Praise for Pauline Gedge
“Gedge excels at setting the scene and subtly evoking a sense of the period as she tells a timeless story of greed, love, and revenge.”
—Kirkus Reviews
“Gedge makes the past so accessible. You can imagine walking between the pillars into a magnificent hall and watching it come alive with the smell of the fresh paint on the frescoes.”
—The Globe and Mail
“Gedge vividly renders the exotic, sensuous world of ancient Memphis, the domestic rituals of bathing and dressing, the social ambience of superstition and spells.”
—Publishers Weekly
“Gedge has such a terrific feel for ancient Egypt that the reader merrily suspends disbelief and hangs on for the ride.”
—Calgary Herald
“Her richly colourful descriptions … hit the reader with photographic clarity.”
—The Ottawa Sun
“Gedge has brought Egypt alive, not just the dry and sandy Egypt we know from archaeology, but the day-to-day workings of what was one of the greatest and most beautiful kingdoms in the history of the world.”
—Quill & Quire
“Each volume is a carefully devised segment, with its own distinct flavour and texture. When put together, then the skill and workmanship of the whole undertaking stand out clearly. The trilogy is one of Pauline Gedge’s most appealing works.”
—Edmonton Journal
“Gedge … has the magical ability to earn a reader’s suspension of disbelief.”
—Toronto Star
“Pauline Gedge’s strengths—imagination, ingenuity in plotting, and convincing characterization—are here in abundance.”
—Books in Canada
“Gedge draws another vivid picture of Ancient Egypt and skillfully weaves her dramatic tale of intrigue, treachery, and manipulation. Her historical novels have the ability to bring a period fully before us; it is possible to feel the heat and experience the pageantry she so ably describes.”
—The Shuswap Sun
“Pauline Gedge’s knowledge of Egyptian history is both extensive and intimate, and has enabled her to produce an entire society of the time of Ramses II with admirable vitality. She has a sharp eye for the salient detail, and an evocative way with landscape and interiors. She can produce a mood and suggest an atmosphere … A very good story well told, and it engrosses the reader from the first page to the last.”
—The Globe and Mail
PENGUIN CANADA
HOUSE OF DREAMS
PAULINE GEDGE is the award-winning and bestselling author of eleven previous novels, eight of which are inspired by Egyptian history. Her first, Child of the Morning, won the Alberta Search-for-a-New Novelist Competition. In France, her second novel, The Eagle and the Raven, received the Jean Boujassy award from the Société des Gens des Lettres, and The Twelfth Transforming, the second of her Egyptian novels, won the Writers Guild of Alberta Best Novel of the Year Award. Her books have sold more than 250,000 copies in Canada alone; worldwide, they have sold more than six million copies and have been translated into eighteen languages. Pauline Gedge lives in Alberta.
ALSO BY PAULINE GEDGE
Child of the Morning
The Eagle and the Raven
Stargate
The Twelfth Transforming
Scroll of Saqqara
The Covenant
House of Illusions
The Hippopotamus Marsh:
Lords of the Two Lands, Volume One
The Oasis: Lords of the Two Lands, Volume Two
The Horus Road: Lords of the Two Lands, Volume Three
The Twice Born
HOUSE OF
DREAMS
PAULINE
GEDGE
PENGUIN CANADA
Published by the Penguin Group
Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4P 2Y3 (a division of Pearson Canada Inc.)
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Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England
First published in a Viking Canada paperback by Penguin Group (Canada), a division of Pearson Canada Inc., 1994
Published in Penguin Canada paperback by Penguin Group (Canada), a division of Pearson Canada Inc., 2002
Published in this edition, 2007
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 (OPM)
Copyright © Pauline Gedge, 1994
All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.
Publisher’s note: This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Manufactured in the U.S.A.
* * *
LIBRARY AND ARCHIVES CANADA CATALOGUING IN PUBLICATION
Gedge, Pauline, 1945–
House of dreams / Pauline Gedge.
Originally publ.: Toronto : Viking, 2007.
ISBN 978-0-14-316742-6
1. Title.
PS8563.E33H68 2007 C813’.54 C2007-903366-0
* * *
ISBN-13: 978-0-14-316742-6
ISBN-10: 0-14-316742-1
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HOUSE OF
DREAMS
1
MY FATHER WAS A MERCENARY, a blond, blue-eyed giant of a man who had drifted into Egypt during the time of the troubles when the Syrian Chancellor Irsu held sway and foreigners ranged where they would, looting and raping. For a time he lingered in the Delta, taking work where he could, for he was not himself lawless and would have nothing to do with the bands of wandering predators. He herded cattle, trod grapes, sweated in the mud pits where bricks were made. Then, when our Great God Ramses’ father, Osiris Setnakht Glorified, wrested power from the filthy Syrian, my father saw his chance and joined the ranks of the infantry, marching through the towns and villages scattered along the length of the Nile, routing and pursuing the disorganized groups of pillagers, executing, and arresting, and played his part in the restoration of a Ma’at that had been enfeebled and almost eclipsed by the febrile creatures who had grappled for the throne of Egypt f
or years, none of whom were worthy to be called the Incarnation of the God.
Sometimes the drunken vermin my father’s troop exterminated were Libu from his own Tamahu tribe, similarly fair-haired and light of eye, who had come to the Two Lands not to enrich it nor to build an honest life but to steal and kill. They were like rogue animals, and my father destroyed them without compunction.
One burning afternoon in the month of Mesore the troop pitched their tents on the outskirts of the town of Aswat, north of holy Thebes. They were dirty, tired and hungry and there was no beer to be had. The captain sent my father and four others to requisition what stores might be available from the headman. Passing the entrance to one of the mud houses they heard a commotion within, women shrieking, men shouting. Fearing the worst, their instincts for trouble honed by many weeks of petty warfare, the members of the troop pushed into the tiny, dark hallway to be met by a crowd of half-drunk men and women swaying and clapping with delight. Someone forced a mug of beer into my father’s hand. “Give thanks! I have a son!” a voice floated over the mêlée. Drinking greedily my father wove through the throng to come face to face with a tiny, olive-skinned woman with elfin features, cradling in her bloody arms a snuffling bundle of linen. It was the midwife. It was my mother. My father took a long look at her over the rim of his mug. In his strong, placid way he weighed, considered. The people were warm in their happiness. The headman offered the troop a generous amount of grain from the town’s meagre supply. The women came to the tents and washed the soldiers’ soiled linen. Aswat was beautiful and quiet, traditional in its values, its cultivable land rich, its trees shady, and the desert beyond was unsullied.
On the day the troop was to continue its march south, my father sought the house where my mother lived with her parents and three brothers. He took with him the only valuable thing he possessed, a tiny gold scarab on a leather thong that he had found in the mud of a Delta tributary and had taken to wearing around his sinewy wrist. “I am on the business of the Good God,” he told my mother, pressing the scarab into her little brown palm, “but when I have served my time I will return. Wait for me.” And she, looking up into the mild but commanding eyes of this tall man whose hair was as golden as sunlight and whose mouth promised joys about which she had only dreamed, nodded dumbly.
He was as good as his word. Wounded twice in the year that followed, he was at last discharged from the army, paid, and allotted the three arouras of land he had asked for in the nome at Aswat. As a mercenary he held the fields on the understanding that he was available for active duty at any time and he was required to pay one-tenth of his crops into the coffers of Pharaoh, but he had what he wanted: Egyptian citizenship, a piece of land and a pretty wife who was already a part of the life of the town and who was able to make his task of winning the trust of the local people easier.
All this I learned, of course, from my mother. Their meeting, their immediate attraction for each other, the taciturn, battle-weary soldier and the wiry little village girl, was a romantic story of which I never tired. My mother’s family had been villagers at Aswat for many generations, minding their own affairs, fulfilling their religious obligations at the small temple of Wepwawet, the jackal God of War and the totem of their nome; births, marriages, deaths weaving them and their neighbours into a tight garment of simplicity and security. Of my father’s forebears she knew little for he never spoke of them. “They are Libu, from over there somewhere,” she would say, waving her arm vaguely in the direction of the west with all the indifference of the true Egyptian for anything and anyone beyond the borders. “You get your blue eyes from them, Thu. They were probably herdsmen, wanderers.” But watching the light from the oil lamp slide over the sheen of sweat on my father’s powerful shoulders and well-muscled arms as he sat cross-legged on the sandy floor of our reception room, bent over some piece of farm equipment he was mending, I doubted it. Far more likely that his ancestors had been warriors, fierce men who surrounded some barbaric Libu prince and fought for him in an endless round of tribal depredations.
Sometimes I daydreamed that my father had noble blood in his veins, that his father, my grandfather, was just such a prince who had quarrelled violently with my father and forced him into exile so that, wandering and friendless, he had at last found his way to the blessed soil of Egypt. One day a message would come, he would be forgiven, we would pack our few belongings onto the donkey, sell the cow and the ox, and travel to a far court where my father would be welcomed with open arms, with tears, by an old man weighed down in gold. Mother and I would be bathed in sweet oils, clad in shimmering linen, draped in amulets of turquoise and silver. All would bow to me, the long-lost princess. I would sit in the shade of our date palm and study my brown arms, my long, gangly legs to which the dust of the village always clung, thinking that perhaps the blood that pulsed almost imperceptibly through the bluish veins of my wrists might one day be the precious pass to wealth and position. My brother, Pa-ari, a year older than I was and much wiser, would scoff at me. “Little princess of the dust!” he would smile. “Queen of the reed beds! Do you really think that if Father was a prince he would have bothered with a few paltry arouras in the middle of nowhere, or married a midwife? Get up now and take the cow to the water. She is thirsty.” And I would wander to where Precious Sweet Eyes, our cow, was tethered. She and I would take the path to the river together, my hand on her soft, warm shoulder, and while she sucked up the life-giving liquid I would study my reflection, gazing into the Nile’s limpid depths. The slow eddies at my feet distorted the image, turning my waving black hair into an indistinct cloud around my face and making of my strange blue eyes a colourless glitter full of mysterious messages. A princess yes, perhaps. One never knew. I never dared to ask my father about the possibility. He was loving, he would sit me on his knee and tell me stories, he was approachable on every subject but his past. The barrier was unspoken but real. I think my mother, still loving him desperately, held him in awe. The villagers certainly did. They trusted him. They relied on him to take his share of the responsibilities of village administration. He helped the local Medjay to police the surrounding area. But they never treated him with the easy familiarity of a genuine villager. His long, golden hair and his steady, startling blue gaze always proclaimed him a foreigner.
I fared little better. I did not particularly like the village girls with their giggles, their simple games, their artless but boring gossip concerning nothing more than village affairs, and they did not like me. With a child’s suspicion for anyone different, they closed ranks against me. Perhaps they feared the evil eye. I, of course, did not make my life among them any easier. I was aloof, superior without intending to be, too full of the wrong kind of questions, my mind always ranging further than the boundaries they understood. Pa-ari was more easily accepted. Though he too was taller and more finely made than the other village children, he was not cursed with blue eyes. From my mother he had inherited the Egyptian brown eyes and black hair and from father an inborn authority that made him a leader amongst his schoolmates. Not that he chose to be a leader. His heart was in words. A mercenary’s land grant could be passed to his son providing the boy followed in his father’s profession, but Pa-ari wanted to be a scribe. “I am content with the farm and I like village life,” he told me once, “but a man who cannot read and write is forced to rely on the wisdom and knowledge of others. He can have no opinion of his own about anything that does not pertain to the physical details of his daily life. A scribe has access to libraries, his heart expands, he is able to judge the past and form the future.”
At the age of four, when I was three, Pa-ari was taken by Father to the temple school. Father himself could neither read nor write and had to rely on the village scribe to tally his crops for the annual taxing and tell him what he owed. We did not know what was in his mind when he took Pa-ari’s hand and led him along the sun-baked track to Wepwawet’s precincts. Perhaps he thought of nothing more than ensuring that his heir would not be
cheated when it became his turn to plough the few fields supporting us. I remember standing in the doorway of our house and watching the two of them disappear into the white freshness of the early morning light. “Where is Father taking Pa-ari?” I asked my mother who was emerging behind me, a flax basket laden with washing in her arms. She paused, hefting the load onto her hip.
“To school,” she replied. “Run back and fetch the natron, Thu, there’s a good girl. We must get this done and then take the dough to the oven.” But I did not stir.
“I want to go too,” I said. She laughed.
“No, you do not,” she said. “For one thing, you are too young. For another, girls do not go to school. They learn at home. Now hurry with the natron. I will start for the river.”
By the time my mother had finished slapping the wash on the rocks beside the water, rubbing the coarse linen with natron while she gossiped with the other women who had gathered, my father had returned and gone back to the fields. I saw him bending, hoe in hand, green spears of wheat brushing his naked calves, as I trailed after my mother up the path from the river to the house. I helped her drape the washing over the line strung in our reception hall, open to the sky like all the others in the village, and then watched her fold and pound the dough for our evening meal. I was quiet, thinking, missing Pa-ari who had filled my days with games and small adventures among the papyrus fronds and weeds of the riverbank.
When my mother set off for the communal oven I ran in the opposite direction, left the track that meandered beside the river and followed the narrow irrigation canal that watered father’s few acres. As I drew near he straightened and smiled, shading his eyes with one broad, calloused hand. I came up to him, panting.
“Is something wrong?” he asked. I flung my arms around his solid thigh and hugged him. For some reason that memory has survived in me, bright and vivid after all these years. Often it is not the momentous occasions that cling, the times when we say to ourselves—I will remember this for as long as I live—but tiny, inconsequential happenings that flick past unremarked, only to surface time and again, becoming infused with greater reality as time draws us further from the original event. So it was for me then. I can still feel the soft mat of hair on his sun-blackened skin against my face, see the faintly stirring carpet of young crops so green against the further beige of a desert shimmering in the sun, smell his sweat, reassuring, safe. I stepped back and gazed up at him.
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