Out of the Black Land

Book Two

Aten in Splendour





Chapter Thirteen

Mutnodjme

The temple sent me to the funeral rites of King Amenhotep, now Osiris-Amenhotep, and, standing at the wall of the palace, I had never seen such widespread mourning.

Ten years had passed quickly for me, because I was always learning. I knew, now, almost all that the priestesses could teach me, and I delved into their stored scrolls and construed puzzling inscriptions in temples which were so ancient that only the old man Snefru the Scribe in the temple of Amen-Re could read them. I sought always for more knowledge.

I had not seen the king since he had fallen ill, though the physicians had sent to the temple of Isis for more and more of the narcotic black resin we extracted from the white poppy seed-capsule. They spoke of his death as a gentle one, and I hoped that it had been so, for he had given my sister Nefertiti six fine daughters; though after the birth of the third I had not seen her either. My Lord Akhnaten had taken her away to his new city at Amarna, and Nefertiti had never been good at writing letters, though she sometimes sent me presents.

I wore the green robes of the Lady Isis now, and I was of a great age; eighteen, nearly nineteen. There were villages in the marshes where that was the usual age for a woman to die, worn out with the dangers of childbearing and disease.

I lived in the cool stone palace built for the Mistress of Magic, high above the sandflies and the mosquitoes, and illness was rare in the temple. I had not borne, because few men pleased me, and what seed I had allowed into my body had not taken root. The temple wished to keep me and I had no wish to leave. I could have gone to Amarna and lived with my sister and my mother; but Tey and I had never been friends and my mother had grown very proud, so that she looked down on a mere priestess. I could not have my own establishment because I was unmarried and I had no wish to marry.

I had heard very strange rumours about what was happening in the new City of the Sun and I worried about my sister, though she always said that she was happy.

I stood in my malachite-dyed robes, my head crowned with the Isis symbol, the jewellery of my rank weighing down my shoulders and arms, while the keening grew from the river banks. The barge was coming with the King Akhnaten and his family, and I could hear the weeping as the priests came forth to line the road to the Temple of Osiris.

The King Osiris-Amenhotep had lain in dry natron for forty days. His body was dried and pickled like a salt fish. His entrails had been preserved and put into jars beside him. It hurt me that such a wise man should be so mutilated; and it struck me for the first time, to wonder how anyone could know that the dead, so treated, came alive in the Field of Reeds.

Then my heart forbade further inquiry. Our ancestors as far back as we could reckon them knew that this was the case. My own Lady Isis had made it so. It was true.

And I had a part to play in this funeral, as representative of my own Goddess, and I must not fail.

The walls were warm under my hand, almost as warm as flesh. The season was Shemu and the month was Pakhons, month of Finding Osiris, and unseasonably warm. The common people said that since the Divine Akhnaten worshipped the sun, He had come closer to us.

The old women in the temple said that such fluctuations had occurred twice in their memories, and that more grain should be stored against bad seasons. They had reported this to the King Amenhotep, now the Osiris-Amenhotep, and he had increased the storage rates so that the bins were full.

Now all his wisdom was lost to us. His translation to the Field of Reeds took with it the last of my childhood.

I could see all the way down the river, from the new temple of the Aten at Karnak, golden in the early sunlight, to the white and yellow ochre cliffs on the other side, which marked the landing place of the Houses of Eternity, where only Kings are buried. We would take Osiris-Amenhotep to his tomb which had been prepared for a long time; he had ruled for thirty-seven years.

Now his son Akhnaten had named his brother Smenkhare as his co-regent. This was thought wise. Smenkhare was eleven and had shown no signs of the illness which deformed his brother. The red-headed woman Tiye the Queen had lately borne a child, the last of the children of Osiris-Amenhotep. She had called him Tutankhaten.

A thought occurred to me. By this transfiguration I would also lose my sister Merope, the Kritian Princess, who had gone into the Palace of Women when she had first bled in purification. She had not conceived. We had been such close companions for such a long time that I would find life difficult without her. But now she would belong, as would all the royal wives and concubines, to Akhnaten.

And that meant that Merope, too, would move to Amarna.

My future was looking more and more lonely.

Beneath me the people wept, tore their hair, threw ashes into the air in token of mourning. I had stood contemplating too long. I hurried down the marble stairs to the street and ran, robes bundled up in one hand, along the alley and into the small square before the Osiris temple where the womens’ gate stood open. There my sister Merope straightened my headdress and smoothed down my gown, without a word, and led me into the House of Life, where the embalmed body of Osiris-Amenhotep lay.

They had painted him and given him glass eyes, and stuffed the loose skin of his face with mud, so that he resembled a corn doll, such as children make of cornstalks with a plaster face. There was no trace of the man he had been, the sweet lover, the wise speaker. Two priests of Osiris were standing beside a heap of torn cloth, waiting for us to begin so that they could enfold Osiris-Amenhotep in his last garments. I took the hand of my sister Merope who was linked to Queen Tiye and Princess Sitamen, whose grip was as strong as a man’s. We were there to represent Isis and Nepthys, Selkis and Neith, protecting the dead king’s body while it was still vulnerable from the attack of fiends, the children of Set the destroyer. We stood in a circle around the body, singing our lamentation.

The bandages were carefully wrapped around our transmuted Pharaoh, the heart scarab in place, the amulets scattered across his body, the phallus bandaged into erection, the fingers wrapped separately. All the time the priests chanted the protective spells and the scent rose, resin and aromatics, frankincense and sandalwood oil with an underlying stench of putrefaction dreadful to smell and cruel to consider.

‘Do not be afraid, my Lord,’ whispered the Queen Tiye. Her long hair was tangled and muddy, her breasts were bare, her face disfigured with long parallel scratches which she had made in her grief. ‘Anubis will make you beautiful, Osiris will take you to his bosom, oh, my heart’s darling’.

We walked around under the palm boughs of the embalmer’s makeshift hut—this structure would be burned the second the Osiris-Amenhotep was removed, and there was no point in burning a good building—singing the lament of Isis and Nepthys:

Hail thou Lord of Otherworld, Bull of those that live there, thou image of Re, most beautiful babe! Thou driver-away of evil, thou maker of gentle fortune, come to us, thy sister and thy wife, even to Isis and Nepthys.’

Merope and I moved to the head of the Osiris-Amenhotep as the priest chanted:

Homage to the divine father Osiris! We embalm all thy members, for thou wilt not perish and come to an end as beasts do: thy breath is strengthened, O Osiris, the winds blow into thee. Thou are established, thou art strong, thou wilt live. The worms shall not devour thy body, thou wilt not fall into rottenness, thou wilt never see corruption when thy soul has gone out of thee.

The priest was a fat spotty youth with a nasal voice, most unfitted for his post, though I presumed that he was ritually clean, not having had intercourse with a woman, eaten meat or consumed wine for forty days. That should have improved his complexion.

When the soul hath departed, a man seeth corruption; the bones of his body crumble and stink, the members decay one after another into a helpless mass which falls away to foetid liquid, thus he becomes a brother to the worm and is made into worms and an end is made of him as for all things that perish.

I wondered how Tiye could bear this dreadful litany; Tiye who had loved the Osiris-Amenhotep for so many years. Her skin was grey, and she had bitten into her bottom lip, trying not to scream, though we would be required to scream soon and that might give her some relief.

Merope’s hand was in my left and Sitamen had my right and she was grinding my bones in her grasp, for she also had greatly loved her father.

It was hot in the House of Life under the palm branches, and I felt sweat run down my breasts and into my eyes. The ritual was horrible, forcing the reality of death into our mouths, the words falling like ash on our heads. All must die, even the wise and generous.

Homage to thee Divine Father Osiris who lives!

Thou didst not decay, no worms made food of thee, thou didst not rot, thou didst not putrefy. Osiris-Amenhotep shall not rot, shall not decay, shall not putrefy. He shall not see corruption. He shall live, he shall live, he shall live! He shall flourish, he shall flourish, he shall flourish! He shall wake in peace, he shall be whole; he shall not lose form or savour of life. He will be stabilised and established; he will never be destroyed on this earth.

The amulets with their attendant spells were placed, even the garland of cornflowers and lotus was laid around the head of the mummiform coffin, which was of gold. This was then laid within a bigger sarcophagus, and then a larger, so that Osiris-Amenhotep was shut away from us within three shells of precious metal.

As Isis, it was my turn to speak. I said:

I am come to be a protector unto thee. I waft unto thee breath for thy nostrils and the north wind which comest from the god Tem into thy nose. I have made whole thy throat, I make thee live like a god. Thine enemies are crushed under thy feet. I have made thy word true before Maat, and thou art mighty among gods.

As Nepthys, my sister Merope said:

I am around thee to protect thee, my brother Osiris, my strength is near thee, thou art raised up. The gods have heard thy call and have made thy words to be truth. Ptah hath overthrown thy foes, and I will be with thee forever.

As Neith, Sitamen said in a loud voice:

I have come quickly, behold, I have driven back the footsteps of the hidden enemy. I have illuminated thy face, Osiris-Amenhotep. Brother, I watch to protect thee, I stand with my bow and my arrows to repel the demons which assail thee.

As Selkis, Queen Tiye delivered her speech in a low, tight monotone:

I protect thee with the flame of my life, Oh Osiris-Amenhotep. I have gathered thy limbs and collected thy bones. I have brought thy heart and placed it on the throne within thy body. I will make thy house to flourish after thee, oh thou who livest forever.

Then the litter bearers came to lift the sarcophagus and carry it to the boat which would cross the river with our lord, and as expected we shrieked and wailed our lament, tearing our faces with our nails and fending off the bearers who would take him away.

‘Come to thy house!’ screamed Tiye, embracing the coffin. ‘Oh my father and brother, oh, my dearest love, return to thy sister who loves thee!’

‘Father and brother and lover, return,’ shrieked Merope, who clawed after the coffin as it was lifted. ‘Return, my lord, return!’

‘Great lord, sweet lord, come back to thy sister, he whose mouth was of honey, whose body was my delight,’ Tiye begged, and was pulled respectfully back by Sitamen, who had not spoken.

I took Merope in my arms. She was shaking with expended emotion. Tears ran down her face and down mine, and Queen Tiye collapsed into her daughter’s strong arms. Even Neith-devoted Sitamen was weeping, even that muscular warrior maiden whose hair was too short to dry her mother’s tears.

Ptah-hotep

I was back in Thebes and he was dead, the wise old man. I was to accompany my lord Akhnaten to the funeral, and he was very reluctant to go.

‘I do not believe in these gods, these fraudulent gods of the otherworld and the Tuat,’ he protested when messengers brought the news that the Pharaoh Amenhotep had gone to Osiris. ‘Tell me, Ptah-hotep, why should I go to this funeral?’

‘Because although you are wise, Lord, the people are not, and they believe. They would think badly of you if you did not,’ I had replied.

But when we had arrived at the palace of Thebes my lord went first to visit his remarkable temple of the Aten, which had taken a year’s sandstone and untold amounts of labour to build. It occupied the ground between Karnak temple and Thebes village, a sandstone city in itself. I was met at the gate of the palace by Sahte, Queen Tiye’s nurse, who demanded to know where the Lord Akhnaten was. I pointed and she spat on the ground.

‘Come and speak to my mistress,’ she urged. ‘She has always respected your learning, Ptah-hotep. Merope the Kritian is with her and we are waiting for Sitamen, but she is mourning and cannot be comforted.’

‘That is to be expected in the loss of so great and wise and gentle a husband,’ I responded, allowing her to drag me by the arm up two flights of steps and onto the first balcony.

‘Yes, yes, of course,’ snapped Sahte crossly. ‘But she will not rouse. There are many things she needs to do, and she just stares at the wall, or at that new temple of the Aten, and then she sighs, and then she stares again. I’m worried about her. She’s got courage, my lady. I don’t know. What is the world coming to? New gods and new temples and not enough to eat in the villages, that’s what. In here,’ she shoved me through a door curtain.

The room seemed empty. Then I made out the figure of a woman sitting on the floor; her hair hanging around her bare shoulders. My sandals whispered across ash on the floor. I knelt down next to the Queen Tiye and took her hand and kissed it. It was quite limp and curled empty on her lap when I released it.

‘Lady, I am here on your orders,’ I reminded her gently. She reacted slowly, but she reacted.

‘I gave no orders,’ she said. Her throat was torn with weeping and the voice creaked unwillingly from her strained throat.

‘But you would have,’ I continued, ‘if you had not been crushed under a burden of despair. Where is the Great Royal Wife Merope?’

‘I sent her away with unkind words,’ confessed the Queen. ‘I wish for no comforts.’

‘Lady, you grieve,’ I said, sitting down on the floor beside her. ‘But consider. He died easily, without pain. He loved you all his life and you loved him. You were his heart, Lady; such pain never vanishes. But you will have some comforts. They are time and distance, and the memory which is cherished.’

‘You are a ruthless young man,’ said Queen Tiye after a pause in which she debated whether to order my instant execution.

‘Lady, I am here because my lord Akhnaten is coming, and I wish to warn you that…’ I paused to choose my words.

‘Well then, warn me,’ she said sharply.

‘He is a devotee of the new god Aten, Lady, and I fear that… the funeral, you see, involves mentioning the gods of the underworld, and…’

‘He would deprive his father of the afterlife because of his thrice-blasted and damned new god?’

I would have felt better if her voice had been raised, but it was perfectly level.

‘He doesn’t believe that there is an afterlife, Lady,’ I began, but she closed her ash-stained hand on my arm—that arm was going to be bruised—and said, ‘I hear him coming, go through that curtain and wait. Sahte will show you the way out. Thank you, Great Royal Scribe, I will never forget this.’

To my astonishment she pulled me close and kissed my mouth. She tasted of starvation and salt. I heard footsteps outside—it the guard who never left the King Akhnaten—and I scrambled through the curtain just in time. Sahte was beside me, a twisted shadow. She took my hand and kissed it but did not speak.

I heard the Pharaoh say to his mother, ‘Lady, I have priests who will bury my father, in the new religion of the Aten, despising all fraudulent gods.

And I heard her reply; though I did not know the voice, it was so cold and flat, like the voice of the dead. I shivered.

Queen Tiye said, ‘If your father, my dearest love, my husband Osiris-Amenhotep is not laid to his rest in the House of Eternity as his father and his father before him, I will curse you.’

I heard Akhnaten step back, papyrus soles rustling in ash. He got as far as a shocked, ‘Mother!’ before the cold voice continued as if he had not spoken.

‘If one of your priests of Aten touches the Osiris-Amenhotep and defiles his ritual, I will curse you both waking and sleeping, I will blight your ways, your board and your bed, slay your wife and your daughters though they are also my daughters, and death will be about you and follow you.’

She was actually beginning on the most potent curse of all, the curse of Set, which is complete destruction to the body, the spirit, the shadow, the fire and the soul, the posterity and the name.

Akhnaten gasped again, ‘Mother!’ and she paused long enough for him to speak.

‘Lady, I will do as you wish,’ he whispered.

‘Do so,’ said the icy voice. ‘You may go and learn your part as Sem-priest at the Opening of the Mouth. One word wrong, my son, and my curse is on you. Purify yourself,’ she said.

There was an interval. A woman came and stood beside me. The Princess Sitamen, warrior-woman of Neith, had been listening intently to all that went on. She stood as still as a shadow, reminding me of a soldier on guard. She put a hand on my shoulder as soldiers do and I reflected the gesture.

‘Scribe,’ she acknowledged.

‘Lady,’ I replied.

We heard the outer curtain swish shut after the Pharaoh and his guard.

‘Your lord has gone, best follow him and make sure that he has the text of the Recension,’ she said. ‘Fare well, most honoured comrade.’

She punched me lightly and Sahte led me out and along some corridors and showed me into the courtyard in time to catch my Lord Akhnaten and his escort.

‘Ptah-hotep,’ he said. ‘I have decided that it is proper that my father should be escorted to eternity by the old ritual. He believed in it when he was alive. Have you a copy of the ritual?’

‘Lord, I will obtain one immediately,’ I said, and left him to find my master Ammemmes in the School of Scribes.

The temple of Amen-Re was empty. Wind carrying dust blew through the massive pillars. After wandering for a while I caught a straying boy and asked him to lead me to the master of the school of scribes, and he took me through a series of winding paths between walls to a small building within the main temple.

Then he ran away before I could reward him.

I paused on the threshold, as was polite, and clapped my hands for permission to enter, and someone let out a held breath. As my eyes grew used to the light, I saw that it was Ammemmes himself, who had been about to bludgeon my brains out with the large club he was lowering.

‘Ptah-hotep, you should have warned me. I was about to kill you.’

‘So I noticed, can I ask why?’

‘We are moving the last of the scrolls today and I promised Snefru before he died that no harm would come to them. A promise to the dead must be honoured.’

A pair of boys were completing the wrapping of a huge bundle of papyrus. They had vanished when I had appeared and now returned to their work. I searched through it swiftly and removed a copy of the Theban Recension, then bade them continue.

‘The worship of the Aten has taken all our funds,’ said the Master. He looked well, though much relieved at not having to murder to carry out his promise. ‘The estates of the temple have been given away; this was your Lord Akhnaten’s order, we received it three decans ago. So we have gathered all our learning and we are leaving,’ he added.

‘How did Snefru die?’ I asked, watching the boys stagger outside with the bundle. I did not wish to know where they were going to hide it.

‘They came to the temple and told us that, on the orders of the Pharaoh Akhnaten, the temple was closed and all of the written material which named the god Amen-Re was to be burned,’ said the Master sadly. ‘Snefru cried out and clutched his chest and died of shock. As he was dying he made me promise to store his cherished scrolls, and I have done so. And we will bury him properly when his time is completed even if I have to do the whole ceremony myself in the dark.’

‘Master, who will train scribes for the service of the people and the god?’ I asked, horrified. I had not seen this order. It must have gone through Pannefer the Master of the Household or Chamberlain Huy.

‘Aten, I suppose,’ the Master shrugged. ‘I’m going back to my own village, Ptah-hotep, to wait out the storm.’

‘Take these,’ I loaded onto his thin arm all my bracelets and put round his neck my pectoral of electrum, a very valuable thing which ought to feed him for the foreseeable future. He smiled at me and kissed me. His eyes were very weary and his hair was quite white under the Nubian wig.

‘Thy brother Kheperren?’

‘Still with the General Horemheb, and alive,’ I replied. ‘I am glad to have found you, Master, and he will be glad to have news of you. But all things pass, Master,’ I said. ‘The Osiris-Amenhotep is to be buried in the old way.’

‘Return the copy of the Recension when the funeral is over,’ said Ammemmes. ‘Send it to me near Sais, at the village of the Crossed Arrows. And survive, dearest son; survive. But do not do evil in the name of any god. The only one who accepts evil deeds is the demon Set—oh, no, I am mistaken. Set does not exist any more.’

‘But evil does,’ I responded, and left the temple.

Thus I stood with the King Akhnaten at the door of the tomb in the Valley of the Kings and prompted him as he recited the litany of offerings to Osiris-Amenhotep. A priest at his right side offered the things as he named them, and passed them to another who piled them in the tomb.

Outside the funeral procession waited, thousands of mourners weeping and crying. There were no colours, no dyed fabrics or rich jewellery. Every person wore a white cloth now stained with mud and ash. Their hair was loose and tangled, as was mine and the King’s. Four sacrificial oxen lowed their displeasure, children cried and the chorus never ceased of women calling for the Osiris-Amenhotep to return. They wailed:

Come to thy house, thy lovers, thy sisters.

Overhead, no good birds flew, but the birds of ill-omen, the vulture and the crow. The vulture was the Goddess Renennet once, before Aten had come upon us. Now she was just a carrion-eating bird. On consideration, I liked the goddess better.

Akhnaten had almost conquered his loathing for the ceremony, overruled by his fear of his mother. He recited:

This libation is for thee, I have brought thee before the eye of Horus, that thy heart may be refreshed thereby. I have brought it unto thee so that no thirst may torment thee.

Queen Tiye was at the door of the tomb, linked with her daughters and the Priestess of Isis Mutnodjme; and Queen Tiye never took her eyes off her son for the whole long, long recital. Her obedient son, Akhnaten, who implored:

Open thy mouth, Osiris-Amenhotep. I cleanse thee, I cleanse thee, the fluid of life shall not be destroyed in thee.

He presented milk in a clay vessel.

Here is the nipple of the breast of thy sister Isis; milk of thy mother has found thy mouth.

The other Sem-priest, an ugly youth, took the vessel and put it on the sarcophagus; and my lord Akhnaten, presenting two iron instruments to the south and the north, continued:

Osiris-Amenhotep, the two gods have opened thy mouth.

He was doing quite well. I remembered what my master Ammemmes had said about fear being a bad teacher, but clearly it had done wonders for my lord’s powers of concentration.

Day hath made an offering for thee in the sky, and the south and the north have caused an offering to have been made. Night hath made an offering to thee, and south and north have caused an offering to be made. An offering hath been made to thee, thou seest the offering, thou hear’st it. The King giveth an offering to the ka of Osiris-Amenhotep.

He repeated this four times. He then began the long—and mostly jumbled and nonsensical—ritual involving cheeses, cakes, beer and perfumes, which seem to some scholars to relate to plays on words whose original meanings are forgotten.

My mind wandered. I had already mourned for the death of the wise old king, and for the future I felt nothing but unease. I did not like the way the rule of my lord Akhnaten was going. His edicts, for a start, had caused the death of an innocent old man, harmless and learned Snefru, who loved his scrolls and hoarded writings as much as any father loved his children. I was keeping my place in the Recension with one finger, and was amazed to find that my tears were blotting the ink. I hastily wiped my face.

It was probably not for Osiris-Amenhotep that I was weeping.