Out of the Black Land

Chapter Twenty-eight

Mutnodjme

The general returned. Everyone was pleased to see him, including me. Even the elegant cat Mou, lord of the household, descended from the high shelf in the kitchen on which he slept and condescended to wrap his body around the general’s feet. Horemheb tripped and I steadied him. He smiled at me.

‘Mistress of the House Lady Mutnodjme, I can see that you have been busy in my absence.’

He was right. I had. The apartments were scoured clean, everything that could be polished was polished, and I had bought Nubian blankets and felted carpets from Upper Egypt. I did not know the general’s taste, and when asked no one could tell me. So I had consulted my own.

I had not spent his gold like water. The rooms, like all rooms in the palace of Amarna, were decorated with friezes. The outer chamber had duck hunters all round the walls, delicate papyrus-reed craft floating over impossibly clear water teeming with fish. In that room I had blue fabrics. The inner rooms were lined with flying birds, a masterpiece, and all I had added to that was a tall lamp in the shape of an ibis, which reminded me of Ptah-hotep and Thoth god of wisdom, and furnishings in white and pale yellow.

Horemheb kissed me and sat down to have his sandals removed and his feet washed by Ipuy. This was his privilege and I would not think of taking it away from him. While the old soldier knelt down, I introduced my maidens and men. They all behaved well. I had even induced Kasa to wipe his nose.

‘Tell me,’ he said to Ii, who giggled. ‘Does the Mistress of the House treat you well?’

‘Yes, Master,’ she replied. ‘She makes us work hard, but she works hard herself. Your woman is a good woman, Master.’

‘My opinion also,’ he said gravely.

Ipuy dried his feet. Horemheb reached into a little bag and handed out a thin gold bracelet to each servant. They had not been expecting this and gathered around Horemheb, thanking him, until he waved an arm and bellowed, ‘Food and drink, especially drink! I must wash. Go and prepare a feast!’ and they scattered like birds.

‘Who is coming to the feast, lord?’ I asked. His broad face split with a large grin.

‘You shall see, Mistress. Four persons, apart from us.’

‘Where is Kheperren?’ I asked gently, hoping that I did not have to hear bad news. ‘Has something…’

‘No, he’s gone to see the scribe of Sais.’

My heart leapt up and the general patted me. ‘Yes, the scribe is well, the woman is well, all is very well, and I need a real wash. Ipuy, where is the old scoundrel? I need a scrub.’

Ipuy had slipped out to talk to the guard who had come with Horemheb and I did not want to get him into trouble by noticing this. So I said to Horemheb, ‘If you will allow me, Master, I have washed a lot of people in my time.’

‘Come along then,’ he strode into the washing place, stripping off his armoured shirt and his breechclout. I had already ordered well-jars of warmed water and I knew that Ankherhau had assembled the pumice and brushes and soft soap which the general favoured. I stripped also, because I considered that I was going to get very wet before the general was clean.

He stood under the falling water until he was soaked, and I began to groom General Horemheb as though he were a horse. He was almost as big as a horse. His thighs were as broad as my waist, I could not get both arms around him, and none of this girth was fat. Scrubbing at the stubborn marks which the shirt left on his shoulders and neck felt like scouring a leather-covered rock. He sat down on a stool so that I could reach his back, and I lathered the expanse of scarred skin and muscle. He was very different from my Ptah-hotep or the scribe Kheperren.

He was relaxing under my attentions, though I was scrubbing him with a hard bristled brush as vigorously as I would scrub a floor. I leaned his head into my breast so I could get at the back of his neck when his mouth found my nipple. I kept scrubbing, though I was becoming aroused. One strong arm went around my hips, moving me until I was straddling his lap. One hand caressed between my legs.

He was not going to force me, though he could have; he was the strongest man I had ever seen. A finger slid inside me. My body was reacting. After all, he was a soldier, a man who risked his life for Egypt. After all, I had been a long time without a man.

After all, he was my husband.

Feeling down to position the phallus correctly, I lowered myself onto a hard spike, carefully so as not to hurt the delicate tissue. Horemheb gasped and threw back his head, so that I could kiss him, the scarred face, the broad cheekbones, the hard mouth, which sucked at my lips. His phallus fitted inside me, just fitted. I had never been so filled and the sensation was strange. I sat awhile joined to him, savouring the feeling.

Then I began to move. I had seen the dancers of Nubia revolve their hips, and Meryt had told me that her success in lovemaking was entirely due to this skill. She had taught it to me. A sideways flick, a return, then a rotation like the upper grindstone. I had seen the effect this had on susceptible Egyptian audiences, who often had recourse to putting plates over their rising laps. This had always amused the dancers, and this is what all those men were thinking of. A woman in the Isis position, rising and falling like a rider.

This had advantages. If Horemheb had descended to lie on me, I might have been crushed flatter than a frieze. This way I could control the depth of the phallus and its angle and something that was itching for attention; some place in my vessel of Hathor which did not ordinarily react. I leaned away from my lover to contrive that this itch should be rubbed, and I began to gasp, almost to sob, as a flood of sensation washed over me.

He seized my buttocks in both hands and I clutched his neck and the mating grew strong. I was not going to hurt Horemheb no matter what I did, not without a weapon. The phallus twitched and he began to seed me, and at the same time I shoved myself down on the spike and wrapped my legs around his waist. He was deeper inside me than anyone had ever been. I shuddered. He held me tight.

‘Mistress,’ he said into my neck, as I disentangled myself and stood up on weak legs. ‘My Mistress of the House Mutnodjme. Lady, you honour me.’

‘Lord,’ I agreed. I kissed his mouth again and picked up my brush, which I had let fall in an excess of passion. We were both covered in lather. ‘We are certainly the cleanest lovers in the palace of Amarna,’ I commented, wiping soap off my belly.

‘It reflects the purity of my passion for you,’ he said, and I laughed and resumed scrubbing.

My household had exerted themselves and I was very pleased with them. When I had eventually emerged from the washing-place with a very clean general, Ipuy and Kasa offered to massage him with perfumed oils and Ankherhau had found his best cloth. She had, without being ordered, shaken out the folds and mended a little tear in one corner.

Takhar was laying out plates for the feast on the low long table which the general had ordered especially built for his house. He often had secret conferences and preferred to serve himself and his guests from a selection of dishes on the table rather than have servants filling cups and supplying food who were also attending to his secrets.

‘Willing hands have listening ears attached,’ he remarked, a truly strange image, but I saw what he meant. Ears did come along with the usual human package.

Apart from Mou, who did us the honour of attending on the preparations, approving of the cuisine and making off with a large piece of roasted beef, I did not know who was attending the feast. Wab had made garlands for seven, as the general had said that there would be six and it was always the custom to make one extra. They were very good garlands, collars of little flowers which I had not seen before put together with skill and I commended her. She put one finger in her mouth and wriggled with pleasure at my praise. I supposed that she would grow out of this, for she was a good child, mostly.

‘Mistress, I had to use small flowers, because the lotus are scarce this year.’

‘But it’s Khoiak, Wab, there should be unnumbered lotus in the pools.’

‘No, Mistress, hardly any. The season has been bad and the flood failed again and now there are few lotus. The farmers are eating the lotus roots and making bread of the seeds.’

I patted Wab and gave her a honeycake, but this was bad news. I saw no need to tell the general—he undoubtedly already knew—and surveyed the table.

There were stewed pigeons and roasted quail, a huge roasted fish, and a dish of garlic, leeks and onions cooked with beans. The general had always liked beans. Bukentef was standing guard over his jars of beer and wine. He gave a jug to Ii, who was to greet the guests with wine while Kasa and Wab draped them in flowers and anointed them with oil. I had bought a set of wine cups, light pottery decorated with cornflowers, and they stood ready on a tray.

General Horemheb, the picture of a cared-for man, clean, satisfied, massaged and clad in an indigo-printed cloth, threw himself down in his chair of state and accepted a cup, tasted, and grinned.

‘I like having a household,’ he announced. Wab trotted over and put a garland around his neck and he patted her on the buttocks as she did so. She giggled.

Then Nebnakht opened the main door and announced, ‘Widow-Queen the lady Tiye, Mistress of Egypt, Menna and Harmose Scribes of the Pharaoh, General Khaemdua Ruler of the Hermotybies.’

Wab and Kasa distributed garlands, Ii presented filled cups, and the guests came in and were seated around the long table.

‘Lady,’ I said a little breathlessly, ‘I am so glad to see you.’

I knelt next to the red-headed woman Mistress of Egypt, and she cupped a hand under my chin.

‘I know that you came every day of my captivity and tried to get in, Mutnodjme,’ she said softly. ‘I know that of all of my friends you never forgot me. I know that you have married the general and he never forgot me either. If it had not been for you, lady, I would still be shut in my rooms, well fed and well cared for but utterly unable to communicate with the outside world. I am so sorry about the scribe. I would have told you if I could, but my son chose that moment to lock me up. I hope that you forgive me.’

‘Lady, I have nothing to forgive,’ I said truthfully. ‘If you had not acted as you did, that scribe of my heart would be dead. I and the general agree very well.’

‘So I see,’ she commented, taking in the room, the servants, the feast and the terribly clean general in one comprehensive glance. ‘You have done well, Mistress of the House.’

I bowed. Ii poured wine for the Widow-Queen and she went on. ‘Tell me, how well do you know your servants?’

‘Not at all well, lady, they are almost all new except for the guards and the old man Ipuy. He is the only one I would trust, for he loves Horemheb like his own brother. In due course they may come to trust me, but it will take another season. But in any case they will be sent away as soon as the feast is laid out and our wants supplied. Horemheb always conducts his gatherings in this manner—it will cause no comment. Lady, when did they release you?’

‘Just now,’ said the Widow-Queen, curling a tress of grey-streaked red hair around one finger in the way I remembered.

‘Horemheb’s men came and relieved my guards. Then I was bidden to come to a feast. The times are very odd at the moment, so I saw nothing particularly strange about being taken out of prison to a feast. I put on my gown and here I am. I may, of course, be dreaming.’

I took up her hand and kissed it. ‘No, Lady of Egypt, you are not dreaming.’

The feast was laid, the wine flowing, and the servants were all dismissed in Horemheb’s usual fashion. Sitting around the table were my two tutors in the cuneiform script, Horemheb and me, the Mistress of the Two Lands and General Khaemdua.

I had heard of him. He was the ruler of the other division of the army. A very powerful person, with a reputation for courage and cold skill. He was not loved, as Horemheb was loved. He would not, for instance, have climbed down a cliff as Horemheb had, ahead of all the others, to show his soldiers that it could be done. But he had never lost an engagement in the whole time he had ruled his army, and he was very careful of his men. It was Khaemdua, however, who had been caught in a blazing fortress with no way out over the fire which the enemy had set about the walls. He had called for volunteers to die for Egypt, killed them swiftly and painlessly, and laid out their bodies across the coals. On this bridge they had walked to safety, eighty-three men and General Khaemdua last of all, treading the roasting bodies of their comrades.

In person he was slim, elegant and very well dressed. He wore no gold-of-valour. His cloth was the short kilt of the Hermotybies. Over it they wore a red cloth which came almost to the calves and a very long and heavily decorated belt which hung down at the front into two tails hung with metal beads. The General’s belt was, of course, sewn with electrum sequins, and his tassels were silver, tagged with Nubian stones. He was married, I had been told, to a very cool and aloof lady who was some connection of the scribe Khety. Khety had often remarked that it was no wonder that the General had no children. Engendering would mean that he had to get close to someone.

But he was sipping wine and eating roast quail with some enjoyment. It was only when he looked on the Widow-Queen that his austere, high-nosed face changed expression at all, and then he looked startlingly like a boy devoted to a goddess.

The food had been tasted and praised, everyone’s health had been asked after, the general’s marriage with me had been toasted and both the Widow-Queen and General Khaemdua had approved of my decorative work. Then the lady Tiye put her elbows on her knees and said, ‘Well, what of Egypt?’

‘Bad, lady. The flood has failed again. The farmers are hungry. The soldiers sent out to obliterate the name of the old god are behaving badly. The inspectors sent out from the temple of Aten are too few to properly administer the cultivation and they are also accepting bribes,’ said General Khaemdua with distaste.

‘I hanged four scoundrels for terrorising a village, and the air is full of denunciations. My own scoundrels are under control, of course,’ he added, though no one would suppose he would tolerate an army that was not under control.

‘Bad, lady,’ agreed Menna, having consulted with Harmose as to who should speak. ‘Letters for the Pharaoh Akhnaten are not being dealt with, and our own chief is accepting gold to pass incorrect tax returns. Some of the Nomarchs are growing rich and some are reduced to beggary. The Watchers are overworked and are falling victim to corruption; some are even extorting money from their villages.’

‘Bad, lady,’ said Horemheb slowly. ‘I rescued Tushratta and put him back on his throne, but the watch on the borders has slept and my soldiers and those of my comrade Khaemdua’s are constantly being diverted to this mad work of destroying the Aten.’

‘The King is totally isolated,’ I said. ‘There is no honest Councillor left. Huy and Pannefer between them make sure that he hears nothing that does not please him. Divine Father Ay plots to own the whole world. His wife plots with him. The children know nothing, are not even literate, and no one sees them but their own court. Great Royal Wife Smenkhare is flirting with the king, using his body to excite whatever it is that can be excited in a eunuch. I fear that the atmosphere has completely corrupted him. The Great Royal Lady Meritaten is trying to seduce Smenkhare, to whom I am told she is also married, and the little ones have no chance, as far as I can see, of growing up sane. Though Ankhesenpaaten at least appears to have some maternal instincts, she looks after Tutankhaten.’

‘In a word, then,’ said Tiye heavily, ‘bad.’

‘The country is lurching along,’ said Horemheb. ‘Egypt has got used to being governed and many officials still hold to their truth which is in Maat. The situation is not good, but if the Nile floods next year then we will all eat, at least. Surely this utterly and uniquely-corrupt royal family cannot last long. Their own way of life, one would think, will kill them.’

‘Possibly,’ said Tiye. ‘We will see. Meet me regularly, my lords, if you please. Menna and Harmose will keep an eye on foreign affairs. The lady Mutnodjme will hear them if they have anything to say, for they are still teaching her the square letters and that is a task for a lifetime. Now I am freed from captivity there may be some words I can say to my sons which will moderate their behaviour. Off hand I cannot think of any rule of virtue which they have not broken, but there may still be some. We will take no action. Yet.’

This was agreed. Then we called in the musicians, and the feast became merry.

I was pouring beer through a strainer for my husband when I realised that I was happy.

Ptah-hotep

I was sitting in a shady spot on a wall with the three volumes of Imhotep’s House of Ascent: Building the Pyramids in my lap. I was not reading the puzzling and difficult script. I was looking at the horizon, where the pale line of dew was burning off the desert, and thinking about nothing at all. Kheperren had gone back to his army, Mutnodjme had married the general, and I was at a loose end.

Sitamen’s steward came to me and dropped to one knee at my feet.

‘Rise,’ I said lazily.

‘Lord, a man who was a priest of Amen-Re has come and wishes to speak to you urgently. He is unarmed.’ She didn’t need to tell me that. The guards would never have allowed an armed man into Sitamen’s palace.

‘Bring him here, with some of the light beer and some bread,’ I ordered, and the steward went away, returning after an interval with a small girl carrying a tray and a young man whom I thought I recognised, though I could not place him. I had seen him a long time ago, that was plain. The face was associated with fear and darkness. I rubbed my eyes.

‘Lord Ptah-hotep, who was Great Royal Scribe, now scribe of the Royal Lady Sitamen, one who was once a priest of the god Amen-Re kneels to your honour,’ he said.

I still could not work out where I had seen him before. A thin face, a thin body, long limbs. I clad him in my mind in a priests’ gown, added a decade or so, and now I knew him.

The last time I had seen this man, he had been a priest in the temple on the night that the terrifying old man Userkhepesh, Chief Priest of the Good God Amen-Re, had attempted to frighten me out of my wits and then decided not to poison me.

I had played many games of senet with Userkhepesh in the palace of Amen-Re in Karnak before the mad king moved the court to Amarna. He always won. We had almost become friends. I had enquired after his fate when the temple was disestablished, but no one could tell me where he had gone and I had assumed that he was dead. Perhaps he was.

‘Rise and sit next to me,’ I told the young man. ‘Have some beer and a bite of this good bread, then tell me what brings you to me, face out of my past.’

He drank a mouthful and ate a token crumb of bread which was required of him by courtesy. Then he said, ‘Lord, I have a request from a dying man.’

‘Speak,’ I said. I guessed who this dying man might be. So the old man had not moved from Karnak after all—I should have known that he would not go far from his temple.

‘It is the man who was once Chief Servant of Amen-Re,’ whispered the priest.

‘I thought that it might be. What else could bring you into this dangerous place, and who else would be bound to know where I could be found?’

‘Lord, he is very old now, and dying, but he always knows where people are and what is happening in the Black Land.’

‘Yes,’ I agreed. ‘I will come.’

‘Then you must come now, Lord Ptah-hotep, and secretly.’

What had I to lose? If this was some trap devised by the palace, it was so clever that it deserved to succeed. And what could Pharaoh do to me now that I had not done to myself? I had been stripped of all titles and wealth. I was just Ptah-hotep. I was completely without influence and valueless.

‘Very well. I will leave my refuge and come with you. But you will tell the Princess Sitamen’s guard where we are going and when I will be back—I will not listen—and if I am not returned by my hour, they will tear Thebes apart looking for me. If you are wishing to encompass my death, you can kill me now with a lot less trouble by just pushing me off this wall.’

He said gravely, ‘Lord, that is not my intention or the intention of my master,’ and I believed him well enough.

We went through the alleys and lanes of Thebes. The condition of the people was parlous. By the rubbish through which I had to wade, they were living mostly on dried fish, which is not good for humans. Their beehive ovens were cool. No one had enough grain to bake bread every day and the palace was no longer handing out rations of grain when the season was poor.

It was not lightly that the gods who invented writing, Isis and Thoth, made the same character for ‘bread’ and ‘life.’ For what was the Black Land without bread?

Swollen-bellied children played in the detritus, throwing fish-spines at each other and quarrelling over scraps. I was almost bowled over by a foraging pig which snapped at me, its jaws clumping shut just short of my shin as I hit it a sharp blow on the snout. It snorted and ploughed on through the stinking midden.

‘The animals are growing bolder,’ commented the priest. ‘In the country the desert wolves are creeping into the villages and taking children, now that the Watchers and the army have been diverted to carve out the name of Amen-Re from monuments made a thousand years ago. Masons make scaffolds to climb up and deface our history instead of repairing what we have.’

‘Truly the state of Egypt is bitter,’ I agreed. He led me into a space between two houses just wide enough for me to traverse and knocked at a door.

It opened inwards, which was a mercy, and I bent under the lintel. Lying on a pallet in a small room whitewashed all over like the inside of a clam-shell, was indeed the old man Userkhepesh, wrapped in a linen sheet.

The only light came from a small oil-lamp. He had aged far beyond age. He was so old that his hands trembled on his breast. His skin was like vellum which has been left in the sun, a multitude of fine lines. His black eyes had filmed over. Time had struck him down and stripped him of his sight, but his voice was clear and he recognised my greeting.

‘Ptah-hotep,’ he said, ‘Greeting. I fear that I cannot offer you anything—not even a game of senet,’ he chuckled. ‘Though I shall soon be playing Passing-Through-The-Underworld in earnest.’

‘I am glad to see you, lord,’ I said, sitting down on the edge of the pallet. It was the usual peasant’s mud-brick shelf-bed, which was usually padded with a straw mattress. ‘I have come as you asked.’

‘You always had courage,’ he remarked. ‘Even when a terrible old man did his best to overawe you. Ah, well. I am dying,’ he said, taking my hand in both of his fleshless claws.

‘Yes, lord,’ it would have been discourteous to argue with him.

‘And I wished to tell you something before I die and have to confess my sins to the judges in the underworld. My heart will weigh heavily against the feather, for all of this is my fault, my fault,’ he began to cry. Tears trickled down the old face and I wiped them gently away.

‘Lord, how can this be all your fault? The state of the Black Land is too terrible for it to be any one man’s fault. It is not your doing that the river did not rise, is it, lord?’

‘Don’t humour me, boy, I am old but I am not senile,’ he snapped, sounding much more like himself. ‘Do you remember the temple of Amen-Re in its splendour?’

‘Certainly, lord. As I recall Amenhotep-Osiris thought that the temple had too much power; for there were two rulers of Egypt, you and the Pharaoh. The lord Amenhotep-Osiris tried to reduce your influence; and it was played like a game, in the sunlit courts, in the golden halls of Amen-Re.

‘When I came to see you, lord, for the first time, a boy just taken from the school of scribes, I was left waiting in your inner apartment. There was a wall painted with doors and a floor made of inlaid turquoise, a ceiling all webbed with golden images of Amen-Re, and your throne made of electrum with a footstool of silver. I had never seen such wealth. And you, my lord, came in through an unexpected door like a spider, attended by two naked women more lovely than any I had ever seen.’

‘You were no fly, Ptah-hotep. I did not realise then what an honourable creature had flown into my web. Though I did realise it after. I heard how you surrendered your office, boy, gave away your goods, set your slaves free, in order not to obey a dreadful order from the vile king. I wished that I had shared your courage.’

‘Userkhepesh, what are you trying to say?’ I asked gently, wishing I had at least bought some wine to moisten the old man’s dry throat. I had not thought to find him so unprovided with basic comforts. I had not imagined that the Chief Servant of Amen-Re could really be poor. I summoned the attendant.

‘Priest, here is maybe a twentieth of a deben. Go and buy some wine and bread, if some can be found.’ I gave all the copper shavings that I had in my pouch to the attendant. He vanished without a word, closing the door behind him.

‘Once a twentieth of a deben would have brought you more than bread and wine,’ commented Userkhepesh.

‘I could have given him a couple of gold beads, but that might have got him murdered,’ I replied. ‘The streets of Thebes are very unsafe now for anyone carrying anything of value.’

‘Indeed. Do you recall the son of the Wise King Amenhotep-Osiris?’

‘Lord, he rules all Egypt now, and a worse king has never sat on the Throne of the Two Lands,’ I replied, wondering if he was indeed senile.

‘There was a parley between all the chief priests, before you were born,’ he went on. ‘It was held in my apartments in the great temple of Amen-Re. The priests of Ptah were there, and Khnum, the strange cosmogeny of Hermopolis. We drank wine and watched Nubian dancers and indulged our flesh with women, with hair the colour of ripe corn, who had been bought in slave-markets beyond the Great Green Sea. The feast cost me a basket of gold.’

‘Yes, lord.’ I could understand why he wanted to live in the past. There was no glory to be got from a tiny room in a mud-brick house in the back streets of Thebes.

‘But the real reason for the gathering was to consider the Great Royal Heir Thutmose. You never saw him, did you?’

‘Never,’ I told him. Prince Thutmose had been bitten by a snake and had died long before I had anything to do with the palace.

‘He was a bold young man, strong, healthy, and the King greatly loved him. He had been trained in diplomacy and could speak three languages and read five. His favourite occupation was chariot-racing, and soldiers said that he would make a good commander. But he had no love for our temple. He had absorbed his father’s views on the balance of power in Egypt. He meant to devote some of his funds to the temples of the lesser gods, Sobek and Bes, Neith and Maat who is truth.’

A horror was growing on me, in the lamplight, in that small bare room.

‘In our arrogance and foolishness we thought that his brother would be more malleable. We thought that Akhnamen would eat out of our hands, once his noble father had gone into the otherworld. Should I ever get there, if my heart is not immediately eaten as I deserve, I do not know what I will say to him.’

‘Master, please,’ I begged, unable to bear the suspense.

‘When I say to you it was my fault, that all this is my fault, Ptah-hotep, I am not mad or deluded. It was the agreement of the meeting—they all agreed—and I myself administered the venom through a hollow needle placed in a chair-leg. It took him two days to die, but he died.

‘I killed Prince Thutmose, and ruined Egypt,’ confessed Userkhepesh, once Great Servant of Amen-Re.

He closed his eyes and did not speak again. I sat and held his hand. I heard the rattle which is death beginning in his throat. At the last, he opened his eyes and stared into mine, pleading perhaps, begging for forgiveness.

It was not for me to judge him. I said, ‘You are absolved,’ and the lashes of the blind eyes closed over them, and he was dead.

When the attendant came back, we arranged the body fittingly and carried it out into the street. We delivered him to the House of Life to be properly embalmed at the expense of the Princess Sitamen. The body was very light.

Then we gave away his wine and bread to the street-children, as the only funeral feast we could make for the high priest who had almost destroyed the land and the god he had sworn to serve.