Casting the Gods Adrift Read online

  But one day the Princess Ankhesenpa-aten would lie here. She too would have her House of Eternity alongside her father’s, crammed with gold, silver, gems and ushabti cats. She was really excited to visit the place that morning. I hated the thought of it. I hated the thought of Ankhesenpa-aten growing old, or sick, or dying – being buried in her father’s misguided religion, in this awful, blood-red place. In fact, I did my best to get all such thoughts out of my head, and busied myself thinking about better things. About chariots, chiefly.

  In particular, I thought about the pharaoh’s chariot. How would it be to ride in that? There it stood, leather and wood armoured all over with gold, with two black horses plumed and stamping. How glorious to tear along, the reins lashed round my waist like a real charioteer, over the desert and through the tape of the horizon, winning every race!

  The last little bit of the way, the pharaoh, his daughters and his men of gold went on foot, not even shielded from the sun’s heat by fan-bearers. The exact location of the tombs must remain a secret, for fear grave robbers might break in and steal the treasure which would one day be heaped around the king’s sarcophagus. Not for me to know. Not for charioteers or fan bearers. I remained behind. I remember, Ankhesenpa-aten looked back over her shoulder and waggled her fingers at me as they walked away.

  I wish I could buy you a grave at Abydos! I thought. Away from this ungodly place.

  I looked at the king’s chariot. His charioteer was busy talking to the other drivers. How could it hurt just to try?

  Up I stepped, on to the running board. One of the horses turned his head and snorted. The charioteer looked round and brandished his whip at me.

  The horses sprang straight from standing into a gallop. There was no time to jump off, no time to even think. The floor of the chariot seemed to be pounding my legs into my hips, jarring my kneecaps like hammer blows. I made a snatch at the reins, but they were tied to the chariot and not round my waist.

  Foam from the horses’ mouths came flying back and hit me in the face. Their black bodies creamed with instant sweat. I clung to the sides, but I was being pitched about like the clapper in a bell, and my legs were not long enough to brace against the leather panels.

  Out over the red, cracked earth I hurtled, out over red earth crumbling away to sand and peppered with rocks. Past locust trees and thorn bushes and boulders shaped like skulls, away from the king’s party, away from the river, straight into the Red Country where no Egyptian chooses to go.

  My hold on the chariot could not last. When both wheels struck a rock, the front of the chariot reared up, and I went out of the back, heels-over-head, landing on my face. The horses galloped round in a wide arc and plunged back the way they had come. But they went without me.

  I was left alone on the red earth, scalding hot against my palms and thighs. I dragged myself on to my hands and knees, got up and ran a few steps. But, suddenly, the whole blue dome of the sky was singing and mouldering over with patches of black. I put my hand up to flick an insect off my neck and found it was not an insect but a trickle of blood from inside my ear. I felt violently sick. The horizon sloped and doubled into two distinct lines. The ground lurched and I fell down again, not knowing how to get up.

  Lying on my back, a prey to scorpions and snakes, I called open-mouthed for my father. But I could not hear my voice. So I called inside my head instead – called on every god whose name I could remember: on Thoth, on Isis, on Apis and Bast and Sobek.

  But I knew, even as I called, that there were no gods in this place. It was empty, barren, scorched. As far as the eye could see, no living creature moved. There might be scorpions and snakes in the crevices of the cracked earth, but there was nowhere for a god to hide. Here was Death’s country, and I was alone in it. Only one thing ruled here, and that was the sun. The pharaoh was right. Out here, on the edge of the universe, there was only Aten. Of course he was right. Was he not a god himself? And gods must know these things. I could feel his beams scorching my face. I could feel his magic boiling my blood. I could see his hands reaching down from the sky – flails of light, crooks of sunlight. Aten was the same here as over the town where I was born, or over el-Amarna, or over the cool reed marshes. He was everywhere; I could see that now. It was just that here he was plainer to see, closer to the earth.

  I found myself praying aloud. ‘O Aten, only ruler of Earth and Heaven; let me live, and I will worship you all the days of my life! O Aten, don’t let me die – not here in the Red Country, all alone and unburied!’

  The ground shook. A scorpion, walking slowly past my outstretched fingertips, paused, sting raised, at the vibration. I thought I was feeling the movements of the serpent Ipep under the earth, wrestling against the forces of light.

  Then a shower of red dust blew over me, and a chariot thundered past, and the pharaoh’s charioteer reined it in. The pharaoh himself came and leaned over me. I could not see his face with the midday sun blazing behind his head.

  ‘There now, Tutmose. That will teach you not to overstep your mark.’

  ‘There is only one god: Aten and Akhenaten his servant!’ I said the words of a prayer I had heard issue many times from the temples of Aten.

  ‘That’s right, little Tutmose. And you have put him to the trouble of saving your life twice over.’ But his face looked only mildly amused, rather than angry.

  His charioteer picked me up and carried me in his arms, bracing himself in the tail of the chariot while the pharaoh himself drove it back to the edge of the Red Country. The Nile valley glimmered greenly along the horizon, broken by the temples and pylon-gateways of el-Amarna.

  Father looked pale to the point of sickness. I was touched by his concern for my safety, sorry he had been put to such long, courteous apologies. ‘My son is a blight on my life … a curse on my family name … his mother’s shame. I shall beat him soundly for being such a grain of sand in the pharaoh’s eye…’ On and on he went.

  But I soon found out that it was not I who had offended my father, not I who had died out there in the desert. At the secret site of the royal tombs, among the grim red cliffs and the wastes of scree, Akhenaten had accorded his men of gold the ultimate honour. They, like the princesses, were to have tombs alongside his House of Eternity. Like it or not, Harkhuf was to sleep forever in the Red Country, under the eye of Aten the sun.

  6

  A Dream of Wickedness

  I did not tell him. I did not even try. There was no point. A father can tell his son what to believe – for a while, at least – but a boy can’t tell his father. I must have told Ibrim fifty times over when we got back and we were alone together, ‘It’s true! Everything the pharaoh tells us is true! There is only one Aten. I felt it. I felt Him! Out there in the Red Country!’ And Ibrim nodded and pictured it in his head, and believed me, because I was his older brother and I had never deliberately told him an untrue thing.

  But Father was a different matter. He left on a trip to Nubia the day after my adventure with the chariot. I was still confined to bed, with double vision and a terrible headache. Not until my head cleared did the solution come to me. I knew how to bring back my father from the brink of despair. The means of doing it was in my own hands!

  I would carve him a stela – a name post to set up at Abydos. So that wherever his mortal remains were laid to rest, Osiris, god of the West Country would know Harkhuf was a true believer and would raise him to everlasting life! It would be the most beautiful stela Abydos had ever seen. I had the skill in my hands to make it. And I owed it to my father. I loved him, and I wanted to give him something which would prove that – both to him and to me.

  In every spare moment I worked on the carving, wrapping it in cloths between times, and hiding it away from prying eyes. I must not on any account betray my father as an unbeliever in Aten; that would have meant his ruin. I think it was the finest piece of work I ever did. When I needed encouragement I would let Ibrim run his sensitive fingers over it and he would say, ‘Such detail!
Such delicate work! It must be the finest piece of work you’ve ever done, Tutmose!’ I could not wait for Father to come home so that I could give him my wonderful present.

  I knew, of course, that the magic of Abydos was imagined. I knew that Aten was the only god over Egypt. But Harkhuf would be buried with the divine Akhenaten. So that was all right, wasn’t it? That would keep him safe and grant him a happy afterlife. Time enough for him to find out his mistake, then, in the Country of the Westerners.

  I treasured up my news, like Akhenaten amassing his treasure ready for the red tombs. The wait was long.

  One day, a neighbour suddenly came running to tell me that my father’s boat was docking at the quayside, with ostriches and a baby elephant, jackals and a dead zebra. I ran to greet my father. Of course I could not blurt out my surprise in a public place, but as soon as we were alone …

  I expected to see Harkhuf as he had looked when he left – bent and broken and grey with misery. But he was transformed. He was thinner, his movements were quick and sharp, his eyes bright as sparks from an axe, and his jaw muscles rigid. He seized me by the elbow and pulled me close to him – not in an embrace, but to whisper in my ear. ‘I have news for you! Later. At the house.’

  ‘So do I,’ I said, grinning at the knowledge of my marvellous secret.

  I never got the chance that day to mention the stela. At home, my father sent Ibrim to practice, and sat down, hard up against me on the couch, his eyes darting wildly right and left. He jumped up to check for eavesdroppers at the door, at the window, then returned to the couch.

  ‘On my way home I stopped at Edfu, at the Temple of Hathor the Protector. I bathed in the holy springs.’

  ‘Why? Are you ill?’ My heart sank inside me. I knew he was still thinking of a cure for Ibrim, still hoping for Ibrim to recover his sight.

  ‘For the sake of your brother, stupid! And that night I had a dream! I did! The plainest dream I ever dreamed in my life. The gods revealed themselves to me, Tutmose!’

  A flicker of wonder and dread crept through me, for all my conversion to Aten. ‘Was I in the dream?’

  He could not hear me. ‘One day, Tutmose, you must paint my dream on the wall of my tomb: Ibrim, his eyes big as cymbals, and the Criminal, and a great cobra—’

  ‘A cobra?’

  ‘I dreamed, Tutmose, that Ibrim was cured – was perfectly whole again. I dreamed of Akhenaten sitting on his throne. And rearing up over him was a hooded cobra in the very act of striking!’

  I was almost disappointed. ‘That’s his crown, Father. The triple crown with the cobra coiled around, rearing up to strike. And Ibrim is made whole. He’s happy. Didn’t you hear him tell you down at the quay? He plays now for Queen Nefertiti herself; in the royal orchestra! He’s very happy.’ I might as well have been talking underwater.

  ‘Don’t you see what it means, Tutmose?’ said my father, grasping my shoulders, almost breathless with delight. ‘The gods are calling for vengeance on their detractor! They want Akhenaten destroyed! And we must do it for them!’

  7

  The Nile-blue Cat

  Out of a soft reed pannier Harkhuf pulled a wooden box, and set it down on the bench where we ate our daily food. Then he pulled on the scarlet gloves – those detested gloves that the pharaoh had presented to him, and lifted off the box lid.

  I thought they were eels at first, wriggling around, knotting and unknotting. Then I realised. They were snakes – deadly poisonous Nile asps.

  ‘No, Father. You can’t,’ I breathed. ‘How can you kill a god?’

  ‘Isis did.’ He had his answers well rehearsed; he had been over and over them so often in his overheated brain. ‘The goddess Isis made a snake to poison Amun-Ra himself, ha ha! Poisoned the father of all the gods! That was how she won herself a place on the Ship of a Million Days!’

  I wanted to say, ‘There is no god but Aten. There never was an Isis or a magic snake. It’s a story, a myth.’ But I did not. I said, ‘But Isis cured Amun-Ra afterwards. How will you cure the pharaoh?’

  The light of madness was in his eyes.

  ‘I shan’t! No one shall! Monsters will tear at him in the Underworld, from everlasting to everlasting. But you, Tutmose, you!’

  ‘Me?’

  How was I to be involved in this insane scheme? Was I to be a part of it, this blasphemy, this plot to kill a god?

  ‘What are you making at the moment? For the Great Criminal Akhenaten. At the workshop.’

  I shrugged. ‘A cat. A cat in blue faience.’

  ‘Bast. The cat goddess. Very good.’

  ‘No, no,’ I insisted. ‘Just a blue cat. For Pharaoh Akhenaten’s tomb. He likes cats.’ But Father was deaf to everything he did not want to hear.

  ‘Excellent. Bast shall do it! It is fitting.’ He thrust his arm under mine and towed me, half-running, out of the house and towards the royal workshops, the box of asps tucked under his other arm. Outside the workshop door he said, ‘Fetch it. Fetch the cat … and clay to seal it.’

  Such was my fear of those protruding eyes, those big blood vessels pulsing in his forehead, that crushing grip on my arm, that I did as I was told. ‘It’s not finished!’ I protested. ‘The eyes—’

  ‘It’s perfect.’ He set down the box of asps and snatched the cat out of one of my hands and the ball of wet clay out of the other. In the shadow of a wall, wearing those blood-coloured gloves, he managed to tip a squirming knot of asps into the hollow figurine and stop up the base with a disc of unfired clay.

  Then he spat in the dirt and made mud plugs to seal up the empty eye-sockets. Never once did he comment on the workmanship, on the luminescent blue glaze, on the expression of the cat that had cost me hours of patient effort. That was all I could think of at the time. My work of art was just a container to him, a vessel in which to package his venomous hatred. The gloves were ruined, too, caked brown and crisp with dirt.

  ‘Now, all you have to do,’ said Father, ‘is to take it somewhere the Criminal will find it. Place it by his bed. The gods will help you.’

  ‘No!’ I could not help the word slipping out. It hung in the air between us, large as an apple. My mind was racing. If I refused to help, Father would make the attempt himself; he might even succeed. If I went along with the plan, I could at least make certain that it failed. Inside the cat, the asps were twisting themselves into infinite coils of wickedness. ‘No, no. It’s not perfect enough, Father! The base is just raw clay. It has to dry. Akhenaten would never believe a thing half-made like this was meant for him. Let me smooth it off and dip it in colour. Let me. Let me do the job properly. Let me, Father.’

  We held the cat between us, me gently tugging, trying to ease it out of his grasp. ‘It just needs a coat of paint. Let it dry and it’s ready,’ I said, wheedling. ‘And the sun’s going down. Soon the gods will be underground. Wait till morning when they’re overhead – when they can see, and help and cheer.’

  It was that picture of the gods hanging over the side of the Ship of a Million Days that won my father round. Like gamblers at a cockfight, he pictured them, cheering him on in his heroic murder. He let go of the blue-glazed cat, and I darted back into the workshop and set it down on my workbench.

  I thought, if the kiln was hot, I would put it in there and kill the snakes. But the kiln was out, so I settled for standing the cat on my bench, under a sack. I would go back after dark when Father was asleep, and dispose of its lethal contents without him ever knowing. That way he might blame the gods, and not me, for letting him down.

  The sun rested on the horizon, distorted to the shape of an ostrich egg. Aten-the-all-seeing was leaving the sky, leaving me alone with my father’s wicked dream. This one night, I was terrified to see Him go. I would be without His help till morning.

  Having kept his plan secret for weeks, my father now wanted to talk. He wanted to talk and talk and talk. Ibrim had gone to the palace to play at a banquet for a visiting Syrian diplomat; he would not be home till morning. Father fel
t free to talk to me, his fellow-conspirator. Though I doubt he had slept one night since his dream at Edfu, he showed no sign of weariness. A demonic energy kept him wide awake, whereas I could feel my eyelids drooping, my stomach aching for want of sleep. I never knew that worry could be so exhausting.

  When I woke, the sun was well up. It took me a moment to remember that Father was home. Then I saw him, curled up like a baby on the couch, his face aged by years in the sun, the bones of his skull sharply white under the skin. Creeping on bare feet, so as not to wake him, I carried my clothes outside and dressed as I ran up to the workshop, through streets already crowded with people.

  A half-dozen craftsmen, already seated at their benches, looked up as I opened the door of the workshop. At my own work place, my tools lay ranged in an orderly row, like a surgeon’s knives. Beside them lay a fold of sacking. Where the blue-glaze faience cat had stood there was a circle in the wood shavings, the spilled slip and scraps of clay. But the cat itself had gone.

  Someone had taken it.

  8

  Song of the Reedbeds

  ‘The cat! Where is the cat?’ I blurted out at the man hammering gold leaf by the window.

  ‘The princess took it,’ he said with a wry smile, knowing how many times it had happened before.

  ‘The princess? Are you sure? Did you see her?’