House of Dreams Read Online Free Page A

feet through the door, we were greeted distractedly by the woman’s mother and sisters who lined the walls, squatting on their heels, a jug of wine between them. My mother shared a joke with them as she led me up the steps and into the couple’s bedchamber. The small mud brick room was cosy with a woven rug on the floor and hangings on the walls. A large stone lamp burned by the pallet on which Ahmose crouched, a loose linen shift folded about her. She looked different from the young, smiling woman I knew. There was a sheen of sweat on her forehead and her eyes were huge. She reached out a hand as my mother set her bag on the floor and approached her.
    “There is no need to panic, Ahmose,” my mother said to her soothingly, taking the clutching fingers in her own. “Lie down now. Thu, come here.”
    I obeyed most unwillingly. My mother took my hand and placed it on Ahmose’s distended abdomen. “There is the baby’s head. Can you feel it? Very low. That is good. And here his little buttock. This is as it should be. Can you discern the shape?” I nodded, both fascinated and repelled by the feel of the shiny, taut skin stretched over the mysterious hill beneath. As I withdrew I saw a slow ripple pass over it and Ahmose gasped and groaned, drawing up her knees. “Breathe deeply,” my mother commanded, and when the contraction was over she asked Ahmose how long she had been in labour.
    “Since dawn,” came the reply. Mother opened her bag and withdrew a clay pot. The refreshing odour of peppermint filled the little room as she removed the stopper, and briskly but gently pushing Ahmose onto her side she massaged the contents into the woman’s firm buttocks. “This will hasten the birth,” she said to me as I stood beside her. “Now you may squat, Ahmose. Try to remain calm. Talk to me. What is the news from your sister upriver? Is all well with her?”
    Ahmose struggled into a squatting position on the pallet, her back resting against the mud wall. She spoke haltingly, pausing when the contractions gripped her. My mother prompted her, watching all the time for signs of any change, and I watched her too, the huge, frightened eyes, the bulge of veins in her neck, the straining, swollen body.
    This is part of the spell also, I thought with a surge of fear as the feeble light from the lamp played on the figure crouched in the corner, trembling and occasionally crying out. This is another room in the prison. At eight years old I was probably too young to have actually expressed in those words the emotion that flooded me, but I remember sharply and clearly the way it tasted, the way my heart lurched for a moment. This was to be my lot in life, to coax terrified women in dim village hovels in the middle of the night, to rub their buttocks, to insert medicaments into their vaginas as my mother was now doing. “That was a mixture of fennel, incense, garlic, sert-juice, fresh salt and wasp’s dung,” she was instructing me over her shoulder. “It is one remedy for causing delivery. There are others but they are less efficacious. I will teach you to blend them all, Thu. Come now, Ahmose, you are doing very well. Think how proud your husband will be when he returns home to see his new son cradled in your arms!”
    “I hate him,” Ahmose said venomously. “I never want to see him again.”
    I thought my mother would be shocked but she ignored the words. My legs were shaking. I slid to sit cross-legged on the warm mud floor. Two or three times Ahmose’s mother or one of her sisters would peer in at us, exchange a few words with my mother, and go away again. I lost track of the passage of time. It began to seem to me that I had been drifting in this ante-room to the Underworld for ever, with the sweet and pleasant Ahmose now transformed into a demented spirit and my mother’s shadow looming distorted over her like some malevolent demon. My mother’s voice broke the illusion. “Come here!” she ordered me. I scrambled