Nefertiti

4

I lay beneath the moon and observed the many serene and imperishable stars of the Otherworld. But the night always stirs with hidden struggles. From the bank came the sounds of birds and beasts busy with their nocturnal lives. I remembered how, when we first met, at that party, Tanefert and I stepped out from the lights and noise and walked along the water’s edge, our hands just beginning to risk a touch here and there, each apparently casual brushing of skin on skin sending shivers through my whole body. It was as if we could finish each other’s thoughts, without speaking. We sat on a bench and watched the moon. I said it was a mad old woman left alone in the sky, but Tanefert said, ‘No, she is a great lady in mourning for her lost love. Look how she calls to him.’ We talked more. She told me the truth about everything in her heart, the good and the bad, with the risks attending her confession, and I knew then, from her honesty, that she would change my life with love. Of course, it hasn’t all been easy. The gods know how I can be: moody, selfish, sad.

A pang of loss flashed through me. I stood up and stared out across the dark waters. I felt alarmed, in the wrong place. I wanted to turn the boat around and return to her at once. Then suddenly, whirring out of the darkness faster than a diving hawk, an arrow. I saw it after I felt the cold needle of its passage through the air by my left eye. I felt-or did I imagine it? — hot feathers brushing past my face, bright with some furious point of light. And then I saw flames racing up and out from the point where the arrow had embedded itself in the wood of the mast, below the Eye of Horus, nailed there for safe passage. The mind is slower than time, slower than fire and air. Then a noise, like enthusiastic applause, brought me out of this trance. I shouted like a fool. The fire was feasting on the sail, its many greedy mouths moving out from the mast, by now a tree of flame. And the captain arrived, pulling on ropes, while the sailors hurried buckets of water out of the river, which they cast into the roaring throat of the blaze. And this interested, then gradually placated, and finally subdued the god.

I slowly came back to myself. All the passengers were gathered now on the deck, huddled in their night attire, holding each other, or weeping, or staring at the now-threatening darkness that surrounded this frail and damaged vessel. I could hear the drip-drip-drip of the water that saved us from extinction, as each drop fell from the charred wood. Everyone knew the arrow was aimed at me. They also knew their own brush with mortality was because of my presence on the boat. And they knew I was not who I said I was.

The Moon Man spoke: ‘You, sir, have not been honest with us. An official in the Treasury does not earn this kind of attention.’

I shrugged. The handsome woman glanced at me with more interest, a question in her eye. And the captain, his face struck with humiliation and anger, looked at the wizened and blackened remains of the arrow. ‘You owe me a ship,’ he said.

He was about to pull it out when I shouted at him to stop. This was evidence. I pushed him to one side and examined it. I could not draw the point from the wood. It had been made so delicate by fire that it could have collapsed to ash at any moment. But although it was damaged, I could see immediately two things that interested me. One: the tip, although blackened, was metal, probably silver. Not flint. Not, then, a casual act of violence, but one in which there had been considerable investment of skill, quality and expense. And two: still visible in the wood, two hieroglyphs. Cobra. The Snake, Great of Magic, Poised on the Crown of Pharaoh, Protector of Ra in his passage through the Underworld of the Night. And Seth with his forked tail, god of chaos and confusion, of the Red Land and war. This was the work of an expert, and I was lucky, strangely, to be alive. Equally strangely, I did not feel lucky. I felt warned. Either I had survived by the merest chance, or I was meant to survive. Either the unknown assassin had missed by the smallest degree-the lucky drift of the night breeze, the sudden cry of a bird distracting the arrow from its true course-or he had hit the mark exactly.

And then he had signed his work.