The Twelfth Transforming

by Pauline Gedge

  Obediently she pulled off her rings, shrugged out of the loose robe, and taking the dish, knelt on the sheets beside him. Pouring a little oil into her palm, she spread it over his wide back and began to work it into the yielding flesh, kneading and stroking, feeling the muscles tight with pain under her fingers. For a long time there was no sound but that of Pharaoh’s heavy breathing. The sweet, cloying scent of the oil rose in Tiye’s nostrils, bringing back to her visions of nights that the past had already embalmed, and, as if he had read her thoughts, he said, “No one else could ever do this the way you do, Tiye. Do you remember our first years together, when I would send for you every night and the oil would be waiting? Tonight my mind is full of that time. For a while I forgot, when your body ceased to surprise and I turned to others, but I have such a hunger for you again.”

  His words puzzled her, but she was touched by them. Though her back was beginning to ache and her wrists to protest, she forced her hands to keep sliding up over the massive shoulders, down the straight spine, her eyes on the glistening warmth of him, the familiar, bold lines of his body. “The little princess did her best to please me,” he went on after a pause, and Tiye’s heartbeat quickened at the odd, deprecatory tone of his voice. “She danced most prettily in nothing but her jewels. She sang me the native songs of her country. She kissed and caressed me, but she went away carrying nothing inside her but a tale of my own impotence to spread abroad in the harem. I tried, but tonight I am like Osiris, maimed and dismembered. Her youth and innocence did not excite me. It caused me to break out in a sudden sweat of fear.” With a grunt he heaved himself over to face her, and in his dark eyes she read something she had never seen before, the vulnerability of a sacrificial beast pleading with her. For a second the knowledge of her own power over him rose like a hot tide of triumph, but it soon receded to leave her aching with sympathy.

  “She has been raised as a royal child,” she replied softly. “She will know that there is a limit to the amount of gossip she may indulge in, in the harem, and she will abide within it. Would you like me to find the boy?”

  His eyes lit with sardonic amusement. “No, I don’t think so. I have had enough of the bloom of youth for one day. Your hands have magic in them. I feel better.”

  The words could have been a dismissal, but she knew they were not. He lay there waiting, begging silently to be redeemed, and she lowered herself upon him with a smile.

  3

  An air of callous expectancy hung over the palace in the months that followed, for in spite of Tiye’s reassuring words, it had not been long before every courtier knew that Amunhotep had been unable to consummate his marriage to the tiny Mitanni princess. This, more than any other sign, convinced them that their god had not long to live, for his sexual appetite was legendary. Yet, although his days were a torment of pain and fever, the foul decoctions of worried physicians, and the endless droning of magicians, he clung to life and found the strength to watch the gradual decay of his body with a cutting black humor. He did not send for Tadukhipa again, and she nursed what she saw as a personal failure in a dignified, shy silence. His boy, his wife, and his wife-daughter filled his nights. The river overflowed and once again gave life to the land, sinking into the parched soil, loosening and stirring the fertile ground. Disease also returned to the land, and in the harem, in the hovels of the poor in the city, and on the farms, women wailed as the coffins of the blind, the crippled, and those wasted with plagues were carried into the tombs.

  Letters finally began to arrive from Memphis, and Tiye, sitting on her throne beside Pharaoh’s empty chair, chin in painted palm and eyes on her own gold-sandaled feet, listened carefully to the scrolls read aloud to her by her personal scribe. Her son’s missives were short, adulatory, and reassuring. He was well and hoped that his eternally beautiful mother was well also. He loved the cosmopolitan life of Memphis, particularly the variety of religious thought to be found there. He was carrying out his duties in the temple of Ptah with gravity and attention. Beneath the words, Tiye often fancied that she sensed a strange loneliness, a wistful desire to be back in the familiar surroundings of the harem but considered it natural that a young man, gaining his freedom for the first time in nineteen years, might sometimes yearn for the security of such a womb. Nor did she fail to note the fact that Amunhotep never asked about his father’s health. The one breath of human affection that rose from the stiff yellow papyrus, apart from that directed to Tiye herself and the occasional enquiry about Nefertiti, was for Horemheb. Eagerly Amunhotep described the young commander’s kindnesses toward him. Tiye found the protestations pathetic and alarming, for her son mentioned no other friends.

  She turned from his letters to the more informal detailed scrolls that arrived regularly from Horemheb himself, describing vividly how the prince had settled into his new life. Horemheb did not equivocate and would describe how his royal friend delighted in being driven about the city in a golden chariot so that people would bow to him. Amunhotep had visited On twice, worshipping in the temples of Ra-Harakhti and the Aten and sitting with the priests of the sun, arguing religion with them long into the cool nights. The priests of Ptah were suppressing their irritation with him, for he carried out his duties in their own temple absently and was always ready to find fault with them. He had taken up the lute and was composing his own songs, which he sang for Horemheb and his concubines. His voice was light but true.

  Tiye heard, sifted, pondered. She had the letters passed on to Ay, in his office in the palace grounds, where he supervised the care of Pharaoh’s horses and oversaw the Division of Splendor of the Aten. She had the letters Amunhotep sent to Nefertiti intercepted, and read them before they were re sealed and delivered to the girl, but learned little that was new. His words to his betrothed varied only slightly from his words to his mother, apart from allusions to several conversations concerning the worship of Amun and his place as protector of Thebes that he and Nefertiti had evidently had while he still lived in the harem.

  Nefertiti had moved into a suite of rooms in the palace that adjoined Tiye’s own. She did not seem to mind that her own servants had been dismissed and her slaves sold. With those who now saw to her comfort she was a harsh mistress, obsessed with detail and brooking no mistakes, and no day passed without tears shed in the servants’ quarters. Her niece’s petulance did not concern Tiye, for it was Nefertiti’s ability to govern that interested her. But the girl was haughty and did not learn easily. Following her aunt from audience to formal reception to the warm winds of the military reviewing ground, her staff of women, fan bearers, and cosmeticians behind, she listened much and volunteered nothing. With her gleaming black hair, pale gray, almond-shaped eyes, dark satin skin, and sensual mouth, she knew she was without physical peer at court. Her whisk bearer also carried a small copper mirror into whose burnished depths Nefertiti would gaze at odd moments throughout the day in order to reassure herself, Tiye often thought with annoyance, that a wrinkle had not appeared since the last swift application of face paint.

  Tiye had known her niece since she was born. Nefertiti’s mother, Ay’s first wife, had died giving birth to her, and Nefertiti had been raised lovingly but rather absentmindedly by Tey, Ay’s second wife and mother to Mutnodjme. Tey, a vague, nervous, but strikingly beautiful woman, preferred life on the family estates at Akhmin to the demanding task of disciplining two girls and entertaining for her powerful husband, though in her own way she loved them all. At Akhmin she designed jewelry, dictated long, rambling letters to her family, and flirted harmlessly with the male members of her staff. It was a pity, Tiye found herself thinking more than once as she walked beside Nefertiti’s pure, immobile profile, that neither she nor Mutnodjme had inherited their father’s strengths. But at least Nefertiti was diligent in dictating replies to her future husband’s letters, and when she spoke of him, which was not often, she used extravagant words of affection and longing.

  On a day full of a lush new greenness, when buds everywhere in Phar
aoh’s vast acres were bursting into flower, the women of the harem took to their boats and drifted, with much laughter and loud chatter, up and down the Nile in the windy sunshine. Tiye lay on her couch, longing to join them but submitting impatiently to the impersonal touch of her physician. She had reluctantly summoned him after several bouts of nausea and a dragging fatigue but now regretted it, chafing at the time being wasted. At last he completed his examination and drew back, smiling. “Your Majesty is not ill, but with child.”

  Tiye sat up, blood draining from her face, hands clutching the sheet. “Pregnant? No! You must be mistaken. It is too late, I am too old! Tell me you have made a mistake!”

  The man bowed, edging toward the door. “There is no mistake. I have attended Your Majesty at the birth of every royal child.”

  “Get out!”

  When the doors had closed behind him, she flung herself from the couch, overturning the ivory table, kicking at the shrine beside it. “I will not tolerate this, no!” she shouted at her cowering attendants. “I am too old! Too old…” She sat on a cushion on the floor, now limp and sullen, her breast still heaving, her limbs trembling. “I wonder,” she muttered acidly, “what Pharaoh will say.”

  Amunhotep said nothing. He laughed until he had to cling to his swollen belly and tears streaked kohl down his cheeks, laughed at the irony of the news and from a secret, wholly masculine pride. “So there is yet life in my divine seed!” he chortled while Tiye looked down on him, unwillingly amused at his mirth. “And a spring fertility in that winter body of yours. The gods must also be laughing.” With a surge of new strength he swung himself from his couch, tossing the sheets aside and standing beside her. She had forgotten how much taller he was than she. She lifted her head to meet his still-streaming eyes. “Are you pleased, my Tiye?”

  “No, I am not pleased at all.”

  He cupped her face with his hands. “What a prolific pharaoh I am! We must consult the sphinx oracle immediately as to the future of the child.” All at once his features became cunning. “What if it is a boy? Healthy and vigorous? I might then have second thoughts about the succession.”

  Tiye jerked her head from his touch. “I think the oracle ought not to be approached until the birth,” she snapped, “and any haggling over the succession can wait also.”

  “I like to make you angry.” He grinned boyishly. “I feel better today than I have in months. Let us order out Aten Gleams and join the harem women on the river. I shall sit in the sun, and you can curse me and flick at the flies.”

  Tiye did consult an oracle, but on her own behalf, not for the child in her womb. She stood before the seer in the little sphinx temple set high above the western cliffs, gifts in her hands, while the man bent over the water in the black Anubis cup. Watching his hesitancy, she found herself wishing for the first time that the Son of Hapu were still alive. While she had hated him as a rival in Pharaoh’s affections, a maker of policies that she had fought to oppose, he was matchless as an oracle. He had been an impartial arbiter of the mysteries, interpreting what the gods showed him with complete disregard for his personal safety. His visions had made him great. Tiye could see him now, in this same little sanctuary, a place made unquiet by the constant moaning of the desert winds, his handsome head inclined over the cup in complete concentration, his arrogant face hidden by the falling locks of the strange, long-ringleted female wig he always wore. When he straightened to give his pronouncements there was never admiration or subservience for her in his eyes. Perhaps that was one reason I disliked him so, she mused, restless and uncomfortable in the continuing stillness. He could reduce me to the level of the lowest peasant with his glance, and it was worse because I knew he did not do so intentionally.

  The oracle covered the cup and turned, waving to his acolytes, and the boys sprang to roll up the mats that had shut out the sun. Light flooded the room, and Tiye blinked at the brilliant blue of the sky, the beige of the cliffs shimmering hot and vibrant. “Well?” she barked impatiently.

  “Your Majesty has nothing to fear,” he said, eyes downcast. “The birth will be normal and your life long.”

  “A normal birth can be hard and long or short and easy. What do you mean?”

  “I mean that you will give birth without complication.”

  “Is that all? What of the sex of the child? Did the gods show you?”

  He shrugged, holding out his hands, fleshy palms up. “No, Divine One.”

  Though she wanted to throw them at him, Tiye placed the gifts carefully at his feet. She left the temple without a word, her retinue behind her, striding out into the bird-clouded afternoon. Pausing only to gaze for a moment at the sphinx whose calm eyes looked out over the dusty houses of the dead and the brown expanse of the river far below, she stepped onto her litter for the long ride down the path that meandered to the valley floor. The Son of Hapu would not have been so craven, she brooded, blind to the invigorating, dry desert wind that lifted the silver-shot linen from her legs and whipped the ringlets of her wig to tangle in her cobra coronet. He would have given me the color of the child’s eyes as well as its sex and told me how many counts would go by before it uttered its first cry. I have just sacrificed three gold circlets and an amethyst bracelet to a man who, whatever happens, cannot be proved wrong. I wonder if Amunhotep fares better when he calls the Amun oracle from Karnak and demands to know how much longer he will live.

  The queen’s unexpected pregnancy caused little stir in Thebes. In the streets the beggars ceased to importune passersby and sat in the shade of the buildings taking bets on whether Egypt would have a new prince or princess. There were many citizens ready to put money into their scabrous hands, but the majority of Thebans simply shrugged and forgot the matter. The royalty who inhabited the brown sprawl of buildings across the river were of no concern. Malkatta was simply another tomb like those surrounding it, a tomb for living but never glimpsed gods. Only Pharaoh’s ministers with their perfumed linens and painted faces directly touched the fortunes of the populace, moving among them like screeching vultures intent on plunder. It was impossible to evince any interest in the birth of a child most of them would never see, to a woman who represented nothing against which the Thebans could measure their own experiences.

  In the palace, however, the subject was pounced upon, chewed, and spat out by the gossiping courtiers. The eyes of those who had turned speculatively toward a new king and a new administration were returned briefly to a pharaoh who had rallied with the promise of new life and a goddess who could yet surprise them. The court became sentimental. The worship of Mut, goddess mother of Khonsu and Amun’s consort, enjoyed a new vogue. Sculptors found themselves employment in carving coy representations of the infant Horus sucking at the breast of his mother, Isis, for rich patrons who wanted to share vicariously in their ruler’s return to youth. Jewelers sold hundreds of amulets to women who hoped that their own fertility might be stimulated.

  Hearing the reports of these doings from her spies, who riddled the harem and the offices of administration, Tiye was disgusted though amused. Yet she could not deny her husband’s improving health, his new interest in affairs of state, or her own feeling of well-being. Optimism reigned. The air was full of the smell of the crops ripening rapidly toward the harvest and the luxuriant blooming of the flowers of summer, whose heady perfume hung night and day in the warm draughts of the palace. Only in the chill hours before dawn, when sleep ceased to be rest and became a drug, did Tiye’s earlier misgivings return, and she found herself waking suddenly, the baby restless in her. Then she would lie watching the pattern of red light and deep shadow the brazier cast on her ceiling, listening to the howl of the jackals out on the desert, the occasional frenetic braying of a donkey, and once the voice of an anonymous woman screaming and sobbing, the sound carried fitfully on the wind like the echo of another Egypt, dark and brimming with a mysterious sadness. In those moments, as slow-moving and borderless as eternity itself, the mood of cheerfulness prevailing at cou
rt seemed a flimsy, artificial thing, ready to be blown away in an instant. Firmly Tiye tried to battle the despair that would creep over her as she huddled beneath the blankets, but it had no discernible source and clung to her until she dropped once more into a sodden slumber.

  Tiye gave birth to a boy on a hot, late afternoon. Her labor was short, the delivery easy. It was as though the fragrant explosion of fruitfulness of the Egyptian harvest had overflowed into the palace, sharing its abundance with her. At the child’s first lusty cry a murmur of approbation and relief filled the bedchamber, and Tiye, exhausted and satisfied, waited to be told the baby’s sex. From the back of the small crowd Ay pushed his way past her physician, whispering, “You have a boy. Well done,” and she felt his lips brush her wet cheeks. Feeling for his hand, she pulled him down onto the couch, clinging to him as one by one the privileged came to pay their respects. He sat impassively, watching the line of bodies bend and straighten, his hand curled around hers, though long before the last courtier had bowed himself out, she had fallen asleep.

  After much fussy deliberation the oracles decreed that the royal son should bear the name Smenkhara. Pharaoh approved and came in person to tell Tiye so. He sat in the chair beside her couch, gingerly sucking on green figs and washing them down with wine. “It is fitting that this child, this symbol of a new beginning, should bear a name never held before by my house,” he said. “And, of course, highly appropriate that he should be dedicated to Ra, seeing that the sun is worshipped universally. I wonder what the next child will be called.” He glanced teasingly at her, picking out a fig seed from between gray teeth with one long, red nail.

  “Horus, you amaze me!” She laughed, caught up in his enthusiasm, relieved of her fears, ready to believe the unbelievable. “Either the presence of Ishtar or your new son has given you back your youth.”