woman in the Black Land vanish into smoke and had applauded the loss. Tey had denied me my freedom and the use of my hard-earned skills. Also, I knew of no cure for such a cancer. She would die, and it could not be soon enough for me.
‘You have sifted the ashes?’ she changed the subject, seeing that I was not disposed to help her.
‘As you see,’ I sat down, placing the folded cloth in my lap.
‘You found…traces?’
‘Lady, I did.’
She glanced around as if someone might be listening and then said in a voice which was rich with pain, ‘Give me something of my daughter Nefertiti.’
‘No,’ I said. Had she gone into that pile of ash and searched for the concubine’s daughter as I had gone to seek my lover? Tey had no claim over what I carried.
‘Cruel,’ said Tey, very softly. ‘Cruel, and it is I who raised you, educated you, unfitted you for a woman’s life.’
‘How, unfitted?’ I demanded. The only reason that I was discussing this so calmly was that I was too shocked and grief-stricken to engage in petty arguments with my mother about her treatment of me. She had said this kind of thing before, mostly while gloating that I would not longer be able to use my talents.
‘The little princess is sick.’ She avoided the argument again.
‘Then you must summon the palace physician,’ I repeated.
‘The King married her last night,’ said Tey with something less than her usual ferocity. ‘Ay lay with her though she is still a child. Now she is feverish and cannot sleep.’
‘That is to be expected,’ I said as calmly as I could, revolted by the idea. ‘I’m sure that she will resign herself to the difficulties of a life in the palace, as I have had to do.’
‘You will not help me, but you will help her,’ said Tey with some of her old venom. ‘You are a priestess of Isis!’
‘I was a priestess of the lady whom I must not name, mother, but that worship has been discredited. Now I must go.’ I said.
I did not look back as I went to the door. Tey rose on one elbow. She did not shriek curses at me. She only said one word, one which I had never heard from her mouth before.
‘Please.’
So I turned back, hating myself. I took the lid off an alabaster dish which stood on the table, a beautiful thing carved in the shape of a bird breaking out of an egg. Into it I put a pinch of fine bonfire ash.
‘Tell your soldiers to take me to the Great Royal Wife,’ I said, and she clapped her hands to summon them.
But when I reached the room where the poor little princess Mekhetaten lay, they were already mourning her. I spoke to the women, but they could not tell me what killed her. She might have died of shock, of loss of blood, of horror or of suicidal or homicidal poisoning, and of course there was always disease. Any underlying condition would have flared up under such conditions, and it was Ephipi, the season of fevers. There was nothing for me to do and I no longer had an escort so I went back to the general’s quarters, a ghostly woman, masked with death. I saw the women making the sign against the evil eye as I passed.
Ptah-hotep
The boat was not a royal barge, but a big fishing vessel, high-prowed and deep-keeled, able to take to the Great Green Sea. On the shrunken Nile it was wallowing, and the lady Nefertiti was sick.
I had found myself under hatches and wondered if I had been abducted or whether this was some strange dream from which I might wake to defy the Pharaoh and burn. But it felt very real. The sound of the water lapping against the side, the smell of the river, the noise of a queen vomiting into a bucket—not the stuff of a death dream. I might have had a queen in my last vision, but she would not have been so sea-sick.
In any case, my love was already given away. I wondered how my lovers had taken this escape. I hoped that they had not mourned me for too long. Doubtless they were even now receiving an explanation from the Widow-Queen. I could do with some explanation myself. I examined my surroundings.
I was in the hold of the boat. I shared it with a queen and a large collection of baskets, which to