The King's Man (32 page)

The King was reclining easily on one elbow, his face raised to Tiye, who had sunk cross-legged beside him. Her back was to the watchers, but Huy saw that she was saying something to Amunhotep that lit up his smile.

“They are becoming quite companionable,” Mutemwia said. “They play board games together and argue about the dispatches, of all things! It distresses Thuyu. She believes that such conversation is not ladylike, but I see in Tiye a Queen who will be more than a wife to my son. He’s used to discussing matters of state with a woman. By the time Amunhotep is crowned, Tiye will have taken my place as an adviser and guide under your supervision.” Deftly she pulled a cluster of grapes free of its stem. “Work has begun on your new house,” she told Huy. “I want you to be happy at Weset. I ordered Kha to put one of his assistant architects on the project. Kha has selected the site himself, by the river and surrounded by your own poppy fields. Thus you will have the privacy and quiet you desire.” Selecting a grape, she slid it between her hennaed lips.

“Your Majesty is kind.” He watched the muscle along her jawline flex as she crunched the grape pips between her strong teeth.

“Not really.” She picked another grape from her open palm. “Weset will be our permanent home, all of us. I can’t have you moving to Sumenu or Aabtu because you’re unhappy.” The piece of fruit vanished into her mouth. Sumenu was approximately twenty miles south of Weset, between the city and Nekheb, Huy reflected silently, and Aabtu, where the head of Osiris was buried, lay a little farther away than that to the north. “In the meantime, your apartments in the old palace are ready for you.” She smiled across at him, her kohled eyes squinting against the bright sunlight in spite of the billowing canopy under which the two of them sat. “You will be living between the King and myself so that you will be easily accessible to both of us. I shall occupy the original Queen’s quarters until Tiye receives the vulture crown. Kha tells me that all the rooms are large and cool.” She dropped the remainder of the grapes back onto the platter. “I want you to be happy, Great Seer,” she repeated. “There is much work ahead of you.”

For a moment they were both quiet. The low murmur of other conversations mingled with the sound of the wind-ripped flag and the low, rhythmic tones of the officer calling the beat to the oarsmen. Tiye’s high, spontaneous laugh came floating across the deck. A grinning Amunhotep had taken both her braids in his hands and was pulling her head from side to side. As Huy watched, Tiye reached towards Amunhotep’s brown ribs. The King recoiled, and both of them began to hurl bantering insults at one another.

“They are learning to touch one another without the risk of a rebuff,” Huy remarked. “I shouldn’t be surprised at how quickly they’ve become friends. After all, Atum has willed their union. But I’m amazed at their increasing ease with one another.”

“So am I.” Mutemwia held up a cup and immediately her chief steward, Ameni, filled it with water. “I think it pleases my son to discuss the business of each day with a female other than his mother. Tiye has no authority with which to challenge his own supremacy.”

“Not yet,” Huy responded thoughtfully. The King had thrown an arm across Tiye’s shoulders and was whispering something into her ear. “He is secure in his dominance as someone older and more knowledgeable than she. But Majesty, that disparity is closing fast. Tiye has a genuine interest in the practices of government. Any immaturity she displays belongs to youth and inexperience, two handicaps that will disappear quite naturally in time.”

“She is suspicious of me, my network of spies, my power over Amunhotep. If her suspicion turns to jealousy, we will have a problem. I want her to trust me.” She drank a mouthful of water, took the square of linen Tekait swiftly held out to her, and dabbed her lips.

“Yet you yourself quite rightly trust no one,” Huy reminded her, “and Tiye sees her position as precarious in spite of the marriage contract. She’s ambitious, Mutemwia. Already she understands that wearing the Queen’s crown when the time comes will not guarantee her a place in the King’s affections or allow her a share in the making of royal policy. She must capture the one and strive to make herself indispensible to the other. It’s an enormous undertaking.”

Mutemwia was holding the cup cradled in both hands. Her head went down over it. Huy could no longer see her face. “I confess that I’m the one feeling the stirrings of jealousy when I see them together,” she said without looking up. “Since the vision of my son’s future came to you by accident all those years ago, I have been consumed by one aim: to see him mount the Horus Throne. I have ordered everything in his life to that end, from the details of his education to the gradual fostering of a necessary self-discipline within his character. My life has belonged to him alone. All my thoughts, my plans, have been concerned with little else but the gradual unfolding of his destiny.” Now she glanced up, and Huy saw her eyes filling with tears. “Tiye will take my place. Atum has decreed it. I shall be put out to pasture like a chariot horse too old to be driven into battle.” Carefully she placed the linen she still held beneath each eye so that her tears would not carry kohl down her cheeks. “I struggle against the antipathy I feel for Tiye, her common ancestry, her plainness,” she continued in a low voice. “I resent the intelligence in her that will rival my own. Amun help me, Huy. I would never have considered myself so petty.”

Huy quickly scanned the deck. Tekait and Ameni, although their attention was obviously fixed on their mistress, were politely out of earshot. Tetiankh was still hanging over the railing some distance away.

“Tiye cannot appropriate the love and respect Amunhotep reserves for you alone, Mutemwia,” Huy said quietly. “She cannot miraculously become a part of the memories you and Amunhotep share. You’ve always known that the time would one day come for you to relinquish the administration of Egypt to the King. Indeed, you have worked patiently and subtly towards that goal for many years. I believe that young Tiye is learning to be worthy of taking your place. She looks to you and to me to help her. Are you willing to deprive Amunhotep of a source of comfort and good advice once you go into the Beautiful West over an emotion as base as jealousy? Such a weakness is beneath you.”

“You’re right, of course.” She sighed and held out the now-stained linen for Tekait to retrieve. “It’s this present upheaval. I have many capable stewards and administrators handling our move from the Delta to the south, and in his letters Kha assures me that the tasks of building and restoring are proceeding without hindrance, but until I disembark at the watersteps of the old palace and walk through it to my own quarters I shall not be at ease.”

“Tiye needs you,” Huy told her. “She needs both of us. Let’s make sure that this beloved country of ours will be ruled by both a wise and capable King and a Queen worthy of her crown.”

Mutemwia did not reply. Settling a pillow at her back, she relaxed against the wall of the cabin. “That, my dear Seer, is a great deal to ask,” she said after a long moment, and closed her eyes.

It took the cumbersome flotilla almost a month to reach Weset. Each late afternoon the barques and skiffs put in against a secluded stretch of the western riverbank. The ramps were run out, fires were lit, linen was collected and washed, the oarsmen spread their blankets out and dozed, and as night fell a simple meal was cooked. Tents were set up. Amunhotep and his body servant had one to themselves, guarded by soldiers appointed by Huy from the Division of Amun. Mutemwia and Tiye shared the other. Huy had declined the offer of any covering. Over the protests of a scandalized Tetiankh, he chose to sleep in the open, leaving his tent to Amunmose, Paneb, and Ba-en-Ra, who had travelled in Huy’s own boat behind the King’s and Mutemwia’s staff.

Perti took up a position beside Huy, sinking cross-legged onto the sparse grass and placing his sword across his knees. “I can sleep during the day, Master,” his answer had been to Huy’s objection. “It seems that no matter where we tie up, we’re discovered by curious villagers. I don’t want them close to you.”

Huy found the presence of his captain comforting. He lay listening to the vast crowd gradually settle into a welcome quiet occasionally interspersed with a snore or a cough, his eyes on the multitude of stars above him glimpsed through a latticework of drooping leaves. It seemed to him that as the ships slowly moved farther south, the air became increasingly dry. The sweet-smelling humidity of the Delta was being replaced by an odourless atmosphere that seemed to deepen the sky and sharpen the multitude of white points glittering overhead. Mesore, the last month of the harvest, was almost upon them. They had floated past mile upon mile of empty irrigation ditches lined with dusty palms within whose boundaries the peasants laboured, the golden stalks of emmer wheat and pale stems of barley swaying and collapsing before their scythes. An increasing number of fields already lay denuded, the surface of the soil cracking under the relentless heat of the sun.

This Egypt is ugly
, Huy thought on the few occasions when he left the shelter of the canopy to stand at the deck rail, hot to his touch.
Everything is barren. I did not know that the face of my precious country could be so harsh. The villages seem empty. Even the animals are sheltering from the power of Ra. In the Delta his strength is muted, but out here he is pitilessly omnipotent. Once Nut has swallowed him and the breath is no longer fiery in our lungs, we feast on blue-black grapes and the sweet, juicy fruit of the nebes shrub. We scoop out the pink flesh of figs and dip fresh dates and reremet fruit in honey, and it is as though these foods are conjured by a magic that has formed them out of nothing, out of the emptiness of death itself. Small wonder that eating reremet fruit becomes more prevalent at this time of the year. Mandrake makes us drowsy, amorous; it diverts us from the fear that seeps towards us from the desolation on either side of the river. Will Isis cry? Will the gods permit yet another Inundation?

The nights were blessedly temperate, however. Huy slept soundly, waking to eat the profusion of fruits Rakhaka provided for him and Tetiankh offered, and rising to join in the communal prayers to mighty Amun before the tents were struck and the interminable journey continued.

On the twenty-eighth day of Epophi, the King’s helmsman began to negotiate a wide bend to the east, and Mutemwia joined Huy by the rail. “We approach the holy city of Weset,” she said, smiling. “At last, Huy! I believe that we should be able to hear it as soon as we curve back to the south. I’ve enjoyed having nothing to do for weeks, but the King and Tiye are increasingly bored.” She had spent most days dressed informally in the loose robes she preferred, but now her filmy white sheath was heavily bordered at the hem, neck, and shoulder straps with a succession of silver scarabs. Her headdress was plain, however, a thin silver circlet with the god of eternity, Heh, resting on her brow. As usual she wore little jewellery. Two blue faience rings shaped delicately like cornflowers blossomed from her fingers, a thin silver band made up of ankhs dangled from one tiny wrist, and red jasper pellets glowed on her sandals. Her steward Ameni held a white linen sunshade over her and Tekait waited, a large ostrich feather fan in both hands, to cool her.

Amunhotep and Tiye were sitting on stools under the canopy. Both were staring silently ahead, obviously weighed down by the full splendour in which they were clad. The cobra and the vulture, the royal uraeus, lifted majestically from the band of Amunhotep’s blue and white striped helmet. Nebmerut, Seal Bearer and Senior Scribe of Protocol, sat at his feet cradling the silver chest containing the Pshent, the Red and White Crowns Amunhotep would not wear until he attained his majority, and the symbols of his supreme authority, the Crook and the Flail. Amunhotep and Tiye were heavily painted, the thick kohl surrounding their eyes glinting with gold dust. Tiye’s wide belt was made up of golden ankhs, and hanging from it in front were several representations of a Queen’s totem, the vulture goddess Mut, each bird clinging to the one beneath it by glittering talons, each folded feather of the great wings limned in dark blue lapis. More vultures in gold and lapis swung from her ears. The vulture headdress of a Queen completely hiding her hair held a shen sign of protection in each golden claw in front of and just below her ears. Its golden neck and lapis-beaked head reared above her forehead. Its green turquoise feathers swept back.

“Long before we left Mennofer, I very carefully chose what they will wear when they disembark,” Mutemwia went on. “Amunhotep must be immediately seen as Amun’s obedient son and Tiye as the god’s divine consort, Mut.” She turned to Tekait. “Bring me a stool under the canopy. I don’t want to sit on cushions dressed like this.” She left the rail and entered the shade.

Huy turned back to watch the eastern riverbank. Its aridity had begun to be replaced by thick stands of acacia and tamarisk bushes, sycamore trees and palms, the growth broken at intervals by wide stone watersteps where boats were tethered. Small groups of people had gathered by the water, and as Huy watched them kneel at the sight of the imperial flag and then slowly drift astern, he suddenly became aware of a sound that must have been growing beyond his awareness, a constant low rumble.

Tetiankh appeared at his elbow. “Judging by the intensity of noise, every citizen of Weset’s sepat has gathered here to welcome the King. Listen to the undercurrent of excitement, Master! We have almost rounded the bend. Soon we shall see them.”

The prow of
Kha-em-Ma’at
was slowly turning to the south. Nebenkempt’s voice rang out, issuing a flurry of commands to the helmsman. For a while the boat held to the centre of the river, and now the banks on either side were hidden under a vast throng of jostling, shouting people trying to kneel as the gilded vessel drew abreast of them. But the crowd was too thick to allow most of them to perform their reverence, and Huy watched the frantic struggle with a pang of apprehension.

“Many of those in front are being tumbled into the water,” he said. “How many more are being crushed? As Scribe of Recruits, I sent a message to Weset’s Mayor some time ago, warning him to anticipate this chaos and requisition enough soldiers to keep order.”