Out of the Black Land (22 page)

Ptah-hotep

We shipped all our furniture and I sailed with the King Akhnaten and his officials, leaving my four Nubians to care for my goods and my scribes. Bakhenmut’s family were loaded last because his lady was prone to sea-sickness, and then she complained bitterly that she must ride in the same barge as Meryt and her clan; between them and their wives, my slaves had seven children, and they were admittedly noisy and prone to romp. Bakhnemut’s children immediately joined the Nubians in a spitting contest, to their mother’s loudly-expressed disgust.

‘My lord Ptah-hotep may you live,’ Huy greeted me with his oily smile. ‘I trust that your burgeoning Nubian family is comfortable?’ This was a hit at my well-known addiction to black women and suggested that all of the Nubian children were actually mine.

‘Indeed, I thank the Great Royal Chamberlain for his condescension. His own household is suitably bestowed on soft cushions?’ This was a moderately nasty response, because although Huy had three wives and several concubines, he had no children, and general gossip suggested that this was because of his insistence on anal intercourse.

‘Indeed,’ he replied. Honours, it seemed, were about even. ‘My lord Akhnaten Lord of the Horizon may he live looks well?’

‘As the Divine One of Amarna always does,’ I agreed.

In fact, the King looked flabby, sunburned and sick. Travel by water did not agree with the Lord Akhnaten may he live and his indulgence in the sacramental wine of the Aten, drunk always at midday, had not improved his digestion. Two servants stood by the Divine One of Aten to make sure he did not fall as he waved to the assembled people on the bank at Thebes. They then seated him in his throne under the embroidered canopy. I noticed a discreet pot, beside one royal foot, in case the royal stomach should prove to be overtaxed by the motion of the water.

But the river was running gently. At this season it should have been strong. Inundation this year had been low, the inner canals had not filled and fully a quarter of the cultivation could only be watered by the use of a shaduf, a sling arrangement with a leather bag on the end, used to raise water up and over a bank. The whole population would need to be employed in keeping the crops wet or the yield for the tax inspectors would be low. And who then would pay for my lord’s new city?

I saw the lady Mutnodjme in the Queen may she live’s barge,
Aten Gleams
. She was glaring at the river bank as though wishing to put a curse on the whole stretch of the Nile, and I did not want to attract her attention. I did not think that she would be able to play at being lovers while she was in such a mood, and I wondered what she had been told. I had never had any difficulty understanding my wife or Meryt, but the lady Mutnodjme was a puzzle which might easily prove engrossing.

‘So, my lord, do you marry?’ asked Chamberlain Huy, following my glance.

‘The lady has not answered me yet,’ I replied honestly.

‘Surely you do not need her answer. Send a load of treasure to her father and you will have her,’ said Huy, who was very jealous of Divine Father Ay. I shared his opinion that Ay was a timeserving unreliable miser who would sell his own grandmother for crocodile meat to the temple of Sobek (if he still existed) but I saw no reason to tell Huy that. The less that any of them knew about me, the better, and the more I could keep them guessing about each other the less they would enquire into my real secrets.

‘I will have her own will in this, not her father’s,’ I said, again with honesty. I thought that I had felt a fervent response in the lady Mutnodjme but I did not know and I have never forced anyone. Huy grunted. Meryt said that Huy chose very young maidens, insisted on virginity, a strange taste, and liked hurting them, requiring their blood. I felt a great distaste for his company. He knew this instinctively; he who had earned a living previously selling asses in the market-place had an intuitive understanding of the buyer. He hated me for it. But there was nothing that he could do but say to Pannefer, ‘Look! We are rounding the island. Soon we shall see the City of the Sun in all its glory.’

The city was, in fact, a long day’s sail away but it meant that Huy was bestowing his conversational gifts on someone else and I had leisure to eat some bread sprinkled with sesame-seed and think of the last time I had seen Kheperren.

He had come to me in extreme secrecy in Thebes, and although he was older, weatherbeaten, and had a new scar, I thought him surpassingly beautiful above all the sons of men. The point of a spear had torn his forehead and scalp, so that his dark brown hair was white along the length of it. I accused him of dyeing it.

‘No need, soon the rest of the hair will match,’ he had said, laughing, but there were new lines around his eyes and he was worried. We had made love but he had been distracted.

‘Tell me,’ I had begged, and in the darkness, guarded by all of my slaves, he had told me that the borders were unstable and that little raids were crossing all the time. So far they had been small and easily beaten off. Tests, General Horemheb thought, to try Egypt’s state of readiness. Shasu had come from the desert to steal goats and horses. Warriors of Kush had sacked and burned a little village in Nubia, and Horemheb had followed and captured them, executed the chief and enslaved his people. Khattim, secret and clever, had crossed into Mittani their neighbour and looted a temple, escaping into Egyptian territory, for which they were punished by the local commander and returned to their king in chains.

‘But this is all in preparation for a major incursion, Horemheb says,’ had whispered Kheperren into the darkness.

‘Then it will be beaten off as we beat them before,’ I said, not understanding.

‘No, ’Hotep, it won’t; don’t you know? The Pharaoh Akhnaten may he live is calling his soldiers into Amarna. There will be no one to guard the borders,’ said my dearest friend.

‘But that’s… Why is he doing that? What great task has he for the army?’ I wondered. Kheperren shook his head. I felt him move against my chest.

‘I know not, and my general is worried. Perhaps you can find out more.’

‘I’ll try. I promised the wise old man as much; and I have been reading the foreign correspondence. So far it’s mainly begging letters, and I have been sending treasure as requested; the lord Akhnaten is very generous with his treasure. King Tushratta of Mittani has a permanent feud with the king of Khatti, and this is being fostered with presents. If ever Mittani and Khatti settle their differences, we will be in serious trouble. But the King prefers not to bother with letters. He’s having a sed festival, you know.’

‘A sed festival? To celebrate thirty years’ reign? He hasn’t reigned long enough for a sed festival, and where are the priests to run it, if he has closed the temple of Amen-Re?’ objected Kheperren, and I put a hand over his mouth before he could name any more forbidden gods.

‘A sed festival,’ I said firmly. ‘He says that he wants to re-establish his reign over all Egypt under the auspices of the Sole and Only Aten. It will be conducted like the other except with the Aten; and the Phoenix, of course, for the Benben bird is the Queen’s avatar.’

Kheperren was silent for awhile, and then he kissed me instead of speaking. It was warm and close in my bed and we were agreeably occupied for some time. It was only after we had consummated our love and were lying back, cooled by sweat, that he spoke again.

‘Explain this Benben bird cult to me. Where did it come from, and if the King says that there are no gods but the Aten and is willing to kill to prove it, how could there be another object of worship?’

‘That I do not know and cannot explain. The worship of the Benben bird is very ancient, in the old temple at Karnak there was a pillar where it was to roost when it returned. It only comes back every one thousand six hundred years or so. When my lord built the Aten temple at Karnak, he ordered a hall of the Phoenix and it is decorated with portraits of the Queen Nefertiti may she live making offerings to the Phoenix. Now in the City of the Sun too there is a temple, a very large one; it occupies the whole of one side of the palace complex. As to what goes on there, Kheperren, I do not know.’

He laid his head down on my shoulder as though he was very tired and said, ‘These are strange times, Ptah-hotep, my heart, my brother, but I know one thing; I know that I love you and you love me,’ and he fell asleep.

I stayed awake, staring into the darkness. If my lord pulled all his soldiers out of border country, what would stop an invasion from west or east or south? At the beginning of the present 18th Dynasty, Egypt had groaned under the heel of the Hyksos, who had come in chariots and swept an army before them. What was to prevent Mittani or Khatti—who were constantly testing each other because they could only expand into each other’s territory when Egypt was strong—from detecting that the guard was elsewhere and crossing the desert in force?

I could see nothing that would stop them but the legend of Egypt’s strength. I would continue to send presents, continue to correspond as though I was in a position of power, and see how long I could keep the boundaries intact.

How long, I wondered, with Kheperren snoring gently beside me, could one—one man—keep a kingdom by bluff?

I was recalled to myself by a passing boatman, who hauled on his rudder to pass close by, calling to us to beware of hippopotamus ahead. The sail-boat was past before the King’s guard could punish the fisherman for describing the animals as ‘creatures of Set’ and I envied the man. He could speak his mind, did not have to continually guard his tongue, and his boat was as fast on the water as a running horse on land. It carried him swiftly to safety beyond bowshot. In any case the King Akhnaten was too ill to bother, which was a mercy.

‘See your servant Ptah-hotep, my lord!’ cried Huy to the King. ‘He dreams of sweet delights with the lady Mutnodjme!’

And as I was, indeed, dreaming of sweet delights, I smiled in assent. I was glad that I had not known Huy when he sold beasts. He would have sold me a broken-winded hobble-legged old child of an ass, and I would have had to buy it, because he would have known instantly, from my expression, what I was thinking.

‘I have made a dedication stone for the sandstone quarry, Lord Akhnaten,’ Huy’s attention was diverted from me as soon as I had acknowledged his acuity. I am thinking of putting this inscription on it:

Living son of the sun disc Aten father of all Akhnaten said to me his most humble servant, let there be stone for the new city, the city of the sun. I, Huy, made it to be so in the name of the beautiful child of the sun-disc, one without peer, who formed and fostered me! The lord knows which servants are not diligent; such give themselves over to the power of the King may he live, for the taxes of other gods are measured in handfuls, and those of the Aten in cartloads!

‘Huy,’ said the King slowly, ‘you have said there are other gods.’

Huy paled. ‘There is the worship of the divine Phoenix, my lord!’ he protested.

Pannefer, who had been subdued, brightened immediately. ‘But her worship is also rich beyond price,’ he put in.

The king nodded. The guard leapt to their feet. I was about to interpose a word—after all, if one has two enemies, it is better to have them in plain view and at each other’s throats; and it would not have suited me to have either Huy or Pannefer on their own as King’s sole counsellor—when the King Akhnaten said, ‘But it is time for evening worship. I like your inscription, Huy, just omit the heretical reference.’

‘
Hail to thee, most beautiful, sole child of the living god
,
’ I began loudly, the first line of the Hymn to the Aten which the King had written so many years ago, dictating it to the boy from the school of scribes who had been me.

Huy, reprieved and shaking, continued:

Thou shinest upon us all, father of creation,
self-created, self-sustaining, light of the world.

Pannefer took up the hymn, in his high dissonant twang:

Thou art indeed comely, great, radiant and high over every land.
Thy rays embrace the land for thou art Aten
and subdueth them for thy beloved son Akhnaten.
Thou art remote though thy rays are on earth.
Thou art in the sight of all, but thy ways are unknown.

Then I sang:

The Two Lands are thy festival.
They awake and stand upon their feet for thou hast raised them up.
They wash their limbs, they put on raiment, they raise their arms in adoration at thy appearance.
The entire earth performs its labours. All cattle are at peace in thy pastures. The trees and the grass grow green. The birds fly from their nests, their wings raised in praise of thy spirit. The animals dance on their hoofs; all winged created things live because thou hast risen for them.