Tutankhamun: The Book of Shadows Read Free

one that would help at all, at this moment.
    The vivid grief in his eyes had changed suddenly into the desperate purity of revenge.
    â€˜When you catch him, give him to me. I will kill him, slowly and mercilessly. He will learn the true meaning of pain.’
    But I could not promise him that. He looked away, and his body began to shudder. I left him to the privacy of his grief.
    Â 
    We stood in the street. The eastern horizon was swiftly turning from indigo to turquoise. Khety yawned widely.
    â€˜You look like a necropolis cat,’ I said.
    â€˜I’m as hungry as a cat,’ he replied, once he had finished his yawn.
    â€˜Before we think of breakfast, let’s think about that young man.’
    He nodded. ‘Vicious…’
    â€˜But strangely purposeful.’
    He nodded again, considering the almost visibly changing darkness at his feet, as if it might provide him with a clue.
    â€˜Everything’s upside down and back to front these days. But when it comes to mutilating and rearranging lame, helpless boys…’ He shook his head in amazement.
    â€˜And on this day, the biggest day of the festival…’ I said, quietly.
    We let the thought settle between us for a moment.
    â€˜Take statements from the family and servants. Check the room for anything we might have missed in the dark…do it while it is all still fresh. Find out if the neighbours saw anyone unusual hanging around. The killer selected this boy carefully. Somebody may have seen him. And then get off to the festival and enjoy yourself. Meet me back at headquarters later.’
    He nodded, and turned back into the house.
    Taking Thoth by his leash, I walked away down the lane and turned into the street at the end. The God Ra had just appeared above the horizon now, reborn from the great mystery of the Otherworld of night into a new day, silver-white, spreading his sudden, vast brilliance of light. As the first rays touched my face it was instantly hot. I had promised to be at home with the children by sunrise, and I was already late.

2
    The streets were suddenly crowded. People were emerging from different quarters, from the upper-class villas behind their high walls and reinforced gates, as well as from the poor back streets and rubbish-strewn alleys. Today, for once, the city’s mules and their burdens of mud-bricks and rubble, vegetables and fruits, were not on the streets, and the immigrant labourers who would normally be hurrying to their harsh work were enjoying a rare day of rest. Elite men of the bureaucracies in their pleated white clothing clung on to the back of their little horse-drawn chariots as they bumped and rattled along the ways of the city, some accompanied by running bodyguards. Men of the lower hierarchies walked with their servants and sunshades, along with rich children and their guardians, and expensively groomed women setting forth on early visits accompanied by their excited maids; everyone making their way, as if in time to some unheard drumbeat, towards the Southern Temple at the end of the city’s territory in order to attend the ceremonies of the festival. Everyone wanted to watch the arrival of the sacred boats bearing the shrines of the Gods, and even more importantly to get a glimpse of the King receiving them in public–before he entered the most secret and sacred of the temple shrines to commune with the Gods and receive their divinity into himself.
    But whereas, once upon a time, everyone’s concern would have been about making sure the whole family was as finely dressed, as neatly styled, as well fed, and as impressive as possible–in these days of strained obedience, the wonder and the awe had been replaced by uncertainty and anxiety. The festivals were not as I remembered them from my own childhood, when the world had seemed like a boundless fable: the processions and the visitations, station by station, of the divine figures in their gold shrines, carried