House of Illusions (33 page)

Part Three

THU

10

THE AFTERNOON
was still hot but not unpleasantly so when I left Nesiamun’s house and walked quickly along the Lake path, feeling dangerously exposed in that elegant, quiet district. I had told Kamen that I did not fear the city, but my words had been a lie to reassure him. I knew little of Pi-Ramses. When I lived with Hui, my days were strictly regulated and my movement constrained to the house and gardens. All else was closed to me. I used to curl up against my window at night, after Disenk had smothered the lamp and gone to her mat outside my door, and gaze out into the darkness through the tangle of tree branches, wondering what lay beyond.

I had sailed through the city of course on my way from Aswat, but I had been excited and afraid and the scenes I had floated past remained jumbled together in my memory, a chaos of colour, shape and noise unconnected to that which had come before or to what followed. Sometimes the sounds of laughter and loud talk drifted to my ears from the unseen Lake. Sometimes torchlight reached me, flickering spasmodically from an illuminated barge that passed Hui’s pylon all too quickly, so that in the end the bounds of my reality were Hui’s walls and the city seemed a mirage to me, existing and yet ephemeral.

Later I had gone to the palace to treat Pharaoh’s symptoms. Hui and I had ridden in a litter. I had begged him to leave the curtains raised as we went and he had done so, but there was still only the Lake path with its thin traffic and the sun on the water and more estates, more watersteps. When I was admitted to the harem, the route Disenk and I took was the same. I came to know the heart of the city well, that great sprawling complex of palace and harem, but of the areas that fed nourishment into it through its many tributaries I was ignorant.

Hunro had taken me into the markets once, but we had lain on our litters and chattered, and though we had occasionally alighted to finger the wares for sale, I had taken no note of the streets through which our escort had forced a way for us. Why should I? For I was the Lady Thu, pampered and protected, the soft soles of my feet need never tread the rutted, burning surfaces over which the rest of the populace surged, and there would always be soldiers and servants to cross the gulf between me and the dust and stench of Pi-Ramses.

Always. I came to myself with a grimace. Always was a long time. The pretty litters were gone, the soldiers and servants withdrawn, and I was about to cross that gulf myself on feet so toughened by years of neglect that they no longer cringed at heat or pain. Pharaoh had decreed that I should go unshod into my exile and so remain, and that had been the hardest shame, for the wealth and position of a lady could be judged on many things, but the condition of her feet was the final test of breeding and nobility.

I remembered how shocked Disenk had been at the state of my feet when Hui first placed me in her obsessive care, how day after day she oiled and abraded them, soaked and perfumed them, until they were as pink and pliant as the rest of me. I was not allowed to touch them to the floor in the morning without linen slippers. I could not go outside without leather sandals. More than the anxious attention she gave to my neglected hair and sun-browned skin, more than the lessons in manners and cosmetics, my feet were the symbols, to Disenk, of my peasant blood, and she was not satisfied until the day when she came to me with a bowl of henna and a brush to paint their soles on the occasion of my first feast with Hui’s friends.

On that day I ceased to be a commoner, became worthy, in Disenk’s snobbish but beautiful eyes, of the title Ramses later bestowed on me. Looking down on them now as I turned away from the Lake and sought a way that would lead me into the anonymity of the markets, I saw my mother in their splayed, sand-encrusted sturdiness. In one blistered, bleeding month of my exile all Disenk’s work had been undone and my Lady Thu, spoiled favourite of the King, vanished once more beneath the flaying of Aswat’s arid soil.

I had slowly forced myself to accept the deterioration of my body. It had been the least of my worries, faced as I was with the sudden transition from a life of idleness to one of hard labour in Wepwawet’s temple, cleaning the sacred precincts and the priests’ cells, preparing their food, washing their robes and running their errands every day and then returning to the tiny hut my father and brother had erected for me where I would tend my pitiful garden and perform my own chores. Yet it had caused me the most grief, not only because I was a vain creature but also because it symbolized all I had gained and then lost. I would grow old and die in Aswat, becoming as withered and sexless as the other women who bloomed early and aged too soon, the juices sucked out of them by the harshness of their lives. No chance to be sustained by the vitality of passion either, for although I was an exile, yet I still belonged to the King and could not, on pain of death, give myself to any other man.

Two things kept me sane. The first, strangely enough, was the hostility of my neighbours. I had brought disgrace upon Aswat and the villagers shunned me. In the beginning the adults ostentatiously turned their backs when I went by and the children threw mud or stones and shouted insults, but as time passed I was simply ignored. I had no opportunity to be absorbed back into the social life of the village and so taste again the despair, the feeling of imprisonment, that had tormented me there in my growing years. In spite of my exile I could remain aloof, convince myself more easily that I was not a part of them and the unrelenting cycle of their days.

The second was the story of my rise and fall. I began to write it in defence against the longing for my little son that would attack me in the hours of darkness and also to tend the weak but steady flame of hope I would not let die. I did not, could not, believe that I was fated to rot in Aswat forever, no matter how irrational that conviction was, and so night after night I wrote grimly, often through a haze of exhaustion and with swollen, cramped fingers, and hid the sheets of stolen papyrus in a hole in my dirt floor.

That floor hid another secret now, one that would save my son and give me a last chance at freedom if I had expiated my sin in the eyes of the gods and they had relented towards me. Now a hatred for the ruin of my calloused hands, my brittle, unkempt hair, the coarseness of my skin abused by sun and enforced neglect, returned with force. I found myself on the fringes of the crowds that thronged the market stalls. No one glanced at me. With my bare feet and arms, my thick tunic and uncovered head, I was just one more common citizen going about her modest business, and that very anonymity, though promising a margin of safety, filled my mouth with the taste of bitterness.

My first task was to find the Street of Basket Sellers so that I could be at the beer house promptly every third evening as Kamen had suggested. My thoughts, as I hovered beside an awning under which a stallkeeper sat dozing, began to circle him, the beautiful young man who I still could not believe belonged to me, but I thrust them away. The afternoon was advancing. I needed direction, food, a place to hide. Parental joy and pride would have to wait. I felt a sharp tug on my sheath. The stallkeeper had woken up. “If you are not going to buy anything, move on,” he grumbled. “Find shade somewhere else. You are blocking my stall.”

“Can you tell me how to get to the Street of Basket Sellers?” I asked him, obediently stepping back into the blinding sunlight. He waved behind him vaguely.

“Down there, past Ptah’s forecourt,” he answered. “It’s a long way.”

“Then could you spare one of your melons? I am hungry and very thirsty.”

“Can you pay?”

“No, but I could mind the stall for you if you wish to refresh yourself with a cup of beer. The day is hot.” He looked at me suspiciously and I graced him with the most ingenuous smile I could summon. “I will not steal from you,” I assured him. “Besides, how does one steal melons? I have no sack. I do not want to sit by any temple and beg.” I held up a finger. “One melon for the time it takes you to drink one cup of beer.” He grunted a laugh.

“You have a persuasive tongue,” he said. “Very well. But if you steal from me I will set the police onto you.” My smile widened. They were after me anyway, but surely they would not be looking for a woman standing behind a stall with a melon held out in each hand to tempt passers-by. I nodded. Tying a linen cloth around his bald head against the sun, he told me what to charge and wandered away, and I took up my post in the shade he had vacated. I longed to take the knife that lay on the table beside the tumbled pile of yellow fruit and split open one of his wares, but I resisted the mouth-watering temptation. Lifting two of them, I began to cry their virtues to the milling crowd, my voice blending with the sing-song shouts of the other vendors, and for a while my troubles withdrew.

By the time the merchant returned, I had sold nine melons, one of them to a soldier who barely glanced at me before using the knife to rend his purchase and walk back into the throng. My new employer slapped down a jug of beer and produced a cup from the folds of his tunic. Rolling a melon towards me and throwing the knife after it, he poured and invited me to drink. “I knew you’d still be here,” he said importantly. “I’m a good judge of character. Drink. Eat. What are you doing in Pi-Ramses?” The beer, cheap and murky, flowed down my throat like a cool blessing and I drained the cup before wiping my mouth with my hand and slicing into the melon.

I thanked him, and between mouthfuls of the succulent food I told him some trite story of a provincial family who could no longer afford to employ me and so I had come north in search of work. My short tale was interrupted twice by melon buyers, but the stallkeeper’s ears stayed open to me, and when I had finished both the lie and the fruit, he clucked sympathetically.

“I knew you’d been in some noble family,” he exclaimed. “You don’t talk like a peasant. If you’ve had no luck, I could use you on the stall for a day or two. My son usually helps me but he’s away. Free melons and beer. What do you say?” I hesitated, thinking quickly. On one hand I needed to be fluid, to be able to come and go, but on the other I had no idea how long I might be adrift in the city with no resources other than my wits. Perhaps this man was a gift from my dear Wepwawet.

“You are kind,” I said slowly, “but I would like to wait until tomorrow to give you an answer. I must find the Street of Basket Sellers tonight.” He was visibly offended.

“Why do you want to go there?” he said. “There are indeed many basket sellers, but there are beer houses and brothels too, and at night when the basket sellers go home the street is choked with young soldiers.” He looked me up and down. “It is no place for a respectable woman.” My dear melon man, I thought with an inward twist of anguish, I ceased to be a respectable woman the night I decided to offer Hui my virginity in exchange for a glimpse into my future. I was thirteen years old. I swallowed the pain away.

“But I met someone who told me that they might have work for me there,” I answered, “and though I appreciate your offer, a position in a beer house would mean a place to sleep as well.”

“It’s your business I suppose,” he said less stiffly. “But be careful. Those blue eyes of yours could lead you into trouble. Come back tomorrow if you have no luck.” I thanked him again for his generosity and took my leave. I also took his knife, my thoughts returning briefly to Kamen as my fingers curled around its hilt and I thrust it into my belt and pulled a fold of my sheath over it. He had killed to save me, but this time I might have to save myself. The sun was beginning to wester, turning the dust motes hanging in the air to darts of light. Quickly I waved without looking back and lost myself in the press of people.

The Street of Basket Sellers was indeed a long way, and by the time I had found it I was tired and thirsty again. Narrow and winding, the buildings to either side of it crowding together and leaning over its crookedness, it snaked into dimness although the sun still shone red in the square before Ptah’s temple. The basket sellers were loading their unsold wares onto donkeys, and the street echoed with the animals’ petulant braying and the curses of the men. Groups of soldiers already wove in and out of the turmoil, young men for the most part, loud and eager, seeking the doors through which a gentle, secret lamplight fell.

As I moved slowly along, I heard music begin suddenly, a happy lilting tune that sent the blood quickening through my veins, and a little of my weariness left me. In spite of my situation I was alive, I was free. For the present, no one could order me to go this way or that, no one could command me to scrub a floor or haul water. If I wished to loiter and watch the crowd, I was free to do so, to lean against a warm wall and draw deeply into my lungs the mingled aromas of animal dung and spilled beer, male sweat and the faint sweetness of the rushes used to weave the hundreds of baskets that were piled here every day. Such a choice felt strange and intoxicating to me after so many years when my will was not my own and I savoured it carefully, putting away the thought that, of course, it could not last.