“You won’t like my answer.”
“I’ll have it anyway.”
“Khay and Menna have tormented me their whole lives,” Qen replied. “You’ve seen them with me. They don’t respect me. They consider me a freak. They’ve made me miserable in countless ways. They’re both pompous, boastful, cruel. They take after their father. He’s treated me exactly the same way since we were boys. He was brutal to all three of his women, wore them out, sent them to early graves. He’s the example his boys will follow once they’re joined to your girls. Before your band appeared, my nieces Hemetre and Khenut were doomed to be joined to Menna and Khay. My sister was doomed to be joined to Meru. I saw that going to the lake, joining my nieces to your boys and my sister to someone in your band instead, would spare them that doom.”
“So you wanted to push Meru and his sons off on my family instead?”
“Better someone I didn’t know, someone not of my blood.”
“But now that you do know us – you’re content that Ahaneith be given to Menna, that Takhat be given to Khay, that I be given to Meru?”
“Content? Of course not! I’d spare all of you if I could – particularly you, Aya. But I can’t. And I have to put my family first, just as you do yours.”
“Why me in particular?” Aya asked. Her eyes bored deep into his. “Do you wish you were being joined to me, instead of Meru?” That would be typical of every man she’d ever met.
Qen straightened, looked her in the eyes. “Let me be clear,” he said, with dignity. “When we first met you belonged to Kakhent. After his death, Meru made it clear you’d be his next. I don’t lust after other men’s women. And certainly not after someone like you.”
“Oh, I’m not good enough for you?” Aya snorted. That was a new one.
“You misunderstand. You’re far too much woman for me.”
“Afraid you won’t be able to tame me? Afraid you won’t be able to control me?” Aya asked with disgust.
“You don’t need a man, Aya. You can live your life just fine on your own terms. I can’t think of a single reason you’d ever love me. And as I’ve told you before – I won’t join with a woman who doesn’t.”
“Love!” Aya exclaimed. “A luxury no woman has.”
Qen smiled sadly. “It shouldn’t be that way.”
State the obvious. “What will you do, Qen, if Hannu and Meru make their peace, if your nieces join with the boys of my band and your sister with one of my people? Will you try to take your patriarchy back from Meru? Will you take revenge for his alleged murder of your father?”
Qen shook his head no. “It’s too late for that. I’d never succeed. And I’m no killer. So once the joinings take place I’ll quietly slip away in the night. My family won’t need me to look after them anymore. No one will miss me once I’m gone. But if I stay Meru will always be suspicious of me, afraid I might try to overthrow him. He’s capable of doing anything to keep that from happening. Maybe a third scorpion…”
“Where will you go?” Aya asked, ignoring his last remark. Qen’s charge – two murders at Meru’s hand – was too far–fetched upon reflection to be true. Iry and Kakhent’s deaths had to be coincidences, ones Meru had simply taken advantage of. As despicable as that might be, it was no crime. It was simply good luck on his part.
“To the North,” Qen replied. “I’ll try to find the people who first brought emmer and barley and animals to this land and settle among them. Iuput is right – herding and farming is the life I’m meant to live.”
***
Within a couple of weeks summer arrived, bringing with it darkening skies and violent storms. It was, to Aya, the most magnificent time of the year. She loved to sit on the tip of the peninsula on afternoons when great white thunderclouds billowed high into the sky and then turned black, to watch as they swept across the distant savannah and lake discharging slanting sheets of rain, to marvel as brilliant bolts of lightning stabbed the earth, to be drenched by the spray as water crashed onto the shore, to race to the shelter of her hut just as great raindrops began to patter around her and raise the dust. She huddled there with her daughters, her hands tight over Betrest’s ears as thunder rumbled and shook the earth and swirling winds nearly tore her hut apart.
On one of the rare clear days Qen took his boat out on its maiden voyage.
That morning Aya made her way from camp onto the peninsula along with her daughters and sister. Qen’s vessel was tied to the trunk of a palm tree at the edge of the shore on the north side of the inlet facing the ridge camp, its stern swinging back and forth in the slight current. The smaller raft that Qen had built with Iuput’s help was attached to the stern by a long rope. A number of men from both bands were milling about restlessly, waiting to board. Aya halted a dozen yards away from them. She noted that Meru was accompanied by his brothers Buneb and Djau and his sons Menna and Khay, Hannu by Paser and Siese and Wetka and Hunefer and Pimay and Iuput. The men were mixing freely, except for the two patriarchs, admiring Qen’s boat, commenting on it to each other, unaware of the rift that existed between Meru and Hannu. For their part, the two patriarchs kept their distance from each other. From the moment of her arrival, Aya felt Meru’s eyes on her.
She was being included on this trip as the representative of the falcon god. At Qen’s insistence, Betrest and Pageti were going along too. They’d spent much time “helping” Qen with the construction. Ahaneith had refused to be left out, especially since Menna was going on the trip, and Takhat because of Khay. Standing in the shade of a cluster of palm trees, eyes scanning the vessel, Aya had to admit the boat was magnificent – sleek, thirty feet long and ten wide, both bow and stern rising elegantly far over her head, shaped like papyrus stalks. The boat matched exactly the one Aya had seen in her dream more than a decade ago. It’s similarity was almost scary.
Qen signaled to Aya from the deck of his boat. She and Pageti, carrying an empty earthenware jar, passed through the men and paused for a moment where the bow of the boat was tied to shore. Pageti knelt on the sand and filled her jar with lake water, then, still kneeling, held it up with both arms extended. Aya removed her talisman from around her neck and slowly dipped it into the jar. Then she pulled it out and slipped it back over her head. Water dripped down her chest. Pageti handed Aya the jar. Aya waded thigh–deep into the water, so that she was approximately even with the middle of the vessel. Aya raised the jar high. In a loud clear voice she invoked the blessing of the falcon god on Qen’s boat. Then she slowly poured all the water from the jar onto the deck. Qen moved to the center of the boat, took the jar from Aya, set it down, then pulled her up over the raised side.
That was the signal for everyone else to board. Iuput stationed himself in the water and Qen on the deck and between them they pulled and boosted everyone over the side. Meru seated himself in the bow and Hannu amidships. The other men settled along the sides of the boat, all of them taking up long oars made of acacia wood. Qen awkwardly limped from the midsection of the boat to the stern and grasped the steering oar. Betrest and Pageti hurried to places on either side of him. Aya joined them and sat at Qen’s feet. The deck beneath her was flat, made of layers of reeds laid perpendicular to each other atop some kind of wooden bracing. In the very center of the deck Aya spotted the net that she and Hemetre had spent a week weaving, its forty–foot length carefully folded upon itself in three–foot sections so that it wouldn’t tangle when it was played out. Beside it were numerous bidents, their flint points razor–sharp. A cluster of water jars occupied a section of deck near the stern. Aya noted a pile of thick palm fronds near the bow. Even with so many people and objects on board the boat didn’t seem crowded.
Qen issued a command. Intef and Isu untied the boat and waded into the water and pushed the bow away from shore, so that it faced west. Then the oarsmen began to pole the vessel through the shallows towards the open lake.
Aya settled back, watched the reed–lined shore of the peninsula as it slipped by. Young boys and girls w
ere running towards the end of the peninsula, shouting, waving, keeping pace with the boat. The vessel reached the west end of the peninsula and rounded it and headed south. Aya suddenly felt the west wind full in her face. The oarsmen seated themselves on low stools and positioned their oars and began to churn the water, though not rhythmically and not in unison. Most of them had never rowed a boat before, much less been on one. Some dipped their oars too low in the water and some too shallowly, sending water raining onto the other oarsmen and Aya and her girls. Some even knocked their oar against their neighbor’s with a ringing thud. Aya supposed it would take much practice before the men became comfortable. Still, in only moments the boat was in the open lake, angling towards its center.
The sun was mercilessly hot and the silver water sparkled and the wind blew. Qen ordered the palm fronds raised. Meru and Buneb gathered handfuls and leaned them against the bow and they caught the wind and the boat began to move somewhat faster. Between the branches and the oarsmen Aya had never traveled so quickly in her life.
She turned slightly and scanned the north shore of the lake. It looked much different from this perspective than it did from the land. She noted the peninsula, the fields along the shore, the low ridge and the huts of her people, the plateaus rising beyond, the marsh and the basin to its east, Meru’s even more distant huts on its ridge. The land looked prosperous, but Aya had never truly realized how empty. Even a dozen bands would hardly fill it.
They reached a spot perhaps a mile from shore.
“This is the place,” Qen told Iuput. “Betrest, Pageti, hold the steering oar steady.”
Both seized the long pole with their small hands, their eyes wide.
The oarsmen lay their oars on the deck, parallel to the sides of the boat. All of them were drenched with sweat and breathing hard. Aya noted that most were rubbing the palms of their hands, inspecting them for blisters, or rolling their shoulders to loosen them. Ahaneith took up the nearest water jar and hurried to slake the thirst of the oarsmen on the starboard side, starting, naturally, with Menna. Takhat took up another and served the men on the opposite side.
Iuput joined Qen in the stern and together they pulled on the rope that held the raft, bringing it to the very side of the larger vessel. Then, gingerly, with the help of several of the men, Iuput and Khay climbed over the side of Qen’s boat and let themselves down onto the raft. They sat. Qen passed each of them a paddle, far shorter than the oars used to propel the boat. Qen moved to the net, lifted the top section, unraveled a few lengths, then tossed its end to Iuput. He caught it and attached it to his raft. Then Iuput and Khay took up their paddles and began to slowly churn away from Qen’s boat. As they did Qen fed sections of the net carefully over the side of his boat. The net’s bottom, weighted with stones, sank, while the top, affixed to lengths of buoyant wood, floated on the surface. Iuput and Khay paddled until the net was stretched taut, perpendicular to both craft. Then they set their paddles aside. The boat and raft began drifting with the wind and current, parallel to each other.
All the men gathered at the side of the boat and peered intently into the water, watching the net for signs of activity. Ahaneith was beside Menna. Aya saw that the two were surreptitiously holding hands. She knew her daughter would be devastated a few weeks from now if the joinings did not take place. She’d probably never understand the fate she’d escaped. But Aya would, and she’d give thanks to the falcon god on that day.
Aya soon became bored with watching the net. She resumed her former seat, tilted her head back, felt the sun hot on her face and chest. She closed her eyes, lay her hand on her belly – she was three months pregnant now – felt the swelling that was her child. She opened her eyes, saw Betrest and Pageti still holding the steering oar. She was reminded of her dream, of sitting on a boat exactly like this one, amidst four daughters, with an infant son in her arms. She caught Meru staring at her from the bow, saw desire in his eyes. She knew he hadn’t given up on having her, despite the dispute between him and Hannu. He can’t be the man in my dream. He'll never make me happy. No one now living at the lake will make me happy. My next man will surely come from a band not yet located at the lake. Aya gently stroked her belly. It won’t happen until long after you’re born, my daughter, for I saw four girls gathered about me in my dream, and a son.
The simultaneous cries of several men startled Aya from her reverie. She rose and joined everyone else who was already staring at the net. She saw a large silver shape thrashing about well below the surface.
“Head back towards me,” Qen called to Iuput.
Iuput and Khay began to paddle, aiming the raft for the stern of Qen’s boat. Aya saw that maneuver would bring the net parallel to the side of the boat. At the same time, Qen directed his men to begin hauling in their end of the net. They did, slowly, hand over hand, bringing in several feet at a time, piling it dripping wet and tangled on the deck. As the distance between the two craft closed and the bottom of the net came closer to the surface, Aya could see that the fish they’d caught was huge. At the end, it took six men to haul the remaining section of net and the fish on board, reaching precariously over the side to do so. The catfish was the largest Aya had ever seen, far bigger than any she’d ever caught by hand in the marsh or in the shallows during spawning season. It thrashed about violently, spraying water everywhere, scattering the men. Meru finally stepped forward and dispatched it with one thrust of a bident in its brain.
“Fifty pounds, at least,” Hannu said, somewhat in awe, moving close enough to study it.
Siese tossed a rope to Iuput and he tied it to the raft and several men pulled it tight against the side of Qen’s boat. Paser and Siese helped Iuput and Khay climb back aboard.
“That’ll do, for a first fishing expedition,” Qen announced. “Let’s go home.”
“We’ll all feast together tonight, to mark the occasion,” Aya called. “The fish is big enough to feed us all.”
Qen moved to the stern and took the steering oar from Betrest and Pageti, thanking them sincerely. Both smiled at him proudly. Aya nodded slightly to Qen; she appreciated that he’d made her daughters feel part of the expedition. Qen acknowledged her, then called a command and the oarsmen dipped their oars into the water. Within an hour, fighting the wind and themselves, they landed in the inlet.
After that, on days when the sky was clear and there were no storms, several men fished the deep water far from land on Qen’s boat and raft. As Aya had expected, before long they got the hang of rowing and their muscles lost their soreness and travel time decreased accordingly. Always, one or more of Aya’s daughters went along at Qen’s invitation and their insistence. The women of both bands spent many hours after each expedition cutting apart and drying a multitude of catfish and perch over slow–burning fires, storing them in earthenware jars for future use.
The stormy season did not last long. After it came fifty awful days marked by hours–long blasts of hot dry air that sometimes made the sky hazy with dust from sunup to sundown and covered everyone and everything with grit. During the worst of it, everyone huddled in their own hut, a piece of linen over nose and mouth. Those winds were accompanied by oppressive heat; even swimming in the lake at night brought little more than momentary relief to Aya and her girls. When the men went out in the boats to fish they stayed close to shore, for when the wind arrived it did so without warning, nearly bending the grasses flat with its force. Occasionally it even snapped a dom palm or acacia or tamarisk trunk in half. Weeks of relentless wind withered the savannah and desiccated the marshes. Birds flew north to escape the heat. Plants and fruits all but disappeared. Wild melons in lakeside gullies became so dry their seeds rattled in their gourds. Wild roots hardened in the gray cracked earth – the women of both bands had to grind them into flour and soak them in water so they could eat them. It was during this season that Aya and her people relied most heavily on their stored grain and other foodstuffs and the milk and blood of their animals. This particular year they sh
ared both with Meru’s band, at Aya’s prompting – the patriarchs might be at odds, but that was no reason to treat the members of Meru’s band badly. The sharing took place over Hannu’s objections, which Aya ignored.
“Our clay awaits, girls,” Aya announced one morning after breakfast when the winds were unusually light. “Let’s get busy.”
She took up a leather pouch full of curved and straight pottery sherds of various sizes and slung it over a shoulder. Betrest grabbed several rolled–up reed mats. Ahaneith and Pageti carried earthenware jars full of water. The four made their way west and north of camp, climbing to the top of the first terrace and crossing it to the second. There a fissure from the bottom to the top of a sheer rocky face assured a constant updraft. The base of the fissure was where Aya fired all of her pottery. The fissure was smoke–blackened; the ground around it was littered with bits of charred tamarisk sticks and dung from past fires. Pottery sherds crunched with every footstep in a wide radius outward from the fissure; a few vessels usually exploded during each firing.
Days before Aya and her girls had cleaned clay they’d gathered from the lakeshore, and now Aya dumped it from containers stacked next to the fissure into a small circular depression half a foot deep atop a level section of bedrock. She carefully added water to the clay, then she and her girls stepped into the depression and began kneading the clay with their bare feet to get it to the right consistency. Every so often Aya added a bit of chopped straw and they kneaded it in; it would make the clay more solid and less sticky.
When the clay was at last ready each girl took a bit and moved to a smooth section of bedrock. Aya helped Betrest make a flat clay base for her vessel; Pageti and Ahaneith were quite experienced and required no oversight. The bases done, they rubbed small lumps of clay between their palms, transforming them into dozens of long finger–thick coils. Then they each set to work – Pageti and Betrest and Ahaneith to make hemispherical bowls, Aya a large jar. She quickly affixed the first coil to her base with strong practiced fingers, then attached the second coil atop the first, and so on until the jar reached the desired height. It flared outward a bit in the middle and again at the narrow top, the sides thick, the rim simple. Aya thought it quite elegant. The first phase of construction complete, she picked up the tool pouch and fished among the curved and straight sherds of pottery, remnants of broken pots, until she found one with a shape she liked. She used the sherd to smooth her vessel both inside and out, scraping gently yet firmly until the gaps between the coils disappeared and the walls of the jar were uniform in width. Once she was satisfied with her jar, Aya set it aside to dry in the sun on one of the reed mats Betrest had unrolled. Drying would take several days; the vessels Aya and her girls were making had to reach the consistency of leather before they could be fired. Aya would check on them both morning and evening for the next few days; if they dried too fast they’d crack or warp and be ruined. When Aya judged them ready, she’d return with her girls to the terrace. They’d apply red slip, then fire the vessels in an open fire hard against the fissure in the rocky cliff face. The pottery Aya made in this manner was far more durable and elegant and less porous than that made by the other women in the band, who simply shaped clay and hardened it in their campfires.
Daughter of the Falcon God Page 25