Black Ships

by Jo Graham

  “We will,” I said. “Our destiny is not in Egypt.” Much as I might wish it otherwise, I thought. I could dream of the archives and the long slow days, the orderly rhythm of the temple, the stately service of the gods. I could be so happy here. I could find everything I sought. I could need no other love but Hers, here in the quiet of Her service.

  I stood up. “We will leave Egypt,” I said. “You will have your wish.” And I went in, before he could see me cry.

  NEAS DID NOT RETURN the next day until afternoon, and I did not see him then. Amynter told me with great satisfaction that Pharaoh had promised to keep us on for good wages, and that Neas had agreed. He whistled as he went about his work. For all that he didn’t speak the language, Egypt was quite good enough for him.

  As it was to me.

  I went to the Temple of Thoth and my heart was heavy. There was nothing I could say to Hry. What could there be? He had shown me nothing but kindness. And now it seemed that Neas meant for us to stay in Egypt forever.

  He was always gone to the palace, and I knew what that meant. He came back to us laughing, smelling of myrrh and precious resin, his white linen skirt kilted like an Egyptian prince. He even trimmed his hair and wore it beneath a soldier’s head cloth, like the bright, beautiful warriors limned on the walls of the Temple of Thoth.

  And I, I was seized with restlessness. My lessons gave me pleasure, but when I returned from them I thought I would go mad, sitting with Tia and Polyra cooking endless fava beans on pots above the fires in the barracks courtyard.

  Hry sensed this in me. One morning he asked me to return at nightfall, rather than staying by day.

  “Why?” I asked him.

  “It is time for you to learn the stars,” he said.

  My first impulse was to refuse. Why should I do his bidding and come at night? And then I thought better. Our ships navigated by the stars. The more I learned of them the better I could help Xandros.

  I stood beside Hry on the roof of the Great Temple while he pointed out this one and that, and I learned their names in Khemet that I had known only in Wilusan. As night drew on the fires of the city were banked and dark, and the sky above shone in the clear desert air brighter than I had ever seen. It was so black that it seemed to have depth.

  “You see?” Hry said softly. “It is an ocean.”

  “I can almost see distant shapes,” I said. “A little blur here and there, like something too faint to see. Like something too far away.”

  “When I was a boy,” Hry said, “I could see much more clearly. Now the faintest stars are lost to me.”

  A pale sheen in Andromeda, like a vague circle of light. “If I could see more clearly...”

  Hry chuckled to himself. “If you could see more clearly, you would know the shape of the stars. You would navigate the skies.”

  “I would,” I said, and in the black depths could almost see it. “I would build a ship of moonlight and silver, and Xandros would pilot it for me.” I smiled at Hry. “And we should sail beyond the baths of the stars and far away, to strange islands in that ocean where men have never walked.”

  “And the wind that would fill your sails is desire,” Hry said. “It is desire that gives our ba wings. To yearn with such might must come to something.”

  “Must it?” I asked.

  Hry patted my arm. “You must learn to be patient. It is not time yet for you to sail.”

  And I did not know if he meant to sail the stars, or the much more mundane seas that lay between the Black Land and the world.

  SOTHIS RISING

  A few days later I was leaving the Temple of Thoth when Lide came hurrying up to me on the steps. “There you are!” she exclaimed. “You must come right away. And bring the priest with you.”

  “What’s happened?” I said. “Kianna? Has something happened to the baby?” But if so, what possible use could Hry be?

  “No, not the baby,” Lide said. “Get the priest. I’ll explain on the way.”

  I ran back inside and got Hry, whom I had just parted with. We came outside together.

  “Come,” Lide said. “It’s important.”

  “Is someone ill?” Hry asked. He was panting a little in the heat.

  Lide was taking us through the city, to the outskirts where the Nubian bowmen practiced at their barracks on the edge of the desert. “You could say that,” she said.

  I struggled to go faster, but I lost them in the streets. I could not really run well, even after so long.

  Nubian barracks? What in the world could Lide need Hry for there? As we got closer I realized it was not just the Nubians who were there, but that they guarded the camp of slaves taken in the great battle, though that camp grew smaller by the day as the slaves were sent all over the land in small groups.

  The sun was blinding, and this far from the river there was little breeze. If there was any, it was bone dry and smelled of the far deserts, not of the sweet green banks. The prisoners had some tents against the sun, just ragged blankets propped on sticks, and nothing else. Lide stood beside one tent some little distance away, while Hry knelt and looked inside. I came up to them as quickly as possible.

  “Achaians?” I said. And then I did not need to ask. The boy who lay inside was my brother.

  Aren was curled up on his side, shaking with fever in the heat of the summer. He was taller than I remembered, with long fair hair clotted with sweat. Thirteen, I thought. He is thirteen now, a young man, not a child. There were bloodstains on his chiton, and he curled tight.

  I turned to Lide. “Has he been castrated, then?”

  “Circumcised,” she said. “All Egyptian men are, even their slaves.”

  Hiram had said as much, I thought, in Byblos, but I had thought that he meant it figuratively that Pharaoh should take the foreskins of all the captives. Apparently not.

  “The cuts have gone bad,” Lide said. “As sometimes happens with cuts of any kind. He’s got a terrible fever.” She knelt down and lifted a pot of water, but he turned his head from her, his eyes clenched shut.

  One of the Nubians had come up behind us, presumably asking us what we thought we were doing. Hry stood up, and I saw the man straighten perceptibly as he saw the priest.

  Lide dipped the hem of her tunic and began to sponge Aren’s face. She had birthed him, I remembered. I remembered that well. She had washed the blood from his baby face and laid him on my mother’s breast.

  Hry turned back to us, speaking in the tongue of Wilusa. “I have told the captain here that this young man is not Achaian, but Denden, and one of your people who went overboard during the battle. He must have been taken prisoner by accident. I have told him that the boy is the honored lady’s brother. I will arrange that we may take him to the temple, where our doctors can tend him.”

  I grabbed Hry’s hand. “Will you really do this?”

  Hry smiled, and the sun beat down on his old bald head. “Of course. He is your brother, isn’t he?”

  “Yes,” I said. “He is my brother.”

  It took some little while for Hry to order bearers and a litter. It was sunset before we carried Aren into the Temple of Thoth and gave him to the care of that doctor that Hry trusted most. Hry then led me and Lide into the courtyard with the pool and sent for cool water. “Come and sit,” he said. “My friend will do what he can, and we must give him room to work. He will have to trim the cut that was made and take the bad skin off. And then there are medicines he will try. But it is better if we are not in his way.”

  We sat down in the cool evening and sipped water. The stars were coming out.

  Hry patted my hand. “You must love your brother very much.”

  “I hardly know him,” I said. “He was two years old when I went to the Shrine. I have barely seen him since.”

  “Except in Pylos,” Lide said. “When you sent him to find us and bid us to come to the harbor.”

  “That wasn’t me,” I replied. “It was Her. I kept Xandros from killing him, though.” In my min
d’s eye I saw them once again, against the broken gates and the wall covered in flowering vine, Xandros with his hair flying loose, his sword coming up in a backhand stroke to open his stomach, Aren with his borrowed sword responding too slowly. I had thrown myself between them and all of Her power had filled me.

  “Will he live?” I asked Hry.

  “We will have to ask the doctor,” Hry said. “There are no more skilled physicians anywhere in the world than here. He is in good hands.”

  We sat in silence in the starlight.

  After a while we went in and sought the doctor. Aren lay in a bed in a cool room open to the river breezes. His manhood was bandaged and lay beneath a linen drape, and his eyes were closed.

  The physician was washing his hands. He turned and dried them on a cloth. “I have cleaned the cut,” he said. “I have trimmed the bad skin and washed it well, then seared the cuts with a knife dipped first in boiling water and then passed through a flame. I have treated it with honey and bandaged it in clean cloth. And I have given him a tea to help his fever. He will need to stay here and be tended for some days, but I am hopeful.”

  I looked at him. Aren was sleeping, and the sweat stood upon his white forehead. He looked nothing like me, I thought. Nothing like my mother. He looked like Triotes.

  “We have apprentice healers who watch through the night,” the physician said. “You need not fear for his care.”

  “I don’t,” I said. I knew the thoroughness with which everything was done in the Temple of Thoth.

  “Go home,” he said, “and rest.”

  LIDE AND I WENT, but I could not sleep. I rose and returned before dawn.

  They knew me now at the temple, and the sleepy door wardens let me in. There was a lamp in the hall of the chambers of healing, but the apprentice on duty did not try to stop me from going in. I went in and sat.

  Aren seemed less flushed. I put my hand upon his brow. The fever seemed less. My hand looked strange there, or perhaps it was just that his was so much a stranger’s face, a young man, not the child I remembered. His nose was straight and strong, his jaw jutting and still too large for his face.

  Aren opened his blue eyes. He looked at me. “Mother?” he said, still half asleep.

  “No, Aren,” I said. “It’s me.” I did not realize that he too, missed her still.

  His eyes widened. “Pythia?”

  “Yes,” I said, and felt my eyes fill with tears.

  “How did you get here? Where am I?”

  “You are in the Temple of Thoth,” I said. “In the care of physicians. And I’ve been here.”

  “The last time I saw you, you were leaving Pylos with a bunch of pirates,” Aren said. “How did you get to an Egyptian temple?”

  “It’s a long story,” I said.

  “Tell me.”

  And so I did.

  By the time I had reached the part where we were in Byblos, the physician had returned with a bowl of barley porridge for Aren and another cup of the tea. “You look better, young man,” he said in Khemet.

  Aren looked at me. “He says you look better,” I said.

  “How is it that you speak their language?” he asked.

  “I’ve been learning,” I said. “It’s not so difficult.”

  “Tell him I want to look at his cut,” the physician said. “And perhaps you should go out. It’s not the sort of thing I’d want to show my sister.”

  I translated for Aren and his face went hard. “It’s the Egyptians that did this. They’ve cut off my manhood.”

  “Not all of it,” I said. “Just the foreskin. All Egyptian men are so. Most of them have it done when they come of age.”

  “I’ll never...” he began, then flushed to the roots of his hair.

  “Yes, you will,” I said. “It doesn’t stop all the Egyptians, does it? It’s not your foreskin that makes you a eunuch; it’s your balls.”

  “I don’t really want to talk to you about my balls,” Aren mumbled.

  “I’ll go out then,” I said. “And come back later this afternoon.”

  I went back to the barracks and slept.

  OVER THE NEXT FEW DAYS Aren mended, and I began to wonder what would happen once he was well. I would not send him back to the slave camp.

  It was four days before I caught Neas, as he was always at the palace. I found him in the courtyard wearing white linen, with a new gold collar around his neck that matched the lion hunt bracelet on his arm. His skin was smooth and oiled, but he looked tired.

  I did not wait, but told him all that had happened. “You see why I had to take him to the temple,” I finished. “He is my brother.”

  Neas looked at me with the same expression he’d had for Xandros on the docks in Byblos when he’d brought Ashterah to the ships. “I see that. But he’s also an Achaian, one of the men we fought against.”

  “He wasn’t at the sacking of Wilusa,” I said. “I made sure of it. His father would not take Aren. He never sailed before this last expedition with the great fleet.”

  “That’s good,” Neas said, and I knew that he was considering fairly. He would always consider fairly any matter I brought to him, no matter how much it might vex him or create trouble where there was none. “So no man will have a direct blood feud with him. But he is still Achaian, one of their people.”

  “He is my brother, born of the same mother, a daughter of Wilusa,” I said. “If I am of the People, so is he.”

  Neas sighed, and I knew that I had won. “What is it you want?”

  “To bring him here,” I said. “I cannot leave my brother to be a slave.”

  “Very well,” Neas said. “But the boy will have to look out for himself. I am not going to run around protecting him from anyone’s ill will.”

  “If you greet him,” I said, “it will be enough. No man will risk your displeasure.”

  “I wish that were true,” Neas said. “There may have been a time when it was, but it is not this time.” Neas sighed. “I need your counsel, Sybil,” he said, leading me away, to the riverside. I knew what he meant, then. I hadn’t really expected him to speak of it, was not even sure if he felt it as I did, since he was so often gone.

  “There are two factions,” Neas said. “I would be a fool not to see it. Those who want to leave Egypt and go somewhere or another, like my father, and those who are content with the bargain I have made with Pharaoh and will stay here.” He looked at me. “I know you love Egypt and that you have made many friends. You understand why I have made the bargains I have made.”

  “Yes. I understand,” I said. And I did, at least in part. As mercenary contracts go, this was a good one, better than escorting convoys. But I could not tell from his face if he meant other bargains as well, if he thought her part of it, a bargain for his people that he must seal with his flesh.

  I put my hand on his arm and he did not flinch, but he did not warm to me either. He was courtly and distant, Prince Aeneas. “Neas,” I said carefully, “there are bargains and bargains.”

  He met my eyes. “She is a beautiful woman. I have nothing to complain of.” He turned and sat down on the quay, where Xandros and I had watched the moon the night of the banquet.

  “Neas,” I said and sat beside him. We did not touch.

  “I am a prince,” Neas said. “I have known all my life what that means. Princes do not choose. They know their duty to their people and what honor demands. I was fortunate when my father chose Creusa as a wife for me. She was kind and lovely, and I would have chosen no better when I was seventeen and she fourteen. I came to love her.”

  “That is the blessing of the Lady of the Sea, Cythera, whom we call Aphrodite,” I said. “You are beloved of Her, and She has given you everything She could.”

  “Yes,” he said. His gilded sandals trailed in the water. “But every man knows that there is a time when you can rely no further on your mother’s gifts. You must do things for yourself. You cannot expect your mother to solve everything, for your mother to make you
whole.”

  “That is true of women as well,” I said. “The first time I wore Pythia’s paints and knew that She Who Was Pythia would not be there to guide me, I knew that I was alone indeed. And that I would never again be safe.”

  Neas looked at me sideways. “Were we ever safe?”

  “No, but we believed we were. Doesn’t Kianna think she is safe, with Tia and Kos to guard her, Bai and Xandros and all the rest?”

  “And me as well,” he said. “She is safe here, and there is food for all of them to eat. I have made my bargain. And that is how it is.” He clapped his hand on my shoulder as though I were one of his men, stood up, and walked away.

  “My prince,” I said, knowing he did not hear me. “You are worth so much more than all the grain and fava beans in the world.”

  And so Aren came and stayed with us. Xandros took him into the ships’ company and gave him the task of tending to Kassander as he mended. They were of an age, and Kassander was still having trouble walking. I did not fear they would quarrel, for I knew the messenger was a quiet boy made even more so by the pain of his healing leg. Like me, he would never be fleet of foot, but a rower does not need to be. It was his back and his arms that must do the heavy work.

  ONE NIGHT not long after, I came at night to view the stars with Hry.

  It was a long time before the lights of the city began to disappear, and there seemed many more people in the streets than usual. I asked Hry about it, and he smiled.

  “Do you see there?” he asked, pointing. “Do you see how on the eastern horizon that group of stars is just rising above the distant hills? Tonight they will come no higher, but tomorrow night Sothis will rise clear and cold out of the desert, and he will blow his hunting horn among the skies. The sound will be heard from one end of the Black Land to the other, and Hapi will open the great vaults of the Nile at Elephantine and let loose the flood. For forty days the river will rise and cover the fields, bringing life to Khemet. Tomorrow night when Sothis rises there will be great celebrations, and the next five days are the birthdays of the gods.”

  “I was born on the night of Sothis’ first rising,” I said. “Lide told me so, and she birthed me.”