Pillar of Fire

by Judith Tarr

  The place of tombs was known, but each tomb that was built was kept a secret, as much as anything could be in crowds of workmen. But the workmen kept to themselves, likewise the priests in their mantles of awe, and while the temples for the dead might be difficult to conceal, the tomb and treasure-house of the body was buried deep and well hidden from thieves.

  It was common for a prince to watch over the building of his tomb and the tombs of his family. The temple of the king’s death, where he would be worshipped after he had died, was in Akhetaten, but the tomb of his body was being built in the desert, deep in the mountain wall, in a wadi as remote as it was difficult to enter. Its door faced the east, toward the rising sun. He wanted the first rays of the Aten to fall full on the hidden door, to bless him in death as they had blessed him every morning of his life.

  oOo

  When the princess—Nofret could never bring herself to say queen—Meritaten was great with child and her sister Meketaten was rounding in the belly, for by the god’s blessing she had conceived as soon as she was bedded, the king and his family made a pilgrimage to his tomb. He went there at least once each season, inspected the work, conferred with the chief of the workmen, inevitably bethought himself of a change here, an improvement there. The workmen, accustomed to royal whims, sighed and did as they were told, even if it were to destroy the last season’s worth of work and begin anew.

  This time the pilgrimage was twofold, since the Lord Ay was also minded to visit his tomb. He was vigorous for a man late in middle years, but he was more likely than some to need it soon. They all rode out of Akhetaten in a procession of chariots, each with his attendant clinging precariously behind. The king rode in front under his golden parasol, wearing the Blue Crown that was most practical for riding out in the wind. The queen rode behind him, and the rest in back of them. A company of guards brought up the rear.

  Somehow—Nofret did not know how—the general Horemheb was in command of the guards. He had left Akhetaten after Meketaten’s wedding, but he had come back. Rumor had it among the servants that he was there to protect the king. Akhetaten was at peace, but it was a taut peace, a watchful stillness. Affairs elsewhere were not so quiet. The Two Lands were not in charity with the king or with his god.

  But it was difficult to fret out there in the sun, with the chariot rattling and lurching under her, and the wind in her face. Ankhesenpaaten was her own charioteer, an indulgence that her father allowed and her mother did not refuse. Her horses, a pair of pretty bays, each with a star on its forehead, were soft-mouthed and gentle. They loved to stretch their stride on the broad level road, and the princess loved to encourage them. Once or twice she even sped past her father, who smiled at her, holding his own team of chestnuts to a more sedate pace.

  She always fell back to her proper place, and she never let out the whoop that Nofret knew was in her. She was too much the princess for that. Sometimes Nofret wished that she would let herself be a child while she could, before she had no choice but to be a lady and a queen.

  This was close enough. To an Egyptian there was nothing grim or sad about a visit to a tomb in the building. It was life to them, a promise of life after life, past the place of judgment and the demons and the trials, in the Field of Reeds that was west of the west.

  Lord Ay’s attendants were singing. The words were demure but Nofret knew the tune. It was a very bawdy song indeed in the taverns. They knew it, too: they were laughing much harder than the song seemed to warrant.

  Royalty had to pretend to ignore such indecorum. The king probably did not even notice. He was full of his god.

  oOo

  The gaiety grew muted as they left the broad way and ventured onto the desert track. The horses slowed on the rougher road. The riders in the chariots clung tightly lest they fall. Nofret wished she were the charioteer and not her lady. Then she could balance in the middle of the chariot, feet braced, poised and graceful as the princess was doing, and as the king did with grace that he never had else. As it was, she gripped the gilded side and did her best not to slip.

  The road ran as straight as it might to the place of tombs, passing the workmen’s village and the house of the embalmers. As bleak as the village was, it was a garden of delights beside the wilderness of crag and stone in which so many noble bodies would rest for eternity.

  The king’s tomb was far up in the hills, the road steep and narrow between high walls that clove the region of tombs into north and south. Lord Ay parted from them at the foot of the cliff to turn south where his own tomb was, begun later than some and still little more than a rough tunnel in the rock. Nofret had not seen it, of course, but her lady had, and she shook her head as she watched her grandfather’s party clatter away.

  “He doesn’t believe,” she said. “He builds a tomb in Thebes, too, to placate Amon.”

  “Is that treason?” Nofret asked.

  The princess shot a glance over her shoulder. There was nothing of the child in it. “That depends on who is king.”

  Nofret shut her mouth tight. This child was not supposed to think such things, or say them to her servant. Maybe it was the freedom of the air and the noise of hooves and chariot wheels that let her speak more openly than she ever had before.

  oOo

  The way to the king’s tomb was even more difficult than Nofret had imagined. It was narrow, little more than a passage in the rock, and stony, and ghastly steep. They had to leave the chariots and scramble the rest of the way.

  When they came at too long last to the king’s tomb, Nofret was worn to a rag, footsore and thirsty and itching with sweat. She was ready to collapse before she even began the last grueling slope, the one that led up to the tomb. And yet the builders walked this road every day, morning and evening, and spent the long day carving a house of everlasting from the living rock.

  There were laborers at work within the tomb. She saw the mouth of it yawning open, and a flicker of lamplight. The chief of the workers was standing outside in front of a canopy, clearly a shelter for the more delicate tools of his trade, but set in order for the king’s use.

  Nofret blinked. She knew that man. For an instant she did not remember where. It had been a long while since she wandered to the workmen’s village—not, she realized with a small shock, since the night she heard Leah’s prophecies.

  The man who built the king’s tomb under the orders of the king and of the king’s master artificer was the foreigner Aharon. He looked much less princely here than he did in his own house. His coat was drab, his beard greyed with dust. His hands were thick with it, as if he had been carving stone and had not had opportunity to wash himself for the king’s arrival.

  Maybe for him it was a point of pride. He was a maker and a builder. He had no shame of it.

  He bowed to the king and the queen and the princesses, not to the ground as an Egyptian might, but from the waist and with peculiar grace, in the manner of the desert. The king did not bridle at it, although the queen’s lips tightened infinitesimally.

  So, thought Nofret. Nefertiti stood on ceremony with her own kin. That was interesting. Was she ashamed of them?

  It could be awkward in this country, Nofret supposed, to be a queen and to be in part a foreigner. She came of the royal line through her mother and her mother’s mother, but that might not be enough for Egypt, where princes reckoned their lineage back three thousand years. A foreigner, a parvenu, even wedded to a royal lady as Yuya and Ay both had been, would be a matter of subtle scorn.

  Maybe that was why the king had built Akhetaten—to show what he thought of such snobbery. Did his princes sneer at his wife and her kin? He would show them what a truly new thing was, a city built where no human habitation had ever been.

  Nofret started back to herself. Her lady was already halfway toward the tomb, clambering like a she-goat up the steep stony slope. The maids were assisting Meritaten, who truly should not have come: she was too big with child, and clearly in discomfort. Meketaten, less advanced in pregnancy, t
railed behind. When her maid offered a hand, she shook it off irritably.

  That was brave of her, but Nofret did not like the look of her face. It was tight and drawn, and it had a greenish pallor.

  Nofret glanced at her own princess. Ankhesenpaaten moved strongly, lightly, as a healthy child should. If Nofret were a proper courtier she would assist regardless, but Nofret was anything but that. She thrust herself upward toward Meketaten.

  Someone else reached Meketaten even as Nofret did. This time Nofret knew him at once, even without his handsome striped coat. Johanan was taller, that struck her first, and even more gangly than ever. He was starting a beard: a furze of down on his upper lip and a patch or two on his cheeks. He looked ridiculous. She would tell him so at the earliest opportunity.

  Meketaten might not be willing to accept help from her own maid, but she was no match for two determined foreigners, both of whom were notably larger than she. Her hand in Nofret’s was cold, and it trembled.

  Nofret stopped. Meketaten halted perforce: Johanan held her, tight but gentle, when she tried to go on.

  “You’re ill,” said Nofret. “Come in under the canopy. Johanan, is there wine? Beer at least?”

  “We have water,” he said, “from a spring in the hills. It’s as pure as a princess could wish.”

  “I wish,” said Meketaten tightly, “to do my duty in my father—my husband’s tomb.”

  “Do that,” Nofret said, “and you’ll have the baby at his feet.”

  Meketaten’s hands flew to her swelling middle. “I can’t. It’s too soon.”

  “Babies don’t always know that,” said Johanan. “Here, lady. Come into the shade. I’ll call the maids. They can fan you while I fetch a cup fit for a queen, and the water-jar.”

  “I don’t want—” Meketaten began.

  “Hush,” said Nofret with rough gentleness that tended to work with children and animals.

  It worked with Meketaten, queen though she might be. Nofret got her under the canopy, heaped rugs for her to rest on, found a roll of plans in a leather case that would do admirably for a bolster.

  The maid with the fan was glad to be let out of attending the queen in the tomb. “Bury us alive, it will,” she said under her breath to Nofret, fanning the princess as she had been trained to do, slow but strong, raising a breeze that felt blessedly cool.

  Johanan left at the run and came back at the run, balancing a tall clay jar on his shoulder. He halted panting just out of the shade, produced a gilded cup from his robes, filled and presented it with a flourish.

  Meketaten was recovering. She laughed, if weakly, at Johanan’s display, and took the cup with good grace, and sipped. Her eyes widened. “Oh, this is good!”

  “Drink deep, princess,” Johanan said. “There’s more if you want it.”

  She drank the whole cup, and a sip of another. Then she insisted that he have the rest, and Nofret, and the maid with the fan.

  “She’s a gracious little thing,” Johanan observed. Having drunk, and having refused what refreshment Johanan could produce—a hamper of bread and goat cheese, and a basket of figs—Meketaten had fallen asleep on her heap of rugs.

  “She’s not well,” said Nofret, frowning. Even in sleep the princess looked ill. There were deep shadows under her eyes, and a pallor about her lips that Nofret did not like.

  “She’s too young to have a baby.” Johanan’s voice was fierce, though he kept it down lest he wake Meketaten. “She’s a baby herself.”

  “Yes.” Nofret turned her back on Meketaten and glared out into the sun. Her eyes watered. It was the light—it was too bright after the shade of the canopy.

  Johanan let the silence stretch. After a while, in a studiedly ordinary tone, he said, “You haven’t visited us lately. Did Grandmother scare you off?”

  “No,” Nofret said. “I’ve been busy. That’s all.”

  “You’re welcome to come,” he said. “Any time you can. Grandmother promises not to say anything too shocking.”

  “She can’t help it,” said Nofret.

  “When you come,” he said, “come at dinnertime if you can. We have a lamb we’ve been raising. We’re going to slaughter it for a feast, come the new moon.”

  Noiret’s brows went up. “Is it a festival of your god?”

  “Mostly,” he said. “And a wedding.”

  Her heart thudded once, sharply. “Yours?”

  He gaped. “What—” His voice cracked, then dropped to a rumble. “Of course not! Rahotep the limner’s marrying old Benavi’s daughter. We’ll have wine,” he said, almost as if he wheedled. “And honey. You like honey, I can see you do.”

  “I don’t know,” she said, “if I can—”

  “I’ll ask your princess,” he said.

  “No!”

  He grinned and would not listen. And when the king came out of the tomb with his family behind him, Johanan waited till they were all drinking water from the jar and clucking over Meketaten—too little too late, in Nofret’s opinion—to walk boldly up to Ankhesenpaaten. Nofret could not leap fast enough to stop him. He bowed in desert fashion. “Lady,” he said, “would you, of your grace, grant your servant leave to visit us on the night of the new moon?”

  The princess looked him up and down. Nofret had not said anything of him, and yet she said, “You must be Johanan ben Aharon. We’re cousins, I think.”

  “Yes, lady,” said Johanan. “There’s a wedding among us, you see, and your servant would like the feast and the dancing. Will you let her come?”

  “Are you friends?” the princess asked.

  Johanan never even flinched. “I think we are. My grandmother approves of her.”

  “Your grandmother . . .” The princess frowned. “Leah? Is that her name?” He nodded. She half-smiled. “My grandfather told me about her. She’s a seeress, isn’t she? Her god talks to her as the Aten talks to my father.”

  “Not . . . quite . . . as compellingly as that,” Johanan said. “But she does see clearer than most.”

  “I think I pity her,” said the princess. “Yes, you may borrow my maid on the night of the new moon. Be sure that she comes back in the morning, and that she’s fit to wait on me.”

  Nofret opened her mouth, shut it again. Not once had her lady glanced at her, nor, worse yet, had Johanan. She might have been a shadow on the wall for all the notice they took of her. They disposed of her with grand disregard for whether she would care to be consulted.

  And she could not say a word. She was a slave. She was the instrument of her mistress’ will, with neither mind nor will of her own, nor right of argument. Too often she forgot that. She had an indulgent mistress, most times. This was not one of them. Though the princess might think differently in setting her free to dance at a stranger’s wedding.

  Eight

  The night of the new moon came much too quickly to suit Nofret. Worse, her lady was in an antic mood, convinced that Nofret wanted to go, and determined to see that she put on as brave a show as a princess’ servant should. She had a gown made of the finest linen, so fine it was transparent, and gave Nofret jewels to adorn it, armlets and earrings and pectoral of lapis and gold, camelian and malachite. A wig Nofret would not endure, but the queen’s own hairdresser arranged her crop of curls into a reasonable semblance of a lady’s wig.

  Nofret felt like an idol set up in a temple. She turned in the clinging gown, tried a step, came up short. “How in the world am I supposed to walk to the village in this?”

  “You’re not,” said the princess. “You’re going in a chair.”

  “I am not!” Nofret stamped her foot. “They’ll think I’m haughty. They’ll stare. They’ll hate the sight of me.”

  “I don’t think so,” said the princess. She paused, frowning. “Well. Maybe not a chair. Can you drive a chariot?”

  “Can I—” Nofret caught her breath. “That’s even worse!”

  “I should think you’d like it,” the princess said. “I’ll wager Johanan would. He looked t
he sort of young man who would love to try the sport.”

  “At night? With no moon?”

  “Well,” said the princess. “There is that.” She sighed the sigh of the lover of spectacle denied her heart’s desire. “Well then. Take the dress off. You’ll carry it with you. You can put it on when you come to the village.”

  That was practical enough to be worth doing. Nofret found herself actually thinking that—and wanting to see Johanan’s face when she came to the feast looking like a lady of the palace.

  The princess helped Nofret out of the gown, taking care not to disarrange her hair, and made a bundle of gown and jewels and the afterthought, a pair of delicate sandals with gilded straps. “You don’t know what you’ll be dancing on,” she said, wrapping the whole in a mantle of coarser linen and tying it.

  “There,” she said in satisfaction. “Carry this on your head, and no one will know you for anything but a maidservant on an errand.”

  “You are too clever by half,” muttered Nofret.

  The princess only laughed.

  Nofret walked through Akhetaten as a servant walks, with her bundle on her head. No one took note of her. The sun was sinking low, the light falling long across the walls and roofs of the city. It did not look so raw in that gold-red light, nor so unfinished. The shadows filled the open places, gilded the skeletal walls, raised pillars where none had yet been built.

  Even the desert seemed a gentler place, its harsh angles softened by sunset. Nofret’s shadow stretched long ahead of her, all legs and spidery arms and misshapen head. There was no one else on that road. The workmen would be coming down another way from the tombs. The people of the city did not go into the desert so close to nightfall. She found herself wishing that she had taken the chair or, better yet, the chariot.

  But she did not want the attention that would have won her, the mistrust, the conviction that she was her princess’ spy. Slaves would think such things, being slaves. And no matter that Johanan would deny vehemently that he was anything but a free man. His freedom was entirely at the king’s pleasure—just as was Nofret’s.