Prince in Exile, Page 2

  Heria suddenly screamed. Keneben leapt to his feet and launched himself at Ramose. He slapped the boy’s hand away from his mouth just as he was about to eat the gazelle meat.

  Ramose looked at his tutor in amazement. “What do you think you’re doing?” he demanded angrily.

  Heria was trembling. Her bony finger was pointing at a lump on the floor. Ramose looked closer. The lump was brown and furry. It was Topi. The boy fell to his knees next to his pet.

  “What’s wrong with him?” He picked up the animal’s limp body. The monkey’s tongue was lolling out of its mouth. “He’s dead. Topi’s dead.”

  He looked around at his tutor and his nanny for explanation. They were both grim faced. Heria took the amulet from around her neck and handed it to Keneben. He broke a seal from the top. The amulet was actually a small flask. Keneben grabbed hold of Ramose roughly.

  “What are you doing? I’ll call the guards!”

  The tutor’s mouth was severe. He didn’t answer. His eyes had a fierce determined look that Ramose didn’t recognise. Ramose was afraid—afraid for his life. Keneben forced the neck of the flask to Ramose’s lips and tipped the contents into his mouth. He grabbed the boy’s hair and pulled his head back so that he had no choice but to swallow. Ramose was surprised at the strength in his tutor’s hands. He felt the bitter-tasting liquid run down his throat. He broke out of Keneben’s hold and got to his feet. Ramose’s legs felt strange. They crumpled beneath him. The room was spinning. Heria was wailing. He could hear the birds in the courtyard calling. The sounds grew further and further away. The faces of his tutor and his nanny grew smaller. He opened his mouth to ask them what they had done to him. Then the floor came up and slapped him in the face.

  3

  AFTERLIFE

  Ramose awoke and shivered. He hoped it was a dream, but he was too scared to open his eyes. What if it wasn’t? He opened one eye. He could see nothing. He felt like he wanted to be sick. He opened the other eye. Everything was still black. He couldn’t see a thing, but he could smell something. The salty smell of natron, the stuff that the priests used to preserve bodies before they were mummified. There was also the sharp, sweet smell of juniper oil which was poured over the body after it was wrapped in linen strips. He was lying on a cold stone table. This is no dream, thought Ramose. His stomach turned somersaults. I’m dead. Someone is about to cut open my body, take out my insides and turn me into a mummy. Ramose heard someone moving. He raised his head. There was a figure in the corner leaning over a lamp.

  “You’re awake!” said a familiar voice.

  “Heria!” said Ramose. “Did you die too?”

  “You’re not dead, Highness.”

  “But this is a tomb isn’t it?”

  Heria shook her head, helped Ramose to sit up and gave him some cool water to drink.

  “This is an embalming room beneath the temple of Maat,” said the old woman.

  Ramose was confused. His mind was still foggy. He was lying on the stone table made especially for embalming dead people. He could see the channels that were meant to carry away the blood when the dead bodies were cut open with a sharp flint. What am I doing in an embalming room if I’m not dead, thought Ramose. He drank the water and then immediately vomited it up again. Heria stroked his back the way she always did when he was sick.

  “What’s happened to me, Heria?”

  Ramose was trying to remember what had happened. Something frightening, something so bad his brain was keeping it hidden from him.

  Keneben came into the room and bowed to the prince.

  “I hope you’re feeling better, Highness,” he said.

  Ramose suddenly remembered the tutor’s strong grip and the taste of the bitter liquid. He looked from his tutor to his nanny. The two people he had trusted most in the world.

  “You poisoned me,” he said, trying to get to his feet.

  Keneben knelt at the prince’s feet. “No, Highness, I wish you nothing but health and long life.”

  “Someone tried to poison you, my prince, but they failed, thank Amun.”

  Heria sat next to Ramose and started to tell him a story. She had told him many stories in his life, but never one that scared him like this one.

  “As soon as Queen Mutnofret came to the palace I knew she was trouble,” the nanny said. “I never liked her. When your dear mother died Mutnofret made sure that she became Pharaoh’s favourite wife. Then your half-brother was born and I guessed what her plan was. She wanted her own son to be the next pharaoh. I found a written spell in an amulet around her brat’s neck. I took the spell to Keneben to find out what it meant.”

  Keneben continued the story. “It was a spell to bring death to you and your royal brothers, Highness. I don’t believe peasant magic can kill a royal heir, but when your brother Prince Wadzmose died, I wondered if it really was an accident. When Prince Amenmose died as well, I was convinced that someone was killing the princes and that you would be next.”

  “Since then, we have watched you day and night,” Heria said with tears in her eyes. “Poisoning was what we feared most. That’s why we tested all your food on the monkey first.”

  All the inexplicable things started to make sense.

  “Poor Topi,” said Ramose. In many ways the monkey had been his best friend.

  Ramose took another sip of water. This time it stayed down. Then he tried a mouthful of bread.

  “When can I go back to the palace? We must send messengers to my father.”

  “I don’t think that’s wise, Highness.”

  “Why not? If Pharaoh knows what she’s done, he’ll imprison Queen Mutnofret.”

  “We can’t prove it was her. She’ll just deny it. Pharaoh is very fond of her and she has a way of making things sound convincing.”

  Ramose’s head ached. He was finding it difficult to understand what his tutor and nanny were planning.

  “But what am I to do? I can’t stay here—unless you think I should become an embalmer.” Ramose laughed despite the pain in his head and his somersaulting stomach. The idea of him having to work for a living was ridiculous. Keneben and Heria didn’t laugh though. They didn’t even smile.

  “If you’re to become pharaoh, Highness, you must stay hidden until you are old enough to claim the throne.”

  “Hidden? You mean imprisoned?”

  “No, Highness.”

  “We have given this a lot of thought. There are so few people in the palace whom we can really trust. The vizier is more than likely on the side of the queen. He is a powerful man who no one dares to defy. Every servant and slave will be a potential enemy. It’s too dangerous for you to stay in the palace.”

  “We could hide you somewhere in a different town—even a different country.”

  Ramose shuddered at the thought of leaving Egypt.

  “Wherever you go, eventually word will get back to the vizier and the queen.”

  “The only way that you will be safe is if everyone thinks you’re dead.”

  “The potion you drank, Highness, gave you every appearance of being dead.”

  Heria wept again at the memory. “When you were taken away for embalming, I managed to switch your body with that of a peasant boy about your age who had just died of an illness.”

  “Does my father think I am dead? My sister?”

  “Yes. It was the only way to ensure your safety.”

  “But surely you don’t expect me to stay here?” Ramose said, indicating the dusty, smelly room.

  “No, Highness, of course not,” said Keneben. “What I have in mind is that you disguise yourself as an apprentice scribe.”

  “An apprentice scribe!”

  “Yes, Highness,” said Heria. “You won’t need to do physical work, and you have the scribal skills.”

  “I have found a scribe looking for an apprentice. He and his wife have no children. They are looking for a boy to train to take the scribe’s place.”

  “I won’t become a scribe,” shouted Ramose.
“I’m Pharaoh’s son, the heir to the throne of Egypt. I won’t do it. You can’t make me!”

  4

  THE EDGE OF THE WORLD

  Ramose leaned over the side of the papyrus boat and trailed his hand in the blue river water. An old man was rowing the boat across the Nile, the lifeblood of Egypt. Without the river Egypt would not exist, he knew that. The river gave Egyptians water to drink and to make their crops grow. Each year in the season of akhet the river turned green and flooded. The fields disappeared beneath its waters. When the water receded and the Nile shrank back to its normal size, a layer of black silt was left over all the farmland. It was a gift from the gods that made fruit and vegetables grow fat and full of flavour.

  Ramose knew these things because Keneben had taught him. He cupped some of the Nile water in his hand and drank it.

  The small boat reached the western bank of the river and Ramose climbed out. He was wearing a coarse tunic over his kilt. He still had his favourite red leather sandals though. He had insisted on keeping them.

  The path from the river skirted around the palace. Behind those walls, which were almost close enough to touch, were his sister, his tutor and his dear nanny. Maybe his father was also there, just returned from a triumphant campaign in Kush. But as well as the people who loved him, there were also people who wished him dead—the queen, the vizier and the brat-prince, Tuthmosis.

  Ramose walked on without stopping. There was no one to farewell him as he walked away from the places that were familiar to him. The day before, Heria and Keneben had sneaked away from the palace at different times to say goodbye to him. It was too risky for him to be seen with either of them and they didn’t trust anyone to guide him. Instead, Keneben had drawn a map for the prince on a small sheet of papyrus.

  Ramose walked along a path between a canal and fields of wheat and vegetables. The path was shaded by date palms. Peasant farmers went about their daily business without even glancing at him. The path zigzagged past fig trees and grapevines. A man lifted water from a canal and poured it into his fields using a device with a leather bucket at the end of a counterbalanced pole. He carefully watered each melon vine and every onion plant. Ramose breathed in the moist air laden with the heavy smell of ripe fruit, lotus flowers and animal dung.

  Then the fields ended abruptly as if someone had drawn a line in the earth. There were no more irrigation canals. The desert began just as suddenly as the fields had ended. And the path immediately changed from a smooth, well-travelled roadway to a rough, sandy track with no trees to shade it. The familiar smells of the Egypt he knew faded and the hot, dry, smell-less air of the desert filled his nostrils.

  Ramose had never walked in the desert before. It was a dangerous place, inhabited only by barbarians, sand dwellers and the dead. The path started to climb. On either side there was nothing but hot sand—apart from the rock that Ramose managed to fall headlong over. He picked up the rock and threw it angrily down the cliff. It skipped and bounced down the rock face. If Ramose had been in the palace he would have blamed a servant for leaving something in his way for him to fall over. He would have yelled abuse at the servant and that would have made him feel better. Ramose watched the rock smash into a dozen pieces when it hit the bottom. It made him feel worse.

  Ramose sat in the sand and had to concentrate hard to stop himself from crying. Normally if he so much as knocked his knee against a stool, three servants would have been at his side to see if he needed attention. A priest would have been called to say a prayer for him. There he was, sprawled in the dirt and no one came to help him. He was alone for the first time in his life. The harsh sun burned the back of his neck. Ramose looked up at the path that rose steeply in front of him. He got to his feet and walked on. He had a long way to go.

  The hill turned into a steep cliff and the path zigzagged back and forth sharply in order to find a way up. Jagged stones dug into his sandals as he climbed. Ramose adjusted the bag on his shoulder. It was a small bag made of woven reeds—the sort that peasants carried their food to the fields in. Yet at that moment the simple bag contained all Ramose’s possessions.

  He reached the top of the cliff and sat down panting. He looked back the way he had come, shading his eyes from the sun. In the distance, he could see the glittering ribbon of the Nile with a stripe of green on each side. He was shocked to see what a thin strip of fertility Egypt was, clinging to the edges of the Nile. The hostile desert beyond stretched as far as the eye could see on either side of it. At the river’s edge, he could just make out the whitewashed walls of the palace. On the other side was the sprawling city and the temple complex with its flags flying and its gold glinting in the sunlight. That was where he had spent the last two weeks, hidden in a basement room. He turned away from the Nile, away from the land he had known all his life, walked over the crest of the hill and down into a valley.

  Ramose couldn’t imagine why the desert was called the Red Land, when it all seemed to be a dirty yellow colour. The slope below him was covered in sharp rocks and flints where a cliff had long ago collapsed. He could just make out a mud brick village on the valley floor the same colour as the desert hills around it. If he hadn’t been looking for it, he might not have even seen the village. From a distance it could easily have been a natural feature, shaped by the winds. There was no green, no gold, no sign of life. This was his new home—the village of the tomb makers.

  Over the next hill, he knew, was the Great Place, the valley that his father had chosen for his tomb and for the tombs of future pharaohs. It was a special place, a place sacred to the gods, where Pharaoh hoped his tomb would be safe from tomb robbers.

  Ramose had refused to leave the city at first. As a prince he was used to getting his own way. But the more he’d thought about it, the more he knew Heria and Keneben were right. He wouldn’t be safe in the palace. Queen Mutnofret was a strong-willed and powerful woman who was feared by servants and officials alike. Eventually Ramose had agreed to their plan. He would live secretly as an apprentice scribe until Keneben and Heria could find proof of Queen Mutnofret’s treachery against him and his brothers. They would seek out the people who had provided the poison, the ones who had rigged his brother’s chariot accident and buy the truth with gold. It would be no more than six months, they said.

  Keneben had found a scribe called Paneb in the tomb makers’ village who was looking for a boy to take on as an apprentice. The scribe had had a local boy in mind for the job, but a large sum in gold and copper had convinced him that Ramose would be a better choice.

  Ramose rehearsed his new life story in his head as he walked. He had been born in a distant part of Egypt far to the south. He was the son of a local official and had been trained to follow in his father’s footsteps. A terrible disease had swept the town though, and both his parents had died. He had miraculously survived and been brought up by an uncle in the city. The uncle had recently died too, leaving him with no one to care for him. Ramose hoped he’d got all the details right.

  5

  THE RED LAND

  The tomb makers’ village didn’t look very welcoming. A high mud brick wall surrounded it. There was just one entrance. Ramose was exhausted. The journey from the city had taken less than two hours, but the prince had never walked so far in his life. It was past noon and he was hungry and thirsty.

  There was one street in the village and it was empty. It hardly even deserved to be called a street. It was just the space between two rows of houses. Keneben’s map showed the scribe’s house about halfway along the street and on the left-hand side. There weren’t that many houses, the whole village would have fitted into one corner of the palace.

  Ramose was soon standing outside the house with Paneb’s name inscribed above the door. Even though he was tired and hungry, he had a strong urge to turn and run all the way back to the palace and tell Keneben that he’d changed his mind. The door suddenly opened and a small figure burst out and nearly knocked him over. It was a young girl.

&n
bsp; Ramose stared at her. He couldn’t help it. Her skin was as dark as Nile mud. She had large rings in her ears and a string of fat orange beads around her neck. Her hair was a mass of tight black curls. She wore a length of coarse-looking material with broad stripes in green and red over her head. Around her waist was a strange belt made of intricately folded cloth. She glared back at Ramose.

  “What are you staring at?”

  No one had ever spoken to Ramose in that way before. He opened his mouth to call for the guards and have the girl taken away. He closed his mouth again, standing on the doorstep in confusion. The girl looked him up and down, at his broken sandals, dusty garment and sweating face.

  “The boy’s here,” she called over her shoulder and then she ran off down the street.

  A man appeared at the doorway.

  “You’re late,” he said. “We were expecting you earlier.”

  Paneb wasn’t at all like Ramose had imagined him. He’d had a vague picture in his head of a younger man who smiled a lot, someone like Keneben. The scribe was an old man, much older than Ramose’s father, his hair was grey, his skin lined and he was fat. His stomach hung over his kilt and he had a number of chins.

  “I was held up at the river,” Ramose lied.

  “You better come in.”

  Three steps led down from the street into the scribe’s house. The house was so narrow, Ramose felt that if he stretched out his arms he could have touched both walls at once. The scribe led him into a room where two women were waiting. One was Ianna, the scribe’s wife, the other was Teti, their servant.

  “This is Ramose,” Paneb told the women.

  “The same name as the poor prince,” said Ianna, who was fat like her husband.

  Ramose nodded. Heria had wanted him to take another name, but he thought he might lose himself completely if he didn’t at least have his real name.