City of the Dead

grave. In the meantime, many additional teams of workmen were exempted from mourning inactivity and sent to the valley to speed up the work on the king’s tomb, which would be by no means ready to receive him properly, as work on it had only been in progress since his accession nine years earlier, but which would have to fulfil its function as best it could. There were some who thought the haste with which this work was set in motion indecent, but as the orders were issued from the palace itself no one could criticise them openly.
    Huy found the hurry interesting: Tutankhamun was, it appeared, going to get little of the dignity which was normally associated with the burial of a monarch. He watched as hastily from one quarter and another of the country the funeral offerings and furniture were gathered together under the quartermaster of the royal tombs. They were displayed on public view for a month before being consigned to the burial chamber. Huy went to look at them, and it grieved him to see what poor stuff it was. Some of the trappings had been lifted brazenly from Smenkhkare’s burial, and though the workmanship and the carving and the volume of precious metal and stone befitted a king, Huy, who, as a child, remembered watching the great entombment of Nebmare Amenophis, was sorry to see how dismissively the young pharaoh was being treated. He was certain that if it had been within her power, Tutankhamun’s widow would have taken steps to prevent such cut-price treatment.
    Shabbily dressed, Huy crossed the River by one of the black ferry boats and visited the tomb builders. Most, caked with sweat and dust, were too busy to talk, but he recognised one overseer whose acquaintance he had made years earlier, and who remembered him.
    ‘Good day,’ said the man, looking at him. ‘It’s been years. You don’t look as if they have been kind.’
    ‘I manage.’
    ‘That’s just about what I’d call it, to look at you. Have a drink.’
    They retired to the shelter of an awning made of an old tarpaulin stretched over driftwood stakes, and the overseer broke the clay seals off two jars of black beer he had resting in a water jug to keep them cool. They drank in silence, looking down over the scorching valley to the sluggish river below. The season was progressing. Perhaps some of the haste was due to the need to get the king buried before the flood came. Already, barely distinguishable, there were traces of the telltale red sand in the water.
    ‘How is the work?’
    ‘It’s a rush job,’ said the overseer. ‘But the main tunnelling was done already, so it’s been a question of plastering and painting. And a lot of that was at least sketched out, so it won’t look too terrible by the time we’re finished.’
    ‘May I see?’
    The overseer laughed. ‘Quite a student of these things, aren’t you? You can see the antechamber. Beyond that, the layout’s secret.’
    Acknowledging this, Huy finished his beer and entered the tomb. Inside, it was cool, though the men working by the light of oil lamps glistened with sweat. He came across one mural which was fresh, the outline only just worked out, with the Painter just starting on the colouring. It showed a large group. Ay, depicted, as he always liked to be, as a vigorous young man, and dressed in regalia which came very close to those of a king, was performing the ritual of the Opening of the Mouth upon Tutankhamun.
    As a mark of respect, the picture was blameless. But Huy found it disturbing that Ay - on whose orders it must have been made — had accorded himself the honour which should fall to the pharaoh’s successor.
    ‘Do you know when this painting was planned?’ Huy asked the man working on it, a plump fellow with pendulous breasts and a careful eye.
    The artist looked at Huy briefly. ‘Since the king died,’ he replied in an undertone, before turning all of his attention back to his work.
    Huy made his way home thoughtfully, grateful for the cool and solitude of his little house. He changed out of his workman’s disguise and bathed, wondering what the significance of the painting might be. There was no representation of Horemheb at all in the tomb; but that could be explained by the fact that the general had only just married, peripherally, into the royal household, and, also perhaps that, secure in the knowledge of his power, he had preferred to remain aloof. But Ay appeared to be indulging in vulgar, pre-emptive and over-anxious claim-staking.