which I find my place
1. Don’t lie.
2. Don’t kill.
3. Don’t steal.
4. Don’t marry more than one person at a time.
5. Be happy with what you’ve got.
6. Be kind to your parents so long as they are kind to you. If not, don’t bother.
7. Take a day off when you need to.
8. Choose your god then stick to it.
9. Don’t make models of him/her. It only leads to trouble.
10. Now think of something yourself, you lazy dog.
So here I am, standing on top of a pyramid. I’m as high as the sky and king of the world.
In front of me, the Great River is a big, fat, dark, lazy snake, winding through a patchwork of fields: green grass, golden wheat, black earth.
Behind me, the desert is as dull as a dead lion’s hide.
On my left and far, far away, the setting sun has just turned the stones of the old city to gold.
On my right, our town is a muddle of narrow streets and four-square, flat-roofed houses built of brown mud brick. Fires blink like bright eyes as people cook their evening meal. On the back road that leads in from the north, I can just see a small dust cloud. It’s tearing along at a fair old lick and there’s a dark man-shape in the middle of it, like the grit in a ball of raw cotton.
When you’re up on a pyramid, you’re standing on an old king who’s buried somewhere in the pile of rocks beneath you. Soldiers used to march around its base to keep rabble like me away and the common people had to crawl up a long stone causeway to ask for blessings from the priests who prayed in his temple. But the new king in the south has banned the old gods and told us to worship the sun. The Aten, he’s called. I suppose the king has his reasons, but I can’t help feeling it’s a bit boring. I mean, what does this Aten do except shine? The old gods got up to all kinds of mischief, some of which is too shocking to talk about, but that makes me like them more.
Still, look on the bright side: no gods means no priests; no priests means no guards; no guards means I get to climb the Great Pyramid whenever I feel like it.
So I’m up in the sky and feeling great when I suddenly realise that the little cloud of dust I saw on the back road could be a guest coming to the inn. And if it is, I have to be back there to meet him or I’m in trouble – a muddy great heap of it.
As it happens, I reach the inn just before my parents return from visiting neighbours, and they get back just before the guest bangs at the courtyard gate.
I’m sticky with sweat as I open it, still breathing heavily from running home. I grazed my knee from sliding down the pyramid too fast and the sticky trickle of blood is a cool itch on my skin.
The new guest is a big mud-coloured man with thick arms like rolls of linen and a face as smooth as wet clay. Dust is sticking to his shaven head and he doesn’t greet us and he doesn’t say any of the usual things.
Not: ‘I was wondering if you had a room, and do you serve meals?’ (Regular guest.)
Not: ‘I say, what a charming inn! Now, would you be so good as to furnish me with a room for a week or so? And is that cooking I smell? How delicious.’ (Will try and leave without paying his bill.)
Not: ‘Gods, what a dump. Still, I suppose it’s the only place I’ll find in this miserable town.’ (Will pay, but argue every penny.)
Not: ‘I’m a poor, hungry traveller and I need a place to rest my head.’ (Has money, but pretends he hasn’t.)
This man says: ‘I want good stew, strong beer and a quiet room.’ And stares through my father into the space behind him. There’s something in the way he talks, the way he uses just the right amount of words and no more, that feels menacing. I don’t know why. I’m ready for my father to shake his head and say: ‘Sorry – no rooms for tonight,’ but I guess three things stop him.
1. My mother starts to make cooing, welcoming noises. She’s fiddling with her good wig – the one with the beads woven into the braids that she stole from her mother’s hoard of grave goods, though she will never admit it.
2. Although anyone can see that this new guest is trouble, something about him makes it hard to say no.
3. (the clincher) My parents are in no position to refuse anyone, even if they think he’s a murderer. Even if they think he’s a mass murderer, for that matter.
You see, ever since the new king banned the old gods, and the plague started devastating the Two Kingdoms, business has more or less dried up. The tourists who used to come to the pyramids and leave offerings at the temples are staying away and the little shrine at the back of our inn is deserted. Worse than that, no one really knows if the old ways of doing things are legal and, as a result, our regular drinkers – tomb builders, wall painters, grave-goods makers, professional mourners and the like – are broke.
But the new guest doesn’t look like the kind of man to worry about things like that. After he’s eaten his stew and drunk his beer, he quietly says he’s going to the shrine and no one will disturb him while he’s there.
Not: ‘I don’t want to be disturbed.’ Not: ‘No one should disturb me.’ Just: ‘I will not be disturbed,’ like he knows that if he says it, it won’t happen.
We all sit around feeling slightly stunned. A few people wander in for a drink or a chat. I serve two travelling carpenters looking for work and a thickset man with a broken nose who wants to know if we’ve got a room, but he bets we’re too busy for the likes of him.
‘Only one guest and there he is,’ I say, nodding to the new man. He’s just left the shrine and is sitting on a bench the other side of the courtyard, leaning back against the wall, his eyes closed against the glare of the setting sun.
I guess the thickset man doesn’t like the look of him any more than the carpenters because they all drink up and leave.
I, on the other hand, have to serve him.
‘More beer, boy.’
Like I said, he uses exactly the right amount of words – no more, no less – and when he finally opens his eyes and finds me staring at him, he gives me a slow, mean, crocodile stare that zings straight into my brain. It isn’t nice at all, but the funny thing is that the meaner he looks, the more I want him to notice me, even though it frightens me half to death.
Next morning, first light of day, and my mother is screaming questions at me. I don’t answer because she’s managing to do that herself :
‘What have you been doing? I tell you what you’ve been doing – playing with mud. What have you done to earn your keep? Nothing. What have we done to deserve you? Nothing. We’ve