Nefertiti

“You can’t give perch to a miw!”

“What is your name?” she demanded.

The fish-seller frowned. “Djedi.”

“Well, Djedi, when your father returns”—she tucked the wrapped perch neatly under her arm—“my lady here will be sure to commend you to him.”

He stared openmouthed as Ipu marched away, then looked to me. “I’ve seen her before. Is she always so impertinent?”

I smiled. “Always.”

In the unseasonable warmth of Pachons, I began pruning withered leaves and crushing eggshells to enrich the garden soil. Our house became flush with bright canna lilies and flowering hibiscus several months early, but when I reached down to pluck the lotus blossoms I thought of Nefertiti and loss overwhelmed me. In my anger, I had refused to apologize, and now I imagined my mother sitting alone in her chamber while my father shut himself away in the Per Medjat, sending spies and writing scrolls to determine how far the Hittites had advanced in the Kingdom of Mitanni. As I sat on my balcony, Ipu came to me and said, “You wanted it this way, my lady.”

I nodded sadly. “I know.”

“You’ve left them before,” Ipu pointed out, not understanding my distress.

“But never like this. Now we are separated because Nefertiti is angry, and my mother will be worried, and my father will need me if she becomes difficult, only I won’t be there.” I looked over the balcony. If I had children, it would all be different, I thought. I would be taking care of a son or teaching a daughter the ways of the soil. I would never find a wet nurse for my child. He would be all mine. He would be everything to me. And I wouldn’t play favorites between my daughters. But I wasn’t the one that had been blessed by Tawaret. The goddess had chosen to smile on Nefertiti.

“Come.” Ipu tried to distract me from my gloom. “We’ll go to the market and watch the fire eaters.”

“In the sun?”

“We can take a shade,” she offered.

We went into the market for the second time in seven days and lost ourselves in the busy sprawl. We had nothing to buy, but somehow Ipu’s fish merchant managed to find us. He held out two packages wrapped in papyrus, blowing the hair from his eyes in the heat.

“For the loveliest ladies in Egypt,” he said.

“That’s very kind.” Ipu glanced at the fish. “But you know the Sister of the King’s Chief Wife can’t accept food from strangers.” She handed the fish back, and he played at being deeply offended.

“And who says I am a stranger, my lady? I’ve seen you here twice. And before you left Thebes I saw you once. You may not have noticed a simple, unmarried man like myself, but I noticed you.”

Ipu stared back at him.

I laughed. “It seems you have left Ipu without words,” I congratulated. “I believe this is a first.”

“Ipu,” the fish merchant repeated her name thoughtfully. “The Friendly One.” He placed the fish back into her hands. “Take it. It isn’t poison.”

“If it is, I will return from the Afterlife to find you.”

Djedi laughed. “There will be no need for that. I will be eating fish from the same catch tonight. Perhaps you will come tomorrow and tell me how it was?”

Ipu tossed her hair coyly over her shoulder and the beads made a hollow music together. “Perhaps.”

When we left the market, I turned to Ipu at the bend in the road. “He is interested!” I exclaimed.

“He’s only a fish merchant,” she said dismissively.

“He’s more than that. Look at the gold on his fingers.”

“Then perhaps he’s a fisherman.”

“With rings like those?” I shook my head. “Haven’t you said you wanted a husband with a little wealth? What if this is him?”

We stopped at the path that led up to my garden and Ipu grew serious. “Please tell no one about this,” she said.

I frowned. “Such as who?”

“Such as any of the women who come to buy your herbs.”

I stepped back, offended. “I never spread gossip.”

“It is only because I want to be cautious, my lady. He could be married.”

“He said—”

“Men say many things.” But there was a gleam in her eyes. “I only want to be careful.”

I didn’t go with Ipu into the market the next day, but I saw her leave and whispered to Nakhtmin that her dress was finer than usual.

“Do you think she is going to see him?” he asked, hugging me to his chest.

“Of course! We have plenty of meat and no need for fish. Why else would she go?” I smiled, thinking of Ipu finally in love.

Now that my return to Thebes had become known, women began appearing at my door again. Most of my business was for acacia and honey, a mixture that women in the villas of Thebes were afraid to send to their physicians for. So servants crept up my pathway at first light, always careful to conceal their lady’s name, arriving with purses full of deben rings in exchange for the certainty that trysts with lovers or unhappy marriages would not produce a child. I tried not to see the irony in this, giving women herbs to stop children when that was all that I prayed for.

Sometimes the women came for other drugs, plants that could cure warts or heal wounds that had been inflicted in ways they did not tell and I did not ask about. One such woman showed me bruises and whispered, “Is there anything that can cover these?”

I flinched to touch the raised bruise on the woman’s small arm. I moved across the room that Nakhtmin had furnished with wooden shelves to hold my glass jars and vials. I took down my book of patients and flipped through the pages. “You came six months ago for acacia and honey. Now you return for something to cover the bruises?”

She nodded.

I said nothing; I only went to the polished cedar shelf where I kept my oils. “If you wait, I will mix you some rosemary oil with yellow ocher. You will have to apply it with a brush in several layers.”

She sat near my table and watched me work with the pestle to grind the powder. I could see by the tone of her skin she would need a yellow copper, and I was proud of myself when she reached out her arm and the bruise disappeared under my paste. She paid with a deben of copper, and I looked at the gold around her neck and asked her if his riches were worth it.

“Sometimes,” she replied.

Servants came all afternoon—some that I knew, others that were strangers. When the house was quiet, I went outside to watch Nakhtmin in the open courtyard of our villa, where the river winked blue and silver between the columns. His shirt was off, and in the warm sun his golden torso glistened with sweat. He turned and saw me watching and smiled. “All the customers gone?” he called.

“Yes, but I haven’t seen Ipu since morning,” I worried.

“Perhaps she developed a sudden interest in fish.”

I thought how strange it was, my helping Ipu dress for her dinner with Djedi—who owned not just one merchant ship, but three. I placed my best wig on her head, and each tress was threaded with golden tubes and scented with lotus. She wore a smooth-fitting tunic and my fur-lined cloak. The braided papyrus sandals on her feet