Out of the Black Land - By Kerry Greenwood Page 0,56

be reborn as another human, as a beast, as a tree.

‘I would like to be a tree, planted in a garden, fruitful and full of life, fed by the water and breathing gentle vapours like prayers to my maker, even to Aten the symbol of the Creator. What would you like to be, Ptah-hotep?’

‘Lord…’ I hadn’t considered it before, but I could think of nothing else. ‘Lord, I would be a dog, who could guard the farmer’s crop against thieves and his household against robbers, and I would sleep every night on his doorstep.’

He seemed pleased with this idea—they had told me that he valued loyalty—and stroked my cheek.

‘You have not even begun to sprout a beard,’ he mused.

‘No, Lord, and I may not; my father has no beard.’

‘Nor mine,’ he said. ‘My father is still too wary of the priests of Amen-Re to take such action as should be taken against them, and I am not yet strong enough. But when Aten transforms my father and I rule alone, then they will be chastened for having the effrontery to admonish my father about my mother, and for promulgating false gods to the people.’

I was about to say, ‘Lord, false or not, the people need their gods,’ when I caught his eye and decided to be silent. It was, in any case, unlikely that I could argue my obsessed Master out of his cherished beliefs.

‘Why do men need gods?’ he asked, having picked up my thought, which he was reputed to often do.

‘Because their lives are hard,’ I replied. ‘They work all day for bread, and though they are seldom hungry in this rich land they have not enough of what they like to eat. They may have married the wrong woman, they may have no children or no sons and too many daughters, they may have lost their only love, they may be in mourning for wife or parent, and they weep, saying, “How can I endure this?” And they are comforted when they consider that after death they will live pleasurable lives in the Field of Offerings, drinking beer which will never sour and eating bread which will never rot.’

‘Dreams,’ scoffed my lord Akhnamen.

‘Or they can attribute their own failure to the ill-humour of a god, as when the Nile flood is too low and the fields parch into dust, spoiling the young seedlings; or too high, and the people watch their houses melt in the water and take to the boats, weeping, screaming insults at Hapi.

‘If the canals are ill maintained or the ducks stray or the fish desert the nets they can always blame the god rather than themselves or their own carelessness. And when pure misfortune strikes, it is always better to have something to curse by,’ I added.

I waited for a moment, hoping for an interruption, but he was thinking.

‘I know nothing of the life of the common people,’ he said at last. ‘You were a commoner, were you not, Great Royal Scribe? Tell me of your life.’

‘Lord, it is not interesting, I was the son of a scribe.’ I suddenly remembered that I had not written to my father to tell him of my elevation, sending some large present so that he would not call me undutiful. I wondered what he would like. A vineyard?

‘Tell me of a commoner’s life,’ he said.

‘Lord, let me recite to you from the Satire of Trades,’ I offered, not capable of so much description without some time to prepare.

‘Recite,’ said Akhnamen; so I began:

Consider the field worker—cruel is his fate! His skin is like leather, and he tends his crop in tears. He eats bread by the side of the meadow and is burned by the sun…

‘He is honoured,’ said my lord, ‘for the sun is the emanation of the Aten.’

I didn’t know what to say.

Chapter Eleven

Mutnodjme

My sister mated with the King every second night for a month, and she conceived.

We tested her urine by watering barley seedlings with it. For if a woman has new life growing within her, shall not every emanation of her body be imbued with life? Tey watched over those seedlings as though she was Isis herself, and I wondered that any of them ventured to grow, so fiercely did she glare at them, daring them to tell her that her daughter was not carrying a child. But by the beginning of the new year, it was clear that one group was growing much faster than the other, and by that time