House of Dreams (48 page)

“Two thousand ingots of copper, three thousand of lead and seven hundred sacks of incense.” He waited. Ramses’ corpulent fingers were tapping out an irregular rhythm on the table.

“One thousand ingots for the Royal Treasury,” he said at last. “Three hundred for Ptah, two hundred for Ra at On, and five hundred for Amun. Of the lead, two thousand for the army and the remainder to Ptah. Two hundred sacks of incense for the palace and its personal shrines, one hundred for the army, and the remaining four hundred to be distributed among the temples.” Again there was a tiny sigh, and although his glance did not slide to the priestly scribe he seemed to be waiting for an interruption. The scribe laid down his pen.

“Your pardon, Great Pharaoh,” he said softly, “but Amun has need of more copper than Your Majesty is prepared to allot. Amun has contributed gold and men to this expedition. Moreover, Amun’s workmen are engaged in making many chests of copper to hold an increase in gifts to the God, and his temple at Takompso has been lacking copper doors for a long time.”

“Amun already has the disbursement of twenty-one times more copper than all other temples in Egypt combined,” Ramses answered. “I do not see why I should provide more. Perhaps Amun’s overseers are careless in their apportionment of the metal.”

“Your pardon, Mighty Bull, but Your Majesty did not think so when Your Majesty requested copper for the manufacture of new dress accoutrements for the army last year,” the scribe objected stubbornly. “If Your Majesty will not increase this portion, Amun may very well be unable to meet any new demands Your Majesty might make in the future. Amun supports eighty-seven thousand people throughout Egypt. Copper is a vital medium of payment, quite apart from its other uses. We are happy with our allotment of lead and incense, however.”

“I’m so glad,” Ramses murmured, “seeing that lead is used primarily in the faience factories and Amun grows many of his own incense-bearing trees. Very well. Take an extra two hundred ingots of copper from the Royal Treasury.” Both scribes’ heads went down and the soft shushing of their pens could be heard. “What next?” Ramses asked.

“One hundred sacks of incense from Your Majesty’s private grove at Pwene arrived at the same time as the goods from the expedition. That need not concern us now,” Tehuti said loudly. “Of gold in grains, sixty thousand. Of bars of silver, twenty-five thousand. Of blue stones of Tafrer, six pyramids. Of green stones of Roshatha, five pyramids.” He paused. Ramses closed and opened his eyes very slowly. He looked not so much tired as supremely patient, even uncaring. My presence had been forgotten and I was listening avidly.

“Seeing that Amun obtains twenty-six thousand grains of gold from his own lands every year, I see no reason to apportion him any,” Ramses said. “I will take thirty thousand grains, and the rest can be distributed evenly among Ptah, Ra and Set.”

“Majesty!” the temple scribe interrupted hotly, “I beg you to consider that it takes twelve kite of gold to pay for the grain allotted to one tombworker for a year. You yourself have placed the construction of all royal tombs at Thebes in the hands of the servants of Amun. If the gold apportionment to Amun is not increased, there is a danger that your workmen will not be paid, and what will result? Unrest, perhaps even bloodshed. Amun cannot afford to pay these men out of his own coffers. He has his own servants whose bellies must be filled. Your workmen often receive their pay from Amun’s storehouses as it is. Majesty, your ruling is not just! Is not Amun the God of Victories? Has he not caused Egypt to triumph over her enemies time and again? Does he not deserve a portion, however small, of the good fortune the trading ships have had?” Ramses’ hand now lay flaccid on the surface of the littered table. He was looking at the lapis-tiled floor that gleamed darkly blue between his sandalled feet. By the sheer immobility of his features I knew he was angry and I expected an explosion of divine rage at any moment but it did not come. As the scribe’s indignant diatribe ceased, Ramses looked up.

“In spite of the gold I continually pour into Amun’s storehouses it seems that his servants find it difficult to procure enough grain to pay my workmen more than the minimum amount set by the Overseer of Buildings,” he said mildly. “Why is that, I wonder? And if Amun is indeed the God of Victories, why are his servants so often miserly in their donations to Egypt’s fighting men? I do not need you to remind me of the obligations my father shouldered, upstart. Nor do I intend to go back on my word to the God whom I love and revere. It is the sound of his servants’ voices, not the tones of the God himself, that tires and saddens me.” The scribe flushed but his eyes glittered and I knew that he was not going to give way.

Ramses was speaking again, giving in, allowing Amun this much of the gold, that much of the precious blue and green stones, and I sat hunched under my tent of sheets, hands clutching my ankles, teeth clenched. Who do you think you are anyway? I asked the temple scribe furiously and silently. You are nothing but a minion. Where is the High Priest? He is the one who should be honouring the Horus Throne by his presence, but he is showing his contempt by sending this puny little under-scribe. Usermaarenakht knows that this is not a negotiation. So does Ramses. This is a worn and familiar formula in which the temple gets what it wants and the King may keep a semblance of his pride.

I no longer listened to the details of the discussion that was nothing more than a waste of words, time and papyrus. Tomorrow, in the great outer court of Amun’s Pi-Ramses home, the treasure and the trinkets, the riches and the oddities, would already have been divided into appropriate piles over which the delegates from the several temples would hover protectively through the long, elaborate ceremonies of rejoicing. There would be a great feast in the palace. The priests, temple guards, temple scribes, would eat Ramses’ food and drink his fine wines. They would applaud his expensive entertainments and ogle his beautiful women. Then they would have their booty, for such it was, loaded onto barges and they would disappear like rats, like locusts exhausted after their rape. Words slipped vaguely into my ears … Turquoise, chests, vases, images of exotic animals, foreigners who had come to Egypt with the trading fleet to do homage to the most powerful God in the world … Which God? I wondered cynically. Ah Ramses, dear King, with your childlike enthusiasms, your careless generosity, your eager fumblings, why do you allow yourself to be humiliated in this way?

When I came to myself the scribes had gone and Ramses was rising stiffly from his chair. Paibekamun was offering him mulled wine and its steam wafted fragrantly, mingling with the olive wood smoke. Ramses took the cup, shed his cloak, and stretching until I heard his spine crack he came over to the couch. His pendulous cheeks looked doughy and his eyes were bloodshot. “I could have dismissed you hours ago, Thu,” he said wearily as I made room for him and he collapsed upon the mattress. He leaned back against the pillows, took a mouthful of wine, and held it before swallowing noisily. “I had forgotten that you were here. You should have made your presence known. I would like to make love to you immediately but I am just too tired. I must be in the temple at dawn tomorrow to perform the sacred duties in person and then I must sit in the forecourt to distribute the bounty the ships brought home.” I watched as one of his body servants unloosed his sandals and another came with hot water to wash him. He lay unmoving, like a misshapen cloth doll stuffed with straw, as they reverently lifted his feet, his arms.

“The bounty has already been distributed,” I said. “All you have to do, Majesty, is watch it disappear.” My tone must have been more acerbic than I had intended, for he suddenly waved the servants away and sat up, glancing at me keenly.

“My little concubine has the temerity to disapprove of her King’s judgements?” he said sharply. “Perhaps she would like to don the Double Crown and attempt to exhibit more discretion than her Lord?”

I knew that he was exhausted and on edge, that he had been forced to control his temper all evening and that effort alone had taken its toll, but for the sake of the loyalty I felt I still owed to Hui I decided to speak up. My position had never been so secure. I was high in Ramses’ favour. He would listen to me. He was watching me over the rim of his gold cup, frowning, his bloodshot eyes attentive. I shook back my tousled hair in a gesture I knew he liked, and gave him the full force of my blue eyes from under lowered lids. “Majesty,” I began softly, “it distresses me to see you seemingly cornered by such lesser men as the under-scribe, to see you give away the fruits of your labour and your worry. The whole of Egypt belongs to you by right of your Divine Incarnation. Why then do you allow the priests to abuse your generosity and carry away your gain like an army of ants descending on a ripe date? Are their treasuries not already greater than those of the Great House? Forgive me, Horus, but I am angered by their rapacity. I do not understand.”

He gazed at me for a long time, and his steady scrutiny gradually deepened into an expression of cool conjecture that I had never seen before. It made me uneasy. He drank again, still regarding me, then he heaved himself further upright and left the couch, taking a chair that placed him opposite me. He crossed his legs, jerked his cup at Paibekamun, waited while it was refilled, and not once did his eyes leave my face. The pouches under them seemed to darken, the light from the lamp on the table beside him making a series of bars of shadow over his features, giving them a stony cast. When he did speak, his voice was hoarse.

“You have angered me, Thu. By what right do you, a mere concubine, question the wisdom of your God? Yet because I love you, because you have given me great pleasure and have shown some intelligence in the treatment of my ailments, I will now stoop to acquaint you with the true state of internal affairs that exists in Egypt. You are honoured. I discuss these things only with a few of my ministers and with Chief Wife Ast-Amasareth. Listen well, and then do not insult me with the ignorance of your shallow concern again.” His naked foot, broad and blue-veined, began to swing to and fro, its shadow expanding and contracting across the tiled floor. I wanted to fix my gaze on it rather than on his face, for his words had humiliated me and I felt like a reprimanded child, but I made myself meet his eyes. They were like hard, black raisins. “First of all,” he continued curtly, “you must understand that by long and holy tradition, all temples are exempt from taxation by the Horus Throne. This is as it should be. The gods pour out their blessings upon Egypt. Why then should they be forced to channel the gifts they give so freely? Their servants administer for them the sacrifices that come into their precincts from worshippers and petitioners and the yield from their fields, herds and vineyards. And why not? To attempt to steal from the gods would be a grave blasphemy. One might say,” he said, anticipating my mute objection, “that the one who sits upon the Horus Throne, being the Incarnation of Amun himself, has the right to command what goods he wishes from wherever he wishes, but the Incarnation rules beneath the God. The spirit of the God is in him but he is not the God. No Pharaoh would dare to change the way of ancient Ma’at. Certainly not myself.” He paused to sip the wine from which fragrant coils of steam rose, but his foot still swayed its signal of irritation. “So,” he rasped, “that avenue of income is closed to the Double Crown. Secondly, because of the promises made to the priests by my father in exchange for their support during the time of trouble, I am bound to conciliate Amun. I know full well what political and economic power his priests hold. My father had no ministers that he could trust, and indeed, long before the time of trouble the secular positions had gone to the priests and become hereditary so that a man might be Treasurer and also High Priest, and pass both stations to his son. The noble families of Thebes and Pi-Ramses control both temple and palace administration. Why do I allow this?” He smiled faintly, humourlessly. “Because I have no choice. Theirs is the power. Its roots are deep in Egyptian soil. My power resides in less stable earth. I have inherited an army made up of largely foreign mercenaries hired by my father to subdue the native nomarchs who rose up when the strength of the central authority failed. Each town, each nome, preyed upon the other, Egyptian against Egyptian. Libu and Syrian adventurers were hired to bring peace. They and the foreign slaves I captured and brought home from my wars remain my only weapon. They must be paid, for their loyalty is to gold, not to the Throne. How are they paid?” He shifted in the chair, one ample hip heaving under his thin linen, and his features changed as the lamplight threw new shadows over it. “By taxes, of course. And what may Pharaoh tax? He may have one-tenth of all crops and animals from all land and people not belonging to the gods. And that is not much, my Lady Thu. He may collect dues, he may tax monopolies held by his nobles, he may make requisitions. He has his gold mines, of course, but their yield is lessening. You did not know that, did you? Every year brings fewer grains to swell a Treasury on which the demands grow. He has his trading vessels. But trade is also dwindling. Amun has his fleets on the Great Green and on the Red Sea, trading with Phoenicia, Syria and Punt, and Amun can offer more in trade than Pharaoh can. Amun is richer. Ptah and Ra also have their ships, but the temple records of those gods reside at Amun’s temple in Thebes. The priests of Amun supervise the administration of all other temples. They also supervise my secular administration because they are also my overseers and ministers. This too I inherited from my ancestors. So Thebes grows in strength and Pi-Ramses declines. And I allow it to happen.”

There was a long silence. Ramses’ cheek slid into his palm but his attention remained fixed on me. I dared not move. I could feel his anger, still curdling at my effrontery, and I was terrified that I had incurred his permanent displeasure. I heard and understood his words but their impact was dissipated by my own inner turmoil. “I allow it to happen,” he repeated at last. “And why? Because I do not trust my Generals, I do not trust the members of my administration and I do not trust my sons. If I move to shake off the weight I carry I could plunge Egypt into yet another henti of anarchy and bloodshed. Whom can I trust? The majority of my high state and court officials who do not belong to families of priests are foreigners. Of my eleven Butlers, five are Syrian or Libu. Not him,” he jerked his head at Paibekamun, motionless in the dimness beyond the circle of the light. “He is Egyptian born and bred. But to announce an upheaval would be to put them all to the test and they would fail. Amun rules Egypt, not me.” I managed to clear my throat. It was dry and burning yet I felt choked.