The Twelfth Transforming Read online

  PENGUIN CANADA

  THE TWELFTH TRANSFORMING

  Pauline Gedge is the award-winning author of the bestsellers Scroll of Saqqara, House of Dreams, House of Illusions, The Twelfth Transforming, Stargate, The Eagle and the Raven and Child of the Morning. The Horus Road concludes her “Lord of the Two Lands” trilogy, which began with The Hippopotamus Marsh and The Oasis. Her books have sold more than 100,000 copies in Canada alone. She lives in Alberta.

  PENGUIN CANADA

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Books, a division of Pearson Canada, 10 Alcorn Avenue, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4V 3B2

  Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  Penguin Putnam Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, U.S.A.

  Penguin Books Australia Ltd, 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia

  Penguin Books India (P) Ltd, 11, Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi – 110 017, India

  Penguin Books (NZ) Ltd, cnr Rosedale and Airborne Roads, Albany, Auckland 1310, New Zealand

  Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty) Ltd, 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank 2196, South Africa

  Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  First published by Macmillan of Canada Limited, 1984

  Published in Penguin Books, 1996

  Published in Penguin Canada, a division of Pearson Canada, 2003

  1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

  Copyright © Pauline Gedge, 1984

  All rights reserved.

  Publisher’s note: This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Manufactured in Canada.

  NATIONAL LIBRARY OF CANADA CATALOGUING IN PUBLICATION DATA

  Gedge, Pauline, 1945-

  The twelfth transforming

  ISBN 0-14-301430-7

  1. Akhenaton, King of Egypt—Fiction.

  2. Egypt—History—Eighteenth dynasty, ca. 1570–1320 B.C.—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS8563.E33T83 2003 C813’.54 C2002-904500-2

  PR9199.3.G415T8 2003

  Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  Visit Penguin Books’ website at www.penguin.ca

  For my sons, Simon and Roger. With love.

  BOOK ONE

  1

  The empress Tiye left her quarters escorted by four Followers of His Majesty and her chief herald. Beneath the torches that lined the passage between her chamber and the garden doors stood the palace guards, scimitars sheathed in leather scabbards, white kilts and blue and white leather helmets cool and startling against brown skin. As she passed, spears were thrust forward and heads bowed. The garden lay unlit, the smothering darkness untouched by the desert stars that flared overhead. The little company paced the paths briskly, paused, were admitted through the dividing wall into Pharaoh’s own acres, and passed along the rear wall of the palace.

  Outside the tall double doors from which Pharaoh often issued to walk in his garden or stand and gaze at the western hills, Tiye ordered her escort to wait, and she and the herald plunged into the passageway beyond. As she walked, her glance, always drawn to the confusion of painted images on the walls, moved up to the frieze under the line of the ceiling. Pharaoh’s throne name, inscribed in gold leaf set in fragrant cedar from Amki, was repeated continuously. Nebmaatra: The Lord of Truth is Ra. There was nowhere in all the acres the palace covered where one could go to escape from the words.

  Tiye came to a halt, and Pharaoh’s steward, Surero, rose from his seat by the door and prostrated himself.

  “Surero, please announce to His Majesty that the Goddess of the Two Lands is waiting,” her herald said, and Surero disappeared, emerging moments later to bow Tiye into the room. Her herald settled on the floor of the passage, and the doors were closed behind her as she walked forward.

  Pharaoh Amunhotep III, Lord of All the World, sat on a chair beside his lion couch, naked but for a wisp of fine linen draped across his loins and a soft blue bag wig surmounted by a golden cobra. The gentle yellow light from the dozens of lamps in stands or on the low tables scattered about the chamber slid like costly oils over his broad shoulders, the loose swell of his belly, the thick paleness of his massive thighs. His face was unpainted. The once square, forceful jaw was now lost in folds of sagging flesh, the cheeks sunken and drawn, evidence of the lost teeth and gum disease that plagued him. His nose had flattened as he had aged, balancing the decay of his lower face, and only the high, tight forehead and the black eyes that still dominated even without kohl told of the handsome, florid youth he had been. One foot rested on a stool while a slave, cosmetic box open beside him and brush in hand, knelt to paint the royal sole with red henna.

  Tiye glanced about. The room smelt of stale sweat, heavy Syrian incense, and wilting flowers. Though a slave was moving quietly from one lamp to another, trimming their wicks, the flames gave off a gray miasma that stung her throat and left the room so dusky that Tiye could barely make out the giant figures of Bes, god of love, music, and the dance, that gyrated silently and clumsily around the walls. Now and then a flicker would illuminate an extended red tongue or a silver navel on the dwarf deity’s swollen belly or would run rapidly along the leonine ears, but tonight Bes was largely an unseen presence. Tiye’s eyes returned to the couch, rumpled and strewn with crisp mandrake leaves and bruised lotus, and now noticed a small black-haired form lying under the sheet, breathing quietly in sleep.

  “Well, Tiye, you have taken an inordinate amount of trouble with your appearance tonight,” Amunhotep said, his voice echoing sullenly against the invisible ceiling. “Have you come to seduce me all over again? I remember perfectly well that you wore blue and forget-me-nots the first night you came to this room.”

  Tiye smiled and went swiftly to kneel before him, kissing his feet. “The courtiers would die of horror if I wore such an unfashionable thing today,” she teased, rising to stand, perfectly composed, before him. “How is Pharaoh’s health today?”

  “Pharaoh’s health has been better, as you well know. My mouth aches, my head aches, my back aches. All day the magicians have droned outside the door, and I have suffered them because I owe Egypt every opportunity to cure me, but the fools sing to hear the sound of their own voices. They have finally gone to swill their well-earned beer and riffle through their scrolls of spells. Do you think I have a demon in me, Tiye?”

  “You have had a demon in you all your life, my husband,” she retorted. “This you know very well. Is that wine in the jug?”

  “No, it is a mandrake infusion, black and foul-tasting. I prescribed it for myself. I have found that it not only acts as an aphrodisiac, something every boy knows by the time he is twelve, but it also surprises me by deadening my pain.” He looked at her slyly, and they both laughed.

  “Princess Tadukhipa is bringing Ishtar from Mitanni with her, to cure you,” Tiye said lightly. “The goddess cured you before, do you remember? Tushratta was very pleased.”

  “Of course that greedy Mitanni king was pleased. I sent him back his precious Ishtar coated with gold, and a mountain of ingots as well. I am making him rich again, this time for his daughter. I hope she is worth all the expense.” He pulled his foot away from the servant. “T
he henna is dry, and the other sole is done. Go. You also!” he shouted at the lamp trimmer. When they had backed down the expanse of tessellated floor and the doors had closed silently behind them, Amunhotep sobered. “Well, my Tiye, what is on your mind? You did not come here to make love to a fat old god with rotting teeth.”

  She quickly suppressed the moment of anxiety such talk from him always brought to her. He was shrewd and cold, this man, extracting a pitiless amusement out of every human failing, even his own, and he better than any other knew the irony in his description of himself. For at Soleb, in Nubia, his priest worshipped him with incense and song night and day, and a thousand candles burned before a colossal statue of Amunhotep, the living god, a likeness that neither aged nor sickened.

  “I want to talk to you privately, Horus.” She indicated the boy. “Please send him away.”

  Amunhotep’s eyebrows rose. He heaved himself out of the chair and moved to the couch with surprising agility, folding back the sheet and gently stroking the sleeping child’s naked flank. “Wake and go,” he said. “The queen is here.”

  The boy groaned, turned onto his back, and opened dark, kohl-circled eyes. Seeing Tiye, he slid from Pharaoh’s hand onto the floor, bent his knee, and without a word strode away.

  “He is older than he looks,” Amunhotep remarked without a trace of defensiveness. “He is thirteen.”

  Tiye sat on the edge of the couch, regarding him coolly. “Nonetheless, you know very well that he is forbidden. This, of all the ancient laws, is the harshest, and the man who brings such a curse on his house is rewarded with death; he and his lover both.”

  Amunhotep shrugged. “I am the law today. Besides, Tiye, why should this infraction worry you? Between us, you and I have broken every law in the empire.”

  Including the one against murder, Tiye thought. Aloud she said, “It is the superstitious gossip that worries me. Your appetites are legendary, and the rumors over the years have only served to enhance you in the eyes of your subjects and your foreign vassals. But this…this will bring ugly whispers, the rubbing of amulets, hostility toward you where there was only adoration and fear.”

  “I care nothing for them, any of them. Why should l? I am the most powerful god the world has ever seen. I speak, and men live or die. I do as I please. And you, Great One of Double Plumes, lady of unlimited power, you sphinx with breasts and claws, why do you frown over this small indiscretion?”

  “I neither frown nor smile. I simply tell you the temper of your people. While the courtiers do not care, all others will.”

  “To Sebek with them, then.” He lowered himself onto the couch and leaned back, breathing heavily. “I have made you in the image of the man I might have been. I did not want to be that man. You govern while I am content to pursue, well, whatever it is I am still hungry for and have not caught. Immortality in a jug of wine, perhaps. The latent fertility in a woman’s body. The essence of my own manhood in that boy. The gods do not have it, and neither does Egypt. Whatever it is.”

  “I know,” she said softly, and for a moment he smiled back. They regarded each other in a comfortable, intimate glance born of years of perfect understanding, Tiye disregarding all but the unpredictable man behind the ruin of the body, a man she would always love. Finally she sighed and handed him the cup of mandrake juice, weighing her next words carefully in the seconds the small gesture gave her.

  “The Son of Hapu has been dead for a long time,” she said.

  He drank, grimaced, and then began to laugh. “The only death that ever shocked me. He was already so old when I came to the throne that I believed he had compelled the gods to give him immortality. Their magic had preserved him through two reigns before mine. No seer since the dawn of Egypt had such visions, such dreams.”

  “He was a peasant from a hovel in the Delta. He had no right to control such weighty matters as the succession.”

  “Why not? As sphinx oracle and mouthpiece of Amun he was as qualified as anyone else. And his predictions came true for nearly eighty years.”

  “All but one, Amunhotep.”

  Pharaoh’s mouth set in a thin line, and he moved restlessly against the withered leaves, the rotting flowers. “While I still live I continue to be in danger; therefore, no, before you ask, I will not release that boy.”

  “Why can you not call him your son?”

  “My son is dead,” he snapped. “Thothmes the hunter, the handsome wielder of the scimitar. Nine years ago the chariot wheel that broke and flung him to his death destroyed direct succession in Egypt.”

  “You are a stubborn man, still worshipping what might have been,” she forced herself to retort, knowing that he would react with contempt to any hint of agitation in her voice. “It is not like you to hold a grudge against fate. Or is it a grudge against the Son of Hapu for failing to predict Thothmes’ end?” She leaned toward him. “Amunhotep, why has your grief not abated? Why can you not admit that the young man in the harem is your son and mine, the last male of our line, and thus entitled to the throne of Egypt when you die?”

  Amunhotep cradled the mandrake cup in both hands, not looking at her. “I wanted to kill him when the oracle told me what he saw in the Anubis cup. That day is burned into my memory, Tiye. I can still smell the wet lotus that had been gathered and laid under my throne, and see the Son of Hapu standing there at my feet, the Eye of Horus glittering on his chest. I was afraid. The Son of Hapu himself advised me to have the child strangled, and indeed I had al ready given the order when something stayed my hand. Perhaps I did not feel threatened enough. How can this son, this three-day-old tiny worm, possibly do me harm? I thought. ‘I have twice looked into the cup and read the omens,’ Hapu objected. ‘There is no doubt. He will grow up to murder you, O Mighty Bull.’” Amunhotep gingerly fingered his swollen cheeks and winced. “But I relented. I locked him in the harem instead.”

  “Where he was kept safely, but only until Thothmes was killed.”

  Amunhotep’s eyebrows rose. He put the cup back on the table and swung his legs over the edge of the couch. Tiye felt his soft thigh settle against hers. “I knew it was you who foiled that attempt,” he whispered, eyes suddenly alight. “But try as they might, my spies could never be entirely sure. Just as I could not discover for certain that it was you who poisoned Nebet-nuhe.”

  Tiye did not flinch. “I understood your panic when Thothmes died,” she said as matter-of-factly as she could. “You allowed the Son of Hapu to convince you that it was a deliberate plot on the part of a ten-year-old boy who had never stepped outside the harem, whose guards were changed every week, and who had never been allowed a single male friend. But there was no conspiracy. Hapu was simply asserting his power over you.”

  “No. He was trying once again to persuade me to do what I had been too weak to do before.”

  Tiye laid her head against his arm. “If you had seriously wanted to kill your son, you would have gone on trying until you had succeeded. But deep in your heart, O God of Egypt, no matter how you despise the boy, you recognize your own flesh. He will be king when your end comes, and I would rather see you proclaim him crown prince now and send him to serve his time in Memphis than face the battle that will come to me if you die without an official heir. If he had been married to his sister as soon as Thothmes had been beautified, the transition upon your death would be smooth and my mind would now be at rest.”

  He sat perfectly still. Only his heavy, labored breathing disturbed the thick stillness of the room. Somewhere in the dimness a lamp crackled and went out, and the cloying stench of perfumed oil intensified. “But I wanted Sitamun. And I took her. Thothmes had trained his sister well, and at sixteen she was a prize too glorious to resist.”

  “But there is now no unmarried royal daughter left, and only one son. And your days are numbered.”

  He reached over and stroked her face. “I taught you to lie with ease to everyone but me,” he murmured. “Now I find your honesty a terror. Yet I do not delude myself. Sup
posing I do order the release of that…that effeminate eunuch I spawned, and the Son of Hapu was right, and he uses his freedom to kill me?”

  Tiye swiftly decided to gamble. “Then you would have the satisfaction of knowing that the oracle was right, though how such a gentle and inoffensive young man as your son could ever conceive of murder, let alone the murder of his own father, is beyond me. Besides, my husband, if by some desperate chance the prince did succeed in killing you, what then? The gods would merely welcome you into the Barque of Ra a little sooner. Your son will be pharaoh what ever you do.”

  “Unless I have him executed immediately and put an end to this wrangling once and for all.”

  He spoke coldly. His face had fallen into an expression of polite repose, and Tiye could not tell whether he was angry or simply taunting her with a reminder of his omnipotence.

  “Very well,” she said cheerfully, aware that her hands were suddenly icy. “Speak the pharaonic word, Majesty. I will see that the order is carried out myself. I am a loyal subject. I know how to obey. Then, when you die in your turn, I will retire to my private estates with a clear conscience, having done my duty. What will it matter that the settling of the succession will be left to lesser men who will shower Egypt with each other’s blood in their scramble for the Horus Throne? I shall certainly not care that the Mighty Bull left no kingly seed behind!”

  He stared at her for a long time before nodding slowly. “The crowning argument,” he muttered, “and behold, my arrogant Tiye, at last I listen. Do not press my face against the bitter mingling of my pride and loss any longer. In Thothmes’ death the gods exacted a harsh payment for the wealth and power I have possessed all my life.” He smiled faintly. “They should be laboring for me in the Royal Treasury. I now concede. Have him released. I have done it all, had it all, and whether I am extinguished by sickness or an assassin’s knife, I must pass. I can at least spare you the annoyance of a ring of jackals barking in your face if I die without an official heir. But do not think that you can give him Sitamun. I need her.”