Valley of the Kings (21 page)

“Do you mean to make trouble for me, Meryat? Don't be a fool.”

“I wanted—” Meryat began, and stopped.

“Before, you might have done some harm,” Ankhesenamun said. Her voice was too loud. Surely she too realized that the servants listened to all that was said. She crossed the room with long, swinging strides. “But you have no power anymore, Meryat. You are nothing!”

“I shall go,” Meryat said.

She started toward the door into the robing room, to chase away the servants. Ankhesenamun got in her path.

“No. Tell me why you have returned.”

Confronted, Meryat said nothing.

“To accuse me,” Ankhesenamun said. “It was to accuse me. Do you think, Meryat, that I can do the deed, but shrink from the word?”

She struck Meryat so hard that the sense left her; the next she knew she was sitting dazed on the floor, with Ankhesenamun shouting at her.

“You misjudge me—they all misjudge me! The Vizier thinks I will be mild and womanly, and make my husband King, and then sit at his knee. But I will place no man above me, and especially not one of my servants, who has bowed to me all my life!”

Meryat stood up on her quivering legs. Ankhesenamun moved restlessly in a circle around her. Her forehead was puckered, and her shoulders hunched. She stopped before the veiled and canopied bed and placed her hand on the carved head of the bed, which was shaped like the head of a cobra.

She said, “I shall sleep with whom I choose henceforth.”

“Remember,” Meryat said, “that because of me you did not sleep with Tutankhamun.”

Ankhesenamun gave her a fiery look. “Who would believe you? Who would ever listen?”

“You listen,” Meryat said.

The Queen hesitated, and in the moment of hesitation Meryat knew that she had said truth, she knew that she was right. She stepped toward the door.

“I will prepare your nightclothes, my lady.”

“You will leave me!”

Meryat said, “I will be in the robing room, my lady.” She did not bow before the Queen; she only went out of the room.

That night Meryat slept in her old bed in the room behind the Queen's. She woke smiling, congratulating herself that she had the Queen in her grasp. Then when she went forth into the Queen's apartments her pleasure died.

The Queen was gone, and all her servants. The bed was gone. In the cupboards and the closets of the robing room only a few old clothes were hanging.

Meryat wandered around the deserted rooms, unable to decide what to do. Stupidly she went from room to room, as if the Queen might suddenly reappear. In the bedchamber there were marks on the floor, where the bed's feet had rested on the packed earth. At last Meryat went down into the quarter of the common servants, and there sat down among the porters and the sweepers.

On the western bank of the Nile, opposite the living city of Thebes and south of the palace of the King, was the City of the Dead. There worked the embalmers and the makers of tombs and coffins, and there many noblemen and princes were buried in great tombs, and there were the splendid temples of the dead Kings, who had become Osiris.

In the City of the Dead was a house called Per Nefer—the House of Vitality. On the second day of Tutankhamun's death, the tent of Pharaoh was spread out above the Per Nefer, and Pharaoh was carried within.

The priests of Osiris who would justify Tutankhamun as Osiris were chosen by lot. In three rituals as old and sacred as the name of their god, the priests cleansed themselves and invoked the power by which they transformed the dead flesh of the man Pharaoh into the perfect and incorruptible body of Osiris. With their voices the priests said prayers. With their hands they prepared the body of the King.

They removed from Osiris' body all that might perish in the corrupting airs of the world of the living. They scooped out his heart and his spleen and gathered up his intestines in baskets, and they put hooks up through the nostrils of the King and drew forth his brains. Then they washed the hollowed body with wine and packed it with sacred oils, to dissolve away the fats that would putrefy. Thus they made perfect the body of Osiris.

The King's household was also busy. They had to prepare the goods wherewith the King's tomb would be furnished. For in the afterlife, in his eternal house, was he who had sat upon gold, dined upon rare meats, gone forth dressed in finest linen, was Pharaoh to sit upon the bare earth and eat of the wind?

For seventy days, thus, they would prepare to bury Tutankhamun.

On the fourteenth day after the death of Pharaoh, the overseer of Hapure's village ordered Hapure and some others of the village to follow him to the Royal Gorge.

Hapure walked just behind the overseer. The men behind him talked excitedly. All knew that they went to work at the tomb of Pharaoh.

The sun was still young in the east. Hapure's shadow ran on before him, sometimes to his right, and sometimes straight ahead of him. He carried his tools in a sack over his shoulder, as he had hundreds of times.

The overseer was a fat little man whose legs milled busily even at a walk. In his belt his coiled whip looked ridiculous and innocuous. He said, “Of course, the Sacred One cannot lie in the tomb we were making for him—it will not be ready for some years.”

They went around a bend in the gorge. The overseer stopped. Before them the wall of the gorge rose in a massive natural parapet. The wind had worn and rounded the stone into great gross shapes like the knees and paws of huge beasts. On either side of the path, in the slopes above the path, was an empty doorway cut into the rock.

Hapure's sack slipped from his shoulder to the ground. He looked with horror on this place. The overseer went on a few steps.

“This eternal house shall be made ready for the Holy One,” he said, and gestured to the tomb opening on the right. He nodded to Hapure. “Come with me, mason.”

Hapure shook himself from the grip of his memories. Stooping, he reached for his tools and followed the overseer up the flinty path to the other tomb, the tomb on the left.

They went down a corridor that slanted into the rock of the desert. At the end was a single chamber. A lamp rested on the floor just beyond the threshold.

The chamber was unfurnished. The walls were covered with a white plaster that reflected the light in uneven patches and pools. The ceiling rose beyond the lamplight, so that the room seemed to go up and up into the darkness. Hapure's hackles rose. It was as if the room lay at the bottom of a well. He was afraid to look up; he longed to run.

At the far end of the room was an alcove, filled entirely by a huge stone sarcophagus. A man in a priest's white loincloth stood beside it.

The light of the lamp colored everything a deep saffron that wiped out all detail. Even the face of the overseer seemed composed only of flat surfaces. Hapure lowered his eyes. He felt the well of time above them, the raw future waiting.

The priest came out of the chamber. He stopped before Hapure.

“Who is this?”

“The mason,” said Hapure's overseer.

“Mason. Tell me, who is God?”

Hapure opened his jaws; the words came forth from his throat. “Amun is God, and all the world is his work. Osiris is God.”

“Good.” The priest nodded. “Do your work.”

The priest went away up the corridor. Hapure's eyes followed him. He wondered what his lot would have been had he answered that the Aten was God.

The overseer picked the lamp up from the floor. “You will stop this door,” he said to Hapure.

The priest was gone. Hapure turned to stare into the darkened chamber toward the sarcophagus. He shivered all over in a sudden chill. This tomb had been empty before. For the first time, he put his mind to work at this. He said, “Whom are you burying here?”

“That does not concern you. Do your work, as the High Priest said.”

Hapure sucked in his breath. Everything made sense to him now: the priest's charge, the preparation of the other tomb, where Akhenaten had lain, and whose position he had revealed to the thieves. He shook his head at the overseer.

“No. He does not belong here.”

“Silence yourself,” said the overseer. “You do not care, do you? You are no Atenist.”

Then it was true: Akhenaten was being buried here. Hapure lifted his hands, pleading. “It is false and wrong to do this. The King must lie in his own tomb.” He struggled for the words that would express what he felt, that if the King were not in his rightful house, then the whole world would fall out of its place.

“That tomb will serve to bury the King that's newly dead,” said the overseer. “What does it matter? One dies, another dies.”

Tutankhamun. Hapure let loose a burst of frightened laughter. Tutankhamun would lie in the tomb that he himself had desecrated.

“Collect your wits!” the overseer hissed at him. “Do your work. There will be gold—”

“Gold,” Hapure cried. “Of what use is gold, when the world tumbles into ruin?”

The overseer took out his whip. At the sight of the long snake, Hapure giggled again; he shrank back, almost back into the alcove where Akhenaten lay.

“Will you block this door?” The overseer shook out his whip. “If not, I will dispose of you, and find another mason, who will not make trouble.”

Hapure swallowed. The cold air of the tomb laid its hands over him. The smell of death filled the place. He felt the weight of the solid stone above him pressing on his mind.

“Where are my supplies?” he asked.

The overseer's face slackened with relief. He coiled his whip. “Near the entrance. Come and I will show you.”

Tutankhamun lay in the Per Nefer, with his guts and his brain in jars. In the palace, the scribes of the procession went from room to room, making lists of the goods and furnishings that would be buried in the ground with the Eternal King.

15

Meryat was given linen to make into nightdresses and robes for Tutankhamun. She sat in the garden with some other women and embroidered the linen.

“Why take such care with this?” one of the other women cried, and cast down her work. “It will only go into the earth and rot.”

Meryat's needle bit into the cloth. She spaced her stitches exactly and kept the linen taut, so that the lines of the embroidery were straight. She chose the colors with care. Everything she did was as fine as she could make it. The other women gossiped. They sent a boy for dates and milk.

“See Meryat, how devoted she is.”

They giggled at her. She drew away from them and bent over her work.

“Soon you will make a wedding gown for the Queen, Meryat.”

“And a nightdress,” said another woman. “But you will have to prick your thumb with your needle if that garment is to be properly blooded.”

Their coarse laughter jarred Meryat. She thrust the needle down into the linen; the stitch was twisted. She picked it out with her nails. Then she clipped off the bit of thread; she would not use it twice; she would not defile the work by using the thread twice.

“Even were she a virgin, there would be no blood on the sheets the morning after her marriage—not with that old bridegroom.”

The word around the palace was that Ankhesenamun would marry Ay, the Grand Vizier, who was past seventy years of age. Meryat straightened her back, one hand over her spine, and found the other women watching her expectantly.

“What?” she said. “Do you think I know any more than you? Or would tell you if I did?” She laughed. Quickly she bent over her work again, to hide the expression on her face. She had not even known where Ankhesenamun was, until a cook's boy had said within her hearing that Ankhesenamun had gone up the river to an old villa of her mother's. Yet she salved her pride with the rumor that the Queen had left her here to spy.

She finished a strip of the linen and folded it and laid the smooth cool folds in a box of cedar. Between the folds she laid sprigs of herbs. She took another piece of cloth across her knees. Bare and white as flesh the cloth lay on her lap. She dipped her needle into it and drew the red thread through it.

The gossiping voices around her stopped and all the women prostrated themselves. The Grand Vizier and the General Horemheb were strolling through the garden.

They walked side by side down the path of gravel, without remarking the women who were bowed down on either side. The Vizier was old and bent with his age, his head thrust forward, as if he searched the ground before him for the doorway that would let him out of this world and into the next. The general walked straight and young on springy feet.

“This shall be the most lavish funeral ever held here,” the old Vizier said. “Yet what solace will it give to anyone? True is the old saw:
The more ceremony, the less understanding.”

“What does that matter?” Horemheb said. They passed through the shadow of the palm tree, and his bronze armor grew dull. “Only the vulgar pay any heed to that.”

“The less they understand,” the Vizier said, “the more they cling to their beliefs.”

They had passed Meryat. She lifted her head; she stared boldly at their backs, contemptuous, as the two men talked their way along. The general towered over the old man beside him. They walked as slowly as women. Did they think that Ankhesenamun who had murdered a King would give herself tamely to a fatuous old man? Meryat lowered her gaze to her work again. Her heart ached that Ankhesenamun had left her behind. With her whole heart she longed for the Queen's love again. Her hands were shaking, and her needle plunged into the linen; red stitches raced across the cloth.

The Queen was supposed to marry the aged Ay, Grand Vizier of Egypt, and by the divine union make him Pharaoh. Instead she sent messages to the King of the Hittites, in which she offered marriage and the kingly crown to a Hittite prince.

In her isolated villa south of Thebes, she waited for her unknown husband. Then soldiers came and took her villa as an army conquers a town. Horemheb commanded them. He said she was a traitor, and that the Hittite prince was dead.

In the bazaar along the east bank of the Nile three Persians in striped gowns were putting on a show with shadow puppets. Hapure stood in the little crowd before the stage, watching. The show was simple: a heroic thief, a landowner with a big stick, chased each other here and there along the screen. Hapure had a handful of dates to eat, and nowhere to go; he loitered there, laughing when the landowner beat the thief, and cheering when the thief stole the landowner's purse.

Sennahet came up to him, looking gloomy.

“What,” Hapure said, “have you found her?”

The slightest movement of Sennahet's head indicated that he had not. Hapure grunted. He looked around them at the crowded bazaar. This day was dedicated to Ra; no one had to work, and all Thebes was searching through the booths and shops for something to spend their money on. Meryat had gone away on a day dedicated to Ra, and that returned Hapure's mind to Sennahet and his problem.

“You have not seen Meryat for eighteen days,” Hapure said. “Why not admit that she has forgotten? She is happy there. She is not of our clay—leave her to her own people.”

“Perhaps you are right,” Sennahet said. He slid his hands flat under his belt, his face still very long. “If I could only see her, I know I could talk her into helping us.”

“Not
us,”
Hapure said. “Only you, Sennahet.”

“You say one thing one day and the other the next day.”

“I told you that if you find where it is and show me the way to steal it, I will help you—but it is your work to convince me.”

“I will choose the day when you agree,” Sennahet said.

At the end of the bazaar, where the great golden column stood, there was someone yelling, and around him people turning to hear. Hapure stood on his toes, trying to see better. He started down in that direction, curious: many others were going to hear.

Sennahet followed him, muttering under his breath. Hapure stole a look at him. Sennahet's singlemindedness alternately amused and upset him. The man did nothing else with such force as he plotted to steal Pharaoh's gold.

“Come,” a voice was shouting, up ahead. “Come and see what has befallen the Queen!”

Sennahet's head snapped up. He exchanged a single fiery look with Hapure, and they ran forward, fighting their way through the crowd flowing past the Ray of the Rising Sun and into the broad street that led to the temple south of Thebes.

The sun was at its height. The gigantic sphinxes that crouched along either side of the street cast no shadows onto the yellow dust. Ten feet ahead of Hapure two boys were climbing up onto the paw of the first sphinx. Hapure cupped his hands around his mouth.

“You! What do you see?”

One boy squinted away to the south, his gaze like an arrow down the street. He cried out, “Chariots! Chariots coming.”

Sennahet was already several yards ahead of Hapure, plowing through the massed bodies. Hapure struggled after him. They reached the edge of the road and spilled out onto it. The crowd followed them.

Ahead, above the columns of the Imperial Temple clustered thick with shadow even at midday, the three great columns of Amun blazed against the fathomless blue of the sky. Hapure blinked; it was a few moments before he saw the line of horse-drawn chariots trotting up the street toward him. The rest of the crowd had seen them also. They hushed.

It was many minutes before anyone could see what the chariots were or who was in them, but the crowd did not disperse; instead it thickened, clotting across the road. No one spoke. No one sat down or turned to gossip with his neighbor. Hapure passed his hand over his eyes. Beside him Sennahet heaved up a great hoarse sigh.

“It is she. Ankhesenamun—it is the Queen, bound in chains.”

Hapure's skin prickled up along his arms and back. He strained his eyes to see.

There in the middle chariot, beside the driver, Ankhesenamun stood. Hapure had seen her only seldom but he knew her at once by the slender straight figure and the proud pose of her head. She was bound with gold chains. Her hands were behind her.

Hapure clenched his fists. He wondered who would dare do this to Egypt's Queen. But Pharaoh was dead; anything could happen now.

The chariots on the wings were moving forward, swinging around to lead the chariot that carried Ankhesenamun. The driver of the leading chariot cracked his whip and the horses began to canter. They were going to try to break through the crowd.

Near Sennahet a man flung his arm forward to point. “They are Horemheb's men.”

His clear cry brought the crowd to life. All around Hapure the voices rose.

“What are they doing? Where are they taking her? Come—come—”

The people broke and ran forward. Unused to being charged by such a rabble, the horses shied and stopped and reared. The crowd rushed forward and encircled the chariots and held the horses by the reins and the chariots by the wheels, and a thousand voices rose demanding to be told what was to become of the Queen.

Hapure was hanging over the wheel of the leading chariot. The driver whipped at him; someone behind Hapure caught the lash and yanked the whip away. The driver shrank back. His eyes were wild with alarm.

“Hear me,” the Queen shouted. “People, hear me!”

Hapure turned toward her, in the third chariot from him. Like a lance, she was, unbending. Her voice rang out again.

“Hear me, Egypt. Will you let Horemheb and the priests make themselves your masters? See what they have done to me!”

The people murmured. Someone brushed by Hapure; he glanced around and saw a thin man in a priest's loincloth clamber up into the chariot whose wheel he held.

“People,” Ankhesenamun cried, “in the time of famine and plague, I saved you—I! I! Now you must save me! Help me, who has nothing but your good at heart!”

Above Hapure the priest thundered out, “People, she is Akhenaten's daughter! Remember what Akhenaten worked in Egypt!”

The crowd's muttering voice answered with a growl. Hapure clung to the wheel. The people behind him surged around him, pressing him to the rough wood, and the wheel rolled a little.

“I helped you—I put food into your mouths—I interceded for you with the gods—”

“Akhenaten attacked the gods,” the priest roared. His voice was trained to carry. His words drew clamoring from the crowd. “Akhenaten hated you and Egypt!”

“Do not listen to him! They want me destroyed! Please—I rescued you—will you not rescue me?”

“She is Akhenaten's daughter!”

The people surged forward. Hapure was forced painfully into the wheel. A shower of stones flew through the air and pelted down around the Queen. The priest's thundering voice was lost in the mindless howling of the crowd. Hapure panted for breath. Ankhesenamun stood erect in the chariot, trying to call reason back to them, while the stones rained down around her. Blood shone on her face. Beside Hapure a man with twisted mouth and glaring eyes stooped for a stone and jumped up to throw it, wildly, without aim. It was Sennahet. Other misaimed stones were falling into the crowd. One struck the horse nearest Hapure, and the chariot lunged forward. He fell from the wheel and staggered to his feet. A mad panic took him. He bent and gathered stones and flung them, flung them anywhere. The Queen was gone. Her chariot looked empty. He turned and fought his way back through the crowd, his chest full of hurt, desperate for some open space.

In the Per Nefer in the City of the Dead, the priests of Osiris set a wooden coffin full of Nile mud. They sprinkled seed on this earth and watered it well. Seventy days after the death of Pharaoh, green shoots broke up through the surface of the soil. Then the word was sent about Egypt, that every man of the land of Egypt might rejoice: for the god that was dead had arisen, and Tutankhamun would now be placed in his eternal house.

The sun stood on the eastern horizon. The air retained the chill of deep night. Horemheb stood behind the sled that would carry the King's bier. The white linen coat he wore chafed his neck. He felt as if he had been waiting for hours, yet it was only a few minutes.

With him were eight other men of highest rank—the Nine Friends of the King—all dressed as he was in white mourning, with white bands of linen knotted around their foreheads. These nine stood a little apart from the great crowd of courtiers outside the palace. The dawn wind toyed with their white clothes, rippling and shaking like strange feathers.

The sun climbed into the sky. Its golden light turned the desert cliff first yellow, then orange; it danced on the breast of the broad, all-mothering river. No one spoke.

A brass horn blasted. Horemheb startled at the sudden sound. Now the procession would begin. He felt freed of the waiting like a bird freed of the tether.

The palace was hung with blue lotuses, the flower of rebirth. The priests led the vast procession around the outer wall, chanting hymns and scattering the ground with incense and the husks of seeds. After the priests came the sled, drawn by red oxen, the sacred cattle of the north. The Nine Friends of the King followed after the sled, and behind them, in five rows, were the hundreds of the courtiers and priests, each bearing some object for the Room of Eternal Royalty, in the tomb house where Tutankhamun would live forever.

As the procession coiled around the building, Horemheb could discern the wails and cries of the women inside, who were mourning over the dead King. The keening of the women was lovely and eerie. Horemheb could not hear it without a quickening of the heart. The priests burst into the palace through several doors and windows. Chanting ancient phrases, the women barred their way. They strove to hold back the King, to keep him in the world of the living, but the priests broke through their ranks and bore off the King's body.