Out of the Black Land - By Kerry Greenwood Page 0,170

committing Egypt to a path which could only have led immediately to invasion by one or other of the outraged powers.

Now there would be an interval of seventy days when a large number of diplomatic relationships could be resumed and most of the problems ironed out, before we laid to rest a Widow-Queen, two Pharaohs and two ministers.

‘I think it very charming that the Widow-Queen took her sons with her; and Pannefer and Huy along to do the dirty work, to which they were accustomed as no others could be,’ I told Mutnodjme. ‘It’s a great pity that your father had to miss the feast of Sekmet.’

‘He had a bellyache, unfortunately,’ she replied. ‘And I do not believe that he is to be unseated from his position as High Priest of the Aten, either.’

‘No need,’ I said. ‘We can just allow the old worship to re-emerge. The Aten can be allowed to fade away quietly. Once the court moves back to Thebes this city also will just be reduced to a provincial capital. A Nomarch should be put in charge.’

‘And you, Ptah-hotep? What will you do?’

‘Since I cannot have you, lady, I shall find some employment which uses my learning.’

‘You can have me,’ she said quietly. ‘The general knows all about us, about you and Kheperren and me.’

‘You still love me?’ I asked.

‘Have I not said so?’ she replied sharply.

And she embraced me, there in the litter, and I lay down on her breast and breathed in the scent of her skin.

***

Forty days are long enough to embalm commoners—in fact forty days are long enough to embalm anyone—but the seventy days required for a Pharaoh are to synchronise with the Sothic cycle; magic, not science.

I went to the funerals for Huy and Pannefer, not entirely, as Mutnodjme accused, to make sure that they were dead, but that sureness did play some part in my attendance. They were both buried in the ritual of the Aten, which made no mention of the other gods and would, I hoped, ensure them a good hungry reception from Aphopis. The beast’s only difficulty would be to locate a heart to eat and I feared that he would gain not even a toothful from both of them.

We buried the Widow-Queen Tiye with great ceremony in the language and ritual in which she had been born, married and reigned. The little King Tutankhaten had given orders that his mother should be laid to rest in a way which she would have ordered for herself. Even so, it was strange to see the priests of Osiris looking over their shoulders in case the inspectors of the Aten should appear from the ground and arrest them for heresy.

Sitamen and the priestess of Isis, Mutnodjme, acted as Isis and Neith, crying over the body and trying to hold it back as the priests of Osiris came to fetch Tiye away from them.

Mutnodjme’s once jet-black hair had streaks of white in it. We were getting old, I more than my lady, and soon I would go away from the City of the Sun to Thebes, where the priests of Amen-Re had come out of hiding and begun to repair their buildings. Snefru was long dead, I needed something to do, and I did not want to stay with Mutnodjme if she belonged to the general. Half measures were not enough for me. I was tired of intrigue, of courts, of danger. I might even have been tired of love.

Seventy days took us into the heat and dust of Mesore. I walked along behind the coffin of the boy Smenkhare, who had been hastily interred in a sarcophagus made for his mother Tiye. The embalmers had been at a loss as to how to classify him. He had been born male and was still male, though dead, but his title had been Great Royal Wife. They compromised, in the end, folding one arm across his breast as a woman is embalmed, but bandaging his phallus into erection just in case.

Smenkhare—who was in my view a blameless victim—and the heretic Pharaoh himself were hurried to a scanty burial in the same tomb.

A great change had already come over Amarna. Now that no one handed out free grain every decan, now that no one flung golden bracelets to the commoners every festival, there were many murmurings against the Pharaoh who was less than three months dead. The signs of the Aten began to be torn down. The priests of the Aten were being