Out of the Black Land (18 page)

‘Because although you are wise, Lord, the people are not, and they believe. They would think badly of you if you did not,’ I had replied.

But when we had arrived at the palace of Thebes my lord went first to visit his remarkable temple of the Aten, which had taken a year’s sandstone and untold amounts of labour to build. It occupied the ground between Karnak temple and Thebes village, a sandstone city in itself. I was met at the gate of the palace by Sahte, Queen Tiye’s nurse, who demanded to know where the Lord Akhnaten was. I pointed and she spat on the ground.

‘Come and speak to my mistress,’ she urged. ‘She has always respected your learning, Ptah-hotep. Merope the Kritian is with her and we are waiting for Sitamen, but she is mourning and cannot be comforted.’

‘That is to be expected in the loss of so great and wise and gentle a husband,’ I responded, allowing her to drag me by the arm up two flights of steps and onto the first balcony.

‘Yes, yes, of course,’ snapped Sahte crossly. ‘But she will not rouse. There are many things she needs to do, and she just stares at the wall, or at that new temple of the Aten, and then she sighs, and then she stares again. I’m worried about her. She’s got courage, my lady. I don’t know. What is the world coming to? New gods and new temples and not enough to eat in the villages, that’s what. In here,’ she shoved me through a door curtain.

The room seemed empty. Then I made out the figure of a woman sitting on the floor; her hair hanging around her bare shoulders. My sandals whispered across ash on the floor. I knelt down next to the Queen Tiye and took her hand and kissed it. It was quite limp and curled empty on her lap when I released it.

‘Lady, I am here on your orders,’ I reminded her gently. She reacted slowly, but she reacted.

‘I gave no orders,’ she said. Her throat was torn with weeping and the voice creaked unwillingly from her strained throat.

‘But you would have,’ I continued, ‘if you had not been crushed under a burden of despair. Where is the Great Royal Wife Merope?’

‘I sent her away with unkind words,’ confessed the Queen. ‘I wish for no comforts.’

‘Lady, you grieve,’ I said, sitting down on the floor beside her. ‘But consider. He died easily, without pain. He loved you all his life and you loved him. You were his heart, Lady; such pain never vanishes. But you will have some comforts. They are time and distance, and the memory which is cherished.’

‘You are a ruthless young man,’ said Queen Tiye after a pause in which she debated whether to order my instant execution.

‘Lady, I am here because my lord Akhnaten is coming, and I wish to warn you that…’ I paused to choose my words.

‘Well then, warn me,’ she said sharply.

‘He is a devotee of the new god Aten, Lady, and I fear that… the funeral, you see, involves mentioning the gods of the underworld, and…’

‘He would deprive his father of the afterlife because of his thrice-blasted and damned new god?’

I would have felt better if her voice had been raised, but it was perfectly level.

‘He doesn’t believe that there is an afterlife, Lady,’ I began, but she closed her ash-stained hand on my arm—that arm was going to be bruised—and said, ‘I hear him coming, go through that curtain and wait. Sahte will show you the way out. Thank you, Great Royal Scribe, I will never forget this.’

To my astonishment she pulled me close and kissed my mouth. She tasted of starvation and salt. I heard footsteps outside—it the guard who never left the King Akhnaten—and I scrambled through the curtain just in time. Sahte was beside me, a twisted shadow. She took my hand and kissed it but did not speak.

I heard the Pharaoh say to his mother, ‘Lady, I have priests who will bury my father, in the new religion of the Aten, despising all fraudulent gods.

And I heard her reply; though I did not know the voice, it was so cold and flat, like the voice of the dead. I shivered.

Queen Tiye said, ‘If your father, my dearest love, my husband Osiris-Amenhotep is not laid to his rest in the House of Eternity as his father and his father before him, I will curse you.’

I heard Akhnaten step back, papyrus soles rustling in ash. He got as far as a shocked, ‘Mother!’ before the cold voice continued as if he had not spoken.

‘If one of your priests of Aten touches the Osiris-Amenhotep and defiles his ritual, I will curse you both waking and sleeping, I will blight your ways, your board and your bed, slay your wife and your daughters though they are also my daughters, and death will be about you and follow you.’

She was actually beginning on the most potent curse of all, the curse of Set, which is complete destruction to the body, the spirit, the shadow, the fire and the soul, the posterity and the name.

Akhnaten gasped again, ‘Mother!’ and she paused long enough for him to speak.

‘Lady, I will do as you wish,’ he whispered.

‘Do so,’ said the icy voice. ‘You may go and learn your part as Sem-priest at the Opening of the Mouth. One word wrong, my son, and my curse is on you. Purify yourself,’ she said.

There was an interval. A woman came and stood beside me. The Princess Sitamen, warrior-woman of Neith, had been listening intently to all that went on. She stood as still as a shadow, reminding me of a soldier on guard. She put a hand on my shoulder as soldiers do and I reflected the gesture.

‘Scribe,’ she acknowledged.

‘Lady,’ I replied.

We heard the outer curtain swish shut after the Pharaoh and his guard.

‘Your lord has gone, best follow him and make sure that he has the text of the
Recension
,’ she said. ‘Fare well, most honoured comrade.’

She punched me lightly and Sahte led me out and along some corridors and showed me into the courtyard in time to catch my Lord Akhnaten and his escort.

‘Ptah-hotep,’ he said. ‘I have decided that it is proper that my father should be escorted to eternity by the old ritual. He believed in it when he was alive. Have you a copy of the ritual?’

‘Lord, I will obtain one immediately,’ I said, and left him to find my master Ammemmes in the School of Scribes.

The temple of Amen-Re was empty. Wind carrying dust blew through the massive pillars. After wandering for a while I caught a straying boy and asked him to lead me to the master of the school of scribes, and he took me through a series of winding paths between walls to a small building within the main temple.

Then he ran away before I could reward him.

I paused on the threshold, as was polite, and clapped my hands for permission to enter, and someone let out a held breath. As my eyes grew used to the light, I saw that it was Ammemmes himself, who had been about to bludgeon my brains out with the large club he was lowering.

‘Ptah-hotep, you should have warned me. I was about to kill you.’

‘So I noticed, can I ask why?’

‘We are moving the last of the scrolls today and I promised Snefru before he died that no harm would come to them. A promise to the dead must be honoured.’

A pair of boys were completing the wrapping of a huge bundle of papyrus. They had vanished when I had appeared and now returned to their work. I searched through it swiftly and removed a copy of the
Theban Recension
, then bade them continue.

‘The worship of the Aten has taken all our funds,’ said the Master. He looked well, though much relieved at not having to murder to carry out his promise. ‘The estates of the temple have been given away; this was your Lord Akhnaten’s order, we received it three decans ago. So we have gathered all our learning and we are leaving,’ he added.

‘How did Snefru die?’ I asked, watching the boys stagger outside with the bundle. I did not wish to know where they were going to hide it.

‘They came to the temple and told us that, on the orders of the Pharaoh Akhnaten, the temple was closed and all of the written material which named the god Amen-Re was to be burned,’ said the Master sadly. ‘Snefru cried out and clutched his chest and died of shock. As he was dying he made me promise to store his cherished scrolls, and I have done so. And we will bury him properly when his time is completed even if I have to do the whole ceremony myself in the dark.’

‘Master, who will train scribes for the service of the people and the god?’ I asked, horrified. I had not seen this order. It must have gone through Pannefer the Master of the Household or Chamberlain Huy.

‘Aten, I suppose,’ the Master shrugged. ‘I’m going back to my own village, Ptah-hotep, to wait out the storm.’

‘Take these,’ I loaded onto his thin arm all my bracelets and put round his neck my pectoral of electrum, a very valuable thing which ought to feed him for the foreseeable future. He smiled at me and kissed me. His eyes were very weary and his hair was quite white under the Nubian wig.

‘Thy brother Kheperren?’

‘Still with the General Horemheb, and alive,’ I replied. ‘I am glad to have found you, Master, and he will be glad to have news of you. But all things pass, Master,’ I said. ‘The Osiris-Amenhotep is to be buried in the old way.’

‘Return the copy of the
Recension
when the funeral is over,’ said Ammemmes. ‘Send it to me near Sais, at the village of the Crossed Arrows. And survive, dearest son; survive. But do not do evil in the name of any god. The only one who accepts evil deeds is the demon Set—oh, no, I am mistaken. Set does not exist any more.’

‘But evil does,’ I responded, and left the temple.

Thus I stood with the King Akhnaten at the door of the tomb in the Valley of the Kings and prompted him as he recited the litany of offerings to Osiris-Amenhotep. A priest at his right side offered the things as he named them, and passed them to another who piled them in the tomb.

Outside the funeral procession waited, thousands of mourners weeping and crying. There were no colours, no dyed fabrics or rich jewellery. Every person wore a white cloth now stained with mud and ash. Their hair was loose and tangled, as was mine and the King’s. Four sacrificial oxen lowed their displeasure, children cried and the chorus never ceased of women calling for the Osiris-Amenhotep to return. They wailed:

Come to thy house, thy lovers, thy sisters.

Overhead, no good birds flew, but the birds of ill-omen, the vulture and the crow. The vulture was the Goddess Renennet once, before Aten had come upon us. Now she was just a carrion-eating bird. On consideration, I liked the goddess better.

Akhnaten had almost conquered his loathing for the ceremony, overruled by his fear of his mother. He recited:

This libation is for thee, I have brought thee before the eye of Horus, that thy heart may be refreshed thereby. I have brought it unto thee so that no thirst may torment thee.

Queen Tiye was at the door of the tomb, linked with her daughters and the Priestess of Isis Mutnodjme; and Queen Tiye never took her eyes off her son for the whole long, long recital. Her obedient son, Akhnaten, who implored:

Open thy mouth, Osiris-Amenhotep
.
I cleanse thee, I cleanse thee, the fluid of life shall not be destroyed in thee.

He presented milk in a clay vessel.

Here is the nipple of the breast of thy sister Isis; milk of thy mother has found thy mouth.

The other Sem-priest, an ugly youth, took the vessel and put it on the sarcophagus; and my lord Akhnaten, presenting two iron instruments to the south and the north, continued:

Osiris-Amenhotep, the two gods have opened thy mouth.

He was doing quite well. I remembered what my master Ammemmes had said about fear being a bad teacher, but clearly it had done wonders for my lord’s powers of concentration.

Day hath made an offering for thee in the sky, and the south and the north have caused an offering to have been made. Night hath made an offering to thee, and south and north have caused an offering to be made. An offering hath been made to thee, thou seest the offering, thou hear’st it. The King giveth an offering to the ka of Osiris-Amenhotep.

He repeated this four times. He then began the long—and mostly jumbled and nonsensical—ritual involving cheeses, cakes, beer and perfumes, which seem to some scholars to relate to plays on words whose original meanings are forgotten.