Out of a soft reed pannier Harkhuf pulled a wooden box, and set it down on the bench where we ate our daily food. Then he pulled on the scarlet gloves – those detested gloves that the pharaoh had presented to him, and lifted off the box lid.
I thought they were eels at first, wriggling around, knotting and unknotting. Then I realised. They were snakes – deadly poisonous Nile asps.
‘No, Father. You can’t,’ I breathed. ‘How can you kill a god?’
‘Isis did.’ He had his answers well rehearsed; he had been over and over them so often in his overheated brain. ‘The goddess Isis made a snake to poison Amun-Ra himself, ha ha! Poisoned the father of all the gods! That was how she won herself a place on the Ship of a Million Days!’
I wanted to say, ‘There is no god but Aten. There never was an Isis or a magic snake. It’s a story, a myth.’ But I did not. I said, ‘But Isis cured Amun-Ra afterwards. How will you cure the pharaoh?’
The light of madness was in his eyes.
‘I shan’t! No one shall! Monsters will tear at him in the Underworld, from everlasting to everlasting. But you, Tutmose, you!’
‘Me?’
How was I to be involved in this insane scheme? Was I to be a part of it, this blasphemy, this plot to kill a god?
‘What are you making at the moment? For the Great Criminal Akhenaten. At the workshop.’
I shrugged. ‘A cat. A cat in blue faience.’
‘Bast. The cat goddess. Very good.’
‘No, no,’ I insisted. ‘Just a blue cat. For Pharaoh Akhenaten’s tomb. He likes cats.’ But Father was deaf to everything he did not want to hear.
‘Excellent. Bast shall do it! It is fitting.’ He thrust his arm under mine and towed me, half-running, out of the house and towards the royal workshops, the box of asps tucked under his other arm. Outside the workshop door he said, ‘Fetch it. Fetch the cat … and clay to seal it.’
Such was my fear of those protruding eyes, those big blood vessels pulsing in his forehead, that crushing grip on my arm, that I did as I was told. ‘It’s not finished!’ I protested. ‘The eyes—’
‘It’s perfect.’ He set down the box of asps and snatched the cat out of one of my hands and the ball of wet clay out of the other. In the shadow of a wall, wearing those blood-coloured gloves, he managed to tip a squirming knot of asps into the hollow figurine and stop up the base with a disc of unfired clay.
Then he spat in the dirt and made mud plugs to seal up the empty eye-sockets. Never once did he comment on the workmanship, on the luminescent blue glaze, on the expression of the cat that had cost me hours of patient effort. That was all I could think of at the time. My work of art was just a container to him, a vessel in which to package his venomous hatred. The gloves were ruined, too, caked brown and crisp with dirt.
‘Now, all you have to do,’ said Father, ‘is to take it somewhere the Criminal will find it. Place it by his bed. The gods will help you.’
‘No!’ I could not help the word slipping out. It hung in the air between us, large as an apple. My mind was racing. If I refused to help, Father would make the attempt himself; he might even succeed. If I went along with the plan, I could at least make certain that it failed. Inside the cat, the asps were twisting themselves into infinite coils of wickedness. ‘No, no. It’s not perfect enough, Father! The base is just raw clay. It has to dry. Akhenaten would never believe a thing half-made like this was meant for him. Let me smooth it off and dip it in colour. Let me. Let me do the job properly. Let me, Father.’
We held the cat between us, me gently tugging, trying to ease it out of his grasp. ‘It just needs a coat of paint. Let it dry and it’s ready,’ I said, wheedling. ‘And the sun’s going down. Soon the gods will be underground. Wait till morning when they’re overhead – when they can see, and help and cheer.’
It was that picture of the gods hanging over the side of the Ship of a Million Days that won my father round. Like gamblers at a cockfight, he pictured them, cheering him on in his heroic murder. He let go of the blue-glazed cat, and I darted back into the workshop and set it down on my workbench.
I thought, if the kiln was hot, I would put it in there and kill the snakes. But the kiln was out, so I settled for standing the cat on my bench, under a sack. I would go back after dark when Father was asleep, and dispose of its lethal contents without him ever knowing. That way he might blame the gods, and not me, for letting him down.
The sun rested on the horizon, distorted to the shape of an ostrich egg. Aten-the-all-seeing was leaving the sky, leaving me alone with my father’s wicked dream. This one night, I was terrified to see Him go. I would be without His help till morning.
Having kept his plan secret for weeks, my father now wanted to talk. He wanted to talk and talk and talk. Ibrim had gone to the palace to play at a banquet for a visiting Syrian diplomat; he would not be home till morning. Father felt free to talk to me, his fellow-conspirator. Though I doubt he had slept one night since his dream at Edfu, he showed no sign of weariness. A demonic energy kept him wide awake, whereas I could feel my eyelids drooping, my stomach aching for want of sleep. I never knew that worry could be so exhausting.
When I woke, the sun was well up. It took me a moment to remember that Father was home. Then I saw him, curled up like a baby on the couch, his face aged by years in the sun, the bones of his skull sharply white under the skin. Creeping on bare feet, so as not to wake him, I carried my clothes outside and dressed as I ran up to the workshop, through streets already crowded with people.
A half-dozen craftsmen, already seated at their benches, looked up as I opened the door of the workshop. At my own work place, my tools lay ranged in an orderly row, like a surgeon’s knives. Beside them lay a fold of sacking. Where the blue-glaze faience cat had stood there was a circle in the wood shavings, the spilled slip and scraps of clay. But the cat itself had gone.
Someone had taken it.