Mara, Daughter of the Nile

  GAINING ENTRY

  It was the next night. The sun had dropped into the hills behind Hatshepsut’s temple three hours since, and the late moon had not yet risen. The palace driveway known as the Road of the Rams was shrouded in darkness. Near the tall bronze doors at the end of the drive a torch sputtered and smoked in its bracket, shedding its orange light down upon the sentry who lounged, yawning, below it.

  Mara, concealed in the shadowy gateway leading to the Court of the Weavers, had been watching him for some moments. He was the same who had grinned at her last night, when she passed through with Inanni. So far, so good. But had his mood changed? Perhaps tonight he would be surly, if he had lost at his gaming with the stableboys, or been reprimanded by his captain for some mistake or other.

  Well, it was a chance she had to take. Glancing behind her once more to make sure the Court of the Weavers was as empty as the drive, she wrapped the folds of her cloak half over her face and began to sob softly.

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  PENGUIN BOOKS

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  New York, New York 10014

  First published in the United States of America by Coward McCann, 1953

  Copyright © 1953 by Eloise Jarvis McGraw

  Penguin supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin to continue to publish books for every reader.

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING IN PUBLICATION DATA

  McGraw, Eloise Jarvis.

  Mara, daughter of the Nile.

  Originally published: New York: Coward McCann, 1953.

  Summary: The adventures of an ingenious Egyptian slave girl who undertakes a dangerous assignment as a spy in the royal palace of Thebes, in the days when Queen Hatshepsut ruled.

  [1. Egypt—History—To 332 B.C.—Fiction]

  I. Title.

  PZ7.M1696Mar 1985

  [Fic] 85-587 ISBN 0 14 03.1929 8

  Ebook ISBN 9780451479365

  Version_2

  TO ALICE TORREY

  who is my idea of all an editor should be

  INTRODUCTION

  Our mother, Eloise Jarvis McGraw, “did it backwards”: she did visit Egypt—but not until many years after the “Egyptian period” of her writing, which produced The Golden Goblet, the adult novel Pharaoh, and Mara, Daughter of the Nile. Nonetheless, the ancient Egypt depicted in these books is not a mere fanciful creation of her imagination. Rather, it is the product of extensive research, which included books on the history, society, religion, art, and daily life of ancient Egypt, and the archaeology that revealed it all; study of reproductions of the wall paintings and inscriptions found in the tombs of the ancient pharaohs; and even a serious go at a dictionary-sized grammar of ancient Egyptian. This last effort eventually defeated her, but not before she spent long hours at it. Inanna remembers coming home from school to find her sitting on the living room couch, surrounded by huge open books and spiral notebooks filled with precise little renderings of the hieroglyphs and their meanings.

  Mom brought the same approach to books set in other times and civilizations, including the traditional society of Native Americans in the era of the Oregon Trail (Moccasin Trail); Anglo-Saxon England from the point of view of a young girl who witnessed the Norman invasion in 1066 (The Striped Ships); and seventeenth-century London at the time of the Great Fire (Master Cornhill). Through this painstaking research, she immersed herself in distant times and distant worlds until she felt she could see them through the eyes of those living at the time and re-create their perceptions and feelings in her characters.

  When she finally did get to Egypt, accompanied by our dad and Peter, Mom kept exclaiming at the living “little hieroglyphs” (animals, birds, plants) that she saw all around her. Actually visiting the mortuary temple of Hatshepsut, the tombs of other pharaohs in the Valley of the Kings, and the Temple of Karnak, all near Luxor, brought thrills but no real surprises. Other highlights of that memorable trip were, of course, the great pyramids at Giza (where she came across a copy of her novel Pharaoh in a gift shop) and an early evening boat trip on the Nile at Luxor in a felucca owned and operated by a diminutive bronze-skinned man named Ahmed Horus, who was clearly a descendant of the ancients.

  Mom majored in art in college and painted professionally for several years before she discovered she was first and foremost a writer, not an artist, but her artist’s eye is apparent in her writing. In many of her books, she used color to unify an otherwise chaotic scene, as in the view of ancient Menfe from the prow of the Silver Beetle in the opening passage of Mara. Indeed, there is a masterful use of color in descriptions throughout the book. Occasional references to the variety of skin tones and clothing, which are still part of the street scene in modern Cairo, are thrown in as highlights in the general rainbow. Sixty-plus years later her daughter Inanna (who is also an artist) recalls: “I still remember that Nubian in the red headcloth, and Mara’s first ‘respectable’ outfit, which included a cinnamon-colored sash.”

  We hope you enjoy Mara’s story as much as readers did when it was first published.

  Peter McGraw

  Inanna McGraw

  CONTENTS

  Gaining Entry

  Other Books You May Enjoy

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Introduction

  PART 1—MENFE

  1 The Mysterious Passenger

  2 The Sale of a Slave

  3 The War Hawk

  PART 2—THE RIVER

  4 Young Man with an Amulet

  5 Dangerous Bargain

  6 Frightened Princess

  PART 3—THE PALACE

  7 Royal Summons

  8 Her Majesty, the Pharaoh

  9 Lion in a Snare

  10 The Lotus Garden

  11 Night Ride

  PART 4—THE INN

  12 The Sentry at the Gate

  13 Conversation at an Inn

  14 Shadow of the Dead

  15 The Signal

  PART 5—THE RING

  16 The Gamble

  17 The Mark of Five

  18 By the Dark River

  19 Fatal Mistake

  PART 6—THE TRAP

  20 The Bait

  21 The Quarry

  22 Disaster

  23 Capture

  24 For Egypt

  25 The Street of Sycamores

  PART 1

  MENFE

  CHAPTER 1

  The Mysterious Passenger

  Nekonkh, captain of the Nile boat Silver Beetle, paused for the fiftieth time beside his vessel’s high beaked prow and shaded his eyes to peer anxiously across the wharfs.

  The city that rose beyond them shimmered, almost drained of color, in the glare of Egyptian noon. Doorways were blue-black in white buildings, alleys were plunged in shadow; the gay colors of the sails
and hulls that crowded the harbor seemed faded and indistinct, and even the green of the Nile was overlaid by a blinding surface glitter. Only the sky was vivid, curving in a high blue arch over ancient Menfe.

  The wharf itself seethed with activity. Sweating porters hurried in and out among groups of merchants haggling over stacks of cargo yet to be loaded; sailors, both foreign and Egyptian, swarmed everywhere, talking in a babble of tongues. A donkey drover pushed through a cluster of pale-faced Libyans, shouting at his laden beasts; three Mitanni traders in the fringed garments of Babel laid wagers on a dogfight at one end of the wharf, while a ring of yelling urchins surrounded a cage of monkeys at the other. Over all rose the rank smell of the river—an odor compounded of fish, mud, water-soaked rope, pitch, and crocodiles.

  But nowhere in that tangle was the one tall figure for which the captain searched.

  Nekonkh chewed his lip and drummed upon the gunwale with his big, blunt fingers. An hour ago he had been uneasy; now he was so tense that when his helmsman strolled across the deck and touched his elbow, he leaped as if he had been burned.

  “By Set and all the devils!” he roared, whirling about savagely. “Fool! Coming upon me from behind like that! What do you want?”

  The helmsman took a hasty step back. “The cargo,” he mumbled. “Everything is stowed, master. We’re ready to sail.”

  “Well?”

  “The—er—we await orders.”

  “Then await them!”

  The helmsman laid his right hand on his left shoulder in the attitude of submission, and escaped, casting puzzled glances backward as he did so.

  Nekonkh sighed explosively and mopped the sweat off his upper lip with a hairy wrist. He was a burly man with a fierce jaw contradicted by mild brown eyes, and just now he looked and felt a good deal older than his forty years. For a moment he leaned wearily against the gunwale, staring upriver, where the luxurious barge of some noble moved over the sparkling water like a gigantic water bug, twelve oars on each side dipping rhythmically. Then he straightened, shoved his square-cut black wig askew in order to scratch under it, and adjusted it again with an irritable slap.

  Automatically his eye checked the Silver Beetle, moving about her trim scrubbed confines from the two great sweeps at the stern to the tall masts with their horizontally furled sails; past the tiny cabin to the bales of wool and hides stacked on the deck, the oarsmen lounging at their posts.

  Yes, all was ready to sail, so far as cargo and crew were concerned. But the passenger? The puzzling, unpredictable, portentous passenger whose very charm set alarm bells ringing loudly in Nekonkh’s mind—what of him?

  Nekonkh swore under his breath, wishing fervently that cargo and crew were all he had to worry about—wishing he knew either more or less. It was dangerous to have brains these days in the land of Kemt.

  He took a restless turn about the deck, his joined hands flapping impatiently at his back, and reviewed once more his brief acquaintance with the missing passenger. It was an acquaintance only ten days old; he had seen the young man for the first time the morning he set sail from Thebes on this trip to Menfe. Since the youth—Sheftu, he had said his name was—had paid his passage promptly, there seemed no reason to give him a second thought. He was pleasant but unobtrusive—tall, somewhere around twenty years old, with an attractively homely face and a common white shenti and headcloth like a thousand others. Except for a certain odd, lazy grace in the way he moved, the captain found nothing unusual about him.

  That was at first.

  Later, during the long, sun-drenched days of the Beetle’s journey down the river, Nekonkh had good reason to study his passenger more attentively. Only then did he become aware of other details—for instance, the areas of slightly paler skin on Sheftu’s upper arms, which indicated that he habitually wore bracelets, though his sole ornament now was a curious amulet on his left wrist; also the absent, brooding expression which sat so often and so oddly on his young face, and the suave charm which covered this instantly if he knew he was being watched. The charm itself was a little odd, once you thought of it. Since when did a scribe’s apprentice—for so Sheftu had described himself—possess the smooth and subtle manners of a courtier? The captain grew surer and surer that his passenger was no ordinary nobody. Breeding was written in every line of his long, well muscled body, and his voice had the careless authority of one accustomed to being obeyed.

  However, Nekonkh might have noticed none of this, had it not been for a conversation which suddenly focused his attention on the young man. It took place early one morning, about five days out of Thebes. The Silver Beetle was sailing past an ancient temple surrounded by scaffolding and piles of stone, around which workmen swarmed busily. Nekonkh, standing alone at the door of his cabin, scowled across the river and shook his head.

  “Ai! There it is again!” he muttered sourly to himself.

  “What do you mean, Captain?”

  Nekonkh jumped. He had not heard his passenger come up beside him. “Why, the rebuilding of the old temple yonder,” he answered, pointing. “If I’ve seen that sight once I’ve seen it forty times in the past few years. Our good queen Hatshepsut evidently thinks gold grows on papyrus stalks! Does she mean to restore every ancient building up and down the Nile?” Nekonkh grunted as scaffolds and workmen slipped upstream past the Beetle’s stern sweeps. “It’s not only the old ruins. Amon himself knows what her new temple at Thebes is costing poor folk like me in sweat and taxes!”

  “The new temple is a beautiful one, though,” remarked Sheftu. “They say every wall of the inner room is covered with handsomely carved reliefs.”

  “Reliefs depicting Her Majesty’s sacred birth, no doubt?” inquired the captain sardonically.

  “Of course. What better subject could there be? Hatshepsut was fathered by the Sun himself, nursed by goddesses, and named Pharaoh in her cradle.”

  “Aye, so she claims, so she claims!” snorted Nekonkh incautiously. “As for me, I would rather see a man on the throne of Egypt! That young Thutmose, her half-brother—when is he to grow up? For fifteen years now she’s been acting as his regent, spending gold and silver like water, sending ships—mine among them!—to the edge of the world for her own amusement, letting the empire foul its rudder for want of trained soldiers. And still the king does not come of age! Why? It’s obvious, friend! He’s not allowed to, nor will he ever be! Hatshepsut is pharaoh, and Egypt must put up with it!”

  “You do not admire the queen, Captain?”

  It was the very blandness of the voice that caused the alarm bells to clang suddenly in Nekonkh’s mind. He swung around and really looked at his passenger for the first time; noted the cleverness of the irregular dark face, the odd little smile hovering about the mouth, the dangerous alertness of the long black eyes. Nekonkh went cold all over. What had he been saying! It was treason to speak against the queen—near treason even to mention the young king’s name above a whisper, much less actually complain . . .

  Full of a sudden clear picture of himself impaled on the torturer’s stake in the midst of some desert, he sagged back against the cabin door. “May the queen live forever!” he exclaimed. “May my tongue be clipped if it utters a word against Hatshepsut, the Daughter of the Sun!”

  “Pray rest easy, Captain.” Sheftu’s voice was like a purr. “You but stated an opinion. But you are somewhat indiscreet. There are those who might haul you off to the palace dungeons at once if they heard what I just heard.” He gave Nekonkh a moment to absorb that thought, then added casually, “So you would overthrow the queen?”

  “By the Feather of Truth, I said no such thing!” gasped Nekonkh. He darted an agonized glance up and down the deck, then strode to a deserted spot in the bows.

  Sheftu followed, his face amused. “A wise precaution,” he commented, arranging himself comfortably against the gunwale. “They say the queen’s spies are everywhere.”


  “No doubt!” Nekonkh was convinced he was talking to one that minute. He wiped the sweat from his forehead and attempted to change the subject, but Sheftu overrode him.

  “She has grounds for her constant suspicions. There’s a group of reckless fools in Thebes—no doubt you’ve heard of them—who have organized in secret to topple Hatshepsut off her throne and set young Thutmose there instead.”

  “I know nothing of them, nothing! Such movements have started before, and been squashed like beetles. They must be fools indeed who would try again!”

  “Perhaps.” Sheftu shrugged expressively. He had lowered his voice, moving a little closer to Nekonkh. “But one must give them credit, Captain: they have courage. And they insist they are fighting for what all Egypt really wants. They say it’s monstrous that a woman should wear the double crown, and call herself not Royal Wife and Consort, but King and Pharaoh. They say the backs of the people are breaking under her taxes, that the children’s ribs show plainer with every statue of herself she erects in the new temple, while Count Senmut the Architect, the favorite, the Lord-High-Everything-In-Egypt, grows mysteriously richer each time a porch is built or a terrace paved. . . . Captain, they say—I but quote, you understand—they say she grows so arrogant that the gods themselves will soon rise up to strike her down, and Egypt with her! Should we permit . . .”

  Nekonkh’s brain was spinning. What was this young rogue up to, talking like a spy one minute, a firebrand the next? But no, of course he was but quoting. Yet the captain found himself responding fiercely to the forbidden words. Aye, it was true, it was all true, and everyone knew it! Count Senmut had a finger in every pot in Egypt, and as for the queen, that usurper . . . Beware, clanged the alarm bells. You’re walking into a trap.

  Sheftu was still talking, softly, insistently. “Should we permit these crimes, they ask? Can we risk the anger of the gods? Is not this woman a peril to all the Black Land?”

  Nekonkh grasped blindly at a safe question, whose answer tradition had taught him. “The First Thutmose—he who was pharaoh in my youth—he lives with the gods now. He will protect Egypt from their anger.”