Nefertiti

32

After dark, the streets were transformed by the sudden influx of the visiting population. Suddenly I liked the city better for it. Impromptu performances of magic or dance or music or juggling were taking place in the ways; temporary restaurants and canteens had been set up in any spare space under cheap, bright bolts of cloth illuminated by torches and lamps; here was a night market, with sellers offering monkeys and birds, tailoring and jewellery, fruits and spices heaped like the perfect hills of a multicoloured land. The atmosphere was lively, noisy, men and women from all over the Empire jostling for service or pushing through the crowds at the performances. Dignitaries and senior families progressed to dinners, receptions and meetings in their finery, staring straight ahead, demonstrating their pride and superiority.

Sudden parks of tents had sprung up in the empty spaces around the central city, and they spread down to the water’s edge. The dark river was busy with boats. I felt drawn down there, under cover of the night, by the busyness of the crowds and the delicious cool of the northern night breeze. Khety and I watched as hundreds of small barques, most rented from an enterprising man on the dock, bobbed about on the black water, their paper lanterns creating shifting archipelagos of illumination for the lovers who occupied them. Under them ran the ever-flowing river, the transient brightness of the present visiting the darkness of the gods. Behind us the palaces and the temples, the offices and the libraries, stood mostly sinister as prisons. I wondered what, of all that had been built here in so short a time, would survive. Or would it all pass away and be lost under the encroaching desert?

We returned to the safe house, keeping to the shadowy edges of the ways, past arguments and calls for drink and the last banging dinner pots being washed by old women at the public wells. Groping quietly for our straw pallets, we settled down for the night. Khety wanted to talk through what little we had found, but I was unwilling. The information was frustratingly enigmatic and inconclusive. And time was ever shortening. I twirled the gold feather in front of my eyes and tried to think everything through. Akhenaten and his problems. Mahu, his loathing of me, and the Queen’s doubts. The assassination of Meryra. Ay, of whom she was afraid. And Horemheb, this strange and ambitious young officer, married directly into the heart of the family, to a girl who wept for a year. I prayed that the night would permit my dreaming mind to discover some pattern that eluded my waking brain.