The King's Man (43 page)

“Are you ready, Paneb?” Huy asked, but it was not Paneb who answered.

“Paneb is ready, but clearly you are not,” the familiar voice remarked. Deep, rough to the point of hoarseness, its tones were redolent with animality. It was standing so close to Huy that he could smell its perfume, the sacred myrrh, mingling with the faint but pungent odour of its skin.

“Anubis,” he whispered. The jackal god smiled. Although he dared not turn to see the long furred snout, Huy had an instant image of sharp white fangs being bared in a semblance of mirth, and a pink tongue. A gust of kyphi incense invaded his nostrils.

“I have not had the pleasure of your company since you Saw for Tiye’s last disastrous effort to produce another boy for her husband,” Anubis said. “Poor Tiye! Empress of most of the world yet less fortunate than the servant woman with a dozen robust sons painting henna onto the soles of her feet.” The exotic timbre of his speech was rich with sarcasm. “But look, Great Seer! What is it that you are clutching? Could it be the insurance Amunhotep has prayed for?”

“He is a good King and Tiye a fine Queen,” Huy managed. “Do not make fun of their sorrow, Mouthpiece of Atum. I See for this child in obedience to them, but without hope. I love and pity them.” With a mixture of horror and a strange kind of relief Huy felt the god’s black hand come to rest on his shoulder. Out of the corner of his eye he was able to glimpse the golden rings adorning each finger and a glitter of more gold from the thick bracelet encircling the sinewy wrist.

“I know you do,” Anubis said quietly. “Well actually, you love the King and Queen Mutemwia. Most of your pity, as well as your hidden anger, belongs to the Empress. She does not deserve it. You should be turning it upon yourself.” Huy’s shoulder was gripped in a sudden and painful pinch and then released. “Who knows how many healthy little princes might be causing havoc today in the women’s quarters if Amunhotep had not been persuaded to marry Tiye? You need not respond. Under your hand my beloved Egypt has prospered, and Atum is pleased. You are a talented mer kat.”

Huy had no intention of responding. He knew that there was worse to come. But Anubis fell silent. Huy could feel the god’s warm, feral breath on the back of his head. He waited.

Presently Anubis sighed. “You have been considering how the Empress’s reputation might be sullied, how the King might be persuaded to send her home to her illustrious parents and elevate one of his other wives in her place. But you already knew that you had done your work all too well. Amunhotep would not have given her a second look if you had not deliberately thrown them together at every opportunity. Now he is hers. Although his sexual appetite is becoming legendary, her fire in bed gives him more pleasure than any concubine and her frank, intelligent conversation still delights and intrigues him. He is alternately comfortable and stimulated in her presence, and she will make sure that she maintains her hold on him. In spite of your disastrous blunder in forcing them upon each other, she is a woman to admire. Besides, you fool, as long as she was pregnant with the promise of another Prince, did you imagine that any scheme of yours could pry them apart? Too late, Great Seer. Too late!” The throaty undercurrent of the god’s tone degenerated into a snarl. “This human spawn will bring Egypt to the very brink of destruction! See what you have done!” Suddenly Anubis was facing Huy, his furred lips contorted, the snarl becoming a fierce growl as he bent and thrust his black hands into the crib. Jerking the baby upward, he threw it at Huy. “Here! Take it!” he spat. “See what is coming, and tremble under the weight of your responsibility!”

Shocked and unprepared for the god’s actions, Huy let go of the Prince then managed to catch the bundle, stumbled, and would have fallen if Anubis had not seized him by one of the braids lying on his chest and pulled him upright. Huy looked down, expecting to see himself clutching the boy, but his arms were empty. He was standing in the middle of a wide paved road facing a high walkway that joined the building on his left to another on his right, at the rear of a restless crowd whose murmurs held an undercurrent of impatience. The stone flags under his feet were hot. So was the top of his head. Looking about, squinting against the glare of an unforgiving sun, he saw flags, mighty pylons, wide paved streets, the dazzling limestone walls of more buildings. Trees flourished everywhere, seeming at first to be lushly green, but as Huy tried to find something recognizable in all this magnificence he realized that the palms were drooping, their crowns thin, many of their leaves brown and brittle.
It must be summer, perhaps the month of Mesore, because it’s obvious that the Inundation has not yet begun. But where am I?

He did not think that he had spoken aloud, but the man standing next to him answered. “Come up from Kush or Wawat, have you? Working under one of Pharaoh’s governors there? You must have been away from Egypt for a long time. This is Akhet-Aten, the City of the Horizon of the Aten, and that”—he pointed to a wide aperture high up on the walkway he and Huy were facing—“is the Window of Appearing. The King stops there every day as he walks between the Palace and his House with the Queen and their princesses, and lets the people see him. Often he throws down gold collars to his ministers and commanders.”

“Gold collars? You mean the Gold of Favours?”

“I suppose so.” The Gold of Favours was bestowed only rarely on those who had shown particular bravery in battle or had served the King in some exemplary way. “I wish he’d pray to Isis and beg her to cry,” the man continued, “but every petition now must be addressed to the Aten. The King has forbidden the worship of any other god.”

Confused, with a growing fear, Huy began to sweat. “What month is this? How long has it been since the last Inundation?”

The man gave him a pitying look. “The sun has obviously addled you. It’s the beginning of Paophi. Egypt should be a huge lake by now, but the flood hasn’t come. We used to dedicate nine days to Hapi the god of the river during Paophi and Athyr. Not anymore. No wonder Isis and Hapi are punishing us. It was the same last year. At least His Majesty makes sure that no one living in Akhet-Aten goes without food or beer.”

“What of the rest of Egypt? Without the water and the silt there can be no new crops, or silage for the cattle!”

The man shrugged. “Not my concern. When Pharaoh closed the temples throughout the country, he brought all the stored treasures and grains here. We’ll be fed, and eventually the flood will come again. You must have noticed the low level of the river, coming up from the south.”

Huy was speechless. The sweat of dismay as well as heat was now trickling down his spine and temples. Lifting the hem of the blue kilt in which he now found himself dressed, he wiped his face. As he did so, a roar went up from the throng. Huy followed their gaze. A group of people now filled the window. Several very young girls clad in transparent white linen and loaded with jewellery were whispering and giggling to each other, painted palms to their mouths. A very beautiful woman wearing a coned headdress and a white sheath of many small pleats with similarly pleated voluminous sleeves stood closely to the left of a man with the most curious deformities Huy had ever seen. His face was fine, even noble, with its sweep of straight nose, its almond-shaped eyes and long chin, but beneath the loose feminine sheath he wore Huy could see that his chest was shrunken, his belly low-slung and protuberant, and his thighs distressingly fat. He appeared to have a pair of female breasts, their prominent nipples ringed in orange henna. His head was covered by a blue bag wig. He sported a wide gold necklace, and his arms and fingers were heavy with gold.

Huy’s attention moved to the woman on his right. He studied her carefully, all at once alert. She was familiar to him. Her heavy eyelids glistened with dark green paint, and the black kohl surrounding her eyes and sweeping across both temples was equally thick. Her sheath and similarly pleated sleeves were bordered with silver sphinxes. The ringlets of a formal wig fell almost to her waist. Her jewellery was beyond price: electrum bracelets, rings of amethyst and lapis lazuli, and an ornate sphinx pectoral made entirely of purple gold from Mitanni. One of her wrinkled breasts was bare, obviously a nod to fashion, as one of the much younger woman’s high, painted breasts was also unselfconsciously revealed. But it was the older woman’s headdress that puzzled Huy. Ornate and weighty, its polished disc flashed in the strong light. The two horns of Hathor curved around the disc and its two tall golden plumes seemed to quiver in the burning air. “The Empress’s crown,” Huy muttered. “Then where is the Emperor? I know that face. I’ve seen it before. Deep lines to either side of a downturned mouth. Sharp, watchful eyes. Authority …”

The man leaning out of the window had begun to speak, his voice a light treble, like a woman’s. “People of the Holy City! Today is blessed in the history of Egypt. Today the Empress graces us with her august presence. Today also, as a mark yet again of my favour towards him, the noble Pentu receives the Gold of Favours from my hand. Pentu!” A man came swaggering to kneel beneath the window, his arms upraised to catch the shower of gold that would come. “This is the third time, is it not?” the man in the blue bag wig continued.

“It is indeed, Most Munificent One!”

“For your devotion to the Aten, for your sacrifices and prayers, I make you a Person of Gold!”

Huy watched aghast as the malformed figure began to strip himself of his jewellery and toss it down to the man below.
Sacrifices and prayers? And the third time this Pentu has been given so rare and precious an award? What is happening here?
The older woman in the long wig and Empress’s crown leaned towards the man next to her, grasping his arm and speaking rapidly into his ear, her face a mask of anger.

“The goddess is not pleased,” Huy’s companion remarked. “She arrives today from Weset to find her husband-son displaying himself rudely like any commoner, and debasing one of Egypt’s most hard-won honours. Amusing, is it not, Seer Huy? Titillating perhaps?”

The voice had become deeper. Huy swung round. Anubis’s black jackal’s eyes met his. The god’s muzzle was slightly open, and as Huy watched, a pink tongue emerged to moisten the furred lips.

“We are both clad in blue, the colour of mourning,” Anubis went on. “Now why is that? Why do I grieve, and wait for you to recognize your own anguish? Why have I been standing in Set’s temple, inhaling the smoke of the sacred kyphi that rises in Set’s sanctuary? To beg my brother, the god of chaos, to have mercy on Egypt, or to bury her under the sands of her deserts? No. I would have done so, but Atum wishes to wait and see what his chosen Seer will do with this final chance to avert the blasphemy of Akhet-Aten and its decadent inhabitants. Look at her, Huy! At last she knows what she has done! At last she prays for a pardon that the gods will not give her! Look at her!”

His rising voice boomed back at Huy, echoing against the pure lines of the buildings fronting the avenue, but the crowd was watching Pentu and his gold walk towards a chariot that waited for him, and the man framed by the wide window went on waving and smiling at the people below. The older woman had stepped back into shadow, and suddenly Huy saw her in his mind’s eye, standing beside this same man in a roofless temple where the sun beat down on them with relentless heat and a hot, greedy silence surrounded them. He knew the vision. Its details lay rolled up and neatly sealed in his office. It composed the second half of a Seeing he had performed years ago for Tiye.

Tiye. The older woman was Tiye. But who was the creature at her side?

“Who indeed?” Anubis hissed. “Perhaps if you had solved the meaning of the Book of Thoth, this future would be nothing more than the fragment of a fantasy blown through your mind and vanishing as you walk from your fine house to your waiting litter-bearers.” He stepped forward and placed both black palms against Huy’s cheeks. He had begun to weep. Glittering black tears slid down the fur of his face to splash on the pavement in front of Huy’s feet. “You have the power to make all this a lie,” he whispered. “Go north, Seer Huy—and hurry! Destiny is waiting for you in Ptah’s House of Life. Go now, and tell neither Amunhotep nor his wife what cursed thing your hand is holding until you return to Weset.”

The god’s face began to fade, became as transparent as thin linen, and Huy found himself staring at a blank wall through cool, dim air. At once his head began to pound. Turning to place both hands on the edge of the crib and steady himself, he realized that he was still holding the baby’s tiny forearm. With a grunt he let go, lost his balance, and slid to the floor. At once Paneb set down his palette and Userhet left his stool and came hurrying. Carefully both men lifted Huy and helped him take the few steps to where the steward had sat.

“Bring poppy quickly,” someone ordered. Huy sank onto the stool and bent over. One of his feet felt damp. Seeing a small grey stain on it, he touched it, and his finger came away wet.

“Anubis’s tears,” he croaked. A cup appeared and he grabbed it, draining the contents with a prayer of thanks to Atum for the creation of opium and passing it back. He closed his eyes. A silence fell. Huy could feel the tension of waiting all around him, but he did not move until his pain became a dull throb. Then he asked that Paroi be summoned, and aided by his scribe and his under steward he was able to rise and approach the King.

“Well, Uncle?” Amunhotep demanded sharply. “What have the gods decreed for my beautiful new son? Will there be another early death, or will he outlive Thothmes and ascend the Horus Throne? Just give us one or two words. Then you must rest, and come back tomorrow to tell us every detail.”

“Help me to kneel,” Huy half whispered to the men who were holding him upright. When he felt himself reach the floor, he forced his arms to extend with palms up in the attitude of reverence and supplication.

“No!” Tiye exclaimed. “Not again! I will not have it!”

Huy turned his palms down, a quick gesture of rebuttal. “Majesty, you need not fret. Before I can impart the result of the Seeing, I have been commanded to travel north to Mennofer. I may not tell you anything at all until I return. I am sorry.”