had no prowess. I could not permit him to become King. That had to be stopped. Once, in the time of wisdom, before this time of fools, there was a sacred custom of killing the king when his failures jeopardized the health and power of the land. I have restored that noble ritual. I have followed the old rites. His bones were broken, his face was cast away, his eyes were cast out, his death mask was composed of rotting things, so that the Gods will never recognize him in the Otherworld. I have renewed the kingship. Horemheb will be King. He has power and virility. He will be Horus, King of Life. And as for the boy King, he will vanish into the obscurity of oblivion. His name will never be spoken again.’
At last, he had mentioned the general. I pushed on.
‘Why Horemheb?’
‘This is a land of lamentation. Our borders are harassed; our treasuries and granaries are empty; whores and thieves and fantasists govern our temples and palaces. Only Horemheb has the authority to restore the Two Lands to glory. I am he who has power over the living. I am he who sees the Gods. I am the dark sun. I am Anubis. I am the shadow!’ he shouted.
‘And so everything you did was on Horemheb’s orders? The objects, the carving in the Colonnade Hall, the murder of Mutnodjmet? And in return he promised you glory and power?’
‘I do not take orders! Horemheb recognized my gifts and he commissioned my acts. But he is a soldier. He has no comprehension of the greater truths. He does not yet know the extent of my work, for it goes far beyond the power and politics of this world. What use is this world if the Otherworld too is not within our grasp?’
I walked around him with my lamp. I knew there was more.
‘Thank you for the gift of the box of eyes. I suppose they came from the victims I found.’
He nodded, satisfied.
‘They were gathered for you. A tribute. And a sign.’
‘Eyes are everything, are they not? Without them, the world disappears to us. We are in darkness. But as in an eclipse, the darkness is itself a revelation. “The Sun at rest in Osiris, Osiris at rest in the Sun!”’
He nodded.
‘Yes, Rahotep; at last you begin to see, to see the truth…’
‘In your workshop I found some glass phials. What did they contain?’ I asked.
‘You have not solved that either?’ And he suddenly barked with contempt. Thoth growled and stirred at my side.
‘I tasted salt…’ I said.
‘You did not think far enough. I collected the last tears of the dead, from their eyes as they saw their approaching deaths. The secret books tell us that tears are an elixir that contains the very distillation of what the dying witness in their last moment, as they pass from life to death.’
‘But when you drank the tears-nothing. Just salt and water, after all. So much for the mysteries of the secret books.’
He sighed.
‘There were compensating pleasures in the act.’
‘I suppose you drugged your victims to make it easier to commit your barbarities? I suppose they did not struggle. I suppose you were able to show them the agonies of their poor flesh in great detail,’ I said.
‘As always you fail to see the deeper meaning. I left them as signs of warning for the King. But I wanted something else, something more profound.’
‘You wanted to watch.’
He nodded.
‘Death is the most glorious moment in life. To behold that moment of passing, as the mortal creature yields up its spirit, from the greatest of darkness into the light of the Otherworld, is to behold the finest elation this life can offer.’
‘But your experiments failed, didn’t they? All the broken bones, and the gold masks, and the dead faces turned out to be just ridiculous props. There was no transcendence. The drug gave illusions, not visions. The dead simply died, and all you saw in their eyes was pain and sorrow. And that is why you need this.’
I dangled the leather bag before his fascinated eyes. He reached out for it, but Thoth suddenly leapt at him, and I held it away.
‘Before I give it to you, and you return my son to me, tell me one thing. How did you obtain the opium poppy?’
I was gratified by the flash of surprise in his stony eyes.
‘It is easily obtainable,’ he replied, carefully.
‘Of course it is, medicinally, in small quantities, for a physician such as yourself. But there is more to it than that; there is a secret trade. I think you know a great deal about that.’
‘I know nothing about it,’ he muttered.
‘Nonsense. The demand for the luxury of its pleasures is so strong now that no number of desperate girls and boys, used as traffickers, could satisfy it. But that remains a useful way to distract the city Medjay from the bigger plan. Let me tell you about that plan. The opium poppy is grown in the Hittite lands, and then its juice is smuggled into Thebes by ship, through the port. The drug is stored and sold through the clubs. All the officials, at every stage-from the border guards, through the port officials, to the bureaucrats who approve the clubs-are bribed. Everyone needs to survive, especially in these tough times. But what fascinates me is this: how do the cargoes manage to pass from the land of our enemies, the Hittites, in a time of war, through the border security of the army? There is only one answer. And that is: the army itself is complicit in the trade.’
‘What an extraordinary fantasy! Why would the army connive in such a thing?’ he scoffed.
‘The treasure from such a secret trade enables Horemheb to achieve economic independence from the royal treasury. This is the modern world. The days of primitive looting and plundering and pillaging are long gone. And an independently financed, well-equipped and highly trained army is a very dangerous monster.’
For a long moment he was silenced.
‘Even if this outlandish fantasy were true, it has nothing to do with me.’
‘Of course it does. You know all of this. You are the physician. Your knowledge of hallucinogens makes you very valuable. Horemheb employed you not just to administer to his mad wife, but as overseer of the business here in Thebes. You oversee the arrival of the cargoes at the port, and you make sure it is transferred reliably to the clubs. But I don’t think Horemheb knew the full extent of your nasty private activities. Did he?’
He gazed at me with his empty eyes.
‘Very good, Seeker of Mysteries. My works of art were personal tributes to Horemheb. They were a contribution to his campaign for power; my offering of chaos and fear. But how does this knowledge profit you? Rather, it now condemns you. I cannot let you go. You are trapped in this underworld of darkness. You will never find your way back to the light. So now I will tell you the truth. And I will watch you suffer. The vision of your misery will more than compensate me for the loss of the other vision. I am no fool. Who is to say whether what you carry is real, or fake?’
And then he uttered a cry, imitating my lost boy, exactly. The obsidian knife of fear slipped between my ribs and pierced my heart. Was Amenmose, my son, dead? I sensed I was too late. He had won.
‘What have you done with my son?’ My voice was cracked.
I took a step towards him. He took a step backwards, raising the light of the lamp to dazzle me and disguise his face.
‘Do you know what Osiris cried to the Great God when he arrived in the Otherworld? “
I lunged at him, Thoth rose on his hind legs, snarling and baring his teeth, but Sobek suddenly threw his flaming oil lamp at me, and disappeared into the darkness.
