‘Yes, mother,’ I say, but she doesn’t so much as glance at me. All the time she’s been yelling at me, she’s had one eye on our new guest, whom she’s started calling the Quiet Gentleman. He’s sitting on the bench in the sun and looking at her through narrowed eyes. I notice that she’s still wearing her best dress and her dead mother’s wig, and she’s painted her eyes with thick lines of kohl.
So I sweep the yard, I repair the gate, I fix a hole in the roof, I mend a bench, I fetch, I carry, and then when I’m knackered, my mother clips me on the side of the head, accuses me of slacking and orders me to make more plates and beakers.
So I do that too.
My pottery area is in the corner of the yard close to the kitchen and across from the Quiet Gentleman. No bit of him moves apart from his eyelids, which have closed again.
I begin to work. First, I lift the cloth off the special mud I use, feel its consistency, add a touch more water and knead it. Next, I put the mud in the middle of my potter’s wheel and give the wheel a spin. Then I begin to work it.
I’m good at this. In my hands, a blob of mud flattens and stretches to make a saucer, a plate or a cup. I lose myself in my work, as I always do, and suddenly there’s a row of plates and a tray of beakers drying in the sun. Twenty plates and forty beakers.
Each plate will last for one meal and the beakers for an evening. Back before the business fell off, I had to make twenty plates a day. Now the same number will last a month.
‘Boy,’ the Quiet Gentleman says, his eyes still closed. ‘Mud boy. What else can you do with that stuff ?’
He’s talking so quietly that I have to strain to hear him.
‘Make animals,’ I say, ‘as a matter of fact.’
‘Like this, as a matter of fact?’
He holds up a lion that I must have left out.
‘Yes,’ I answer.
‘Any others?’ he asks.
‘Falcons,’ I say. ‘And lionesses and dogs and cobras.’
‘And storks?’ he asked. ‘And a sphinx or two. Maybe a crocodile?’
‘Maybe,’ I answer, wondering what he’s after.
A pause. His eyes snap open. ‘You will show me,’ he says. ‘Mud boy.’ And then they shut again.
Mud boy. Not a bad name. I am a mud boy. In my humble opinion, but in no one else’s, this makes me special. Yes, indeed. For the People of the Two Kingdoms, the People of the Great River, the People of the Black Earth, us in other words, mud is life.
Why are we the greatest nation on earth? Mud.
What do our crops grow in? The Great River’s mud.
How do we build our houses? You guessed it: from bricks made of mud.
What’s wrong with the desert? Extreme lack of mud.
If you work in an inn, you soon see how like mud we all are. Give us too much to drink and we collapse like wet mud. Give us too little to drink and we crack like dry mud. In life, we start out firm and strong and smooth like newly mixed-up mud and then, in the end, we just crumble away like old mud.
But here’s an interesting thought. I know the new king has banned the old gods, but that doesn’t mean they’ve gone away, does it? No, they’re hiding and I know where.
You see, the old woman who used to sweep our yard told me that in the early days of the world, Ra and Isis and Osiris got bored strolling around the muddy young world on their own, so they decided to use the mud to make the man and the woman, the dog and the cat, the crocodile and the hippo, the horse and the cow, and every other animal you can think of. In other words, they must know a thing or two about mud, and that’s a clue.
Here’s another. As she swept our yard, the old woman used to mutter a rhyme as she worked.
The wheel turns, the wheel burns
The stork and the falcon fly.
The wheel turns, the wheel burns
The cobra and lioness cry.
The wheel turns, the wheel burns
The sphinx is buried in earth.
The wheel turns, the wheel burns
The queen of the sun dies of thirst.
The wheel turns, the wheel burns
The king in the cavern turns green.
The wheel turns, the wheel burns
The ram and the phoenix grow lean.
So hey for the wind and hey for the air
For they don’t care for the wheel,
And the black dog walks and the black dog stalks
And the ghosts of the dead city squeal.
And the wheel turns and the wheel burns
The ghouls in the graveyard sigh,
The wheel turns and the wheel burns
And the stork and falcon fly . . .
And so on. And so on. And so on. That old song is as much a part of my world as the feel of dust under my feet or the smell of woodsmoke in the evening, but I never really thought about it as I followed the old woman around the yard.
Then just last year, after the new king had declared the Aten to be the one true god and his soldiers had closed the temples, the old woman checked we were alone, put her broom down, grabbed me by the arm and marched me to the empty temple at the foot of the Great Pyramid. I was frightened of the enormous stone gateway, the dark doors and the huge statues of dead gods and dead kings, their faces and names hacked off on the orders of the new king.
On we walked, through empty courtyards and dusty, high-pillared halls. Courtyards and halls grew smaller, then darker, then even darker and smaller but the more scared I grew, the harder the old woman’s nails dug into my arm.
At last we paused at a low, square doorway. Inside I could hear scrabbling and snarling. The old woman pushed me to one side and threw stones through the dark doorway until a wild dog rushed out and past us. Then she led me in.
We waited in the dark stillness. Slowly my eyes adjusted and dim shapes began to emerge from the walls. Figures carved into stone. The king’s soldiers had been at work with their chisels here as well and it was hard to make the shapes out until the old woman took my hand, laid it on the stone and started to chant.
Through the stone, under the roughness of the chisel marks, the shapes of the falcon and the stork, the sphinx and the lioness pressed up against my fingers. Gods and goddesses.
‘The new king thinks he killed ’em, but he’s just driven ’em out of the stone,’ the old woman whispered in my ear. ‘They’re hiding now. Boy of water, boy of earth: you’ll find ’em, boy. You’ll bring ’em back. That’s your job.’
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