Father and Mery were happy to consent. They went back to their work, Henenu toddled off into the garden, and I stole after him as soon as I could. I don’t know how he managed it, but I was grateful for his cleverness. It gave us the time we needed to pursue my studies undisturbed.
There was only one problem: Bit-Bit. The older she got, the more time she wanted to spend with me. I loved her dearly, but I was jealous of the lesson time I had with Henenu. Every time we met, he showed me fresh treasures—new words, new ways to use them, new papyrus scrolls containing stories of the gods and goddesses, of pharaohs and queens from distant times, of love and adventure, even of the world that lay beyond the borders of the Black Land! There was always something exciting to learn from the little scribe, whereas Bit-Bit—
Bit-Bit was Bit-Bit: always wanting to play the same games, sing the same songs, dance the same dances with me. If I tried to distract her with some new pastime, she turned up her nose and began wheedling for us to play “the right way.” At best it was boring, at worst it was annoying, and trying to evade her when I had a lesson with Henenu was a challenge.
I admit it: I bribed one of the slaves to keep my little sister busy whenever Henenu came to visit. The slave was an old woman who’d been in our household for as long as I could remember. I didn’t bother learning her name, or even if she had one. Slaves were slaves; they didn’t have to be spoken to the same way as servants. They were something we owned, there to do a job for us, like a chair or a bowl or a pot of kohl. I didn’t know how they’d come into our household, and if any of them died, it didn’t affect me.
One day, in the year I reached my tenth birthday, everything changed.
I will never forget that morning. Bit-Bit and I were dancing in the garden. I loved to dance almost as much as I loved to write, and in my heart I cherished the secret ambition to dance at one of the great temple festivals with all of Akhmin looking on. I didn’t even care which god I’d honor with my dancing, as long as the priests chose me. It was a great honor, because only the best dancers could be trusted to keep their steps and movements perfect. Anything less might anger the gods.
“Well, what do we have here?” Henenu’s voice boomed through the sunlit air, such a big sound coming from such a small body. Bit-Bit and I stopped our dance and ran to greet him. The scribe was a great favorite with everyone in our family.
“What’s that, Henenu?” Bit-Bit asked, clinging to his left arm while pointing at the object he cradled to his chest with his right.
“Don’t tell me you’ve never seen my palette, little monkey?” he said, letting her get a good look at the long, narrow rectangle of polished slate with Thoth’s image carved just below the two oval wells to hold the black and red pigments. “See how cleverly it’s made. It even holds a small clay pot for water and a handful of the best reed pens, newly sharpened. If it only had a case for storing papyrus scrolls, I couldn’t ask for a better tool.”
“Oh.” Bit-Bit sounded disappointed. “You’re going to work. I thought you’d come to play with us. Does this mean we have to leave the garden?”
“Well …” Henenu gave me a conspiratorial look. This was my cue to find a way to send Bit-Bit elsewhere, so I could have a lesson.
“We can come back later,” I declared, taking Bit-Bit by the hand. “The sooner we leave Henenu in peace, the sooner he’ll finish his work. Then we can show him our new dance.” I steered her firmly back into the house.
Once indoors, it didn’t take me long to find an excuse for thrusting Bit-Bit into the old slave woman’s care and to rush back to Henenu. I only delayed my return long enough to fetch my waxed tablet from its hiding place in my room. I found the little scribe seated under the tallest palm tree in the garden. Even though I was now old enough to wear a pleated linen sheath dress, I dropped cross-legged onto the dirt beside him. Mery would scold me for ruining my clothes, but I didn’t care. I’d sacrifice a dozen dresses to learn how to write a single new word.
“Look at what I’ve done, Henenu,” I said, eagerly holding out my waxed tablet. It was a surprise I’d been working on ever since our last lesson, something more than my usual practice lines. This time, instead of copying out someone else’s words over and over, I’d written my own.
The scribe’s brows drew together as he studied the lines I’d etched into the smooth wax. “This isn’t what I gave you to do.”
“No, it isn’t,” I said, grinning.
“In Thoth’s name, why? What ever made you want to copy this stuff?”
My grin was gone. “It’s—it’s not stuff. It’s a hymn in praise of Isis!”
“Yes, and every line of it seems to come from a different song. Here the goddess is soaring through the skies as a hawk, here she’s swimming along as part of the Nile’s waters, next she turns into a sacred cat for some reason, and the cat becomes a lion, and the lion decides it would rather be the moon!”
I felt as if he’d slapped my face. “Is it—is it that bad?”
“The pieces are all right by themselves—some even have a rough touch of beauty—but when they’re thrown together like this, it’s a worse horror than Ammut.” He shuddered at the thought of the hippo-lion-crocodile monstrosity. “How did you find such a thing?”
I turned my face away from him. I wanted to crawl into a hole in the sand and die. “I wrote it.”
“You … ?” I heard Henenu make a very strange sound, a noise that was as much of a badly matched mix as my miserable poem. It was part snort, part chuckle, and partly a failed attempt to hold back his laughter.
Something flared inside me. My chin came up sharply and I glared at him. “I know it’s bad!” I shouted, slapping my hands on the earth. “You said so clearly enough! I won’t write anything of my own ever again, but you don’t have the right to laugh at me for trying!”