to make sure that her sister-queen goes to a good home,’ I said angrily. ‘She would do as much for any stray cat.’
‘I speak a little Kritian,’ mused Dhutmose.
‘Good, then please put your seal here and here and you can come and fetch her as soon as the King divorces her.’ Kheperren laid out a scroll on the table.
‘That is outrageous,’ he whispered. ‘Those poor women!’
‘Exactly so, master, now seal the document, if you please.’
‘What is her name?’
‘Merope. The Widow-Queen Merope of Kriti in the Great Green Sea.’
Even the shock he had just received could not induce a scribe to seal a document without reading it, and he spelled his way through the edict.
‘This confers on me all rights over the lady, with or without her will,’ he observed. ‘I hope it is with her will. But if she is wishing to be out of the palace, she might like my house, the friezes are rather fine, and my little daughter needs a mother even if the lady does not want to undertake any more of the duties of a wife. I will understand. Poor woman!’
He sealed the papyrus and Kheperren rolled it up again. My private view was that of all the duties of a wife, the one which Dhutmose was prepared to forgo was the one which Merope was most eager to comply with. I only hoped that he was equal to the challenge.
We left the astonished and gratified Dhutmose calling for a Kritian grammar, and walked back through the wide airy streets to the palace.
I had not looked at it from this angle before. It was like a castle. All the walls were sheer and very high, crowned with square bevelled battlements. There were four gates into the palace, and we were taking the one which led to the Queen’s palace.
‘Tell me of Neferti and his prophecies,’ I asked, remembering the message which Dhutmose had sent to Ptah-hotep.
‘Not here,’ said Kheperren.
Ptah-hotep
I was delighted to hear that my old teacher Dhutmose had found a place in the new regime, and thoroughly agreed with Mutnodjme’s choice. He was, as I remember, a shrewd man, but gentle and kind. It was always Dhutmose who comforted the homesick and sat with the feverish. He loved only women. I recalled that one of the boys had tried to seduce him and totally failed. Dhutmose had lifted the boy’s cloth, pointed at his phallus and said, ‘You are very beautiful, boy, but that thing would get in the way.’ He was just the man to soothe the wounded feelings of an ex-Great Royal Spouse.
But his message was worrying.
I did not have a copy of the prophecies, of course, because the work mentioned the name of Amen-Re and had been suppressed, but edicts cannot suppress memory. Their despairing tone had attracted me when I had been a boy, and I could recall many of the verses without racking my brains.
The line reference, however, meant that I had to reconstruct the whole poem, so I sat down after lunch when men usually sleep and wrote out, from memory, The Prophecies of Neferti on a plaster board which I could easily erase.
Kheperren was sitting at my feet, eating Nubian flat bread, roasted garlic and onions and filling in an occasional gap in my recollection. I am fairly sure that we had the whole of the poem after about an hour.
Line 37 began a verse. It said:
I show you a land in calamity.
Unimaginable happenings.
Men will take weapons of war
Confusion will live in the land.
Men will make arrows of bronze
Men will beg for bread of blood
Laugh with laughing at pain
None will weep at death
None will fast for the dead
Each heart will think only of itself.
‘That sums it up, I think,’ said Kheperren, kissing my knee.
‘You are very cheerful for one reading news of disaster and prophecies of doom!’ I objected. ‘Don’t drop onion juice on my clean cloth.’
‘It’s 12th dynasty, right? The prophecy of the coming of Ammenemes the First. In his time, look a bit further down, it says:
I show you a land in calamity
The weak-armed now are strong
I show you the lowly now as lord…
‘You should have seen the priests at that temple school, ’Hotep, they were filthy and unlearned. Here, look at this next bit. Isn’t all this happening?
The poor man will achieve wealth
The great lady will fornicate to exist…
A sentence is passed
And a hand wields a club
The land is diminished
The counsellors die…
‘And here,’ Kheperren continued:
There will be no Theban Nome
To be the birth-land of