Out of the Black Land

Chapter Fifteen

Mutnodjme

The first thing my sister said, as I walked into the royal apartments past the ubiquitous guards, was ‘Oh, Mutnodjme, my heart is glad for you! Ptah-hotep will make you a fine husband!’

‘I am still thinking about it,’ I replied. Even after years in the temple of Isis I was not used to the speed at which gossip travelled. ‘How do you fare, my dearest sister?’

She had aged. She was breath-catchingly beautiful still, perhaps more so, since with age had come dignity and queenly self-possession. Her long neck was unmarked, her profile perfect, and her breasts despite six children still as firm as a maiden’s.

She lifted the last child from her knee and said to it, ‘See, little princess, here is your aunt!’ and I had to kneel and coo over the baby Septenre. I have never liked babies—which is strange, because I have seldom been bitten by any animal and I even handled snakes in one ordeal with the Lady whom I must no longer name—but human young look unformed, furless and puddingy. The baby gaped at me with a toothless grin which was almost charming, and then was obligingly sick, so that her mother gave her to her nurse and slaves mopped the Queen and replaced her cloth.

I wanted my sister to herself.

‘I am coming with you to Amarna,’ I told Nefertiti.

‘Of course, my lord has closed the temple,’ said my sister tactlessly.

‘No, I am in…’ I was about to say ‘love’ but my sense of truth revolted; and so I said, ‘two minds about the Great Royal Scribe. Also my friend Merope is going as part of the establishment of Lord Akhnaten may he live.’

‘Oh, yes, the wives of the Osiris-Amenhotep; no, I mean the dead King,’ she corrected herself. ‘Things are so much simpler now that there is only one god,’ she said, accepting a cup of light beer from a slave. ‘Except that I sometimes forget.’

‘Nefertiti, sister, has your lord told you of the changes which are taking place in the Black Land?’ I asked, knowing that every word was going to be reported to one spy or another and choosing my speech with extreme care. Nefertiti put down the cup and took both my hands.

‘Yes, it’s a miracle,’ she said solemnly. ‘It’s a revelation. My lord has seen the land all under one god, one worship, one truth. He is the high priest of the Aten, may it be forever adored.’

‘And you?’

‘I am the High Priestess of the Phoenix, the Star-bird, the Fire-wing.’

Her face shone. She was so transfigured by her devotion to this cult that I knew that I would waste my breath attempting to convert her to anything approaching sense.

‘You shall come with me,’ she whispered, conferring a great favour. ‘You shall see the temple of the firebird, the columns of marble, the carvings in stone, the paintings in fresh colours. We leave for Amarna tomorrow. You will stay with me? I shall order a room prepared.’

‘No, sister, I thank you, but I have already agreed to lodge with the Widow-Queen Merope.’

‘And that is near the apartments of the Great Royal Scribe,’ she patted my cheek with her elegant fingers. ‘Sly sister, wanting to be near your lover! Tell me, is he as skilled as the lady Hunero used to say? Does he make you faint with delight?’

‘He is all they say,’ I said warily. This was an aspect of Ptah-hotep which I had not considered. ‘What of you, sister? Your children, are they healthy?’

‘They are. My lord Akhnaten may he live has taken them for a walk to the Window of Appearances in the Temple of the Aten, or I would introduce you now. But there will be time. Travel with me tomorrow, sister, bring the lady Merope with you. I have not seen you for years. You have grown beautiful,’ she said, untruthfully.

‘And Divine Nurse Tey, my mother, she lives?’ I asked.

‘She is well and awaits us in the City of the Sun. I must go to my lord now, sister, the sun is setting and we have evening offerings. And here is Sahte, come looking for you, I’ll guarantee. The slave will take your bundle to the Widow-Queen’s quarters and I will see you tomorrow.’

Thus dismissed, I accompanied Sahte to the rooms of Queen Tiye, where I also found my sister Merope. They both smiled at me and congratulated me on my choice of lover, Tiye adding something extremely rustic on the subject of phalluses and the goddess Isis.

‘Lady, live forever, and if you wish to continue to live, you must not mention the name of any other god but the Aten,’ I said, sitting down and hauling Merope into a close embrace. I had missed her and she always felt good in my arms.

‘Ah,’ said the Queen Tiye. She wrapped a tress of greying red hair around her plump hand and asked ‘My Royal Son’s religion has a firm grip on him?’

‘And on his officials. Pannefer the Master of the Household and Huy the Chamberlain are both fervent believers in the Aten, or at least in their own power and position.’

‘Such is always the case in weak rulers,’ said Tiye, far too clearly for my newly-discovered sense of peril.

‘And the walls have eyes and ears,’ I added.

‘Doubtless,’ agreed the old queen, not moderating her tone in the slightest.

‘If it would please you, I would like to lodge with you when we reach Amarna, and the Widow-Queen Merope and I are ordered to join my sister tomorrow in the royal barge,’ I told her.

‘That is acceptable,’ said the lady Tiye. She was still mourning. Pain was on her countenance like a tight grey veil. Merope helped me to my feet and led me into the outer chamber, where more slaves were binding the last bundles of belongings.

‘Are we not taking the lamp?’ I asked. It was a fine alabaster one, carved in the shape of Sekmet, the lion-headed woman.

‘No objects with other gods on them may be taken into the City of the Sun, we have received orders,’ Merope said quietly. ‘Apparently we will have much more splendid rooms in the new palace. Come, sister, let us eat and then let us sleep, for I am very weary and confused.’

I listened as she ordered a servant to fetch us a light supper, ate most of it for I was hungry, and we lay down together. I dreamed—strangely, not of fear or danger—of Isis descending on the phallus of Osiris, and woke shivering and wet with desire.

I slaked it in the arms and breasts and sweet mouth of my sister Merope, but it was Ptah-hotep who had awakened it.

***

It is sweet to sail on the bosom of the Nile and watch the cultivation slip past, hear the voices of the boatmen and the bleating of goats on shore. Priestesses of the unnamed lady travel sparely and eat lightly, and the last time I had taken to the water I had been on the way to attend a fever in a distant village and had travelled in a fishing boat made of reeds, which had leaked and wallowed and threatened every moment to throw us to the crocodiles.

I was now seated in the boat Aten Gleams with my sister Merope. Little Ankhesenpaaten was lounging on my lap. With the usual perversity of children, she had divined how I felt about small humans and had decided that I was the one she would favour with her royal attention today. She was solid and heavy and would not sit still, so my thighs were being gradually flattened. I could feel every knothole in the wooden bench I was sitting on.

‘I like you,’ announced the small princess, unexpectedly. She was entirely naked except for the strings of beads and her earrings, which were evidently a source of great pride to her.

‘Thank you, Great Royal Lady,’ I replied cautiously.

‘You’re comfortable,’ she explained, digging her elbows into my side as she wreathed her arms around my neck.

‘I am honoured,’ I said, lifting her a little to free my breast from her knee.

‘My father is the Royal One of Amarna, Akhnaten may he live,’ said the little princess. ‘And if you aren’t nice to me, he’ll order his soldiers to spear you.’

‘I see,’ I replied evenly, concealing my shock at such a cool pronouncement.

‘Like he did to Teacher Khons. He was making me learn a long list. I didn’t like him and the Pharaoh may he live killed him for me.’

‘Ah,’ I choked down rage, which boiled up in my throat as bile. My dear Khons, he of the ready grin, dead on a mad King’s whim and here was this barbarous child threatening me with the same fate. There was a lot of water very near; I had already seen several crocodiles, and one swift movement would drop this royal monster into a fanged maw which would end her presumption in one bite, snap, wrench and swallow.

Ankhesenpaaten might not have been civilised, but she was perceptive enough when it came to her own safety. She climbed promptly off my lap and went to her mother, not saying a word more, and I stared out over the water while Merope my sister whispered, ‘Consider how it must have been for her, her tutor slaughtered! She had to invent something to explain it. Do not blame her, sister, she is only a child.’

This was true but not helpful. If I could not blame the little princess I could certainly blame the Royal One. And I did— vengefully and darkly—watching the fronded vegetation, the Nile blue and Nile white waves, the palm trees and the farmers, and a naked boy washing a horse in the river, all with a gaze Merope that said was ferocious enough to wither barley.

‘We must present a pleasant appearance,’ she whispered to me, burying her face in my neck. ‘They will suspect you of belonging to the goddess we cannot name; and they suspect me of being associated with the old king—as I was, and I miss him so much! And our lady the Widow-Queen is not, I fear, going to temper her opinions, and that may get us all killed as dead as poor Khons.’

‘All right, Merope; yes, you are correct,’ I said softly into her nut-brown hair. ‘We should talk to my sister. How long has she been a fanatic?’

‘Oh, years,’ said Merope. ‘I’ve got used to it, you know, it’s only now that you are back that it seems strange. Ask her to tell you about the children, it’s all she’s interested in; that and the cult of the Phoenix, of course. And you’ll be taken all around the temple.’

‘What about my father, Ay?’

‘Ah,’ Merope’s expression said it all. Clearly Ay was as mean as ever and must, I assumed, be the richest man in Egypt by now. ‘He is High Priest of the cult of Aten in Amarna,’ Merope told me.

‘Is he,’ I commented as tonelessly as I could. I had not seen Divine Father Ay for seven years, and on the whole, they had been happy. On the last occasion, he had given me a long, cold, appraising look, growled, ‘Too old for marriage now’ with a certain complacency, and had gone away to spend more time with his treasure. I could not think of anyone less-fitted for a religious office than my father. I diverted my thoughts by imagining short fat Father Ay in a priest’s leopard skin—the tail would certainly drag on the ground, and perhaps he would trip on it.

‘He has expressed his joy to the lord Akhnaten at seeing you, his daughter, again,’ said Nefertiti, who had been listening.

‘My father said that?’ I was instantly suspicious. The only reason that Father Ay could have for wanting to see me again was that he had some gold-producing scheme and he intended to use me in some way. I was never, unlike some maidens, under any false impression that my father cared for me.

‘Yes, I told him that if I could persuade you to come with me, sister, I could induct you into the worship of the Phoenix.’

‘For which privilege he is paid some fee?’ I hazarded. I was on safe ground, for Nefertiti may she live was nodding.

‘Certainly; for you are dedicated to the temple, and your father must be paid the equivalent of a dowry.’

‘I see,’ I relaxed. In the confusion of a new worship, at the head of a new cult, living in a new city, it was comforting that at least Father Ay had not changed. ‘Tell me about this dedication, lady and sister.’

‘Not here,’ said Nefertiti, shocked. ‘It is a mystery.’

In the temple of Isis, whence my thought instantly flashed, I recalled Duammerset, the Lady’s Singer, instructing a group of young women: If anyone tells you that they cannot explain their actions because it is a mystery, then you know you are in the presence of woolly thinking.

I had a feeling that belief in the Amarna cults might require enough woolly thinking to denude whole flocks of sheep.

But I remembered Khons, and kept my tongue safely between my teeth.

Ptah-hotep

We shipped all our furniture and I sailed with the King Akhnaten and his officials, leaving my four Nubians to care for my goods and my scribes. Bakhenmut’s family were loaded last because his lady was prone to sea-sickness, and then she complained bitterly that she must ride in the same barge as Meryt and her clan; between them and their wives, my slaves had seven children, and they were admittedly noisy and prone to romp. Bakhnemut’s children immediately joined the Nubians in a spitting contest, to their mother’s loudly-expressed disgust.

‘My lord Ptah-hotep may you live,’ Huy greeted me with his oily smile. ‘I trust that your burgeoning Nubian family is comfortable?’ This was a hit at my well-known addiction to black women and suggested that all of the Nubian children were actually mine.

‘Indeed, I thank the Great Royal Chamberlain for his condescension. His own household is suitably bestowed on soft cushions?’ This was a moderately nasty response, because although Huy had three wives and several concubines, he had no children, and general gossip suggested that this was because of his insistence on anal intercourse.

‘Indeed,’ he replied. Honours, it seemed, were about even. ‘My lord Akhnaten Lord of the Horizon may he live looks well?’

‘As the Divine One of Amarna always does,’ I agreed.

In fact, the King looked flabby, sunburned and sick. Travel by water did not agree with the Lord Akhnaten may he live and his indulgence in the sacramental wine of the Aten, drunk always at midday, had not improved his digestion. Two servants stood by the Divine One of Aten to make sure he did not fall as he waved to the assembled people on the bank at Thebes. They then seated him in his throne under the embroidered canopy. I noticed a discreet pot, beside one royal foot, in case the royal stomach should prove to be overtaxed by the motion of the water.

But the river was running gently. At this season it should have been strong. Inundation this year had been low, the inner canals had not filled and fully a quarter of the cultivation could only be watered by the use of a shaduf, a sling arrangement with a leather bag on the end, used to raise water up and over a bank. The whole population would need to be employed in keeping the crops wet or the yield for the tax inspectors would be low. And who then would pay for my lord’s new city?

I saw the lady Mutnodjme in the Queen may she live’s barge, Aten Gleams. She was glaring at the river bank as though wishing to put a curse on the whole stretch of the Nile, and I did not want to attract her attention. I did not think that she would be able to play at being lovers while she was in such a mood, and I wondered what she had been told. I had never had any difficulty understanding my wife or Meryt, but the lady Mutnodjme was a puzzle which might easily prove engrossing.

‘So, my lord, do you marry?’ asked Chamberlain Huy, following my glance.

‘The lady has not answered me yet,’ I replied honestly.

‘Surely you do not need her answer. Send a load of treasure to her father and you will have her,’ said Huy, who was very jealous of Divine Father Ay. I shared his opinion that Ay was a timeserving unreliable miser who would sell his own grandmother for crocodile meat to the temple of Sobek (if he still existed) but I saw no reason to tell Huy that. The less that any of them knew about me, the better, and the more I could keep them guessing about each other the less they would enquire into my real secrets.

‘I will have her own will in this, not her father’s,’ I said, again with honesty. I thought that I had felt a fervent response in the lady Mutnodjme but I did not know and I have never forced anyone. Huy grunted. Meryt said that Huy chose very young maidens, insisted on virginity, a strange taste, and liked hurting them, requiring their blood. I felt a great distaste for his company. He knew this instinctively; he who had earned a living previously selling asses in the market-place had an intuitive understanding of the buyer. He hated me for it. But there was nothing that he could do but say to Pannefer, ‘Look! We are rounding the island. Soon we shall see the City of the Sun in all its glory.’

The city was, in fact, a long day’s sail away but it meant that Huy was bestowing his conversational gifts on someone else and I had leisure to eat some bread sprinkled with sesame-seed and think of the last time I had seen Kheperren.

He had come to me in extreme secrecy in Thebes, and although he was older, weatherbeaten, and had a new scar, I thought him surpassingly beautiful above all the sons of men. The point of a spear had torn his forehead and scalp, so that his dark brown hair was white along the length of it. I accused him of dyeing it.

‘No need, soon the rest of the hair will match,’ he had said, laughing, but there were new lines around his eyes and he was worried. We had made love but he had been distracted.

‘Tell me,’ I had begged, and in the darkness, guarded by all of my slaves, he had told me that the borders were unstable and that little raids were crossing all the time. So far they had been small and easily beaten off. Tests, General Horemheb thought, to try Egypt’s state of readiness. Shasu had come from the desert to steal goats and horses. Warriors of Kush had sacked and burned a little village in Nubia, and Horemheb had followed and captured them, executed the chief and enslaved his people. Khattim, secret and clever, had crossed into Mittani their neighbour and looted a temple, escaping into Egyptian territory, for which they were punished by the local commander and returned to their king in chains.

‘But this is all in preparation for a major incursion, Horemheb says,’ had whispered Kheperren into the darkness.

‘Then it will be beaten off as we beat them before,’ I said, not understanding.

‘No, ’Hotep, it won’t; don’t you know? The Pharaoh Akhnaten may he live is calling his soldiers into Amarna. There will be no one to guard the borders,’ said my dearest friend.

‘But that’s… Why is he doing that? What great task has he for the army?’ I wondered. Kheperren shook his head. I felt him move against my chest.

‘I know not, and my general is worried. Perhaps you can find out more.’

‘I’ll try. I promised the wise old man as much; and I have been reading the foreign correspondence. So far it’s mainly begging letters, and I have been sending treasure as requested; the lord Akhnaten is very generous with his treasure. King Tushratta of Mittani has a permanent feud with the king of Khatti, and this is being fostered with presents. If ever Mittani and Khatti settle their differences, we will be in serious trouble. But the King prefers not to bother with letters. He’s having a sed festival, you know.’

‘A sed festival? To celebrate thirty years’ reign? He hasn’t reigned long enough for a sed festival, and where are the priests to run it, if he has closed the temple of Amen-Re?’ objected Kheperren, and I put a hand over his mouth before he could name any more forbidden gods.

‘A sed festival,’ I said firmly. ‘He says that he wants to re-establish his reign over all Egypt under the auspices of the Sole and Only Aten. It will be conducted like the other except with the Aten; and the Phoenix, of course, for the Benben bird is the Queen’s avatar.’

Kheperren was silent for awhile, and then he kissed me instead of speaking. It was warm and close in my bed and we were agreeably occupied for some time. It was only after we had consummated our love and were lying back, cooled by sweat, that he spoke again.

‘Explain this Benben bird cult to me. Where did it come from, and if the King says that there are no gods but the Aten and is willing to kill to prove it, how could there be another object of worship?’

‘That I do not know and cannot explain. The worship of the Benben bird is very ancient, in the old temple at Karnak there was a pillar where it was to roost when it returned. It only comes back every one thousand six hundred years or so. When my lord built the Aten temple at Karnak, he ordered a hall of the Phoenix and it is decorated with portraits of the Queen Nefertiti may she live making offerings to the Phoenix. Now in the City of the Sun too there is a temple, a very large one; it occupies the whole of one side of the palace complex. As to what goes on there, Kheperren, I do not know.’

He laid his head down on my shoulder as though he was very tired and said, ‘These are strange times, Ptah-hotep, my heart, my brother, but I know one thing; I know that I love you and you love me,’ and he fell asleep.

I stayed awake, staring into the darkness. If my lord pulled all his soldiers out of border country, what would stop an invasion from west or east or south? At the beginning of the present 18th Dynasty, Egypt had groaned under the heel of the Hyksos, who had come in chariots and swept an army before them. What was to prevent Mittani or Khatti—who were constantly testing each other because they could only expand into each other’s territory when Egypt was strong—from detecting that the guard was elsewhere and crossing the desert in force?

I could see nothing that would stop them but the legend of Egypt’s strength. I would continue to send presents, continue to correspond as though I was in a position of power, and see how long I could keep the boundaries intact.

How long, I wondered, with Kheperren snoring gently beside me, could one—one man—keep a kingdom by bluff?

I was recalled to myself by a passing boatman, who hauled on his rudder to pass close by, calling to us to beware of hippopotamus ahead. The sail-boat was past before the King’s guard could punish the fisherman for describing the animals as ‘creatures of Set’ and I envied the man. He could speak his mind, did not have to continually guard his tongue, and his boat was as fast on the water as a running horse on land. It carried him swiftly to safety beyond bowshot. In any case the King Akhnaten was too ill to bother, which was a mercy.

‘See your servant Ptah-hotep, my lord!’ cried Huy to the King. ‘He dreams of sweet delights with the lady Mutnodjme!’

And as I was, indeed, dreaming of sweet delights, I smiled in assent. I was glad that I had not known Huy when he sold beasts. He would have sold me a broken-winded hobble-legged old child of an ass, and I would have had to buy it, because he would have known instantly, from my expression, what I was thinking.

‘I have made a dedication stone for the sandstone quarry, Lord Akhnaten,’ Huy’s attention was diverted from me as soon as I had acknowledged his acuity. I am thinking of putting this inscription on it:

Living son of the sun disc Aten father of all Akhnaten said to me his most humble servant, let there be stone for the new city, the city of the sun. I, Huy, made it to be so in the name of the beautiful child of the sun-disc, one without peer, who formed and fostered me! The lord knows which servants are not diligent; such give themselves over to the power of the King may he live, for the taxes of other gods are measured in handfuls, and those of the Aten in cartloads!

‘Huy,’ said the King slowly, ‘you have said there are other gods.’

Huy paled. ‘There is the worship of the divine Phoenix, my lord!’ he protested.

Pannefer, who had been subdued, brightened immediately. ‘But her worship is also rich beyond price,’ he put in.

The king nodded. The guard leapt to their feet. I was about to interpose a word—after all, if one has two enemies, it is better to have them in plain view and at each other’s throats; and it would not have suited me to have either Huy or Pannefer on their own as King’s sole counsellor—when the King Akhnaten said, ‘But it is time for evening worship. I like your inscription, Huy, just omit the heretical reference.’

‘Hail to thee, most beautiful, sole child of the living god,’ I began loudly, the first line of the Hymn to the Aten which the King had written so many years ago, dictating it to the boy from the school of scribes who had been me.

Huy, reprieved and shaking, continued:

Thou shinest upon us all, father of creation,

self-created, self-sustaining, light of the world.

Pannefer took up the hymn, in his high dissonant twang:

Thou art indeed comely, great, radiant and high over every land.

Thy rays embrace the land for thou art Aten

and subdueth them for thy beloved son Akhnaten.

Thou art remote though thy rays are on earth.

Thou art in the sight of all, but thy ways are unknown.

Then I sang:

The Two Lands are thy festival.

They awake and stand upon their feet for thou hast raised them up.

They wash their limbs, they put on raiment, they raise their arms in adoration at thy appearance.

The entire earth performs its labours. All cattle are at peace in thy pastures. The trees and the grass grow green. The birds fly from their nests, their wings raised in praise of thy spirit. The animals dance on their hoofs; all winged created things live because thou hast risen for them.

This had always been my favourite part of the hymn. I recalled how enchanted I had been when I first took it down in my fast cursive, how the poem had grown on the whitened board under the spell of the soft voice of the King.

‘How wonderful are thy works!’ declared the King, forgetting his water-sickness, as he spoke his own words:

How mighty and how manifest to thy children!

They are hidden from the sight of men, Lord of the Sky, Sole God, like unto there is no other!

Unique One of the World, how sweet are thy ways!

Thou didst fashion the world according to thy desire when thy wast alone—all men, cattle great and small, all that are upon the earth that run upon feet or rise up on high on wings.

And the lands of Syria and Kush and Egypt—thou appointest every man to his place and satisfieth his needs.

Each man receives sustenance and his days are numbered. Their tongues are diverse in speech and their qualities likewise, and their colour is different because thou hast distinguished the nations.

My lord Akhnaten stood up and raised his arms as he declared the final blessing:

O Divine Lord of all,

All men toil for thee,

The Lord of every land, the Aten disc of the day-time, Great in majesty!’

And it occurred to me for the first time—considering how often I had repeated the hymn the realisation was late in coming—that unlike the previous hymn to Amen-Re, the Aten as a god had done nothing but create and provide. There was nothing in the hymn about compassion, or mercy, or justice, or kindness, or love.

And there were precious few of those qualities in the King, or in his Egypt.