yet, daughter of Ay,' she grinned toothlessly at me.
I was nettled at being excluded and wandered back to the window, where fascinating debris was being swept down the swollen river. The placid water foamed like honey from Asun. I waited until the girl was entirely engrossed in her guard and slipped quietly out of the window and onto the paved place outside the palace.
The air was full of people crying out and giving orders that no one was listening to. The flood had come down suddenly this year, my sixth in Maat, and early. Little houses which had been made by herdsmen to be dismantled later were being dismantled early by the water, running faster than a running horse. No one noticed me as I wandered through the crowd. Of all the children of Ay I most resembled the common people and apart from the fineness of my amulet and the gold rings in my ears there was nothing to set me apart. A woman leading a mother-goat and carrying a kid almost stood on me and cursed me out of her path in the name of Set, a serious curse. I threaded my way through the people to the edge.
Fascinating. People like ants scurried away from the water, carrying hay and sacks and terracotta pots. A solemn priest of Basht bore away a sacred cat from a grain storehouse which had been inundated. It was soaking wet, spitting and furious, and it scored his smooth pale shoulders with long angry lines, which he did not even seem to notice.
I was so interested in the movement and the voices, crying on a variety of Gods to allow them to get to safety before the water enveloped them, that I did not notice that the water had eaten away the spit of sand which I was standing on and was about to eat me.
I must have screamed as I fell. It was cold water, terribly strong, and I saw the flash of a reptilian tail as a crocodile was swept helplessly past, turning belly-up as it struggled to regain its balance. Ivory teeth flashed in the gaping mouth. I was seized by the Nile, pummelled and thumped. There was no air. A red mist rose in front of my eyes. I struggled to surface, striving against the current, gained the air and gulped, then the fists of the water thrust me under again, and the scales of another crocodile scraped my legs.
I struggled again, twisting all my slight weight, grabbed at something, and was hauled bodily out by strong hands. I came up red-faced, gasping, soaking wet, into strong arms which squeezed the Nile out of my lungs and shook me bodily.
It was the young man Horemheb, double my age and destined to be a soldier. He was tall and good looking, with long hair as black as ink and the most considering dark eyes. His hair was plaited in locks, each one tipped with a blue faience bead, which bobbed across his bare shoulders as he moved. He tucked me under one arm as though I was baggage and climbed the bank. I did not struggle against this humiliation, because I was still breathless and suddenly conscious of being in very deep trouble.
'You ran away from your nurse, Mutnodjme,' he said solemnly, setting me down on wobbly feet. I grasped at him as I felt myself falling and he picked me up again. His body was warm and his arms secure and I relaxed a little.
'I did,' I agreed.
'You will be beaten,' he added.
I will,' I said, observing that his fine cloth was stained with river-mud.
'Now, how are we to get you out of this?' he asked himself, mounting the next bank and striding towards the palace of Ay. 'Where is Asen?'
'Tending to a woman in childbirth,' I said. 'Put me down, I can walk.'
He did so, and took my long side-lock in his hands, wringing it to spill out the water. He surveyed me. I was a mess. My skin was stained with black mud, my feet and hands filthy, and blood was flowing from the crocodile scrapes along my legs. He wiped at the grazes with a hard hand.
'Doesn't this hurt?' he asked.
'Of course.' I winced as he blotted at the blood with his palm.
'But you haven't cried, 'Nodjme,' he commented.
'There is no point in crying, Lord.'
He smiled then. Horemheb rarely smiled. It lit up his broad face like Re Exalted who is the sun at noon and I smiled back.
'We can't just steal back into the palace as though nothing has happened,' said my rescuer. 'I know. Nefertiti will help. Come along, little sister. Climb on my back, we have to hurry.'
Thus I saw her for the first time, the beautiful one.
Horemheb skirted the palace walls, walked carefully through the first hall, then dived through a curtained door into the Princess' courtyard. I never thought to wonder how he knew the way. A woman was bathing in a pond full of fragrant water. I smelt lotus and jasmine. The air was heavy with scent like spring.
'Lady, I bring you a little sister in distress,' he said, putting me down. 'She was eaten by the river, and faces a beating for being drawn to the Great Mystery of the River, enchanted perhaps by Hapi, God of the Nile.'
There was an odd tone in his voice, which worried me. Hesitancy, from so sure a person as Horemheb? But I forgot all about him as soon as the lady turned and held out her arms to me.
Oh, beautiful, lovely beyond belief, my half-sister Nefertiti. Her skin was as smooth as marble, her features all perfect; long nose, high cheekbones, eyes like almonds, liquid and soft. But it was her gentleness which glowed, which shone. I walked straight into her embrace as she gathered me, mud and weed and all, into her milky pool and I lay on her smooth, rounded breasts as though I had been fostered there.
'You have done well,' she told Horemheb, and he bowed and went away.
I had fallen in love with my sister. She washed all the mud off me with her own hands, heedless of the blood in the water, then called her women. She called her own nurse to treat the grazes on my legs, and then dried me and dressed me, for concealment, in a woman's cloth.
When Asen came to find me, my wounds were carefully hidden under a too-big gown and I was sitting like a good little girl, while my most beautiful sister plaited flowers into my hair.
'Is she not my sister, daughter of my father?' she asked Asen, who bustled in full of outrage and threatening a beating. 'Should she not come to me? Let her come again,' said Nefertiti in a voice like flowing gold, and Asen melted right away in front of my eyes.
So I first saw her, the beautiful one who is come, the Great Royal Wife. And so I first saw Horemheb the young soldier, who rescued me from the Nile.
Ptah-hotep
I cannot remember not being able to read and write.
When I was five years old in Maat who is truth, my father Imhotep sent me to the palace of the Temple of Amen-Re at Karnak to become as he is. I had taken his stylus and made squiggly attempts at letters all over the whitewashed inner wall of the house, using cooking-pot soot for ink, because I had seen him writing and wanted to imitate it. My mother raised a hand to slap me, because she valued her clean walls, but my father had put her aside, saying 'Here is a scribe and son of a scribe, should he not practice his father's profession?'
And the woman my mother had agreed, while I was still naked, while I wore nothing but the amulet and sidelock of childhood.
And here I am now many years later, my legs crossed under me, immaculate fine linen cloth uncreased, the plaster-board laid across my lap, my own palette beside me on the floor. My brushes and styli are carefully selected and meticulously kept
