Out of the Black Land - By Kerry Greenwood Page 0,140
the Destroyer was her patron.
I held my tongue. In any case the huge clouds of billowing burning spices made sight difficult and breathing almost impossible. A brief eddy in the smoke showed me that the throne was now empty and I heard soldiers coughing. A door in the palace slammed shut. Even the musicians of Attis had choked and fled.
I yielded to the tug of the Widow-Queen’s hand and followed her, still carrying, I noticed, the bundle which contained the tools of my trade. If that hadn’t been a real body, then what had it been? I knew Nefertiti’s face, the most famous countenance in the Black Land, and it was her face. I began to be angry. I had been cheated of my death. I had given away all my goods, consecrated my lovers, given up my office, and now I was not to die after all. How could I go back? The king must have heard my defiance. If he saw me again, I was certainly dead.
I ran knee-first into what, on closer inspection, turned out to be a litter-carriage with heavy leather curtains, such as is used by ladies on journeys. Into this Widow-Queen Tiye shoved me, shouting through the smoke, ‘The horsemen know where to go. Stay with her. Don’t return until you have word from me, write no letter, send no word. I will tell them.’
Then, of all strange happenings in that most strange day, she took off her pectoral and put it around my neck and kissed me on the mouth, hard. She tasted of smoke and spices. ‘You are a good man. Amenhotep would have been proud of you,’ she told me. Then she stepped away and I was thrown back against a soft bundle as the horses were whipped into a gallop.
I was still alive, I was not burned. I rubbed my eyes. When I had cleared the smoke out of them, I found that the carriage was already through the gates of the City of the Sun and we were racing across the open plain toward the river. I pinched myself, hard, and watched a red weal come up on my skin. Yes, I was also awake.
The carriage bounced as the charioteer yelled to his horses to go faster. I clutched the bundle I was leaning against and found that I had my hand upon a breast.
I removed it hastily. I had been leaning on the most beautiful parcel in the world. In the carriage with me, stunned or asleep, was Nefertiti, Great Royal Spouse, Lady of the Two Lands, whom I had just sacrificed to the Phoenix.
Book Three
The Hawk at Sunset
Chapter Twenty-five
Mutnodjme
I did not see his ending, for the clouds of smoke drove Kheperren and me back despite our longing to watch the unbearable, but we heard his defiance flung to the lord Akhnaten on his high seat. The fire had burned with a flame hot enough to melt bronze. There might not even be bones for us to bury fittingly.
We had nowhere to go to indulge our grief and horror. I could not take a man to the Widow-Queen’s apartments so we trailed back to the office of the Great Royal Scribe. There Kheperren and I gathered all the personal belongings of our lover, weeping as we did so. I wept as I picked up a garment he had thrown aside to make love to us the night before, and Kheperren wept as he found Ptah-hotep’s favourite stylus under a chair. We took his vials of Nubian oil, his store of copied papyri, his cloths and his sandals. We wrapped it all in the Nubian blanket on which we had made love together.
It was a burden for one man in the way such weights are measured. Not much for all those years of dedication. He had given away all his jewels—those of his office to the new Great Royal Scribe, those of his own to his slave Meryt and her household. We were not taking away anything that would be valuable to anyone but us.
Kheperren shouldered the burden. As I picked up my own, he said, ‘Come with me, lady,’ and drearily, I followed.
On the way out we passed a pop-eyed lady, very decorated, who was superintending the removal of her own furniture into the apartments. A line of servants carried beds and chairs and baskets. Bakhenmut, the new incumbent, gave us an apologetic look as we shouldered past the bearers.