In the beginning, Djamose was happy.
In the way of idiots and small children, he accepted everything that came within his orbit as right and fine and amply sufficient to his perfect contentment. His father was tall and strong and wise, his mother beautiful and kindly and properly doting, his sister, Asha, an endlessly diverting companion. He knew the other children of his village to be smart and funny and rich in important information, and he knew their parents to embody every good quality that he could name, and many more that he couldn’t. To Djamose, the wretched mud huts of Bibleb-Akhet were palaces, the close, gritty passages between them over-flowed with delight and interest. The murky water he drank from his cracked bowl flowed over his lips like cool bliss, and he couldn’t conceive of a meal more satisfying than a crust of coarse barley bread afloat in a thin millet soup.
Exploring the desert’s stony margin with Asha and the other children as they went about harvesting the scanty crop of fish grass that clung to life amid the rocks, he marveled at the harsh Red Land’s immensity and mystery. He feared the gods of those dry wastes, yet happily sought their company and never tired of pursuing their secrets.
Swatting flies away from his mother while she and the other village women gossiped and sang and with bleeding fingers twisted that wretched material into baskets and mats and exceedingly small profits, Djamose felt only awe before the simple plant’s miraculous utility and the impossible artistry of the rough, graceful hands that transformed it into wretched wares.
Each morning as he watched his father march away with the other grown sons of Bibleb toward the unseen land beyond Ibhi Wadjet to tend herds from which they received no milk, build light and airy houses far more comfortable than their own, and muck out ditches and canals that delivered not a drop of water to their benefit, he easily imagined them spending the hot days pleasantly engaged in exciting activities that, while not clearly defined, were surely remarkable and heroic and praiseworthy. Wadjet’s Teeth he considered a reassuring shield against certain poorly understood adult perplexities that existed in some distant realm and frequently cropped up disapprovingly in village conversation. For that matter, Djamose believed that when the morning breezes blew from Khepera’s mouth it was the desert itself that smelled green and fresh and deliciously wet, for he had never seen the verdant landscape so close at hand and assumed the playful spirits of sun-baked grit and hard flint and choking dust could exude the scents of paradise whenever they fancied.
Perhaps more than anything, Djamose was happy because he knew himself to be beloved of Bibleb. After all, could his life be so favored without the great god’s constant and tender approval? And wasn’t his own father, Bib-useka, personally appointed by Bibleb to serve as his chief minister? Granted, as reflected by Bibleb-Akhet’s rather subdued manner of worship the high priest of Bibleb enjoyed little in the way of special privilege. Bib-useka’s only badge of rank was a thin copper bracelet from which any identifying markings had long since worn away, and his principal duties were seeing to the orderliness of Bibleb’s shrine and reciting the ancient liturgies during the god’s relatively few festivals and formal observances. Even so, that unremarkable bracelet shown like burnished heaven in the child’s eyes, and listening to his father intone the mysteries of Bibleb before the assembled faithful in the sonorous tones and measured cadences distinctive to priests was all the proof he needed that Bibleb-Akhet was the eye of everything good and holy and wonderful, and that he, Djamose, born of the storm, was the eye of Bibleb-Akhet.
Unreasoning joy is common enough in children, but only the lucky or the unbalanced can nourish it into adulthood. Sooner or later rational people surrender the delusions of youth, allowing them to gradually sink to the very bottom of their hearts, locking foolish chimeras like supreme confidence, unshakable hope, and unconditional love in a strong chest were they can’t influence the natural and necessary course of life. They take out those luxuries only rarely, in quiet moments, remembering what it felt like to be truly happy, smiling and sighing over their former innocence. For most, that chest takes many years to fill, ensuring a relatively gentle transition from wide-eyed wonder to jaded cynicism. For Djamose, the evolution was rather more abrupt, and certainly more traumatic.
Possibly his happiness was simply too perfect. Possibly his illusions were simply too grand. Possibly his untested psychological apparatus was simply unprepared to withstand the decidedly unwelcome and certainly unexpected truths that were the bars on the cage of his existence. Whatever the case, on the 38th day of Flood, in the 11th year of the blessed reign of Pharoah Amenhotep III, Great Spear and Shield of the Two Lands, the self-appointed Eye of Bibleb-Akhet got his first unvarnished look at his place in the world. On that bright morning, Bib-useka took his supremely confident, unshakably hopeful and unconditionally loving son by the hand and led him east through Wadjet’s Teeth into the moist and waiting mouth of Sobek, and it can fairly be said that Djamose was never happy again.
