Out of the Black Land - By Kerry Greenwood Page 0,172

They will be dispatched, if he takes my advice, to settle the borders. But I will need fully half of mine just to begin the task of distributing grain to the starving.

‘We will see if Opet this year will bring on a proper inundation. If so, we shall be able to distribute seed grain early and see if we can get two crops, which will avert immediate famine—if we can find enough measurers and inspectors who aren’t entirely corrupted by their devotion to the Aten. Ah, here we are.’

‘Where?’ I asked.

‘As a special favour to the throne,’ said Horemheb, leading me up a set of stairs. ‘For a short time.’

I had a growing feeling of unease, but somehow I could not stop following Horemheb up the steps. He opened the door into a small room where various regalia of state was laid out on benches, and three servants were combing and dressing wigs. They smiled and ushered me to a chair, where my head was measured, a suitable court wig found, and before it was placed on my head, General Horemheb dropped a necklace of office around my neck.

I stared at the pendant: a vulture, holding the eye of Horus, over the scarab beetle Khephri. I knew that set of symbols.

‘General, I’m not a judge!’ I protested, trying to get up and being pressed firmly but respectfully back into my seat by the servant who was draping an assortment of gowns over my shoulders.

‘Just for the moment,’ the general assured me. ‘You are the only man of unassailable virtue in the whole of the Black Land. You are the only one the people will accept to judge the corrupt officials who have been amassing fortunes at the expense of the people.

‘Amen-Re is obviously with you and the new Chief Priest Dhutmose has approved you. He will be here directly to bless you in the name of the Great God and remove any lingering stain of Atenism. He has already renounced the Aten himself.’

‘Why do the people approve of me?’ I asked, bewildered.

General Horemheb, seeing that he was not going to have to restrain me bodily, sat down and accepted a cup of beer from one of the servants. I drank some too, bewildered.

‘The story went all over Egypt,’ he said slowly. ‘Children on the borders of Nubia tell it around campfires; boys in the service of the border fortresses hear the tale from soldiers; the children of commoners dip into the bean-pot and listen to it. Everyone knows the thrilling story of how Ptah-hotep—born a commoner like them but risen to Great Royal Scribe—stripped himself of all his wealth and titles, freed his slaves, and dismissed his household and walked out naked to defy the Pharaoh to his face, when he was offered a choice of doing a vile deed which would have saved his life.’

‘It was simple,’ I told him. ‘There was nothing else I could do.’

‘When it was thought that you had perished in your brave deed,’ the general said, watching me closely, ‘your parents wept until you wrote to tell them that you were alive and safe. Being sensible people, they did not allow this to be known.

‘But ever since you ‘died’ in the pyre of the Phoenix, your parents received small gifts from the people. They were not formal gifts-of-offering—which have the name of the giver attached—but were loaves and jugs left anonymously on the threshold. People who were hungry, when there was so little grain, gave them bread and beer to honour and commemorate the scribe Ptah-hotep who was the only one of all that vast horde of courtiers who dared to defy Pharaoh. Do you see now why you must be a judge?’

A servant gave me a linen cloth to wipe my eyes. I had never thought that what I had done, which had seemed utterly inevitable at the time, would have been seen as courage.

‘Very well,’ I said. ‘I will be a judge. But I will be a just judge, ruling on the cases I have before me. I will not have any persecution of those who believed in the Aten if they have done no other wrong.’

‘That is also the will of Tutankhamen may he live!’ agreed General Horemheb.

Chapter Thirty

Mutnodjme

I reflected, when I looked across the feasting multitude, how well the boy who had been born Tutankhaten and was now Tutankhamen had managed. He was slim and bronzed and good looking, greatly resembling his brother Smenkhare whose fate had been so bitter.