The Dagger of Isis (The First Dynasty Book 2) Read online

  “Mery! Wait. Come back here,” my uncle called after me.

  The last thing I heard was my aunt saying, “No, let her go,” just as I ran through the wide mud-brick portico and back out toward the gardens. This time no one stopped me as I ran, sobbing, to my secret hideaway. I ducked under the overhanging branches to the tiny, secret clearing tucked under the protective hedges that was my own special refuge.

  Marriage! Could what I just heard really be true? In my own mind I was still but a child, despite the two bumps that had magically appeared, almost overnight, on my chest. I lifted my knees to my chest and wrapped my arms around them, not feeling at all like a woman, at least not like the beautiful women who strutted around the Royal Court, dressed in their finest white linen robes, gold chains studded with precious jewels adorning their necks and wrists, cosmetics perfectly applied and smelling from delicious unguents. Yes, I had started my monthly bleeding, but I yet did not feel like I understood even an inkling of the many secrets that women must surely know, secrets that I suspected they shared with each other with but a glance or a nod of their perfumed necks and oiled hair. I rested my chin against my arm and tried to think of the predicament that was suddenly thrust upon me. My tears had already dried, but the dry sobs had turned into hiccups.

  Ti-Ameny. That was it! It was Ti-Ameny who would teach me the mysterious womanly arts, I thought. I was suddenly as sure of that as I was about my aunt’s choice for me. Of all the healers Ti-Ameny was most in demand. But the King inexplicably had not yet assigned her as a personal healer to anyone within the court, and now I knew why. Everyone seemed to love her dearly. She lightened a room by her very presence and it did not matter whether or not men were present. Ti-Ameny’s ka was as strong and independent as that of the fiercest warrior. They must have intended her for me for many years. I felt a great weight lift from my shoulders in that instant and though I remember well my youthful fears of what was to come, of how much I did not yet understand, I still felt hopeful and full of the energy and the promise of youth.

  I silently prayed to my mother and thanked both her and my father for interceding on my behalf, for I had no doubt that they always watched over me from the Afterlife. Even this private spot, Aunt Herneith once told me, must have been revealed to me by my mother, for she, too, was a great lover of animals and would often stroll among the Royal menagerie. Here is where I felt closest to my mother, who I had never met. It was here that I could talk to her when I felt saddest, when other children would ask where my parents were, when I longed to hold her tightly and instead hugged my own bent legs. Now I felt myself smile, imagining my mother laughing with me, dancing around the palace celebrating my betrothel, holding me and swinging me around, and my mood was buoyed up greatly.

  And so I learned a powerful and painful lesson that very moment, one that has served me well throughout my life; that the wings of hope are too often borne aloft by the winds of despair. For right then, curled up as I was in my shaded hiding place, I heard a whispered voice calling to me. And not the delicate whisper of Abana as she stroked my hair just before I fell asleep, nor the heavier whispers of my uncle as he explained to me during festivities why he greeted so warmly someone he had told me just days before he despised. No, the voice of this whisperer was carried on the dead fish tide. His breath reeked of decayed fish such as we experience each year when the Inundation recedes and fish lay flapping on the fertile mud plains until they die and rot.

  “Don’t be afraid, child, it’s me, Rami. Remember me?” he asked, as if I could ever have forgotten him and his frightening manner. He was on all fours, crawling into the tiny clearing that I had carefully tended over the many years I had sought refuge in the royal gardens. I felt trapped, like one of the animals he looked after in the menagerie. I wanted to run, but his stubbly face loomed right in front of mine now. He barely squeezed himself into my hiding place. I quickly put my feet down and backed as far away from him as I could.

  “No, no Mery, don’t be afraid. I’m here to help you. Yes I am. I… I heard you crying and I’ve come to help. I swear to Horus,” he said, making the sign to the heavens.

  My breath caught in my throat and I suddenly felt mute. “You…” I started and hiccupped. “I… I do not need help.”

  “But surely something bad… no, something difficult perhaps. Yes, yes, something difficult has happened, for whenever I see you coming here to hide it’s always with you in a mischievous mood, never sad and crying. No, never.” He smiled at me and I counted only six front teeth and even they were worn down from eating rekhi bread that was peppered with desert sand.

  “You have been spying on me?” I said, catching my breath and trying my hand at frightening him into letting me pass. Instead he curled up into a sitting position directly in front of me.

  “Spying? Me spying? Oh, no, no, no,” he answered, his forced smile still on his lips. “I don’t have time to do all my chores, let alone spy on anyone. No, no, never.” Immediately behind me we heard the deep rumbling of one of the lions. “It’s just that you remind me of my daughter, who now lives with the gods in the Afterlife, or I hope she does since we couldn’t afford a decent burial for her, nor many foods or her bed to take with her on her journey. Not much, not much at all.”

  “How… how did she die?” I asked, intrigued.

  “Oh, how indeed. Yes, she died all right. Drowned. Dead. Not more than a few steps from Horus’ temple. Two days we searched for her body. Two cursed days they were. By then, may Hathor be kind to her, she was little more than the leftovers of a crocodile’s meal.” Rami looked away from me and for a moment I let my guard down.

  “That is awful,” I said, trying to sound as adult as I could. “How old was she?”

  Rami thought for a few seconds. “She would’ve been your age. Just a few days before her death our village had celebrated her becoming a woman.”

  “As have I!” I jumped in. Almost immediately I realized my error. He turned toward me and the dappled light of Ra piercing through the branches gave his face the appearance of a monster from the underworld.

  “Ah, so you have, little Mery, so you have.” He stared at my chest and a lump formed solidly in my throat, so great was my fear. My heart raced.

  “And there’s so much for a young woman to do,” he continued. “So much to learn, so much to think about. So very many burdens. Yes, yes, so many.” He paused for a moment and looked away. Then, looking uncomfortable in this tight space, he shifted to a squatting position and turned toward me.

  “Have they yet talked of your marriage? Surely they must have, for you’re a princess of high worth to the royal family. Not that it’s any of my business. No, I’m just a lowly servant of the King’s menagerie,” he said, shaking his head.

  “But, you, princess, you will soon marry and then what? Have you thought about that, Mery? Have you thought about what it means to be a wife, to please a man the way a woman is bound by ma’at to please him?”

  I had been so absorbed by Rami’s evil magic cast upon me, I had not noticed that his left hand had fallen between his legs and his fingers were now wrapped around something. At first glance I thought it was one of the snakes from the menagerie, but as he turned more in my direction, I saw what it was that he grasped. It was swollen and red.

  “Yes, Mery, look at this, look at it good, for this is what ma’at is all about. This is what you must do for your husband. Soon, yes, yes, very soon you’ll need to… here give me your hand and I’ll show you how to gently coax the milky seed from a man and please him… oh, yes, please him in untold ways.” Rami swayed to his side and pulled hard on his member. It was not that a man’s private organ was new to my sight, but I had never seen one so engorged, as if it were possessed of an angry spirit of its own. No matter how hard I tried, I could not take my eyes off of it. I feared that it might strike out at me like a desert viper if I turned away for even an instant.

  “Yes, that’s it, look. Watch how I stroke it. See how it stretches
toward you, its ka wanting to please you. Let me have your hand, Mery and together we’ll make it very, very happy.”

  When he reached for my hand with his dung-stained hand, I suddenly came to my senses. The stench of his breath mixed with the sweat of his heated body and I felt the sudden urge to vomit. Instead, I screamed.

  In an instant he lunged at me, grabbing me hard and forcing me down into the sand. He grabbed my robe and tore it from my body in one swift motion. He touched my breasts with one hand and held my mouth shut with the other as I struggled in vain against him. All the while, his knees worked feverishly to split my legs apart, to do something to me, I was sure, something vile with his angry member. I fought him as long as I could, for what seemed like an eternity. I tried to scream again, but his filthy, foul-smelling hand - oh, Ra, his stench haunts me still!- covered my mouth and nose and I felt as if I would suffocate. I felt in my ba that it would be but a moment before I lay unconscious and subject to his evil desires.

  And then, it was over. Suddenly I could breath and I gasped repeatedly. I looked up to see Rami flying off me, as if the talons of Horus himself had snatched him from me. I watched, uncomprehending, as he was propelled out of my hiding place and out into the light of Ra. I quickly sat up and watched him fall hard, face down, on the garden path.

  “Princess Mery, are you alright?” Akori, the captain of the King’s palace guards called in to me, his booming voice full of concern. I grabbed my robe and hurriedly threw it around me, whimpering and shaking as a leaf. My head throbbed and without answering I crawled out of the place that had been a haven for me throughout my childhood, and to which I never again returned.

  “I… I… I am good,” I said weakly, sensing that it was important for me to regain a semblance of control. I held my head high, although my legs shook so badly I was afraid I would collapse. Tears streamed down my cheek.

  “Thanks to Ra,” Akori said and nodded to his soldiers. Two of his guards held Rami by his arms and twisted them so that he was forced to kneel on the garden path, shaking, sweat dripping from his dirty face. He whimpered like a child, begging to be spared. A crowd of my relatives and some gardeners had gathered and murmured amongst themselves, some pointing with revulsion toward Rami. Then I watched a tiny figure break from the crowd and run directly toward me. Despite tears blurring my vision, I knew at once it was my older half-sister, Nubiti.

  Akori motioned for Nubiti to come closer and quickly whispered something to her. She then turned and grabbed me tight into her arms and it was as if a dam had burst. Tears flooded from me and my entire body convulsed with fear and shame. With one side of my head nestled against Nubiti’s warm breast, she shielded me from the sight of Akori’s swift action. The last thing I remember before passing out was Rami’s head rolling past us on the garden path, its lips parted, his bared teeth already caked with sand and mud.

  SCROLL TWO

  Mery

  The Royal Court was in a frenzy of activity. Despite the heat, servants ran from the grain fields and the orchards to the palace, then from room to room, making ready for visitors to the grand celebration. They arranged flowers, prepared food baskets, and moved in specially commissioned furniture for distant relatives I had never before seen and for exotic dignitaries from lands to our south and east. It appeared to me like a beehive, but with two queen bees in charge, my healer, Ti-Ameny, and Amka, my uncle’s Vizier and my personal tutor. Yet everyone instinctively knew the gods would never permit two queens in one hive. The crosser those two became from stepping on each others’ toes, the better the servants became at hurriedly getting their jobs done and scurrying away. Perhaps that was Amka’s strategy in order to get the job completed in time, but I knew that my dear Ti-Ameny was far too expressive to reign in her emotions no matter what the nobler goal.

  As for my emotions at the time, I can still recall my childish fears, although I hardly would have agreed to call them childish back then. But the truth is that I was but fifteen years old, a woman, yes, but barely beyond a child. As the wedding plans progressed and became steadily more complex, many is the time that I wished I could have run to Queen Herneith’s lap, close my eyes and retreat from all my cares in the warmth of her embrace, my nose buried in her neck, smelling the faint remnants of her distinct perfumes and unguents on her soft skin.

  “Come here,” I recall her once saying to me as we discussed a complex wedding ritual that had me perplexed and anxious. She held open her arms to me as she stood on the shaded portico overlooking Mother Nile. Oh, how we hugged in that moment, her soft womanly breasts gently pressed against my chest.

  “You miss her still, do you not?” she whispered.

  I hesitated, knowing full well what is was she referred to, yet also not wanting to acknowledge it. “I do not think of them anymore,” I answered brusquely. “I try not to think of them, of her.” I could feel Herneith smiling. She stroked my hair.

  “As your dear Uncle would say, Mery, despite your perfume you smell of dung.”

  I turned away from my aunt, then, and leaned over the balcony, thinking of how difficult it was at times to push away thoughts of my mother. Yet ever since that horrible day with that rekhi in the garden, I did not want to revisit the pain and longing of being motherless.

  “You know, I do not think we have ever spoken of this, Mery,” Aunt Herneith started as she turned toward me and leaned her hip against the brick railing.

  “Your father, he died as your Uncle Djer watched, helpless to do anything. He was killed by a Ta-Tjehenu’s sword in his back.”

  “So I’ve heard,” I sighed. “Uncle Djer has told me many times.”

  “Yes, he has, yet this he has not told you for it concerns his dear sister, your mother.” At this I turned toward my aunt. “He loved her greatly, Mery, as only a brother and sister born of the same parents and raised together can. Of death in battle my husband can plainly speak; of a broken heart he cannot, for even today it pains him beyond measure that his sister walks the Afterworld and is not here by his side. I have seen him on lonely nights stand in this very spot while Ra’s silver light reflects his tears.”

  This revelation surprised me, for I always sensed a reluctance on the part of my Uncle to discuss my mother at all.

  “They were always close. Your uncle protected his younger sister as your grandfather, Hor-Aha, commanded he do. He handpicked your father to marry her, but only after examining his sister’s heart for her approval.

  “That is why it is said that their marriage was ordained by the gods. They loved each other very much, Mery. When the news of your father’s death reached your mother, she… she grieved, yes, but like none other I had ever seen, or have seen since.” Herneith turned toward Mother Nile and gazed across her mighty waters.

  “She was but a ten-day from your birth. All the preparations had been made. She calmly retreated to her rooms and waited. Some say Amka helped her birth pangs to begin, of this I do not know for he would never reveal such a thing to me. But she soon gave birth to you, quietly, without even a whimper. Then she held you… even now it is hard for me to speak of this, my sweet Mery.” Aunt Herneith lifted the drape of her gown to dab her eyes.

  “In all these years, Amka and I have never spoken of this, although we both were present to witness this miracle. Now that you are about to marry, I will confide in you.” Herneith looked out over the water, her eyelids red. “She held you so lovingly all I could do was observe, spellbound. It was the early morning hours and suddenly Ra’s rays lit up the room and through a smattering of clouds Ra shone his golden beam of light onto your tiny body and upon your mother’s face. That was it, just the two of you illuminated, as if none of the rest of us mattered at all.

  “You did not cry. Instead you reached up your tiny little hand so gently to her face and even though you could not yet see with your own eyes, your ka and hers met for those brief moments. I could hardly breathe. Amka, too, stood with his mouth open. Together the two of you sat, locked in each other’
s embrace, speaking without words, sharing the secrets of your hearts.”

  My eyes were closed as my aunt told me this story, yet I could see my mother as clearly as if it were she who stood before me. I could clearly recall my mother’s love. It had not been a dream after all, a child’s wish, that I had felt all these years. Tears now ran down my cheeks, yet I was grateful to Herneith for confirming this.

  “She handed you to me then and I swear to Horus I knew right then that she would never hold you again. Amka told me that something in her insides must have torn open, like happens to so many of our women at childbirth. But once, months later as we strolled along Mother Nile as I held you, he confided in me that he believed her ka could not live without her husband, that despite her love for you she could not bear the pain of raising you knowing that your ba was born of two so beloved and he not there to share in this love. In a few days time she was gone.”

  Over the next few days I thought much on what Herneith had told me. After my initial sadness I found that I drew strength from thoughts of my mother and the love she felt for my father. I then began to realize that despite the difference in our ages, Wadjet and I might yet enjoy a love as deep. At least that was my heartfelt hope.

  A few days alone with my thoughts were all I had, for the wedding details pressed upon me once again. At those times I was secretly grateful that Ti-Ameny, Amka, and the King and Queen made most of the important decisions.

  And so it was that the King, after conferring with Amka, had decided to hold my wedding to Wadjet in Inabu-Hedj, rather than further south, at the Temple of Horus in Nekhen, the sacred birthplace of King Narmer, may his name be blessed for all eternity. This was not a lightly made decision and Amka, in turn, had conferred with Tepemkau, the Chief Horus Priest in Nekhen before finalizing the plans. The revered Horus priests, for Amka was one himself in addition to being the King’s Vizier, wanted to reserve the ancient temple in Nekhen for Wadjet’s eventual coronation and not diminish its value by making it available for lesser functions like his wedding.