breast. For a moment, I saw fear in the heart of the Lord Amenhotep.
‘My son is building a new city, and you will go there with him when it is finished, Ptah-hotep,’ said the King. ‘I doubt the King Akhnamen—Akhnaten now, of course—will bother with a foreign office, so I am asking you to do me this favour. Take with you several scribes from my service who speak the foreign tongues and write the barbaric cuneiform. Receive the ambassadors politely, send out such presents as will please them, and try—for me, for Egypt—to balance the allies and suppress the enemies. You can maintain a link with the army by your letters to your heart’s brother Kheperren who will stay with the General Horemheb, who will keep him safe for love of me.’
‘Lord of the Two Crowns, I will try to do as you wish,’ I began. ‘But I do not know what the Lord Akhnaten intends for me, and at any moment I may lose his favour. Already I am worried by this man Huy, whom he took from the cattle-market.’
‘Ah, yes,’ said the King, sitting down heavily, so that the straps of his chair squeaked. ‘Huy. He has named him Chamberlain?’
‘Yes, Lord. Huy is insolent to his superiors and cruel to his inferiors and he has great ascendancy over the Great Royal Son. I know that he is disliked by everyone; but the same could be said of me,’ I added, conscious that I was telling tales.
‘No, the same is not said of you,’ said the King. ‘Ever since you came back alive from your interview with the Chief Priest of Amen-Re, you have been respected.
‘It is my fault, you know; all of this,’ he added.
We stared at him.
‘I began to attack on the power of the Priests of Amen-Re. It seemed to me that they had grown too great. A kingdom must have balance, young men; it must lie between contending powers on a fine point, like a pair of scales. I saw the Amen-Re temple taking over more and more administration until my father was almost helpless to act at all; for they ran the kingdom, and he was merely a figurehead. That was not my idea of royalty, though it would have been better if I had not meddled.
‘I thought the Aten a charming philosophy, rooted in ancient belief, that I could use to remind the Amen-Re priests that they were not as important as they thought. I managed to retrieve a number of operations from them. Now I believe that I was wrong.’
He began to pace again, an old man under a great burden.
‘Lord, you were not to know that your son would be sick…’ began the Queen, saying something which I would not have dared to voice.
‘But such things happen,’ said the King. ‘There will in the nature of history be weak kings and mad kings, and the kingdom must be able to cope if the head of state is an infant or incapacitated. I took all the reins into my own hands in my arrogance, and now it may be that the next driver is going to steer the chariot off a cliff, to the ruin of all.’
‘It shall be prevented, if our lives can do so,’ said Horemheb, and we agreed aloud.
‘I may not be able to speak to you again,’ said King Amenhotep may he live, laying his hand on my head then on my brother’s.
‘Particularly beware of Mittani. Tushratta is a devious, greedy and unprincipled king who will tear up any treaty if it suits him. His main enemy is Khatti; luckily they love gold. Send them cartloads of statues. Do what you can to mitigate the effects of my son’s fanaticism. Report to General Horemheb. The gods bless you and keep you, my sons.’
As we were leaving, carefully reproducing our previous stance though we had never felt less drunk, we heard him whisper, ‘And may the gods save Egypt.’
The last I saw of the Pharaoh the Lord Amenhotep may he live long, he had slumped down next to his wife, burying his face in her neck, and she was stroking his white hair.
Book Two
Aten in Splendour
Chapter Thirteen
Mutnodjme
The temple sent me to the funeral rites of King Amenhotep, now Osiris-Amenhotep, and, standing at the wall of the palace, I had never seen such widespread mourning.
Ten years had passed quickly for me, because I was always learning. I knew, now, almost all that the priestesses could teach me, and I delved