Casting the Gods Adrift (2 page)

My father, too, was offered an oar's end to lift him clear. But he refused to be rescued until he had opened every cage, loosed every animal. At last, with his feet splashing through black, silty water, sinking deep into the fabric of the boat, he struggled aft towards the cheetah. But in her panic and fury, she hurled herself at him, overturning the cage which rolled through a gaping split in the boat and sank out of sight into the river. Crocodiles moved in under the hulk. Only then did my father allow himself to be lifted to safety with the blue-and-white oars.

The top-spar of the beautiful rescue ship was now alive with baboons swinging by their hands and feet, grimacing at the people below. I saw several little girls huddled together in the prow, pointing up at them and laughing uncertainly. The ship's rowers were now easing the barge upstream, away from the sandbar, leaving the
Palm of Thoth
foundering in midstream like a bale of straw pulled apart by rats.

Rather than watch ours sink, I looked
around at the boat that had come to our rescue. The deckhouse was more sublime than most houses I had ever seen on shore, with blue-and-white chequered walls and a gold-leaf balustrade. At the door stood a man and woman, hand in hand. They could have been westerners – spirits from the Land of the West where the fortunate go when they die. Their clothes were of gauzy white linen, and they wore jet-back wigs and amulets of gold and silver.

But they were not spirits, of course. They were gods. For we were aboard
The Splendour of Aten
. We had been redeemed from drowning by its captain, the god-king himself. ‘Lie down on your face and pray,' I whispered to Ibrim. ‘We are in the presence of the pharaoh!'

I think my father was more afraid now than with the crocodiles gaping after him. He was in the presence of the pharaoh, watching the pharaoh's shipment of animals disappear into the boiling brown turmoil of the sandbank. He fell down along the deck, his face pressed against the boards, his breath breaking from him in little sobs of abject terror.

But, to his astonishment, the pharaoh bent down and raised him to his feet. ‘Never fear, man, never fear! Give thanks to almighty Aten that he preserved you from the crocodiles!'

‘But your animals—' blurted Father.

I could see the imprint of the cedarwood
deck on his cheek.

‘There are always more animals. Calm yourself. Your children are safe. Is that not more reason to celebrate than to grieve? They are your sons, I take it?' He laid his hand on my shaven head – a god's hand on my head! – and ordered the rowers to pull away into the wider river, away from the sights and sounds of the sandbank.

We sailed on downstream, towards the distant white cubes of el-Amarna.

‘Ah yes! Harkhuf! Your name is known to me!' said the pharaoh genially. ‘You did great service to my father.'

‘May his name live forever,' said Father.

‘I hope you will fetch
me
many animals too. The queen and I are very fond of animals, and so are my daughters. Monkeys and cats, for preference. My daughters are particularly fond of cats.'

I snatched a glance at the little girls who had come to the doorway of the stateroom, dressed in linen so gauzy thin that they seemed to be wearing clouds. I gasped at the sheer beauty of them. Their pleated skirts were clasped at the hip with gold, and each
girl wore a collar of lapis lazuli.

‘And birds for my aviary, yes!' the pharaoh was saying. ‘I love their colours and their song… That reminds me. Did I hear singing from your boat, before she struck the sandbar? Was it you, boy?'

He turned to me a face more like a woman's than a man's, a wig of extraordinary curly hair bunching out from under his plumed headdress.

The smile was so encouraging, I stopped trembling in the instant. ‘That was my brother, Ibrim! I can't sing a note!'

‘Tutmose is a worthless boy,' agreed my father.

‘Ah, but you are surely good at something?'

Now the
queen
was speaking to me. Day of days! A god and a goddess speaking to me! I was so overwhelmed that Ibrim had to answer for me.

‘Tutmose is a great maker of things. He is clever with his hands! Clay models. Wood carvings. Just wonderful! Last year he made me a little elephant… I don't see very well, but even by touch I can tell—'

‘Ibrim, be silent!' hissed my father, horrified by our temerity.

‘Then there is a place for you all, at el-Amarna, it seems,' said the pharaoh. ‘Wash off that Nile mud, good Harkhuf. We shall soon be reaching the quay.'

Nubian slaves brought bowls of clean water, and we washed. I bent my face over a washing bowl, and when I looked up again, I saw el-Amarna slipping up to meet the boat. It looked just as if it had dropped from the sky an hour before – a city of pale clay buildings, all new, all clean, all perfect. Huge pylon gateways, palaces and silos of stored grain all soared towards the burning blue sky. Squatting around them were smaller, cube-shaped houses, and everywhere there was colour and noise and movement and smells enough to make my head spin.

In a bakery, a man was taking honey cakes out of a clay oven. A dwarf was walking a pair of pet dogs along the shore. A row of bronze axe heads caught the sun – for sale outside a metalworker's shop. In every house yard, incense trees cast little pools of shade where cats slept, old men snoozed, or women
sat washing lentils or chopping leeks. Naked children ran about playing leapfrog or football, or towing little toys about on string. The smoke from the cooking fires rose up to mingle with steam from freshly washed clothes. Men with brick-red skin were building yet more soaring walls of brick, while in the dark houses pale-skinned women stayed hidden from the sun's ferocious heat.

We seemed to be expected to follow the royal family, so we did – up one of the vast smooth ramps which led to doors high in the palace walls. Through countless anterooms, the pharaoh led us through his pharaoh – his ‘great house'. I remember thinking how strange it was to call a king a ‘great house'; but then I suppose a pharaoh does afford his people shelter and safety, so in that way he is like a house. We passed through a hall with, oh, fifty pillars holding up a painted ceiling. Then we were on the King's Bridge, on top of the city's gateway, in a covered walkway with a view right over el-Amarna. The pharaoh stopped and so did we.

‘Welcome, my friends,' he said. ‘Welcome to the city of Aten, the
only
god.' He turned
to one of the courtiers who bobbed along in his wake like seagulls behind a plough. ‘Take my animal collector to a temple where he can ask the priests to give thanks to Aten. Then find him somewhere to live. Tutmose here is to study handcrafts; the blind one is to study music under the royal musicians.'

‘Oh, but my son isn't—' Father wanted to explain how Ibrim was not blind – far from it! He wanted to say how his eyes were getting better every day. But he dared not contradict the king.

‘We greatly prize music here,' said Queen Nefertiti, resting the tips of her fingers on Ibrim's shoulder. ‘You must not fear the dark, Ibrim. Aten shines into every life, in some way.'

Then the king's courtier led Father, Ibrim and me over the King's Bridge and directly to the Temple of Aten the sun. The courtier told us it was not like any other temple. It was not some gloomy secretive cave of a building, with looming statues and inner rooms where the priests communed mysteriously with images of the gods. This temple was open to the sun. ‘There are no
roofs to the temples of Aten. They are open to the rays of Aten, as every heart is open to His eyes,' said our guide in a bored, slightly routine way, as if he had said it many times before. He told us that the altars – there were many of them, either to Aten or to the divine pharaoh himself – were piled with fruit and flowers, and the walls were painted with the rays of the sun, each ray ending in a hand. I could feel the sun shining on the top of my head. I could feel the painted hands emptying blessings on my head. I was going to be a craftsman – a sculptor! – a maker of beautiful things for the beautiful daughters of Akhenaten! I was the happiest boy alive.

‘But where are the other temples?' said Father, and there was a strange, strained quality to his voice. ‘My boys must ask the priests to perform a thanks-offering ritual to the great baboon-god Thoth. Their life is preserved by the goodness of Thoth.'

‘There is no god but Aten the sun,' said our escort, haughty as an ostrich. ‘There are no other temples in el-Amarna. Aten the sun and our own god-king Akhenaten
rule here. Is the news so slow to travel throughout their kingdom?'

‘I had heard something of the kind,' said my father guardedly.

‘So it shall be, as it is here, from end to end of the Nile. One god, just as there is one sun.'

Ibrim took hold of my hand. The floor was patterned, and he did not feel safe walking across it, for fear there were steps he could not see. ‘I want to ask a priest to put an offering on his altar. On Akhenaten's altar,' he whispered to me. I could see from his face that he was as happy as I at the way things were turning out. ‘But I only have the elephant you gave me. Everything else was lost with the boat.'

‘Give it,' I said, brimming over with joy. ‘I can make you something else. Soon I'll be able to make you
anything
! I'll be the best craftsman in all Egypt!' I led him over to a priest, and Ibrim took the elephant out of a little shoulder bag which hung, still river-sodden, against his dry clothes. We asked if it could be laid, with two figs, on an altar to Akhenaten.

On the wall beside us, a huge depiction of the pharaoh looked benignly down upon us. He was wearing the full panoply of kingship; the blue cobra crown, the crook and flail of kingly power crossed on his chest. The face looked pleased, gratified.

The heat bounded off the high, bright walls, redoubling like an echo. We sweated joy, my brother and I.

No more than a few steps from the temple, the courtier jerked his head abruptly at a house. ‘You may stay here, since it is the pharaoh's wish,' he said grudgingly and, duty done, he scurried back to the palace.

‘Isn't it wonderful, Father?' I burst out, dancing around, shaking my hands in the air. ‘Music for Ibrim, and I shall be a sculptor! In the pharaoh's own workshops!' But even as I said it, I knew that somehow I was throwing straws on a fire, fuelling my father's rage, making his eyes bulge with pent-up fury.

Father was not overjoyed. He was on the verge of cursing or bursting into tears.

‘What? Am I to collect animals to decorate a room? To entertain babies? For slaves to walk them on a lead?'

Ibrim pressed himself against me. I put an arm around his shoulders, but we were reeds in front of a howling wind. I had never seen my father so angry.

‘Are there to be no temples for my crocodiles? Are my baboons to be given no sacred burial?'

Ibrim began to whimper. Foolishly, I said, ‘I don't know, Father.'

He bent down to yell into my face, ‘My animals are the embodiment of the gods! Does this serpent-demon think he can overturn the Ship of a Million Days? Does
he think to cast the gods adrift – to spill them back into the ocean of nothingness and drown them? His father, Amenhotep, may his name live for ever, was chosen by the gods to be pharaoh over Egypt! And does his son deny that the gods exist?' His hand reached out and snatched hold of the gold case strung around Ibrim's neck. ‘If there is no Thoth, what good is this promise, eh? Who is protecting your brother's life? Eh? Eh?' And he let go so violently that the talisman flew up and hit Ibrim on the forehead.

I barely understood what he was talking about – only that this same Akhenaten who, with a word, had made my dreams come true, loosed some terrible nightmare on my father. The god-king so eager to employ him was a traitor to his own kind. Father had no choice but to serve the new pharaoh. He was a god, after all. But as a believer in the many other gods – Hathor, Khon, Thoth, Anubis, Osiris, Amun-Ra – he was bound by religious duty to hate Pharaoh Akhenaten with all his might.

‘That's no reason to be angry with us,'
I snivelled, after he had stalked away into the house and we could hear him kicking the furniture.

‘He's not angry,' said Ibrim, one hand closed round the golden talisman, the other against his forehead. ‘He's scared.'

Of course I told him he was a fool and said what did he know, and that he was too young to understand. But I knew he was probably right. Ibrim always is about things like that.

Things soon righted themselves, for Father did not have to stay. We never had to suffer his terrible moods for long. He was always so soon gone again, south, upriver into Nubia and beyond, collecting more rare animals, trapping gorgeous birds. We stayed behind in el-Amarna this time, instead of going back to our old house. We did not miss our nagging, crabbed aunts. And we were happy.

Do you think that's strange? Do you think we should have been wondering and fretting about the number of gods in Heaven? Are you mad? We were boys. Little boys.

Ibrim learned the seven-stringed harp and the hand lyre, and then he discovered the Syrian lyre. It was taller than he was, and had
eight
strings. But he took mastery of it like a man taking mastery of a syrup tree, and soon he could fetch music out of it sweeter than syrup.

Me, I studied in the royal workshops. I was quick to learn – hungry to learn. Around me, everything was being made – the city sprawling outwards from the five palaces, the temples of Aten, the statues, the vases, the paintings were all new. There was a continuous noise of building, and the air was full of stonedust. A feeling of new opportunities existed here. Not like the feeling you get at Memphis, where the greatest achievements – the pyramids, the sphinxes, the colossal statues – were all made hundreds of years ago by people long dead; or at the Great Temple of Amun in Karnak.