Out of the Black Land - By Kerry Greenwood Page 0,58

He was attended by two gigantic slaves with red feathers in their hair and I could not tell the difference between them. They looked like a mirror images, but clearer than any polished bronze one could show. They were preserving their countenances very well amongst the noise and music, which must have been very strange to them, coming from a people without such spectacles.

Ptah-hotep noticed me and smiled. He was a sedate young man, I thought, unlike his boisterous second in command Mentu, who was already drunk and singing along with the Hymn to Amen-Re, out of tune and out of time. There was something wrong with seeing Mentu on foot. He belonged in a chariot. We had often watched him racing through the narrow streets to gain the desert, where he competed against the finest charioteers in the army. And won, or so they said. His father and my father were friends, and Mentu’s father had always despaired of his drunken careless son finding any office. When Mentu had been named Second Scribe his father had given a party at which everyone had been merry for three days.

Ptah-hotep glanced at Mentu, smiled, and said, ‘It’s the festival, Lady, everyone should rejoice.’

‘I do,’ I replied, a little in awe of this powerful person but enjoying his attention. The palace said that he was arrogant and proud and spoke to no one. But he seemed grave to me, even sad. The Nubian woman had arrayed him gloriously, in a red cloak embroidered with the icon of Thoth the Ape as befitted a scribe. Around him were his household; three slaves, three scribes, and Mentu, who was attended by a servant to carry his wine jug.

The household of the eldest scribe Bakhenmut included an over-decorated woman with the stretched neck and popping eyes of a camel, her two sons, and a gaggle of maidservants who might have been chosen for their ugliness. This usually meant that the Master of the House had a roving eye and his wife was worried that he might take a concubine, but the scribe who seemed to belong to her looked unassertive and crushed and was attending meekly to whatever it was the camel-lady was hissing into his ear.

Then we heard trumpets. Ptah-hotep grabbed my hand as the crowd surged forward and pulled me into the lee of his tall Nubians. The mob broke on their satiny backs and strong legs like water on a rock, and flowed around them. Pharaoh Akhnamen’s soldiers closed around him and fended off the people. The Sacred Barge was coming.

In a roar of voices, a flourish of trumpets, a mutter of drums, the god came. The Sacred Barge of Amen-Re was carried by forty priests. It was a real boat, capable of voyaging on water, and it must have been heavy but they bore it up on their shoulders; and the people seethed noisily around it, striving to touch it and be assured of good luck in the coming year. Even so—over the screams and the cries of Amen-Re! and the curses of those who were trampled underfoot, over the chanted litany The God comes, he comes, even the Lord Amen-Re who is master of all—I heard the Pharaoh Akhnamen say, ‘Superstition!’ Then the crowd swept me away and I thought I was lost until Ptah-hotep noticed, retrieved me, and pulled me closer to one of the twins.

‘Stay close to Hani, little daughter,’ he ordered; and I did, for a change, as I was bid, for I was afraid of the press of people. In their desire to get closer to the god, they were impeding the procession, and they were being shoved aside by the priests and falling. As each one fell, they tripped a few others who fell in their turn and there were cries of distress from under the heap of people. I saw a child fall under her mother, a man collapse over them. My vision was filled with snarling mouths and blurring fabrics and arms and legs and the sudden stink of fear.

The Chief Priest, a very old man who was being carried in a litter before his god, flicked his sceptre of office and the bearers picked up their pace.

I put my back to the Nubian Hani’s legs—my head was about level with his belt—and he smiled down at me, a huge watermelon grin which showed all his white teeth. He was oiled with the same scents as the Great Royal Scribe. He was fending

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