called him Tutankhaten.
A thought occurred to me. By this transfiguration I would also lose my sister Merope, the Kritian Princess, who had gone into the Palace of Women when she had first bled in purification. She had not conceived. We had been such close companions for such a long time that I would find life difficult without her. But now she would belong, as would all the royal wives and concubines, to Akhnaten.
And that meant that Merope, too, would move to Amarna.
My future was looking more and more lonely.
Beneath me the people wept, tore their hair, threw ashes into the air in token of mourning. I had stood contemplating too long. I hurried down the marble stairs to the street and ran, robes bundled up in one hand, along the alley and into the small square before the Osiris temple where the womens’ gate stood open. There my sister Merope straightened my headdress and smoothed down my gown, without a word, and led me into the House of Life, where the embalmed body of Osiris-Amenhotep lay.
They had painted him and given him glass eyes, and stuffed the loose skin of his face with mud, so that he resembled a corn doll, such as children make of cornstalks with a plaster face. There was no trace of the man he had been, the sweet lover, the wise speaker. Two priests of Osiris were standing beside a heap of torn cloth, waiting for us to begin so that they could enfold Osiris-Amenhotep in his last garments. I took the hand of my sister Merope who was linked to Queen Tiye and Princess Sitamen, whose grip was as strong as a man’s. We were there to represent Isis and Nepthys, Selkis and Neith, protecting the dead king’s body while it was still vulnerable from the attack of fiends, the children of Set the destroyer. We stood in a circle around the body, singing our lamentation.
The bandages were carefully wrapped around our transmuted Pharaoh, the heart scarab in place, the amulets scattered across his body, the phallus bandaged into erection, the fingers wrapped separately. All the time the priests chanted the protective spells and the scent rose, resin and aromatics, frankincense and sandalwood oil with an underlying stench of putrefaction dreadful to smell and cruel to consider.
‘Do not be afraid, my Lord,’ whispered the Queen Tiye. Her long hair was tangled and muddy, her breasts were bare, her face disfigured with long parallel scratches which she had made in her grief. ‘Anubis will make you beautiful, Osiris will take you to his bosom, oh, my heart’s darling’.
We walked around under the palm boughs of the embalmer’s makeshift hut—this structure would be burned the second the Osiris-Amenhotep was removed, and there was no point in burning a good building—singing the lament of Isis and Nepthys:
Hail thou Lord of Otherworld, Bull of those that live there, thou image of Re, most beautiful babe! Thou driver-away of evil, thou maker of gentle fortune, come to us, thy sister and thy wife, even to Isis and Nepthys.’
Merope and I moved to the head of the Osiris-Amenhotep as the priest chanted:
Homage to the divine father Osiris! We embalm all thy members, for thou wilt not perish and come to an end as beasts do: thy breath is strengthened, O Osiris, the winds blow into thee. Thou are established, thou art strong, thou wilt live. The worms shall not devour thy body, thou wilt not fall into rottenness, thou wilt never see corruption when thy soul has gone out of thee.
The priest was a fat spotty youth with a nasal voice, most unfitted for his post, though I presumed that he was ritually clean, not having had intercourse with a woman, eaten meat or consumed wine for forty days. That should have improved his complexion.
When the soul hath departed, a man seeth corruption; the bones of his body crumble and stink, the members decay one after another into a helpless mass which falls away to foetid liquid, thus he becomes a brother to the worm and is made into worms and an end is made of him as for all things that perish.
I wondered how Tiye could bear this dreadful litany; Tiye who had loved the Osiris-Amenhotep for so many years. Her skin was grey, and she had bitten into her bottom lip, trying not to scream, though we would be required to scream soon and that might give her some relief.
Merope’s hand was in my left and Sitamen had