"It matters not," Othrys said with a sigh. "If I kill you, news of it will come to the right ears."
Meren felt the chill of the embalming knife at his throat but smiled his most tranquil smile. "You're absolutely right, pirate."
For the first time he saw Othrys jolted from his airy confidence. Meren swirled the wine in his cup and continued to look amused.
"Of course, from the pattern of events so far, the most likely outcome of your killing me would be your own death."
"What?"
Setting his cup down on the balcony floor, Meren rose, folded his arms over his chest, and regarded Othrys. "The evil one will assume that you forced me to tell all I know of his transgressions before you killed me. Once he makes that conclusion, you'll join me in the netherworld."
"He can't reach me."
Meren held the pirate's gaze as his lips twisted into an ironic grimace. "If he can ruin me, he can catch you in his net." He didn't move as the pirate went still with contemplation. The breeze played with the curtains and danced in Meren's hair.
Suddenly Othrys grinned, slapped Meren's back, and said, "Welcome to my house, Egyptian. You're under my protection, and if you bring this evil one down on me, he won't have to kill you. I'll do it myself."
Chapter 13
Horizon of the Aten, the independent reign of the pharaoh Akhenaten
Nefertiti woke before sunrise. She turned onto her side and beheld a servant creeping about, lighting lamps. Her eye caught a scene from a wall mural of her and the children in a reed skiff. The boat floated in a marsh brimming with wildfowl. In the image heron and ducks fluttered above her head as she drew back a throw stick and took aim. Akhenaten had offered to have the scene repainted to omit Meketaten, but she'd refused. Her little girl was gone, and all she had left were things—clothing, toys, and paintings of the child like this one.
Meketaten had been her second-born, a little bundle of endearing glee who'd found gravity and decorum almost beyond her nature. After she died, Nefertiti hadn't wanted to live. Only the thought of leaving her five remaining daughters had kept her tethered to this world. Sometimes she went to the playroom in the queen's palace, where the girls were allowed to draw, and studied the dabs and streaks of red, yellow, and green that Meketaten had splashed on the floor and walls. No one had approved of her allowing the children such freedom. Royal princesses should be brought up mannered and well groomed and not given the freedom to spatter paint around an entire room. Nefertiti had ignored such advice, and Akhenaten, who had suffered from a royal upbringing, had sided with her.
This mural of the girls was her favorite. Nefertiti loved the cool blues, greens, and blue grays of the feathers and water. It was disappointing that the girls' bodies had been drawn with sagging middles like Akhenaten's. She wished everyone didn't have to look like a potter's discard simply because Akhenaten didn't have wide shoulders and a muscled torso.
Nefertiti rose from the bed and clapped her hands. Attendants appeared with toiletries. Even after so many months, it took all her considerable will to face a new day. There was a blackness about her heart that tinged the world with gloom. Desolation reigned her ka, and she knew she would never recover from losing that little being who had come from her body to bless her life with laughter. And even if she hadn't wanted to live for her children's sake, there was Egypt. Egypt was troubled, for pharaoh was troubled.
Akhenaten's hatred of the old order increased daily, fed by defiant priests and subjects. The people obeyed Akhenaten's edicts in form but believed as they always had in their hearts. And now pharaoh's frustration and hatred had impelled him to do violence against his enemies—but she didn't want to sail down that stream of thought.
Despite her desolation, Nefertiti dressed and proceeded with her morning activities. She ate the morning meal with her girls, settled their quarrels, and reviewed their lessons with their tutors. She had interviews with a few of the countless officials of the queen's household—her steward, the overseer of the cabinet, the chief of hairdressers, the queen's herald, the traders of the queen's household, the overseer of the seal.
She listened to complaints from the bearer of floral offerings for the queen, the chief of musicians of the queen's household, and the merchant who'd provided horses for her chariot. Of them all, only Sebek, captain of the troops of the queen, had no laments. Much of the routine was tedious, but it gave Nefertiti a sense of continuity and security she badly needed.
The sun was above the eastern cliffs by the time she finished and was ready to join Akhenaten in the morning worship. As was her custom of late, she was to meet her husband at the great Aten temple in the southern city. The drive down the main road that spanned the city from north to south was filled with the din of construction. They'd moved to Horizon of the Aten so quickly that many buildings were still being constructed. Akhenaten simply hadn't the patience to wait. Even the great Aten temple was constructed primarily of mud brick, so great had been pharaoh's haste.
She had discussed the plan of Horizon of the Aten with her husband, and they'd agreed that, if they were to have any privacy, the royal palaces should be placed away from the rest of the city. So the enormous riverside palace was far north of the city, with her smaller palace a little farther south. Below these lay the city itself, with its vast Aten temple, ceremonial palace, and the King's House, which they used when in the city. Interspersed among the government buildings and in enclaves to the north and south were the rest of the city's inhabitants—the ministers, officials, servants, and artisans. Horizon of the Aten was like no other city in Egypt. It had been planned. All of it was new. And no other god had a temple there. Akhenaten was confronted with no reminders of opposition, of the old ways, of the old king of the gods— Amun.
At the great Aten temple, when pharaoh shuffled into the colonnaded courtyard, Nefertiti and her attendants were waiting. She gave her youngest lady's wig a surreptitious jerk so that it sat straight on the girl's head and joined her husband for the adoration. In front of her and to either side stretched altar after altar. Not for Akhenaten the mysterious, secluded ritual of old. No, he worshiped in the heat of the sun, his god, offering simultaneously with his priests at hundreds of altars. Often, when she'd been standing in the sun too long, Nefertiti longed for the practical structure of the old temples. The thick stone walls and darkness of the sanctuaries meant shelter from the dangerous heat of the sun—a blessing from the old gods of which Akhenaten seemed oblivious.
After the ceremony Nefertiti accompanied pharaoh to the great audience hall of the ceremonial palace, where the king barely listened to reports from ministers and petitions from citizens, and received foreign delegations. Once she'd been proud that the ministers were carefully respectful of any advice she gave. When Akhenaten first allowed her to attend such governmental audiences, the ministers had assumed she knew little of the difficulties of expeditions to the gold mines of Nubia or the problems encountered in surveying crops for taxation. It hadn't taken long for them to learn otherwise. By contrast, Akhenaten seemed to think that any question would be solved by delegating it to a minister or by referring it to the divine wisdom of the Aten.
What was worse, pharaoh spent less than half the time his father had given to the task of governing. Long afternoons went by in the royal gardens, where Akhenaten would lounge under a tree watching his daughters play. Every day was a feast day, each night an occasion for dancing, juggling, love songs, and games. If Nefertiti hadn't taken an interest, government in the Two Lands would have floundered while pharaoh and his court diligently practiced sloth.
In the years since they'd come to Horizon of the Aten, Nefertiti had grown sick of afternoons spent prone on a couch with Akhenaten shoving food at her. She was fortunate that the solution to her problem had occurred to her. Invariably the heat, beer, and food lulled pharaoh into a nap each afternoon. She left as soon as Akhenaten fell asleep.
During these afternoons Nefertiti served as an unofficial vizier. What Akhenaten ignored and vizier Nakht mismanaged, she tried to salvage with her father's advice and help. Often Nefertiti joined Ay in the House of Correspondence of pharaoh, the office of works, or the police barracks.
One day she had discovered her father in the House of Correspondence, talking with the king's chamberlain, Tutu. The conversation centered around inventories of some kind, and Nefertiti grew tired of listening to them. She wandered through a hall where scribes sat in rows and scribbled notes on limestone flakes or wrote letters on expensive papyrus. She passed walls with shelves filled with docketed letters. Walking past five such archives, she finally reached a room where young apprentice scribes ground pigments for ink and burnished sheets of papyrus with smoothing stones. Remembering how cramped her fingers had become when she performed such tasks for Tati, Nefertiti watched several lads ply mortar and pestle. Across the room, through a door, she could see clerks taking delivery on a shipment of papyrus.
Drawing closer to the door, she watched slaves unloading bales from donkeys. She heard Ay calling to her and started back to the main hall. On her way she passed a room filled with clay tablets. The kingdoms of the Asiatics, Babylon, the cities of Palestine and Syria, all used the heavy cakes of earth as writing material instead of papyrus. A scribe would impress wedge-shaped symbols on moist clay and allow the inscription to dry. In Egypt, when the correspondence arrived, pharaoh's secretaries transcribed the clay tablets onto papyrus and then stored the clumsy originals.
Nefertiti picked up a sample. Someone had written the regnal year of Akhenaten and the date the letter was received on the side of the tablet. The edges of the brown cake were crumbling from being tossed about carelessly. Nefertiti ran her hand over the smooth surface of the tablet. Ay's voice came to her, and she hurried to join her father, the letter still in her hand.
She caught up with Ay and Tutu in the main hall. "I found one of the storage rooms. Imagine having to write on wet lumps like this all day."
"Cursed things," Tutu said. "There's a mountain of them in the courtyard out back. They took up so much room that the scribes shoveled them outside."
Ay took the tablet from Nefertiti. He held it to the light coming from a window.
"This is a letter from the prince of Gezer, majesty," Ay said to Nefertiti. "It was received three months ago."
Nefertiti turned slowly to face Tutu and asked quietly, "Why has pharaoh not been given a transcription of this?"
She watched Tutu peer at the tablet with a vague look on his face. The man waved his walking stick.
"Majesty, I'm sure someone probably already did that."
"You know very well the king entrusts all the correspondence from other lands to me," Nefertiti said. "My father and I summarize it for him each day, and neither of us have seen this letter. Come."
Her irritation growing, Nefertiti led the way to her find. Ay knelt beside a pile and held up one brick missive after another. In a few moments his hands were covered with dust, and his face looked as hard as the clay he handled. Nefertiti understood the look he gave her. She snapped at the chamberlain, "Who is chief transcriber?"
Tutu summoned the overseer of the House of Correspondence. The overseer summoned his assistant, who appeared after a slave was sent to find him. He scurried into the room with his mouth full of bread, wiping his hands on his kilt. At the sight of Nefertiti, the man started choking. The overseer pounded his back and thrust a cup of water at him. Nefertiti would have laughed if she hadn't been so furious.
"Speak," Ay said. He crossed his arms over his chest and glared at the scribe.
"Great lord, the only transcriber we had fell ill and died months ago. We sent for another, but since the temples were closed, it's been hard to find knowledgeable workers."
Nefertiti stared at the overseer of the House of Correspondence. "You only have one transcriber? For all of the writings that come from the monarchs of the Asiatics and across the waters of the Great Green, for all the vassals and petty princes, the tribal chiefs?
One
?"
"Actually they don't have even one," Ay said. "Haven't had for a long time, I'd say."
Nefertiti and Ay looked at Tutu. The chamberlain studied the carved tip of his walking stick while they waited. The scratch of reed pens on papyrus pierced the silence. Nefertiti could see the resentment in Tutu's eyes.
"The king complained of the amount of reading he had to do, even with thy majesty's help. Pharaoh was annoyed at the constant complaints and bickering of the vassals. His majesty spoke to me, and I suggested that we wait until many of the less important documents had collected. That way we could get rid of many at once instead of a few day after day. Pharaoh was pleased with my suggestion."
Trying to control her boiling temper, Nefertiti asked,
"How long were you going to wait before presenting this correspondence?"
"I await the request of pharaoh."
Ay almost shouted at the minister. "But the king probably thinks you'll come to him when you're ready!"
Tutu straightened his shoulders. He looked down his nose at Ay and sneered. "I understood the words of the good god perfectly. When the divine one wishes to see the writings of the wretched Asiatics, I will bring them before him."
"You'll bring them before me," Nefertiti said.
"But, majesty—"
"Do you question the word of the great royal wife?" Ay asked.
"No! Nonononoo."
Tutu bowed and bobbed and groveled before her. Disgusted, Nefertiti waved him out of the room.
As soon as the man was gone, Ay clasped her arm. "I know you were provoked, daughter, but tread carefully in your dealings with Tutu. He's a man who harbors resentments with the zeal of a miser."
"Don't worry, Father. I'll speak to Akhenaten. He'll be relieved that I've offered to take this burden from him completely. You know Tutu is right. His majesty barely tolerates listening to foreign delegations; he hates reading correspondence. And no matter what I do, Tutu will look upon my interest as an invasion. He's a petty little man." She gave her father a wry smile. "I wouldn't be surprised if he started throwing away tablets just to keep me from violating his boundaries."