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 for 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.

“I want to go to school with Pa-ari,” I said. He bent, and taking a corner of his short, soil-powdered kilt, wiped his forehead.

“No,” he replied.

“Next year, Father, when I am four?”

His slow smile widened. “No, Thu. Girls do not go to school.”

I studied his face. “Why not?”

“Because girls stay at home and learn from their mothers how to be good wives and tend babies. When you are older your mother will teach you how to help babies come into the world. That will be your work, here in the village.” I frowned, trying to understand. An idea occurred to me.

“Father, if I ask Pa-ari, could he stay home and learn to help babies come and I can go to school instead of him?”

My father seldom laughed, but on that day he threw back his head and his mirth echoed against the row of wilting palm trees that grew between his land and the village track. He squatted and enfolded my chin in his large fingers. “Already I pity the lad who sues for you in marriage!” he said. “You must learn your place, my little sweetheart. Patience, docility, humility, these are the virtues of a good woman. Now be a good girl and run home. Keep your mother company when she goes to fetch Pa-ari.” He planted a kiss on the top of my hot head and turned away. I did as I was told, scuffing the dirt as I went, obscurely insulted at his laughter, though I was too young to know why.

I found my mother peering anxiously down the path, a basket on her arm. She gestured to me impatiently as I came up to her. “Leave your father alone when he’s working!” she said sharply. “Gods, Thu, you are filthy and there is no time to wash you. Whatever will the priests think? Come.” She did not reach for my hand, but together we walked past our acres, past other fields, all thick with crops, the wandering line of palms on our left, the tangled river growth on our right, cool and inviting, with the wide reaches of the silver river glimpsed intermittently through it.

After some minutes the fields stopped abruptly, the shrubs to our right straggled into nothing, and Wepwawet’s temple was there, its sandstone pillars soaring to the unrelieved blue of the sky, the sun beating impotently on its walls. From the time of my birth I had come here on the God’s feast days, watching my father present our offerings, prostrating myself beside Pa-ari as the incense rose in shimmering columns above the closed inner court. I had watched the priests moving in solemn procession, their chants falling deep and awesome in the still air. I had seen the dancers swirl and dip, the systra in their delicate fingers tinkling to draw the God’s attention to our prayers. I had sat on the temple water-steps, my toes in the gently sucking Nile, my back to the paved forecourt while my parents were inside with their petitions. To me it was both a place of exotic mystery, forbidding in its secrecy, and the focus of Ma’at in our lives, the spiritual loom to which the various threads of our life were firmly attached. The rhythm of the God’s days was our rhythm, an invisible pulse that regulated the ebb and flow of village and family affairs.

During the time of the troubles a band of foreigners had come. They had camped in the outer court, set huge fires in the inner court. They drank and caroused in the temple, torturing and killing one of the priests who tried to protest, but they had not dared to violate the sanctuary, the place none of us had even seen, the place where the God lived, for Wepwawet was the Lord of War and they feared his displeasure. The village headman and all the adult men had armed themselves in righteous anger and had descended upon the brigands one night as they slept beneath Wepwawet’s beautiful pillars. The women spent the following morning washing the stones free of their blood and no man would ever tell where the bodies were buried. Our males were proud and brave, fit followers of the Lord of War. The High Priest had made a sacrifice of apology and restoration, reconsecrating the holy building. This was before my father and his troop camped beyond the village and went in search of beer.

I loved the temple. I loved the harmony of the pillars that led the eye up to Egypt’s vast heaven. I loved the formality of the rituals; the odour of flowers, dust and incense; the sheer luxury of space; the fine, floating linens of the priests. I did not realize it then, but my appreciation was not for the God himself but for the richness that surrounded him. Of course I was his loyal daughter, I have always been that, yet I cared less for him than for a glimpse of a different existence that set me to dreaming.

We turned onto the paving and made our way across it, my mother and I, passing between the pillars and into the outer court. Several other mothers waited there, some standing, some squatting on the stone, talking quietly. The outer perimeter of the court was honeycombed with small rooms, and from the dimness of one of them came the sound of boys’ voices raised in a sonorous chant that broke into an excited babble as my mother and I came to a halt. She greeted the women cheerfully and they nodded to her. Presently a tumble of children disgorged from the chamber. Each carried a drawstringed bag. Pa-ari came up to us panting, his eyes alight. Something clinked in the bag. “Mother, Thu!” he shouted. “It was fun! I liked it!” He collapsed onto the floor, folding his legs under him, and Mother and I settled beside him. Mother opened her basket, producing black bread and barley beer. Pa-ari accepted his meal gravely and we began to eat. Other mothers, sons and smaller children were doing the same. The court was alive with chatter.

As we were finishing, a lector priest approached, his shaven skull gleaming in the noon sun, the gold of his armband sparkling. His feet were impossibly clean in his white sandals. I stared at him, bemused. I had never been so close to one of the God’s servants before. It was some time before I recognized the scribe who farmed land on the eastern side of the village. I had seen him topped with curly brown hair, streaked with the mud of the Inundation, I had seen him weaving his way down the village street, drunk and singing. I knew later that the God’s men were also farmers like my father, giving three months out of every year to temple service, wearing fine linen, washing four times a day, shaving all body hair regularly, performing the rites and duties appointed by the High Priest. My mother scrambled to her feet and bowed to him, signalling to us to do the same. I managed to describe a clumsy little obeisance. I could not take my eyes off the black kohl around his eyes, the bony surface of his skull. He smelled very good. He greeted us kindly, and put a hand on Pa-ari’s shoulder.

“You have an intelligent son there,” he said to my mother. “He will be a good student. I am happy to be teaching him.”

My mother smiled. “Thank you,” she answered. “My husband will come tomorrow with the payment.”

The priest shrugged lightly. “There is no hurry,” he said. “None of us is going anywhere.”

For some reason his words touched me with cold. I reached up and tentatively drew a finger down the wide blue lector’s sash that enfolded his chest.

“I want to come to school,” I said timidly. He gave me a brief glance but ignored my words.

“I will see you tomorrow, Pa-ari,” he said and turned away. My mother gave me a little shake.

“You must learn not to put yourself forward, Thu,” she snapped. “Pick up the scraps now and put them in the basket. We must be getting home. Don’t forget your bag, Pa-ari.” We began to straggle out of the court, joining the thin stream of other families wending their way back to the village. I sidled close to my brother.

“What’s in the bag, Pa-ari?” I asked. He held it up and shook it.

“My lessons,” he said importantly. “We paint them on pieces of broken pottery. I have to study them tonight before I go to bed so I can repeat them in class tomorrow.”

“Can I see them?”

My mother, doubtless hot and irritable, answered for him. “No you cannot! Pa-ari, run ahead and tell your father to come in for his food. When we get home you are both taking a nap.”

So it began. Pa-ari would leave for school at dawn every day, and at noon my mother and I would meet him with his bread and beer. On God’s days and holidays he did not study. He and I would slip away to the river or back onto the desert, playing the games that children devise. He was good humoured, my brother, seldom disappointing me when I made him pretend to be Pharaoh so that I could be his queen, trailing about in a tattered, discarded length of linen with leaves twined in my hair and a vine tendril into which I would tuck stray birds’ feathers around my neck. He sat on a rock for a throne and made pronouncements. I issued commands to imaginary servants. Sometimes we tried to draw the other children into our fantasies but they quickly became bored, leaving us in order to swim or beg rides on the patient village donkeys. If they did join in, they complained bitterly that I was always the queen, and they did not get a turn to order me about. So Pa-ari and I amused each other, and the months slipped by.

When I became four, I once again begged my father to let me go to school and was again met with a firm denial. He could ill afford to let Pa-ari attend, he said. The fee for me was out of the question and besides, what girl ever learned anything useful outside her own home? I sulked for a while, sitting sullenly in a corner of our reception room, watching my brother’s head bent over his bits of pottery, his shadow moving on the wall behind him as the lamp’s flame guttered and swayed. He did not want to play Pharaoh and his queen any more. He was forming a bond with some of the village boys with whom he shared the schoolroom and often he would get up from the afternoon sleep and vanish, joining them as they fished or hunted rats in the granaries. I was lonely, and envious, but I was eight years old before it occurred to me that if I could not go to school the school might come to me.

By then my mother had me firmly in hand. I was learning to prepare the bread that was our staple, to make soups with lentils and beans, to broil fish and prepare vegetables. I did our laundry with her, stamping on my father’s kilts and our thick sheath dresses, slapping the linen briskly on the glistening rocks, enjoying the showers of water that flicked against my hot skin, the feel of the Nile silt between my toes. I rendered tallow for the lamps. I mastered her fine bone needles, mending my father’s kilts with meticulous care. I went with her when she visited her friends, sitting cross-legged on the dirt floors of their tiny reception rooms and sipping the one cup of palm wine she would allow me while she gossiped and laughed, discussing who was pregnant again, whose daughter was being courted by whose son, how the local tax assessor’s wife had sat too close to the headman’s son, the hussy! The voices would flow over and around me, encasing me in a kind of stupor so that I often felt I had been there for ever, that the quiver of dark liquid in my cup, the grit under my thighs, the slow rivulet of sweat coursing down my neck, were all parts of a spell holding me prisoner. Several of the women were heavily pregnant and I stared furtively at their misshapen bodies. They were part of the spell also, magic that would keep me one of them always.

Sometimes my mother was summoned to deliver a baby during the hours of darkness. I paid little heed to those infrequent disturbances. I would vaguely hear her exchange a hurried word with my father and leave our house before I settled deeper into a contented sleep. But just after my eighth Naming Day my apprenticeship with her began. One night I opened my eyes to find her bending over my pallet, a candle in her hand. Pa-ari was curled asleep on his side of the room, oblivious. There were whispered voices out in the reception room. “Get up, Thu,” she told me kindly. “I am bidden to Ahmose’s confinement. This is my task and one day it will be yours also. You are old enough now to help me and thus begin to learn the duties of a midwife. You need not be afraid,” she added as I struggled up, fumbling for my sheath. “The birth will be straightforward. Ahmose is young and healthy. Come now.”

I staggered after her, still in my dreams. Ahmose’s husband squatted in a corner of the reception room looking uneasy and my father, bleary eyed, squatted with him. My mother paused to retrieve the bag that always sat in readiness by the door and went out. I followed. The air was cool, the moon riding high in a cloudless sky, the palms spiking tall against the dimness. “We should get a live goose and a bolt of linen out of this,” my mother commented. I did not reply.

Ahmose’s house, like all the rest, was little more than an open-roofed reception room with steps at the rear leading to sleeping quarters. As we padded in our bare feet through the door, we were greeted distractedly by the woman’s mother and sisters who lined the walls, squatting on their heels, a jug of wine between them. My mother shared a joke with them as she led me up the steps and into the couple’s bedchamber. The small mud brick room was cosy with a woven rug on the floor and hangings on the walls. A large stone lamp burned by the pallet on which Ahmose crouched, a loose linen shift folded about her. She looked different from the young, smiling woman I knew. There was a sheen of sweat on her forehead and her eyes were huge. She reached out a hand as my mother set her bag on the floor and approached her.

“There is no need to panic, Ahmose,” my mother said to her soothingly, taking the clutching fingers in her own. “Lie down now. Thu, come here.”

I obeyed most unwillingly. My mother took my hand and placed it on Ahmose’s distended abdomen. “There is the baby’s head. Can you feel it? Very low. That is good. And here his little buttock. This is as it should be. Can you discern the shape?” I nodded, both fascinated and repelled by the feel of the shiny, taut skin stretched over the mysterious hill beneath. As I withdrew I saw a slow ripple pass over it and Ahmose gasped and groaned, drawing up her knees. “Breathe deeply,” my mother commanded, and when the contraction was over she asked Ahmose how long she had been in labour.

“Since dawn,” came the reply. Mother opened her bag and withdrew a clay pot. The refreshing odour of peppermint filled the little room as she removed the stopper, and briskly but gently pushing Ahmose onto her side she massaged the contents into the woman’s firm buttocks. “This will hasten the birth,” she said to me as I stood beside her. “Now you may squat, Ahmose. Try to remain calm. Talk to me. What is the news from your sister upriver? Is all well with her?”

Ahmose struggled into a squatting position on the pallet, her back resting against the mud wall. She spoke haltingly, pausing when the contractions gripped her. My mother prompted her, watching all the time for signs of any change, and I watched her too, the huge, frightened eyes, the bulge of veins in her neck, the straining, swollen body.

This is part of the spell also, I thought with a surge of fear as the feeble light from the lamp played on the figure crouched in the corner, trembling and occasionally crying out. This is another room in the prison. At eight years old I was probably too young to have actually expressed in those words the emotion that flooded me, but I remember sharply and clearly the way it tasted, the way my heart lurched for a moment. This was to be my lot in life, to coax terrified women in dim village hovels in the middle of the night, to rub their buttocks, to insert medicaments into their vaginas as my mother was now doing. “That was a mixture of fennel, incense, garlic, sert-juice, fresh salt and wasp’s dung,” she was instructing me over her shoulder. “It is one remedy for causing delivery. There are others but they are less efficacious. I will teach you to blend them all, Thu. Come now, Ahmose, you are doing very well. Think how proud your husband will be when he returns home to see his new son cradled in your arms!”

“I hate him,” Ahmose said venomously. “I never want to see him again.”

I thought my mother would be shocked but she ignored the words. My legs were shaking. I slid to sit cross-legged on the warm mud floor. Two or three times Ahmose’s mother or one of her sisters would peer in at us, exchange a few words with my mother, and go away again. I lost track of the passage of time. It began to seem to me that I had been drifting in this ante-room to the Underworld for ever, with the sweet and pleasant Ahmose now transformed into a demented spirit and my mother’s shadow looming distorted over her like some malevolent demon. My mother’s voice broke the illusion. “Come here!” she ordered me. I scrambled up and hurried over to her reluctantly and she handed me a thick linen cloth and told me to hold it beneath Ahmose. “Look,” she said. “The crown of the baby’s head. Push now, Ahmose! It is time!” With a last wail Ahmose did as she was told and the baby slithered into my unwilling hands. It was yellow and red with body fluids. I knelt there stupidly, staring at it as it flailed its little limbs. My mother tapped it smartly and it let out a breathless howl and began to cry. She passed it carefully to Ahmose, who was already smiling weakly and reaching for it. As she settled it against her breast it turned its head, blindly nuzzling for food. “You need not worry,” my mother said. “It cried ‘ni ni,’ not ‘na na.’ It will live. And it is a boy, Ahmose, perfectly formed. Well done!” She swept up a knife, and I saw the pulsing cord in her slimed fingers. I had had enough. With a mumbled word I left the room. The women outside sprang up as I pushed past them. “It’s a boy,” I managed, and they surged towards the stairs with shrieks of joy as I fell into the cool, vast air of dawn.

I stood leaning against the wall of the house, eagerly sucking up the clean odour of vegetable growth and dusty sand and a faint whiff of the river. “Never!” I whispered to the greying, palm-brushed sky. “Never!” I did not know what I meant by the vehement word, but in a confused way it had something to do with cages and fate and the long traditions of my people. I ran my fingers down my boyish chest, across my concave little stomach under the enveloping sheath, as though to reassure myself that my flesh was still my own. I dug my bare toes into the film of sand that always drifted in from the desert. I gulped at the tiny wind presaging the slow rising of Ra. Behind me I heard the women’s voices, chattering excitedly and incomprehensibly, and the baby’s intermittent thin protests. Soon my mother came out, bag in hand, and in the first light of the day I saw her smile at me.

“She is worried about the flow of her milk,” she remarked as we set off for home. “All mothers share the same concerns. I left a bottle of ground swordfish bone with her, to be warmed in oil and applied to her spine. But she need not worry. She has always been very healthy. Well, Thu,” she beamed. “What did you think? Is it not a wonderful experience, helping to bring new life into the world? When you have attended more births, I will allow you to minister to my women yourself. And soon I will show you how to combine the medicines I use. You will become as proud of your work as I am.”

I gazed ahead to the quiet ribbon of the path with its line of trees now swiftly gaining definition as Ra prepared to burst over the horizon. “Mama, why did she say she hated her husband?” I asked hesitantly. “I thought they were happy together.”

My mother laughed. “All women in labour curse their husbands,” she said matter-of-factly. “It is because their husbands are the cause of the pain that traps them. But as soon as the pain stops they forget how they suffered and they welcome their men back to their beds with as much eagerness as before.”

Traps them … I thought with a shudder. Other women might forget the pain but I know I never will. And I know I will not make a good midwife though I will try. “I want to learn about the medicines,” I said, and did not need to go on, for my mother stopped walking and bent to hug me. “Then you shall, my blue-eyed darling. Then you shall,” she said triumphantly.

I did not realize until much later how profoundly the experience of that night served to focus the discontent with which, I am certain, I was born. All I knew at the time was that I was repulsed by the sheer animality of childbirth, did not envy Ahmose the life of constant care the arrival of the baby would mean, and shied away from the deep stirrings of panic the event represented. I felt guilty because my mother seemed delighted at my interest in the whole process, an interest that did not extend beyond a fascination for the potions, salves and elixirs she mixed and brewed as part of her profession. Of course I felt proud when she ushered me into the tiny room my father had built onto our house where she measured out her herbs and prepared her concoctions, but the pride was a part of my whole urgent need to learn, to acquire knowledge, for knowledge, as Pa-ari had said, was power. That little room was always redolent with the aroma of fragrant oils, of honey and incense and the bitter tang of crushed plants.

My mother could neither read nor write. She worked by eye and hand, a pinch of this, a spoonful of that, as she had learned from her mother. I would sit on a stool and watch and listen, filing everything away. I continued to attend village births with her, carrying her bag and soon passing her the medicines required before she even asked for them, but my distaste for the process of parturition never left me, and, unlike her, I remained unmoved at a child’s first cry. I have often wondered if there was some serious lack in my make-up, some gentle component of femininity that did not take root when I was myself in the womb. I struggled with my guilt and tried very hard to please my mother because of it.

I soon became aware that my mother’s work entailed more than just the task of midwife. Women slipped into our home for other reasons, some of them whispered furtively into my mother’s understanding ears. She did not discuss specific secrets with me but spoke about them in general ways.

“An abortion may be procured by a crushed mixture of dates, onions and acanthus fruit steeped in honey and applied to the vulva,” she told me, “but I think that this treatment must be supported by a potion of harsh beer, castor oil and salt drunk at the same time as the outward salve is used. Be very careful if you are asked to prescribe for this, Thu. Many wives come to me for such a purpose without the knowledge and consent of their husbands. As my first duty is to the wives I do my best to satisfy them, but you must always be able to keep their requests to yourself. It is better to prevent conception than deal with it after the damage is done.”

My ears pricked up at this. “How can you prevent such a happening?” I asked her, trying not to sound too eager.

“Not easily,” she retorted, unaware of the importance of my question. “I usually suggest a thick syrup of honey and auyt gum in which acacia tips have been soaked. Crush the acacia first, and after three days, throw them away and insert the syrup into the vagina.” She gave me an oblique glance. “This can wait,” she said abruptly. “You must learn to assist the beginnings of life before you study how to prevent it. Give me the pestle resting in that dish, then go and see if your father has come in from the field and wants to wash.”

I think that my father must have compelled her to take her own advice, for not long after this conversation with my mother I heard her and my father arguing one night when I could not sleep for the heat of Shemu. Their voices had begun as a low murmur and then risen in anger and I listened while Pa-ari snored.

“We have a son and a daughter,” my father said sharply. “It is enough.”

“But Pa-ari wants to be a scribe not a farmer. Who then will till the soil when you are too feeble? And as for Thu, she will marry and take the skills I am teaching her into her husband’s household.” I could hear the fear rise in her, being expressed as anger, and her tone grew shrill. “There will be no one to care for us in our old age and I would be ashamed to trust to the kindness of our friends! I obey you, my husband. I do not become pregnant. Yet I grieve for the emptiness of my womb!”

“Hush, woman,” my father commanded in the way that prompted immediate obedience from us all. “I do not plant enough crops on my three arouras to support more mouths. We are poor but we have dignity. Fill the house with children and we increase our poverty while sacrificing what little independence we enjoy. Besides …” His voice fell and I had to strain to catch the words. “What makes you think Aswat is as peaceful and secure as it seems? Like all women you see no further than the path to the river where you carry the washing, and your ears open only to the gossip of the other wives. The men here are not much better. They direct the pedlars and wandering workmen to the women, to buy or to hire, and do not listen to their tales, for they are insular and suspicious of all who were not born here. But I have seen this Egypt. I do not spurn the strangers who come and go. I know that the eastern tribesmen are trickling into the Delta, trying to find land for their flocks and herds, and in the Delta there is trouble. It may come to nothing, or it may mean that the Good God may call upon all his soldiers to leave their fields and defend their country. How would you fare then, with babies to feed and your midwifery to perform as well? If I was killed the land would revert to Pharaoh, for as you say, Pa-ari is not likely to follow in my footsteps. Ponder my words with your mouth closed, for I am weary and need to sleep.” I heard my mother mutter something else and give a resigned sigh, and then there was silence.

When my father’s voice had died away I lay on my back, gazing into the pressing dark heat of the little room, and imagined the foreigners he had spoken of sifting slowly across the fertile soil of the Delta, a place I had never seen and barely heard of, spreading out, oozing southward along the Nile towards my village like the black mud of the Inundation. The vivid picture excited me. Suddenly Aswat shrank in my mind from being the centre of the world to a very small backwater in a threatening vastness, yet I did not feel lost or in danger. I wondered what they were like, these sinister people, what the Delta was like, what blessed Thebes, home of Amun the King of the Gods was like, and I was in a boat floating down the Nile towards the Good God’s fabled northern capital when I fell asleep at last.