“Why can you not serve both gods?”
“I can worship Amun, but I can only serve the Aten. I wish no harm to any man. I am pure of speech and have never caused offense either with my body or my words. Majesty, I only wish to leave Karnak quietly and join the Aten temple staff.”
“Does Pharaoh know of this?”
“Yes. But he will allow it only with the permission of my superior.”
At least Amunhotep has been diplomatic in this, Tiye thought. I can see why Ptahhotep did not go to Pharaoh with his complaint. “It is pointless to keep men against their will,” she said to the high priest. “They will serve Amun only grudgingly and will make trouble. Let this man go. But, Meryra, you leave having forfeited all you have to the god you are deserting. Do you understand?”
The clear eyes met hers without flinching. “Yes, Majesty.”
“Ptahhotep, I suggest you make it known at Karnak that any priest who leaves on behalf of the Aten immediately impoverishes himself. Thus only the most fervent will go, and the waverers will stay. Is there anything more?”
“Your Majesty is gracious.”
“Go, then. I want my food.”
It would have been dangerously foolish to hold that young man against his will, she thought as she and her entourage walked toward the banqueting hall. I only hope that my son has the good sense not to reward Amun’s traitors openly, or we will have a veritable river of greedy priests flowing from one temple to the other at Karnak. Well, to Sebek with them all. Today I want beer with my bread.
In the weeks that followed, Tiye’s judgment proved to be less effective than she had anticipated. While the abandonment of Amun’s temples that she had feared did not take place, there were enough dissatisfied priests who were encouraged by Ptahhotep’s announcement to shift their allegiance to the Aten. She knew how important it would be to keep a diligent eye on all religious activity and held regular conferences with her spies in priests’ dormitories, hoping that any similar problems could be forestalled.
The few minor disturbances that did occur were promptly dealt with, and Tiye had again begun to feel that she was gaining control over the situation when she received a visit from a visibly disturbed Ay. It was Shemu, when the Inundation still seemed an eternity away, and the scalding wrath of Ra’s breath spread fever and violence through the land.
She had just risen from her afternoon sleep feeling enervated and still exhausted and was sitting on the edge of her couch when her brother was announced. She nodded for him to speak.
“Tiye, I want you to come across the river with me. Pharaoh’s Aten temple is almost complete. There has been much talk of the statues that line the forecourt, and we should see them before the temple is dedicated and we cannot walk where we will.”
Tiye rose listlessly, and Piha draped her in a white gown, fastening jewels around her neck, wrist, and ankles. “I have heard the rumors also. Amunhotep has been trying to persuade me to inspect his craftsmen’s work, but truthfully, Ay, I have not been able to find the interest.” She sat before her cosmetics table and picked up the mirror. It showed her a heavy, puffed face and sallow skin. She put it down again as the cosmetician began to open his pots.
“Find it today. Aten Gleams is waiting to ferry us. There might be some air stirring on the river.”
“Don’t taunt me. My eyes are watering, Nebmehy, so be careful with the kohl. I have not seen Mutnodjme for a long time, Ay. Where is she?”
“She and Horemheb have gone north to Memphis, and then to Hnes to visit Horemheb’s father. The marriage seems a good one, Tiye. Depet and Werel’s parties are not the same without my daughter.”
“Your other daughter is not so retiring. Her hostility puts me off my food every evening. Huya tells me that she is pregnant again.” Her Keeper of Wigs set the one she had absently selected on her head, tucking her own auburn hair out of the way, and her Keeper of Jewels draped the hairpiece with a golden, carnelian-studded net. After the Keeper of the Royal Regalia had placed the queen’s cobra coronet on her brow, Tiye picked up the mirror again and this time man aged a smile.
“So her steward told me.” Ay laughed. “She has paid fortunes to every seer and oracle around to promise her a boy, and she has even bought spells from the Anubis ones.”
“I know. Call for a litter, Ay. I want to ride to the water steps. It is too hot to walk.”
They gossiped as they were ferried across the river, and Tiye was revived by a small puff of wind that stirred out of the north. At the Karnak water steps they were met by a litter and a covering contingent of guards who escorted them past Nefertiti’s Aten temple. Tiye, who had been letting her gaze wander idly as they glided past the temple’s first pylon, suddenly called a stop. “Step down, Ay, and come here. I think my eyes have sand in them.” Obediently he walked to her litter, and the fanbearers rushed to shade them. Tiye felt rage and bewilderment as they came to a halt and craned their necks upward.
The stone pylon towered over them. On each of its supports, incised deeply into the stone and painted vividly in blue and gold, a giant Nefertiti strode across the bodies of dead Nubians and vile Asiatics. The scene was an approximation of one that ran around Tiye’s own throne. But in that carving Tiye was represented as a clawed and breasted sphinx with enemies beneath her. Here Nefertiti was portrayed in a male’s short kilt, and her pose, now frozen in the stone, was one in which no one but a ruling pharaoh had ever been depicted. Raised in one vengeful hand was the royal scimitar, with the flail lowered in the other. The figure had no breasts, and on the head was a tall, flat-topped crown fronted by a cobra. Only the face was recognizably feminine, unmistakably Nefertiti’s.
Tiye and Ay looked at each other. “The days when I knew what was happening in my dominion before it came to pass are over,” Tiye muttered between clenched teeth. “How dare she do this? It is sacrilege! What is she trying to prove?”
“She is saying in stone those things she cannot say with her mouth,” Ay replied shortly. “I trust Your Majesty has honest food tasters and incorruptible guards.”
“She would not!”
Ay turned back to the litters. “She has struck before without warning. This is a warning.”
I was stupid to ignore the building here, Tiye thought, sick with anger. I have the feeling that the cords that bound Egypt to me alone are being unpicked by Nefertiti’s deft little fingers. Stiffly she got back onto the litter, and Ay ordered the procession to move on. He was brooding and had little to say as they approached Amunhotep’s temple.
They left the litters beneath the first pylon leading to the huge flagged court and, sheltered beneath a sunshade, walked toward the private inner court. Groups of Aten priests, regal in white linen, turned from their conversations and bowed profoundly. Sweating stonemasons laid aside their tools and prostrated themselves on the hot stone. Several pillars that marked the outer walls were already in place, but between them were still only pits where the others would be sunk.
Tiye and Ay came to the second pylon, taller and wider than the first. Flagstaffs holding aloft the blue and white emblems of royalty stood before it. Once the temple had been dedicated, priest-guards would stand at either side of the entrance to prevent the common people from entering the inner court, but today the pylon was deserted, sending waves of heat that beat out at them as they passed. Tiye had expected some manner of a roof under which worshipers could stand in comfort, but there was none. The sun poured into the vast space without pity.
She stopped just inside the entrance. Hundreds of offering tables spread before her in seemingly endless rows, each set on a small dais of two steps, filling the court with just enough room between them for processions to pass. The wall of the court was marked at regular intervals by pillars only three-quarters freed from the stone of the wall itself. On each pillar was an image of Pharaoh— hundreds of identical images of Amunhotep staring down into the holy place. Ay touched Tiye’s arm. “Come and look at them.” They made their way around the offe
ring tables to the wall and gazed upward.
The likenesses were immense but well executed, conveying perfectly the calm infallibility inherent in Pharaoh’s godhead. The cobra and vulture rose together from the winged helmet. Amunhotep’s eyes were canted downward, giving a slightly forbidding, judgmental cast to the otherwise serene face. The nose was beautifully delicate, the full lips closed and faintly smiling, the pharaonic beard jutting to where the crook and flail—it was already well known that Amunhotep disdained the scimitar—were crossed on the smooth chest. The stone hands grasped the regalia firmly, and carved on bracelets around each wrist and upper arm were the king’s cartouches. The figures were unpainted. Tiye stepped back and looked along at the others, an infinity of motionless images of her son staring down on the tables from which the flames of offerings to his god would rise.
Then, as her eyes moved lower, she saw that Pharaoh’s full belly curved down into hips and upper thighs that in turn became the bottom half of each pillar. Apart from the helmets, the statues were naked, and as no kilt had been carved to hide them, it was obvious that not one of the figures had genitals. The thighs of each lay tightly together, like a woman’s. Tiye began to walk beneath the walls, eyes on the statues passing slowly above her. As she paced, a deep spiritual disturbance began to afflict her, emanating from the massive things above, an invisible aura that flowed toward her, surrounded her, until she began to believe that her eyes were deceiving her, that the carved mouths were crying out some tormented truth that only they could feel, filling the temple with the eddies of their inner torture. She came to the end of the wall and turned, shocked and faint.
“Where is the ben-ben?” she whispered.
“There is no ben-ben,” Ay said soberly. “No god, no pyramid, no holy stone. The Aten is not present in this temple.”
“Ay, I am afraid. There is great evil in this place, and I feel like a child stumbling upon living terrors in some deserted valley. My son knows that Pharaoh is the Mighty Bull, the symbol of fertility in Egypt, ensurer of the vital seed of man and crops alike. To have himself portrayed without the organ of regeneration is to invite sterility for all of Egypt.” Walking to the nearest offering table, she leaned against it. “But that is not the worst transgression. Pharaoh’s essence inhabits every carving of himself, every painting, every place his name is written within the cartouche. He is fully present wherever these things are placed, casting his virile, ageless magic over all, as the god he is, and long after his death he protects and nurtures his people. What protection for Egypt is there in these misshapen things?”
“I know these truths, Tiye,” Ay reminded her gently. “But perhaps Pharaoh is trying to state other truths. He believes he is Ra’s incarnation, Aten the Visible Disk, and unlike Amun, the Aten has no sex. I think he believes Egypt has nothing to fear from these representations of himself because the magic they cast is stronger than Amun’s magic. He talks a great deal about how he and everyone else must live in truth. The images are an example.”
“But it is Nefertiti who will draw the approval and recognition of the gods by the blasphemous portraits of herself we saw a moment ago! They will believe that she is pharaoh, and my son nothing but a vulnerable man!” She had paled.
Ay stepped to her side. “Let us leave,” he said. “It will be different here when the tables are heaped with food and flowers and a priest stands with incense rising on each dais. Unfinished building sites often have an air of forbidding about them.” His voice rang hollow.
“Not like this.” She met his eyes. “Ay, I am pregnant. I have not felt resentful or afraid about it, merely resigned. But now I sink under the knowledge. I did my best to prevent this, but when it happened, I was glad for Amunhotep, and yes, I gloated a little when I thought of Nefertiti’s reaction. Now I could wish myself back in Memphis with a denial for my son on my lips.” She spoke with great bitterness. Putting his arm around her, Ay led her out to where the litter bearers lounged in the shade of the pylon. Her skin was cold.
When Amunhotep came to her that night, she still had not shaken her mood. He smiled at her, talked of small things, and made love to her with, she fancied, a willing mind but an unexpectedly reluctant body. She could not respond. Her visit to the Aten temple had changed her perception of him, and now it was as though she was seeing him for the first time. His innocuous words seemed sinister to her, the movements of his deformed flesh in the lamplight an unspoken threat. Though she wanted to, she did not dare to question him.
Next day she paid a visit to Tia-Ha, hoping that her friend’s cheerful common sense would restore her anxiety to a proper perspective. The princess was sorting through her gowns with the aid of her body servant, and her apartment was even more chaotic than usual. Tiye greeted her, received her reverence, and picked a way through the disorderly piles of bright linens to the cushions that had been flung out of the way against a wall.
“You are always in such a muddle, Tia-Ha,” Tiye said, sinking onto the pillows and settling back. “You have more servants than anyone else in the harem, yet your visitors can hardly get through the door.”
“I am not well organized,” Tia-Ha answered, waving the girl out. “I promise myself that I will become neater, and I dictate long lists of things to be done, but before my servants can carry out the instructions, someone brings me a new board game to try, or I receive an invitation to a party and must make myself beautiful, and my women and I end up playing together or dabbling with cosmetics.” She lowered herself onto a chair facing Tiye, kicking aside the gowns that littered the floor. “Today is a good example,” she went on. “I decide to get rid of my old gowns, give them to my servants, and what happens? Scarcely have we begun when the empress comes to see me! It is of course my greatest pleasure to gossip with you, dear Tiye. You are looking well. So is Pharaoh, if I may say so.”
“Yes, I suppose he is,” Tiye replied noncommittally, her eyes on Tia-Ha’s sandaled feet. “Tell me, Princess, have you by chance been across the river to see the sanctuary of Amunhotep’s Aten temple? It will soon be finished and closed to the populace.”
Tia-Ha laughed. Swinging her legs up onto the couch, she shrugged deep into the cushions and began to pull the rings from her plump fingers, dropping them one by one with a tinkle into a glass bowl on the floor. “By chance, Majesty? When the courtiers in their hundreds have been trotting like sheep into their barges to be poled across the river solely to look at their naked pharaoh in stone? No, not by chance. I, too, followed my curiosity and went to see what all the fuss was about.” The last ring rattled into the bowl, and Tia-Ha began to massage her knuckles.
“And what did you think?”
“I was prepared to see some grave violation of Ma’at,” Tia-Ha explained, “but the images offend only my concept of good taste. Why, Majesty, you are upset!”
Tiye had transferred her gaze to her own hands clasped in her lap. “Art is a sacred pursuit,” she said faintly. “A king may not cause his true physical likeness to be copied. Any statue or painting is to represent only the king as Divine Incarnation, without human flaws.”
“But Pharaoh’s predecessor did it. Do you remember the delight our husband took in unveiling that little stela that showed him slumped on a chair with his body wrapped in thin feminine linen?”
Tiye’s heart lightened. She smiled gratefully at the princess. “I remember. But that stela stands in the palace. Temple art is different.”
“Not very. Besides, there is no god in Pharaoh’s new temple to see his body, so what does it matter? Shall we have some shat cakes?” Tiye nodded. Tia-Ha clapped sharply, and a servant appeared immediately, listened to her order, and went away. “What amuses me is the way the courtiers are rushing to have them selves portrayed as little copies of your husband. In the Teaching, he tells them that Ra has given him a unique body as a mark of especial favor, so they hurry to their craftsmen with instructions to cover the walls of their houses and tombs with distorted images of themselves. If there is bene
volent magic in such ugliness, they want to share it. But how on earth the gods are expected to recognize the overseers, stewards, generals, and commanders from such grotesqueness, I do not know! Even the two mighty viziers are slavishly following the fashion. Everyone wants to ingratiate themselves with Pharaoh. That is the way it has always been.”
“So you believe it is all a fashionable diversion and will pass?” Tia-Ha’s servant had returned with a dish of shat cakes, and Tiye, suddenly hungry, took two.
“Of course I do.” Tia-Ha was hesitating over her choice of the sweet concoctions, her head on one side. “Now, with Your Majesty’s permission, I would like to change the subject.” She darted a shrewd glance at Tiye and began an involved account of the boating party she had attended the evening before, and soon Tiye was laughing as she ate, her misgivings forgotten for a while.
In the middle of the season of Akhet, as the river was rising and the air was relieved by a slight cooling, Tiye gave birth, with difficulty, to a girl. She had successfully hidden a fear for her life that had increased with the swelling of her body, knowing that in the veiled glances of the courtiers was an expectation of punishment for her flaunting of a forbidden relationship. In the face of Pharaoh’s disapproval she had set statues of Ta-Urt, goddess of the childbed, about her chambers, and when her labor began, she had ordered magicians into her bedchamber with amulets and chanted spells. Their voices and her groans were the only sounds in the crowded room, for the few courtiers who were privileged to watch a royal birth only looked on in an anticipatory silence. Defenseless and drowned in pain, Tiye felt their hostility. There were no murmurs when the birth was announced, and the small audience filed out in the same accusatory silence in which they had stood. Amunhotep held the child proudly to his shallow chest.
“Sister-Daughter,” he said, looking down on the tiny, sleeping face, “you, above all, are the proof of my piety. I shall call you Beketaten, Servant of the Aten. And you, Tiye, most favored Great Lady, your fears were ungrounded.”
The Twelfth Transforming Page 19
