land for thou art Aten
and subdueth them for thy beloved son Akhnaten.
Thou art remote though thy rays are on earth.
Thou art in the sight of all, but thy ways are unknown.
Then I sang:
The Two Lands are thy festival.
They awake and stand upon their feet for thou hast raised them up.
They wash their limbs, they put on raiment, they raise their arms in adoration at thy appearance.
The entire earth performs its labours. All cattle are at peace in thy pastures. The trees and the grass grow green. The birds fly from their nests, their wings raised in praise of thy spirit. The animals dance on their hoofs; all winged created things live because thou hast risen for them.
This had always been my favourite part of the hymn. I recalled how enchanted I had been when I first took it down in my fast cursive, how the poem had grown on the whitened board under the spell of the soft voice of the King.
‘How wonderful are thy works!’ declared the King, forgetting his water-sickness, as he spoke his own words:
How mighty and how manifest to thy children!
They are hidden from the sight of men, Lord of the Sky, Sole God, like unto there is no other!
Unique One of the World, how sweet are thy ways!
Thou didst fashion the world according to thy desire when thy wast alone—all men, cattle great and small, all that are upon the earth that run upon feet or rise up on high on wings.
And the lands of Syria and Kush and Egypt—thou appointest every man to his place and satisfieth his needs.
Each man receives sustenance and his days are numbered. Their tongues are diverse in speech and their qualities likewise, and their colour is different because thou hast distinguished the nations.
My lord Akhnaten stood up and raised his arms as he declared the final blessing:
O Divine Lord of all,
All men toil for thee,
The Lord of every land, the Aten disc of the day-time, Great in majesty!’
And it occurred to me for the first time—considering how often I had repeated the hymn the realisation was late in coming—that unlike the previous hymn to Amen-Re, the Aten as a god had done nothing but create and provide. There was nothing in the hymn about compassion, or mercy, or justice, or kindness, or love.
And there were precious few of those qualities in the King, or in his Egypt.
Chapter Sixteen
Mutnodjme
I had never seen such a beautiful palace.
Ankhesenpaaten, who for some reason had decided to like me—and there was nothing I could do about this—took my hand and led me through all of the rooms of her mother’s palace, and it was remarkable.
Because the artisans were forbidden the use of the old outlines of gods—no falcon-headed Horus or cat-headed Basht—they had had to invent entirely new ways of depicting the world. The child told me that thousands of men had worked for months on the walls, and it showed.
Everywhere was light and colour and beauty. One whole room, for instance, was decorated with grapevines so real that one looked to pluck a handful of fruit. I stopped abruptly on what seemed to be the brink of a fish-filled pool, and Ankhesenpaaten laughed; the first natural sound I had heard out of that unnatural child. The pool was not real; it was a tesserae mosaic of fish and weed, so realistic that I had thought at first glance that I was about to step into water.
There were depictions of the royal family too; endless scenes of my Lord Akhnaten playing with his children, being anointed by his wife, offering piles of food to his sun god, and one delightful frieze of naked children playing games. The colours were bright, reds and browns and gold and blue.
We were alone in the centre of a room decorated all over with cornflowers and lotus, when the strange child suddenly said, ‘I was afraid,’ and I knelt down so that I could see into her face. She was thin limbed and big-bellied, like most children of that age, and instead of her usual bold stare she was eluding my gaze and biting her nails.
I decided that this was probably not a ruse of some sort and asked softly, ‘When were you afraid?’
‘When the soldier speared the teacher. There was blood. I was afraid.’
‘Yes, I’m sure that you were,’ I agreed, wondering what I could say that would not be reported back to every spy in the palace, or quoted where it would do most harm by the