We looked at each other for a moment. What was happening to me?
‘Is this my new life?’ I asked. ‘Did I die? Am I reborn?’
‘Perhaps, if you look at it in the right way. The true way.’ She tilted her head to consider me.
‘I am honoured to meet you,’ I said.
‘Oh, please don’t be honoured. I am tired of honours. I’m sorry to have made things so difficult for you. So dramatic. All these tasks and tests. You must have felt like a man in a fable. But I had to know whether I could trust you. Whether you were the true man. Are you hungry? Thirsty?’
She gestured to the table and poured me a goblet of water. I drank it down, not realizing how parched and dull my mouth was, how warm the room had become. Perhaps that was why I was talking such rubbish. She refilled the jug from a small fountain set into the wall, and placed it before me. Every gesture and movement was perfect. A woman in complete possession of herself. Even the water pouring into the jug had seemed to command her full attention and pleasure. She was alive to everything.
‘You have sweet water here?’
‘Yes, there’s a spring beneath the building. That is partly why I chose this site.’
‘For what?’
‘For my sanctuary.’
‘Sanctuary from what?’
She paused. ‘I must not forget you are the man who finds the answers to the great mysteries by asking simple questions.’ She poured me more water, then walked slowly away, up the chamber. ‘Is that how you found me? By asking questions?’ Her eyes glittered. Amusement. Curiosity. Interest. ‘How do you know what you know?’
At this moment I had no answer. I felt as if my life’s work, my actions and thoughts, my dreams and ideals, had dissolved into a handful of dust being cast by her hand, glittering in the lamplight as it fell. And I liked that feeling.
‘Our Lord-’
‘Call him by his name. Names are powerful. Call him Akhenaten.’
The way she spoke his name was as complex as a phrase of music. There was some melody of affection in it, but also dissonances and sharper conflicting emotions. She moved further into the darkness of the chamber.
‘Akhenaten called for me, rather than for the chiefs of the city Medjay, to try to find you.’
‘He did not call for you. I did. And I have been watching you since you arrived.’
I felt as if a door had opened where no door had been. She turned back to me, her magnificent face revealed again by the light. She waited calmly for my reaction, her cool eyes appraising mine. For a moment I floundered, trying to incorporate her words into the information I had collected so far-trying, in truth, to see the whole mystery anew from the perspective demanded by those few simple words. I suddenly felt a terrible vertigo. Seshat, the dead girl? What about Tjenry, and Meryra? And why this magnificent and horrible charade?
The cat sidled up to me, rubbing her long flank against my leg, sending a silvery cascade through both of us. I stroked her. Nefertiti smiled, and this time the smile was more open.
‘She likes you.’
‘I like her.’
‘But you are a man who does not like cats.’
‘Things change. How could you know she would find me, and lead me to you?’
The cat moved over to her mistress, jumped onto her lap and looked back at me, bowing her head a little, her tail curled neatly beneath her.
‘I didn’t know. I believed.’
I felt lost again in uncharted territory where things are not what they seem. Where truth is many things. Where belief can make things happen. Where I did not know what I knew.
‘I knew she would come back to me. And I believed you might follow.’
I said, ‘I have the strangest feeling that I’m a character and you’re writing my destiny.’
‘We are in a story that includes us all. I had to call you to me because I do not know the ending. You have set the birds to flight. But now we are in the difficult middle of it, and can only find the end by living through what is to come. I know what I wish for my ending, but it is not sure. It cannot be, until it is enacted, accomplished, made real. The Book of the Living, if you like. And for that I need your help.’
Her cleverness was exciting; I relished the nuances of her expression as she talked-the ebb and flow of emotions, of intelligence, of wit. The thought occurred to me, fleetingly, that I was watching a great actress, deeply involved with every word yet superbly in control of herself. I also began to perceive something else: an absolute dark well of need in her. She was desperate to reveal herself, her story, her reasons and perhaps even her fears. She needed someone to talk to. I suddenly realized she was alone, in a small boat, adrift on a sea of troubles. And she was asking for my help.
I am a sceptic where words are concerned. I have learned to mistrust them for often they lead us astray or tell us apparently simple things that disguise or deny darker, less appealing paradoxes and truths. There is a slipperiness, an unreliability, in words. But there is also something in their power that sometimes has its own inevitable beauty. And is it not true that part of the story of words is that they metamorphose into other things-into stories we tell about the world or ourselves or each other, or into dreams we half recall, or into the silence beyond words? I had to hear her story. After all, I was a part of it now.
‘Tell me what you need me to do,’ I said. ‘And please tell me why.’
She sat down again, opposite me. ‘It’s a long story.’
‘Am I in it?’
‘You are.’
29
‘I have to go back to the beginning,’ Nefertiti said. ‘Most stories start with birth, and childhood, don’t they? I was born in such and such a place, and at this time and this season; these were the propitious or the unlucky stars that witnessed the moment of my birth and held the secret of my destiny. But such things are far away now, so far I do not know them. I was lucky, I suppose, to be raised in a family that possessed power and influence and wealth and pride. So much abundance! We forgot the fragility of all fortune.’
I listened. She was seeking the thread of her tale.
‘Apart from fragments which might as well be dreams-running through a green garden between the sunlight and the shadow; the sounds of the Great River on a boat in the evening; travelling home one night in a carrying chair, my head on my mother’s lap as I gazed up at the stars-my first real memory is of being taken by my father during the Opet Festival to walk the new processional colonnade at Luxor. I held his hand for I was frightened by the avenue of sphinxes: they seemed like monsters with sunny faces. I couldn’t understand why there were so many of them! As we walked my father told me fables: of Thutmosis, who answered a dream and removed the encroaching desert sands from the Great Sphinx in return for the throne of the Great Estate; and of the dashing Amenhotep, who loved horses above all things, who distributed and displayed the corpses of his conquered enemies on the walls of the city, and who was buried with his favourite longbow; and of his grandson, Amenhotep our King, the Handsome, now grieving the sudden death of his first son. I remember he told me the dead prince was buried with his favourite cat, whom he called Puss. Puss went with him into the Otherworld. I liked the thought of Puss sitting in the prow of the Great Barque of the Sun, his green eyes looking upon the mysteries of the Otherworld, and on the green face of Osiris himself.
‘When I asked my father, as children do who are delighted by stories of men and women of greatness and power, what happened next, he said, “You will see.” And one day, I did. One day my father called for me and said, “I want you to be very brave. Will you do that for me?” His face was always so serious. I looked at him and said, “Can I grow my hair now?” And he smiled, and said, “Now would be a good time.” I clapped my hands. I thought:
