Mara, Daughter of The Nile

“And still the king does not come of age! Why? It’s obvious, friend! He’s not allowed to, nor will he ever be! Hatshepsut is pharaoh, and Egypt must put up with it!”

Impulsively, Nekonkh fumes against Hatshepsut, Egypt’s female ruler, whom he believes has usurped her throne from the rightful pharaoh, her younger half-brother Thutmose. As Sheftu is quick to remind him, such utterances are treasonous and could easily lead to his death, since the queen’s spies are “everywhere.” Nekonkh’s outburst is particularly reckless because Sheftu shows every sign of being an impostor and may himself be one of these spies. However, Sheftu quickly reassures Nekonkh that he has nothing to fear; indeed, the captain’s candid remark leads to a secret alliance between the two men against the queen.

“What’s that you’re hiding, you thieving wretch? One of the master’s scrolls again, I’ll take my oath! Hai-ai! Remember the last time! He all but took the flesh off your shoulders, stupid, isn’t once enough?”

Mara, a young woman enslaved to a merchant, has learned to read and write from a former master and harbors a powerful and secret thirst for knowledge. She is also a risk-taker; in this scene, Teta, an older enslaved woman, has just caught her sneaking a papyrus scroll from her master’s library, an offense that would have dire consequences if her master were to catch her at it. Zasha and his wife are illiterate and thus have no use for their books, which they collect only for show: a pretension that increases Mara’s contempt for them.

“‘Someday,’ she said through her teeth, ‘I’m going to have gold. So much gold that I could eat roasted waterfowl every day. So much that I could buy Zasha and his simpering wife and all his relatives, and toss them to the crocodiles!’”

At this early stage in the story, Mara’s grandiose ambitions reveal mere fantasies of revenge, power, and personal wealth. Much later, after befriending Sheftu and Inanni, her ideals become less self-centered, and she will eventually undergo The Shift from Self-Interest to Social Consciousness as she gains a sense of camaraderie with others and develops patriotic feelings for Egypt itself.

“A princess of Canaan, one Inanni, is on her way to Thebes at this moment to become the wife of the young pretender Thutmose.”

In one curt statement, Mara’s mysterious new owner reveals his political allegiances, and his reference to Thutmose as a “pretender” sets him in clear opposition to the conspiracy to depose the queen. His loyalty to the queen augurs a deepening of the novel’s intrigue, since Mara must now use deception to ensconce herself in the heart of the royal court itself and spy on the king to earn her freedom. The impostures of Sheftu and Mara, the two main characters, put them on opposing sides of this intrigue.

“That was what I wanted, to be pharaoh’s friend at home as well as on the battlefield. But pharaohs do not love men, they use them. No, Lord Sheftu, I have seen enough of pharaohs.”

The aging General Khofra, embittered by his years of service under Hatshepsut’s father, Thutmose I, who treated him with ingratitude, at first refuses to join Sheftu’s conspiracy. However, Sheftu appeals to his patriotism by insisting that his plot against the queen is not for the glory of any one man (such as King Thutmose) but for Egypt herself. As Inanni does later with Mara, Sheftu argues that a nation is far more important than the individual who happens to occupy the throne.

“But suddenly she found herself picturing Sheftu’s face instead, and the way the little golden river reflections danced across it, and how his arms had felt about her.”

Just days into her career as one of the queen’s spies, Mara has scored a huge coup by learning the identity of the leader of the conspiracy against Hatshepsut. With this information, she can easily buy her freedom and perhaps enrich herself as well, fulfilling her dreams of wealth and vengeance. However, she immediately has qualms because of her growing attraction to Lord Sheftu, who proves himself to be a far warmer presence than her “granite-faced” master.

“For the second time in one week she was being threatened with her life, being maneuvered with almost identical phrases into the position of spy and intriguer—and by two who were deadly enemies, fighting in opposing camps, for opposing causes!”

Caught eavesdropping by Sheftu, Mara is pressed into the role of double agent. Sheftu, who believes her to be running from her enslaver, forces her, on pain of death, to join his conspiracy against the queen’s people, who have already ordered her to spy on Thutmose. This situation puts her in extreme danger since she risks discovery by both sides. However, she knows that if she is very careful, her position will also give her considerable power, since she can choose which side to help. At this point, Mara sees little difference between the two factions, both of whom have threatened her life. For now, she plans to help the side that will materially benefit her the most.

“The jewelry was crude and tasteless, the boxes uncarved, and the scattered clothing so vulgar in its gaudy colors that Mara’s civilized Egyptian nose wrinkled disdainfully.”

Although she is enslaved, Mara has served a jewel merchant and has seen enough of Egyptian finery and fashions to look down almost snobbishly on the Canaanite princess’s rustic panoply. As an insult to the prince, Queen Hatshepsut has chosen him a bride from a backwater region, and Mara fully expects to feel nothing but contempt for this “shepherd’s daughter.”

“But her eyes moved Mara to sudden pity. They were enormous, timid, frightened dark eyes, and they stared at the Egyptian girl as they must have stared at countless strange faces and customs that had come up to bewilder her in this foreign land.”

Mara is surprised to feel compassion for Inanni, the homesick Canaanite princess for whom she must act as interpreter. Predisposed by her brutal life to despise royalty, especially from “barbarian” countries, Mara finds Inanni to be very different from the haughty parvenu she expected. Instead, the princess is a sad, frightened woman far from home, and her lack of control over her life mirrors Mara’s own. Mara’s pity humanizes her and suggests that her mercenary self-interest has begun to thaw.

“Why make a choice between these two when each thought her his ally, his bonded slave? Why not play both ends against the middle—serve both, meanwhile serving only herself?”

At her first meeting with Queen Hatshepsut and Count Senmut, Mara cannot bring herself to expose Sheftu as a traitor to the queen. Instead, she decides to bide her time in order to determine which of the two sides will offer better prospects. Her personal feelings for Sheftu and her dislike of the queen and her minions are beginning to outweigh her expedient goal of gaining freedom and wealth. Of course, the longer she waits, the greater the danger to her from both sides.

“It was no stone devil-god but Count Senmut whose nose and brow traced the same harsh angle. In Amon’s name, what hornet’s nest had she walked into, that day in Menfe?”

Mara realizes that her new master, who bought her in Menfe and made her a spy, is much more highly placed than she had thought. He is Nahereh, the brother of Hatshepsut’s ruthless aide-de-camp, Count Senmut. Besides his power over her as her owner, he is one of the last people anyone in Egypt would want for an enemy.

“This was no palace intrigue, but a revolution, involving priesthood, nobility, and the populace—no doubt the Army as well.”

Sheftu has just told Mara that the queen’s plans to murder Thutmose were thwarted by his groundswell of popular support, and now much of the nation prays for her violent overthrow. The stakes in Mara’s game of tightrope are raised considerably, for she sees that Sheftu’s machinations are not grounded in petty self-interest or personal feeling but in the will of a nation.

“Ten thousand kinds of a fool, to risk your soul among the khefts! They’ll steal away your ka and leave naught but the shell of you! They’ll dwell in your shadow, they’ll bring you down to blindness and sickness, they’ll deliver you to the Forty Beasts—”

As Mara’s sympathies lean more and more toward the idealistic Sheftu and against her harsh owner and the haughty queen, she passes a secret message to him from Thutmose but begs him not to commit the terrible crime it demands: the pillaging of a pharaoh’s tomb. To the Egyptians, this is the worst possible sin, punished by eternal agony, and Mara’s burgeoning feelings for Sheftu recoil with unfeigned horror at such a prospect for the man she is increasingly growing to love.

“He no longer believed, even in his heart, that there lived man or woman gold could not buy. Only their prices differed.”

Ironically, Sheftu’s success in laying the groundwork for his idealistic revolution has made him more cynical about human nature. He is disillusioned by the ease with which he has been able to bribe the country’s nobles with gold, and he now believes that every human has their price. This outlook leads him to doubt Mara’s trustworthiness as well.

“Worse yet, the King of Kadesh has stirred up every city king in northern Palestine and Syria—they’re banding together to defy us, and the queen does nothing, nothing!”

Sheftu discusses with Khofra the “sorry mess” of the Egyptian empire, which he blames on Queen Hatshepsut, who reputedly cares less for war and plunder than for building monuments to her own glory. Her extravagant building projects, funded with extortionary taxes, have ruined the Egyptian economy, and her passivity on the international stage has encouraged revolt by Egypt’s subject states, further hurting the country. In reality, however, this portrayal is deeply inaccurate, for modern historians have judged Hatshepsut to be one of Egypt’s most successful pharaohs.

“I know the king has no interest in me, nor ever will, and when I have audience with him he does not speak of the things you say he does. There is a great trouble of some sort here, and I have somehow become part of it.”

Inanni shows that, despite her perplexity with Egypt’s strange customs and language, she has not been fooled by Mara’s subterfuge. She also knows that her own “engagement” to Thutmose is a sham and that he and Mara are discussing far weightier things in their meetings. In this moment, Mara is forced to realize that the princess is far less naïve than she once believed her to be.

“Egypt is not pharaoh, Mara, nor is it this long, green valley with its black mud that is so different from what I know. Egypt is neither the Nile nor the cities.”

This exchange marks a key moment in Mara’s character development, for Inanni shares the insight that a country is much more than its land or its government. The essence of Egypt, for instance, resides in the daily lives and customs of its many citizens and their friends and families, who share a love for each other and for their way of life that has little to do with the queen and her nobles. While Mara does not yet take this patriotic insight to heart, Inanni’s words will eventually echo back to her in the novel’s climactic scene and steel her resolve against the injustices of the queen.

“If all goes well—if all this we have talked of tonight comes to pass, and the king rules Egypt—then you need stay here and be homesick no longer, in this land you hate.”

Mara demonstrates her sympathy and personal loyalty to the Canaanite princess by vowing to return Inanni to the land she loves. At the same time, Mara reveals that she has finally ceased to play her two-sided game and is now firmly on Sheftu’s side in the coming conflict.

“She found herself clinging to him fiercely, caught up in an emotion more compelling than any she had known. For once she did not plan or scheme or use her wits, since it was quite impossible. She did not even think.”

After Sheftu’s near-miraculous escape from the pitch-dark labyrinth in the tomb of Thutmose I, he tells Mara that he loves her and kisses her for the first time. Mara, who has always plotted and schemed throughout her impoverished life, experiences something entirely new: a seismic feeling beyond choice or reason. As a result, all the subterfuge of her recent activities vanishes in a moment.

“Too late, she was aware of the hard shape of the ring as if it were a circlet of fire burning into her flesh.”

Ironically, right in the middle of Mara and Sheftu’s embrace, when her love for him has vanquished any thought of persisting in her duplicity, Sheftu discovers the electrum ring on her finger and realizes just how deep her deceptions run. The precious ring, which was supposed to pay her way into Inanni’s service, is now proof of her double-dealing.

“Mara stood dry mouthed, sick, and numbing all over, gazing at last into the face of treachery, with which she had been flirting for so long.”

In his casual betrayal of all his comrades at the Inn of the Falcon, the juggler Sahure slips into the treacherous role that Mara once aspired to attain. Despite what Sheftu may think of her now, her visceral horror at Sahure’s actions reveals how much she has changed in the few weeks since she has gotten to know Sheftu and his friends, for such treachery is inconceivable to her now.

“She understood Inanni’s story now. They were her friends and kin, the only ones she had. They were Egypt. I do not do this for the king, she thought in wonder. I do it for Egypt.”

Mara once pitied Inanni for her naiveté in believing that wealthy people might sacrifice their own self-interests for the good of the nation, but she now sees the truth in Inanni’s words. Cornered by Nahereh, she steels herself to make the ultimate sacrifice. She gives up her ambitions of gaining freedom or gold and instead resolves to sacrifice her very life to help “people like [her]self”: the common people of Egypt, who are wasting away under the queen’s ruinous regime.

“Aye. The greatest treasure in Egypt—a maid whose loyalty cannot be bought. Whatever bargain we make, Daughter of the Sun, must include her freedom.”

Sheftu, who once vowed that all humans have their price, has finally recognized the death-defying selflessness of Mara, whom he declares Egypt’s “greatest treasure.” However, his words only inflame the sadism of Hatshepsut, who orders the young woman to be beaten to death in front of him.