I think my father was more afraid now than with the crocodiles gaping after him. He was in the presence of the pharaoh, watching the pharaoh’s shipment of animals disappear into the boiling brown turmoil of the sandbank. He fell down along the deck, his face pressed against the boards, his breath breaking from him in little sobs of abject terror.
But, to his astonishment, the pharaoh bent down and raised him to his feet. ‘Never fear, man, never fear! Give thanks to almighty Aten that he preserved you from the crocodiles!’
‘But your animals—’ blurted Father.
I could see the imprint of the cedarwood deck on his cheek.
‘There are always more animals. Calm yourself. Your children are safe. Is that not more reason to celebrate than to grieve? They are your sons, I take it?’ He laid his hand on my shaven head – a god’s hand on my head! – and ordered the rowers to pull away into the wider river, away from the sights and sounds of the sandbank.
We sailed on downstream, towards the distant white cubes of el-Amarna.
‘Ah yes! Harkhuf! Your name is known to me!’ said the pharaoh genially. ‘You did great service to my father.’
‘May his name live forever,’ said Father.
‘I hope you will fetch me many animals too. The queen and I are very fond of animals, and so are my daughters. Monkeys and cats, for preference. My daughters are particularly fond of cats.’
I snatched a glance at the little girls who had come to the doorway of the stateroom, dressed in linen so gauzy thin that they seemed to be wearing clouds. I gasped at the sheer beauty of them. Their pleated skirts were clasped at the hip with gold, and each girl wore a collar of lapis lazuli.
‘And birds for my aviary, yes!’ the pharaoh was saying. ‘I love their colours and their song… That reminds me. Did I hear singing from your boat, before she struck the sandbar? Was it you, boy?’
He turned to me a face more like a woman’s than a man’s, a wig of extraordinary curly hair bunching out from under his plumed headdress.
The smile was so encouraging, I stopped trembling in the instant. ‘That was my brother, Ibrim! I can’t sing a note!’
‘Tutmose is a worthless boy,’ agreed my father.
‘Ah, but you are surely good at something?’
Now the queen was speaking to me. Day of days! A god and a goddess speaking to me! I was so overwhelmed that Ibrim had to answer for me.
‘Tutmose is a great maker of things. He is clever with his hands! Clay models. Wood carvings. Just wonderful! Last year he made me a little elephant… I don’t see very well, but even by touch I can tell—’
‘Ibrim, be silent!’ hissed my father, horrified by our temerity.
‘Then there is a place for you all, at el-Amarna, it seems,’ said the pharaoh. ‘Wash off that Nile mud, good Harkhuf. We shall soon be reaching the quay.’
Nubian slaves brought bowls of clean water, and we washed. I bent my face over a washing bowl, and when I looked up again, I saw el-Amarna slipping up to meet the boat. It looked just as if it had dropped from the sky an hour before – a city of pale clay buildings, all new, all clean, all perfect. Huge pylon gateways, palaces and silos of stored grain all soared towards the burning blue sky. Squatting around them were smaller, cube-shaped houses, and everywhere there was colour and noise and movement and smells enough to make my head spin.
In a bakery, a man was taking honey cakes out of a clay oven. A dwarf was walking a pair of pet dogs along the shore. A row of bronze axe heads caught the sun – for sale outside a metalworker’s shop. In every house yard, incense trees cast little pools of shade where cats slept, old men snoozed, or women sat washing lentils or chopping leeks. Naked children ran about playing leapfrog or football, or towing little toys about on string. The smoke from the cooking fires rose up to mingle with steam from freshly washed clothes. Men with brick-red skin were building yet more soaring walls of brick, while in the dark houses pale-skinned women stayed hidden from the sun’s ferocious heat.
We seemed to be expected to follow the royal family, so we did – up one of the vast smooth ramps which led to doors high in the palace walls. Through countless anterooms, the pharaoh led us through his pharaoh – his ‘great house’. I remember thinking how strange it was to call a king a ‘great house’; but then I suppose a pharaoh does afford his people shelter and safety, so in that way he is like a house. We passed through a hall with, oh, fifty pillars holding up a painted ceiling. Then we were on the King’s Bridge, on top of the city’s gateway, in a covered walkway with a view right over el-Amarna. The pharaoh stopped and so did we.
‘Welcome, my friends,’ he said. ‘Welcome to the city of Aten, the only god.’ He turned to one of the courtiers who bobbed along in his wake like seagulls behind a plough. ‘Take my animal collector to a temple where he can ask the priests to give thanks to Aten. Then find him somewhere to live. Tutmose here is to study handcrafts; the blind one is to study music under the royal musicians.’
‘Oh, but my son isn’t—’ Father wanted to explain how Ibrim was not blind – far from it! He wanted to say how his eyes were getting better every day. But he dared not contradict the king.
‘We greatly prize music here,’ said Queen Nefertiti, resting the tips of her fingers on Ibrim’s shoulder. ‘You must not fear the dark, Ibrim. Aten shines into every life, in some way.’
Then the king’s courtier led Father, Ibrim and me over the King’s Bridge and directly to the Temple of Aten the sun. The courtier told us it was not like any other temple. It was not some gloomy secretive cave of a building, with looming statues and inner rooms where the priests communed mysteriously with images of the gods. This temple was open to the sun. ‘There are no roofs to the temples of Aten. They are open to the rays of Aten, as every heart is open to His eyes,’ said our guide in a bored, slightly routine way, as if he had said it many times before. He told us that the altars – there were many of them, either to Aten or to the divine pharaoh himself – were piled with fruit and flowers, and the walls were painted with the rays of the sun, each ray ending in a hand. I could feel the sun shining on the top of my head. I could feel the painted hands emptying blessings on my head. I was going to be a craftsman – a sculptor! – a maker of beautiful things for the beautiful daughters of Akhenaten! I was the happiest boy alive.
‘But where are the other temples?’ said Father, and there was a strange, strained quality to his voice. ‘My boys must ask the priests to perform a thanks-offering ritual to the great baboon-god Thoth. Their life is preserved by the goodness of Thoth.’
‘There is no god but Aten the sun,’ said our escort, haughty as an ostrich. ‘There are no other temples in el-Amarna. Aten the sun and our own god-king Akhenaten rule here. Is the news so slow to travel throughout their kingdom?’
‘I had heard something of the kind,’ said my father guardedly.
‘So it shall be, as it is here, from end to end of the Nile. One god, just as there is one sun.’
Ibrim took hold of my hand. The floor was patterned, and he did not feel safe walking across it, for fear there were steps he could not see. ‘I want to ask a priest to put an offering on his altar. On Akhenaten’s altar,’ he whispered to me. I could see from his face that he was as happy as I at the way things were turning out. ‘But I only have the elephant you gave me. Everything else was lost with the boat.’
‘Give it,’ I said, brimming over with joy. ‘I can make you something else. Soon I’ll be able to make you anything! I’ll be the best craftsman in all Egypt!’ I led him over to a priest, and Ibrim took the elephant out of a little shoulder bag which hung, still river-sodden, against his dry clothes. We asked if it could be laid, with two figs, on an altar to Akhenaten.
On the wall beside us, a huge depiction of the pharaoh looked benignly down upon us. He was wearing the full panoply of kingship; the blue cobra crown, the crook and flail of kingly power crossed on his chest. The face looked pleased, gratified.
The heat bounded off the high, bright walls, redoubling like an echo. We sweated joy, my brother and I.
No more than a few steps from the temple, the courtier jerked his head abruptly at a house. ‘You may stay here, since it is the pharaoh’s wish,’ he said grudgingly and, duty done, he scurried back to the palace.
‘Isn’t it wonderful, Father?’ I burst out, dancing around, shaking my hands in the air. ‘Music for Ibrim, and I shall be a sculptor! In the pharaoh’s own workshops!’ But even as I said it, I knew that somehow I was throwing straws on a fire, fuelling my father’s rage, making his eyes bulge with pent-up fury.
Father was not overjoyed. He was on the verge of cursing or bursting into tears.