City of the Dead

approaching and saw them hovering in the curtained doorway, not daring to enter as they noticed the queen still sleeping. He picked up a linen wrap from the back of a black wood-and-gilt folding chair and tied it round him, approaching the door.
    ‘Mesesia,’ he said to one of them, beckoning. The man came forward a few paces, his shaven head bowed.
    ‘Go and find Ahmose,’ said the king. ‘Bring him to the Red Room and tell him to wait for me there.’

    Some time later, after the conclusion of the interview, Ahmose made his way out of the palace by a side entrance. He had not talked of much with the king. It had seemed to him that all Tutankhamun wanted to do was bolster his confidence by once more going over and refining his plan to assassinate Horemheb. Ahmose, a courtier for seventeen years, and a man whose solid, avuncular presence had served him well in the matter of eliciting secrets, congratulated himself that the king still seemed to regard him as a member of his inner circle. It was a nuisance that the young man was too clever to allow the members of it to know each other. For a time Ahmose had wondered if the king mistrusted him; then he had wondered if the whole conspiracy against the general was not a simple fantasy. Now he was sure that some loose form of revolution was being prepared. Patience would bring him the details, and perhaps even the names of the conspirators.
    Leaving the outer courtyard of the palace, he turned round once to look up at the columned gallery which ran along the first storey. He could see no one there. He turned again and set off at a brisker pace.
    From behind the column against which he was leaning, the king watched the fat courtier turn, and scurry through the gate, hesitating for only a fraction of a second before taking the street which led in the direction of Horemheb’s overblown house. Tutankhamun clenched his fist. This battle would not be soon won. But he was learning, all the time.

THREE

    The king accepted in his heart that unless they were helped, the gods would remain impartial. As the present custodian of the perpetual incarnation of Ra-on-Earth, he did not hesitate. And to his joy, but hardly to his surprise, one action by him triggered others by those gods whose alliance he had solicited for so long.
    He meant Ahmose’s death as a warning, however oblique, to the general. He had the man abducted and drowned downriver, reluctant to accord him anything other than a merciful, noble death. Then he had the body brought back to the city and laid on the shore near Horemheb’s jetty. It was a custom which he followed, rather than initiated, and he was sure that the general would read the shorthand correctly. His worry stemmed from not knowing how many other Ahmoses there were in his camp.
    Anxiety turned to triumph later, though he still had several months to wait, during which neither side - Tutankhamun had begun to think of the series of moves and counter-moves as a cold war — did more than wait, watchfully maintaining their positions on the board. Then the gods suddenly struck two blows in his favour.
    The year had turned round and the Black Land had entered the season of sbemu again. After the enervating activity of the harvest, which in this good year had filled the granaries and taken even the workers from the valley, where the great tombs of the departed lay on the west bank of the River across from the Southern Capital, to help gather the generous crop of emmer, barley and flax, the country lay in grateful exhaustion. The king’s heart could not rest, though, because it dwelt with an unwelcome tirelessness on the fact of his wife’s empty birth-cave, and on the imminent gift from Nut and Geb of a child to Horemheb and Nezemmut. It took two seasons and one passage of the moon for a child to grow in the birth-cave, and the time was almost up.
    But Nezemmut’s child was born early and dead. To the king’s secret satisfaction, it had been a boy. That would be vinegar on the general’s lips. The little corpse, with its huge head, curled like a baby crocodile in the egg, was swiftly dried and embalmed, and set aside in a cedar box for the time to come when it would join its unlucky parents in their tomb. They would know the same pain the king had.
    The next month Ankhsi’s bleeding stopped. She showed Tutankhamun the linen towel. It was as clean as when her maid had bound it to her loins. The king hardly dared breathe.
    The news quickly spread from