‘When the child is born, if it’s a boy, I will name him after his father.’
‘It is a fine name to carry through life,’ I said.
‘He will live for his father. He will be a good man, too. You will take care of him. You will stand in for his father,’ she said simply.
Epilogue
Year 1 of the Reign of King Horemheb, Horus is in Jubilation
Thebes, Egypt
Our skiff lolled on the edges of the Great River, among the reed beds, a little way south of the city, in the dappled shade. It was a quiet afternoon. Amenmose and I lay back with our fishing rods in our hands. Thoth crouched in the prow, gazing suspiciously down his long nose at us, and glancing swiftly aside at the sudden ripples made by the fish as they snapped at insects. He hated the open water. Ducks argued and birds sang invisibly within the dense stands of papyrus; across the water we could hear the calls of other fishermen, and further off the farmers and their children at work in the fields. I offered my son some bread, which he took and chewed thoughtfully.
‘Father?’ he said, in the way he usually commenced a long enquiry into philosophical matters.
‘Son…’
‘What happens when we die?’
‘Well, it’s a long story. First our hearts must be judged in the presence of Osiris himself, and the forty-two judges.’
‘Why?’
‘To see whether we have lived a good life,’ I answered.
‘And how can they tell?’
He squinted up at me in the strong sunlight.
‘Your heart is weighed in the scales, against the feather of the truth, which belongs to the Goddess Maat, and you have to make a denial of wrongdoing,’ I said.
‘And then what?’ he insisted.
‘If your heart is heavy with evil or wrongdoing, then it will tip the scales against the feather, and it will be gobbled up by Ammut, who stands waiting by the scales; she’s a monster with the head of a crocodile and the hind legs of a hippopotamus. But, if you’re clever and quick, before she gets it, you can also ask for forgiveness,’ I said.
‘How?’ he asked, curious.
‘You have to make an offering to Osiris, because he is God of Truth. You have to say: “Oh lords of justice, put away the evil harm that is in me. Be gracious to me and remove all anger which is in your heart against me.”’
‘So next time you’re angry with me, or with any of us, we can say that?’
‘You can try…’ I said, smiling.
He was silent for a long moment.
‘So what’s it like in the Otherworld?’ he asked.
I looked around, at the wide sky and the shining waters, and the city in the distance, with its temple pylons, and its stone palaces and poor districts. I looked to the east, and the mystery of Ra’s rebirth, and to the west, the great desert, where Ra set each night in the place of the dead. I looked up at the dark, perfect shape of a falcon silently sweeping across the face of the sun. I thought about the future in which my son would live his life, under a new King, and a new dynasty. I looked down into the green waters of the Great River, ever flowing, and remembered my dead. I remembered my father, and the dead Nubian boys, and Khety, and Ankhesenamun. But their faces didn’t haunt me now. I could look them in the eye. I thought about Horemheb’s offer. Perhaps, after all, I could make a difference to the world my children would grow up in.
I looked at my young son, staring at me, waiting for a good answer.
‘It’s like this,’ I replied. ‘It’s like this moment.’
Suddenly he called out in excitement. A fish was pulling on his line. And then, to my surprise and his delight, he reeled it in with a skill he must have learned from his grandfather, on those long fishing days without me. And he stood-holding up the silver fish, as it danced and struggled on the line-laughing and grinning proudly.
Author’s Note
The King’s Wife to Suppiluliuma of the Hittites-‘He who is my husband is dead! I have no son! I do not want to take one of my subjects and make him my husband. I did not write to any other land, I wrote to you! They say sons are plentiful for you. Give me one of your sons. He will be my husband, and he will be King in Egypt!’
From the Seventh Tablet, The Deeds of Suppiluliuma As Told By His Son Mursilis II
This letter (actually a clay tablet in Akkadian, the lingua franca of international diplomacy at the time) from an Egyptian queen to Suppiluliuma I, the King of the Hittites, was discovered in the Hittite archives, and is a tantalizing clue to one of the most mysterious and compelling unsolved mysteries of the Ancient World.
It is in every way an extraordinary, audacious communication-not least because the Egyptians and the Hittites had been at war for decades, battling for control of the Syrian territories and kingdoms between the borders of their empires, and so such a letter could have been seen as treacherous. But even more significantly, no Egyptian royal had ever made such a request to a foreigner, let alone an enemy; the trade in international royal brides was strictly a one-way affair. And yet here is an Egyptian queen asking her enemy for one of his sons to join her on the throne. It is an extraordinary mystery to rival that of the death of Tutankhamun.
In the letter, the queen is called ‘Dahamunzu’, which may be a translation of the Egyptian title Tahemetnesu (the King’s Wife). For complex reasons of Egyptian chronology and the uncertainty surrounding the translation of the Hittite rendering of Egyptian names, the attribution cannot be certain; some scholars propose a chronology according to which the King’s Wife might have been Nefertiti. But the letter is thought by others to have been sent by Ankhesenamun, widow of Tutankhamun, and daughter of Akhenaten and Nefertiti. The latter attribution forms the historical basis of this novel.
Ankhesenamun became the last surviving member of her dynasty, the eighteenth, when her husband Tutankhamun died aged around nineteen. She was probably only twenty-one years old herself at that moment; and she had no heirs. It is thought she was then married to Ay, the powerful courtier who had been closely involved with the royal family since the Amarna period-indeed he might even have been her own great-uncle. Already an old man by the time of the marriage, Ay ruled for only four or five years. His death must have presented Ankhesenamun, at this point perhaps twenty-five or twenty-six years old, with a grave set of dilemmas. How could she rule alone? How could she continue her line? How could she ensure the stability of her own position, and that of Egypt, domestically and internationally? Who could she trust? The elite men of the nobility and the priesthood might well have seemed more like a threat to a young and relatively inexperienced queen, than a source of support. Above all, how could she defend herself against the ambitious challenge for the crown by Horemheb, the general of the Egyptian army? No wonder she wrote in one of the Hittite letters, ‘I am afraid!’
In the eighteenth dynasty other royal women had achieved great power, including Queen Hatshepsut (1473–1458 BC), who had enjoyed the full support of the Amun priesthood in crowning herself; Queen Tiy, consort of Egypt’s own Sun King, Amenhotep III; and, most famously, Nefertiti (c.1380–1340 BC), principal wife of Akhenaten, whose story is told in Nefertiti: The Book of the Dead. But perhaps, due to her youth, relative inexperience of power, and lack of a stable royal marriage and heirs, Ankhesenamun’s position at this moment was much more vulnerable.
Egypt in the eighteenth dynasty was the greatest power of the Ancient Near East, and the Hittites were their most confrontational enemy. But after the later collapse of their empire, the Hittites disappeared from history, and not until the late twentieth century did they become the focus of archaeological and historical research. Kingship was hereditary, and the king, addressed as ‘My Sun’, acted as high priest for the kingdom. Among his responsibilities were the supervision of annual festivals and the maintenance of the sanctuaries and temples.