Anton Gill: City of the Dead

The king bit his lip. The interview had gone badly. He watched the general’s retreating back with murder in his heart. How much longer would he have to put up with the curbs of this ambitious old man?

To begin with, he had been grateful for Horemheb’s experience, and he had leant on him. But it was four floods since his coronation, and at seventeen years old, he was still pharaoh in name only. The army, his spies told him, remained loyal to Horemheb, its commander since the days of his predecessor, the disgraced pharaoh Akhenaten. He would have to work on getting them to transfer their loyalty to him. Then he would see about sending Horemheb off on a diplomatic mission to some remote province. He toyed with the idea of assassination, but knew that the day when he felt secure enough to have that done was still far off.

Then there was Ay, even older, but just as ambitious, and as much of a thorn in his side. The king was well aware that both these men – joint regents in doubtful alliance during his minority – wanted only one thing – to wear the pschent themselves. He made a point of having the red-and-white double crown of the Black Land placed on his head at every meeting with his two advisers, as they now liked to be called, though down the years General Horemheb, the stronger of the two, had got the young king to confer a greater string of titles on him than any commoner had ever carried in the entire history of the country, and that stretched back through one and a half recorded millennia, and eighteen dynasties.

Ay had been Akhenaten’s father-in-law. Another commoner. The son of a Mitannite whose sister had the good fortune to become Great Wife of Menkheprure Tuthmosis, grandfather of Akhenaten, he had put it about – and the pharaoh could not disprove it – that he was also the brother of Tiy, Akhenaten’s; mother. Ay had further consolidated his position in the royal household by marrying off his daughter Nefertiti to Akhenaten. The girl, the most beautiful ever seen in the Black Land, became the king’s Great Wife, by whom he produced seven daughters. The present king was married to the third daughter, who had much of her mother’s beauty. But the family net Ay had woven around the young pharaoh had not endeared him.

‘I am king. Nebkheprure Tutankhamun.’ He said his name to himself as the high steward removed the heavy crown and replaced it with a blue-and-gold headdress – lapis and gold leaf over a light leather frame. The king sniffed the leather, enjoying the smell. His name gave him confidence. He wanted it on the people’s lips, on columns, pylons, temples and city gates. He would be the redeemer of the country, the man who would bring the Black Land back its glory after the sombre years of failure and doubt which had preceded his reign. But, he thought angrily, returning to his original theme, to be entered as such a king in the papyri of the scribes of history, he would first have to emerge from the shadows of his ‘advisers’. And, if he was to found a dynasty that would sweep aside all remaining doubts about his own remote legitimacy of descent, and therefore his own claim to the throne, he must have a son. So far, in the five years of marriage that had passed since Ankhsenpaamun grew capable of motherhood and they had started to share a bed, they had not even been able to produce a girl. He had no doubt of his own powers – he had two sons and three daughters by concubines already – but their claim to lineage was not strong enough, and he had no illusions about their chance of survival if he were not there to protect them against the cunning Ay and the predatory Horemheb.

How could two old men thwart him like this? Horemheb was all of fifty-five, and Ay ten years more than that. Yet they were as thirsty for power as men half their age. The king supposed that the lust stemmed from years of frustration, but their ability to survive was borne out by the fact that after the fall of Akhenaten they had emerged not only with their careers intact but in key positions of power which they had immediately and ruthlessly consolidated. Tutankhamun himself was in no doubt at all that they had brought about the fall and the death of the old king, though even to consider killing the pharaoh was on a level of blasphemy to start the demons of Set howling.

He made himself calm down. What was needed above all to combat these two was a clear head. He had few friends and they were all his age or younger. Inspecting the stables a few days earlier, where he was showing off his new Assyrian hunting horses to a group of young barons, he had been surprised by a visit from Horemheb, who, with his usual mock servility, had requested a meeting. Horemheb had not come alone into the presence of his king, but had the arrogance, then as always, to arrive flanked by half a dozen of his special Medjays. Tutankhamun had felt like the leader of a schoolboy gang surprised raiding date palms by the farmer. The memory irritated him to such an extent that even now he clenched his teeth and balled his fists, as he wished the general a violent death. Tear out his eyes! But as soon as the image was past, Tutankhamun cursed himself for not being able to maintain his decision for even a moment to keep cool blood.

Snapping his fingers for wine, he told the major domo that he wished to be washed and made-up afresh. The interview with Horemheb had unsettled him, and it had come hard on the heels of new information from his spies which had been even more perturbing. They had revealed a plan of Ay’s – though nothing could be substantiated – to marry Ankhsenpaamun, if anything should happen to him.

He knew that this was merely a political contingency plan: marrying the dead king’s wife would strengthen his successor’s claim. Ay already had a Chief Wife, Tey, Nefertiti’s stepmother, to whom he had been married for as long as anyone could remember, and to whom he appeared to be devoted. But the thought that Ay could contemplate outliving him disturbed Tutankhamun; and as for the idea of Ankhsi having to go to bed with a man fifty years her senior, it was too disgusting to contemplate. The king wished that he were ten years older himself. Then he would be able to outmanoeuvre these two crocodiles who had been experienced sons of guile before the Eight Elements which formed him had joined in his mother’s birth-cave.

He told himself that Ay’s plan would come to nothing. He had even half begun to devise a plan to neutralise Ay by spreading a rumour in Horemheb’s camp that the old Master of Horse was plotting against him. He was doubtful of its success. Horemheb appeared to need Ay to balance his own power game; just as the little crabs that scuttled in and out of their holes along the bank of the river held up an enormous claw and a minute one.

It was not outside the bounds of possibility that Horemheb would use Ay to catch him in a pincer movement, thought the king, as the little crabs scuttled out of his heart to give way to consideration of the meeting he had just had with the general. Anger bubbled up again as he remembered that Horemheb had turned his back before leaving the audience chamber; but Tutankhamun managed to control it this time.

Horemheb had come alone, for once. His proposal had been outrageous. The king had requested – requested of a subject! – time to consider, but in reality he knew that there was little he could do to prevent it. The general wanted to marry Nezemmut.

The pincer movement again. For a moment of panic, the king saw himself outmanoeuvred on the senet board, saw himself dispensed with before he had begun to reign. Nezemmut was now twenty-four. She had never had quite the beauty of her older sister Nefertiti, but she had a far more durable character, and she had ridden out the storm following the fall of Akhenaten without recourse to her father’s protection. She had a dark, strong face, her eyes full of sexual challenge and threat. If Nefertiti’s looks reminded you of the sky, Nezemmut’s made you think of the earth.