Nefertiti

‘At what time do the guards change duty?’

‘At sunset and sunrise.’

I took a moment to think through what to do next.

‘We need to retrace her last steps. Can you take us to the terrace, and then along the route to her bedroom?’

‘Is that allowed?’

‘It is.’

She led us to a wide stone terrace with steps leading down to the water’s edge, protected from the sun and from the possibility of scrutiny by a marvellous vine. A chair was placed under this sunshade, facing out to the waters and the opposite shore. No real construction had taken place there: just extensive fields, a few hamlets, and beyond that the Red Land shimmering in the distance. In the haze on the border, I could see just one significant building, a low tower or fort lonely in the heat, like a mirage. The water lapped, grey and green, against the salty glitter of the as yet unworn stone.

In the silence I calmed myself in order to absorb everything. Then I took a risk and sat down directly in the chair. Her chair. Khety looked nervous at this breaking of taboo, and the girl seemed genuinely upset. I felt around the edges of the cushion with my fingers. Nothing. I wanted to feel the shape of this vanished woman in the contours of the chair, as if a message, a clue, or some form of connection between us might be discovered in this way. What happened was I felt too big, too clumsy. I could not conform my body to the natural flowing shape of the chair. I sat still a moment longer, my fingers on the arms where her own fingers would have lain. I touched wood carved into the likeness of the paws, unclawed, of a lion. The grain was soft beneath my fingertips. The fresh paint was smooth. I imagined her staring out across the river, into the inscrutable light. And thinking, thinking, her mind as clear as cool water.

I opened my eyes again and noticed what I had missed before. The fort, if it was a fort, on the opposite shore lay precisely in line with the view from the chair. She had sat here, gazing across the water at the land of the west and a fort. What was going on in her mind?

‘And the way to the bedroom, please.’

The girl led the way, the corridor turning left, then right, then left again. We came to a pair of simple wooden doors. No heraldic symbols above them, no Aten disc, no symbols of royalty. Senet looked at me for permission. I nodded, and she opened it.

The room was a delightful surprise. Unlike the elegance of the rest of the house, here was the private world of a public woman, a living disorder that came as a relief after so much careful taste and refinement. Many chests lined one wall, their lids and compartments open, a vast number of robes and costumes collected there, arranged against each other like choices yet to be made. Chest after chest of sandals, the compartments specially made to accommodate the collection. A large polished bronze mirror sat on a cosmetic chest whose lid was strewn with little alabaster pots and containers of gold and glass: cosmetics, perfumes, eye-paints, ointments and creams. Open drawers revealed slate palettes for mixing, one still bearing the dried traces of ochre and black paste, and teardrop-shaped applicators, enough for a hundred pairs of eyes-enough to satisfy a theatre. Little statues and figurines of gods and goddesses, of animals and beasts. A necklace of flying fish and tiny sea shells in gold on chains of red, green and black beads. And some glorious antique pieces, less garish and elaborate than the work of our time: a winged scarab inlaid with cornelian and lapis; gold finger rings with frogs and cornelian cats on the bezels; bracelets of reclining cats in gold; and a scarab set in gold as a finger ring.

Here was no crime scene. The disorder was natural and likeable, betraying no evidence of struggle or haste. There was nothing inappropriate about it. She had not been taken from here.

‘Is anything missing?’ I asked the girl.

‘I would not dare to look, or to know.’

‘Then please, at my request, make as thorough an inventory as you can. Simply note anything that is not where it should be.’

She turned her attention to the chests, running her eyes and her fingers along the rich and colourful fabrics, her lips moving as if speaking the names of the dresses.

‘One set of clothes is missing,’ Senet announced after a short while. ‘A long gold tunic, gold sandals, linen undershirt. But I remember that was what she was wearing on the last evening.’

So I knew what she was wearing when she disappeared.

‘Now the cosmetic chest, please.’

Her eyes scanned everything on and in it. Her memory must, after all, be exceptional. She seemed to stop for a moment, as if mentally rechecking one of the compartments, her eyes ranging more widely as if looking for something significant; but then she closed it carefully.

‘Everything I remember is here, except what she was wearing on the last night I saw her.’

‘Which was?’

‘A gold necklace.’

‘Anything else?’

‘No.’

I was about to question her further when there was a sudden knocking on the door. Khety opened it. It was Tjenry, alarm on his smooth young face. We made our way out into a courtyard to the side of the house, where I hoped no-one could overhear our conversation.

‘A body,’ said Tjenry. ‘A body has been found.’

11

She lay cradled in a low dune, some way into the Red Land behind the northern edges of the city, among the desert altars to the east. A fine second skin of grey sand had been brushed over her and into the folds of her magnificent clothes-long gold tunic, fine gold necklace, gold slippers, linen undershirt-by the light attention of the wind. She was turned on her side, her legs drawn up, her arms holding each other like a sleeping girl; and facing the west, the setting sun, I noticed, as in a traditional burial. It was all wrong. Her stillness. The empty muffled sound of the desert, like a shuttered room with nothing living in it. The heat of near midday, which shimmered over us all. The offending sweet stink of recently killed flesh. And above all, the furious tormented excitement of flies. I knew this sound too well.

Her face was turned considerately to the sands. Holding a cloth to my mouth and nose, with Mahu, his slavering and overheated dog, and Khety standing at a distance, I gently touched her shoulder. She unrolled awkwardly towards me, the reluctant movement telling me at once that death was likely to have taken place in the small hours of the night. Then I confess I jumped back. Where her face should have been was a seething mask of flies that, conjured instantly by my disturbance, shimmered up into the air around my own head, and then reformed again, a barbarian hive thick with the buzz of intense devotion, upon the bloody remains of lips, teeth, nose and eyes. I heard Tjenry puking. Mahu remained still, casting a large and very sharp shadow over me as I crouched again by the corpse of the Queen whose glorious and famous face had been so brutally destroyed. I understood at once the extent and significance of the mutilation: this spectacular barbarity meant that the gods could not recognize her and she would never be able to speak her name when her shadow arrived in the Otherworld. She had been murdered in this life and in the next-a royal outcast of eternity. But something was not right. Why here? Why now?

‘I think you are out of a job.’

I looked up. Mahu’s face was hidden in deep shadow. There was no tone of victory in his voice, but he was right. The Queen was dead. I was too late. Her own death surely signalled mine. My thoughts reeled. Was this the end of everything already? I had hardly begun.

The peasant who had found her stood at a distance, trying not to look, trying not to exist. Mahu signalled for him to approach. Trembling, he did so. Without expression, as if he were an animal, without even the basest preliminaries of execution, Mahu’s curved sword whispered in an invisible arc through the thin air and the man’s thin neck. His severed head fell to the sand like a ball dropped out of its orbit, and his body sank instantly to its knees and collapsed. Blood pumped from his neck. The unholy priesthood of flies renewed their disgusting celebrations.