Lynda Robinson: Slayer of Gods

Although he couldn’t see his arm, Meren felt a wet cloth wipe the flesh of his wrist, saw the brand lift in the air. It was the Aten, the sun disk, whose symbol was a circle with sticklike rays extending from it and ending in stylized hands. The glowing sun disk poised in the air, then the guard pressed the hot metal to Meren’s arm.

There was a brief moment between the time the brand met his flesh and the first agony. In that moment, Meren smelled for the first time the odor of burning flesh. Then he screamed. Every muscle convulsed while the guard held the brand to his wrist. When it was taken away Meren broke out in a sweat, and he shivered. Pain from his wrist rolled over him.

He lost consciousness briefly, and when he opened his eyes, the man who’d branded him was smearing a salve on his burned flesh. The pain receded as he was lifted and held so that he faced the king. Akhenaten’s black fire eyes burned into him as no brand ever could. Pharaoh took Meren’s hand, turned it to expose the mutilated wrist, and examined the crimson symbol of his god. He placed Meren’s hand in Ay’s.

“He is yours now. But remember, my majesty will know if the boy is false. If he falters from the true path, he dies.”

He dies. Meren shook his head and tried to banish the sound of Akhenaten’s voice, high, hard, like the sound of a metal saw drawn against granite. Oh, yes, he still remembered that voice even after sixteen years.

Rubbing the back of his neck, Meren shivered and stepped out of the path of the night breeze. There had been something different about this night’s evil dream. At the last, when the brand burned into his flesh, something strange happened to him. Suddenly it was as if he’d left his body and floated, invisible, beside the tortured figure on the floor. Only the prisoner who suffered at his feet wasn’t himself. It was Tutankhamun. The boy king writhed in agony, screaming, his dark, haunted eyes wide with terror, his body streaked with blood, dirt, and sweat.

“Damnation.” Meren paced back and forth beside the bed.

What did this new vision mean? He couldn’t consult a magician priest and expose the fact that he’d dreamed about the living god of Egypt.

“Calm yourself, you fool,” he muttered. “You dream about things that worry you. You always have.”

And he’d been worried about pharaoh for some time. Only fourteen, Tutankhamun had lost most of his family, including his mother, Queen Tiye, and the woman he thought of as a second mother, his brother’s wife, Nefertiti. Now that he knew the queen had been murdered, Tutankhamun grieved anew for Nefertiti’s loss. He’d been very young during his brother’s reign and so had understood nothing of the violent hatreds engendered by the Aten heresy. Tutankhamun remembered Akhenaten as a doting older sibling, a limitless source of toys, sweets, and exciting chariot rides.

Akhenaten’s sudden death had brought both confusion and relief to Egypt, but after a period of turbulence during which the next heir, Smenkhare, succumbed to illness, Tutankhamun became king. Inheriting the throne of Egypt and becoming a living god who controlled a vast and fabulously rich empire had been a formidable task for the boy. But he’d succeeded, only to find himself condemned to opulent isolation. Grave, beautiful, and headstrong, Tutankhamun had faced the burdens heaped upon him with courage, but in the last few months those burdens had grown. Evildoers had desecrated the bodies of Akhenaten and Nefertiti in their tomb at Horizon of the Aten.

Tutankhamun had faced that crisis and endured, but after years of trying hard to be a great king, he was beginning to show signs of strain. More and more he would slip out of the palace with a single guard to accompany him and seek relief in escapades that terrified his ministers. So far no harm had come to the king, but how long could this good fortune continue?

What was worse, Meren could see the strain in the king’s face. During an audience or ceremony at a temple he would see a distant look come over Tutankhamun, and Meren knew he was thinking of Nefertiti, wondering who could have killed his beloved second mother. He was wondering if her ka wandered lost and mad in the desert, as the souls of unavenged victims were said to do. Did she haunt the boy’s dreams, visit him and cry out for vengeance? Meren saw evidence of it when he looked at the king, in the shadows beneath those large, somber eyes. And then Meren would wonder-how long could the living god, who was after all a mortal boy as well, continue to bear this intolerable burden before he succumbed?

Meren shook his head, went to a chest and pulled out a kilt, which he belted around his hips. He covered the Aten brand on his wrist with a leather band. Finding Nefertiti’s killer was urgent. As strong and brave as the king was, he was far too young to endure such anguish and the torture of uncertainty for long. The only solution was to find the truth and present it to the king. If Meren could give Tutankhamun the murderer, perhaps the boy could find peace. Perhaps Meren could find some peace as well.

Still rubbing the brand on his wrist beneath the leather band, Meren left his bedchamber. He wasn’t going to get any more sleep, so he slipped out of the house with a brief command to his own guards to be silent regarding his absence. During his enforced rest he’d gone on long walks in the hours before dawn before his daughter Bener was awake. Arguing with her tired him as no exercise could.

This would be his last walk, a test of strength before he went in search of Nefertiti’s favorite bodyguard, Sebek. He’d had his men searching for the queen’s old servants, including Sebek, for some time, but they’d been unable to locate him. However, his persistence and patience with Satet had borne fruit unexpectedly when the old woman had mentioned the guard last night. He’d been surprised that she remembered Sebek, but her memory tended to appear and disappear like the ephemeral clouds in the Egyptian sky. Learning Sebek’s whereabouts was a good sign. Perhaps the guard knew something that at last would reveal the identity of Nefertiti’s murderer.

He left the house and walked down the avenue between the two reflection pools to the gate. He glanced at the water lilies floating on the surface of the water, their buds closed and invisible. He heard a fish snap at an insect and felt a tiny spray of water drops. He reached the gate. One of his guards let him out, and he set off in the direction of the temple of Ptah, the god of the city, thinking as he walked.

He knew who had supplied the poison to Nefertiti’s cook, Hunero, but someone else had conceived of the idea of killing the queen. Nefertiti had been engaged in a dangerous attempt to reconcile her husband with the old gods of Egypt. Losing her had nearly sent Egypt into chaos along with her pharaoh. That had been more than eleven years ago.

Now Tutankhamun was king, and bore the responsibility for healing Egypt’s open wounds. Some who had suffered at Akhenaten’s hands wanted to keep those wounds open and bleeding. It was this group who fostered the unspoken belief that the boy was tainted with the blood of a line that had nearly destroyed Egypt. Tutankhamun lived with the certainty that they wanted to rid the throne of its tainted occupant. A heavy burden for a boy not yet fifteen.

Meren shook his head as he remembered how, despite these adversities, the king was determined to become the epitome of a warrior king. In pursuit of this ideal he’d insisted on going with the army on a raid against an outlaw band. The boy had taken too many risks in that skirmish. Tutankhamun was the incarnation of the king of the gods, but he was still mortal. A bandit’s arrow could kill him in an instant, and then what would happen to Egypt?