had sought to kill him was the only warning she could give him. And she was now too far away to be able to see, from his face, whether he had understood.
O God of Abram, she prayed. Forgive my selfishness in resenting the deception thou didst urge upon us, and my vanity in thinking I was wise in the ways of a royal house. I will bear whatever burden thou placest upon me, but keep my husband safe. Let him live, O God, to have the children of thy promise to him. It matters not to me that I be the mother of those children, as long as Abram is their father.
But even as she prayed the words—and surely she meant them—another voice, one that could not find words, was crying out in anguish in the deep recesses of her mind. To think of another woman as the mother of Abram’s children was unbearable. Was this the vengeance of Asherah?
Yet with the part of her mind that she could control, she outshouted that wordless wish. Better that it be Asherah avenging a broken oath and reclaiming a lost servant than to have it be Pharaoh, avenging the death of Suwertu and claiming the life of an escaped sacrifice. God, hear the words I pray, not the unworthy, selfish cry of my inmost heart.
Part III
Pharaoh's Women
Chapter 7
What impressed Sarai most was the cleanliness. How did they manage it? The same wind blew here as anywhere else, carrying dust, fine sand, fleas, and flies. Yet in the house of Pharaoh, the stone floors held no dust, the tapestries on the walls were unfaded by dirt or sunlight, and water stood in pools so clear she could see the mosaics on the bottom. Everyone moved swiftly and quietly about their tasks. She could hear the laughter of children as she passed one door, the low throaty chuckle of a gossiping woman as she passed another, but the work of the house—the work of banishing every grain of sand—went on silently, invisibly.
In such cleanliness, where does anyone live? Children are dirty, work is dirty, life is dirty, so when you ban the dirt, where does the life of the house go? And yet there was that laughter, that chuckle; there was pleasure and delight in this place. And Sarai felt, for the first time in her life, like a country bumpkin, for in Ur there was no such luxury as this, to banish the desert.
It was men who brought her here—obsequious men in command, bored soldiers giving teeth to their authority. Sarai said little and tried to smile benignly as if being kidnapped and carried off to Pharaoh’s house were exactly what she had expected in a place as benighted as this. She tried not to let herself gawk at the size of the house. She refused to ask questions. And so she found herself now following a servant girl through the labyrinth of rooms, with no idea where she was going or what was expected of her.
They entered a room where a woman sat in conversation with a man. The woman wore a linen drape so light that Sarai could see the shape of her breasts as easily as if she were naked. The man wore a kilt of linen, but it was apparently long enough to be wrapped twice around him, so it was not so transparent. Still, even from behind she knew more about his body than she wanted to. On the way here, she had seen that the workers in the fields were naked, but they were far away. The soldiers wore kilts, but of rougher, thicker fabric. It seemed that the rich wore clothing, but clothing that left them as close to the nakedness of the poor as possible.
I would not dress like that even if I were dead.
“Ah,” the woman said. “The desert princess.”
“No princess,” said Sarai.
“If you stay in this house, you’re a princess,” said the woman. “But the desert, we’d prefer to leave that outside.”
“So would I,” said Sarai, “but I was brought here with no chance to rest or change my clothing after a long journey.”
“How untidy,” she said. “I am told you are Milcah. My name is Eshut.”
“Are you the queen?” asked Sarai.
She gave a brief glance at the man, but neither showed any sign of what they thought of her question. “No,” said Eshut. “I am a cousin of Pharaoh. I manage his household and see to it that the women and children of the house are provided for. This is Sehtipibre, who manages Pharaoh’s kingdom and sees to it that the people of Egypt are provided for.”
Sehtipibre smiled slightly. “Pharaoh and his brother gods provide for Egypt,” he said. And then, without so much as a pause, he continued in thickly accented Sumerian: “They do a better jo
b of it than the gods who pour water into the Euphrates, I hear.”
Sarai did not have to pretend to be straining to understand—Milcah would not understand Sumerian at all, but even Sumerians would have a hard time understanding Sehtipibre. “I’m so sorry,” she said. “My Egyptian is so bad that I didn’t understand a word you said.”
He grimaced slightly. “No one ever does. I hoped that, being from the upper Euphrates, you might have some knowledge of Sumerian.”
“Oh, that’s a very hard language, and few speak it even in Sumeria now—it’s all one Amorite dialect or another.”
“You don’t consider yourself an Amorite?”
“You don’t consider me one, either,” said Sarai. “You think of me as Hsy.”
This earned her a thin smile, but not a nice one. “I can see that Abram’s sister is unmarried for good reason.”
“If you are proposing to me,” said Sarai, “I’m afraid I must ask you to take your petition to my brother.”
His face reddened slightly, but he did not speak—perhaps because of his iron self-control, or perhaps because of Eshut’s hand lightly touching his arm. “My lord Sehtipibre,” she said, “you have made the mistake of sparring with a great lady, who is weary from traveling and annoyed at the abrupt way our hospitality was imposed on her.”
“When you make your report to Pharaoh,” said Sehtipibre, “please point out that I did not call her Hsy. It was a term she chose herself.”
“I’m so sorry,” said Sarai. “I thought it was an Egyptian word, since I heard it so many times in the muttering of my hosts.”
“Go, go,” said Eshut. “Let us not fight a border skirmish here in the House of the Women.”
“Am I dismissed from the sacred presence?” Even though the language was not easy to understand, Sarai grasped his irony. It was he, not she, who normally would do the dismissing.
“No,” said Eshut, “I and the whole house are dismissed from your presence. But the house is too big to move, so it would be a kindness if you would remove yourself instead.”
Sehtipibre smiled then, with warmth—but the smile became chilly when he turned from Eshut to Sarai. He murmured a brief blessing and walked from the room.
“How would an Egyptian man learn a language like Sumerian?” asked Sarai.
“Sehtipibre told me once that his goal is to know everything and do everything.”
“I assume that he will do death last.”
“He does not expect to achieve his goal. Still, he can’t help but profit from the attempt. Now let us cease this conversation and get you to your room. Will you have wine? The barley beer of Egypt? Or is there some concoction of goat’s milk and sheep’s blood that you drink?”
Eshut looked completely cheerful, but Sarai understood now that she was in the house of her betters and would be criticized or ridiculed whatever she did. So be it—since the condemnation was assured, she might as well please herself. Besides, she was a hostage here, wasn’t she? So she answered with a light laugh, “Oh, dear, no. I doubt that anyone here would have the skill to make that drink.”
That broke Eshut’s poise, for a moment at least. Sarai could imagine her gossiping later. “I joked that she might want to drink something of goat’s milk and sheep’s blood and—can you believe it?—apparently there is such a drink!” Someday, perhaps, someone would point out to Eshut that in fact there was no such drink, and Eshut would realize, belatedly, how Sarai had mocked her to her face.
“I’ll have the beer, please. It’s what Egypt is most famous for.” Again, a little jab. Let her wonder if it really was their nasty barley drink, and not the Nile or the pyramids, that foreigners talked about.
“By the way,” said Eshut, “we asked among your company and the only maid they could find for you was a woman so old I doubt she could dress herself, let alone you.”
“I’ve been dressing myself since childhood,” said Sarai.
Eshut gave Sarai’s clothing a brief glance. “And there’s so much of it.”
“But it doesn’t require a miracle to keep it on,” said Sarai.
“Ah, yes, I’m aware that you desert people think that our clothing is improper.”
“Not at all,” said Sarai. “It’s just that our men have enough imagination or memory that they don’t need constant reminders of what women look like under their clothes.”
Eshut sighed. “He’s had desert women before, you know.”
“Before what?” said Sarai. “Surely you do not imply that he has ‘had’ or will ‘have’ me?”
“As a guest, of course,” said Eshut. “Let’s not quarrel, shall we? He may have an infatuation with all things Mesopotamian, but in fact he is Egyptian, and he prefers the women in his house to be clean—and their clothing as well, even your exotic desert clothing.”
“You keep speaking of the desert,” said Sarai, “but I have spent my life passing easily between grassland and city, while I have only seen true desert here, in your land. Start from the assumption that I have not spent my entire life among cattle, and perhaps we can cease our banter before one of us gets offended.”
Now was the moment for Eshut to break down and smile and embrace her as a sister. Instead, she merely grew chillier. “Perhaps it is time for me to assign you a maid who will find your exotic ideas fascinating.” She glanced over her shoulder. “Hagar,” she said.
A tall young woman—still a girl, really, from her boyish hips and scant bosom—entered through the door behind Eshut, her head bowed, her hands clasped before her.
“Hagar, this is Princess—oh, pardon me, Lady—Milcah. She’s to be a guest in the house. Do show her where to bathe and get her clothes to the laundresses. You’ll be with her while she’s here.”
Hagar bowed deeply to Eshut, and then again to Sarai.
“Thank you for your help,” Sarai said to the servant girl.
She stood there, in mid-bow, obviously unsure how to respond. Had no one ever thanked her?
“You see how pleasant it will be, Hagar, learning the charming customs of desert people,” said Eshut. “Go now, Hagar. Lady Milcah is no doubt eager to wash the filth of travel from her body.”
“If only a mere bath,” said Sarai, “could make me as beautiful as Lady Eshut.” She spoke without allowing even a trace of irony into her voice.
Eshut looked at her sharply for a moment, then raised an eyebrow—as eloquent as another woman’s shrug. “Our house is richer for your presence here, Lady Milcah. And I know Pharaoh will be delighted with your . . . charming conversation, as I have been.”
Hagar was at the door now, waiting for Sarai to follow, which she gratefully did.
You may put on airs, Eshut, but I’m a captive here, and that makes you my jailer.
Chapter 8
Hagar led her to a room not far away, one with windows overlooking a lush garden. The smell of the blooms reached even into the room, though the windows were so deep that only the sun’s light and very little of its heat made it through. If there had been such a room in her father’s house in Ur-of-the-North, that is where he would have brought his visitors, for such constant extravagance with water would have spoken more of his wealth and power than any other display he might have made. Yet here in the house of Pharaoh’s women, this room was no doubt quite an ordinary one. Or was it? It was hard to know whether she was being treated with honor or disdain. Quite probably both—outward respect and secret contempt.
All that mattered to Sarai was what this might imply with regard to Abram. If this was an opulent room, did that mean Abram would be treated well? Or did the favor extend only to her, so that his life was in danger if he resisted whatever Pharaoh might want of her?
“Do you have any idea what any of this means?” Sarai asked the servant girl.
Hagar looked at her blankly.
“Is my accent so bad you can’t understand me?”
“I can understand you,” said Hagar—in heavily accented Egyptian.
“So you’r
e not a native of Egypt,” said Sarai. “What language do you speak, then, from birth?” She tried Amorite first, and the girl seemed pleased enough.
“If Mistress wishes to speak the tongue of the desert thieves, it’s all one to me,” said Hagar. Her tone was sweet, but the barb was obvious. Had the girl sized her up and decided Sarai wasn’t dangerous?
In Hebrew, Sarai said, “Is this a good room or an ordinary one?”
The girl paused a moment before she got what was said. “That is for Mistress to judge.”
One more language to try. In the Arabic of spice traders from the south, Sarai said, “Is this your tongue?”
Hagar’s eyes widened, and suddenly a torrent of words poured forth. Sarai was not fluent in Arabic, and though it was close to Hebrew and Amorite, there were enough differences that she only caught a few phrases—enough to know that Hagar was asking her if she had come only recently from Arabia and did she know anything of Hagar’s father. A boatmaker? A sailor?
Sarah: Women of Genesis: 1 (Women of Genesis (Forge)) Page 8