‘I am Anubis,’ he would squeak, pushing one forward. ‘No, I am Anubis,’ the other one would reply. The Veiled One loved to use the two carvings to mock the great Lord of the Mortuary. Priests he hated, dismissing them as ‘shaven heads’ or ‘soft pates’. At times he was mischievous and invited priests from a certain temple to a small feast in the cool of the evening, either in the audience hall or the garden pavilion. I was always beside him. The ritual was ever the same. The Veiled One would sit and ask them innocent questions. ‘Where do the gods live? If they are spiritual, why do they have masks? If Seth killed his brother Osiris, how can he be a god? If the gods really live in the temples and are all-powerful, all-seeing and everywhere, how can they be locked up in a tabernacle? Why do they need food? And if the choicest meats are laid out for them, why don’t they come and eat it or take it away to give to the poor?’
Of course the questions would change depending on the circumstances but the object was the same, a sneering ridicule. Invariably the priests left hot-eyed and sullen-faced. Afterwards the Veiled One would mimic them: despite his own disabilities, he had an eye for another’s voice or look. He’d imitate their stoop, the sanctimonious way they walked or raised their eyes heavenwards. Sometimes, when he had drunk deeply, he’d deliver his famous lecture on how Isis had to hunt for her husband’s penis.
‘To sew it back on again?’ he’d yell. ‘When he’s supposed to be a god? He doesn’t need needle and thread! Can you imagine it, Mahu?’ He’d stick out his own groin. ‘Walking around with your penis sewn on?’ He’d collapse in laughter or sing an obscene hymn he’d composed to Isis.
Soldiers he admired, and he talked to me volubly, excitedly, about history and the might of Egypt. He studied maps depicting the land routes into Kush, Punt and across Sinai. He knew the trade routes along the Great Green to Canaan. Once he joined me and Imri on the drill ground but he was too clumsy and slow, an easy opponent to overcome. Afterwards he took me aside, face laced with sweat, eyes agitated.
‘I’m not very good, am I, Mahu?’
‘In a chariot,’ I replied tactfully, ‘you’d excel the best.’
‘You speak with true voice,’ he smiled, slapped me roughly across the face but never returned there.
Every quarter an imperial physician would visit him. The Veiled One remained silent and passive as the man prodded him, staring into his mouth and ears or feeling his hands and feet. He and the physician never exchanged words. I was always present, armed with sword, dagger, a bow and a quiver of arrows.
‘I feel like a horse at the stud farm,’ the Veiled One described such examinations, yet he never resisted.
My master often visited the kitchens. He would just stand there, watching the cooks from under heavy-lidded eyes. Either I or Imri always tasted his food and wine. Never once did he tell us what he feared. Imri told me a few details about the Veiled One’s early life. How he was not meant to live as a child. How the priests had recommended that he be placed in a reed basket and left to float in a crocodile pool. Tiye had been furious. The best physicians had been summoned but there was little they could do so the ugly child was banned from his father’s presence. Only those with deformed faces, war veterans or criminals who had lost noses were allowed to serve him.
‘You,’ Imri tapped me drunkenly on the chest, ‘are the first and only exception, though you are so ugly, you might as well be one of us!’
In many ways, it was a strangely halcyon existence, albeit tinged by danger. Nothing definite or precise but there were sometimes mysterious occurrences, with their own silent menace, which kept me nervous and wary. One incident took place during the second month of the Inundation in the thirty-fourth year of his father’s reign, just after the Festival of Opet. Imri’s men always escorted the stewards down to the city markets as the servants’ disfigured faces might cause provocation and hostility. Amongst the provisions brought back was a basket of juicy figs, fresh and smeared with honey — the Veiled One’s favourite delicacy, to be kept near him in his garden pavilion. I took the basket across. The smell from the figs was delicious: moving the lid, I was about to take one out when the figs moved like water rippling. I drew my dagger and knocked some of the fruit aside — a thin venomous rock adder, followed by another, coiled out. I killed both, took the basket and flung it away in a far part of the garden. I considered it an accident and told no one.
A few weeks later I was called down to the wine cellars, a long low cavernous room supervised by a wine steward, a former criminal who had lost both his nose and a slab of flesh on his right cheek. He was in the far corner already in his death throes, eyes glazed, legs and arms jerking, a white froth smearing his lips. Near him lay an unstopped jar of wine from Absh, a favourite of the Veiled One, always stored in a special jar protected by a wadge of basketwork. I picked up the stopper; the docket around it described the wine, the vineyard and the year the grapes had been plucked. The cellarer had decided to help himself and been most unfortunate: both the stopper and the jar smelt so foul I whispered one of my aunt’s spells to repel venom.
The rest of the servants thought the man had suffered some form of seizure or falling sickness. I had the body removed and again informed no one. In the first month of the Peret, the thirty-fifth year of the Magnificent One’s reign, the danger became more real. The Veiled One often went down to the banks of the Nile, to watch the boats and barges and the frenetic activity of the riverside markets. He always sat in what I called his tabernacle on a cart pulled by oxen, a veil across his face. I always walked behind, and on either side strolled the Kushites armed with spear and shield. Discipline was lax; the guards often chatting amongst themselves, now and again pushing away the curious. One of those shabby individuals, a road wanderer, a travelling tinker or trader came close to the cart, gathering his tattered rags about him. He had a dark, pinched face, and his long hair and beard were streaked with grey. In one hand he held a staff, in another a sistrum which he clattered. Now and again he broke into song. He reeked of sweat and other odours but seemed harmless enough walking beside me, eyes on the tail of the cart. I looked at him carefully; I remembered the day Aunt Isithia took me into the temple and the fortune-teller cursed her. Was it the same person?
‘Have we met before?’ I asked.
‘No, great lord,’ the beggar whined. ‘I have only come to sing the praises’ — pointing to the cart — ‘of God’s own son.’ He broke into a chant, repeating almost word for word one of the hymns the Veiled One sang to the Sun Disc, the Aten:
The man’s voice grew stronger. He began to dance and cavort, singing his praises to the Aten. ‘All glory to his son,’ he warbled. ‘All glory to him, Beloved of the Father.’
At the Veiled One’s command the cart stopped. The Kushite driver came along the side and pulled back the curtains. The Veiled One sat there, his face now exposed. He snapped his fingers and pointed at the road-wanderer with his fan, indicating he should come closer.
As the fellow clambered into the cart and went to kneel at the Veiled One’s feet to make obeisance, I noticed the bulge in the tunic on the man’s right side; it moved even as the fellow twisted his shoulders slightly sideways. He was drawing a dagger. I drew mine and leaped into the cart. The Veiled One sat transfixed, eyes staring, mouth slightly open. The assassin made to leap forward but I knocked him in the back, sending him sprawling onto the bottom of the cart. He turned, dagger coming towards me. I thrust mine once, twice, deep into his exposed throat. The cart was now surrounded by the Kushites, so the scuffle was hardly noticed by those passing on either side. I stared into the dying man’s eyes, watching the light of life fade, a strange gargling sound echoing from the back of his throat. I looked at that face darkened by the sun, the lips opening and closing.