“Maatkare Hatshepsut’s memorial chapel and that of her father,” the architect told Bak, his tone waspish.
Ignoring the anger, aware it was not directed at him, Bak dutifully peeked into the two chambers. Inside the smaller room, three men were painstakingly carving delicate reliefs of food offerings on the walls, while five painters were toiling in the larger, applying bright colors to carved proces-sions of servants bearing offerings of fruits and vegetables, beef and fowl. Though Bak appeared indifferent to the discussion in the anteroom, he missed not a word.
“Montu claimed his country estate takes up much of his time,” Amonked said.
“The property isn’t his. It belongs to his wife, inherited from a previous husband.” Pashed sniffed. “The sole task that occupies him is ordering her around. Her and her daughter and the scribe who’s managed the estate since long before they were wed. They’re the ones who toil alongside the servants, not him.”
“His duty is here, and here he must come each day. And so I told him.”
Noticing Bak standing at the chapel door, waiting to move on, Pashed beckoned. “Come. I’ll take you to the shrine of the lord Re.”
He led them outside and along the incomplete wall at the front of the court. A break in the center wide enough to admit the large sledges on which stones were hauled would someday be made into a portal. A granite lintel and jambs lay nearby, waiting to be installed. Bak eyed the broken wall and half-finished portico, astounded that the court was not a beehive of activity. Why was the task not proceeding?
“I’m tempted to have Montu sent north to toil on the shrine of the lady Pakhet,” Amonked said. Pakhet was a fierce lion-headed provincial goddess, and the new building was located in the desert west of the province’s very rural capital. Not a place a man accustomed to life in sophisti-cated Waset would wish to go.
Pashed’s laugh carried an edge of meanness. “I can think of no task more fitting.”
Passing through a doorway at the north side of the court, the architect hurried them through an anteroom whose roof was supported by four sixteen-sided columns and into a large chamber in which ten steps rose up the side of a high altar dedicated to the lord Re. The room was open to the sky, allowing the priests to commune freely with the deity. Here again Maatkare Hatshepsut, depicted in fine, brightly colored reliefs, was shown making offerings.
“This shrine is complete except for statues of our sovereign that will be placed here and in the anteroom,” Pashed said.
The trio returned to the courtyard, where Bak stopped to look around. “Djeser Djeseru has been under construction for five long years, Pashed, and still this upper level is in-38
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complete. Why do you not have men here, finishing the portico?” Bak spoke more sharply than he intended, but Amonked’s nod of agreement told him he had not stepped beyond the bounds expected of him.
“The workmen. .” Pashed hesitated, glanced at Amonked, said, “All right, you’ve come to learn the reason for our many unfortunate accidents, so you may as well hear the truth.” He paused, screwed up his face to show distaste.
“The men fear a malign spirit. They spend more time looking over their shoulders and listening to whispered tales of lights in the dark and shadows where none should fall than in performing the tasks for which they receive their daily bread.”
“They believe this part of the temple more fearful than the rest?”
Pashed flung his head up in a superior manner. “If that were the case, neither artists nor sculptors would toil here, would they?”
“There’s some truth in what Pashed says,” Amonked told Bak, “but he’s failed to mention another obstacle in the way of progress. Senenmut has several times changed the plan.
He’s thinking now of making this open court a columned hall. Thus the work has stopped, awaiting his decision.”
Looking distinctly uncomfortable, Pashed clamped his mouth tight, refusing to admit he had skirted around a part of the truth rather than lay blame on the man to whom he owed his well-being.
Amonked, his thoughts masked, eyed the architect briefly, then turned away, led his companions out of the building, and stopped at the top of the mudbrick and debris ramp up which materials and equipment were hauled to this upper, most sacred part of the temple.
The view was glorious: the hot, sunny bay nestled at the foot of the cliffs and, in the distance, a patchwork of brown and golden fields, of green garden plots and palm groves, marking the broad strip of farmland along the river, made in-distinct by the heat haze.
They were standing on the upper terrace Bak had seen from afar, in reality a portico which, when completed, would span the front of the temple. The twin rows of columns, square in front, sixteen-sided behind, covered by roof slabs, were split into two segments by the wide gap in the center, yet to be completed. Two oversized painted statues of Maatkare Hatshepsut in the form of the lord Osiris had been erected against the two northernmost ex- terior columns. Similar images would be placed all along the portico, looking out across the valley for all the world to see.
Bak looked down upon the unfinished, lower colonnade he had glimpsed from the causeway. To either side of the ramp, which he assumed would ultimately be finished as a stairway, two rows of columns were being erected to form a portico. Just a few at each end had been built to their full height, with roof slabs in place. The roof of this lower portico, when completed, would form a broad, open terrace in front of the upper colonnade, which stood above and slightly behind the retaining wall that contained the earth on which the temple was being built.
In front of the lower colonnade, the sloping terrain had been leveled to form a flattish surface, a terrace of sorts. To the north, the high side of the valley floor and a part of the fairly steep slope at the base of the cliff were being cut away and a retaining wall built to hold back the hillside. Another retaining wall was being built to the south to hold in place the dirt and debris shifted from north to south to build up the low side of the terrace.
Raw stone newly taken from the quarry, and roughly shaped blocks whose purpose was impossible to guess, shared the terrace with stone cubes to be made into square columns, drums to become sixteen-sided columns, rectangular slabs for lintels and jambs, architraves and roof slabs.
Scattered here and there, sometimes singly and sometimes in groups, were dozens of statues of Maatkare Hatshepsut in various stages of sculpting, from roughed-out blocks of stone to nearly complete sitting or standing figures or images of reclining human-headed lions. To the east, where the terrace fell away to merge into the landscape, the remains of an old mudbrick temple, neglected and crumbling, was gradually being consumed as the terrace was extended.
Scattered among the stones were the craftsmen who were shaping and polishing parts of columns and statuary, and the workmen who provided unskilled labor. The skilled artisans dwelt in villages outside the valley along the edge of the floodplain, while the other men lived in huts built in a shallow hollow between Djeser Djeseru and the ancient temple of Nebhepetre Montuhotep. These men had come from throughout the land of Kemet, men whose crops had been gathered, leaving them free to serve their sovereign. They had been pressed into duty to haul stones, dig ditches, build walls, whatever they had to do to pay off their debts or those of the noblemen on whose lands they lived, or to repay with labor offenses against the lady Maat.
To either side of the terrace, men toiled at the retaining walls, those to the north cutting away the slope, those to the south shaping and placing the stone blocks. A ragged line of youths carried dirt and debris by the basketful from the high side of the terrace to the low. Other boys walked among the men with donkeys, carrying skins of water. Well over a hundred men and boys whistling, laughing, calling out to each other, or talking among themselves. None afraid of malign spirits, at least in the light of day.
A nearly naked man, a workman if the dust and sweat covering his body told true, raced up the rubble ramp down which materials were moved from the terrace to the men building the southern retaining wall. He sped through the clutter of stones, drawing every eye, silencing the laughter and talk. Clearly agitated, he stopped among the columns below. “Pashed! Sir! I must speak with you, sir. Right away!”
The architect looked at the workman and at Amonked, his face a picture of indecision. Amonked was an important man, while the workman’s message might well be as urgent as he appeared to believe it was.
“Go to him,” Amonked said. “We’ll await you here.”
Pashed hurried away with the workman, both soon to vanish behind the southern retaining wall.
“Another accident?” Bak asked.
