City of the Dead

that Ay’s patience would run out as soon as he sensed the moment to strike was passing. Huy would have to give Ay all the information he had within the next two days. To do that and guarantee the safety of the queen would require quick thinking.
    ‘Has Ay asked after me since our last meeting?’
    ‘No. But don’t think for a moment that he has forgotten you.’ Ineny smiled. ‘I admire you, Huy. All this time we have been talking I find that I’ve opened my soul to you - such as it is. And you manage to be a pleasant companion, cordial, even warm - and yet at the end of it I know not one grain more about you than I did to begin with.’
    ‘You would make a poor spy, Ineny.’
    ‘My wits have not disappointed me so far.’
    ‘Stay with Ay. It would be foolish to make more enemies than you need to at a time like this.’
    ‘I do not ask your advice.’
    ‘Then why have you told me all this?’
    ‘What is it you know, Huy?’
    ‘Very little.’ Huy managed to remain close-faced. But Ineny’s restlessness worried him. To take the man into his confidence demanded too great a risk for him to take now. If it turned out later that he regretted his caution, he would accept what the gods arranged. In the meantime Huy would need all the help he could get from the one person he had decided he could trust without any reserve: Nehesy. Senseneb too, perhaps; but she knew enough about medicine to procure and administer poison, and she would not be the first woman to use sex to turn a potential enemy’s judgement. Huy had not forgotten Merinakhte, the young doctor who had climbed as high as he could and whose eye would now be on his next goal — Horaha’s position. Had he enlisted Senseneb’s help to get it?
    He shook himself like a dog to cleanse his heart. It was surely not good, not healthy, to see the dark side of everything Ra sent.

    For Ay, it was a difficult interview. He had rehearsed it in his heart many times before facing it in reality, and now had to acknowledge that reality has the disadvantage of having no script.
    The step he was attempting to take was one which he had considered at length, and he had discussed it with his Chief Wife. Tey had acquiesced, but with reserve, and Ay was left with the feeling that although she had always supported him in his ambitions, she drew the line at agreeing to give up her primacy as a stepping stone. Still, the speed with which Ankhsenpaamun had put her plan to marry the Hittite prince into action had alarmed him. If Ineny had not got wind of it through the royal body servant he slept with, Prince Zannanzash might be in the Southern Capital even now, sending messages about his safe arrival back to his ever more powerful father. An accidental death here would have been out of the question, and it would not have been long before not only he, but Horemheb, would have felt the earth open beneath them.
    For a while he had hesitated, hardly daring to believe that Horemheb’s spies had not got wind of the queen’s plot too -and then when he was sure, he had hesitated again; but finally he had given the order to have Zannanzash killed, because Horemheb’s downfall would not necessarily have ensured his own survival; and with Zannanzash enthroned, Ay’s own hope of the Golden Chair would vanish forever.
    But the incident had shown him how essential it was for him to strengthen his links with the royal family. It was his own lowly birth which had failed to secure him the succession when Akhenaten had died. He would not make the mistake of overlooking that again. He did not have the time! Age hung like a clinging ape around his shoulders, weighing him down, and no amount of make-up, exercise or a frugal diet could keep the lines from the neck, the forehead and the elbows, or could prevent the skin from sagging at the jowls and losing its elasticity on the hands, or stop the biceps from turning into loose, flabby folds. Ay had his hair dyed, and under his robe he wore a tight linen bandage to hold in his shocking balloon of a stomach, which would not decrease even though he only ate one small meal of rice and figs a day, and drank nothing but water.

    * * *

    Ankhsenpaamun received Ay formally, with a retinue of body servants. That disquieted him. He had little doubt that she knew why he had come, and was irritated at her insistence on addressing him as ‘grandfather’. After the formal greetings were out of the way, he managed to persuade her to dismiss most of the