No matter how many times I asked my eternal question, Henenu’s answer remained the same. He made me work for knowledge. Even though he was forever the size of a child, he was a grown-up. More important, he was one of those rare grown-ups who knew how to talk to children without treating us like living dolls or clever puppies.
“It looks like you’re doing the same thing you did on the Day of the Scorpion,” I said, standing behind him and peering over his shoulder. “You’re making pictures, only you’re not doing it in the dirt.”
This was true. I’d found my friend sitting cross-legged in the shade of one of our sycamore trees, a sharpened reed in one hand, a piece of beeswax-covered wood in his lap. The wax was covered with line after line of pictures. Even though we had known each other for a year, this was the first time I’d discovered him busy with this particular activity.
“And why do you think I’m doing this, little kitten?” It hadn’t taken him long to call me by the pet name Father had given me. It made me happy to hear him use it.
“I don’t know,” I admitted, settling myself on the ground beside him and studying the lines in the wax. “Magic?”
“Maybe.” The keen point of the reed flew across the board and a new row of pictures appeared. “There,” he said. “That’s you.”
“That?” I pointed at the figure of a seated woman at the right-hand end of the line of images. “That doesn’t look like me. She’s too old and she’s got long hair.”
Henenu chuckled. “What I meant to say was, that’s your name. This is how you write ‘Nefertiti.’ ”
I looked more closely at the figures. “You’re teasing me again,” I said. “You’re trying to trick me the same way you did on that day, pretending you were using magic to save Bit-Bit. But you were only pretending.”
Henenu sighed dramatically and let his large head slump forward onto his chest. “So this is the thanks I get for helping you: nothing but cruel doubt and accusations of falsehood. If I were to die tomorrow, when I came before Osiris for judgment, the gods would hear your words and condemn me for being a liar. They’d feed my heart to the Devourer and that would be the end of me, body and soul.”
“Nooooo!” I threw my arms around his neck. The Devourer of Souls was the goddess Ammut, a ghastly monster who was one-third hippo, one-third lion, and one-third crocodile. Any soul that failed to pass its trial of virtue was her lawful prey. There was no escape, no appeal, only oblivion. “I didn’t say you lied,” I protested. “I said you pretended.”
“Some people might argue that those are the same thing,” Henenu said, cheerful once more. He gently freed himself from my hold. “I did pretend to heal your sister, who needed no healing, but I assure you, whenever I write, I write only what I know to be true. The words I made in the dust on that day were a prayer to Hathor, asking her to calm and comfort you. Like this.” He scraped the reed pen over the waxed tablet.
I studied the results closely. “Where is Hathor’s name?” I asked. He pointed to a picture of a hawk inside a square. I frowned, skeptical. “That doesn’t look like her. Sometimes she looks like a cow, and sometimes like a woman with cow’s ears and horns, but never like a hawk.”
“It doesn’t need to look like her. There are plenty of painters and sculptors to make images of the goddess. But this symbol means her name.”
“The way this means me?” I asked, fascinated. I pointed to the centerpiece of my own inscribed name, a row of four strange images between what looked like a pair of feathers. “But how does it do that?”
Henenu seemed to take real pleasure in answering my questions. “Ah, my lady is wiser than many of my students. They never take the time to wonder about the reasons behind their lessons; they only drudge away like oxen plowing a field, eager to have the task over and done. They memorize everything and learn … nothing. It’s said that long ago, the god Thoth himself taught men the mysteries of writing. These are his sacred symbols. We are merely the servants that carry them from place to place and age to age. Now this”—he indicated the same symbol that had drawn my attention, a rounded object with a long, straight line rising from it—“this is a picture of the human heart and the windpipe.”
“The what?” I knew about the heart, which was the house of the soul, but the other word was unknown to me.
“The path from your lungs to your mouth that carries the breath of life and lets you speak, cry, sing, laugh, and ask such interesting questions.” He winked at me. “That’s what the picture is, but what it represents is nefer, the part of your name that means beauty and goodness.”
“I guess that makes sense,” I admitted. “Mery taught me that my heart should always stay beautiful or Ammut will eat it, and it’s good to breathe.”
My words made Henenu laugh out loud. “I never thought of it that way! Very good, my lady: It’s not every day that someone gives a lesson to a teacher. What would you make of the rest of these symbols, I wonder?”
I pushed myself closer to the little scribe and fixed my eyes on all of the writing on the waxed tablet. “Well, that one looks like ripples on the river, so it must mean water, and that one’s a flower, so maybe it means beautiful, too, and that looks like Bit-Bit when she sucks her thumb, so I’ll bet it means baby, and that one—it’s just a bent line, I don’t know what it’s supposed to be. Oh! And there are two feathers in my name! Is it Ma’at’s sacred Feather of Truth, the one that goes into the other side of the scales when the gods weigh our hearts?” I turned to Henenu, eager to see approval in his eyes.
I was not disappointed. His smile spread all the way across his broad face. “It’s much more complicated than that, my dear, but you’re not too far off the target. You have good eyes and a good mind. You’re also not afraid to try to answer even though it means you might be wrong, and smart enough to confess when you don’t know something. I’d love to see how well you’d do with some real instruction in the scribal arts. I wish you could be one of my students.”
“Why can’t I?” I asked.