by Nick Drake
‘Here we are again, walking on the water.’
Khety looked down. ‘Oh yes,’ he said, surprised.
‘What is it with these people and their river scenes?’ I asked.
‘Aten’s creation. They need to see it everywhere.’
We walked across it anyway, and came to a great door. It was beautifully panelled, and within it was a smaller door, and within that a smaller shutter the size of a little window. The mural beneath our feet showed nothing but still water. Khety knocked quietly on the shutter. We waited, and again I experienced the prickling sensation that we were being watched. I looked around. There was nothing to be seen. Then the shutter was opened from within.
‘Show your faces,’ said an odd, strange-pitched voice.
Khety gestured for me to approach the shutter, and as I did so a strong light shone directly into my eyes. Then the little door swung open on silent hinges and a patch of light fell onto the floor. I stepped into it, and through the portal.
Inside, the light continued to dazzle me. I held my hands up to shield my eyes. I seemed to see now a multiplication of little lights, a repetition of small moons, all shifting about. Suddenly I realized they were decorated papyrus lanterns bobbing and turning on slender reed stems. And holding these lanterns were girls. Pretty young girls. The lantern directly in front of me was lowered and I saw a face, large-boned but elegant, with painted lashes and mouth, and skin whitened thickly with powders. And a body dressed in the most elaborate costume yet belonging, in stature, to a prize-fighter or a cart-driver.
‘It’s rude to stare,’ she said. The voice matched the body, not the face.
‘Forgive me.’
‘I appreciate your interest.’ She slurred the last word as if she were licking it off a plate.
‘Good evening. We’re with the city Medjay. We need to interview the women of the Harem.’
‘At this hour?’
‘It doesn’t matter what time it is.’
She looked annoyed. ‘Which women do you mean? We have all kinds of women here: seamstresses, dressers, women of the right hand, dancers, musicians, right through to the foreign parties. I don’t think any of them would want to see you at this hour.’
‘Oh? Let’s see. I know one of them is missing. Vanished. A very special girl. A kind of mirror. Her sisters will know what I mean. They must be worried. Frightened, probably. It’s worse not to know what’s happened, don’t you think?’
She looked at me intently, her big face furrowing. And then she let us in.
‘She’s a eunuch!’ whispered Khety.
‘I know,’ I whispered back. I’ve seen everything Theban nightlife has to offer, all the lower depths of the clubs and dens, and the other places men go to realize and enact their most secret desires. Boys as women, women as men, men with men, women with women.
She walked ahead of Khety and me and the girls followed, giggling and whispering, their lanterns jiggling and bouncing as they skipped along. What with the strangeness of the surroundings and the constantly dancing lights and shadows, I soon lost my sense of direction as the passage turned left, right, right, left…We walked ever deeper into this dark labyrinth, passing empty reception rooms full of unoccupied couches and heaped cushions, low workrooms where little figures sat hunched, stitching by close lamplight and ruining their eyesight, silent laundry courts where washing bowls were stacked and white linen dried on endless racks, shut offices, and dark sleeping quarters where tired women came and went in different states of dress, their hair down. The eunuch stepped lightly, elegantly, ahead of us, occasionally glancing back slyly to make sure we were still following.
At last we came to another door. The girls gathered around us, their lanterns and chatter finally resolving into stillness and quiet.
‘We can go no further. We are not permitted.’
The eunuch knocked at the door, whispered urgently, then ushered me in. Khety was not allowed to follow. The last I saw of him he was standing in a pool of light with a sad entourage of pretty girls smiling up at him. Then a thick curtain was drawn across the portal, and he was gone.
‘Good evening.’ Her voice was light, amused, intelligent. ‘Forgive the girls, they’re silly and over-excited. We don’t usually see visitors at this hour, but I’ve been expecting someone.’
She was dressed in a pleated outfit, the whole garment seeming to shape itself to her body, giving prominence to her naked right breast, which was beautifully displayed. Golden sandals on her immaculate feet, her shining and perfumed hair hanging loose. She looked not unlike the woman I had seen carved and painted everywhere in the city.
Her name was Anath. We were in a comfortable entertaining room, with elaborately wrought high-backed wooden chairs inlaid and gilded, and finished with lions’ feet. On a stand between us lay a board set out for a game of senet, the board itself a beauty, its thirty squares decorated with ivory.
‘Do you play?’ she asked.
‘At home. With my wife and my daughters. My oldest is smarter than me. She beats me often now. She remembers all the moves, she thinks through every permutation, and she almost always throws exactly what she needs.’
‘Girls are more intelligent than boys. They have to think for themselves from the day they are born.’
We sat down, and I told her everything. As I spoke, a few other women gradually drifted out of the shadows and into the room, one by one taking up positions in chairs and on heaped cushions to listen to me. I tried to focus, to attend to the face of the woman before me. She was listening intently.
There was a shocked silence, then a murmur of sorrow, and little gasps of grief from around the room. I looked up now at the other women, six in all. Suddenly I too felt as if the world had lost its balance. As I looked from face to face, gathered now in the flickering light of the lamps, it seemed I had wandered by mistake into a room of living mirrors. For these women, though different from each other in slight details, looked more or less identical. In their poise and their profiles, they could all pass for the same person. The Queen.
Eventually Anath spoke. ‘We are raised here, sometimes from girlhood, in this harem within the Harem, because we were all born with one gift. There are other offices in the Harem Palace serving different purposes, but here, the spirit of the Queen’s perfection is reflected, however dimly, in each one of us, and we labour and struggle to bring those elements of ourselves-our eyes or our noses, the length of our legs or the sound of our laughter-that are not quite like her into a closer harmony. This is a great purpose, wouldn’t you agree?’
I did not know what to say. ‘But why?’
‘To protect her. To pass for her when she needs us.’
I looked at them all, unbelieving. ‘Is she here among you now? Is the Queen one of you? If she is hiding here, please come forward. I will bring you safely home. I swear.’
I looked around the silent faces in the still light of the candles. I was desperate, in truth, to recognize her, for her to step forward and say, ‘You have found the Queen. Your search is over.’ But no-one moved. I realized they were all terrified. They looked anxiously at Anath, who looked confused.
‘Why would she be among us?’ she said.
‘Because she has vanished. I have been sent for to find her and return her to safety.’
The silence in the room became more concentrated.
‘Please, tell me: what happened the night Seshat disappeared?’
‘Three nights ago,’ Anath began, ‘a sealed message came from the Queen. There were detailed instructions. It was imperative that no-one, including ourselves, should know of their contents.’
A second woman spoke: ‘We thought nothing of it. It was not unusual to receive such a command from the Queen.’
‘The instructions were particularly for Seshat,’ Anath continued.
‘And who brought the message?’
They looked at each other, and Anath shrugged. ‘We do not know. From the moment we walk through the door, all
is secret. Of course we can describe everything to each other afterwards, when we return. But not this time. For Seshat never returned.’
When I described the scarab amulet, they knew nothing of it. It did not seem to have belonged to Seshat. I was still glad I had given it to her grieving family.
‘What sort of men would destroy our sister with such terrible brutality?’ asked one of the women.
Another voice spoke up angrily from the back: ‘What sort of men would want our Queen herself murdered?’
‘That is what I am trying to discover.’
‘Some sort of monster,’ said one.
‘No,’ said another, ‘there are no monsters. Only men.’
I bade farewell to the hall of strange women. Anath took me by the arm and led me out along a dark avenue of sycamore figs to the furthest edge of a garden lit by the moon, and by many lamps. At the head of a pool was a statue of Nefertiti. She stared, all-seeing, all-knowing, across the dark water at her feet. We sat down for a moment on a bench, listening to a solitary night bird.
‘Where I live, within the Harem, we have little contact with the outside world,’ Anath said after a short while. ‘I know people think the Harem is a place of desire and mystery, and perhaps for some it is. Perhaps they imagine the things they would like to find in the secret world of women. But it is not like that for those of us who live here. We have our dedications, our daily rituals, our tasks. Sometimes I have felt like a bowl of silence, untouched, undisturbed by the outside world. But your news has destroyed my tranquillity. That bowl is cracked now. What an illusion it all was, that this world is kind and good.’
What could I say to her? There was no purpose in telling her that in my experience violence was buried deep within each one of us, a potential written into our very bones, something we shared even with the gods.
‘I don’t know what will become of us if the Queen too is dead,’ she continued. ‘If someone would murder the Queen herself, then what will they do to us? What good would we be to anyone? Who would want us? We would be nothing more than pale reflections of the dead. We will be spirits trapped in life.’
‘I do not think the Queen is dead,’ I said. ‘I believe she lives.’
‘May the gods prove you right.’ She sounded relieved to hear my words. She turned my hand over in hers so that the palm faced upwards. ‘I think I see something here.’
I felt myself seizing up inside. I cannot abide the nonsense of fortune-telling and horoscopes, all that silly business of spells and potions and mumbo-jumbo. Seeing patterns and meanings where none exist. It goes against my training and my instincts.
She must have sensed this at once, for she smiled and said, ‘Don’t worry, I am not going to tell your fortune like a market-place prophetess. All I want is to say what I feel. That you are a good man. That you want to get home.’
I felt like a piece of faience that has suddenly been caught by sunlight. Ridiculous. The white statue of Nefertiti, still meditating on the black pool at her feet, ignored us. ‘May she protect you on your journey,’ she said, quietly, as if she knew already that I would have to travel into much darker places before I could finally, if ever, reach that longed-for place that seemed to recede with every step and every day.
‘I won’t forget you,’ I said.
She smiled ruefully, then opened the doorway back into the main Harem building. I stepped through it. The ghost of her scent stayed with me for a moment, then disappeared.
19
Khety was waiting for me on the other side. I asked him to take me to the house of Nakht, the noble. We arrived there without being seen. The street, in the south suburb, was shadowy and silent, the dark villas and estates secure and hidden behind their high walls. The air was thick with heat. Nothing stirred. I knocked quietly on the door. Quickly, it was unlocked, and Nakht’s kind face, not the porter’s, appeared. He looked tremendously relieved.
‘It’s the middle of the night and you open your own door,’ I said.
He gestured for us to enter, and we passed through into the sanctuary of his house without speaking.
We sat in his garden, around a single lamp. The scents of strange flowers hung richly in the warm night air.
‘Can anyone observe us?’ I asked.
‘No. I built this place for privacy.’
The walls were high, and the frogs around the pool talked louder than we did. He poured some wine.
‘I’m honoured to offer you some sanctuary.’
‘It will just be for one night.’
He inclined his head. ‘So you survived Mahu’s hunt. Apparently you were the intended duck.’
‘Is my demise the talk of the town?’
‘It is indeed. It has contributed to the feeling that no-one is in control any more. First Nefertiti. Then the young Medjay officer. Now you. Everyone is convinced she has been murdered. And the city is obviously still unprepared for this ill-conceived Festival. The entourages are arriving to find unfinished accommodations, inadequate supplies and a King without a Queen. It all seems to be escalating into chaos.’
‘Someone is in control of this, but it is not Akhenaten,’ I said.
‘Nor is it Mahu, if that is what you are thinking. Whatever else he is, he’s famous for his loyalty, and he’s not so stupid as to have you killed at his own party.’
‘So who, then?’
Nakht shook his head. ‘I don’t know. But you must be getting warm to earn this kind of attention.’
‘I feel I’m getting nowhere at all, and time is dripping away fast. Before long the basin will be empty and dry.’
‘We know the dead girl’s identity, and we know some of what happened that night,’ said Khety, encouragingly.
‘Who would want Nefertiti dead?’ I asked Nakht. ‘Who would want to destabilize everything? Ramose?’
‘I cannot see that. Ramose stands at the heart of the new order. He admires the Queen, and it seems to me he prefers dealing with her than with the King because she has a more pragmatic understanding of the affairs of the Great Estate than he does. He’s obsessed with his grand design, and his new religion.’
I gazed into the fast-dwindling shallows of my wine. ‘What about within the old Priesthood? The Amun faction? What kind of power could they have here?’
‘The whole point of the city was to create a capital apart from them and their power-bases in Thebes and Memphis,’ Nakht said, refilling my goblet.
‘But surely they still have their powers? Akhenaten can ban them, but he can’t destroy whole families, whole generations. They won’t give it all up without a struggle.’
Nakht nodded and looked off into the dark foliage of his garden. ‘I was one of them myself. Yet now I’m here. There were many of us who chose the pragmatic way of conversion to the Aten. But it was more than pragmatism. The Amun Priesthood was not of course just a Priesthood, although they venerated the god, kept the rituals and managed the festivals. As you know, they controlled vast commercial interests too. They owned a great deal of the land and its riches. Their commercial and political interests clashed repeatedly with those of the royal household. It was inevitable that at some point one or the other would have to make a bold move for absolute supremacy. Now, I have my private doubts about the Great House and their melodramas, but’-he smiled quietly-‘in the end I thought how much more interesting it would be to see what would happen when Akhenaten committed us to his enlightenment. Perhaps, after all, it will be to the greater benefit of many people. It has opened many doors previously shut in the faces of talented but non-elite men. It has brought the business of worship out of the carefully preserved secrecy of the temples and into the light of day for all to see. And there is something about it, in its finest forms, which tells people not to be afraid to live. Let’s not forget, the Amun families are generally repulsive. They take their supremacy for granted. It was a special pleasure to see the shock and amazement on their arrogant faces as Akhenaten and Nefertiti stripped away their powers and riches.
Welcome to the human race!’
He looked unembarrassed by this confession.
‘But of course in converting to the Aten you also managed to preserve your own fortune,’ I said.
He smiled. ‘I can’t see the purpose of destroying my life and the work of my ancestors just to prove a point, especially since it was a point I disagreed with. It was a way of converting their efforts into something new, something more generous. I wanted to explore the new possibilities. Do you think I was wrong?’
‘No, I think you did the necessary thing.’
‘Not the right thing, then.’
‘I am wary of the words “right” and “wrong”. We use them far too easily to judge things which we have no competence to judge. And I could not say that the things I have seen here in Akhetaten are right. People are people: avaricious, ambitious, strutting, careless. That doesn’t change.’
He nodded. ‘Certainly. The way is difficult. Things get messy and complicated as soon as they descend from the realm of the ideal into the chaos of the human. There are many people here who harbour serious doubts about what has happened lately. They see idealism changing into fanaticism. There are the same old self-serving struggles for personal power. But to return to the Amun question, it is quite likely they are here too, under the guise of conversion, perhaps waiting for their instructions, waiting for the opportunity to bring down the new regime.’
I drank some more wine. And then a name popped into my head.
‘And Horemheb?’
Nakht sat up. ‘Now that’s a name to reckon with.’
‘We met some young guards who seemed to be completely infatuated with him.’
‘I’m not surprised. He seems to have come from nowhere, built himself a brilliant career, married the Queen’s mad sister, and is now clearing a path for himself up the military tree by galvanizing the whole force.’
‘Who is this mad sister?’