Out of the Black Land (38 page)

Ptah-hotep

I was worried. I could not account for my sense of dread. I was in the palace of the Great Royal lady Sitamen—not even an edict of the king could make her change her name to delete the forbidden god and turn her into Sitaten—and I could not have been more safe. The daughters of Neith—warrior women and well-armed—guarded every entrance.

The lady Nefertiti had been handed over to a clutch of doting ladies who had obviously been longing for someone to look after.

I had tired of her continual wailing about how her husband could do this to her—‘how could he?’—for it was beyond me that she could ask such a thing when she had seen there was nothing he would not do to honour his foul god; when she had been his active accomplice in, for instance, the suppression of learning in Egypt.

She was very beautiful, but only if she was out of earshot.

I concluded that my nerves were obviously out of order and left the room I had been allotted—a cool shaded one, under a vine—to go and find someone to talk to. Preferably, I wanted the Princess the Lady Sitamen. I needed some task.

I found her watching archery practice. She did not seem to have taken her eyes off the field, but she greeted me by name.

‘Lord Ptah-hotep, blessed be Amen-Re in his rising.’

‘Praise to the good god,’ I answered, after a moment’s fumbling in my memory. I had used this only once since the Aten had been established, and that was when Mutnodjme and Kheperren had bidden me farewell and I had walked out to my death.

‘It was a close thing,’ she said, motioning me to sit beside her. ‘My mother had only time to send me word that you were coming an hour before you came. If you had arrived unannounced, the guards would have kept you in the boat until daylight, and that might have been dangerous.’

‘Indeed, though I doubt that we were pursued.’

‘If the king finds out that his wife is here, I may have to stand a siege,’ she answered, then clapped her appreciation as a stalwart woman drew back a full-sized bow to her ear and the arrow thudded into the exact centre of the cloth and straw target.

‘Lady, that is true. Princess, what would you have me do here? For I would not exchange one prison for another, and I am used to working.’

‘Hmm,’ I had caught her attention. ‘You wish to leave?’

‘Not precisely, lady. I am delighted to be alive, or I would be if a cloud of misery had not settled on me. Give me something to do.’

‘That is easily found,’ she said. The Princess had aged like a soldier, as Kheperren had aged. Here were the helmet galls, the crows’ feet, the harsh lines on throat and forehead from staring across the plain and from the weather. But she was vigorous and strong still, this daughter of Amenhotep-Osiris. Her eyes were bright and their gaze was level.

‘When the temple of Amen-Re was closed we rescued a huge bundle of documents,’ she said. ‘Some of the citizens had found them, dug them up and were using them to light fires. No one has looked at them yet. Some of my women are literate, but none have a taste for learning or they would have gone to the temple of Isis. I would esteem it a favour if you could catalogue the writings.

‘Come every evening and read something to me, Ptah-hotep. It is not safe for you to be abroad, not yet, and in any case it is too hot for journeys. When inundation comes with Akhet and the days are cooler, men will have ceased to search for Ptah-hotep.’

‘If they are searching at all. No one was near when the pyre blazed up but the Widow-Queen Tiye.’

‘Who would never forgive me if anything happened to you after she has gone to such a lot of trouble and put herself in such danger to rescue you. You still wear her pectoral, lord. She must have commended you highly.’

‘She said that Amenhotep-Osiris would have been proud of me.’

We paused to watch the archers. They were very skilful. I made up my mind. Learning had always served me well. As that very same Amenhotep-Osiris had said:
The one comfort which will not fail is learning
.

I took the Princess Sitamen’s calloused hand. Her nails were cut short and her knuckles had recently been rubbed raw. ‘Lady, I will do as you wish.’

She punched me lightly in the chest and sent me away to look at the manuscripts while the warrior women shot arrows into targets in the courtyard of her palace.

***

I found that the days were slipping past without anything to mark them. I found that I could sleep, though I had vivid dreams. I dreamed one night that Kheperren was lying beside me and the disappointment when I woke alone was so acute that I burst into tears. I dreamed strange little pictures which had no connection with anything I had ever seen. I saw Mutnodjme cleaning a soldier’s armour, humming as she often did, under her breath, and I had certainly not seen that in waking life. I saw Kheperren throwing a spear, though I could not see his enemy, but woke with the sensation of dust in my eyes and war-shouts echoing in my ears. I heard the sound of wailing and saw the funeral of a royal princess through eyes which were quite dry.

I also wondered that they sent no word to me, and so, after Inundation had failed again, did the Princess Sitamen.

‘I have had no word from my mother,’ she announced, walking into the house of books. I was sitting easily on the floor, reading a full copy of the Prophecies of Neferti, pleased that my reconstruction had been, as far as I could remember, accurate to the word.

‘You are worried, lady?’

‘Very worried.’ She bit her knuckle. ‘Never has such a long period gone past without some greeting from her, even if she had nothing in particular to say she would not fail to write to me. I have written four letters to her and received no reply. My messengers have handed over the correspondence to the right people, I have questioned them. Something has happened in that cursed city.’

‘Nothing more probable,’ I assured her, putting down the prophecy and allowing the scroll to roll up under its own weight.

‘Could he have killed her?’ she asked with a soldier’s bluntness.

I thought about it. I shook my head.

‘I really don’t think so, lady. I cannot imagine him having the courage even to order such an execution. What do your messengers say? Is there gossip about the Widow-Queen’s fate?’

‘No, there is nothing. You are accounted dead, Ptah-hotep; and so is the queen Nefertiti. You both perished in the fire of spices. The daughter of the king who was married to him that night, Mekhetaten, is dead, died the next morning, and the townspeople are whispering that Tey poisoned her.’

‘That does not seem likely,’ I said.

‘No, she would want the royal daughter alive, though there are more royal daughters. Meritaten is the next in age. Bitter will be her fate and that of my brothers. Smenkhare is already invested as Great Royal Wife and is being used, they say, by Divine Father Ay as though he was a woman. And there is still Tutankhaten and Ankhesenpaaten to play with. Poor children, to be so abused.’

‘But the Widow-Queen, what does gossip say of her?’

The Princess scowled at me. ‘Nothing, I told you, scribe. There is no word of her at all. Not alive, not dead. I came to you to ask if there was someone to whom we could write who might know more.’

‘Mutnodjme,’ I said, delighted by the idea of communicating with my loves again. ‘Or Kheperren. One is Tey’s daughter, one is the scribe of General Horemheb.’

‘Horemheb has gone, taking his personal guard to the borders where Mitanni wars with Assyria. It will have to be the lady. Very well, you may write, but you must use such words as cannot be attributed to you,’ she warned.

‘We do not know what is happening in Amarna while the rest of the country goes to ruin and destruction. The message may be intercepted. I wish I knew what was happening in that cursed place!’

She began to pace and I began to think.

What could I send to Mutnodjme which would tell her where I was? A terrible thought occurred to me.

‘Lady, when did the Widow-Queen go into seclusion? Do you know when?’

‘She has not been seen or heard from since the night of the sacrifice to the Phoenix, why?’

‘Because my lovers have been thinking me dead unless she has managed to get some word to them,’ I knew now where the load of despair which had descended on me had come from. They mourned me. They thought me gone. If they had not been able to speak to Tiye the Queen then they did not know that I was alive. Nor did they know the fate of the complaining woman who had shared my boat. This was awful.

But the Princess was right. All correspondence was probably intercepted. I had to find a way of conveying to Mutnodjme—for Kheperren would surely have left with the general to assist Tushratta—that she could write to Sitamen and would find both her sister and me. I racked my brains.

‘I will consider this, lady. I will not do anything which would bring your palace or the lady Nefertiti into peril. I must speak with her. She might know something, some shared incident of their childhood which would convey the message to her sister.’

‘Rather you than me,’ snarled Sitamen, and stalked out.

The lady Nefertiti, who had been Great Royal Wife and Queen of Egypt, was sitting by a pool when I found her. She was staring listlessly into the water, where silver fish swam under the lotus flowers. It was a beautiful place, a courtyard shaded by a great vine which had grown across the space, supported by trellises. She looked up as I came through the gate, sighed, and returned her gaze to the water.

‘Lady, we need to speak,’ I began sitting down next to her on the broad marble rim.

‘Once you would not have dared to approach me except on your knees,’ she commented.

‘Lady, that is true, though as the husband of your sister I might have been allowed some familiarities,’ I agreed.

‘You were never her husband, only her lover,’ snapped Nefertiti. I began to see why the Princess Sitamen had avoided this interview. Clearly loss and fear had not improved the lady’s temper.

‘Do not quarrel with me, most beautiful of women,’ I said. I needed her cooperation, and I have always found flattery very reliable. ‘Look kindly on a fellow fugitive, jewel of the Black Land, peerless daughter of the Aten.’

To charm this sulky woman into helping me, I was even willing to speak the name of the Aten, a god whose worship I had utterly abandoned.

‘I am old and cast aside,’ she said bitterly, but her expression, which had been that of a stone image, had softened.

‘Lady, no man could cast you aside. Your husband is mad,’ I said truthfully. ‘For who could plot the murder of beauty? Shed the light of your smile upon me, lady,’ I pleaded and sank to my knees, embracing her shins.

She did smile then; and she was still beautiful, once the lines of discontent had been smoothed away. Even abandonment and betrayal could not take away the pure lines of her brow and throat, the delicate line of her mouth. She was designed to be sculpted.

Not entirely without some truth then, I said, ‘Lady, your beauty dazzles me.’

She ordered me to rise with a graceful wave of her pale hand and I resumed my seat.

‘What do you want of me?’ she asked with a flirtatious lilt. That was more than I had bargained for, and was certainly not my desire.

‘I would never aspire to any more grace than the touch of your hand, Great Royal Lady. The Princess Sitamen is worried about her mother, the Widow-Queen Tiye, to whom we owe our deliverance. Nothing has been heard from the Widow-Queen for two months. She may be captive or dead. Therefore I need to write to your sister Mutnodjme to assure her that I, that we, are alive and well, and I need to do this without words. I want you to cast your mind back to your childhood, and find me an incident which will convey this news.’

She looked a little disappointed—I may have been flattering myself—but obliged me by thinking.

‘We did not really share a childhood,’ she said slowly. ‘I was with my step-mother and she was with her nurse. Her mother, my step-mother Great Nurse Tey, nurtured me very carefully, considering that, although I was not the daughter of her own body, I was the most valuable of the children of Father Ay. As I was. He sold me to the Pharaoh for a mountain of gold.