Sunrise on the Mediterranean

by Suzanne Frank

  The object of all the surrounding gossip walked right in front of me. She was veiled, and gold disks hung from her headdress and the edges of her veiling and banded around her arms and legs. The woman carried at least twenty extra pounds in currency.

  Who was she? “Why is she back, then? If she was so happy?” The crowd conversation continued.

  “Dadua made it part of the b’rith covenant when he agreed to rule over Yuda and Y’srael.”

  “Ach, so he unites the old house of Labayu with the new house of Dadua.”

  She was Mik’el, Saul’s daughter? Dadua’s first wife? The weeping of the gray-haired man following her made my heart clench. He must love her deeply to humiliate himself like that.

  Mik’el didn’t spare him as much as a glance.

  Dadua stepped down and lifted her off the donkey, then set her beside him. A snap of his fingers produced another crown. He lifted her face veil, shielding her from the crowd with his body. As the crown touched her head, the wails of the child, forsaken by his mother, rent the air. Dadua kissed Mik’el on both cheeks, then turned her to face her subjects.

  Her expression was frozen, though her face was lovely. Long brown hair fell to her waist, and huge doe eyes surveyed us all dispassionately. She stood tall and regal, the wind blowing her dress against her high breasts and soft stomach. Mik’el stepped forward, her arm linked with Dadua’s, into the city. The child cried again. They paused for a moment, then walked on.

  When we got back to the kitchens, there was hell to pay. Shana yelled at us, then put us to work cleaning vegetables. My ears were still ringing with epithets when I got back to my house. I lay down next to Cheftu, who was already asleep on the pallet.

  He turned to his side, slipping his arm around me. Feeling clothes on my body seemed to wake him up.

  “Why are we here?” I asked sleepily. “What real significance is there to my grinding grain and you working the fields? Is this a cosmic joke?”

  Cheftu frowned. “I thought you were happy. I thought you liked living here, being together. No madmen are chasing us, the ground is secure, and the waves are far away. It’s nice. We can actually live instead of running from one disaster to another.”

  “How can you be so complacent?” I asked.

  He shrugged, that Gallic movement that made my blood race. “Is it complacent to be content?”

  I got up to pace, restless though I was tired. “Don’t you think we should be serving a purpose, though? You’re a doctor, for heaven’s sake!”

  “What is the purpose of life? Of love? Of living?” he asked, ignoring my last comment. “It is the end of itself,” he answered. “It is the question and the answer.”

  “I hate it when you give those kinds of esoteric responses,” I said. “It makes me feel very young and …” I searched for a word.

  “Idealistic?” he said in English. “I mean, why are we here?”

  He sat up, adjusted the blankets, and linked his fingers behind his head. “You claim you came back for me alone.”

  “I did!”

  “Then I alone am not enough?”

  I did a double take before I realized he was teasing. “ Ach, forget it,” I said, suddenly sick of the subject. “There is a wedding feast tonight. Dadua’s first wife is back. They are renewing their vows, or remarrying, or something, for political reasons.”

  “Chérie, at any point in history, it is the same. Only when we see it in a book does history appear to be happening every moment. In truth we just live, day to day, whether under the rule of Pharaoh and in court, or under the rule of David and in the fields.”

  I splashed some water on my face and rebraided my hair as he spoke. “Well, then I’m off to be under the rule of Shana, in the kitchens,” I said on my way out.

  The spirit in the palace was one of forced gaiety. Children dressed up for their father’s first marriage’s renewal of vows raced up and down the stairs. Shana stood at the top of the staircase, guarding the decorated roof.

  “You!” she said. “Keep them from coming up here before the feast.”

  I played the role of cop, keeping the children away and letting the adults in. G’vret Avgay’el was preparing the evening’s feast to honor her husband and his first wife. That must really stink.

  However, she put on an impressive spread, competition or no. Grain in five forms, fruit that was steamed, stuffed, mashed, root veggies that were roasted, and a platter of dark, stringy meat passed by me. My stomach was growling as the family began to arrive. That was the amazing thing about dinner tonight: all family members would be present, including children and wives.

  It was a boisterous meal, the yeladim singing and running around, women laughing and chattering, Dadua overseeing it all, exchanging pleasantries with the various men also considered part of his household. Mik’el, still wearing her pocket change, sat as still and exciting as a statue.

  Actually, that was unfair. A statue could be exciting. Mik’el, however, made the mushroom seem vibrant.

  As the moon rose, the men demanded a story. Dadua, who hadn’t actually looked at his bride all night, agreed enthusiastically. Avgay’el was beseeched to tell one, as she was the best storyteller.

  Charmingly hesitant, she began. “Beresheth …”

  I could not breathe, from her first word. My lexicon translated, stumbled, then translated again: In the beginning …

  “Yahwe created the sun, moon, and stars with a single word. Like a tent he stretched the skies over the Deep, making a place for his court, the elohim, upon the Higher Waters.” Avgay’el gestured gracefully, showing how God lived above the rest of the planet.

  “Now look: For by his creating, Yahwe rose over the Deep, which rebelled against him. Tehom, the dark queen of the Deep, tried to drown the creations of Yahwe, but in a chariot of burning flame he rode against her, his weapons hail and lightning.”

  The children watched, wide-eyed. I sat there, bewildered. “Tehom set her champion Leviathan against Yahwe, but Yahwe hit his skull with lightning, then thrust a sword into the serpent Rahab’s heart. The waters of the Deep fled from Yahwe’s voice. Tehom, shaking with fear, surrendered. Yahwe declared the moon to partition the seasons, the sun to differentiate between day and night. In awe of Yahwe’s victory, the morning stars sang together, while the elohim shouted for joy.”

  The children shouted, elated, while the adults knuckled the floor—the tribesmen’s approach to applause. Avgay’el leaned forward to her audience, her voice soft. “Before a plant or a field was growing from earth, or a grain had taken root—for Yahwe had not sprinkled rain, nor peopled the land with earthlings—yet from the day that the earth had divided from the sky, a mist rose from the deep to moisten the land.

  “From the adama—”

  Red soil, my lexicon provided. “Yahwe, with his hands, crafted an earthling.”

  The children gasped with surprise. “And into his nostrils, like you have, Avshalem, or you, K’liab,” she said to two of Dadua’s children, “Yahwe blew nishmat ha hayyim.”

  The screen in my brain filled with the image of God and Adam touching, the Michelangelo fresco in the Sistine Chapel. Only now, instead of fingertip touching fingertip, the bearded heavenly portrait of God was breathing into an inanimate Adam: who opened his eyes and looked at his creator.

  That, my lexicon said triumphantly, is nishmat ha hayyim. The very divine breath of God, which gives life, a zeal for living.

  “Now look: Man has become flesh,” Avgay’el said.

  My hands were shaking; I hoped no one would request wine.

  “So: Yahwe grew a garden; eastward of Eden he settled the man, Adama, whom he had formed of clay and his own breath. All trees that pleased the eye, pleased the stomach, grew there by Yahwe’s word. The tree of life grew there, also the tree of differentiating between good and bad.” Avgay’el paused to tousle one kid’s hair.

  “Yahwe brings the man to the garden to husband it. ‘Eat from any tree,’ he tells the man. ‘But the
tree of differentiating between good and bad, you will not know. The day you eat of it is the day death knows you.’ ”

  “Isn’t he lonely?” one of Dadua’s sons asked.

  Avgay’el smiled at him. “Ken, he is lonely. Yahwe has made all the creatures of the field, the air, and the sea, Adama names them, but none are his partner.”

  “But Mik’el is Dadua’s partner, nachon?” one of the children said. The entire room stiffened, looking at the motionless woman. Avgay’el smiled at her competition and didn’t miss a beat.

  “ ‘Poor Adama,’ this is what Yahwe says. So he lays Adama in a deep sleep. While he sleeps, Yahwe takes a rib, seals the wound. Starting with the rib of man, Yahwe hand-crafts a woman, then returns her to Adama’s side.”

  “What’s her name? What’s her name?” they shouted enthusiastically.

  “You know her name,” Avgay’el said, smiling. She looked like a Wedgwood cameo. “The mother of all things. Who is she?”

  “Hava!” they cried in unison.

  My lexicon unnecessarily provided me the name: Eve. Avgay’el turned to the bride, Mik’el. “As Hava ruled Eden and Adama, so I welcome you as my sister, to rule—” She stopped speaking, then bowed gracefully. Was there going to be more?

  Mik’el looked at all of us. The room leaned forward imperceptibly, curious as to what she would say, how she would graciously respond. She was silent, probably gathering her thoughts. She looked straight at us. “I would like to retire now.”

  A gasp. Dadua’s face hardened, but he rose with her. Avgay’el stayed bowed, her face shielded. The queen Mik’el rose and walked out. Dadua was right behind her.

  “Ach, well, she was tired after such a long day,” an older gibori said. “She is not as young as she used to be.”

  She’d probably scratch his eyes out for that observation. I watched them leave, then it was time to clean up once more.

  Really, my current servitude wasn’t much different from being a waitress. With no tipping. But no come-ons, either. Actually, I was almost invisible. It seemed to me that slaves were wallpaper. Had I ever paid attention to the hundreds of men, women, boys, and girls in the palaces of Thebes in Egypt? Or Kallistae in Aztlan? Had I been as blind then as I was now unseen?

  RAEMHETEPET SLAPPED the girl, sending her away. Some blessed time alone! Some time to breathe without fourteen handmaids, three flower-strewing children dogging her every step, five women to touch up her coiffure, her makeup, adjust her clothing. She’d had enough; enduring this was driving her crazy!

  Meryaten came in almost immediately. “My lord, you struck that child?” RaEm’s bride was too fragile, too damnably sweet, to strike anyone.

  RaEm focused on her image in the mirror. “What of it?” The girl glided across the room. “Are you not happy, my lord? Is there something you require?”

  She laid a small hand on RaEm’s shoulder, and RaEm had to fight to not flinch. It was the beginning of her cycle and her month-long banishment had expanded into two months. Never had she ached for someone the way she did for Akhenaten. She needed his body, his voice, his mind. She was cold, chilled to the bone with longing. “I abhor being here with these rebels,” she finally said.

  Meryaten glided to the window, looking out on the city of Waset. She leaned on the low mud-brick wall. “I confess that I love it here. Look! It is so colorful, so vibrant.”

  RaEm stonily watched herself in the bronze mirror. Waset was a wreck. The temples that had once been brightly painted and emblazoned with jewels were faded, neglected. The colorful standards that had once blown from every window throughout the city were gone. It was hot, white, crowded, and noisy. The Way of the Nobles was lined with boarded-over homes. The practice fields for Hat’s once great army were now overgrown pastures for field mice.

  Though RaEm loved the man, she had come to loathe the ruler Akhenaten was. Where was his pride? Did he not know what these people said of him, the Son of the Sun, Pharaoh, living forever!, the god incarnate? She didn’t care much for the people, either, certainly not as individuals. They were so much grain in a field. However, as a mass they were the wealth of Egypt, the throne legs on which rested the weight of the royal house.

  They despised Akhenaten.

  Meryaten was yet on the balcony, listing the many things she found delightful about Waset. RaEm watched coolly as her makeup was applied: kohl for her eyes, harsh lines that took away their almond-shaped curves. Her head was shaved, the night’s growth removed. Did they ever wonder why her face had no need of shaving? Her stomach growled, but she ignored it. Especially in Waset she needed to stay as lean and masculine looking as possible, since they were unused to the idea of men and women being undifferentiated, save for clothing. She thanked the gods that shirts were the fashion of the moment.

  Though her dresser would testify to seeing the bulge of Smenkhare’s proven masculinity, still RaEm was concerned. Meryaten hadn’t an idea, and RaEm wanted her secret to remain—especially in Waset. Living this closely made it all the more difficult to hide her monthly cycle.

  “Queen Tiye requests you,” the chamberlain said.

  RaEm rose, stepping into the curved toe sandals, adjusting the heavy counterweight and collar she wore. “Where are you going, my lord?” Meryaten asked, standing beside her, brown eyes wide with rejection. “You said we were going to walk through the market today. Are we not going?” She touched RaEm again.

  Smenkhare stood while the slave buckled on his jeweled dagger and sheath. “Business calls me away. I shall return late.”

  Meryaten looked away, blinking furiously. “Have I been too talkative? Did you not like the dinner I prepared? Why—”

  Rolling her eyes, RaEm kissed her wife. “It is business. Nothing more. Take your cousin … one of them”—she gave up on the name—“to the market with you. Be certain to take a contingency of guards, however. These people do not respect your father’s house.”

  “Your brother’s house,” Meryaten said.

  “Aye. Now go, no long faces.”

  Meryaten smiled tearfully, her voice barely above a whisper. “Perhaps tonight when you return we could … try again?”

  RaEm looked over her head. “Perhaps. May the Aten bless your day.”

  Her wife ducked her head and left the room. Thank the gods, RaEm thought.

  Once loaded in her palanquin, RaEm opened the scrolls that were delivered in the dead of night while Meryaten slept off the drug that she drank each time she and “Smenkhare” made love. What a nuisance she was, RaEm thought.

  For a moment she paused, seeing the seal on the papyrus. Hatshepsut, my dear friend, how I miss you, she thought. Then RaEm cracked it with her nail and unrolled it, squinting at the scribe’s small, perfect writing.

  The former priest had kept immaculate records of where things were kept, such as grain for a country that would soon be starving. Field after field lay fallow, with no one to plow them, seed them, for always this had been the job of the priests. The masses kept their plot of vegetables. In exchange for their taxes, in payment for their faithfulness to the gods and their shrines, they received flour to make bread.

  Save there was no flour, no grain, and eventually no bread.

  RaEm’s finger followed the scribe’s line drawing. It showed several underground silos of grain. In the intervening reigns—RaEm didn’t know how many or for how long—the priests had followed this layout. Therefore grain should be awaiting RaEm.

  She beckoned a slave. “Go to Queen Tiye,” she instructed him. “Tell her that her son Smenkhare has left the city on urgent business and won’t return till week’s end. Ask her if she would share this information with his wife, the princess Meryaten.”

  The slave ducked his head and RaEm dismissed him, gesturing for another. After instructing him, she leaned forward to the palanquin carrier. “Take me to the stables, then arrange for a boat to meet me on the Nile. A small skiff, nothing large.”

  She didn’t have a lot of power yet, but she was learn
ing to use it.

  The trip had taken twice as long as she’d thought. “Stop!” she called out to the oarsmen. Once again she looked at the map, then looked around them. She waved away more mosquitoes as she was assisted out of the rowboat. Her feet immediately sank into the marshy ground, submerged to her lower calves.

  Leaving her sandals behind, RaEm squelched through what had once been a field. “The Inundation was poor, why is this field rotting?” she asked the hapless farmer they’d stumbled upon a few fields back.

  “The corvée, my lord,” the man said. “It broke about two Inundations ago, and there is no one to fix it.”

  “What do you require for the repairs?” RaEm asked, picking her way carefully. Snakes were rumored to live in places like this.

  “Stone, my lord. We don’t have stone, just mud brick.” He sighed. “The mud brick is what we kept using to hold it, since it was better than nothing. Then one night, must have been about this time last year, old Ma’a—atenum,” the man stumbled, making the name religiously acceptable, “was out here. Aii, he was repairing the corvée when the gods took him.”

  RaEm turned to face the man. “He died?”

  “Aye, my lord. Never found him, because when he fell, he bashed out the overly dry mud brick, and whoosh! the waters came rushing in and washed the whole mess, Ma’atenum, the corvée, and the river, right into this pasture. Drowned a few animals, too.”

  RaEm was stepping gingerly now. She didn’t want to find the remains of Ma’atenum.

  “Is this it, my lord?” one of the oarsmen called. He was standing by a stone stake, more than half submerged. RaEm didn’t need to consult the diagram because she knew it by heart. She nodded once as they continued plodding toward him.

  Looking around, RaEm tried to picture what these fields had been like before they became a mosquito-infested pond. “Is there any way to open the silo without getting water inside?” she asked the men in general.

  “You could dredge the field,” the old farmer suggested. “Then you could do anything, open it as wide as you please.”