Nefertiti

me.

‘What are you up to?’ she whispered. ‘Are you some kind of classy thief?’

‘Can’t say, I’m afraid.’

‘Oh, the mystery man.’

‘Must be on my way now, though.’

She regarded me. ‘Join us. Have some wine.’

I smiled. ‘Another time.’

She sighed. ‘I hope we’ll meet again. I’d like to hear more of your stories, when there is time to tell and listen. The street is that way.’

I confess to you now, she then kissed me slowly on the lips before letting me go. I slipped away, smiling, into the dark.

I found a lane that led me in the direction of the necropolis. My eyes were now accustomed to this night walking, and my other senses had become more acute too. I knew this sensation, this strange way of experiencing the world; it was as if I had begun to live the animal in me. I sensed things without knowing them exactly: the presence of a low branch invisible in the darkness before I walked into it; changes in the height of the path; loose stones in my way; guard dogs behind high walls. I zigzagged my way through the suburb, believing rather than knowing where I was going.

Even at this hour there was a risk of passers-by, of night guards. But what did I have to fear? Few in the city knew me by sight. And even if I did happen to cross the path of someone who recognized me, I could improvise a story, just as I had done in the garden. No, the real feeling was this: with no reason but with total conviction, I knew I must not be seen by anyone else on this journey. I needed to disappear without a trace.

I took a turning along a wider road. The moon whitened one wall, the opposite remained dark. I heard arguing voices from a room, and passed by quickly. Somewhere a child cried. In the shadow of the wall a couple were kissing, the man’s body up hard against the woman, her hands alive with rings and polished nails, moving on his neck and back. Not even my passage through the near air disturbed their intimacies. Her whispered encouragements as he moved inside her sounded as close as if she were in my own arms. I felt as if I could be anyone, a visiting spirit passing through the bodies and the feelings of anyone I chose. A kind of delight seized me, an old relish for this dark freedom. Then I moved fast across open ground like a jackal.

The necropolis was no more than a big open space, surrounded by a mud-brick wall. Most of the cemeteries in the cities I knew were built to the west of the river, closer to the setting of the sun. Perhaps this was a temporary ground, or perhaps the location of this new city, so far from civilization, its border more vulnerable to attack, predisposed the planners to bury the dead nearer the suburbs of the living, rather than risk interring their worldly goods and bones in a place where they could not be defended from tomb robbers.

Not enough people had died in the new city yet for the necropolis to be well populated, but even so there were markers and little shrines, and perhaps twenty larger private chapels in various stages of construction. None of these would be for people of noble rank-their tombs were already being carved into the rocks of the hills that surrounded the eastern edge of the city and its hinterlands, closer to the gods. This was a burial place for anyone who was neither a labourer-they had their own burial grounds close to their village-nor a Priest. Here would lie everyone in between: the foreign bureaucrats who died far from their lands; the middle classes; professional, family people who committed their lives to the quieter slavery of offices and desks, seeking to inter their own kind with some sense of reverence and permanence in this new place without a history-at least a human one.

What now? I had no more clues, but something must be here. I wandered among the chapels, trying to move in silence, trying to stay out of the moonlight that cast its blueness upon the black and grey ground. When we were first married and I was working the night patrols, Tanefert insisted I wore an amulet for protection against the spirits. And though I would not confess it to anyone, I was glad to feel it now against my chest.

I had begun to hate the woman I was seeking. Her vanishing seemed more than ever a case of selfish flight. I had so far discovered nothing in the circumstances of her life that seemed so terrible, so awful, as to justify the abandonment of her children and the abdication of her responsibilities. Now here I was, a man she had never even thought of but whose life and fate were bound up with hers. Her beauty seemed cursed-a Queen of disaster.

As I thought these futile thoughts, I began to notice the silent presence of cats in the shadows, having been alerted by a brief squabble among their dark population. Every necropolis has its population of starving cats, and we worship these animals in our temples, adorning them with wedjat amulets and gold rings through their noses, and painting them on the walls of our tombs in the role of Ra himself slaying Apophis, the serpent-headed god; finally they are buried, mummified with a look of surprise on their faces, in careful shrouds of cotton and papyrus cloth. One of these cats was staring at me from the top of a large tomb. She did not, I have to admit, bear the attitude of superiority common to her kind. Instead, she jumped down and ran over to me with a friendly greeting and a tinkling of the bell under her collar. Her thick black coat, lustrous in the moonlight, caused her to vanish completely whenever she passed into shadow, but for her eyes, white as new moons, which kept their regard for me. She wound herself around my legs, attempting to converse in her idea of my language, and despite myself I reached down and stroked her full length, allowing her tail, curved into a question mark, to pass through my hand.

What was I doing, in the middle of all this, in the middle of the night, attending to a cat? I was losing my mind. I straightened up and continued my attempts to investigate the necropolis in a consistent and professional way for some kind of answer to the clues that so mystified and irritated me. The cat would not leave me, however. ‘I have no food for you,’ I whispered to her, thinking all the time what a fool I was being. She continued to purr quietly to herself. I moved off, but when I looked back she was sitting in the moonlight in her ritual pose, scenting the air of my departure, her tail swishing with the power of her thoughts. So I turned around. And this pleased her, for she moved off, her tail up high, curved now like a crook, and pattered off a little way before turning to check that I was following her. Given that I had no idea myself as to where to turn, the random nature of her invitation appealed to me as part of the gamble, the belief in luck, that was pulling me on. I confess here that I, Rahotep, chief detective of the Thebes Medjay division, investigator of the great mystery, gave up all my training to follow the enigmatic instructions of a black cat through a moonlit graveyard. I can hear the hysterical laughter that would greet such a confession back in the office.

The cat nimbly skipped her way through the stones and monuments. Sometimes I lost her in the shadows, but then she would reappear, an elegant black figure against the silver-blue ground. I tried to keep my eyes open for anything along the way that would remind me of the enigma whose power had brought me to this point. But there was nothing.

Then she came to one of the private chapels. With a backward glance, she entered the forecourt and disappeared. It was recently constructed, and one of the bigger ones. Panels of moonlight illuminated the interior. I moved carefully through the outer hall, and into the inner hall. The cat was crouching at the sanctuary niche, eating carefully from the offering bowls. Someone had freshly filled them. She looked like a hieroglyph of herself against the carved stone stele and the symbols of the hetep offering table: the reed mats and many-shaped loaves of bread, the cups and vessels, the trussed ducks whose cold images stood for the reality of provisions for the dead.

I stood watching, not wishing to disturb her feast by stroking her. I had no offering to make to the owner of the chapel. In the light of the moon I found I could make out the hieroglyphs of the offering formula. It began at the top in the usual way with hetep-di-nesw, ‘a gift which the King gives to Osiris’, followed by the standard list of food. And as my eyes moved down the sides of the panel I saw, yes, the figure of a man seated before the offering table. My eyes continued down the stele to the title and name of the deceased. It read: ‘Seeker of Mysteries’ and then: ‘Rahotep.’

The cat stopped eating and looked up at me calmly, as if to say: what else did you expect? You are here. This is the moment of your reckoning. It licked its lips, then quickly slipped behind the stele and vanished.

I had walked into an obvious trap, led on by need and gullibility. How could I have been so stupid? Mahu had fooled me with the kind of tale that appeals to women, children and Priests. I had to get out of there. My tongue was thick and dry. Panic surged through me, its concoction of bile and fear embittering my mouth. Images of my girls swept through my mind, and then a feeling of terrible waste and loss, and something like that snow falling, cold and eternal and silent.