ways listened,
for Mermes was a true-hearted man.

Afterwards Mermes married Asti, but like Pharaoh for a long while he
remained childless, since he took no other wives. On the day of the
birth of the Princess Tua, the Morning Star of Amen, however, Asti bore
a son, a royal-looking child of great strength and beauty and very fair
in colour, as tradition said that the kings of his race had been before
him, but with black and shining eyes.

"See," said the midwife, "here is a head shaped to wear a crown."

Whereon Asti, his mother, forgetting her caution in her joy, or perhaps
inspired by the gods, for from her childhood she was a prophetess,
answered,

"Yes, and I think that this head and a crown will come close together,"
and she kissed him and named him Rames after her royal forefather, the
founder of their line.

As it chanced a spy overheard this saying and reported it to the
Council, and the Council urged Pharaoh to cause the boy to be put away,
as they had urged in the case of his father, Mermes, because of the
words of omen that Asti had spoken, and because she had given her son a
royal name, naming him after the majesty of Ra, as though he were indeed
the child of a king. But Pharaoh would not, asking with his soft smile
whether they wished him to baptise his daughter in the blood of another
infant who drew his first breath upon the same day, and adding:

"Ra sheds his glory upon all, and this high-born boy may live to be a
friend in need to her whom Amen has given to Egypt. Let things befall as
the gods decree. Who am I that I should make myself a god and destroy a
life that they have fashioned?"

So the boy Rames lived and throve, and Mermes and Asti, when they came
to hear of these things, thanked Pharaoh and blessed him.

Now the house of Mermes, as Captain of the Guard, was within the wall of
the great temple of Amen, near to the palace of the priestesses of Amen
where the Princess Neter-Tua was nurtured. Thus it came about that when
the Queen Ahura died, the lady Asti was named as nurse to the Princess,
since Pharaoh said that she should drink no milk save that of one in
whose veins ran royal blood. So Asti was Tua's foster mother, and
night by night she slept in her arms together with her own son, Rames.
Afterwards, too, when they were weaned the babes were taught to walk and
speak together, and later, as children, they became playmates.

Thus from the first these two loved each other, as brother