Authors: Carol Thurston
Mena shouted, “Grab hold,” and touched his whip to his team’s backs, with me cheering him on. Like the others, his pair are palace-bred, for both strength and speed, so we had no trouble catching up. Pharaoh turned to see us gaining on them and motioned his boyhood friend to spread out, a ploy to force us into a wider path should we attempt to pass them, at a cost of both distance and time. Instead, Mena looped the reins tighter around his fists and waited his chance, then charged straight through the narrow space between the two royal chariots. By the time they realized what was happening,
we had pulled ahead, giving them a taste of
our
dust. But almost at once Mena slowed his team to let Tutankhamen regain the lead, making it appear that his animals were blown.
Later, when we slowed to a walk to pass through a narrow defile between some sandy hills, Ay raised a fist to salute Mena’s skill. We could hear each other then without yelling, and I remarked on the two Nubians—Senmut and Pharaoh’s boyhood friend. “Hiknefer plays the palace pet while his brother stands outside, an observer with a passion for healing. So they differ in more than their mothers.”
“Tutankhamen’s friend came to manhood in the palace, hostage to his father’s allegiance to the old Pharaoh,” Mena reminded me, “while Senmut was a youth of some fifteen years when he arrived in Waset. And he came for one purpose only.”
“The House of Life?” I guessed.
He nodded. “It is the custom among his mother’s people to cut the clitoris and inner labia of their girls. Afterward they rub the outer lips raw with a stone and skewer them with thorns until they grow together. It not only makes a woman difficult to penetrate, but causes many of their babes to lose their breath before they can come forth, oftentimes taking their mothers as well.”
“His mother died in childbirth?”
“No, his little sister, after they cut her. The one he loved above all others. He could do nothing to stop it. Or the bleeding.”
“No wonder.” I sighed, recalling his bitter words about Bekenkhons.
Our destination lay at the edge of the vast open expanse of bleached sand, where migrating birds come in low to seek respite in the trees and gardens just beyond. Small rodents and snakes also hide from the sun among the hillocks of rock and clumps of brush. And while falcons prefer ducks and ptarmigan—and to catch their prey in flight—they will go after small animals on the ground in order to feed on their
hearts, which they tear into while still pulsing. Endowed with sharp hearing and eyes that see better and farther than any other living thing, the falcon is capable of stunning an animal as big as a jackal. Especially the female, who is half again larger than the male and the stronger of the pair.
Tutankhamen pulled his team to a stop, jumped from his chariot, and stood tapping the handle of his whip against his thigh, impatient for the rest of us to arrive. He wore a short kilt and striped nemset bearing a hawk fashioned of thin gold leaf across the top, its beak pointing toward his face and wings spread from ear to ear. Otherwise, Pharaoh bore no ceremonial trappings except a bracelet with the iron eye of Horns and a sheathed dagger strapped around his hips. He handed the reins to a guard and strode to where the birds and trainers were just coming to a stop.
Mena’s horses are trained to stand when he ties their reins to the rail of his chariot, so we left them and went to uncage our own hawks. Mine was bred in captivity and taken from the nest as a fledgling, but the best hunters are captured in the wild after they have learned to fly and hunt—betrayed into captivity by a pigeon worth no more than a pair of papyrus-reed sandals. As a result they display more spirit, even though it takes longer to overcome the birds’ natural fear of man. In the end, though, the falcon learns to trust the man who trains her, so it is rare for one to return to the wild. Mena slipped his hand into the thick horsehide sleeve and took the hooded bird from his falconer and calmed her with the sound of his voice.
“See how she ripples her feathers in anticipation of the kill? She smells it coming—that one exhilarating moment when she flies in search of prey. It is what she lives for, even if she must spend the rest of her life in the darkness of the hood, waiting, kept hungry and fed only when she returns to me with the weighted lure.”
“It is true, then,” I asked, since he gave me the opportunity, “that men take pleasure in subjugating the female falcon
to their will because they see in her a wild, abandoned woman?”
“Perhaps,” he agreed, as we carried our birds to where the others gathered, “but the most fascinating woman of all is both wild and shy. And the truth, my abstinent friend, is that your balls will shrivel from disuse unless you start discovering such things for yourself.”
By then we were too close to the others to chance a response in kind, so I held my tongue for the time when I could return the jibe. Merankh, the king’s big hunting hound, stood at his side, his long tail moving in a lazy swing whenever Tutankhamen fondled his drooping ears. He wore no leash, having been trained to his master’s voice. “I like to come here,” Pharaoh said to a man I did not recognize, “because to hunt where the game is neither plentiful nor what she prizes most is a challenge for my Horus of the Sky. At this time of year, of course, the migrating birds descend on our fields.” He glanced at me with a quickening smile, reminding me that Aset was of his blood. “Even so, I will give you both a count of ten before I release my Horus of the Sky.”
“As will I,” Hiknefer agreed.
Mena started to protest, but Tutankhamen raised his hand. “No, it is only
maat.
Our birds know the terrain while yours do not.” With his free hand he fingered the leather thongs attached to his bird’s legs, causing the golden hawk to dance in anticipation. “Shall we wager that the one whose bird captures live prey first forfeits a jar of the finest wine to the others?”
So did he mask his acquired arrogance with innate generosity, and for the first time I saw the god in the man. I smiled, daring to believe that I could give him something as rare to him as his gifts were to me—the camaraderie of friendship.
“And the first to return her prey to her handler?” I inquired, suggesting a possible imperfection in his hawk’s performance. “Shall he forfeit the same?”
He laughed. “Agreed.” He waited for Mena and Hiknefer to do likewise, then Mena and I lined up to match the time of our release, while Tutankhamen and Hiknefer moved some distance off to do the same. The instant the hoods came off our birds, Tutankhamen started his count, to a chorus of ecstatic screeching and flapping wings.
A moment later he pulled the hood free and we all stood in awe, watching his hawk climb into the blue sky. For what appears to be reckless abandon to man is perfect control on the part of a hawk, who by nature is equipped to rise higher and higher on the eddying breezes and shifting winds.
It was almost eerily silent, except for the distant creaking of leather harness from our horses, as one by one our birds scribed loops in the air, turning upside down at the top of each one in a display of style and grace unmatched by any other beast. Or by man, with his feet bound to the earth even when he walks the path to eternity. Was that only because the priests lack the imagination to let him soar, I wondered, even in the company of Shu, god of the air, and Nut, goddess of the sky—and so made Amen a jealous God, resentful of his own brothers?
Mena’s Beautiful Lady was first to swoop out of a wide loop, giving chase to a small heron, a bird that is lighterboned and therefore capable of rising in smaller rings. A worthy opponent because the falcon has to climb in wider circles and at a higher speed, to get above the other bird in order to strike her target.
Pharaoh stood separate from the rest of us, an anxious look on his face, nor did he breathe easy until Mena’s Lady overflew her quarry and circled up with her talons empty. By then Tutankhamen’s Horus of the Sky had soared so high she was only a dark spot against the brilliant sky. For a time she glided, changing direction as she caught one air current and then another. Then, suddenly, she folded her wings and stooped, as if bowing to the Lord of the Two Lands, and came plummeting toward earth in a spectacular show of speed and power.
I could hear the wind ruffle her feathers, until she changed the angle of her dive and appeared to be heading straight toward us, gaining momentum as she came. When I saw her prepare to strike her quarry, I thought it a trick of the sun on her golden feathers. But in the next instant I heard a loud crack, from somewhere close by, and spun around to see the young Pharaoh stagger where he stood. His eyelids fluttered, then his eyes turned up into his head and he crumpled like a rag doll.
Mena and I started for him at the same time, leaving the others paralyzed with shock. Or disbelief. Except Hiknefer, who let out a howl of anguish and dropped to his knees beside his friend.
“Do not touch him!” Mena yelled. I ripped off my kilt and wadded it into a ball, then dropped to my knees and pressed the cloth to Pharaoh’s bleeding cheek while Mena put his fingers to the hollow at the base of his throat.
“Shallow. And too fast.” He looked around, searching for Ay, who stood rooted to the spot where we left him. “Bring his chariot,” Mena yelled. “We must get him back to the palace.” The old man turned and ran across the sand while Merankh licked his master’s face in an attempt to wake him. Mena had to push him aside in order to remove the cloth headdress, revealing a swelling the size of a goose egg.
“Perhaps the blow only knocked him unconscious for a few minutes,” he mumbled. But neither of us could forget the sound of the falcon’s hind talon—like a rock flung at a hollow gourd—as it struck the young king’s skull. “Lift his shoulders while I support his head. Hiknefer can take his legs.” With tears running down his brown cheeks, the Nubian prince could only nod. “Under the knees and thighs,” Mena added, “to support the lower part of his body.”
Ay pulled up in a cloud of dust, turned Tutankhamen’s team, then backed them toward us. “One of us must hold him,” I told Mena. “Thank the gods his chariot is larger than most or it would not hold two men standing, let alone a third on his back. Someone must hold him, and no one at the
palace will take orders from me. You go ahead of us, to have a litter ready.”
I squeezed past him, braced one foot against the side of the chariot, and took Tutankhamen’s head and shoulders against my chest. Merankh tried to climb in as well, but Mena pushed him away, then looped a piece of rope across the open bed, rail to rail, for me to hold to.
“Take the racecourse back. It will not jostle him so much,” he told Ay. “And don’t waste any time.” Then he was gone, running toward his horses.
To me it seemed a journey without end. I tried to keep Pharaoh still by taking the bumps and jolts with my own body. And all the while I looked for any movement he might make himself, whether an arm or leg or even the flutter of an eyelid. But my thoughts returned to the place where Tutankhamen loosed the hood of his golden Horus of the Sky. My eyes followed her again as she rose higher and higher, then came plummeting toward earth. I knew then that the truth lay in the instant I looked away. I tried closing my eyes, to see if my ears remembered what my eyes could not—and heard the silence of the desert broken by the creak of harness, the whisper of feathers ruffled by the wind, and a soft, barely audible whistle. Not high and sharp but low, like the purr of a cat. The sort of signal a falconer might use so as not to startle his bird while in the act of swallowing, yet sufficient to train her to associate it with feeding. Or was it only a trick of the wind, blowing through the crevasse of an outcropping of rock?
When I looked at the young king’s face again I found his eyes wide-open. “Stay as you are,” I warned, putting my lips to his ear to make sure he heard me. “You were knocked from your moorings for a few minutes is all. We take you back to the palace.”
“In … good hands. Gift from … gods.” The words came one or two at a time, then his lips went slack, and his eyelids fell. His face took on a serenity I had not seen before, and for the first time in my twenty-nine years I found a man
beautiful. A few minutes later he spoke again, without opening his eyes. “Legs … cold.”
A shiver ran down my spine though the sun burned hot on my back. “Do not try to move,” I warned. “Mena waits at the palace, and he knows more about the injuries men suffer in battle than any other physician in the Two Lands.”
“I… battle? Anubis?”
“With your Horus of the Sky,” I replied, though his eyes had closed again.
At the barracks Mena waited with six palace guards and an oxhide litter. Ay tossed the reins to one of the guards and hurried off, probably to summon the palace physicians. When the guards started away with him, Mena followed, with me close behind.
“He wakes from time to time,” I told him, keeping my voice low, “but moves only his eyes and mouth, and can say only a word or two at a time—to complain of cold in his legs.” Mena gave me a sharp look, then started into the antechamber of the royal apartment. “I will wait out here, in case you need me.”
“No, I need you now. No one will deny you so long as Tutankhamen lives.”
Word of the accident spread like fire before the wind, and we barely had time to lay him on his couch before we were shoved aside by Djehouty, Chief of Physicians in the palace, and Kemsit, Physician to Pharaoh. Behind them came Ay and Nakhtmin, Tutankhamen’s Fan Bearer and Chief Royal Scribe, trailed by a gaggle of lesser priest-physicians.
The room was quickly shuttered and incense lit in the wall shrines, while they huddled to argue among themselves. Before they could decide how to treat him, Tutankhamen’s entire body began to shake, sending the chanting priests scurrying lest the evil spirits take possession of them as well. No one considered that he might be cold, or what that could mean if he was. In the end it was the Queen who ordered a servant to bring blankets to cover her husband, then sat at his side holding one of his cold hands in hers. Merankh padded
from one side of the couch to the other, pleading in vain for his master’s touch, until Ankhesenamen finally ordered him to sit by her feet, where he whined and nosed their clasped hands.