Tutankhamun: The Book of Shadows (10 page)

‘Who was she?' she said, quietly.

‘Her name was Neferet. I think she worked in a brothel. She was your age. For what it's worth, I don't think she suffered. And I will find out why your amulet was found on her body.'

‘But somebody must have stolen it from my private chamber. Who could have done that? And why?'

She paced the corridor, anxiously. ‘I was right. Nowhere is safe. Look at this place. It is all shadows. Now do you believe me?'

She held up the amulet, which twisted, shining in the dark of the corridor. I saw tears gathering in her eyes.

‘I will never be able to wear this again,' she said, and walked silently away.

 

As soon as I re-entered the chamber, Ay turned on me.

‘Don't think this supports your presence here. This is nothing. It is mere nonsense.'

‘It may be nonsense, but it has worked in the way its creator intended.'

He snorted.

‘And that is?'

‘It has capitalized on the climate of fear.'

‘
The climate of fear
. How poetic.'

I wished I could swat him out of existence like a fly.

‘And once again, this “gift offering” has managed to reach the King himself. How did that happen?' he continued.

All eyes now turned to the soldier.

‘It was discovered in the Queen's apartments,' he admitted, reluctantly.

Even Ay was taken aback.

‘How is that possible?' he said intently. ‘What has happened to the security in the royal quarters?'

‘I am unable to offer an explanation,' said the soldier, in shame.

Ay was about to shout back at him, but suddenly he scowled, and gripped his jaw, as a sudden spasm of toothache afflicted him.

‘And who discovered it?' he continued, as the attack subsided.

‘Ankhesenamun herself,' offered Khay.

Ay pondered the box for a moment.

‘This will not happen again. You understand the penalty of failure?'

The soldier saluted.

‘And I suggest you and the great Seeker of Mysteries acquaint yourselves. Perhaps two idiots are better than one, although experience suggests otherwise.'

He paused.

‘There can be no more disturbances in the security of the palace. You will both report to me before the Colonnade Hall opening ceremony with your proposals for the King's security.'

 

And so he departed. A little of the tension in the room abated. The soldier introduced himself as Simut, Commander of the Palace Guard. We made dutiful gestures of respect, and said the right formulas, but he looked at me like a man who would relish my ruination. I was intruding on his territory.

‘Who has access to this chamber?' I asked.

‘The Queen's ladies…the King, those who serve him, those who serve here, and no others…' said Khay.

‘There are guards stationed at every entrance to the royal quarters,' said Simut. ‘Everyone must possess permissions to pass.'

‘Therefore it must have been delivered by someone with high-priority access who moves with ease within the royal quarters,' I replied. ‘I imagine that, once past the security points, in order to allow the family some privacy, there are no guards and no searches within the royal quarters themselves?'

Khay nodded, uncomfortably.

‘The competence of the royal guards is absolutely not in question, but there is clearly a serious flaw somewhere that has allowed this object, and the carving, to appear here. I'm sure you'll agree it is imperative we put in place more stringent security arrangements for the King and Queen, both within the quarters and in public. When is the Colonnade Hall to be commemorated?' I asked.

‘In two days' time,' said Khay. ‘But tomorrow there is a gathering of the Council of Karnak which the King must attend.'

‘Tomorrow?' I frowned. ‘That is unfortunate.'

Khay nodded.

‘What is “unfortunate” is that these “disturbances” could not have happened at a worse time,' he replied.

‘It is no coincidence,' intoned Simut in his humourless, military fashion. ‘If this were a conventional situation, such as a battle, I could see the enemy facing me. But this is different. This enemy is invisible. He could be one of us. He may be inside this palace now. He certainly
seems to know everything about its layout, its protocols and hierarchies.'

‘So we have a problem, for I imagine you cannot simply question elite men high in the order of power, without the strongest evidence,' I said.

‘Alas, that is true,' Khay replied wearily, as if all his energy had suddenly departed.

‘Nevertheless, every one of them is now a suspect. A list of names would be a start. And some simple questions about their whereabouts and so on would help to clarify the situation. We need to know who was here in the quarters tonight, and who has no alibi,' I offered.

‘But at the same time we must not reveal anything of these objects. It is imperative we maintain strict silence on this matter,' said Khay nervously.

‘My assistant will gladly help you assemble the information, and make the preliminary enquiries,' I replied.

Khay glanced at Khety, and was about to accept when Simut intervened.

‘The security of the royal quarters is my responsibility. I will have the information prepared immediately.'

‘Very well,' I replied. ‘And I assume you will also include your own guards in the list of those with access to the area?'

He was about to confront me, but I interrupted.

‘Believe me, I have no cause and no wish to doubt the integrity of your guards. But I'm sure you must agree we cannot afford to overlook any possibility, however unlikely or unacceptable.'

Eventually he nodded in unhappy acquiescence.

And so we parted.

‘What a spectacle!' said Khety, blowing out his cheeks. ‘That place reminds me of a particularly brutal school. There are always the big boys and the small boys. There are the ones who use their fists, and the ones who use their brains. There are the despots and the warriors and the diplomats and the servants. And there's also always one strange child somewhere, off to the side, tormenting another poor creature slowly to death. That's Ay,' he said.

The moonlit land drifted past as we sailed up the channel towards the Great River. I watched the dark water disappear under the keel for a little while before I spoke.

‘Did you notice on the underside of the lid, the markings? In particular the black circle? It's some kind of language…'

Khety shook his head.

‘What I noticed was the maker's nasty imagination, and his appetite for blood and guts,' he said.

‘But he is educated, highly skilled, and almost certainly a member
of the elite. His fascination with blood and guts, as you put it, is because they represent something to him. They are symbols, rather than things in themselves.'

‘Try telling that to the girl with no face, or the boy with the shattered bones, or the new mystery man missing his own head,' he replied, accurately enough.

‘It's not the same thing. And are we right to assume we're dealing with the same man in all cases?' I asked him.

‘Well, just consider the connections, and the timing, and the style,' he replied.

‘I have done. Similar imagery is deployed. The same obsessions with decay and destruction appear. And somewhere in all of this, I sense a love of beauty and perfection. There's almost a sorrow to these actions. A kind of grotesque pity for the victims…'

Khety looked at me as if I had lost my mind.

‘When you talk like this, I'm glad no one can overhear us. How can there be sorrow in slicing off a girl's beautiful face? All I can see is the horrible, vicious cruelty. And anyway, how does that help us?'

We sat in silence for a while. Thoth at my feet gazed up at the moon. Khety was right, of course. What faced us was possibly just madness. Was I imagining patterns where perhaps none existed? And yet still I sensed something. Underneath the killings and the brutality, under the threats of iconoclasm and destruction, was something deeper, and darker: some kind of search, or vision. But if we were right, and the same man was responsible for all of these events, then there was a bigger question to answer: why? Why was he doing this?

‘I also think whoever is responsible wants us to know he is an insider, in order to enhance the power of his threat. In fact, part of the game is to make us feel he is watching us all,' continued Khety. And as he said this, I suddenly realized the gifts and deaths had another element in common:
Rahotep, Seeker of Mysteries.

We had just reached the jetty, and so rather than share it with him, I decided to let this odd thought sit at the back of my mind for a little while. It seemed too foolish and vain a thing to articulate.

 

I bade farewell to Khety, and with Thoth padding ahead of me walked home through the curfew streets. I released the baboon to his bed, and entered the dark house. Its silence upbraided me for my absence. Sometimes I feel I do not belong in this house of young women and old men and babies. I remained in the kitchen for a while before retiring to sleep. By the light of the oil lamp in its niche, which Tanefert had left for my return, I poured myself a large cup of decent red wine from the Kharga oasis, and set a few dried figs and almonds on a dish.

I sat down on the bench in my usual place beneath the statuette of the household God who knows I do not believe in him, and thought about families. It often seems to me that all troubles and all crimes begin with families. Even in our ancient stories, it is jealous brothers who kill each other, enraged wives who castrate their husbands, and furious children who avenge themselves on their culpable or innocent parents. I remembered how the girls still sweep from tender affection to murderous rage, from stroking each other's hair to dragging it out with their bare hands, in an instant, over some cause so minor even they blush for shame when it is confessed.

And so it is in marriage. We have a good marriage. If I have disappointed Tanefert by my lack of worldly success then she has disguised it well. She says she did not marry me for my fortune. And then she gives me one of her knowing smiles. But I know there are half-understood things between us that we keep in silence, as if words would somehow make them too painfully real. Perhaps it is so between all couples whose relations have survived for many years; the unnoticed influences of habit, and the perils of domestic tedium. Even the familiarity with each other's bodies, once so obsessively desired, leads to an undeniable hunger for the surprise of a stranger's beauty. The beauty and the contempt of familiarity…perhaps that is what I need to escape, when I relish the excitement of my work? The thought does not make me proud. I am now a man in the middle of the way of my life, and I am afraid of the middle way of it all…Why can I not be satisfied with everything the household God above me has granted?

If it is so for ordinary people like us, then how much stranger it must be to be born into a family whose purpose is public, and whose privacy has to be defended and policed continuously like a terrible secret? For all their wealth and power, the children of the royal family and of most elite families are raised in an air devoid of human warmth. What do they talk about at dinnertime? Matters of state? Manners at a banquet? Do they have to hear, over and over, the heroic stories of their grandfather, Amenhotep the Great, who they know they will always fail to emulate? And if my girls argue over the possession of a comb, then how must it have been when siblings struggled for possession of treasure, power, and the Two Crowns?

But I had seen two siblings who did not seem to be struggling for power. They seemed to be close, and supportive, perhaps bonded by their miseries under Ay's control. The affection between them had seemed entirely genuine. But Ankhesenamun's plan had one flaw. Tutankhamun was no warrior King. His virtues might be in his mind, but they clearly did not lie in physical prowess. Unfortunately the world requires its kings to demonstrate their vitality and virility in parades and protestations and adventures of power. Yes, heroic statues could be carved from stone, and impressive carvings could be set up in temples announcing Tutankhamun's feats and campaigns and restorations of the old traditions and authorities. And Ankhesenamun's own ancestry would help, for although she was still young she carried strong echoes of her mother–her beauty, her popularity, her independence of mind. And she had shown remarkable resilience this evening in confronting Ay. But the fact remained that at the heart of the great drama of state power was a flaw: the Image of the Living God was a clever, but frightened and physically not very heroic young man. That made both him and the Queen vulnerable. And whoever was tormenting the King with fear understood this.

 

Tanefert was standing in the dark doorway, watching me. I moved to make room for her. She sat next to me, and nibbled on an almond.

‘Will there ever be a night when I know for sure no one will knock on the door, to ask you to come away with them?'

I put my arm around her and hugged her close, but this was not what she wanted.

‘Never,' she said. ‘Never.'

No words came to my aid to make this better.

‘I think I am used to it. I accept it. I know it is your work. But sometimes, like tonight, when we are celebrating, I want you here, and I want to know you will not leave. And that's impossible. Because crime and cruelty and bloodshed are part of what people do to each other; and so you will always have more work. There will always be more knocks on the door in the night.'

She looked away.

‘I always, always want to be here with you,' I stammered.

She turned to look me in the eye.

‘I'm afraid. I'm afraid one day you will not come back to me. And I could not endure that.'

She kissed me sadly, rose, and walked away into the passage's darkness.