A pang of loss flashed through me. I stood up and stared out across the dark waters. I felt alarmed, in the wrong place. I wanted to turn the boat around and return to her at once. Then suddenly, whirring out of the darkness faster than a diving hawk, an arrow. I saw it after I felt the cold needle of its passage through the air by my left eye. I felt-or did I imagine it? — hot feathers brushing past my face, bright with some furious point of light. And then I saw flames racing up and out from the point where the arrow had embedded itself in the wood of the mast, below the Eye of Horus, nailed there for safe passage. The mind is slower than time, slower than fire and air. Then a noise, like enthusiastic applause, brought me out of this trance. I shouted like a fool. The fire was feasting on the sail, its many greedy mouths moving out from the mast, by now a tree of flame. And the captain arrived, pulling on ropes, while the sailors hurried buckets of water out of the river, which they cast into the roaring throat of the blaze. And this interested, then gradually placated, and finally subdued the god.
I slowly came back to myself. All the passengers were gathered now on the deck, huddled in their night attire, holding each other, or weeping, or staring at the now-threatening darkness that surrounded this frail and damaged vessel. I could hear the drip-drip-drip of the water that saved us from extinction, as each drop fell from the charred wood. Everyone knew the arrow was aimed at me. They also knew their own brush with mortality was because of my presence on the boat. And they knew I was not who I said I was.
The Moon Man spoke: ‘You, sir, have not been honest with us. An official in the Treasury does not earn this kind of attention.’
I shrugged. The handsome woman glanced at me with more interest, a question in her eye. And the captain, his face struck with humiliation and anger, looked at the wizened and blackened remains of the arrow. ‘You owe me a ship,’ he said.
He was about to pull it out when I shouted at him to stop. This was evidence. I pushed him to one side and examined it. I could not draw the point from the wood. It had been made so delicate by fire that it could have collapsed to ash at any moment. But although it was damaged, I could see immediately two things that interested me. One: the tip, although blackened, was metal, probably silver. Not flint. Not, then, a casual act of violence, but one in which there had been considerable investment of skill, quality and expense. And two: still visible in the wood, two hieroglyphs. Cobra. The Snake, Great of Magic, Poised on the Crown of Pharaoh, Protector of Ra in his passage through the Underworld of the Night. And Seth with his forked tail, god of chaos and confusion, of the Red Land and war. This was the work of an expert, and I was lucky, strangely, to be alive. Equally strangely, I did not feel lucky. I felt warned. Either I had survived by the merest chance, or I was meant to survive. Either the unknown assassin had missed by the smallest degree-the lucky drift of the night breeze, the sudden cry of a bird distracting the arrow from its true course-or he had hit the mark exactly.
And then he had signed his work.
5
The rest of the journey passed in an uncomfortable silence. I was under the suspicion of all the passengers and crew, and they kept well away from me. The captain had had the charred damage patched but our pace was slowed, and it made us seem ugly and noticeable, now, among the busy ordinary traffic on the river. Even the children of the river villages, always ready to laugh and wave and call, watched us pass in silence. I offered the captain compensation through the Medjay office. But we both know the chances of his receiving anything are remote. If we are not paid our salaries, how are such unusual claims to be honoured? But I gave him my word, and it was all I had to give. He was not impressed. Somehow I must make this good. And I must consider the obvious fact: someone powerful knows I am coming, and does not want me in Akhetaten, this city that I had not seen-until now.
As we rounded a bend in the river, suddenly, after nothing but fields and hamlets and beyond them always the endless shape-shifting and broken stones of the Red Land, there appeared a vision: a bright white city laid out in a great crescent along the eastern curve of the river, and defended at its back by a range of red and grey cliffs that encircled and delineated the eastern edges of the territory, marked in the centre by a deep and narrow valley, like a large notch in a length of wood. The cliffs met the river at their north-westernmost tip. Thus the city was held-cupped, almost-in the vast palm of the land. It appeared nothing like the other cities of our world, not as a chaotic improvisation of ancient and temporary buildings. Rather, it seemed a vast ordered garden from which rose towers, temples, offices and villas, spreading from the shores of the river towards the edges of the desert behind. Great flocks of birds wheeled in the sky, and the sound of their singing and their cries reached me even from some distance.
All the passengers stood in awe together at the prow of the boat gazing at this impossible paradise in the desert, the place that held all our futures in its grasp. The young architect was able to point out the various sections of the city as well as the northern palace and its related buildings, all set, he said, within a novel system, a regulated grid of thoroughfares and streets so that all the buildings conformed to its consistent pattern. Why there should be a separation of sites he did not know. The workmen’s village was behind the main city, as one would expect. Apparently it is a model of its kind. Conceived, I am sure, not out of enlightenment but the simple fact that healthy and well-fed artisans and workers constitute a properly economical means of achieving the fastest and most competent construction. And run, as the world runs, on lines to suit the overseers and the heads of construction gangs.
At the landing stage a small Medjay retinue waited at attention to meet me. As I descended the gangplank, one stepped forward to offer the formal greeting. He introduced himself as the assistant to Mahu, and said he would be honoured to accompany me to my first meeting with him. Two guards before me, and two behind, we marched from the dock, leaving behind my astonished fellow passengers. The young architect bowed, as if caught out by the possibility that his indiscretions were naive and careless. I acknowledged him, in an attempt to reassure him that we both know this is a world in which Priests shit. The Moon gentleman merely raised a supercilious eyebrow, as if to say: you played us like fools, and now you assume your true identity. Good luck to you. The bureaucrat looked annoyed. And his handsome wife sent me a quick, bright glance, as if to say: perhaps I will see you in a crowded room some day, at an official function. And we will know each other…I bowed respectfully to her.
I was surprised at the absence on the streets of crowds, of bustle, of people with the usual variety of casual business. It seemed to be a place of single purpose. Its industry was the focus of its activities, in the service and celebration of Akhenaten and the royal family. All of which gave to the city a conscious and conspicuous strangeness, as if the confusion and colour of street life in Thebes had been reduced, calculated away almost; a place in which everyone was aware of the status and power of everyone else. It seemed less a city, more like a vast temple and palace complex with additions for the necessities of daily life. A beautiful place of enormous and overwhelming artifice.
But as we walked further into the city it began to seem less organized and complete than it had at first appeared. The newness of it all meant the courtyards’ pylons and sacred buildings dazzled because they were whitewashed but in many places undecorated. The hieroglyphs on the walls were unfinished. Whole sections of the city centre were still under construction. Ugly scaffolding hid what will surely be offices and temple complexes. Thousands of workmen laboured at every level of the constructions. Wide pathways and processionals petered out into desert tracks, or lost themselves in stones and dust. In the suburbs to the north and the south I was puzzled to note fine villas set next to poor shacks. The first tombs and chapels raised on an empty, stony arena at the edge of the cultivation, near the workmen’s village, suggested the city’s necropolis. At the heart of it all lay the central city, with the temple complexes to Aten and the bureaucracies. The extensive nature of these headquarters-indeed they seem as massive and as dominating as the temples themselves-is a signal of the true nature of the city, and I have heard they contain the largest secret papyrus archive assembled anywhere. I am keen to inspect this palace of secrets, and carry with me a letter of introduction. The purpose of collecting so much information can only be power. Perhaps, for all its impressive appearance, this is a city predicated on making its people afraid.