Nefertiti rr-1 Read online

  The way he spoke those names, sacred to my heart, filled me with dark fury. But I would not let him see this. I would not let him win. Suddenly an idea came to me, and before I could even begin to consider its ramifications the words were out of my mouth.

  ‘You have your threats, and I have mine.’

  ‘Such as?’ he said, uninterested.

  ‘I am not only working under the protection of Akhenaten. Let me mention another name. Ay.’

  I let this hang in the air. It was a huge risk. I knew nothing of their relationship. He gave nothing away, but for the swift passage of some thought, some consideration, some idea, in his mind’s eye, as if for the first time I had played an interesting move in a game he commanded. I am sure I saw it.

  ‘I’m glad we’ve had this little talk,’ he said after a short while. ‘The next time we meet, if we meet again, will be interesting for both of us. Good luck with your big decision.’

  He opened the door with ostentatious politeness, allowed me to pass through it, then slammed it shut behind me. It did not slam particularly effectively, because, as I noticed earlier, the door had warped slightly in its frame. So much for his grand gesture.

  I was escorted out of the headquarters, past the rows of new desks where new recruits with no experience waited for someone to tell them what to do, then out onto the Royal Road. It was late, and the ways were empty but for the light of the moon. In any other city at any other time the streets would still be busy: little stalls and kiosks lit by lamplight still selling food and necessities; drunks parading up and down performing their turns of comedy or tragedy, or standing up to each other on staggering hind legs, yelling their magnificent soliloquies of injustice and ill fortune. But tonight, in this city of facades and appearances, people were afraid. They were inside, hiding in safety. On the streets there was nothing but silence and shadows as we passed by the monolithic buildings of this mud-brick nightmare of power. I longed to hear a dog bark, and another reply from across the city. But this was the kind of place where they slaughtered dogs to avoid the sound of barking in the night.

  The guards accompanied me to my room and made it clear they would be staying outside the door throughout the night. Not as a comfort to me, of course. I entered the room I had left two days ago. The guards had given me a lamp, and I stood looking to see what had changed. The jug stood by the bed. I sniffed the water-stale, with a slight film of dust. The bed and its sheet-untouched. The statuette of Akhenaten-unmoved. I passed the lamp back and forth over the floor, trying to see whether there were prints of any kind. I could see nothing. I set it down on the desk, took out this journal, and wrote down all I recalled of the last two days.

  The one thing I returned to was the look that passed, like a brief complication, no more than a shadow, across the face of Mahu when I mentioned the name of Ay. Who was this man? Could I gamble on the unknown power of that name, at least for a few days? Perhaps. But it felt like risking my life, and those of my family, on a wild guess.

  I sat looking out into the courtyard lit by the full moon. Companion of my night work through my life. How many nights had I spent under his light, seeing things in the dark? The night life of our world, when the god travels on his barque through the perils of the Otherworld, and I in my way travel through mine (on foot of course). When I could have been sleeping close and quiet with Tanefert, I had spent too many nights stumbling among the dark detritus of mortal crimes and unredeemable tragedies. Regret comes to us always when it is far too late to change that which we have done.

  As I unrolled the scroll to start another sheet, and at the moment when I had run out of all thoughts and possibilities, I found written, but not in my hand, these signs:

  A shiver ran through me. I scanned the room again, as if someone might now be standing in the shadows, waiting with a knife. But there was no-one. This writing must have been done-could have been done-at any moment in the last few days. And I could not but believe that someone had written this here knowing I would find it about now, this very evening, perhaps; they needed to tell me something they could not, or did not, wish to communicate in any other way. But who, and how, and why?

  I read the hieroglyphs. This was my interpretation:

  Do you go to the necropolis. Do you go down into the Otherworld

  As it is said in the Chapters of Coming Forth by Day

  Do you find there stability

  When you reach what you seek it is a woman

  When you reach what you seek it is a woman

  Her sign is Life

  Enigmatic instructions! It seemed like nonsense. I read them again. I had seen the site of the necropolis near the artisans’ village. There were also of course the noble and royal rock tombs under construction in the cliffs to the north. But how could anyone go down into the Otherworld, following the instructions and prayers of the Book of the Dead, unless they were themselves dead? And then came two signs of hope: the hieroglyph for stability, the pillar of power raised upright before the Gods to restore order to the world. The hieroglyph was also worn as an amulet to accompany the dead. And then those final hieroglyphs: Her sign is Life. The symbol of life was the Ankh, which I had seen everywhere in the city being passed down to creation by the Aten.

  Her sign. Was ‘She’ the source of this strange message? If so, was this proof she was still alive, and instructing me to find her? Possibly. But why in this mad way? And then came another idea: was Mahu playing with me, luring me by means of this puzzle to my doom? I had no choice. I could not ignore this message. I had to act while I still had the advantages of darkness and surprise.

  There were guards posted at my door, but were they guarding the unfinished terrace beyond the window? I looked out for a minute, and no-one passed by. I listened at the door, and I heard the two guards speaking quietly to each other as they paced up and down. I went back to the window, and the moonlight showed me the way I needed to go: across the terrace and over the wall.

  I write these words not knowing whether I shall ever write more. Will there be more to tell? Or will this journal be found and returned to you, Tanefert, my beloved? What else can I write on this scroll, perhaps the last, but a message to you and the girls. I love you. Is that enough? I do not know. I leave the empty scrolls that follow in the deepest hope that they will soon be covered with more writing. Not, please Ra, left blank after my death.

  25

  There are wise men and seers who claim to have visited the Otherworld in visions. They starve themselves, or sing in the language of the birds, and all we mortals can do is believe, or disbelieve and say, ‘These men are mad. Lock them away, in prisons of stone and silence, so that their visions and their impossible tales cannot frighten us.’ I am now one of those men. And now I must seek the words to explain the mystery.

  I could hear the guards outside the door, playing a game of senet, casting their astragals and moving their pieces accordingly through the long, snaking journey of chance, the propitious and the unlucky squares. I was lucky, for the game preoccupied them. Boredom is the fugitive’s greatest gift from the god of chance. Carrying only my leather satchel, I hopped over the lintel of the window and landed silently outside. I crouched there for a moment in a sliver of shadow, for the moon was still full, and the silver light, creating vacant silhouettes of trees and buildings, made everything seem like a vast and perfect simulacrum of the absent world by night.

  It was as well I waited, for just then a guard ambled past me, a body’s length away. He was looking up at the stars. I saw how his hair needed cutting, how his sandals were in poor condition, how his callused feet were dusted silver in this light. He stopped, looked up for a moment, took a slow breath, thinking about something-his destiny, or his debts perhaps-then carried on. I could have taken him, and with a swift jerk of the head despatched him in silence, but it was not necessary. I thought too of the family, somewhere, who would grieve his loss. To me he was a passing figure, to them a unique, irreplaceable life. Why add to the woe
of the world? And besides, his body or his absence would have alerted the others. Better to slip away unnoticed. Better not to leave traces of change. People notice change more quickly than anything.

  So he passed and I moved forward, making less than no noise. There were gods in my feet that night; my body seemed suddenly to be possessed by a different energy, a kind of lightness. I scaled the wall, its height perhaps ten cubits, as if it were nothing, as if the laws of the world were already slipping and changing, becoming fluid with possibility.

  I dropped softly on the far side and found myself in the garden of a house. I crouched down behind a small shrine. I looked carefully around the side, and saw that there was a dinner in progress. Lamps lit up the white napkins on small tables set beside a pool that rippled with luxurious light. Another world, suddenly: the tinkle and murmur of people eating and talking casually. A little drama of talk and food, in a small halo of light under the vast panorama of stars obscured for them by the glow of a few lamps.

  I skirted the garden’s borders, keeping to the shadows, hoping no dogs kept guard. I sensed that the wall continued all the way around the property. I had little choice but to try to reach the front of the house. As I moved I kept my eyes on the dinner party. A woman stood up, making some comment whose astuteness and wit precipitated a round of laughter. She moved out of the light and into the house. I used this moment to move quickly along the far border of the garden. A long dark passage to the side of the house lay ahead of me, except where an open doorway’s patch of light fell across my path. I hesitated, listened. I could hear the woman moving about in the interior, humming, as if assembling the next course of the meal, and issuing instructions to the servants. I heard footsteps passing away from me, up a tiled corridor. The woman’s humming continued. It was close. I held still. Suddenly she appeared in the light. She looked up and saw me. Quickly I put my hand over her mouth and at the same time a metal dish slipped from her hand. Despite my attempts to catch it, it hit the ground and clanged noisily.

  We froze. A man called, ‘Is everything all right?’ Her eyes were wild with fear, and her body struggled. But as her gaze took me in, she went still. She realized she knew me before I made the connection. It was the woman from the boat. The intelligent, handsome woman. I slowly took my hand away from her mouth, begging for her silence with a simple gesture. She nodded. She called back to the man, ‘Yes, I just dropped something.’

  Suddenly I realized how close, how tight, I was still holding her. She didn’t resist, but looked wryly up at me.

  ‘What are you up to?’ she whispered. ‘Are you some kind of classy thief?’

  ‘Can’t say, I’m afraid.’

  ‘Oh, the mystery man.’

  ‘Must be on my way now, though.’

  She regarded me. ‘Join us. Have some wine.’

  I smiled. ‘Another time.’

  She sighed. ‘I hope we’ll meet again. I’d like to hear more of your stories, when there is time to tell and listen. The street is that way.’

  I confess to you now, she then kissed me slowly on the lips before letting me go. I slipped away, smiling, into the dark.

  I found a lane that led me in the direction of the necropolis. My eyes were now accustomed to this night walking, and my other senses had become more acute too. I knew this sensation, this strange way of experiencing the world; it was as if I had begun to live the animal in me. I sensed things without knowing them exactly: the presence of a low branch invisible in the darkness before I walked into it; changes in the height of the path; loose stones in my way; guard dogs behind high walls. I zigzagged my way through the suburb, believing rather than knowing where I was going.

  Even at this hour there was a risk of passers-by, of night guards. But what did I have to fear? Few in the city knew me by sight. And even if I did happen to cross the path of someone who recognized me, I could improvise a story, just as I had done in the garden. No, the real feeling was this: with no reason but with total conviction, I knew I must not be seen by anyone else on this journey. I needed to disappear without a trace.

  I took a turning along a wider road. The moon whitened one wall, the opposite remained dark. I heard arguing voices from a room, and passed by quickly. Somewhere a child cried. In the shadow of the wall a couple were kissing, the man’s body up hard against the woman, her hands alive with rings and polished nails, moving on his neck and back. Not even my passage through the near air disturbed their intimacies. Her whispered encouragements as he moved inside her sounded as close as if she were in my own arms. I felt as if I could be anyone, a visiting spirit passing through the bodies and the feelings of anyone I chose. A kind of delight seized me, an old relish for this dark freedom. Then I moved fast across open ground like a jackal.

  The necropolis was no more than a big open space, surrounded by a mud-brick wall. Most of the cemeteries in the cities I knew were built to the west of the river, closer to the setting of the sun. Perhaps this was a temporary ground, or perhaps the location of this new city, so far from civilization, its border more vulnerable to attack, predisposed the planners to bury the dead nearer the suburbs of the living, rather than risk interring their worldly goods and bones in a place where they could not be defended from tomb robbers.

  Not enough people had died in the new city yet for the necropolis to be well populated, but even so there were markers and little shrines, and perhaps twenty larger private chapels in various stages of construction. None of these would be for people of noble rank-their tombs were already being carved into the rocks of the hills that surrounded the eastern edge of the city and its hinterlands, closer to the gods. This was a burial place for anyone who was neither a labourer-they had their own burial grounds close to their village-nor a Priest. Here would lie everyone in between: the foreign bureaucrats who died far from their lands; the middle classes; professional, family people who committed their lives to the quieter slavery of offices and desks, seeking to inter their own kind with some sense of reverence and permanence in this new place without a history-at least a human one.

  What now? I had no more clues, but something must be here. I wandered among the chapels, trying to move in silence, trying to stay out of the moonlight that cast its blueness upon the black and grey ground. When we were first married and I was working the night patrols, Tanefert insisted I wore an amulet for protection against the spirits. And though I would not confess it to anyone, I was glad to feel it now against my chest.

  I had begun to hate the woman I was seeking. Her vanishing seemed more than ever a case of selfish flight. I had so far discovered nothing in the circumstances of her life that seemed so terrible, so awful, as to justify the abandonment of her children and the abdication of her responsibilities. Now here I was, a man she had never even thought of but whose life and fate were bound up with hers. Her beauty seemed cursed-a Queen of disaster.

  As I thought these futile thoughts, I began to notice the silent presence of cats in the shadows, having been alerted by a brief squabble among their dark population. Every necropolis has its population of starving cats, and we worship these animals in our temples, adorning them with wedjat amulets and gold rings through their noses, and painting them on the walls of our tombs in the role of Ra himself slaying Apophis, the serpent-headed god; finally they are buried, mummified with a look of surprise on their faces, in careful shrouds of cotton and papyrus cloth. One of these cats was staring at me from the top of a large tomb. She did not, I have to admit, bear the attitude of superiority common to her kind. Instead, she jumped down and ran over to me with a friendly greeting and a tinkling of the bell under her collar. Her thick black coat, lustrous in the moonlight, caused her to vanish completely whenever she passed into shadow, but for her eyes, white as new moons, which kept their regard for me. She wound herself around my legs, attempting to converse in her idea of my language, and despite myself I reached down and stroked her full length, allowing her tail, curved into a question mark, to pass through my hand.

>   What was I doing, in the middle of all this, in the middle of the night, attending to a cat? I was losing my mind. I straightened up and continued my attempts to investigate the necropolis in a consistent and professional way for some kind of answer to the clues that so mystified and irritated me. The cat would not leave me, however. ‘I have no food for you,’ I whispered to her, thinking all the time what a fool I was being. She continued to purr quietly to herself. I moved off, but when I looked back she was sitting in the moonlight in her ritual pose, scenting the air of my departure, her tail swishing with the power of her thoughts. So I turned around. And this pleased her, for she moved off, her tail up high, curved now like a crook, and pattered off a little way before turning to check that I was following her. Given that I had no idea myself as to where to turn, the random nature of her invitation appealed to me as part of the gamble, the belief in luck, that was pulling me on. I confess here that I, Rahotep, chief detective of the Thebes Medjay division, investigator of the great mystery, gave up all my training to follow the enigmatic instructions of a black cat through a moonlit graveyard. I can hear the hysterical laughter that would greet such a confession back in the office.

  The cat nimbly skipped her way through the stones and monuments. Sometimes I lost her in the shadows, but then she would reappear, an elegant black figure against the silver-blue ground. I tried to keep my eyes open for anything along the way that would remind me of the enigma whose power had brought me to this point. But there was nothing.

  Then she came to one of the private chapels. With a backward glance, she entered the forecourt and disappeared. It was recently constructed, and one of the bigger ones. Panels of moonlight illuminated the interior. I moved carefully through the outer hall, and into the inner hall. The cat was crouching at the sanctuary niche, eating carefully from the offering bowls. Someone had freshly filled them. She looked like a hieroglyph of herself against the carved stone stele and the symbols of the hetep offering table: the reed mats and many-shaped loaves of bread, the cups and vessels, the trussed ducks whose cold images stood for the reality of provisions for the dead.