Out of the Black Land - By Kerry Greenwood Page 0,142
the Phoenix cult. Let me do Ptah-hotep this last service. We shall conduct the funeral together.’
The general patted me on the shoulder as he might do to a comrade, and I went out of the palace into the yard. There were no guards. No one challenged me.
The heap of ashes was not great. The spices had been tinder dry and had burned very bright, leaving little sign that a Nome’s worth of precious wood had been destroyed there. The sweet scent was still extremely strong but in it I could detect no lingering scent of burned flesh, which was odd. But then no one had ever burned so many spices together before, so it was possible that any other reek had been entirely subsumed in the perfumes.
No one was there. No one watched me as I began at one side of the mound and spread the ashes, running them through my fingers, looking for bones. It was the second decan of Ephipi, very hot and dry, and the furnace wind rose, the breath of the Southern Snake. This usually blows all morning, and it was now long toward evening, but the wind blew harder. It seemed that the gods wished to assist me in my task. The hot wind was winnowing the ashes, blowing away the light bonfire fluff and stirring the heavier charcoal at the bottom.
I stood in the midst of a whirling cloud of ash. I covered my mouth and nose with the cloth I had brought with me and strove to see through watering eyes. Bone ash is white, and I saw no streaks of the right colour as the detritus blew around me, funnelled in the hollow of the courtyard. Two people had burned to death in this pyre, and they seemed to have burned away to nothing, so hot had the fire been. I saw the ghost of a garland of cornflowers as it flew past, dissolving even as I thought I saw it; the pins of a heavy court-wig; and some jewellery—possibly the ring I had given Ptah-hotep—were melted into little metallic globs puddled on the marble pavement which was cracked and discoloured by the heat of the fire. I gathered up the gold, two handfuls of charcoal and two handfuls of ash before it all blew away into the west where the dead journey to judgment.
Then, scoured by the heat, I entered the palace again and walked slowly toward General Horemheb’s quarters. I carried, wrapped in his own cloth, all that remained of my sister and my lover, and it was a very light burden.
On the way I was stopped by two soldiers of the king’s guard. They did not touch me—I must have presented a terrible spectacle, a reproach to those who had officiated over the blood-sacrifice. I knew that my hair was loose and filled with dust and I could feel ash stiffening into a mask on my face.
The taller of the two said, ‘Lady, your mother would speak with you.’ They were clearly not going to allow me past until I had spoken to Great Royal Nurse Tey, so I allowed them to usher me along a corridor painted with dancing gazelles.
‘Mother,’ I said as I came in. ‘What do you want of me?’
‘Daughter,’ responded Tey, ‘I am ill.’
This was a surprise. I had not seen my mother at the shameful sacrifice last night. I assumed that she had been there. I assumed also that the death of the Queen Nefertiti, his daughter, had been some part of Divine Father Ay’s scheme to eventually own all Egypt. Though what he would do with it I had no idea. He could not sit and brood like a spider on a mountain of gold.
‘Lady, what form does your illness take? And you are aware that I am forbidden to practice medicine? You told me so yourself. Tell one of your tame soldiers to bring you the palace physician.’
‘I have done so,’ said Tey. She was lying on a couch, picking at the straps with her restless fingers. ‘He says that it is an illness which is not to be cured. He says that I have cancer of the womb.’
‘Then that is the end of the matter, lady,’ I said. I hated her with a remarkable depth of feeling, considering how exhausted I was.
Tey had warned me off trying to take Nefertiti away from the worship of the Firebird. Tey had watched over the sacrifice. Tey had seen the immemorial rights of every