by Mike Ashley
The Princess Merytre – when she appeared next morning all by herself – proved to be very lively, articulate and prone to fun.
“Hullo,” she said, putting her head cautiously round the schoolroom door-screen, “are you my Teaching Person?”
Men-amun bowed, offered his name, and admitted that he was.
“Can I come in?” she asked – not really waiting for his answer but hopping the rest of herself into view. “I was ‘sploring,” she confided. “So I could find you first!”
She would not be clothed until her fourth birthday so as yet she trotted about in nothing more than a set of amulets (“Life! Health! Prosperity!”), a pair of tiny gilt sandals and a string of bright beads. Like all royal children, her head was shaven except for the sidelock denoting her rank. This was tightly plaited, tied off with a gold-thread ribbon.
Heeding Inawt’s injunction, Men-amun had not come unprovided.
He laid out on the worktable a scroll of best quality papyrus and a new scribe’s palette, complete with red and black ink cakes, a reed pen and a brush in their holders.
“These, Highness,” he told her, “are my first gift to you. See: they are labelled with your name.”
She touched them, curious and shy.
“But I won’t know what to do,” she said.
“Is it not my job to show you? You shall, quite soon. But we will keep this for your very best work.”
He had other things up his sleeve: a splendidly carved and painted wooden duck set on eccentric wheels so that when pulled along by its string it bobbed up and down – as ducks do.
“Ooh!” she exclaimed, entranced.
And after that he unrolled Inawt’s blue silk embroidered belt.
“Oo-ooh! Pretty!”
He showed her where it said her name on the ends.
Snatching up the belt and toy, she ran away from him, out of the room. He could hear her voice, eager, diminishing with distance, shouting: “Mama! Mama! See what I have! . . . and the blue thing says its ME!”
He spent an anxious time wondering whether to go after her, but didn’t know his bearings yet and feared to put a foot wrong. In a while, Merytre was firmly returned, downcast, and led by a young attractive nursemaid.
“Lady Merytre,” the nurse instructed, “You will tell the Tutor, please, exactly what Her Majesty your mother says you must!”
The child took a deep breath, looked him in the eye, and recited in one long rush: “I-must-say-Thank-You-because-your-presents-are-kind-and-I-must-say-Sorry-because-running-off-like-that-is-not-what-princesses-do-and-I-might-have-made-you-cross. There!” and she added, “You can let go now ’Ty. I won’t do it again.”
The nurse told Men-amun she had permission to stay a while until the pupil settled in – and he, beginning with practice slate and sponge and chalk to show his small charge how to set out her name properly inside its Pharaoh House, was rather more than glad.
The little girl was quick-minded, infinitely engaging. Men-amun soon found within himself an ability to teach. He wanted this job. Before too long, the first scratchy entries of “very best work” began to go into the papyrus roll.
They were absorbed in a counting game he had invented – where you stepped along a painted mat from square to square – when, one morning, turning round because his pupil’s calculations had abruptly exploded into giggles, he found himself face to face with Queen Hatshepsut. This time, shorn of much formality, she was smiling broadly. He had a job to make his obeisance with proper dignity.
“Forgive me,” she said, “I was passing. The mathematics attracted me . . . Please, do carry on.”
She dropped in from time to time after that. She was always charming – often complimentary – but she had an astonishing capacity for appearing almost out of nowhere, and in silence. Only a drift of perfume would warn him of her proximity. She often favoured sandalwood. Other things disturbed him.
He had thought up some little tales about a duck called Wek-wek (Merytre’s name for the toy he’d given her). Wek-wek got into scrapes and had to be constantly rescued by a small but brave and resourceful princess. These adventures proved sufficiently popular that eventually he wrote them down – not least so that nursemaids might make use of them at princessly bedtimes. He looked up once, in class, from trying out a new one, to find Her Majesty – who had quietly borrowed his chair – sitting enjoying it with them. She was absent-mindedly stroking her earlobe. And she possessed always, an air, however kindly she watched him out of her elegant small-cat’s face, of the suppressed danger, the ferocity of Sekhmet, the Lioness.
Uneasily, he remembered No-name.
He tracked down the scribes who were Keepers of the Royal Records and made himself agreeable. Household status had qualified him for limited access and since they were often pushed with work in, say, diplomatic correspondence, his skilful offers of occasional assistance at copying or glossing outdated material was welcome. He located the pigeonholing and labels of the current dynasty. There came an afternoon when sheer press of business combined with some sickness absences had the duty scribe in charge actually asking him to “hold the fort” for the time he was called away to take dictation.
Left alone, Men-amun took down the scroll bearing the labels of Tuthmosis I. Much was as his father had sketched: the Queen’s three most senior half-brothers were very much her elders. Their births, careers and deaths were fully documented. Menkheper-re-sobek, the last one living, had a different mother – a lady called Isis, who had also given the King a daughter of that name. Prince Sobek too, was twelve years older than the Queen. Amenemes, her full brother had come and gone, half grown – like Neferubity, her sister. Both were several years her junior. The last of the Lady Mutnofret’s sons, Akheperenre, who became Tuthmosis II, must have been a surprise. The gap between him and Ramose was a full ten years. And plainly, in red and black, his birth was recorded as coinciding exactly – to the month, the day, the hour, with that of the Princess Ma’at-ka-re, born to the Great Queen, Ahmose. “His Majesty,” ran a marginal note to the text, “was pleased to regard them almost as twins . . .” There was no indication of anyone else.
Akheperenre Tuthmosis II was well accounted for. Being sovereign, he had a scroll to himself: “Prince . . . King . . . slightly wounded in skirmish, fourth regnal year . . . recovered well . . . injured hunting hippopotamus, tenth regnal year . . . persistent grumbling infections from this . . . deteriorating health . . .” For the last two years of his reign, it was tacitly obvious the Queen had carried the burden of government. True to the convolutions of his family, he’d had female children with Hatshepsut; his male heir Menkheperre – now Tuthmosis III – was of the Lady Isis junior.
Men-amun re-examined the first scroll.
Ma’at-ka-re was fifteen when Ahmose, her mother died. Tuthmosis I proclaimed her in co-rule, but died himself a year on. She and Akheperenre were sixteen, barely of age, when they married and were crowned. Sixteen, add twelve and now the two years since his death – made her thirty now . . . just about. Again he scrutinized all the birth entries, but the script was neat and even with no detectable alteration or excision. No-name. Aged thirty . . . just about. But no name.
The Queen was said to be mildly indisposed, but Men-amun soon learned on the Temple grapevine that she had shut herself away in the innermost shrine of Amen-Ra Himself. Only the First Prophet, Hapu-seneb, was in any way permitted to approach.
He ought not have been surprised when Prince Sobek came seeking him, saying, “I need someone I can trust. Will you come?”
He knew what was implied.
Sure enough, the passage they went down – from the royal apartments – penetrated inevitably to the same familiar stony desolation. Only, this time, beyond the first door there was sufficiency of light and there were no guards.
No-name was dead.
He had been carried from the cell and laid down. His hands and feet were bound fast; his mouth stretched wide, seized in a huge rictus which betr
ayed a terrible and losing fight for breath. His eyelids, not quite closed, showed the dead eyes as white reflective slits.
“Highness! How has this happened?” Men-amun was aghast.
Prince Sobek shrugged.
“I wasn’t here. They tell me he began a rage but the guards pinioned him and tied him up. When they pushed him into his bag, it seems, a cobra had coiled inside.
Death from cobra venom is swift, by means of inexorable paralysis.
“What is it I’m to do?” Men-amun queried.
“Help me sort him out. We’ll have him interred tonight.”
But whatever No-name was due in the way of burial, by the looks of it, it was to be quite shockingly unorthodox.
Someone had provided new, watersoaked sheepskins, strong twine and needles. They had to set to and stitch the whole thing together with No-name inside it. When these skins dried out they would shrink tight. Men-amun found it grotesque.
“Is he to have no embalming? No proper rites?” he protested.
“No.”
Men-amun felt ashamed and uncomfortable.
The head, before its dense crown of matted, crinkly hair disappeared forever, was turned far to one side and had an odd, flattened appearance. No-name might have died of venom – or he might have been subdued and then pressed down into relentless suffocation. There was no way to be certain.
When they finished Prince Sobek sat back on his heels and breathed relief.
“Amen be praised!”
He brought up a rough wooden coffin. Together they lifted in the damp, stiffening bundle. Sobek shut the lid. Inside and out, the coffin was painted plain white. No good spells, no invocations, no name.
Men-amun was enough of a priest to be appalled.
“Have we not just obliterated his Being?” he argued hotly.
“No. I see how it looks to you, but his Being is not here. He has been subsumed.”
Men-amun scowled.
“How . . . subsumed?”
He ran a risk, being belligerent, but this mattered to him – or his training, his way of life, his belief-system, would be in doubt. The Prince stayed patient.
“Do we not teach that the soul is unquenchable? That I myself certainly hold! Then it has migrated elsewhere and I assisted it. Now: we shall cleanse ourselves. I would ask you to rest early this evening. In the small hours I shall need you one more time. You will accompany me properly as a priest. I ask you to judge nothing until our task is ended.”
In the dense blackness which precedes the end of night, Men-amun was taken to the royal quays. Hapu-seneb was waiting. They boarded the kind of little boat site workmen used. It already held the white coffin. Senenmut alone, was captain and crew. They sculled across the river in silence – making the journey to where the new mortuary temple was building. Once there the coffin was placed on a sledge. They dragged it along what would ultimately be the processional Way, then lifted it up new stone stairs to the great first platform. All of this was recently paved except, in the centre, for an open rectangular pit with a small pile of earth and a single flagstone propped next to it. Using ropes, they lowered the coffin carefully into the hole. Senenmut shovelled and levelled the dirt, manhandling the paving stone to seal the place. He and Hapu-seneb spoke together about getting back.
“There is much to be done,” Men-amun overheard Sobek agree, “But he and I remain until the Aten rises.”
When they had gone, Sobek hunted about for a workman’s mat, batted it vigorously free of grit and spread it on the ground.
“We have quite a wait,” he said. “Be easy.”
Men-amun sat down beside him, cross-legged.
“No one less than a prince,” he stated baldly, “would be buried here. However shabbily it has been done!”
Gazing remotely out into the purple of pre-dawn, Prince Sobek countered drily, “I heard you were busy in the Royal Archives. What did you learn?”
“Nothing, Lord.”
“Yet reason and instinct say you are correct. He was my half-brother. Can you not imagine such a burden – such endless sadness? He was the Queen’s brother – more – he was her true twin. Yet it was Akheperenre who so resembled her, and whom she loved.”
Chastened, Men-amun asked, “Was he always dangerous?”
“Always. But he was never in such hard captivity until these last few years – after he tried, once, to murder the Queen. In youth, she could calm him – but latterly his rages grew until they overtook him altogether.”
“I see . . .”
“I wonder if you do!”
After a pause, Men-amun admitted gloomily, “I feel I let him down, all the same. Perhaps I should have gone back.”
“I think not. Feel no blame for that. And shortly, now, you and I shall set him free.”
The density of night had thinned and greyed.
“I’m not sure, Highness, I understand your meaning in his being subsumed.”
“I believe that some part of his Being shall be absorbed elsewhere. I have done rites to that effect. It was his body, surely, that was so wrong – never his soul. The Ka and the Ba are quite other. Is that not what we comprehend as priests?”
“Ah. Yes. But where – absorbed?”
“You shall see. When the Queen emerges from seclusion this day, she will do so renewed, as Pharaoh in her own right, without impediment.”
No wonder they hadn’t killed him! This inextricable half of the Pharaonic whole. Men-amun’s thoughts whirled. . . . Or had they? Finally. Had she? Had she, in the end, taken the risk of overturning Balance in the whole Kingdom by using Wadjet, the cobra, that instrument of royal guardianship, against him? Or worse?
“She has upheld Ma’at – Balance, Truth, Justice – in the Two Lands as it is – since before Akheperenre’s death. Redoubled, she can rule now as she should.”
“And the young King?” Men-amun queried, astounded – for such a thing was unprecedented.
“Do not imagine her as evil! He will continue as he is. Amun-Ra chose him, and besides, she loves him for his father’s sake. He is still two years short of his majority and wishes to pursue a military life – to command, eventually, the whole army. He has nothing to do but wait.”
The east was changing – suffusing subtly with colours: violet, rose, the palest aquamarine. They had reached that breathless moment of stillness and expectation.
Prince Sobek stood up, and Men-amun with him, preparing for the return of Amen-Ra in all his glory.
“Did he ever have a name?” Men-amun asked urgently.
“No. The King my father forbade it. His birth was second and a hard one. He was thought dead at the time. Only on the preparation table in the House of Anubis did he suddenly kick and cry. When the embalmers returned him to the Palace my father deemed it unchancy. As it proved. Later, who dared to risk his gaining any understanding of what he truly was?”
“If he had had a name, Highness,” Men-amun pursued stubbornly, “What might it have been?”
The Prince half smiled into the coming dawn.
“Is she not Ma’at-ka-re? What is the twin of ka-re?”
“Ba. Ba-re.”
“And who is Kheper?”
“The scarab who rolls back the sun daily . . . and Khepri, his deity arising – who is Existence itself!”
“Good. And the prefix ‘Established’?”
“Men . . . kheper . . . ba . . . re.”
Side by side they raised their arms in prayer, each thereby forming the glyph Ka, commending him to Amen-Ra who made him – this Lost Prince whose flawed body was done with, and whose Ba, also, could now take wing in freedom.
The Aten, his golden chariot poised upon the rim of morning, blazed upward – hastening to receive and refashion him.
“I am Deity,” proclaimed Ma’at-ka-re Hatshepsut, Beloved-of-Amun, in her new dual voice as Pharaoh. “I am the Beginning of Existence.”
Historical Note
In the 19th century, Gaston Maspero, then Egypt’s Director
of Antiquities, embarked on a preliminary clearing of Queen Hatshepsut’s mortuary temple at Deir el-Bahari.
A plain, white-painted wooden coffin was discovered beneath the paving of the First Platform. It bore neither image, nor label, nor any indication of identity. Inside, sewn into sheepskin wrappings lay the body of an adult male, estimated at death to have been between 25 and 30 years of age. At variance with all custom, no embalming had been done, nor any internal organs removed. The man’s wrists and ankles still showed ligature marks, though the bonds had rotted away. Otherwise there was no sign of injury, except what Maspero called “the terrible distortion of the features” – which he thought consistent with the extremity of suffocation. The sheepskin had been sewn up wet and had shrunk on drying out. The white paint was considered to have been deliberate: the creation of a “blind spot” in the Afterlife.
Maspero, who was horrified, called this man “The Unknown Prince”. (See: “Everyday Life in Egypt” p. 218, Pierre Montet.)
Pharaoh Hatshepsut’s declamatory boast is extant in her mortuary temple. (See: “The Splendour that was Egypt” p. 110, Margaret A. Murray Sidgwick & Jackson 1977.)
MURDER IN THE LAND OF WAWAT
Lauren Haney
We are still in the reign of Hatshepsut, but now we are far to the south of Egypt in the fortress town of Buhen, in Nubia, which was then called Wawat. Lauren Haney is the pen name of Betty Winkelman, a former worker in the aerospace industry, who now indulges her interest in ancient Egypt with a highly praised series featuring Lieutenant Bak, head of the Medjay police. The books in the series so far are The Right Hand of Amon (1997), A Face Turned Backward (1999), A Vile Justice (1999), A Curse of Silence (2000) and A Place of Darkness (2001).
“Lieutenant Bak!”
Bak, officer in charge of the Medjay police, glanced up from the scroll he was reading, the week’s compilation of entries taken from the daybook kept by the commandant of the fortress of Buhen.