He was standing on the grass opposite Hori and Suti’s cell, but the door was closed. So was every other door along the block of administrative offices. Nothing stirred. No insect moved in the grey lawn. No wind lifted the hem of Huy’s kilt. No bird troubled the leaden grey sky. The lack of sound was absolute, and everything Huy’s eyes rested upon was the colour of death except his own shadow. Pitch-black, it snaked across the lawn, crawled up the side of the grey wall, and continued to climb into the sky until Huy had to crane his neck to see the enormous, misshapen head. He did not look at it for long. Not far from his feet the hyena squatted, inky dark within the blurred outline of the shadow. It was not staring at him. Its attention was fixed on Anubis.
“What did Mighty Atum do when he saw his shadow, Great Seer?” Anubis said harshly. “I am ashamed to be here, asking this question, and you should be ashamed to be standing in the place of No-Time without an answer.” His lips lifted in scorn. “How often have I warned you to look to your house? How many words of caution have I wasted on such a pathetically weak ka as yours?” Stepping close to Huy, he snarled, his wet white teeth bared. His skin gleamed. The golden ankh resting on his black chest glittered. The pleats of his golden kilt swung shimmering against the perfect musculature of his legs as he moved. He was the only vibrant, living thing in all that tomblike drabness, and Huy, glancing down at himself, saw his own dusty greyness. “Tell me,” Anubis growled, “what does a triad represent?”
“It represents eternal and unchanging truths.”
“And what of a doubling?” Huy watched the long furred nose, the pink tongue, those lethal jaws, form the words. The god’s breath was warm and smelled of the sacred kyphi perfume reserved for temple rites.
“A doubling is all fleeting, earthly wisdom.”
“Tell me, then, what is the heb sed?”
Huy stared at him. Anubis waited, black eyes half closed, majestic ears stiffly raised. “I have discovered, Most Dread God of the Judgment Hall, that the heb sed takes the King and transcends his doubling. He becomes eternal, infinite. He enters the mathematical certainty of the triad. His nature is changed. Thus the heb sed is the mathematics of eternity.”
“You have discovered this, and yet you do not remember what Mighty Atum did when he became Light and saw his shadow? Frogs, Son of Hapu. Frogs. Look!”
He stretched out his Staff over Huy’s distorted shadow and to Huy’s horror the hyena crouching within it began to grow. It swelled, lengthened, began to fill the contours of the shadow, until the shape of the head high against the slate-grey sky was not Huy’s anymore but a huge, grotesque thing of tuft and snout. Within the darkness flowing across the grass from Huy’s feet there was movement, seething on the wall, churning into the sky, and with it came a stench Huy recalled. It was not the whiff of a wild animal. It was putrefaction, rotting flesh, but that was only half the odour emanating from the Ished Tree in Ra’s temple, Huy thought with a jolt of recognition. Honey and garlic and orchard blossoms as well … The creatures trapped inside his shadow were struggling towards him. Frogs. With a shriek he stumbled backward, but his shadow went with him, attached to him, part of him, and so did the frogs.
“Stop it, Anubis! Please stop it!” he begged.
The god shrugged his broad shoulders. “Stop it? How can I? You and your shadow are one, foolish Seer, even as Atum’s shadow belonged to him.”
“But Atum saw the chaos within his shadow and calmed it! He commanded the harmony of pairs, two, four, eight, male and female, frogs, Anubis, oh yes, of course! Frogs! I remember all of it now! Water, endless space, darkness, and what is hidden, and so the cosmos was conceived, before creation could take place. But I’m not a god! I can’t command concord inside my shadow!”
“So you recollect the meaning of the second scroll at last.” Anubis’s grating tone was caustic. “All these years Atum has waited, Thoth has waited, I have waited, for you to understand. No human being is able to bring order into his darkness. He may try. He may succeed for a little while. But his shadow will always shelter a hyena.” With a flick of one beringed finger, the frogs vanished and Huy’s shadow returned to an ordinary size. The hyena had also disappeared. “It’s still there,” Anubis said. “It has been there all your life. You were no more than thirteen when you read the substance of the second Book and you and Thoth’s High Priest unravelled its meaning together. Why did you forget it so soon?”
Huy shook his head. Excuses flashed through his mind—I was very young, I was uneasy in Thoth’s temple, I didn’t concentrate on the task because I was aware all the time of Sennefer’s presence in the temple’s school—but they would be unacceptable to the jackal god who had taunted and goaded him for years. It came to him that perhaps Anubis had been instructed purposely to provoke him, to force a return to obedience when the path of rebellion beckoned.
Anubis sighed, an exaggerated gush of scented breath. “Fear, proud Huy,” he said, his animal throat making the word an inadvertent growl. “Fear that the future you saw in your visions was flawed. Fear that the wounds and diseases you treated under my instructions would eventually be transferred elsewhere. And you saw it happen, didn’t you? Not often, but often enough to trouble your sleep. Were you forced to think of yourself as infallible so that blame could be placed somewhere else? I am infallible, human, but you are not. The answer was deep within your ka, but you refused to face it for fear that you would have to admit your shortcoming to those who sought your help.” Rapidly he passed his tongue over the soft fur of his lips. “The insurmountable disorder in your shadow, the insurmountable disorder in the shadows of those for whom you Scryed, warped the truths that Atum gave you through me. Not always, and usually insignificantly, but often enough to cause you, and them, distress.” To Huy’s alarm, Anubis leaned forward and, putting an arm around Huy’s neck, licked his cheek. The god’s nose was damp and cool. “You carry needless guilt, dear human,” he purred. “Only the merest fraction of responsibility for Egypt’s destiny lies with you. The King has behaved correctly, and Ma’at is pleased. She sees into your heart also. Get about your business, mer kat. Govern this blessed country and Scry for its people.”
He stood away and, taking his Staff in both black hands, spoke in a language Huy did not know. At once the heavy rings on his fingers sparkled in new sunlight, the grass flushed green, and a flock of birds piped as they flew by. Beyond the open cell door two men looked up, saw him, and bowed. Beside him Mahu waited politely. Huy glanced about. Anubis had gone, but a faint trace of kyphi perfume lingered in the warm air. Huy nodded at Mahu, smiled, drew a deep breath, and stepped past him into the office.
EPILOGUE
AMUNHOTEP SON OF HAPU lived well into his eighties. He had declared that he would reach the age of 110, a purely symbolic number, although given his longevity he may well have meant the figure literally. During his life he was responsible for a staggering amount of work throughout Egypt on behalf of the gods and his King. He oversaw the construction of Amunhotep the Third’s funerary temple on the west bank of the Nile, an edifice estimated to have covered over 4,200,000 square feet. With floors of silver, doors of electrum, and gold throughout, it was larger than the temple of Ipet-isut (Karnak) itself. It was erected so that only the inmost shrine remained dry during the annual flood. Unfortunately, due to earthquakes, later plundering, and the weak foundations of the pylons and columns, nothing remains of it but the two huge statues known as the Colossi of Memnon. Standing seventy-five feet tall, they are of a seated Amunhotep the Third accompanied by a much smaller effigy of Tiye on the southern statue and with his mother Mutemwia beside him on the northern one. On the base of one of the colossi Huy records, “I have established the statue in this great temple that it might endure as long as the heavens. You are my witnesses, you who shall come later.” One of the statues was reputed to have “sung” at dawn. This phenomenon drew a steady stream of ancient tourists, including the Roman emperor Hadrian. The music ceased when an attempt was made to repair the
image. It’s assumed that when a crack in the sandstone was struck by the rising sun, the rock expanded and produced a sound.
Under Huy and their father Kha, the twins Hori and Suti laboured to complete their major work at Ipet-isut, Amun’s home, and in the twenty-ninth year of Amunhotep’s reign it was finished and the temple was dedicated. Men, the stonemason and sculptor, obeyed the commission to construct two quartzite likenesses of the King to be set up at Ipet-isut. They towered seventy feet into the air above one of the pylons on the south side of the temple. Only a pair of feet remain. A series of statues of the King as Osiris, each twenty-five feet high, were ranked on either side of the Nile along the east and west banks. Amunhotep’s beautiful temple to celebrate his own divine birth at Luxor (the southern Apt) was not finished until after Huy’s death.
In Year 26 of the King, a temple to Horus was begun at Hebenu, close to Thoth’s great home at Khmun. A temple to Mut, Amun’s consort, had been started the year before in the southwest area of Ipet-isut. It was surrounded on three sides by a horseshoe-shaped sacred lake, linked to Amun’s temple by an avenue of sphinxes, and more than six hundred black basalt statues of the goddess Sekhmet stood around it. These are just a few examples of the steady building and beautifying that took place throughout Amunhotep the Third’s reign.
In Year 17, Huy was granted permission to begin his own funerary temple just behind that of Amunhotep and in the company of other great Kings below the cliffs that conceal the famous Valley of Kings. It was a singular honour. Amunhotep himself richly endowed it in perpetuity. Huy added his own curse on anyone in the future who might allow the endowment to fall into decay or steal any of the male and female slaves cultivating its fields. The temple was completed in Year 31.
In the King’s twentieth year on the throne, Huy began the research and planning that would culminate with Amunhotep’s first heb sed festival in May (Epophi) of his thirtieth year. The most complete record of this major event dates back to the Twelfth Dynasty. Not only did the rites themselves have to be perfect, but there were shrines to be built and statues of the King to be set up throughout Egypt. The ceremonies took place at the ancient capital of Mennofer. Amunhotep bestowed the honorary, and temporary, titles of “festival leader” and “hereditary Prince in the offices of the sed festival” upon Huy. In painted fragments from Huy’s temple, he is depicted wearing a decorated headband commemorating the occasion. In that same Year 30, Egypt enjoyed an enormous agricultural harvest from Kush in the south to Naharin in the east. A delighted King showered rewards on all his Treasury officials. At this time he renamed the Palace of the Dazzling Aten; it became the House of Rejoicing. However, the worship of the Aten, once a cult adhered to almost exclusively by a handful of Egypt’s aristocrats and those of Amunhotep’s foreign wives who revered the sun, began to be even more firmly established, thus paving the way for Akhenaten’s disastrous reign. Amunhotep held three more heb seds in the following three years.
Amunhotep the Third has rightly been called “The Magnificent.” Under him, Egypt became an empire. Gold poured into the country from Kush, far to the south, and trade with conquered and satellite nations was brisk. Egypt basked in over thirty years of increasing wealth and power. More statues were erected throughout that time than at any other period in Egypt’s history. The art of embalming reached its highest degree of skill. Indeed, the mummy of Yuya, Tiye’s father, who died in Amunhotep’s twentieth year on the throne, is regarded as the most expertly preserved. Thuyu, Tiye’s mother, died soon after her husband. Her mummy is also proof of the embalmers’ skill. Yet representations of the King in later life show him as overweight beneath the drape of the loose female linens he began to prefer. There is an air of listlessness about him, a jaded boredom, as though being the most significant ruler in the world and able to have everything he desired had left him empty. He died in Year 38 of his reign at an age somewhere in his early fifties.
His son Thothmes had predeceased him by almost ten years, leaving no Hawk-in-the-Nest but his much younger brother Amunhotep. This Prince eventually inherited his father’s glorious legacy, an Egypt bursting with vigour, prosperity, and influence. In a scant seventeen years he became a fanatical heretic, changed his name to Akhenaten in honour of his god, closed all temples but those of the Aten, lost most of the empire, plunged the country into poverty, and brought Egypt to the brink of invasion. (I have told his story in my novel The Twelfth Transforming.)
Queen Mutemwia was in her sixties when she died in her son’s thirty-second year on the throne. He had loaded her with titles, and tells us that “Everything she commanded was done.”
As for Huy, he died rich and highly respected in the King’s Year 34. The previous year, the King had ordered two statues of Huy to be placed along the processional route through Ipet-isut, near the ninth pylon, thus inviting Amun himself to regard Huy as a god. On the statues, Huy made Amun’s worshippers aware that they could bring their prayers and libations to him and he would take their petitions directly to Amun. He had been named by the King to do so. Amunhotep must have grieved deeply for the loss of the friend he had loved and trusted. Over the following centuries Huy gradually attained true godhead by healing the sick, and particularly the blind, who came to pray to him. He may have lost his own sight before he died.
Tiye’s younger brother Anen died in the same year. Anen’s great friend Ramose, Huy’s younger nephew, finished Anen’s tomb at his own expense. Ramose became Mayor of Weset at this time. Huy’s other nephew, the harsh Amunhotep-Huy, did not long survive his uncle. He was in his fifties when he died in the year following Huy’s death. The Empress Tiye lived on well into the reign of her second son.
ACKNOWLEDGMENT
MANY THANKS to my researcher Bernard Ramanauskas, whose diligence and insight into what remains of both the Book of Thoth and the heb sed festival have been invaluable in the creating of this trilogy.
Table of Contents
Cover
Also by Pauline Gedge
Title Page
Copyright
Part One
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Part Two
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Epilogue
Acknowledgements
The King's Man Page 46