Nefertiti's Sister

By Felicia Roche

Nefertiti's Sister takes place in a historically accurate ancient Egypt of the 18th Dynasty in the New Kingdom-the time of Nefertiti and her husband, King Akhenaten, as well as ultimately by the famous "boy king" Tut. 

The story centers around a clutch of royal women who are doing everything they can to keep each

• Language: English
• Publisher: Felicia Roche
• Release date: Aug 25, 2023
• ISBN: 9781087986012

Book preview

Legacy

Beket- Aten (like bucket but with an e)

Daughter of Tiye and Amenhotep (Pharoah).

Eventual wife to Akhenaten.

Kasaika (casa eeka)

Friend of Katril’s mother. Katril is scribe to Aye.

Becomes confidant and partner in ‘midwifery’ with Tiy

Katril – (kuh-trill)

Son to Ati. Scribe to Aye.

Ati is the woman who takes in Kasaika and introduces her to birth work.

Kiya (key-uh)

Given to Amenhotep as a bride/gift as a child.

Eventual wife to Akhenaten.

Tiy (tea)

Mother to Nefertiti and Mutnodjmet.

Wife to Aye.

Nekht (half of the word nectar – nect)

Faithful servant to Tiy.

Aye (eye)

Husband to Tiy and father to Nefertiti and Mutnodjmet.

Vizier to Amenhotep (Pharoah).

Amenhotep III (Amen – hoe- tep)

Father to Amenhotep IV/Akhenaten and Beket.

Mutnodjmet (moot-nod-juh-met) (moot for short)

Daughter of Tiy and Aye.

Sister to Nefertiti.

Nefertiti (nef-er-teetee)

Daughter of Tiy and Aye.

Sister to Mutnodjmet.

Wife to Akhenaten.

Amenhotep IV becomes Akhenaten

Husband to Nefertiti and Kiya.

Brother and husband to Beket.

Sinamun (cinnamoon)

Manages the harem.

Terms

Ma’at

Maat or Maʽat comprised the ancient Egyptian concepts of truth, balance, order, harmony, law, morality, and justice. Ma’at was also the goddess who personified these concepts, and regulated the stars, seasons, and the actions of mortals and the deities who had brought order from chaos at the moment of creation.

Vizier

The most powerful position after that of king. Known as the djat, tjat, or tjati. A vizier was the equivalent of the modern-day prime minister of the nation who actually saw to the day-to-day operation of the government in all its aspects.

Scribe

Usually only men learned to read and write. Although experts believe that most scribes were men, there is evidence of some female doctors. These women would have been trained as scribes so that they could read medical texts.

Canopic jars

Containers that were used during the mummification process, to store and preserve the viscera of their owner for the afterlife. They were commonly either carved from limestone, or were made of pottery.

Cartouche

A hieroglyphic name plate. It’s shaped like an oval with a horizontal bar at the base of the oval usually used for royalty only.

What is the flooding of the great river (Nile)?

The river flooding was what allowed the Egyptians to grow successful crops in the desert. This floodplain constitutes only 3% of Egypt’s land and is very fertile. It was a general rule that the prosperity of the year was dependent on how much silt the floods left behind.

1.

Like a Fish Jumping and Twisting

Beket-Aten stepped across the threshold on the tips of her toes with no more thought than taking a breath. The next blink, the next swallow, the next step. Her mind was consumed with finding her oldest and dearest wifesister Kiya. She wanted to tell her that her birth waters had leaked, and her birth time had come. What seemed like an eternity of planning and preparing and finally, a new baby and the necessary ma’at (harmony) in the palace because of this greatly anticipated baby.

And so it was with relief that Beket stepped across the threshold that would take her from her private chambers to Kiya’s wing of chambers.

She stepped across the large granite threshold as she had an untold number of times, when her foot slid a little. Then her foot slid a little more, and Beket grabbed for anything she could balance herself with, finding nothing but cool slick marble, and her foot kept sliding. The pain was simultaneous and instant, and there seemed to be nothing she could do to stop it. She knew in one thought that she was going to fall, and fear immediately followed this thought, the fear certain knowledge that this fall was going to hurt her. Her foot, her ankle, her baby unborn. The loudest fear-thought she had was please let the baby be safe. The baby was right there, inside her outstretched womb. Not much padding in these last few days. PLEASE don’t let me fall on my baby ready to be born. And fall she did. Hard. And directly onto her big belly. Beket managed to twist onto her side, midair, like a fish jumping and twisting out of the great river. Her little body was mostly outstretched belly. Her arms flailing, wig falling behind her, twisting onto her side as fast as she could. It was quite a sight, but no one saw. She fell right down onto her ankle, collapsing underneath her like a shell underfoot.

She had hurt her ankle badly, and there was blood, she had landed hard on the side of her belly, and her water was leaking out of her. She screamed as she fell, and the scream turned to moans as she lay on the cold marble floor and had her first labor pain. And with that, the plan to deliver the next pharaoh, King of Egypt, was in peril as well.

2.

Because I Loved Her

Kasaika was seven years old and was with her older sister Ebio, who was thirteen. Ebio was blossoming into a young woman, her chest now swelling with little buds, and she was also old enough to wear a wig with bangs like the older girls. Kasaika thought it looked quite beautiful on Ebio and found herself a little shy around her only sibling when she wore the grown-up wig. Ebio was taller than most girls her age, a trait she inherited from her mother, who was taller than their father. Ebio was catching up and before too long would be standing eye to eye with her father. She had long legs and a lean body, and she had an ease with her length. She reminded Kasaika of the giraffes she had seen coming off the cargo ships. Kasaika had seen the way boys and men were now stopping what they were doing to notice Ebio walk by. Yet when it was just the two of them, Ebio would still play hide and seek and sing the children’s songs as she always had.

One boy in particular, Gyasi, a customer of their family bakery, had shown a great deal of interest in Ebio. His father was a successful businessman specializing in transportation services. He owned a fleet of boats that shuttled people back and forth on the river. He also sold food on his boats, and his family had been customers of Kasika’s family bakery for years.

Ebio was excited to be drawing the attention of boys and about the possibility of marrying into a wealthier family. She didn’t want to pit olives and pound yeast her whole life. It made her hands look like a monkey’s hands, dried and cracked. She would daydream often about what life would be like to be wealthy. She would sit at the river all day, that’s what she would do. Sit at the river all day and invite her sister for meals they bought from the street vendors. She was also hoping to better her own family’s situation, and she really did like this boy. They were spending more and more time together, and she hoped that in the not-too-distant future he would ask her father for permission to marry her.

Her father’s parents had owned the bakery for several generations, and the business was lot of work for the entire family, including seven-year-old Kasaika.

One particularly hot evening, Ebio and Kaisaika were in the bakery alone, waiting for her parents to return from the big market on the river. There would not be enough room on the wagon for the girls and the purchased goods, and the girls did not want to walk back in the dusty heat of the desert. So, they decided to stay back and take the pits out of the olives for tomorrow’s olive bread, saving themselves work in the morning.

Sika, said Ebio, work faster and we will have time to get to the river before they return with the full cargo cart—I’ve done twice as many as you and your hands are faster and smaller, what’s wrong with you?

Kaisaika answered, The last time I worked fast, we still didn’t have enough time to go to the river and I worked fast for nothing. Kasaika really did hope they might be able to sneak to the river and see the trade boat that just arrived. There were rumors of exotic animals on board she hoped to get glimpse of.

Kaisaika loved to sit at the front counter of the bakery and watch all the people go by with their goods and their business. She had forgotten to work fast as she people watched but vowed to pick up her pace, and sure enough her little fingers began smashing olives and squeezing out pits with the speed of a lizard.

Finally, they finished pitting the olives and it was Kaisaika’s job to take the pits into the kitchen to be stored. Olive pits were closely inventoried and returned back to the palace for replanting. Returning the pits to the inventory jar was an important job, and Kasaika took this task seriously. She had just put the lid on the oversized jar for the pits, taking great care not to drop the heavy lid too hard, lest it crack. She had already cracked one lid, and her father would be very mad if she cracked another. She gently placed the lid back in its socket, loving the sound the heavy wet ceramic made when it settled in—there was something mysterious about the dank, gritty, tone. She imagined that’s what it would sound like if you took the lid off the moon and put it back on.

The lid had just been replaced when Kaisaika heard shouting coming from the front counter. The shouting scared her, it was so close. Kaisaika hid in the kitchen behind a gigantic jar of yeast, glad she wasn’t in the same room with the shouting. Then she remembered that her sister was in the front room and was scared for Ebio, hoping she had hid and was safe. Then she heard a pounding sound and a deep thud and a groan? a cough? a sound that came from a person, but she’d never heard that kind of sound before, it made Kaisaika shake just to hear it. That sound would haunt her the rest of her life, which seemed to end that day... for the end of her sister’s life in a very direct way was the end of Kaisaika’s life as she knew it.

She heard a pounding, she heard someone suck in their breath, and she heard a gurgling. She heard it all. Clearer than she ever heard anything. There were no words, only sounds. No one spoke as her sister died. There were just the sounds and then silence. A silence that made the hair on her body stand straight up. It was if the air, the clouds, the birds, the river all stopped moving. The silence was everywhere. It was terrifying and confusing.

It was in that moment that Kaisaika’s childhood ended. And she was far too young to be a woman. She was in a kind of limbo, neither here nor there.

She didn’t remember anything else from there, not how she or her sister were found or when or by whom. She did know that the metallic taste in her mouth hadn’t been there before that day, and then after, it was always there.

The boy who killed Ebio was named Khepri and had been troubled in the past. There had been rumors of him trying to kill his mother on a few occasions. Ebio smiled at him the same as she smiled at everybody that walked by or came into the bakery. She knew of his troubled personality but didn’t feel threatened by it or him. He only showed her his shyness. After the attack, he was seen leaving the bakery wielding a knife. Later that evening, he was caught in his home, his mother answered the door.

When asked why he killed her, he said it was because he loved her. He ended up being eaten by a crocodile when he escaped the confinement center and ran to the river to hide. His leg washed up on the shore and his mother claimed it.

After Ebio had been killed, Kaisaika found herself alone more often than not. Which was the exact opposite of what she had known in her hard-working yet happy childhood. She had never spent any time alone when her sister was alive. She was almost always with Ebio, and then she would be with her mother or in the bakery. But she was usually with her sister, surrounded by the bakers and the people who’d come to buy the bread.

Before the death of Ebio, Kaisaika would sit on her father’s lap while he negotiated for his supplies with the merchants. Sometimes familiar customers would come in with a little bead or a sweet for Kaisaika. Then suddenly nothing about her life was the same. Ebio’s death killed Kaisaika’s family life.

Some days would be as ‘normal’ as they could be. Some days her mother would sit slumped in a chair unable to hear anything anyone had to say and would not taste any food brought to her. Nor would she light the incense that signaled prayer time. Other times her mother would spend entire days or days at a time praying, and no matter of urgency could make her turn away from her prayers. And the days in between those days were becoming fewer and fewer.

It was during those times that Kaisaika learned to fend for herself, as her father was busy with the bakery and the delicate daily struggle of success or poverty.

Her father would run the bakery, the staff and the constant inventory of all the supplies and orders. Her mother would chaperone the deliveries, as she had not been able to once step back into the bakery after Ebio was killed. She made it very clear that she didn’t want her remaining daughter to be in the bakery either. So, she would often get on the delivery carriage with the driver and pull Kasaika up with her. Eventually it was just Kaisaika and the driver who were delivering the bread, as her mother further sank into the ritual of prayer, worshiping in the big temple most of her days and coming home at night only to sleep, if she came home.

Kaisaika loved the constant movement of the delivery truck. The same and different people they would meet and encounter. The businessmen, the house servants, and she was always extremely curious to see the different house setups and the various ways people lived. Some were so very wealthy, and lived a life that seemed exotic. Some were not obviously wealthy but were quite comfortable. She noticed early on that there weren’t any deliveries to her house. If one lived on her street, or cramped streets like it, they usually did not have bread delivered. They went to the market and bargained for their own bread.

Bread delivery was not something that everyone could afford, and certainly not her family. After Ebio died, they were able to trade bread to a woman in exchange for cooking and cleaning every week. A task no one in their family seemed interested or able to do.

One particular house that was of interest to Kasaika was one where a woman named Ati lived. Ati shared servants with other households, and the households had the bread delivered to Ati’s house, where they would pick it up. Her husband was a low-level scribe to the palace, and they lived modestly. Kasaika would run to the woman, and Ati would greet her with smiles and hugs. They became fast friends and looked forward to the fleeting moments when they would see each other on bread day.

Eventually, Kaisaika asked her mother if she could stay with Ati while she finished her gardening or went to the markets. Her mother was assured by Ati that she was grateful for Kaisaika’s company and visits. She only had one son, Katril, and he was older now and was apprenticing with his father as a scribe for the palace. He had shown great talent and promise, and the family hoped he could surpass his father’s mediocre position. Both father and son were busy and gone a majority of the time, and this left Ati feeling a bit lonesome.

Katril was growing into a man and wanted to spend his own time learning the trade of scribe and making connections to move up in his profession. Ati supported her son with his journey into manhood, but as is ancient and true, he needed her mothering less and less. And Ati still had a lot of mothering left in her, so she was left with much more free time on her hands and a gap in her heart. She had been helping the women in the village while they were in childbirth, sometimes dressing as a goddess and chanting or sometimes brewing teas and making cool cloths in scented water. She was gone helping with