by Anton Gill
They turned off finally and for several paces ran the length of a high, blank white wall, coming to a halt by a door painted ochre, adorned with the protective ankh amulet. Here Amenworse, who hadn’t spoken a single word to Huy during the whole time that he had been in his charge, jerked his head at him to indicate that he must alight.
‘Where are we?’
A repeated jerk of the head.
‘Whose house is this?’ Then Huy saw that Amenworse was not looking him in the eye, but at his lips. The sailor’s eyes then rose to meet his, and in turn he opened his mouth, and nothing came out but a strangled chaos of sound. Without speaking further, Huy slung his satchel on his shoulder and climbed down to the path. He could feel the late afternoon heat through his palm-leaf sandals.
No sooner had he descended than the rickshawmen padded off and he was left alone in the silent, sunny street.
He was about to knock on the door when it opened, swinging inwards on silent hinges, to reveal a pleasant formal garden, with lotuses surrounding a rectangular pool in which large dark fish brooded. Standing back from the entrance was a servant-girl wearing a long shift, copper bracelets and ankle-rings. Perhaps this was Amotju’s place after all, and he’d been brought to the back door.
Then he saw her.
The last time they’d met, she would have been twelve. What a difference six years made, though at the time she had already been beautiful, and old Ramose had been entertaining three prospective husbands. He wasn’t in a hurry to marry her off though, because she would bring a good dowry with her, and he hadn’t wanted to see it go far from the family. If he had had his way he would have married her as a secondary wife to Amotju, who was after all only her half-brother; but her mother, though only Ramose’s chief concubine, had set her face against it. Ramose had grumbled terribly at the time, but since the death of Amotju’s mother, his chief concubine had become his favourite, and he found himself unable to deny her anything. There were no cousins, and so Ramose had still been undecided on the matter of a husband for his daughter Aset, since she herself, in the stubborn manner of her mother, had refused all the suitors presented to her, at the time of his death.
Huy had seen her before she saw him, as she stood in the doorway with her head partly turned towards the interior, talking to some person invisible within. He could see instantly from the style of her hair and the way her dress was folded that she was not yet married; and he was half surprised to find himself excited by knowing this. At the same time he was uncomfortably conscious of being hot and dusty from the journey, and wished that he could have bathed and changed before meeting her. As she turned to descend the short broad flight of steps to the garden, he saw the closed expression on her face, the slight frown which, he remembered, appeared when she was confronted by an unwelcome task; and he wondered how often Amotju had imposed his secret passengers on her in this way. He wondered, too, what her reaction would be when she recognised him. If she recognised him.
But she did so immediately, her brow clearing like the sky after night and her dark eyes widening in disbelieving pleasure. Four servants, three girls and a man, had followed her out of the house, and they took their cue from her smile, visibly relaxing too.
‘Huy! What wind blows you here? My brother said to expect a guest; he did not say it was to be a pleasure.’
‘You flatter an old man.’
‘Come in; and do not pretend to be more of a fool than you are!’
She took his arm and led him into the house. He felt the light pressure of her hand and wondered if in truth it was possible to be more of a fool than he was; but years had washed by without a woman and the smell of her caught and teased and stung in his nostrils. A dream, of course; but no less pleasant for that. As she showed him his room, and as the servants undressed him and poured jars of cool water over him in the bath, fatigue and doubt and worry slipped away.
‘Amotju says you can tell me everything. I am honoured, of course. But tell me what you have been doing since I was a little girl.’
‘That is a very long story, and there isn’t time for it.’
‘But I hope you will stay long enough to tell me.’
Aset’s skin was pale but her eyes and hair were ebony; she was small and light-boned, and there was still much of the child in her movements. She seemed to have so much energy that she danced rather than walked. A keen intelligence shone from her eyes and it illuminated her oval face, which was framed by hundreds of slender plaits. Her hands were strong, like her brother’s, and there was a determined set to her chin. Huy was reminded of Aahmes, before her face had become so constantly sad.
‘What do you do with your time, Aset?’
She smiled mischievously. ‘I run the vineyard my father left me. Amotju cannot understand it. He thinks I will never marry.’
As he talked to her, he found the plan which had been eluding him all afternoon beginning to form in his heart, though not without effort. But the questions she asked were the questions he needed to stimulate him.
‘Will you want to meet Rekhmire?’
‘Yes. Can it be arranged?’
‘It is possible. But he is a very important man now. He has already abandoned the work on his tomb on the edge of the Valley, and they have started a new one for him, grander, nearer the centre where the kings lie. When would you like to see him? What pretext shall we give?’
‘Not so fast,’ said Huy. ‘First I need to feel the pulse of the city. I have become a stranger here; I can’t just go blundering out into the streets. If there is a case for Rekhmire to answer, it must be constructed. So far all I have got is one story from your brother.’
‘Where Rekhmire is concerned, my brother jumps at shadows.’
‘Do you know anyone else who might have threatened him?’
Aset was silent.
‘Are you thinking, or do you have no answer?’
‘I am thinking that, after all, no harm has come to anyone.’
‘Amotju took it seriously enough to leave. He did not bring me back here to amuse himself.’
‘He is becoming a politician, now that he sees order settling once more on the land. And he jumps at shadows.’
‘So you have said. But are they shadows?’
‘That is for you to find out.’ She looked at him.
Somebody had seen him arrive; somebody must have done, and perhaps even recognised him, for, as he walked in the street in the centre of town, a tall man in the crowd blundered into him. He was gone again before Huy could react but he had left a souvenir — a tiny slip of papyrus pressed into a fold of Huy’s cloak. On it was written simply the name of a tomb in the Valley, together with the word, tonight.
Huy knew the name. This is quick work, he said to himself. He had not been back in the Southern Capital for more than three days. The question was whether the message was a warning from a friend or the bait for a trap from a foe.
There was nothing else on the papyrus, not the slightest clue. Huy knew that all he could do was go up to the tomb and watch. What else he might do if anything happened, he didn’t think about for the moment. His military training was long behind him, and he did not possess so much as a dagger. Perhaps, after all, nothing would occur. But it was unlikely that this scrap of information would lead nowhere.
He decided to tell no one. There had been nothing to report yet to Amotju, but his friend was not impatient, and was now involved in arranging an audience with Rekhmire for Huy, a job which, in the convoluted politics of the Southern Capital, involved the use of contacts at the third remove. Huy had also asked Amotju to arrange a house in the city and a body-servant as soon as possible. He would take them as advance payment for his services. He had not told Aset of this. She would be offended, and press him to stay; and he would be tempted. But the truth was that he was used to his own company, and thought he needed solitude.
He would not tell Aset about the papyrus either. This was the toughest decision he had to make, for the man whose tomb wa
s named was old Ramose. Huy told himself that whatever happened there, it was already guarded. Perhaps the note simply alluded to a rendezvous, the sender mentioning a tomb whose location Huy would certainly know.
He would cross on the ferry at dusk, though he burned with impatience to get over there now. In the afternoon, the Valley, despite the palms that had been planted there in profusion, was the sun’s anvil. Apart from the tomb workers, busy in the cool caves they were quarrying out from the rock, no one would be there.
Evening saw him on the west bank, the buildings there already throwing long shadows towards the River. Keeping to them as far as possible, for he had no official business here and needed to avoid being challenged, he started the long walk to Ramose’s tomb, which he remembered from the time when it had been under construction, and Ramose himself had taken him with Amotju to see it. The builders had tunnelled out an imposing entrance hall, which was to be dominated by a statue of Ramose, beyond which an antechamber led to the chapel, with its blind door for the Ka to come and go from the tomb itself, which would be at the bottom of a vertical shaft cut six paces down into the rock. At the time, the halls were bare of the rich painting with which they would now be decorated; but there was no doubt that this was the tomb of a very wealthy man; and Ramose’s pride had been so evident to the young Huy that he had envied him for his own father’s sake.
He walked on, past the last workmen’s huts, now deserted, and up towards the silent city, carved into the rocks, where the great dead lived. He had no fear of them; they existed alongside the living, happy if they were respected and fed the ritual meals, if their names were remembered and spoken. But the silence up here awed him, and the black pools of shadow in the rock seemed capable of harbouring all the demons in The Book of the Dead. Walking as softly as he could, the noise of his feet on the stony desert floor nevertheless seemed deafening, the clack and tumble of the stones certain to give him away.
Night fell swiftly, and would have been absolute, had it not been for a slender moon which Huy was grateful for. Although it made the shadows even more fearful, and intensified the silence, he could not have found his way in the utter darkness of a moonless night. Now he could look back down upon the city, its outline etched on the desert by the moon. A few fires flickered, their light at this distance almost too feeble to reach him.
He wondered about the guards Amotju had set. The men who undertook this work were often ex-soldiers, or said they were. They commanded high prices and yet it was hard to check that they did their work.
Huy could not envy anyone who had to spend their nights here for a living. A bat swooped down, quick and silent, close to his head; taken by surprise he ducked, tingling with fear. Then, after waiting a moment to steady his breath, he went on. It could not be far now, for he had reached the outer edge of the tombs — where the very rich were allowed to rub shoulders with the least of the royal family. Only the most influential and favoured of the priests and politicians could break through this enchanted circle.
Reaching the next crest of rock he saw the tomb entrance below him. As he had hoped, he had come upon it at an angle where he could see before he was seen. Now, he pressed himself into the shadow of the rock wall — a friendly shadow, he told himself wrily — and peered into the little arena formed by the wall of rock into which the tomb had been cut, and the low parapet of dressed stone which curved out on either side of it to form an almost circular courtyard.
The moonlight was concentrated here, and Huy could read the inscriptions around the door: the name of the dead man, the invocation to Ra, the invocation to Horus and to Osiris; the prayer for food and the prayer Not-To-Be-Forgotten. The door itself was expensive, of massive cedar inlaid with bronze. Unless it was well guarded, it would be cut up and carried off itself, Huy thought; let alone that which it guarded.
Spoiling the effect of this was a crude shack, hastily thrown up against the rock to the right of the door, and from which a dim light glowed. So there were guards.
The normal method of operation for grave robbers was to tunnel through the soft rock from the outside, directly towards the mortuary chapel where the chief treasures were laid up for the dead to enjoy through his Ka. Entrances were usually concealed — old Ramose could never resist show — but even here the corridor beyond would probably be booby-trapped. Unless you had knowledge of the locking mechanisms, even if you got beyond the door in the pitch darkness of the entrance hall, you could find yourself thrown down a shaft, or crushed or cut off from your goal by a sliding stone portcullis.
Huy settled down to wait for he knew not what. He had walked far and his feet ached. If he strained his ears, he could hear, but not distinguish, the muffled conversation of the guards. But in the first hour, no one emerged from the shack. He glanced up at the moon, measuring the progress of Khons’ silver chariot over the dark roads.
He must have slept, for when he looked again, the silver chariot was high and thin, and he was cold to the centre of his stomach; but something had awakened him, some sound. Associated in his heart with a dream it had shaken him out of, he could not name it. Then, as he struggled to remember, it came again. The sharp dry bark of a jackal, curiously loud, and nearby, somewhere below him to his left. Almost immediately there was movement within the shack, and two men emerged. Huy wondered if anyone could be left inside but decided that the size of the shack made it impossible, unless it were a dwarf.
At the same time, figures detached themselves from the shadows at the entrance to the courtyard. There were three of them, huddled, shrouded almost, so that it was impossible for Huy to tell much about them or see their faces. They had moved silently and fast, but now hovered at the edge of the shadows. Despite himself, Huy felt his guts knot in fear. Below, the first of the guards was clearly suffering the same emotion, going into a half crouch, scrabbling for the short sword at his side. The other, who held a pike, seemed to hesitate, and looked not at the creatures in the half-dark, but at his friend.
With a sudden surge of energy that leapt from his bowels to his mouth and tore his stomach away, Huy saw what was going to happen, even as the second guard continued to hesitate, even as the central one of the three figures detached itself from the shadows.
‘Do it!’ The words came out as a terrible falsetto shriek, a voice that was bubbling and frothing over with madness, and a lean arm rose and pointed. Huy instinctively raised his own arm, cried out a warning, but his limbs were made of lead, his mouth full of linen. The figures below played out their roles before him like actors in the slow dance of a pantomime as the second guard seemed taken over by a power beyond him and made a small, deliberate lunge forward, transfixing the first on the pike, which, like the good soldier he must once have been, he then twisted and tore upwards and outwards. Blood followed the blade in an impatient black gush.
The first guard stood looking at it, a frozen statue, no part of him moving except the blood pumping out of him. Already the figures were moving forwards, past him, towards the door, ignoring him. The second guard had flung down the pike and was joining the others at the door, where one of the figures was confidently searching the carving on the left for the stone bolt which, once withdrawn, would leave the tomb at their mercy. And if they were so certain about where that was…
There was nothing Huy could do to stop them, but if he ran, he could try to get help from the tomb workers’ settlement below. If they believed him; if they could be bothered to turn out. For a moment he considered waiting and letting the robbers enter the tomb, then closing and sealing the doors behind them. But they were already pushing one open, and it was taking three of them to do it. It was time to make his move.
The hand that crushed his shoulder was made of bronze.
He was lifted off his feet and hurled against the rock behind him, then pulled out of the shadows again. He smelt foul, asphyxiating breath, an odour of long-dead fish and sulphur. He gasped and closed his eyes; something enormous, hard and yet animate, like a vast muscle, wa
s pressing him into the rock, suffocating him. He could no longer feel his arms or legs; his whole body was one mass, one centre of pain. He made himself open his eyes, and found himself staring into a face that appeared to be made up of green stones; a long-jawed face with gimlet eyes, and a great red mouth in which a sinuous tongue voluptuously rolled. A face he remembered from the scrolls of The Book of the Dead — the face of the demon, Set.
FOUR
The High Priest of Osiris, Lord of the Underworld, sat at a low table in the large room prepared for him in the palace. The palace was the mightiest ever built: Amenophis III had reigned for thirty years in wealthy peace.
Rekhmire’s mother had been in charge of the south linen store here, and he could remember playing in the grounds as a ten year old, three decades earlier. There was no question of restoring the whole building. The facade facing the River was seven hundred paces long, and behind it the clusters of big, rambling buildings stretched five hundred paces inland. There was no end to the harem suites, servants’ quarters, offices, kitchens, workshops and storerooms. It was a city in itself, and there was no possible way in which the new young pharaoh and his diminished retinue could fully occupy it. There was no revenue to restore it all either, even if there had been the need.
But this was not what was preoccupying Rekhmire as he sat poring over the rolls of papyrus spread out on the table in front of him, a bewildering mass of information covering everything from absenteeism among the army of unskilled workers and craftsmen to the cost of the dyes used in the repainting of the walls of the royal quarters, and the replacement of Amenophis’ name with Tutankhamun’s.
Try as he might to concentrate on his work, Rekhmire could not rid his thoughts of Mutnefert. She possessed him! What had started as a civilised affair like any other had become a passion, and he knew that the passion was one-sided. Yet, the cooler her treatment of him, the more he burned. He reflected on what he risked losing if he placed himself too much in her power. She was unscrupulous, he knew; and he was not certain that she was faithful to him. There was no question that she could do him harm; but she might make him look ridiculous, occasion him loss of face; and that was something his career and his pride could not stand. He had already taken enormous risks to come as far as he had, and so fast, since the re-establishment of order under General Horemheb, whose ear he had; but Horemheb did not need him. He was not indispensable, and there were far too many willing and able to step into his shoes.
