River God Page 15

  The dominant colour I had chosen for these designs was blue in all its variation: the blue of the starling's wing, the blues of the sky and the Nile in the sunlight, the blues of the petals of the desert orchid and the shimmering blue of the river perch quivering in the fisherman's net. However, there were other colours as well, all those vibrant reds and yellows that we Egyptians love so well.

  Pharaoh, accompanied closely by my Lord Intef, in his capacity of Keeper of the Royal Tombs, made a slow circuit of the high walls, examining every detail, and commenting on most of them. Naturally the theme I had chosen for the mortuary was the Book of the Dead, that detailed map and description of the route to the underworld that Pharaoh's shade must follow, and the depictions of all the trials and dangers he would confront along the way.

  He paused for a long while before my drawing of the god Thoth, with his bird head and long curved ibis beak, weighing Pharaoh's disembodied heart on the scales against the feather of truth. Should the heart be impure, it would tip the scales against the feather, and the god would immediately toss it to the crocodile-headed monster that waited close at hand to devour it. Softly, the king quoted the protective mantra laid down in the book to shield himself from such a calamity, and then passed on to my next engraving.

  It was almost noon before Pharaoh had completed his inspection of the mortuary temple and led the way out into the forecourt where the palace chefs had laid out a sumptuous open-air banquet.

  'Come and sit here, where I can speak to you further on the matter of the stars!' Once again the king ignored precedent to place my Lady Lostris close to him at the banquet table, even moving one of his senior wives to make a place for her. During the meal he directed most of his conversation towards my mistress. She was now completely at her ease and kept the king and all those around her enthralled and merry with her wit and charm.

  Of course, as a slave I did not have a seat at the table, nor could I even inveigle myself within range of my mistress to warn her to moderate her demeanour in the king's presence. Instead, I found myself a place on the pedestal of one of the granite lions, from where I could look down the length of the banquet table and watch everything that took place there. I was not the only observer, for my Lord Intef sat close to the king and yet withdrawn, watching it all with glittering, implacable eyes, like a handsome but deadly spider at the centre of his web.

  At one stage of the meal a yellow-billed kite wheeled high over head, and uttered a screech, a sardonic and mocking cry. Hurriedly I made the sign against the evil eye, for who knows what god it was that had taken the form of the bird to muddle and confuse our petty endeavours?

  After the midday meal it was customary for the court to rest for an hour or so, especially at this the hottest season of the year. However, Pharaoh was so wrought up that today he would have none of it.

  'Now we will inspect the treasuries,' he announced. The guards at the doors of the first treasury stood aside and presented arms as the royal party approached, and the doors were swung open from within.

  I had planned these six treasuries not only as store-rooms to hold the vast funerary treasure that Pharaoh had been collecting for the past twelve years, ever since his accession to the double throne, but also as workshops in which a small army of craftsmen and artisans was permanently employed in adding to that treasure.

  The hall that we entered was the armoury that housed the collection of weapons and accoutrements of the battlefield and the wild chase, both practical and ceremonial, which the king would take with him into the afterworld. With my Lord Intef's concurrence, I had arranged for the craftsmen to be at their benches so that the king would have the opportunity of watching them at work.

  As Pharaoh passed slowly down the row of benches, his questions were so astute and technical that those nobles and priests to whom he addressed himself could provide no answers, and they looked around frantically for someone who could. I was summoned hastily from the back of the crowd and pushed forward to face the king's interrogation.

  'Ah, yes,' Pharaoh grimaced bleakly as he recognized me. 'It is none other than the humble slave who writes pageants and cures the sick. No one here seems to know the composition of this electrum wire that binds the stock of the war-bow that this man is making for me.'

  'Gracious Pharaoh, the metal is a mixture of one part of copper to five parts of silver and four of gold. The gold is of die red variety found only in the mines of Lot in the western desert. No other gives the wire the same pliability or elasticity, of course.'

  'Of course,' the king agreed wryly. 'And how do you make the strands so thin? These are no thicker than the hairs of my head.'

  'Majesty, we extrude the hot metal by swinging it in a special pendulum that I designed for the purpose. Later we can watch the process in the gold foundry, if Your Majesty so wishes.'

  Thus during the rest of the tour I was able to remain at the king's side and to deflect some of his attention away from Lostris, but I still could not find the opportunity to speak to her alone.

  Pharaoh passed down the armoury to inspect the huge array of weapons and armour already in store. Some of these had belonged to his forefathers and had been employed in famous battles; others were newly manufactured and would never be used in war. All of them were magnificent, each a pinnacle of the armourer's art. There were helmets and breast-plates of bronze and silver and gold, battle swords with ivory hilts set with precious stones, full-dress ceremonial uniforms of the commander-in-chief of each of the king's elite regiments, shields and bucklers in hippo-hide and crocodile-skin, all starred with rosettes of gold. It made a splendid array.

  From the armoury we crossed the atrium to the furniture store, where a hundred cabinet-makers laboured with cedar and acacia and precious ebony wood to build the funeral furnishings for the king's long journey. Very few substantial trees grow in our riparian valley, and wood is a scarce and costly commodity, worth very nearly its weight in silver. Almost every stick of it must be carried hundreds of leagues across the desert, or shipped downstream from those mysterious lands to the south. Here it was piled in extravagant stacks, as though it were commonplace, and the fragrance of fresh sawdust perfumed the hot air.

  We watched while craftsmen inlaid the head-board of Pharaoh's bed with patterns of mother-of-pearl and woods of contrasting colour. Others decorated the arm-rests of the chairs with golden falcons and the back-rests of the padded sofas with the heads of silver lions. Not even the halls of the royal palace at Elephantine Island contained such delicate workmanship as would grace the rock cell of the king's tomb.

  From the furniture treasury we passed on to the hall of the sculptors. In marble and sandstone and granite of a hundred differing hues, the sculptors whittled and chipped away with chisel and file so that a fine, pale dust hung in the air. The masons covered their noses and mouths with strips of linen on which the dust settled and their features were powdered white with the insidious stuff. Some of the men coughed behind their masks as they worked, a persistent, dry cough that was peculiar to their profession. I had dissected the corpses of many old sculptors who had worked thirty years and died at their trade. I found their lungs petrified and turned to stone in their bodies, thus I spent as little time as possible in the masons' shop lest I contract the same malady.

  None the less, their products were wondrous to contemplate, statues of the gods and of Pharaoh himself that seemed to vibrate with life. There were life-sized images of Pharaoh seated on his throne or walking abroad, alive and dead, in his god form or in the shape of a mortal man. These statues would line the long causeway that led from the funerary temple on the valley floor up into the wall of black hills from which his final tomb was even at this moment being excavated. At his death the golden hearse, drawn by a train of one hundred white bullocks, was to bear his massive sarcophagus along that causeway to its final resting-place.

  This granite sarcophagus, only partially completed, lay in the centre of the masons' hall. Originally it had been a single bl
ock of pink granite quarried from the mines at Assoun, and ferried down-river in a barge especially constructed for that purpose. It had taken five hundred slaves to haul it ashore and drag it over wooden rollers to where it now lay, an oblong of solid stone five paces long, three wide and three tall.

  The masons had begun by sawing a thick slab from the top of it. Upon this granite slab a master mason was fashioning the likeness of the mummiform Pharaoh, with his arms crossed and the crook and flail gripped in his dead hands. Another team of masons was now engaged,in hollowing out the interior of the main granite block to provide a nest into which the cluster of inner coffins would fit perfectly. Including the huge outer sarcophagus, there would be seven coffins in all, fitting one within the other like a child's puzzle-toy. Seven was, of course, one of the magical numbers. The innermost coffin would be of pure gold, and later we watched it being beaten out of the formless mass of metal in the hall of the goldsmiths.

  It was this multiple sarcophagus, this mountain of stone and gold housing the king's wrapped corpse, that the great golden hearse would carry along the causeway to the hills, a slow journey that would take seven whole days to complete. The hearse would stop each night in one of the small shrines that were spaced at intervals along the causeway.

  A fascinating adjunct to the hall of statues was the ushabti shop at the rear where the servants and retainers who would escort the dead king were being carved. These were perfect little manikins of wood representing all the grades and orders of Egyptian society who would work for the king in the hereafter, so as to enable him to maintain his estate and the style of his existence in the underworld.

  Each ushabti was a delightfully carved wooden doll dressed in the authentic uniform of his calling and bearing the appropriate tools. There were farmers and gardeners, fishermen and bakers, beer-brewers and handmaidens, soldiers and tax-collectors, scribes and barbers, and hundreds upon hundreds of common labourers to perform every menial task and to go forward in the king's place if ever he were called upon by the other gods to work in the underworld.

  At the head of this congregation of little figures there was even a grand vizier whose miniature features closely resembled those of my Lord Intef. Pharaoh picked out this manikin and examined him closely, turning him over to read the description on his back.

  My name is Lord Intef, grand vizier of the Upper Kingdom, Pharaoh's sole companion, three times the recipient of the Gold of Praise. I am ready to answer for the king.

  Pharaoh passed the doll to my Lord Intef. 'Is your physique truly so muscular, my Lord Intef?' he asked with a smile just below the surface of his dour expression, and the grand vizier bowed slightly.

  'The sculptor has failed to do me justice, Your Majesty.'

  The last treasury that the king visited that day was the hall of the goldsmiths. The infernal glow of the furnaces cast a strange glow on the features of the jewellers as they worked with total concentration at their benches. I had coached them well. At the entrance of the royal entourage, the goldsmiths knelt in unison to make the triple obeisance to Pharaoh, and then rose and resumed their work.

  Even in that large hall the heat of the furnace flames was so sulphurous as almost to stop the breath, and we were soon bathed in our own sweat. However, the king was so fascinated by the treasure displayed for him that he seemed not to notice the oppressive atmosphere. He went directly to the raised dais in the centre of the hall where the most experienced and skilful smiths were at work upon the golden inner coffin. They had perfectly captured Pharaoh's living face in the shimmering metal. The mask would fit exactly over his bandaged head. It was a divine image with eyes of obsidian and rock-crystal, and with the cobra-headed uraeus encircling the brow. I truly believe that no finer masterpiece of the goldsmith's art has ever been fashioned in all the thousand years of our civilization. This was the peak and the zenith. All the unborn ages might one day marvel at its splendour.

  Even after Pharaoh had admired the golden mask from every angle, he seemed unable to tear himself too far from it. He spent the remainder of the day on the dais beside it, seated on a low stool while box after cedar-wood box of exquisite jewels were laid at his feet and the contents catalogued for him.

  I cannot believe that such a treasure was ever before accumulated in one place at one time. To make a bald list of the items does not in the least way suggest the richness and the diversity of it all. None the less, let me tell you at the outset that, there were six thousand four hundred and fifty-five pieces already in the cedar-wood boxes, and that each day more were added to the collection as the jewellers worked on tirelessly.

  There were rings for Pharaoh's toes as well as his fingers; there were amulets and charms, and gold figurines of the gods and goddesses; there were necklaces and bracelets and pectoral medallions and belts on which were inlaid falcons and vultures and all the other creatures of the earth and the sky and the river; there were crowns and diadems studded with lapis lazuli and garnets and agate and carnelians and jasper and every gemstone that civilized man holds dear.

  The artistry with which all this had been designed and manufactured eclipsed all that had been created over the preceding one thousand years. It is often in decline that a nation creates its most beautiful works of art. In the formative years of empire the obsession is with conquest and the building-up of wealth. It is only once this has been achieved that there is leisure and a desire to develop the arts, and—more importantly—rich and powerful men to sponsor them.

  The weight of gold and silver already used in the manufacture of the hearse and the funeral mask and all the rest of this breathtaking collection of treasure was in excess of five hundred takhs; thus it would have taken five hundred strong men to lift it all. I had calculated that this was almost one-tenth of the total weight of these precious metals that had been mined in the entire one thousand years of our recorded history. All of this the king intended taking with him to the tomb.

  Who am I, a humble slave, to question the price that a king was willing to pay for eternal life? Suffice it only to state that in assembling this treasure, while at the same time conducting the war against the Lower Kingdom, Pharaoh had, almost alone and unaided, plunged this very Egypt of ours into beggary.

  No wonder, then, that Tanus in his declamation had singled out the depredation of the tax-collectors as one of the most terrible afflictions visited upon the populace. Between them and the robber bands that ravaged unchecked and unhindered through the countryside, we were all ruined and crushed under the financial yoke that was too heavy for any of us to bear. To survive at all, we had to evade the tax collector's net. So as he set out to beggar us for his own aggrandizement, the king made criminals of us at the same moment. Very few of us, great or small, rich or poor, slept well at night. We lay awake dreading at any moment the heavy knock of the tax-collector upon the door.

  Oh, sad and abused land, how it groaned beneath the yoke!

  LAVISH QUARTERS HAD BEEN PREPARED in the necropolis in which the king would spend that night upon the west bank of the Nile, close to his own final resting-place in the gaunt black hills. The necropolis, the city of the dead, was almost as extensive as Karnak itself. It was home to all those associated with the building and the care of the funerary temple and the royal tomb. There was a full regiment of the elite guard to protect the holy places, for the usurper in the north was as avaricious for treasure as was our own dear king, while the robber barons in the desert became each day bolder and more daring. The treasuries of the funerary temple were a sore temptation to every predator in the two kingdoms, and beyond.

  In addition to the guards there were the companies of the craftsmen and the artisans and all their apprentices to house. I was responsible for the records of wages and rations, so I knew exactly how many there were. On the last pay-day their number had been four thousand eight hundred and eleven. Added to this, there were over ten thousand slaves employed upon the work.

  I will not weary myself by listing the numbers of oxen
and sheep that had to be slaughtered each day to feed them all, nor the cartloads of fish that were brought up from the Nile, nor the thousands of jars of beer that were brewed daily to slake the summer thirst of this multitude as they laboured under the watchful eye and the ready lash of the overseers.

  The necropolis was a city, and in that city was a palace for the king. It was with relief that we moved into it to spend the night, for it had been a wearying day. But once again there was little rest for me.

  I tried to reach my Lady Lostris, but it was almost as if there existed a conspiracy to keep me away from her. According to her little black maids, first she was at toilet, and after that she was in her bath, and then she was resting and could not be disturbed. Finally, as I still waited in the antechamber of her quarters, a summons reached me from her father, and I could linger no longer, but must hurry to my master.

  As soon as I entered my Lord Intef s bedchamber he dismissed all the others in the room. When we were alone, he kissed me. I was once more surprised by his benevolence and disturbed by his excited manner. Seldom had I seen him in such mood, and always before it had adumbrated calamitous events.

  'How often the gateway to power and fortune is found in the most unexpected place!' he laughed at me, and caressed my face. 'This time it lies between the thighs of a woman. No, my old darling, don't play the innocent. I know just what a cunning hand you have taken in all of this. Pharaoh has told me how you cajoled him into it by promising him a male heir to his line. By Seth, but you are the cunning one, are you not? Not a word to me of your design, but you schemed it all on your own account.'

  He laughed again, and twisted a lock of my hair between his fingers. 'You must have divined my ultimate ambition all along, even though we have never discussed it openly. So you set out to achieve it for me. Of course, I should have you punished for your presumption,' he twisted the lock of hair until tears started into my eyes, 'but how can I be angry with you when you have placed the double crown within my grasp?' He released the tress of my hair and kissed me again. 'I have just come from the king's presence. In two days, at the culmination of the festival, he will announce his betrothal to my daughter, Lostris.' I felt a sudden darkness behind my eyes, and a chilly dew formed on my skin.