River god - Smith Wilbur. Страница 34

  He paused for a long while before my drawing of the god Thoth, with his bird head and long curved ibis beak, weighing Pharaoh's disembodied heart on the scales against the feather of truth. Should the heart be impure, it would tip the scales against the feather, and the god would immediately toss it to the crocodile-headed monster that waited close at hand to devour it. Softly, the king quoted the protective mantra laid down in the book to shield himself from such a calamity, and then passed on to my next engraving.

  It was almost noon before Pharaoh had completed his inspection of the mortuary temple and led the way out into the forecourt where the palace chefs had laid out a sumptuous open-air banquet.

  'Come and sit here, where I can speak to you further on the matter of the stars!' Once again the king ignored precedent to place my Lady Lostris close to him at the banquet table, even moving one of his senior wives to make a place for her. During the meal he directed most of his conversation towards my mistress. She was now completely at her ease and kept the king and all those around her enthralled and merry with her wit and charm.

  Of course, as a slave I did not have a seat at the table, nor could I even inveigle myself within range of my mistress to warn her to moderate her demeanour in the king's presence. Instead, I found myself a place on the pedestal of one of the granite lions, from where I could look down the length of the banquet table and watch everything that took place there. I was not the only observer, for my Lord Intef sat close to the king and yet withdrawn, watching it alj with glittering, implacable eyes, like a handsome but deadly spider at the centre of his web.

  At one stage of the meal a yellow-billed kite wheeled high over head, and uttered a screech, a sardonic and mocking cry. Hurriedly I made the sign against the evil eye, for who knows what god it was that had taken the form of the bird to muddle and confuse our petty endeavours?

  After the midday meal it was customary for the court to rest for an hour or so, especially at this the hottest season of the year. However, Pharaoh was so wrought up that today he would have none of it.

  'Now we will inspect the treasuries,' he announced. The guards at the doors of the first treasury stood aside and presented arms as the royal party approached, and the doors were swung open from within.

  I had planned these six treasuries not only as store-rooms to hold the vast funerary treasure that Pharaoh had been collecting for the past twelve years, ever since his accession to the double throne, but also as workshops in which a small army of craftsmen and artisans was permanently employed in adding to that treasure.

  The hall that we entered was the armoury that housed the collection of weapons and accoutrements of the battlefield and the wild chase, both practical and ceremonial, which the king would take with him into the afterworld. With my Lord Intef's concurrence, I had arranged for the craftsmen to be at their benches so that the king would have the opportunity of watching them at work.

  As Pharaoh passed slowly down the row of benches, his questions were so astute and technical that those nobles and priests to whom he addressed himself could provide no answers, and they looked around frantically for someone who could. I was summoned hastily from the back of the crowd and pushed forward to face the king's interrogation.

  'Ah, yes,' Pharaoh grimaced bleakly as he recognized me. 'It is none other than the humble slave who writes pageants and cures the sick. No one here seems to know the composition of this electrum wire that binds the stock of the war-bow that this man is making for me.'

  'Gracious Pharaoh, the metal is a mixture of one part of copper to five parts of silver and four of gold. The gold is of die red variety found only in the mines of Lot in the western desert. No other gives the wire the same pliability or elasticity, of course.'

  'Of course,' the king agreed wryly. 'And how do you make the strands so thin? These are no thicker than the hairs of my head.'

  'Majesty, we extrude the hot metal by swinging it in a special pendulum that I designed for the purpose. Later we can watch the process in the gold foundry, if Your Majesty so wishes.'

  Thus during the rest of the tour I was able to remain at the king's side and to deflect some of his attention away from Lostris, but I still could not find the opportunity to speak to her alone.

  Pharaoh passed down the armoury to inspect the huge array of weapons and armour already in store. Some of these had belonged to his forefathers and had been employed in famous battles; others were newly manufactured and would never be used in war. All of them were magnificent, each a pinnacle of the armourer's art. There were helmets and breast-plates of bronze and silver and gold, battle swords with ivory hilts set with precious stones, full-dress ceremonial uniforms of the commander-in-chief of each of the king's elite regiments, shields and bucklers in hippo-hide and crocodile-skin, all starred with rosettes of gold. It made a splendid array.

  From the armoury we crossed the atrium to the furniture store, where a hundred cabinet-makers laboured with cedar and acacia and precious ebony wood to build the funeral furnishings for the king's long journey. Very few substantial trees grow in our riparian valley, and wood is a scarce and costly commodity, worth very nearly its weight in silver. Almost every stick of it must be carried hundreds of leagues across the desert, or shipped downstream from those mysterious lands to the south. Here it was piled in extravagant stacks, as though it were commonplace, and the fragrance of fresh sawdust perfumed the hot air.

  We watched while craftsmen inlaid the head-board of Pharaoh's bed with patterns of mother-of-pearl and woods of contrasting colour. Others decorated the arm-rests of the chairs with golden falcons and the back-rests of the padded sofas with the heads of silver lions. Not even the halls of the royal palace at Elephantine Island contained such delicate workmanship as would grace the rock cell of the king's tomb.

  From the furniture treasury we passed on to the hall of the sculptors. In marble and sandstone and granite of a hundred differing hues, the sculptors whittled and chipped away with chisel and file so that a fine, pale dust hung in the air. The masons covered their noses and mouths with strips of linen on which the dust settled and their features were powdered white with the insidious stuff. Some of the men coughed behind their masks as they worked, a persistent, dry cough that was peculiar to their profession. I had dissected the corpses of many old sculptors who had worked thirty years and died at their trade. I found their lungs petrified and turned to stone in their bodies, thus I spent as little time as possible in the masons' shop lest I contract the same malady.

  None the less, their products were wondrous to contemplate, statues of the gods and of Pharaoh himself that seemed to vibrate with life. There were life-sized images of Pharaoh seated on his throne or walking abroad, alive and dead, in his god form or in the shape of a mortal man. These statues wouMJine the long causeway that led from the funerary temple on the valley floor up into the wall of black hills from which his final tomb was even at this moment being excavated. At his death the golden hearse, drawn by a train of one hundred white bullocks, was to bear his massive sarcophagus along that causeway to its final resting-place.

  This granite sarcophagus, only partially completed, lay in the centre of the masons' hall. Originally it had been a single block of pink granite quarried from the mines at Assoun, and ferried down-river in a barge especially constructed for that purpose. It had taken five hundred slaves to haul it ashore and drag it over wooden rollers to where it now lay, an oblong of solid stone five paces long, three wide and three tall.