Nefertiti

28

The shadows were drawn aside like a curtain, and I saw her.

I was sitting in an antechamber. It seemed the walls and floor were made of silver; but perhaps this was just the cumulative effect of the multitude of lamps, and besides, by this point I would have believed anything, such was the state of confused enchantment in my mind. There was nothing in the chamber but steps disappearing up into further shadows, a low bench, a small table set out with food and drink, and two chairs. She was sitting in one of them. She was wearing the blue crown, revealing the pure shapes and contours of her neck and shoulders, and accentuating the open beauty of her face.

She sat with her hands in her lap, watching me quizzically, observing and enjoying, I believe, the play of thoughts and feelings that passed no doubt plainly across my face. I would have told her anything. And it seemed she knew this, for as the thought occurred to me she smiled quickly. The brief smile passed through me like a wave of delight, of warmth, of…where are the words for moments like these when we feel ourselves most alive, most alert to another living presence, to its mysterious spirit, tingling to the very borders of our physical being and beyond so that we feel we are not after all limited by skin and bone but have become a part of everything? I am nothing more than a Medjay officer, a detective, just one passing character in the world’s charade; yet for a moment, in the glory of her attention, I felt like a small god liberated from time and the world. Then her smile passed. I knew I wanted it to come back, knew indeed that I would do anything to return it to that remarkable, dignified, open face.

‘What time is it?’ I finally asked, and immediately felt like a fool for asking such a simple and irrelevant question.

‘It is the hour of Akhet.’ Her voice was calm and clear.

‘Remind me what that means, please.’ I felt crude next to her.

‘It means the hour before dawn. It is also what the Books call the time of becoming effective. Another way of thinking of it might be this: the akh is the name we give to the reunion of the person with his soul after death. Some think this reunion endures for eternity.’

‘That’s a long time.’

She returned my nervous irony with a careful look. It reminded me I did not need to play the Medjay man here. The challenge was harder: to be myself.

‘And another way of thinking about it is this: in the sacred language the sign akh is the sacred ibis, bird of wisdom. Think of it as the dawn chorus of your new life.’

We looked at each other for a moment. What was happening to me?

‘Is this my new life?’ I asked. ‘Did I die? Am I reborn?’

‘Perhaps, if you look at it in the right way. The true way.’ She tilted her head to consider me.

‘I am honoured to meet you,’ I said.

‘Oh, please don’t be honoured. I am tired of honours. I’m sorry to have made things so difficult for you. So dramatic. All these tasks and tests. You must have felt like a man in a fable. But I had to know whether I could trust you. Whether you were the true man. Are you hungry? Thirsty?’

She gestured to the table and poured me a goblet of water. I drank it down, not realizing how parched and dull my mouth was, how warm the room had become. Perhaps that was why I was talking such rubbish. She refilled the jug from a small fountain set into the wall, and placed it before me. Every gesture and movement was perfect. A woman in complete possession of herself. Even the water pouring into the jug had seemed to command her full attention and pleasure. She was alive to everything.

‘You have sweet water here?’

‘Yes, there’s a spring beneath the building. That is partly why I chose this site.’

‘For what?’

‘For my sanctuary.’

‘Sanctuary from what?’

She paused. ‘I must not forget you are the man who finds the answers to the great mysteries by asking simple questions.’ She poured me more water, then walked slowly away, up the chamber. ‘Is that how you found me? By asking questions?’ Her eyes glittered. Amusement. Curiosity. Interest. ‘How do you know what you know?’

At this moment I had no answer. I felt as if my life’s work, my actions and thoughts, my dreams and ideals, had dissolved into a handful of dust being cast by her hand, glittering in the lamplight as it fell. And I liked that feeling.

‘Our Lord-’

‘Call him by his name. Names are powerful. Call him Akhenaten.’

The way she spoke his name was as complex as a phrase of music. There was some melody of affection in it, but also dissonances and sharper conflicting emotions. She moved further into the darkness of the chamber.

‘Akhenaten called for me, rather than for the chiefs of the city Medjay, to try to find you.’

‘He did not call for you. I did. And I have been watching you since you arrived.’

I felt as if a door had opened where no door had been. She turned back to me, her magnificent face revealed again by the light. She waited calmly for my reaction, her cool eyes appraising mine. For a moment I floundered, trying to incorporate her words into the information I had collected so far-trying, in truth, to see the whole mystery anew from the perspective demanded by those few simple words. I suddenly felt a terrible vertigo. Seshat, the dead girl? What about Tjenry, and Meryra? And why this magnificent and horrible charade?

The cat sidled up to me, rubbing her long flank against my leg, sending a silvery cascade through both of us. I stroked her. Nefertiti smiled, and this time the smile was more open.

‘She likes you.’

‘I like her.’

‘But you are a man who does not like cats.’

‘Things change. How could you know she would find me, and lead me to you?’

The cat moved over to her mistress, jumped onto her lap and looked back at me, bowing her head a little, her tail curled neatly beneath her.

‘I didn’t know. I believed.’

I felt lost again in uncharted territory where things are not what they seem. Where truth is many things. Where belief can make things happen. Where I did not know what I knew.

‘I knew she would come back to me. And I believed you might follow.’

I said, ‘I have the strangest feeling that I’m a character and you’re writing my destiny.’

‘We are in a story that includes us all. I had to call you to me because I do not know the ending. You have set the birds to flight. But now we are in the difficult middle of it, and can only find the end by living through what is to come. I know what I wish for my ending, but it is not sure. It cannot be, until it is enacted, accomplished, made real. The Book of the Living, if you like. And for that I need your help.’

Her cleverness was exciting; I relished the nuances of her expression as she talked-the ebb and flow of emotions, of intelligence, of wit. The thought occurred to me, fleetingly, that I was watching a great actress, deeply involved with every word yet superbly in control of herself. I also began to perceive something else: an absolute dark well of need in her. She was desperate to reveal herself, her story, her reasons and perhaps even her fears. She needed someone to talk to. I suddenly realized she was alone, in a small boat, adrift on a sea of troubles. And she was asking for my help.

I am a sceptic where words are concerned. I have learned to mistrust them for often they lead us astray or tell us apparently simple things that disguise or deny darker, less appealing paradoxes and truths. There is a slipperiness, an unreliability, in words. But there is also something in their power that sometimes has its own inevitable beauty. And is it not true that part of the story of words is that they metamorphose into other things-into stories we tell about the world or ourselves or each other, or into dreams we half recall, or into the silence beyond words? I had to hear her story. After all, I was a part of it now.

‘Tell me what you need me to do,’ I said. ‘And please tell me why.’

She sat down again, opposite me. ‘It’s a long story.’

‘Am I in it?’

‘You are.’