by Nick Drake
‘I am not reliable,’ I replied.
‘And perhaps that is why I respect you. These are the days of reckoning, Rahotep. It is time to make choices, and swift changes. Think about it carefully,’ he said.
I stood before the great wooden door of Nakht’s mansion, and hesitated. And then I knocked three times. I heard footsteps. The door slowly opened. Tanefert stared at me. I could not speak. Slowly, she raised her hand, and carefully touched my cheek, not yet daring to believe I was alive. Then she beat her fists against me, in fury and grief; but, suddenly, she crumpled. I caught her in my arms, just in time.
43
We crossed the Great River in sunlight for Khety’s funeral rites; Khety’s wife, Kiya, and her daughter, and his younger brother Intef, and my own family. We were all dressed in white linens. Kiya’s belly was swollen now; the baby was growing. The girls sat together, Khety’s daughter folded into the generous company of my girls, her face alert to the strange seriousness of the ritual. Tanefert tried to comfort Kiya; but to her the river traffic all around us was simply unreal.
I found myself gazing into the dazzle of the light on the waters, mesmerized and apart. Since my return home, and from the dead, three weeks ago, I had kept myself apart. The grim agony of separating myself from the addiction was finally over; but I felt empty and detached. The darkness was still inside me. I had told Tanefert everything on my first night home. And her silence had taken possession of the house as surely as Horemheb’s soldiers had taken possession of the city. We slept like strangers, and her eyes avoided me during the day. As I sat on the boat, my son insisted on sitting with me, his hand in mine, as if he were afraid he would lose me again. He gazed up at my face, perhaps searching for the father he remembered and could no longer recognize.
At the embalmer’s shop on the west bank, we met Khety’s coffin, and the cortège of priests and mourners who would accompany it. The coffin was placed on its covered bier, decorated with bouquets, and pulled by the embalmer’s men to the cemetery. I insisted on joining them in their labour. I wanted to feel the true burden of Khety’s death as I dragged my friend’s coffin to his tomb. The professional mourners went ahead of us in their blue robes, tearing their hair and beating their breasts. I hated their high wails and cries, so rehearsed and inauthentic. The chest containing the canopic jars was dragged on a bier by more of the embalmer’s men. The priest, wearing a panther skin thrown over his shoulder, went before the coffin, sprinkling milk on the ground, and wafting incense in the bright air of the morning. Behind came the funeral servants, carrying the trays, foods and flowers, jars of wine and jugs of beer, and the other necessities of the funeral feast. And behind that, others carried the few objects from Khety’s life that would be left in the tomb with him.
We came to the cemetery, and the tomb. The lector priest was waiting for us, chanting prayers and spells from the papyrus roll he held out before him. Khety’s mummy was propped upright, and the priest set about preparing the instruments he would need for the Opening of the Mouth ceremony. The lector priest began to recite the Instructions, and the priest approached the tomb statue of Khety. I tried and failed to find his face in the generalized features the embalmers had given him. He was one with the innumerable dead, now. Following the prescribed gestures, the spells and libations, the priest took his instruments from their alabaster tablet, one by one, and touched the face of the statue with the forked pesesh knife, the chisel, the adze and the rod ending in the snake’s head–restoring the senses to the dead man so that he might live again in the Otherworld, and eat, and speak his name. He made offerings of incense and natron, of food and wine, and the traditional cuts of meat–the foreleg and the heart. All this was intended to reunite the parts of the body and the spirit; and I could only hope the magic would work powerfully, restoring the butchered parts of Khety’s body to his new, whole self, in the beautiful light of the Otherworld.
It was hot. The children, who had been awed and fascinated, began to look around, slightly confused and bored. Tanefert gave them each a drink of water. Intef looked dazed. Kiya stared straight ahead, holding her daughter’s hand. The child must have been puzzled by the elaborate rituals, and by the disappearance of her father into this anonymous wooden shape.
Finally, the rites were concluded; Khety’s coffin was carried down the small steps into the tomb chamber. The canopic chest was settled in its niche. I descended into the small space of the tomb; there, around the mummy, I placed his senet game board, over which we had spent many hours of play, and his staff of office, and his knife, which, according to ritual, I broke so that it could not be used against him in the afterlife. And then I laid in front of Khety the papyrus scroll of the Book of the Dead which I had commissioned especially for him, with his name written throughout, and whispered my earnest prayer for his afterlife, that he should pass the trials of death, and arrive at the Field of Reeds, and that it should bring him all the pleasures and the peace he dreamed of, but never quite achieved in this life; and that, if he could, he might one day forgive me my failure of friendship.
Kiya and Intef kissed his headrest, and then passed it to me to place gently beside the coffin. But when her daughter gave me his favourite old sandals, Kiya suddenly began to weep in terrible and uncontrollable jolts. Her daughter embraced her, and Tanefert went to her support. Then all the girls began to cry together. Quickly, the funeral feast was prepared; back up the stairs, in the light of day, they stood at the chapel door together, eating and weeping, weeping and eating. I could do neither.
The priests and embalmers whispered their condolences and excuses, and made their way back to the river, with all the tools and paraphernalia of the rites. The professional mourners had already gone to another engagement, another burial. Death was everywhere, of course.
There was nothing more to do. There was nothing else to be achieved. Tanefert came to my side. We didn’t speak. Very carefully I took her hand in mine, and this time she allowed me to do so. We remained like that for a few, vital moments. Then, with a brief squeeze, she withdrew hers, gathered the children together, and led them away.
Kiya remained behind, unwilling to leave. We stood together in the heat. She looked at me.
‘I loved him,’ I said.
She nodded.
‘He knew that.’
She touched her belly. Her words, and the sorrow on her face, and the sadness of the unborn child inside her who would never know its father, suddenly passed into me, into my dead, black heart. And then bitter tears poured out of me, despite myself; my cries of grief were wordless and helpless as a child. I wept for what I had risked, and what I had lost, and for who I had become. She held me, as I buckled, as best she could.
As we walked back to the Great River, arm in arm, we were silent. But just before we came to the boat, she turned to me.
‘When the child is born, if it’s a boy, I will name him after his father.’
‘It is a fine name to carry through life,’ I said.
‘He will live for his father. He will be a good man, too. You will take care of him. You will stand in for his father,’ she said simply.
Epilogue
Year 1 of the Reign of King Horemheb, Horus is in Jubilation
Thebes, Egypt
Our skiff lolled on the edges of the Great River, among the reed beds, a little way south of the city, in the dappled shade. It was a quiet afternoon. Amenmose and I lay back with our fishing rods in our hands. Thoth crouched in the prow, gazing suspiciously down his long nose at us, and glancing swiftly aside at the sudden ripples made by the fish as they snapped at insects. He hated the open water. Ducks argued and birds sang invisibly within the dense stands of papyrus; across the water we could hear the calls of other fishermen, and further off the farmers and their children at work in the fields. I offered my son some bread, which he took and chewed thoughtfully.
‘Father?’ he said, in the way he usually commenced a long enquiry into philosophical matters.
; ‘Son…’
‘What happens when we die?’
‘Well, it’s a long story. First our hearts must be judged in the presence of Osiris himself, and the forty-two judges.’
‘Why?’
‘To see whether we have lived a good life,’ I answered.
‘And how can they tell?’
He squinted up at me in the strong sunlight.
‘Your heart is weighed in the scales, against the feather of the truth, which belongs to the Goddess Maat, and you have to make a denial of wrongdoing,’ I said.
‘And then what?’ he insisted.
‘If your heart is heavy with evil or wrongdoing, then it will tip the scales against the feather, and it will be gobbled up by Ammut, who stands waiting by the scales; she’s a monster with the head of a crocodile and the hind legs of a hippopotamus. But, if you’re clever and quick, before she gets it, you can also ask for forgiveness,’ I said.
‘How?’ he asked, curious.
‘You have to make an offering to Osiris, because he is God of Truth. You have to say: “Oh lords of justice, put away the evil harm that is in me. Be gracious to me and remove all anger which is in your heart against me.”’
‘So next time you’re angry with me, or with any of us, we can say that?’
‘You can try…’ I said, smiling.
He was silent for a long moment.
‘So what’s it like in the Otherworld?’ he asked.
I looked around, at the wide sky and the shining waters, and the city in the distance, with its temple pylons, and its stone palaces and poor districts. I looked to the east, and the mystery of Ra’s rebirth, and to the west, the great desert, where Ra set each night in the place of the dead. I looked up at the dark, perfect shape of a falcon silently sweeping across the face of the sun. I thought about the future in which my son would live his life, under a new King, and a new dynasty. I looked down into the green waters of the Great River, ever flowing, and remembered my dead. I remembered my father, and the dead Nubian boys, and Khety, and Ankhesenamun. But their faces didn’t haunt me now. I could look them in the eye. I thought about Horemheb’s offer. Perhaps, after all, I could make a difference to the world my children would grow up in.
I looked at my young son, staring at me, waiting for a good answer.
‘It’s like this,’ I replied. ‘It’s like this moment.’
Suddenly he called out in excitement. A fish was pulling on his line. And then, to my surprise and his delight, he reeled it in with a skill he must have learned from his grandfather, on those long fishing days without me. And he stood–holding up the silver fish, as it danced and struggled on the line–laughing and grinning proudly.
Author’s Note
The King’s Wife to Suppiluliuma of the Hittites–‘He who is my husband is dead! I have no son! I do not want to take one of my subjects and make him my husband. I did not write to any other land, I wrote to you! They say sons are plentiful for you. Give me one of your sons. He will be my husband, and he will be King in Egypt!’
From the Seventh Tablet, The Deeds of Suppiluliuma As Told By His Son Mursilis II
This letter (actually a clay tablet in Akkadian, the lingua franca of international diplomacy at the time) from an Egyptian queen to Suppiluliuma I, the King of the Hittites, was discovered in the Hittite archives, and is a tantalizing clue to one of the most mysterious and compelling unsolved mysteries of the Ancient World.
It is in every way an extraordinary, audacious communication–not least because the Egyptians and the Hittites had been at war for decades, battling for control of the Syrian territories and kingdoms between the borders of their empires, and so such a letter could have been seen as treacherous. But even more significantly, no Egyptian royal had ever made such a request to a foreigner, let alone an enemy; the trade in international royal brides was strictly a one-way affair. And yet here is an Egyptian queen asking her enemy for one of his sons to join her on the throne. It is an extraordinary mystery to rival that of the death of Tutankhamun.
In the letter, the queen is called ‘Dahamunzu’, which may be a translation of the Egyptian title Tahemetnesu (the King’s Wife). For complex reasons of Egyptian chronology and the uncertainty surrounding the translation of the Hittite rendering of Egyptian names, the attribution cannot be certain; some scholars propose a chronology according to which the King’s Wife might have been Nefertiti. But the letter is thought by others to have been sent by Ankhesenamun, widow of Tutankhamun, and daughter of Akhenaten and Nefertiti. The latter attribution forms the historical basis of this novel.
Ankhesenamun became the last surviving member of her dynasty, the eighteenth, when her husband Tutankhamun died aged around nineteen. She was probably only twenty-one years old herself at that moment; and she had no heirs. It is thought she was then married to Ay, the powerful courtier who had been closely involved with the royal family since the Amarna period–indeed he might even have been her own great-uncle. Already an old man by the time of the marriage, Ay ruled for only four or five years. His death must have presented Ankhesenamun, at this point perhaps twenty-five or twenty-six years old, with a grave set of dilemmas. How could she rule alone? How could she continue her line? How could she ensure the stability of her own position, and that of Egypt, domestically and internationally? Who could she trust? The elite men of the nobility and the priesthood might well have seemed more like a threat to a young and relatively inexperienced queen, than a source of support. Above all, how could she defend herself against the ambitious challenge for the crown by Horemheb, the general of the Egyptian army? No wonder she wrote in one of the Hittite letters, ‘I am afraid!’
In the eighteenth dynasty other royal women had achieved great power, including Queen Hatshepsut (1473–1458 BC), who had enjoyed the full support of the Amun priesthood in crowning herself; Queen Tiy, consort of Egypt’s own Sun King, Amenhotep III; and, most famously, Nefertiti (c.1380–1340 BC), principal wife of Akhenaten, whose story is told in Nefertiti: The Book of the Dead. But perhaps, due to her youth, relative inexperience of power, and lack of a stable royal marriage and heirs, Ankhesenamun’s position at this moment was much more vulnerable.
Egypt in the eighteenth dynasty was the greatest power of the Ancient Near East, and the Hittites were their most confrontational enemy. But after the later collapse of their empire, the Hittites disappeared from history, and not until the late twentieth century did they become the focus of archaeological and historical research. Kingship was hereditary, and the king, addressed as ‘My Sun’, acted as high priest for the kingdom. Among his responsibilities were the supervision of annual festivals and the maintenance of the sanctuaries and temples.
Hattusa, the fortified capital of the Hittite homeland, was in central Anatolia (modern Turkey); through the might of their armies (a mixture of professionals, men answering the call of feudal obligation, and mercenary troops), and their control of vassal states and territories, they conquered northern Syria and extended their empire so that it stretched from the Aegean coast of Anatolia as far as Babylon. By the time of the setting of this novel, they had established themselves as one of the key players on the international stage. King Suppiluliuma I (c.1380–c.1346 BC) was one of the great warrior kings, who corresponded on equal terms with the other kings of the Ancient Near East. But the astonishing success of the Hittite expansion brought them into direct conflict with Egypt.
At the time this novel takes place, the Egyptians and the Hittites had been at war for years. At stake was control of Syria, the crossroads for all the commerce of the Ancient Near East. From the great port of Ugarit, goods from all over the eastern Mediterranean–cedar, grain, gold, silver, lapis lazuli, tin, horses, etc.–would arrive to be sold and distributed via a network of trade routes that stretched south to Egypt, east to Babylon and north-east to Mittani. So Syria was vital for commerce, but it was also strategically indispensable, and the great empires warred and negotiated with each other for influence and dominance ove
r it.
Egypt had long controlled southern and central Syrian territories, which were a source of great profit and political prestige. But Suppiluliuma, in a series of what must have been daring military campaigns, quickly took control of the northern kingdoms and cities of the region from the empire of Mittani. The status quo was threatened, and the region became politically volatile. (It is not hard to recognize the parallels with today’s Middle East.) Characters such as Aziru of Amurru, as historically attested, grasped the opportunity to forge alliances that suited their ambitions, and to extend their own territories.
So Ankhesenamun’s letter to Suppiluliuma requesting him to send her a son to marry was unprecedented, and came at a time of escalating conflict between the two superpowers. Suppiluliuma was, understandably, very suspicious of her request. According to the annals, he sent a high official to Egypt to investigate. And the following spring, the high official (the Ambassador Hattusa in this novel) returned with a representative of the Egyptian court (Nakht, in the novel) with a further letter:
Why did you say ‘they deceive me’ in that way? Had I a son, would I have written about my own and my country’s shame to a foreign land? You did not believe me and have said as much to me. He who was my husband has died. A son I have not. Never shall I take a servant of mine and make him my husband. I have written to no other country, only to you have I written. They say your sons are many: so give me one son of yours. To me he will be husband, but in Egypt he will be King.
According to the annals, Suppiluliuma remained suspicious:
You keep asking me for a son of mine as if it were my duty. He will in some way become a hostage, but King you will not make him.
But we know that, after further negotiations, a deal was agreed, and his son Zannanza was sent back to Egypt. But then, disaster struck, for Zannanza was murdered on the journey. The Hittites blamed the Egyptians, of course:
