Out of the Black Land - By Kerry Greenwood Page 0,2
all, into her milky pool and I lay on her smooth, rounded breasts as though I had been fostered there.
‘You have done well,’ she told Horemheb, and he bowed and went away.
I had fallen in love with my sister. She washed all the mud off me with her own hands, heedless of the blood in the water, then called her women. She called her own nurse to treat the grazes on my legs, and then dried me and dressed me, for concealment, in a woman’s cloth.
When Asen came to find me, my wounds were carefully hidden under a too-big gown and I was sitting like a good little girl, while my most beautiful sister plaited flowers into my hair.
‘Is she not my sister, daughter of my father?’ she asked Asen, who bustled in full of outrage and threatening a beating. ‘Should she not come to me? Let her come again,’ said Nefertiti in a voice like flowing gold, and Asen melted right away in front of my eyes.
So I first saw her, the beautiful one who is come, the Great Royal Wife. And so I first saw Horemheb the young soldier, who rescued me from the Nile.
Ptah-hotep
I cannot remember not being able to read and write.
When I was five years old in Maat who is truth, my father Imhotep sent me to the palace of the Temple of Amen-Re at Karnak to become as he is. I had taken his stylus and made squiggly attempts at letters all over the whitewashed inner wall of the house, using cooking-pot soot for ink, because I had seen him writing and wanted to imitate it. My mother raised a hand to slap me, because she valued her clean walls, but my father had put her aside, saying ‘Here is a scribe and son of a scribe, should he not practice his father’s profession?’
And the woman my mother had agreed, while I was still naked, while I wore nothing but the amulet and sidelock of childhood.
And here I am now many years later, my legs crossed under me, immaculate fine linen cloth uncreased, the plaster-board laid across my lap, my own palette beside me on the floor. My brushes and styli are carefully selected and meticulously kept and my ink is of the finest, solid black and bright scarlet. I compound and grind my own ink, which I dilute with water if I am writing on papyrus and with painter’s size derived from boiled hoofs if I am inscribing a wall. Beside me are a pile of limestone shards and broken pottery, the ostraca for notes and random thoughts, and my master is reading out the Building Inscription of Amenhotep II, which the whole class is copying, miserably or obediently.
I am bored almost to extinction. Cruel father, to condemn me to this endless toil! Better I had been such as the young men who work in the fields, who care for oxen and fish in the river. Better even to be a slave carrying water or grinding corn, better to be a weaver in his little house or a laundryman beating filthy clothes in the shallows, a messenger on a fast horse, a soldier in danger of death on the border of Egypt, where the vile Kush lurk in ambush.
Better anything than this: the heat of noon, heavy on the eyelids. The glare outside of sun on marble. The silence except for the droning of a fly, the heavy sigh of some overburdened scholar, the scratching of styli on plaster, the scrubbing of someone rubbing out a mistake with a ball of cloth, the endless, endless droning voice and the never-ending Building Inscription of Amenhotep II, the grandfather of the present Pharaoh who lives, Amenhotep III. And my master goes on, and on:
Live the Horus: Mighty Bull, great in Strength: Favourite of the Two Goddesses: Mighty in Opulence: Made to Shine in Thebes: Golden Horus: Seizing by his Might in all Lands, Good God, Likeness of Re, Splendid Ray of Atum, begotten Son whom he made to shine in Karnak. He appointed him to be king of all living, to do that which his ka did: his avenger, seeking excellent things, great in marvels, creative in knowledge, wise in execution, skilful-hearted like Ptah; king of Kings, ruler of rulers, valiant, without his equal, lord of terror amongst the southern lands, great in fear at the end of the north. Every land comes to him bowing down…’