Anton Gill: City of the Dead

Lurking at the edges of the crowd, men from Horemheb’s special section of Medjay police were not troubling to make their presence less than obvious. The general was flaunting his private power more and more flagrantly, but Huy was not sure why. Did he seek to prove to the king that he was the real power in the land? Or did he deliberately seek a confrontation with the young pharaoh? Despite all his sophistication, all the political dexterity he had learnt down the years, might it not perhaps be a case of an old lion showing his teeth to a young one – even though he knows that, once he has entered the seqtet boat, his power is doomed, and not even the flexing of all his muscles will pull him backwards one second in time?

Huy wondered if Horemheb was, after all, either subtle enough or modest enough ever to entertain such thoughts in his heart. The general was a practical man. Abstractions did not interest him, though he did make a show of an interest in the arts, pouring money into the hands of painters and carvers, singers and potters; imitating the manner of his own hero, the warrior pharaoh Menkheperre Tuthmosis, creator of the Great Empire, whose death a century earlier was still lamented, as from it the historians now dated the decline of power in the | Black Land. Horemheb, Huy was certain, wanted to be the man to arrest that decline. Huy privately had little doubt that i he would succeed, but he reserved a scrap of judgement because he remembered, years ago, a light of independence – or even of defiance – in the eyes of the young pharaoh, then only nine years old, as he fulfilled the rite of the Opening of the Mouth at the entombment of his immediate predecessor, Smenkhkare. Since then his every step, his every move, had been dogged by his two adviser-jailers. Huy wondered if, with maturity, the young king might not find the strength and jhe cunning to break the bars, shoot the bolts of the doors.

The litters had lumbered past him now, their bearers kicking;

up dust. Huy watched the swinging curtains and tried to imagine the private thoughts of the occupants of each. He doubted if the paymasters of the banquets to follow would enjoy them much. For a few minutes longer he watched the excited, chattering crowd of lesser guests and officials pass by, the headdresses glittering in the sun, a swirl of white linen and brown bodies whose precise outlines were softened by the fine dust their footsteps raised from the road. Huy’s eyes sought Taheb among them. For a moment he thought he saw her, but he could not be sure, and something in his heart prevented him from looking further. It had been two years since their love bond had ended, after several false stops and starts. In that time he had seen her once, and then only at a distance, but it was enough to tell his heart that he had not forgotten her. Now here he was, hopelessly looking for her again. He knew he was chasing a dream, but the spectre remained. Exhausted by it, he sometimes wondered what it would take to lay this ghost.

He turned away from the procession, and shouldered his way through the press of people who lingered to watch until the last of the marriage guests had passed by. He felt at once disappointed at not pursuing Taheb, and relieved. If he were to meet her, he would have no words to say to her. Why, then, play with the illusion that they might be together again? As a palliative for loneliness? He knew in his heart that he did not want her back; if the desire had truly been there, he would have done something about it long ago.

Leaving the crowd behind him, the music growing fainter as he walked down the low hill on which the temple stood, he made his way home. For some time he had lived in a small house in the harbour quarter. A handful of years earlier, it had been bought for him by Ipuky, the Controller of the Silver Mines, and a man to whom he had been able to be of service. As a result of the work he had done at that time, a corrupt chief scribe had been exposed, and a vile brothel was closed; but although Ipuky, an official of high enough rank to have the ear of Horemheb, had interceded for him, credit for the investigation had gone to the priest-administrator officially in charge, Kenamun. That had rankled with Huy. He knew that Kenamun himself had murdered a Babylonian prostitute, but the priest-administrator’s rank had protected him from accusation, and Huy had had to accept defeat, taking consolation in the fact that public praise for him might have attracted unwelcome attention from Horemheb. Being human, however, it had been some time before he ceased to wish both men thrown to the crocodiles.

She awoke, immediately aware that her husband was already conscious, lying there in the darkness, staring at nothing, troubled by thoughts he only grudgingly shared with her, but which she found easy to guess. It was the lack of a child that kept him from sleep.

She sighed as softly as she could, so as not to let him know that she was awake, but she felt tension run through his muscles and knew that she had not kept her secret. He did not speak to her however, and for a long time they lay in silence, listening to the muffled island of sound that came from the feast in Horemheb’s house on the other side of the palace compound. It had been a long day and she was tired – tired from the heavy regalia, and tired from the rich food and the wine.

In the darkness his hand found hers and grasped it. She curled her fingers gratefully round his, but did not know whether this affection proceeded from his heart or just from kindness. She was jealous of all that he kept back from her. She hated her body. Why would it not produce a child that lived? Only six months had passed since Horemheb’s marriage, and now they were celebrating her aunt’s pregnancy. Nezemmut, so much older than she, had peopled her birth-cave with no effort. Of what value, then, had their own six months of prayer and sacrifice to the gods of fertility been? Were the gods as stony as their images?

His hand moved up to her face and she turned it away so that he could not feel the tears on her cheeks. Perhaps her birth-cave was as barren as the City of the Horizon where she had been born: a city of the dead.

‘It will be all right,’ came the king’s voice. He spoke with a gentleness that surprised her. ‘The gods are leading Horemheb on in order to destroy him. As for the child that is coming to him, it will never sit on the Golden Chair.’

‘I want you to be sure. I want you to have a direct heir.’

He put an arm round her. ‘I will. We will.’

‘Why do the gods not hear us? You are one of them. Or can Horemheb order them about as he does everyone else?’ Tutankhamun fought down anger at her remark, telling himself that he had to indulge the candour of someone who was, after all, not much more than a child.

‘His days of giving orders are all but over.’

‘And Ay?’ she asked, not forgetting the other enemy.

‘He is already out of the game.’

Ankhsenpaamun did not make any comment. She did not agree with her husband, but did not know why, and so decided to keep her silence. The king stroked her brow gently, wishing that tiredness and the nagging interruption of his thoughts were not preventing him from showing even the pretence of desire. He turned his heart to the plans that he had begun to lay secretly, not telling anyone except the few trusted men of his household who would carry them out. He did not feel that everything could be confidently left to the gods to sort out. In any case, he had to do something, and, unfocused as his plans were, it comforted him to consider them as they began to develop.

He soothed her back to sleep, thinking how young she was. Little Ankhsi, with her slim arms and her little breasts that barely showed. Would she ever grow into the strong, voluptuous woman her aunt had become? She seemed to the king like a flower on the point of opening.