Out of the Black Land - By Kerry Greenwood Page 0,8

and Lower Lands, and her skin was as white as milk and her face rounded and smooth. I knew that her hair was red, thought to be unlucky, the colour of Set the Adversary and of Desaret, the Red Waste outside Khemet the Black Land. I knew that there had been trouble with the priests when the Lord Amenhotep had married the foreign woman, although he was Pharaoh and could presumably marry as he pleased, and there were no royal children left from his father’s reign. But I also knew that she had borne sons and daughters to the King and he doted on her. I saw the great crown tilt as Queen Tiye smiled at Nefertiti, and my sister sighed with relief.

Then the priests censed everyone, declared a blessing in language so hieratic that I could not understand it, and we were released to go back to the palace at Thebes and feast.

It was a good feast, and I was sick, after all.

Ptah-hotep

When Pharaoh declares his wish, it is as good as done; and so it was with me. I slept one more night with the trainee scribes in the dormitory. My destiny had been declared. I would now not be a priest. I had no great leaning towards such a life, anyway. I had just wanted to be a skilful scribe, if I had to be a scribe, not a priest.

But I was distracted with grief at leaving my heart’s brother. The Master of Scribes, for some reason, relaxed his usual rule and allowed us to sleep my last night together. In fact the Master seemed strangely sorry for me, considering the fact that everyone else was congratulating me on my amazingly good fortune. He sent me bread and roasted goose and fruit from his own table, and the servant who brought it had been ordered to stay and serve Kheperren and myself as though we were grown and masters in our own house.

We sat in my little room, one on either side of a borrowed table, dressed in our best clothes, and the servant poured wine for us whenever our cups were empty. And because I was a boy and my heart had already been broken when Pharaoh touched my shoulders with the flail, I began to enjoy myself. The food was good, and we ate heartily and drank deep, and drunkenly embraced. Then we slept in each other’s arms all night, and I woke to the dawn twittering of the swallows who nest in the temple of Amen-Re and saw my brother, my spouse, asleep with his head pillowed on his arm. By the cool light he was to me entirely beautiful and unexpressively dear. The light embraced the curve of his olive cheek and the fringe of his sooty eyelashes. Kheperren’s other hand had been curled on my chest as I slept beside him.

I stood silently in the doorway, my bundle of possessions in my hand—a few spare cloths, a childhood amulet given to me by my father, the usual belongings. My palette and the gear of my trade had already gone to the palace. I did not want to wake Kheperren. I feared I would not survive a farewell.

So I dipped my finger in lamp-black and wrote ‘I will always love you’ on the wall near his face, where he would see it when his eyes opened, and went away.

I washed in the sacred lake, put on my best cloth, painted my eyes with kohl to protect them from the glare, and went with the servant who had come from the Lord of the Upper and Lower Lands to take me to the palace.

And despite my best resolutions, I wept all the way.

I was met by a Chamberlain, who exclaimed, ‘So young! Amen-Re have compassion on us, boy, you cannot appear before Pharaoh like that. Come in here.’ He ushered me into an anteroom where a young woman was bandaging a slave’s foot. She did it very neatly, I noticed in my dreary grief. She dismissed the slave with a pat on the toe and an injunction to rest for at least a week, and then turned her attention to me; as the Master of Slaves scolded her patient for being stupid enough to put his foot under a falling bench. ‘And you the King’s favourite cup bearer, what am I going to tell him?’

‘This is the King Akhnamen’s new scribe,’ said the Chamberlain, a fussy man of middle age wearing too much jewellery