City of the Horizon

by Anton Gill

  The thought encouraged him. His movements were not restricted; he had been allowed to keep his house. But how to earn a living? His stock of beer and wheat dwindled, and he found himself forced to eat barley bread, a minor humiliation at the baker’s which nevertheless rankled.

  The one thing which had always attracted him as an alternative to a scribe’s life was work on the River. Of course to actually contemplate such a move was impossible, as impossible as the thought of moving home without reference to one’s superiors, to the system, and ultimately to the pharaoh’s needs; but life had unsettlingly changed all that, and now Huy was even — with a certain pleasure which he dared not admit to his conscious mind — willing to throw away the entrenched sense of status his job brought with it. Be a scribe that your limbs may be sleek, and your hand may become easily wearied, that you may not be extinguished like a lamp, like him whose limbs are soft, for you have no men’s bones in you. You are tall and fine-limbed. If you should take up a load to carry it, you would sink down, your feet trailing exceedingly, for you are miserably weak, all your limbs are wretched, and your body puny. Set your mind to become a scribe, an excellent trade, well fit for you. When you call one, one thousand answer. You will walk unhindered on the road, and not become an ox to be handed over. You will be at the head of others. There had been something like that in one of the early textbooks, but Huy had never liked the implication that it was good to have an effete body — as a by-product and badge of learning. He was unfashionably short and stocky, and his body was naturally well muscled. As for calling one and having one thousand answer, and walking unhindered on the road, that had never been his experience, least of all now. He had ceased to be a member of the exclusive club his teachers had always dangled as the ultimate encouragement.

  He took to wandering down to the port, the one part of the city which was still busy, though few boats unloaded here now. The palm piers on their cedar pylons bore a constant procession of copper-coloured men co-opted from the farms on the fringes of the desert, dressed in dirty white linen wraps and carrying endless baskets of possessions aboard the high-prowed barges for the journey south, or revictualling other ships bound to or from the coast, taking cargoes of gold and ivory and granite northwards, and cargoes of cedar, sycamore and Tura limestone south. He would squat on the quay, and as the sailors and longshoremen grew used to him, he would chat to them, or play a game of senet, enjoying their company as a completely new experience, and learning the gossip of the River without the trappings of court politics. But the one time he broached the subject of working alongside them he was countered with laughter so firmly incredulous that he knew he could not insist. He had forgotten for a moment that he had become an outsider who could contemplate breaking taboos built up over one hundred generations.

  As his food supplies dwindled he became leaner. In the first month of Shemu, he was down to his last bag of meal and his last jar of beer. The little house was so cheerless that he avoided returning to it except to sleep. Few people remained in his street now, and none he knew. His alternatives were to continue his life as a hanger-on at the docks, or to seek work. The second course was the only viable one, and two or three times now he had packed his few possessions and his scribe’s palette before lassitude at the thought of moving overcame him.

  He wandered down to the harbour once again. It was evening. He couldn’t set off until the morning, he told himself. Wherever it was he was going.

  A vast sea-barge was drawn up, dwarfing the jetty, pointing upriver, lightly laden. A gold ship on its return journey. He could see a tall man at its prow, wrapped in a woollen cloak; but the figure was no more than a silhouette against the sun descending in a pool of blood beyond the far shore.

  He was turning towards his familiar companions when the figure on the boat called to him by name.

  TWO

  Huy was roused by the cries of the boatmen casting off. He threw off the light rug that covered him and looked towards the high prow which was turning slowly into the River, a group of men there busy coiling the ropes flung off the jetty. In front of him in the centre of the boat, just below the raised rear deck where the cabin was, another team, straining on ropes, hauled the square sail aloft to catch the unfailing north wind. Huy rubbed the sleep from his face and stretched. He was unused to sleeping on hard decks with only the thinnest linen bedroll to lie on.

  Now the barge was free, swinging ponderously into midstream, its progress controlled by two men working the great rudder oar aft. The sail flapped hesitantly, and then, as the bows cut into the current, filled with wind with the assurance of an expanding muscle. There was a gentle groaning of wood, accompanied suddenly by the sound of urgently lapping water, and they were underway.

  Huy lowered the leather flap of the cabin entrance and sat upright in the gloom. Across the narrow strip of floor, he could see that Amotju’s sleeping-place had already been cleared. In the thin pre-dawn light that edged through the narrow air-slits in the cabin walls, he could see the tidied bedroll, and Amotju’s sailing kit slung from a hook above it in a linen bag.

  Leaning back, he touched his own leather satchel, hanging from a similar hook, in which he had finally stowed the belongings he had neglected to pack for so long. In the event, it had taken him fifteen minutes, no longer, and no more than twice that time to close his house and bid it farewell. And that was how long ago now? He opened the flap again. The gloom was already lifting, and the faintest lilac glow was just discernible in the east. Though the cliffs of the desert were still black, he could see tiny pinpoints of light buried amidst them, as people lit their morning fires along the strip of inhabitable green land on either side of the River which went to make up the long serpent of his country. Dawn might be an hour away, and it had been dusk when Amotju had first hailed him.

  Scanning the deck, he could see no sign of his old friend. The cook had struck a flint for the ship’s fire, and his assistant was filling a large copper cauldron with water and crushed barley to hang from the tripod for the porage. The glow of the fire as it flared illuminated the cook’s greasy, morning face for a moment. Around him the activity of the sailors gradually decreased, as the boat settled into its pattern. Everything had been conducted in the muted fashion in which people work before dawn, and the occasional shouted order or urgent cry of warning had seemed somehow shocking. Huy’s other boat journeys, few and far between, and none since he had first arrived at the City of the Horizon, had been on official visits, on state barges. He had never been on a working boat and the excitement he felt overrode the cautious objections another part of his heart had started to issue as he reflected upon the rashness with which he had accepted Amotju’s invitation.

  Despite the length of time that had elapsed since he’d last heard it, Huy had recognised his friend’s voice the minute he’d heard it, and it seemed to him that Amotju had been sent by a god, or at least a protector, maybe by his Kay to rescue him at the precise moment of his lowest ebb. Even so, he hadn’t been able to believe it.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Don’t you remember me?’ The voice was light with enthusiasm, and there may even have been a hint of relief. The tall figure in the woollen cloak practically danced down from the prow — Amotju had always been elegant — and was by him on the quay in an instant. ‘It must be six years.’

  ‘Since I came here, yes.’

  Amotju had never left the Southern Capital. The fleet of six barges he had inherited from his father was based there, plying the River south and north with mixed cargoes, but always going south to pick up gold, and carrying it on downstream as far as the Delta, where it would be transferred to the sea-going ships which carried on the coastal trade. The barge from whose deck he had hailed Huy was the flagship. On the rare occasions when Amotju travelled with the fleet himself, it was on board Splendour-of-Aten.

  ‘Now back to her old name,’ smiled Amotju. ‘Splendour-of-Amun. One has to move with the times.’

  ‘What are you doing here
?’

  Amotju smiled again, more fleetingly. ‘An important cargo. A big shipment to the Northern Capital. And my best captain suddenly sick. The important thing is that if I hadn’t come, I’d never have met you again. What are you doing?’

  Wondering how far he could trust this friend after such a long gap, Huy filled in as many details of his life as he felt prudent; but there was no avoiding — and as far as he could tell, no need to avoid — telling him about his lack of work. Amotju’s keen dark eyes had already been scanning his undeniably shabby appearance, and no doubt that told its own story.

  ‘So, what is there left for you to do here?’ asked Amotju when he had finished.

  Huy shrugged. ‘Very little.’

  ‘With no job and no family, I would have thought that this was a very good place to leave.’

  ‘But I cannot leave without a reason.’

  ‘Might you go north?’

  Huy read his thought. ‘There isn’t any question of returning to Aahmes.’

  ‘You do have a reason for leaving, though. This city is finished. In a year, it will be empty. In another, the desert will reclaim it. It will be a place for the rats and the dead.’

  ‘That is true. And yet, I cannot tell you what hopes we built up here.’

  ‘They are gone. You must look elsewhere.’

  Huy couldn’t deny the truth of all this. Perhaps he had just needed someone to tell him. Those members of the court who had not already departed to long-neglected residences in the Southern Capital, where Horemheb was already busy supervising the rebuilding of the palace, had accompanied Ay and the pharaoh downriver on a state visit to the newly appointed Vizir of the North. The only stop they would make here on their way back south in the summer would be to collect the city supervisor whose job was to seal the tombs of the great in an attempt to protect them from robbers until it became possible to ship their bodies to new homes being prepared for them in the Great Valley of the Setting Sun on the western bank of the River, opposite the Southern Capital.

  ‘You look as if you need a wash, a shave, food, wine, a woman — maybe two women — and work,’ said Amotju. ‘The first four we can provide here. The last we can discuss. The other is up to you.’

  Putting an arm around him, to the astonishment of the longshoremen, who saw their former gaming partner and dock layabout taken up by one of the most powerful lords of the River, Amotju took him aboard. As soon as he set foot on the planking. Huy knew that he wanted to leave, to go south on this boat, and to seek whatever crumbs fortune might throw him. For the first time, as he looked back from the ship to the dark, lifeless outline of the city in the dusk, he felt that his future was no longer here. He was clinging to nothing, unless he himself turned grave robber, and even then, he thought drily, the pickings were richer to the south.

  ‘The supervisor here has a soft job, sealing the tombs from robbers,’ he said over the first glass of Kharga wine — Amotju had always spent his money discerningly, so he was not surprised to be drinking the best. ‘As far as I’ve heard, all the grave thieves have been working in the south, in the Valley, since Akhenaten moved the court up here.’

  Amotju looked troubled. ‘Perhaps you should come and see for yourself,’ was all he said.

  ‘I might. One day.’

  ‘Let it be soon.’ Huy noticed an eagerness in his voice which he couldn’t possibly ascribe to friendship; after all, Amotju had more or less ignored his existence for six years. He told himself to be more charitable. They had both been building careers, in cities two days’ river journey apart.

  ‘It cannot just be chance that we have met again,’ Amotju said later. ‘Why don’t you seize the opportunity, and come with me now?’

  ‘I am not one for quick decisions,’ replied Huy; but he felt his pulse quicken. Two pottery wine jars lay empty at their sides as they sat cross-legged opposite each other on the stern-deck, their faces lit by the last fire of Ra as he slipped behind the Hills of the Dead.

  ‘There is nothing to keep you here; everything to draw you there.’

  Huy felt his blood race, finally. In all his life everything had been fixed, certain, but the last few months had been like wandering in the desert, and he was tired of it. Here was a chance. He would take it.

  ‘Why not?’ he had said.

  He had refused Amotju’s offer to send men to collect his gear — no strangers could have found his house through the maze of dark streets. Amotju had been astonished that Huy was prepared to go alone, however; and Huy was reminded that even he had not entirely shaken off the fear of the ghosts that lurk beyond the firelight, or of the disembodied dead, those unfortunates without memorial statues, whose mummies have been rotted with water, and, having no dwelling-place any more, must seek another, by tearing out the heart of a living man and eating it. Akhenaten had dismissed such beliefs as stories concocted by the priests; but the traditions stretched back to beyond the time of the pyramids, and they were a thousand years old. Huy had agreed to an escort, though the rational part of his heart told him that Amotju was sending the men with him as much as anything to ensure that he did not change his mind.

  Leaving home fast had been salutary, and left no time for sentiment or regret; having the boatmen there with him had helped, too; but he would not have changed his decision. His little house was cold and dark, unloving and unloved: it too had become a ghost. The time of his life in it was already long past. He took his expensive ox-leather satchel and into it put the two or three remaining papyrus rolls he knew he could not do without, and his scribe’s palette, some ingots of gold that had survived, and, after hesitation, the small statue of the house god, Bes, the little protector whom Aahmes had made him promise always to keep with him, with tears in her eyes, at their last meeting.

  After he had closed the door on the courtyard he turned his back on it. He had not taken a last look round. He had not said goodbye to the places where he had formerly been happy. That happiness was a ghost, too. His mind turned to the warmth of the company on board, to the dinner of roast duck and millet. The moon was up already, Khons in his chariot, turning the sand that had already drifted against the walls of the deserted buildings a soft silver. He breathed in the velvet air, clutching the Eye of Horus at his neck, which had always hung there despite the influence of the New Thinking, and hastened his step towards the tiny lights outlining the barge.

  Amotju was one of those people upon whom life had consistently smiled. So great had been his fortune that from time to time these days he could not suppress the worry that he was tempting providence and that the day when his luck ran out was increasingly likely to be sooner rather than later. Inheriting from his father not only his fleet but also a level-headed sense of business and a strong instinct for self-preservation, he had managed never to commit himself to either side during the troubled years which now seemed to be coming to a close. The service his business provided was too essential to any politician for him to come to harm by hedging. All he had needed was to be unfailingly polite, and to give an impression of being charming but dim — and therefore not to be feared. Now that the heresy of Aten seemed to be thoroughly scotched, and the old gods back in their place, he began to feel that he could drop some of the pose and re-enter the political arena. But his instincts told him to keep his mask in place.

  He’d done so admirably, but, as he told himself ruefully, even the most cautious man can’t help twisting his ankle in the occasional pothole. In his case, the pothole was a girl called Mutnefert. A girl? A woman! A tall, slender woman, whose father had come here from Mitanni — she had the high cheekbones of that race.

  He summoned her into his mind and undressed her there, appraising the dark copper of her skin, her long legs, high buttocks, hips narrow like a boy’s, though her breasts were firm and full. She had broad shoulders, her back was muscular, and her arms had strength in them, unlike the soft arms of the court ladies he had known. Unlike them, too, she wore her own hair, not a wig, washing and lightl
y oiling it so that it shone. Her hair was not black like a pure Egyptian’s, but a deep chestnut, and straight and soft. Her eyes were large and dark, though the whites of them were dazzling; and they seemed always to be keeping something to themselves. Amotju caressed every detail in his imagination, and as he did so he knew that he could not give her up, could not abandon the fight to possess her completely; but with that thought a shadow crossed his heart. As if anyone could possess her! It was she who would choose; and at the moment she did not choose to abandon her principal lover, the priest Rekhmire, guardian of the shrine of Osiris at the Southern Capital, and overseer of the reconstruction of the palace.

  Powerful as he was, Amotju did not have either the contacts or the resources of his older rival, who had become tougher during the years in which the old priesthood had been driven underground, out to the oases and far, far to the south, or into the desert as far as the coast of the Eastern Sea. Returned to power, even within half a year, the followers of Amun had breathed new life into the Southern Capital. They had a pharaoh and a general who supported them again — Horemheb had started publicly to worship at the shrine of Osiris as soon as he had returned from the City of the Horizon. Amotju thanked his Ka that he was not a victim of the witch-hunts pursued against the followers of Aten.

  How far Rekhmire himself suspected that he had a rival, Amotju did not know. Mutnefert would permit no discussion of the other part of her life; but he knew her to be discreet, if only for her own sake, and from the passion of her lovemaking he could not believe that she was not a woman worth taking risks for. Nevertheless, a month earlier he had been taking the food offerings to his father’s tomb late in the day, with only one servant to accompany him. It was a duty-visit, for Amotju was rich enough to hire mortuary priests full-time to perform this function; but he owed his father much, and could never be sure that the Ba of old Ramose did not hover over him reprovingly at times. Amotju therefore chose to propitiate the old man’s Ka, more powerful than the Ba, but at least unable to leave the tomb.