Tutankhaton had spread a rumour that he was the son of King Amenhotep IV, Akhnaton's father. Tuta's mother, Meritra, was one of the king's concubines for a day—he had numbers of such. Gossips said, however, that Tuta's father was not the king, but the king's namesake, Amenhotep, the chief of the Surveying Office. Thanks to his mother, Tuta had obtained, as a child, the rank of the prince's play-fellow, and he rapidly made a career: royal chamberlain, chief fan-bearer on the right hand of the divine and gracious king, treasurer of the king's household, bread-giver of the Two Kingdoms, defender of Aton's faith and, finally, the king's son-in-law, husband of Ankhsenbatona, Akhnaton's twelve-year-old daughter.
No one could look up to heaven as devoutly as he did, whispering in a honeyed voice:
"Oh, how salutary is your teaching, kind Uaenra, the only Son of the Sun!"
Or compose such pious inscriptions for tombs: "Akhnaton, the Son of the Sun, rose early in the morning to lighten me with his light for I was zealous in carrying out his words," said one of those inscriptions. "I have followed thee, O Lord Aton—Akhnaton!" said another.
This identification of the king with God seemed absurd and blasphemous, since everyone knew that Aton was the Father and the king the son. But when it was known that these words expressed the king's secret doctrine about the perfect unity of the Father and the Son, people marvelled at Tuta's cunning.
The courtiers vied with one another in trying to revile the old god Amon. But Tuta surpassed them all: he ordered for himself a pair of plaited sandals made of golden straps, with Amon's face on the soles so as to tread on the unholy one with every step he took. And everyone marvelled again—they understood that he would go far in those sandals.
Tuta had been sent to Thebes with the title of Viceroy to carry out the decrees about taking away burial grounds from the priests and desecrating the god Khonsu, Amon's Son.
When Dio came to the Viceroy's white house the old servant, who knew her, met her with low bows and wanted to tell His Highness at once about her. But hearing that Tuta was having lunch with the chief of the Lybian mercenaries, Menheperra, a man whom she disliked, she said she would wait and going into an inner room, lay down on a low day-couch. Watching the slanting pink oblongs cast by the setting sun on the white ceiling through the long narrow slits of windows high up on the wall she sank into deep thought, as in the antechamber of Gem-Aton's temple: was she to go or not to go?
She grew tired of thinking and dozed. Two big flies were buzzing by her very ear as though disputing "to go or not to go?"
She woke up suddenly and grasped that it was not the buzzing of flies but a whisper, somewhere quite close to her ear. She looked round, but there was no one there. The whisper came from the next room, which was divided off by a latticed partition covered with a carpet; Egyptian rooms were sometimes arranged in this way for the sake of coolness. The speakers were probably sitting on the matting-covered floor just by the side of Dio's couch.