by Nick Drake
Intef looked sick. He was shivering. ‘They’re changing the watch,’ he whispered. ‘We’ve got no more than a moment to get out of here.’
I picked up the sheet from the floor and re-filed it (in the wrong position, for my own satisfaction). We made our way cautiously to the edge of the stack. No sign of any guards. Then it occurred to me: I wanted to check my own file. I beckoned Khety to follow me.
‘Come on, we’ve got what we came for,’ he said urgently.
But I ignored him, and found the passageway beginning with my hieroglyph. Rameses, military officer, see under Horemheb; Rahotep, royal scribe; Raia, musician; Ramose, Vizier, Chief Minister, born Athribis, mother Ipuia…Where was my file? I checked back along the documents. It was missing. Why? I suddenly felt like a non-person. Who would remove my file, and why? Nefertiti said she had read it. Perhaps she still had it, or perhaps it was lying somewhere in Mahu’s office. There must be a simple explanation…
Khety dragged me away, holding his finger to his lips. We moved silently back down the staircase, then heard more footsteps marching towards us, up the corridor we had taken earlier. Intef panicked, hurried us into a small storage room and shut the door. Khety and I looked at each other intently, trying not to breathe. Intef’s eyes were shut tight. Once the new detachment of guards had passed, we slipped out and hurried through the building, back through the now empty and silent library, until we finally reached the courtyard. Bowing to Intef, who looked emotionally devastated by the adventure, Khety and I pulled our linens over our heads and walked past the guards, out into the noise and chaos of the street.
‘So what did we get from that?’ asked Khety.
I carefully showed him the gold feather. ‘I found it in Ay’s file. It was hidden there. I don’t know what it means.’
I twirled the beautiful, strange thing in the late light.
32
After dark, the streets were transformed by the sudden influx of the visiting population. Suddenly I liked the city better for it. Impromptu performances of magic or dance or music or juggling were taking place in the ways; temporary restaurants and canteens had been set up in any spare space under cheap, bright bolts of cloth illuminated by torches and lamps; here was a night market, with sellers offering monkeys and birds, tailoring and jewellery, fruits and spices heaped like the perfect hills of a multicoloured land. The atmosphere was lively, noisy, men and women from all over the Empire jostling for service or pushing through the crowds at the performances. Dignitaries and senior families progressed to dinners, receptions and meetings in their finery, staring straight ahead, demonstrating their pride and superiority.
Sudden parks of tents had sprung up in the empty spaces around the central city, and they spread down to the water’s edge. The dark river was busy with boats. I felt drawn down there, under cover of the night, by the busyness of the crowds and the delicious cool of the northern night breeze. Khety and I watched as hundreds of small barques, most rented from an enterprising man on the dock, bobbed about on the black water, their paper lanterns creating shifting archipelagos of illumination for the lovers who occupied them. Under them ran the ever-flowing river, the transient brightness of the present visiting the darkness of the gods. Behind us the palaces and the temples, the offices and the libraries, stood mostly sinister as prisons. I wondered what, of all that had been built here in so short a time, would survive. Or would it all pass away and be lost under the encroaching desert?
We returned to the safe house, keeping to the shadowy edges of the ways, past arguments and calls for drink and the last banging dinner pots being washed by old women at the public wells. Groping quietly for our straw pallets, we settled down for the night. Khety wanted to talk through what little we had found, but I was unwilling. The information was frustratingly enigmatic and inconclusive. And time was ever shortening. I twirled the gold feather in front of my eyes and tried to think everything through. Akhenaten and his problems. Mahu, his loathing of me, and the Queen’s doubts. The assassination of Meryra. Ay, of whom she was afraid. And Horemheb, this strange and ambitious young officer, married directly into the heart of the family, to a girl who wept for a year. I prayed that the night would permit my dreaming mind to discover some pattern that eluded my waking brain.
33
I woke up with the name Horemheb going through my mind. I looked up at the dust drifting through the blades of strong light already piercing the broken strips in the reed roof. Khety’s pallet was empty. I heard someone moving through the outer room, and reached for my dagger. The door scraped open, and in he came, carrying a basket. How had I slept through him leaving? I must be losing my touch.
‘Breakfast.’
We ate fruit and sugar-bread, and shared between us a jug of beer and a handful of olives.
‘I want to pay a visit to Horemheb,’ I said. ‘But how?’ I was, after all, supposed not to exist.
We munched on our olives, thinking.
‘What if he doesn’t know you’ve disappeared?’ Khety said after a short while. ‘Why should he? Who would think to tell him? What if you just request an audience, say who you are, and that Akhenaten has commissioned you to investigate a very important mystery and you need to speak to him?’
It had the merit of simplicity. Akhenaten’s name would get me through the door. I could be who I really was and, during the interview, feel my way carefully to see whether I could sense or test the direction of his loyalties. I could inform him of the disappearance of Nefertiti, and observe his reaction. I could assess his relationship with Mahu perhaps, without compromising further the safety of my family. On the other hand, he could have me arrested. But it was worth the risk.
Khety discovered where Horemheb was being accommodated, in the northern suburbs-not, as I would have expected given his status, in the southern. Perhaps this was because he was therefore closer to the northern palaces, which were the more domestic and private of the royal residences. We decided to avoid the streets, despite the cover of the crowds, and since we could not make our way along the banks of the river-for the royal gardens ran down to the water’s edge-we hired instead a small barque. We skirted the docks, which even at this early hour were busy. Even more boats of all kinds had anchored overnight, nodding and bumping together like a floating shanty town.
We sailed slowly down the river. The first of the light as it rose above the eastern hills revealed the brilliant colours of the Red Land as well as the languorous, shining currents of the river, illuminated here and there by the shafts of light angling down through the eastern riverside trees. The hillsides, with their rock tombs and construction gangs, remained in grey-yellow and black shadow. Shadoufs, those clever new designs, worked ceaselessly under the trees, drawing water to supply the green force of the city. And on the west bank, workers and slaves, Egyptian and Nubian, bent to the green and yellow fields. No rest for them if they were to supply the endless, monstrous appetite of the city.
We steered the barque into a small pier and tied it to a post. Here were fewer people, although a cargo boat was unloading goods and foodstuffs, and several smaller vessels were ferrying field workers and crops to and fro across the river. We walked up to the Royal Road. To the south, in the distance, we could see the Great Aten Temple, which set the northern boundary of the central city, rising above all other buildings; its pennants drifted in the faint morning breeze. To the north, villas had been constructed on either side of the road within high mud-brick walls. A number of larger buildings in complexes stood out from the low-lying houses. Khety knew them; he told me the north city included the Riverside Palace, a square tower that lay next to the river, just under the northern hills where they curved to meet the river, while to the south of us stood another palace.
‘Who resides there?’
‘I don’t know. It’s empty. They say it’s full of amazing paintings of animals and birds.’
To the east were the desert altars facing the rising sun. And above them, cut into the hillsides
, Khety pointed out more great tombs.
‘Whose are they?’
Khety shook his head and shrugged. ‘The rich and powerful.’
The rest of the area seemed a more haphazard collection of low-level buildings. In the darkness of their workshops carpenters laboured, metalsmiths hammered; the pungent smells of wood shavings, hot fires and beaten metal drifted into the street. Rubbish of all kinds-food, building materials, broken pots, ruined sandals, bits of toys, scraps of linen-lay dumped in every vacant lot like temples of detritus for the scavenging cats and birds to worship at.
Like many of the other villas, Horemheb’s lay inside a rectangle of long, high, crenellated mud-brick walls with just one main gateway and no other windows or doorways. The lintel over the gateway was not inscribed. No-one, it seemed, had yet claimed ownership of this house, although someone must have paid for its costly construction. The finish on the exterior was immaculate, almost shiny it was so new.
We gave my name and authorities to the guard at the entry. He was uniformed. I asked him which division he belonged to. He looked me up and down as if I was too fat and soft, and replied, with the tone of hostile politeness that afflicts so many of our military, ‘Akhetaten division, sir.’
We were escorted up the entrance path, past a small domestic chapel where there were small statues of Akhenaten and Nefertiti. I paused, deliberately making some kind of fake, sanctimonious gesture of respect.
‘Do you worship much?’
The guard was irritated. ‘We worship as we are commanded to worship.’ But there was a tone in his voice that said: and we don’t much like it.
We turned right, walked on through the gardens where the heat of the day was now settling, and arrived at the welcome shade of a small courtyard with high walls. At this point the guard passed us over to another guard. He saluted as dismissively as possible, and turned away. The new guard led us up some stairs and into the main house.
A large, cool, airy loggia gave on to several other still more ample and airy pillared rooms around a central space lit by high windows. The air smelled of fresh paint and wood dust. The floor was unscratched and polished to a mirror shine. And the furniture looked as if it had been placed there that very morning. There was also a similar air of efficiency and purpose in the conduct of the uniformed men going about their business. These were career men, not conscripts or mercenaries. Quiet conversations were orchestrated with crisp nods, appreciative tilts of the head, wry smiles, evidently sensible remarks, and smart glances around the room. Several Nubians of high rank were gathered together in a serious conference in the loggia on the far side of the main room.
A secretary seated at a desk noticed us. Khety addressed him quietly. He shook his head. Khety remonstrated with him, and produced the authorities from Akhenaten. The secretary nodded, and walked off crisply along the corridor. We eased ourselves into two elegant chairs, their scrolled arms ending in gilded sphinx heads.
As we waited, I looked at these men, the commanding set of their young faces, the confident manner of their conduct, the precision and understated expense of their garments and uniforms, the inclusiveness of their racial and social backgrounds, and above all the vivid sense of the secret codes of their society in their measured gestures and responses. And I began to realize that here, after all, was the future, not in crazy worship of the sun or in new cities built in the desert, conjured by treasure and labour out of the dust and the light. No, the future was the military. These were the next generation of the King’s sons, from the elite Egyptian families. Many of them had been taken from their foreign homelands and raised as child-ransom in the nurseries of the Great House-all now grown into ambitious, educated, clear-minded young men, seeing the opportunities for advancement opening quickly before them. Who knew what loyalties, grudges and ambitions they nursed? They looked like men who had a plan, who knew their entitlement and were waiting for their time to come. They looked like men who were not afraid.
The secretary approached us and murmured to me that I would be seen now. Leaving Khety to wait for me, I followed the man along more corridors and into a private chamber. He knocked on an ordinary-looking door, and I was admitted into an ordinary kind of room, transformed into a small office by a desk and two chairs. Absolutely nothing to show the status and ambition of the man, as if he had refused all superficial trappings of power.
The man at the desk was shockingly handsome. His frame was not remarkably sturdy or robust-he was no giant-and his head, on his small but powerful shoulders, was not exceptionally noble, but his body was pure worked muscle-not a deben weight of casual fat on him anywhere-and his face exhibited pure focus, not the carnivorous appetite of Mahu but something alert and entirely unsentimental. I judged he wouldn’t kill for pleasure, but that he would kill for his own reasons all the same, and think nothing of it. I guessed his heart was nothing more to him than a well-disciplined muscle that pumped his cool blood.
He moved away from the desk, shook my hand with a brief firmness, and looked me directly in the eyes. There was not a trace of uncertainty in his look. Neither of us spoke for a moment. Then he gestured for me to sit and offered me refreshments, which I declined. He sat down in his chair-the same as mine, on the other side of the desk-his posture poised like a heron beside a fish-filled pond.
‘What can I do for you?’
He meant: state your business. I outlined my office and my role in the investigation of a great mystery. He kept his eyes on me all the time, observing my face as much as listening to my tale. When I had finished he looked away, up at the small, high window. He stretched out his legs, put his hands behind his head. His handsomeness continued to puzzle me, as I could not locate it in any particular feature; it seemed to come from a collusion of parts that were in themselves not especially remarkable. I recalled another of Tanefert’s writers who said that most people had enough material in them for several faces. Not here. This man had one face only.
He fixed his eyes on me. ‘You have told me an interesting tale, full of great excitements and dangerous possibilities, but what I don’t understand is this. Why you are here? Why do you wish to talk to me?’ He sat up again, and leaned forward.
‘Because you are related to the Queen, and the Queen has vanished.’
‘You think I am involved in her disappearance?’ His face was cold, challenging.
‘I need to speak to everyone who knows the Queen as part of my investigation.’
‘Why?’
‘I am trying to build up a picture of the circumstances of her disappearance. Not just the forensic detail but the emotional and political background.’
‘And from this you will deduce the guilty party.’ It was not a question.
I nodded.
‘Your method is flawed,’ he said, lightly.
‘Oh? Why?’
‘Because it will not get you to the heart of the matter. Talking never does. It is overvalued in every way. Also, you have nearly run out of time. If the Queen is not recovered in time for the Festival, then you have failed.’
‘There is still time.’
He paused, then said, ‘You are Medjay. I am Army. Why should I talk to you?’
‘Because I have authorizations from Akhenaten himself, and those transcend the hierarchical distinctions between us.’
‘Ask me a question, then.’
‘What is your relationship to the Queen?’
‘She is my sister-in-law. You know this already.’
‘I know the facts. I mean, are you close?’
He sat back and stared at me. ‘No.’
‘Do you support the Great Changes?’
‘Yes.’
‘Unequivocally?’
‘Of course. You have no right to ask such a question. It has no bearing on the matter in hand.’
‘With respect-’
‘Your question is disrespectful. You imply treason.’
‘Not at all, and the question is relevant. Whoever has taken the Queen ha
s a political motivation.’
‘I support unequivocally the suppression and destruction of corruption and incompetence.’
Which was not quite the same thing, and we both knew it. We had quickly reached an impasse.
‘Are you or are you not accusing me of having a role in the disappearance of the Queen?’ His eyes narrowed on me.
‘I am not accusing you of anything. I am trying to understand the truth.’
‘Then you are failing. This has not been an impressive display of your qualities as an investigator. I fear for the Queen. Her life is not in competent hands. I wish I could be of more assistance in her recovery, but now I must continue with my work. There are preparations to be made before the Festival.’
‘Such as?’
‘None of your business.’
He stood up and opened his office door, dismissing me. I needed to make a move. I produced the gold feather and placed it on the desk between us. He suddenly looked very interested, and quietly closed the door.
‘Where did you get that?’
‘Can you tell me about it?’
He picked it up and twirled it between his fingers. ‘It opens doors.’
‘How can a feather open doors?’
‘How literal you are. It opens doors to rooms that do not exist, and to words that are not spoken.’