House of Dreams Read Online Free

they complained bitterly that I was always the queen, and they did not get a turn to order me about. So Pa-ari and I amused each other, and the months slipped by.
    When I became four, I once again begged my father to let me go to school and was again met with a firm denial. He could ill afford to let Pa-ari attend, he said. The fee for me was out of the question and besides, what girl ever learned anything useful outside her own home? I sulked for a while, sitting sullenly in a corner of our reception room, watching my brother’s head bent over his bits of pottery, his shadow moving on the wall behind him as the lamp’s flame guttered and swayed. He did not want to play Pharaoh and his queen any more. He was forming a bond with some of the village boys with whom he shared the schoolroom and often he would get up from the afternoon sleep and vanish, joining them as they fished or hunted rats in the granaries. I was lonely, and envious, but I was eight years old before it occurred to me that if I could not go to school the school might come to me.
    By then my mother had me firmly in hand. I was learning to prepare the bread that was our staple, to make soups with lentils and beans, to broil fish and prepare vegetables. I did our laundry with her, stamping on my father’s kilts and our thick sheath dresses, slapping the linen briskly on the glistening rocks, enjoying the showers of water that flicked against my hot skin, the feel of the Nile silt between my toes. I rendered tallow for the lamps. I mastered her fine bone needles, mending my father’s kilts with meticulous care. I went with her when she visited her friends, sitting cross-legged on the dirt floors of their tiny reception rooms and sipping the one cup of palm wine she would allow me while she gossiped and laughed, discussing who was pregnant again, whose daughter was being courted by whose son, how the local tax assessor’s wife had sat too close to the headman’s son, the hussy! The voices would flow over and around me, encasing me in a kind of stupor so that I often felt I had been there for ever, that the quiver of dark liquid in my cup, the grit under my thighs, the slow rivulet of sweat coursing down my neck, were all parts of a spell holding me prisoner. Several of the women were heavily pregnant and I stared furtively at their misshapen bodies. They were part of the spell also, magic that would keep me one of them always.
    Sometimes my mother was summoned to deliver a baby during the hours of darkness. I paid little heed to those infrequent disturbances. I would vaguely hear her exchange a hurried word with my father and leave our house before I settled deeper into a contented sleep. But just after my eighth Naming Day my apprenticeship with her began. One night I opened my eyes to find her bending over my pallet, a candle in her hand. Pa-ari was curled asleep on his side of the room, oblivious. There were whispered voices out in the reception room. “Get up, Thu,” she told me kindly. “I am bidden to Ahmose’s confinement. This is my task and one day it will be yours also. You are old enough now to help me and thus begin to learn the duties of a midwife. You need not be afraid,” she added as I struggled up, fumbling for my sheath. “The birth will be straightforward. Ahmose is young and healthy. Come now.”
    I staggered after her, still in my dreams. Ahmose’s husband squatted in a corner of the reception room looking uneasy and my father, bleary eyed, squatted with him. My mother paused to retrieve the bag that always sat in readiness by the door and went out. I followed. The air was cool, the moon riding high in a cloudless sky, the palms spiking tall against the dimness. “We should get a live goose and a bolt of linen out of this,” my mother commented. I did not reply.
    Ahmose’s house, like all the rest, was little more than an open-roofed reception room with steps at the rear leading to sleeping quarters. As we padded in our bare