According to custom, a captive chief must be presented to the great god Amen of Thebes. Established precedent required that he be killed before the temple portals of the god himself. Whether Aton would scorn such a blood-thirsty offering, Ramses did not pause to think.
The irruption of the victorious Egyptian army into Kadesh was followed by wholesale loot, division of the women among the soldiery, riotous drunkenness, child-murder and the apportioning of the manhood of the vanquished among the temples of Egypt. There followed the utter obliteration of the conquered city in a holocaust of fire.
Within twenty days from the time Pahura had commenced to list the first golden ewer, the once famous city of Kadesh with its gilded towers and blue-glazed walls, its palace ablaze with lazuli, silver and ivory, and the great temple to the Sun-god, a veritable treasure-house of richly colored tiles and bricks, gold, turquoise, silver, ebony, Lebanus cedar and sweet-smelling woods from the Incense Country, lay a mass of smouldering ruins, encircled during the day by a veritable ring of vultures, throughout the night by droves of snarling and quarreling hyenas.
But, by this time, the victorious host of Egypt was well on its way up the straight highroad to the frontier, where it was hailed by the acclaiming vanguard of the overjoyed Egyptian populace.
At the first Egyptian city, Suan-of-the-North, it was rumored that the aged Magician Enana, Ramses’ grandsire, together with two unknown and mysterious personages, had been seen to enter Ramses’ tent. Thereafter they accompanied him.
A feeling, closely akin to panic, had settled upon the Egyptian Court. Its members, of whom by far the greater number were, outwardly at least, firm adherents of Aton, had now received a second violent shock to their already perplexed minds.
Following her safe return from one of her periodic visits to Pharaoh’s new capital to the north, Thi the Queen-Mother, had suddenly and most mysteriously vanished.
The Women’s Quarter of the palace was in an uproar. Consternation and, withal a nameless dread, was stamped upon the faces of courtier and servant alike. The remembrance of Menna’s unaccountable, and still unsolved disappearance, was still fresh in their minds.