6
The Keeper of the Royal Household took a lit oil lamp from a niche. Everything seemed hushed, lavishly decorated and sealed from the outside world. All along the corridor, down which we marched at speed, were beautiful statues and carvings set upon plinths. I wondered what went on in these side chambers; what meetings, what discussions, what resolutions with what great consequences reaching down through the hierarchies, and out into the unsuspecting and powerless world? We moved on, taking turns to the right or to the left, passing through high, echoing halls where occasional groups of officials conferred and guards were stationed, making our way deeper and deeper into the complex. It was a labyrinth of shadows. Sometimes a servant or a guard passed, their heads bowed low, pretending not to exist as they tended the lights of the oil lamps.
Chamber after chamber of walls painted with glorious scenes of elite pleasure and leisure-birds in the reed marshes, fish in the clear waters-appeared and disappeared in the light of the lamp. It would be difficult to find my way back. My footsteps sounded all wrong-a disturbance in the vast hush. Khay moved ahead on his costly, quiet sandals. I decided to make more noise, just to annoy him. He refused to dignify my behaviour with even a backwards glance. But it is strange and true that we can read a man’s face by the back of his head.
We passed swiftly through a checkpoint, as Khay waved away the elite guards of the royal quarters, and then he led me into the inner sanctum, along another high passageway, until finally we paused before great double doors of dark wood inlaid with silver and gold, beneath a carved, winged scarab. He knocked precisely, and after a pause the doors opened, and we were admitted into a large chamber.
Opulent surfaces and furniture were illuminated by large hammered bowls, set all around the walls, whose flames burned very still and clear. The furnishings and decor were immaculately restrained. Here, the room seemed to say, life could be lived calmly, with elevated feelings. But it also had the air of a stage spectacle: as if behind these glamorous facades one might discover masons’ rubble, painters’ brushes, and unfinished business.
A young woman entered quietly from the courtyard beyond the open doors, and paused at the threshold, between the firelight from the great bowls and the dark shadows that surrounded everything. She seemed to carry something of both with her. Then Ankhesenamun stepped into the light, closer now. Her face, for all its youthful beauty, was engagingly confident. She wore a fashionable, braided, lustrous wig that framed her features, a pleated linen gown tied beneath her right breast, whose flowing cut seemed to sculpt her elegant, neat form, and a broad gold collar, fashioned from row upon row of amulets and beads. Bangles and bracelets shifted and tinkled elegantly around her wrists and ankles as she moved. Rings of gold and electrum flashed on her delicate fingers. Gold disc earrings glittered in the lamplight. She had carefully painted around her eyes with kohl, and drawn out the black lines in a style that was slightly old-fashioned-I realized, as she gazed at me, the ghost of a smile on her lips, that she had deliberately made herself look very much like her mother.
Khay quickly bowed his head, and I copied him, and waited, as protocol demanded, for her to begin the conversation.
‘I am not sure if I remember you, or if what I remember is from stories I have been told.’
Her voice was full of self-possession, and curiosity.
‘Life, prosperity and health. You were very young, majesty.’
‘In another life. Another world, perhaps.’
‘Things have changed,’ I said.
‘Look up,’ she said, quietly; and with an enigmatic flash of her dark eyes, she turned away, expecting me to follow her.
We moved into the courtyard. Khay did not withdraw but followed discreetly, at a distance where he could still hear us, but pretend not to. A fountain trickled somewhere in the shadows. The dark air was cool and scented. She moved along an ornamental pathway, lit by more flickering lamps, further into the moony dark.
I remembered the little girl I had met years before: full of petulance and frustration. And here was an elegant and accomplished young woman. Time itself seemed to be mocking me. Where had the years gone? Perhaps she had grown up very suddenly, too quickly, in the way people do when devastating change falls upon them in youth. I thought of my own girls, their ease with their changing lives and themselves. They had no need, thanks to the gods of fortune, for such strategy and appearance. But they too were growing up, growing away, into their own futures.
‘So you remember me,’ she murmured, as we walked.
‘You had a different name in those days,’ I replied, carefully.
She glanced away.
‘I have had little choice in the matter of myself. I was an awkward unhappy girl, never much of a princess, unlike my sisters; and now they are all dead, it turns out I must be so much more. I have been reinvented, but perhaps I have not yet felt worthy of the role for which I have been-appointed. Is that the word? Or destined?’
She sounded as if she were talking about a stranger, not about herself.
We arrived at a long pool of black water at the centre of the courtyard, with oil lamps placed at each corner. The moon was reflected there, lilting slowly in the water’s dream. The place felt romantic, and secret. We strolled along the pool’s edge. In some way I felt we were moving towards the heart of the matter.
‘My mother told me that if I was ever in real danger, I should call for you. She promised me you would come.’
‘And here I am,’ I replied quietly. I had sealed her mother’s memory in a box in the back of my mind. It was too potent, and too hopeless, to do anything else. And the fact that she was dead now made no difference, for she lived on where I had no power to control her, in my dreams.
‘And since you have called for me, and I am here, you must be in real danger.’
A fish broke the immaculate surface of the water, and concentric rings spread out, lapping silently at the pool’s walls. The moon’s reflection broke apart, and then slowly unified again.
‘I am concerned by signs. Portents…’
‘I am not a great believer in signs and portents.’
‘So I have heard, and that is important. We are too easily alarmed, my husband and me. We need someone with less superstition and less fear. I think of myself as modern, as a person not easily frightened by things that are not there. But I find it is not so. Perhaps this palace does not help. It is so vast and empty of life that the imagination populates it with everything it fears. A wind blows from the wrong direction, down from the Red Land, and already I sense malicious spirits stirring at the curtains. These rooms are too big to sleep in without fear. I keep the lamps lit all night, I rely upon magic, I clutch amulets like a child…It is ridiculous, for I am no longer a child. I cannot afford to indulge the fears of a child.’
She looked away.
‘Fear is a powerful enemy, but a useful friend.’
‘That sounds like something only a man could say,’ she replied, amused.
‘Perhaps you should tell me why you are afraid,’ I said.
‘I hear you listen well.’
‘That is not what my daughters tell me.’
‘Oh yes, you have daughters. A happy family…’
‘It is not always as simple as that.’
She nodded. ‘No family is simple.’
She paused, thinking.
‘I was married to my husband when we were both very young. I was older by a few years. But we were children, united by the state for the purposes of alliances of power. No one asked us if we wished it. Now we are brought out like statues for state occasions. We perform the rites. We make the gestures. We repeat the prayers. And then we are put back inside this palace. In return for this obedience, we are given luxuries and indulgences and privileges. I do not complain. It is all I know. This beautiful shrine is as much of a home as I have known for many years. It is a prison, and yet it has felt like home. Is it strange that I should think of it that way?’
I shook my head.
Again she paused, thinking ahead.
‘But lately-I do not feel safe, even here.’
‘Why?’
