Tutankhamun Uncovered (27 page)

And there it lay, reclining on a bed of straw, like a newborn awaiting its first cleansing. On setting her eyes on the figure, a warmth filled her body from her heart to her cheeks. Her skin prickled with excitement.

“My eternal lord,” she whispered, leaning over to touch its forehead, her words inaudible to Dashir. “I shall lie with you for all eternity.”

“It is good, is it not, my lady?” asked Dashir with a broad, expectant smile on his face.

“A true likeness. Most handsomely executed. The gods truly took a hand in this.”

Her words fell on the eagerly receptive ears of the artisans now closely gathered about her. They could be paid no better compliment. There would be much to tell their wives and others in Pademi this night. Truly a day to be remembered. Tomorrow each of them would return to work, their energies recharged aplenty.

The queen drew back. “Dashir, I wish to speak with you in private.”

“Aye, my lady.”

Dashir’s colleagues moved away and resumed their various duties.

“It is my wish that we meet alone, mark you on the east bank at sunset near the place where you embark the ferry. I have some serious business to discuss with you.”

“Oh, my lady, what have I done?”

“Be not afraid. You have done nothing of harm. It is that which you should yet do that will be the subject of our meeting. Tell no one of your appointment, and do not fail me.”

She signalled to the guard. In a moment she was gone.

For the remainder of that day Dashir was so preoccupied with speculation that he sat alone in a corner of the foundry and did little of substance other than issue a few instructions to his apprentices.

As the sun disappeared behind the mountain on the west bank, the men stopped their frenetic labours, cleared up their work areas, and left for the ferry. Mentu, himself late in tidying up his tools, noticed Dashir still working at the fire box. With the prospect of beer ahead, it was most unusual for Dashir to be the last to leave.

“Dashir, you laggard. We shall be late for the ferry. I need you. I cannot pay for a boat tonight. I have nothing to barter for my carriage.”

“Go ahead, Mentu. I must finish this.” Dashir was still sweating over the fire and apparently holding some small piece within the blazing coals. “I have spent the whole afternoon in supervision of other work and neglected my own.” He handed his friend some bread. “Do not worry. I have sufficient barter with me. I will join you all presently at Hammad’s.”

Mentu knew there was no time left to continue the discussion and took off in haste towards the river bank. As soon as his colleague had left the foundry, Dashir removed the empty tongs from the fire and stopped pumping the bellows. After waiting a while for the fire to die down, he closed up the foundry, gave the same instructions he’d always given to the guards posted outside for that night’s vigil, and trotted off towards the river and his appointed rendezvous.

The queen, her senior maidservant and her guards were quite obvious as a group. They were assembled on a small rise above and set back from the river bank. She was sitting on a small folding chair. Tia knelt beside her with a flask of date wine and a bowl of fruit. The guards stood equidistant and erect on either side and about six feet from her. Ankhesenamun was gazing out at the faint blue reflections rippling on the waters. Her expression was almost whimsical.

Dashir was careful not to come upon the group too suddenly. He announced his arrival with a low cry from about thirty feet distant.

“Approach, Dashir. You are welcome,” greeted the queen. At the same time she gestured to the guards to move out of earshot.

The master goldsmith came close by her feet and went down on his knees.

“Dashir,” she began. “These are grave times, and I must speak grave business with you this night.”

Dashir became troubled. He had been this close to the Pharaoh’s wife just the one time before. He had never expected to be summoned into the presence of the royal family a second time. Now he was here, he could not begin to imagine the business of which she spoke.

“I have heard many good things about you, Dashir. You were loyal to the Pharaoh during his short reign, were you not?”

“Aye, my lady, loyal. But no less and no more than any other. Most loyal.”

“Your loyalty persists in his death, does it not, Dashir?”

“It does, my lady. It most certainly does.”

“Then you will do my bidding, Dashir, if it be for the welfare of Pharaoh, will you not?”

“That I shall, my lady. That I shall. Say it and it will be done.” Dashir was relaxing a little. He felt less convinced that the queen was going to accuse him of being the cause of her last miscarriage, and more so that she might be preparing to ask him to create some unique and beautiful object to be added to the king’s grave goods.

“Pharaoh lives through his ka. I wish Pharaoh to continue his life with me. I wish his ka to lie with me as Tutankhamun did...”

This was all getting a bit much for poor old Dashir. The queen’s innermost bedtime wishes were hardly something he wished to share. But then came the surprise...

“...You will bring him to me. When Pharaoh is laid to rest and the tomb sealed, you will enter, seek out his ka, and bring him to me!”

Shocked and stunned as he was by this totally unanticipated directive, Dashir nevertheless comprehended exactly what his queen had instructed him to do. The gold ka figure, that which had been completed in the king’s likeness and, as they spoke, still lay on a bed of straw in the foundry, was what she expected him to remove from the tomb.

Dashir bowed his head. “Oh, my lady,” he whispered, “you ask too much of me. Much as I love Pharaoh, I am not able to do this thing.”

Rather than raise her voice in the anger of command, the queen counselled her servant. “Master goldsmith, do you not agree that all Pharaohs’ tombs have been robbed shortly after burial?”

“Aye, my lady. It is a tragically common affair.”

“Do you not think it possible that our Lord Tutankhamun’s is no less likely to be desecrated? Everything lost for ever?”

“Possible? Aye, my lady. It is possible. But we... we faithful, will try hard to protect it from these irreligious vandals.”

Dashir knew of many examples of the night-time business of several of his colleagues, particularly the tomb builders themselves, who knew exactly the tombs’ whereabouts and their architecture. To some degree, violation was almost inevitable.

“In this light, then, do you not think that through our conspiracy, should we succeed in securing the safekeeping of Tutankhamun’s ka, this is a responsible act? Our duty, even?”

“Aye, my lady. Duty.” Dashir could think of nothing more to say. He trembled at the reality of her words but continued to listen.

“Then you will do it. We need have no more words on the matter.”

“Bbut what if I be caught?”

“You shall not. I shall engineer the circumstances such that you have the freedom to execute your business in my name. This thing that you will do shall be a good thing for Tutankhamun, for Ankhesenamun, for Pharaoh’s subjects. Through your deeds your deeds eternal life for his spirit will be assured, as it will for all of us.”

When Dashir finally met up with his carousing friends that night, he carried a weighty secret.

The Anubis dog was complete, painted, gilded and already lying on the large wooden casket from which, with its black obsidian eyes, it would overlook the king’s body.

Meneg had new problems. This time they were more practical than psychological. He had been instructed to carve a likeness of the king in his late boyhood. His ageing memory was failing him he was unable to picture the king in his youth; he had no recollection of any early piece of artwork that could act as a guide, and the reliefs and frescos of the temples were too stylised for his liking, and in any event, these were two-dimensional.

He was pondering this dilemma as he walked home that evening. It was one of those rare close evenings when storms were gathering to deluge the dry valley in which he lived. He quickened his step in case he got caught before he reached shelter. He entered the narrow street which formed the spine of the village and began to trot no more than this being careful not to lose his footing. As he neared the doorway to his little house, he came to be in the path of some children running at full pelt in the opposite direction. Clumsily, they tried to overtake him. There were many of them and, the street being so confining, it was unavoidable that one of them would connect bodily with the older man. He was sent tumbling, finally coming to rest on his back and, as it happened, on his doorstep.

The children all skidded to a halt. Recognising him to be an elder of the village and as such greatly respected, the boys became fearful of their carelessness. “Sir, are you all right?” asked one of the boys anxiously.

Meneg was by now sitting up with his back against the wall of his house. He looked thoughtfully at the group of boys. The first raindrops fell on his face. He smiled.

This concerned the boys greatly perhaps he had taken a severe blow on the head; perhaps they had caused him some permanent damage. They stood in stunned silence staring at the old man, not knowing what to say or do next.

It was the old man who broke the silence. “No harm done.” He gestured towards one who stood to the right of the group. “You. Yes you, boy. You are the third born of Dashir, are you not?”

“Yyes, sir,” replied the child nervously, puzzled as to why he had been singled out.

Meneg stared at him for a moment. The boy had large eyes and well formed ears; the top of his partly shaved head was elongate, his cheeks chubby with youth. The boy was as close a likeness to Tutankhamun as a child as Meneg could remember.

“What a piece of luck,” Meneg said spontaneously.

The boys regarded the old man quizzically.

“You will model for me, boy. Go tell your father. We begin tomorrow. Now be off with you with you all!”

The boys stood there, stunned, motionless.

“I said, be gone! If the ears on your heads do not hear me they will feel the sting of my whip!”

By now the skies had opened up and everyone was becoming rapidly soaked to the skin. In an instant they scattered to their various doorways. Meneg picked himself up and turned into his own. He felt an internal, satisfying warmth that insulated him from the biting cold of his sodden clothing.

He could see it already... A small statuette portrait of the king appearing as if made when he was just nine years old, as if made at the time of the royal couple’s coronation. Just a head, the neck implanted on a lotus flower base, the earlobes deeply pierced and supporting earrings of gold with lapis inlay. He would see if he could get Dashir, who, he was quite certain, was on close enough speaking terms with the queen, to obtain the appropriate jewellery.

He entered his house and closed the door on the weather.

This day Ugele felt doubly blessed. He took the greatest satisfaction in being the last worker to emerge from the completed tomb. After all those weeks of what had seemed such meagre progress along with the added irritation of the ever-present Parneb who, persistent in his duties, insisted on noting down the issue of every consumable tool and demanding visible evidence of wear before releasing another the chippings were now finally cleared and the walls dressed.

In the burial chamber he examined the surfaces for defects. The light of his oil lamp illuminated the smooth, white limestone. It practically glowed.

The king’s treasurer, Maya, had confirmed that the four rooms were now large enough to store all the grave goods. It would take some creative organisation, but he had no doubt that the king’s funerary paraphernalia would be adequately accommodated and sequestered safely below ground level. It had been an exacting task to complete this space to the demands of the architect. Maya had been explicit and unyielding in his instructions. The largest room, presently a single, L-shaped cavity with a three-foot step down between the two parts of the L, ultimately would become divided; the lower portion was to be the burial chamber. This part was a totally new creation, not conceived of in the original design for the usurped tomb of the noble. The assembled shrine set would fill the room floor to ceiling and cover full five times the area of the sarcophagus itself, leaving space within the chamber barely sufficient for a man to negotiate his way around the structure.

An additional two store chambers led off both arms of the L-shaped room through smaller apertures, that one off what was to become the burial chamber so small that a short man could not walk through it without stooping. The entrance to the one off the upper part of the L was considerably smaller, not much larger than a crawl space. It provided access to the smallest room, the floor of which once again had been excavated below the level of the entrance. This chamber would serve as overflow storage space for the more mundane articles food and drink and such like.

Unlike the tomb of Smenkhkare, which lay almost opposite on the other side of The Valley, this small crypt now had sufficient space to accommodate, packed tight, every bit of the trappings necessary to sustain Pharaoh in his celestial flight. The elder brother’s reign had been yet more foreshortened than that of Tutankhamun, and there had been no time to extend the tomb beyond a single chamber. It had been necessarily light in all but the most essential of grave goods by now a good deal lighter following the intrusions of the general.

Ugele took one last look around. He recalled the great corridors of the tomb of Pharaoh Akhenaten, extending seemingly forever into the bowels of the earth: the furnishings, the food, the clothing, the jewellery, all arranged comfortably about the many chambers, corridors and ancillary rooms, as they had been in life a virtual household for the dead. Nevertheless, for Tutankhamun, one way or another it would all be there, crowding the three chambers surrounding the royal remains. With everything to hand, the king would be able to rearrange it to his liking in the halls of his heavenly Osiride palace.

The master mason was the last to leave the empty tomb and the first to introduce an object the usurped sarcophagus. The great stone casket lay at the top of the stairs, its engravings altered to identify it with its new owner. As he emerged into the midday sunlight, the Nubian’s team of labourers stood in a crescent at the top of the stairwell awaiting his orders.