The Sleeper in the Sands (30 page)

Yet in the end he was to be gravely delayed. That afternoon, as had happened to Thua the evening before, the Queen was taken suddenly into her confinement, and when the news was brought to Joseph it was accompanied by an order to attend at once on Pharaoh. Joseph found him by the doorway which led into the Harim, gazing out beyond the Palace towards the flow of the Nile. ‘I am doing as you advised,’ King Thoth-mes said without glancing round, ‘and imprinting the beauties of life upon my mind. See, the blueness of the sky and the greenness of the fields, and the grace of the birds soaring high before the sun! How can the world be evil when it contains such things of wonder?’

Joseph opened his mouth to answer, but then suddenly, from the depths of the Harim, there rose a scream, long and dreadful, before at last it fell away Despite himself, remembering the same sound he had heard the night before, Joseph winced; and King Thoth-mes, as he turned round, saw him do so.

‘The labour is many months early,’ he whispered.

Joseph bowed his head. ‘All may still be well.’

For a long while King Thoth-mes did not reply. ‘I have been thinking much,’ he said at last, ‘of what you said to me this morning. Then, some hours back, I fell asleep, and I dreamed the dream once again which I described to you long before, the same which you had dreamed as you slept above the valley’

From behind him, Joseph heard the sudden sound of feet running, and he half-turned to see who it was. But King Thoth-mes seized him by the arm and drew him very close. ‘That first time,’ he whispered, ‘when I told you my dream . . .’ - he swallowed -- ‘I did not tell you all.’

Joseph started. ‘What, then, did you omit?’

King Thoth-mes swallowed again. The footsteps were drawing nearer, and it struck Joseph suddenly that his companion was afraid. ‘Here,’ said the King, drawing a scroll of papyrus from under his cloak and smuggling it into Joseph’s hands, ‘read this well.’ Then he stepped backwards and Joseph, turning, saw that a stranger had entered the room, shaven-headed, and holding a staff on which was surmounted the talisman of Amen.

The priest bowed low.

‘What news?’ King Thoth-mes asked.

‘The Queen,’ the priest answered, ‘your sister, O King . . .’

He left the rest unspoken and, turning, began to lead the way into the depths of the Harim. When he saw that Joseph was accompanying King Thoth-mes, however, he halted and attempted to forbid him access; but King Thoth-mes ordered him to be silent and continue on his way. The priest bowed again, with evident reluctance, but he did as he was commanded, and it was not long before the three of them had arrived by the place of the Queens confinement. Joseph hesitated before entering, reluctant to intrude; but then he heard, from ahead of him, King Thoth-mes cry out, and at once he followed him into the chamber.

He too, gazing at the scene before him, could not restrain a gasp. ‘May the All-High have mercy upon her,’ he whispered, looking at the Queen, for she lay in a filthy pool of mingled blood and sweat, and a hideous gash had been torn across her belly. It seemed impossible to Joseph, gazing upon the wound, that the Queen could have survived it; but even as he thought this, she moaned very softly, and he saw a single tear well and then start to roll down her cheek. King Thoth-mes crossed to her and gently raised her in his arms, staining his white robes with his sister-Queen’s blood; and Joseph, watching them together, remembered what the King had said to him earlier that day, that he was the heir to Osiris and could never die. Joseph felt a touch of something cold very deep inside him, at the horrible thought that such words might be the truth. And if they were, he wondered suddenly, then what of the infallible sign which the High Priest had promised, the marvel which would prove the truth of all his claims?

He looked again at the hideous wound to the Queen. ‘The child,’ he exclaimed urgently, ‘where is the child?’

King Thoth-mes turned to glance at him, his face a mask of agony and foreboding. At the same moment, from the shadows, a man stepped forward, shaven-headed like his fellow but with a golden collar and a cloak of leopard-skin, and Joseph knew that these marked him as the High Priest of Amen. Despite himself, Joseph took a pace backwards, and the High Priest, observing this, smiled very faintly. Then he clapped his hands, and a servant girl came forward with a bundle in her arms. The High Priest took it from her, and as he did so Joseph saw that the bundle was stirring violently. The High Priest parted the cloth in which the infant had been swaddled, and for a moment -- as he inspected it -- Joseph imagined that his eyes betrayed a terrible void, more lonely than he had ever dreamed might exist. But then the thin smile returned and, plucking away the swaddling sheet, the High Priest held what had lain beneath it up to the light.

‘No!’ cried King Thoth-mes suddenly, gazing upon the infant -- the thing -- that was his child. Its skull was hideously distended and long, its belly swollen, its limbs very spindly: a loathsome parody of King Thoth-mes himself. Yet worst were its eyes, for they were burning bright and seemed more a demon’s than a mortal child’s; and then suddenly it began to hiss and spit, and reach out with its fingers, which were thin and hooked like an insect’s claws. It appeared to be sniffing after something; and then Joseph realised that it was the blood of its own mother, spilled across the floor.

‘No!’ King Thoth-mes cried out again. He stumbled forward, and Joseph saw how palely the sweat gleamed on his brow. He tried to reach out for the creature in the High Priest’s arms, but as he did so, he choked and began to clutch at his chest, as though the horror of what he had seen could be ripped out from his heart. But his heart would not be stilled; and Joseph, as he ran forward to take King Thoth-mes in his arms, could hear it thudding very fast and loud.

‘The horror will kill him!’ he cried. ‘His heart will not endure it!’

‘Then fetch physicians,’ answered the High Priest. ‘Go! I will stay with Pharaoh, for it is you who knows where help can best be found.’

Joseph met his stare a moment in silent suspicion, then gazed down at King Thoth-mes and listened again to his heart. A second time, Joseph glanced up and met the High Priest’s stare, and then he rose and hurried away, calling for attendants. By the time he had summoned sufficient servants, however, and returned to the chamber itself, King Thoth-mes was no longer there -- nor the Queen, nor the High Priest, nor the hideous child. Of the blood as well, which had been smeared across the floor, there was now not a trace, and indeed, it was as though all the horrors which he had witnessed in the room had never been.

Still, though, long after he had dismissed all the attendants, Joseph lingered in the chamber, hoping that King Thoth-mes might perhaps reappear. All remained silent, however; and as the shadows of evening began to lengthen, so his sense of despair and dread grew the more. Then suddenly, just as he was on the verge of abandoning all hope and leaving, he heard footsteps from behind him and, turning round, saw the form of the High Priest.

The two men stood in silence for a moment, then the High Priest bowed his head. ‘The falcon is flown to heaven,’ he announced in a tone drained of emotion. ‘The new falcon is arisen in his place.’

Joseph breathed in deeply. ‘I am sorry . . .’ he whispered, ‘to hear such news ... I am sorry’ He breathed in again, then he narrowed his eyes. ‘Yet, so Pharaoh told me, it was your claim that he would never die.’

The High Priest’s face remained utterly impassive. ‘Do not, O Wazir, seek to intrude upon our mysteries -- for have we ever trespassed upon your own affairs of state? King Thoth-mes is dead -- King Amen-hetep is now the ruler over Egypt. He will need the guidance of a wise and loyal servant -- and who else, O Yuya, can that be if not you? For you should know that it was the last wish of King Thoth-mes, spoken upon his dying breath, that you should be to his son what you had always been to him.’

Joseph remained silent a while; then he nodded shortly. ‘In his death as in his life, I shall of course obey him.’ He paused a moment more, meeting the High Priest’s eye. ‘Yet still I would like to know if he can truly be dead.’

For the first time that evening, a flicker of amusement touched the High Priest’s lips. ‘If there are mysteries which are hidden from all but the highest of my fellows, why then should I share them with you, when you do not even believe in our traditions and our gods?’ He paused; and again, staring into his eyes, Joseph imagined that he caught the glimpse of an infinite loneliness. ‘Do not pry,’ the High Priest whispered suddenly, touching Joseph lightly upon the chest with his staff. ‘For believe me -- there are secrets it were better you should never come to learn.’

Then he bowed once again, and turned and left the room. Joseph did not seek to follow him. But later, when all three of his children lay before him asleep, he pulled out the papyrus which King Thoth-mes had smuggled to him and read it closely, the shadow of perturbation deepening all the while upon his face. When he had finished with it, he crossed to where Tyi, his infant daughter, lay, and for several minutes gazed down upon her tiny sleeping form, abandoned to his own thoughts. Then at length, he crossed to the balcony and slipped the papyrus under his cloak, gazing all the while at the distant western hills, beyond which lay the valley of the tombs of the Pharaohs.

It was from the same balcony, some seventy days after the death of King Thoth-mes, that Joseph watched the embalmed body being taken from the Palace, borne upon the shoulders of the worshippers of Amen, swathed beneath bandages and encased within gold. Joseph had not sought to join the procession, but even so, he stood long while watching the passage of the torches as they flickered in a line across the western plain, winding through the night towards the tomb beyond the western hills, cut from the rock of the sacred valley. Only when all was darkness again did Joseph turn at last. He wandered slowly to the room where his daughter lay asleep and, picking her up, cradled her in his arms, inspecting the beauty of her face very closely. Then he stood a long while as before, lost in thought.

But at this point, Haroun saw the approach of morning and broke off from his tale. ‘O Commander of the Faithful,’ he said, ‘if you would care to return here tomorrow evening, then I shall describe to you the fortunes of Joseph’s daughter, Tyi.’

And so the Caliph did as Haroun suggested; and the following evening he returned to the mosque. And Haroun said:

By the explicit order of the will of King Thoth-mes, Tyi was brought up as a royal princess, so that from her earliest days she lived in the Harim, in the splendour of its chambers and amidst its gardens filled with flowers. Yet she was fairer herself than the fairest flower in bloom; and since she was also the youngest of the children in the Palace, she did not find it hard to become the favourite of her nurses. Certainly she knew herself more admired than the Royal Queens and Princesses, for she was often told so by King Amen-hetep himself, who did not like his sisters save to pull upon their hair. But Tyi did not need Pharaoh to make her feel loved, for she already knew that her father loved her more than all the world. He rarely said as much; but she would often catch him watching her in silence and sometimes, when he hugged her, he would speak to her of her mother. Once he carried Tyi on his shoulders to a spot beyond the Palace, where trees lined the border of a tiny lake, and he told her that her mother had often loved to wander there. He never mentioned the fact again; but as Tyi grew older, so it became her father’s favourite pastime to take her from the Harim and walk with her through the fields, to watch the ducks where they swam upon the lake or the pigeons flying brilliantly white against the sky. For Tyi, such excursions provided rare and fleeting glimpses of freedom; and so she too, like her father and her dead, unknown mother, fell in love with the lake, and with the views of the birds and of the hills towards the west.

This love grew all the more intense as Tyi’s life in the Harim began to worsen. Her brothers, like her father, had always adored her, and it had pleased them -- since it served to help them feel more like men -- to spoil their younger sister horribly. In time, however, both Inen and Ay had left the Harim behind and entered the great world which stretched beyond its walls, so that Tyi, still a little girl, felt herself cruelly abandoned. She was bored with the gardens and the courtyards of the Harim; she did not love the company of the other girls about her; she wanted only to be with her brothers again. When either of them came to call upon her, then, she would ask them greedily for details of all the wonders of the world, and when they left she would be plunged deep into tantrums of resentment and frustration. But when she spoke of leaving the Harim herself, her companions, Pharaoh’s sisters, would mock her and take their revenge for their brother’s treatment of them by pulling Tyi’s own hair. As she grew older and ever more beautiful, so the Princesses’ hatred of their rival steadily increased, until at last Tyi was desperate with her passion to escape. But still her only tastes of freedom were her walks with her father - those, and the cherished visits from her brothers.

Both Ay and Inen, in their very different ways, were equally precious to her. Ay brought a taste of the wide-open deserts, for already, although he was barely fourteen years of age, he could hunt, and ride a chariot, and excel in all the arts of war as well as any man. Inen, the elder, was closer and more reserved, as though his silence protected some deep-buried secret, which he could barely endure to admit to himself. Yet his intelligence was piercing and ever restless: Tyi suspected that sometimes, when, their father was away, he would spy on the priests of the Temple of Amen, and he could penetrate to their heart the workings of the Court. It especially pleased Tyi, enduring the torments inflicted upon her by Pharaoh’s many sisters, to think that she knew more of their brother’s doings even than the Queen; and so when Inen’s visits began suddenly to diminish, Tyi grew upset and alarmed. Several months went by; and still in all that time, her elder brother never once came to call. One day, when Tyi was walking with her father through the fields beyond the Palace, she asked him where Inen had gone, and she watched as his expression, normally so calm, at once began to darken. But Tyi could not believe that her father might truly be angry, for she had never seen him lose his temper before; and so she asked him once again where her brother might have gone. Joseph paused in his walk, and stood frozen a moment. ‘I dread to think,’ he said at last, turning as he did so and raising his hand to silence any further questions from his daughter. ‘He is the thing now of my deadliest enemies. I can do nothing for him. Do not, please, mention your brother’s name again.’ And so stern did he appear, and such was Tyi’s respect for her father’s wishes, that she restrained her curiosity for the whole of that evening and only succumbed to it on the following day, when she sent a messenger to hunt out Ay.