It was the Davis letter. It all came flooding back. All that his holiday had erased returned as fresh as if he had never left. He sagged back onto the bed and read the letter again.
Carter remembered how he had felt when he first read the words. Though he had done little more than put up with Davis’s rantings and physical laziness in their past associations in the field, the fact that this impersonal, totally selfish man, a man with little regard for those about him, and foremost regard for his own aggrandisement, had taken the time, let alone the thought, to put these words to paper, became of the utmost importance to Carter. He read the letter twice more, took a brandy, rested back in his easy chair and reflected, not on the incident now months past, but upon the American.
‘They have not our history, our traditions, our stoic principles’, he thought. ‘Theirs is a selfish lust for riches regardless of class. And when they achieve riches they take leisure pursuits to fulfil themselves. So why make any effort to turn me from my conviction? Why take the time? Why care?’ It was this, more than Davis’s words, that peeked Carter’s curiosity. ‘The man has either been got at by his politically minded associates or he really cares perhaps a bit of both. Funny bloke. Well meaning, but Americans will never understand the history and traditions that underpin the principles of an Englishman.’
Carter contented himself with this final thought, arrogant as it was. He knocked back a mouthful of brandy and dozed off in his veranda chair. The evening sunlight soon faded to indigo and then moonless blackness and, as the stars twinkled above him and the blessed coolness of the evening comforted him, he fell into a deep sleep.
Suddenly there was a cacophony of foreign voices all about him. Those blasted Frogs. They were everywhere, taunting him with obscenities and offending in their stylised Napoleonic marching. One of them was urinating on a nearby obelisk, calling for all to see how far up he could reach. Another presented Carter with a diminutive wooden ushabti, then withdrew it before he could reach for it, placed its head in a cigar cutter in the shape of a miniature guillotine, and with a quick snap, and the roaring applause of his parading comrades, chopped off the head. Carter tried to stop them, but his body felt unusually slothful. He moved, it seemed, in slow motion, never getting any closer to them. As if to complete the insult, Jacques advanced from the crowd broadly smiling with a bottle of red wine in his hand and chanting, “Amun Re oh, holiest of inspectors we anoint ye with the blood of Napoleon!”, and shook the bottle at him, the wine spurting all about his head and clothing.
Startled by the cool liquid on his face, Carter leapt to his feet. But he stood alone on the veranda. The wind whipped the rain into his face. With his hands he dragged at his clothes in an effort to wipe the imaginary wine from his dampened clothing. After a moment or two, his senses returned. He went back into his house, dropped his suit on the bathroom floor, closed the bedroom door behind him, fell on the bed, and once more gave himself up to sleep.
It was personally embarrassing for the inspector to be woken by the reis at ten in the morning. The brightness of daylight blinded him and for a moment he couldn’t think of an appropriate excuse for the situation in which he had been discovered. Worse still, he quickly realised he was not in his bed attire, rather a horribly creased shirt and tie, underpants, socks and suspenders, and lay in sheets damp with his own sweat.
“Ah... Er... Ali. Thank you for waking me. Long trip. Rather a late night. Very tired. Too tired to undress. Just collapsed.”
“Tea, sir?”
“Please. Just what I need. What... What time is it?”
“Two hours before midday, sir.”
“My goodness. My duties. What have I not been doing that I should have?”
“Nothing, sir. You were expected to take rest this day after your journey. Miss Dorothy is visiting you, sir. She awaits you in the office.”
“Oh, my goodness,” Carter repeated. “Oh, goodness me. Tell her I will be with her presently. Give her some tea while I shave.”
Carter emerged about thirty minutes later, now appropriately dressed. He walked over to the lady who sat at his desk examining a small alabaster oil lamp, a find he had made some years earlier.
“Dot,” he began, “I must apologise for my late rising... Working into the wee hours on my notes. How nice of you to visit a man in such public isolation, and at such an inclement time of year.”
“Howard,” she acknowledged, smiling. “It is good to see you. We were distressed when we heard the news. Sally and I have been most concerned for you. Are you to resign from the Service? The talk in Cairo is that it would be for the best. You have not been truly happy working the Lower Nile not as you had been in The Valley. That unsatisfactory affair with the young Froggies surely provides a more than adequate opportunity for you to resign with honour?”
Carter reflected on her candid words for a moment. “Well, if that isn’t what’s called coming right to the point, I don’t know what is! You don’t believe in pulling your punches, do you, Dot?” The shoe fit, however. “You read my mind. I do believe you do. I have been giving the subject much thought these past few months.”
He lied. But Dot’s endorsement of Davis’s suggestion was just what he needed.
“I am gratified you agree with the course I think I must now take. Your sensitive support provides me with some considerable inner peace.”
He looked relieved.
“And what will you do with yourself once you become a free man?”
“I have been giving that some thought as well, Dot,” he lied again. After a pause he said, “There seems little course but for me to become the proverbial starving artist.”
They laughed together.
Chapter Nine
Tomb
Horemheb awoke to the piercing monotones of the early morning trumpets. His bed servants brought him a warm libation to help lift him from his drowsiness. As he sat on his bed and contemplated another day of inspections, he reflected upon the goings-on of the night before. Despite the soundness of his sleep, the old woman was not a faint memory to him. Her accusing words still rang in his ears. He shivered as a draught of cool morning air swept from the open ceiling. ‘No matter,’ he thought. His only real concern was ultimately how he might engineer her approval to take the hand of her daughter, the fair Mutnodjme. But then she may not care had he not heard her give tacit approval last night? ‘Anyway, with any luck the old witch will die before I need to marry.’
Be that as it may, right now he had more pressing problems. He would visit the goldsmiths and the sculptors again today.
At the time of the boy king’s death, the block of quartzite that was to become his sarcophagus was barely rough-cut from the quarries at Hatnub and it was quite clear there would be no time for its completion prior to entombment. General Horemheb was prepared for this kind of crisis. He had earlier ordered that the yellow quartzite sarcophagus enclosing the body of his brother be brought up from Smenkhkare’s tomb and re-engraved with texts applauding Tutankhamun. However, the lid to that sarcophagus had been hastily made from a local granite and was known to be flawed. It had a clear crack across the middle. The general had a solution for that, too.
“It is but a single fissure.” he told the masons. “Fix it!”
Horemheb’s arrival at the foundry was not welcomed at the best of times. Today, as it happened, things were going particularly badly. Mentu, using a hammer, had been delicately raising the contours of the king’s facial features from two sheets of gold. These had earlier been partially beaten to fit the casting of the king’s plaster death mask. Form slowly materialised from Mentu’s light, rapid, repetitive blows, the point of hammer contact moving imperceptibly over the surface between each strike. But soon came disaster. Probably due to a slight thinning in the metal, the gold sheet had stretched and drawn a tiny crack. The aperture was on the outer skin and little more than a hair’s width, but this was cause enough for Mentu to die a thousand deaths. The plaster mask was now smashed and disca
rded. There was no way the die could be recast. There had been no room for error; the piece had to be flawless; any mistake was critical.
The accident stopped work. Artisans from the entire foundry gathered around Mentu to share in his crisis. After all, it was to be through the mask that the gods would recognise the king and defend and support him in his journey of all things, this treasure had to be perfect.
Dashir, chief goldsmith, stepped forward to see if he could help. He examined the piece closely, then put a reassuring hand on Mentu’s shoulder. “Mentu, fear not. I can attempt a weld. The scar can be removed with burnishing. No one will notice. Not even Tutankhamun himself long may he live.”
Cradling the complete piece between the two of them, they took it over to the glowing hotbox. Mentu worked the bellows until the fire was almost too hot to bear. With a glowing copper rod Dashir applied heat to the inside of the mask under the spot where the lesion had occurred. As soon as he saw the glow shine through on the facial side he took a small, preheated hammer and lightly tapped the crack in the cheek. As he worked, the small, dark line in the fiery metal shrank and within moments, as if by magic, it was gone. His helpers lifted the mask away from the heat. As the metal cooled, Dashir brushed lightly over the affected area with a soft linen rag. With all the workers about him and Mentu eagerly looking over his shoulder, Dashir withdrew the rag to reveal the aperture successfully closed. There was a slight scar in the metal where the repair had taken place, but Mentu knew he could easily work this into the contours of the face. Ultimately the blemish would become imperceptible.
But not to Horemheb. He arrived later that day and, after approving the engraver’s design work on the gold coffin, he came over to Mentu to inspect progress on the mask. “The king’s cheeks are out of balance, Mentu!” he grumbled immediately. “He looks as if he has the toothache! You have erred, I fear.”
“Yes, my lord,” responded the submissive artisan. “But you can see I am working to remove the offending inaccuracy.”
“Be precise in your artistry, Mentu. The gods see all things. Pharaoh sees all things. It must be right.”
“I will, my lord. The king’s face will be perfect. The gods will guide my skills in the execution of this task.”
“Mark that they do. Pray. Make offerings at the shrine of your parents.”
Horemheb chose to underline his statement with a solemn scold to all about him. “Men!” He swung about and bellowed gruffly, “Before you reach the afterlife whether there is to be one for you or not you must first live out this life. That can be in comfort, or it can be in hell. It can be prolonged, or it can be foreshortened. All these things are within the power of Pharaoh. Remember this.”
With these final words of comfort, he left the foundry to pay a visit to the sculptors, surely bent on delivering the same fearful message to them.
As the foundry doors closed behind the departing general and his entourage, the metalworkers stood for a moment in silence. They looked about guiltily, the one to the other.
Mentu was the first to speak. “Well? Which of us is to tell him? There is more. It is inevitable he will discover it. The general must be told before he discovers it for himself. Who is to tell him? We must decide, and quickly. There is little time for reparations. His Excellency must be told,” Mentu repeated.
“Let the general find out for himself,” said Dashir. “We have had sufficient excitement for one day.”
The artisans shrugged their shoulders in agreement and got back to busying themselves with their respective tasks. In the end, what happened to them in this life mattered little. For the guarantee of eternity, and nothing else, they would work to ensure as much as possible was perfect and complete by the appointed day.
They need not have worried. Horemheb had anticipated that construction of the golden shrine would take longer than the time available. Three of the planned total of four nested shrines were far from completion. He knew this and had prepared accordingly.
Some weeks before the funeral was to take place, the general ordered his guards back to Smenkhkare’s tomb, since resealed following its earlier breaching. Its previous priestly violators had dismantled the shrine set in order to get to the sarcophagus. On Horemheb’s orders they had left the panels and doors stacked against the back wall of the burial chamber.
In their haste, the guards did not completely clear the refilled entrance corridor and did no more than burrow a shallow channel the width of the passageway. While the inner pieces of the shrine were manhandled outside with relative ease, when they attempted to remove the sides of the outer shrine they found the panels too wide to get past the doorjambs at the entrance. Realising it would take some considerable time to clear the remaining rubble that choked the corridor, they left the first of the panels where it was and rushed off to report to the general.
To their surprise, Horemheb showed no concern. He had kept the artisans working on the outer panels of Tutankhamun’s shrine and their progress had been much better than expected. These would be ready in time after all. As the general moved about the workrooms just a week before the funeral, his sense of relief was manifest in his unusually agreeable disposition.
He was not the only one feeling relieved. The faces of Mentu, Dashir and the others, those who had kept their secret, were positively beaming.
In the days leading up to the funeral celebrations, Ankhenesamun would work around her daily duties to find time for personal mourning and reflection. Each evening she visited the temple which housed the slowly desiccating corpse of her husband. She would sit with him alone in a simple wooden chair at the head of the stone embalming bed, facing away from it. Behind her lay the long, even pile of slowly discolouring salts, busy at their passive work on the body beneath. She sat erect, looking out at the stars glinting between the pillars of the temple colonnade. For an hour each night she would create Tutankhamun’s afterlife in her mind and live within it, then retire to her chambers, hoping to dream on in his company.
Occasionally, this nightly preoccupation worked. Shortly after subsiding into sleep she might find herself walking with him, hand in hand, along the verdant banks of the Nile...
Anubis is close beside them, the other gods all about them, the scene fills with a golden light.
Birds start from the cover of the papyrus reeds and flutter into the sky. The drops of water spilling from their wings catch the rays of the sun in brilliant flashes. Tutankhamun sinks to one knee and pulls his bow. Ankhesenamun takes an arrow from the quiver on his back and hands it to him. He steadies his aim ahead of the arc of the bird’s flight, draws the bowstring tight and looses the arrow into the air.
A barely audible cry is heard and the bird falls gently earthward. There is some swift movement in the tall grass. The court cat emerges with the bird in its jaws. The king takes the bird and turns to show it to his queen. He cradles its head in one hand. Thin rivulets of blood issue from its beak and nostrils...
The queen awoke with a start. The vigilant Tia lit the oil lamp beside her bed couch. The queen sat up. The dreams were now occurring so often that she wished for the day of the funeral feast to be past. Perhaps then the all too real images would cease. She would no longer have to relive her tragedy. In reality, however, there were yet twenty nights before all would be behind her. But strength of character would not permit her to dwell on the prospect. Rather, her mind would turn to plans for Horemheb’s eternal damnation.
This day she was to visit the foundry on the pretext of examining progress for herself. Later, in the evening, she would arrange to meet with Dashir by the riverside before he took the ferry to the west bank.
Dashir, a man with an appetite for drink and the ladies to match, was well known nevertheless for his strong sense of loyalty towards the boy king. He had been one of few of the king’s subjects who had become deeply touched by Tutankhamun’s early reversal of Akhenaten’s religious order. Dashir did not credit the king’s consorts with these reparations. They had, after all,
demonstrated in the past regency that they were mere followers of Pharaoh’s will, and they had reacted in the same way to the orders of Akhenaten’s young cousin. All the more remarkable, then, was this boy king who had judgemental skills and strength of character developed well beyond his years. All the more remarkable were his achievements. All the more promise had he held. All the greater the loss for the community now that his consorts must inherit.
Ankhesenamun knew Dashir felt this strongly. She was well aware of his dedication. The spies planted in the village across the Nile had reported to court everything that was material to the ongoing health of the community. Many an evening she and her husband had listened with gratification to Dashir’s reported conversations with his friends at the bar in Pademi. The queen had no doubts as to the strength of loyalty this man possessed. If there was anyone who would carry out her wishes faithfully it would be he. There could be no other.
The guards opened the doors wide to allow the queen and her entourage free passage inside. The vision of Queen Ankhesenamun standing in the open doorway with the morning sunlight shining brightly through the skirt of her white linen dress brought work to a standstill in an instant. The artisans fell to their knees. The Nubian who held the parasol which shaded her waited outside while a guard and Tia, as lady-in-waiting, accompanied the queen into the foundry.
“Please rise. I wish to inspect your work. Who will act as guide?” she asked, looking directly at the man by the blazing fire.
“I would be most honoured, my lady,” said Dashir, bowing low.
He took her first to the two engravers who were embellishing the inside of the golden coffin with written texts. They had not yet started decoration of the outer skin. Beside the two inverted open halves lay the two larger, wooden coffins, the outer one now complete and temporarily closed. Its gilding sparkled in the light from the foundry fire. The brilliance was almost overpowering. Smenkhkare’s coffin lay open beneath a linen pall. The cartouches in the texts were yet to be altered to those of Tutankhamun.
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