Pillar of Fire

by Judith Tarr

  She would not answer when questioned, though she responded to the sound of a voice. Any voice, saying anything, and even the howl of a jackal.

  For all Nofret knew, her lady’s mind was gone, lost among the dead or wandering her palace in Egypt. An Egyptian would have said that the ka, the double, was apart from its body. Whether it would come back, Nofret did not know, nor would she ask Leah. It was petty, that refusal, but there was no accounting for the heart’s foibles.

  With Ankhesenamon awake but unaware and the rest of them grown incautious with safety, they were nearly in the camp before any of them realized what they were doing. Outside of storm season travelers often walked in the wadis, the dry sandy riverbeds that were as smooth as roads in the stony waste. These soldiers, trusting in a clear sky and an empty land, had made camp in a broad turning where the sand was wide and clear. Elsewhere the banks were cut deep, but here the wadi’s eastern edge eased into the desert, a low hill of firm sand that was not ill climbing for a fit man.

  The camp seemed as little concerned for trouble as the travelers themselves had been. There were fires lit without concealment, and tents in a rough circle about them, each with its thicket of spears thrust into the sand. There was a chariot beside the largest tent, with a pair of horses tethered by it, nibbling on a heap of dry fodder. Men must have had to carry the chariot into the wadi: the sand was deep, and would have caught the wheels till they stuck fast.

  Right on the edge of the camp, just out of reach of the outermost fire, the travelers stood as if they had forgotten how to move. The camp filled that part of the wadi, but there was room to skirt it if they were careful. Nofret was about to say so when one of the horses whinnied.

  The donkey brayed a reply. It was a she-donkey and those were stallions. They must have caught wind of her: they began to fret and tug at their tethers. Men came stumbling out of tents, cursing the racket. One of them had a brace of hunting hounds on leads. They began to bay, leaping and plunging against their collars, one toward the horses, the other toward the dark where the travelers stood rooted.

  The donkey, being a donkey and contrary, had fallen silent after that one, betraying call. She would not move, either, though Johanan tugged at her rope.

  The light of the camp flowed out toward them, borne by men with torches. Nofret would have dived for cover, but Ankhesenamon on her donkey was as deeply tranced as ever, and neither Johanan nor Leah seemed able to move. Johanan, having done what he could to budge the donkey, stood still in the torchlight, looking taller and narrower than ever, a shape of robes and shadow.

  One of the Egyptians called out as he approached, in what he no doubt fondly fancied was the language of the desert tribes. It sounded like, “Who what name give you?”

  “Sirs!” Johanan called back in Egyptian, but with such an accent as she had never heard in him before: a tribesman’s accent, and reasonably convincing, too. It would hardly do for a man in desert robes to sound like a nobleman from Thebes. “Sirs,” he said again, “well met on a dark night. We’re travelers into Sinai. My grandmother is tired and my sister is ill. May we rest a while under your protection?”

  Nofret held her breath. Shyness had never been a flaw of Johanan’s, nor had she known him for a coward. But this was bolder even than she would have ventured.

  It had its effect. The soldiers glanced at one another. After a moment one said, “Better ask his lordship.”

  “By all means,” said Johanan, “consult your commander. You’ll not want to take in guests for an hour without his say-so.”

  Again the soldiers exchanged glances. The one who had spoken before said, “Come with us.”

  oOo

  Nofret would not have put it past the gods to set Horemheb himself here in the desert far from any city, lying in wait for three runaway slaves and a runaway queen. But the man in the largest tent was a stranger, thickly built for an Egyptian, with a broad, solid-jawed fighter’s face. He was surly with being waked so deep in the night, but he had a great deal of native courtesy. He poured wine for Leah with his own hands, and had his cook prepare a meal for them as if they had been princes and not mere wanderers in the waste.

  The Apiru seemed not at all dismayed to be the guests of an Egyptian commander and his troops. Ankhesenamon was oblivious as ever. She ate, drank, but said nothing. To Nofret’s anxious eye her bearing and her face were unmistakably royal, but in her robes and veils she must have seemed no more than a simple desert woman, mute and not greatly gifted with wit. She attracted no notice.

  None of the women did. Johanan kept their eyes on himself, chattering endlessly of everything and nothing. He managed to say very little of consequence, and nothing at all of where he had come from or where he was going. Mostly he regaled them with tales of hunting lions, which was what the commander was doing here, and trading for purple in Tyre, and searching out new oases in the wilderness of Gaza.

  “There’s one,” he said, “deep in, where even the wolves of the desert fear to go; where, it’s said, the dates grow already dipped in honey, and the trees pour forth sap that’s pure sweet milk. A goddess blessed it long ago, they say, and promised that any traveler who was worthy could rest there for the span of a night and a day. But only as long as that. Anyone who overstays his time wakes on the second morning to find the dates turned to stones and the milk of the trees to ashes, and even the water in the well is foul.”

  “That’s a marvel, to be sure,” the commander said. He did not share the meal but he was clearly fond of wine. He was on his second cup. “Tell me, have you ever been there?”

  “Alas, not I,” said Johanan, wide-eyed with innocence. “But I met a man who had, and who was no fool. He left within the time allotted, and he swears that he’s never found milk or honey to equal what he tasted in the oasis. Everything he’s eaten and drunk since, he says, has been a disappointment.”

  “One could call that a curse,” the commander said.

  “So one could,” said Johanan amiably.

  oOo

  They escaped near dawn. Johanan wanted to reach an oasis that he said was within reach before the day’s heat overtook them. He was remarkably vague about its location, while seeming to give the commander precise directions. They parted with an exchange of gifts: a skin of the commander’s wine for a finely woven rug that had been one of Ankhesenamon’s saddlecloths.

  It was by no means a fair exchange, in Nofret’s estimation. The commander must be grinning at the gullible tribesman. The tribesman seemed disgustingly pleased with himself, calling out cheerful farewells to the whole camp, including the dogs and the horses.

  “He cheated you,” Nofret said when the camp was well behind.

  Johanan’s grin was clearly visible in the early-morning light. “He did, didn’t he? He’s congratulating himself on it, too.”

  “You could have given him something less valuable, and still left him feeling as if he’d got the better of you.”

  “Oh,” he said, “but this convinces him completely that I’m a fool and all tribesmen are idiots. He didn’t even notice you, let alone your lady. He was too busy being the mighty, the noble, the infinitely superior Egyptian.”

  “And not thinking that maybe we’re worth inquiring into further.” Nofret shook her head. “There’s such a thing as being too clever.”

  “May the god protect me from it,” he said, still grinning.

  Forty-Nine

  After the camp of the soldiers they met no human creature. The desert was empty of men though full of living things: birds, lizards, snakes, jackals hunting in the night. The night after they left the camp, Nofret glimpsed movement as she trudged over yet another hill of sand and stones. A lean prick-eared shape loped ahead of them, seeming for a moment to be leading them, guiding Johanan who was their guide in the waste.

  It glanced over its shoulder. Its eyes were lambent in the gloom, not green or red as other animals’ would be, but frosty white like stars.

  She blinked hard. For an insta
nt the creature ran not on four legs but on two: a man’s lean body but jackal-headed, jackal-eyed, with fangs that gleamed as it smiled at her.

  Jackal-headed Anubis was guide of the dead, and Egyptian dead at that. She was all too much alive. She ached in every bone. Her feet were raw with night after night of walking in thin-soled sandals. She was thirsty, hungry, tired beyond belief.

  Leah must be even worse, though she walked with apparent ease. She would not let herself be mounted on the donkey behind Ankhesenamon. She could walk, she insisted. She would not hear of anything else.

  They found water that night, a well in the desert, so small and secret that not even a tussock of grass marked it. There was not enough water in it to fill more than one of the donkey’s waterskins, but it would do.

  Johanan would not say how much farther they had to go to be with his people in Sinai. They were far out of traveled ways, out of the world even, though not—Johanan said firmly—lost. Even if Nofret had known any map or road of this desert, she would not have known where they were, except that they were north and east of Egypt.

  She had not known there was so much desert in the world, or that she would have to walk over it. It was tumbled, broken, barren desert, and mountains looming against the sky. Each night they loomed closer. Each night Ankhesenamon came more to herself, but never completely. Never enough that she seemed to know where she was.

  If her spirit was gone and did not come back, Nofret did not know what would become of her. She was meek, who had always been royally imperious; docile, who had accepted no one’s will but her own since her father went to the house of purification in Akhetaten. It hurt to watch her, to see the face so lovely and so empty, the eyes unseeing, staring out over the dry land as if it had been the green richness of her garden.

  Maybe she was in comfort. She knew no pain. No memory vexed her. She was a body without a spirit, going wherever she was led.

  “Did he come this way?” Nofret asked Johanan as they walked almost easily on a stretch of level sand. “Was he as far out of himself as she is? Did he ever come back?”

  Johanan did not need to ask whom she meant. “He led us, with the god in front of him.”

  “Of course,” said Nofret after a pause. “And she follows, as blind as she ever was.”

  “It’s better so,” said Johanan. “When we come to the place of the tribes, she’ll wake.”

  “Do you know that?” she demanded of him. “Can you be sure of it?”

  “I was promised,” he said. “As I was promised that no danger would touch us. Haven’t we come safe through the lions’ country, and through the burning land, and through the camp of the soldiers?”

  “We’re not there yet,” she muttered. “At this pace we may never be.”

  “Have hope,” said Johanan.

  “Hope is for fools.” Nofret speeded her pace till she was well ahead of him, keeping a straight path from sand to stones to trackless waste. She heard the others behind her. A shadow came and went in front of her: the jackal again, or one of its kin. She knew nothing better than to follow it, though it might do no more than lead her to its den.

  It led her to the dawn, to a hollow in a hill of stones, where a spring bubbled from the rock, and on the wan grass beside it they could slake their thirst and rest and even sleep.

  The others slept, even Ankhesenamon. Nofret lay awake. In the shade of the stones she had chosen not to take shelter within the tent where Leah and Ankhesenamon were. Johanan had set himself on guard: sitting up against a rock, shrouded in his robes and veils, watching the sun rise and with it the hammering heat.

  It was not so terrible here. The water’s presence cooled the air a little. She laved her face and cooled her aching, blistered feet, sighing with the simple pleasure of it.

  There were eyes on her. She looked up from the water to Johanan’s face. He had let fall his veils. His beard was coming back, black and thick already, but the shape of his jaw was still clear to see. His eyes were dark, shadowed under the strong brows.

  She flushed and looked down again to the water, and to her feet in it, raw white and raw red, nothing lovely about them at all. She withdrew them hastily and tucked them under her skirts.

  What in the world was she doing? She had walked naked through the great cities of Egypt, and here in the desert, under one man’s eyes, she went all modest like a wild tribeswoman.

  Deliberately she thrust her feet out again and dipped them in the water, washing her ankles too, and her legs to the knee. She was filthy inside and out, though she had been scrubbing herself as desert people did, with sand. But nothing cleansed deeper or better than clear water on the skin.

  Her temper was up, and the water was here, clean and plentiful. She stripped off all her robes, every reeking one of them, and washed herself as best she could from head to foot. She did not care if he watched. She rather hoped he would. He had offered nothing but what was most proper and most brotherly since he returned to Memphis.

  A splash beside her made her start. He was there, his robes in a heap beside hers, but unlike her he had kept a rag knotted about his loins. Pity, that. The scars on his back flexed and shifted as he moved. Some were barely healed: they had opened not long ago. He had betrayed no sign, nor seemed to be in pain.

  He scoured himself as she had, with sand from the verge and water from the spring. He even loosed his hair from its plaits and washed that, working out knots and tangles with fierce concentration. He had a great deal of hair, almost as much as Nofret had, and nearly as long.

  She saw the moment when he lost patience. She was clean herself and had given up on her hair: she was thinking rather longingly of Egyptian cleanliness, a skull shaved smooth and free of itches and vermin. But that would have to wait till she came to a civilized place, if there was any such thing in this bleak outland of the world.

  She moved in behind him, plucked the comb from his fingers, began to ply it. It was a rich thing, carved of white bone and ornamented with the heads and horns of gazelles. He must have kept it from the time when he was a prince of tomb-builders in Akhetaten.

  He sighed and leaned into her hands. No shyness in him, or none that he would let her see. She thought of tugging till he yelped, but her hands were cruel enough as it was.

  He endured in silence. He had mixed a bit of herb from the poolside with the sand; he carried its sharp green scent over the musk of humanity. It was a pleasant mingling, more pleasant than any unguent she could remember.

  She combed and coaxed his hair till it was smooth. Then sitting on her heels she plaited it in two long braids and wound it about his head as it had been before.

  He was asleep sitting up, or so she thought, breathing deep and slow, the long muscles of his body seeming longer with ease. She smoothed her hands across the width of his shoulders, careful of the scars, those that were healed and those that were rough still and scabbed.

  “If I had ointment,” she said, “I could soften these.”

  She had been talking to herself, but he heard her. He glanced over his shoulder. His eyes were bright, unclouded with sleep. “In the donkey’s pack,” he said, “wrapped in a bit of wool.”

  She resisted moving, but curiosity thrust her up. She had to hunt among a remarkable variety of things, most of which she did not remember seeing before, but in the end she found it: a packet wrapped in faded black wool. Inside was a jar of pale chalcedony with a seal on its lid. She knew the symbol on the seal.

  As she went to kneel behind him again she said, “You don’t buy anything but the best, do you?”

  “It was a gift,” he said, “from a man who was a king.” Akhenaten, he must mean. Nofret broke the seal and lifted the lid. A glorious scent rose to surround her, the scent of the richest of ointments, compounded of myrrh and aloes. It was made to soothe the skin of queens, and to delight princes with its fragrance.

  A pair of slaves could take pleasure enough in it, when all was considered. Nofret smoothed it into Johanan’s scars, one
by one and as lightly as she could.

  He did not gasp or flinch. His skin around the scars was softer than one might imagine a man’s could be. Soft, she thought, as sleep. She laid her cheek against it.

  He turned so smoothly that she was not caught off balance at all. His breast was rougher than his back, thick with curly hair. She worked her fingers into it.

  His voice rumbled under her ear. “You understand that if we go on, there’ll be no hope for you—for either of us. I’ll name you my wife in the assembly of my people.”

  She stiffened, but she could not bring herself to pull away. “How many wives do you have already?”

  “None,” he answered.

  “Not even a concubine? No one at all to keep you warm of nights?”

  “I only need one woman,” he said. “I’ve never needed more.”

  “I’m surprised no one’s married you off. Aren’t you a prince among your people?”

  “Who would try? Grandmother knows who was meant for me. She warned Father long ago not to try to find me a wife among the Apiru.”

  “And you? Are you so blindly obedient?”

  “If this is obedience,” he said, “then I embrace it.” “Maybe I don’t want you,” said Nofret.

  He laughed under her ear, with his arms about her and his body warming to her. She had not embraced a man so in a long stretch of years. Not since Seti died.

  Poor Seti. She could not remember his face or the sound of his voice. She could barely remember the feel of his body against hers.

  Then even that was gone. Her only memory was this; this man, this body. His loincloth had vanished, fallen and forgotten. She gasped as he passed the gate, not for pain but for the intensity of her pleasure.

  oOo

  They woke in the cool of evening, tangled in one another. Nofret had a brief and piercing memory of waking beside another man, of the stab of impatience mixed with affection that had always struck her when she lay with Seti, but this was no one who mattered so little to her as Seti had. This was the half of her soul.

  This big raspy-bearded man with his surprisingly delicate touch, this stranger whom she had barely seen since he was a child. This slave of a god whom she did not know. She tensed to recoil, found herself clinging tighter, winding limbs with his, as if she could sink into him, make herself a part of him.