City of the Dead

but there was determination in the set of his thin-lipped, old man’s mouth. For a moment the eyes of the former scribe and the former Master of Horse, both veterans of the disgraced Akhenaten’s court, met. Was there a spark of recognition there, or was it just imagined? It was many years since they had last seen each other, and yet in the time that Huy had been back in the Southern Capital, forbidden to practise his former profession, he had built up a reputation as a problem solver. Aware of Horemheb’s dislike of less powerful fellow-adherents of the former regime, Huy had kept his head down, but could do nothing about the reputation he had won, due to which he was able to scrape a precarious living.
    Lurking at the edges of the crowd, men from Horemheb’s special section of Medjay police were not troubling to make their presence less than obvious. The general was flaunting his private power more and more flagrantly, but Huy was not sure why. Did he seek to prove to the king that he was the real power in the land? Or did he deliberately seek a confrontation with the young pharaoh? Despite all his sophistication, all the political dexterity he had learnt down the years, might it not perhaps be a case of an old lion showing his teeth to a young one — even though he knows that, once he has entered the seqtet boat, his power is doomed, and not even the flexing of all his muscles will pull him backwards one second in time?
    Huy wondered if Horemheb was, after all, either subtle enough or modest enough ever to entertain such thoughts in his heart. The general was a practical man. Abstractions did not interest him, though he did make a show of an interest in the arts, pouring money into the hands of painters and carvers, singers and potters; imitating the manner of his own hero, the warrior pharaoh Menkheperre Tuthmosis, creator of the Great Empire, whose death a century earlier was still lamented, as from it the historians now dated the decline of power in the | Black Land. Horemheb, Huy was certain, wanted to be the man to arrest that decline. Huy privately had little doubt that i he would succeed, but he reserved a scrap of judgement because he remembered, years ago, a light of independence - or even of defiance - in the eyes of the young pharaoh, then only nine years old, as he fulfilled the rite of the Opening of the Mouth at the entombment of his immediate predecessor, Smenkhkare. Since then his every step, his every move, had been dogged by his two adviser-jailers. Huy wondered if, with maturity, the young king might not find the strength and jhe cunning to break the bars, shoot the bolts of the doors.
    The litters had lumbered past him now, their bearers kicking;
    up dust. Huy watched the swinging curtains and tried to imagine the private thoughts of the occupants of each. He doubted if the paymasters of the banquets to follow would enjoy them much. For a few minutes longer he watched the excited, chattering crowd of lesser guests and officials pass by, the headdresses glittering in the sun, a swirl of white linen and brown bodies whose precise outlines were softened by the fine dust their footsteps raised from the road. Huy’s eyes sought Taheb among them. For a moment he thought he saw her, but he could not be sure, and something in his heart prevented him from looking further. It had been two years since their love bond had ended, after several false stops and starts. In that time he had seen her once, and then only at a distance, but it was enough to tell his heart that he had not forgotten her. Now here he was, hopelessly looking for her again. He knew he was chasing a dream, but the spectre remained. Exhausted by it, he sometimes wondered what it would take to lay this ghost.
    He turned away from the procession, and shouldered his way through the press of people who lingered to watch until the last of the marriage guests had passed by. He felt at once disappointed at not pursuing Taheb, and relieved. If he were to meet her, he would have no words to say to her. Why, then, play with the illusion that they might be together again? As a palliative for loneliness? He knew in his heart that he did not want her back; if the desire had truly been there, he would have done something about it long ago.
    Leaving the crowd behind him, the music growing fainter as he walked down the low hill on which the temple stood, he made his way home. For some time he had lived in a small house in the harbour quarter. A