The Season of the Hyaena (Ancient Egyptian Mysteries) (37 page)

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Authors: Paul Doherty

BOOK: The Season of the Hyaena (Ancient Egyptian Mysteries)
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Pentju went to take the scrap but I held it tight. ‘Why does he mention you, Akenhaten and Nefertiti in the same line, then make these references to Hotep the son of Ptah and other members of the Memphis trinity. What do you know, Pentju, about Tutankhamun? Are there further secrets?’
Although he tried to hide it, the physician’s agitation quickened so much he had to turn away, rubbing his hand up and down his chest as if trying to soothe some pain. I grasped him by the shoulder.
‘Come, my lord, you’ve confronted me. I am the Prince’s Protector, his guardian. We can discuss this here or in the presence of the rest.’
Pentju turned round. I was shocked by the change in his face. He seemed to have aged.
‘What is it?’ I insisted.
‘You’ve seen the Prince,’ he replied slowly. ‘I know from Djarka that you once found him in a trance, acting like a blind-deaf mute.’
‘And?’ I asked.
‘We physicians know nothing of the heart, of the soul. If a snake bites you we know how the poison will race through your body and stop your heart. But madness, insanity, the strange workings of the soul?’ He shook his head. ‘We know nothing.’
I sat down on a small wall seat.
‘I am concerned.’ Pentju chose his words carefully. ‘As you know, my lord Mahu,’ he lapsed into formal phraseology without realising it, ‘I was appointed physician to the Royal Household. Great Queen Tiye took me into her confidence. She told me that her blood was marred by a streak of madness. These trances the young Prince suffers from,’ Pentju licked his lips, ‘Akenhaten, when he was a young boy, suffered the same.’
Even then, yes, I will admit, I sensed that Pentju was not telling me the full truth. Yet at the time, the implication of what he was saying was sufficient to chill my heart.
‘I do worry.’ Pentju came and sat beside me. ‘Mahu, we have all walked down a long, dangerous road, only to find ourselves not at the end of the journey but at the beginning of an equally terrifying one. My dreams are full of that. What happens if Tutankhamun is his father come again? Has Akenhaten’s son inherited the same vision, the same absorption? Will he, too, turn Egypt on its head?’
‘That’s for the future,’ I rasped. ‘These attacks? Are they dangerous?’
‘I have studied every medical text.’ Pentju sighed. ‘That’s one of the reasons I was in Memphis. I visited its House of Life. These trances cannot be explained. I don’t know what causes them or how to treat them, except to keep the patient warm and comfortable.’
‘What brings them on?’ I asked. ‘Will they pass?’
Pentju edged closer. ‘As you say, Mahu, that’s for the future. What terrifies me is the likes of Horemheb discovering what you know and arguing that our Prince is not fit to govern the Kingdom of the Two Lands.’
seshetat
(Ancient Egyptian for ‘a true mystery’)
Chapter 13
My love, my lover,
My heart is yearning,
All my dreams sing of you,
Your face like a ghost haunts my heart.
Your perfume comes like an inviting cloud
Taking me back …
I remember this poem. I composed it that evening as I tried to quieten my heart. Pentju’s words had quickened my own agitation, my deep concerns for the future of the Prince. I felt soiled, dirty, polluted by the past, the way it would give no release and allow us to continue. In a way Akenhaten still ruled Egypt. He certainly ruled my heart. I thought as much when I bathed again in the Pool of Purity, then oiled and perfumed my body, putting on my chain of office and sparkling rings in preparation for the small banquet Nebamun’s cooks were preparing. I asked Djarka to play the double flute and, for a while, listened to Tutankhamun sing. He had a good, carrying voice and his singing always thrilled me. When he had finished, I let my soul go back into the past, to meet her, the Beautiful Woman. No, not Nefertiti the murderess during those last gloomy days in the City of the Aten, but the red-haired, blue-eyed young woman who had captivated my heart when I had first met her. I wrote those lines that night but, after a while, gave up to stare through the window, half listening to the sounds of the servants as they prepared the tables.
Colonel Nebamun was most gracious. He allowed us to sit and eat, as I jokingly put it, ‘as a family household again’. Ankhesenamun simply glowered at me, but Tutankhamun clapped his hands and thought it was a splendid treat. We sat before the small tables, cushions piled around us. Alabaster cups, brimming with wine and beer, were served first to whet our appetites and appease our thirst. We began with dried and salted roe, grey mullet and small fishcakes. The main dish was roast goose, served in a spiced sauce in which we could dip the soft white bread fresh from the house bakeries. Djarka and Pentju were there. Khufu’s death soul hung like a shadow around us, though the conversation grew livelier when I announced that we were to return to the City of the Aten.
Ankhesenamun was furious. ‘The City of the Dead,’ she snapped. ‘Everybody is leaving! Thebes is the place to be. How can we go to the markets? What about clothes and perfumes? No one goes to the place of the Aten.’
Tutankhamun, however, was pleased at the news. Thebes had frightened him, with its busy streets and soaring temples. I explained patiently how it would be best if, for a while, the Royal Family stayed in the shadows.
‘Egypt is not at peace,’ Pentju confirmed. ‘The City of the Aten is much safer. Colonel Nebamun will be our guard, we shall be protected.’ He smiled at Tutankhamun. ‘Whilst its gardens are truly beautiful.’
‘Do you want to go there, Uncle Mahu?’ Tutankhamun chewed noisily on a piece of bread. ‘And what about Sobeck?’ The Prince had taken a great liking to my companion, who had regaled him with frightening tales of life in the slums and ghost stories about the Necropolis.
‘I think it’s best, Your Highness, if we do. You and the Princess Ankhesenamun will one day marry and then be crowned Pharaoh and Queen of Egypt.’
‘I am going to ride in the state chariot,’ Tutankhamun declared. ‘Uncle Mahu, you will be my charioteer. I shall wage war on the vile Asiatics and the Kushites; they shall tremble before my name.’
We all began to tease him; I let the conversation drift for a while.
‘There’s something you want to say, isn’t there, Uncle Mahu?’ Ankhesenamun asked spitefully. She and Amedeta sat close together. They looked like twins, two beautiful spoiled women with an eye for mischief. Both of them had spent most of the meal flirting outrageously with Djarka. At first he had been dour, but as he had drunk more deeply, he had responded wittily to their barbed remarks.
‘Yes, Uncle Mahu.’ Djarka now joined in the teasing.
I glanced warningly at them and nodded towards Tutankhamun, now rattling an ivory-handled knife against his alabaster cup.
‘Do you know who the Watchers are? Has anyone ever made reference to them?’
Pentju shook his head. Djarka cracked a joke about Horemheb and Rameses. Ankhesenamun wondered aloud if I was referring to spies, so I let the matter drop.
The next morning we slept late, and when I rose, I immediately became involved in the preparations for the return to the City of the Aten. Colonel Nebamun was pleased that he had received a commission, loudly declaring that he would rather be patrolling the Red Lands than confined to barracks.
A week later we left Memphis. The other members of the Royal Circle came down to the quayside to make a solemn farewell, their shouts and good wishes carrying across the water. Horemheb and Rameses were eager to return to the Delta to reinforce law and order, whilst Nakhtimin, Maya and Huy were full of the preparations for their return to Thebes. I gathered from Nebamun that prisoners were still being tortured, but if fresh information was dragged from them, Ay kept it a secret.
Our journey back to the City of the Aten was full of pomp, a colourful flotilla led by two great barges,
The Glory of Amun
and
The Power of Ra
, bedecked with standards and streamers, gilded prows and sterns dazzling in the sun. All around us clustered war barges full of soldiers with their armour, chariots and horses. For a short while a boatload of musicians, together with the temple choirs, made sweet music, their songs and hymns echoing across the water. After a while they left us and we continued our journey with as much speed as I could urge. Ay had made sure that Tutankhamun would want for nothing. Big-bellied barges full of provisions accompanied us, as well as a host of flunkeys and court retainers to serve in the Prince’s household. Some of these officials were from Thebes, others handpicked at Memphis. Djarka and I had already decided that once we reached the City of the Aten, we would interrogate them ourselves and try to discover which were the Lord Ay’s spies, not to mention those whom Horemheb, Rameses, Maya and Huy would also place with the Prince to watch and whisper and keep them informed about what was happening.
‘We’ll have more spies here than we do in the House of Secrets,’ I murmured to Djarka as we stood in the stern, staring at the flotilla of boats around us.
‘Each of the Great Ones,’ he agreed, ‘have nominated people, flunkeys or musicians, stable boys or kitchen cooks. How dangerous are they?’
‘To the life of the Prince,’ I replied, ‘no danger whatsoever. It’s in everyone’s interests that our young boy reaches maturity, becomes Pharaoh and begets an heir. It’s as simple as that. Tutankhamun will keep the peace in Egypt.’
‘And what about Meryre?’
‘You heard my lord Ay. He will be hunted down. That is,’ I smiled thinly, ‘if he isn’t dead already.’
Indeed, the whereabouts of Meryre and the other members of the Aten cult still concerned me. Despite my diffident observations about him, Meryre was a Child of the Kap, a cunning, astute man who had come within a hair’s-breadth of bringing about a revolution in Egypt. A man full of his own ambition and vision of the way things should be, rather than what they were. But while the Royal Circle had been busy issuing proclamations and decrees against him, one serious problem had been virtually ignored. Canaan was still gripped by unrest, and every report we received pointed to the growing power of the Hittites. Nebamun had voiced this concern. Would the Hittites break out of their mountain fastness and sweep south, overrunning the Canaanite princelings, not stopping till they reached Sinai? What if, I wondered, Meryre and his followers fled to the Hittites for protection, or even tried to set up a government in exile? Or worse still, discovered the true whereabouts of Akenhaten? I decided to let matters rest, though they were lurking nightmares. All I could do was look after the Prince and take whatever measures were necessary for his safety.
Five days after leaving Memphis, our barges swung left towards the City of the Aten and its waiting quaysides. Go there now and it is nothing but a burning, desolate sea of sand, a warren of ruins in a vast amphitheatre ringed by limestone cliffs. However, on our return, the city dazzled in the sun, the fertile strip beside the Nile was still being cultivated and the quaysides were busy. The vineyards and gardens were flowering and the temples of pink and white limestone eye-catching in their beauty. It was a city of sun temples and pleasure parks, of well-laid-out paradises with fruit trees and orchards planted in the black soil of Canaan. Artificial lakes, stocked with golden fish, shimmered in the sun; the blue and white lotus buds floating on top exuded a powerful, cloying perfume. The great avenue was kept in good repair and lined with colonnaded walks, their pillars and columns of different colours. The City of the Aten still glowed like a jewel.
The Royal Palace towered over all, an elegant building with its bricks of glazed blue faience, its lintels, doorways and entrances of dazzling white limestone surmounted by silver masts from which red, blue and green streamers fluttered in the breeze. Inside the palace lay splendid chambers with glazed tiled floors, walls decorated with vivid, eye-catching paintings. At first sight, it had all the splendour and majesty of the Malkata, except for one aspect which Djarka shrewdly commented on as we left the quayside and made our way up to the great central palace of the Aten. The city was quiet, lacking the frenetic clamour, the constant noise of Memphis or Thebes. The market squares had their booths and stalls, and yet the crowds did not surge there; it was more of a mausoleum than a great city of Egypt. Some of the population had stayed, especially the craftsmen and the merchants, because the City of the Aten was well placed on the Nile, halfway between Memphis and Thebes, an important trading post for those who made it their business to sell and buy along the river. Of course, Lord Ay had been busy, issuing orders and proclamations for the palaces, temples and other royal buildings to be prepared for our return. Yet in reality, the City of the Aten was no better than a summerhouse, a place of retreat for quiet and calm. No decrees, edicts or proclamations had been issued against it. The Royal Circle did not want to kill the city or destroy its buildings; simply leave it to its own devices. If it survived then it would be just another city; if it lingered and died, it would be quietly and quickly forgotten.

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