Daughter of The Nile
• • •
The sun had barely crowned the horizon when temple attendants wrapped young Thermuthis in white. These sheets were not the soft, perfumed royal linen reserved for sit-ins in the court. Instead, she was wrapped in coarse temple cloth that scratched at her collarbone and smelled faintly of salt and ash. It seemed everything about today was supposed to be uncomfortable. Thermuthis had been told, for as long as she could remember, that this day would come. The sacred privilege of the firstborn daughter of royal blood: to be summoned to the House of Neith in the week of her seventh birthday, where warrior-priestesses trained and virgins were set apart for divine service. They said it was a rare honor. Walking now through the temple gate, her small hand swallowed in her mother’s, she tried to find the honor in the coldness rising through the soles of her feet.
“Today, you are made worthy,” her nurse whispered, placing a scarab amulet in Thermuthis’s palm. “The goddess sees your strength.”
Thermuthis said nothing. She looked at her mother’s face, searching it the way children search for permission to be afraid. What she found instead was pride — and beneath the pride, something that looked like relief. As though this ritual would deliver the obedient, properly shaped daughter her mother had always needed her to become. Thermuthis closed her fingers around the amulet and said nothing.
Her mother looked ahead and beamed as they climbed the seventy steps into the temple of the goddess Neith. The temple was cool, its stone walls beige and still. Incense burned in slow ribbons, coiling upward like silent and persistent prayers. Several statues of Neith lined the corridor. Stern and straight-backed, some depicted her with a loom, others with a shield, her unmistakable roles in creation and conquest rendered in stone.
The High Priestess greeted her with arms open and eyes unreadable. “You are Pharaoh’s blood, little girl, but today you become Egypt’s.”
Moments later, Thermuthis lay on an elevated stone slab. The stone was cold in more ways than one. It pressed against her back with the indifference of something that had held many small bodies before hers and would hold many after. Priests and priestesses surrounded her, murmuring chants and humming invocations. At the foot of the slab, the Head Priestess stood with her back to Thermuthis, her elbows moving with slow, deliberate care over a small flickering flame.
Thermuthis stared at the ceiling. Every hair on her skin stood. Her legs had been positioned in a way her body understood as wrong before her mind had words for it, and the dread rising in her
chest was older and more animal than thought. She wanted to stand and run but there was nowhere to go. The attendants felt her trembling and held her limbs with firm, practiced hands. They were not cruel, which somehow made it worse. The priests’ whispers washed over her like water over stone.
And then the Head Priestess turned, blade in hand. What followed, Thermuthis would spend years trying not to remember and years more trying to understand. There was the blade. There was a pain in the cut to her private area that had no comparison because nothing in her seven years had prepared her body for the idea of itself being taken away. Screams left her throat and hit the stone walls with no consequence. The murmured incantations continuedwithout pause, and the goddess did not intervene.
When it was over, they left her to cry. And she did. For as long as her lungs would let her. For her seventh birthday, Thermuthis had survived “the traditional cut of the beautiful woman”. Some would describe it as a blessing, but Thermuthis would call it a decree, or a binding spell meant to preserve the sanctity of Pharaoh’s bloodline, tethering her future to the state, not to any desire or future she might choose for herself. Fourteen days passed, and so did the physical pain. But the anguish and sense of a missing self never left.
Thermuthis wore her womanhood like a garment she could never fill as the years turned. The other royal girls eventually turned into women who spoke in hushed, delighted tones of nighttime thrills and the whispered prayers that followed pleasure. Thermuthis listened, smiled, and said nothing. Her own body remained an untouched temple sealed before its first incense offering, consecrated not to passion, but to policy and a hunger not for touch, but for the desire to be touched.
And yet, in the stillness of certain mornings, as she walked past the Hebrew quarters or watched their women chat as they worked, she wondered, did their unseen God require the same cut? Was pain the price of a woman’s purity in their tongue? Was there a way of being a woman untouched by decree, whole, and somehow still acceptable?
After thirteen years and five months since the cut, Thermuthis allowed herself to wonder. What was once a memory soaked in pain had begun to shape itself into a search for meaning beyond the ritual that marked her body and claimed her future. What if womanhood was not meant to begin with a blade? What if devotion did not require her blood? In the mundane hours between royal duties and temple rites, she allowed her thoughts to drift, hesitantly at first, and then freely and easily. She would consider the Hebrew women in the servants’ quarters, marvel quietly at their songs and stories, and wonder about this One they called El Roi, the God who sees.
How nice, she thought. To be seen, without something to offer.
The God of the Hebrews seemed different. His stories whispered of deliverance, of barren women made joyful, of laws written not in the blood of girls, but in the breath of the divine. Thermuthis had been made Egypt’s, but something in her soul stirred at the thought of being claimed by, or at least being a small part of, something greater. Not empire or ritual. Just perhaps… someone who did not cut open little girls to make them worthy.
One early morning, Thermuthis sat in the shaded colonnade of her chamber, partially eaten plate of fruits laid in her lap. Her fingers toyed absently with the edge of her robe, mind adrift as it often was in those quiet hours before the court stirred. She had been dreaming again, this time of purpose and places beyond the palace; the kind of dreams that left her chest tight and strangely hollow.
She did not hear the footsteps until the voices were already past the lattice screen. Shifra and Keziah, two of her attendants, moved quickly along the outer corridor, their heads bent together, speaking in the unguarded way of people who believe themselves alone. Thermuthis went still. There was a quality to their urgency that separated it from ordinary gossip.
“What I know for sure is it is not a rumor anymore. He has made it an official decree.” One said.
“No!” the other responded.
“They are all going to be killed. No exceptions.”
Their footsteps continued and faded. Thermuthis did not move for a long moment. The plate slipped from her lap and dropped with a sharp clang, spiling grapes across the floor. A coldness moved through her that had nothing to do with the morning air.
The thought was nauseating, but she was familiar with what power looked like when it is most afraid of itself. She would not dare challenge the Pharaoh on something so laced with the brittle fear of what he could not control. But in the quiet of her own mind, she saw it plainly. He would wipe out an entire group of newborn boys to protect his empire, and he would call it divine wisdom. But it was in fact the trembling fist of an insecure man afraid of shadows he did notunderstand.
The decree became action, and Thermuthis watched as servants lowered their eyes, priests recited justifications, and soldiers averted their gaze as they obeyed. The north side of the Nile, once a place of life, became a grave.
Still, grave or not, Thermuthis to the other end of the river to bathe. Morning after morning, she led her attendants to the far east side of the Nile, the one place where her body felt like its own, immersed in something other than duty.
One morning, as she waded slowly through the water, she turned over her shoulder to glance at Shifra and Keziah, who walked dutifully along the riverbank, chattering at their usual pace There was always much to discuss with those two. Thermuthis let her gaze drift from the girls to the reeds, and then to her own hands, which had begun to look like aged raisins in the water. That was when her eyes fell upon a basket, tangled and resting precariously among the drying stalks that fringed the river’s edge, its presence both sudden and oddly out of place in the quiet morning light. The basket rocked gently, as if the river itself were cradling it. She called for Keziah to bring it to her.
Collecting the basket, Thermuthis noted that it seemed heavier than it looked. She had only seen this kind of weaving among the Hebrew women, and this one was new, made by someone with a love for careful attention to detail. Unsure what to expect, Thermuthis opened the basket and gasped.
Inside was a baby boy — terrified, hungry, or both. Their eyes met, and his cries pierced through Thermuthis with a familiar depth.
“This must be one of the Hebrew children,” she whispered, half to herself and half to Keziah, who was now standing in the water beside her.
Her hand hovered above the baby’s brow, unsure. But the memory of hands in temple linen flashed through her, and she lowered her palm, slowly and reverently.
“Little baby boy,” she whispered, her voice soft like wind through reeds, “you were not meant to be, and yet... here you are.”
Sensing a resolute decision forming in her lady’s eyes, Keziah cautioned softly, “My lady… You could face the same fate as this boy.”
Thermuthis did not answer. She lifted the child from the river, his weight unfamiliar but right. The gods may have taken her desire for intercourse, but not the rivers in her heart. Here in her hands lay an opportunity to belong to someone seen by El Roi. And just maybe, He may see her too, when He glances down at this boy.
“Should I go and find one of the Hebrew women to nurse the baby for you?” The voice wasn’t Keziah’s or Shifra’s. It was much younger, higher, and cautious.
Thermuthis and Keziah turned, startled, and found a young Hebrew girl standing nearby on the riverbank, her gaze fixed on the basket. Her features were delicate, but there was a sharpness in her eyes, and a knowingness that didn’t quite match her age.
• • •
“Yes, do!” the princess replied. So the girl went and called the baby’s mother. “Take this baby and nurse him for me,” the princess told the baby’s mother. “I will pay you for your help.” So the woman took her baby home and nursed him. Later, when the boy was older, his mother brought him back to Pharaoh’s daughter, who adopted him as her own son. The princess named him Moses, for she explained, “I lifted him out of the water.” — Exodus 2:8-10
