‘Hail, Akhenaten,’ he said, embracing him. ‘Hail, Nefertiti-na-Aten, my sister,’ he said, kissing her hand.
She held him by the shoulders, kissing him on both cheeks. ‘Hail, Moses, my brother,’ she said.
Akhenaten embraced him again. ‘It is as we planned, my brother, when you came as a slave to my palace and we first sat watching the sun set over the pyramids, and then came here with me. Now I am pharaoh, and our vision has become my quest. I will go into the desert to the land of my forefathers to seek the place where the Aten rises, and then I will bring back the light and it will shine over all Egypt. Where will you go?’
Moses gestured at the slaves. ‘I will take my people north and return to the land of our fathers, where we will live under the light of the one God. I will await word from your new city that the Aten shines on all Egypt, and then we shall go forth together and spread the word to the world.’
‘May the Aten reach out and embrace you with his arms like the rays of the sun,’ Nefertiti said. ‘May you and your people find your way north in peace.’
Akhenaten shut his eyes. He would do something else, too. Soon he would release all the knowledge from the temples, knowledge from past ages that the priests had locked away and kept for themselves. The priests who had mocked his appearance as a boy had said that they had the knowledge to cure the illness that caused it, but that Amun and his consorts had instructed them not to, had told them to keep it concealed. For that he would bring down his own judgement on the priests, and on the gods; he would extinguish them all. He would take the knowledge from the temple libraries and bring it together in one place, in the one temple to the one God, and he would preside within, the light of the Aten shining through him on those who came for divine dispensation, which he would give freely: the knowledge of the ancients would be laid open for all. He had already begun to depict his vision of this temple of light, this city of knowledge; he had instructed his masons to show it within the image of himself on the temple wall, and soon, when he reached the birthplace of the Aten, he would inscribe it all on stone, when the light gave him the vision to plan his temple and send word for the masons and carvers and quarrymen to begin their work.
He opened his eyes, and Moses gestured towards the slaves, and then at the temple. ‘But they cannot go. The priests will demand the sacrifice.’
Akhenaten smiled again, feeling serene. He looked at the shadow rising up the face of the temple, seeing that the sun would only be shining through the aperture at the top for another few minutes; it was the sign for the ceremony of propitiation to end and the priests to leave, and for the final act of appeasement to take place. He raised one arm, and two teams of soldiers swung shut the stone doors, placing transverse wooden beams across to seal them. He looked towards the juncture of the channel with the river, and raised his hand again. The priestly guards had been pushed aside by his own soldiers, who now began to pull on the ropes on either side of a wooden frame above the channel, slowly raising the sluice gate. The first trickles of water became a torrent, driving down the channel towards the place where it disappeared under the rock face into the temple. The water would only fill the chamber with the priests to the height of a man, but that would be enough.
Suddenly there was a commotion at the sluice gate. The men jumped back, turning away and hiding their faces in their hands, terrified of laying eyes on the one who shall not be seen. A wave ran down the channel, pushed forward by something in the water: the leviathan, five times the length of a man, its great hoary tail slapping the sides of the channel as it surged forward, invisible below the muddy surface of the water. And then it was gone, as if it had clawed its way under the rock into the temple, a great wave sucking and spraying behind it, drenching the soldiers who cowered on either side of the entrance, making sure the doors remained shut.
It had been starving, ravenous. For days now the priests had kept it without food in the pool, and when the procession of shackled slaves had arrived, it had begun crashing its head against the sluice gate, knowing what lay in store. Only this time the feast would be far greater than before: not slaves who had been wasted down to skin and bone, but instead those who had overindulged their own appetites for excess, and whose flesh would now provide one last gluttonous feast for the god.
For a few moments the rushing sound as the water entered the temple drowned out the cries of the men inside. Then a terrible shriek rose above it, and another, the noise magnified by the hollow space within. The sun dropped below the level of the cliff, and the aperture became a slit of darkness, the noise like a death rattle.
The god had supped its last sacrifice. The beast now ruled the temple, unshackled from the will of the priests, free to return to its pool in the river and prey on any men foolish enough to come this way and linger here again. But the beast would rule to its own measure, no longer as a god.
Akhenaten raised his arm one final time, signalling to the foreman of the team on the slope beside the temple. They began to heave on a rope attached to a rectangular slab on one side of the aperture that had let in the light high up on the temple wall, drawing it across to close the opening. The final scraping sounds of the rock ended, and the noise inside was gone. All that could be heard was the faint rustling of wind in their clothes, and the distant sound of the river over the rapids to the south. Everyone remained stilclass="underline" his own retinue, his soldiers on the clifftops, the slaves and their priestly guards. Then one of the guards dropped his whip and ran, and the others followed. The soldiers swooped down on them, spears raised. The guards would not be food for the temple, but carrion for the vultures.
The water that had flowed into the temple had found its level and was now surging back, a wave that lapped the edges of the channel as it rebounded into the river. Akhenaten looked down at the water that had splashed up around his feet, and saw that the muddy brown was sluiced through with blood.
It was done.
He turned towards the setting sun. The soldiers on the clifftop above the temple raised their elephant-tusk horns and blew one blast, the noise booming and echoing down the Nile and then fading away, like the last bellowing of some great beast. He opened his arms, staring into the orange orb, feeling the rays burn into him, letting his soul flow out through his eyes and become as one with the Aten.
The old religion was dead.
Let the new one begin.
PART 1
1
Jack Howard eased forward in the confined space of the submersible, raising himself on his elbows so that he could see through the forward porthole into the azure shimmer of the Mediterranean. The thick cone of Perspex was designed to withstand the enormous pressures of abyssal depth, and distorted the view around the edge so that the research vessel Seaquest II some twenty metres above appeared as a strange play of white superstructure and dark hull. But the view in the centre was undistorted, a tunnel of clarity that seemed to match the single-minded determination that had brought Jack this far. As he made out the slope of rock and sand on the seabed below, his heart began to pound with excitement. Somewhere out there lay one of the greatest lost treasures of antiquity. For a moment Jack saw the image he had seen in his dreams for days now: a black basalt sarcophagus rising stark from the seabed like the toppled statue of a pharaoh half buried in the desert sand. Only this was not a dream. This was real.