Out of the Black Land (33 page)

But his message was worrying.

I did not have a copy of the prophecies, of course, because the work mentioned the name of Amen-Re and had been suppressed, but edicts cannot suppress memory. Their despairing tone had attracted me when I had been a boy, and I could recall many of the verses without racking my brains.

The line reference, however, meant that I had to reconstruct the whole poem, so I sat down after lunch when men usually sleep and wrote out, from memory, The Prophecies of Neferti on a plaster board which I could easily erase.

Kheperren was sitting at my feet, eating Nubian flat bread, roasted garlic and onions and filling in an occasional gap in my recollection. I am fairly sure that we had the whole of the poem after about an hour.

Line 37 began a verse. It said:

I show you a land in calamity.

Unimaginable happenings.

Men will take weapons of war

Confusion will live in the land.

Men will make arrows of bronze

Men will beg for bread of blood

Laugh with laughing at pain

None will weep at death

None will fast for the dead

Each heart will think only of itself.

‘That sums it up, I think,’ said Kheperren, kissing my knee.

‘You are very cheerful for one reading news of disaster and prophecies of doom!’ I objected. ‘Don’t drop onion juice on my clean cloth.’

‘It’s 12th dynasty, right? The prophecy of the coming of Ammenemes the First. In his time, look a bit further down, it says:

I show you a land in calamity

The weak-armed now are strong

I show you the lowly now as lord…

‘You should have seen the priests at that temple school, ’Hotep, they were filthy and unlearned. Here, look at this next bit. Isn’t all this happening?

The poor man will achieve wealth

The great lady will fornicate to exist…

A sentence is passed

And a hand wields a club

The land is diminished

The counsellors die…

‘And here,’ Kheperren continued:

There will be no Theban Nome

To be the birth-land of every god.

Kheperren dripped more onion juice on my cloth as he went back to his odorous repast, seeming to think that he had made his point.

‘Well, what?’ I twitched the cloth out from under his dripping repast.

‘When Egypt got to that state last time,’ he replied, speaking as though I was a very stupid schoolboy, ‘then a great hero arose and saved everyone, fought off the invaders, brought back the gods and established his throne in might, correct?’

‘Correct.’

‘Then it will happen again. In Egypt, my dear Ptah-hotep, everything happens again and nothing ever happens for the first time, as Master Ammemmes used to say. I’m so glad that he’s well and happy on his estate. What present did you give him, my heart?’

‘All my bracelets and an electrum pectoral which could have purchased a small province. I hope you are right,’ I told him.

‘About what?”

‘The rescuer.’

‘So do I.’

We read the rest of the prophecy in silence. As we read, we drew closer together, until we finished it sitting in the same chair, hugging each other as though we were cold. His body was comforting, even in a fume of garlic.

I show you a son as an enemy

A brother as a foe.

Every mouth says ‘love me’

all good things have passed away

A law is decreed for the state’s ruin

men destroy what is made

Make desolation of what is found

What is made is unmade

Thieves plunder, lords steal.

In all it was something of a relief when the lady Mutnodjme arrived for her cuneiform lesson and we could stop considering the state of Egypt. Kheperren’s general did not need him, so we sat down to sort the diplomatic correspondence and listen to her learning her day’s quota of signs from Harmose, who had claimed his right.

‘This is the sign for… Can you guess?’

‘It looks like a field,’ said my lady Mutnodjme. I observed her as she picked up the stylus to copy the sign. She moved decisively, as though she had always meant to do that which she was doing. It was very attractive, watching her do anything. She was deft. The Kritian princess had called her ‘fat-handed’ which I had taken for an affectionate insult, such as is common between sisters, like Kheperren calling me a commoner or my statement that the nobility were throwing undersized children if Kheperren was their best effort. But now I saw what the soon-to-be-divorced Great Royal Wife meant. The muscles of my lady Mutnodjme’s hands, especially round the thumb and the wide part of the hand, were well developed and strong.

‘It is se-u, which is grain. And this?’

The old scribe stabbed a number of wedges into the clay and my lady’s brow wrinkled. ‘It looks like a stack of building wood,’ she confessed. ‘What does it mean, Master?’

‘It means nunu in Babylonian, which signifies ‘fish.’ See, here is the oldest sign for it.’

‘Yes, I see. Something clearly happened to it in the translation.’

‘Now we will look at compound words; phrases, in Egyptian. Yesterday you learned ‘epinnu’ the sign for plough. If I write that one, then this sign, what do we have?’

‘Plough the field?’ guessed Mutnodjme.

‘Very good. Now there is a difference in these phrases is there not? Plough that field. Plough the field! He ploughs the field. The field was ploughed. The field will be ploughed. If the rains come, the field will be ploughed.’

‘Yes, Master, you are talking about cases, such as nominative, accusative, imperative, dative and ablative, and tenses like future and past,’ said Mutnodjme, disconcerting the scribe, for he had heard, but not really believed, that she was a learned woman.

‘We will consider the grammar later. For the moment all you need to know is that the word order is important.’

‘Master Harmose, I am sorry to interrupt, but I need some help with this Hittite inscription,’ said Kheperren from the floor. Harmose, who was elderly, leaned down with some difficulty and peered, then objected,

‘What’s wrong with it? Just an honorific preface, all letters begin like that, ‘To the lord of the Two Lands and the Mistress of Egypt Mayati in whom his heart delights…’

‘It is Mayati, isn’t it?’ asked Kheperren softly.

‘Who is Mayati?’ asked the lady Mutnodjme.

‘In Egyptian we would call her Mekhetaten,’ said Harmose.

‘You know, I’m getting tired of shocks,’ Lady Mutnodjme complained after a pause.

‘We all are,’ agreed Harmose.

‘What has happened to the position of my sister if foreign kings are referring to the little princess by her title?’ she asked, and we did not have an answer.

The diplomatic correspondence was completed and we were casting about for more work when a slave slammed the door open and announced, ‘The Great King’s Chamberlain Whom He loves, Huy!’

And there was Huy’s oily countenance and his scent of cassia, his usual perfume, offending my apartments. He wrinkled his nose at the smell of onions and garlic which Kheperren still exuded.

‘My lord, what can a humble servant of the King do to honour your visit?’ I asked in the accepted mode of address between superior and inferior, which I knew would annoy him.

‘My lord has sent me to order you to come to his presence,’ he said, using no words of ceremony at all.

‘I come,’ I said, climbing to my feet and brushing down my garment. This summons was unusual. I had not been called to the King’s presence since he had dictated poetry to me. He seemed happy to know that the office of Great Royal Scribe went on efficiently—or perhaps he did not care what I was doing.

Now, however, something had attracted his attention, doubtless bought to him by either Pannefer or Huy, or perhaps the Divine Father Ay. It might have been a coincidence that this summons came after we had heard that something was going on to change the status of the Great Royal Spouse Nefertiti. I shot a look at Paneb, the boy whom I suspected of being the spy, but he looked blank.

I brushed Kheperren’s neck with my hand as I stood up, and the lady Mutnodjme’s knee. I straightened my cloth, which smelt of onions, and smiled reassuringly at my worried staff. I took up a papyrus roll and my writing board, ink and stylus, the tools of a scribe to which I was entitled.

Then I went out, flanked by soldiers, feeling like a prisoner.

They stopped in an antechamber to the great temple of the Aten and motioned to me to sit down, so I sat. Huy paused for a parting sneer at the door and left. Waiting has never worried me. I had a lot to think about.

The lady Mutnodjme and Kheperren appeared to be getting along well. This was excellent. I remembered the stab of jealousy I had felt when I realised that Kheperren was the general’s lover, and his flash of rage when he knew that I had lain with Meryt so long ago. There had been nothing like that this time. Of all lucky men in the Black Land—and there were not many fortunate men in Egypt at this present time—I was probably the most blessed. I had position and wealth which had not made me proud like Pannefer, corrupt like Huy or a miser like Divine Father Ay. I had been able to benefit those whom I loved, my family and my Master Ammemmes. Those who loved me called me generous. I was healthy and over the age when field workers die of exhaustion and poverty, and I might live twenty years more. I had two lovers who both loved me and liked each other.

No one else could have made this boast, though I was not boasting. In spite of the advent of the Aten, I knew what I had to confess after I was dead, and I knew my Book of Coming Forth by Day by heart. I would say:
Lord Osiris, I did no evil, except that under duress I ate the flesh of a sacred beast which I afterwards vomited forth. I gave food to the hungry and water to the thirsty and to those who could not cross the water I have boats. I lay with no woman when she was still a child. I took no bribes. I did not oppress the widow and the fatherless. No man cried to me for mercy that I did not hear.

And in my mind’s eye I could see my funeral, and I could hear the voices of the priestess of Isis and a scribe of the army, stretching out their arms to me, crying,
Ptah-hotep, dear love, come back to thy house!

When the King’s soldiers came for me, I was quite prepared to die.

Chapter Twenty-three

Mutnodjme

I had never been so frightened in my life.

Danger is all right if it’s you. Not that I ever went seeking it. But if I am the threatened one, I am immersed in the action, and until it is over my attention is firmly engaged. In real peril one does not usually even have time to notice that one is afraid until it is all over.

But danger to another person is agonising. I could think of nothing to do after I saw my dearest love walk out between two soldiers to what Huy, at least, grinning through his rotten teeth, thought was a terrible fate.

Ptah-hotep walked calmly to whatever doom the mad king was going to put him.

‘I’m going to the general,’ gasped Kheperren, and was gone in a flash of limbs. I told Meryt to send for me as soon as any word came and ran to the Widow-Queen Tiye.

She was loading Merope with gold so that she would not go to her husband with nothing. Divine Father Ay had sent around a list of the jewellery and goods which had arrived with each princess, and he wanted it all back or accounted for before they left the palace.

‘Oh, dearest sister,’ Merope grabbed me as I whirled into the inner chamber. ‘Tell me, is he kind? Is he young? Will he be a good lover?’

‘I suspect he’ll be an excellent lover, dear Merope, but he’s forty. There was not a young man in the whole scribal school who was fit for you to wipe your feet on. I’ll tell you more later. Great Royal Lady Tiye, what does the king want with Ptah-hotep?’

‘There is nothing that you can do,’ said Tiye slowly. ‘Go on telling your sister about her new husband. Has this Dhutmose sealed the deed?’

‘Yes, I saw him. The deal is made. What do you mean, lady, that there is nothing I can do?’

‘I mean what I say, which is my habit,’ snapped Tiye. ‘We will see. If I can help your man, daughter, you know that I will. But he has to make his own destiny to live or die. We must await events. Now, tell us about Merope’s new owner.’

‘He’s a cuddly forty, a scribe, a man of learning, with a small daughter who is motherless. He was a priest of the temple at Thebes before the present one, now a priest of the Aten so he qualifies,’ I prattled.

What did she mean, the red-headed woman, that Ptah-hotep must make his own destiny? He had always done so, hadn’t he? He had dealt with loss and pain and loneliness as best he could, suffered high office which was thrust upon him, lived within his own code in a palace with no rules.

I assumed that the Widow-Queen’s calm meant that either his death had been decreed beyond doubt or that this was not a threatening situation. It didn’t feel like the latter. I was distracted, but if she said there was nothing I could do then there really was nothing. Tiye would not have discounted any action; secret murder, treason, bribery, if the method would achieve her intended result. Widow-Queen Tiye alarmed me almost as much as the situation. She was a woman to whom literally nothing was, in itself, out of the question.

And she said that there was nothing I could do.

So I swallowed fear, digested anxiety, and gave such of my mind as I could locate to preparing my dear sister Merope for her new husband.

Merope was flushed with excitement. I had never seen her so beautiful. She had combed out her own ash bark coloured hair and garlanded it with lotus blossoms. Her cloth was gauze and draped her slim flanks and thighs as she inspected the growing pile of gold armrings and pectorals in her lap.

‘This is too much,’ she told the Widow-Queen.

‘Are you not my sister, Great Royal Wife of my husband?’ asked Tiye, adding a little pouch of the most precious of jewels, the blue rounded ‘eye-stone’ which came from deep in Nubia, eight dark-blue gems with a flash of white light in them.

‘In case you are stripped of your adornment before you are allowed to leave, my dear, place these stones where they will not be found by any man except the one to whom you are pledging your future,’ she said with a chuckle. Such a hiding place would only have occurred to that most ingenious of ladies. Merope blushed.

‘I’ll help you conceal them,’ I promised, and she laughed and kissed me.

What was happening to Ptah-hotep? I could feel his calm, his acceptance. He was going to his death with perfect ease, perhaps even a tinge of relief. My whole mind and body rebelled against such an end to his life, to what might have been our shared life. Was this why he did not marry me? So that I would not share his downfall?

I wrenched my mind away. In mid afternoon the messenger from the office of the Master of the Household came to deliver to Merope the papyrus which decreed that she was no longer a Great Royal Wife and the order that she was to attend on the Queen in the courtyard an hour before night. There she would be given away to her new husband, the Aten.

‘It appears that we are in the presence of sophistry,’ commented the Widow-Queen Tiye. ‘My son will say to all those Kings who ask for their daughters and sisters that they are all married to the Aten, and since the King is the Aten then they are all, in a way, still married to him and the alliances sealed with their bodies are still in force. I wonder who thought of that?’

‘Probably my father,’ I said. Was there no end to his meanness? I sent word to the temple school in the town that Dhutmose should come and collect his bargain after the ceremony.

The messenger came back breathless and reported, ‘They are building the strangest fire in the courtyard!’

‘Strangest? How do you mean?’ I asked. Tiye gave me a look which bade me ask no more and I ignored her for the first time in my life.

‘It’s made of precious woods. Cinnamon wood, and cassia, and myrrh.’

It meant nothing to me. It did mean something to the Widow-Queen Tiye, however, for she immediately ordered the Royal Sculptor to attend on her. When he arrived—the best of the Amarna artists, a true genius with wood and stone—she drew him into her own bedchamber, leaving Merope and I to talk of her new husband.

I rapidly ran out of things to say about the worthy Dhutmose. Merope kissed me and drew me close, and we occupied a hour, perhaps, in pleasing her and inserting the eye stones into their treasure-chest. I brought her easily to a climax, but I was far too tense to take pleasure even in the breasts and the mouth of my most delightful sister, even though I was about to lose her.

Why was there no word of Ptah-hotep? I could not lie still even in Merope’s embrace. I kissed her and said, ‘Sister, I must go and discover what I can,’ and with moist eyes, she released me.

I went to the office of the Great Royal Scribe and found it silent. Immense diligence was being exhibited by all of the scribes, even Mentu, who was translating Hittite letters into Egyptian. No one looked up and I was directed to the inner apartment by a wary wave of Khety’s stylus.

When I reached the place where Meryt and her brothers lived, I found them packing. Bundles were being made of fine cloth and small children compulsorily fed and washed. Babies wailed. Teti, who was the calmest of the brothers, stubbed his foot on a table and swore explosively. Anubis was stalking stiffly from one group to another, whimpering.

‘You have something heard?’ Meryt’s Egyptian was deserting her. I shook my head. She continued to fold cloth into a roll which would go over someone’s shoulders, secured with leather straps.

‘You’re expecting the worst,’ I commented. She finished the roll and grabbed my hand, leading me to one side, out of the way of Hala who was loading onto a small wriggling child all the bracelets which its little arm could carry, stiffening it from shoulder to elbow.

‘All our lives together he has been living on the edge of a razor,’ she whispered. ‘We have orders as to what to do if he is summoned unexpectedly to the king. See, here I have all our freedoms, not written by him but by the old man Amenhotep-Osiris and sealed by the office.’ She replaced the papyrus in the bosom of her cloth.

‘We have title to all of our goods and we have a safe-conduct to the Village-between-two-trees sealed by the Pharaoh Akhnaten and countersealed by General Horemheb. As soon as any word comes, Kheperren’s soldiers are waiting to take us to the river.’

‘Kheperren is here?’

She waved at the bed chamber and I went that way, feeling superfluous. Meryt had the household in hand and would get it away safely at the earliest opportunity. I had not known my lover long enough to have received any instructions as to what I should do in this eventuality. I began to wonder whether I knew him at all.

But there was the emotion, which was not mine, on the edge of my feelings; calm acceptance. It was certainly not my mind. I stalked into the bed chamber and Kheperren demanded, ‘What do you here, lady? Didn’t he tell you to keep away if anything happened? He would not involved you in his ruin!’

‘Oh, be silent,’ I snarled. ‘How can I not be involved in his ruin? The Pharaoh gave us to each other, put our hands together. I am his and he is mine and he cannot repudiate me now. What is happening? Do you know?’

‘No.’ Kheperren did not seem to resent my tone. Actually it was a pity, as it would have been a great relief to my feelings to be able to scream at someone; but I suppose it was for the best.

‘He was called and went, and he has been sitting outside the temple of the Aten for hours. The King is inside the temple. That monster Huy is walking about with a huge smirk on his filthy face—how I would like to hand him over to my Nubian irregulars! They can keep a prisoner alive for weeks, screaming in agony all the time.’

‘Yes,’ I agreed. ‘They could abolish the screaming by cutting out his tongue, of course. We do not want to keep the children awake.’

I was keeping step with him as he paced from one side to the other of the large room. I was interested as he instructed me as to exactly what, and in what order, the Nubian irregulars do to their most precious enemies, and the recital pleased my heart. I got a truly evil pleasure out of imagining Huy suspended from a tree upside down with bone needles thrust into his phallus. But even the ingenious Nubians run out of tortures in the end. As time passed, Kheperren put an arm round my shoulders, and we walked more slowly.

Eventually we sat down in the Great Royal Scribe’s chair together.

‘You’re afraid for him, aren’t you?’ he asked me. It was stupid question. But he was trying to communicate and I had walked out some of my bitter rage.

‘Yes, and you?’

‘Yes,’ he agreed.

‘Soldiers must be used to waiting for an attack,’ I commented. He snorted.

‘That’s the army. Hurry to get all prepared and every detail finished. Then wait. I have waited on the hills in Apiru country, lady, and in the jungles where the vile Kush lurk. I have sat all night and listened for any noise in the dead silence, a noise which might mean that the sentries have been surprised and killed and that an attack in force by the merciless shepherds is about to break upon the tents. I have waited three days together for rescue when Horemheb left us watching a border post and we were besieged. I have waited until my teeth hurt with gritting together and my body was exhausted just from the strain. But I have never sat in a cool delightful palace and waited, lady, and it is terrible beyond any battle. There at least I knew who the enemy were, and at the last I could fight for my life.’

‘Terrible,’ I agreed. ‘For even the Widow-Queen Tiye says that there is nothing to be done, and that lady would have no compunction about any action if she thought that it would work.’

He was very like Ptah-hotep, if my love had been a soldier. His back felt the same under my hands, the long and beautifully arranged muscles. I had not been aroused when I had made love with my sister Merope. Now I was feeling an entirely inappropriate interest in Kheperren. I shook myself. The palace insanity was catching.

And we sat there for hours, and nothing happened, and no news came.

Ptah-hotep

I had been sitting for a long time, thinking about my life and putting it into order and perspective. Not many who die are given this time to think, and I was grateful for it. I knew that the King had arranged to dismiss the Royal Women before dark, and wondered if my summons had anything to do with that, though I could not see how it would. When the soldiers came at last to take me to the King, I gathered up my scribe’s tools and walked between them into the immense temple of the Aten.

The pillars soared up beyond sight. The temple was lined with beaten gold, and the light of the westering sun struck such blinding brilliance from the walls and floor of the central hall that I was dazzled. I could still not really see when I was shoved to my knees before a throne and went down into the full ‘kiss earth’ before my lord, the Pharaoh Akhnaten, Sole and Only One of the Sun Disc Aten, Favoured Child of the Unknowable God, Aten.