Chapter 2 #2
Walking away from the river, I reach to pluck camomile flowers from where they grow in their clusters, thinking of sweet tea with honey, my mother’s favourite.
She is standing just beyond where the river meanders, where the ground becomes sandy.
She is wearing red and gold, her favourite combination, drops of jasper blooming like blood at her neck and wrists, winking yellow bands caught by the sun and throwing off rays.
They say stars burn brightest as they die, but my mother has always been the most radiant.
Behind her, our home is a sprawling mass of richly painted sandstone.
High walls and a gated entryway sit at the base of a slope, cut with an avenue that draws a sharp line up to the palace, which overlooks our river.
Columns coloured with lapis lazuli and madder are flanked by pink granite pillars.
Alabaster statues depict the Potamoi – Nilus and his brothers, twisting, hungry river men.
The Titan Oceanus, their father, guards our threshold.
What I know of these behemoths I know mostly from my grandmother’s stories and a little from my father’s lessons.
My father bothers with me rarely and mostly to impress our great lineage upon me, to ensure I do not forget that all I am has followed all of the greatness that has been, and all that I have, I owe to the greatness that must follow. I, myself, am not great.
My mother’s gods are, of course, absent.
They will find little here in the way of devotion and my father’s worship is tied too closely to his own ego; he would not erect a statue without ensuring that it reifies the might of his blood.
As I approach my mother now, I can feel her disapproval reaching towards me, hands itching to tidy and mould. I hold out my basket.
‘I caught dinner!’ She does not take it.
Merely turns wordlessly, walking straight-backed towards the avenue ahead of me, lined with date palms, avoiding their shadows like the plague she believes pallor to be.
I run to catch up with her and we walk in silence for a time.
The date palms become fig trees, their fruit bruised and full before the small hanging suns of the orange trees take their place.
My mother picks a few. She inhales deeply, the sound of the scent in her nostrils somehow visceral, somehow earthy, at odds with her usually delicate gestures, the precision of her fingers as she strips dead leaves from favoured flowers.
I see the way the orange takes up residence beneath her skin, eases the tension of her muscles.
‘I planted this tree.’
‘I know, Mama.’
‘All of these orange trees, I planted. I was the age that you are now.’
I don’t say anything; she knows I know this.
When she left her home at sixteen, seeds were all she had taken, along with her dowry.
She would have new dresses, new jewels, she was to wed a king.
Her mother’s family had once been minor nobles in my father’s kingdom but she had grown up in her father’s house in Jaffa, the land of oranges.
He was a merchant, an ally of the Pharaoh’s general and a proud follower of their religion.
My mother had been intended as a priestess, in service to Tawaret.
Perhaps this was prophetic – a devotee of the Lady of the Birth House and the Mistress of Pure Water, half-woman half-hippopotamus, betrothed to the grandson of a river god. My mother would certainly say so.
She lives in the legacy of our futures far more presently than the reality of her existence.
Word was sent that Cepheus, King of Aethiopia, grandson of Nilus, wanted a wife.
She was not permitted to bring anything of her old life, of the gods and goddesses she had held in her heart.
The Western gods have always favoured my father’s family, despite the proximity of our kingdom to the empire where Amun-Ra is most revered.
Cepheus once dined with Zeus himself, at the table of his grandfather.
Nilus was old enough to tell wonderful stories without the scheming ambition that would have made him a threat.
When my mother had arrived in Aethiopia, she said not a word to anyone and was not seen by my father until their wedding night.
She has told me this story often, dragging me into my future with her, the minutes of my father’s straining, his pinching fingers at her breasts, the collapse of his body against hers, his subsequent order, ‘You have what you need. Make me a son.’
She had run out to the front of the palace, seeds sweaty in the palm of her hands, and scattered them in the bare earth that had once been a path between the fig trees and the looming figure of Oceanus.
She has told me of his glare as she fell to her knees and prayed for abundance to a goddess she should no longer believe in.
The oranges were ripe and sweet the day that I was born.
My mother sucked on them as she suckled me herself and would hear nothing of my father’s consternation at her failure to produce a son.
It became clear, not long after, that she was barren.
She had been old to wed but was late to bleed and frankly so beautiful that her age had been overlooked.
Any other woman might have found herself flung from her throne, but not Cassiopeia.
When she whispers to me of her old gods, I cannot picture Isis without picturing her face.
Though her secret communion with Tawaret burns bright inside her, to me Cassiopeia is as inevitable as the divine mother.
King makers, both. I do not need more children, I have been fruitful enough.
You will bear kings and sons of kings. She has often murmured to me of the sister and wife to Osiris, who grieved him so fiercely, and whose rage was so acute at his loss that her pain itself became a kind of magic and resurrected him.
Osiris may be ruler of the Duat, the underworld, but all he possesses, he has because of Isis.
My mother is similarly steely and unyielding, and she is a good queen, everyone says so.
She is shrewd and charismatic, and my father is neither.
She places the oranges in my basket now and walks on, nearing Oceanus’ likeness.
He glares down at her and, as usual, she glares back.
Everything in our palace is vast, dwarfing, intended to humble, but humility is unnatural on my mother.
She turns at the threshold, notices my attention, the familiar standoff weighing heavy on me today.
I make as if to imitate her, to raise my chin at the river of the world, but she tuts.
‘Do as I say, not as I do,’ she says. ‘The appearance of modesty is a privilege, Andromeda. It is a cosmetic infinitely more appealing than kohl or blush and will keep you far safer. They say Aphrodite can be jealous of those who are beautiful and know it too well. I carry hubris so you don’t have to.
’ My mother often says things that confuse me but make me feel as though I have somehow disappointed her.
I look down at my hands where they clutch the basket, pick at the caking mud.
‘I have laid out your clothes for later. You are to wear your silver set with it. Come to me when you are bathed and dressed, and I will do your hair.’
My head snaps up. In our land gold is commonplace, beautiful but ordinary like the blue lilies in my hair. Silver is harder to find, prized by our family for the way that it resembles the light that plays over the river.
‘Why the silver set?’
She pats her artfully coiled and braided hair. I know the gesture. It is the one she makes when she is evading a direct answer and is displeased at being dishonest on another’s terms.
‘Because I wish it.’
She is unhappy with me, but she is not scolding.
Suspicion blooms at the corner of my mind.
I nod and move past her, embraced by the cool dim of the antechamber.
I turn towards my apartments but she catches me first, takes the basket from my hands, plucks the lilies from my hair.
She moves off in the direction of the kitchens, grinding the flowers under her jewelled sandals, smearing blue across the white marble.
A servant emerges from the shadows and immediately cleans it away, leaving not a trace behind.