Outside the hall, along the Royal Road, a number of citizens remained, still keen for a sighting of someone important. No-one took much notice of Khety and me, luckily, so we drove slowly away.
Now, as I lie here, I am considering the various strands of the evening. At my head stands the strange little icon of Akhenaten. I remember Parennefer’s words: the city is a beautiful enchantment. But it does not seem so simple now. For all the language of light and enlightenment the same dark shades of human ambition, avarice and cruelty seem to reside here too, awaiting opportunities. It seems to me, suddenly, that Akhenaten is standing under the sun for fear of those night shadows creeping closer to him with every passing day. I too am now subject to the encroachment of these shadows. Mahu was right. I cannot yet disentangle truth from speculation, fact from fiction, honesty from lies.
I go to the window and look out at the bleak little courtyard. At least the heat has lifted a little. The desert makes this city tolerable by night; breezes cooled by the face of the moon move through doors and passages across our sleeping faces and into our restless dreams. Tomorrow I must pursue the identity of the dead girl. It strikes me I am investigating versions of possibility. I am pursuing copies in the hope of tracing their lost original. But at least I have my next move. The scarab and this journal I will place beneath my pillow on my headrest for safe-keeping. May the gods bless my children and my wife, and bring me to the new light of the dawn. Suddenly my love for them is singing in my breastbone like a stitch of pain.
14
I woke to an urgent knocking on the door. It was Khety. Something was wrong. It was still dark. We drove fast through the deserted ways, in silence.
I opened the door to the chamber of purification. It was very dark and very cold. I entered the room carefully, anxious to disturb nothing. I raised my lamp. The girl’s shadowy body remained in the same position. The chilly air was tainted with decay. All the candles in their sconces had burned down. I walked slowly around the room, trying to observe everything, as is my method, breaking up the surfaces and spaces into squares, noting everything and moving on to the next. It was as I remembered it: the chests were closed, the implements in their places, the canopic jars on their shelves. The Sons of Horus stared down at me. I walked along the wall of empty, decorated coffins, holding up the lamp. Suddenly I leaped back: one was wide open. It contained a body, propped up like a bad scary joke.
Tjenry was upright in the coffin, his eyes open, a slight smile stuck on his bloodless handsome face. I waved the lamp over him and caught a strange glitter in his wide-open eyes. I looked carefully into them. Glass. I lowered the lamp. Something else was set on the floor at his feet. One canopic jar.
Khety and I lifted him out, with infinite care and sorrow, and set him gently down on a table. We could not look at each other. A few hours ago this thing of muscle and bone had been a young man of charm and prospects. In the glow of the newly lit lamps I examined every inch of the body. Apart from a loincloth he was naked, washed, clean. There were brutal red and blue gouges in the yellow and grey flesh of his wrists and ankles, and around his waist and chest. Over his forehead was a deep band of purple bruising. He had been bound down tightly. He had struggled greatly for life. There were also marks and little tears on his nostrils. I dreaded what I would find. I opened his mouth, stiff now like a trap, and pulled sticky red wadding from the cavity. What was left of the tongue was a chewed piece of meat, unrecognizable as the instrument of speech. I kept going, although my deepest wish was to walk from this room and keep walking, rather than go forward to the discovery I knew lay ahead. He had clearly been alive when all this was done to him. Everything pointed to an experience of slow, excruciating and terrifying agony. I looked up and saw the grim instruments of mummification hanging in the shadows on their hooks. I steeled myself and looked inside the canopic jar. His brain, mangled, torn and already tinged blue with decay, the organ usually thrown away, lay within, topped by his eyes on their bloody, torn strings.
I could barely believe it. Someone had bound him down, and while he was alive had removed his brain through his nostrils, as if he were already dead and ready for burial, using the iron hooks hanging innocently on the wall. It had been done meticulously, expertly. It had been done during the time we were at the reception, eating and drinking and talking. It had been done in this room.
I struggled to keep control of my feelings. I had seen bad things in my time. I’d smelled the sweet stench of human bone burning, and the steam from just-dead viscera rising from a gutted belly. But I had never seen anything like this inhuman enactment with its barbaric precision.
There was nothing now I could do for him. No prayers from the Book of the Dead would guard against the horror of this. I remembered that I had ordered him to remain behind. And now he was dead. I closed his delicate, cold eyelids over his strange, bright glass eyes. Khety and I left the room, with its appalling chill, and stood outside. The dawn was breaking. Birds were singing.
15
I commanded Khety to return to the Medjay headquarters to report the murder, while I waited. I needed time alone, before the shouting and the noise. I needed to think, even though my mind was emptier and more haunted than the Red Land. The images of what had been done to this promising young man stopped every thought in its tracks.
I watched the street wake up. An old man shuffled out of his dark doorway carrying a jug of water, which he poured tenderly around the roots of a sapling that had taken root in the earth. He seemed to have all the time in the world to accomplish his task. Then he picked up some of the broken rubbish from around the tree and threw it further into the street, and shuffled back into the darkness of his accommodation. Then the sun came up, and more people appeared, leaving their homes and going about their daily business.
Rage swept through me then-at myself for having let this young man die, at the waste of life, at the disgusting futility of this city, at the refined cruelty that had committed this crime. I knew, of course, that this act was aimed at me. It was as purposeful as the arrow on the boat. Whoever committed the crime wanted me to know they knew everything I was doing. They wanted me to know I was being watched closely. Also, they wanted me to know they could inflict worse things upon me if they so chose. There was something mocking in it, taunting. They were slowly and meticulously destroying the ground of authority under my feet. Soon I would be marooned on a tiny island of complete uncertainty. I had come to the city to investigate a missing person. Now I was investigating murders as well.
Mahu arrived, of course. He barely acknowledged me as he entered the chamber. When he came out, he inflicted the best of his fury on me. It was shaming, of course, in front of the other men, but I felt strangely immune. The facts of Tjenry’s death made his noise and anger irrelevant and futile. Then he was gone again, with dire warnings and threats. He would inform Akhenaten. I hardly cared. I wanted to track down and trap this man, or woman. I had my own private revenge to drive me now. I needed to know what kind of human being could do such a thing to another. Was this person a monster, or did he or she have a heart and soul, blood and emotions, like the rest of us?
When everyone had gone, Khety and I sat together for a little while, not speaking.
‘This is the worst thing I’ve seen in my life,’ said Khety eventually.
‘We’ve had two barbaric murders in the space of a few days. There’s no reason to suppose they will stop here. There’s every reason to suppose they are directly connected to our investigation. We’re being followed.’