On our way back across the Nile, Father asked me to speak with true voice. Was I well? Was I happy?
‘I am, sir,’ I replied.
‘And are you not happy to live in the Land of Tomery?’ He used the old term for the Kingdom of the Two Lands, the realm of Egypt.
‘Of course, Father.’
‘Then what is wrong, son?’
My aunt’s obsidian-like eyes caught my gaze, but sheltering by my mother’s tomb had strengthened me.
‘I am lonely, sir.’
My father laughed and ruffled my hair. I thought he’d ignore me but, in the riverside marketplace, he stopped and bought me a pet monkey, an agile little creature with bright mischievous eyes who clung to me and screeched noisily. My aunt whispered a joke, how it would be difficult to tell us apart. I was delighted. I called my pet Bes after the ugly household god, and when my father left I hardly noticed. I loved little Bes. He truly was a brother. Indeed, I took pride in the jokes, made by my aunt and taken up by the servants, about the resemblance between us. I bought Bes a little shawl and a silver medallion with the debens of copper I had saved. I didn’t actually do this in person. An old servant called Dedi went to the marketplace for me. She was a bekou, a slave who did the laundry and who somehow knew a great deal about monkeys. Bes was the delight of my life. A greedy creature, the very aroma of duck or meat cooked in onion and garlic would send him chattering wildly whilst a piece of sliced melon made him dance with joy. Where I went, Bes followed.
My aunt came to hate him.
‘He attracts the flies,’ she snapped.
Bes grew very wary of her copper-tipped whisk.
Isn’t it strange where dreams come from? Memories drift in and out of our hearts like incense across a sanctuary. Our memories are traces of ghosts, things that were, or even might have been. My aunt’s house was always dark yet tinted with yellow as if one of those great sandstorms had blown in from the Red Lands. My childhood was like a wall frieze with a yellow background against which all those around me, including Bes, acted out their roles. I can still recall that little monkey, his jerky movements, the silver chain glittering around his neck, the naughty face and darting eyes. I also remember that fateful day so well. Dedi was filling the vase of the water clock: it was decorated with carvings of the baboons of Thoth, ringed with twelve lines to signify the hours of the day. I was explaining all this to Bes, chattering like a monkey to a monkey, one of the few occasions I ever did so in my aunt’s house.
‘You see,’ I pointed with my finger, ‘it takes one hour for the water to sink from one line to the next as it trickles out of that small hole at the bottom.’ Bes jumped up and down on my lap. Dedi started laughing at me, not in a mocking way; her fat face crinkled up, her eyes, like two slivers of black glass, bright with merriment. I rose and embraced her; she was one of the few people I touched. She smelt of dust and soap. Dedi stopped what she was doing, put the jug down and gave me her endearing gumless smile. I heard a patter behind me and looked round. Bes was streaking like a pellet from a sling through the doorway towards a piece of juicy melon lying there. That monkey could never resist melon. I shouted and ran after him, but Bes grabbed the melon and scampered across the courtyard.
I had almost reached the doorway when an agonising scream, followed by a low growl, made my stomach lurch. I could hardly step through that doorway. Even then I knew what had happened. Someone had let Seth the great Saluki hound out. Bes was already dangling between his jaws. The cur was shaking him as a cat would a mouse; blood spattered the pavements. Bes’s arms hung limp, his head strangely sideways, the small medallion glinting in an ever-widening pool of blood. A nightmare image as that hellhound shook the little corpse like some bloodsoaked rag.
My screams seemed to come from far off. Servants came running, led by Api. He grasped Seth’s collar and pulled him away but made no attempt to retrieve Bes from his jaws. Dedi put her arms around me. I pushed her away and looked up. My aunt was staring coldly down through a latticed window. Dedi tried to comfort me but I was inconsolable. She ran away in a patter of sandals and, a short while later, brought back Bes’s corpse wrapped in a green, gold-edged cloth. We buried him beneath the shade of a sycamore tree. Then I wept for the first and last time. Dedi, grey-faced with anxiety, sat cradling me. I was all but eight summers old. My eyes couldn’t leave the freshly dug earth. Dedi had even found a small ankh, a life sign, and pressed it into the black soil.
‘Cruel she is,’ Dedi whispered.
I knew what she meant. The melon near the doorway, the waiting Saluki hound, Isithia’s vicious gaze fixed on me.
‘She was always cruel,’ Dedi continued.
Something pricked my memory. I felt a shiver as if I’d been doused in cold water. Dusk was gathering. The sky was scorched with slivers of red. Dedi led me deeper into the garden under the shade of a beautiful willow, its branches curving down as if to drink the water from the narrow canal. Here she knelt and dug at the earth. She brought out a lightly coloured pot-shard and, with stubby fingers, traced its strange markings.
‘I can read,’ Dedi murmured. ‘I am, I was, of To-nouter.’
I recognised the phrase for the Land of Punt, the Incense Country.
‘I was captured in war and brought back here during the Time of Starvation by your father’s father. I can read.’
‘What does it say?’ I asked.
‘“Go away from me, Meret. Let your spirit not haunt me”.’
‘Meret was my mother. Did she,’ I gestured back at the house, ‘leave that there as she left the melon?’
Dedi cackled with laughter and reburied the pot shard.
‘Your mother often came here, that’s why Isithia has placed the curse beneath the tree. Cruel she was to her, cruel as she is to you.’
I heard a sound and turned. Dedi, mumbling in terror, clambered to her feet but there was nothing except the whispering branches in the gathering darkness. Nothing? So I thought, but the next morning Dedi was gone, and I never saw her again.
My aunt left me alone to brood on Bes and Dedi. My anger soon cooled. I decided to hide my feelings and mix with the servants. Akhit, the Season of the Inundation, came and went followed by Peret, the Season of Sowing, and Shemou when the sun burns hot and the servants fight against the vermin which swarm into the house. My aunt hated this time of year as the flies hovered like black clouds and the rats thrived fat and supple. I loved such confusion and did my best to help it. I found a rat’s corpse, bloated with poison, and hid it in the whitewashed toilet, its limestone seat fitted around a hole over brick containers filled with sand. I tunnelled deep and placed the rat beneath the sand. Two days passed before my aunt realised what had attracted the horde of flies and gave off the terrible stench. A short while later I managed to find some poison. I hid some duck, soft and tender and coated with venom, near Seth’s kennel.
‘An accident!’ the servants later cried. ‘The hound must have eaten bait meant for the rats.’
My aunt grieved, but that night I went out in my linen shirt, stood beneath the willow tree and whispered softly to the breeze about Dedi and Meret.
The death of the Saluki hound was only the beginning of my aunt’s troubles and my own liberation from her. Two days later a dusty, sweat-streaked messenger bearing the cartouche of Pharaoh arrived at the house. He was taken into a hallway to be cleaned but, even as a slave bathed his feet, he gabbled out his message: my father was dead! He had recently been promoted to a full Colonel of the Chariot Squadron known as the Vengeance of Anubis with the direct responsibility for the protection of the tombs in the Valley of the Nobles. A gang of skilled robbers had broken into one of these through the adjoining mortuary temple. Once inside, the robbers had stripped the gold sheets from the faces, fingers and toes of the mummies, seized the amulets and ointment jars. They had compounded their blasphemy by setting fire to the mummies of children so as to provide light for their plundering. The fire had burned fiercely, and smoke had curled out through a venthole so the alarm was raised. The robbers fled out into the Red Lands, my father following in hot pursuit.