The King's Man (34 page)

“It’s said that the steps are haunted,” Kha told him. “At least, I assume that there are steps inside, connecting this doorway with another blocked aperture below. His Majesty forbade me to touch any of it. The story is that a Prince of Weset often used that stair to come up here and pray or think, and sitting in the shade of that wind catcher he was attacked and grievously wounded. Later he died in battle. His Majesty insists that the Prince was the Osiris-one Seqenenra, he who began our revolt against the vile Setiu, and at that time the palace was a dangerous ruin. Whatever the truth is, we know that the Tao family lived there.” He pointed to where a long, low building sprawled close by. “King Ahmose, Seqenenra’s son, had the wall between the two removed, and it was he who accomplished the first major restoration here. But he would not unblock the stair up which his father’s betrayer may have crept, and neither must we.” He laughed. “I was a very lazy student of history and was beaten many times because of it. All I cared about was designing in brick, wood, and stone. I have expanded the Taos’ old estate. It will house the women, except for Queen Mutemwia, of course, and later His Majesty’s Consort. Look to the south. The ministers are very pleased with their new offices …”

He went on describing the scene directly below, but Huy, after passing a swift gaze over the vast royal acres with their protecting wall surrounding him, looked beyond them. The river was a thin brown ribbon waiting for the Inundation, still over a month away. On the west bank the scattered mortuary temples and tombs of the dead could hardly be distinguished through a haze of beige dust hanging suspended over a waste of barren, churned sand. Beyond them a serried range of cliffs shivered in the heat. Here on the east bank, outside the green and watered confines of the palace grounds, lay the city of Weset, spreading out of Huy’s sight to north and south, a bewildering accumulation of narrow dirt streets, jumbled houses, shrines, markets, all wrapped in the same thin pall of summer motes, yet murmurous with brisk life. It seemed to Huy, as the city’s muted clamour reached him, that the pulse of Weset’s heart beat more rapidly than Mennofer’s dignified pace.
Here the past exists as a foundation to be built on
, he thought suddenly,
not sunk into with an excess of awe
.

“I have already begun drafting the plans for the King’s new palace over on the west bank,” Kha was saying, and Huy’s attention returned to him with a jolt. “It will be a long time before the laying of the cord, and perhaps by then His Majesty will have changed his mind. Senwosret Is Observing the Primeval Hill is a beautiful and harmonious place.”

Once back at the entrance to Huy’s apartment, Kha invited him to dine and then took his leave, and Huy answered the salute of the familiar soldiers to either side of his door and went in. Quiet enveloped him. His tables and chairs sat peacefully on the spotless floor, where the central motif, a cluster of blue water lilies, was now revealed. The far door leading to the garden was closed. The air was cool and smelled faintly of lotus oil. Walking towards one of the doors on his far right, he glanced inside. His couch had already been dressed in clean white linen. One of his lamps, together with a jug of water and a cup, sat on the small table beside it. His tiring chests were lined up neatly against one wall, and against the other his shrine to Khenti-kheti, totem of the Delta town of Hut-herib near where he had been raised, stood open, a long-handled censer lying beside it.

As he hesitated on the threshold, there was the brisk slap of sandals on tiles behind him and he turned to see both Tetiankh and Kenofer approaching, accompanied by Seneb. Both body servants looked tired, but the physician’s newly shaved skull gleamed and the black kohl around his eyes had obviously been freshly applied. “I have your midday dose of opium, Great Seer,” he said, “and by the Queen’s order I am to give you a complete examination. I have not done so since you left Mennofer.”

Huy nodded curtly, reached for the drug, and drank quickly, welcoming its familiar bitterness.

“Amunmose has gone to the kitchens to taste your noon meal, Master,” Tetiankh told him. “It will be here directly. You might wish to eat it while it’s hot.” He cast a disapproving glare at Seneb. “Scribe Paneb waits for your attention with letters.”

For answer, Huy stepped towards the couch. “Hurry up and get this over with, physician. The food can wait. I’m not hungry. Kenofer, tell Paneb to bring the correspondence as soon as Seneb leaves. No, not you, my dear Tetiankh,” he added as the man turned away. “Your service was at an end when I left Mennofer. You’ve trained Kenofer well, and now it’s time to take the gold I’ve given to you and go home to your family. We’ve already said our goodbyes.” His smile took the sting out of his words.

Tetiankh hesitated, then bowed. Kenofer had already disappeared. “Caring for you has been the habit, and the pleasure, of my life, Master, and I am reluctant to relinquish my duties. But you are right. I trust that I leave you in capable hands. Farewell.”

Huy returned his bow with an inward pang of regret. Seneb had begun to surreptitiously tap one hennaed foot. Huy swung back to his couch and began to remove his sweat-stained kilt.

Later, bathed and clad in clean linen, he sat in his imposing new reception room with Paneb before him and his Chief Herald Ba-en-Ra a polite distance away, waiting for instructions. Paneb’s palette lay on the ivory-inlaid table beside him together with a box full of unsealed scrolls. “I have taken the liberty of saving you time by reading these, Master. Naturally, their contents remain with me in the strictest confidence. Shall I begin?”

Nasha had written that she had managed to secure a small suite of rooms for herself and her servants in a house not far from the palace. “Anybody who is anybody is rushing to move to Weset, and lodgings are scarce,” she said. “Who knows—I might even find myself an agreeable husband in this arid, rather horrible city. Please use your authority, O mighty and powerful Seer, and get me an apartment inside the royal compound. I am impatient to see you.”

“Make a note of her request,” Huy said. “Next?”

Thothhotep’s letter was warm and full of news. “I see a great deal of Architect Hori,” she told Huy. “Since Anhur’s death I have been at a loss for something to do, and Hori often employs me as an assistant scribe. The work is easy and the progress being made on the erection of a new temple for Nekhbet very interesting. Are you well settled into the palace yet?”
She doesn’t urge me to visit her
, Huy thought as Paneb set her scroll aside and picked up another one.
That’s good. She is becoming less lonely
.

“Prince Amunnefer wishes to show you your poppy fields as soon as possible,” Paneb said. “The present crop was sown during the last month of Akhet and this year’s opium has just been extracted. A yield of superior quality, he says. He invites you to a welcome party in his house tomorrow.”

“Send Herald Ba-en-Ra. Tell the Prince that I’m most eager to greet him once again and to see the fields for myself at last. If Their Majesties have no need of me, I shall meet him tomorrow morning. Use your own words, Paneb. No dictation is necessary.”
Amunnefer
, Huy mused.
A good, kind man once married to a vain and selfish woman. Anuket. I can speak your name to myself without a single tremor, and even the boyhood memories of my passion for you have no sting anymore. How was your heart weighed in the Judgment Hall?
I wonder.
Did Ma’at’s scales balance after all?
“Anything else, Paneb?”

“Your brother has sent you a sack of pistachio nuts harvested from Ra’s temple gardens, with a brief letter wishing you well.”

“Good. Now prepare your palette. As Scribe of Recruits, I’m summoning all army and navy commanders to Weset to discuss the changes in troop strength and deployment this move south has demanded. The policing of our northern borders with the Great Green and east with the tribes of Rethennu and beyond must increase. Don’t include Prince Yuya, though. As Master of the King’s Horses, he holds no rank outside the royal household.”
Nevertheless, I must deliberately do my best to cultivate the man’s acquaintance
, Huy’s thoughts ran on as Paneb gathered up the scrolls and bowed himself away.
His foreign blood notwithstanding, he is an Egyptian aristocrat and father of the future Queen, and Tiye is close to her brother Ay. I need their confidence
.

That night, in spite of his regular dose of poppy, Huy could not sleep. It was his first night in a strange place. The shadows on the walls of his bedchamber moved in unfamiliar ways as the flame within his night light guttered. He was aware of the hundreds of rooms and mazes of passages cocooning him in walls through which no sound seemed to penetrate. He was acutely conscious of his position between the young King on one side of his apartment and Mutemwia on the other. He did not know where Tiye was—probably asleep in the Tao’s refurbished estate, safely installed with her mother and her new servants. Huy lay on his back gazing up at his starry blue and white ceiling. He poured himself water from the jug Kenofer had set ready for him, and considered waking the young man for a game of sennet, but immediately rejected the idea. He was too restless for board games. In the end he got up, put on the kilt he had worn all afternoon, and let himself barefooted out into his garden.

Softly greeting the guard on the door, he stepped onto the dry grass and walked away from the deep shadow of the palace wall. The moon was three-quarters full, casting a dim, pallid light that barely reflected in Huy’s little pool, and the darkness under the trees was thick. Nevertheless, the sky was a dense mat of stars, clearer and sharper than anything similar seen in the Delta, where the humid air created a mist that veiled the heavens. The air here was dry and almost scentless, with a barely perceptible whiff of the desert that stretched immeasurably far on either side of the river beyond the thin and somehow precarious spread of both city and cultivated fields.
It embraces the tombs on the west bank
, Huy thought.
It is as arid and lifeless as the desiccated bodies lying in their coffins. I can sense its voice beneath the muted rumble of the city, timbreless, eternally self-sufficient, unchanging, as cities rise and wane and men are born, flourish, and are eventually carried into the House of the Dead
.

A puff of wind found him, lifting his tangled mane of hair and pressing the kilt briefly against his thighs. He had wandered to the wall dividing his garden from that of the King and was about to turn back when he heard a low laugh followed by a string of quiet words, and paused. He recognized the voice. It was answered at length by another—deeper, more masculine. Huy could not make out what was being said, but he stood still and began to smile.
The vision you gave me spoke true, Anubis
, he said silently to the jackal god who had become his guide and often his taskmaster.
Amunhotep and Tiye are talking together quietly, intimately, under the cover of a hot summer night, and I am happy. Everything is going to be all right
.

PART TWO

10

CHIEF STEWARD USERHET
bowed profoundly as Huy, with Paneb behind him, walked into the Queen’s apartments and settled into one of Her Majesty’s gilded chairs. Paneb lowered himself to the floor at Huy’s knee and began to prepare his palette, the small sound of the burnisher against his papyrus faint but discernible in the quiet air. The room was empty but for Userhet, who glided past them to take up his station just out of earshot against one of the walls. Slowly Huy inhaled the faint, spicy aroma of the perfume Tiye still wore, a distinctive blend of cardamom and myrrh that enveloped her and remained hanging, an invisible cloud, wherever she had been. The room was empty and still but for an occasional gust of the hot night wind out of the north, coursing through the low, unshuttered window. It was the middle of Mesore.

Throughout the country, the last of the harvest was being hurriedly reaped, grain scythed, fruit pulled from tree or vine, honeycomb lifted, oozing golden and sweet, from the hive. Here in Weset the heat was unrelenting. Dust pervaded every corner of the city. The fields straggling along the river’s eastern bank were already fissured by deep cracks. The palm-lined canals were dry. At first Huy had been appalled and depressed by such aridity, but in the twelve years since he had sailed south with the court he had learned to endure it. Nevertheless, the return of the New Year was celebrated here with a greater fervour than the dwellers of the Delta could understand. The river was due to begin its life-giving rise in about two weeks, and the prayers of the populace had become clamorous with entreaties to Isis for a fresh outpouring of her tears and to Hapi for an Inundation teeming with fish.

Twelve years
, Huy mused.
How rapidly the time has slipped away! Weset has burgeoned into one of the largest and most vibrant cities in the world, the centre of an empire I have forged for my King. At its heart the golden outer skins of its stone buildings are visible for miles around. Its citizens enjoy the influx of a constant supply of goods from every nation eager to befriend a King who could crush them with a wave of his hand if he chose to end their precarious autonomy. My countrymen flood Kush and Wawat as far as the Fourth Cataract. Gold cascades into the Royal Treasury every day. Amunhotep desires, and out of all this wealth the things he desires at once acquire substance. What he desires most is the beautifying of his domain, and I have spent the better part of these last years in fulfilling his wish. Apart from the projects begun before he was crowned, my hand has been on the raising of every monument, every statue, so that wherever I go I see a memory of those times. A few are not particularly pleasant. Working with Amunhotep-Huy on the restoration and adornment of Ptah’s temple at Mennofer was difficult. I became Vizier in his place, but he was given the control of Ptah’s temple as Overseer of Works in the temple of Nebma’atra-United-With-Ptah, and Overseer of Priests. I can understand why the King wished himself to be seen united with the creator-god, but I have never understood why he elevated my bad-tempered nephew to a position of such power in Mennofer. Was it Mutemwia’s decision, a ploy to keep Amunhotep-Huy firmly fixed in one place? He drove his craftsmen with whip and harsh tongue, and at that time I had not been given the authority to replace him
.