1600 BC, in an alternate timeline
Itaweret moved her final pawn off the last square on the senet board. She straightened on her stool and crossed her arms with a triumphant smirk, victory assured in the game of passing.
“By all the gods, not again!” Bek slammed his hands on the ebony table, which knocked his two remaining pawns off the gameboard. “There must be some mistake!”
Itaweret laughed. “What mistake? That you’ve been losing the past few times? I keep telling you, Brother, you take these games much too seriously. You act as if the fate of all Per-Pehu depended on it.”
Bek narrowed his eyes as his lips curled into a snarl. “I might not be wrong, then. If I am to govern this colony, I must hone my strategic skills. How can I do that when I keep losing to a—a priestess?”
Itaweret didn’t take one grain of offense. If anything, his righteous anger amused her even more. “Remember what Father says. You do not need to succeed to learn.”
Bek opened his mouth for another retort but stopped, stood from his stool beside the table, and took a deep breath. His mahogany-skinned brow sparkled with sweat from the afternoon sunlight that descended upon the back courtyard. He stormed across the courtyard to an alabaster bench beneath one of the olive trees and plopped down to sulk in its shade.
As entertaining as her brother’s tantrums were at the end of every senet game, any pleasure Itaweret felt evaporated when she saw him wipe a tear off his cheek. Not since they were children had she seen Bek show such emotion unless he thought nobody was looking.
She walked over, sat beside him on the bench, and laid her arm on his shoulders. “It is alright, Brother. Take your mind off it.”
She pointed to the rectangular pool in the middle of the courtyard, which was fringed with papyrus reeds, its blue lotus flowers throwing off a delectable fragrance. “Remember how you loved to chase the frogs across the lily pads? Or how you would dig every morning under the palm trees in search of treasure or old monster bones? I believe the hole is still there.”
Bek brushed her arm off. “I outgrew those childish things years ago. I am a man now. And what’s more, I am the great chief of Per-Pehu’s son. I should be off studying anyway.”
He got up and retreated quickly to the columned gallery surrounding the courtyard, disappearing through the doorway that led to his bedchamber.
Itaweret sighed and muttered a prayer, asking the gods to guide her younger brother to find peace in his heart. Bek looked at matters in the world differently: everything the gods had placed on earth would test his mettle as the future great chief. He even regarded the senet game as less of a diversion and more of a practice of his tactical abilities, should he have to lead the colony’s garrison into battle. Not even the sons of the pharaohs back in Kemet, across the Great Green Sea to the south, would have preoccupied themselves with such uneasy anticipation of their responsibilities.
Itaweret couldn’t do more to ease her poor brother’s temper. Instead, she savored the tranquility of the courtyard, listening to the dulcet twitter of black doves nested on the palm, acacia, and olive trees. With the bench to herself, she laid down and basked in the summertime warmth, stretching her body over its length, her figure adding contours to the straight bench back, her locks of tightly coiled black hair spilling down.
“What’s the matter with your brother, my child?” Itaweret bolted upright, startled. Dedyet, mother to Itaweret and Bek and wife of the great chief of Per-Pehu, entered from the opposite side of the courtyard. A smile creased across her weathered, middle-aged face, her skin almost as dark as the wig of tightly curled black locks running down its sides.
Itaweret scooted aside to make room. “Oh, he’s a bit upset that he lost another game of senet today. I suppose I can’t blame him.”
“You would act the same way if you were in his place, believe me,” Dedyet said. “And while he does need to learn graciousness, your brother isn’t wrong to feel the stress he does. If anything, Itaweret, I think you could stand to learn from him.”
Itaweret cocked an eyebrow. “What do you mean, Mother?”
“Suffice to say, I’d think the high priestess of Mut would spend her time doing more important things than playing games with her brother. These are troubled times we’re living in, after all.” Itaweret’s smile flopped into a frown. “Speaking of which, your father has an important guest arriving within a couple of hours, and they specifically requested your presence. You ought to put on your best for the occasion.”
Itaweret wasted no time. She returned to her dressing room, washed herself clean, and slathered scented oil over her umber skin to make it glisten. She then focused on her face and hair, combing and perfuming her locks and beading their tips with gold, and lining her eyelids with black kohl. She adorned her neck and limbs with jewelry of gold, copper, and colored stones, and threw on her whitest, most translucent linen dress. Such was the work that went into making any self-respecting daughter of Kemet look presentable for public attention.
She strode out, adjusting her collar of gold, lapis-lazuli, malachite, and carnelian as she navigated through a series of painted hallways to her father’s audience chamber. Who had he invited for such a formal occasion? Since he summoned her to his side, the guest was presumably a man. Men always wanted at least one young woman to decorate the scene while they talked politics, regardless of what they were discussing.
She could only pray to the gods that the mystery guest wasn’t the sort who demanded anything more from women than visually appealing background decor.
She arrived in the audience chamber to find Mahu, her father—and no one else. That was a surprise. Where was the guest she’d spent hours preparing for? Only the clipping of Mahu’s sandals over the tiled floor disturbed the silence within the spacious columned room as he stepped down from his great chief ’s throne to her. He wore his finest jewelry, whitest loincloth, and blackest braided wig, with gold rings slipped onto his long and narrow beard.
“You’ve come at the very best time, my child,” Mahu said. His caramel-colored face seemed a shade paler than normal. “I feared you would keep our guest waiting.”
“Who exactly might this man be, Father?” Itaweret asked. “He seems to have you as spooked as an antelope being stalked.”
“You will see why the moment you first lay eyes on him. All I can say is that he really isn’t one you want to provoke. Please conduct yourself the absolute best you can, Itaweret.”
The doors at the far side of the audience chamber parted open with an echoing grind. Mahu hurried back onto his gilded throne, with Itaweret following and then standing next to him. She tilted her head up, her arms straight down, trying to look as regal as possible despite the anxious chill trickling up her spine.
A procession of men marched into the chamber, their steps loud and menacing. They were dressed in clanking panoplies of banded bronze armor, which looked like bronze pots stacked atop one another, from biggest to smallest. Such bottom-heavy suits would have invited ridicule normally, but these men wielded spears flashing reddish glints that reflected the evening sunlight. Sheathed broadswords banged along their hips as they walked.
The leader of the arriving party took off his helmet of boar-tusk platelets and shook his long mane of straight black hair. A crimson cape streamed behind him as he strutted onto the dais supporting Mahu’s throne. His hazel-brown eyes scanned all around the audience chamber.
“Not unimpressive, I must say,” the leader said in baritone Achaean. “It’s not the most monumental pinnacle of Kemetian architecture, to be sure, but I suppose I’ll have to find that in Kemet itself.”
“It’s the most a colonial great chief like myself could afford, I’m afraid,” Mahu replied, also adopting the Achaean language for purposes of the diplomatic conversation. “Ever since the Canaanite Hyksos seized the north of Kemet and so cut us off from our mother country, we’ve been a bit stretched on resources.”
“Such a shame. It’s almost as if settling down on faraway shores wasn’t so ingenious after all.”
The Achaean man’s gaze drifted over to Itaweret, his eyes rising and following the contours of her body. A broad grin stretched almost the full width of his olive-skinned face. “Ah, if it isn’t the lovely Itaweret herself! I see the rumors do not lie. She’s quite the exotic young beauty, isn’t she?”
He reached a hand over to stroke Itaweret’s hair. She forced herself to stand still and let him caress it, despite every impulse to back away and slap him senseless.
“Who are you, anyway?” she asked. “And what, by all the gods, do you want?”
“You haven’t heard of me already? I am Scylax, king of Mycenae. And I’ve come to negotiate the fate of your little settlement here.”
Mahu leaned forward, alarmed. “What do you mean, our fate? You’re not plotting anything violent or destructive, are you?”
Scylax cut loose a laugh filled with hearty mockery. “My dear Mahu, you do not seem to realize how little all the Achaean people approve of your colonizing our lands. Trust me when I say that I do not speak only for myself, or even the people of Mycenae. Why, if we were to rub out the black stain that is the Kemetian presence here, every Achaean city and village would sing my praises.”
He glanced up at a painted relief behind Mahu’s throne, which depicted the pharaoh of Kemet holding a troop of yellow-faced men by their hair while raising a battle mace to smite them. Another row of captives knelt underneath the pharaoh’s feet, ropes tightly binding their arms together. Itaweret could not shake the moment captured in the relief, nor the fact that the captives’ features and attire resembled those of native Achaeans.
“After all, it’s not like your colony’s relations with my people have always been peaceful,” Scylax continued. “Consider it a testament to my benevolence that I’m providing you with the option of survival—on two conditions.”
He returned his gaze to Itaweret, who retreated a step. The disgust his eyes and words churned inside her stomach burned her with the rage of oil on fire.
“I know from your eyes exactly what one of those conditions is,” she snarled.
“Itaweret!” Mahu banged his scepter on the floor of the dais. “I told you to conduct yourself the best you could. That’s on behalf of all Per-Pehu.”
“Your father gives sound advice, my ebony maiden,” Scylax said. “Especially when I haven’t even named my terms yet. The first is a regular tribute in gold and silver, which I understand you Kemetians have mined in abundance since coming here. The second, of course . . .”
The Mycenaean king thrust an arm around Itaweret’s waist and pressed her against his armor, using the crushing force of his massive muscles to suppress her attempts to squirm from his hold. Only Scylax’s superior strength kept her from tearing herself away and pouncing on the lustful brute to savage him with a leopardess’s fury.
“. . . is your daughter’s hand in marriage,” Scylax finished. “She’d make a fine trophy for me, wouldn’t you agree?”
Mahu’s eyes shifted back and forth between Itaweret and the Mycenaean king. “King Scylax, I would be willing to send you as much gold and silver as you request. Ever since we lost contact with our mother Kemet, we’ve little use for most of it anyway. But I am afraid we Kemetians don’t normally give our daughters away to foreign rulers. It’s not our custom.”
“Perhaps you will think differently when you consider that I’ve already encamped the bulk of my army on the plain east of your city. Believe me when I say our action will be immediate if you do not honor my requests.”
“Well, in that case . . . as much as I would loathe to lose my eldest child, I’d loathe even more to lose everyone else in the colony that I hold dear. My daughter, what do you think?”
Itaweret had no intention of giving anything to the despicable tyrant before her, let alone herself. Neither did she want Per-Pehu razed to the ground, and its people either massacred or forced into chains.
She thought more about it. Her father had a point. No woman wanted to lose her freedom, especially a woman with the great freedom she enjoyed, but the freedom of one woman would never outweigh the survival of an entire colony.
Nor could one man be allowed to take so many lives and wipe out an entire people because he couldn’t have one woman’s body.
She came upon a solution. “No man, not even a king, should feel like a woman owes him her love,” she said. “If you truly desire me, O Scylax of Mycenae, you’ll have to fight for it!”
Mahu banged his scepter again. “Itaweret, think about this. We haven’t the strength to go to war right now.”
Scylax’s smile suggested he couldn’t have been more amused. “On the contrary, O great chief of Per-Pehu, I look forward to it. We’ll have more sport with a fair fight than merely hacking up helpless citizens anyway. Let us meet on the plain east of here.”
Silence hung within the audience chamber. Finally, Mahu let out a frustrated sigh, shaking his head. “I suppose I’ve no longer any choice. Know only that if we win, you will have to leave our proximity empty-handed.”
“And if you lose . . . well, I needn’t spell that one out. Dine and sleep well tonight, my Kemetian hosts. You’ll need it.”
Scylax and his retainers marched out of the audience chamber, the echoes of their steps taunting the hosts until they could be heard no more.
Silence hung in the hall. Itaweret wrung her hands together while absorbing her father’s harsh and incredulous expression. She felt like a child about to be blasted with a scolding lecture.
“Tell your brother about this,” Mahu said. “He should know he’ll be leading the defense.”
Itaweret nodded and left the room.