“Tell me...” I say brokenly, humbly, to my old enemy.
He smiles.
“Need I tell you? You are no fool. You know the ambition of the queen for her own flesh and blood.”
“But –” I was thinking of Sitamun herself. Was she so over-awed by Tiye that she allowed herself to be taken as wife then kept in obscurity among the foreign princesses as though she were no more than they? Childless as far as any one knew; dying young. I had never seen her, except perhaps in a dream, weeping, standing behind her father-husband and his wife, Tiye.
Somewhere in my heart words I can hardly comprehend are beating. Akhenaten is my brother! Akhenaten is my brother!
It seems to me that the great void is very, very near. I could reach out and pick up the crook and the flail — or I could reach out and pick up a fe
