The Heretic King

Chapter One: The Second Son PART 2

Amenhotep had been taught the words by his tutor, a patient scribe named Senneferi, who had also taught him to grind ink and hold a reed and read the signs of the god’s speech: the owl, the quail chick, the coiled rope. He knew that the signs were holy. He knew that the world had been spoken into being, and that the spoken words were written, and that the written words were power. He also knew, in the plain way that a boy of eleven knows things, that the man inside that gilded case could not hear a word of it.

That was when he saw the cat.

She lay in a small coffin of her own, borne on a litter behind the great sledge by a weeping servant, no longer than a man’s forearm, her carved face turned as if in sleep. Ta-miu, Thutmose had called her, which meant only the cat, because his brother had never wasted effort on names for the things he loved. She had slept on his chest. She had followed him through every garden in the palace with her tail up like a standard. When the body had been carried home from Memphis she had been found curled at its feet in the boat, and had refused all food, and in the end she had been mercifully put to sleep by the palace physicians so that she could follow her master. Amenhotep, who had loved her nearly as much as his brother had, had been told this as a kindness.

He watched the jackal-headed priest lean over the little coffin and mutter the words, and something that had been tight and cold in him since the night at his mother’s door gave way without warning. His eyes stung. His throat closed. He did what he had been trained to do and stood perfectly still while the tears ran down his face, and nobody in all that crowd—not his mother, not his father, not Ay—seemed to notice.

When it was over, and the coffin had been carried into the dark of the rock, and the doors sealed and plastered and stamped with the jackal and the nine bound captives, which was the seal of the necropolis, the court dispersed beneath awnings to eat and drink and murmur. The old king, white-faced, was helped away to a litter. Tiye went with him. The boy was left at the rim of the shade with nothing to do and no one to tell him to do it.

Ptahmose passed him on the way to the offering tables. On an impulse he could not have said he had decided upon, Amenhotep stepped into his path.

“Prophet. Where has he gone?”

The High Prophet of Amun looked down. His eyes were pale for an Egyptian, and cold, and they travelled over the boy’s long face with a flicker that Amenhotep knew well. It was the flicker of a man who sees something that does not fit his picture of what a prince should be, and who dislikes it on principle.

“Your brother has gone to the Hall of the Two Truths, Highness,” the priest said. “His heart will be weighed against the feather of Maat. If it is light, he will be presented to Osiris and live forever in the Field of Reeds.”

“Is that what the jackal does? Takes him there?”

“Anubis guides the dead.”

“But he is a man,” Amenhotep said. “Under the mask. I know who he is. His name is Pawah. His brother sells sandals.” He was aware that he had said something he should not have, and he could not seem to stop. “And the cat. Will she go too? Does she weigh her heart? Does she have one?”

Something moved behind the priest’s face, very fast, and was gone. “These are matters for the learned, Highness,” he said. “It is not meant that a prince should trouble himself with them.” He inclined his head, in a manner exactly short of insult, and moved on.

Amenhotep stood looking after him, hot with shame and with something else he could not name—a kind of outrage that grew rather than shrank. It was not that the priest had refused to answer. It was the unmistakable sense that there was no answer; that behind the jackal and the scales and the feather and the Field of Reeds there was only the sealed door and the sand; and that the whole vast machinery of the gods, the temples and the gold and the priests with their chins in the air, was an elaborate way of not saying so.

He was eleven. He did not have the words for it. He would not have the words for it for years.

He slipped away from the feast in the afternoon, when the heat lay on the valley like a hand and the nobles had retreated into stupor. No one stopped him. A boy who is neither the heir nor the favourite is invisible, and he had learned to make use of it. He climbed the slope behind the encampment, scraping his shins on the stone, until he reached a shelf of rock above the plain from which he could see the whole sweep of the country laid out below: the river, silver and swollen; the green fields drowned in flood; the white blocks of Karnak and Luxor on the far bank; and the Colossi, small as toys, facing the place where the sun would rise tomorrow.

He sat there for a long time. The shadows grew long and blue. Below him the funeral party was breaking camp, tents folding like the wings of enormous moths, and he watched without really seeing.

Then the wind changed. A cool breath came off the desert, and he turned his back on the river to face it. The sun was there, enormous and low, a red disk settling toward the sand.

He had seen a thousand sunsets. He thought now that he had never seen one. The dust of the day hung in the air, and the light came through it in long straight rays, slanting from the burning circle down to the earth, so that for a moment it seemed to him that the sun was not a thing in the sky at all but a reaching, a lowering of countless hands. They touched the river. They touched the drowned fields and the roofs of the city, each place in turn, with perfect and impartial tenderness. They touched the temples of Amun and the hovels of the weavers. They touched his father’s statues. They touched, he realised with a leap of the heart, the small cold hill of stone and sand where his brother lay.

It wore no mask. It had no priest.

He thought: it gives life to everything. It does not ask the name of what it warms.

He thought: that is the only god I have ever seen.

“You should not be up here.”

He flinched so hard that he nearly slid from the rock. His mother stood behind him. She had come up the slope alone, without a fan-bearer, her linen gritty with dust to the knee, and for a moment he was certain she would strike him. Instead she sat down on the stone beside him, a thing he had never seen her do, and for a while said nothing.

“Your father is asleep,” she said at last. “Or he is pretending to be. In his state it is the same thing.”

“Will he die?”

In another house the question would have been a scandal. Tiye considered it as she considered everything, seriously and without sparing. “Not this year,” she said. “Perhaps not for several. But he is not the man he was, and he will not be that man again, and the Two Lands know it. Every governor from the Delta to Nubia is counting this evening. Counting who stands behind the old king, and who will stand behind the king who comes.”

He waited.

“There is no one else,” Tiye said. “You understand that. Thutmose is gone, and the others are daughters. You are what remains.”

“I am not—” His voice cracked. “I am not like him. Everyone says so. Ptahmose looked at me as if I were—”

“I know how Ptahmose looked at you.” She did not raise her voice. “I have been looked at that way for thirty years, by men who thought a girl from Akhmim had no business in the palace of Thebes. Listen to me. You are not your brother. That is not a thing to be ashamed of. Your brother would have been a good king, a king who did what kings have always done, and the priests would have loved him and the gods would have been content and the world would have rolled on in its ruts.” She paused. “I do not know what you will be. But I have watched you, Amenhotep. I have watched you stare. Most children look at the world as if it were a thing already made. You look at it as if you were asking it a question.”

He did not know what to say. He had never heard his mother speak so many words together.

Beyond them the sun touched the horizon, flattened, bled out into a line of red, and went. The rays lifted from the valley one by one. Down on the plain someone was lighting torches.

“What were you looking at?” she asked.

He hesitated. Then, because it was dusk and she was beside him and there was nothing in her face to fear, he said, “The light. The way it comes down. It does not care who it falls on.” And then, very low, ashamed: “The Prophet could not tell me where Thutmose has gone. But the light touched his tomb. I saw it. It touched him too.”

Tiye said nothing for so long that he thought he had offended her. When at last she turned her head, her face in the failing light was unreadable, and she was looking at him not as a mother looks at a child but as a general looks at a map. It was a look he would remember in the years that followed, in the white heat of the city he would build, and in the dark that came after.

“Come,” she said, rising and shaking the dust from her linen. “They will be missing us. Walk behind me, and keep your face still. From tonight you are the Crown Prince of Egypt, and there are three hundred men down there who need to see that you do not weep.”

“I did not—”

“I saw you,” said his mother. “At the cat.”

She went down the slope without looking back. He followed. Behind them the first stars came out over the desert, and somewhere beyond the dark rim of the world, where he could not see it, the sun was already turning on its road toward tomorrow. It would rise in the east and set again and rise again, for him, for his brother, for everyone, without once being asked.