Heretic of El Amarna

Chapter 27: Amenhotep

I stared out across the desert, feeling sick at heart, though I was healthy otherwise.

The professional mourners wailed in the background as they followed the funeral procession for five of my siblings.

A deep, pervading numbness spread through me, chilling me all the way to the core. Me and Isit.

Me and Isit.

We were the only two left of the royal siblings born to my father and his Great Wife – my mother, Tiye. The only ones left. We were all alone facing this without help or comfort.

I watched my sister walk with my mother, tears streaming down her cheeks, her own quiet sobs not reaching my ears over the loud cries of the mourners. She looked so small and fragile. And so alone. She stood there, a beacon of light and sadness all at once with her white dress and running kohl, which streaked her cheeks. Her hair was dishelved from a night spent tossing and turning and then having spent little time caring for it before joining the procession.

The oxen lowed, pulling the boat shaped crafts that contained my brothers and sisters.

Their deaths were sudden, and we had no real place to put them aside from burial in the half-finished tombs my father had been preparing for himself and the rest of us. If you said anything of us Egyptians, it would be that we prepared for death.

But this time, death had struck without warning before we could prepare. And when that happened, it was a tragic thing. Any death was. But the sudden deaths… Those were some of the hardest. Though I thought that perhaps the hardest deaths of all were the ones where you watched as your loved one withered away, dying slowly and painfully, as my father was. And there was nothing anyone could do.

Those were the worst deaths because you were helpless to stop them and you knew it. With the ones that struck quick, at least, you had no time to feel the helplessness. You just felt the loss with a keen sense of emptiness.

But with those deaths that were prolonged, you spent each moment with that person in pure and utter torment because you wanted to help but knew you couldn’t. It was enough to make a person both scream and weep. But you always held it back so that you wouldn’t upset the other person who was dying. The person you knew was in enough pain without having the emotional pain added of knowing that you were suffering too. That you were suffering because of them.

Such was death.

A painful, unnatural thing.

But it led to the Afterlife, and so, in some ways, there was comfort. We knew where our siblings would go. They had been good people in their lives.

Of course, there was always the dread that settled in the pit of your stomach. The dread that perhaps they hadn’t been good enough. The dread that perhaps their good acts wouldn’t outweigh the bad. The dread that – when that occurred – their soul would not be lighter than Ma’at’s feather of truth. The dread that their souls would be devoured by Amat, soul devourer.

But the dread was useless because there was nothing anyone could do after they were gone. Once they were gone, they were gone. They would be judged, and no matter what anyone they left behind said or did, they would not escape their fate.

Death was both an ending and a beginning.

A closed door and an opening one.

A knife blade that killed the hearts of those left behind and the river that opened up either eternal bliss or eternal torment for those who had passed on into the West.

But there was never anything anyone could do when Death came. It was the way it was. Death knew no bounds and had no pity or care for who it took. It was no respecter of persons. It took everyone at some time – from the highest of us to the lowest.