City of the Dead

one of kindness.
    ‘I am not barren. We never made love. We slept first with our backs turned to one another, then in separate beds, and at last in separate rooms. But I had a need. And it was not a marriage.’
    ‘When did it end?’
    ‘Two years ago. But it lasted seven.’
    ‘That is long.’
    She smiled. ‘I have become a middle-aged woman.’
    ‘No.’
    ‘Do you have children?’
    ‘I have a boy. Heby. But it is long since I have seen him.’ They were silent once more, but it was a different kind of silence now.
    ‘Have you thought about what you will do?’ asked Huy.
    It might depend on you, said her heart, but her voice replied, ‘No. There is the house in Napata, in the south, which my father has left me. Perhaps I will go there. I have had enough of this city.’
    Huy nodded. Outside the window the waning moon filled the street with grey light. Some small animal, probably a dog, clicked by, its paws tapping out a regular rhythm on the hard ground. Nothing else stirred.
    ‘What will you do in Napata?’
    Senseneb smiled. ‘I may be a doctor there. I am not leaving all my father’s drugs and instruments and papers for his successor.’ Her voice became hard, and her eyes turned inwards.
    ‘Why? Who is he?’
    ‘Merinakhte.’
    Huy paused before speaking again, trying to read her face. She let him do it, pretending to study the little statue of Bes which stood guard on a shelf. ‘Will you help me?’
    She turned her eyes to his. ‘How?’
    ‘I must get the queen away from here.’
    She reached out her hands to him and he took them.
    ‘Yes, I will help you. I will live and die for you.’
    ‘And I for you.’
    A ferry had crossed between them. They talked more; he told her about Nehesy, about Ay. He told her almost all that he had discovered, but at the back of his heart he knew that from now on they would have to be careful. He could not allow himself to imagine what would happen if Kenamun found out that she knew him. Huy told her about his life, and the City of the Horizon, and how above all he wanted to be a scribe again, and about Heby, and how he still missed him, even though he had no idea what his son must look like now.
    When later they made love, it was no longer as strangers.

    Nezemmut had gone to her cold bed long ago, though not without an assurance from her husband that he would visit her later, for the getting of an heir formed an important part of his busy schedule. In another part of the palace, in a large dark room overlooking the river on one side and the city to the north on the other, General Horemheb sat crouched at a black wood table on whose surface a number of scrolls were scattered.
    Many were old, plundered long since from the archive at the City of the Horizon, because Horemheb was tracing his lineage. Before long, he thought, a time would come when his own historian would have to rewrite the annals of the Black Land in such a way as to make him the direct heir and successor of Nebmare Amenophis. Thus the difficult years of Akhenaten and his immediate successors would be erased for posterity, and even his own wife would cease to exist in the records. By then, if the gods were good, she would have served her purpose. For the moment, however, it was too soon to strike for the final goal. Patience had always been Horemheb’s great ally; and he would not abandon his faith in it now, though age and time were not patient, and were beginning to nudge him.
    For weeks he had not left the palace, brooding over the past, imagining the future, and leaving his men to control the present.
    The reports he received were good, and he had no reason to think that their work was patchy. His belief in his own destiny had grown so hard that he could not imagine anything with the power to break it.
    Kenamun stood near the table, half in the light cast by the lamps and half out of it. He bit his lip in impatience as he waited for his master to come down from the sky. They had got nothing out of Nehesy before they had killed him, and yet Horemheb’s reaction to this news - Kenamun’s chief dread -had been mild. Knowing the general’s aversion to unnecessary torture, he had played down that part of the interrogation. In fear of betrayal, he had had the Medjay sergeant who had been present transferred to the Northern Capital — a move to which the sergeant himself had no objection. The vizir there was a quiet man who obeyed orders from the south. The place was no centre of power but