Many food stores have been ruined by the sand. Wells that were uncovered have been spoiled. The supply of sweet water is unreliable. There have been many deaths in the panic.' He hesitated. The harder part of the report was obviously yet to come.
'And what else?'
'There is disorder.'
'Meaning?'
'Authority has collapsed. My troops are few, and unable to control the situation. The temple stores have been ransacked, all the supplies of grain, wine, fruit - all dispersed among the mob. They have even butchered sacrificial animals in the temple precincts for food. The people have become barbarians overnight. There has been fighting on the streets between different nationalities for possession of food and shelter. The ambassador of Mittani and his family and followers were assassinated in the confusion. We suspect Hittite forces. We could not protect them. We accommodated as many of the important families and leaders as we could within the Great Palace, and we have set up temporary shelters in the Small Aten Temple.'
'Why have you failed to maintain control over the city in our name?'
His face darkened. 'Horemheb elected to take command, over my own authority and that of the Medjay. He has deployed his soldiers around the city and commanded the support of reserves. They arrive in the next day or two. He has won military control of the area, until such time as...' He paused again, having reached the moment of the unspeakable.
'Speak.'
'Until you return to meet with him.'
Her face remained impassive, but this was bad news.
'Has he sent you here? As his errand boy?'
Mahu glared at her, pride triumphing over respect. 'I am not now, nor have I ever been, other than a loyal servant. I am no errand boy. I came to warn you of his intention.'
She allowed a slight relaxation of her features. 'Your loyalty is greater than gold to us.'
It was strange to see the power of a few words of praise upon such a man. Mahu's fierceness melted away.
She spoke quickly now, alive to the imperatives of the new situation. 'I shall return. But to command, not to negotiate with Horemheb's army.'
This statement did not quite have the expected or desired effect on Mahu. There was something he was not revealing. An argument? Bad news? An assassin's knife, even? The Queen glanced quickly at me, having observed this too. I decided to move closer.
Mahu growled at me. 'Stay away from me.'
Nefertiti nodded imperceptibly, and I stepped back again.
'You must speak truthfully,' she said. 'Hide nothing. Otherwise I return to the city flawed in my knowledge and understanding.'
I glanced up to where I'd last seen Khety, but I could not spot him up there in the darkness. Surely he was listening though.
Mahu made up his mind and spoke with a hesitation I had not thought he was capable of. 'There is . . . another thing.' He paused, dramatically.
'Do not expect me to interpret silence. Speak.'
Then out of the silence and the darkness came a hissing sound, and a dull thud. Nefertiti and I stared out into the unknown. Mahu made no move. His expression changed to puzzlement, as if he could not quite remember the beginning of his thought. Then a dribble of blood appeared at the side of his mouth. He reached up and touched it slowly, surprised at the redness on his fingertip. Then he shook his head, and slowly fell forward like a beast with too great a burden, onto his face.
We crouched down and ran over to his body. An arrow had split his spine. It was lodged deep between his shoulder blades. I looked at it carefully; it bore a familiar hieroglyph: the cobra. My mind raced back to the memory of the charred arrow on the burning boat. The warning sign sent to me before I'd even arrived. And here it was again. Identical.
I turned him on his side as carefully as possible. He was still breathing, in shallow gasps, as if he were now in the wrong element, as if air were water. Some recognition of the irony that mine should be the last face he would look upon in this life dawned on him.
'Damn you.' He forced out each word through his bloody teeth from a gurgling throat. 'You were right.'
The Queen looked at me. I shook my head. Mahu coughed and spat, and a sudden shower of red drops speckled my clothes. This made him laugh, and more blood welled out of him, thicker, darker now. He noticed.
'Dying,' he said, almost with a shrug, as if mortality were nothing. The dog licked his face. I pushed it away.
'Right about what?' I said.
I sensed someone standing above us. It was Akhenaten, looking like an old man awakened from a deep sleep. He was holding a lamp, and in his white robes he stood out like an easy target for another arrow. I dragged him down out of the range of danger. He shouted with outrage. I held my hand over his mouth. The three of us huddled together around Mahu, whose eyes took in the sorry sight of his puzzled and shambolic Lord. Did I see disappointment pass across his eyes before death's hands slowed then stilled them and turned their topaz glitter to something more like misted bronze?
I grabbed Akhenaten by the arm and we all scurried, crouching like dogs, back to the mouth of the tomb chamber. He stumbled, try-ing to look back at Mahu's corpse, the dog sitting faithful and confused by its side, and I had to drag the King of the Two Lands behind me in the dust. Khety appeared as if from nowhere to help me.
We hid inside the chamber, our breath making brief clouds in the now chilly desert air. The lamps had burned down low, lending a flickering, feeble light to the painted figures and the forest of white columns. The girls had woken up and were huddling around their mother, who warned them in a whisper that they must be completely silent. We waited, listening intently. I knew these might be the last moments of our lives. We had trapped ourselves; there was no way out. Anyone could enter the chamber and slaughter us all like beasts in this dying light. As if to presage this, I heard Mahu's dog whine sharply, then fall silent.
'Please do not hide on my account.'
The words, spoken very quietly, seemed to come from nowhere. Then a long shadow slanted across the moon-silvered stones of the entrance, and moved along the wall into the chamber. The shadow was followed by a man's figure, slim and elegant. He had with him a lamp, which illuminated a bony face made gaunter by the flickering shadows.
Ay was accompanied by guards who stood back at the entrance. Their bows glinted in the moonlight. I noticed that their arrows were tipped with what looked like silver. I looked across at Nefertiti. She looked as if she had finally come face to face with her worst fear.
Ay nodded to the bowmen, who checked us for weapons, taking my dagger. I knew two of them. One had been on the hunting party; the other was the young architect from the boat, the one who was designing the temple latrines. So I had been watched from the start. He looked me in the eye, as if to say: we meet again. Then Ay ordered them to go outside, and he slowly approached us. The Queen and I split up, moving in different directions among the forest of white columns.
'How strange and yet how right that you came to my own tomb for sanctuary,' Ay said. 'I'm sorry to see you all accommodated in such in-adequate surroundings. But perhaps there is a sense in which this incongruous setting amuses you, and so compensates for the dis-comfort.' He was toying with us. He smiled like a necropolis cat. 'We are all mortals. Except for those of us who have become gods. In their own opinions, at least. See, here it is, written in stone.' He read off a column of hieroglyphs: ' "An adoration of the Aten who lives for ever and ever, the Living and the Great Aten, Lord of all that Aten encircles, Lord of Heaven, Lord of Earth. Lord of the House of the Aten in Akhetaten, of the King of the South and the North, living on Truth, Lord of the Two Lands, the Son of the Sun, Lord of Diadems, Akhenaten, great in his duration, and of the Great Wife
Nefer-Neferuaten-Nefertiti, who has life, health and youth for ever and ever." And so on and so on. Oh, here's my part: "the Bearer of the Fan on the Right Hand of the King, Overseer of all the Horses of his Majesty, he who gives satisfaction in the whole land, the favourite of the good god, God's Father, Doer of Right, Ay who says: Your rising is beautiful on the horizon of heaven, O living Aten, who gives life; when you rise on the eastern horizon you fill every land with beauty.' " ' He paused for a moment, relishing the irony of it all. 'Well, hardly, as it turns out
...
'
Then another voice spoke out from the shadows, shaky and strange: ' "For you are splendid, great, radiant, uplifted above every land . . . You are the Sun, distant but on the Earth, and when you set on the western horizon the Earth is in darkness, and in the likeness of Death..."' Akhenaten's voice grew in strength as he declaimed the lines, his thin arms raised up, mirroring his own carved image on the stone wall beside him, towards a sun that was not there. But then he stopped suddenly, as if he no longer wished to say the words that followed.
Ay looked at this spectre of failed power without expression. 'Yes, the likeness of Death,' he said. 'I commissioned this tomb at some con-siderable expense, but I have never had the time to visit it and inspect the progress of the work. They are quite expensive now, these Houses of Death, yet there is no time while we are alive to attend to the things that matter. We rush, we make mistakes, we hurry to correct them, we do not think enough about the past and the future.'
He paused. I had no idea where he was going with this. Nefertiti remained oddly silent.
'Would you like to hear a story about the past or the future?'
'Let us consider the future.' Nefertiti spoke at last from the dark-ness at the far end of the chamber.
Ay moved towards her, but she moved away again. I could not tell shadow from substance.
'Certainly,' he said. 'I will tell you what I see. I see a time of calamity. I see this world crumbling, collapsing. I see Priests attacking the Aten temples, I see the Treasury empty, I see hatred in the eyes of the people, I see our enemies conquering our great cities and destroying our gods. I see our great green and gold world drying up, the Great River denying its bounty, the land parched and the crops wilted, and the locusts consuming all in their path. I see our granaries full of dust. I see the wind of time sweeping in from the Red Land, bringing fire and destruction, razing our cities, turning all that we have made to ash. I see children instructing their parents in acts of barbarity and horror, and I see barbarians celebrating in our temples. I see the statues of the gods replaced by chattering monkeys. I see the river flowing backwards and Ra turning cold. I see dead children in unnamed graves.'
'You should not eat dinner so late,' Nefertiti responded, carefully. 'It disturbs the imagination.'
He fastidiously ignored her. 'I see things as they are, and as they will be. Unless we act decisively now. We must return to things as they were. We must return to the ways of the traditions. We must fold up this city and lock its god, this Aten, in a box, and bury it deep in the desert as if it had never been. Then we must be practical. We need troops and grain. We must negotiate agreements and compensations with the new army, and with the Amun Priesthood. We must restore to the Theban Priesthood some portion of control over their wealth and resources, and allow them back into their temples. At the same time we must show the world we, as a family and a country, are stronger than ever, and that the gods support us. And to do this we must have a figure of power who can say to the people and the gods: "I am yester-day and tomorrow; I see all time; my name is one who passes on the paths of the gods. I am Lord of Eternity." '
'There is no such person.'
'I think there is,' he said, quickly. 'I think it is time to reveal her.'
He let that hang in the air. An offer. A possibility. But who was Ay, for all his authority, to make such a proposal? Was he a king-maker, a god-creator, a director of what shall and shall not be?
Then Akhenaten spoke with a madman's futile conviction. 'This is treason, and I will have you arrested and executed like a common
thief.'
Ay laughed in his face - the first time I had heard him make such a human sound. 'And who will hear this command, and who will obey it? No-one. You are a bankrupt, broken man. Failure and dissolution hang over you. Your power is departed. You will be lucky to be allowed to continue to live.' His voice was calm and ruthlessly severe.
Akhenaten moved quickly to the entrance, but was barred by two guards. 'Let me pass!' he ordered. 'I am Akhenaten!' They remained still and silent. His powerlessness was terrible to behold. He beat his fists against them like a child in a tantrum. His blows were light and they simply ignored him.
He turned to Ay, incandescent with rage now. 'The King will not be denied! You have stolen my kingdom. You have betrayed my trust. I curse you, and I and the god will be revenged upon you.'