Khu: A Tale of Ancient Egypt Read Online Free Page B

Khu by her side. Neferu walked on the king’s other side with her infant heir to the throne. The king’s second major wife held her baby close, as the child’s nursemaid walked a pace behind, ready to take the babe from her mistress at a moment’s notice. But Neferu did not relinquish the infant. She held him closely to her chest, wrapped in a long linen cloth which had been fashioned into a sling. It was tied across one shoulder and around her back. The movement of the procession had lulled the child to sleep.
    Neferu kept looking at the sleeping babe worriedly, and casting surreptitious glances Khu’s way. She distrusted Khu. As mother of the heir to Upper Egypt’s throne, Neferu took her place in the royal palace quite seriously. And in a time when infant mortality was high, she cared for the child with all the protectiveness of a whole pride of lions guarding their young. Small amulets were tied to the infant’s limbs, and spells were chanted daily for his protection.
    Khu felt Neferu looking at him, but every time he glanced back she would turn away. And although she was physically attractive, her brows were often drawn, and her mouth taut with pride, which lent her features a hardened and brittle edge.
    Neferu feared Khu. It was not just his strange eyes that unnerved her either. Now that Tem had claimed Khu as her son, Neferu was afraid that Khu might usurp her own son’s position as heir to the throne. This was ridiculous, of course, for nothing could take the child’s future crown from him but death. Although her fears were unfounded, her jealousy and ambition clouded her judgment and good sense. She did not want anyone or anything to thwart her child’s future as king. And for all her motherly instincts, she could not help seeing Khu as a constant threat since his arrival to the palace compound.
     
    The rest of the royal family, nobility, officials and palace servants followed behind the king and his main wives, their heads bowed with grief. They were headed to the rock-carved royal tombs that waited in the desert by the side of a cliff on the western bank of the Nile across from Thebes.
    The mortuary temple shone almost white under the desert sun. Though still under construction, its pillared halls and columned hypostyle rose like a palace for the dead, where it was believed that the sun would carry the deceased to the Underworld. The walls would later bear hieroglyphic texts and high relief images of the king in various scenes of his life, along with the principle gods of Thebes, including the god Amun. Once completed, artisans would also paint the inscriptions in vivid pigments befitting of the monarch’s eminence.
    Khu watched the paid mourners weeping and throwing dust over their heads in a flamboyant display of sorrow. Some flung themselves onto the ground, waving their arms miserably through the sand, while others threw their heads back toward the sky, wailing loudly in various tones of violent and distressing cries and exclamations that filled the air with their lamentations. But the sadness was palpable, especially as Henhenet had been young, and her death unexpected. There is nothing more painful than the untimely death of someone young and dear to the heart. The harrowing grief surges from a bottomless well of sorrow, drowning the mourner in a torrent of agonizing pain; an exquisite pain that continues to afflict the mourner with heartache and loneliness long after the deceased is buried and gone.
    Khu glanced up at Mentuhotep who remained stoic at his side. The king had shaved off his beard and head once again, now that the prescribed seventy days of mourning before the funeral ceremony had passed. On top of his smooth scalp he wore the formal conical-shaped Hedjet White Crown of Upper Egypt. He did not carry the crook and flail at this funeral—scepters symbolizing his power as shepherd and protector of his people, and his position as leader and inflictor of justice, respectively. But he did