Nefertiti rr-1 Read online

  Alas, I am carried away again. I must be sober as the great serpent of water carries me away from all I know, and all I love, on its blackness, its perpetual glittering scales, with its sightless memory of a long journey from high in the unknown stones of Nubia, down through the great cataracts, and into the fields, into the fruit and the vegetables, into the wine, into the sea; and somewhere into snow.

  3

  I admire the neatness of a boat. The simplicity of necessity. Blankets folded in the morning and stowed. Objects made small and precise for their purpose. Everything in its place. The captain has blue eyes, a handful of crooked white teeth, a confident belly and the hands-on look of an intelligence at home on the water; an intelligence that can look through people of the land and discern their motives and thoughts as if they were as easy to read as small fish in the shallows. Then there is the boat itself, a wonderful construction, an equation between wind and water that results in sails filling to perfect curves, drawing out the ropes to an immaculate geometrical tension that brings about the miraculous power to draw the vessel and its temporary passengers through the water. Look: the perfect cut of the prow through the skin of the water that heals as we pass. The wake-blind white fingers feeling their way along the edge of some unknown material, then relenting, with little shrugs and gestures of farewell, and sinking back into the blackness whence they so briefly appeared.

  Here I am, a senior detective of the Medjay, spending my time pondering the inscrutable puzzles of the passing water as we are carried with the current of the river past Coptos, Dendera and the Temple of Hathor, and the Temple of Osiris at Abydos. My mind like a water fly, thinking of nothing, when I should be preparing myself for the urgent mystery at hand.

  The captain invited the passengers to dine together this evening, around the brazier, for it is cold on the water once the sun has descended. I hate dinner parties, and I annoy Tanefert by making sure work prevents me from attending the invitations we receive. In part, this is because I cannot talk, at the table or even anywhere else, about my work: who wants to hear about murder when they are enjoying their meat? And in part because I just cannot discuss the perils and evils of the world from the point of view of luxury, around a table set with good things, as if it were all just matter for debate.

  We greeted each other politely as we took our places, and then fell into an uneasy silence. It is true that the Great Changes have brought about more caution, and sometimes almost suspicion, into daily life. Once we spoke freely; now people think twice before they express an opinion. Once one provoked laughter and amusement for expressing a heretical point of view; now such things are met with silence and discomfort.

  I was seated next to a portly gentleman whose belly was the most notable part of his anatomy; it was like a great globe with a white moony head gazing down in constant surprise at itself. The food, which was simple and plentiful, drew from him gestures of approval and delight: his polished little hands wafted in the air to describe his pleasure. He leaned over to me, and broke the silence: ‘And what, sir, is your purpose in our new City of the Horizon of the Aten?’

  I could tell he was pleased with himself for calling the new capital by its rather pompous proper name. I like to engage in the amateur drama of an assumed identity in these circumstances.

  ‘I am an official in the Office of Accounts,’ I replied.

  ‘So we should make friends with you, as otherwise we shall never be paid!’ He looked around the table for approval of his little quip.

  ‘Indeed, our Lord’s finances are a great mystery, but the greatest is that they are never-ending, and ever bountiful.’

  He appraised me and the conformity of my reply with a cool eye. Before he could get further into this, I quickly asked, ‘And what are your own affairs in Akhetaten?’

  ‘I am director of the court orchestra and dancers. It is a position enjoying considerable status, and I believe there was great competition for it. I shall be directing the opening drama for the city’s inauguration. Did you know, all the members of the court orchestra are women?’

  ‘Do you mean, sir, that women are less capable than men in the expertise of dance and music?’

  A handsome, intelligent woman had spoken from the opposite side of the table. Her husband, a smaller and somehow diminished middle-aged man with the appearance of a born bureaucrat, glanced at her as if to say: it is not your place to speak of this. But she gazed calmly on the Great White Moon.

  He sniffed and said, ‘Dancing will always be the woman’s art. But music makes great technical and spiritual demands. I am not speaking of mere decoration but of the deep soul.’ He picked out the morsel of a prawn from its pink sheath and popped it between his fastidious and ambitious lips.

  ‘I see. And is our Queen Nefertiti decoration? Or is she of deep soul?’ She smiled at me, an invitation to share her amusement.

  ‘We know too little of her,’ he said.

  ‘Oh no, sir,’ she responded. ‘We know she is beautiful. We know she is clever. And we know she is the most powerful woman alive today. She drives her own chariot, and she wears her hair as she wishes, not as tradition would dictate. She smites her enemies as a King. And no-one tells her what to do. She is, in fact, the epitome of the modern woman.’

  A small silence ensued around the table. Finally, the Moon spoke: ‘Indeed, and that may very well be why we find ourselves in a world which is changing faster than perhaps everyone would like.’

  The conversation was becoming more charged; the stakes of the game increased. She answered him with a counter-play.

  ‘Do you not, then, approve of the new religion?’

  This was a subject not to be carelessly discussed among strangers. Moon Man squirmed with discomfort and uncertainty, caught between speaking his mind and fearing for his future. ‘I approve it with all my heart. Of course I do. I am merely a music-maker. It is not my business to ask questions, merely to do what is asked of me and make it sound as tuneful as possible. I only wonder, privately, and I am not alone in this, whether our Lord and his Lady, she-who-will-not-be-told-what-to-do, have not bitten off more than they can chew.’ And with that, he placed a fried sprat between his lips and teased off the flesh from the bones as if he were playing a tune on a small reed pipe.

  The handsome woman’s eyes were alive with amusement at the absurdity of his turn of phrase, which she seemed to want to share with me.

  ‘We live in a time of great turbulence,’ said her husband. ‘Can we know whether we are blessed or cursed? Will the people miss their old gods, and the Priests their easy riches? Or are we moving forward, together, as a society, towards a higher and greater truth, however challenging?’

  Moon Man spoke again: ‘Higher truths need proper financing. Enlightenment is expensive. So I am pleased to hear you’-here he pointed a greasy finger at me-‘can confirm the finances of our Lord are drawn from so perpetual a spring of plenty. I hear the harvest is poor again this year. And I hear salaries are in arrears, sometimes by several years. Indeed, it is the guarantee of regular gifts from Akhenaten that has persuaded me to uproot my life and cast my fortune on the success of the new capital.’

  I did not respond. Instead, the handsome woman gracefully changed the subject. She turned to the young man to her left, who had remained silent throughout these exchanges. He was an apprentice architect.

  ‘So, what can you tell us about the construction of the city?’ she asked. ‘And more importantly whether the bigger houses have gardens, for little else would have persuaded me to sacrifice my own home and friends for the desert.’

  ‘I believe the villas are luxurious. And the supply of water to the gardens is prodigious. So although the city is surrounded by the desert, and would seem an arid and unpropitious place to build a new world, yet it is now green and fertile. But alas, I am working only in a minor capacity.’ He paused, embarrassed.

  ‘And what is that?’ I asked.

  ‘I am designing the toilet area near the Great Aten Te
mple.’ Everyone laughed at that. Encouraged, he added, ‘Even Priests must take their libatory shits in sacred surroundings!’

  ‘Don’t talk to me about the Priests,’ Moon Man said. ‘Their calling is riches. And that’s all there is to it. The least Akhenaten will have achieved is the destruction of their great temples to the gods of profit!’

  We all fell into silence. It is dangerous to criticize the Priests, or let us say the Old Families who have commanded so much inherited power for so many generations and are now in turmoil, like an enraged monster, at their losses of status, land and income. Likewise the Medjay: many believe that elements within the force are compelling the less orthodox members of society to accept and conform to the new religion by the use of the old techniques-intimidation, violence and suffering. I have heard stories of people disappearing, of unidentifiable bodies washing up in the river, their hands chopped off, their eyes plucked out. But it is hearsay. We are a force for order over chaos, for the harmony of maat and the rightness of things. It is how things must be.

  We retired, with bids and nods of goodnight, to our hammocks and blankets. I found some solitude in my couch in the stern of the boat, among the coils of rope, beneath the great guiding oars now driven into the mud of the riverbed. The captain lay in the prow in a hammock, with a candle. Soon all the passengers were snoring beneath tents of cloth and insect nets.

  And so I sit here now with this journal and think about what I may encounter in the city of Akhetaten. Essentially, I have no idea. It is a blank. Akhenaten’s so-called great idea, to initiate a new religion and to forbid the old, strikes me as insane. It is a revolution against sense. This is not an original thought: I doubt if there are more than a handful of people-the close circle of the King, and those like the builders and architects who have jobs for life-who think he has not lost his mind. A new religion, based upon himself and Nefertiti as the incarnations and only intermediaries of the Aten, the sun disc? Akhenaten has banished the minor gods the people have worshipped all their lives, as well as the major deities of the Otherworld, the World and the Sky. These days I only believe what I can see with my own eyes, or glean from the clues available to me here in this world, so he may well be right to disclaim the power of the invisible. And indeed he may be right to play the Priests at their own game, which they have been winning, at enormous personal gain, for generations. But then to take all power from them unto himself at one stroke, to drive them from their ancient temples at Karnak, and (worst of all) to leave them at large in the country wandering without employment or purpose other than inventing revenge? How is this possible? How can it end but in disaster? We hear he is hardly a god to look at. They say he is as unusual in body as he is curious in mind. His limbs long and spindly as a grasshopper, his belly like a water butt. But this is from those who have not seen the man himself. The only thing he has done right is come from a powerful mother and father, and marry well. Nefertiti. The Perfect One. They say her ancestry is mysterious, but that she is greatly admired.

  Perhaps I will see all this for myself. What is clear is that these are changing times, and we must change with them or perish-at least until the powers-that-be bring about a reversal of all this, and what has come to pass crumbles back into the dust of its making. For surely Akhenaten cannot survive long. The Priests will not allow their riches and their earthly powers to be taken away from them.

  But what all this has to do with the mystery to which I am called, I cannot tell.

  4

  I lay beneath the moon and observed the many serene and imperishable stars of the Otherworld. But the night always stirs with hidden struggles. From the bank came the sounds of birds and beasts busy with their nocturnal lives. I remembered how, when we first met, at that party, Tanefert and I stepped out from the lights and noise and walked along the water’s edge, our hands just beginning to risk a touch here and there, each apparently casual brushing of skin on skin sending shivers through my whole body. It was as if we could finish each other’s thoughts, without speaking. We sat on a bench and watched the moon. I said it was a mad old woman left alone in the sky, but Tanefert said, ‘No, she is a great lady in mourning for her lost love. Look how she calls to him.’ We talked more. She told me the truth about everything in her heart, the good and the bad, with the risks attending her confession, and I knew then, from her honesty, that she would change my life with love. Of course, it hasn’t all been easy. The gods know how I can be: moody, selfish, sad.

  A pang of loss flashed through me. I stood up and stared out across the dark waters. I felt alarmed, in the wrong place. I wanted to turn the boat around and return to her at once. Then suddenly, whirring out of the darkness faster than a diving hawk, an arrow. I saw it after I felt the cold needle of its passage through the air by my left eye. I felt-or did I imagine it? — hot feathers brushing past my face, bright with some furious point of light. And then I saw flames racing up and out from the point where the arrow had embedded itself in the wood of the mast, below the Eye of Horus, nailed there for safe passage. The mind is slower than time, slower than fire and air. Then a noise, like enthusiastic applause, brought me out of this trance. I shouted like a fool. The fire was feasting on the sail, its many greedy mouths moving out from the mast, by now a tree of flame. And the captain arrived, pulling on ropes, while the sailors hurried buckets of water out of the river, which they cast into the roaring throat of the blaze. And this interested, then gradually placated, and finally subdued the god.

  I slowly came back to myself. All the passengers were gathered now on the deck, huddled in their night attire, holding each other, or weeping, or staring at the now-threatening darkness that surrounded this frail and damaged vessel. I could hear the drip-drip-drip of the water that saved us from extinction, as each drop fell from the charred wood. Everyone knew the arrow was aimed at me. They also knew their own brush with mortality was because of my presence on the boat. And they knew I was not who I said I was.

  The Moon Man spoke: ‘You, sir, have not been honest with us. An official in the Treasury does not earn this kind of attention.’

  I shrugged. The handsome woman glanced at me with more interest, a question in her eye. And the captain, his face struck with humiliation and anger, looked at the wizened and blackened remains of the arrow. ‘You owe me a ship,’ he said.

  He was about to pull it out when I shouted at him to stop. This was evidence. I pushed him to one side and examined it. I could not draw the point from the wood. It had been made so delicate by fire that it could have collapsed to ash at any moment. But although it was damaged, I could see immediately two things that interested me. One: the tip, although blackened, was metal, probably silver. Not flint. Not, then, a casual act of violence, but one in which there had been considerable investment of skill, quality and expense. And two: still visible in the wood, two hieroglyphs. Cobra. The Snake, Great of Magic, Poised on the Crown of Pharaoh, Protector of Ra in his passage through the Underworld of the Night. And Seth with his forked tail, god of chaos and confusion, of the Red Land and war. This was the work of an expert, and I was lucky, strangely, to be alive. Equally strangely, I did not feel lucky. I felt warned. Either I had survived by the merest chance, or I was meant to survive. Either the unknown assassin had missed by the smallest degree-the lucky drift of the night breeze, the sudden cry of a bird distracting the arrow from its true course-or he had hit the mark exactly.

  And then he had signed his work.

  5

  The rest of the journey passed in an uncomfortable silence. I was under the suspicion of all the passengers and crew, and they kept well away from me. The captain had had the charred damage patched but our pace was slowed, and it made us seem ugly and noticeable, now, among the busy ordinary traffic on the river. Even the children of the river villages, always ready to laugh and wave and call, watched us pass in silence. I offered the captain compensation through the Medjay office. But we both know the chances of his receiving anything are remote. If we are not pai
d our salaries, how are such unusual claims to be honoured? But I gave him my word, and it was all I had to give. He was not impressed. Somehow I must make this good. And I must consider the obvious fact: someone powerful knows I am coming, and does not want me in Akhetaten, this city that I had not seen-until now.

  As we rounded a bend in the river, suddenly, after nothing but fields and hamlets and beyond them always the endless shape-shifting and broken stones of the Red Land, there appeared a vision: a bright white city laid out in a great crescent along the eastern curve of the river, and defended at its back by a range of red and grey cliffs that encircled and delineated the eastern edges of the territory, marked in the centre by a deep and narrow valley, like a large notch in a length of wood. The cliffs met the river at their north-westernmost tip. Thus the city was held-cupped, almost-in the vast palm of the land. It appeared nothing like the other cities of our world, not as a chaotic improvisation of ancient and temporary buildings. Rather, it seemed a vast ordered garden from which rose towers, temples, offices and villas, spreading from the shores of the river towards the edges of the desert behind. Great flocks of birds wheeled in the sky, and the sound of their singing and their cries reached me even from some distance.