Out of the Black Land (13 page)

So Isis said to him, ‘Declare your real name, your hidden name, and you will be healed.’

And the poison burned in Amen-Re like a smith’s fire, and he said, ‘I will allow Isis to search my heart, and my name shall go from my body into her body, from my heart into her heart, and she shall know my name.’

Then Isis the Great Lady of Magic kissed his mouth and the Name flowed into her, and she said, ‘Flow, poison, I make you to fall upon the ground, for you are conquered, in the name of the Great God which he has told me. Re shall live and the poison shall die, for if the poison lives then Re shall die.’

These were the words which Isis spoke, the Queen of Magic, and she had knowledge of Amen-Re’s name.’

‘But what good did it do her?’ I objected.

‘She knows still the secret name,’ said Khons. ‘And secrets known to only one other make the other very powerful. The Lord Amen-Re endowed her son Horus with his two eyes, the sun and the moon, and they helped Horus in his battle with Set the Destroyer. And the Lord Amen-Re healed Isis when that same son injured her, because she let Set loose from his chains.’

‘Why did she do that?’

‘Because he was her brother,’ said Khons.

It was very hot, and we lay down in the shade to sleep. How could the Lady Isis be the sister of Set the destroyer? It was very confusing.

Ptah-hotep

I went to the King very early the next morning, as he had ordered, and sat down at his feet with my whitened board to listen as he was shaved and tended.

‘My father may he live first quarrelled with the High Priest of Amen-Re when he was minded to take the Lady Tiye as his Great Royal Wife. She was a commoner, no Princess, but there was no Great Royal Heiress for him to marry and he was sure that Tiye, my mother, would be a good queen and she was his choice.

‘That High Priest remonstrated with Amenhotep, who was a boy, thinking that he could overbear him and alter his mind, but my father was not convinced or afraid. He had already fought one battle then, and said that there should be no more wars in Egypt.’

The barber, who was trying to shave the king, stood patiently with his bronze razor in his hand waiting for a break in the conversation. I tried to provide one.

‘Lord, as it says on the scarab:
I married the Great Royal Wife Tiye and made for her a lake called Lake Tiye on which I sail my barge Gleam of the Aten,
’
I said, watching as one side of the royal face was oiled and scraped. He had hardly any beard but shaving is good for the skin.

‘And further, my lord, I have read the account of the Battle of Kush, where it says:
One came to the Lord, saying,“The foe, Kush the wretched, has planned war in his heart. The King went forth. Kush knew not this lion which was before him.”’

The King murmured along with me, as though he too knew this inscription by heart. I only knew it because I had been forced to copy it perfectly seven times in dictation or suffer the consequences. I recited:

Kush came, their hearts eager to fight, and many fell. The might of the King took them in an hour; making a great slaughter of them, their king and their cattle. They planted the harvest, but the King reaped it, mighty bull, strong in heart; great things were in their hearts, but this fierce-eyed lion slew them by the command of Amen, it was he who led them in victory.

I added the words of the viceroy, and my Lord Akhnamen knew them also.

The king’s son, vigilant for his lord, favourite of the good god, the king’s scribe Mermose said, ‘Praise to thee, good god! Great is thy might against him that affronts thee; thou hast caused the rebellious to say, “The fire we have kindled rages against us.” Thou hast slain his enemies and they are under his feet.’

‘Amen again,’ muttered the king.

I observed that the barber had now shaved both sides of his face and was sliding the razor under his chin, so I kept talking.

‘They say that the construction of the lake only took fifteen days, remarkable speed,’ I observed. ‘It is a fair place and I hope to see it when the family moves back to Djarukha after the New Year. I believe that the palace is beautiful beyond belief.’

The royal throat was shaved and the King was now free to answer. ‘It is beautiful, but not as beautiful as my new city of Amarna will be, once the canals are built and there is water. You saw the plans, Ptah-hotep, are they not splendid?’

‘Absolutely breathtaking,’ I agreed, for they were, although I didn’t think that there was enough gold in the world to build them; or enough labour.

‘Do you know your titles, Ptah-hotep?’

‘Yes, Lord.’

‘Then, Keeper of All Secrets to Whom No Heart is Hidden Whose Heart is the King’s, listen.’

‘Lord, I listen.’

As he talked, he allowed his hand to lie on my shoulder, and it was probably only my imagination which made it seem very heavy. Servants came and replenished his cup and mine, made him stand to replace his cloth, and painted his eyes with kohl, and he did not seem to notice them. The Keeper of All Secrets was going to share his knowledge with at least eight people, I estimated.

‘In the beginning was nothing,’ he said, and I seized my stylus. ‘Void. The primeval chaos before Nun the primeval ocean, before the gods, all these later pretenders in which an ignorant people believe. My father is renowned for his wisdom, is he not? And he believes in the Aten, the spirit before the beginning which made all things, the visible god who manifests himself every day to all humans, the sun-disc is his symbol, but it is not he. He is himself and no other and cannot be known.

‘Lord, I hear you,’ I said. So far it seemed a harmless mysticism.

‘My father believes in the beginning, in Aten the voice in chaos which said to the world, ‘Be!’ and it was. All men shall believe it,’ he said.

I began to feel uneasy. ‘Lord, does not your father may he live renowned for his wisdom, also say,
Enquire not into another man’s gods
?’

‘He said that, but he is an old man, and does not have the heart for the great work which is before us. All men shall speak to god, not through the medium of priests and their prattle and their useless rituals, but to the Aten himself by the sun-disc which gives life to all of the Black Land. I shall simplify,’ said Akhnamen the Pharaoh, making a broad gesture with his soft hands.

For a moment, I caught his enthusiasm. Without priests or sorcery or words, without the trade in sacrifice and charms and spells, a man could speak directly to the source of all goodness, to the breath of creation. He saw my understanding in my face.

‘Away with the mumbling old men of Re and the toothless old women of Isis. Away with faithless promises of an afterlife! There is no afterlife but to be reborn as another human, as a beast, as a tree.

‘I would like to be a tree, planted in a garden, fruitful and full of life, fed by the water and breathing gentle vapours like prayers to my maker, even to Aten the symbol of the Creator. What would you like to be, Ptah-hotep?’

‘Lord…’ I hadn’t considered it before, but I could think of nothing else. ‘Lord, I would be a dog, who could guard the farmer’s crop against thieves and his household against robbers, and I would sleep every night on his doorstep.’

He seemed pleased with this idea—they had told me that he valued loyalty—and stroked my cheek.

‘You have not even begun to sprout a beard,’ he mused.

‘No, Lord, and I may not; my father has no beard.’

‘Nor mine,’ he said. ‘My father is still too wary of the priests of Amen-Re to take such action as should be taken against them, and I am not yet strong enough. But when Aten transforms my father and I rule alone, then they will be chastened for having the effrontery to admonish my father about my mother, and for promulgating false gods to the people.’

I was about to say, ‘Lord, false or not, the people need their gods,’ when I caught his eye and decided to be silent. It was, in any case, unlikely that I could argue my obsessed Master out of his cherished beliefs.

‘Why do men need gods?’ he asked, having picked up my thought, which he was reputed to often do.

‘Because their lives are hard,’ I replied. ‘They work all day for bread, and though they are seldom hungry in this rich land they have not enough of what they like to eat. They may have married the wrong woman, they may have no children or no sons and too many daughters, they may have lost their only love, they may be in mourning for wife or parent, and they weep, saying, “How can I endure this?” And they are comforted when they consider that after death they will live pleasurable lives in the Field of Offerings, drinking beer which will never sour and eating bread which will never rot.’

‘Dreams,’ scoffed my lord Akhnamen.

‘Or they can attribute their own failure to the ill-humour of a god, as when the Nile flood is too low and the fields parch into dust, spoiling the young seedlings; or too high, and the people watch their houses melt in the water and take to the boats, weeping, screaming insults at Hapi.

‘If the canals are ill maintained or the ducks stray or the fish desert the nets they can always blame the god rather than themselves or their own carelessness. And when pure misfortune strikes, it is always better to have something to curse by,’ I added.

I waited for a moment, hoping for an interruption, but he was thinking.

‘I know nothing of the life of the common people,’ he said at last. ‘You were a commoner, were you not, Great Royal Scribe? Tell me of your life.’

‘Lord, it is not interesting, I was the son of a scribe.’ I suddenly remembered that I had not written to my father to tell him of my elevation, sending some large present so that he would not call me undutiful. I wondered what he would like. A vineyard?

‘Tell me of a commoner’s life,’ he said.

‘Lord, let me recite to you from the
Satire of Trades
,’ I offered, not capable of so much description without some time to prepare.

‘Recite,’ said Akhnamen; so I began:

Consider the field worker—cruel is his fate! His skin is like leather, and he tends his crop in tears. He eats bread by the side of the meadow and is burned by the sun…

‘He is honoured,’ said my lord, ‘for the sun is the emanation of the Aten.’

I didn’t know what to say.

Chapter Eleven

Mutnodjme

My sister mated with the King every second night for a month, and she conceived.

We tested her urine by watering barley seedlings with it. For if a woman has new life growing within her, shall not every emanation of her body be imbued with life? Tey watched over those seedlings as though she was Isis herself, and I wondered that any of them ventured to grow, so fiercely did she glare at them, daring them to tell her that her daughter was not carrying a child. But by the beginning of the new year, it was clear that one group was growing much faster than the other, and by that time my sister was beginning to swell at the waist.

Her husband was delighted. He would sit with her by the hour, his fingers stroking the curve under which the child lay, naming her Phoenix, self-created, impregnated by the god, Mother of Miracles. He ordered artisans to paint her rooms with the story of the Benben bird, which flew through the sky in a burst of cosmic flame and laid a black stone egg which one day would hatch to produce another firebird. Nefertiti was so delighted that she glowed. She adopted the stance of the pregnant woman long before her burden became heavy, the hand to the small of the back, the slowed movements; she who had been so lithe and quick.

Meanwhile it was Opet, the festival of the New Year and the day when Amen-Re came to his wife Mut and stayed with her a decan. I knew that the Sacred Barge had been refurbished and repainted, that the priests of the god and the goddess were fasting in preparation for the Mystery Play, where the Chief Priest and the Chief Priestess would enact the roles of the gods and ensure that the Nile rose to flood the thirsty land.

The royal family would attend, of course. Nefertiti insisted that she was well, had never been so happy, and would not be denied; and her husband the Lord Akhnamen may he live did not protest, saying that the Phoenix knew what was fitting for her avatar.

I asked Teacher Khons about the Phoenix, and he had no more to tell me than the story I already knew, which seemed curiously pointless, though circular. He did add that the Bennu or Benben bird had been worshipped a long time ago by the ones who built the pyramids, those Houses of Eternity which dotted Desaret, huge, strange, and of mysterious purpose. The capstone of each pyramid, he said, was carved with the Phoenix.

This did not make my sister’s husband’s remarks any clearer. Nor did his endless insistence on the primacy of the Aten, an immortal, unknowable creator whose visible symbol was the disc of the sun.

In the Black Land we knew of the sun, of course, it shone every day, it was the god Amen-Re who appeared in many forms, but sunlight itself was dangerous. The rays of Re could wound and blister, and only field workers and the common people went out into it, and no one could look at Him. But I saw my lord Akhnamen staring into the sun at noon as though the heat and brightness would not blind his eyes, and wondered how long he could do that without sacrificing his sight to his Aten.

In any case it seemed to have nothing to do with the festival of the New Year, and I was going out with my sister Merope and Teacher Khons to enjoy it.

We began our walk before dawn. We could have travelled in a carriage, and Mother Tey had urged my sister to do so, but she said that the motion of the horses made her sick and left her bruised and she was perfectly capable of a gentle pace for a few shoeni along the well made temple road between the rows of ram-headed sphinxes.

I love processions. Ahead were the trumpeters, the drummers, the players upon both the short and the long pipe, and the women shaking sistra—which made a sound like a rattle. Everyone was wearing their best clothes to honour the god; everyone was hungry after the strict fast of the Epact Day of Set, on which no work is done and no food consumed. The early morning was cool, with some condensation still on the trees, and the river was already beginning to rise.

I could smell green things and growing waters, when the gusts of perfume from the nearest people cleared. We smelt lovely. From the lotus and galbanum of my sister and King Akhnamen may he live to the robust male scents of labdanum and cassia and the aromatic Nubian oils from the Chief Royal Scribe who walked next to the King. My lord Ptah-hotep smelt of clove and cinnamon and I walked closer to him and drew in several deep breaths.

They said that he had a fascination for black women, that he was conducting orgies with his Nubians and that he was a commoner, but I did not mind. It was none of my business; though I did wonder what it would be like to lie down with identical twins. He was attended by two gigantic slaves with red feathers in their hair and I could not tell the difference between them. They looked like a mirror images, but clearer than any polished bronze one could show. They were preserving their countenances very well amongst the noise and music, which must have been very strange to them, coming from a people without such spectacles.

Ptah-hotep noticed me and smiled. He was a sedate young man, I thought, unlike his boisterous second in command Mentu, who was already drunk and singing along with the Hymn to Amen-Re, out of tune and out of time. There was something wrong with seeing Mentu on foot. He belonged in a chariot. We had often watched him racing through the narrow streets to gain the desert, where he competed against the finest charioteers in the army. And won, or so they said. His father and my father were friends, and Mentu’s father had always despaired of his drunken careless son finding any office. When Mentu had been named Second Scribe his father had given a party at which everyone had been merry for three days.

Ptah-hotep glanced at Mentu, smiled, and said, ‘It’s the festival, Lady, everyone should rejoice.’

‘I do,’ I replied, a little in awe of this powerful person but enjoying his attention. The palace said that he was arrogant and proud and spoke to no one. But he seemed grave to me, even sad. The Nubian woman had arrayed him gloriously, in a red cloak embroidered with the icon of Thoth the Ape as befitted a scribe. Around him were his household; three slaves, three scribes, and Mentu, who was attended by a servant to carry his wine jug.

The household of the eldest scribe Bakhenmut included an over-decorated woman with the stretched neck and popping eyes of a camel, her two sons, and a gaggle of maidservants who might have been chosen for their ugliness. This usually meant that the Master of the House had a roving eye and his wife was worried that he might take a concubine, but the scribe who seemed to belong to her looked unassertive and crushed and was attending meekly to whatever it was the camel-lady was hissing into his ear.

Then we heard trumpets. Ptah-hotep grabbed my hand as the crowd surged forward and pulled me into the lee of his tall Nubians. The mob broke on their satiny backs and strong legs like water on a rock, and flowed around them. Pharaoh Akhnamen’s soldiers closed around him and fended off the people. The Sacred Barge was coming.

In a roar of voices, a flourish of trumpets, a mutter of drums, the god came. The Sacred Barge of Amen-Re was carried by forty priests. It was a real boat, capable of voyaging on water, and it must have been heavy but they bore it up on their shoulders; and the people seethed noisily around it, striving to touch it and be assured of good luck in the coming year. Even so—over the screams and the cries of
Amen-Re!
and the curses of those who were trampled underfoot, over the chanted litany
The God comes, he comes, even the Lord Amen-Re who is master of all
—I heard the Pharaoh Akhnamen say, ‘Superstition!’ Then the crowd swept me away and I thought I was lost until Ptah-hotep noticed, retrieved me, and pulled me closer to one of the twins.

‘Stay close to Hani, little daughter,’ he ordered; and I did, for a change, as I was bid, for I was afraid of the press of people. In their desire to get closer to the god, they were impeding the procession, and they were being shoved aside by the priests and falling. As each one fell, they tripped a few others who fell in their turn and there were cries of distress from under the heap of people. I saw a child fall under her mother, a man collapse over them. My vision was filled with snarling mouths and blurring fabrics and arms and legs and the sudden stink of fear.

The Chief Priest, a very old man who was being carried in a litter before his god, flicked his sceptre of office and the bearers picked up their pace.

I put my back to the Nubian Hani’s legs—my head was about level with his belt—and he smiled down at me, a huge watermelon grin which showed all his white teeth. He was oiled with the same scents as the Great Royal Scribe. He was fending off the crowd without any difficulty, standing steadfast like a colossus, and I suddenly felt safe. The procession was now moving on, the Sacred Barge was past, and the pile of people disentangled themselves with much personal abuse and settling of crumpled garments and straightening of holiday garlands.

I admired Hani’s strength. His legs were like columns and his body was thick and solid, like ebony. Muscles moved under his oiled skin as he breathed. I dared to look around him at the retreating procession and he said, ‘Come up, maiden,’ and lifted me without any apparent effort and set me on his shoulders.

I looked through the nodding red plumes on his braided head and saw the whole procession stretched out like a brightly coloured river. At the head, the Chief Priest and the Sacred Barge, then the Pharaoh’s family, then the press of the households of all the people employed at the palace. My fear had gone and I felt immensely proud to live in the Black Land where such spectacles could be seen. Not even in the Island of Kriti, where the Bull-King lived, could there have been such a magnificent sight.

‘Hani, Tani, Teti, all my staff, we follow,’ ordered Ptah-hotep, but I had seen someone I knew and grabbed Hani’s hair to make him stop. Between two ram’s head sphinxes stood a man I had not seen for years. He was a tall man with a blue bead on each lock of long hair. ‘Horemheb!’ I screamed, and because my voice was high, it carried over the multitude of voices and he heard me and wove a path through the people to me.

‘Such a mount, little Princess,’ he grinned, reaching up to me to take my hand and kiss it. ‘Such a horse only a princess could ride.’

‘His name is Hani and he just rescued me,’ I told him. ‘This is the lord Ptah-hotep, Great Royal Scribe may he live. This is Captain Horemheb, my lord,’ I said formally, because even if I was sitting on a Nubian giant’s shoulders, I was still aware of protocol and I wanted to show Horemheb how much I had learned since he rescued me from the Nile. He seemed impressed.

‘My lord,’ he bowed to Ptah-hotep, ‘I have returned to deliver a report to Pharaoh Amenhotep may he live of events on his border. Might I ask you a favour? Offer my scribe some assistance in writing his report. Here he is,’ he reached into a group of soldiers and extracted a young man, somewhat dusty and crumpled by his passage through the mob of worshippers. ‘His name is Kheperren, and he has been valiant and faithful. I want to ensure that he does not censor his own part in a recent victory over the vile Kush.’

‘Captain, I will do as you request,’ said Ptah-hotep with surprising formality. He took the young man by the hand, as token of agreement with the captain. But from my vantage point on the Nubian’s shoulders, I saw his eyes widen as though he had been given a sudden shock.

The crowd shoved us and we shifted, throwing the scribe almost into Ptah-hotep’s arms and pushing even the massive Hani into close proximity with Horemheb. They were almost of a height. Horemheb grinned at Hani, and his equally huge twin Tani, and punched him lightly in the chest. ‘You are slave to the lord Ptah-hotep? Have you never thought of joining me as a soldier, little one?’

I thought that this was an insult, but Hani laughed.

‘We had enough fighting in Desaret against the Tribes,’ he replied. ‘Our sister is concubine to the lord Ptah-hotep, and we stay with her.’

‘Then you must be from the Village-between-two-trees, ‘ said Horemheb. ‘Yes, that would be enough fighting for any stomach. We will be in the palace for the festival. Come along to the field if you fancy a little exercise. Mentu of your office will be there, I have no doubt. He has a new chariot team; matched greys, faster than the sun, he says.’

I could not see Hani’s face, but Tani his twin was regarding Horemheb with approval. ‘We will come, lord, if our lord allows,’ he said.

‘What did he mean about where you came from?’ I asked.

‘In the Village-between-two-trees, men are loyal to their sisters,’ said Hani. ‘The brothers accompany the sister to her new husband, and stay with her. If Tani, Teti and I marry, our wives will stay with Meryt our sister, and we will be a new tribe, with Meryt’s name.’

‘A very good custom,’ I declared. Hani patted my knee. ‘Are you not loyal to your own sister, little Princess? I have seen the way you care for her.’