City of the Dead

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The king bit his lip. The interview had gone badly. He watched the general’s retreating back with murder in his heart. How much longer would he have to put up with the curbs of this ambitious old man?

To begin with, he had been grateful for Horemheb’s experience, and he had leant on him. But it was four floods since his coronation, and at seventeen years old, he was still pharaoh in name only. The army, his spies told him, remained loyal to Horemheb, its commander since the days of his predecessor, the disgraced pharaoh Akhenaten. He would have to work on getting them to transfer their loyalty to him. Then he would see about sending Horemheb off on a diplomatic mission to some remote province. He toyed with the idea of assassination, but knew that the day when he felt secure enough to have that done was still far off.

Then there was Ay, even older, but just as ambitious, and as much of a thorn in his side. The king was well aware that both these men – joint regents in doubtful alliance during his minority – wanted only one thing – to wear the pschent themselves. He made a point of having the red-and-white double crown of the Black Land placed on his head at every meeting with his two advisers, as they now liked to be called, though down the years General Horemheb, the stronger of the two, had got the young king to confer a greater string of titles on him than any commoner had ever carried in the entire history of the country, and that stretched back through one and a half recorded millennia, and eighteen dynasties.

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