I carefully showed him the gold feather. ‘I found it in Ay’s file. It was hidden there. I don’t know what it means.’
I twirled the beautiful, strange thing in the late light.
32
After dark, the streets were transformed by the sudden influx of the visiting population. Suddenly I liked the city better for it. Impromptu performances of magic or dance or music or juggling were taking place in the ways; temporary restaurants and canteens had been set up in any spare space under cheap, bright bolts of cloth illuminated by torches and lamps; here was a night market, with sellers offering monkeys and birds, tailoring and jewellery, fruits and spices heaped like the perfect hills of a multicoloured land. The atmosphere was lively, noisy, men and women from all over the Empire jostling for service or pushing through the crowds at the performances. Dignitaries and senior families progressed to dinners, receptions and meetings in their finery, staring straight ahead, demonstrating their pride and superiority.
Sudden parks of tents had sprung up in the empty spaces around the central city, and they spread down to the water’s edge. The dark river was busy with boats. I felt drawn down there, under cover of the night, by the busyness of the crowds and the delicious cool of the northern night breeze. Khety and I watched as hundreds of small barques, most rented from an enterprising man on the dock, bobbed about on the black water, their paper lanterns creating shifting archipelagos of illumination for the lovers who occupied them. Under them ran the ever- flowing river, the transient brightness of the present visiting the darkness of the gods. Behind us the palaces and the temples, the offices and the libraries, stood mostly sinister as prisons. I wondered what, of all that had been built here in so short a time, would survive. Or would it all pass away and be lost under the encroaching desert?
We returned to the safe house, keeping to the shadowy edges of the ways, past arguments and calls for drink and the last banging dinner pots being washed by old women at the public wells. Groping quietly for our straw pallets, we settled down for the night. Khety wanted to talk through what little we had found, but I was unwilling. The information was frustratingly enigmatic and inconclusive. And time was ever shortening. I twirled the gold feather in front of my eyes and tried to think everything through. Akhenaten and his problems. Mahu, his loathing of me, and the Queen’s doubts. The assassination of Meryra. Ay, of whom she was afraid. And Horemheb, this strange and ambitious young officer, married directly into the heart of the family, to a girl who wept for a year. I prayed that the night would permit my dreaming mind to discover some pattern that eluded my waking brain.
33
I woke up with the name Horemheb going through my mind. I looked up at the dust drifting through the blades of strong light already piercing the broken strips in the reed roof. Khety’s pallet was empty. I heard someone moving through the outer room, and reached for my dagger. The door scraped open, and in he came, carrying a basket. How had I slept through him leaving? I must be losing my touch.
‘Breakfast.’
We ate fruit and sugar-bread, and shared between us a jug of beer and a handful of olives.
‘I want to pay a visit to Horemheb,’ I said. ‘But how?’ I was, after all, supposed not to exist.
We munched on our olives, thinking.
‘What if he doesn’t know you’ve disappeared?’ Khety said after a short while. ‘Why should he? Who would think to tell him? What if you just request an audience, say who you are, and that Akhenaten has commissioned you to investigate a very important mystery and you need to speak to him?’
It had the merit of simplicity. Akhenaten’s name would get me through the door. I could be who I really was and, during the interview, feel my way carefully to see whether I could sense or test the direction of his loyalties. I could inform him of the disappearance of Nefertiti, and observe his reaction. I could assess his relationship with Mahu perhaps, without compromising further the safety of my family. On the other hand, he could have me arrested. But it was worth the risk.
Khety discovered where Horemheb was being accommodated, in the northern suburbs-not, as I would have expected given his status, in the southern. Perhaps this was because he was therefore closer to the northern palaces, which were the more domestic and private of the royal residences. We decided to avoid the streets, despite the cover of the crowds, and since we could not make our way along the banks of the river-for the royal gardens ran down to the water’s edge-we hired instead a small barque. We skirted the docks, which even at this early hour were busy. Even more boats of all kinds had anchored overnight, nodding and bumping together like a floating shanty town.
We sailed slowly down the river. The first of the light as it rose above the eastern hills revealed the brilliant colours of the Red Land as well as the languorous, shining currents of the river, illuminated here and there by the shafts of light angling down through the eastern riverside trees. The hillsides, with their rock tombs and construction gangs, remained in grey-yellow and black shadow. Shadoufs, those clever new designs, worked ceaselessly under the trees, drawing water to supply the green force of the city. And on the west bank, workers and slaves, Egyptian and Nubian, bent to the green and yellow fields. No rest for them if they were to supply the endless, monstrous appetite of the city.
We steered the barque into a small pier and tied it to a post. Here were fewer people, although a cargo boat was unloading goods and foodstuffs, and several smaller vessels were ferrying field workers and crops to and fro across the river. We walked up to the Royal Road. To the south, in the distance, we could see the Great Aten Temple, which set the northern boundary of the central city, rising above all other buildings; its pennants drifted in the faint morning breeze. To the north, villas had been constructed on either side of the road within high mud-brick walls. A number of larger buildings in complexes stood out from the low-lying houses. Khety knew them; he told me the north city included the Riverside Palace, a square tower that lay next to the river, just under the northern hills where they curved to meet the river, while to the south of us stood another palace.
‘Who resides there?’
‘I don’t know. It’s empty. They say it’s full of amazing paintings of animals and birds.’
To the east were the desert altars facing the rising sun. And above them, cut into the hillsides, Khety pointed out more great tombs.
‘Whose are they?’
Khety shook his head and shrugged. ‘The rich and powerful.’
The rest of the area seemed a more haphazard collection of low-level buildings. In the darkness of their workshops carpenters laboured, metalsmiths hammered; the pungent smells of wood shavings, hot fires and beaten metal drifted into the street. Rubbish of all kinds-food, building materials, broken pots, ruined sandals, bits of toys, scraps of linen-lay dumped in every vacant lot like temples of detritus for the scavenging cats and birds to worship at.
Like many of the other villas, Horemheb’s lay inside a rectangle of long, high, crenellated mud-brick walls with just one main gateway and no other windows or doorways. The lintel over the gateway was not inscribed. No-one, it seemed, had yet claimed ownership of this house, although someone must have paid for its costly construction. The finish on the exterior was immaculate, almost shiny it was so new.
We gave my name and authorities to the guard at the entry. He was uniformed. I asked him which division he belonged to. He looked me up and down as if I was too fat and soft, and replied, with the tone of hostile politeness that afflicts so many of our military, ‘Akhetaten division, sir.’
We were escorted up the entrance path, past a small domestic chapel where there were small statues of Akhenaten and Nefertiti. I paused, deliberately making some kind of fake, sanctimonious gesture of respect.
‘Do you worship much?’
The guard was irritated. ‘We worship as we are commanded to worship.’ But there was a tone in his voice that said: and we don’t much like it.
