House of Dreams by Pauline Gedge Read Free Book Online Page A

up beside him. “Ra has descended into the mouth of Nut,” he commented, “and we must go home before full darkness catches us. Do you have any plan that will deliver you from the so-smothering womb of Aswat?” His tone was bantering, so that I did not want to discuss the matter with him any more.
    “No I don’t,” I replied shortly, and strode ahead of him, back towards the fields and down the dusky path that led into the evening quietness of the village.
    But my cry of agony in the desert, genuine and unfeigned, did not go unnoticed by the invisible powers that govern our fates. Sometimes in life a moment of pure anguish rising from long turmoil can arrow with great force into the realm of the gods who pause in their mighty deliberations and turn towards the source of the disturbance. So it is Thu, they say. What ails the child? This is no ordinary grumble. Is she not happy with the fate decreed for her? Then let us weave for her another destiny. We will put before her the map of an alternative future so that she may choose it if she wishes. Thus unperceived do the slow-wheeling fates reverse and begin to grind along another path, and we do not realize until the years behind us have lengthened that we have chosen to be carried with them into a new direction.
    Of course I did not reason thus at the time. It was only later that I saw, I felt, the mysterious shifting that had been set in motion in my life by my desperate outburst that day. I resumed my studies with Pa-ari. What else could I do? Pointless or not, they were my drug, the balm with which I tried to soothe my indignation. Yet I believe that from that moment on my old destiny began to wither like a seedling pushed aside by the stronger, more ruthless thrusting of a tall weed, and my new one began to take shape.
    Three months went by, and then one scorching afternoon I heard a piece of intriguing news. My mother and her closest friend were sitting outside our house in the shade cast by the wall, the beer jug between them next to a bowl of water into which they dipped squares of linen to cool themselves. I was stretched out some way from my mother, lying on a flaxen mat, my head propped on one elbow as I lazily watched them wring out the linen over their brown thighs, their sheaths rolled up around their hips and their arms glistening with water. Beyond us, across the baking expanse of the village square, the dusty river growth stood bowed and without a stir and I could not glimpse the river itself. I was in a dreaming, not unpleasant stupor induced by the heat and this precious, unaccustomed moment of sheer idleness. I had turned thirteen and my body had begun to acquire the first tentative curves of full womanhood to come. I was contemplating these changes, aware of the small valley damp with sweat between my breasts, the modest hill of my hip against which my other hand rested. The women’s voices rose and fell, a pleasant litany of meaningless gossip in which I had little interest. Occasionally my mother passed the sopping linen to me and I drew it over my face but neither of them addressed me directly and I was glad. I sipped my own beer, my thoughts moving from the delights of my body to Pa-ari, kept late at school to take private dictation from his teacher, and then to my father who had gone to a meeting of the village elders. His crops had been harvested and the land lay dead in the summer fire. He was often bored during these months. He had never yet been summoned to work on one of Pharaoh’s building projects for his bread and onions as so many were, but then the word from outside was that Egypt was still too impoverished to erect any great monuments. My mother and her friend were discussing the terrible famine that had cursed us during the time of the Syrian usurper Irsu, before the Good God Setnakht and his son Ramses, our present Incarnation and the third to hold that illustrious name, began to put the country back into the way of true Ma’at.