Whether he became ruler or not, Rawer was slated to be joined to Aboo’s oldest daughter, Abar. She was the most stunningly beautiful young woman in Nekhen. I was probably the only boy in the valley, elite or commoner, who didn’t covet her. I’d gotten somewhat acquainted with Abar as she sat next to Dedi beside his nightly campfire in the months after Mother and I first came to live with him, both of us listening spellbound to his stories about her ancestors and Nekhen’s past. On occasion she’d used me to make Rawer jealous, as she had the night of the barbarian executions. But our already–limited relationship had abruptly terminated the day my mother joined with Dedi. Abar had never deigned to speak pleasantly to me even once after I became Dedi’s stepson, either beside the fire or in the boatyard or at one of Nekhen’s numerous festivals. The reason was ridiculous – Abar had decided I was a threat to Rawer’s status as Dedi’s heir and thus hers as a future ruler’s woman. My mother’s death a couple of years later should have eased her mind, having severed my tenuous link to Dedi, but it hadn’t. While I was under no illusion I’d ever be anything more than a boatman, Dedi’s affection for me – he continued to treat me like his son – didn’t meet with Abar’s approval, and so she acted to this day as if I didn’t exist. That was fine with me – that she could turn so quickly from friend to foe without any provocation was frightening. She was cold and arrogant and superior and intolerant and manipulative and I had no desire to have anything to do with her. Almost every other boy, however, pursued Abar despite knowing she was promised to Rawer. Her beauty made fools of them all. Abar always rebuffed their advances and remained indifferent whenever anyone tried to flirt with her, for she clearly considered every elite boy and man in Nekhen to be beneath her, including Rawer. Abar was ambitious and hard–working and had practically shadowed Dedi and her father the last decade, learning the intricacies of ruling Nekhen and operating her family’s donkey herd. In contrast, Rawer was lazy and entitled, her exact opposite. They’d make a horrible match. They deserved each other.
“I have something for you, Meret,” Rawer announced, pulling a necklace of colorful stones from a pouch attached at his waist as he shoved his way between us. As Dedi’s grandson he had access to the finest items made by Nekhen’s craftsmen. He slipped it over her head, let it fall onto her chest. The stones caught the sun and shone against her light brown skin.
“It’s beautiful,” Meret said, her smile fixed. She’d stiffened.
“Meet me beside Grandfather’s cargo boat after dark,” Rawer said suggestively.
“Of course,” Meret promised. I caught a hint of reluctance in her voice.
“Come along, Nykara. You too, Rawer,” Dedi called loudly from the edge of the boatyard.
Dedi was not a man to be kept waiting. “I have to go,” I told Meret.
Rawer seized her hand. “Remember. Later.”
“I won’t forget.” Meret rolled her eyes at me as Rawer turned away. “Sorry,” she mouthed.
I shrugged, pretended to be sorry myself. But I wasn’t. Rawer had unknowingly performed a service for me. I wasn’t interested in Meret.
He and I headed towards Dedi.
“Girls like Meret adore me because of what I can give them and do for them,” Rawer crowed as we walked. “You’ll never be able to match me, Nykara. See how easily I just took Meret away from you? I can do that with any girl. You best remember your place and keep that in mind.”
“Oh, I will.”
Dedi was waiting impatiently. Despite his advanced age – he’d been a boatman for parts of six decades – he was still fit, sharp–eyed, stronger and more active than most of his men. Dedi probably wanted Rawer and me to accompany him today on some errand, not an unusual occurrence. The rest of his boat builders were always engaged in far more important work than either of us. I assumed my assignment would be, as usual, to keep Rawer out of trouble. Dedi had long ago given up trying to keep his grandson under control himself. My babysitting him was exactly the sort of thing that made Rawer hate me even more.
The boatyard was humming with activity. I’d been helping assemble Dedi’s newest vessel at its northernmost edge, the one he intended to use to relaunch long distance trade. Close by, under a large rectangular wood frame topped with palm fronds to provide shade, women and girls were twisting together reed strips and flax and other plant fibers to make rope, both the fine type I used to fasten bundles of reeds together as well as thicker to secure boats to their mooring posts. Under another sunscreen women were weaving mats from reeds; those mats would be used to roof and enclose a small pavilion on the new boat’s deck to provide shade for Dedi on his travels. Close beside them men were assembling long reed and papyrus stems into thick bundles. Other boatmen were using those bundles to construct a small punt for a fisherman; he’d catch perch and catfish by spearing them with a bident from a small platform on the boat or by dragging a weighted net in concert with another punt. A few men were repairing one of Dedi’s larger reed boats I’d helped drag ashore yesterday, one that transported earthenware jars brimming with milk and blood and beer to hamlets and farms twenty–five miles in both directions from Nekhen on a daily basis, returning with fresh foodstuffs from those farms to be distributed to the workmen who lived in Nekhen. Those same boats transported massive quantities of emmer and barley from those localities at the conclusion of every harvest for storage in great clay–lined bins in Nekhen’s lower settlement.
Currently, men were unloading jars from a string of Aboo’s donkeys and carrying them up the gangplanks of one large and several small reed vessels moored along the riverbank. Dedi’s captains would deliver those jars throughout the local valley today. The jars filled with milk and blood had been collected early this morning from the elite herdsman’s cattle penned in a nearby wadi; those with beer came from Pipi’s brewery in the lower settlement about three–quarters of a mile away. Pipi was the largest brewer in Nekhen and one of its elite men, as had been his forefathers as far back as the old tales stretched. The jars were the product of Teti’s pottery works, also located in the lower settlement. A few boats were already on the river, those going north drifting with the current, those going south being rowed. One was being unloaded directly across from Nekhen at Nekheb, a large hamlet atop a sand dune at the mouth of a wadi leading into the eastern desert. Nekheb had no brewery of its own; like the other nearby hamlets its people owed allegiance to Nekhen’s ruler and so Nekhen supplied its residents with beer. That boat would no doubt return today loaded with flint tools made in Nekheb’s workshops. Based on the amount of flint debris littered around that settlement, tool–making had been the primary occupation there for centuries.
Lining the western edge of the boatyard were the wattle–and–daub huts of Dedi and his workmen. The area was teeming with women tending hearths from which columns of smoke were rising, and young children playing, and girls fetching water from the river or wood from the plains or grinding emmer into flour or watching over their siblings.
Past the south end of the boatyard, where Itisen’s fishing enterprise was located, two fishermen were staggering away from a punt tied to the riverbank towards large wood racks a little back from the water, a huge perch dangling by its mouth from the center of a pole resting on their shoulders. Its tail dragged on the ground – it was almost six feet long and probably weighed a couple of hundred pounds, large enough to feed all of Dedi’s men for several days. Cut up fish were already drying on those racks. The majority of Itisen’s fishermen’s catch, however, was processed in a facility on the upper terrace, where cattle and goats and sheep were also butchered. The fish were hauled there on the backs of donkeys. The sharpest and thinnest of the fish bones remaining after processing were turned into needles and arrow points by craftsmen in Dedi’s workshops.
As fine as Dedi’s existing boats were, the one I was working on would be majestic, forty–five feet long, the largest he’d ever attempted to build. I’d seen its plan, inked on a large strip of cowhide. Its bow and stern would
sweep gracefully upward like papyrus stalks topped with flowers. There’d be a deck with removable sections laid atop crossbeams, and a pavilion amidships – four posts holding a frame, covered on top and sides with reed mats. There’s be a long steering oar in the stern and slats enough to seat ten oarsmen on each side, and a place in the bow to attach leafy palm fronds to help propel the boat upriver against the current using the wind. A standard would rise beside the pavilion, a long slender pole decorated with ribbons and feathers and topped with an image of Nekhen’s primary deity – the falcon, god of the sky.
Dedi pointed to half a dozen ten–foot long oars lying on the ground, the bundle bound at each end with rope. “They need to be repaired.”
“Bring them, Boy,” Rawer snapped.
I was already reaching for them. That he’d given me an order didn’t surprise me. Rawer loved to throw his weight around. It made him feel superior. I lifted the oars and rested the midpoint of the bundle on my right shoulder. It was heavy, but I was already a couple of inches taller than most of the boatmen, all of whom were full–grown men, and strong. I bore my burden easily. We headed west on a well–trod dusty path arrowing across a fertile half–mile wide plain divided into many long narrow farms, each with its easternmost end abutting the river. We passed one of the boundary stones marking a corner of the nearest farm, placed there at the conclusion of the last inundation by Aboo. The entire plain was lush with knee–high emmer and dotted with gardens full of beans and lentils and peas and other vegetables. Farmers and their women and children were hoeing weeds from some fields; others lay on the ground, resting or even sleeping beneath a sunscreen or isolated tree. A few cattle grazed along the river’s edge. I recalled a similar errand some years ago when Rawer disparaged farmers as we crossed their fields. Dedi had lectured Rawer at length that farmers were the backbone of Nekhen, that the settlement would not exist without them, that all the craftsmen and workers employed by the elites would starve without the products of their fields. So numerous were they, Dedi had said, and powerful, if they ever united behind one of their own a farmer would rule Nekhen. But, fortunately for the settlement’s elites, the farmers were too scattered and disorganized to act as one.
West of the cultivated strip lay Nekhen itself.
I knew much of its history, for nearly every evening around his campfire Dedi told stories handed down in his family for generations and I’d memorized each and every one. Nekhen had once been little more than a few huts clustered together, grouped by family, each governed by its own patriarch. But it was now the largest settlement anywhere along the river, according to Dedi, and he should know, for he’d traveled more extensively than anyone now living. No one in Nekhen and perhaps the entire valley had gone as far to north and south. Mostly, Dedi said, the land along the river was empty except for scattered hamlets in the midst of small farms. There were only two major settlements the entire length of the valley besides Nekhen – Tjeni and Nubt. Both lay a week or more by boat to our north. And Tjeni was actually a collection of hamlets, loosely joined, not a single entity like Nekhen.
We walked rapidly, Rawer and I trying to keep pace with Dedi. I had an easier time of it, with my long legs. We reached the border between the cultivated strip and Nekhen’s ceremonial grounds at the eastern edge of the lower settlement, scaled a low rise.
Dedi paused to catch his breath, surveyed his surroundings. “I’m going on a trading expedition in a few days,” he suddenly announced. “Nykara, you’re coming with me.”
What he’d said took a moment to register. “Me?” I couldn’t believe it. Almost every night I sat beside the river, watching it slip past, wondering what marvelous and mysterious lands it traversed, wishing I could see them myself. But I’d never been more than two dozen miles from Nekhen, rowing a boat making deliveries to hamlets north and south. I’d memorized Dedi’s tales about his ancestors’ wanderings. I’d listened with fascination to the stories the other boatmen told of trading expeditions to Tjeni and Nubt during the years Shery and my father had been alive. I’d wanted to travel to those distant settlements for as long as I could remember. I’d even made models of boats and set them adrift, dreaming myself on their decks, reaching those fabled destinations. And now I was going to get to see them in person.
“Yes. You.”
“When do we leave?” Rawer asked.
“Two days,” Dedi said. “But you’re not going.”
“You’re taking this… this errand boy and not me?” Rawer exclaimed, incredulous. “You can’t!”
He’d never accepted I had any special relationship to Dedi, even when my mother was alive. Since her death he’d treated me even more inconsiderately than Abar, which was saying something.
“You think there’s room to waste on a trade expedition?” Dedi queried. “I’ll need every inch of my boat to hold goods. There’s no room for you to just ride along, Rawer. Everyone I’m taking will have to work.”
“You’ll need someone to hunt in the evenings,” Rawer protested. “I can do that.”
“Nykara’s a better hunter than you,” Dedi said evenly. He shook his head. “I brought you with me this morning as a test, Rawer. All you had to do was offer to help Nykara carry the oars. That never even crossed your mind.”
“Because it’s a menial task, obviously,” Rawer sneered. “That’s what Nykara’s suited for.”
“On an expedition every man must be ready to do whatever needs to be done, whenever it needs to be done, no matter who they are, without being asked. I can’t afford to bring along anyone who thinks certain kinds of work are beneath their dignity.”
“Grandfather, you’re making a mistake!” Rawer insisted sharply.
“You think so? Nykara’s handy making repairs. He’s one of my stronger oarsmen. He’s a better fighter, if it comes to that, which it may where I’m going. He’s more curious than most of my men, and bright. Certainly more curious and brighter than you, Grandson.” Dedi addressed me. “It’s time for you to see some of the valley, Nykara. I know you won’t shirk the work involved.” He gazed at Rawer once more.
Rawer was so angry now he was trembling. It wasn’t because he wanted to make the trip. He just didn’t want me to make the trip. There wasn’t a man in the fleet who wouldn’t realize why I’d been selected instead of him when Dedi announced I was going. The hatred in Rawer’s eyes said I’d pay for this someday.
“Where are we going?” I asked excitedly. Rawer’s tantrum wasn’t going to spoil this for me.
“Abu, at the cataract. We’re taking a load of pottery and linen, and objects made by my craftsmen, to exchange for blocks of fine stone, and perhaps ostrich feathers and ostrich eggs and exotic pelts.”
I was disappointed by the destination. I’d been dreaming of the settlements in the North, the ones Dedi wanted to make subservient to Nekhen someday. “Why stone?” I asked.
“The transition of rule from me to Aboo hasn’t gone as smoothly as we both hoped,” Dedi admitted. “Because I ruled for so long many in Nekhen still treat me as if I’m Aby. Men come to me seeking help when they should go to him. They’ve appealed their cases to me when Aboo hasn’t rendered the decision they’ve sought. I’m afraid when I yielded to Aboo I unleashed a bit of chaos where none was intended. And so, to separate himself from me, to come out from under my shadow, so to speak, Aboo has set about creating new, more visible signs of his authority.”
“Signs like fish–tailed knives?” I asked.
Dedi nodded. “When I was ruler I gave them out to the elites and no others, as had rulers for generations before me. Their scarcity makes them special. Possession of one sets an elite apart from commoners. Aboo has continued that tradition and is beginning more. For example, he’s decided to take all the elites on a hunting expedition every year a few months before the inundation festival to capture animals to increase the size of the menagerie he’s maintaining in one of the side wadis.”
“To add to his elephant and hippo and oryx?”
“Yes. Those are the only animals of his dozens he didn’t slay during the inundation festival five months ago. That menagerie illustrates Aboo’s ability to control nature. Everyone who walks by can see that. He’ll acquire crocodiles and more hippos and wild bulls and gazelles and baboons during his hunt, and whatever other game is in the area. He won’t let anyone kill an animal – only capture. Then, at the festival, Aboo will sacrifice every beast he doesn’t intend to breed. That will illustrate his generosity to the people, while at the same time enabling him to honor the gods. Last week Aboo proclaimed only elites may capture animals from now on. He also proclaimed only Merenhor’s men will be allowed to hunt to supply Nekhen with meat. Hunting is now an elite privilege too.”
“Will the elites receive new status symbols in addition to knives?” I asked.
“Just as soon as my new boat’s ready. I’m going to seek ostrich feathers and ostrich eggs and exotic pelts and mudstone palettes and ivory. I’ll provide those raw materials to my craftsmen to turn into finished objects Aboo can distribute to elites. No commoner will own one. In my future travels I may stumble upon unique status symbols to provide the elites from places mentioned in Ankhmare’s tales – Badari, the delta, maybe even the shores of the Wadjet Wer.”
The Women and the Boatman Page 9
