Despite the deprivations of the last few days, for all the gold in the deserts of Nubia I could not sleep. The pain in my finger throbbed in time to my heartbeat, as if it intended to keep me awake-perhaps punishing the rest of my body for its apparent well-being. Perhaps also it was a reminder of my deepest fear. The fate of Tanefert and the girls tormented me, and I turned and turned again from side to side. The weather, too, was heavy, discontented. Irritable gusts of wind cast handfuls of sand and dust in frustration against the outer walls. I could hear a loose door banging in the wind, like a warning. Someone must then have gone out to close it, but somehow the silence after that was worse. Once this coming day was over, and its changes-whatever they were, however good or bad-were brought into being, I would take the first ship south, back home. I would row myself all the way back against the current in a little papyrus reed boat if I had to. The distance and the uncertainty had made me miserable, and I vowed never to leave my family like this again.
I was tossing and turning with these thoughts for company, when I heard footsteps outside my door. I had been given a side chamber to sleep in, and as we three had walked through the house some hours earlier, in a deliberate silence, hardly even bidding each other goodnight, the house had seemed deserted, the rooms shut up, the furniture covered. We were careful to light no lamps, nor give any evidence to the outside world of our presence. Nefertiti had assured us that no-one would think to seek us here, in her own palace. But now the quiet footsteps. They stopped outside my door. I lay very still, holding my breath. Then they continued, softly, and quickly faded away.
I dressed swiftly, and opened the door as quietly as I could. No sign of anyone. The passageway was dark, relieved only by a silvery light where it opened up ahead on to the terrace. All the rooms appeared silent and empty. I arrived at the end of the passage and looked out on to the terrace. The moonlight threw down a tangled labyrinth of black shadows from the vine onto the stones; and among the well-defined tendrils and leaves stood a familiar figure. She seemed part of the design, as if wound into the complicated filigree of light and dark.
I walked across to Nefertiti, now part of the dark design myself. We were silent for a moment, looking out across the moonlit river rather than at each other.
‘Can’t you sleep?’ she asked eventually.
‘No. I heard someone moving about.’
‘Perhaps we could play a game of senet?’
‘In the dark?’
‘By moonlight.’
I knew she was smiling. Well, that was something.
We sat down at the board, facing each other across the thirty squares, three rows of ten, in a shape, the snake of life.
‘Green or red?’ she asked.
‘Let’s throw for it.’
She cast the four flat sticks, all of which landed face up on the black side-a propitious start. I threw them and got two white, two black. She chose green. ‘I like the little pyramids,’ she said. I took the red reel pawns and we placed our fourteen pieces in readiness.
She threw, and moved her first piece from the central square, the House of Rebirth, onto the first square. We played in silence for a little while, casting the sticks, moving our pieces forward, occasionally knocking each other’s off the squares and returning them to their original position, where they waited in limbo for a lucky throw to begin again. Sometimes the hot wind interrupted our silence, insisting on something. I watched her thinking, considering her moves. She was beautiful, and unknowable, and I felt, with something not unlike amusement, that I was actually playing against a spirit in the Otherworld, and for the well-being of my immortal soul.
Soon we reached the last four squares of the game, the special squares. She threw, and landed on the House of Happiness. A rueful smile broke over her face. ‘If I were superstitious, I could believe the gods have a sense of irony.’
I threw, and my first piece landed on the next square, the House of Water. ‘If I were superstitious, I’d agree with you,’ I said, pushing my piece off the board and back to the House of Rebirth again. ‘Here we have strategy and chance, the two forces encountering each other. I feel like Chance; I think you’re Strategy.’
She didn’t smile. ‘You have your strategies too.’
‘I do. But I rarely feel I am in control of them. I apply them to the mess of the world, and sometimes the two things seem to correspond.’
She threw, and played.
‘So you think the world is a mess?’ she said, as if the question were another move in the game.
‘Don’t you?’
She thought for a while. ‘I think it depends on how you look at the experience of being alive.’
She threw the three white faces required by the square of the House of the Three Truths to move her first pyramid off the board, and looked pleased to be winning. I wanted her to win.
‘This is turning into the kind of conversation lovers have when they’ve just met at some drinking den late at night,’ I said, before throwing and losing another piece.
‘I’ve never been to such a place.’
I could see her there, though. The mysterious woman waiting for someone who isn’t going to come, sipping her drink slowly like lonely people do, making it last.
‘You haven’t missed much,’ I said.
‘Yes I have.’
She threw again, and moved another piece off the board. She would beat me hands down.
The wind lulled then, and the quietness under the stars was strange and welcome. The moon had drifted further across the glittering sky.
‘There are things I’d like to ask you,’ I said. I could see her eyes in the darkness.
‘Always asking questions. Why do you ask so many questions?’
‘It’s my job.’
‘No. It’s you. You ask questions because you fear not knowing. So you need answers.’
‘What’s wrong with answers?’
‘You sound like a five-year-old boy sometimes, always asking why, why, why.’
She threw again, and moved another piece ahead to the House of Ra-Atum, the penultimate square. I threw. Four black sides; a six took my first piece on to the last square.
‘Speaking of answers, what is there between you and Ay?’
She sat back and sighed. ‘Why do you keep asking about him?’
‘He’s waiting for you.’
‘I know that. Perhaps I am afraid of him. Consider what happened to Kiya.’
‘I have heard that name,’ I replied. ‘She was a queen, yes?’
‘She was a royal wife.’ Nefertiti looked away.
‘And she bore royal children?’ I asked.
She nodded.
‘What happened to her?’
She stared at me. ‘Here is an interesting answer for you. She disappeared one day.’
‘That sounds familiar.’
I thought about this. A royal wife and mother of royal children, and therefore a competitor to Nefertiti herself within the royal family. Why did she disappear? What kind of threat did she represent? Was she despatched on the orders of someone; Ay, perhaps? Could he have the power to organize and plan to the level of assassination? Or-almost unthinkably-was Nefertiti herself capable of such ruthlessness?
She watched me carefully.
‘A story that turned out well for you,’ I observed.
‘Perhaps. But where has your question taken you? To the truth? To a greater understanding? No. It has taken you to more questions. You are in a labyrinth in your head with no escape. You have to go beyond the labyrinth.’
‘But what is beyond the labyrinth?’
She gestured around us, as we sat together over the squares and pieces, the chances and the strategies, the secrets and the nonsense of the unfinished board game.
‘Life, Rahotep, life,’ she said.
She had never used my name before. I liked the way she said it. Her face was half in the light of the moon, half in the dark of the shadows. I would never really know her.
She rose quietly. ‘Thank you for letting me win.’
‘You won all by yourself,’ I said.
We looked at each other for a long moment. The eyes, the eyes. Nothing more could be said.
We parted then, leaving the pieces of the game set out on the board as if we might return to them in the morning. At her door she wished me a good night-what was left of it. I knew she was afraid. She left her door ajar, but I could not cross this threshold. I drew up a stool and sat down to sit out the night like a playing piece on the last square of the great game of senet, on a board the size of this strange city, with its lucky and unlucky squares, its chances and its plots, waiting for the throw of fate.