“When I had proven to him and to myself that I had learned them beyond forgetfulness, he came to me and again begged to return home to the Horizon-Dwellers. I was loathe to let him go. He had for so long been my friend and my confidant and my teacher! I wished to share eternity with him. His wisdom was boundless; I wished to know all he could teach me. His dances pleased the gods, they pleased me, and I wished that they would do so forever. He told me, wagging one finger, ‘I am going to call upon a god. The god will teach you a lesson, a lesson that I myself cannot teach you. Which lesson the god teaches will depend entirely upon which lesson you learn.’
“One night of my eighty-seventh year of kingship, he took me into the desert. He pointed to the sky, and I saw this god of his, a pale streak in the sky. I had seen such things before and shrugged. The pygmy said, ‘That is my god. Will you let me return home to the Horizon-Dwellers?’ My heart could not bear to let him go. For eighty-five of my years he had been beside me. He was like my shadow; what would I do without him?
“The month and the days passed, and the pale streak remained in the sky, growing brighter, until one night it was enormous, brighter than the moon, and then the pygmy said to me, ‘My god has arrived! Now I will go home.’
“And he jumped. The pygmy from beyond Yam jumped out of his skin. I saw his ba, or something very like his ba, fly so very, very high! For two days I stood there watching him, neither sitting nor eating. He landed upon the great, bright streak with such force that some of it broke away and fell beyond the western horizon. He rode it like a boat, this god of his, back to the Horizon-Dwellers.
“The earth tossed dust upon its head in bereavement. To this day, to this very day, the gods and the earth mourn the loss of my pygmy. And so do I. In the fullness of my power I learned the lesson that the god taught.
“Power is sacrifice. To gain power one must give it away in due proportion. To gain the utmost power one must be denied that most desired thing. I loved the pygmy more than I loved my own everlastingness. And in my longing for him, from the heat of the unquenchable fire within my heart, my power will last forever. And in your longing, Ankhtifi, so will yours.”
And since those days the river has lain quietly in its bed, listless and bereaved. Sandbars do not submerge, but loll like hippopotami in the water. Soon one will be able to walk from east to west and back again with a dry kilt, and after that, with dry sandals. Boats sail carefully, with a pilot ever at the bow taking soundings with his pole. Ankhtifi has been a pilot for Hefat. He once thought he had found the deepest channel. Today, dying of wounds from old campaigns and of privation, he doubts.
“Ankhtifi the Brave, the hero without peer,” Idy says when Ankhtifi’s story has come to the deep droughts and the years of failing crops and starvation, when it is with barley in their arms and not bows that the troops of Nekhen and Edfu meet the troops of Koptos and Thebes. Inglorious, ignominious years. Suffering years. Years of languish and lack.
Through this Idy has remained as certain as ever. And so have the men, everyone of the Districts of Edfu and Nekhen, even as their children grow sickly and their pregnant wives die and their arms grow weak.
How certain are they of Ankhtifi’s authority? Could there not be some doubt?
He points to written words and reads them aloud: “As for any overlord who shall be overlord in Hefat and who commits a bad deed or an evil act against this, my tomb, Hemen will refuse his sacrifices on his festival-day, Hemen will not accept any of his offerings, and his heir will not inherit from him.”
He turns this finger upon the workmen, upon his son. “Do you doubt this?”
The men are dumbstruck. It is their own handiwork the god has so guarded, and if they have not thought of this before they think of this now, and tremble.
“Would any of you do such a thing ever, in a span of a million of years?”
Idy blinks. He steps away and stands apart from the others. Will he speak? Ankhtifi wonders. Idy will, he must speak out while the people are silent, on the day of fear. He must not be afraid. He must doubt. He will be the next to see the falcon and receive the King’s boon. He must see what Ankhtifi has come to see, to know what Ankhtifi has come to know.
Idy replies.
“No, my lord, my father. For you are the hero who has no equal. No one like you has existed before nor will he exist ever after. You have accomplished more than your forefathers, and coming generations will never be able to equal you, not for a million years.”
Ankhtifi leans on his staff, bowing his head to the truth of it. By covenant it has been so written, upon the walls and upon the columns of this tomb, and thus it is so in the world. The men whisper that he is listening to the god; Ankhtifi the Brave would never otherwise bow his head.
But, now gesturing toward the doorway with his staff, he says, “Look, the sun has set while we have stood here talking. The light dims over the hills in the west, and it is time to eat, soon time to sleep. Go home. I would be alone in my house of eternity.”
They leave, without question, even the spearmen who would sooner see their sons die and lie unburied than allow any harm to Ankhtifi. Idy looks back before he has passed over the threshold, which Sasobek sweeps clean of wind-borne dust, but he does not linger. They know that Ankhtifi speaks with the god. They love Ankhtifi. They fear him. Neither they nor their children, born and to be born, will ever do anything against him, disobey, violate.
Ankhtifi the Brave is alone. The falcon has not yet returned this evening for the two khenmet-loaves and the foreleg. The King, still wakeful, paces the Residence, perhaps, or receives tribute from men of far-off lands. He yet counts the oil jars in the great storehouses of Neni-Nesut, makes love to a queen he does not love so much as his pygmy.
Whatsoever else he does, the King does not raise the river, and never will.
Ankhtifi raises his hands toward the ceiling, as if he might reach out through its stones to heaven. He raps the ceiling with his staff. “All I asked from you was this one thing, O King! O lord! O god! Do not deny me what I most desire.” His staff clatters to the floor. He clutches at his own image on the pillar and presses his cheek upon it. “I do not want your authority. What has it given me? Might my own tears raise the river? Must I myself lay new mud upon the fields?”
Ankhtifi’s fingers trace the hieroglyphic script upon the pillar. He is He-Who-Shall-Live, the brave, the hero, whose equal cannot exist. These are the King’s own words, uttered with the King’s own authority. These are the god’s own boon.
Into the shadows he whispers, “What you have given to me, O lord, I now give to you in kind.”
He turns from the pillar. It is cool, and he presses the carved signs into his back. They scratch his skin as he squats.
His bowels move. He is an old man. He is dying.
It is dark and soft like Nile mud. It reeks.
And, leaning heavily on his staff, his back bent, with the two khenmet-loaves and the foreleg of a calf burdening his arms, Ankhtifi walks toward the west, home to share one last meal with Idy.
The emergence of a writing system dramatically alters the record of human activity. Not only does it preserve more detail, such as names and activities that might otherwise leave no trace in the archaeological record, but those details are skewed to the interests of those for whom the accounts are kept. This has meant that, unlike the prehistoric period when men and women equally laid their traces (although archaeologists have not always paid them equal attention), historical records are overwhelmingly biased toward the activities of men. Literary glimpses of Bronze-Age women are usually veiled by the male point of view, whether of their contemporaries or of much later authors. One such author was the Roman poet Vergil, whose epic Aeneid (composed for none other than Augustus Caesar) follows the Trojan hero Aeneas to the shores of Italy. There he wins the daughter of the Latian king and ultimately founds the Roman people. Katharine Kerr and Debra Doyle lift the veil to take another look at the story of fair Lawinia, daughter of Latinu
s, heir to Latium.
The God Voice
KATHARINE KERR & DEBAR DOYLE
On her hands and knees the old woman scrubs the wood floor of the shrine. She dips her wad of linen rags into the leather bucket of water, then scours each plank in turn. Her back aches, her calloused knees burn with pain, but if she omitted this daily ritual, her dreams would torment her with work left undone. Sunlight streams in through the western window and falls across her back, the touch of the god Dian, easing her pain.
“I’m gray and wrinkled and twisted in the bone,” Watis says aloud, “but you love me still.”
In this warmth she can finish her task. Getting to her feet presents a challenge, but by clinging to the windowsill she manages to haul herself up. She sets the bucket and the rags outside for her slave—a woman nearly as old and bent as she is—to take away, then pauses to look over her work. In the sunset light the oak planks, polished daily for over forty years, gleam like the pure yellow sun-gold of Witelli. On her bare feet the wood feels smooth and cool, scoured down to a surface as sleek as metal. She turns in a way that mimics Dian’s path across the sky, first east, then south, then west, and back, finally, to the north.
Across the little shrine stands a block of gray stone, and behind it on wooden shelves sit the offerings that suppliants have given the god: a beaten silver bowl, a bronze dagger with a blade shaped like a bay leaf, a tripod of bronze and a bronze cauldron to go with it, and a bulbous ingot of pure tin, brought all the way from the edge of the world by a dark-haired trader from the land of Hatti.
The strangest gift of all hangs nailed to a side wall. Sea-bird feathers, stuck with wax, cover leather straps and thin strips of wood to form two huge wings, big enough to support a man in the air—or so they seemed to have done. She did see a man glide from the sky and stagger, dragging his wings, down the hillside one bright morning, a half-crazed fellow whose outpouring of speech she found incomprehensible. He wept and moaned, then with a stick drew pictures in the dirt; a huge bull, a man with a bull’s head, a boy falling from the sky as his wax wings shed feathers like tears. At last she decided that he had given either the bull or the boy or both to Dian as a sacrifice. In return she fed him and blessed him when he left, still babbling in his strange tongue.
Other suppliants have brought other gifts, but those she bartered to build this shrine, to get a slave, to feed them both in the lean winters. The god never begrudged her the use of his gifts. If he had, Dian Farseer would have slain her and the slave both with his black arrows; Watis is sure of that. But just as Dian pours his golden light freely upon the earth, to her, his priestess and his voice, he has given gold and amber to trade as she needed, and his sister Diana has never begrudged her silver as well. The sun and the moon, the holy twins, their wishes and their supplicants—these have been her entire life. Once she had another name, but the years have scoured it away. As she stands in the doorway to the shrine, the only name she knows is Watis, the seer, the god voice.
When she turns to leave the shrine, the pain in her back stabs her and steals her breath. For a moment she clings to the rough wood of the doorway and gasps. It’s time for me to die. That thought has become familiar over the past few months. Whenever her back twists and sags, whenever she cannot breathe from the pain of a back breaking under its own frail weight, the thought comes to her, and she longs for death, for rest deep in the earth. Yet she cannot die and will not die until she has found another woman capable of taking up the god’s work.
“It will be soon.” The words pour from her own mouth, but they are in the god’s voice, deep and hollow. Her body trembles, and she feels sweat trickle down her back and between her breasts. “She will come soon. Her feet are upon my road.”
When the god leaves her, Watis staggers outside, calling for the slave. The shrine perches on a ledge halfway up a mountain, overlooking the sea. Above it, steps cut in rock lead to the mouth of a cave. From the ledge she can see down to a village, thatched houses the size of fists from her distance. Two fishing boats, draped in drying nets, stand on the narrow pale beach. The old slave is climbing the twisted path; she puffs and gasps, but she carries only a basket, balanced on one hip. Over the years, she too has lost her name and become merely the slave woman.
“Fish,” Serwa gasps. “For dinner.”
“Good. They’ll make a nice change from barley porridge.”
Serwa nods and smiles. Together they turn away from the sea and follow the narrow path that leads past the shrine and down. Already evening’s shadows have filled the grassy valley where they have a little square house, shaded by olive trees. Past their cottage lie the fields, all green with tall wheat and barley, that belong to the farmers in the village beyond. Fishers and farmers make up the twin villages of Cumae.
“The god spoke to me today,” Watis says. “He’s promised me a successor. When she comes, you’ll be free.”
“And where will I go?” Serwa turns to her, and her voice rises in panic. “They took me so long ago, the raiders! Do you think anyone on the island will remember me, even if I could get back there?”
“No, they probably won’t. Stay here, then. I’ll tell the new priestess to find a young slave to wait on both of you.”
As she speaks, Watis feels a comfortable warmth like remembered sunlight. Soon the new voice will come. She’s sure of it. The god, after all, told her so.
Whether or not Dian has sent her, a young woman does appear some days later. The god hangs low in the sunset sky when Watis leaves the house to climb to the shrine to scrub the floor. Leaning on a stout stick, she clambers up the path; every now and then she stops to rest. Just as she reaches the ledge where the shrine perches, she realizes that someone sits sprawled all in a heap by its door—a woman, her long brown hair a tousled mess, her tunic filthy and torn, her face streaked with dirt and old tears. At the sight of Watis hobbling toward her, the woman hauls herself up to a kneel. She looks familiar, Watis realizes, though she cannot find her name in her memory.
“Sanctuary,” the woman gasps. “I beg you, please, please help me.” Her voice too strikes a familiar note.
“What’s so wrong, child?”
“They say I murdered my husband, but I never did. They won’t listen. They’re right behind me on the road. The gods—our gods, the true gods—hid and helped me, Grandfather Faunus the most, but Dian and Diana came to my aid as well. The men rode right past me. I stood at the forest edge and watched them clatter by without a glance in my direction. Dian must have blinded them with his light. How else could such a thing happen?”
“Slowly, slowly, hush! Who are ‘they’? When did—”
“You don’t remember me.” The young woman’s eyes fill with tears. “You don’t remember.”
“I’m very old, child. I forget everything but those things I need to serve the god.” Yet a memory is stirring in her mind, like the flicker of sunlight on a stream. “Wait. You were brought to me as a child for the omens.”
“Yes, by my father, Latinus.”
“Lawinia! Forgive me, child. So many people have come here since.”
“Of course. I should have thought of that. I’m sorry.”
“Now, what’s this about your husband? I’ve had news of the wars, and I know that the men from Wilion conquered Latium. Aeneas himself came here, you see, before he reached you. The god told me that he was fated to take your lands.”
“And so he did, and me with them.” Lawinia sits back on her heels. “My mother hanged herself. The war drove her to it. Did you know—”
“That I’d not heard, no. What a sad, sad thing!”
Lawinia nods, staring down at the rocky ledge in front of her. “It’s all been horrible,” she whispers. “I never wanted to marry Turnus, but I didn’t want to see him dead. I never wanted Aeneas, either, but I didn’t murder him, I swear it!”
“Who thinks you did?”
“His son, of course. Askanios.”
“He was always devoted to his father, an
d his father to him.”
“Oh, I’m sure of that! You won’t let them take me, will you?” Lawinia’s upturned face runs with tears. “Please, please, don’t let them take me.”
“That’s not my decision, child. It’s up to the god.”
“But—”
“Don’t argue! If the god decides you’re a murderer, and I lied to save you, then he’d leave me and never speak through me again. I absolutely must tell the truth. Do you understand?”
Lawinia’s words dissolve into one long sob. She tips her head back further and stares up at the gleaming dome of the sky. “Yes, of course,” she says at last. “I’ll accept whatever the god decides.”
“Good. Now get up. I hear horses coming.”
They walk to the head of the seaward path. Far below, horsemen are heading their way on the hard damp sand at the edge of the foaming water. Two young men ride in front, their purple boots dangling under their horses’ sleek bellies. Directly after comes a man driving a two-horse chariot, a young man with slicked-back dark hair. Over a fine white tunic he wears a purple cloak carelessly slung from one shoulder. Four more horsemen, one leading a laden pack horse, ride after him. All of them carry long swords in sheaths slung from baldrics across their chests. The charioteer has a pair of spears as well, standing upright next to him in the vehicle. The bronze buckles and chapes, the bronze spear points, all glitter in the sunlight. Lawinia sobs once.
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