Out of the Black Land - By Kerry Greenwood Page 0,24

of Akhnamen may he live.’

‘Oh,’ she murmured. ‘Not King Amenhotep, then.’

‘No.’ There was something pointed about the way she made no further comment, but it was too soon to talk about that dangerous subject. I did not know if I could trust her yet, this barbarian princess. What was always a safe subject?

‘Tell me of the island of Kriti,’ I urged.

‘It’s a fertile and green place, an island ruled by Minos the King, a nation of sea farers. Our ships go all over the Islanded Sea, as far as the river Oceanos extends, half across the world.’

‘Is it a peaceful place?’ I had heard that barbarians spent all their time fighting.

‘Certainly,’ she seemed offended. ‘I don’t know why Egyptians always think that their ways are superior to all others!’

‘Divine Amenhotep says: Go around the world, speak to all peoples, and you will not find one who will change his country’s customs for another’s. And he is right. I beg your pardon, sister, but don’t be so touchy. I wish only to know.’

‘I’m sorry, I’ve been so lonely and everyone thinks I’m a savage. But that is what the men of my island would say about Egypt, I expect. Is it always this hot here?’

‘No, this is Ephipi, the hottest month. That’s when the lion-wind blows, the poison-breath of the Eastern Snake. Soon it will be Mesoré, and the grapes will ripen and we will have the harvest festivals.’

‘I don’t understand your year,’ she said plaintively. ‘At home we had four seasons, but here there are only three.’

‘That is because we are the gift of the river. The Nile is our mother. We have three seasons of four months each, made of three decans of ten days,’ I instructed my foreign sister.

‘Shemu, which is harvest, that’s now; Akhet, which is flood; and Peret, which is sprouting, the time of plants. Every time has its festival and every day its god, and over all of them is Amen-Re, Lord of Lords.’

‘It is well known that Gaia Mistress of Animals is the head of the gods!’ objected the foreign princess.

‘Not in Egypt. But we will ask the scribe about gods; Mother says that they are not fit subjects for humans.’

‘I know.’

She might have been about to say something more, but Basht walked off her chest and onto mine, dipping her head to sniff delicately at my neck and settling down with her pin tipped feet folded under her richly-patterned body.

‘We were meant to be friends,’ concluded Merope. ‘Basht is never wrong about people.’

‘Of course not. She’s the avatar of Basht the Lady, Goddess of love and motherhood.’

‘She couldn’t be just a cat, then?’ asked Merope slyly.

‘No more than a crocodile is not the avatar of Sobek or a hippopotamus of Set the Destroyer.’

‘But the crocodile will still bite and the hippopotamus break boats,’ she argued. ‘Acting like animals, not gods.’

‘It’s a mystery,’ I replied, thinking about it for the first time and taking refuge in the scribe Ani’s invariable response to such questions.

‘Egypt is a strange place,’ concluded my new sister, and we drowsed into sleep.

For the first time I had met someone who asked more questions than I did, and I thought the Queen Tiye wise to put us together. It might even preserve my own mother’s temper.

***

The Kriti princess was equally pleased, it seemed, with me as a companion. Though she refused to abandon her tunic, which covered her chest, for a proper knotted cloth, and would not have her head shaved to a sidelock, as we did for cleanliness and convenience, she adapted to life in her new country well. She had learned the language very quickly, though some words still eluded her, and some of the grammatical constructions which I had learned before I knew that I was learning them gave her trouble. She could not differentiate between the three levels of formal address, so spoke to all persons as though they were Pharaoh or a High Priest, which gave her a reputation for humility. And she asked me why my mother had commended her for lack of greed when she had asked for a solid gold bracelet.

‘Because you did not ask for silver, the most precious metal in the Black Land,’ I explained.

‘In Kriti the most precious metal is gold,’ she protested.

‘Here gold is as sand,’ I replied, beginning to laugh. After a moment she joined in. ‘Whole shiploads of it come from Nubia in Upper Egypt every day. Whereas silver has to come from barbarian lands and