‘You should be ashamed of yourself, treating a good customer like this.’
‘Not such a good customer recently,’ retorted Nubenehem, letting herself flop back down on her couch. ‘What’s happened to you? Min desert you?’
Their conversation was interrupted by the familiar sound of a girl’s badly-acted laughter from behind the bead curtain which led to the interior of the brothel, punctuated by the growling of a man who is under the illusion that he is cock of the dunghill. The girl remained unseen, but the man emerged a moment later, his eyes, as they caught Huy’s, switching from initial guilt to fraternal collusion as he saw that Huy was someone he did not know. In the dark days of the Southern Capital under Akhenaten, Nubenehem had told him once, a father who had sold his daughter into prostitution sometime later visited the City of Dreams to watch a session: his daughter, whom he had never touched himself, was one of the participants. It seemed that the father had gone straight from the brothel to the River and drowned himself. But there was nothing furtive or guilty about this customer, who radiated well-being and contentment.
‘Nice little ass, that Hathfertiti; but a bit of a tight squeeze.’ He gave Huy a connoisseur’s wink.
‘It’s a pity you’ve gone off fucking,’ continued Nubenehem when the customer had left. ‘There was a girl here not long ago, looking for fun, wanting to earn a bit on the side. God knows why. One of the aristos slumming. She was your type, maybe a bit on the young side. But you could smell the mandrake fruit on her across the room. I’ll tell you what; I’ll give you the wig for a silver deben. I’ll even throw in some henna for you to tart it up.’
Huy dug into the leather pouch at his side, concealed under a fold of his kilt, and withdrew its contents: a couple of silver deben were all it contained.
Leaving the whorehouse with the wig tucked under an arm, he reflected that it was worth at least what he had paid to have Surere off his back. At the same time he found it interesting that prison had made the former district governor more passionate about the cause championed by Akhenaten. The pharaoh had thrown out beliefs held for two thousand years, rejecting them as superstitions, and replaced them all by a single god, whose spirit could not be contained in images, whose love extended to all people, and who lived in the power of the sunlight. In the twelve bright years of the young pharaoh’s reign – he had died insane aged twenty-nine, his dream and his country in ruins – a new light had seemed to dance in the souls of men too.
But prison had protected Surere from the truth. Huy himself, who had had to adapt to the new world constructed after Akhenaten’s fall by Horemheb, had learnt above all that ideals do not change people. He acknowledged now that the majority of people, the great brown mass of the fieldworkers, had not even been noticed by the visionary pharaoh he had followed with such devotion, let alone been affected by his thinking. In a matter of weeks, not months, the old, disgraced order had reasserted itself. The priests of the old deities had emerged from the desert or from hiding in neglected provincial cities in Shemau and Tomehu, and established themselves again, without difficulty, the people grateful to have the old gods returned to them, who demanded no more than unquestioning duty, propitiation and sacrifice; gods who did not require a man to think for himself; gods who forgave sin if the price was right, and who guaranteed a good time in the Hereafter.
Surere had been unusually inflexible for an intelligent man. Always insisting on the purity of life, on the importance of family existence, he had gone far beyond the mild precepts laid down by his mentor. Before madness overcame him, Akhenaten had at least understood that there would always be a gulf between an ideal and its realisation. The Aten itself was amoral; but in life one should always forgive a man who had sinned. In his province, Huy remembered, Surere had tried to impose what he had interpreted as the supporting columns of a decent society: sexual responsibility and even monogamy were held to be the roots of a stable family; sexual relations between members of that family were restricted to cousins. Concubines were discouraged. In Surere’s province, there had been many transgressions, despite the loss of privilege which was the only punishment he had dared impose, though there were rumours that in some cases he would have preferred to apply the death penalty. There were rumours that in some cases he had.
Even the king, who, unlike his district governor, had practised these precepts himself, had not expected his subjects to do so too, though he hoped they would strive towards the ideal. His own queen, whom Surere had revered so deeply, when she requested that she be buried not in the new City of the Horizon, but near her old home, in the Valley of the Dead across the river from the Southern Capital, had been granted her wish, though it had hurt Akhenaten deeply.
Nefertiti had died young. Five floods at least had fertilised the Black Land since her departure in the Boat of the Night. Since her husband had gone to join her, her tomb had been neglected, and sand was already drifting across its entrance, covering it inexorably in a red blanket. It had been thought among the citizens of the Southern Capital that the new pharaoh, Tutankhamun, whose own Chief Wife was a daughter of Nefertiti, might have renovated the Death Halls of her mother. His neglect of such a sacred duty had scandalised some, even members of the old priesthood, but behind Tutankhamun’s inaction the policies of Horemheb were discerned, and no public protest was raised. The king, after all, owned the land, the people, every animal and everything that grew. There was no questioning his word or deed. Even the thought of doing so would not enter the hearts of most.
Huy wondered how Surere would react to the world he found himself in now. He had not visited the Southern Capital, Huy felt sure, for at least eight years, and possibly longer, following the removal of the court to the new City of the Horizon downriver. In that time, its geography had changed little, the only difference being that more and more houses had squeezed themselves on to the mound of detritus that had built up over generations to form the hill on which the city squatted, above the highest level of flood the river could attain.
The man had survived in his pursuit of a political career by mingling adaptability with discretion. But his adaptability did not apply to his tenets, merely to his instinct for self-preservation. An amoral man applying a fixed morality to others might not have hoped for the success Surere had had; but now, with so much ranged against him, in a world so different from the one he had lorded it in, Huy wondered how he would get on. He found himself hoping that the man would succeed in his plan to take a knot of followers remaining faithful to the Aten – if they existed – out to the deserts which, he had heard, extended to the east of the Great Green, and form an outpost of the new religion there.
Huy had lived a more realistic life. He remembered the release he had felt when he had first heard the teachings of Akhenaten, which had cut away the rotten trappings of the old beliefs, festooned as they were with the cynical speculation of the priests. Now, though, having to live again in a world where ideals were something to be discussed by intellectuals and certain priests, but never applied, as they would have got in the way of Horemheb’s programme of reform, Huy found his feelings dulled. Unable to accept again the superstitions he had discarded, nevertheless with time and misfortune he found himself turning back to the three deities who had guided his early life, and helped him through his harsh apprenticeship as a scribe: the reasonable Thoth, ibis-headed, god of the scribes; Horus, son of Osiris; and the protector of the hearth, Bes – the little god of his childhood.
As he reached his door he found his thoughts turning once more to the urgent problem of putting food in his belly, and a part of his mind registered with pleasure that these thoughts were at last supplanting the ones in which he alternately pined for Aset and visited unholy vengeance upon her. As for his former wife, Aahmes, she had become a shadowy figure who sent him a letter from the Delta every new year, at the midsummer opet festival, with news of his favourite son, Heby. He tried to imagine how the boy would look now that he was nine. In her last letter, Aahmes had spoken of a new marriage. Huy tried to imagine her going through the simple ceremony with someone else, and could not. What seemed most real was that Heby would have a new father – someone who was there, instead of a remote figure several days’ sail upriver.