the lion- wind blows, the poison-breath of the Eastern Snake. Soon it will be Mesoré, and the grapes will ripen and we will have the harvest festivals.'
'I don't understand your year,' she said plaintively. 'At home we had four seasons, but here there are only three.'
'That is because we are the gift of the river. The Nile is our mother. We have three seasons of four months each, made of three decans of ten days,' I instructed my foreign sister.
'Shemu, which is harvest, that's now; Akhet, which is flood; and Peret, which is sprouting, the time of plants. Every time has its festival and every day its god, and over all of them is Amen- Re, Lord of Lords.'
'It is well known that Gaia Mistress of Animals is the head of the gods!' objected the foreign princess.
'Not in Egypt. But we will ask the scribe about gods; Mother says that they are not fit subjects for humans.'
'That is not what your sister's husband thinks,' commented Merope, avoiding the use of honorifics in case someone was listening.
'I know.'
She might have been about to say something more, but Basht walked off her chest and onto mine, dipping her head to sniff delicately at my neck and settling down with her pin tipped feet folded under her richly-patterned body.
'We were meant to be friends,' concluded Merope. 'Basht is never wrong about people.'
'Of course not. She's the avatar of Basht the Lady, Goddess of love and motherhood.'
'She couldn't be just a cat, then?' asked Merope slyly.
'No more than a crocodile is not the avatar of Sobek or a hippopotamus of Set the Destroyer.'
'But the crocodile will still bite and the hippopotamus break boats,' she argued. 'Acting like animals, not gods.'
'It's a mystery,' I replied, thinking about it for the first time and taking refuge in the scribe Ani's invariable response to such questions.
'Egypt is a strange place,' concluded my new sister, and we drowsed into sleep.
For the first time I had met someone who asked more questions than I did, and I thought the Queen Tiye wise to put us together. It might even preserve my own mother's temper.
The Kriti princess was equally pleased, it seemed, with me as a companion. Though she refused to abandon her tunic, which covered her chest, for a proper knotted cloth, and would not have her head shaved to a sidelock, as we did for cleanliness and convenience, she adapted to life in her new country well. She had learned the language very quickly, though some words still eluded her, and some of the grammatical constructions which I had learned before I knew that I was learning them gave her trouble. She could not differentiate between the three levels of formal address, so spoke to all persons as though they were Pharaoh or a High Priest, which gave her a reputation for humility. And she asked me why my mother had commended her for lack of greed when she had asked for a solid gold bracelet.
'Because you did not ask for silver, the most precious metal in the Black Land,' I explained.
'In Kriti the most precious metal is gold,' she protested.
'Here gold is as sand,' I replied, beginning to laugh. After a moment she joined in. 'Whole shiploads of it come from Nubia in Upper Egypt every day. Whereas silver has to come from barbarian lands and is traded for three times its weight in gold.'
'Come, then you shall learn some Kritian, if I must learn Egyptian,' she said.
'Why should I do that?' I teased.
'Because it would be sweet to speak again in my own tongue, and I shall never see my home again,' she responded, and burst into tears.
I was shocked at my insensitivity. I would never be sent away from my country, never have to learn difficult words in another tongue to speak to my captors. I tried to imagine how much she must miss the green island and the sound of her own language, and thought how I would miss the land of the Nile, the speech of the women, the scent of dung fires which kept off mosquitoes, the taste of plum and melon. I imagined it so well that I made myself cry and hugged her close and she wept into my neck, strong sobs which hurt her slim body. When the tears had died down a little, we kissed, I mopped her face with a linen cloth and we began to learn Kritian as I re-drew the kohl around her strange brown eyes.
'Adelphemou,' she taught me as my first words, which means, my sister.
Ptah-hotep
The summons from the High Priest of Amen-Re came for dinner the next day, when I had settled my scribes into my office and instructed them in their duties. It was basic record keeping, really, as the master had said. Not difficult, but requiring steady attention and some skill. Few actual orders issued from the office of the Great Royal Scribe, but he acted as auditor for the whole of the nation, expected to uncover fraud and misreporting, to protect the common people from over-zealous officials and extortion, and to oversee the administration of the kingdom.
He was - I was - also responsible for receiving the Nomarch's accounts, the Chief Watcher's report on the state of lawlessness in Egypt, and for recording the Lord Akhnamen's thoughts and orders.
That seemed to be enough for one very youthful scribe whose previous heaviest responsibility had been as overseer of a class of ten boys.
And Pharaoh still had not sent for me. I wondered if he had forgotten me, and if I should ask for an audience with him. Perhaps he was leaving me for a decan to find out if I could avoid assassination for ten days.
That might prove to be harder than I thought.
Meryt had come to me at dawn, brow wrinkled.
'Lord, someone tried to get into my chamber last night.'
'There could be many reasons for that,' I said sleepily. With her beautiful smile and her rounded body, many men would have found Meryt attractive. She shook her head and her earrings chimed.
'Nothing as innocent as that,' she protested. 'Besides, no one would dare. I belong to you, Master. I don't like this. I heard someone try the door; saw the handle move. Lord, I want to spend some of your gold and make you a gift.'
Her face was solemn, and I shook myself into real wakefulness.
'You may spend my gold. I will accept your gift,' I said, matching her seriousness.
'Thank you. I will be gone perhaps an hour, Master. Wait for me, fasting, if you will.'
'Very well,' I agreed. Fasting was no great pain to me. I doused a pang of some unexpected emotion - was it disappointment as to the nature of her gift? Since I had refused her offer of her body, she had not attempted any intimacy. Meryt bowed and left, closing my door behind her.
She had returned within her time, towing a heavy chain behind her. It appeared to be suspended in the air and I was surprised at the size of the hound to which it was attached. He was huge. 'This is Anubis,' Meryt informed me. 'A Nubian hound for a Nubian slave, and he has cost you an ingot of gold, Master.'
Anubis sat down, all paws together, and regarded me with an intelligence which was vaguely disturbing from a canine. He was part-jackal, perhaps, a black, high shouldered dog with a pointed muzzle, long legs and a long whip-like tail. I had seen such hounds racing alongside chariots.
'He's a hunting dog, a war-dog,' I said. 'Meryt, what have you spent my gold ingot on? He surely will not be comfortable in a palace.'
'His kind comes from the Mountains of the Moon; my home now lost forever. Such hounds belong to kings, and his father belonged to my father, captured as loot when my village was raided. He is a Nubian, as I am, and we are faithful to death.'
Meryt stood with her dark hand on the hound's black head. Both pairs of eyes were regarding me almost dispassionately, but with such steadfastness that my own eyes burned and I had to look away. What had I done to deserve such loyalty? I was only a scribe, son of a scribe, no great