by Gill, Anton
Tutankhamun drew himself up. If he resisted, he had better be perfectly sure of success.
He watched the girl mixing make-up from a cake with water and a linen pad. She approached, avoiding eye contact, which was forbidden to all but the highest servants. He would have to lay plans even deeper than the general’s, and he would have to strike hard and accurately, and only when he was absolutely sure that the blow would be fatal. In the meantime, he would redouble his efforts to get a child. He would have Ankhsi secretly examined, and he would pray with her to Renenutet and Tawaret, Hathor and Bes. If there could be a boy child, he would show him to the army. He would assume command - his royal right — before Horemheb could object.
As the girl dabbed on the make-up, he sensed her breath on his cheek. He felt better. A glow began inside him, and he raised his head. He would permit this marriage to Nezemmut. It could always be broken off later, and if Horemheb had children they would die with their father as soon as the king was strong enough. His heart dwelt on that day and his thoughts were glad.
TWO
Everyone had something to gain, thought Ay as he watched his younger daughter take the hand of Horemheb and exchange vows with him. The usually simple ceremony had been blown up into a state occasion by the general, who had secured the king’s permission to hold it in the temple of Amun.
Ay was not sure about the young pharaoh’s recent acquiescence to Horemheb’s requests. He had been sure that Tutankhamun was on the point of rebelling against them, and had told Horemheb so during one of their infrequent meetings, following the hearing of the reports of the vizirs of the north and south. Horemheb had laughed at the idea, but Ay was left with the impression of being excluded, and since then had seen a scorpion under every stone.
He wrung his hands as he held them in front of him, and his heavy rings scraped against one another. The assembly stood in a long, pillared hall, the priests at one end by the naos, in white robes and multicoloured headdresses; the nobles were ranged along the sides and squeezed between the pillars. His gaze travelled upwards to the painted lotus flowers of their capitals. Ay read the inscriptions carved into them, and noticed where the names of the disgraced had been cut out. In some places he could see where his own name had been inserted, squeezed in to give credence to his lineage. He wondered how long his cartouches would stand. Everywhere he took care that he was represented as a young and vigorous man, and he promoted an image of himself as one whose personality and years combined strength with wisdom and experience. But he was fighting a losing battle against the patient, raw energy of Horemheb’s ambition, and he knew it.
He glanced across to the dais where the king and queen sat with their retinue, a splash of pale blues, golds and greens among the white robes and kilts most of the others wore. It was too far away for Ay to be able to see the king’s expression, but the proud, cold bearing of the body was scarcely expressive of joy.
As for the couple, whose voices rose to the high roof and rebounded back down to the throng from the massive stone cross-blocks and heavy cedar roof-planks, their faces betrayed little. Nezemmut might have been wearing a mask, and Horemheb’s huge, battered head bore such a network of deep wrinkles that no one expression could be deduced from their juxtaposition. The brown eyes shone within that tanned sea of crevices but knew how to keep their secrets, showing no more than alert and undiminished intelligence. Horemheb, it was said, could deal with five problems simultaneously in his heart.
The sun, descending on his journey west, suddenly slipped his light through the tall, narrow entrance of the temple and spread his wings within, darting rays here and there, dancing on the cream and red, blue and gold of the columns and walls. As if Ra himself had sent the signal, the musicians struck up the sistra and the clappers, cymbals and bells. The king turned his head towards the light and now Ay could clearly discern the hard line of his mouth. If Horemheb had noticed it too he gave no sign. Outside, the people were calling his name as well as the pharaoh’s. No one would deny what Horemheb had done for the Black Land, thought Ay; but perhaps there was also such a thing as too much gratitude.
Led by the king and his retinue, immediately succeeded by the newlyweds, the people in the temple filed out into the sunshine. It was still early in the season of shemu, and even at midday the heat was tolerable. Many of the noblewomen wore shawls of light wool over their pleated robes. The procession passed along the avenue which connected the temple to the main north-to-south axis road of the Southern Capital, where canopied litters awaited the greater among them. The music continued to play, and as the lesser guests arranged themselves in a loose order behind the litters for the walk to the palace compound and- the three-day feast which would begin in an hour’s time in the great shaded courtyard of Horemheb’s house, a murmur of conversation was added to the sound of the instruments. The crowd lining the route waved palm fronds and cheered, throwing boughs under the feet of the robust copper-coloured men in kilts of dazzling white linen trimmed with gold who carried the litters of the king and queen, Horemheb, Nezemmut, and Ay. Behind the litter of the general’s new wife danced her constant companions, the girl-dwarfs Para and Reneneh.
Amongst the protagonists of the celebration there was the least joy. Only a few perfunctory words had been exchanged between them as they entered their litters.
They would have to put on a better act than that at the feast, thought the former scribe, Huy, watching from a position near the front of the crowd. He saw the closed expressions of Horemheb and Nezemmut. Tutankhamun wore the impenetrable, ambivalent, mask-like look which he had developed during the last years of his adolescence. He might have been smiling inwardly, but there was no way you could be sure. His wife and Ay were the only ones whose faces could be read. Ankhsenpaamun looked worried. Ay seemed troubled, envious; but there was determination in the set of his thin-lipped, old man’s mouth. For a moment the eyes of the former scribe and the former Master of Horse, both veterans of the disgraced Akhenaten’s court, met. Was there a spark of recognition there, or was it just imagined? It was many years since they had last seen each other, and yet in the time that Huy had been back in the Southern Capital, forbidden to practise his former profession, he had built up a reputation as a problem solver. Aware of Horemheb’s dislike of less powerful fellow-adherents of the former regime, Huy had kept his head down, but could do nothing about the reputation he had won, due to which he was able to scrape a precarious living.
Lurking at the edges of the crowd, men from Horemheb’s special section of Medjay police were not troubling to make their presence less than obvious. The general was flaunting his private power more and more flagrantly, but Huy was not sure why. Did he seek to prove to the king that he was the real power in the land? Or did he deliberately seek a confrontation with the young pharaoh? Despite all his sophistication, all the political dexterity he had learnt down the years, might it not perhaps be a case of an old lion showing his teeth to a young one — even though he knows that, once he has entered the seqtet boat, his power is doomed, and not even the flexing of all his muscles will pull him backwards one second in time?
Huy wondered if Horemheb was, after all, either subtle enough or modest enough ever to entertain such thoughts in his heart. The general was a practical man. Abstractions did not interest him, though he did make a show of an interest in the arts, pouring money into the hands of painters and carvers, singers and potters; imitating the manner of his own hero, the warrior pharaoh Menkheperre Tuthmosis, creator of the Great Empire, whose death a century earlier was still lamented, as from it the historians now dated the decline of power in the | Black Land. Horemheb, Huy was certain, wanted to be the man to arrest that decline. Huy privately had little doubt that i he would succeed, but he reserved a scrap of judgement because he remembered, years ago, a light of independence - or even of defiance - in the eyes of the young pharaoh, then only nine years old, as he fulfilled the rite of the Opening of the Mouth at the entombment of his immediate predecessor, Smenkh
kare. Since then his every step, his every move, had been dogged by his two adviser-jailers. Huy wondered if, with maturity, the young king might not find the strength and jhe cunning to break the bars, shoot the bolts of the doors.
The litters had lumbered past him now, their bearers kicking;
up dust. Huy watched the swinging curtains and tried to imagine the private thoughts of the occupants of each. He doubted if the paymasters of the banquets to follow would enjoy them much. For a few minutes longer he watched the excited, chattering crowd of lesser guests and officials pass by, the headdresses glittering in the sun, a swirl of white linen and brown bodies whose precise outlines were softened by the fine dust their footsteps raised from the road. Huy’s eyes sought Taheb among them. For a moment he thought he saw her, but he could not be sure, and something in his heart prevented him from looking further. It had been two years since their love bond had ended, after several false stops and starts. In that time he had seen her once, and then only at a distance, but it was enough to tell his heart that he had not forgotten her. Now here he was, hopelessly looking for her again. He knew he was chasing a dream, but the spectre remained. Exhausted by it, he sometimes wondered what it would take to lay this ghost.
He turned away from the procession, and shouldered his way through the press of people who lingered to watch until the last of the marriage guests had passed by. He felt at once disappointed at not pursuing Taheb, and relieved. If he were to meet her, he would have no words to say to her. Why, then, play with the illusion that they might be together again? As a palliative for loneliness? He knew in his heart that he did not want her back; if the desire had truly been there, he would have done something about it long ago.
Leaving the crowd behind him, the music growing fainter as he walked down the low hill on which the temple stood, he made his way home. For some time he had lived in a small house in the harbour quarter. A handful of years earlier, it had been bought for him by Ipuky, the Controller of the Silver Mines, and a man to whom he had been able to be of service. As a result of the work he had done at that time, a corrupt chief scribe had been exposed, and a vile brothel was closed; but although Ipuky, an official of high enough rank to have the ear of Horemheb, had interceded for him, credit for the investigation had gone to the priest-administrator officially in charge, Kenamun. That had rankled with Huy. He knew that Kenamun himself had murdered a Babylonian prostitute, but the priest-administrator’s rank had protected him from accusation, and Huy had had to accept defeat, taking consolation in the fact that public praise for him might have attracted unwelcome attention from Horemheb. Being human, however, it had been some time before he ceased to wish both men thrown to the crocodiles.
She awoke, immediately aware that her husband was already conscious, lying there in the darkness, staring at nothing, troubled by thoughts he only grudgingly shared with her, but which she found easy to guess. It was the lack of a child that kept him from sleep.
She sighed as softly as she could, so as not to let him know that she was awake, but she felt tension run through his muscles and knew that she had not kept her secret. He did not speak to her however, and for a long time they lay in silence, listening to the muffled island of sound that came from the feast in Horemheb’s house on the other side of the palace compound. It had been a long day and she was tired — tired from the heavy regalia, and tired from the rich food and the wine.
In the darkness his hand found hers and grasped it. She curled her fingers gratefully round his, but did not know whether this affection proceeded from his heart or just from kindness. She was jealous of all that he kept back from her. She hated her body. Why would it not produce a child that lived? Only six months had passed since Horemheb’s marriage, and now they were celebrating her aunt’s pregnancy. Nezemmut, so much older than she, had peopled her birth-cave with no effort. Of what value, then, had their own six months of prayer and sacrifice to the gods of fertility been? Were the gods as stony as their images?
His hand moved up to her face and she turned it away so that he could not feel the tears on her cheeks. Perhaps her birth-cave was as barren as the City of the Horizon where she had been born: a city of the dead.
‘It will be all right,’ came the king’s voice. He spoke with a gentleness that surprised her. ‘The gods are leading Horemheb on in order to destroy him. As for the child that is coming to him, it will never sit on the Golden Chair.’
‘I want you to be sure. I want you to have a direct heir.’
He put an arm round her. ‘I will. We will.’
‘Why do the gods not hear us? You are one of them. Or can Horemheb order them about as he does everyone else?’ Tutankhamun fought down anger at her remark, telling himself that he had to indulge the candour of someone who was, after all, not much more than a child.
‘His days of giving orders are all but over.’
‘And Ay?’ she asked, not forgetting the other enemy.
‘He is already out of the game.’
Ankhsenpaamun did not make any comment. She did not agree with her husband, but did not know why, and so decided to keep her silence. The king stroked her brow gently, wishing that tiredness and the nagging interruption of his thoughts were not preventing him from showing even the pretence of desire. He turned his heart to the plans that he had begun to lay secretly, not telling anyone except the few trusted men of his household who would carry them out. He did not feel that everything could be confidently left to the gods to sort out. In any case, he had to do something, and, unfocused as his plans were, it comforted him to consider them as they began to develop.
He soothed her back to sleep, thinking how young she was. Little Ankhsi, with her slim arms and her little breasts that barely showed. Would she ever grow into the strong, voluptuous woman her aunt had become? She seemed to the king like a flower on the point of opening.
Tutankhamun did not return to sleep so easily himself, though the regular breathing of his wife, its faint breeze on his chest, soothed him in turn. He had awakened from a dream of hunting. The sand had been hard under the wheels of his lightest chariot, drawn by his two favourite horses from the north. They responded to the slightest touch, and the chariot was manoeuvrable enough to pursue the swiftest prey. Even the long spotted cat, the fastest animal, could not escape him.
In his dream he had been hunting the great birds, which had thundered ahead of him on their powerful legs, running in desperation and darting their idiotic heads on long naked necks hither and thither in panic. He wanted to make two kills, to collect enough black body feathers and white tail feathers for the golden flywhisks he had commissioned for the commemoration day of his queen’s coming-forth. It was a point of honour to collect the feathers himself, and he was an experienced hunter. After the enforced inactivity of the court, hunting was his chief joy.
Now, he flew across the Western Desert near Kharga, it seemed; far, far out among the dunes and nowhere near his usual hunting grounds. The big black-and-white birds galloped directly ahead of the chariot, making half-hearted feints to right and left, but unable to manoeuvre their bulk out of harm’s way. All he had to do was select his target and bring it down with his first harpoon. Then, a second target with the second weapon, and it would be over. They would return to the kills and his charioteer would take what they needed from the bodies, leaving the rest for the children of Nekhbet.
In his dream he wanted to pass the reins of the chariot over, to grasp the harpoon. It was only then that he realised he was alone. And now his horses were slowing, tiring, and the birds were making distance between them, running on into the desert in their flailing, grotesque way, until they became shimmering untidy specks in the heat, melting into the air, finally disappearing altogether, leaving him alone. The chariot came to a halt, and his beautiful dun horses, Hyksos-trained, so he had been told, sank under the sand. The chariot tilted forward on to its shaft and he had to grasp the side to steady himself.
The jolt had awakened him. At first he was r
elieved that it had been a dream, for it had seemed real enough, and his last dreaming thoughts had been despairing ones of leaving the empire without an heir to the mercy of Horemheb. Then he recognised where he was, heard his wife’s gentle breathing, and knew, with a stab of irritation of which he felt ashamed, that before another minute had elapsed she would sense him awake and come back from sleep herself.
He looked at his Great Wife briefly, the slender profile of her body outlined by the moon in the darkness, and sent out one more prayer to Min to flood her birth-cave with the fertile silt in which people grow. Then he lay back, adjusting his headrest as quietly as he could, and listened to the sound of Horemheb’s celebration. It seemed like months, not hours, since they had left the party, gracing only its beginning with the royal presence.
He continued to lie awake until the sounds of carousal had died away, to be replaced soon after by the muted shuffling and suppressed coughing of the palace servants as they rose, lit fires for cooking, fetched water, milk, beans and flour for the first meal, and brought the palace to life. Soon, the body servants would come to awaken them and bathe them, and the chief steward would arrive with the private secretary, both to receive and give the domestic and public orders for the day. To be so shackled to duty without the reward of power was beginning to kill the king’s Ka. Behind all the other noises came the call of egrets by the river. Tutankhamun’s strained eyes continued to stare into the gathering day. Lightheaded, hungover from lack of sleep, his mouth dry, he sat inside himself and tried to listen to what his heart would tell him.