City of Desire Read online

  City of Desire

  Anton Gill

  © Anton Gill 1993

  Anton Gill has asserted his rights under the Copyright, Design and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work.

  First published in 1993 by Bloomsbury Publishing Ltd.

  This edition published in 2015 by Endeavour Press Ltd.

  Table of Contents

  Prologue: The Background to Huy’s Egypt

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Author’s Note

  Prologue: The Background to Huy’s Egypt

  The nine years of the reign of the young Pharaoh Tutankhamun, 1361-1352 BC, were troubled ones for Egypt. They came towards the end of the Eighteenth Dynasty, the most glorious of all the thirty dynasties of the empire. Tutankhamun’s predecessors had included illustrious warrior kings, lawmakers and innovators, who had created a new kingdom and consolidated the old one. But shortly before his reign a strange, visionary pharaoh had occupied the throne: Akhenaten. What had happened essentially was this: Akhenaten had thrown out all the old gods and replaced them with one, the Aten, who had his being in the life-giving sunlight. Akhenaten was the world’s first philosopher, and the creator of the idea of monotheism. In the seventeen years of his reign, and he was only 29 when he died, he made enormous changes in the way his country thought and in the way it was run; but in the process he lost the whole of the northern part of the empire (modern Palestine and Syria), and brought the country to the brink of ruin. Now, powerful enemies gathered there.

  Akhenaten’s religious reforms had driven doubt into the minds of his people after generations of unchanged certainty which went back to the building of the pyramids, over 1,000 years earlier, and beyond; and although the empire itself, already over 1,500 years old in Huy’s time, had been through bad times before, Egypt now entered a short Dark Age. Akhenaten had not been popular with the priests of the old religion, whose power he took away, nor with ordinary people, who saw him as a defiler of their long-held beliefs, especially in the Afterlife and the Dead. After his death in about 1362 BC, the new capital city he had built for himself – Akhetaten – the City of the Horizon – quickly fell into ruin as power reverted to Thebes – the Southern Capital. The northern seat of government was at the city we call Memphis, but at this period it was less important than Thebes. Akhenaten’s name was cut from every monument, and people were not even allowed to speak it.

  Akhenaten died without a direct heir, and the short reigns of the three kings who succeeded him, of which Tutankhamun’s was the second and by far the longest, were fraught with uncertainty. None of the three left a direct heir, and during this time the pharaohs themselves very probably had their power curbed and controlled by Horemheb, formerly commander-in-chief of Akhenaten’s army, but now bent on fulfilling his own ambition to restore the empire and the old religion, and to become pharaoh himself. He did so finally in 1348 BC, possibly after a power struggle with his immediate predecessor, Ay, an old man who had also been a senior official in Akhenaten’s court. Like Horemheb, Ay was an ambitious commoner; but his daughter, who became Akhenaten’s chief wife, was the most famous queen in Egyptian history after Cleopatra – Nefertiti. The story which follows takes place during the five-year reign of Ay – about 1352–1348 BC; but Horemheb is very much a power in the land.

  Horemheb himself reigned for about 28 years, well into old age, marrying Akhenaten’s sister-in-law to reinforce his remote claim to the throne. He, too, died without a direct heir, and his reign ended the Eighteenth Dynasty.

  Egypt was to rally under Horemheb, and early in the Nineteenth Dynasty it achieved one last peak under Ramesses II. It was by far the most powerful and the wealthiest country in the known world, rich in gold, copper and precious stones. Trade was carried out the length of the Nile - known simply as The River - from the coast down to Nubia and the Sudan, on the Mediterranean (The Great Green), and on the Red Sea as far as Somalia (Punt). But it was a narrow strip of a country, clinging to the banks of the Nile and hemmed in to the east and west by deserts. It was governed by three seasons: Spring, Shemu, was the time of drought, from February to May; Summer, Akhet, was the time of the Nile flood, from June to October; and Autumn, Peret, was the time of Coming-Forth, when the crops grew. The level of the annual flood was of vital importance: too high, and farms and building could be swept away; too low, and no crop could be grown: the difference between prosperity and ruin was a matter of a few metres.

  The Ancient Egyptians lived closer to the seasons than we do, and to their natural surroundings. They also believed that the heart was the centre of all thought and feeling. The brain’s only function, they thought, was to pass mucus to the nose, with which it was assumed to be connected.

  The period during which these stories take place is a tiny part of Ancient Egypt’s 3,000 year history; but it was a crucial one for the country. Egypt was becoming aware of the less-blessed, more aggressive world beyond its frontiers, and of the possibility that it, too, might one day be conquered and come to an end. It was a time of uncertainty, questioning, intrigue and violence: a distant mirror in which we can see something of ourselves.

  The people worshipped a large number of gods. Some of these were restricted to cities or localities, while others waxed or waned in importance with time. Certain gods were duplications of the same ‘idea’. Here are some of the most important:

  AMUN – The chief god of the Southern Capital, Thebes. Represented as a man, and associated with the supreme sun god, Ra. Animals dedicated to him were the ram and the goose.

  ANUBIS – The jackal or dog-headed god of embalming, and the protector of the mummy from the forces of evil during the night.

  ATEN – The god of the sun’s energy, represented as the sun’s disk whose rays end in protecting hands.

  BES – A grotesque dwarf who protected the household from demons.

  GEB – The god of the Earth, represented as a man.

  HAPY – The god of the Nile, especially in flood. A man whose woman’s breasts represented fecundity.

  HATHOR – The goddess of love, music and dance. Often represented as a cow, or a human whose head is surmounted by a cow’s horns and the sun’s disk, she was also the suckler and protectress of the king.

  HORUS – One of the most popular gods. Horus was a defender of good against evil, the hawk-headed son of Isis and Osiris, and therefore a member of the most important trinity in Ancient Egyptian theology. He was also associated with the sun.

  ISIS – The divine mother; wife and sister of Osiris.

  KHONS – The god of the moon; the son of Amun.

  MAAT – The goddess of law, truth and world harmony.

  MIN – The god of sexual fertility.

  MUT – The wife of Amun, originally a vulture goddess.

  NEKHBET – The vulture goddess of Upper Egypt. The lotus and the White Crown were associated with this region, the southern of the ‘Two Lands’ which made up the ‘Black Land’ of Egypt.

  NUT – The goddess of the sky and the sister of Geb.

  OSIRIS – The god of the underworld and of resurrection. The afterlife was of great importance to the Ancient Egyptians.

  RA – The principal sun god.

  SEKHMET – The lioness-headed goddess of destruction, a defender of the gods against evil and associated with healing; but also dangerous when uncontrolled.

  SET – The god of storms and violence; brother and murderer of Osiris. Although s
ometimes regarded as a protector god, he is very roughly equivalent to Satan.

  SOBEK – The crocodile god.

  THOTH – The god of time, also associated with writing: usually ibis-headed, he sometimes takes the form of a baboon.

  WADJET – The cobra goddess of Lower Egypt, the northern of ‘Two Lands’. The papyrus was associated with this region, as was the Red Crown.

  Love gives me strength,

  love is my magic spell.

  I gaze on my heart’s longing:

  she stands before me.

  How delightful, my beloved,

  to go down with you to the River.

  I look forward to the moment

  when you will ask me to bathe before your eyes.

  - Fragments of love poems

  Chapter One

  Chaemhet awoke, as he always did these days, with mixed feelings. There was no denying the pleasure he felt when he looked around at his bedroom, with its broad window overlooking the lower roofs of the Palace Compound and commanding a view of the River and the Great Place shimmering beyond its far bank. The west-facing room was cool in the mornings and he felt keen and alert waking into it. Mia had furnished it expensively – sometimes he felt that she had overreached herself – but his wife had immaculate taste and the simplicity of the room, and their house within the Palace Compound generally, could draw envious comment from no-one. He had been nervous at first of her use of the black hard wood from far to the south, a material which was usually reserved for the king’s exclusive use; but as she had pointed out, he, Chaemhet, was now one of the king’s principal servants, and they did, after all, live in a part of the king’s house. There was no vainglory here, and indeed his worries had been allayed after the Inspector of Royal Appointments had viewed and passed over Mia’s decorations without any disapproving comments.

  The bedroom was painted yellow with a frieze of lotus flowers in blue and gold to remind Mia of her home to the south. The other rooms were pale blue, white, and orange, each with its own frieze of flowers or animal life – papyrus, rushes, ducks and geese flying, young bulls romping in spring sunshine. Yellow matting covered the baked mud floors and the window-frames were picked out in ochre-painted surrounds. Only in the servants’ quarters were there stools – Mia had pronounced her intention early on of exclusively having chairs in her new home. Chaemhet had been afraid that this would certainly arouse comment; but there had been none, even from the family of the Chief Steward of the First Household, who managed the affairs of Pharaoh Ay and his Chief Wife, Ty, personally. But that Chief Steward, Horisheri, was an old man, going back with Ay to a time when the equally old pharaoh – he was well into the seventh decade of his life – had been Master of Horse to another king. Horisheri and Ay were more like old friends than master and servant. Horisheri knew he had nothing to fear from younger, junior stewards, however grandly their wives might declare ambitions for them through opulent decor. Chaemhet seriously doubted if Horisheri noticed such things. Since the death many years ago of his own Chief Wife, Horisheri had lived with half-a-dozen concubines in a pretty house with its own pond and walled garden next to the palace itself. There was no black wood there, but there was nothing that was not made of cedar, and fittings normally made of copper and bronze were made there of gold and silver. Horisheri was well past the stage of needing to feel ambitious. He had got as far as he would ever go, and had reason to feel contented with that.

  Chaemhet envied him his peaceful heart; but Chaemhet had seen thirty fewer floods than Horisheri, and there would have been something wrong if he did not still feel restless. He had already done well – and if the gods remained benign he would, if he reached Horisheri’s age, be at the pinnacle of a taller tower than the Chief Steward of the First Household. But there were always places where a man might stumble, and snares set deliberately by rivals. And, as if these were not enough, Chaemhet had loaded himself with a handicap. The knowledge of this handicap brought almost as much discomfort to his heart as it brought pleasure. But the pleasure still outweighed the discomfort. Even if it had not, Chaemhet doubted if he could extricate himself. His reservations were always strongest when he awoke. Each day is a journey, bringing its own dangers, and at its beginning, any journey can seem insuperably long.

  He lay for a moment or two longer, his head cupped by the polished wooden rest on which it lay, his neck a little stiff, causing him to roll his head gently from side to side to ease it. The linen sheets still lay loosely over his naked body, protecting it. In another room – or was it a distant part of the bedroom? – he could hear a light scuffling as someone – probably his wife, as a servant’s movements would have been brusquer – tinkered with something on a table. His eyes were still half-closed and he was too lazy to investigate the noise. He knew it was early and that he did not need to hurry. He looked forward to his day because he was equal to the work; and part of him did not look forward to it for exactly the same reason.

  But he did have challenge in his life. It might be small, selfish, and self-indulgent; but it was there, and if he wasn’t careful it would grow.

  Had it been easier before? Certainly, with less responsibility a man was noticed less. Was he also less attractive – except to those very few who loved him for himself and who had loved him from the first? Chaemhet acknowledged the likely truth of this; but he would not have sacrificed the greater power just to be rid of the greater risk. Surely one of the good trappings of power was the ability it gave you to protect yourself. If you knew how to use it.

  The scuffling had stopped – it had resolved itself into the rustling of papers, and Chaemhet had given the noise meaning, seeing in the eye of his heart a picture of his wife as she bent over the table that stood in the far corner of their bedroom against the intersection of the window and door walls and sifted through the letters that had come upriver from the north the day before. The Flood was subsiding, it was the season of Peret, the Coming-Forth of the Black Land, glistening under its new coating of silt. It had been a good flood. Soon the farmers would be repairing the fields and planting them, and the land would rise from its torpor. The letters were from the Northern Capital, and they concerned a visit to be made there from the Southern Capital by Ay’s Second Queen, who was Chaemhet’s employer. As Chief Steward of the Second Household, he was responsible for everything to do with Queen Ankhesenamun’s waking hours, and for her protection while she slept.

  His was a new appointment and the household was new too. Like Chaemhet, Ay had for long only been married to one wife; but a little over a year earlier he had recalled his surviving granddaughter from self-imposed exile far to the South and married her. The marriage had caused concern at the time. Why should Ay do such a thing? The obvious answer was, to strengthen his own claim to the Golden Chair, because Ankhesenamun was the widow of the pharaoh Tutankhamun and the daughter of Ay’s child, Nefertiti, the most beautiful woman the Black Land had ever seen. Ankhesenamun’s father had been another pharaoh, Akhenaten, the bringer of great and troubled times to his country. There were those who held that she had the blood of gods and demons in her veins, and that under the skin her flesh was blue. But why should Ay want to strengthen his claim unless he felt insecure? That was what had set the tongues wagging. Everyone knew that, waiting in the wings, General Horemheb, master of the royal armies, was biding his time, watching for the moment when in truth he could ascend the Golden Chair. Horemheb was an old man too – though not as old as Ay, he had still seen too many Floods to be able to indulge in the luxury of patience. Horemheb had a son, Tuthmosis, a pale child who had lived now for two cycles of the seasons, never leaving Horemheb’s house in the Southern Capital where he lived with his mother under close guard while his father was away, fighting a long campaign against the vigorous new enemy that was pressing upon the Black Land from the north. Ay had no male heir. Ty was too old to give him one. Did he hope for one from Ankhsi? Such a son would have a strong claim indeed.

  Finally, at the last festival o
f Opet, the god Amun had put an end to the speculation. The chief temple priests took the god from the stone room in which he lived for his annual journey to his Southern Chapel. The stolist priest washed him and dressed him in new linen of the finest quality – white, red, blue and green – before applying makeup to his eyes and face, and adorning him with jewellery, anointing him at last with medjet oil, using the little finger of his right hand. The god was protected with every amulet, and strengthened with sceptres. Then the wab priests carried him to his tabernacle, and six rows of four of them, preceded by sem priests, carried him from there to the River. Chaemhet had attended many such festivals, but he remembered this one with special sharpness, as its outcome had confirmed his own good fortune. How he had responded to the throaty, rough call of the trumpets that cleared the way for the god. How heavily the smell of incense hung on the still air.

  The god was brought aboard his barge for the short journey to the Southern Chapel, accompanied by his wife, Mut, his son, Khons, and the king himself. The ropes were taken up by the Haulers, men who had intrigued for a year to be granted this honour, and of whom Chaemhet was one. The clothes they wore were of shining white linen. Later they would be put away, smeared, sweat-stained and stinking, in a cedar box of honour, never to be worn again. They took the strain and prepared to walk along the tow-path, dust and grit already in their sandals, as the soldiers lining the route kept them free of the crowd which had gathered to watch. On raised platforms he remembered seeing dancers from the Land of Two Rivers, and tall, bony, dark men of UatUat and Kush gazing with grave faces at the women musicians twirling their sistra and the young priests clapping time.

  At the Southern Chapel they had already slaughtered the eight bulls, and cut off their legs for the sacrifice. The tabernacles were brought up on the backs of the priests and placed ready to receive the offerings from the king.