The Heretic Queen
THE
HERETIC
QUEEN
CONTENTS
To my mother, Carol Moran
Without you, this would never have been possible.
AUTHOR'S NOTE
THERE WAS A time in the Eighteenth Dynasty when Nefertiti's family reigned supreme over Egypt. She and her husband, Akhenaten, removed Egypt's gods and raised the mysterious sun deity Aten in their place. Even after Nefertiti died and her policies were deemed heretical, it was still her daughter Ankhesenamun and her stepson, Tutankhamun, who reigned. When Tutankhamun died of an infection at around nineteen years of age, Nefertiti's father, Ay, took the throne. With his death only a few years later, the last link to the royal family was Nefertiti's younger sister, Mutnodjmet.
Knowing that Mutnodjmet would never take the crown for herself, the general Horemheb took her as his wife by force, in order to legitimize his own claim to Egypt's throne. It was the end of an era when Mutnodjmet died in childbirth, and the Nineteenth Dynasty began when Horemheb passed the throne to his general, Ramesses I. But Ramesses was an old man at the start of his rule, and when he died, the crown passed to his son, Pharaoh Seti.
Now, the year is 1283 BC. Nefertiti's family has passed on, and all that remains of her line is Mutnodjmet's daughter, Nefertari, an orphan in the court of Seti I.
THE
HERETIC
QUEEN
PROLOGUE
I AM SURE that if I sat in a quiet place, away from the palace and the bustle of the court, I could remember scenes from my childhood much earlier than six years old. As it is, I have vague impressions of low tables with lion's-paw feet crouched on polished tiles. I can still smell the scents of cedar and acacia from the open chests where my nurse stored my favorite playthings. And I am sure that if I sat in the sycamore groves for a day with nothing but the wind to disturb me, I could put an image to the sound of sistrums being shaken in a courtyard where frankincense was being burned. But all of those are hazy impressions, as difficult to see through as heavy linen, and my first real memory is of Ramesses weeping in the dark Temple of Amun.
