Chapter 8
Aethiopia
The following year, the Nile floods on my eighteenth birthday.
It is the perfect flood: not so light as to cause drought and starve the people, and not so heavy as to affect the villages that lie lower on the south banks.
Those closer to the desert and highlands, where the rainy seasons occur, are always at risk of famine and destruction but such things are rare under the rule of Nilus’ own family – or so our people say.
The summer, after the inundation, will be perfect, the soil will grow rich and fertile, and by the time the cooler days arrive, the land will be ready to yield plenty.
Next year’s spring harvest will be fruitful, and delight rises like pollen from the ground lightly coating the warm sweet air.
I gaze out of my window and wonder at it.
So many of my Mother’s gods are linked to the Nile.
I struggle to keep them straight in my head.
They overlap in dominions, share rule and are beloved variously depending on region.
Sobek, with his crocodile’s head, whose sweat was said to have formed the river.
Hapi, with their swollen belly. Osiris, whose cycle in and out of life and death bonds him with the rhythm of the river.
I asked my mother about it once, asked her where her gods – intangible and far away – fit in with Nilus and Achiroe.
I never wanted to suggest that she was somehow mistaken in their veracity – Cassiopeia is never mistaken about anything.
But the implication that, in turning her back on them – in marrying my father – they had forsaken her, hung heavy in the air.
She had simply replied, ‘A fine meal is rarely made by one cook alone. A metropolis cannot be built by one pair of hands.’ She would say nothing else and became even more covert about her worship.
Outside is flurrying with bodies and fresh pooling water.
Ceto will not admit to wishing to take some small part in the day’s activity and would likely rather die than acknowledge that she is coming to love the river as she does the sea, but I know her better now and can sense she is furious at being kept inside.
‘You could swim, you know. You do not have to be stuck to me like a limpet. You would know if any trick has been attempted.’ I do not expect the plea to work; in the almost two years that she has been by my side, she has not left me for more than a night.
People mutter that I must be sickly. They shrug in confusion when they see my radiant health.
They kiss their teeth in frustration when they take in the fullness of me.
I am everything they thought I might be and more.
Cassiopeia indeed spoke true, and they wish to indulge in the bounty of my marriage; their princess, Queen of the Sea.
I catch glimpses of this famed face where I can.
I confess myself as curious as the rest of them; I, too, wish to know what all the fuss is about.
I turn my head this way and that at the undulating shadows reflecting in the river and squint at the twisted, tinted self that wobbles back at me in the polished bronze plates.
It is hard to get a measure of it and even if I could, what do I know of the world to comment on whether I am the most beautiful girl in it? I must take their word.
Ceto sighs now, reclining on a daybed in my apartments. The morning sun bathes her until she looks poured from it. This is another thing I know she has come to enjoy in our time together. The colour of her skin has deepened, she is rich and warm looking, even if her expression is not.
‘I have been instructed to keep an especially close watch on you today.’
‘Why?’ I look up from my food. I had offered her some, but she had declined. She always declines. I often ask her what she eats and each time the answer is different and disgusting: the intestines of fish, the hair of dead sailors, the hands of my sisters, do not worry, they grow back.
‘This day is the only day the might of the Nile is greater than that of the sea. My master is suspicious already. It makes him uneasy that today is also your birthday.’
I struggle with a sudden sense of my own import.
To be a princess is to be discussed elsewhere, but I know so little of elsewhere.
Though elsewhere, it seems, knows me. ‘I understand his … suspicions. It is indeed unusual. I assume you have reassured him that my family are keen for the marriage to go ahead?’
She fixes me with one of her looks and does not deign to respond. Of course he has asked and of course she has answered honestly.
‘What does it matter that it is my birthday?’
She selects her words carefully, laying them out before me as I have seen otters do with stones. ‘It seems that this … this and other things I have reported to him … about you … lead him to believe that you are more auspicious than he had thought.’
I chew the last of my breakfast, swallow her words. ‘I see.’
I suppose it is not entirely news. I have never heard it spelled out so explicitly, but I am certainly more at home in the river than on land.
I have never harnessed the river the way my grandmother has, but then again, I have never tried.
I see a glimmer of possibility but say nothing.
I do not wish to be called small again. I leap on something else instead.
‘You report to the sea god. Regularly? About me?’
‘Obviously.’
Another piece of half-news; I had known this but had not thought about it much. But now I angle my head in curiosity. ‘What do you tell him? What do you say about me?’
‘Oh, what a bore you are mostly. Vapid and myopic. That you are a pretty face and nothing else.’
‘So you do think I have a pretty face!’
‘As I said. Vapid and myopic and boring.’
‘Well, that can’t be true. If that’s all you told him, he would have no reason to be suspicious of me.’
She shrugs casually but I see the spark and flint of her eyes, the torch that suddenly lights the depths.
I recognize that look. I have seen it before, but I do not know what it means.
It is akin to her frustration, lives between her play and her pique.
It is almost a demand. She wants something from me, but I do not know what and I am sure that even if I did, I would not know how to give it.
What can I give her? What could I ever give her?
‘I am sure I told him I was desperately in love with you, my little queen, as everyone is. I am sure I said that you are mercurial, sometimes staid and dutiful and wary, and other times sparkling with whimsy. I am quite sure I fawned and flattered, fear not.’
It is my turn to scowl, and I am saved from any attempt at thinking of a suitably quick reply by the arrival of my attendants, preparing to dress me for the day’s festivities.
‘Go away,’ I tell her. ‘It is almost time for me to dress.’
She sighs again but I am rewarded by this one.
She is playing now, enjoying our needling once more; something I have said has pulled her back from wherever it is she goes and now we will shout and swear and maybe even throw things.
She brushes past me as she leaves, the whisper of her snake-scale dress raising the hairs on my arms.
‘It is nothing I have not seen before,’ she says. I shiver. I do not understand why.
My dressing takes much of the morning. The ritual bathing is lengthened by the care of the occasion and my mother wishes me to try on many robes and dresses, beaded overlays made of differing stones, silver coronets twisted in a variety of shapes.
I can feel Ceto sulking just outside the door as I am turned this way and that.
Eventually I am dressed in white again, my least favourite, but the colour my parents prefer on me.
Clean and contrasting the dark of my skin, which shows through the places where the linen is cut: at my ribs revealing my waist, below my neck revealing the plunge between my breasts, up the sides of my legs.
My beaded overlay alternates lapis lazuli, coral and pearl.
The shape of the outfit reveals my bounty, the cut imitates Ceto’s but is tighter, more restrictive, keeping me upright, back straight.
I see what my mother has done. The virgin Wife of the Sea.
‘For the women of our family, my little queen, even jewellery is political.’ My mother adds the silver to my hair and neck and wrists and feet as I step into my sandals.
I feel heavier than I have on any other birthday, but this is not just my birthday.
It is the day of a perfect flood, and our people must believe me blessed and highly favoured.
My mother and attendants leave me, returning to their own preparations for the day ahead.
I am not far behind them, longing to take advantage of the quiet before the festivities begin.
I emerge from my room meeting the disdainful gaze of my reluctant companion.
Her face darkens in distaste, and I roll my eyes.
‘You look ridiculous.’
‘When you wear something other than your own moult I shall listen to your opinion.’
I stride past her, trying to ignore the way her insult burrows beneath my skin, taking up residence between my stomach and chest. I march through the eastern court, empty, for once, of my mother’s companions.
They are all, no doubt, readying themselves, seeing to their own daughters.
Today will be a day of many proposals and betrothals, many girls will make good matches and be sent away from their families.
They will marry young men with boy’s voices and old men with long grey beards.
They will marry men who will hit them and men who will rape them and, if they are lucky, men who will ignore them.