Guardian of the Horizon - Elizabeth Peters [105]
Emerson stopped short. “Beaded collars!” he shouted.
Ramses fought an unholy desire to laugh. “Father, I think you mean meri—friends—not meni.”
“It got their attention,” said Emerson, unabashed. The workers had dropped mallets and chisels. When he saw their expressions as they looked up at Emerson, Ramses no longer wanted to laugh. They bowed their heads and a soft murmur arose.
Realizing that his father was about to make a speech, Ramses said urgently, “We had better move on, Father. I don’t like the way the guards are handling those spears.”
“I thought I just might say a few more words,” said Emerson. “And perhaps ask a question or two about—”
“We don’t want to stir up trouble, sir. Not yet.” He knew that truculent scowl, and appealed to the ultimate authority. “Don’t you agree, Mother?”
His mother patted her forehead and cheeks with a square of linen. “Quite. Come along, Emerson. The king cannot object to us showing ourselves to the workers, but a prolonged conversation would probably result in punishment to them and confinement for us.”
She took his arm and they went on. The soft murmur followed them. It was a single phrase, repeated over and over. “The friends. The friends.”
The royal palace sprawled along and up and around the hillside, a huge, disorganized pile of buildings which had been added on to over thousands of years. It was impossible to get an idea of the internal plan from outside, since the apartments extended far back into the cliff. Their quarters were at the south end. The central facade, reached by a flight of stairs lined with sphinxes, was heavily guarded. All the local ducks and geese must have been divested of their tail feathers to uniform this lot. The more feathers, the higher the rank, one must assume.
The Window of Appearance and the plaza below it were on the north side, facing the Great Temple. Selim, who was walking with Ramses, stopped dead at the sight of its obelisks and gold-tipped flagstaffs and the gigantic painted figures on the pylons. “It is like Thebes in the great days of the pharaohs,” he breathed.
“Not really,” said Ramses. “This city is only a faint imitation of Thebes in its glory. Take a closer look at the paintings.”
After an eye-popping interval Selim laughed so hard he had to sit down on the pavement. “I don’t see what’s so amusing,” said Emerson, who had been studying his image with a complacent smile.
“Ramses,” Selim gasped. “It is Ramses, yes? The nose—the name—”
The name was there, all right, in an inscription behind the unflattering little figure. “Ramses the Great One, who speaks for the god, gives the breath of life to His Majesty.” Close up, the changes in the royal cartouches were obvious. They had been done hastily and without skill.
“You’re too clever by half, Selim,” Ramses remarked. He proceeded to translate the inscriptions identifying his father. “ ‘The Great One, the Father of Curses, smites the enemies of Maat.’ They’ve transliterated ‘Emerson’ alphabetically—m bird, r, the horizontal s, chick, water sign. You get the determinative of nobility, Father.”
“So I see,” said Emerson, pleased. The determinative, that of a striding man carrying a long staff, was a foot high. Like the larger image, it had blue eyes.
“Hmmm,” said his wife, who had been trying to read her own inscription. “Curse it, the hieroglyphs are quite different from those of Egypt, aren’t they? Ramses, can you make them out?”
“Not as well as Uncle Walter, but I remember a bit. You are the embodiment of Sekhmet, raging for the king with her—”
“Oh, good Gad,” exclaimed Emerson. “Don’t tell me…”
“I’m not sure, but it looks as if they have tried to spell the English word as it sounded to them, like your name.” He added with a grin,