City of the Horizon

by Anton Gill

  City of the Horizon

  Anton Gill

  © Anton Gill 1991

  Anton Gill has asserted his rights under the Copyright, Design and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work.

  First published in 1991 by Bloomsbury

  This edition published in 2015 by Endeavour Press Ltd.

  Table of Contents

  ONE

  TWO

  THREE

  FOUR

  FIVE

  SIX

  SEVEN

  EIGHT

  NINE

  TEN

  ELEVEN

  TWELVE

  ONE

  At the moment of his death darkness covered the land. The very sun at noon was blotted out by a black disc — sent there by Set, the demon, some said; and for an hour midnight reigned. Was it a sign that the sun mourned the pharaoh — or that the old gods approved his death?

  King Smenkhkare could not have chosen a worse time to die. The scribe, Huy, thought that this might be his opinion more than anyone else’s; these days people were so quickly covering up their association with Akhenaten, his worship of one god, the Aten, and his theories about peace and light and universal brotherhood, that you could see the dust rise on the banks of the River from the breath of their recantations. Even Ay, the old king’s Master of Horse and the father of the Great Queen, Nefertiti, was giving voice to reservations about the Aten.

  Now that Smenkhkare, Akhentaten’s adopted son and last loyal follower in any position of real power, had died, Huy wondered how long even the caution would last. After all, the last twelve years had seen the loss of the entire northern part of the empire. In his short reign, Akhenaten, with what most people regarded as crazy religious ideals, had lost what his great-great-grandfather had won, smashing the audacious power of Upper Retennu with the newly-found weapons of war: the chariot, the two-wood longbow, and spears of bronze, harder and more durable than copper. The messages had come in over a whole decade to the pharaoh, the God on Earth, the Unquestionable Power, to say that he was being questioned, challenged, destroyed in his might to the north. But the king had not sent a single reply to the torrent of requests for aid from his despairing vassals and governors.

  Huy was not the only one to have been shattered by doubt at the speed with which the Aten had fallen. The Aten had been a fresh wind; the sweeping away, in ten hectic and cruel years, of two millennia of ever more hidebound and corrupt thinking, in a world where priestly ritual clogged the wheels of a government grown stale in the thirty decadent years of peace which preceded the young iconoclast’s ascent to the Seat of God. But at the beginning there had been plenty of young men and women who were caught up in the New Thinking; the Black Land was at the height of its power, it stood at the apex of the world, ruled to the edge of the Great Green in the north, and beyond; ruled deep into the Red Land to the west, to the gold mines which lay between the River and the Eastern Sea, even south to the beginnings of the forest which those explorers who returned told of.

  It was time to draw breath, to question. People had jumped at the chance to sweep away that jungle of old gods, that mess of superstition, raddled with the main-chancing of the priests of Amun. Huy allowed himself a wry smile as he recalled the joy with which they had set off north from the Southern Capital to people the New City, the City of the Horizon, itself a fresh skin after the old had been sloughed off.

  How long ago had that been? Huy actually laughed now. Six years. To build a dam against two thousand years of entrenched thinking with only six years and a new town. What could they have been thinking of? The great mass of the people, backs bowed, still, whenever the pharaoh passed so that they would not see his face — Akhenaten’s reforms hadn’t stretched that far — had not been affected by so much as the whisper of a passing thought. It had been a revolution for the elite by the elite, and as the old pharaoh’s obsession had borne him into madness, it had all but cost the Black Land her supremacy.

  And now Smenkhkare, the pharaoh, the God on Earth sustaining the Power of the Aten, the Disc of the Life-Giving Sun, was gone, aged twenty, having survived his mentor by six months. He had not carried the baton far alone.

  How young they died, Huy thought. Akhenaten had been only nine years older, but then, his body had been wasted from birth, subject too, as if that was not enough, to those fits of holy ecstasy which threw his fragile frame on to the baked earth with the accurate violence of a professional wrestler, pinning him there and shaking him with such fury that his mouth foamed. Huy had seen it happen once. The king would have bitten through his tongue and broken his attenuated limbs by mere force of pressure, had there not been someone to prevent it. No one as lowly as Huy dared to begin to place an interpretation on the groans and frantic gurgling with which the god spoke through the king on those occasions, and their sense was never communicated to junior officials.

  The king had died in such a fit, his soul soaring wherever it was it went, spiralling upwards towards his special god. A lonely fate; but Huy had wanted to believe in it too. Better towards the sun than remaining below in a tomb, however sumptuous, however plentifully stocked with magical food and servants of clay, however well protected by the spells of The Book of the Dead. Huy had wanted to believe, but hadn’t come far enough along the road, hadn’t been able to rid himself of the safe certainties of his fathers’ fathers; but, seeing their tombs neglected by their successors, he now found himself believing only in life; what came before and after was a void his heart couldn’t bring itself to contemplate.

  Smenkhkare had died in his sleep; no one knew why. He had been a healthy young man, a keen hunter and a fond husband, though not yet a father. Only old Ay and the general, Horemheb, had visited the body before it was handed over to the embalmers.

  The king hadn’t held on to the reins of power well. The desert pirates of the north had approached dangerously close to the Delta, where the River entered the Great Green, and still the army merely patrolled and manoeuvred, never striking. At the same time, building work at the City of the Horizon ground to a halt. Ever since the death of Akhenaten, a trickle of people had started moving away. The place was on high ground above the River, but also in desert, unfriendly, baking in the season of Drought and plagued with mosquitoes in the seasons of Inundation and Coming Forth. Half-built, thrown up, with middens where there should have been drains, it seemed to Huy like a flower which had been blasted by a night frost in the act of opening. The life had gone out of it with the death of the old king; and although in parts of the city to the north, where the palaces reared among piles of builders’ rubble like great sea-barges drawn on to the shore for repair, work was still going on in a half-hearted way, already in the suburbs the cheaper dwellings were beginning to crumble.

  People needed to be told what to do, and instead, the king had died; it seemed as if he had run away. Then there had been the eclipse; and it had all happened in the middle of Peret, the season of Coming Forth, when the River’s flood subsided, leaving the fields rich with the black silt which gave the land its name, but demanding every man’s strength to work, clearing the irrigation canals and planting, as earth was reborn of water. It would be seventy days before the embalmers’ work was complete, but the pharaoh’s tomb was nowhere near finished. Many men badly needed on the land now would nevertheless be drafted to quarry and excavate and hew and haul limestone from the rock-face to bring the dwelling-place of the dead into at least a semblance of order. The dead were not usually vengeful; but the anger of a king beyond the grave was something to be avoided.

  Huy, as he watched the elaborate rites and preparations taking place, wondered after all whether it wasn’t the living who were more to be feared. He had already seen several
of his senior colleagues — great scribes in their late thirties and forties — sent on missions to Nubia and to the gold mines of the eastern desert. These jobs were well beneath them, but even before the death of the old king it had become clear that their positions were no longer as secure as they had been when the glory of the Aten was at its height. Under Smenkhkare, power had shifted more and more to the general, Horemheb, and to Ay. Both had been loyal supporters of Akhenaten too, in the beginning. Perhaps it was just that they had been the first to see that the future did not, after all, lie with him.

  None of the senior scribes had returned from their missions. Huy, at twenty-nine just emerging from a long and arduous apprenticeship, was beginning to wonder if the investment of time was going to be worth it. As he trudged down the narrow street of mud-packed earth that led to his house he looked back regretfully on his little achievements. His house, for one thing. It was one in a straggling row of identical dwellings for junior officials, each of mud-brick, with a small courtyard, a room downstairs and a room upstairs. He had lived here since his divorce three years earlier. He still found himself missing Aahmes, the child even more. They had long since returned to the Delta, and he didn’t see them, though at least through his friends among the official couriers he was able to keep in irregular touch by letter.

  His career had been a foregone conclusion, following in the footsteps of his father, Heby, a chief scribe in the court of Amenophis III in the Southern Capital. From the age of nine, Huy had known little other than study, learning the Three Scripts, and, interspersed with beatings (‘a boy’s ears are on his back’), the other subjects essential to a civil service career: arithmetic, drawing, bookkeeping, geometry, surveying, and even basic engineering. It had been a long haul. Now he hoped that it had not all been for nothing. He had ignored his more cautious father’s warnings — Heby had sat on the fence until his death — and thrown in his lot with Akhenaten. He had come to the City of the Horizon without a second thought, imbued with the kind of pioneering spirit Akhenaten liked to see about him. Now the dust in the neglected and unsprinkled road seemed to him like the dust of that spirit.

  The heat filled the street like folded linen. This physical presence sometimes made Huy long for the lands to the north, from where the blessed wind came. The couriers who had been there told him of the inexpressible green plain of the sea, which Huy had never seen and couldn’t imagine. Escaping from the depressing thoughts which contemplation of his immediate future brought him, he embarked on a fantasy in which he patched things up with Aahmes and became the captain of one of the great Byblos ships which traded along the coastline and came down as far as the Northern Capital, whence their goods were transferred to high-prowed barges for the journey further upriver.

  His reverie made him oblivious of the emptiness of the street, though the Matet-boat of the sun was almost at its height and the place should have been busy with people returning to eat and doze away the afternoon before work resumed. He broke out of it just as he turned the last corner before his house, and became aware at once both of his isolation, and of the man leaning against the already blistered acacia wood of his door-frame. He recognised what the man was immediately, and for a moment wondered if his approach had already been noticed, or if there was still a chance to duck away and hide. But the man was staring at Huy in the studiously bored, detached way policemen have when they have unpleasant news to impart. In any case, all along the blank walls of the meandering street there wasn’t so much as an alley to dive down. And why fight fate? The sun shone and the River flowed. What more was there, in the end?

  The policeman — a Medjay — was tall, taller than Huy, who was short and heavily built. He took advantage of his height as he lazily detached himself from the doorjamb on Huy’s approach. But here was none of the deference a Medjay ought to show a court scribe. The Medjays had originally been recruited from a Nubian tribe who were skilled scouts, and who’d given the force their name. Now, the police came from all sections of society. This officer had the bony angularity, dark skin and flat features of someone from the far south — perhaps from Napata. His face was familiar to Huy but he could not place it. He wore a simple tan linen kilt. His long limbs shimmered in the heat. At his waist was a copper sword in a palm-leaf scabbard. Not a high-ranker then, thought Huy. But his presence explained the emptiness of the street. In the short months since Smenkhkare’s death, with most of the people too busy in the fields to notice or care, General Horemheb had been busy. As the trickle of people away from the City of the Horizon increased, so did rumours of the renewed power of the priest-administrators in the Southern Capital. It was permitted again to speak the names of the old gods aloud. Those who had been close to Akhenaten were burying that fact if they could.

  ‘Huy?’

  ‘Yes.’ There was no point in denying it, and no point in drawing attention to the omitted courtesy of his title, Court Scribe.

  ‘Maiherpri, Warrant Officer.’ Reminding Huy of his name. Looking at him with shy familiarity for a moment, and then his face closing in disappointment as Huy failed to register.

  Why was the face familiar? Did it matter?

  ‘Do you want to talk here, or inside?’ continued the Medjay.

  ‘You could have waited inside.’

  ‘Not without permission.’

  That, at least, was something. Huy glanced up the dusty street again. Some way distant, the now deserted Royal Palace towered, like a building in a dream.

  Huy unlatched his door and went into the little courtyard. Following him, Maiherpri looked around. He saw a neat square, open to the sky but partially shaded by a tired vine.

  ‘You live here alone?’

  ‘Yes.’ Since his divorce, there had not even been a house-servant. Hapu had gone with Aahmes; there was no room here even for a Syrian slave-girl.

  It was customary to offer some form of refreshment, even to someone on an official visit. Maiherpri stood, obviously waiting.

  ‘Some beer? Some bread?’ asked Huy, and pointed to a low stool in the shade.

  The policeman sat down, stiffly. He had been waiting in the sun for a long time; but despite his relief he would not unbend. He was a young man, on his dignity, conscious of being unwelcome, delaying his news to give it more importance. Now he wondered if the action of sitting hadn’t robbed him of some advantage.

  ‘First, there is the news of the God King’s successor.’

  They had not wasted time, then, thought Huy. Like his predecessor, Smenkhkare had died childless; but he had been an obvious favourite of Akhenaten’s and married the eldest princess even before he had become co-regent. The bond had been sealed when Akhenaten himself had ceremonially married his oldest daughter too; but Smenkhkare had had no favourite or named successor. He had been young, and thought that there would be time enough to consider such things. Huy’s heart delved quickly among the possibilities. There were two obvious contenders. But would they dare declare themselves so quickly?

  ‘It is Tutankhaten.’ Smenkhkare’s half-brother. But Tutankhaten was only nine years old; there would have to be a regency.

  The Medjay showed no sign of moving. There was more to come. So far there had been little to justify the expression on his face. Now, from a fold of his kilt, he produced a papyrus scroll, standing to hand it to the scribe. Huy paused for a moment before taking it, aware of the stillness of the air at midday. It was too hot for birdsong, and the relentless scraping of the cicadas was so familiar that it passed for silence. It crossed his mind that the Medjay might have read it, but then he realised that Maiherpri was only a warrant officer and would have been unable to.

  The message was terse; it must have been one of several similar, for it had been copied out clumsily and hurriedly. Huy wondered which of his colleagues had also been recipients. There was a final paragraph which had clearly been inserted just for him.

  It wasn’t entirely unexpected. The burden of it informed him under the seal of the new pharaoh that scribes
and court officials of his rank were being relieved of their duties immediately. Access to their offices would henceforward be denied them, and they should surrender to the Medjay bearing this message any papers, official seals, even jottings on limestone flakes, that they had at their homes. Once relieved of duty they were ordered not to associate with former colleagues again, either for business purposes or socially, on pain of immediate exile. Huy knew that this meant being sent to one of the oases deep in the western desert, the Red Land, or to the gold mines which lay between the River and the Eastern Sea. His personal addition read simply: See! By the great God, Amun, Father of Karnak, Father and Mother of the Black Land, and by his Embodiment the King Tutankhamun, that you will no more practise your profession, either for the state or in private.

  Huy looked up from this to meet Maiherpri’s eyes, where he was surprised to read a guarded sympathy.

  ‘You don’t remember me, do you?’

  ‘No. I’m sorry. This is a shock.’

  ‘You didn’t remember me before.’

  ‘Your face is familiar.’

  ‘It was before I joined the police. Still in the reign of Neferkheprure Amenophis IV.’ Huy noticed that this official was careful to use the name Akhenaten had been born with, not the one he had bestowed upon himself. ‘My brother and I were accused of taking barley from the south-western granary in the Southern Capital. You helped us.’

  Huy did remember, and he was surprised that he hadn’t before. It had been one of those small, almost incidental achievements — a detour from the normal route of his profession — of which he had been proud. It was seven years ago, for Aahmes had been pregnant with little Heby then. Two teenagers seen fleetingly at dusk, robbing the granary. These two brothers pulled in and accused-such a routine case that Huy, then a rank junior, had been given the paperwork; it hadn’t even warranted papyrus, just limestone flakes. But the evidence had seemed to be so circumstantial that he had to object, ask his superior for leave to re-examine it. It had been a lean year, a low flood and a poor harvest. The two young men stood to have their noses and the fingers of their right hands cut off as punishment.