Nefertiti rr-1

by Nick Drake

  ‘How do we get out?’ I yelled over the screams of the wind.

  ‘Inside the sanctuary!’ Nefertiti shouted back.

  I looked again and saw, running through the storm and pushing aside all who stood in his way, a familiar, hulking outline, with a close-cropped head of tight curls. Mahu. He would reach us in a very short time.

  We ran into the forbidden interior of the sanctuary. At a point in the stone wall where a figure of herself was painted, Nefertiti pushed open a narrow, low door which I would never have seen. I looked back and saw Mahu enter the sanctuary; he called out but I could not hear his words. I had no intention of asking him to repeat them. I hurried everyone inside and closed the double door behind me, sliding across the strong wooden bolt to secure it. Suddenly the pandemonium of the storm seemed muffled. The glorious golden regalia of the royal family now looked fake, shoddy, something from a dressing-up box. Akhenaten had transformed into a confused old man, unable to look anyone in the eye. The girls were frightened, coughing and clinging to their mother, who smoothed their hair and kissed their dusty eyes. Outside, the wind and Mahu rattled, banged and shouted, trying to get in. Khety and I allowed ourselves the luxury of a quick grin at the thought of the chief of police hammering furiously on the other side.

  There was almost no light at all. My head swam with dizzy constellations. Then someone was pulling a flint, and there was a spark. The little light hesitated, then leaped to life. We huddled around the flame. Akhenaten glanced at Nefertiti with fury. He was about to speak when she raised her fingers to her lips. Even now she was in control.

  A newly lit lamp revealed steps disappearing down into darkness. Nefertiti, this woman of passageways and underworlds, led us down and we followed, grateful to be moving, glad of direction. No-one spoke, and when one of the girls started to cry with fatigue, Nefertiti calmed her. Where the passage divided she unerringly chose her direction. After what seemed a long time, we found another set of stone steps, half buried in sand, leading up to a wooden trap door. I pushed at the door, but it gave barely an inch. I tried again, struggling against some unexpected weight. It must be the sand, deposited above us: whole landscapes could change overnight after such storms, becoming unrecognizable. It was possible we would not be able to escape the Otherworld here. I looked at the lamp flame. It was diminishing. Khety joined me under the door; we both heaved our shoulders into place and pushed hard. The thing moved perhaps a cubit, then a torrent of cold sand poured in. We spluttered and coughed as the door slammed back down. We pushed again, grunting and groaning like performing strong men, and the trap door creaked over our heads and gave way, bit by bit, as more sand poured over our heads.

  Strong light blinded us. We had emerged onto the desert plain to the east of the central city, next to an altar. Luckily, no-one was near. I shaded my eyes. I looked back at the city and could see how the storm, vanished now as if it had never been, had blown off roofs and piled up slopes of debris against the walls of the main buildings. The real devastation would be in the streets, and I could imagine the chaos there. And here was its magus, Akhenaten, squinting and shuffling from foot to foot in the wilderness, his great dream, it seemed, blown away.

  We could not remain standing here in the heat and light. We needed sanctuary, water, food and a plan. The city lay one way, but it promised great danger. All the opposition would be hurrying to take advantage of the disaster of the storm, with its implicit judgement of the god, the catastrophic failure of the Festival, and the blow to Akhenaten’s prestige and power. I remembered the look of intent upon Horemheb’s face. I could imagine he would be capitalizing on the situation immediately. The desert lay the other way, and it offered nothing but bad spirits and death. Our only choice was to seek refuge in one of the tombs in the cliffs, preferably one closer to the river, and then use the river as a means of escape. But to where? I stopped the thought. There was no time for such considerations at the moment. They could come later.

  ‘The tomb artisans might keep basic supplies of water and food,’ I said. ‘We could rest, at least.’

  Nefertiti nodded.

  We began walking towards the northern cliffs taking as distant a route as possible from the limits of the city. Khety, Senet and I each carried one of the younger girls on our shoulders, while the older daughters walked. Nefertiti sang to them like a mother now, but their father continued to shuffle and mumble to himself behind us. Meretaten walked sulkily at his side. Such was the royal family on the evening of this strange day.

  By the time we reached the tombs, the sun was once again descending over the far western cliffs. Our lengthening shadows trudged and stumbled beside us. The girls were desperate with thirst; they had all fallen silent, and the younger ones had nodded off to sleep. We stood at the base of the ramps of sand that led up to the tomb entrances, which were set perhaps fifty cubits up in the rock faces of the cliffs, some with their columns and doorways almost completed, others no more than low wooden gates guarding the laborious work in progress. Khety and I slipped the sleeping girls off our shoulders and quickly and silently ran up the ramp to check whether they were truly deserted. We moved from chamber to chamber, but there was no-one there. Just piles of tools and, luckily, pots of relatively fresh water.

  ‘Pick a tomb,’ I said to the Queen.

  She did not smile, just pointed to one furthest to the west. Its entrance was knee-high with sand and grit. We stepped down into this little interior desert, under the as yet uninscribed lintel, and entered a grand, square chamber, perhaps twenty cubits high. So this was how the rich spent their wealth. It was very large and beautifully proportioned; cut from the rock, it must have required the labour of many skilled artisans over several years. The ceiling was supported by a forest of powerful columns, all white except where their middle sections bore painted carvings. The walls were painted with unfinished scenes and dominating every wall were carved images of the royal family worshipping the Aten, and of the family in turn being worshipped by two kneeling figures, a man and a woman.

  I looked closely at the face of the rich man whose eternal resting place this would be. It was very familiar. And then I suddenly understood whose tomb we were hiding inside-Ay’s. I looked at Nefertiti. Her face was turned away from the walls, towards the last of the golden evening light entering directly through the main door. She had chosen this place. She had wanted to come here.

  41

  The last of the light faded to black. The Queen sat outside watching, her arms around her dozing girls, her gold costume dulled and streaked with dust and sand. Senet sat near, frozen despite the heat of the evening. Meretaten was awake, sitting a little apart, staring not at the sunset but at the ground. Her mother glanced across at her, but seemed to decide to leave her alone for now. Akhenaten remained in the tomb chamber, huddled on a pallet in a dark corner.

  Khety and I found lamps, and a small supply of twisted wicks.

  ‘They add salt to the oil,’ he said, whispering for no reason. Perhaps because we were in the presence of Akhenaten; perhaps because we did not want to hear our own voices in the dead acoustic of the chamber.

  ‘Why’s that?’

  ‘To stop the wick smoking and spoiling the ceiling work. Look.’

  He stepped up a ladder that was leaning against an uncarved column and revealed, in the light of his lamp, a great patterned pathway of gold stars-the celestial kingdom of the goddess Nut-against the serene indigo of the night. He looked for a moment like a dusty young god among his constellations, swinging a sun gently in his hand, his face touched with a smile of wonder at all he had made. I saw that Akhenaten, too, had turned and was staring up at the old vision of creation on the ceiling.

  After a moment of silence, I said to Khety, ‘Come down now.’

  The glow descended to our mortal level and Khety became himself again.

  ‘We’ve only got enough wicks to last a few hours,’ I said. ‘There’s water and some bread, but I can’t find anything else.’

&n
bsp; Khety inclined his head towards Akhenaten’s dark figure, which had turned again from the light to face the dark wall. ‘What are we going to do about…?’

  I shrugged. I had no idea. It was too big a problem for me to solve.

  ‘Bring me some water,’ called Akhenaten from the shadows.

  I took him a cup, and had to help him to sit up to drink from it, like an invalid. Something had snapped inside him. He was light and frail. He drank with little tentative sips.

  ‘We must return to the city immediately,’ he said suddenly, as if the thought had just occurred to him. His eyes, in the dark, looked haunted, as if he already knew this would not be possible, and that this knowledge of his powerlessness made it more urgent still. He struggled up, propping himself on his beautiful ceremonial staff. ‘I insist we return immediately.’

  Suddenly Nefertiti was beside him, talking quietly, persuading him to lie back down, making him comfortable. I moved away. There was something both intimate and dreadful about the way she calmed him, and the look of something like loathing hovered faintly in his eyes.

  The girls were all lying on pallets now. Meretaten was staring at the scene of her mother and father carved on the wall beside her. She had a strange look on her face. ‘That’s me,’ she said, pointing at the largest of the smaller figures gathered at the feet of the King and his Queen in the Window of Appearances to receive the blessing of the Ankh of Life. Then she looked across at the very different scene of her mother trying to calm and restrain her father. Suddenly she looked older and wiser, as if she understood too much too soon of the casual, lazy brutality of this battered world. I hoped my girls would never look like that.

  ‘We’re not going home, are we?’ she said quietly.

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Yes you do. Everything’s going to change now.’ She spoke with all the fierce candour of an angry child. Then she turned haughtily away from me.

  She is right, I thought as I looked at her, a child with the weight of the world upon her hunched shoulders.

  I stood up. In the light of the lamps placed around the chamber the scene looked like a picture from a story. But this was no picture-book story. Where could we really go from here? The best we could do was try to hold out. But I no longer rated our chances. I went outside to try to think, and to keep watch. Khety was perched in a dark niche of the cliff, on guard. Nefertiti joined me, and we looked down over the plain spreading west and south to the city. In the clear night air we could see hundreds of tiny night-lights-sentries and soldiers congregating at the roadblocks. We also saw chains of lights approaching, gathering and spilling around them, heading for the passes out of the city’s territory and into the surrounding desert.

  ‘I don’t know whether it would be better to move on from here by night or by day,’ I said.

  She did not reply. Had she heard me? I glanced at her. Silence extended like a great distance between us, although we were no more than a few cubits apart. I looked up at the great imperishable stars.

  Then she spoke:

  ‘The land is in darkness as if in death.

  They sleep in their chambers, heads covered.

  One eye cannot see the other.

  Were they robbed of all their earthly goods

  — even those that lie beneath their heads-

  They could not awake.

  All the serpents bite.’

  ‘Thank you,’ I said. ‘That’s very encouraging.’

  She smiled and looked away.

  ‘Which poem is that?’

  ‘It is the Poem of the Aten,’ she replied. ‘It is written on the walls of the chamber. Did you not notice it?’

  How could she think about poems now?

  ‘It sounds like a warning,’ I said.

  ‘It is a wise one.’

  We looked up at the stars again.

  ‘Do you think perhaps there are many other worlds besides ours under the sky?’ she asked suddenly.

  ‘I can imagine a few better ones, especially tonight,’ I said.

  ‘I imagine one where the Red Land is turned into a great garden. The trees are golden, and there are many rivers, and beautiful cities built on hills.’

  ‘You always see heavens. I see the opposite.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Perhaps because I live in a land where malignity rules, where fear and shame dwell. I see botched and corrupted lives, failed hopes, broken dreams, murders and mutilations. Injustices committed with authority. I see people with no souls doing the worst possible things to people with no power. For what? For nothing more than riches and power. There is no honour and no dignity in such things. But we’re a rich, big, strong, tough, proud land now, so it doesn’t matter at all.’

  I looked away to the southern horizon, surprised by the ardour of my reply.

  ‘I had a dream before I came here,’ I continued. I realized I suddenly needed to tell her about it.

  ‘You are quite a dreamer for such a sceptical man,’ she said softly.

  ‘I was in a cold place. Everything was white. There were dark strange woods. The trees looked black, as if they had burned. Everything was very still. I was lost. I was looking for someone. Then something impossibly light began to fall from a white sky. Snow. That’s all I remember, but the desolation has stayed with me. Like a loss that can’t ever be put right.’

  She nodded, understanding. ‘I have heard of snow.’

  ‘I heard a story about a man who carried a box of it back to the King as a treasure. When it was opened, the snow had vanished.’

  She looked interested in this. ‘If I were given such a box I would not open it.’

  ‘Surely you’d want to know what was inside?’

  ‘You should never open a box of dreams.’

  I thought about this for a moment. ‘But then you never know if the box is empty or full.’

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘You never know. But it is still your choice.’

  Eventually my thoughts came back to the present.

  ‘We could get to the river and find a boat,’ I suggested.

  She shook her head. ‘And then go where? We must return to the city. All the night creatures are collaborating on their plots and betrayals. I imagine the serpents are sharpening their teeth and filling their mouths with poison. The world makes its claim upon us, and we must not say no.’

  She was right, of course. More than anything else, the storm had damaged the family’s prestige and opened it up to attack. If they were going to survive they needed to show themselves and reassert their authority. But at what risk?

  ‘But let me ask you this: how are you going to do that? They’ll say the storm was a divine judgement against you both.’

  She laughed. ‘The one thing you never think of is the thing that brings all the great dreams, plans and visions crashing down on your head.’

  Her eyes glittered with something other than curiosity and amusement. Everything she had done seemed, now, to have been futile. Everything she had achieved had been destroyed by the storm, as if it had been clearing the playing board, making many new and unforeseen developments possible.

  ‘Perhaps you could commission a poet to rewrite the story of today to make the storm seem like part of your grand plan after all. The Poem of the Triumph over the Storm. The Queen returns in glory from the Otherworld, the god of chaos tries to vanquish her, but all his might could not blow down the city of the Aten, nor frighten its Queen.’

  ‘I’m frightened now.’

  She looked at me for a moment. I wanted more than anything to hold her as she sat with her arms wrapped tight around her legs, trying to keep warm-or trying to stop herself shaking. My heart was suddenly inappropriately tripping and fluttering like a schoolboy’s. She was so close. I could sense the warmth of her skin across the cool night air; I could see the potency of her eyes in the dark. She was distant and sad. I reached out and gently let my hand touch hers. I feared the mountains would rumble and the stars fall from the sky. But none
of that happened. She did not move. I believe, now, her breath stilled for a moment. We sat like that for a long moment. Then, with something I hope was reluctance, she slipped her hand out from under mine.

  It was then that I heard a very faint trickle of grit and tiny stones nearby on the slope below us. It could have been a desert rabbit, but it was not. I looked up to see Khety gesturing at something. I stood up slowly and backed towards the tomb entrance, trying to make no sound, trying to shield the Queen from whatever was coming up out of the darkness. Another faint trickle, then a clearly audible step being taken closer up the slope, a foot seeking purchase. But the stranger remained in the realm of the shadows. At least we had now reached the entrance to the chamber, which offered us some temporary sanctuary; we lacked the means, other than our daggers, to defend ourselves. I pushed the Queen back into the shadows of the chamber and waited.

  A shadow rose up from the slope. It was somewhat out of breath. I recognized immediately the outline of the bulky, powerful body, the brutal shape of the head. I recognized too the dark panting bulk that followed him, faithful and dumb.

  ‘This is a strange place to spend the night.’ Mahu’s voice was tense. He was trying to disguise his breathlessness.

  ‘We were just looking at the stars,’ I replied.

  ‘You could use their help. Where are they? Are they safe?’

  ‘Why are you asking me?’

  Then Nefertiti slipped past me, holding a lamp. Mahu looked relieved, and immediately got down uncomfortably on his knees, like a monster before a child.