Out of the Black Land (31 page)

The general slumped down into a chair, making the cords creak. Kheperren poured him a cup of the pale Nubian-style beer which he preferred and suggested that he would be more comfortable in the chair of state, which was built for such large limbs. Horemheb moved obediently, which was nice of him, because I was fond of the saddle-strung chair and I didn’t think it would hold up his weight much longer.

He was huge. He was also very tired and very worried.

‘How safe is it to talk?’ he asked.

‘There are two Nubians outside this door; the walls are thick and as long as we keep away from the windows no listener can hear; besides, we are on the third floor,’ I told him.

‘Apart from Hani and Tani and their equally huge brother Teti, there is Meryt; and apart from her there is Mentu, who will knock over a very large bronze pot which has carelessly been placed far too close to his chair, if he has to leap to his feet and prostrate himself before any Royal Personages. It makes a sound like a war-drum and can be easily heard from here,’ I concluded.

The General passed one scarred hand over his ravaged face and said, ‘You choose your lovers well, Kheperren. I can see that you are as careful and wise as your friend has been telling me these ten years, my Lord Ptah-hotep.’

He leaned forward and stared into my eyes. He had dark eyes in a broad face, much like the common people, a beaked nose and wide cheekbones. The eyes were very tired but shrewd and deep and they held my attention. ‘This I must tell you, Great Royal Scribe; unless we can contrive something, you and me and the Great Royal Wife Tiye, we are going to lose most of Egypt before the next Inundation.’

Chapter Twenty-one

Mutnodjme

Tani and Hani escorted me into the inner chamber of my lord Ptah-hotep’s office. They were both carrying spears and were grave—no jokes about lust this night. The Widow-Queen Tiye and I had groomed ourselves very carefully for this meeting. She was wearing her greying hair loose, threaded through with garlands and ribbons, and the finest gauze draped her limbs. I had borrowed Merope’s block-patterned cloth with indigo riders all over it and had tucked my own hair under a heavy court-wig, decorated with a lotus crown.

We wanted to look like we were going to a feast with no other thoughts but good wine and good company. The Widow-Queen had sung a little song as we paced the corridors. When I could hear what she was singing, it was not a feasting or a love song but a curse, sung to a light melody.

The Widow Queen Tiye says

The crocodile be against him in water

The snake be against him on land

He shall have no offering

No bread and no beer

No wine and no oil

The earth shall not be dug for him

The offerings shall not be made for him

When he dies, when he dies.

She was frightening me, this red-headed woman, and I began to wonder whether there might have been something in the old superstition that red hair is a sign of the children of Set the Destroyer.

The occupants of the room rose as we came in. There was my dear Ptah-hotep, and with him a young man equally slim and well made, with black eyes and dark, weathered skin. He smiled and bowed, as did the huge man hauling himself out of the chair of state.

General Horemheb still stood a cubit above me. His chest was massive, his hands were huge as he took mine very carefully, bowed, and then knelt to the Widow-Queen as was proper. She put her right palm on his head and told him to rise and we all sat down.

‘Meryt has made a feast and we will have to eat it,’ said Ptah-hotep with a trace of apology. ‘Otherwise my domestic life will not be worth living.’

‘That does not seem to be a heavy task,’ said General Horemheb, smiling, and when Meryt and Teti came in escorting a train of children, all bearing dishes, he greeted the Nubians in very good Nubian.

‘Hail, lady of the Village-between-two-trees!’ he said, and Meryt was so surprised that she almost dropped her big platter of cooked meat. She replied in her own tongue, ‘Hail, Great Warrior! You do my family honour by eating with us. When were you in the Village-between-two-trees, lord?’

‘But last year. The children who were babes when the Egyptians came are grown now and your uncle is Chief. He sends you greetings, sister.’

It was a measure of the worth of the General Horemheb that he had remembered the slave Meryt, whom he had seen perhaps twice, and had enquired into the state of her home village. The Nubians all bowed to him.

Then I collected a piece of egg panbread and a slice of fennel cake and Meryt’s speciality, flat fried goat, from a very self-important toddler. The food was exclusively Nubian and very tasty.

‘How are you getting along in your study of cuneiform, lady Mutnodjme?’ asked Kheperren. This was my lord’s heart’s love and I examined him closely, hoping that he was worthy of such regard.

‘It is very difficult. I shall try learning a few new signs every day, practicing the previously-learned ones, and I may master it before I die of old age. I stand in awe of anyone who can decipher three languages from the same script. Babylonian is not too difficult to learn if you have someone to talk to, and there were three Babylonian ladies in the temple where I learned such things,’ I replied, censoring the name of Isis may she forgive me. ‘How is your Nubian? Your general is very fluent.’

‘Not too bad, but I have had to learn it, lady, we have a large number of Nubian troops. It is not a particularly difficult dialect. But I can’t speak Babylonian at all.’

He was far too thin for a scribe, who usually tended to fat due to the sedentary nature of their profession. He had a scar on his forehead, running up into his hair which was white over the track, giving him an appearance of being painted, like the Nubians warriors who had been known to dye their heads and beards red or blue. He looked like a child of the common people, his colouring much like my own. But I knew, because Tiye the Queen had told me, that his father was a nobleman and his connections were very high indeed. His hands were restless. He had them clasped so that they would not move or tap. I recognised my own method of restraining tension. The knuckles were pale under the tanned brown skin. He wore a scribe’s long cloth, entirely plain, and a pectoral and earrings of stylised lotus blossoms, exceptionally beautiful and very valuable.

His general was wearing the same armour and cloth as any common soldier. I wondered that he had no medals of honour, because I had actually been there when Amenhotep-Osiris had given him a commendation for bravery, a golden fly, and the King had commented that he had a whole flock of flies already settled on his mail-shirt. That deed, I recalled, had been the rescue of a band of troops cut off and besieged under a mountain with no chance. Horemheb had sent his soldiers climbing down the cliff, going first himself, and had got all his soldiers out when the enemy’s attention had been diverted by a line of bonfires on the opposite ridge.

Horemheb was relaxing. I knew that he was seldom in company and perhaps he was not used to the presence of ladies. He did not go to feasts, saying that he was merely a rough soldier and did not know how to behave at such things. There was a saying in the palace at Thebes, used when someone talked about an unlikely happening;
That will be when General Horemheb attends a feast!
—meaning, never. But here he was at a feast, a small feast but a feast nonetheless, with garlands and wine and music.

The music was provided by Teti on double-pipe, his wife Hala on a drum and one of the other wives singing, all accompanied by any spare Nubian children clapping in time. Nubian children seem to absorb musical skill with their mother’s milk. I had seen one of them sit down quietly with a little drum and play for hours, teaching himself how to produce a variety of sounds. Like Egyptian music, the Nubian ‘day-long-song’ consisted of one voice singing a verse and the rest singing the chorus. Most of the songs were about love. This one was no exception. I could not follow all of it and I asked Kheperren the scribe to translate.

‘They are singing,
Oh, my love, my maiden, she who is as slender as the pine tree, as sweet as the melon, as faithful as the sun
,’ he sang along gently in Egyptian.

‘
Come to me, my maiden, when the moon rises, when the night is loud with frogs, and lie down under the tree of fragrance, take me in your arms, make the night fall in love with the day.

‘It is a courtship song. A Nubian can keep singing it for months, until finally the object of his affection is seduced.’

‘Or she cannot bear one more verse and complies,’ I suggested.

He laughed and said, ‘On the condition that he does not sing anymore.’

We were friends. This pleased me and would certainly please Ptah-hotep who had been worried about having two lovers. I did not see any difficulty and it did not seem that Kheperren did, either. This was a relief. The song continued—I could see how, after a decan or so, it would begin to irritate the nerves—and the general who never went to feasts made polite conversation with the Widow-Queen Tiye and even made her laugh.

He still had the blue beads which I remembered from my encounter with the Nile. He was still huge and I imagined that he was still as strong as he had been when he had been a youth with smooth shoulders. He felt me looking at him and turned very quickly, as if expecting an enemy at his back, and laughed when he saw that it was only me.

‘Lady, I hope I did not startle you,’ he said. ‘I felt your eyes, and most eyes which have been fixed on my back have had an arrow trained along their gaze.’

‘It is nothing, lord general, and I do not startle easily,’ I replied. He examined me.

‘No, you don’t, do you? Tell me, lady Mutnodjme, where have you been since I last saw you?’ I liked his voice, it was deep and a little harsh.

‘In the temple, General, learning all I could learn, and then here, since Amenhotep-Osiris went to the Field of Reeds.’

‘And what do you do here? Apart from feast and make love?’

‘I learn, lord, one can learn anywhere.
Good speech is rare, but it can be found in the speech of common women at the mill-stone
, as was said in…’

‘
The Maxims of Ptah-hotep
!’ exclaimed General Horemheb. ‘My scribe has been quoting him to me for years. A very wise man.’

‘So is the present Ptah-hotep,’ I told him.

‘So I hear. You know, lady, I have been avoiding feasts for years. Do you know why?’

‘No, lord. Perhaps you were shy?’ I grinned at the huge, confident man.

‘Because I have never been to a feast where I have not had to listen to hours of elaborate compliment about being a soldier, together which a lot of ill-informed curiosity about what it feels like to kill someone. Not that they really wanted to know, you understand, not enough to actually listen. I tired very quickly of bringing stay-at-home sluggards the thrill of action, so I just refused all invitations. This is the first time I can recall that I have actually enjoyed myself at a feast.’

‘Perhaps because we know some of it, and would not think of asking the rest,’ I said.

‘Lady, I find it difficult to ascertain exactly what you know, but you are no palace ornament of the king, are you?’

‘No, lord, I am merely, as you know, the base-born half-sister of Nefertiti the Great Royal Wife; and my father, I regret to say, is Divine Father Ay and my mother is Royal Nurse Tey; and I must ask you not to hold my parentage against me. And I would never qualify as Ornament of the King,’ I said, making a play on the title of the Royal Women. General Horemheb was shaking his head.

‘Certainly not. You are very beautiful,’ he said consideringly, ‘but you are far too intelligent to be a concubine. What is this I hear, by the way, about your father making the Royal Women marry? I never heard of such a thing!’

‘Neither did I,’ I agreed, signalling to him to keep his voice down. ‘Not only is it shockingly unfair—some of the Royal Women have been here since they were small children, and they are old now—but what will the King tell the allies when they ask what has become of our sisters whom we sent you for espousal?

A lot of treaties were sealed with a marriage with Amenhotep-Osiris. The treaty with Kriti in the Great Green Sea was sealed with the gift of my dearest sister Merope, a princess of her island. If she is given away to a priest, what will King Minos of Kriti say about the insult?’

‘And what will Merope say?’ asked the Widow-Queen, who had caught some of this. ‘He even had the audacity to tell me that I must marry again—I, his mother!’

Ptah-hotep, who had clearly not heard of this, looked startled. ‘But, lady, are you sure that’s…’ he began, caught the Widow-Queen’s eyes, and said hastily. ‘I am sure that you are, of course, naturally, one would not make a mistake about such an outrageous proposal. But whoever thought of this must not have considered the foreign implications. One cannot give away the wives of a previous King as though they were a handful of festival ribbons!’

‘Why can’t he, if he does not care for the opinion of any but the Aten?’ demanded Kheperren.

‘Who are the priests of the Aten?’ asked General Horemheb.

‘Some of them are priests of Amen-Re who have seen the error of their previous ways,’ said Ptah-hotep. ‘Some are traders out of the market or commoners from the fields who do not even wash before they don their fine crowns and vestments. And some are boys, taken like I was taken, out of the schools. There is a school for scribes in the new temple of the Aten in Amarna now, and the children of the nobility go there. Some are aiming to repair their family’s fortunes and all of them are aiming to amass as much treasure as possible as fast as they can.’

‘Ah,’ Horemheb put his chin in his hand.