Free Nefertiti by Nick Drake

along the rich and colourful fabrics, her lips moving as if speaking the names of the dresses.
    'One set of clothes is missing,' Senet announced after a short while. 'A long gold tunic, gold sandals , linen undershirt. But I remem ber that was what she was wearing on the last evening.'
    So I knew what she was wearing when she disappeared.
    'Now the cosmetic chest, please.'
    Her eyes scanned everything on and in it. Her memory must, after all, be exceptional. She seemed to stop for a moment, as if mentally rechecking one of the compartments, her eyes ranging more widely as if looking for something significant; but then she closed it carefully.
    'Everything I remember is here, except what she was wearing on the last night I saw her.'
    'Which was?'
    'A gold necklace.'
    'Anything else?'
    'No.'
    I was about to question her further when there was a sudden knocking on the door. Khety opened it. It was Tjenry, alarm on his smooth young face. We made our way out into a courtyard to the side of the house, where I hoped no-one could overhear our conversation.
    'A body,' said Tjenry. 'A body has been found.'

    11
    She lay cradled in a low dune, some way into the Red Land behind the northern edges of the city, among the desert altars to the east. A fine second skin of grey sand had been brushed over her and into the folds of her magnificent clothes - long gold tunic, fine gold necklace, gold slippers, linen undershirt - by the light attention of the wind. She was turned on her side, her legs drawn up, her arms holding each other like a sleeping girl; and facing the west, the setting sun, I noticed, as in a traditional burial. It was all wrong. Her stillness. The empty muffled sound of the desert, like a shuttered room with nothing living in it. The heat of near midday, which shimmered over us all. The offending sweet stink of recently killed flesh. And above all, the furious tormented excitement of flies. I knew this sound too well.
    Her face was turned considerately to the sands. Holding a cloth to my mouth and nose, with Mahu, his slavering and overheated dog, and Khety standing at a distance, I gently touched her shoulder. She unrolled awkwardly towards me, the reluctant movement telling me at once that death was likely to have taken place in the small hours of the night. Then I confess I jumped back. Where her face should have been was a seething mask of flies that, conjured instantly by my disturbance, shimmered up into the air around my own head, and then reformed again, a barbarian hive thick with the buzz of intense devotion, upon the bloody remains of lips, teeth, nose and eyes. I heard Tjenry puking. Mahu remained still, casting a large and very sharp shadow over me as I crouched again by the corpse of the Queen whose glorious and famous face had been so brutally destroyed. I understood at once the extent and significance of the mutilation: this spectacular barbarity meant that the gods could not recognize her and she would never be able to speak her name when her shadow arrived in the Otherworld. She had been murdered in this life and in the next - a royal outcast of eternity. But something was not right. Why here? Why now? 'I think you are out of a job.'
    I looked up. Mahu's face was hidden in deep shadow. There was no tone of victory in his voice, but he was right. The Queen was dead. I was too late. Her own death surely signalled mine. My thoughts reeled. Was this the end of everything already? I had hardly begun.
    The peasant who had found her stood at a distance, trying not to look, trying not to exist. Mahu signalled for him to approach. Trembling, he did so. Without expression, as if he were an animal, without even the basest preliminaries of execution, Mahu's curved sword whispered in an invisible arc through the thin air and the man's thin neck. His severed head fell to the sand like a ball dropped out of its orbit, and his body sank instantly to its knees and collapsed. Blood pumped from his neck. The unholy priesthood