by Anton Gill
‘It wasn’t difficult to demolish that case. The granary overseers just wanted a scapegoat. They had been negligent,’ Huy said. The Medjay was how old now? At least he understood the lack of deference. It had been familiarity, friendliness clumsily resumed, and Huy had been too guarded to notice it. ‘I am sorry to bring you bad news now.’
‘Much of it is expected. After what has happened —’ Huy hesitated. He wanted to go on, to ask why the new pharaoh had changed his name from Tutankhaten to Tutankhamun, and to ask about the invocation to Amun in the letter. But how far could he trust Maiherpri? The man was a Med jay now, and Huy was an out-of-work junior official of a regime which, with the death of Smenkhkare, was about to be officially disgraced. He altered his tack.
‘Have you time for a beer?’ Huy remembered his hospitality.
The Medjay glanced at the sun, moving slowly across the patch of blue above them. He relaxed, sat down again. ‘Yes. But I cannot stay long, or say much.’
Huy fetched a jar of red beer and two glazed beakers, together with a flat savoury loaf. While he busied himself, he ran over the best way to ask the questions which elbowed their way to the front of his mind, while simultaneously he tried to come to terms with what had happened to him. The dominant thought was that he no longer had a family to share his fall from grace. At the same time, he had never felt lonelier.
Maiherpri took his beer and drank sparingly. ‘Of course there will be edicts. I cannot tell what form they will take. I do know that many scribes of your rank have been offered their careers back if they will deny the Aten and re-embrace Amun. The new king expects all his officers to follow his lead.’
‘I wasn’t offered that option. Not in this letter.’ Huy was thinking, the king is nine years old; who is doing this?
‘Not all were. I cannot tell why. Many more senior officials have been exiled, and some have been killed.’
‘When did all this start?’
‘I don’t know. They wanted to remove any supporters of the old regime quickly. The renewed God King will be proclaimed in two days, on the day preceding the entombment of Ankhkeprure Smenkhkare, so that he can perform the Ceremony of Opening the Mouth.’
Smenkhkare was sent to join the ancestors in the new Royal Tomb complex at the City of the Horizon. His vault and mortuary temple had been brought into some hasty semblance of completion, though the gangs working there had not had time to clear all their rubble from either side of the entrance, and the Tura limestone of its facings still bore the marks of claw chisels — there had been no time to polish them. There wasn’t much of a crowd to line the route from the Temple of the Sun where the cortege set off. Huy saw with regret that already the great building, with its clean lines open to the sky, had been pillaged. It had been the only one to be fully completed within Akhenaten’s lifetime, and was his joy and pride, dazzling with colour, as ducks, young bulls, lotus blossoms all in faience-work had danced and leapt vividly and vigorously in the sunlight which they worshipped and which brought them life. Now, most of the men who had worked this miracle of art had dispersed. How fast a thing decays when its life-force is gone, thought Huy. They had embalmed Akhenaten’s body, but his ideas, his heart, had been scattered to the wind.
There was little of the simple ritual Akhenaten had introduced in Smenkhkare’s burial, which was a reversion to the ways under the old gods. The funeral sledge bore the mummy in its brightly painted cedar shell under a shrine. It was pulled by two toiling oxen along the road to the tomb-rocks, while behind it eight house-servants pulled a second sledge carrying the viscera, guarded by the Sons of Horus: Duamutef, the jackal, for the stomach; Qebhsenuef, the hawk, for the intestines; Hapy, the baboon, for the lungs; and Imsety, the man, for the liver. Alongside the mummy walked two women, court actresses, representing the goddesses Isis and Nephthys, the divine protectresses. Behind the second sledge came fifty women, professional mourners, whose formal ululation filled the dawn sky. Then followed the Nine Friends, and the palace servants carrying the furniture of the tomb, for the use of Smenkhkare’s Ka who would live there and never leave it.
Far to the front Huy noticed that Meryre, the High Priest of Aten, had been replaced by a man he did not know. Succeeding him were Ay and Horemheb, with the young pharaoh like a prisoner between them.
Huy walked alongside but at a distance, for the crowd was thin except at the entrance to the mortuary temple, and he had no wish to draw attention to himself. At the entrance, the Muu dancers and the Anubis priest in his jackal-head mask waited. The cortege arrived just as the sun broke the rim of the horizon, and the blue-grey light gave way to pale gold. The ululation of the mourners ceased, and as the dancers performed the dance of welcome, Horemheb approached Jackal-Head with the young king. Huy could see that though he was nervous of this, Nebkheprure Tutankhamun was not going to show it. Perhaps he would make a king who could rule even Horemheb, one day.
The attendant priests struggled to bring up the heavy coffin and stood it on its feet, the smooth wood slipping under their sweating palms which left dark marks on it. Then, guided by Jackal-Head, the new pharaoh reached up and touched the mouth of the old with the Sacred Adze and the Four Sacred Amulets.
These are the tokens by which I, the Son-Whom-You-Love, open your mouth, your eyes, your ears, your nostrils; put sense into your fingertips and the soles of your feet; lift the gates of the channels of your body: be now as you were in life, watched over by your Ka.
Huy did not stay for the whole ceremony, for the ritual furnishing of the temple, the presentation of the First Meal, and the sealing of the tomb. He felt guilty at leaving so important a funeral, but he was too much a son of the doctrine Akhenaten had taught him to really fear the anger of the old gods for deserting it. He needed some questions answering. Perhaps with official attention deflected to the entombment, he might hope to slip under the rope of the law and talk to one of his former colleagues. He wasn’t aware that a Medjay had been especially deputed to watch him, and he didn’t think that he was important enough for such attention, but he had to be cautious. Why hadn’t he been allowed the option of recanting?
‘They think you’re a troublemaker, that’s why; and of course they’re right,’ sniffed Tehuty, whom he had tracked down in a dusty archive, luckily far away from anyone else, or the man would never have agreed to talk to him, former brother-in-law or not. They want people they can rely on. The old way’s dead. It brought the land to its knees.’
‘They want people who just toe the line, do what they’re told,’ said Huy. It certainly made sense.
‘Precisely. People know. You’ve overstepped your authority before; you were one of the first to come here when the city was opened. And you’re divorced.’
‘So is half the population.’
‘Not the responsible half.’
Huy turned away in despair. He was never going to get any sense out of Tehuty, whose accusing tone meant that he was going to reduce the conversation to a simply personal one. Tehuty was one year older than Huy, but had been kept back as an archivist for the short and unimportant reign of Tutmosis II while Huy had moved into law reporting. Huy’s divorce had sealed his resentment.
‘I don’t know why you come to me for help. It seems to me you’ve always despised our family.’
‘That isn’t true.’
‘Why did you leave Aahmes, then?’
‘You know why. It had died. She wanted the divorce as much as I did.’
‘Well, you’ve had it now.’ Tehuty turned back to the scrolls he was arranging on a shelf and scrabbled at them with nervous, bony hands. Some of them, a hundred and fifty years old, were dry and fragile. ‘I’m glad to see there’s some advantage to being a simple archivist.’
‘But you came here too.’
‘I was given the option to recant.’ A new thought struck Huy’s brother-in-law. ‘Not important enough not to be kept on, I suppose you might say,’ he added with fresh bitterness. ‘But I never believed that the theory of
one god was anything other than madness.’
Huy tried a different tack. ‘What are the changes? What are they going to be?’ Tehuty may not have made much of his career, but he was morbidly suspicious as well as jealous, and insatiably curious: those qualities coupled with a highly developed sense of self-preservation and natural subservience made him a perfect spy. If he’d been intelligent, somebody might even have employed him as one.
He could see Tehuty deciding to keep quiet. ‘I don’t know. If I did, I’d be compromising myself if I told you.’ He dropped his voice violently on the last few words, the querulous tone resolving itself into a harsh whisper, for he had heard footsteps approaching from the far end of the archive. But they stopped. Whoever it was had turned off to consult a document on one of the stacks nearer the entrance. ‘Why don’t you talk to some of your old friends — if you’ve got any left?’
The last remark went home. In the two days that had elapsed since Maiherpri’s visit, Huy had been able to find out very little, except that the three or four scribes, including his former chief, whom he knew he could trust, were no longer at their houses, or under guard and impossible to reach.
‘I have heard that certain new edicts are to be made public. Do you at least know when the proclamations are to be made?’ Huy tried to choose his words carefully. ‘I do need help.’
‘You’d never seek me out for any other reason,’ said Tehuty. But put into a position of superiority, he relented slightly. ‘Yes, I have heard of the new edicts too.’
‘And? Will they be read at the coronation?’ This was normal, though as far as Huy knew, no date had been set for Tutankhamun’s enthronement.
Tehuty looked tense. Someone else had entered the archive, joined the first man at the stacks near the door, and started a conversation. If Tehuty could hear them…He lowered his voice again, to what he hoped wouldn’t sound like a conspiratorial whisper. ‘There isn’t going to be a coronation. There’s going to be an investiture. At the same time a regency will be declared, until the king is old enough to reign by himself.’
‘Who’ll be doing that?’
‘Can’t you guess? Horemheb, though I daresay on paper it’ll be a co-regency with Ay.’
‘Don’t underestimate Ay.’
‘It’ll be a long time before he can wash himself clean of his son-in-law.’
‘But when he does —’
‘You love to make deductions, don’t you? Have you deduced what you’re going to do with yourself now?’ Tehuty was reminding him that they were not friends. He didn’t want to get drawn into a discussion about the future with Huy.
Huy sighed. ‘Is there anything else you can tell me?’
‘No,’ said Tehuty.
‘Does that mean “yes”, but you’re not prepared to say?’
Tehuty selected a large scroll and drew it off the shelf, fussily tilting it so that sand ran out of one end. A fat beetle, disturbed, scuttled into the darkness at the back of the stack. Tehuty glanced at Huy and tucked the scroll carefully under one arm before setting off along the dim corridor towards another stack, further away from the door. Huy followed. As soon as he felt he had covered a safe distance, Tehuty turned round and brought his face close. Huy could smell the sweet onions he must have lunched on.
‘Well, it’s hardly classified, but if I were caught telling someone like you before it was made public, I’d lose my nose and lips.’
Huy resisted telling Tehuty that no one in real power would even glance at small fry like them. He assumed a suitably awed expression.
‘They are bringing back the glorious old gods,’ he said, a party-liner even in secret. ‘Amun will be restored to his rightful place in the pantheon. That is why the king has decided to change his name from the heretical one he had the misfortune to be born with. The trumped-up god, the so-called Aten, will have his name blotted out.’
In the darkness Huy held his breath. The news did not surprise him; Horemheb was a practical man, and it was inevitable that he would select this way of bailing out the sinking boat of the state. The New Thinking had made far more enemies than friends, and the loss of the Northern Empire had accelerated Akhenaten’s fall. Nevertheless, and despite the last madness of the old king, Huy grieved. The land belonged to the pharaoh. The people belonged to the pharaoh. The pharaoh could not be questioned. On that order the stability of two thousand years had been based. Now, it had been shaken. Not badly enough to matter for most people; for most people it could be restored, and Horemheb was the man to restore it. But not for Huy. He had discovered what it was to be an individual and to question; and so it was also for himself that he grieved.
He turned to go, but Tehuty held him back. ‘There’s more. The name of the old king is to be blotted out. His name is to be excised from every monument, in the same way as he excised the name of Amun. Without his name, he will die the death beyond death. He will no longer even be.’
Huy faced him with a passion he hadn’t thought himself capable of amidst so much stress. ‘His name will live for ever.’
That is capital-offence blasphemy, my friend.’ Tehuty smiled his thin smile, and Huy could see that he was enjoying himself now. ‘I wouldn’t go around saying that sort of thing to just anyone.’
At home ten days later, Huy drew out a copy he had made years earlier, when he had first come to the city, of a description by its principal architect, Bek. He had kept it back from the Medjay. Now he read the short passage once more. It had been an apprentice-piece, and the hieroglyphs were beautifully worked. Its hope and its aspiration seemed to mock him in the dusty courtyard of his little house:
After twelve years, the central part is now complete. Still we have used only one-tenth of the land chosen by Aten for the city, but we rest. Soon, once the enemy to the north has been calmed by the wisdom of Aten, we will begin again. God has only to preserve the king. All our thoughts are on that. Here in the city, we hear little of the world outside any more.
Meanwhile, the city will grow, and it will last for ever. When it is complete, it will be the greatest city on earth. The Southern Capital will crumble to nothing with its false gods and its inhumanity, and the light of Aten will shine on the whole earth. Even the darkness of the north will be dispelled by the light.
How I am looking forward to starting work again! How much I have to do, now that I know what to do! The city occupies me completely. It must grow like a forest, naturally, with beauty and without symmetry. The columns will be carved with vines and their capitals will be clusters of grapes. Already the palace is covered with paintings; all the animals and all the flowers of the Black Land rejoicing in the one God. The river birds break from the papyrus clumps and escape the fowler. Calves dance in the meadows and deer sprint in the woods. The ceilings and the colonnades are overrun with daisies and thistle, lotus and bulrushes. Each courtyard has a well, and the sakkieh wheels draw water from the River, so that out of the desert here we have brought greenness.
In the hall of a thousand pillars the inlay work is of black granite and red quartzite; the cells of the concubines are decorated with scenes of preparation for the arrival of the king. The painted pavements themselves have been a triumph and a delight to the eye. We laid a mud-brick floor and covered it with a veneer of mortar. We faced it with light plaster bound with the fine hair of girls, and on that we painted. We laid on the colours while the plaster was wet, even when it could still be moved by the brush — form should be as natural as possible. When the painting was done and dried in, then came the polishers and the waterproofers. The colours will never fade, not when the empire is twice as old as it is today.
We have four glass factories and two glazing works now, but still from the coast the barges bring pottery vessels from Kheftyu and glassware from Byblos. There will never be enough to decorate the palace and the high temple alone. Jasper and alabaster are all the king will have used for his own figurines, and those of the queen and the princesses. But not only that. The votive scarabs, fish a
nd scorpions must be made of nothing less. All richness is here and our craftsmen work with a creativity as fecund as wheat in good silt. The cedar doors are covered with beaten gold.
Throughout the years of building, the king has paced through the city as one pursued by time itself, changing this, altering that, as God moves within him and hones his vision. Grant us only…
Huy let the paper fall. What fools people were to give in to enthusiasms. Outside, the noises in the street were of people packing their possessions on to carts. On the day following the investiture of the young king, General Horemheb and Regent Ay had announced that the court would return to the Southern Capital. The Southern Capital was also the centre of worship for Amun. Work there had already begun on refurbishing the gigantic old palace of Amenophis III. It would be ready in time for New Year, for the Festival of Opet after the beginning of the next Inundation of the River in midsummer. With extraordinary speed, the City of the Horizon had begun to haemorrhage. People flowed from it in search of work, taking what was useful with them. Tehuty and his colleagues were worked off their feet clearing and packing the archives. The buildings of which Bek had written with such pride only a child’s lifetime before were already littered with the rubble of their despoliation. Before the autumn was out the place would be a ghost town.
And I will be one of the ghosts, Huy thought. He had no skill beyond the one he had learned, and without that means to channel his natural wisdom, his intelligence would atrophy. There seemed to be very few in his position: forgiveness upon recantation had been the general rule for those who had been in the old king’s service — that, or exile or death. Perhaps some such fate would have been his, but for an anonymous superior who must have interceded for him.
