Prince in Exile (5 page)

He stumbled towards the stairs, falling over a sculptor.

“Where do you think you’re going?” the scribe asked impatiently. The tomb workers were all laughing.

He felt his way up the stairs. His chest felt like it was exploding. He couldn’t draw a breath. He scrambled under the scaffolding, tripped over a jar of paint and crawled along the floor. A square of daylight came into view. Ramose rested his cheek on the cold stone floor and breathed in the fresh air that came from above.

“Whoever heard of a tomb worker afraid of being underground?” said one of the tomb workers. They all thought it was a great joke.

“You’ll have to get used to being underground,” Paneb snapped. “I can’t have the workers laughing at me. You get used to it or you go.”

“I’ll be all right,” Ramose said in a quiet, croaky voice.

“Whether you’re all right or not, you have work to do,” said Paneb angrily. “You must keep a tally of the copper chisels that the sculptors use.”

The scribe sat down on a block of stone. “Whenever a chisel wears out it is to be replaced. Go back up, out to the valley and collect some new chisels from the store. There are men up there in the corridor with worn out chisels, we can’t have them sitting around doing nothing.”

The scribe was, however, quite happy to sit and do nothing himself.

“Where is the papyrus I am to write on?” Ramose asked.

Paneb looked around quickly, hoping that the workers hadn’t heard.

“Where did you get this apprentice from, Paneb?” shouted one. “Are you sure he knows how to write?” The painters were all chuckling to themselves.

“We don’t use papyrus in the tomb,” hissed Paneb. “Whatever gave you that idea? It’s very expensive as I’m sure you know.”

“So what do I write on?”

The scribe sighed at the ignorance of his apprentice. “On stone flakes, of course. The pieces chipped from the rock when the quarry men were excavating the tomb. You’ll find plenty of them in piles up on the surface, all different sizes. I use papyrus only for the documents I send to Vizier Wersu.”

Ramose shivered. Whether it was the mention of the vizier’s name or the cool air in the tomb he wasn’t sure. Either way he was glad to be making his way out of the tomb and up into fresh air again, even if it was hot desert air.

Out on the valley floor Ramose stood in the sun and felt it heat up his skin. He looked up at the clear blue sky and the bright sun until his breathing slowed and he felt calm again. Ramose looked around the valley, now dotted with after-images of the sun. The scribe was right, there were piles of stone flakes outside the tomb entrance: small ones no bigger than a hand which could be used for short notes, larger ones for long reports.

The mud brick storehouse was about fifty paces from the tomb entrance. Another huge, dark-skinned foreigner stood on guard outside. Ramose explained who he was and the guard let him enter. The storeroom was packed with everything that the tomb makers needed: paints, tools, oil for the lamps as well as grain and water.

“Treat these very carefully,” said the storekeeper taking a dozen copper chisels from a wooden chest. “The workers like their chisels sharp, and Scribe Paneb gets very angry if anybody damages them.” He wrapped them carefully in a strip of linen. “One of these chisels is worth about six of those bags of wheat.” He jerked his head in the direction of the food stores. “That’s three months wages for you.”

A boy was stacking sacks of grain. He was one of the boys whom Ramose had seen playing a game outside the village.

Ramose took the chisels from the storeman. He walked out into the hot air again, pushing the chisels into the belt of his kilt. The other boy hurried out of the storehouse behind Ramose and knocked his elbow so that the chisels fell out of his grasp and onto the rocky ground. He didn’t stop to apologise. He kept walking, turning for just long enough to give Ramose a glare full of hatred.

Ramose called out to the storeman. “Did you see that? Did you see what he did?”

The storeman shrugged and went back to his work. Ramose was furious. He took out his anger on a nearby rock. All that achieved was a bleeding toe. He collected up the scattered chisels. Three of them were damaged. He knew he’d get the blame for this.

Paneb was very angry about the damaged chisels. Ramose showed him the stone flake on which he’d recorded the workers who had received new chisels. Paneb wasn’t very happy about that either.

“Is that the best writing you can do?” he said incredulously. “I can only read half of it.” He turned the stone flake around, making a big show of how difficult it was to read. “You’ll have to rewrite it. In fact you can rewrite the whole thing ten times to make sure you get it right.”

Ramose didn’t complain. He was glad to have an excuse to get out of the tomb. He found a tiny wedge of shade outside the tomb entrance and sat down to rewrite the details about the chisels. He remembered the stories that Keneben had made him write out about how wonderful it was to be a scribe.

“Ramose!” Paneb’s voice echoed up the tomb shaft. “Come here, boy.”

So far Ramose couldn’t think of anything good about being a scribe. You might get to sit down a lot of the time and you didn’t have to lift blocks of stone the size of small houses, but it wasn’t much fun. He trudged back down into the darkness of the tomb past the sculptors, his heart already starting to race at the thought of being shut off from the light. Fortunately, Paneb only wanted a cup of water and Ramose was soon climbing back up the sloping corridor again. The back of his legs ached already.

By midday Ramose had walked up and down the tomb shaft at least ten times. It seemed that every time he got to the bottom of the shaft, Paneb remembered something he wanted from above. Every time he found a patch of shade to sit down in above ground, Paneb’s voice would echo up the shaft and he was needed down below.

The other workers gathered in groups to eat their midday meal. Ramose ate his gritty bread, dried fish and figs by himself. The other apprentices sat in a group of their own. He caught them looking at him a couple of times, but none of them came over to talk to him.

By the end of the day Ramose’s legs ached so much and he was so tired that he just wanted to go to sleep.

“Where do we sleep?” Ramose asked Paneb when the scribe came panting up the shaft.

Paneb pointed to some piles of rocks on the valley floor opposite the storehouse. Ramose looked closer. He’d thought that they were more discarded rocks. Now he could see that they were actually low huts made from the sharp rocks that lay around on the valley floor stacked up on top of each other. The huts were roofed over with dead palm branches that must have been carried all the way up from the river.

“You can sleep with the other apprentices,” Paneb said. “I can’t have you in my hut. I don’t sleep well and the sound of unfamiliar breathing would keep me awake.”

The three boys were sitting outside their hut.

“Scribe Paneb said I should share your hut,” Ramose told them.

No one replied. Ramose went inside. The flea-ridden bed back at the scribe’s house now seemed like the height of comfort. His chamber in the palace with the painted walls and the bed with the soft mattress was a dim memory. All he had to sleep on was a reed mat spread on the bare ground. He was too tired to eat. He just wanted to close his eyes. He got out his cloak and wrapped himself up in it, even though the sun had barely set.

The other boys had different ideas though. After they had eaten, they came inside the hut and played board games. Ramose had played similar games back at the palace with Keneben. It had always been a quiet business. The games the boys played involved a lot of shouting and disputing. One of the boys was a bad loser. He always accused the others of cheating, but he would do anything to win himself. Whenever Ramose was about to drift off to sleep, one of the boys would shout out or nudge him with a foot. When they were ready to sleep, they each took it in turns to keep Ramose awake while the others slept. Ramose hardly slept at all.

In the morning Ramose stood in line to receive his breakfast. His stomach growled with hunger. He took his bread and dried fruit and was pleased to see that there was milk to drink. Just as he went to sit down with his food, one of the boys pushed him from behind and the food, milk and Ramose himself ended up in the sand. The tomb workers all laughed.

“That apprentice of yours has got two left feet, Paneb.”

Ramose hated them all. He wanted to make them all suffer the same as he was, but he knew anything he said or did would only make them laugh at him more. He swallowed his anger and picked up the remains of his meal.

The job of an apprentice scribe was to keep a register of all the workers reporting for work every morning. If someone was late, he recorded it. If someone didn’t come, he had to find out if they had a good excuse, such as being sick or having a special family feast day. He recorded that too. Then he had to note down all the tools they took from the store, all the pigment used to make paint, all the oil and wicks for the lamps. Even the water was rationed. The nearest water was the Nile and it had to be carried up by donkey from the river in big jars. Each man was only allowed six cups a day to drink.

Ramose collected the worn and broken chisels and took them back to the storeman. Copper was expensive and the chisels would be melted down and made into new chisels. At least once a day, Ramose dropped one of the stone flakes that he was writing on and had to pick up the pieces and fit them together again before he could copy the writing onto a fresh flake. He also had to walk up and down the steep stone ramp to the tomb again and again. Sometimes it was to fetch things from the store; sometimes it was to fetch a cup of water for Paneb. Paneb didn’t do much at all.

The pace of work at the tomb was leisurely. Pharaoh was in good health and expected to live for another five or ten years at least. No one was in a great hurry to finish the work.

At meal times and in the evenings, the three boys did their best to make Ramose’s life a misery. They never spoke to him, but from what they said to each other he got to know each of them. Nakhtamun was a short, stocky boy with a squashed nose and a shaved head. He was an apprentice sculptor. Hapu was an apprentice painter. He was quieter than the other two and always had a worried look as if he was sure he was going to get into trouble at any minute. Weni was the ringleader of the little group.

Weni was angry. It was he who had made Ramose drop the chisels. He was the boy who was going to be apprentice scribe before Ramose came along. Now he was just a general errand boy at the tomb. Eventually he would have to leave and join the army or work in the fields. He was a sullen boy with a downturned mouth, hard eyes and a scar on his cheek from a fight he once had with a sculptor wielding a chisel. Weni never smiled. Even when he won at senet he just scowled triumphantly at his opponents. The other two boys did whatever Weni said. The three boys hated Ramose. They wanted to get rid of him so that Weni could take his place.

Ramose tried to tell Samut, the foreman, about his problems with the boys, but the man wasn’t interested.

“Sort out your own problems,” he said. “Don’t come telling tales to me.”

This seemed most unjust to Ramose until he later found out that the foreman was Weni’s uncle.

At the end of the eight-day shift, Ramose left the Great Place with relief. He didn’t know if he had the strength to go back there again. The scribe’s house now seemed large and bright. He collapsed onto the rickety bed which seemed unbelievably comfortable. His legs ached so much, he thought he might never get up again.

The next day, Ramose felt better after his first full night’s sleep in eight days. He had something important to do. After breakfast, he told the scribe he was going out for a walk.

“You’re not going to try to run away again are you?” asked Karoya who was out in the garden grinding grain as usual.

“I don’t have to tell you what I’m doing,” snapped Ramose.

He walked briskly up the path that led towards the city, despite his sore legs. He wasn’t running away though.