by Gill, Anton
On the last day the king was awakened early by an excited Sherybin.
‘The trackers have brought news,’ said the charioteer, scarcely able to contain his enthusiasm.
‘Of what?’ The king squinted past him at the sky outside the tent. Could the trackers be back already?
‘Wild cattle,’ Sherybin told him in a triumphant whisper.
Tutankhamun’s heart leapt. If the news were true, then the omen had been good after all. Wild cattle! That would be a prize worthy of the great Tuthmosis himself. Only the pharaohs were allowed to hunt them, and if he could bring down a bull...!
His ambitions raced ahead of him.
‘Waken the others. We must set off immediately.’
Sherybin quietened him. For a moment they were two excited men, equals, eagerly discussing the merits of an important hunt. ‘No. Not the others. You know how nervous wild cattle are. If we go in a big group we might panic them and then they’d be gone before we could get one decent shot at them.’
‘But if we go alone we’ll have fewer chances of getting anything.’
‘More than a group would ever have. I know your shooting. You are the best in the Black Land.’
Tutankhamun had trained himself to bite the metal of flattery to see if it was good. But coming from so experienced a hunter and charioteer as Sherybin, this was to be taken as a compliment without question.
‘We will leave word with one of the guards to say what direction we have taken,’ continued Sherybin, allaying the king’s other unspoken fear without being asked. ‘Come, if we delay we will miss our chance. They must be crossing the desert from oasis to oasis and they will not be caught in the open once the sun is high.’
Convinced, the king rose, washing and dressing at speed, strapping on his leather armguard himself, and brushing aside the attentions of his body servant. He stepped out of the tent into the keen blue night and the cool silence of the desert. No one stirred, though not far from the encampment he was surprised to see his chariot ready harnessed, one of the trackers standing by the horses. Sherybin spoke swiftly and urgently to a guard as he came forward into the glow from the fire, and then helped the king on to the footplate of the chariot, where the right weapons were ranged ready. The long-limbed tracker ran ahead, soon barely visible in the gloom, taking a southerly direction. They followed at an unhurried trot, making as little noise as possible. The king took a last look at the sleeping camp, but the thought of wild cattle dispelled any lingering doubts in his heart. He turned his face to the wind and imagined brown-and-white hides, proud jet-black eyes, and long, crooked horns.
The tracker was out of sight now. Clicking to the horses, Sherybin encouraged them to a canter. Tutankhamun grasped the leather handstrap more firmly, and cast his eye over the Weapons. A heavy throwing spear, a sturdier bow than he had used on the first day, and a bronze short-sword in a leather scabbard. The horses moved faster now across the featureless desert, but somehow the tracker must have kept ahead, for the king did not see him. Then, coldly, the thought came to him that Sherybin could not see him either, and if that were so, how did he know what direction to take? He looked covertly at his charioteer, who did not return the glance, even if he were aware of it, but kept his eyes ahead.
‘How much further?’ asked the king. A thin line of pale blue outlined the low hills near the coast away to the east and he knew that very soon there would be light enough to see for miles. He gauged the speed with which he could draw the sword. With the dawn came a gathering wind from the north.
‘Soon,’ came the reply. The voice was still warm and enthusiastic, even carrying with it some of the tension of the hunt. But the king’s belly told him what a fool he had been.
‘Where is the tracker?’
‘Ahead.’
‘No tracker could run that fast.’
Sherybin drew the chariot up. ‘Listen.’
At first, after the noise of the horses’ hooves and the clattering of the chariot, the silence seemed impenetrable. But then, out of it, distant at first, came the noise of other hooves. The king peered ahead into the gloaming from where the sounds came, and as he watched dark shapes began to detach themselves from it, crossing the path ahead. The king’s breath came faster. He felt himself becoming transfixed and forced himself to turn, to see what Sherybin was doing. He was just in time. His charioteer’s hand was on the haft of the sword.
Without thinking, the king brought his own right fist smashing down. The three heavy gold rings crushed the bones of the thin brown hand beneath them, and the charioteer drew away with a hiss of pain. Tutankhamun brought the sword out of the scabbard in one sharp movement and held it at Sherybin’s throat.
‘What have you done?’ he said.
The man smiled wanly, but there was fear in his eyes.
‘You should not have driven so fast,’ continued the pharaoh.
‘I might never have suspected anything.’ He was surprised at his own calm, as from the corner of his eye he saw the shapes approach, still too far away to identify individually, but in the gathering light were certainly not cattle. Horsemen. Could they see what had happened on the chariot? They were approaching without haste.
He tried to calculate how far from the camp they had come. Sound travelled a long way in the desert, especially in the thin air of morning. Whatever happened now, would happen fast.
He seized the reins from his charioteer’s numb left hand, and raised the sword, at the same time pushing his foot firmly into the footstrap for balance.
‘May Set swallow you, Sherybin,’ he said, pronouncing the curse precisely, without emotion. Fear and — possibly — shame had turned the charioteer into a statue. Thoughts flew through the king’s heart. He wanted to say more, to find out why. Above all he was appalled at the betrayal and at the speed with which it had taken place. He had little doubt of its originator. But there was no time. The horsemen were approaching, and they were doing so faster. He brought the sword down hard. The blade cut the base of Sherybin’s muscular young neck and cleaved through the collar bone down to the sternum. The charioteer was still gaping and gagging, his hands jerking up to the wound, when the king, leaving the sword where it had jammed, thrust him off the chariot with his elbow.
The horses were uneasy. Trying to keep his own voice steady to calm them, Tutankhamun turned them. The riders were not a hundred paces away now, and he could hear them calling to each other. They had seen Sherybin fall. The chariot’s turn, accomplished in a second during the hunt, now took an age, but at last it was done. The king took a firm grip of the reins and held them taut so that the horses’ heads reared. With his free hand he took up the spear. Then, gathering air in his lungs, he lashed the horses forward and sped back towards the camp, roaring his battle cry as he did so. Behind him, he could hear the sound of hooves as his pursuers whipped their mounts forward. How many of them were there? Ten? Twenty?
He flew, but as he continued to cry out he knew that the north wind was blowing the sound of his ever-weakening voice back to the men behind him. Nehesy would never hear him at the camp. But by now they would be up, and perhaps even saddled and riding after him. It had been clever of Sherybin to give directions to a guard, but perhaps over-confident. The thought gave the king new heart.
Then one of his horses stumbled, and though it recovered almost immediately, the chariot had slewed round and the king knew that he had lost fatal seconds by the time he was back on course. His heart became hollow as from the corner of his eye he could see a rider gaining on his flank. He yelled encouragement at the horses and once more the light chariot flew forwards. Tutankhamun gulped air, part of him caught in a wild thrill that had little to do with the horror of his situation. He could not believe that he would die, that anyone would dare to perpetrate, plan or even imagine bringing about the death of a pharaoh. Such an act was to kill god. But through the mists of his flying thoughts came a clear one of his immediate predecessor Smenkhkare, who had died suddenly at the age of twenty,
in the midst of life. How?
He brought his senses back to his own race with death. A dark figure was riding close to his horses now, stooping to grasp their head harness. He pulled his horses back to slow them of his own accord, throwing the rider off balance, and, drawing ‘ his right arm back, thrust the spear forward blindly. He felt its point catch weight and dig in, and then the end of the shaft he held was pulled out of his hand as the figure impaled on its end soundlessly dropped from his mount, which veered away ¡ into the open desert.
Tutankhamun looked ahead, but the rush of wind in his face forced him to keep his eyes screwed tight, and he could see little. There was no sign of the camp or of Nehesy riding to help him. A grain of sand caught in his left eye and made him j
close it, involuntarily slowing again. His heart told him it was over. He could sense them on either side of the chariot now, and his own horses giving him up as they lost the will to run. He had no weapon left which he could use at close quarters.
The death of their fellow had been to their gain, because killing him had cost Tutankhamun the final seconds of advantage he had. They had both his horses by the head now, leaning back on their mounts to slow the chariot, digging in with leg muscles like rope to the brown flanks.
One more yell produced a last flagging effort from his horses, but they were beyond obedience now, frightened and confused. He felt that reality was receding from him. As if in a dream he watched his team dragged to a halt, lowering their heads as they were released, submissive, done. From behind him at last a voice issued one harsh and laconic order:
‘Quickly.’
Tutankhamun’s heart acknowledged that he had heard the voice of death, but still the events around him seemed to have nothing to do with him. He stood in the chariot like the captain of a sinking riverboat, watching as the horses were hastily unhitched. The tilting of the shaft downwards as they were withdrawn and the men holding it lowered it to the sand made him stagger. Then, in the precise second before he was seized and dragged from his place, reality flooded him, and in a moment of anguish he saw Anhksi again, whom he would never see again, whose warm breath he would never again feel on his chest as she slept. He thought of the child he would never know, and the kingdom he would never rule. How had he been so cruelly out-manoeuvred? He had been so careful!
A last thought crossed his heart: if he could not live as a king, he would at least die like one. He plucked an arrow from the quiver just as they laid hands on him, and flung him at the rider whose voice, it appeared to him, had issued the order; a thin, angular man with a scant beard. Its flight was true, and for a glorious, hopeful moment it looked as if it might strike him in the eye. But it fell short. Tutankhamun had time to see it dash against his right cheek, drawing blood, before they pulled him down.
Now he no longer seemed to be part of his body. He watched from somewhere in the air above as they forced it to its knees, pinioning its arms. Two men did this, destroying their hearts and souls for all eternity as they committed the crime. He could not see their faces; indeed did not want to. Two other men were overturning the chariot with feverish haste. Two more were slinging the body of the man he had killed over his horse, which they had recaptured. He could see how the wind, which had borne his voice away from his friends, was blowing sand over the mess of their tracks. By the time Nehesy arrived, there would be no sign of what had happened. Except for Sherybin. What would they do with him?
But as he watched, more horsemen, working in the same hasty silence, dragged the charioteer’s body up. His wound was split over one wheel of the machine, as if he had fallen on it in the accident. The sword was cleaned carefully and stowed in its place on the chariot. Still the wind continued its work as accomplice, erasing the traces as they appeared.
Then the voice spoke again. There was tightness in it, but he could not tell, nor did he care, whether the tone stemmed from anger at the wound or increased urgency.
‘Quickly.’
It occurred to him at last that they had not stopped his mouth. He was still bent forward, held, and he could not fill his lungs. But he opened his mouth and started to bellow his war cry. Suddenly it was a desperate cry for life. Ankhsi appeared before him so vividly that he could smell her, taste her soft body, bury his head in her breast. The yearning was unbearable.
Then the blow fell, and, before the darkness came, all he could feel were the sand in his nostrils and a trickle of blood on his face.
FOUR
‘It was an accident?’
‘A hunting accident. Yes. Most tragic.’
Huy looked out of the broad window of the room towards a columned gallery, beyond which the sun hung in a hard blue sky. Below, the river ran between its dun banks, crowded on this side with the jumble of mean houses that formed the district where Huy lived.
Much had happened in the two days which had passed since the hunting party had secretly brought the king’s body back, although no public announcements had been made by the newsbreakers. That Huy was being given privileged information had been impressed upon him at the beginning of this interview. But the city was already full of rumours, and there was an indefinable tension in the air, which Huy had even picked up in the harbour quarter, where people’s concern for the pharaoh was slight.
Now, he tried to absorb the shock of the king’s death. He looked at Ay, standing by the window. In age, Ay had grown a Paunch, but his bird-like, intellectual head had barely changed. There were wrinkles, and the hairline had receded; but the hair was dyed dark, and Huy would have had no difficulty in recognising the man he had known, distantly, at the City of the Horizon.
“When will the news be broken?’ Huy asked.
It must be soon. You are aware how people are beginning to fear something. Neither the king or queen have been seen in public, and that will strike everyone as strange, especially after the announcement of the queen’s pregnancy.’ Ay spoke with formal stiffness, which Huy supposed had become a habit after years in politics.
‘Why has it been delayed?’
Ay shook his head. ‘Horemheb has decreed it. Of course, he tells me it is for reasons of security. But if the king’s death was simply a question of a tragic accident, what reason could there be for secrecy?’
Huy reflected that the wheel had come full circle, and tried to deduce what Ay was deliberately omitting from his account. In the old days, at the City of the Horizon, Huy had been a scribe in the legal section of Akhenaten’s court, and now and then had to do with colleagues attached to Ay’s office. After the fall of Akhenaten, and the ruin of his city, Huy imagined that Ay must either have died, or escaped into one of the friendly neighbouring countries — Mitanni or Babylon, perhaps - to live out his life in self-imposed exile. But even before the court had returned to the Southern Capital, Huy had seen Ay with Horemheb escorting the young Tutankhamun to the ritual of Opening the Mouth of his predecessor, Smenkhkare. Ay was clearly a survivor.
Huy had returned to the Southern Capital himself soon after, and, forbidden to continue to practise as a scribe because of his association with the disgraced Akhenaten, he had turned, partly by chance, to solving the kind of problems people had which they did not wish the Medjays involved with. His association with the great men of the city a few years earlier seemed to have borne fruit at last. Now he had been summoned to Ay’s presence in secret, on the recommendation of his former employer Ipuky, another man who had managed to escape unscathed after the fall of Akhenaten.
And now Ay was asking him to solve a problem. At least it looked as if the conversation was going that way. Quickly Huy ran through what Ay had told him.
Two days earlier, Nehesy and the hunting party which had accompanied the king into the desert had returned with his chariot and horses, and the bodies of the king and his charioteer. Knowing what the public outcry would be if he rode openly into the city, and scared about his own fate as the professional in charge of the expedition, Nehesy had made sure to return at nightfall. He had then gone straig
ht to Horemheb with the news of what had happened.
‘What happened then?’ Huy asked the old man. They were both seated by a low table on which wine and dates had been placed, more as a gesture than genuine hospitality. What they had to talk about was too serious to be discussed over food and drink.
Ay shrugged briefly. ‘All the information I can give you is what I was told by Horemheb, so bear that in mind. Of course he had to share the news with me immediately. I had just retired to read when his messenger came to fetch me.’
‘Where were the bodies?’
‘We had them both taken back to the palace. The charioteer was laid out in his quarters and the king was placed in the audience chamber. The first thing to do was summon doctors, and then tell the queen.’
Huy shifted in his chair. ‘Of course.’ It occurred to him that the queen’s isolation was not only to the advantage of Horemheb, but Ay’s as well. Ay had no son; but Huy had a shrewd idea that the limit of his ambition would not be reached by seeing his daughter Nezemmut as queen; and if Horemheb had recently lost a son, Ay had lost a grandson. Nezemmut could have more children. Ay could take a younger wife if he chose and try to father sons himself. Neither he nor Horemheb would want to run the risk of seeing Ankhsenpaamun give successful birth at last to a male child.
‘How is the queen?’ he asked.
‘Distraught,’ replied Ay.
‘What will happen to her?’
Ay looked surprised. ‘What should happen to her? She will remain in the palace. She carries the future pharaoh, perhaps.
The gods may even decree that if a girl-child is born she will reign as king. It has happened before.’
‘And in the meantime?’
Ay avoided looking at him. ‘That has yet to be discussed. We must ask the gods for guidance. I imagine... a new regency... as a temporary measure, for the stability of the country. Unlike Smenkhkare, the king died leaving no close relative to whom the crown may be given, except for the still-to-be-born in the queen’s birth-cave.’