"By the Aten, little wife. You're the only one in all of Egypt who dares glare at me. Come, we mustn't quarrel." Akhenaten planted a kiss on her hot cheek.
She would have objected to this sudden end to their conversation, but the barge was docking at the royal quay. Allowing Akhenaten to guide her to the gangplank, she eyed him surreptitiously. His manner was excited, cheerful, and something else. She noted his rapid breathing. By the gods, her defiance had excited him.
As she stepped off the gangplank, Nefertiti was mobbed by her daughters. While she greeted each little girl with a kiss, her thoughts chased each other in a furious attempt to assess this new development. Perhaps Tiye had been wrong. If her defiance excited Akhenaten, might she be able to use it as well as her charm and tact to bring him to see reason?
Lifting the naked and chubby Ankhesenpaaten, Nefertiti followed her husband as he made his way toward the royal palace. She gave half her attention to the happy chattering of her two oldest daughters—Merytaten and Meketaten—and pondered this new discovery. Dared she use defiance as a tool? It had served the priests of Amun ill. But she was Akhenaten's queen, whom he called mistress of happiness, fair of face.
Suddenly she remembered the two colossal statues of himself that Akhenaten had recently shown her. Twice normal size, each was a nude, elongated monster with the feminine attributes Akhenaten insisted upon. A narrow, triangular skull supported the pharaonic headcloth and diadem. The eyes were mere slits, separated by a long, thin nose. The only fullness in the face came from the lips, which protruded with a roundness that was blatantly sensual.
Those statues represented confusion to her. Akhenaten had explained their symbolism, but Nefertiti remained unconvinced. As the son of the Aten, Akhenaten was the font of all regeneration; he was both male and female. Well, pharaoh could be anything he wished, she supposed. But to her, those composite stone creatures represented confusion more than anything else. Akhenaten was confusing, and his reactions to defiance unpredictable. Neither his father nor Tiye had made progress with him by argument. Could she?
Nefertiti felt a tug on her ear. Her youngest was playing with one of her heavy gold-and-carnelian earrings. Disentangling tiny fingers from the jewel, Nefertiti handed the child to her nurse and hurried to catch up with Akhenaten and her older daughters. A quick glance over her shoulder showed the glint of the sun off the electrum-tipped poles and gold-encrusted doors of the temple of Amun.
The dying sunlight caused the facade of the pylon gates to burst into flame and then grow dim. Turning away, Nefertiti shivered. Soon her husband would extinguish the brilliant flame of that place. And she was very much afraid that from pharaoh's sacrilege, misery would flow like the waters of Inundation.
Memphis, reign of Tutankhamun
The morning after Kysen looted Dilalu's refuse heap, Meren stood under the small loggia attached to his office on the top floor of his town house. The air was suffused with moisture, a sign of Inundation, for the Nile had swelled over its banks to flood the fields of Egypt and deposit its fertile gift of new soil. It was almost dawn, and he could see silver mist floating above the river. The vapor obscured the east bank except for the tallest palms, but its ephemeral cloud was no barrier to the croak of toads or the occasional bleating of goats.
Meren glanced at the bundle of papyri in his hand, but he was distracted by the sight of Bener striding into the granary court, her household records under her arm. She proceeded to direct his steward in the distribution of grain for the day's baking. A splash from the reflection pool deflected his thoughts. He could see Kysen's young son, Remi, toddling around the edge of the water. The child bent down and slapped the water again, causing a duck to squawk and flap its wings and Meren to smile. Isis scurried from the direction of the women's quarters and scooped the child into her arms with an ineffectual admonishment.
Meren's smile vanished. Isis was still avoiding him. Twice now he had lingered after an early-morning meal in the hope that she would remain behind with him rather than hurry away. He'd spoken kindly to her, had done so for days, without response. Isis, his most beautiful and willful daughter, had lost her pride and seemed filled with shame. Meren had never been blind to Isis's lack of humility, but this bent-necked, cringing remorse gave him pain.
The murmur of voices from his office reminded him of his duties. He hadn't yet had time to do more than receive the reports of the men he'd sent to various offices in search of records from Nefertiti's household. He went inside and collapsed on his chair on the master's dais, the focal point of the long room. Stacks of document cases and rolls of papyrus littered the elegant chamber. They obscured the delicate wall paintings and leaned against slender wooden columns.
All three of his scribes had been diverted from their search for old royal records to pursue two tasks he'd given them. Kaha, the best translator of the wedge-shaped characters used by the Asiatics, sat on the floor in the middle of several small piles of clay tablets, deciphering Dilalu's discarded correspondence. Dedi and Bekenamun, called Bek, strode about the office and dug through the piles of documents strewn over every surface. Most of the records had been borrowed from various government departments like the treasury, the chamberlain's office, and the army. Meren had instructed his scribes to trace the career of the military officer known as Yamen.
It seemed years ago, although it had only been weeks, since Kysen had brought word of the three men suspected of being the mastermind behind Nefertiti's murder—Dilalu, Yamen, and Zulaya. Kysen's account of the fear the names of these men inspired hadn't alarmed Meren until his son told him that even the Greek pirate Othrys gripped his sword and spoke of them in a whisper. Othrys was the kind of man who dined on his enemies' entrails and drank their blood.
"Lord."
Meren looked up to find Kaha standing before him with several clay tablets in his hands. "What have you found?"
"You said, lord, that this Dilalu is a dealer in weapons?"
"He also trades in exotic animals, horses."
Gripping a small rectangle of clay, Kaha pointed at a mound of tablets on the floor behind him. "Yes, lord. Those are bills of lading for such items. And the tablets next to them are records of stores of copper arrowheads, spear points, and so on." Kaha held up the rectangular tablet so that Meren could see the lines of angular script. "This, however, is not."
Meren noted the gleam in Kaha's eyes. The youngest son of a minor lord, he was known for his facility with languages.
"Out with it, boy."
"Lord, this is a letter from the chief of a town near Gaza, specifying the number of troops he requires for his payment to Dilalu. Not weapons. Troops. Nubian bowmen." Kaha thrust the tablet under his arm and proffered two more. "These had been damaged. Parts of them are missing, but from what I can decipher, each is to one of Dilalu's customers at the border between the empire and the Hittites. They give the cost for several services—providing weapons, providing infantry, providing chariotry."
Meren heard a crackling sound and looked down to find that he'd crumpled the documents in his hands. He forced his fingers to release and smooth the papyrus.
"So," he said quietly, "Dilalu isn't just a merchant of weapons."
Gathering the tablets in his hands, Kaha smiled proudly and shook his head. "He's a mercenary."
"A clandestine mercenary squatting in pharaoh's capital and sending forth chaos throughout the empire," Meren replied.
Kaha's smile faded.
"You know this matter is not to be spoken of," Meren said.
"Of course, lord."
"Destroy those tablets—no, wait." Meren smoothed his palms over the documents in his lap. "Put them in a records box, Kaha, and hide them."
"But where, lord?"
"Go to the foreign minister's office and put them in the midst of the correspondence from the reign of Amunhotep the Magnificent, may he live forever."
"But the Magnificent ruled for many dozens of years, lord. There is more correspondence there than there are water drops in the Nile."
Meren was shuffling through his papyri. "What? Yes, I know. Don't forget to mark the storehouse and the location of the box within it, or we'll spend years trying to recover it."
"Aye, lord. Lord?"
Meren stopped perusing documents and looked at the young scribe.
"I never would have thought of the foreign records storehouse. How does one acquire such, such—"
"Guile?" Meren asked.
Kaha cleared his throat. "Artfulness," he said with certainty.
"I suppose it's a gift from the gods," Meren said as he ran his finger down a line of hieroglyphs. "That and spending so much time at court."
"Yes, lord." Kaha went back to his tablets with a contemplative expression.
Before Meren could begin to ponder the implications of the scribe's discovery, there was a knock at the door.
"Enter," he called.
When the door swung open to reveal the rounded form of his oldest daughter, Meren dropped his papyri to the floor and went to greet her.
"Tefnut, my rotund little gazelle." He took both her hands and kissed her cheek, leaning over his daughter's large belly. "Are you certain there are still three months before the birth?"
Her face flushed with the exertion of climbing stairs, Tefnut grinned at him and responded breathlessly, "I'm certain. Father, I've something to discuss with you."
"Come sit down."
He led Tefnut to his chair and found a stool for her feet, which were swollen. Tefnut groaned and pulled at the skirt of her loose gown. Kaha brought a tray with a water jar and cups. While Meren poured, Tefnut regained her breath.
"I've missed you, daughter."
"In this large household?" Tefnut swept her arm around, indicating the sprawl of the family town house, the gardens and service buildings, the barracks of the charioteers. "You're too busy to miss me, Father."
Meren handed her a cup. "When you are gone, part of my heart is missing."
Over the rim of the cup, Tefnut's eyes widened, and she swallowed hard. Her surprise was the measure of his guilt. Meren had only recently come to the understanding of how inattentive he'd been toward his daughters. Heedless of their need for his approval, he had given them over to the care of nurses and then his sister after his wife died. In the years that passed, he'd given them brief encouragement, kissed them when they were hurt or especially clever, and sent them on their way. His reward had been to see hopelessness in their eyes. Now he was trying to amend his neglect.
Tefnut seemed speechless, so he went on. "You are my eldest, the first to capture my heart with your toothless little smile."
"Toothless!"
"All babes are born toothless."
"Oh." Tefnut's eyes glittered with unshed tears.
"Daughter, I know you never understood why I adopted Kysen. You resent him, and it's my fault."
Shifting in her chair, Tefnut shook her head. "I don't resent him anymore, Father." She placed a hand on her belly and smiled. "Having this child within me has given me a little wisdom, I think. All parents need a son to carry on for them. Daughters go out of the house, to begin families of their own, to become mistress of a new house. Sons remain behind."
"Do you know how hard it was to see you go from my house to one of your own?" Meren grabbed the water jar and filled another cup.
"I'm sorry, Father."
Sighing, Meren picked up the cup. "It's the way of the world. Where is that big hippo of a husband of yours anyway?"
"Sunero has gone to the docks to buy cedar and spices for us to take home. Which brings me to what I wanted to discuss. I want to take Isis with me when I leave."
"You're leaving already? You just arrived."
"No, I'm not going yet, but when I do, Isis should come as well." Tefnut leaned forward and put her hand on his arm. "I've spoken to Kysen and Bener, and they agree. Isis needs time to grow in wisdom and time to forget her disgrace. She can't do that here with you."
"But I have forgiven her!"
"Which only increases her shame, Father."
Meren threw up his hands. "I don't understand her. She goes from extreme to extreme, from being swollen with pride to prostrate with contrition."
"True," Tefnut said, "but once she is away from the scene of her disgrace, I think she'll begin to sail a more steady course. She just needs calm waters in which to guide her skiff, Father."
Giving his daughter a wry smile, Meren said, "Perhaps you're right. And at least she'll be away from all her admirers. I've had offers of marriage from three men of my acquaintance since I returned to Memphis. But I can't allow Isis to choose a husband until I'm sure she won't drive her mate to insanity."
Tefnut laughed and clutched her belly. "Ooo! I think I woke the babe."
Forgetting about Dilalu and the army officer Yamen, Meren lost himself in wonder as Tefnut guided his hand to feel the kick of his second grandchild. Only two. He was thirty-four and had only two grandchildren. Men his age usually had many more. But Tefnut had been slow in conceiving, and Kysen was divorced from his wife. Bener had so far refused to marry the candidates Meren had suggested, and Isis wasn't ready. Meren was discussing likely husbands for his middle daughter with Tefnut when the summons came from the palace. The king commanded the presence of the Eyes and Ears of Pharaoh.
The king was touring the royal workshops near the palace when Meren responded to his summons. As he left his town house, the scribe Dedi had thrust a thick set of documents in his hands and requested that he read them. Meren held them now as he strode down the avenue between long lines of workshops. The air was filled with the din of hammering and the shouts of workmen. He walked around a stack of cedar logs that had just been delivered from Byblos. The long, straight wood was valued in Egypt almost as much as gold. It was used in rich furniture and in the great warships and royal barges that made Egypt the maritime power that she was.