Seven Nights Down to Sais

On the morning that met them after seven nights aboard since leaving Thebes, naked farmers and their oxen were already out at work in the fields spread along both banks of the river. Humble villages clustered here and there as well — single-story houses whitewashed to a bright pale, gathered close together.

Through the green fronds of the palms came the chatter of birds, and fishermen who wore nothing at all stood in skiffs of loosely woven papyrus, casting their nets. Wild ducks and swallows that had been sporting on the glittering blue Nile startled at those nets and burst upward in a flurry of wings.

At last they were entering the Delta — that fertile Black Land edged with marsh, the region as far from Iuni's Nubian homeland as Egypt could offer.

"I never knew Egypt had land this green."

Was it not a sight one saw all the time, even in wall paintings? There was nothing in it to wonder at, to Iuni's eyes, and yet from the moment they left the quay at Thebes, Pesejet had seemed unable to leave the bow.

"Seeing what lay outside the village was my dream. I think I'm being punished for dreaming a vain dream. They say that if you want something greater than the fate you were given, you are punished."

Sleep crept over Iuni at talk so excessively sentimental, and he barely kept his eyeballs from rolling back out of sheer boredom. Accustomed as he was to Sebua's manner — never yielding a word, firing back at once — ordinary, quiet conversation was nothing but dull.

"Kian's really pretty, isn't he? Once this false charge is cleared, I'm going to Cyprus. Not some fake woman like that — I want to look my fill at real Cypriot women. It must be paradise there."

"Is that so? You wanted to look your fill at women, did you?"

He had never heard her approach; she was simply there. Sebua's mocking aside as she passed not only drove every trace of sleep from Iuni — he nearly fainted from the shock.

"When you have the time, you ought to have a serious talk with Sebua, uncle."

"I'm the same age as Kian, I'll have you know."

Iuni shot the words at her, glaring fiercely at Pesejet, who tacked uncle onto the end of everything she said. But unlike a week ago, when she had wilted at nothing more than meeting his eyes, she no longer seemed frightened in the least, even when he put on a deliberately savage face. She had spent a week watching him fail to answer a single word properly, and shrink, before Sebua.

"Is it foolish to give meaning to having spent a single night together?"

"W-w-why are you asking that?"

Iuni was so startled he stammered. Gentle as Pesejet was, she would never scheme — and yet this felt exactly like a question that wicked Sebua had put her up to!

Iuni's tribe had a custom: kill an enemy chieftain in battle, and you took in all of his women. It was a custom good for both sides, with this advantage — even if you yourself were defeated and died, your family would go on as the family of some other tribe's chief, and live in comfort.

And so, in Nubia, there were dozens of women called Iuni's wives. The women of the Kushite captain he had killed near the Third Cataract alone had numbered twenty-four.

If there was one great mistake Iuni had made in his life, it was answering too honestly when Sebua asked whether he had only gathered them under the name of wife, and never actually spent the night. He had told the truth — that he had taken them in as wives, and still, shouldn't he have held each of them at least once? — and that was how matters had come to this. It had all been before he met her. It was the custom of his tribe. He simply hadn't thought she would be angry.

"Spending one night together means nothing! It means nothing at all, I tell you! Especially for a man! Nothing! It's as meaningless as drinking beer when your throat is dry! Have you ever seen anyone remember the taste of every beer he drinks and attach meaning to it? There is no such case!"

The faces of the many women he had believed, until he met Sebua, that he loved passed one by one, vivid, before his eyes — but Iuni decided to abandon honesty. Honesty was no help in staying alive.

Goddess of justice, Ma'at! Forgive the tongue that speaks this lie! Surely a man may bend the truth a little about what happened before he crossed into Egypt!

Having begged the goddess Ma'at in his heart to forgive the sins he was committing, Iuni went on.

"You never treat a woman you love carelessly! Just as I kept Sebua's chastity for her until we became husband and wife! Catching fire in the body first and rolling around is nothing but the meaningless coupling of base beasts!"

To be precise, the moment he saw Sebua they had lived in the same house and become a couple, so there had been no chastity left for him to keep — but he wanted, somehow, to rewrite the memory in his own favor.

"A single night really means nothing at all—"

"Stop! Stop, please!"

All at once Pesejet burst into tears and ran into the cabin.

"What's wrong with her?"

Could it be that she liked him? Had she been meaning to tempt him with that dazzling body? What was he supposed to do if Pesejet confessed?

Iuni considered it for a moment. She was Pesejet, possessor of the most beautiful face and the most dazzling body in Deir el-Medina, so it would be a shame to refuse — but at a time like this, all the more reason to keep his wits about him. If he fooled around even a little with his friend Pesejet and Sebua caught him at it, she would take every man with the slightest acquaintance of Iuni into her bed.

And then, as he wondered how he had come to be on the same boat as Sebua, watching her every mood, the reality of being branded a murderer flashed back upon him. Bewitched by Sebua, he had forgotten he was even wearing a false charge!

"Faster!"

The time had come to enter the mooring basin at the quay of Sais. At the captain's shout, the boatmen quickened their oars. They slid in against a dock thickly padded with straw to soften the shock, and the ropes flung from the ship were lashed hard to the posts. The mooring was done.

At last they had arrived in Sais, the domain of Neith, goddess of war and the hunt.

Set beside the streets of Thebes, crowded with people, beasts, and goods, the road from the Sais quay to the Temple of Neith was very easy going. Yet before the towering temple wall, not one of them could help but feel small. Raised to seal the sanctity within from the world without, that wall stood higher and thicker than many a fortress.

"Wait here. I'll go in first and get my master's permission."

Kian spoke to the party, who lingered, unable even to think of passing the temple's first pylon.

"Won't your master know we're criminals, too? If he reports us, that's a problem — and if he takes us in without reporting us and the authorities find us, he'll be punished along with us."

"Not even Pharaoh can do as he likes with what happens inside a temple."

The priests offered the sacred rites in Pharaoh's stead, and so a temple was a place even Pharaoh could not touch — a place that answered to the rule of the god alone. Beyond the priestly order of the First Prophet, the High Priest, the four Second Prophets, and the priests of lower rank, a temple kept a vast administration that ran its household: a country within a country. From keepers of the granaries and the treasuries to scribes of the farmland, farmers, weavers, metalworkers, sculptors and painters, butchers — once a person had stepped inside a temple so organized, not even a soldier could lay a hand on them lightly.

So if only Kian's master, Iimeru, Chief Physician of the House of Life, gave his leave, they might count themselves safe for as long as they remained within the temple.

"But you're going to your master looking like that? All pretty?"

"Shut up!"

The words were hardly a tease at all, yet Kian lashed out in a rough tone unlike his usual self. Even at that, Iuni only smiled, broad and easy. However Kian bulged his eyes and raged, to Iuni he was still nothing but the pale, scrawny friend who was good only at his studies.

"Does Kian look that pretty to you? You've never met a real Cypriot woman?"

Sebua had spoken, but Iuni could not answer a single word. While he hoarded his speech, unable to tell what she intended, she wrinkled the bridge of her nose and said,

"I've slept with plenty of Cypriot men."

Properly struck, Iuni wanted to flare up — but his heart had shriveled from the wound, and he hadn't even the strength left to work his lips.

"I envy you. I ought to have lived like you..."

As if that were anything to envy. Pesejet's eyes brimmed with tears again as she envied Sebua for having slept with so many men.

"Look — there's Kian."

At Sebua's words they turned their heads. Kian was coming toward them with an older man whose hair and eyebrows had all been shaved away.

"These are my friends. Guardsman Iuni; Pesejet, who is as a younger sister to me; and Sebua, mistress of The Drunken Cobra. This is my master, Chief Physician of the House of Life, Iimeru — he is from Deir el-Medina. I explained our circumstances, and he said he would help us."

Moved that the most famous Chief Physician of the House of Life in all Egypt would take them in even knowing they were hunted as suspects, the party struck their heads to the earth again and again in thanks.

"You have had a weary journey, all of you. The temple is under alert, and we were about to forbid the entry of outsiders — you have come at a fortunate hour. Please, come inside."

In a strange hush, with not a single person passing, it felt as though every function of the temple had stopped.

"The sacred bull Apis has breathed his last, so the company of priests led by the High Priest — foremost of the weavers — has left for Memphis to take the Apis's measurements. The Apis receives the same honors as Pharaoh, so his body must be wrapped in cloth from the looms of Neith's temple, woven of thread spun from flax grown in Sais."

The sweat of the sun god Ra was held to have fallen upon the earth and sprouted as the flax of the Sais region. Only cloth woven from flax grown there could become Pharaoh's swaddling clothes and the shroud of his resurrection — and the shroud of the Apis.

Listening to Kian's explanation, the way past the pylons and gardens of the Temple of Neith, on to the colonnade of vast columns carved densely with sacred hieroglyphs, was silence itself.

"This is the House of Purification. As many as twenty may lodge here, but at present, owing to the emergency, it stands empty. You will remain here."

Short of the sanctuary where the cult image stood, a row of small houses lined the bank of a lake of clear water.