by Nick Drake
‘What are you implying?’ said Khay, stiffly.
‘That it was delivered from within the palace.’
‘That is quite impossible. The royal quarters are carefully guarded at all times.’
‘And yet here it is,’ I said.
His narrow chin was raised now. He bristled with righteous indignation, like an angry bird. But before he could interrupt, I continued: ‘Also the perpetrator is very sure of what he is doing, for this has the intention of creating fear where it does the most damage. In the mind of the King, and those close to him.’
They both stared at me, disconcerted. I had probably said too much, by imputing to the King any kind of human weakness. But it was too late now for protocol and correctness.
‘…Or so the culprit would seem to hope. Can I assume no one knows anything of this?’
Khay looked as if he had eaten a sour fruit.
‘Ay has been informed. He requires to be informed of everything that happens within the royal quarters.’
No one spoke for a moment.
‘You will know what I am going to ask you,’ Ankhesenamun said, quietly.
I nodded.
‘You wish me to find out who is responsible for sending this object, and for its hostile desecration.’
‘Someone malicious has access to the royal quarters. They must be discovered. But we need more than that: I want you also to attend my husband and me as our-private protector. Our guardian. Someone to watch over us. Someone unseen by others…’
‘You have the Palace Guard,’ I said.
‘I cannot trust the Palace Guard.’
Each sentence of this conversation felt as if it was leading me deeper and deeper into a trap.
‘I am one man.’
‘You are the only man. And that is why I have called for you.’
Now the last of the doors that might still have led away from here and back to my own chosen life closed silently.
‘And what is your answer?’
Many answers jostled in my mind.
‘It will be an honour for me to fulfil the promise I made to your mother,’ I replied eventually. My heart was knotted tight at the consequence of these few words.
She smiled with relief.
‘But at the same time, I can’t abandon my family…’
‘Perhaps that is all to the good. This must remain a secret between us. So you should carry on normally, and then-’
‘But Ay knows me. Others will know of me. I cannot be here in secret. It would make my task impossible. You should simply say you are employing me, in addition to the Palace Guard, because of the threats you have received. Say I am independently assessing the internal security arrangements.’
She glanced at Khay, who considered the options, and then nodded once.
‘We accept this,’ she said.
The thought of the double life ahead made me anxious. And, I had to confess, excited. I had promised Tanefert I would not forsake the family. But I reasoned I would not be breaking that vow, for I would not need to leave the city to pursue this mystery. And there was little enough work for me at the Medjay headquarters, under Nebamun’s thumb. I wondered why I was persuading myself.
Khay was making the kind of noises that indicated it was time for us to depart. We offered our formal farewells. Ankhesenamun held my hands between her own, as if she wished to seal there the secret things that we had spoken about.
‘Thank you,’ she said, her eyes brimming with accomplished sincerity. And then she smiled, more openly and warmly this time, and instantly I glimpsed her mother’s face; not the beautiful public mask, but the warm, living woman.
And then the great double doors were silently opened behind us, and we retreated, backwards, bowing, until the doors closed again and we found ourselves in that endless, hushed corridor, with its many identical doors, like a scene from a nightmare.
I needed to piss, and I wanted to see whether the rumour about the water supply was true. Khay took me down a side corridor. ‘Third doorway on the left.’ He sniffed. ‘I will await you before the Queen’s chamber doors.’ He turned away.
I entered. The space was long and narrow with a stone floor on which were painted pools of water, with gold fishes swimming. A lattice drew in the cool scents of the night. A few tapers swayed in the breeze of my appearance. I did what was necessary. It sounded too loud, in the awful, almost religious, hush. I felt as if I were pissing in a temple. Then I washed my hands in the basin, pouring water from the jug. No miracles of plumbing here. I was drying my hands, when I sensed something-a prickle of the hairs on my neck, a blur of something across the polished surface of the copper mirror-and in an instant I turned.
The woman watched me knowingly, her clever eyes shining in the dim light, her black hair tied severely behind her head, her face angled and strangely gaunt, her robes like a dress of shadows.
‘Do you know me?’ she said, low and quiet.
‘Should I?’
She shook her head, disappointed.
‘I came to tell you my name.’
‘In the toilet?’
‘I am Maia.’
‘Your name means nothing to me.’
She clicked her tongue in annoyance.
I finished drying my hands.
‘I was the wet nurse to the King. He fed from me from the day he was born. Now I care for him as no one else can.’
She must have lived in the city of Akhetaten. She must have witnessed the life of Akhenaten, and the royal family, from close quarters. It was known the King’s mother was Kiya, who had been a rival royal wife to Nefertiti. But Kiya had disappeared. And then, later, Tutankhamun, son of Kiya, had been married to Ankhesenamun, the child of Nefertiti. The children of enemies, both fathered by Akhenaten, last survivors of their lines, married to each other. From a political point of view it was a great alliance. From theirs it must have been hell, for stepchildren rarely love each other, even less so when great power and treasure are at stake.
She nodded as she watched me work this out.
‘What do you wish to say to me?’
She glanced around, cautious even here.
‘Do not trust that girl. She has the blood of her mother.’
‘She is the Queen. As was her mother. Why should I not trust her?’
‘For all your power, you know nothing. You cannot see what is there. You are dazzled like a fool before gold.’
I felt the grip of anger at my throat.
‘Man of pride. Man of vanity. Think! Her mother disposed of her rival, Kiya, the mother of my King. That must not be forgotten. It must never be forgiven. It should be avenged. And yet you come like a dog to wait at her door.’
‘You sound like a marketplace storyteller. And you have no proof of anything you say. And even if you are right, it was all a long time ago.’
‘I have the proof of my eyes. I see her for what she really is. She is the child of her dynasty. Nothing changes. So I come to warn you. Her care is not for her husband. Her care is all for herself.’
I moved closer to her. She drew herself deeper into her robes.
‘I could have you arrested for this.’
‘Arrest Maia? The King will not allow it. He is my child, and I speak out from love for him. For no one else loves him. Without me he is alone in this palace. And besides, I know their names. I know the names of the shadows.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Shadows have powers,’ she replied, and with those enigmatic words she slid away along the dark wall, and vanished.
8
At the jetty, Khay gave me a papyrus of authority that would allow me to enter the Malkata Palace again, and to request an audience with him at any time. He told me he lived within the royal quarters. I should make use of him whenever I needed. Everything he said made it clear he was the pass to all gates, the man whose word was law, whose every whisper was heard in the ear of power. As I turned away, he offered me a leather bag.
‘What’s th
is?’
‘Consider it a small advance.’
I looked inside. It contained a good-quality gold ring.
‘Why is it a small one?’
‘I trust it will be adequate.’
His voice ground the words like grit under a millstone. He turned and left without waiting for any response I might have cared to offer.
I stood at the stern of the boat, looking backwards as it was rowed away, until the palace containing its lonely Queen and its strange, clandestine young King disappeared behind the ramparts of the great lake’s defences.
The boat left me discreetly in a far corner of the docks, and I walked back past the hundreds of moored boats, each with their painted eyes, shifting and knocking against each other on the surface of the river’s dark currents, their sails folded and stowed, and their crews and some of the dock workers sleeping on the decks and in the shadow of the heaps of goods, curled into their dreams like ropes into a coil. At the far end of the dock, in the dark, I noticed, to my surprise, two boats being unloaded of their cargo. No torches were lit to illuminate the work-but the moon’s light was almost adequate. The men worked silently, efficiently transferring a number of clay containers from the ships to a convoy of carts. I saw a tall, thin man walking among them, directing affairs. Smugglers, probably, for no one else dared to navigate the dangerous river in the dark. Well, it was none of my business. I had other concerns.
Walking is my cure for confusion; it is the only thing that makes me feel sane sometimes. I made my way back through the deserted streets, and now the night city felt like a vacant theatre, a construction of papyrus, shadows and dreams. I set myself to a proper consideration of everything this extraordinary day had laid before me. The festival ceremonials with their strangely repressed atmosphere; the astonishing act of sacrilege; the girl in the cells, and her rage, which had matured like a wine into something dark and powerful; this night meeting with the Queen of the kingdom-anxious with fear; the encounter with the King’s wet nurse. And perhaps most shocking of all, the dead boy, his cruelly shattered limbs, his appalling posture of perfection, arranged for death, and the linen spell. What did these things, the events of this day, have to do with each other? If, indeed, they had anything to do with each other-for I am given to finding patterns where, perhaps, none exist. Still, I sensed something-an intuition, elusive, just out of the reach of thought, like the glinting edge of a shard flashing for a moment among ruins-but then it was gone again. At this moment nothing added up. I know I love to consider the ways disparate things may be surprisingly related-more as in a dream or a poem than in reality. My colleagues ridicule me, and perhaps they are right, and yet somehow I do not find the mystery at the heart of human beings is ever as logically fathomable as they say it is. But then again, what use was that to me now?
Next, I considered the carving. Superficially, it expressed animosity towards the previous regime of the Aten, of which the King was the inheritor, survivor and (as had been made clear by his public pronouncements, acts and new buildings) now the destroyer. The iconoclasm, however, was not exceptional, and the interesting question was: why had it been delivered in such a deliberate, even intimate, manner to the King? More subtly, it expressed a severe threat: for the annihilation of the sign represented the annihilation of the reality. The King was also the Sun. And the Sun destroyed, and still worse the royal names destroyed, represented the destruction of the King and Queen in the afterlife. And there was something else: the sheer fury of those chisel-marks spoke of deep, almost mad, anger. It was as if each stab of the chisel was a stab into the King’s eternal spirit. But why, and who was responsible?
I looked up at the moon, now sunk low over the rooftops and the temple pylons, like the sickle of light in the left eye of Horus; and I remembered the old fable we tell our children about how this was the last missing fragment of the God’s destroyed eye, which was finally restored by Thoth, God of Writing and Secrets. Now we know better-we know the actions and movements of the celestial forms from observation; our star calendars record their perpetual motions and great returns over the year, and over infinities of time. And then-suddenly it occurred to me: what if the stone represented a more obvious meaning? What if it said: eclipse? Perhaps it meant a true eclipse? Perhaps the eclipse of the Living Sun was just a metaphor. But what if it wasn’t? It seemed a possible link, and somehow I liked the thought. I would talk to Nakht, who knew all about such things.
I walked up my street, pushed open the gate, and entered the courtyard. Thoth was waiting for me, alert on his haunches, as if he knew I was about to arrive and had prepared to present himself smartly. Tanefert had insisted I acquire him a few years ago, for the city’s streets had become more and more dangerous for a Medjay man like me. She claimed she wanted him as a household guard, but her real intention was for me to have more protection at work. To please her I had acquiesced. And now I could almost admit I loved the animal for his intelligence, loyalty and dignity. He sniffed the air around me, as if to divine all that had happened, and then looked me in the eye with his old, gentle challenge. I passed my hand over his mane, and he walked around me, ready to receive more attention.
‘I’m tired, old man. You’ve been dozing here while I’ve been out working…’
He moved back to his place and settled down, his topaz eyes on guard, seeing everything in the dark.
I closed the outer door, and moved silently into the kitchen. I washed my feet, then drew a cup of water from the clay pot, and ate a handful of dates. Then I moved along the passage, and as quietly as I was able I drew back the curtain to our room. Tanefert was turned on her side, the form of her hips and shoulders like an elegant cursive upon a dark scroll, described by the light from the lamp. I took off my robe, and lay beside her, placing the leather bag by the couch. I knew she was awake. I drew close to her, put my arms around her warm body, fitted my form around hers, and kissed her smooth shoulder. She turned to me, half-smiling, half-annoyed, in the dark, kissed me, and moved into my embrace, soft and comfortable. More than anywhere in the world, this felt like home. I kissed her sleek black hair. What should I tell her of the evening’s events? She knew I rarely spoke about work, and understood my reticence. She never resented it, because she knew I needed to keep it apart, separate. But then again, she can always read me: she sees something wrong or troubling in my face, or in the way I enter a room. There could be no secrets. So I told her.
She stroked my arm as she listened, as if calming her own anxiety. I could feel her heart beating-the bird of her soul in the green tree of her life. I finished my story, and she stayed like that for a while, quietly considering everything; looking at, but also somehow beyond me, the way someone looks into a fire.
‘You could refuse her.’
‘Do you think I should?’
Her silence was eloquent, as always.
‘Then I will return this tomorrow.’
I held up the bag, and shook out the gold ring into her palm.
She looked at it, then handed it back.
‘Don’t ask me to tell you what to do. You know I hate that. It’s not fair.’
‘But what, then?’
She shrugged.
‘What is it?’
‘I don’t know. I have a bad feeling…’
‘Where?’ I reached out for her.
‘Don’t be a fool. I know each day is full of dangers, but what good can come of this? Palace intrigues, and attempts on the life of the King? These are dark matters. They frighten me. But look at you: your eyes are sparkling again…’
‘That’s because I’m worn out…’ I yawned extravagantly for effect.
Neither of us said anything for a little while. I knew what she was thinking. And she knew what I was thinking.
Then my wife spoke.
‘We need this gold,’ she said. ‘And you can’t help yourself. You love a mystery.’
And she smiled sadly, in the dark, at the implication of her words.
‘I lo
ve my wife and my children.’
‘But are we mystery enough for the Seeker of Mysteries?’
‘Our girls will be leaving us soon. Sekhmet is nearly sixteen. How did that happen? It’s a great mystery to me how time has passed so swiftly since they were crawling and throwing up and grinning their proud, toothless smiles. And now look…’
Tanefert slipped her hand into mine.
‘And look at us. A middle-aged couple that need their sleep.’
And so she settled her head on its stand and closed her elegant eyes.
I wondered if sleep would honour me on this night. I doubted it. I had to think about how I might approach this new mystery when the sun rose, as it very soon would. I lay back and stared at the ceiling.
9
I arrived soon after first light at the office of the treasury. A cleaner, with a brush and pot, worked backwards across the great floor, scattering fresh water with deft gestures then wiping it away until the stone shone brightly before his feet. He worked methodically, impassively, his head down, as the first of the bureaucrats and officials arrived for work; men in white robes who glanced at me and Thoth with brief curiosity, but passed the cleaner as if he did not exist, leaving the dirty prints of their dusty sandals upon his immaculate floor. He wiped these away, over and over, with endless patience. He was a man who would never walk on shining, clean stone. At no point did he look up at the stranger sitting on the bench, his baboon patiently beside him, waiting for someone.
Finally a senior official, the Deputy of the Treasury, invited me into his office, slightly anxious under his affable competence. I knew his kind: loyal, quietly proud of his merits, relishing the just rewards of his profession-the comforts of a good villa, productive land and faithful servants. I left Thoth tied up outside. We sat on stools opposite each other. He adjusted the few objects-statuettes, trays, the tube of his reed pen, his mixing palette, two little bags for the red and the black ink-on his low table, and recited his long list of titles, from the beginning of his professional life until this very moment. Only then did he ask how he could be of assistance. I told him I wished to be granted an audience with Ay.