The Women and the Boatman

by Mark Gajewski

  “Dig up the floor,” Senebi ordered.

  “Not that corner,” I pleaded. “That’s my daughter’s grave.”

  “Start there,” Senebi commanded smilingly.

  My tears started flowing then.

  Five minutes later one of the thugs pulled a small linen bundle from the ground, ripped it open.

  “It’s what she said,” he reported, then casually tossed Takhat’s body back into the hole.

  I wanted to die.

  “Start at the corners and work towards the center,” Senebi ordered.

  It was only a matter of time now. The men split up and started digging. Before long the man nearest the hearth cried out triumphantly. He carried a dusty leather pouch to Senebi. Senebi opened it, spilled its contents onto the floor. All the fine items I was by now so familiar with cascaded out.

  “You knew about this!” Senebi charged, his face inches from mine.

  “No.”

  “Yes. You helped Sanakht rob graves.”

  “I didn’t!”

  “You didn’t say anything because of all the fine things Sanakht gave you.”

  “What fine things? Look around! Have you ever seen me wear any jewelry except my talisman?” I touched the copper boat amulet with my toe. “That was mine. Nykara gave it to me. I placed it around Great–grandmother’s neck when she died. Do you think I’d have buried it if I’d stolen it? You’re being ridiculous and you know it.”

  “We’ll see.” Senebi’s eyes grew hard. He addressed the men who were restraining me. “Stretch her out on the ground. Hold onto her hands and feet. You – bring me my stick.” He smiled wickedly. “You’ll confess the truth soon enough, Amenia.”

  They forced me face–down onto a puddle of beer. I began shaking uncontrollably. Senebi was famed for the thoroughness and violence of his beatings. I’d never be able to stand it. But what could I say to stop him? I couldn’t tell him the truth about last night. He’d jump to the conclusion Nykara had murdered Sanakht. I couldn’t tell him I’d discovered the cache and followed Sanakht to the cemetery and killed him by myself either. Senebi would never believe I’d acted alone and Ma–ee would figure out who’d helped me and I’d already done enough to Nykara.

  Suddenly, rescue from a most unexpected source. “Don’t you dare beat Amenia!” Uncle Hemaka was standing chest to chest with Senebi. “She’s the priestess of the falcon god! Do you want to be struck dead on the spot?” He glanced at Senebi’s thugs. “How about the rest of you?”

  Senebi and Uncle Hemaka stared at each other for a long moment. My heart was pounding.

  “Bring her to the oval court,” Senebi ordered his men angrily, backing down. “You too, Hemaka,” he added. “Ma–ee’s going to deal with your brother this afternoon. You’re required to be there.”

  The thugs jerked me to my feet, then dragged me from Sanakht’s house. I was so terrified I could hardly stand. What was Ma–ee going to do to me? Everyone from the upper settlement had crowded into the yard. My face was streaked with tears, my body and hair wet with beer–soaked mud from being stretched out. If not for the thugs holding me up I would have collapsed. I’d never been so humiliated in my life. My girls’ faces were buried against Auntie’s skirt. She put her hands over their heads, pressed them close so they wouldn’t have to see. I was grateful for that. Then began the long trek down the wadi path. A guard supported me on each side, hurrying me along, following in Senebi’s wake. I kept my eyes fixed on the ground. A crowd followed, everyone gossiping and speculating. The stolen items clinked in the pouch Senebi had thrown over his shoulder.

  Ma–ee was already sitting on the dais in the oval court when we arrived, dressed in all his regalia, his face grim, waiting for us. Abar was seated next to him. She stared at me in horror. Her hand rose to her mouth. Sanakht’s body lay at the foot of the dais, stiff and bloody, contorted in death. Three–foot lengths of acacia were stacked a few paces away. All the elites were gathered in the curve of the oval, and as many commoners as had been able to press into the court with little notice. More, having just discovered something was going on, were running through the entrance.

  The thugs left me standing at the foot of the dais, facing Ma–ee, Senebi at my side. Ma–ee beckoned and Senebi ascended the steps, handed him the pouch, whispered something to him, glanced at me. Ma–ee opened the pouch, looked inside, stood.

  He held the pouch high in his right hand so all could see. “The goods the grave robber Sanakht stole were found in his house. For this, I condemn him to the eternal death.”

  Ma–ee stared at me. I started shaking. Was that to be my fate too?

  “Senebi has questioned Amenia – though not as thoroughly as I would have liked. He is fairly certain she was not involved in Sanakht’s thievery. So I will let her live. But,” he looked directly at me, “one can never be totally certain. So, from this day, Amenia, you will no longer celebrate beside me as priestess when we honor our gods.”

  I bowed my head. Even in death Sanakht was taking my life from me.

  “Now I will deal with the condemned man,” Ma–ee announced.

  He descended the steps to where Sanakht lay. Senebi handed Ma–ee a vicious looking flint knife. Ma–ee knelt, then cut off in turn Sanakht’s head and arms and legs. Then he rose. Several of Senebi’s thugs carried the parts of Sanakht’s body to the pile of wood and tossed them carelessly on top. Then one of the thugs gave Ma–ee a lit torch.

  “By burning Sanakht, I will destroy his essence forever,” Ma–ee cried. “Even his spirit will disappear, so it will never disturb any of us who dwell in Nekhen.”

  That punishment was rarely used, a measure of the depravity of Sanakht’s crime. In truth, I welcomed it.

  Ma–ee touched the torch to the base of the wood. The pile immediately burst into flame. Someone had obviously doused the wood with a quantity of oil. Ma–ee returned to his seat on the dais. The rest of us moved farther back, to avoid as much as possible the heat and rolling black smoke.

  Never once throughout the day’s ordeal – the ransacking of my home, the questioning, the public humiliation, the burning – did I mourn Sanakht. My sorrow was reserved for Nykara alone. Thankfully, he wasn’t in the oval court with the rest of the elites, though, as badly as he’d been hurt last night that wasn’t surprising. I couldn’t have faced him. I prayed to the falcon god Nykara wouldn’t blame himself for doing what I’d forced him to do. I hoped someday he’d forgive me for putting him in that position. But I doubted he would. I’d upended his life.

  When the fire finally burned out Ma–ee stood. “Scatter the ashes in the river, where they’ll be carried far from Nekhen,” he ordered Senebi. He addressed Hemaka, pointed at me. “Get her out of here.”

  Uncle seized me by the arm and wrenched me around. I screamed from the pain. Unfeelingly, he yanked me, stumbling, through the crowd and out of the oval court. People looked at me with distrust and pity and doubt and anger and compassion. From now on no two people in Nekhen would regard me the same way, I supposed. Most would never again believe anything I proclaimed in the name of the falcon god. If I was even allowed to proclaim it.

  Auntie was waiting outside the entrance with my girls and cousins.

  “You’re going to Yuny’s farm,” Uncle Hemaka told me angrily. “You’re never to show your face in Nekhen again, do you understand me?”

  “Yes, Uncle.”

  “You’ve brought disgrace on this family.”

  Not me. Your brother, I wanted to reply. But didn’t. And you conveniently ignore the fact you joined me to him over my objections. If you’d just joined me to Nykara years ago like you promised none of this would have happened.

  Not surprisingly, Yuny didn’t welcome me and my girls with open arms, and I couldn’t really blame him. He had barely enough land to support himself and Peseshet and his son Ibi and daughter Aat and Uncle’s family and workers – he hadn’t provided foodstuffs for Sanakht’s side of the family or his pottery workers for several years.
Uncle Hemaka had cut Sanakht off when he became Nykara’s partner in trade and started getting rich. The addition of my two daughters and me was going to stretch Yuny’s resources to the limit. At sixteen and fifteen respectively his children were old enough to work the land and glean the riverbanks and wild places, but my daughters were only four and two and a burden. There wasn’t room for us in Yuny’s hut, and he showed no inclination to expand it, so late that first day I constructed a small low palm–roofed reed structure against the hut’s side for the three of us. It was so low we had to crawl inside to sleep.

  The inundation had fully subsided a week earlier. The river was flowing once more within its banks and the land had dried sufficiently to work. Yuny’s long slender field was covered a half foot deep with rich dark mud. The very morning after my arrival I was thrust into farm life. I walked stiff and aching behind Yuny along with Peseshet as he dropped seed into the mud, trampling it below the surface with my feet to keep it safe from birds. In the weeks that followed I helped plant various other crops – lentils and onions and such – side by side in long rows, almost as if the field was a very large garden. Aat and Ibi ran around the field the entire time we worked, shooing away the birds that inevitably landed to try to eat seed before we could cover it. My girls did their best to mimic their older cousins.

  “The emmer will ripen and be ready for harvest in five or six months,” Yuny explained as we briefly rested after one long morning in the hot sun. “We’ll reap the barley in ninety days, same for peas, lentils a week or two later, beans in four months. If we had livestock we’d plant clover and cut it twice and leave the last crop for seed, but we don’t. We’ll plant watermelon seeds on the riverbank in a month and a half and they’ll produce in ninety days.”

  I settled quickly into my new life. Once plants began to push above the soil I spent hours each day weeding the ground between them with a wood hoe, and protecting them from birds. I got fairly deadly at throwing stones. Of course, I had other tasks to perform when I wasn’t in the field – cooking, cleaning, baking bread, making linen, weaving reed mats to trade for necessities. Yuny didn’t have the resources to build or supply a kiln, so making pottery was out of the question. Besides, whenever we needed any, Peseshet simply went to Uncle’s works and got some. I carried water, cut and fetched wood – with no surplus emmer Yuny couldn’t trade for that necessity – gleaned wild fruits and grasses from uncultivated land. I learned to fish – Yuny used the single copper fishhook he owned tied on the end of a long piece of twine; I used a bident, a two–barbed spear with a line attached to the end so I could retrieve it after I thrust it into the shallows along the riverbank. I also trapped wild game in the marshes – birds and hares, mostly.

  Harvest season was back–breaking. While Yuny and Ibi cut emmer and barley with flint sickles, Peseshet and Aat and I trailed after, bundling stems into sheaves, picking fallen ears from the tall stubble and placing them in baskets strapped to our backs. Yuny and Ibi later transported the grain to the threshing floor operated by Aspelta and used by all the farmers in common in baskets slung between them on a pole. There, cattle were driven over the spikes to separate kernels from husks. After Ma–ee took his share, and Aspelta his, and Uncle his, Yuny brought the remainder back to the farm for our use.

  Peseshet and I picked beans and peas and other lentils by hand. Yuny put me in charge of pollinating his small grove of date palms. When the flowers budded on the trees I removed a powdery substance from each male flower and placed it inside female flowers, ensuring all bore fruit. Yuny admitted at the end of the first season the grove had yielded its largest crop ever.

  Somehow I survived that first year. My body hardened under constant physical labor and my skin darkened from exposure to the sun. My girls grew and thrived and were happy. I learned to coexist with Yuny, though warily. By the second year I began to enjoy the rhythm of farm life, the moods of the river, the seasons. There was variety, not the endless repetition of making my uncles’ rough pottery or caring for Sanakht’s household. I got to be outside most of the time, came to love the azure skies and emerald fields and dark blue river and golden hills. I bathed in the river each night, glorying in the crimson sunsets and fluorescent afterglows and the moon path dancing on the water. The first few evenings after I arrived at Yuny’s farm, as I floated in the water and gazed at the columns of smoke rising from Nykara’s distant smithy, I let myself dream of what might have been for us, but that proved agonizing and thereafter I made it a habit to look to the north instead when I bathed, towards Maadi and the delta. Maybe someday I’d find my way there, I hoped, leave the mess I’d made behind me and start over. Though that was just a foolish dream. I couldn’t travel the river valley by myself. This farm was where I’d live out my days, and once my daughters had grown and had themselves died no one would remember I’d ever lived.

  Not once did I leave the farm and go into Nekhen itself – not to attend the harvest or planting or inundation festivals or any of the other feasts celebrated in the settlement. Yuny didn’t even move his family to the temporary huts used by the other farmers during the inundation located close by the lower settlement anymore – instead, he erected a lean–to on high ground near the base of the western plateau. Because of the shame brought on me by Sanakht my days of representing the falcon god were truly over – as he’d promised, not once did Ma–ee send word for me to celebrate alongside him. I doubted he knew I was still living near Nekhen. Which was fine with me. He’d ruined my life in so many ways, and I didn’t trust myself to be anywhere near him for fear of what I might do. But I mostly avoided the settlement because I didn’t want to encounter Nykara. It was quite evident he didn’t love me anymore. If he did he could have easily taken me away from Nekhen after Sanakht’s death, could have made me his woman, could have made the dream the falcon god has sent me real, for we were both free. But he’d never tried to contact me even once after that awful night in the cemetery. I stayed away from Nekhen because if I ever ran into Nykara I wouldn’t be able to bear seeing the hatred he surely bore me staring from his eyes. That rejection would be too much. For I loved Nykara still, so badly it hurt.

  3439 BC

  Bakist

  Two years after Nykara’s first visit to Farkha with Papa and me the three of us returned, this time with four of my younger sisters, aged ten to fifteen, in tow. As before, Nykara had happened to dock at Maadi a week prior to the expected arrival of a caravan of wine at Farkha. Nykara had once again volunteered the use of his boat. We reached Farkha a few days early. I suggested instead of waiting around for the caravan we could visit the Wadjet Wer. Nykara had wanted to see it for years; he readily agreed. The two of us and my sisters set out at dawn in company with four of his men, who crewed our small borrowed reed craft.

  We set up camp a little after midday, not far from where the river’s marsh–lined branch met the sea. Then the ten of us set out to explore. I led the way over what was to me familiar terrain. In only moments we emerged from a grove of palm trees onto the shaded fringe of a long wide beach. Fifty yards in front of us curling lines of white–capped waves were breaking with a roar, running up the sand, pausing, receding, over and over. My hair and skirt whipped about in the fierce salty wind. I turned and called to Nykara. His face had a look of utter delight. I recalled the first time I’d seen the sea at this very spot. Like me, he’d remember this moment the rest of his life.

  With a wild cry I turned and dashed from the shade across the burning hot sand and splashed into the water until it was knee–deep, then dove headfirst into an oncoming wave. I reappeared on its far side, spluttering and laughing and much cooler. My sisters and the boatmen and Nykara joined me. We played together in the salty water for hours, swimming, bobbing up and down in the incoming waves, chasing each other across the sand, occasionally lying on the beach to dry in the hot sun or rest in the shade of palms. We ate the evening meal, completely famished, beside a blazing bonfire beneath the trees. That night, after everyone els
e had fallen asleep, I walked from our camp to the exact point on the beach the breaking waves reached, sat, buried my feet in the cool wet sand, let the salt tang wash over me. The sound was mesmerizing, the brilliant stars flowing like a river across the sky softly lighting the sea, the palm fronds in the trees at my back clacking in the strong ceaseless wind.

  I was startled some time later when Nykara plunked down beside me. I hadn’t heard him approaching on the soft sand and over the night’s sounds.

  “I couldn’t sleep,” he said. “Or, I should say, I didn’t want to sleep.”

  “So you like the sea?” I asked. I rested my chest against my bent legs and wrapped my arms around them. “I love the Wadjet Wer. I never get tired of it.”

  “Very much. It’s better than I imagined.”

  “I’ll bet you’re already figuring out how to build a boat sturdy enough to travel all the way to Byblos, aren’t you,” I said. I wasn’t asking a question.

  Nykara laughed. “Guilty.”

  After a very long stretch without any conversation – “Can I ask you something, Nykara?”

  “Anything.”

  I’d longed to be alone with him like this for years. I loved Nykara. I wanted to be with him. I didn’t want to spend the rest of my life in Maadi while he spent his in Nekhen, seeing him for too brief a time on too few occasions. But the pattern we’d fallen into would never change unless I took the initiative and said something. He surely wouldn’t. He still saw me as a twelve year–old girl, not as a woman, not as a partner for his life. Nothing was going to alter that unless I tried. But trying was a risk. We’d developed a comfortable relationship that could, if I said nothing, continue on forever. What I was about to confess might make him very uncomfortable, might rend our relationship beyond repair. But I had to take the chance. My future happiness depended on it.

  “Why are you so sad?” I asked.