by Nick Drake
I stepped out of the boat. The cat dropped casually down, stretched elegantly, walked over to me and wound herself around my legs.
‘She still likes you.’ Her voice carried a light trill of tension.
‘She has faith. She believes in me.’
‘It is in her nature.’
I said nothing. Khety, who had disappeared for a moment, brought another chair, then retired, perhaps to stand guard. I sat down opposite her, the cat purring in my lap.
‘So, where do we start?’ I said.
‘With the truth?’
‘You think I am here to lie to you?’
‘Why not tell me your story? Then I will see whether or not I believe it.’
‘More stories.’
She said nothing.
‘I went looking for plots and conspiracies. I found men with reasons to want you to disappear for ever, and some of the same men with reasons to want you back. I found out about the golden feathers of the Society of Ashes. Does that mean anything to you?’
She shrugged. ‘It’s the kind of name men give to something they take too seriously.’
‘Your brother-in-law told me the golden feather opens invisible doors. He seemed excited by it.’
‘You see? Men love their riddles and codes and strange seals. It makes them feel clever and important.’
‘That’s more or less what your mother-in-law said. So did Ay.’
I watched her carefully. Something in her eyes flinched at the name-not for the first time. She changed the subject.
‘Mahu got hold of you.’
It wasn’t a question. I held up my finger in its splint. It looked silly.
‘I didn’t talk,’ I said. ‘Well, not much. I told him about the Otherworld and so on, but strangely he didn’t seem to believe me.’
‘He has no imagination.’
‘He does seem to be quite a literal man.’
‘But I am puzzled. How did you escape?’ she asked, returning again to the same point, anxious as a cat trapped in the wrong room.
‘Your friend Ay came and talked to him. Mahu seemed to be persuaded after all that he should brush me down and let me go. Then Ay invited me to lunch, and of course I had to accept. It was quite interesting.’
I wanted that to hang in the air. I wanted her to ask about it.
‘I imagine Mahu tried to hurt you in your heart and soul. I imagine he threatened your family as well as your little finger.’ Her face did not bother to make an expression of sympathy.
‘He’s threatened me with my family before. You know that. And anyway, while I was in the prison I had a bad dream. It was almost worse than anything he could do to me.’
‘Dreams,’ she said quietly. ‘Tell me your dream.’
I looked away, across the river. Why should I tell her anything? But of course, I wanted to tell her everything.
‘I dreamed I was home at last. It had been a long time. I was glad. But everyone was gone. I was too late.’
In the silence that followed I stroked the cat over and over, as if my distress could pass into her but cause no harm. She looked up at me with her calm green eyes. I found I could hardly bear to look up and meet the equally direct gaze of her mistress.
‘It was a dream of fear,’ she said.
‘Yes. Just a dream.’
‘Fear is a strong delusion.’
‘It makes some of us human.’
I was suddenly angry. Who was this woman to tell me about fear? But she was angry too.
‘And do you think I do not suffer fear? Do you think I am not human?’
‘I see fear in your eyes when I mention Ay.’
‘What did he say to you?’ Again, she would not leave this alone, worrying at the question like a cat with a dead bird.
‘He was very reasonable. He asked me to give you a message.’
That stopped her. Now she was on to something. I could sense her hunger, her need to know.
‘Give me the message.’ She said this too quietly.
‘He said he knows you are alive. He knows you will return. His question is, what then? His message is: meet him. He will work with you to restore order.’
She shook her head in disbelief and, somehow, disappointment. The noise in her throat was something between a sob and a tiny lost laugh at something that was never very funny.
‘And you thought it right to bring me this message?’
‘I am no messenger boy. I’m telling you what he said. It sounded reasonable.’
‘You are so naive.’
I killed the anger that leaped into my mouth. I tried another line of enquiry.
‘What power has Ay got over you?’
‘No-one has any power over me,’ she said.
‘I don’t think that’s true. Everyone has someone who frightens them. Their boss or their mother, their sworn enemy or the monster under the bed. I think you’re afraid of him. But the strange thing is, I think he’s afraid of you too.’
‘You think too much,’ she said, quickly.
‘People don’t think enough. That’s the whole problem.’
She stayed silent. I knew I had hit upon some nerve, some thread of truth. Some secret bound them together, I was sure. But she changed the subject again, trying to turn the tide of my questions.
‘So you have found out nothing for sure about the plots against me, and instead you have brought me a foolish message and led them, like a decoy, back to me. It’s as well I anticipated the problems.’
I refused to change course. ‘It’s clear what is happening. Tomorrow is the Festival. Akhenaten is besieged by troubles at home and abroad. These troubles are focused now in the very event with which he hoped to resolve them. Why? Because your absence destroys the illusion he needs to perpetuate. Your return will precipitate enormous changes. This is anticipated by several men, including Ay and Horemheb, both of whom are waiting to see what happens when you do reappear. I imagine they wish to take full advantage of any change of authority. You, having sent me back into the lions’ den, then assume me guilty of betrayal when I return to you with the little information I have been able to glean, at some personal cost to myself. And the interesting thing is, Ay is right. I think you have no idea what happens next.’
I found myself, at the end of this outburst, pacing the terrace. At the door, Khety looked alarmed. The waters of the Great River seemed to be listening carefully for Nefertiti’s reply. Eventually it came, very calmly, concealing everything.
‘You are right,’ she said. ‘I have no idea what happens next. I will make my prayers for an outcome that restores peace and stability to all of us.’ She looked out over the dark waters then, and added, ‘I have one request.’ Her eyes searched for mine. I confess my breath was tight in my chest. ‘Will you accompany me tomorrow, when I make my return? Will you do that for me, despite everything?’
I did not even have to think about it. ‘Yes,’ I said. I wanted to be there.
I realized, as I said this simplest of words, that I wanted to face the uncertain future, with its fears and its dreams, with her, no matter where it would take us. I felt suddenly as if the wide, dark water was flowing under my feet; as if this terrace and all of this strange city, this little world of frail lights and hearts like flickering lanterns, were floating on the blackness, borne along on the currents, the fluent and the turbulent, of the river’s long, deep dream.
39
Despite the deprivations of the last few days, for all the gold in the deserts of Nubia I could not sleep. The pain in my finger throbbed in time to my heartbeat, as if it intended to keep me awake-perhaps punishing the rest of my body for its apparent well-being. Perhaps also it was a reminder of my deepest fear. The fate of Tanefert and the girls tormented me, and I turned and turned again from side to side. The weather, too, was heavy, discontented. Irritable gusts of wind cast handfuls of sand and dust in frustration against the outer walls. I could hear a loose door banging in the wind, like a warning. Someone must then have gone
out to close it, but somehow the silence after that was worse. Once this coming day was over, and its changes-whatever they were, however good or bad-were brought into being, I would take the first ship south, back home. I would row myself all the way back against the current in a little papyrus reed boat if I had to. The distance and the uncertainty had made me miserable, and I vowed never to leave my family like this again.
I was tossing and turning with these thoughts for company, when I heard footsteps outside my door. I had been given a side chamber to sleep in, and as we three had walked through the house some hours earlier, in a deliberate silence, hardly even bidding each other goodnight, the house had seemed deserted, the rooms shut up, the furniture covered. We were careful to light no lamps, nor give any evidence to the outside world of our presence. Nefertiti had assured us that no-one would think to seek us here, in her own palace. But now the quiet footsteps. They stopped outside my door. I lay very still, holding my breath. Then they continued, softly, and quickly faded away.
I dressed swiftly, and opened the door as quietly as I could. No sign of anyone. The passageway was dark, relieved only by a silvery light where it opened up ahead on to the terrace. All the rooms appeared silent and empty. I arrived at the end of the passage and looked out on to the terrace. The moonlight threw down a tangled labyrinth of black shadows from the vine onto the stones; and among the well-defined tendrils and leaves stood a familiar figure. She seemed part of the design, as if wound into the complicated filigree of light and dark.
I walked across to Nefertiti, now part of the dark design myself. We were silent for a moment, looking out across the moonlit river rather than at each other.
‘Can’t you sleep?’ she asked eventually.
‘No. I heard someone moving about.’
‘Perhaps we could play a game of senet?’
‘In the dark?’
‘By moonlight.’
I knew she was smiling. Well, that was something.
We sat down at the board, facing each other across the thirty squares, three rows of ten, in a shape, the snake of life.
‘Green or red?’ she asked.
‘Let’s throw for it.’
She cast the four flat sticks, all of which landed face up on the black side-a propitious start. I threw them and got two white, two black. She chose green. ‘I like the little pyramids,’ she said. I took the red reel pawns and we placed our fourteen pieces in readiness.
She threw, and moved her first piece from the central square, the House of Rebirth, onto the first square. We played in silence for a little while, casting the sticks, moving our pieces forward, occasionally knocking each other’s off the squares and returning them to their original position, where they waited in limbo for a lucky throw to begin again. Sometimes the hot wind interrupted our silence, insisting on something. I watched her thinking, considering her moves. She was beautiful, and unknowable, and I felt, with something not unlike amusement, that I was actually playing against a spirit in the Otherworld, and for the well-being of my immortal soul.
Soon we reached the last four squares of the game, the special squares. She threw, and landed on the House of Happiness. A rueful smile broke over her face. ‘If I were superstitious, I could believe the gods have a sense of irony.’
I threw, and my first piece landed on the next square, the House of Water. ‘If I were superstitious, I’d agree with you,’ I said, pushing my piece off the board and back to the House of Rebirth again. ‘Here we have strategy and chance, the two forces encountering each other. I feel like Chance; I think you’re Strategy.’
She didn’t smile. ‘You have your strategies too.’
‘I do. But I rarely feel I am in control of them. I apply them to the mess of the world, and sometimes the two things seem to correspond.’
She threw, and played.
‘So you think the world is a mess?’ she said, as if the question were another move in the game.
‘Don’t you?’
She thought for a while. ‘I think it depends on how you look at the experience of being alive.’
She threw the three white faces required by the square of the House of the Three Truths to move her first pyramid off the board, and looked pleased to be winning. I wanted her to win.
‘This is turning into the kind of conversation lovers have when they’ve just met at some drinking den late at night,’ I said, before throwing and losing another piece.
‘I’ve never been to such a place.’
I could see her there, though. The mysterious woman waiting for someone who isn’t going to come, sipping her drink slowly like lonely people do, making it last.
‘You haven’t missed much,’ I said.
‘Yes I have.’
She threw again, and moved another piece off the board. She would beat me hands down.
The wind lulled then, and the quietness under the stars was strange and welcome. The moon had drifted further across the glittering sky.
‘There are things I’d like to ask you,’ I said. I could see her eyes in the darkness.
‘Always asking questions. Why do you ask so many questions?’
‘It’s my job.’
‘No. It’s you. You ask questions because you fear not knowing. So you need answers.’
‘What’s wrong with answers?’
‘You sound like a five-year-old boy sometimes, always asking why, why, why.’
She threw again, and moved another piece ahead to the House of Ra-Atum, the penultimate square. I threw. Four black sides; a six took my first piece on to the last square.
‘Speaking of answers, what is there between you and Ay?’
She sat back and sighed. ‘Why do you keep asking about him?’
‘He’s waiting for you.’
‘I know that. Perhaps I am afraid of him. Consider what happened to Kiya.’
‘I have heard that name,’ I replied. ‘She was a queen, yes?’
‘She was a royal wife.’ Nefertiti looked away.
‘And she bore royal children?’ I asked.
She nodded.
‘What happened to her?’
She stared at me. ‘Here is an interesting answer for you. She disappeared one day.’
‘That sounds familiar.’
I thought about this. A royal wife and mother of royal children, and therefore a competitor to Nefertiti herself within the royal family. Why did she disappear? What kind of threat did she represent? Was she despatched on the orders of someone; Ay, perhaps? Could he have the power to organize and plan to the level of assassination? Or-almost unthinkably-was Nefertiti herself capable of such ruthlessness?
She watched me carefully.
‘A story that turned out well for you,’ I observed.
‘Perhaps. But where has your question taken you? To the truth? To a greater understanding? No. It has taken you to more questions. You are in a labyrinth in your head with no escape. You have to go beyond the labyrinth.’
‘But what is beyond the labyrinth?’
She gestured around us, as we sat together over the squares and pieces, the chances and the strategies, the secrets and the nonsense of the unfinished board game.
‘Life, Rahotep, life,’ she said.
She had never used my name before. I liked the way she said it. Her face was half in the light of the moon, half in the dark of the shadows. I would never really know her.
She rose quietly. ‘Thank you for letting me win.’
‘You won all by yourself,’ I said.
We looked at each other for a long moment. The eyes, the eyes. Nothing more could be said.
We parted then, leaving the pieces of the game set out on the board as if we might return to them in the morning. At her door she wished me a good night-what was left of it. I knew she was afraid. She left her door ajar, but I could not cross this threshold. I drew up a stool and sat down to sit out the night like a playing piece on the last square of the great game of senet, on a board the size of this strange city,
with its lucky and unlucky squares, its chances and its plots, waiting for the throw of fate.
40
I was woken by Khety, who found me slumped like a village idiot against the wall outside the Queen’s chambers. He had that amused look on his face.
‘You can wipe that grin off,’ I said.
I felt weary and nervous at the same time, as if I had not slept at all. I stood up and knocked on the double door. For a moment there was no sound, and then it opened to reveal Nefertiti’s maid Senet, her quietness, her honesty. She smiled, but she was not pleased to see me. She looked as immaculate as ever, but today she was not wearing gloves.
‘Good morning,’ she said. ‘The Queen is ready.’
‘I have a quick question for you.’
She glanced back into the chambers. ‘We have no time. The Queen is ready.’
‘It is a very simple question.’
She stepped out of the chamber and pulled the door gently closed behind her. Her face assumed an expectant look.
‘It’s probably nothing,’ I said.
She nodded.
‘You went to the Harem Palace to deliver instructions for one of the women, a specific woman, from the Queen.’
It was hard to gauge her reaction.
‘Yes.’
‘As you know, that woman died under violent circumstances the same night.’
‘You told me.’
‘Please tell me which woman was to follow the Queen’s instructions.’
She looked uncertain. ‘I did not read the instructions. They were sealed, in any case.’
‘I see.’
We both waited for something.
‘I may as well tell you the name of the woman who died,’ I said.
‘I do not need to know it.’
‘It was a girl called Seshat.’
She stared at me, her mouth open. It was as if she were glass and I had shattered her. She made to go back into the chamber, but I held her arm.
‘Did you know her?’
