Out of the Black Land - By Kerry Greenwood Page 0,73

city in itself. I was met at the gate of the palace by Sahte, Queen Tiye’s nurse, who demanded to know where the Lord Akhnaten was. I pointed and she spat on the ground.

‘Come and speak to my mistress,’ she urged. ‘She has always respected your learning, Ptah-hotep. Merope the Kritian is with her and we are waiting for Sitamen, but she is mourning and cannot be comforted.’

‘That is to be expected in the loss of so great and wise and gentle a husband,’ I responded, allowing her to drag me by the arm up two flights of steps and onto the first balcony.

‘Yes, yes, of course,’ snapped Sahte crossly. ‘But she will not rouse. There are many things she needs to do, and she just stares at the wall, or at that new temple of the Aten, and then she sighs, and then she stares again. I’m worried about her. She’s got courage, my lady. I don’t know. What is the world coming to? New gods and new temples and not enough to eat in the villages, that’s what. In here,’ she shoved me through a door curtain.

The room seemed empty. Then I made out the figure of a woman sitting on the floor; her hair hanging around her bare shoulders. My sandals whispered across ash on the floor. I knelt down next to the Queen Tiye and took her hand and kissed it. It was quite limp and curled empty on her lap when I released it.

‘Lady, I am here on your orders,’ I reminded her gently. She reacted slowly, but she reacted.

‘I gave no orders,’ she said. Her throat was torn with weeping and the voice creaked unwillingly from her strained throat.

‘But you would have,’ I continued, ‘if you had not been crushed under a burden of despair. Where is the Great Royal Wife Merope?’

‘I sent her away with unkind words,’ confessed the Queen. ‘I wish for no comforts.’

‘Lady, you grieve,’ I said, sitting down on the floor beside her. ‘But consider. He died easily, without pain. He loved you all his life and you loved him. You were his heart, Lady; such pain never vanishes. But you will have some comforts. They are time and distance, and the memory which is cherished.’

‘You are a ruthless young man,’ said Queen Tiye after a pause in which she debated whether to order my instant execution.

‘Lady, I am here because my lord Akhnaten is coming, and I wish to warn you that…’ I paused to choose my words.

‘Well then, warn me,’ she said sharply.

‘He is a devotee of the new god Aten, Lady, and I fear that… the funeral, you see, involves mentioning the gods of the underworld, and…’

‘He would deprive his father of the afterlife because of his thrice-blasted and damned new god?’

I would have felt better if her voice had been raised, but it was perfectly level.

‘He doesn’t believe that there is an afterlife, Lady,’ I began, but she closed her ash-stained hand on my arm—that arm was going to be bruised—and said, ‘I hear him coming, go through that curtain and wait. Sahte will show you the way out. Thank you, Great Royal Scribe, I will never forget this.’

To my astonishment she pulled me close and kissed my mouth. She tasted of starvation and salt. I heard footsteps outside—it the guard who never left the King Akhnaten—and I scrambled through the curtain just in time. Sahte was beside me, a twisted shadow. She took my hand and kissed it but did not speak.

I heard the Pharaoh say to his mother, ‘Lady, I have priests who will bury my father, in the new religion of the Aten, despising all fraudulent gods.

And I heard her reply; though I did not know the voice, it was so cold and flat, like the voice of the dead. I shivered.

Queen Tiye said, ‘If your father, my dearest love, my husband Osiris-Amenhotep is not laid to his rest in the House of Eternity as his father and his father before him, I will curse you.’

I heard Akhnaten step back, papyrus soles rustling in ash. He got as far as a shocked, ‘Mother!’ before the cold voice continued as if he had not spoken.

‘If one of your priests of Aten touches the Osiris-Amenhotep and defiles his ritual, I will curse you both waking and sleeping, I will blight your ways, your board and your bed, slay your wife and your daughters though they are also my daughters, and death will be about you