The Twelfth Transforming

PENGUIN CANADA

THE TWELFTH TRANSFORMING

Pauline Gedge is the award-winning author of the bestsellers
Scroll of Saqqara, House of Dreams, House of Illusions, The Twelfth Transforming, Stargate, The Eagle and the Raven
and
Child of the Morning. The Horus Road
concludes her “Lord of the Two Lands” trilogy, which began with
The Hippopotamus Marsh
and
The Oasis
. Her books have sold more than 100,000 copies in Canada alone. She lives in Alberta.

PENGUIN CANADA

Published by the Penguin Group

Penguin Books, a division of Pearson Canada, 10 Alcorn Avenue, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4V 3B2

Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

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Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

First published by Macmillan of Canada Limited, 1984

Published in Penguin Books, 1996

Published in Penguin Canada, a division of Pearson Canada, 2003

1   3   5   7   9   10   8   6   4   2

Copyright © Pauline Gedge, 1984

All rights reserved.

Publisher’s note: This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental
.

Manufactured in Canada.

NATIONAL LIBRARY OF CANADA CATALOGUING IN PUBLICATION DATA

Gedge, Pauline, 1945-

The twelfth transforming

ISBN 0-14-301430-7

1. Akhenaton, King of Egypt—Fiction.

2. Egypt—History—Eighteenth dynasty, ca. 1570–1320 B.C.—Fiction. I. Title.

PS8563.E33T83   2003      C813’.54   C2002-904500-2

PR9199.3.G415T8 2003

Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

Visit Penguin Books’ website at
www.penguin.ca

For my sons, Simon and Roger. With love
.

BOOK ONE

1

T
he empress Tiye left her quarters escorted by four Followers of His Majesty and her chief herald. Beneath the torches that lined the passage between her chamber and the garden doors stood the palace guards, scimitars sheathed in leather scabbards, white kilts and blue and white leather helmets cool and startling against brown skin. As she passed, spears were thrust forward and heads bowed. The garden lay unlit, the smothering darkness untouched by the desert stars that flared overhead. The little company paced the paths briskly, paused, were admitted through the dividing wall into Pharaoh’s own acres, and passed along the rear wall of the palace.

Outside the tall double doors from which Pharaoh often issued to walk in his garden or stand and gaze at the western hills, Tiye ordered her escort to wait, and she and the herald plunged into the passageway beyond. As she walked, her glance, always drawn to the confusion of painted images on the walls, moved up to the frieze under the line of the ceiling. Pharaoh’s throne name, inscribed in gold leaf set in fragrant cedar from Amki, was repeated continuously.
Nebmaatra: The Lord of Truth is Ra
. There was nowhere in all the acres the palace covered where one could go to escape from the words.

Tiye came to a halt, and Pharaoh’s steward, Surero, rose from his seat by the door and prostrated himself.

“Surero, please announce to His Majesty that the Goddess of the Two Lands is waiting,” her herald said, and Surero disappeared, emerging moments later to bow Tiye into the room. Her herald settled on the floor of the passage, and the doors were closed behind her as she walked forward.

Pharaoh Amunhotep III, Lord of All the World, sat on a chair beside his lion couch, naked but for a wisp of fine linen draped across his loins and a soft blue bag wig surmounted by a golden cobra. The gentle yellow light from the dozens of lamps in stands or on the low tables scattered about the chamber slid like costly oils over his broad shoulders, the loose swell of his belly, the thick paleness of his massive thighs. His face was unpainted. The once square, forceful jaw was now lost in folds of sagging flesh, the cheeks sunken and drawn, evidence of the lost teeth and gum disease that plagued him. His nose had flattened as he had aged, balancing the decay of his lower face, and only the high, tight forehead and the black eyes that still dominated even without kohl told of the handsome, florid youth he had been. One foot rested on a stool while a slave, cosmetic box open beside him and brush in hand, knelt to paint the royal sole with red henna.

Tiye glanced about. The room smelt of stale sweat, heavy Syrian incense, and wilting flowers. Though a slave was moving quietly from one lamp to another, trimming their wicks, the flames gave off a gray miasma that stung her throat and left the room so dusky that Tiye could barely make out the giant figures of Bes, god of love, music, and the dance, that gyrated silently and clumsily around the walls. Now and then a flicker would illuminate an extended red tongue or a silver navel on the dwarf deity’s swollen belly or would run rapidly along the leonine ears, but tonight Bes was largely an unseen presence. Tiye’s eyes returned to the couch, rumpled and strewn with crisp mandrake leaves and bruised lotus, and now noticed a small black-haired form lying under the sheet, breathing quietly in sleep.

“Well, Tiye, you have taken an inordinate amount of trouble with your appearance tonight,” Amunhotep said, his voice echoing sullenly against the invisible ceiling. “Have you come to seduce me all over again? I remember perfectly well that you wore blue and forget-me-nots the first night you came to this room.”

Tiye smiled and went swiftly to kneel before him, kissing his feet. “The courtiers would die of horror if I wore such an unfashionable thing today,” she teased, rising to stand, perfectly composed, before him. “How is Pharaoh’s health today?”

“Pharaoh’s health has been better, as you well know. My mouth aches, my head aches, my back aches. All day the magicians have droned outside the door, and I have suffered them because I owe Egypt every opportunity to cure me, but the fools sing to hear the sound of their own voices. They have finally gone to swill their well-earned beer and riffle through their scrolls of spells. Do you think I have a demon in me, Tiye?”

“You have had a demon in you all your life, my husband,” she retorted. “This you know very well. Is that wine in the jug?”

“No, it is a mandrake infusion, black and foul-tasting. I prescribed it for myself. I have found that it not only acts as an aphrodisiac, something every boy knows by the time he is twelve, but it also surprises me by deadening my pain.” He looked at her slyly, and they both laughed.

“Princess Tadukhipa is bringing Ishtar from Mitanni with her, to cure you,” Tiye said lightly. “The goddess cured you before, do you remember? Tushratta was very pleased.”

“Of course that greedy Mitanni king was pleased. I sent him back his precious Ishtar coated with gold, and a mountain of ingots as well. I am making him rich again, this time for his daughter. I hope she is worth all the expense.” He pulled his foot away from the servant. “The henna is dry, and the other sole is done. Go. You also!” he shouted at the lamp trimmer. When they had backed down the expanse of tessellated floor and the doors had closed silently behind them, Amunhotep sobered. “Well, my Tiye, what is on your mind? You did not come here to make love to a fat old god with rotting teeth.”

She quickly suppressed the moment of anxiety such talk from him always brought to her. He was shrewd and cold, this man, extracting a pitiless amusement out of every human failing, even his own, and he better than any other knew the irony in his description of himself. For at Soleb, in Nubia, his priest worshipped him with incense and song night and day, and a thousand candles burned before a colossal statue of Amunhotep, the living god, a likeness that neither aged nor sickened.

“I want to talk to you privately, Horus.” She indicated the boy. “Please send him away.”

Amunhotep’s eyebrows rose. He heaved himself out of the chair and moved to the couch with surprising agility, folding back the sheet and gently stroking the sleeping child’s naked flank. “Wake and go,” he said. “The queen is here.”

The boy groaned, turned onto his back, and opened dark, kohl-circled eyes. Seeing Tiye, he slid from Pharaoh’s hand onto the floor, bent his knee, and without a word strode away.

“He is older than he looks,” Amunhotep remarked without a trace of defensiveness. “He is thirteen.”

Tiye sat on the edge of the couch, regarding him coolly. “Nonetheless, you know very well that he is forbidden. This, of all the ancient laws, is the harshest, and the man who brings such a curse on his house is rewarded with death; he and his lover both.”

Amunhotep shrugged. “I am the law today. Besides, Tiye, why should this infraction worry you? Between us, you and I have broken every law in the empire.”

Including the one against murder, Tiye thought. Aloud she said, “It is the superstitious gossip that worries me. Your appetites are legendary, and the rumors over the years have only served to enhance you in the eyes of your subjects and your foreign vassals. But this…this will bring ugly whispers, the rubbing of amulets, hostility toward you where there was only adoration and fear.”

“I care nothing for them, any of them. Why should l? I am the most powerful god the world has ever seen. I speak, and men live or die. I do as I please. And you, Great One of Double Plumes, lady of unlimited power, you sphinx with breasts and claws, why do you frown over this small indiscretion?”

“I neither frown nor smile. I simply tell you the temper of your people. While the courtiers do not care, all others will.”

“To Sebek with them, then.” He lowered himself onto the couch and leaned back, breathing heavily. “I have made you in the image of the man I might have been. I did not want to be that man. You govern while I am content to pursue, well, whatever it is I am still hungry for and have not caught. Immortality in a jug of wine, perhaps. The latent fertility in a woman’s body. The essence of my own manhood in that boy. The gods do not have it, and neither does Egypt. Whatever it is.”

“I know,” she said softly, and for a moment he smiled back. They regarded each other in a comfortable, intimate glance born of years of perfect understanding, Tiye disregarding all but the unpredictable man behind the ruin of the body, a man she would always love. Finally she sighed and handed him the cup of mandrake juice, weighing her next words carefully in the seconds the small gesture gave her.