City of Dreams
Authors: Anton Gill
Anton Gill
has asserted his rights under the Copyright, Design and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work.
First published in 1993 by Bloomsbury
This edition published in 2015 by Endeavour Press Ltd.
The end of the knout hit the base of his spine with a force that burst a star of pain through his body, to his fingertips, feet, and skull. The prisoners’ heads were shaved but they were allowed no covering as they worked in the granite quarry in the heat of the day. The priests had decreed that the god Ra must also participate in their punishment.
Another blow flung him on to the harsh ground, where the broken rocks stabbed at knees and elbows. Still, he scrambled forward to escape a third lash. He heard the hiss of the scourge through the air, but this time the guard only succeeded in catching him across the back of the legs, where the muscles, hardened by eighteen months’ labour, were equal to withstanding its force. But he had no strength left to evade a fourth attack, and lay prone, feeling the sun’s harsh heat, tasting salt from the blood on his lips as it mingled with the scented dust of the quarry. A spiked rock close to his eyes loomed large as a mountain.
Summoning the last of his strength he braced himself for another blow. To get more courage he whispered in his heart his name: Surere. From the corner of his eye, he saw the end of the whip flick past. Beyond it, the dirty feet of other prisoners, who were standing out of range, watching.
The guard relented.
‘Get up,’ Surere heard far above him.
Cautiously, he pushed himself on to hands and knees, fearing that the guard would change his mind; but he looked up and saw the man’s muscular back as he walked off, looking for another shirker.
He rose, firing silent curses. The one thing that had preserved his sanity in this southern hell, the Number Seven Red Granite Quarry near the River’s First Cataract, was the maintenance of his dignity. He had been a district governor under the old king, Akhenaten, and a district governor he would remain, though it was already long since he had been stripped of rank and title, and shipped down from the City of the Horizon in a convict barge with many of his fellow-officials during the purges that followed Akhenaten’s death and the collapse of his new capital.
How long had it been? Two years? Three? Surere had struggled to keep a note of time, but only the annual inundation of the river marked it in the changeless succession of sunny days, at a place where not even the great festivals were noticed. In the time that had passed, most of his former colleagues, senior scribes and civil servants like himself, had perished through the unaccustomed hard labour.
Surere put his survival down to the strict continuation of his inner life. He would never be impolite, nor allow the brutalising effects of the labour camp to enter his soul; though the effort this cost was great. He had known men of culture here who had become so obsessed with self-comfort that they masturbated ceaselessly, their hands straying to limp penises even at work, whenever the guards’ attention was not on them, their skin grey, drawn across their faces like papyrus, their eyes milky at the death of intelligence. He had known officials who at the court of the City of the Horizon would never have been seen even by their concubines, let alone their wives, without make-up or unperfumed, now careless even of washing, their ragged loincloths daubed with the crust of faeces, the disgusting stubble of beards on their chins, their breaths foul from neglected teeth and the sour-bread-and-onion doled out to them here.
He fell to work again at the relatively easy task which good behaviour and an ability to survive had earned him: scraping away the chippings that accumulated as the masons worked at cutting an obelisk out of a sloping bank of granite. The palm-rope shackles around his feet still chafed at the worn skin, though by now his feet had grown sufficiently hard not to be unduly worried by them. Diseased feet spelt death for a prisoner. Unable to walk, he was unable to earn his keep, and as no doctors worked in the camp, the end would come either through the blows of the guards, or be sought by the prisoner himself, who might drag himself to the water’s edge at night and give himself up to the River.
He gathered dusty shards into his tattered apron, looking down at his calloused hands as if they belonged to a stranger. He remembered touching his dear lover with them. Amenenopet, that sweet boy. He only dwelt on the tender thought for a moment. The purity of youth. How beautiful life would be if one could be spared the disillusion of experience.
Shaking his head, Surere clambered out of the trench to dump the shards on to the waste-sledge which would later be rolled down the slope to the dump. He knew that here in the labour camp one of the many ways to madness led through remembering a happier past.
He turned his heart in another direction. For weeks now he had been cultivating one of the masons. They were semi-skilled men who roughly hewed out the obelisks from the rock before they were loaded on to barges bound downriver for the Northern and Southern Capitals, where master masons would trim them to their final shape, and metalworkers and carvers would adorn them with the hieroglyphs appropriate to the subject of their commemoration.
This man, Khaemhet, would soon be taking a new obelisk to the Southern Capital, and Surere felt confident that at last he would be selected to be one of the very few privileged prisoners to accompany it, though until now no former official of Akhenaten’s court among the camp’s inmates had been accorded such a favour. The late pharaoh, whose visionary reign had ended so disastrously for the empire of the Black Land, had even been deprived of his name. Now, under the pharaoh Tutankhamun, his predecessor could only be referred to by the words Great Criminal. Surere shuddered. To take a man’s name away, even if he were a god like the pharaoh, was to destroy his soul. The thought of non-existence after death was too horrible to contemplate.
The day was well advanced, and the sun, in his
seqtet
boat, had begun the descent to the western horizon. Still the heat beat down, and reflected back from the smooth granite slope, setting up a fierce glow in Surere’s face. For a moment he allowed his heart to wander again through the streets of the City of the Horizon, the capital Akhenaten had built as the centre for his new religion, for which all the old gods had been swept away. The pharaoh had taught his people to worship the life that came from Aten — the power that dances in the sunlight. Unbidden, lines from the king’s great song came to Surere, and the dust and heat of the labour camp receded. It was as if a cool hand had been placed on his brow, soothing his loneliness and his desperation.
Thy dawning is beautiful in the horizon of heaven,
O living Aten, beginning of life!
When thou risest in the eastern horizon of heaven,
Thou fillest every land with thy beauty;
For thou art beautiful, great, glittering, high over the earth;
Thy rays, they encompass the lands, even all thou hast made.
Thou art Ra, and thou hast carried them all away captive;
Thou bindest them by thy love.
Though thou art afar, thy rays are on earth;
Though thou art on high, thy footprints are the day.
He stooped to gather more chips of stone, flying from the bronze chisel of the mason. Passing close to the man, Surere could smell his sweat, and thought how it would have offended him once. Now, he was sure, he smelt far worse himself. Sensing his eyes, the mason turned round to glare. Surere straightened up, easing his back, and carried another apron-load to the sledge.
His attention was attracted to the River far below, where a massive barge was manoeuvring itself into position. It must have come down to the quay while he was working, for he had not noticed it before. From its vast beam and length, and its battered appearance, he knew it to be an obelisk barge, and his pulse quickened. Was it possible that this time he might be on it when it sailed, instead of just watching it go?
Controlling his excitement, knowing that hope followed by disappointment was a destroyer here, he worked on for the rest of that afternoon with a diligence which surprised the mason, who put it down to the beating Surere had taken from the guard. The mason speeded up his own work; this was the last obelisk he would have to cut here, he thanked the gods. As soon as it was released from its rocky bed, his indenture would be finished, and he would make the long journey north to work in the limestone quarries of Tura, where no prisoner labour was employed. The mason disliked working with convicts. Their presence, and the smell of their despair, depressed him, made him feel like one of them.
Later, in the compound, on the narrow strip of hard land between the quarry and the River, Surere squatted a little apart from his fellow inmates, stooped over the usual evening meal of
shemshemet
, the glutinous cabbage stew which was their staple diet. There was not much social contact between the prisoners: the authorities had seen to it that few former officials of Akhenaten’s court were placed together in the same gangs, and the two Surere shared a tent with at night, along with a dozen ordinary petty criminals serving short sentences for picking pockets or minor fraud, were quiet men, turned inwards, unable to forget what they had been, or face what they were now. Therefore no one minded or noticed that Surere sat apart with his chipped earthenware bowl, spooning the stew into his mouth with his fingers.
Night fell, and here and there a torch — papyrus bundles dipped in bitumen — was lit. Each cast a little pool of light, and stark shadows within it, before giving up to the gigantic darkness. Here, not even cicadas broke the silence, and the only noise, now comforting, now mocking, was the restless murmur of the River.
Against the torchlight, Surere could see the silhouettes of the strong cedar derricks, with their palm-ropes and cradles. Near them, still on the log rollers which had transported it from its birthplace in the quarry to the quay, lay a large mottled obelisk, now just a dark shape, the flickering light making its outline shadowy and threatening. Scooping up the last of his food, he scanned the shoreline for the brawny figure of Khaemhet. There were few people about, picking their way along the shore on some late business or standing in small groups from which the sound of muted conversation came faintly to him. The friendly stonemason was not among them, and Surere reminded himself sternly that he must not let hope get the better of him. Nevertheless, he continued to look until the torches burned low, and there was no one left on the quay except the night guards.
He walked down to the River to wash his eating bowl, and then himself. This was allowed and even approved of by the camp authorities. Security in the compound was relaxed. The quarry and the camp lay on the east bank, and there was nowhere to escape to. Away from the River lay desert. On the opposite bank, if one succeeded in the almost impossible task of swimming the distance, more desert, and the Kharga oasis ten days’ march across it. To the south and north, equal difficulties lay. The only way out was by getting on to a barge bound for one of the capital cities, and making an escape from there.
Surere squatted by the dark water. From somewhere out of sight but not far away a girl squealed, her voice quickly muffled. The voice sounded too clear, too innocent to belong to one of the gruff Syrian whores who were kept in a palm-thatched shack, its walls decorated with imaginative pictures of girls strapping their legs around jackasses and baboons, for the benefit of the civilian workers in the camp. Surere thought of Amenenopet again, briefly. What could have happened to him? Sadly, he acknowledged that in his memory the boy’s features were becoming blurred. Once, he would never have believed that possible; the thought would have been unbearable. Now, all it elicited was a dry smile. Sentimentality was another road to death.
He stood up, easing his back again, the pain from the beating resolving itself into a dull ache. The moon had risen and its light on the black water made it seem thick, like oil. He started up the slope that led back to the compound and his tent. Halfway up it, he heard the unseen girl cry out again.
The sound made him pause, trying to decide if it had masked another, barely perceived, but which might have been a footfall. He quickened his pace and reached the edge of the compound without seeing anyone or hearing anything more, but before he left the cover of the tall rushes that grew along its River side, a man stepped softly on to the path in front of him.
‘Khaemhet.’
The mason looked at him shyly.
‘Were you following me?’
‘I saw you down by the River. I was going to talk to you tonight but I wanted to be sure to see you alone.’
‘There was a girl down there somewhere.’
‘One of Kheruef’s girls,’ said Khaemhet, mentioning the name of the brothel-keeper. ‘A new arrival. She came up with a couple of others on the barge this afternoon. Kheruef said he was going to try them out.’ Khaemhet took a step closer, then hesitated. ‘I didn’t want to risk them disturbing us.’
Surere looked at him coolly, smelling the
seshen
with which he had perfumed himself. Khaemhet could not hold his gaze, but looked down at his square, mason’s hands, folding and unfolding his fingers.
‘Have you news for me?’ asked Surere, hardly daring to put the question for fear of a negative answer.
‘Yes,’ replied Khaemhet.
‘And what is it?’
Now the mason’s broad young face broke into a smile. Perfect teeth, thought Surere, glad that his own, through hard brushing with the beaten ends of twigs, had survived his imprisonment.