War of the Crowns by Christian Jacq

Author:Christian Jacq [Jacq, Christian]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781416592051
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

31

After a night disturbed by his itching skin and one of his wife’s bouts of hysteria, which he had cured with a slap, High Treasurer Khamudi got up much earlier than usual.

It was the time of day when one of his Egyptian slave-girls cleaned the rooms, making not a sound so as to avoid disturbing the couple.

What Khamudi saw took his breath away. Unaware that he was there, the slave slipped into a cloth bag a valuable mirror the emperor’s wife had recently given him. The slave was actually daring to steal from him in his own home!

‘Curse you, what do you think you’re doing?’

The girl was so frightened that she dropped the bag. As it hit the stone floor, the precious mirror shattered.

‘Forgive me, Master, forgive me! I wanted to sell it so that I could take care of my parents. Believe me, I beg of you!’

Khamudi grabbed a wooden stool and smashed it down on the girl’s head. She collapsed to the floor. Maddened with rage, he trampled her underfoot, shouting so loudly that the whole household was aroused. The other servants watched, powerless, as he killed a young woman born of an excellent family in Sais. She had escaped deportation only to die by the hand of an enraged torturer.

‘Stop, Khamudi, stop!’ shouted Yima, trying to pull him back. ‘She’s dead!’

Eventually he emerged from his frenzy and calmed down. ‘Have hot branding-irons brought to me and summon all my staff.’

Terror-stricken, the slaves were herded into a corner of the room by Hyksos guards.

‘The thief who tried to steal my mirror has been suitably punished,’ declared Khamudi emphatically. ‘So that no one else will try the same thing, I am going to brand everything that belongs to me, whether slaves or objects. You, come here.’

The assistant cook Khamudi pointed at tried to run away, but two guards pinned him to the ground. As Khamudi branded him on the back, the young man let out a heartrending cry of pain.

Although he usually had a hearty appetite, Khamudi merely toyed with his food.

‘Are you ill, my darling?’ asked Yima.

‘No, of course not.’

‘But … you’re all yellow.’

‘ Don’t talk nonsense.’

‘Look at yourself in a mirror, I beg of you.’

Khamudi had to face facts: he did indeed have jaundice.

Emperor Apophis was eager to examine an interesting discovery made in the library at the temple in Sais: papyri devoted to geometry, mathematics and medicine. He enjoyed nothing more than the world of figures and calculations, which excluded all human considerations. A thousand deportees, a hundred executions … It was so simple and so entertaining to write these quantities on a papyrus, which took on the force of law without his having to listen to cries or protestations. Reducing people to numbers, and manipulating them in the tranquillity of his palace: that was surely the summit of power.

Life, divided up geometrically; the state, directed by mathematics; the economy, subject to equations: that was the goal the emperor had attained. Egypt, the supreme land of the gods, was his own private workshop, where he could experiment as he wished.

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