Out of the Black Land - By Kerry Greenwood Page 0,70

into their stored scrolls and construed puzzling inscriptions in temples which were so ancient that only the old man Snefru the Scribe in the temple of Amen-Re could read them. I sought always for more knowledge.

I had not seen the king since he had fallen ill, though the physicians had sent to the temple of Isis for more and more of the narcotic black resin we extracted from the white poppy seed-capsule. They spoke of his death as a gentle one, and I hoped that it had been so, for he had given my sister Nefertiti six fine daughters; though after the birth of the third I had not seen her either. My Lord Akhnaten had taken her away to his new city at Amarna, and Nefertiti had never been good at writing letters, though she sometimes sent me presents.

I wore the green robes of the Lady Isis now, and I was of a great age; eighteen, nearly nineteen. There were villages in the marshes where that was the usual age for a woman to die, worn out with the dangers of childbearing and disease.

I lived in the cool stone palace built for the Mistress of Magic, high above the sandflies and the mosquitoes, and illness was rare in the temple. I had not borne, because few men pleased me, and what seed I had allowed into my body had not taken root. The temple wished to keep me and I had no wish to leave. I could have gone to Amarna and lived with my sister and my mother; but Tey and I had never been friends and my mother had grown very proud, so that she looked down on a mere priestess. I could not have my own establishment because I was unmarried and I had no wish to marry.

I had heard very strange rumours about what was happening in the new City of the Sun and I worried about my sister, though she always said that she was happy.

I stood in my malachite-dyed robes, my head crowned with the Isis symbol, the jewellery of my rank weighing down my shoulders and arms, while the keening grew from the river banks. The barge was coming with the King Akhnaten and his family, and I could hear the weeping as the priests came forth to line the road to the Temple of Osiris.

The King Osiris-Amenhotep had lain in dry natron for forty days. His body was dried and pickled like a salt fish. His entrails had been preserved and put into jars beside him. It hurt me that such a wise man should be so mutilated; and it struck me for the first time, to wonder how anyone could know that the dead, so treated, came alive in the Field of Reeds.

Then my heart forbade further inquiry. Our ancestors as far back as we could reckon them knew that this was the case. My own Lady Isis had made it so. It was true.

And I had a part to play in this funeral, as representative of my own Goddess, and I must not fail.

The walls were warm under my hand, almost as warm as flesh. The season was Shemu and the month was Pakhons, month of Finding Osiris, and unseasonably warm. The common people said that since the Divine Akhnaten worshipped the sun, He had come closer to us.

The old women in the temple said that such fluctuations had occurred twice in their memories, and that more grain should be stored against bad seasons. They had reported this to the King Amenhotep, now the Osiris-Amenhotep, and he had increased the storage rates so that the bins were full.

Now all his wisdom was lost to us. His translation to the Field of Reeds took with it the last of my childhood.

I could see all the way down the river, from the new temple of the Aten at Karnak, golden in the early sunlight, to the white and yellow ochre cliffs on the other side, which marked the landing place of the Houses of Eternity, where only Kings are buried. We would take Osiris-Amenhotep to his tomb which had been prepared for a long time; he had ruled for thirty-seven years.

Now his son Akhnaten had named his brother Smenkhare as his co-regent. This was thought wise. Smenkhare was eleven and had shown no signs of the illness which deformed his brother. The red-headed woman Tiye the Queen had lately borne a child, the last of the children of Osiris-Amenhotep. She had