by Tom Holland
‘No!’ cried King Thoth-mes suddenly, gazing upon the infant -- the thing -- that was his child. Its skull was hideously distended and long, its belly swollen, its limbs very spindly: a loathsome parody of King Thoth-mes himself. Yet worst were its eyes, for they were burning bright and seemed more a demon’s than a mortal child’s; and then suddenly it began to hiss and spit, and reach out with its fingers, which were thin and hooked like an insect’s claws. It appeared to be sniffing after something; and then Joseph realised that it was the blood of its own mother, spilled across the floor.
‘No!’ King Thoth-mes cried out again. He stumbled forward, and Joseph saw how palely the sweat gleamed on his brow. He tried to reach out for the creature in the High Priest’s arms, but as he did so, he choked and began to clutch at his chest, as though the horror of what he had seen could be ripped out from his heart. But his heart would not be stilled; and Joseph, as he ran forward to take King Thoth-mes in his arms, could hear it thudding very fast and loud.
‘The horror will kill him!’ he cried. ‘His heart will not endure it!’
‘Then fetch physicians,’ answered the High Priest. ‘Go! I will stay with Pharaoh, for it is you who knows where help can best be found.’
Joseph met his stare a moment in silent suspicion, then gazed down at King Thoth-mes and listened again to his heart. A second time, Joseph glanced up and met the High Priest’s stare, and then he rose and hurried away, calling for attendants. By the time he had summoned sufficient servants, however, and returned to the chamber itself, King Thoth-mes was no longer there -- nor the Queen, nor the High Priest, nor the hideous child. Of the blood as well, which had been smeared across the floor, there was now not a trace, and indeed, it was as though all the horrors which he had witnessed in the room had never been.
Still, though, long after he had dismissed all the attendants, Joseph lingered in the chamber, hoping that King Thoth-mes might perhaps reappear. All remained silent, however; and as the shadows of evening began to lengthen, so his sense of despair and dread grew the more. Then suddenly, just as he was on the verge of abandoning all hope and leaving, he heard footsteps from behind him and, turning round, saw the form of the High Priest.
The two men stood in silence for a moment, then the High Priest bowed his head. ‘The falcon is flown to heaven,’ he announced in a tone drained of emotion. ‘The new falcon is arisen in his place.’
Joseph breathed in deeply. ‘I am sorry . . .’ he whispered, ‘to hear such news ... I am sorry’ He breathed in again, then he narrowed his eyes. ‘Yet, so Pharaoh told me, it was your claim that he would never die.’
The High Priest’s face remained utterly impassive. ‘Do not, O Wazir, seek to intrude upon our mysteries -- for have we ever trespassed upon your own affairs of state? King Thoth-mes is dead -- King Amen-hetep is now the ruler over Egypt. He will need the guidance of a wise and loyal servant -- and who else, O Yuya, can that be if not you? For you should know that it was the last wish of King Thoth-mes, spoken upon his dying breath, that you should be to his son what you had always been to him.’
Joseph remained silent a while; then he nodded shortly. ‘In his death as in his life, I shall of course obey him.’ He paused a moment more, meeting the High Priest’s eye. ‘Yet still I would like to know if he can truly be dead.’
For the first time that evening, a flicker of amusement touched the High Priest’s lips. ‘If there are mysteries which are hidden from all but the highest of my fellows, why then should I share them with you, when you do not even believe in our traditions and our gods?’ He paused; and again, staring into his eyes, Joseph imagined that he caught the glimpse of an infinite loneliness. ‘Do not pry,’ the High Priest whispered suddenly, touching Joseph lightly upon the chest with his staff. ‘For believe me -- there are secrets it were better you should never come to learn.’
Then he bowed once again, and turned and left the room. Joseph did not seek to follow him. But later, when all three of his children lay before him asleep, he pulled out the papyrus which King Thoth-mes had smuggled to him and read it closely, the shadow of perturbation deepening all the while upon his face. When he had finished with it, he crossed to where Tyi, his infant daughter, lay, and for several minutes gazed down upon her tiny sleeping form, abandoned to his own thoughts. Then at length, he crossed to the balcony and slipped the papyrus under his cloak, gazing all the while at the distant western hills, beyond which lay the valley of the tombs of the Pharaohs.
It was from the same balcony, some seventy days after the death of King Thoth-mes, that Joseph watched the embalmed body being taken from the Palace, borne upon the shoulders of the worshippers of Amen, swathed beneath bandages and encased within gold. Joseph had not sought to join the procession, but even so, he stood long while watching the passage of the torches as they flickered in a line across the western plain, winding through the night towards the tomb beyond the western hills, cut from the rock of the sacred valley. Only when all was darkness again did Joseph turn at last. He wandered slowly to the room where his daughter lay asleep and, picking her up, cradled her in his arms, inspecting the beauty of her face very closely. Then he stood a long while as before, lost in thought.
But at this point, Haroun saw the approach of morning and broke off from his tale. ‘O Commander of the Faithful,’ he said, ‘if you would care to return here tomorrow evening, then I shall describe to you the fortunes of Joseph’s daughter, Tyi.’
And so the Caliph did as Haroun suggested; and the following evening he returned to the mosque. And Haroun said:
By the explicit order of the will of King Thoth-mes, Tyi was brought up as a royal princess, so that from her earliest days she lived in the Harim, in the splendour of its chambers and amidst its gardens filled with flowers. Yet she was fairer herself than the fairest flower in bloom; and since she was also the youngest of the children in the Palace, she did not find it hard to become the favourite of her nurses. Certainly she knew herself more admired than the Royal Queens and Princesses, for she was often told so by King Amen-hetep himself, who did not like his sisters save to pull upon their hair. But Tyi did not need Pharaoh to make her feel loved, for she already knew that her father loved her more than all the world. He rarely said as much; but she would often catch him watching her in silence and sometimes, when he hugged her, he would speak to her of her mother. Once he carried Tyi on his shoulders to a spot beyond the Palace, where trees lined the border of a tiny lake, and he told her that her mother had often loved to wander there. He never mentioned the fact again; but as Tyi grew older, so it became her father’s favourite pastime to take her from the Harim and walk with her through the fields, to watch the ducks where they swam upon the lake or the pigeons flying brilliantly white against the sky. For Tyi, such excursions provided rare and fleeting glimpses of freedom; and so she too, like her father and her dead, unknown mother, fell in love with the lake, and with the views of the birds and of the hills towards the west.
This love grew all the more intense as Tyi’s life in the Harim began to worsen. Her brothers, like her father, had always adored her, and it had pleased them -- since it served to help them feel more like men -- to spoil their younger sister horribly. In time, however, both Inen and Ay had left the Harim behind and entered the great world which stretched beyond its walls, so that Tyi, still a little girl, felt herself cruelly abandoned. She was bored with the gardens and the courtyards of the Harim; she did not love the company of the other girls about her; she wanted only to be with her brothers again. When either of them came to call upon her, then, she would ask them greedily for details of all the wonders of the world, and when they left she would be plunged deep into tantrums of resentment and frustration. But when she spoke of leaving the Harim herself, her companions, Pharaoh’s sisters, would mock her and take their revenge for their brother’s treatment of them by pulling Tyi’s own hair. As she grew older and ever more beautiful, so the Princesses’ hatred of their rival steadily increased, until at last
Tyi was desperate with her passion to escape. But still her only tastes of freedom were her walks with her father - those, and the cherished visits from her brothers.
Both Ay and Inen, in their very different ways, were equally precious to her. Ay brought a taste of the wide-open deserts, for already, although he was barely fourteen years of age, he could hunt, and ride a chariot, and excel in all the arts of war as well as any man. Inen, the elder, was closer and more reserved, as though his silence protected some deep-buried secret, which he could barely endure to admit to himself. Yet his intelligence was piercing and ever restless: Tyi suspected that sometimes, when, their father was away, he would spy on the priests of the Temple of Amen, and he could penetrate to their heart the workings of the Court. It especially pleased Tyi, enduring the torments inflicted upon her by Pharaoh’s many sisters, to think that she knew more of their brother’s doings even than the Queen; and so when Inen’s visits began suddenly to diminish, Tyi grew upset and alarmed. Several months went by; and still in all that time, her elder brother never once came to call. One day, when Tyi was walking with her father through the fields beyond the Palace, she asked him where Inen had gone, and she watched as his expression, normally so calm, at once began to darken. But Tyi could not believe that her father might truly be angry, for she had never seen him lose his temper before; and so she asked him once again where her brother might have gone. Joseph paused in his walk, and stood frozen a moment. ‘I dread to think,’ he said at last, turning as he did so and raising his hand to silence any further questions from his daughter. ‘He is the thing now of my deadliest enemies. I can do nothing for him. Do not, please, mention your brother’s name again.’ And so stern did he appear, and such was Tyi’s respect for her father’s wishes, that she restrained her curiosity for the whole of that evening and only succumbed to it on the following day, when she sent a messenger to hunt out Ay.
She had to wait for several days. The delay did not surprise her, for Ay, she knew, had grown to be King Amen-hetep’s closest friend and the two of them were often abroad on their pleasures, leaving the tedious affairs of state far behind. Almost a week passed before Ay finally appeared, carrying the pelt of a lion on his back, and accompanied by King Amen-hetep who bore a second lion’s head. Tyi immediately prostrated herself; for although the King had once been her playmate, she had not seen him now for almost a year, and she remembered how capable he had been of strange humours and rages. But at once he bent down and raised her by her hand, kissing it very lingeringly, so that she blushed and turned away. Ay, watching this, winked and laughed loudly, then gestured down at the corpses of the lions.
‘You see,’ he said, ‘we have brought you some presents.’
Tyi gazed at the bodies, then wrinkled her nose. ‘I would rather have live ones.’
King Amen-hetep shrugged and smiled. ‘That can easily be arranged.’ He glanced at Ay. ‘For we are mighty hunters, are we not? Only just sixteen, and already there is no one in Egypt who can rival me.’
Ay nodded and smiled but Tyi, watching them together, doubted that the King could be the equal of her brother. Though still almost boys, they were both very large; whereas Ay, however, seemed carved from the hardest marble, King Amen-hetep’s belly and limbs appeared far more soft. Nevertheless, Tyi kept her opinion to herself, for the King seemed determined to impress her with wild tales of his prowess, and he would pause every so often to fondle the lion’s severed head. At one point, he dabbled his hands in the still sticky gore and sucked on each finger; then, just before leaving, he daubed Tyi’s mouth red with another smear of blood. He began to lick his own lips extravagantly, and Ay promptly laughed; but Tyi, although she smiled, did not understand the joke. She was relieved when King Amen-hetep departed at last, and she could ask Ay what he might have heard of their elder brother. Ay frowned and shrugged his shoulders, for he knew nothing; but he promised her faithfully to find out all he could.
It was not Ay who called upon her in the following days, however, but King Amen-hetep, who kissed her hand as before and then suddenly, to her astonishment, seized her in his arms. The effort made him pant, but his fat lips were parted all the same in a hungry smile, and Tyi tensed as she felt them soft and damp against her own. With a sudden effort she wriggled from his grasp, but her assailant’s smile only broadened all the more. ‘It is fitting,’ he wheezed, ‘that I am such a mighty hunter -- for I see you are not only beautiful but spirited as well. A pretty thing to chase!’
Tyi met his gaze with bare contempt. ‘I would have hoped I was worthy of being something more than that.’
For a moment, King Amen-hetep’s smile was frozen on his lips. ‘You are indeed,’ he whispered suddenly. He crossed to her, and as he did so his smile seemed to fade into a pout of half-regret. ‘You are indeed,’ he whispered again, taking her arm and leading her across to the balcony. ‘For why else would I have brought you a gift so worthy of a queen?’
He gestured to the courtyard below where three black-maned lions, blood-streaked and covered in dust, lay slumped in a cage. King Amen-hetep beamed at Tyi with pride. ‘I caught them myself, just myself and Ay’
Tyi gazed at them in silence.
The King reached out to touch her on her arm. ‘Why do you not thank me,’ he whispered, ‘for your gift?’
Tyi shrugged. ‘I would rather have them free.’ She glanced behind her at the Harim walls. Wild creatures should not be kept in cages.’
King Amen-hetep tensed, then nodded violently and clapped his plump, soft hands. ‘And so it shall be done!’ He took Tyi by the arm and led her down into the courtyard below, where she pressed her face closely against the bars of the cage. Despite the lions’ wounds and evident exhaustion, their eyes were still agleam with a menacing dignity, and one of them, meeting Tyi’s gaze, stirred and half-rose to sit on its haunches. It yawned very slowly, and the tails of all three began to beat to and fro.
Tyi was just thinking to herself that she had never before seen such beauty and power in living creatures, when a train of servants began to pull upon the cage and roll it across the courtyard. Tyi turned to the King, to ask him what his plans for the animals were, and he smiled and pointed towards a tiny metal gate, framed on one side by a high white wall and on the other by the highest portion of the Harim. Tyi frowned as she watched the metal gate being opened and the cage led inside. ‘But those are the gardens of the Great Queen!’ she exclaimed.
King Amen-hetep laughed. ‘No longer,’ he replied. He took Tyi by the arm again, and led her up to the Harim roof. Looking down, she could see the three lions, freed now from their cage, draped amongst the garden’s rare and precious trees, and despite herself, she smiled and cried out with pleasure. Her suitor’s own smile at once grew thicker. He raised her hand and kissed it once again. ‘A gift worthy,’ he murmured, ‘as I said, of a Queen.’
Then he turned and left, and Tyi, watching him go, felt a thrill of ambition and sudden hope, all the sweeter for having risen so unforeseen. She lay an hour, watching her lions, before descending back into the coolness of the Harim, and the gardens appointed to the women who dwelt there, for she felt a strong desire herself to sit by fountains and flowers. But when she arrived there, she saw to her annoyance that someone had already taken her favourite spot; and as she drew nearer, she realised that it was Pharaoh’s eldest sister, the Great Queen herself.
Tyi froze and would have walked away, save that the Queen had observed her and called out her name. Nervously, Tyi approached her and knelt before her feet.
‘Do not wonder,’ the Queen said at last, ‘that I am forced to sit in your garden, Harim-girl. My own, as you will know, has been closed to me.’
Tyi bowed her head, but did not reply. Suddenly, the Queen kicked her and sent her sprawling backwards. ‘What did Pharaoh say?’ the Queen hissed. What did he promise you?’
Tyi blinked back her tears of indignation. Now she could see that there were more of King Amen-hetep’s sisters gathered behind the Queen, the
ir faces all as frozen with hatred as their elder’s. The sight filled Tyi with fury herself and she rose to her feet, drawing herself up to her full height. ‘He told me,’ she announced, ‘that I would be Great Queen.’
To her pleasure, from the circle of the Princesses, she could hear whispers and gasps. But the Great Queen herself only shook her head and laughed. ‘That is what he told you?’ she exclaimed. ‘Then it means he is intending to make you his whore.’
‘You may think that if you please,’ Tyi laughed, ‘yet it is plain he loves even my lions more than he loves you.’
At once all the blood seemed to drain from the Great Queen’s face, but as she rose to her feet she appeared almost strangely, icily calm. ‘You will never be more than his concubine,’ she whispered, reaching out to touch the side of Tyi’s face. ‘For - do you not know, my child? - only a Princess may become Pharaoh’s Queen.’
‘I have been raised as a Princess.’
Again, the Great Queen laughed. ‘Hear her!’ she exclaimed. Then at once the smile faded away from her lips, and she seized Tyi’s chin and jerked her head backwards. ‘You lack the royal blood,’ she spat. ‘Therefore you are nothing. Why!’ -- she laughed even more, but hysterically now - ‘you are not even Egyptian -- and yet you think to be our Queen? Look at this hair!’ She pulled upon it violently. ‘See how it crinkles, how ugly it is! See this skin!’ She tore away the tunic to expose Tyi’s breasts. ‘It is black like pitchest night!’ She reached behind her, and Tyi saw that one of her sisters had handed her a whip. ‘It were better for you,’ the Great Queen whispered, ‘if you truly wish to serve as the concubine of Pharaoh, that we flayed your skin from your flesh, so that you might then appear less of a Nubian.’ And so saying, she tore Tyi’s clothing fully from her body, then began to swing down the whip upon her back. Desperately Tyi sought to rise to her feet, but she was seized by the Princesses and pinned to the ground, and the blows did not stop until the Great Queen was exhausted. She tossed the whip aside and gave Tyi a final, parting kick; then she turned with all her sisters, and Tyi was left alone.
