that he might like me.
‘Tell me about my father,’ he said, gesturing to a low stool where I could sit at his royal feet.
He had caught me by surprise again. His mind moved oddly, suddenly and unexpectedly sideways, by association, like a crab.
‘What do you wish to know?’ I replied.
‘My memory of him is diminishing every day. I hold on tightly to certain images but they are like an old piece of embroidered linen: the colour is fading, and the threads are frayed, and soon I fear his memory will be lost to me.’
‘I think he was a great man with a new vision of the world. What he did took great personal courage and political will. But I think he had too high an opinion of the capacity of human beings to perfect themselves. And that was the flaw in his great enlightenment,’ I said.
‘You do not believe in perfection, either?’
I shook my head.
‘Not in this life. Man is half-god, but he is also half-beast.’
‘Yours is a sceptical view. The Gods have made many attempts to create a perfect humanity, but each time they have been dissatisfied, and have thrown their work away, and abandoned the world to chaos. I believe that is what befell my father. But it was not the end of the story. Do you remember it? The God Ra, with his silver bones and gold skin, and hair and teeth of lapis lazuli, and his eye from whose vision humanity was born, understood the treachery in the hearts of men, and sent down Hathor, in her form of Sekhmet the Vengeful, to slaughter those who plotted against him. But in his heart Ra felt pity for his creatures. And so he changed his mind. And he tricked the Goddess; he created the red beer of the Gods, and she became drunk with its delight, and did not realize it was not humanity’s blood that stained the desert; and that is how we survived her revenge, by the compassion of Ra.’
He stroked the monkey as if it was humanity, and he was Ra.
‘You are wondering why I have told you this tale,’ he said, quietly.
‘I wonder if perhaps it is because you are not your father. And perhaps you told me because although he desired perfection, he brought this world to the brink of a terrible catastrophe. And perhaps because in your compassion you wish to save the world from disaster,’ I said.
He gazed at me.
‘Perhaps that is what I was thinking. But what of Hathor and her taste for blood?’
‘I do not know,’ I replied, honestly enough.
‘I believe there is a pattern of retribution to events. A crime begets a crime begets a crime, and so on until the end of everything. So how can we escape this pattern, this labyrinth of revenge and suffering? Only by an act of exceptional forgiveness…But are human beings capable of such compassion? No. I have not yet been forgiven for the crimes of my father. Perhaps I will never be forgiven. And if that is so, then I will have to prove myself better than him. And here we are, travelling in darkness, surrounded by fear, so that I can bring back a wild lion in triumph. Perhaps then I will establish myself as King in my own name; not as my father’s son. It is a strange world. And here you are, to protect me from it, like the Eye of Ra.’
He reached into his robe, and took from it a ring, adorned with a small, but very fine, protective Eye. He gave it to me. I slipped it on my finger and bowed in thanks.
‘I give you this all-seeing Eye so that your vision may be as powerful as Ra’s. Our enemies travel as fast as shadows. They are with us always. You must see them. You must learn to see in the dark.’
26
The strong current drew us onwards, ever northwards, towards Memphis. Simut and his guard kept watch at all hours. I was restless, unable to sleep, and I felt trapped on the water. Whenever the King took the air, which was not often, we made sure we were away from the villages. Even so, every field and every grove of palm trees presented the possibility of danger, for we made an extravagant target. From our point of view, I saw dirt-poor villages huddled beneath the shade of the date palms, where naked children and dogs swarmed the narrow, crooked mud streets, and families lived crowded on top of each other with their animals in one-room dwellings that were little more than stables. In the fields, women in miraculously bright, clean robes tilled the immaculate green and gold rows of barley and wheat, onions and cabbages. It all looked idyllic and peaceful, but nothing is as it seems: these women would toil from dawn until dusk just to pay the grain taxes to work the land, which they probably leased from one elite family, who lived comfortably inside their richly furnished and luxurious property in Thebes.
After three days’ sailing we neared the almost-deserted city of Akhetaten. I stood at the prow to observe the range of broken red and grey cliffs behind the city. Just a few years ago this had been the site of Akhenaten’s great experiment: a new, bright, white capital of the future; great towers, open sun-temples, offices and suburbs of luxurious villas. But since the death of the King’s father, the bureaucracies had gradually returned to Thebes or Memphis. And then plague had arrived like a curse of revenge, killing off hundreds who had remained, many of them with no work and nowhere else to go. It was said this plague had also killed the other daughters of Akhenaten and Nefertiti, for they had disappeared from public life. Now, aside from a basic staff, the city was said to be largely abandoned, flyblown and falling into dereliction. But to my surprise, and interest, Simut informed me of the King’s great desire to visit the city.
And so it was, early the next morning, just as the first birds began to sing, and the river mist drifted insubstantial and chilly over the sinuous currents of the dark water, and while the shadows of the night still lay long upon the ground, we stepped-accompanied by a troop of guards-from our moored ship on to the dry land of history.
With the King in his white robes and Blue Crown carrying a gold walking stick topped with a glass knob, and a troop of front and rear guards in their armour carrying polished weapons to scare away any peasant sightseers dazzled by this unexpected visitation from another world, we set off towards the central city via deserted footpaths that had, just years before, been busy thoroughfares. As we entered the precincts of the city, I saw at once the effects of its abandonment: the walls, once freshly painted, were now faded to dusty greys and browns. The once carefully planted, stylish gardens were now wildly overgrown, and the pools of the rich were cracked and empty. A few bureaucrats and servants still walked to work on these deserted ways; but they seemed to move in a desultory fashion, and they stopped still in astonishment to stare at our group, before falling to their knees as the King passed by.
Finally we stood upon the royal road. The sun’s rays had now risen over the horizon, and instantly it was hot. Once an immaculately swept ceremonial way for the arrival of Akhenaten and the royal family in their gold chariots, the road was now an empty pathway for ghosts and the dusty wind. We came to the first pylon of the Great Aten Temple. The soaring mud-brick walls were crumbling. The long, bright flags, which had once fluttered in the northern breeze, were tattered and faded to no colour by the bleaching power of the sun. The high wooden gates hung loosely on their rusted hinges. One of the guards forced them open, with a reluctant creaking and cracking of desiccated wood. We passed through into the vast courtyard. Once it would have been crowded with hundreds of offering tables, attended by thousands of worshippers in their bright white robes, their hands raised in the new ritual to the sun, holding up fruit and flowers, and even babies, for the blessing of the evening rays. The many stone statues of Akhenaten and Nefertiti still stared across the vast space, but all there was to see now was dereliction; the failure of their great vision. One or two of the statues had fallen, and lay face down or face up, staring blindly at the sky.
The King moved ahead, making clear he wished to have some moments of privacy. As we hung back, trying to keep watch, Simut whispered: ‘The whole city’s turning back into dust.’
‘I suppose that’s all it ever was.’
‘Just add water,’ he joked, sombrely.
I grinned at this surprising moment of wit. He was right. Just add water, and make mud; dry the bricks in the sun, then add plaster and paint, and timber and copper from the island of Alashiya, and gold from the mines of Nubia, and years of labour, of blood and sweat and death, from everywhere else-and behold: a vision of heaven on earth. But there had been neither sufficient time nor treasure to build the vision in eternal stone, and so now it was
