The Egyptologist - Arthur Phillips [150]
The agony of his ailments, the death of a hound,
This war that laps at the shore and never abates.
Text: In the eleventh year of his reign, Atum-hadu’s palace glowed with another feast night, beauty to be carried into eternity. The main hall was open to the air and covered with billowing linen. The high torches shed their light on the edges of the linens, and the roof seemed to burn red with a fire that never consumed. Peacocks roasted over columns filled with fire of many colours. The columns were covered with spells against the torments of the king’s stomach, but to no avail. The smell of the birds brought cats and dogs into the court. Amongst them was the cat Atum-hadu loved most dearly, and she leapt into his lap.
Atum-hadu lay across his throne and stroked the cat. With his other hand he held a long spear, thin and flimsy, used only by the women in their combats where they would fight and die when Atum-hadu tired of them. He pierced a peacock and drew from its flesh a stream of juice. He pierced a bound Hyksos prisoner and drew from its flesh the Hyksos commander’s plans.
Atum-hadu’s calm questions belied his fury and the boiling in his belly. The wrath of his internal cobras was visible on the surface of the king’s abdomen and in the map of cataracted Nile on his bronze temple. Despite the lavish rewards he had dispensed to magicians of medicine, still he suffered. There was no reason for his pain, and there was no relief.
Until this night. Ma’at herself appeared, glowed as hot and bright as the sundisk, so that none in the court might gaze at her. All pressed their faces to the floor, all but Atum-hadu, Ma’at’s ferocious lover. Atum-hadu rose from his throne and his stomach released him. Ma’at embraced him in softness, and she spoke to him in the soft language of a cobra, as she and Atum-hadu rose into the sky and conversed.
Ma’at spoke: “O Atum-hadu, beloved of the gods and of the people, you suffer because in your belly, rotting and bubbling, is your mortal past, your first childhood, the mere thought of which boils your insides. Inside you too, grows the future which must come, as the old king predicted. Great son of Atum, the end of the land will accompany the end of your second life. Your final birth approaches. You must clean your past away.”
Ma’at kissed the king and disappeared. Atum-hadu descended to his throne; the dancers, cooks, and priests rose. The sounds of the court returned: twin acrobats praising Atum, women soothing their infants, small boys demanding that their fathers play with them, an old man calming his shaking son, soldiers drinking beer. The body of the prisoner drew the attention of Atum-hadu’s hounds, and the cat, the king’s favourite friend, lapped at the pool of Hyksos blood spreading across the floor like a map being constantly redrawn. Even in death, this display of Hyksos expansion was not lost on the king.
Soldiers entered bearing another Hyksos spy. “Atum-hadu would like them to understand,” the king announced, and called for the keeper of the royal menagerie to bring a young serpent, one that carried no venom. Soldiers held the boy, and Atum-hadu seized a knife and cut a small hole in the boy’s side, opened the intestine, and inserted the snake tail-first into the gap. He called for priests to sew the hole so that only the serpent’s head emerged, then instructed his soldiers to carry the boy back where his own people could find him, to leave him with plenty of food and drink. “He must be found alive with Atum-hadu’s sign in him,” said Atum-hadu.
Illustration: Of the extensive and marvellous illustration covering the whole wall from floor to ceiling to the right of the opening into the Second Empty Chamber, some elements are particularly worthy of our immediate praise. As elsewhere, the animals are brilliantly rendered (the roasting peacock, the purring cat), as are the furnishings of what was certainly a richly but not tastelessly decorated court, where the accent was on pleasures of the bed and table. The court scenes