The Heretic King

Chapter One: The Second Son The funeral of a prince is quieter than the funeral of a king, and Amenhotep, who was eleven years old, learned this the way he learned most things: by standing at the edge of the room while the grown people forgot he was there. It was the season of Akhet, when the river rose and spread across the black land like a second sky. All of Thebes smelled of wet earth, rotting reeds, and the sweet resin smoke of the embalmers’ fires. For seventy days his brother’s body had lain in the House of Purification on the west bank, being drained and dried and packed with salt. For seventy days the palace had behaved as though nothing at all had happened. The cooks baked. The scribes counted grain. The musicians practiced in the garden courts of Malkata, and their harps drifted over the artificial lake his father had ordered dug for his queen—a lake so large it had taken fifteen days to flood. Only the women wept, and they wept behind screens. Now the seventy days were over, and the whole court stood on the quay in the grey light before dawn, waiting for the barges. Amenhotep stood a little apart from his sisters. He knew that he looked wrong among them. The princesses had been born with their mother’s grace, small-boned and level-eyed, and they wore their wigs and linen as if the clothes had grown on them. He had been born long. His face was long, his jaw narrow and jutting, his neck a stalk that bent forward under the weight of the band they had pinned to his brow. His arms hung nearly to his knees. His hips were wide and his calves thin, so that when he ran—which he was no longer permitted to do—he ran like a heron startled out of the shallows. He had heard the servants whisper about it, in the way servants do, in voices pitched just low enough to be denied later. The second son, they said. The one the gods did not finish. His brother had been finished. His brother had been the finest thing the Two Lands had produced in a generation: broad in the shoulder, quick to laugh, a boy who could draw a bow and recite the Teachings of Ptahhotep in the same breath, and who had been named High Priest of Ptah at Memphis before his voice had finished breaking. Thutmose. Crown Prince Thutmose, beloved of the gods, the future Lord of the Two Lands. He had come home from the north in the heat of summer with a fever in his chest, and in nine days he had gone from a young god to a shape in a linen sheet. Amenhotep had not been permitted to see him in those nine days. He had been told it was a lung sickness and that it was catching. But he had listened at the door of his mother’s rooms, and he had heard what no one meant him to hear: the physicians quarreling in low voices over the charms and the poultices, the chantress of Sekhmet muttering her litany, and at the end, very late on the ninth night, a sound he had not recognised until much later. It was the sound of his father, the Great King, the Dazzling Sun, the Lord of Joy, who had ruled for thirty years and raised more statues of himself than all the kings before him, weeping like a field labourer. The barges came out of the mist with their oars lifting and dripping, and a hush went over the quay. A steward in a white kilt found him at last and bent to his ear. “The Queen asks for you, Majesty.” Nobody had yet called him Majesty. The steward stumbled over the title as if he had picked it up off the ground and did not know whether it was his to hand over. Amenhotep nodded as though he had not noticed. They walked him up the gangplank between rows of fan-bearers and standard-bearers, past officials who bowed to him with a precision that was almost an insult, as if they were bowing to a boy whose place on the ladder of the world had suddenly, awkwardly, become uncertain. His sisters were left to follow in the second barge. He walked alone. The coffin lay under a canopy on the deck, a shape of gilded wood too bright for the grey dawn. Beside it, in a chair that had been bolted to the planks, sat the king. Amenhotep had not seen his father in half a month, and the sight of him now turned his stomach. The Great King had always been enormous, a man whose belly had the quiet confidence of wealth, whose laughter carried across a hall. But he sat now like a sack that had been emptied. His jaw was swollen on one side, where the rotten teeth that tormented him had bred their poison, and he pressed a cloth against it as if he could keep the pain from spilling out into the world. The royal regalia sat on him as though borrowed. Beside the chair, upright as a post, stood his mother. Queen Tiye did not weep, and she did not lean, and she did not look at her husband. She looked at the river. She was not beautiful in the manner of the court paintings; she was small and dark and sharp-featured, with a mouth that closed like a trap. She had come out of a provincial family in Akhmim to sit beside the greatest king in the world, and she had never once, in Amenhotep’s hearing, been grateful for it. He had been afraid of her all his life. He had also, in a corner of himself he did not examine, been in love with her, in the helpless way that very small children love the sun. She did not turn her head when he reached her side. After a moment he looked at the river too, because that was what she wanted. Behind her stood a heavy-faced man in a plain wig whom Amenhotep knew as Ay, a kinsman of the Queen’s from Akhmim, a man whose title changed every year or two and whose face never did. Ay’s eyes passed over the boy, took some measure of him, and moved on. It was the look of a man pricing livestock. Amenhotep had learned to recognise it, and had learned also that it was best not to flinch. The oars bit. The barge slid out into the current, and the quay of Thebes drew back behind them. The temples of Karnak rose out of the mist to the north like a mountain range made by men: pylons, obelisks, the gilded tips of flagpoles catching the first light before anything else in the world. Amun’s house. Amun’s wealth. For five hundred years the kings of Egypt had given that god the gold of Nubia and the cattle of Syria, and the god, being a god, had never once said enough. The Great King did not speak. Up close his illness was worse. The swelling had pulled his mouth to one side, and he breathed through it with a thin whistle that carried over the slap of the water. When the barge rocked he closed his eyes. Once, as if he had only just become aware of the boy beside him, he turned his heavy head and looked at Amenhotep for what felt like a very long time. “You have grown,” he said thickly. “Yes, Father.” “You were small when I last looked.” The king’s eyes drifted away again, back to the casket under its canopy. “He was never small. Even when he was born, he was large. The midwives said so. They said, this one has come to be king.” A ragged breath. “I should not have sent him north. The air in Memphis. I told him it was an honour.” No one answered. Tiye’s hand moved, very slightly, on the rail; that was all. Amenhotep understood that he had been shown something he was not supposed to see, and that the proper response was to keep his face still and his mouth closed. He did both, although something in his chest had begun to shake. Ay leaned toward the Queen once and murmured something too low to hear. Tiye answered with a single word, and Amenhotep saw Ay’s heavy mouth twitch in what might have been approval. The two of them had the manner of conspirators who had long ago stopped needing to speak. He understood, dimly, that he was standing in the presence of a decision, that the decision concerned him, and that no one would tell him what it was. They crossed the flooded plain on the west bank by a causeway raised above the water, and the Colossi rose ahead of them out of the lake of the inundation: two seated figures of the king, each as tall as ten men standing on one another’s shoulders, facing east with their hands on their knees and their faces calm. Behind them sprawled his father’s mortuary temple, still half-built, its walls crawling with scaffolding and painted ramps. Amenhotep had been told since infancy that the king was a god. He had never known whether the statues were meant to prove the claim or merely to state it. They looked patient. They looked like beings who could wait for the end of the world. The procession left the river and climbed. The priests of Amun went first, shaven-headed, in leopard skins and linen so white it hurt the eyes, led by the High Prophet Ptahmose, a lean man with a face like a closed door. Behind them came the sem-priests with their censers, the lector-priests with their scrolls, the mourning women with their hair unbound and their breasts streaked with Nile mud, wailing in a high, rhythmic keening that rose and fell like the cry of a bird. Oxen drew the sledge that bore the coffin. And at the head of the sledge walked a man wearing the black head of the jackal. Amenhotep had seen the mask of Anubis before, at other funerals, and each time it had frightened him a little. The priest inside it was a man with a name and a wife and a house in the street of the weavers. Yet under the climbing sun, with the long black muzzle swinging and the shadowed eye-holes staring, he was not a man. He was the god of the embalmers himself, walking in front of the dead toward the scales. Amenhotep found that he could not stop looking, and he found, too, that looking made his skin crawl, and he did not know why. In a hollow among the cliffs, where the rock had been cut into a doorway, they stopped. The coffin was stood upright on a bed of sand, facing south. The heat was already gathering, though the sun had barely cleared the hills. Ptahmose raised the adze of the Opening of the Mouth, its blade made of iron from the sky, and spoke the old words in the old tongue, and his dry, certain voice rolled out across the stones. I have opened your mouth. I have opened your eyes. You will eat, you will drink, you will walk among the living.