Tutankhamun: The Book of Shadows

15

‘What a spectacle!’ said Khety, blowing out his cheeks. ‘That place reminds me of a particularly brutal school. There are always the big boys and the small boys. There are the ones who use their fists, and the ones who use their brains. There are the despots and the warriors and the diplomats and the servants. And there’s also always one strange child somewhere, off to the side, tormenting another poor creature slowly to death. That’s Ay,’ he said.

The moonlit land drifted past as we sailed up the channel towards the Great River. I watched the dark water disappear under the keel for a little while before I spoke.

‘Did you notice on the underside of the lid, the markings? In particular the black circle? It’s some kind of language…’

Khety shook his head.

‘What I noticed was the maker’s nasty imagination, and his appetite for blood and guts,’ he said.

‘But he is educated, highly skilled, and almost certainly a member of the elite. His fascination with blood and guts, as you put it, is because they represent something to him. They are symbols, rather than things in themselves.’

‘Try telling that to the girl with no face, or the boy with the shattered bones, or the new mystery man missing his own head,’ he replied, accurately enough.

‘It’s not the same thing. And are we right to assume we’re dealing with the same man in all cases?’ I asked him.

‘Well, just consider the connections, and the timing, and the style,’ he replied.

‘I have done. Similar imagery is deployed. The same obsessions with decay and destruction appear. And somewhere in all of this, I sense a love of beauty and perfection. There’s almost a sorrow to these actions. A kind of grotesque pity for the victims…’

Khety looked at me as if I had lost my mind.

‘When you talk like this, I’m glad no one can overhear us. How can there be sorrow in slicing off a girl’s beautiful face? All I can see is the horrible, vicious cruelty. And anyway, how does that help us?’

We sat in silence for a while. Thoth at my feet gazed up at the moon. Khety was right, of course. What faced us was possibly just madness. Was I imagining patterns where perhaps none existed? And yet still I sensed something. Underneath the killings and the brutality, under the threats of iconoclasm and destruction, was something deeper, and darker: some kind of search, or vision. But if we were right, and the same man was responsible for all of these events, then there was a bigger question to answer: why? Why was he doing this?

‘I also think whoever is responsible wants us to know he is an insider, in order to enhance the power of his threat. In fact, part of the game is to make us feel he is watching us all,’ continued Khety. And as he said this, I suddenly realized the gifts and deaths had another element in common: Rahotep, Seeker of Mysteries.

We had just reached the jetty, and so rather than share it with him, I decided to let this odd thought sit at the back of my mind for a little while. It seemed too foolish and vain a thing to articulate.

I bade farewell to Khety, and with Thoth padding ahead of me walked home through the curfew streets. I released the baboon to his bed, and entered the dark house. Its silence upbraided me for my absence. Sometimes I feel I do not belong in this house of young women and old men and babies. I remained in the kitchen for a while before retiring to sleep. By the light of the oil lamp in its niche, which Tanefert had left for my return, I poured myself a large cup of decent red wine from the Kharga oasis, and set a few dried figs and almonds on a dish.

I sat down on the bench in my usual place beneath the statuette of the household God who knows I do not believe in him, and thought about families. It often seems to me that all troubles and all crimes begin with families. Even in our ancient stories, it is jealous brothers who kill each other, enraged wives who castrate their husbands, and furious children who avenge themselves on their culpable or innocent parents. I remembered how the girls still sweep from tender affection to murderous rage, from stroking each other’s hair to dragging it out with their bare hands, in an instant, over some cause so minor even they blush for shame when it is confessed.

And so it is in marriage. We have a good marriage. If I have disappointed Tanefert by my lack of worldly success then she has disguised it well. She says she did not marry me for my fortune. And then she gives me one of her knowing smiles. But I know there are half-understood things between us that we keep in silence, as if words would somehow make them too painfully real. Perhaps it is so between all couples whose relations have survived for many years; the unnoticed influences of habit, and the perils of domestic tedium. Even the familiarity with each other’s bodies, once so obsessively desired, leads to an undeniable hunger for the surprise of a stranger’s beauty. The beauty and the contempt of familiarity…perhaps that is what I need to escape, when I relish the excitement of my work? The thought does not make me proud. I am now a man in the middle of the way of my life, and I am afraid of the middle way of it all…Why can I not be satisfied with everything the household God above me has granted?

If it is so for ordinary people like us, then how much stranger it must be to be born into a family whose purpose is public, and whose privacy has to be defended and policed continuously like a terrible secret? For all their wealth and power, the children of the royal family and of most elite families are raised in an air devoid of human warmth. What do they talk about at dinnertime? Matters of state? Manners at a banquet? Do they have to hear, over and over, the heroic stories of their grandfather, Amenhotep the Great, who they know they will always fail to emulate? And if my girls argue over the possession of a comb, then how must it have been when siblings struggled for possession of treasure, power, and the Two Crowns?

But I had seen two siblings who did not seem to be struggling for power. They seemed to be close, and supportive, perhaps bonded by their miseries under Ay’s control. The affection between them had seemed entirely genuine. But Ankhesenamun’s plan had one flaw. Tutankhamun was no warrior King. His virtues might be in his mind, but they clearly did not lie in physical prowess. Unfortunately the world requires its kings to demonstrate their vitality and virility in parades and protestations and adventures of power. Yes, heroic statues could be carved from stone, and impressive carvings could be set up in temples announcing Tutankhamun’s feats and campaigns and restorations of the old traditions and authorities. And Ankhesenamun’s own ancestry would help, for although she was still young she carried strong echoes of her mother-her beauty, her popularity, her independence of mind. And she had shown remarkable resilience this evening in confronting Ay. But the fact remained that at the heart of the great drama of state power was a flaw: the Image of the Living God was a clever, but frightened and physically not very heroic young man. That made both him and the Queen vulnerable. And whoever was tormenting the King with fear understood this.

Tanefert was standing in the dark doorway, watching me. I moved to make room for her. She sat next to me, and nibbled on an almond.

‘Will there ever be a night when I know for sure no one will knock on the door, to ask you to come away with them?’

I put my arm around her and hugged her close, but this was not what she wanted.

‘Never,’ she said. ‘Never.’

No words came to my aid to make this better.

‘I think I am used to it. I accept it. I know it is your work. But sometimes, like tonight, when we are celebrating, I want you here, and I want to know you will not leave. And that’s impossible. Because crime and cruelty and bloodshed are part of what people do to each other; and so you will always have more work. There will always be more knocks on the door in the night.’

She looked away.

‘I always, always want to be here with you,’ I stammered.

She turned to look me in the eye.

‘I’m afraid. I’m afraid one day you will not come back to me. And I could not endure that.’

She kissed me sadly, rose, and walked away into the passage’s darkness.