Pillar of Fire Read online

  The king blinked at her, too astonished to be offended. It was Aharon who said, “Well, no, he doesn’t, but he won’t be alone. I’m going with him.”

  “And I,” said Johanan. “We decided a long time ago. It would come to this, Grandmother saw it. We’re to be what after all we are, tribesmen who’ve been living in Egypt and have a mind to go home. We’ll get safe-conducts to pass the garrisons, and we’ll have donkeys, and things to sell, to keep us fed and to keep people from being suspicious as we make our way north.”

  “His majesty will be my brother,” Aharon said, “a bit feebleminded, you see, and apt to see visions. We keep him close for fear he’ll take a fit.”

  It was rather beautiful, as insanities went. “It will never work,” Nofret said. “Someone will catch you. General Horemheb is nobody’s fool. If he gets even a hint of what you’re up to, he’ll be after you with the whole of his army.”

  “Then we’ll have to see that he doesn’t,” said Aharon. He was as pleased with himself as Johanan was, like a boy plotting mischief.

  “Don’t you see?” Johanan said to her, reading her with damnable ease. “It’s so ridiculously simple, it has to work. We’ll walk out of here as if we have every right to do it, and we’ll take our brother with us, leading him home.”

  “Home,” said the king, hugging the word to his narrow breast. “Home to the Red Land, to my god’s holy mountain. I’ll build a temple there. I’ll set it high, against the sky. Everyone will look at it and wonder.”

  “Yes,” said Nofret sharply. “He’ll wonder and he’ll come there, and he’ll recognize the late king of Egypt.”

  “Egypt’s king will be dead,” the king said. “He dies now. Do you hear him gasping? His span is shrunk to days—to hours. The Guide is waiting, the jackal-god who guards the paths of the dead.”

  Nofret threw up her hands. “Who will ever listen to me? You’re all mad.”

  “We do what we must do,” said Leah gently. “Yes, even you, who brought your lady to me, and gave me time to teach her what she must learn.”

  Nofret’s lady nodded, still white about the eyes, but calm. “You do understand, though you don’t want to. Like me. This is right, Nofret. This is what the god wants us to do.”

  But which god? Nofret wondered. The Aten, who professed to love the king—or Amon, who hated him? Or was there a difference?

  Twenty-Eight

  The king’s dying was a grand and terrible thing. He took to his bed with pomp and ceremony, attended by flocks of priests, physicians, slaves and servants, lords and hangers-on, as he had done everything for his life long. What should have been a long slow fading into dark was a royal spectacle, albeit not of gold and sunlight as so many others had been, but of white linen and the dark smoke of incense and the wailing of women and eunuchs.

  None of them—not one—knew it for a lie. The king, fasting, taking no more than a sip of water or a bite of bread from day to day, looked sick unto death. Too convincingly so, in Nofret’s mind. It would be like him to die in truth, simply because his god had bidden him to feign it.

  She would not have wept more than duty required if he had been as ill as he seemed. He dragged it out interminably, though when she counted, it was no more than a single round of the moon from new to full and back to new again. The nine days of the tomb’s completion passed, and he still lived, but as if on the edge of death. Even his enemies believed him; or else had resolved to be patient, to let the gods dispose of him.

  In the dark of the moon, while his priests prayed and his physicians wrung their hands and his servants wailed in their chorus, he drew one great rattling breath, and then no more.

  Nofret was there because her lady was there, playing the part of the grieving queen, and playing it as the king did: too well. It was in her arms that he died, or seemed to die.

  She who had been silent, who had spoken no word for days out of count, let out a great cry. The priests’ drone stopped short. The physicians flocked toward the king’s bed. The servants stood gaping, mute.

  The queen would not let him go, though people tried to coax and then to compel her. The struggle impeded the physicians, as it was meant to. Their examination was distracted, their scrutiny less keen than it might have been.

  If any of them might have remarked on this, he never spoke. Amid the flurry a new confusion burst in, Smenkhkare running naked from his bed, and Meritaten trailing behind, clumsy with her pregnancy. She saw the figure on the bed, pale and ghastly in the light of the lamps, and shrieked even more terribly than her sister had. Before anyone could stop her, she flung herself on her father’s body.

  Maybe he truly was dead. A living man would surely have leaped awake in shock, or gasped as she fell on top of him. She was quite out of her mind, shrieking, wailing, seizing and shaking him till her sister got a grip on her and pried her loose. There was great strength in the younger queen’s slenderness, as they all knew who had tried to separate her from her father. She used it on her sister, flung her into Smenkhkare’s arms. He caught her unthinking, and held her as she struggled, staring at the bed, at the king, at Ankhesenpaaten.

  He was stunned, and stupid with it. Maybe he had not believed that his brother was ill. Maybe it had not mattered to him: he had been too certain that there was no danger. People could be like that, particularly beautiful, young, spoiled princes. Death did not mean anything to them, not till they faced it; and then they forgot it till the next time it struck near them.

  He had not been there when his mother died: he had been in Thebes, escaping from the plague. Nofret wondered where he had been at his father’s death. Elsewhere, she supposed, convincing himself then as now that the king’s illness was nothing. Had he been this startled then?

  Maybe. Maybe not. She did not see any joy in him. He had not realized yet that this made him sole and uncontested king.

  Meritaten kept him occupied, to be sure. She was wild beyond reason, struggling, yowling, carrying on as if she had never turned gladly from her father-husband to her beautiful uncle. Nor had she been there night and day as her sister was, except when duties required, the duties that no one else had troubled to perform.

  “Take her out,” the younger queen said in a soft, still, but carrying voice. “One of you healers, go with her. Prepare a draught for her, to make her sleep.”

  Meritaten’s departure brought blessed silence. The servants, outdone by her hysterics, did not resume their wailing. The queen dismissed as many of the rest as she could, still in that quiet voice, sending some for the embalmers, others with messages for the lords and the court.

  Her composure calmed them, though they eyed it askance. Nofret hoped that they would ascribe it to exhaustion and to queenly strength, and not to the fact that—as far as the queen knew—her father was still alive. There was no telling it from the look of him. If he breathed, he breathed too shallowly to see. His face above the crimson coverlet was a corpse’s face, skin sunk to skull, empty of life or of soul’s presence.

  Nofret had a duty of her own. She was forgetting it, or willing herself to forget. She did not want to leave her lady alone with an undead king and a frantic court, but there was no one else who could run this errand.

  She gathered will and courage, slipped into the shadows and was gone.

  oOo

  Johanan and Aharon were awake though it was deep night, sitting in the gathering-room of their house. Leah drowsed in her place, but woke as Nofret came in. None of them needed to ask what had brought her. Johanan was already on his feet, reaching for his sandals. His father began to offer Nofret courtesy, even at such an hour, but she cut him off. It was rude, but she was past caring. “We need you now,” she said. “The embalmers—”

  “I’ll see to it,” said Johanan. He did not seem to move quickly, but he was gone before she was aware of it.

  Nofret started to follow, but Aharon restrained her. “Stay here,” he said. “Rest if you can. They won’t bring him in till daylight. What we need to
do . . . it isn’t pleasant.”

  Find a corpse, he meant, that was long enough and thin enough to be the king, if it were steeped in natron and wrapped in the mummy-wrappings. It did not need to be a fresh corpse, but fresh would be more convincing. The embalmers would swear more easily to its authenticity if they could say that they had embalmed it new on the day the king was brought to them.

  They were already well bribed with royal gold. There was more for them in a box somewhere in Aharon’s house, gold that he would never touch, but of which the embalmers would be most glad. They would receive some of it when they took the body into their house, and the rest when their task was done.

  Nofret hoped that they would keep the secret. Everything hung on that. If they found more profit in crying fraud and scandal . . .

  “Rest,” said Leah. The word, though gently spoken, shattered the round of her fretting. She fell rather than lay on the heap of rugs and cushions that was nearest. Aharon left, she saw that: she was still awake. She had something she must tell him. She could not remember what. By the time she gathered her wits, he was gone.

  “Don’t,” she said to the place where he had been. “Don’t kill anybody.”

  “There will be no need,” Leah said. “The god looks after his own.”

  “Which god?” Nofret asked, or meant to ask. She never knew which. Sleep was taking her, bitterly though she fought it.

  oOo

  Aharon and Johanan found their corpse. Where and how, it was best not to ask. They delivered it to the embalmers and came back to their house, and scrubbed themselves over and over, not speaking, not looking at Nofret when she brought in each new tub of fire-warmed water. They had forgotten modesty, so intent were they on being clean again.

  She could not help but notice that they were handsome men, and fair-skinned where the sun had not burned them brown. It was the kind of thing one noticed when one was too tired to be circumspect.

  Johanan had a small brown mark on his hip, like a flame, or like a spearhead. It would be reckoned a blemish in a place where people sacrificed their beautiful youths to rapacious gods. She thought it a fitting ornament for the spare clean lines of his body.

  She was too tired not to look, but not so tired that she yielded to the temptation to touch. He would never have forgiven her. Not in front of his father.

  When they had washed three times all over, hair and beards and all, they let her bring them the drying-cloths and their own clean clothes. The garments they had worn for the corpse-hunting, they burned.

  They still had not said anything. These Apiru, Nofret realized with a twisting of sickness that must be a faint echo of theirs, had a horror of handling the dead. And yet they had done it, because their kinfolk asked.

  They were risking their lives now for one of them, the worst of them all. They would guide him out of Egypt, take him into the desert of Sinai, hide him among their own people. They would leave life and safety here, and maybe die on his behalf, because they were honorable, and he had no honor at all. Only his god and his royal whim.

  She did not hate him any longer. Hate did nothing but cramp her belly. He was like the heat of Egyptian summer or the stink of dung or the snap of a crocodile in the reeds: present, and inescapable.

  Even his departure would nor change that. His memory would linger. His daughter would have to live with the lie of his death—and with his enemies, too, without the Aten to protect her as he protected her father.

  It was like watching a storm roll toward them over the open desert, and no shelter anywhere, nor any hope of finding it. What little protection they had had, the king’s office and his presence, was gone. Already she could feel the wind blowing. Egypt was waking, was discovering that the king whom it hated was king no longer. Its gods would rise now, its priests come out of hiding. Smenkhkare, even if he could resist, was not strong enough to stop them.

  Nofret wondered if he would try. There was no telling. He might yield to the priests, or he might choose to be stubborn. He had been the Beloved of Akhenaten, the other half of the king: the half that was frivolous, that loved his pleasure and detested the duller duties of kingship.

  Probably she should have tried to learn more, to discover what he would do. It had not occurred to her. She was too caught up in the king’s deception, and in her lady’s part in it.

  For now, she had things that she must do. Aharon and Johanan, damp and pinkly raw with their threefold scouring, were getting ready to go out again. When the king came to the embalmers—the queen would make sure it was done in haste, because of the heat as she would insist, but in fact because the longer she waited, the greater the risk of discovery—they must be there. They had their baggage, distressingly light for as great a journey as they had ahead of them: a small bundle for each, and a larger one for the king.

  Nofret knew what was in it; she had helped to fill it. Clothes, of course, and sandals, and a headdress and veil to cover the king’s too-familiar face, his shaven head. Provisions for the way, all dried and hard and tightly wrapped. A few oddments that might be of use.

  No weapon for him, though the others had their long knives, and Johanan carried a bow in a case, and a quiver of arrows. Nofret felt oddly annoyed, looking at it. She had not known that Johanan was an archer.

  She had to go back, to tell her lady that all was ready. She was reluctant to move. She would enter this house again, she supposed. Leah was staying, could not go lest she hinder the flight. But it would not be the same.

  It was Johanan who startled her out of herself, tugged at the untidy plait of her hair and said, “Wake up, sleepyhead. Tell your lady we’ll be waiting as we agreed, with food and drink, and a donkey for our sick brother who’s going home to the desert to get well.”

  “Or to die,” said Nofret.

  “I don’t think we’ll be that lucky,” he said.

  He was keeping his heart light, even as horrible as it had been for him to hunt down a slave’s corpse and carry it to the embalmers. She shamed him and herself with all her glooming and brooding.

  She did not put on a smile; it would have been a ghastly thing. But she said, “I’ll go. I’ll see you again. Before—”

  “Yes,” said Johanan, pushing her lightly toward the door. “Quick. It’s almost sunup.”

  oOo

  As tired as she was, as fuddled as her wits kept trying to be, she still managed to keep a decent pace back to the palace. She ran when she could. The rest of the time she walked quickly.

  The ache in her legs faded to a distant nuisance. She reached the sunrise gate just after it opened to the first light of the morning, passed through it into a city that had roused and found itself reft of a king. The sounds that she heard, passing through, might have passed for grief; but they were suspiciously like rejoicing.

  The palace was in remarkably little disarray. The queen, wise with the lessons of the plague, had seen that everything would be taken care of when this moment came. There were still people running about without perceptible purpose, and other people wailing and beating their thighs where they could be seen and marked for loyal servants, but most of those whom Nofret saw were going about their business.

  She was careful to be seen only after she came to the queens’ palace, and then only when it could not be clear that she had come in from outside. Such caution might not be necessary. She chose to believe it was.

  The air was full of whispers and of wary eyes. The Aten’s great servant was dead. No one knew yet what the young king would do. Maybe he himself had taken no thought for it, although his courtiers and his ministers most certainly had.

  Nofret, hastening down a corridor toward her lady’s chambers, nearly collided with the Lord Ay. She slipped aside and lowered her head as servants learned to do, making herself invisible.

  But he had seen her. Worse, he stopped. She prayed that she did not show signs of her errand: dust on her feet, wind-tousle in her hair. His voice was soft over her head. “Ah, Nofret,” he said. “Your lady
is asking for you.”

  “I go to serve her,” Nofret said, “my lord.”

  “Ah,” he said. “Good.”

  He was barring her way. She waited for him to move, but he did not.

  Her teeth set. It would not be advisable to treat a man of his rank as she did the drunken young idiots who tried to back her against a wall, but she could not think of anything else to do. She was disappointed. She had thought him above such things.

  She did not have the sensation now that she did with Smenkhkare’s lordlings, that he was panting to sink his shaft in a convenient target. Quite the opposite. Lord Ay was calm. But he would not move to let her go.

  She raised her head. “Sir,” she said, “I would go to my lady, if I could.”

  “Yes,” he said, still not moving. His face was expressionless. “Do persuade your lady to rest. She insists that she must be queen now as always, however exhausted she may be.”

  Nofret swallowed a sigh of relief. He was fretting over his granddaughter, that was all. He did not seem aware that the king’s death was a deception. Briefly, wildly, she thought of telling him. But she was not as mad as that, though she would have trusted him. Her lady did not, or not enough.

  She lowered her head in honest respect. “I’ll do what I can, my lord.”

  “Do that,” said the Lord Ay. He sounded as if he believed her. Better yet, he moved aside so that Nofret could pass.

  Neither of them had mentioned the second queen, the one who could have eased the burden. Nofret, walking quickly but without unseemly haste to wait on her mistress, decided not to think just yet about what would happen when Meritaten was queen regnant and Smenkhkare was one and only king—what would become of Ankhesenpaaten, whose husband was dead, who had no man to give her a new and potent title.