by Paul Doherty
‘You have eaten the salt and drunk the wine,’ Tiye declared. ‘You have taken the oath. Life and death, Mahu. Every time you eat bread and drink wine it will commemorate this occasion.’
Outside I heard a servant call. A horn wailed as a sign that the day had officially begun. Tiye rose and left and so it was that my life was woven into the life of the Veiled One. I was his bodyguard, his manservant, sometimes his friend and, when his moods shifted, even his opponent, someone to argue with, as well as to lecture, warn and instruct. I soon slipped into the regular routine of his household. I’d rise in the morning and join the Veiled One at his prayers, followed by meetings with different officials and flunkies of the court. I was given my own chambers in the far side of the Silent Pavilion, with washed-green walls and a small storeroom beside it.
The daily routine of the household was soothing. Sometimes I thought about Sobeck and, now and again, wondered if the beautiful woman would return. Great Queen Tiye and Prince Tuthmosis were frequent visitors and sometimes, at least once a week, God’s Father Hotep came. The latter had accepted me. He’d smile and nod, sometimes he’d draw me into superficial conversation about affairs in Thebes or visitors from abroad. He’d inform me how Horemheb and Rameses were now Captains in the Sacred Band, how Pentju and Meryre promised their worth in the House of Life whilst Huy and Maya were proving to be excellent scribes. Tuthmosis ignored me as if I did not exist. On one occasion when he met his brother alone in the small audience hall he asked that I stand outside. The Veiled One shrugged and told me to wait in the garden. For the rest, I was always close to him. He would eat before noon, rest during the heat of the day and then spend his time in a range of different studies, hobbies and pursuits.
Occasionally, mysterious visitors would arrive. They’d be garbed in striped robes, coarse garments and heavy sandals; they looked like Sand Dwellers with their long hair and beards though they lacked their shifty gaze and furtive ways. They were warriors with sharp-nosed, haughty faces who swaggered rather than walked and only reluctantly handed over their weapons to Imri’s keeping. Why they came or what they discussed was kept secret. The Veiled One was very cunning. He always met such visitors at the far end of his audience hall or out in the garden pavilion where eavesdroppers would find it difficult to lurk. These men would come and squat before the Veiled One, talking softly, gesturing with their hands, always treating him with the greatest respect. Great Queen Tiye would often join such meetings and sometimes, at night, she and her son went out to meet these strange ones beyond the gates. I’d go with them, Tiye and the Veiled One shrouded in cloaks and hoods. The strangers would be waiting, hoods pulled over their own heads. They were always armed, one or two carrying pitch torches. They’d leave, slipping quietly through the darkness, both my master and his mother returning shortly after dawn. No one from the Silent Pavilion was ever allowed to accompany them. I’d established a good relationship with Imri and often practised with him on the drill ground. Over a beer jug I asked about these mysterious visitors. The Kushite pressed a calloused finger against my lips.
‘You may ask, Mahu, but never expect an answer. I know very little of them except that they are Apiru, a tribe of the Shemshu.’
‘Apiru?’
‘Hush!’ Again the finger against my lips. He nudged me gently, got to his feet and strolled away.
The Apiru were no strangers to me. They were not desert people but nomadic tribes who’d wandered across Sinai following the Horus roads past the silver mines. They’d been allowed to enter Egypt and suckle at her fertile breasts. Some joined the army, others became craftsmen; they were Egyptian in everything but name. Others kept to themselves, living away from the cities, only visiting them to barter and haggle in the marketplace. I wondered what they would have in common with my master and with Egypt’s Great Queen, yet Imri was correct. The danger of such a question lurked not so much in asking it, but in searching for the answers.
For the rest, the Veiled One immersed himself in his activities. He loved painting and sculpture, and two of Tiye’s master craftsmen, the painter Bek and the sculptor Uti, were frequent visitors to the house. The Veiled One had taken over and converted a high-ceilinged storeroom, transforming this into what he called his ‘House of Paintings’. I often joined him there. Sometimes Bek painted on screens, other times the walls, but only after the Veiled One had given his approval. Most of the paintings were similar to those found in temples, palaces or tombs, executed in vivid colours, light blues, dark greens, rich yellows: garden scenes, a hunter boating along the Nile, a hawk plunging on its quarry or an athlete about to throw a stick. The gods did not appear in them, however, nor did the Pharaoh or, indeed, the imperial court. Other paintings were more dramatic and vivid, different from any I had ever seen. Bek and Uti were related; in fact, they looked like twins, small men with round smiling faces, totally immersed in their art, ever ready to please. They were a little shamefaced about these new paintings, but listened patiently as the Veiled One enthused over their realism.
‘We must live in the truth,’ my master announced proudly, displaying the images of himself painted on the wall.
Bek and Uti had followed his instructions scrupulously and, rather than disguise his physical imperfections and deformities, they exaggerated them. The Veiled One was portrayed in a striped blue and gold head-dress, and a gloriously coloured kilt, with a sash round his waist, his face and jaw were portrayed as much longer than in real life, the sensuous lips more full, the eyes sharper and more elongated, his chest and belly more protuberant, his hips wider. ‘The truth?’ The Veiled One repeated, and gestured with his fingers. ‘If life is truth and paintings reflect life, then they should be truthful. Well, Mahu, what do you think?’
‘Has your father seen them?’
The question was a mistake. The Veiled One spun on his heel and strode out of the House of Paintings. Bek and Uti stood, heads down, as if they were war-prisoners.
‘Never,’ Bek whispered, ‘ever mention his father again.’ He raised his gentle face, eyes screwed up. ‘You are most fortunate, Mahu. I have heard of others being struck with a sharp-edged cane for saying less.’
‘Does his father know of these paintings?’ I refused to be abashed. I had not intended to give offence and I was angry at being treated so unfairly.
‘No one knows of them except us and Great Queen Tiye.’ Bek laughed sharply. ‘If we exhibited these in the temples and palaces we would be the laughing stock of Thebes.’
The Veiled One soon forgave me. He was always busy and, as Bek and Uti had once confided, passed from one thing to another like a butterfly in the garden. He would invite the two artists down, question them, work them like slaves, then reward them with banquets and a stack of gifts, only to forget them for a month. He’d become interested in shrubs, tending the herb plots or using plants to make stoppers for wine jars, chaff glued together or a parcel of young sycamore leaves. He would fashion candles and elaborate oil lamps. He would spend an entire afternoon making floral garlands out of the fibre of palm leaves, lotus petals and willow leaves. He’d experiment with the destruction of a snake’s nest by leaving dried fish, lumps of natron or even an onion at its entrance. Occasionally he would call the housekeepers together and lecture them on the use of fleabane mixed with charcoal to drive away flies or the way to mix frankincense and myrrh, mingled with boiled honey, to give the kitchens and storerooms a pleasing fragrance. He was fascinated by animals, particularly the cats, which roamed through the storerooms ever vigilant against vermin. I once found him outside the kitchens dissecting a mouse’s corpse, taking out the small organs and laying them on the paving. He glanced up as I approached.
‘No, I didn’t kill it, Mahu. I just wondered, is the life-force in a mouse the same as in a lion? Does the lion receive more? And, if that is the case, do we share the same life-force and express it in a different way?’
He never waited for an answer but returned to the task in hand. He was a generous master in
many ways. One day he brought me a beautiful tame bird, a golden oriole. I was much taken with it.
‘What will you call it?’ the Veiled One enquired.
Again I replied before thinking. ‘Why, Weni! He was our overseer at the House of Instruction.’
The Veiled One’s face showed I had made a mistake. I flew the Oriole twice in the small meadow beyond the pavilion walls, but afterwards it disappeared and I never saw it again. My master did not replace it, and I never uttered the name Weni in his presence again.
He did not attend the Jubilee days or visit his father’s court, nor did he observe the religious festivals. In none of the rooms did I see one statue or carving of a god. In a nearby market, I bought a small wooden statue of Anubis, a tawdry imitation of the great statue in the god’s temple at Thebes, the one I had seen as a boy, the jaw of which moved so as to issue an oracle. I meant it as a gift for one of the servants who had been particularly kind to me. When the Veiled One saw it, he snatched it from my hand and ordered me to buy another. He later crouched on the ground like a little boy and pretended the two gods were talking to each other or fighting like quarrelsome curs. He was particularly fascinated by the moving jaw and used them as puppets.
‘I am Anubis,’ he would squeak, pushing one forward. ‘No, I am Anubis,’ the other one would reply. The Veiled One loved to use the two carvings to mock the great Lord of the Mortuary. Priests he hated, dismissing them as ‘shaven heads’ or ‘soft pates’. At times he was mischievous and invited priests from a certain temple to a small feast in the cool of the evening, either in the audience hall or the garden pavilion. I was always beside him. The ritual was ever the same. The Veiled One would sit and ask them innocent questions. ‘Where do the gods live? If they are spiritual, why do they have masks? If Seth killed his brother Osiris, how can he be a god? If the gods really live in the temples and are all-powerful, all-seeing and everywhere, how can they be locked up in a tabernacle? Why do they need food? And if the choicest meats are laid out for them, why don’t they come and eat it or take it away to give to the poor?’
Of course the questions would change depending on the circumstances but the object was the same, a sneering ridicule. Invariably the priests left hot-eyed and sullen-faced. Afterwards the Veiled One would mimic them: despite his own disabilities, he had an eye for another’s voice or look. He’d imitate their stoop, the sanctimonious way they walked or raised their eyes heavenwards. Sometimes, when he had drunk deeply, he’d deliver his famous lecture on how Isis had to hunt for her husband’s penis.
‘To sew it back on again?’ he’d yell. ‘When he’s supposed to be a god? He doesn’t need needle and thread! Can you imagine it, Mahu?’ He’d stick out his own groin. ‘Walking around with your penis sewn on?’ He’d collapse in laughter or sing an obscene hymn he’d composed to Isis.
Soldiers he admired, and he talked to me volubly, excitedly, about history and the might of Egypt. He studied maps depicting the land routes into Kush, Punt and across Sinai. He knew the trade routes along the Great Green to Canaan. Once he joined me and Imri on the drill ground but he was too clumsy and slow, an easy opponent to overcome. Afterwards he took me aside, face laced with sweat, eyes agitated.
‘I’m not very good, am I, Mahu?’
‘In a chariot,’ I replied tactfully, ‘you’d excel the best.’
‘You speak with true voice,’ he smiled, slapped me roughly across the face but never returned there.
Every quarter an imperial physician would visit him. The Veiled One remained silent and passive as the man prodded him, staring into his mouth and ears or feeling his hands and feet. He and the physician never exchanged words. I was always present, armed with sword, dagger, a bow and a quiver of arrows.
‘I feel like a horse at the stud farm,’ the Veiled One described such examinations, yet he never resisted.
My master often visited the kitchens. He would just stand there, watching the cooks from under heavy-lidded eyes. Either I or Imri always tasted his food and wine. Never once did he tell us what he feared. Imri told me a few details about the Veiled One’s early life. How he was not meant to live as a child. How the priests had recommended that he be placed in a reed basket and left to float in a crocodile pool. Tiye had been furious. The best physicians had been summoned but there was little they could do so the ugly child was banned from his father’s presence. Only those with deformed faces, war veterans or criminals who had lost noses were allowed to serve him.
‘You,’ Imri tapped me drunkenly on the chest, ‘are the first and only exception, though you are so ugly, you might as well be one of us!’
In many ways, it was a strangely halcyon existence, albeit tinged by danger. Nothing definite or precise but there were sometimes mysterious occurrences, with their own silent menace, which kept me nervous and wary. One incident took place during the second month of the Inundation in the thirty-fourth year of his father’s reign, just after the Festival of Opet. Imri’s men always escorted the stewards down to the city markets as the servants’ disfigured faces might cause provocation and hostility. Amongst the provisions brought back was a basket of juicy figs, fresh and smeared with honey – the Veiled One’s favourite delicacy, to be kept near him in his garden pavilion. I took the basket across. The smell from the figs was delicious: moving the lid, I was about to take one out when the figs moved like water rippling. I drew my dagger and knocked some of the fruit aside – a thin venomous rock adder, followed by another, coiled out. I killed both, took the basket and flung it away in a far part of the garden. I considered it an accident and told no one.
A few weeks later I was called down to the wine cellars, a long low cavernous room supervised by a wine steward, a former criminal who had lost both his nose and a slab of flesh on his right cheek. He was in the far corner already in his death throes, eyes glazed, legs and arms jerking, a white froth smearing his lips. Near him lay an unstopped jar of wine from Absh, a favourite of the Veiled One, always stored in a special jar protected by a wadge of basketwork. I picked up the stopper; the docket around it described the wine, the vineyard and the year the grapes had been plucked. The cellarer had decided to help himself and been most unfortunate: both the stopper and the jar smelt so foul I whispered one of my aunt’s spells to repel venom.
The rest of the servants thought the man had suffered some form of seizure or falling sickness. I had the body removed and again informed no one. In the first month of the Peret, the thirty-fifth year of the Magnificent One’s reign, the danger became more real. The Veiled One often went down to the banks of the Nile, to watch the boats and barges and the frenetic activity of the riverside markets. He always sat in what I called his tabernacle on a cart pulled by oxen, a veil across his face. I always walked behind, and on either side strolled the Kushites armed with spear and shield. Discipline was lax; the guards often chatting amongst themselves, now and again pushing away the curious. One of those shabby individuals, a road wanderer, a travelling tinker or trader came close to the cart, gathering his tattered rags about him. He had a dark, pinched face, and his long hair and beard were streaked with grey. In one hand he held a staff, in another a sistrum which he clattered. Now and again he broke into song. He reeked of sweat and other odours but seemed harmless enough walking beside me, eyes on the tail of the cart. I looked at him carefully; I remembered the day Aunt Isithia took me into the temple and the fortune-teller cursed her. Was it the same person?
‘Have we met before?’ I asked.
‘No, great lord,’ the beggar whined. ‘I have only come to sing the praises’ – pointing to the cart – ‘of God’s own son.’ He broke into a chant, repeating almost word for word one of the hymns the Veiled One sang to the Sun Disc, the Aten:
‘Oh gorgeous in every aspect are you!
Your power unseen
You fertilise the shoot
And stock the river with fish.
All creatures adore you …’
The man’s voice grew stronger. He
began to dance and cavort, singing his praises to the Aten. ‘All glory to his son,’ he warbled. ‘All glory to him, Beloved of the Father.’
At the Veiled One’s command the cart stopped. The Kushite driver came along the side and pulled back the curtains. The Veiled One sat there, his face now exposed. He snapped his fingers and pointed at the road-wanderer with his fan, indicating he should come closer.
As the fellow clambered into the cart and went to kneel at the Veiled One’s feet to make obeisance, I noticed the bulge in the tunic on the man’s right side; it moved even as the fellow twisted his shoulders slightly sideways. He was drawing a dagger. I drew mine and leaped into the cart. The Veiled One sat transfixed, eyes staring, mouth slightly open. The assassin made to leap forward but I knocked him in the back, sending him sprawling onto the bottom of the cart. He turned, dagger coming towards me. I thrust mine once, twice, deep into his exposed throat. The cart was now surrounded by the Kushites, so the scuffle was hardly noticed by those passing on either side. I stared into the dying man’s eyes, watching the light of life fade, a strange gargling sound echoing from the back of his throat. I looked at that face darkened by the sun, the lips opening and closing.
‘No, we have not met before,’ I whispered. The man’s body jerked, his head fell to one side. I was content to drag the corpse off and leave it on the highway.
‘No,’ the Veiled One intervened. He spoke sharply to the Kushites. A rug kept in the cart was brought. The corpse was wrapped in this and we returned to the palace grounds. Once there, just before we entered the courtyard, the Veiled One ordered the cart to be stopped. He kicked the body with his foot off the tail of the cart and, grasping his cane, climbed down to examine it more carefully. The foul, dirty robes were removed. The Veiled One, unperturbed, studied the man’s corpse carefully, noticing the criss-crossed scars on the muscular torso and thighs, the welt marks now faded on his back.