Out of the Black Land (42 page)

In person he was slim, elegant and very well dressed. He wore no gold-of-valour. His cloth was the short kilt of the Hermotybies. Over it they wore a red cloth which came almost to the calves and a very long and heavily decorated belt which hung down at the front into two tails hung with metal beads. The General’s belt was, of course, sewn with electrum sequins, and his tassels were silver, tagged with Nubian stones. He was married, I had been told, to a very cool and aloof lady who was some connection of the scribe Khety. Khety had often remarked that it was no wonder that the General had no children. Engendering would mean that he had to get close to someone.

But he was sipping wine and eating roast quail with some enjoyment. It was only when he looked on the Widow-Queen that his austere, high-nosed face changed expression at all, and then he looked startlingly like a boy devoted to a goddess.

The food had been tasted and praised, everyone’s health had been asked after, the general’s marriage with me had been toasted and both the Widow-Queen and General Khaemdua had approved of my decorative work. Then the lady Tiye put her elbows on her knees and said, ‘Well, what of Egypt?’

‘Bad, lady. The flood has failed again. The farmers are hungry. The soldiers sent out to obliterate the name of the old god are behaving badly. The inspectors sent out from the temple of Aten are too few to properly administer the cultivation and they are also accepting bribes,’ said General Khaemdua with distaste.

‘I hanged four scoundrels for terrorising a village, and the air is full of denunciations. My own scoundrels are under control, of course,’ he added, though no one would suppose he would tolerate an army that was not under control.

‘Bad, lady,’ agreed Menna, having consulted with Harmose as to who should speak. ‘Letters for the Pharaoh Akhnaten are not being dealt with, and our own chief is accepting gold to pass incorrect tax returns. Some of the Nomarchs are growing rich and some are reduced to beggary. The Watchers are overworked and are falling victim to corruption; some are even extorting money from their villages.’

‘Bad, lady,’ said Horemheb slowly. ‘I rescued Tushratta and put him back on his throne, but the watch on the borders has slept and my soldiers and those of my comrade Khaemdua’s are constantly being diverted to this mad work of destroying the Aten.’

‘The King is totally isolated,’ I said. ‘There is no honest Councillor left. Huy and Pannefer between them make sure that he hears nothing that does not please him. Divine Father Ay plots to own the whole world. His wife plots with him. The children know nothing, are not even literate, and no one sees them but their own court. Great Royal Wife Smenkhare is flirting with the king, using his body to excite whatever it is that can be excited in a eunuch. I fear that the atmosphere has completely corrupted him. The Great Royal Lady Meritaten is trying to seduce Smenkhare, to whom I am told she is also married, and the little ones have no chance, as far as I can see, of growing up sane. Though Ankhesenpaaten at least appears to have some maternal instincts, she looks after Tutankhaten.’

‘In a word, then,’ said Tiye heavily, ‘bad.’

‘The country is lurching along,’ said Horemheb. ‘Egypt has got used to being governed and many officials still hold to their truth which is in Maat. The situation is not good, but if the Nile floods next year then we will all eat, at least. Surely this utterly and uniquely-corrupt royal family cannot last long. Their own way of life, one would think, will kill them.’

‘Possibly,’ said Tiye. ‘We will see. Meet me regularly, my lords, if you please. Menna and Harmose will keep an eye on foreign affairs. The lady Mutnodjme will hear them if they have anything to say, for they are still teaching her the square letters and that is a task for a lifetime. Now I am freed from captivity there may be some words I can say to my sons which will moderate their behaviour. Off hand I cannot think of any rule of virtue which they have not broken, but there may still be some. We will take no action. Yet.’

This was agreed. Then we called in the musicians, and the feast became merry.

I was pouring beer through a strainer for my husband when I realised that I was happy.

Ptah-hotep

I was sitting in a shady spot on a wall with the three volumes of
Imhotep’s House of Ascent: Building the Pyramids
in my lap. I was not reading the puzzling and difficult script. I was looking at the horizon, where the pale line of dew was burning off the desert, and thinking about nothing at all. Kheperren had gone back to his army, Mutnodjme had married the general, and I was at a loose end.

Sitamen’s steward came to me and dropped to one knee at my feet.

‘Rise,’ I said lazily.

‘Lord, a man who was a priest of Amen-Re has come and wishes to speak to you urgently. He is unarmed.’ She didn’t need to tell me that. The guards would never have allowed an armed man into Sitamen’s palace.

‘Bring him here, with some of the light beer and some bread,’ I ordered, and the steward went away, returning after an interval with a small girl carrying a tray and a young man whom I thought I recognised, though I could not place him. I had seen him a long time ago, that was plain. The face was associated with fear and darkness. I rubbed my eyes.

‘Lord Ptah-hotep, who was Great Royal Scribe, now scribe of the Royal Lady Sitamen, one who was once a priest of the god Amen-Re kneels to your honour,’ he said.

I still could not work out where I had seen him before. A thin face, a thin body, long limbs. I clad him in my mind in a priests’ gown, added a decade or so, and now I knew him.

The last time I had seen this man, he had been a priest in the temple on the night that the terrifying old man Userkhepesh, Chief Priest of the Good God Amen-Re, had attempted to frighten me out of my wits and then decided not to poison me.

I had played many games of senet with Userkhepesh in the palace of Amen-Re in Karnak before the mad king moved the court to Amarna. He always won. We had almost become friends. I had enquired after his fate when the temple was disestablished, but no one could tell me where he had gone and I had assumed that he was dead. Perhaps he was.

‘Rise and sit next to me,’ I told the young man. ‘Have some beer and a bite of this good bread, then tell me what brings you to me, face out of my past.’

He drank a mouthful and ate a token crumb of bread which was required of him by courtesy. Then he said, ‘Lord, I have a request from a dying man.’

‘Speak,’ I said. I guessed who this dying man might be. So the old man had not moved from Karnak after all—I should have known that he would not go far from his temple.

‘It is the man who was once Chief Servant of Amen-Re,’ whispered the priest.

‘I thought that it might be. What else could bring you into this dangerous place, and who else would be bound to know where I could be found?’

‘Lord, he is very old now, and dying, but he always knows where people are and what is happening in the Black Land.’

‘Yes,’ I agreed. ‘I will come.’

‘Then you must come now, Lord Ptah-hotep, and secretly.’

What had I to lose? If this was some trap devised by the palace, it was so clever that it deserved to succeed. And what could Pharaoh do to me now that I had not done to myself? I had been stripped of all titles and wealth. I was just Ptah-hotep. I was completely without influence and valueless.

‘Very well. I will leave my refuge and come with you. But you will tell the Princess Sitamen’s guard where we are going and when I will be back—I will not listen—and if I am not returned by my hour, they will tear Thebes apart looking for me. If you are wishing to encompass my death, you can kill me now with a lot less trouble by just pushing me off this wall.’

He said gravely, ‘Lord, that is not my intention or the intention of my master,’ and I believed him well enough.

We went through the alleys and lanes of Thebes. The condition of the people was parlous. By the rubbish through which I had to wade, they were living mostly on dried fish, which is not good for humans. Their beehive ovens were cool. No one had enough grain to bake bread every day and the palace was no longer handing out rations of grain when the season was poor.

It was not lightly that the gods who invented writing, Isis and Thoth, made the same character for ‘bread’ and ‘life.’ For what was the Black Land without bread?

Swollen-bellied children played in the detritus, throwing fish-spines at each other and quarrelling over scraps. I was almost bowled over by a foraging pig which snapped at me, its jaws clumping shut just short of my shin as I hit it a sharp blow on the snout. It snorted and ploughed on through the stinking midden.

‘The animals are growing bolder,’ commented the priest. ‘In the country the desert wolves are creeping into the villages and taking children, now that the Watchers and the army have been diverted to carve out the name of Amen-Re from monuments made a thousand years ago. Masons make scaffolds to climb up and deface our history instead of repairing what we have.’

‘Truly the state of Egypt is bitter,’ I agreed. He led me into a space between two houses just wide enough for me to traverse and knocked at a door.

It opened inwards, which was a mercy, and I bent under the lintel. Lying on a pallet in a small room whitewashed all over like the inside of a clam-shell, was indeed the old man Userkhepesh, wrapped in a linen sheet.

The only light came from a small oil-lamp. He had aged far beyond age. He was so old that his hands trembled on his breast. His skin was like vellum which has been left in the sun, a multitude of fine lines. His black eyes had filmed over. Time had struck him down and stripped him of his sight, but his voice was clear and he recognised my greeting.

‘Ptah-hotep,’ he said, ‘Greeting. I fear that I cannot offer you anything—not even a game of senet,’ he chuckled. ‘Though I shall soon be playing Passing-Through-The-Underworld in earnest.’

‘I am glad to see you, lord,’ I said, sitting down on the edge of the pallet. It was the usual peasant’s mud-brick shelf-bed, which was usually padded with a straw mattress. ‘I have come as you asked.’

‘You always had courage,’ he remarked. ‘Even when a terrible old man did his best to overawe you. Ah, well. I am dying,’ he said, taking my hand in both of his fleshless claws.

‘Yes, lord,’ it would have been discourteous to argue with him.

‘And I wished to tell you something before I die and have to confess my sins to the judges in the underworld. My heart will weigh heavily against the feather, for all of this is my fault, my fault,’ he began to cry. Tears trickled down the old face and I wiped them gently away.

‘Lord, how can this be all your fault? The state of the Black Land is too terrible for it to be any one man’s fault. It is not your doing that the river did not rise, is it, lord?’

‘Don’t humour me, boy, I am old but I am not senile,’ he snapped, sounding much more like himself. ‘Do you remember the temple of Amen-Re in its splendour?’

‘Certainly, lord. As I recall Amenhotep-Osiris thought that the temple had too much power; for there were two rulers of Egypt, you and the Pharaoh. The lord Amenhotep-Osiris tried to reduce your influence; and it was played like a game, in the sunlit courts, in the golden halls of Amen-Re.

‘When I came to see you, lord, for the first time, a boy just taken from the school of scribes, I was left waiting in your inner apartment. There was a wall painted with doors and a floor made of inlaid turquoise, a ceiling all webbed with golden images of Amen-Re, and your throne made of electrum with a footstool of silver. I had never seen such wealth. And you, my lord, came in through an unexpected door like a spider, attended by two naked women more lovely than any I had ever seen.’

‘You were no fly, Ptah-hotep. I did not realise then what an honourable creature had flown into my web. Though I did realise it after. I heard how you surrendered your office, boy, gave away your goods, set your slaves free, in order not to obey a dreadful order from the vile king. I wished that I had shared your courage.’

‘Userkhepesh, what are you trying to say?’ I asked gently, wishing I had at least bought some wine to moisten the old man’s dry throat. I had not thought to find him so unprovided with basic comforts. I had not imagined that the Chief Servant of Amen-Re could really be poor. I summoned the attendant.

‘Priest, here is maybe a twentieth of a deben. Go and buy some wine and bread, if some can be found.’ I gave all the copper shavings that I had in my pouch to the attendant. He vanished without a word, closing the door behind him.