Casting the Gods Adrift by Geraldine McCaughrean

Author:Geraldine McCaughrean
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Casting the Gods Adrift
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing PLC
Published: 1998-09-19T04:00:00+00:00

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 a terrible 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 be the 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

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