too much perfume. He seemed consumed with chagrin, biting his pale lips and twisting his ringed hands together.
‘So, Pannefer, you were wrong,’ said the Pharaoh. ‘This is innocent and charming. Neither party is married and I expect that they will reach some arrangement. Nefertiti will rejoice that her sister has come to her, and that love has brought the adherent of a false cult to reason. Ptah-hotep, do you love the lady Mutnodjme?’
‘Lord, thou knowst the secrets of all hearts,’ replied the Great Royal Scribe. He also was naked, and he was very well-made. Living mostly with women I had not tired of the sight of male flesh, and he was finely and sparely handsome.
‘Lady, do you love the lord Ptah-hotep?’
‘As you see, Lord,’ I said, matching my lord Ptah-hotep for obscurity.
‘Then I give you each other,’ said Akhnaten, joined our hands, and left, taking Master of the House Pannefer and the soldiers with him.
As soon as the entourage had gone, Ptah-hotep hugged me to his breast and said, ‘Oh, most quick-witted of women!’ and I began to laugh and couldn’t stop until the slave Meryt, ruler of the household, bought me a cup of undiluted wine.
‘Master, he just walked straight in, and I didn’t even have time to warn you,’ she said in an undertone to Ptah-hotep.
‘It’s all right, Meryt, not your fault. Pannefer is clearly watching me even closer than I thought. Now, some more wine for the lady and you can leave us.’
Then they all went away again, and I said to Ptah-hotep, ‘Perhaps we should lie down, in case we are still being watched, and then you can explain.’
He led me by the hand to his bed in the inner apartment. A woman had arranged the room, it was clear. There were lamps in the form of lotus flowers and a statue of an ibis. The walls were painted with scenes of fishing and fowling and were old fashioned but charming.
We lay down together on the big bed and I pillowed my head on his bare smooth chest. I have never felt comfortable lying with a man—except this one. I fitted into his embrace; there was none of the preliminary shoving as one worked out what to do with arm and elbow and knee. He seemed to feel the same sense of rightness, for he stroked my cheek gently with his free hand.
‘Lady, I have importuned you, put you into a false position, and by nightfall it will be all over the palace. Everyone will know that you are my lover. I apologise as profoundly as I can,’ he began hesitantly.
‘Lord, I have no particular objection to being known as your lover, I need an excuse to see you and be private with you, and you need not apologise,’ I replied.
He smelt lovely, of cinnamon oil, his own skin and the scribes’ scents of papyrus, sand and ink. ‘In fact the apology is due to you, because I have clearly endangered you by bringing a letter from Ammemmes into this exceptionally spy-ridden palace. I thought the Temple of Isis was gossipy,’ I said heatedly. ‘How long has the palace been like this?’
‘Ah, lady, a long time,’ he sighed. He sounded so weary that I moved, taking his head onto my breast, and he snuggled down into my embrace as though he had been lying with me for years.
‘It was kept in check while Osiris-Amenhotep was alive, that wise old man. He spoke to his son, saying that he was surrounding himself with sycophants and that he needed at least one counsellor who would tell him the truth, but my lord just looked at his father with those vague eyes. You see, he is convinced that there is no god but Aten, and when that was his own religion and no pain to any other, it was no trouble. But now he is so petted and encouraged by Pannefer and Huy and the others that he is intending to impose this Aten on all of Egypt. There is no god but the One, he says. There shall be no god but the One.’
‘So he has closed the temples of Amen-Re,’ I said. ‘And the others, as well? Are all the gods to be abandoned? What, then, will happen to the people?’
‘I do not know,’ he sighed. I stroked his shoulder and cheek and he nestled closer to me, twining his legs with mine.
We did not speak for a while, and I wondered if he had fallen asleep.