Tutankhamun: The Book of Shadows

9

I arrived soon after first light at the office of the treasury. A cleaner, with a brush and pot, worked backwards across the great floor, scattering fresh water with deft gestures then wiping it away until the stone shone brightly before his feet. He worked methodically, impassively, his head down, as the first of the bureaucrats and officials arrived for work; men in white robes who glanced at me and Thoth with brief curiosity, but passed the cleaner as if he did not exist, leaving the dirty prints of their dusty sandals upon his immaculate floor. He wiped these away, over and over, with endless patience. He was a man who would never walk on shining, clean stone. At no point did he look up at the stranger sitting on the bench, his baboon patiently beside him, waiting for someone.

Finally a senior official, the Deputy of the Treasury, invited me into his office, slightly anxious under his affable competence. I knew his kind: loyal, quietly proud of his merits, relishing the just rewards of his profession-the comforts of a good villa, productive land and faithful servants. I left Thoth tied up outside. We sat on stools opposite each other. He adjusted the few objects-statuettes, trays, the tube of his reed pen, his mixing palette, two little bags for the red and the black ink-on his low table, and recited his long list of titles, from the beginning of his professional life until this very moment. Only then did he ask how he could be of assistance. I told him I wished to be granted an audience with Ay.

He feigned surprise.

I pushed Khay’s papyrus of authorization at him. He unrolled the document, and glanced along the characters swiftly. Then he looked up at me with a different expression.

‘I see. Could you wait here for a few moments?’

I nodded. He disappeared.

I listened to the irrelevant sounds of the corridor and the distant chorus of the river birds for a while. I imagined him knocking on doors, one after the other, like a box within a box, until he arrived at the threshold of the innermost shrine.

When he reappeared, he looked as if he had gone on a long march. He was out of breath. ‘If you would follow me…’

We passed through the deep shadows and the long angles of sunlight laid out along the corridors. The guards at the doors lifted their weapons respectfully. The official left me at the last threshold. He would go no further. A supercilious, brittle assistant-one of three who sat in tense attendance outside the office-knocked on the door like a nervous schoolboy, and listened to the following silence. He must have heard something, for he opened the door, and I passed through.

The chamber was empty. It contained the bare minimum of furniture: two couches, both exquisitely wrought, were set perfectly opposite each other. A low table, beautiful in a purely functional way, was placed just so, equidistant between the couches. Walls undecorated, but clad in stone so fine that the very grain matched up all the way along. Even the light that entered was somehow minimal, perfect and composed. I loathed the immaculate order. For pure pleasure, I nudged the table out of its perfect alignment.

There were two doors in opposite walls, set like choices in a game. Without my noticing, one of them had opened silently. Ay was standing on the threshold of the dark, in his white robe, which glowed in the light from a high window. He looked like a priest. His face was hard to make out.

I bowed my head. ‘Life, prosperity and health,’ I said, according to the formula. But when I looked up I was surprised to see that for all Ay’s great powers, as Ankhesenamun had said, in the years since we had last met time the destroyer had begun his work on him. He moved cautiously, stiffly, as if he did not trust his own bones. He was obviously suffering from ague, although he made every effort to disguise it. But his sharp reptilian eyes had tremendous focus and concentration. He observed me intently, like a connoisseur assessing an object of dubious value. His thin mouth expressed inevitable disappointment and disapproval. I gazed back. There were lines on his forehead, and wrinkles around his chilly eyes, and the skin was stretched tautly across the planes of his face; those eyes were sunken, almost as in death. There were red spots where his blackheads had been erased. I could smell the scent of the lozenge he held under his tongue: cloves and cinnamon, the remedy for toothache, the curse of age.

‘Sit,’ he said, very quietly.

I obliged, observing the difficulty with which he lowered himself on to one of the exquisite couches.

‘Speak.’

‘You will be aware that I have-’

‘Stop.’

He raised his right hand. I waited.

‘If the Queen had ventured to ask my opinion, I would have forbidden her to send for you.’

He looked me up and down.

‘I do not like the city Medjay interfering in the administration and the business of the palace.’

‘She called for me in a private, personal capacity,’ I replied.

‘I am perfectly aware of the nature and history of your involvement with the royal family,’ he said quietly. ‘And if this does not remain an entirely private, personal affair, you may be sure I will show you and your family no mercy.’

I nodded, but said nothing.

‘In any case, I have decided that carving is irrelevant. It must simply be destroyed and forgotten.’

His hand, mottled and bony, quivered as it gripped the head of his walking stick. I looked around the pure order of his chamber. The room seemed to lack life, and its natural state of disorder, entirely.

‘And yet it seems to have alarmed the King and Queen.’

‘They are children. Children fear the insubstantial. The ghost in the tomb. The bad spirit beneath the couch. It is superstition. There is no place for superstition in the Two Lands.’

‘Perhaps it is not superstition but imagination.’

‘There is no difference.’

Not to you, you slice of emptiness, I thought.

He continued: ‘Nevertheless, this represents a failure of order. The officers of the palace should have detected it. That it came to enter the precincts of the palace at all is gross negligence. This will not be tolerated.’

‘No doubt there will be an investigation, and the flaws will be remedied.’

He ignored the contempt that inflected my tone.

‘Order is the priority of power. After the arrogant catastrophes of the past, the glorious reign of Tutankhamun represents the triumph of the divine universal order of maat by the will of the Gods. We have set these lands aright. Nothing will be allowed to threaten that. Nothing.’

‘You called him a child just now.’

He gazed at me, and for a moment I thought he would throw me out. He didn’t, so I continued.

‘Forgive me for labouring a point, but when the crowd start to splatter the King with the blood of slaughtered pigs, in public, at the height of the Opet Festival-’

‘An isolated incident. These elements of dissent are unimportant and they will be crushed out of existence.’

He noticed the table was out of alignment, frowned, and returned it to its perfect position.

‘And then the carving. Discovered on the very same day? Someone within the palace hierarchy is conspiring against the King. And bearing in mind the rumours of the failure of the Hittite wars, and the long absence of General Horemheb-’

I had hit the spot. His walking stick slammed down on the low table between us. A glass figurine tipped over and shattered. He barked: ‘Your job is to apply the law. Not to question the ethics or the practice of its application.’

He tried to calm himself.

‘You have no authority to speak of any of these issues. What are you doing here, wasting my time? I know what the Queen has asked of you. Why should I care if she wishes to indulge her little fantasies of fear and protection? And as for you-you imagine yourself as the hero in a romance of truth and justice. And yet who are you? Others have been promoted before you. You languish in a middle-ranking position, alienated from your colleagues, lacking accomplishments. You think of yourself as complex and subtle, with your interest in poetry, and yet you are uncertainly engaged in a profession that exalts the violent business of the execution of the law. That is the sum of you.’

Silence. I stood up. He remained seated.

‘As you say, I’m a figure from a romance: absurd, old-fashioned and out of date. The Queen prevailed upon me. I can’t help myself. I have a weakness for ladies in distress. Someone shouts the word “justice,” and I appear like a dog.’

‘Justice…what has that to do with all of this? Nothing…’

The mocking way this old and rotting man spoke the word at me made me think of everything that was not just.

I moved towards the door.

‘I’ll assume I now have your approval to continue with the investigation of this mystery, regardless of where it takes me.’

‘The Queen is sufficient authority. I support her wishes in all things.’ And he meant: ‘You will have no authority from me.’

I smiled, opened the door, and left him and his aching bones in his perfect chamber. At least I had now asserted my role in the situation. And I knew one other important thing: he had no idea of Ankhesenamun’s plan.