Daughter of the Falcon God

by Mark Gajewski

  Kakhent leaned back with a satisfied sigh. “This is most excellent, Meru. Nothing stands in the way of our children being joined at the upcoming festival now. And in years to come, as our younger children reach the age of joining, they will have partners near at hand as well. Both of our bands will prosper.”

  Meru drained his beer. “We shall indeed.”

  At a sign from Aya, Ahaneith refilled his cup.

  Kakhent took a long drink, then turned to Aya. “It’s time to entertain our guests.”

  Pageti fetched a reed pipe from inside the hut and handed it to Aya. She settled to one side of the campfire and began to play while her three daughters danced. Ahaneith was a vision, her skin golden in the firelight, long hair swirling, body lithe and supple. Aya did not miss that Menna’s eyes were locked on her daughter, and that her dark flashing eyes constantly sought his. Aya knew the girl was dancing just for him, her father and Meru and Hannu totally forgotten. Aya envied her daughter her stirrings of love, something she herself had never experienced. She’d been selected by Kakhent to be his when she was her daughter’s age and that had been that. Aya did not fail to note that every time she looked in Meru’s direction that he was watching her. He never once dropped his eyes or looked away when she caught him but continued to stare boldly. She did not drop her eyes either. Meru’s blatant interest made her extremely uncomfortable, but she had to endure it, even seem as if she welcomed it, if she was to gain even a bit of control over him. She wondered that Kakhent had not taken note of what was passing between her and Meru. That was fortunate, or he might have caused a scene.

  When the dancing was done Aya and her daughters sang for the two patriarchs, old songs handed down from mother to daughter, even a few that Aya had made up years before. She was renowned for her singing; the music drew others from the camp until almost everyone in the band was seated near Kakhent’s fire.

  When Aya finished, Meru rose. “It’s late. Thank you for your hospitality, Kakhent.”

  “You are always welcome here, Meru. You always will be. Now, and in the years to come.”

  ***

  Two weeks to the day after the slaying of the lion, Aya awakened a little before dawn and immediately sensed something was wrong inside her hut. It was too still. She touched Kakhent on the pallet beside her. His arm was cold and stiff. She shook him. He did not respond. Fearfully, she lay her head on his chest. She heard no sound, felt no measured rising and falling. Kakhent was dead.

  Aya knew she should be overcome with sorrow, but she felt only relief. She’d belonged to Kakhent for half her life, had given him children, had made the land bloom while he’d pursued different interests, had hidden his decline from the rest of the band for years. He’d treated her brutally at times, more rarely kindly, always as a possession, and had most often taken her for granted. There was little reason for her to mourn him. But her sense of relief quickly passed. Now that Kakhent was gone, her future was suddenly at risk. The door that had kept her safe from Meru had just swung wide open.

  Aya rose to her knees in the dim light and began to keen, for herself and her daughters, not Kakhent. The sound startled her daughters and sister awake. They crowded around Kakhent’s pallet, wide–eyed, saw what had happened, added their voices to hers. Not long after that a hand pulled the reed mat over the doorway aside. Hannu entered, carrying a torch, casting shadows inside the hut.

  “Father,” Aya said, looking up, her tearless eyes meeting his. She bowed her head. “Patriarch.”

  He took a position across from Aya and the girls, remained standing.

  Soon Kakhent’s four sons and their three women arrived, all of them breathless, all disheveled. The men and Bintanath, Paser’s woman, crammed inside the small hut; the rest of the women remained outside. Aya heard them and their children keening. Bintanath openly smirked at Aya. Aya realized that the primacy she’d held over the rest of the band’s women because of her joining to Kakhent had just ended. She assumed her father would continue to rely on her as Kakhent had in the short term, since he had no woman of his own, but that would last only until his joining with Nofret a few weeks from now at the inundation festival. Aya did not doubt that the rest of the women were already counting the days until they were once again her superior, for she was the youngest of them and would drop to the lowest ranking. Aya could tell from Bintanath’s expression that she was already calculating how she’d pay her back for years of having to obey her directions. Well, so be it. Aya had never asked to be set over the other women, and would not miss the responsibility it entailed. Besides, Bintanath had apparently forgotten that Hannu’s future woman was barely thirteen years old. She’d no doubt have a fit once she remembered. Aya turned back to Kakhent. His deeply lined and wrinkled face was peaceful in the torchlight. Had he regarded her so more often over the years she might actually have come to love him. But too late for that now.

  Aya got to her feet and went outside. A path opened for her through those waiting before the hut, and she walked straight to the lake and knelt and washed her face and then sat and covered her face with her hands and cried – for herself and her daughters, not for Kakhent. As if her life hadn’t been uncertain and unsettled enough because of the barbarians before, now she had no idea how she was going to support her family until Meru staked his claim to her at the inundation festival three months from now. She doubted her father would provide much help, if any; he was a stingy man, and he’d been quite happy to pass her off to Kakhent at his earliest opportunity thirteen years ago so that he wouldn’t have to feed and clothe her. Aya dropped a hand, rested it on her stomach. Three girls to care for, she thought, and another child Kakhent will never know. She hadn’t had the chance to tell him she was pregnant for the sixth time.

  A shadow fell over Aya and she looked up. Hannu stood beside her, carrying the crook that had been the sign of Kakhent’s authority, a lion’s pelt draped over his shoulders. Both belonged to him now. The deal he’d made with Kakhent so long ago to succeed him in exchange for her had finally come to fruition. “I’ve sent your brother to fetch Meru,” Hannu said.

  Aya wasn’t surprised. If Kakhent’s sons were going to make a move against Hannu, challenge him as Kakhent’s successor, they’d do it today. Hannu wanted his ally, Meru, close by to intervene in case they did.

  “By the way, in the light it was obvious that a scorpion stung Kakhent in the night and killed him,” Hannu added. “You’re lucky it didn’t get you too.” And then he strode off in the direction of his hut.

  ***

  Aya’s girls and her sister joined her soon after beside the water and she did her best to comfort them, giving them assurances about the future that she herself scarcely believed. At midday she returned to her hut and began preparing Kakhent’s body for burial. She washed him in water carried from the lake in earthenware jars by Ahaneith and Pageti and Takhat. Then she dressed him in his finest loincloth and carefully arranged his hair and placed one of his bands with ostrich feathers on his brow. She fastened a bull’s tail to the belt that circled his waist and then she was done.

  Paser and Siese and Wetka and Pimay and Hunefer carried an oryx skin suspended between two long poles into the hut. As Hannu watched, they moved Kakhent’s body onto the skin. They seized the poles and lifted them and exited the hut. Aya followed them outside, blinking against the sunlight. It was now late afternoon and her stomach growled with hunger, for she’d had nothing to eat since the night before.

  She was not surprised to see everyone in Meru’s band gathered alongside her people, knowing of Hannu’s and Meru’s agreement. Still, she appreciated the sign of respect. Meru stood beside Hannu, dressed in his finery and carrying his staff, as befit the occasion. Aya’s eyes met his and she saw possessiveness. She suspected that if he hadn’t already spoken to Hannu about her he would shortly. She realized that her plan to convince Meru to adopt her band’s lifestyle and stay at the lake permanently, based on the assumption that he’d have to wait several years to poss
ess her and she could cajole him into granting her what she wanted in that time, was now in ruins. She would be his very soon, at his mercy, with no leverage. She had to come up with a new plan, and she had precious little time in which to do so and execute it. Otherwise, her days at the lake were numbered. She glanced at her father. Hannu looked nervous. Perhaps the only other person with as strong an interest as she had in Meru remaining at the lake permanently was him. Aya was certain that the day Meru left Kakhent’s sons would remove Hannu as the band’s patriarch. He knew it too.

  Aya’s daughters slipped to her side and she took hold of Pageti and Betrest’s hands. Ahaneith wrapped her arm around Takhat’s waist.

  The men raised the poles to their shoulders and began to walk slowly, northwest, towards the base of the nearest plateau, led by Hannu and Meru. Hannu carried his crook in one hand; ostrich feathers were bound to his brow and a bull’s tail dangled at his waist. He angled towards a prominent outcropping of rock three–quarters of a mile away and about as far to the west as the end of the peninsula, the same place they’d buried Bek so many years ago. The area was reserved for the band’s adult dead; Aya’s two newborn sons and the children of several other women lay beneath their mothers’ huts in the camp itself. The sun was already low in the west and rays of light slanted across the land, turning the emmer and barley stubble and the lake golden. Aya walked directly behind Kakhent’s body, keening mechanically, though no tears rolled down her cheeks. The other women and girls keened as well, bending often to grab handfuls of dust and toss it on their heads. Kakhent’s grandsons followed silently. Meru’s people trailed them all.

  The procession reached the outcrop. Aya saw a few jackals prowling atop the plateau thirty feet above her head, outlined against the darkening sky. Sand and dirt were already mounded beside a hole that someone had scooped in the ground a few hours earlier almost against the rock face, deep enough, Aya thought, that Kakhent’s body would be safe from the skulking scavengers. Everyone gathered around in a semicircle. The men lifted Kakhent’s body from the carrying skin and placed him on his side in the grave, his head to the south, face to the west. They flexed his knees so they nearly touched his chest, arranged his hands so they covered his face, the same position as an infant in its mother’s womb, so that he could be reborn. Wetka placed a second of Kakhent’s headdresses in the angle made by his knees. Pimay lay a crook beside him. Then Siese carried a large earthenware pot full of red ochre to Hannu, and he poured it over Kakhent, covering him entirely from head to foot. It was an ancient tradition, Aya knew, one kept by her band from a time beyond memory. Then Hannu stepped back and tossed the jar aside. Aya moved to the edge of the grave and held up the talisman in her right hand and invoked the protection of the falcon god on Kakhent’s spirit. Then Kakhent’s four sons pushed the sand over Kakhent’s body using the shoulder bones of an aurochs and he disappeared forever. Soon afterwards the crowd dispersed, everyone heading to their respective camps in the gathering darkness.

  Aya remained standing by the grave as everyone else streamed away, her eyes tightly closed. She hated Kakhent for dying at so inopportune a time, for leaving her in Meru’s clutches. She felt uncertain, abandoned, lost, afraid. I have to be strong, she told herself fiercely. My girls and Takhat have no one but me to rely on now. I can’t let them down. She clutched the talisman. Watch over me, and them, o falcon god, she prayed.

  Aya opened her eyes. With a start she realized that Qen was standing a few feet away, leaning on his staff, watching her. The two of them were alone.

  “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to intrude on your grief,” he said apologetically. “I just wanted to be certain you were alright.”

  Aya knelt down beside Kakhent’s grave, smoothed the mound with her hands. She was too tired to skirmish with Qen about his presumptiveness. “I won’t rest here beside him, as I should,” she said pensively, more to herself than Qen.

  Qen nodded. “You’ll die in a distant land, Aya, far from this lake, wherever Meru wanders. He won’t stay here after you’re joined to him. At least not long.”

  Aya looked up at him. “Who told you we’re to be joined?”

  “Forgive me, Aya,” Qen said apologetically. “I shouldn’t have brought it up on this of all days. It’s just a logical assumption – Meru’s a patriarch without a woman; you’re a patriarch’s woman without a man.”

  Aya made no reply. She was suddenly overcome with weariness. She sat, braced her back against the outcrop, placed her hand on Kakhent’s grave. “Do you think we continue to exist after we die, Qen? Is that what your people believe?”

  “It’s more comforting than thinking we disappear forever, lost in nothingness, isn’t it?” he answered. “Who can say for sure, Aya? Perhaps there’s a world beyond the one we know. Doesn’t the sun return to the sky every morning from somewhere? Doesn’t it go somewhere at night? Don’t the waters of the inundation move north without fail every year from somewhere?” He glanced upward at the sky. “Don’t the lights reappear every night? Everything in our lives is part of a cycle – does that stop when we die? Maybe we never really leave this world at all. I came across a body once, buried in the eastern desert, when I was traveling to the sea. Some animal, probably a jackal, had partially dug it up. It must have been hundreds of years old, yet the sand had preserved the body perfectly. All it was missing was whatever is inside us that gives us life, lets us see and speak and breathe and talk and love.” He gazed at the sky again. “Sometimes, at night, when I look up at the lights, I wonder if they aren’t our ancestors looking down at us. Or the very gods themselves.” He shook his head. “I suppose we’ll never know.”

  “Until we’re dead ourselves,” Aya answered.

  ***

  “Dig here, girls.”

  Aya distributed flint chisels to her daughters and they began stabbing them into the rich deposit of red ochre at the base of a long low ridge a mile north of camp. Kakhent’s burial ten days earlier had exhausted the band’s supply and Aya had volunteered to replenish it. She’d discovered this particular deposit years earlier on one of her exploratory rambles and it had been the source of cosmetics for the band’s women ever since. It was now pocked with numerous deep pits. Aya noted a number of discarded blunted flint chisels scattered around the area, some half–buried in the dirt, the remains of earlier expeditions.

  Aya watched her girls as they worked. Their lives had changed considerably since Kakhent’s passing. Before, Aya and her family had been given the patriarch’s due of the large game slain in the communal hunt. But since Kakhent’s death, Aya’s father, concerned with firming up his hold on the patriarchy, had not dared to appear to favor her in any way, especially when his cousins’ women began whispering to their men about her, and so provided for her only token supplies, and those begrudgingly, even though he was now receiving the patriarch’s share and couldn’t come close to consuming it all. At least he claimed that to be the reason. Hannu had never been a generous man, Aya reflected, and so his miserliness had not surprised her. So she and her girls and Takhat spent much time these days setting snares for waterfowl and hares and other small game, catching fish, carefully rationing their store of dried fruits and vegetables, drawing a reduced daily portion of emmer and barley from the camp’s storage bins. Aya now worked long into the night beside her campfire making earthenware pots and baskets to trade for whatever her family lacked. Iuput, without asking his father’s permission, made sure she and her girls continued to receive milk and blood daily from the herds. “You won’t starve as long as I’m around,” he promised her.

  Aya was still serving as the patriarch’s woman on her father’s behalf, for he had no intention of taking on the work that involved himself, but Aya knew it was a temporary accommodation until he joined with Nofret, and all the women knew it, and so they’d already started treating her as if she was the least among them. Despite that, Aya was happier than she’d ever been. Though simply trying to provide for her girls from day to day was c
hallenging, for the first time in her life Aya was truly free. She’d spent her girlhood answering to Hannu, the succeeding years to Kakhent. Now she belonged to no man. She could come and go as she pleased, do what she wanted when she wanted. And having tasted freedom, she had no intention of giving it up for just anyone. Her father may have bargained her life away months ago, promised her to Meru, but she wasn’t about to join with the barbarian. She had no idea how she was going to prevent it from happening, but she vowed to find a way. The falcon god had once shown her a future filled with love and contentment and happiness; because she had unshakeable faith in the falcon god, she clung tightly to the belief that her dream would someday come true and she would be joined to the man she’d seen in it.

  As her daughters busily filled the pouches of animal skin they’d brought with them from camp, Aya scaled the ridge. She loved to gaze over the country from high places. Once on the crest she turned to survey the region to the south. The land descended in terraces from the ridge where she was standing all the way to the wide cultivated strip on the north shore of the lake. The lake itself was massive, stretching almost from horizon to horizon. She noted the peninsula jutting into the lake, dark with palms, the water in the inlet to its north calmer than that of the open lake. The lake’s surface shone silver, a vast bright mirror surrounded by savannah and low hills. Except for columns of smoke spiraling into the air from Hannu’s and Meru’s camps, and the fields of grain waving in the lowlands beside lakeshore and basin, not much had changed in the years since she’d first followed the falcon god to this country. For her personally, of course, so much had changed.

  Aya descended the ridge and headed for where her girls were still digging. About halfway there she saw a glimpse of white nearly hidden by the tall grass. She pushed the grass aside and discovered an ostrich nest, littered with the remains of half a dozen thick shells. Aya knelt and gleefully picked up all the pieces one by one, carefully placing them in her leather pouch. Several shells were nearly intact; pecked open at only one end, they’d serve admirably as water containers. The smaller bits could be turned into beads for necklaces. When she was done Aya sat back on her haunches, satisfied. Ostrich shells were very valuable. She’d be able to trade what she’d just found for a considerable amount of foodstuffs of various kinds. She and her girls should be able to live off these bits of shell for months. She remembered making a similar find the day she’d first visited the lake country. She could only conclude that the falcon god had led her to this spot today as well. It was comforting to think he was still looking out for her.