“Take a bodyguard,” Khaemwaset admonished automatically, and Hori smiled and turned away.
It was a long walk to the city of Memphis from the high plateau of Saqqara, down through the stately palm groves and across the drainage canal now little more than a smooth ribbon of darker darkness that momentarily reflected the lights of the Prince’s escort. Khaemwaset, swaying in his cushioned litter with its tasselled curtains turned back so that he might look out upon the soft night, reflected, as he so often did, on the peculiar character of this, his favourite city. Memphis was one of the oldest places of continuous habitation in Egypt, and the holiest. Here the god Ptah, creator of the universe, had been worshipped for two thousand years. Here a long succession of kings had spent their sacrosanct lives, so that an aura of grace and dignity imbued every street.
The ancient core of the city could still be seen, the White Wall of Menes that had once enclosed the entire population but was now merely a tiny oasis of calm where rich and poor from all over the country came to stare and comment.
Sightseeing was a national pastime, the thing to do if one could afford it. Khaemwaset smiled a little sardonically to himself as his bearers entered the palm plantations and the sky was blotted out by a forest of stiff, feathery fronds that rustled pleasingly in the dimness. History had become fashionable—not the history over which he himself pored with such single-minded determination, but the stories of the conquests and personalities, miracles and tragedies of the kings of old. Guides thronged the market-places of Memphis eager to fleece country noblemen and wealthy merchants alike in exchange for titillating stories of a spurious past lit up with juicy, if highly doubtful, palace scandals of one hundred, one thousand years ago. Men took up chunks of stone and hacked their names and often their comments into the White Wall, the outer court of the temple of Ptah, even the gates of the temples of the kings in the old Ankh-tawy district
Khaemwaset had begun to employ burly Hurrians to patrol the monuments of the city. He had ordered offenders to be lightly beaten if caught, and his father, the august Ramses, had not objected. Probably because he does not care over-much, Khaemwaset surmised as the palms became fewer and the black night sky once more soared above him. He is too busy raising his own monoliths to posterity and expropriating the work of his ancestors to his own glory where it is most convenient.
Dear Father, Khaemwaset thought with an inward chuckle. Ruthless, arrogant and deceitful, yet full of lordly generosity when it suits you. You have been more than generous with me. I wonder how many complaints you have received from the noble foreign defacers of our marvels? Three-quarters of the populace of Memphis are foreigners enamoured of our strong economy and our supreme hierarchy. I wish you did not love them quite so much. He felt the bare feet of his bearers move on to something hard, and presently the night began to lighten with the orange glow of the city. They were behind the quietness of the Ankh-tawy district, where the temples hulked in a shrouded gloom relieved only occasionally by the tiny dot of a torch held for a priest going to or from his nightly duties. Beyond the rearing, dusky pylons and soaring pillars was the district of Ptah, dominated by the god’s mighty House, and beyond that was the Fine District of Pharaoh, with its two canals running to the Nile, its palace, often neglected, often rebuilt by successive pharaohs from time immemorial, and at present resplendently restored and added to by Ramses. Its tumultuous docks and warehouses were interspersed with the hovels of the very poor.
The White Wall citadel was to Khaemwaset’s right, and he caught a glimpse of its tall, now grey presence before the bearers emerged from its shadows into the district Northof-the-Walls, where he and many other nobles had their estates. This was a full city away from the noise and stench of the South district where the foreigners—Canaanites, Hurrians, Keftiu, Khatti and other barbarians—worshipped at the shrines of Baal and Astarte and conducted their loud and rude businesses with Egypt.
Khaemwaset often visited the foreign noblemen on their own estates that mirrored the gracious, peaceful enclaves of the North-of-the-Walls. His father entrusted him with much of the affairs of the government, particularly here in Memphis where Khaemwaset had elected to live. In his capacity as the most revered physician in the country he was often consulted by the Semites, but he did not like them. To him they were polluted streams invading the limpid, clean flow of his country’s society, carrying the corruption of strange gods to diminish the reverence due to Egypt’s faithful and powerful deities, the poison of exotic cultures, debased morals, cheap business dealings. Baal and Astarte were fashionable at Court, and Semitic names abounded, even in pure Egyptian homes of every strata. Intermarriage was common. Pharaoh’s dearest and most trusted friend was a Semite, a silent, spare man named Ashahebsed. Khaemwaset, a courtier born and bred, was well used to disguising his true feelings and did so with ease. He had had many dealings with this man, who now preferred to be known as Ramses-Ashahebsed, and had done no more than mildly insult him by refusing to use the prenomen “Ramses” except on written documents.