Sphinx's Princess by Esther Friesner
For Tom Hise,
one of the few real princes I know,
and for his wonderful wife, Jan,
the power behind the throne
From the time of my first memories, my dreams were filled with lions—fierce, impossibly huge monsters with fiery manes and eyes black and cold as a starless night. There were no lions of such colossal size in all of Pharaoh’s realm, not even in the wild Red Land, the desert where the waters of the holy Nile never reached. I was only a small child, barely four years old, but old enough to know that the lions haunting my dreams could not be real. And yet—I was still afraid.
The dreams were always the same: It was daytime and I was playing with my doll in the shade of the sycamore trees in our garden when suddenly the earth under my feet turned to sand. My doll sank out of sight as the lions clawed their way into the blazing sunlight, their mouths gaping, ready to devour me. I ran toward the house, crying for help, but no one came, and my home slipped beneath the surface of the sand before I could reach it. Then I was running, running across the Red Land where nothing grew but stones and bones. I saw strangely shaped mountains in the distance, and though I somehow knew I would be safe if I could reach them, I never did.
No matter how fast my dream-self ran, the lions always caught me. When they did, they surrounded me in a ring, and that was when their faces underwent a frightening change: They became the faces of men. Before I could marvel at the transformation, their lips parted and I saw that though their mouths looked human, they still held the keen, bloodstained teeth of lions. Their roars shook the desert.
In every nightmare, the last thing I saw before I woke was their fanged faces. As soon as I felt the first hot touch of their breath on my cheeks, my eyes flew open and I found myself shivering and sobbing in my bed.
I can’t count how many times my terrified tears brought Father running. He was a very patient man who never once scolded me for waking him. Even if my beloved nursemaid Mery was already there, trying to calm me, he would dismiss her. Then he’d pick me up in his arms and hold me until I fell asleep again.
My nightmares grew worse. Sobs and tears became shrieks and howls that roused everyone in the household. After one particularly harrowing night, I woke up to find myself not in my own bed, or even in Mary’s comforting arms, but beside the pool of blue lotus flowers in our garden, only a stone’s throw from the very spot where the lions appeared in my dreams. I sat bolt upright and screamed.
“Nefertiti, hush, it’s all right, I’m here.” Father’s arms were around me, strong and sheltering. He was down on one knee beside me, his face filled with sadness. “I thought that if I brought you out here to sleep, Isis would take pity on you and banish your evil dreams forever.” He gestured to the delicately painted stone image of a woman whose serene face and welcoming arms were reflected in the waters of the lotus pool.
“Isis?” I was very young and the name was new to me, even if the statue itself was already one of the eternal, unchanging parts of my childish world, like our house, our garden, the city of Akhmin beyond our walls, and the great river that flowed beside them. “Will she make the lions go away?”
“Lions?” Father echoed. “What lions?”
“The ones that come to hunt me every night,” I said. Though everyone in our house knew I suffered from nightmares, that was the first time I ever spoke about the images those nightmares contained. No one under our roof—not even Mery or Father—had ever asked me to describe the dreams that woke me up, screaming. By night, their chief concern was getting me to go back to sleep. By day, they might have been afraid to remind me of my midnight terrors. If we pretend the evil dreams don’t exist, maybe she’ll forget about them tonight, at last!
My father settled himself cross-legged on the ground and took me into his lap. “Tell me about the lions, Nefertiti,” he asked as solemnly as if I were a grown-up, and not a child who had only lived to see four Inundations of the sacred river.
So I told him everything about the dream that haunted me, and when I reached the part about how their faces changed, he hugged me close to his chest. “My poor little bird,” he said. “The same dream, time and time again, and I never knew. All of your unhappiness for so long, and I could have put an end to it so quickly if only—” He sighed. Then his expression changed from regret to determination. “Never mind what’s past. Now I can help you.”
I never doubted it for a moment. Of course he could help me! He was Father, strong, all-loving, all-powerful, the only true god in my eyes. All the rest—Amun, Osiris, Thoth, Ra, Hathor, even Min, for whom our city was named—were only names to me. (Indeed, I had heard Isis’s name many times before that morning in the garden, but I’d never thought to attach the sound of it in my ear to anything solid, the way hearing the word table or cat or tree called up a specific image in my mind.)