Casting the Gods Adrift Read Online Free PDF

the words ofa prayer I had heard issue many times from the temples of Aten.
    â€˜That’s right, little Tutmose. And you have put him to the trouble of saving your life twice over.’ But his face looked only mildly amused, rather than angry.
    His charioteer picked me up and carried me in his arms, bracing himself in the tail of the chariot while the pharaoh himself drove it back to the edge of the Red Country. The Nile valley glimmered greenly along the horizon, broken by the temples and pylon-gateways of el-Amarna.
    Father looked pale to the point of sickness. I was touched by his concern for my safety, sorry he had been put to such long, courteous apologies. ‘My son is a blight on my life … a curse on my family name … his mother’s shame. I shall beat him soundly for being such a grain of sand in the pharaoh’s eye…’ On and on he went.
    But I soon found out that it was not I who had offended my father, not I who had died out there in the desert. At the secret site of the royal tombs, among the grim red cliffs and the wastes of scree, Akhenaten hadaccorded his men of gold the ultimate honour. They, like the princesses, were to have tombs alongside his House of Eternity. Like it or not, Harkhuf was to sleep forever in the Red Country, under the eye of Aten the sun.

6
A Dream of Wickedness
    I did not tell him. I did not even try. There was no point. A father can tell his son what to believe – for a while, at least – but a boy can’t tell his father. I must have told Ibrim fifty times over when we got back and we were alone together, ‘It’s true! Everything the pharaoh tells us is true! There
is
only one Aten. I felt it. I felt Him! Out there in the Red Country!’ And Ibrim nodded and pictured it in his head, and believed me, because I was his older brother and I had never deliberately told him an untrue thing.
    But Father was a different matter. He left on a trip to Nubia the day after my adventure with the chariot. I was still confined to bed, with double vision and aterrible headache. Not until my head cleared did the solution come to me. I knew how to bring back my father from the brink of despair. The means of doing it was in my own hands!
    I would carve him a stela – a name post to set up at Abydos. So that wherever his mortal remains were laid to rest, Osiris, god of the West Country would know Harkhuf was a true believer and would raise him to everlasting life! It would be the most beautiful stela Abydos had ever seen. I had the skill in my hands to make it. And I owed it to my father. I loved him, and I wanted to give him something which would prove that – both to him and to me.
    In every spare moment I worked on the carving, wrapping it in cloths between times, and hiding it away from prying eyes. I must not on any account betray my father as an unbeliever in Aten; that would have meant his ruin. I think it was the finest piece of work I ever did. When I needed encouragement I would let Ibrim run his sensitive fingers over it and he would say, ‘Such detail! Such delicate work! It must bethe finest piece of work you’ve ever done, Tutmose!’ I could not wait for Father to come home so that I could give him my wonderful present.
    I
knew, of course, that the magic of Abydos was imagined. I knew that Aten was the only god over Egypt. But Harkhuf would be buried with the divine Akhenaten. So that was all right, wasn’t it? That would keep him safe and grant him a happy afterlife. Time enough for him to find out his mistake, then, in the Country of the Westerners.
    I treasured up my news, like Akhenaten amassing his treasure ready for the red tombs. The wait was long.
    One day, a neighbour suddenly came running to tell me that my father’s boat was docking at the quayside, with ostriches and a baby elephant, jackals and a dead zebra. I ran to greet my father. Of course I could not blurt out my surprise in a public place, but