Two days later there was a glint of white and gold in the distance and Thebes lay before them. Ramose’s heart started to race. He would soon be home. The green fields on either side of the river stopped at the foot of whitewashed walls. A hundred or more gold-tipped flagpoles rose into the air with coloured pennants flapping in the breeze.
Among the temple buildings on the east bank Ramose could see the twin black granite obelisks that his father had raised in the temple of Amun. They were covered with carved hieroglyphs praising Amun, each symbol filled with gold paint. On the west bank was the palace and behind it the cliffs that hid the Great Place.
Gardens grew down to the edge of the river. It looked so beautiful that Ramose felt tears filling his eyes. The gardens contained the same crops as the fields they had passed, but they were carefully planned so that the squares of lettuces and onions made an attractive pattern. There were also flower gardens. The red of poppies, the blue of cornflowers, and the yellow and white of daisies added colour to the beautiful scene. Ramose was relieved to see that the patch of lotus pads was still floating on the river in front of the palace garden. It was before noon and the flowers were reaching up to the sun with their blue petals spread wide. Children were wading in the shallows. There wasn’t a crocodile in sight.
7
ASCENT TO THE SUN
There was a strange atmosphere in Thebes. The city was bustling with activity. It was an anxious time for Egyptians. Everyone hoped and prayed that their pharaoh would live, but if he didn’t, all had to be ready for the smooth transition to a new pharaoh. Egypt without a pharaoh was unthinkable.
Crowds of people were coming and going—all involved in preparations. Ramose wanted to walk around the streets of Thebes, but Keneben hurried them straight to the house of his mother. She worked in the small temple of Hapi, god of the Nile, on the west bank of the river.
“You must not go out of the temple grounds, Highness,” Keneben said. “We cannot take any risks now that you are so close.”
“But I want to see my sister.”
“I have told Princess Hatshepsut that you are here.”
“You’ve seen her? How is she? Doesn’t she want to see me?”
“She is longing to see you, but she agrees that we should wait until the vizier is out of the palace.”
At first, Ramose was happy to rest and walk among the temple buildings. It was a pleasure to stroll through the gardens that stretched right to the river’s edge. He delighted in showing Karoya and Hapu the places by the river where he had played as a child. They could hardly believe that their friend was the spoilt, unpleasant boy who had enjoyed making servants’ lives miserable. Ramose couldn’t believe it either.
After three days, Ramose had walked every path in the temple grounds five times over.
“We have to work out a plan, Keneben,” he said. “I will have to sneak into the palace without being seen. You will have to get a disguise for me.”
“You must be patient, Highness,” the tutor replied. “You must promise me you will wait until I am sure it is safe.”
Ramose promised that he would be patient, but it was hard when he was so close to the palace. He was no longer used to doing nothing. He’d waited too long. With the whitewashed walls of his home visible from the temple gardens, the temptation was too great.
“I’m going for a walk in the gardens,” Ramose told his friends.
Hapu was busy teaching Karoya how to play senet.
Ramose walked through the temple vegetable garden and fig tree grove. He wandered past the stables where the oxen were kept. He strolled near the muddy area where the goose herder led the geese down to the riverbank. Without thinking about it, not consciously anyway, he had walked to the high wall that marked the end of the temple grounds. Beyond the wall was the palace. He walked in the shadow of the wall. He wasn’t walking aimlessly now. There was something he was looking for.
The wall stretched in a straight line for many cubits, then it turned suddenly at a right angle in front of him. In the corner, at the bottom of the wall, Ramose found what he was searching for. A hole had been cut at the bottom of the mud brick wall to allow water to drain from the courtyard within. It wasn’t a big hole. It had been Ramose’s secret way out of the palace when he was younger. Now it was going to be his way in. He looked around. There was no one in sight. He got down on his hands and knees and examined the hole. It wasn’t big enough for him to fit through; he’d grown too much.
He searched the garden beds until he found a sharp stone. He started to hack at the mud brick around the edges of the hole. It was still a little damp from the last time water had washed through the hole. In a few minutes the hole was big enough for him to wriggle through.
Ramose scrambled to his feet on the other side. He was in a small courtyard. It was a place where female servants sat when they were spinning or sewing. Some herbs were growing in pots around the walls but otherwise it was empty. It was just as well. No one had complained about him being there when he was a child. They might have felt differently now that he was older.
He entered the palace. There was a sense of quiet urgency in the corridors. Servants and officials moved swiftly but silently, each one with their own purpose. He felt self-conscious at first, imagining that people would notice him. But in his simple kilt and reed sandals he looked just like a servant. There were hundreds of servants in the palace. No one knew them all. He walked with the same silent purpose as everyone else. No one even glanced at him. Now that he was there, he didn’t try to pretend to himself that he hadn’t intended to get into the palace. He knew exactly what he was going to do. He’d known it all along really.
It was strange being back in the palace. The corridors were wide, the rooms huge. Everywhere was smooth and clean. The legs of stools were carved into elegant lion paws or gazelle feet. The backs of chairs were decorated with delicate patterns of inlaid jewels. Almost every wall, floor and ceiling was painted with bright pictures or patterns.
He entered a wide corridor. On either side there were rows of stone statues—enormous seated figures of the royal ancestors. His grandfather and his great grandfather were among them. They stared across at each other with blank unseeing eyes. Ramose barely came up to their knees.
Ramose was afraid that he would run into someone who knew him. He kept his head bowed and tried not to look anyone in the eye. Then he realised that there was no one he knew. Not a single servant or official looked familiar. It was like a dream. Everything was so familiar, yet it had changed somehow. He was a stranger in his own home.
He walked through the western hall. The floor was painted green, dotted with bright painted flowers. The huge papyrus-topped columns towered over him. They too were brightly painted, covered in paintings and hieroglyphs recounting the pharaoh’s deeds. Here was a painting of the pharaoh throwing a spear. There was the pharaoh with his foot on the head of an enemy.
Ramose had walked through this hall every day when he had lived in the palace. He had hardly been aware of the paintings. Now he was dazzled by the brilliance of the colours. When he was a child, he had never thought about the size of the columns. Now, even though he’d grown half a cubit since he was there last, he felt dwarfed by the enormous pillars of stone.
He turned a corner, then another, and opened a door. He was in his own room. Except that it looked nothing like his room. Papyrus scrolls lay on a table. A young apprentice was busily copying cursive writing from a large stone flake onto a papyrus. He looked up and then ignored Ramose.
The room had been turned into a scribe’s office. His soft bed had gone. So had the chests that held his clothes and playthings. The lion-footed chair wasn’t there either. If it hadn’t been for the paintings of the god Amun on one wall and his father hunting on the other, Ramose would have thought he was in the wrong room. He’d imagined he was coming home, but the palace didn’t feel like home at all.
Ramose followed another corridor that led to the other side of the p
alace. This corridor was less familiar. There was a blanket of silence over that part of the palace. No one was hurrying. Ramose only passed one servant. At the end of the corridor there was a doorway guarded by two palace guards each holding a long, curved dagger. It was the door to his father’s private quarters.
Ramose thought back. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d seen his father. Many seasons had passed since he’d left the palace. Before that, in the innocent days when he didn’t know his life was in danger, his father had been away on a campaign in Kush for many months. Before that?
He searched his memory for a time when he had been with his father. He had a picture in his mind of his father hunting hippopotamus by the riverbank. It was a clear picture. Then Ramose realised that all he was remembering was the painting of his father in his own room—or what used to be his room.
The last memory he had of being in his father’s presence was when he had been summoned to these very rooms. His father had lectured him about throwing rotten figs at the kitchen servants. His father had told him it was not the behaviour of a future pharaoh.
Ramose had vague memories of happy times playing with his brothers before they died. He could hear a tinkling laugh and smell a particular combination of perfume and herbs, which he knew belonged to his mother. He had no pictures of her in his memory, though. Now, soldiers with daggers guarded his father’s chamber and he had to think of a way to get past them.
“Don’t loiter in the corridor, boy,” said a voice behind him.
Ramose bowed his head. He didn’t have to look up to know who had spoken. It was a deep growling voice. He would have known Vizier Wersu’s voice anywhere. The vizier had slipped into the corridor and crept up behind Ramose without him realising.
“Fetch me a goblet of wine,” ordered the vizier as he swept noiselessly into the pharaoh’s quarters.
Ramose bowed his head even lower as he turned and went towards the kitchens. He knew the way from his childhood. When he was small he’d liked to go there and watch the bread being made. The servants would make special cakes for him shaped like animals. As he’d gotten older, he’d stopped going there. Instead, he’d sent Heria to return dishes untouched when he’d demanded something bigger, better or entirely different. He still remembered the way to the kitchens, though.
No one questioned him. He tried to stop his hands from shaking as he filled a jar with wine and returned to his father’s quarters. He held the jar before him and the guards lowered their daggers and let him pass.
He entered the pharaoh’s audience hall. It was smaller than the ceremonial western hall, but still impressive. The floor was painted blue to represent a pool covered with lotus pads and flowers. Fish and frogs swam in the water. Painted ducks paddled around the edges. It was beautiful. The columns in this room were more slender and made of wood. Their tops were carved in the shape of lotus buds. On the ceiling, a painting of a huge vulture with its wings spread wide scowled down at Ramose. Its wings must have been ten cubits across. Ramose walked through the hall and into the throne room where the pharaoh’s throne sat on a raised platform. The empty throne glittered with gold and jewels. On the steps leading up to the platform were paintings of foreign captives on their knees, bound together with a rope around their necks. Each time the pharaoh walked up the steps he would tread on his enemies.
Ramose walked through the throne room into the pharaoh’s sitting room. Gold goblets and bowls sat unused on a low table. There was a couch made of ebony with carved legs and arms. The rare wood was usually used only to make small items such as jewellery boxes. The wood in the couch was probably worth more than the gold and jewels that decorated it. Ramose thought back and could only remember a handful of times when he’d been in the room before. He picked up one of the goblets and filled it with wine.
Another doorway led to the pharaoh’s bedchamber. Ramose entered the room. Looking through his fringe he glanced over to the bed. Ramose could not see his father for the crowd of people standing around his bed. He thought for one dreadful moment that his father must have just died. He was wrong. It was a group of priests muttering prayers. Pharaoh’s physician was there as well, mixing a foul-looking brown potion. The vizier was standing to one side.
Only one of the high windows was unshuttered, so the room was dim. With his head bowed low and his heart thudding, Ramose handed the goblet to the vizier. The vizier didn’t even glance at him. Ramose backed away like a good servant, but when the vizier turned his attention back to the bed, Ramose sidestepped into the pharaoh’s robing room.
It was unlikely that Pharaoh would ever be left alone, but Ramose had to hope. He sat in a corner and waited. Even that small, unlit room was lavishly painted. He sat down on a stool and rested his head against a wall painted with a grapevine pattern. The sound of the priests’ chanting made him drowsy. The ceiling was covered with a spiral pattern. He was mesmerised by the swirling shapes. The chanting suddenly stopped and Ramose sat up with a start. Once again, his first thought was that the pharaoh had died. The priests and the doctor filed out. Vizier Wersu followed them. There was no wailing, no sounds of grief. Ramose was relieved to realise that it was only time for the midday meal.
One elderly priest was left to keep watch over the dying pharaoh. He was soon dozing. Ramose crept into the room so that he could see his father. Now he was so close he began to worry. Seeing his dead son appear at his bedside could easily make Pharaoh die of shock. He looked at the figure lying on the bed. What he saw was an old, old man. A man so thin and feeble it was impossible to imagine that he was the most powerful person in Egypt, that he was a god on Earth. The frail body looked nothing like the powerful, erect figure Ramose had just seen in the palace paintings, nothing like the memories he had of his father.
The priest’s head dropped to his chest. Ramose crept to the bed. He thought that his father was sleeping, but when he leant closer, he saw that he was awake.
Ramose looked down at the old man’s face. He opened his mouth but couldn’t speak. Tears ran down his face and fell on the bed sheet. One tear fell on his father’s hand. The hand rustled on the linen sheet like a dried vine leaf.
A pair of pale, watery eyes turned to him. The eyes looked at Ramose blankly.
“It’s me. Ramose, your son. I didn’t die. There was a…misunderstanding. I have travelled. I have learned much.”
Ramose gently took the dried-up hand in his. “Father, I don’t want to alarm you. I know you are ill, but I have to speak to you.”
The eyes stared at him unblinking. His father had no idea who he was.
“Father, I am Ramose. I have come to take my place as your elder son…as your heir.”
The dry, white lips moved, but no sound came out.
“Are you thirsty, Father?” asked Ramose.
He hurried out to the sitting room. The jar of wine he had brought from the kitchens was empty. He poured out a goblet of water instead.
“Here,” he said. “There’s no wine, but the waters of the Nile taste better than wine.”
The old man raised his head a finger-width, but could get no further. Ramose helped him to sit up. He held the goblet to his father’s lips. A few drops of the water trickled into his mouth. His tongue ran along his lips moistening them with the river water. The old man’s eyes found Ramose’s again. He looked at him for a long time.
“Ramose,” he whispered. The words came slowly as if each one was a great effort. “I have looked forward to meeting you and your brothers in the underworld.”
“Yes, Father,” said Ramose, his heart beating fast, tears running down his face. “It’s me, Father. But I’m alive. I’ve been in hiding.”
The old man smiled at his son. He raised his frail hand. Ramose felt the dry skin gently rasp his cheek. Then his father’s eyes closed, his hand dropped to the bed. Ramose felt the body in his arms turn from a living thing to a lifeless shell as the spirit left. He laid his father down gently. His face still held the trace of a smile.
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br /> 8
GHOST IN THE SCOOLROOM
Someone hurried into the room. Ramose didn’t move.
“Ramose,” the person said. “I thought I would find you here.”
It was Keneben.
“My father is mingling with the sun,” said Ramose. “He’s dead.”
“May Amun protect him.”
Keneben touched Ramose’s shoulder. “You can’t stay here, Highness. It is too dangerous.”
Ramose looked up at his tutor. He wasn’t sure how long he’d been sitting there in silence at the side of his dead father. It could have been a few seconds or an hour.
“I wanted to tell father about my adventures,” said Ramose softly. “When I was young, he always thought I was foolish. I wanted him to be proud of me.”
“Priest,” said Keneben sharply. “Wake up, Priest. Pharaoh has rested from life.”
The priest woke with a jolt. He looked from the stern face of the tutor to the servant boy weeping silently over the lifeless form of the pharaoh.
“Don’t just sit there, Priest!” said Keneben. “Get the physician.”
The priest tripped on the hem of his robes as he stumbled out of the room.
“Come, Prince Ramose,” said Keneben. “We must plan what to do next.”
“I have to see my sister,” said Ramose. “I have to tell her.”
“Princess Hatshepsut is not in the palace.” Keneben’s voice softened when he spoke of the princess.
“Where is she?”
“She is at the women’s palace.”
“Why isn’t she at father’s side?”
“Queen Mutnofret found it too distressing to be near the pharaoh in his illness. She insisted that the princess go with her.”
The women’s palace was an hour’s journey by boat south of Thebes. Ramose’s sadness was replaced by anger at the mention of the hated queen’s name.
Sting of the Scorpion Page 6
