here who love you almost as much. There is my little brother Tutankhaten, he is only two years old, he needs you, Mother, and I need you. You cannot leave us yet!’
He allowed the Queen to lay her head on his smooth shoulder and stroked her cheek, adding with just a trace of mischief, ‘And you have to come to my coronation,’ and Tiye laughed. It wasn’t a very good laugh, being bitter and brief, but it was a laugh.
‘Very well, sweet son,’ she agreed. ‘I will stay awhile yet,’ and Smenkhare kissed her.
Ptah-hotep
I woke, hearing voices at the door, very late on the night which was once the feast of Isis and Osiris, and a sleepy Meryt admitted a lamp-bearing woman into my chamber and shut the door after her with a slam. Meryt hates to be woken from her first sleep. My sandclock showed the time to be almost midnight. I heard the guard changing outside.
‘All well?’ asked the relieving guard.
‘All well,’ answered the soldier, and I heard him march away.
No wind was blowing. It was so still that I heard Meryt grunt as she lay down beside Teti in the outer chamber where she insisted on sleeping so that I could not be surprised. Meryt had appetites and her brother Teti supplied them. I wondered that the Nubians had similar customs to our own Royal House until I found that Teti was not the son of Meryt’s father or Meryt’s mother, but what in Egypt we would call a cousin. I had lain alone more nights than I could count, hearing them making love, which emphasised my loneliness.
Now I was not alone. I knew of only one woman whom Meryt would have allowed into my bedchamber without introduction.
‘Lady Mutnodjme,’ I said, struggling up onto one elbow and tipping over my neck-rest. ‘This is an unexpected honour.’
‘I mean you no harm,’ she said, crossing the room with her peasant’s stride. She set down the lamp. It was a small saucer-shaped oil lamp in the shape of an opium-poppy. It gave very little light, just a small bead of pale flame. In the half-darkness I saw that the lady Mutnodjme was quite naked.
She was rounded and full, with heavy breasts, wide hips and strong thighs. Her ringletted ebony hair fell almost to her waist and she shook it back impatiently. At the junction of thighs and belly was a perfect triangle of pale flesh and a cleft which was the entrance to the female mystery.
‘What do you want of me, lady?’ I asked. She came closer and sat down familiarly on the edge of my bed.
‘I want you to listen to the mysteries of the Firebird,’ she said, and I listened to her voice as she whispered to me of blinded musicians and a sister possessed of a strange worship. I wondered why she had come to tell me such things in the middle of the night and caught myself in a yawn. I knew now what no man knew, but it was not a useful secret. Misuses of the law had become commonplace. I said so.
‘Lady, the King orders whole provinces flogged if they do not pay his bounty,’ I said, my mouth almost touching her ear.
‘He ordered the Nomarch of the Nome of the Black Bull to have his ears cropped for not providing labour, even though it is the wrong season.
‘He sent the Nomarch of Set to the quarries and he sends men who are not slaves to work in the mines. And they die, but he does not care, for they provide him with eye-stones for his statues and gold for his bounties.’
‘That is true,’ she sighed, and for some reason we lay down together, her thigh touching my thigh, her hand clasping mine on her rounded belly.
‘There is no justice in the Black Land, and no peace, and no safety for any man, for at any moment the Pharaoh Akhnaten may order his home, his sons and his cattle seized to pay a tax which he has just imposed for the construction of Amarna and the glory of the Aten,’ I said, a litany of misery which I had never voiced before.
‘It is true,’ she responded, very sadly.
‘The Nile does not rise and the farmers will hunger this year,’ I said into the dark, rush-scented hair. Her mouth was very close to my mouth as she breathed, ‘This is true.’
‘And the old gods are angry, for their altars are empty and their worship abandoned;