Hatsuret
They do not know, the two besotted fools, how closely at hand wait the instruments of their destruction. They do not know that I am in Akhet-Aten, yea, even in the Great House itself. They do not know how well this is known to others, who also wait, and how secretly and subtly I am being helped to my tryst with them … for tryst I have, and all signs now point that it will not be long in coming.
When I was given assurance of my safety and was aided in my hiding by General Horemheb and the Councilor and Divine Father-in-law, Aye, I did not know at first the real meaning of their assistance—though I have been sure for ten years, since I first became an acolyte in the most holy ancient temple of Amon-Ra at Karnak, that eventually the Pharaoh Akhenaten would have to die for his sins against Amon and his betrayal of the ma’at of Kemet. When my brilliance and shrewdness took me up to become chief aide to doddering old Maya, Amon’s High Priest, this conviction grew. When Akhenaten ordered Maya’s murder and desecrated the temple on the day of the entombment of the Good God Amonhotep III (life, health prosperity!), I had no further doubts. Such monstrous evil as Pharaoh did that day can have only one final repayment, however long we must wait and plot to secure it. For never was there such a dreadful thing!
He ordered General Horemheb to batter down the doors. He ordered Maya and myself to be killed as we faced the soldiers and their battering rams, our arms outspread across the ancient planks. At the last second I leaped aside, to be spirited instantly away by many willing hands among the crowd. Maya, less nimble, died. Then Pharaoh directed the soldiers to seize the sacred statue of Amon-Ra, King of the Gods, and hurl it into the Nile, which they did, and called down eternal curses upon any who would seek to recover it. Of course a team of divers recruited by Horemheb recovered it that night, after Akhenaten and his brother the new King Smenkhkara had sailed downriver to Akhet-Aten; and it, too, is in hiding, safe until the day when Amon may rule again in his rightful place in the Two Lands.
Now I am in Pharaoh’s house itself, having been presented to His Majesty six months ago by General Horemheb as a slave captured in some skirmish in Canaan. Horemheb had directed me to grow a beard, which is almost unheard of in clean-shaven Kemet, so this made me look foreign enough, and to that I added a reddish dye to my glossy black hair, and also affected a noticeable limp in my right leg, which served to disguise me further. Horemheb explained that my perfect tongue for the language was due to my actually being a native of Kemet whose family lived close to the border. I was kidnapped by a marauding band of Canaanites when I was twelve years old, he explained, and spent ten years in captivity before being retrieved. My leg, he said, had been deliberately broken by my brutal captors, and thus the limp.
His Majesty, who seems to pay so little attention any more to what is actually going on in the land of Kemet that he barely glanced at me, accepted all this without question. My very oddity was my safest disguise. The only break in his indifference came when Horemheb called attention to my limp. Then he asked me to walk up and down before him, which I did with an easy awkwardness, since I have practiced this handicap until I am now almost afraid that I shall not be able to walk normally again after His Majesty has been removed.
“Ah,” His Majesty said, a genuine sympathy in his voice. “I, too, know what it means to limp. You are welcome to my household, Peneptah (for such is the false name I have taken). We shall limp about the Palace together, you and I, and keep each other company.”
And he gave me for a moment a smile of quite extraordinary sweetness, which, did I not hate him so and were I not so dedicated to his death, might well have made me pause, ashamed by what we are doing to betray him. But even as I teetered for a dangerous second on the brink of this fatal precipice, he destroyed my mood by abruptly turning away.
“Where is Ankh-Kheperu-Ra?” he demanded in a high querulous voice, using King Smenkhkara’s coronation name. “He was supposed to wait upon me half an hour ago, and still he does not come. Cousin, fetch him!”
“Yes, Son of the Sun,” Horemheb said smoothly. “At once. It is all right, then, for Peneptah to be assigned to the ranks of your household scribes?”
“Take him to Amonhotep, Son of Hapu,” he said impatiently. “Tell the old man to put him to work. We’ll find something for him to do.”
“Thank you, Majesty,” I said, bowing low and feeling a great relief surge through me, for had he suspected anything I should have been dead upon the spot. But he turned his back upon me and shuffled away to a window where he could look out over the city, resting one clawlike hand against the wooden lintel, long bony fingers drumming insistently while he waited for his brother—a rasping, scratching, anxious sound in which all his uneasy yearning was expressed.
General Horemheb led me away before I could witness their touching reunion, which I am sure, now that I know them, came after a separation of no more than an hour at most. Since then I have seen them together many times. The younger King treats the elder with a deferential yet self-confident air, joshing, good-natured, patient and obviously deeply affectionate. The elder receives his confident deference with a gratitude so humble and self-effacing that it is almost embarrassing to see. It is but one more reason why the rule of Nefer-Kheperu-Ra must come to an end. It is the thing that will make its ending easier, perhaps, than we now think.
These past six months I have been working as a scribe with that wise old man, Amonhotep, Son of Hapu, probably the most honored of all the commoners of Kemet. Across the Nile from Thebes in the necropolis, his mortuary temple, given him by grateful Amonhotep III (life, health, prosperity!), has now been completed and is open for worship. He still, though in his sixties, supervises many of the architectural and public works. He continues to head the corps of scribes who assist Their two Majesties, and his opinion is almost always sought in the counsels of the Family.
“If Amonhotep, Son of Hapu, takes a liking to you,” Horemheb told me, “all your plans will be greatly assisted.” A fleeting smile touched his shrewd, sharp-featured face. “He has assisted mine, and I know.…”
But somehow I have never been quite able to establish such a relationship with the old man. He knows who I am, but he has never revealed it to anyone else by so much as a hint. He could betray me and have my head in an instant if he would, but he does not do so. I assume this means that he agrees with my purposes, but I can never be sure. Perhaps he wants it this way, because it means, of course, that I cannot move without his agreement. No more can I move without the agreement of Aye and Horemheb. Together these three, and possibly the Great Wife as well, whom they all consult, will decide the timing of my vengeance—and theirs.
I had been working for Amonhotep, Son of Hapu, two months when he discovered my secret. He caught me with the simplest of ruses. We were alone in the writing room, he at one side, I perhaps fifteen feet away. He lurched suddenly against a table, tipping it just sufficiently so that a pot of black ink began to slide toward a pile of pristine papyrus lying on the floor.
“Oh!” he cried in well-simulated anguish. “How stupid of me! Catch it!”
And instinctively, abandoning my carefully nurtured limp, I sprang to do his bidding.
“Thank you very much, Hatsuret,” he said serenely when I had secured the ink and returned the table to its upright position. “I am getting so stupid in my old age.”
But I would not say Amonhotep, Son of Hapu, is stupid at all.
Aside from an involuntary start at the sound of my name, which I could not suppress, I made no response. Nor have we ever discussed the matter. But Amonhotep, Son of Hapu, keeps a very close eye on me: I think for Aye and Horemheb, though he never reveals in the slightest where his sympathies lie. So I conduct myself with extreme care at all times, understanding that it is apparently my task to wait until I am needed, and that I will be told when that time is, and what to do when it comes upon us.
In the meantime I can only watch in anguish the desecration of the gods and the ruin of religion throughout the Two Lands. There are many among the palace servants who are still faithful to Amon, and very cautiously, little by little, I have let it be known to a few trusted ones who I am. Through them I am able to keep in touch with my principal priests in exile, and thus am I able to know most of the news of Kemet. So I know that from the Fourth Cataract to the Delta the temples of Amon lie in ruins, that the priesthood is dispersed and mostly in hiding as I am, that all the other principal gods, including Osiris whose rituals and customs for the dead His Majesty has abandoned, are in equal despair and desolation.
Never has there been such a great overturning of the gods as has happened under this Pharaoh, not even in the days of the Hyksos kings. Even they honored Amon-Ra and his fellow gods; even they associated the temples with their ruling. Not so the Heretic of Akhet-Aten, the Criminal, the Madman. Not so His pathetic Majesty, who shuffles about his palaces here as in a dream world, sacrificing to his false god the Aten, still trying to convince the people that one god can be so great and so all-embracing that he can know and respond to all the infinite needs of mankind, which is absurd on the face of it.
I serve discreetly, I listen, I observe. I see two foolish lovers trying to pretend that they are rulers of a great country. I see all, all, religion, civil government, Empire and all, falling away around them.
I see a man of thirty, so crippled in body and so discouraged in heart—for I believe he is greatly discouraged at last, though he still pretends he is not and tries to put a good face upon it—that he seems almost to have no energy left to rule.
I see a man of twenty, strong and vigorous and, yes, let me admit it, handsome, generous, kindly, and appealing, though of limited brain, wishing harm to no one, friendly to all—I see this amiable but inadequate man trying to administer the Two Lands for his listless brother.
Was there ever such a pair tried to lead a modern nation? And will it not be right and fitting in the eyes of Amon, and of all the gods, when their puny and pathetic charade is put at last to end?
So do I believe, and for that day I work. Now there is battle in the Family—they conceal it from the servants, who learn all things—over the tombs of Huy and Meryra. It would be a minor issue in any reign but this. Now, I think, it has suddenly become a symbol of everything, the issue on which the Living Horus may be brought to ground.
I am ready when they need me.
Hatsuret, who will yet be High Priest of Amon in the temple of Karnak when the great days return, is here.
***