by Angela Hunt
At dinner that day, Prince Webensennu plucked a poisoned piece of fruit from Pharaoh’s bowl and died within the hour. Potiphar and his guards surrounded the royal kitchens, where a junior baker confessed to the crime. Two days later, under torture, the condemned man exposed a year-old conspiracy that had been orchestrated by Pharaoh’s chief baker and funded by a group of rebel Syrians. The poisoning of Pharaoh’s taster many months before had been the first attempt to murder the divine king.
Satisfied with the answers he had received, Potiphar left his guards with the nearly dead traitor and stalked to the great hall where a somber king was attempting to observe his birthday. Potiphar did not bother to bow as he entered. Amenhotep sat on his throne, untouched bowls of rich food spread before him, his royal visage cloaked in grief. The queen and other family members ate with little enthusiasm, their eyes occasionally darting toward the place where Webensennu usually sat with his wives.
Pharaoh’s brow lifted when Potiphar halted before him. “The murderers have been found,” the captain announced, bowing his head. “Two bakers in your kitchens are guilty, urged to commit this crime by the chief baker now in my prison. They were paid in silver by the Syrian dignitaries who sat at meat with Pharaoh some months ago.”
Pharaoh stood and held a quivering hand over the banqueting assembly. “Let the chief baker be removed from the prison and hanged on a tree outside the city walls. Let those who conspired with him be killed with the sword. And let all their bodies remain in place for the wild animals, for they do not deserve to enter immortality.”
Potiphar bowed again. “It shall be done. But there still remains the matter of Taharka, your cupbearer.” He looked up, reminding the grief-stricken king of unfinished business. “We could not tell whether the first attempt involved food or wine, and Taharka has awaited your judgment in prison.”
Pharaoh took a deep breath and barreled his chest. “Let the cupbearer be restored to his former position and cleared of all suspicion.” The king’s eyes turned to meet those of his queen. “I have lost a son. Let no more innocent blood be shed.”
When the seventy days of mourning for Prince Webensennu had passed, Pharaoh proclaimed that his fourteen-year-old second son, Abayomi, was henceforth to be known as Menkheprure, Beloved of Osiris, Tuthmosis, Crown Prince of Egypt. Tuya watched her husband’s young shoulders brace for responsibility as his thoughts grew heavier during the months of mourning. Though he had told her of his strange vision before the Sphinx, she had not truly expected him to become Crown Prince. But as soon as he was proclaimed heir, her husband, the fourth to be named Tuthmosis, began to consider plans by which the Great Sphinx might be evacuated from the sand that had all but smothered it.
And Tuya, who had steadily and quietly prayed for her friend Taharka’s safety, thanked the Almighty God for the cupbearer’s release.
Tuya left her baby with a wet nurse and slipped from her chamber to seek Taharka in the palace kitchens. Several startled servants, unaccustomed to the sight of a royal lady in the workrooms, dropped bowls and trays as they hurried to prostrate themselves at her approach. “Do not trouble yourselves,” she said, glancing around. “Where is Taharka?”
One of the slaves pointed toward a back room, and Tuya startled even the balding butler when she stepped through the doorway. “By Seth’s eyeballs, I didn’t expect you to come,” Taharka blustered, struggling to lower himself to his knees.
“Rise, Taharka, I came to congratulate you, not to accept homage,” Tuya said, injecting a teasing note into her voice. “I was distressed when you were arrested. I have asked my god to return you safely.”
“Thanks to the gods, I am safe,” the slave answered, wiping his hands on the stained apron over his kilt. “And thanks to the divine pharaoh, of course. And to you, naturally. And to Horus—”
“You need not pretend with me, old friend,” Tuya whispered. She paused, wondering how she might ask the question badgering her heart. “You were a long time in the prison.”
“Six months.” Taharka shrugged. “I’d do it again if Pharaoh demanded it. I won’t be having it said I’m disloyal or bitter about it—”
“Be assured that I will say nothing of this conversation,” Tuya said, wishing the cupbearer could forget that she was married to a royal prince. She wanted to ask a specific question, but Taharka knew nothing of her love for Yosef, and to tell him about it would be the worst kind of disloyalty to her husband. And Pharaoh could not abide disloyalty.
“Did you…meet many people in prison?” she asked, pretending to study a bowl of grapes.
“By the gods, no.” Taharka leaned against a wall. “We were kept in a dark cell no bigger than this workroom. Much smaller, in fact. The baker, may the gods condemn his soul for all eternity, and I saw no one but the warden and his slave. The baker—and you may pass this on to whomever you like—behaved as a guilty man from the first day we were thrust together. He complained and uttered treasonous statements, he even called your son a brat, yes, that was his exact word—”
“Did you ever,” she asked, unable to remain silent, “hear of a prisoner called Yosef?”
Taharka blinked. “We were kept alone, I tell you, that cursed baker and I. A most foul and disagreeable sort he was, a loathsome toad—”
The cupbearer knew nothing. “Thank you, Taharka,” Tuya murmured, backing out of the room. “I wish you well.”
The Nile rose and fell twice more, blessing the land with bounty.
Now the heir apparent, Prince Menkheprure left his wife and son at the palace and began his military training. His valiant efforts in battle earned him the title “Conqueror of Syria,” and Tuya watched her dreaming husband become as fierce a warrior as his father. After his engagement in Syria, the courageous prince led a campaign in Nubia and proved himself worthy to assume his father’s throne. Tuya saw little of him during those years, for when he was at home in Thebes, her husband spent hours being tutored by the high priests of Osiris for the role that would one day be his. A godling, it seemed, had much to learn.
As Tuya’s husband equipped himself for the throne, the priests prepared the people for the eventuality of his ascension to power. They told the story of how Amon consulted with the other gods to see who should bear his divine child. Thoth suggested Queen Teo, one of Amenhotep’s many wives, and Amon visited her in the physical form of Pharaoh so a divine child could be conceived. “Not once, but twice Amon visited a wife of Pharaoh,” the priests explained to the people. “Pharaoh’s second son is as divine as his first son was.”
The afterbirth that had followed Menkheprure’s body into the world was brought from its place of preservation. Wrapped as a mummy painted with a child’s face, the deified placenta was known as the Khonsu. Just as Pharaoh’s royal Khonsu was carried on a standard before the king on all state occasions, so Menkheprure’s preserved placenta was paraded before the people whenever he appeared in the royal court. Soon just the appearance of the young prince’s Khonsu elicited rapturous applause and cheering from curious crowds of well-wishers.
As Menkheprure progressed in his royal education, Tuya noticed that Pharaoh’s smile widened in approval and relief. He had appeased the gods, he had led his kingdom, he had prepared his successor.
Shortly after celebrating his forty-fifth birthday, Amenhotep II retired to his chamber and surrendered to an illness that had sapped his strength for many months.
“My father’s death is the beginning of his journey to resurrection,” the crown prince proclaimed to the assembled court the next day. “The gods once lived on earth, begat children, and died, yet they still live and have needs. Like them, my father has passed from one state of life to another, and we will help him prepare for the needs of the other world.”
The new king sought Tuya’s eyes for an instant of reassurance. She gave him a smile of encouragement, then he cleared his throat and continued. “We will mourn for seventy days while the king’s body is prepared for immortality.”
; During the seventy days of mourning, Tuya kept her three-year-old son by her side as much as possible. The stubby-legged toddler seemed to be the only person in the world she could love without risk, for just as Abayomi had become Prince Menkheprure, her prince had become Pharaoh, and Pharaoh belonged to his people. Now that her husband wore the red and white double crown, priests, counselors and diplomats would hold more power and influence over him than a wife. Tuthmosis IV would not need her approval, for a host of courtiers yearned to assure him of his strength, wisdom and authority.
And now that he was King, her husband no longer needed her as a wife. A harem of the kingdom’s most beautiful women awaited his pleasure and attention.
Yet in those early days, Tuthmosis’s devotion and adoration were reserved for the god who had spoken from the Sphinx. As the young pharaoh prepared for his coronation, he ordered slave crews to clear the sand from around the mammoth statue. Workmen labored in the blazing sun to repair the sacred figure, and between the monument’s outstretched paws, Tuthmosis mounted a special stela engraved with the notice that he had restored the Sphinx in order to honor the god’s prophecy. Tuthmosis believed that the Sphinx had brought about his kingship, and the impressionable young man was determined to honor the god who could work such a miracle.
As Tuthmosis attended to the Sphinx, the priests attended to the earthly remains of Amenhotep II. Tuya had beheld the face of death many times, but since her fellow slaves counted for nothing in the afterlife, their bodies were tossed into the Nile as food for the crocodiles. But Amenhotep had spent the latter part of his life preparing for paradise, and his divinity demanded that he be mummified with all ceremony and propriety.
Careful not to intrude, Tuya listened from a corner of the throne room as every morning the high priest of Osiris reported the progress of the dead king’s funeral rites. First the king’s viscera were removed and placed in canopic jars, then the priests split his body open with a flint. After seventy days of wrapping and encoffining, the royal cadaver, desiccated, resewn and reshaped, would be carried to the tomb to enact the entry of the king into the underworld. Tuthmosis would be required to preside over this elaborate ritual, for as the dead king had abdicated his earthly powers in favor of his son, the new king would establish the dead pharaoh as a god in the other world.
The Nile had just begun to recede when the seventy days drew to a close. Tuya clutched her tiny son’s hand as she joined the funeral procession and left the Nile’s east bank, the land of the living. Hundreds of mourners, all dressed in white, crossed the swollen river on ferryboats and walked deep into the western valleys where jagged cliffs rose like armed warriors. Here in the Valley of the Tombs, the eternal dwellings of the dead waited for yet another king.
An ox-drawn hearse, symbolizing the sun-god’s blazing boat, led the procession with Amenhotep’s mummified remains, and behind it followed a sledge bearing the four canopic jars containing the king’s liver, lungs, stomach and intestines. Behind Pharaoh’s body marched a host of slaves carrying the furniture and other equipment Amenhotep would require in the life to come.
A freshly painted portico had been erected before the tomb, and at the left end of the shelter a pair of mummers performed a funeral dance. The special mortuary priests, the hemu-ka, slid the coffin from its sledge and stood it upright at the door of the tomb. One priest, his face hidden by the jackal mask of Anubis, supported the immense coffin while the chief mortuary priest symbolically restored speech to the dead king by touching the king’s painted lips with an adze-shaped instrument. The ceremony was called wep-ro, “the Opening of the Mouth,” and the priests believed the rite would give speech to the king in his new life.
Tuthmosis, looking young and frail in his heavy white head covering, stood with the other male mourners at the right of the portico. Tuya and the other women sat behind him, while Queen Merit-Amon wept and wailed at the side of the coffin.
The time had come for the dead to depart. The jackal-masked priest gently pulled the queen away from the coffin, then a score of attendants placed the gilded box inside the granite sarcophagus. Before the heavy lid was put in place, Amenhotep’s wives walked by, each of them draping flowers over his painted coffin. When all the wives had passed, a score of shaven-headed priests heaved the lid into position, then lifted the sarcophagus onto rollers and proceeded to push this most intimate of the king’s chambers through the tomb’s tunnels.
Beneath the painted gazes of numerous gods and goddesses, the priests trudged to the somber rhythm of a funeral chant until they reached Amenhotep’s burial chamber, an immense hall decorated with paintings that told the story of the king’s life. The ceiling was supported by two rows of pillars decorated with life-sized images of the king in the presence of the gods. Beyond the last two pillars, steps led into a crypt where the great king’s sarcophagus was laid on a granite slab.
When the sarcophagus and the canopic jars had been set in their places, the priests and relatives filled the rooms of the tomb with supplies for the king’s afterlife: furniture, baskets of food, pottery, glass, garlands of flowers, jewels, treasures, funerary statues of servants, slaves and wives. Several chambers already bulged with items Amenhotep had accumulated in his lifetime.
Tuya walked past a king’s ransom in gold and riches as she carried her contribution for the king’s eternal life: a small alabaster vase on which she had painted the likeness of her baby, Pharaoh’s grandson. Wading through an assortment of earthly treasures, she crept to the innermost burial chamber and knelt before the remains of the man who had been her sovereign and father-in-law. After pressing her lips to the cold stone of the sarcophagus, she tenderly placed the vase within a wreath of lotus blossoms.
Queen Merit-Amon stood with wide eyes near the entrance to the burial chamber, and Tuya slipped her arm about the woman’s waist as the priests installed magic amulets to guard against tomb robbers. As others lit the golden torches that would illuminate the chamber after they had gone, Tuya whispered in the queen’s ear and coaxed her from the room. Carefully sweeping their footsteps from the sand as they backed out, the priests left the tomb, shutting and sealing the inner passageways one by one.
By the time Re’s sun boat had sailed to the west, Egypt had a new king.
Chapter Twenty-Five
One aspect of her husband’s coronation caught Tuya by surprise. Even before the dead pharaoh was entombed in his grave, rebellion stirred in the northern nomes. To ensure that the Mitanni Empire would enforce the peace and maintain Egyptian interests in the northernmost lands, the royal counselors unearthed an old treaty between Amenhotep and the king of the Mitanni tribe. Amenhotep had promised that one of the Mitanni king’s daughters would marry the next king of Egypt, so a hasty union between Tuthmosis and Mutemwiya, a Mitanni princess, was arranged. Narmer, Amenhotep’s faithful courtier, was dispatched to escort the bride to Thebes with a copy of the marriage contract. The agreement stipulated that the princess be designated as the Great Wife, Queen Mutemwiya. Since Tuthmosis had no royal sisters to vie for the title, the princess was readily accepted.
On her husband’s coronation day, Tuya found herself standing with her son among various other members of the royal family as her husband and his new wife were crowned King and Queen of the Two Kingdoms. Tuya told herself the new marriage did not matter. The emotion she felt for her husband usually vacillated between affection and pity, and Mutemwiya would certainly struggle as she adapted to a new country, husband and king.
Tuya had never dreamed of wearing a crown. Even though she had borne the king’s son, she had never thought she might actually reign over the land of her birth. No, Mutemwiya was a royal heiress, and the people would give her their allegiance. Tuya refused to allow anger or jealousy to prick her heart.
The foreign queen was lovely, Tuya had to admit. Older than Tuya and probably twice the age of Tuthmosis, the woman moved through the great hall with a subtle and sensuous bearing, her golden face marked by crimson lips and brilliant
black eyes. Her hair, which she had not yet cut in order to adopt the Egyptian wig, spilled to her waist in a plume of black gold. Rumor had it that she had already buried one husband, and as she watched the coronation, Tuya thought the woman looked more like Pharaoh’s mother than his bride.
Yet the eyes of every man in the room followed Mutemwiya as she moved toward her throne at Tuthmosis’s side. She walked with the hard grace of one who has total control of herself, and her boldly confident eyes rebuffed every man who dared to look at her…except one. Narmer met the woman’s flinty gaze head-on. Even as Mutemwiya stepped up to the dais and slipped her hand into Tuthmosis’s, Tuya saw Narmer’s bold eyes rake the new queen with a fiercely possessive look. What, she wondered, had transpired between these two on the journey from Mitanni?
As the high priest’s voice droned in the stillness, filling the room with blessings of prosperity and promises of fealty, Tuya allowed her eyes to wander. Potiphar, watchful and paternal, stood at the head of the guard, his hooded eyes searching the gathering as though assassins waited behind every pillar. Beneath the Gold of Praise, the brown skin of his neck sagged with age and weariness. He was an old, tired man, ready to meet his gods—if he had any.
Sighing, Tuya returned her attention to the wedding canopy as the gathering cheered her husband and his new queen.
Tuthmosis sat bolt upright in bed and stared into the darkness, trying to see whatever it was that had slashed his sleep like a knife. Fear shook his body from toe to hair and twisted his face into an expression he was glad no one could see. He was alone, completely and totally alone with nameless terror, and he yearned for Tuya.