Forced to find an expedient way to meet the country’s debts, Smenkhara began to sell abroad grain from the granaries, which were once again filling. None of his young friends who were now members of the new administration attempted to remonstrate with him over this rash move for fear of losing the favors he showered on them, and it was finally Ay who requested audience a few days before the beginning of Khoyak. Akhet, the season of flooding, was almost over, and the weather had cooled. Men looked to Peret and the sowing with lighter hearts.
Smenkhara greeted his uncle’s obeisance with obvious relief. When Ay entered, he had been pacing desultorily around the echoing reception hall, pecking at the sweetmeats set on tables here and there and flicking at the insects that filled the moist air while his attendants trailed after him. He stood still while Ay kissed his hennaed feet and then mounted the steps of the throne. Flinging himself down, he indicated the ebony stool below. Ay sat, and with barely audible sighs the attendants sank onto cushions on the floor.
“I hate Akhet,” Smenkhara said. “Half of it is too hot to do anything, and the other half is too wet. Nothing but sheets of water to look at, and the river running too swiftly for barging. Everyone else goes hunting behind the city, but I do not enjoy killing animals. When I was younger, I would long for the river to sink, because then the fishing would be tremendous, but of course now that I am pharaoh, I am forbidden to catch them or eat them. Akhenaten did, but then for him there was no Hapi in the Nile to be offended.”
“Your Majesty could always go boating on one of the lakes, or wander through Maru-Aten.”
“No, I can’t. Today I had to sit here and listen to the Aten priests whine.”
Ah, Ay thought. There is the cause of this pouting. “Would Your Majesty care to tell me what they wanted?”
“If you like.” Smenkhara tugged at one swinging golden earring. “Offerings are becoming scarce. Fewer worshipers go to the temple, and the street shrines are being defaced. In a word, Uncle, they do not have enough to do, and they are becoming bored.”
“What did Your Majesty tell them?”
“To go and have some fun.”
Ay watched the long, red-nailed fingers pull and worry at the earring. “Has Your Majesty considered closing some of the smaller Aten temples and sending the priests out into the countryside to reopen and repair the houses of other gods?”
Smenkhara stared at him. “Are you mad? Who is going to keep them alive while they pretend to work? And besides, priests do not like to get their hands dirty.”
“They would have no choice. They could be supported by this coming summer’s produce from the holdings in the Delta that had belonged to Amun.”
Smenkhara laughed. “So you wish me to return to Amun his land? Certainly not. My fellahin are even now waiting for the flood to abate so that they can begin sowing that land for me. I need the crops.”
Many times Ay had wished to bring to Pharaoh’s attention a matter of great urgency, but a more suitable moment than this had not arisen before. The talk of Amun gave him an opening. “Great Horus,” Ay said urgently, “it is time to send an official embassy to Maya in Thebes granting him permission to reopen Karnak, and stewards to the palace there to see what must be done to make it habitable again. You do not know the temper of your people. Believe me—”
Smenkhara raised a hand. The smile had disappeared from his face. “I have already done as you wished, and made a great fuss about hollowing a tomb in the western hills at Thebes. I have ostentatiously said my prayers at the Amun shrine here in the palace. I have even appointed Pwah”—he waved at a young man dressed in priestly white behind him—“as Scribe of the Offerings of Amun in the Mansion of Ankheperura. My mansion. Mine. I have no intention of handing back any land to Amun and impoverishing myself. Nor do I intend to leave Akhetaten. For years I waited in Thebes, in an empty palace with my stubborn mother, longing for Meritaten, miserable, while here the music and dancing never stopped. I despise Thebes. If it was noisy and dirty then, it will be doubly so now. Speak of something else!” His voice had risen, and the curved shoulders draped in gold hunched with anger.
Horemheb’s words came back to Ay, and as he watched his nephew, he realized with a chill that he was, for the first time, taking a clear look at Pharaoh. When did it begin? he thought despairingly. When did the gods decree a curse on Egypt? When Tiye bedded with her son? Or much earlier, when she moved to prevent his murder against the express order of the oracle? Smenkhara’s thighs were spread, filling the throne under his scarlet linen. His belly, though he was still young, had begun to sag. “Majesty,” Ay managed, though he felt suddenly weak, “at least send the Vizier of the South to Thebes to tell the people that they may once more worship as they choose.”
Smenkhara jerked his head. “Nakht-pa-Aten! Do you want to go to Thebes and tell the people this thing?”
The vizier crawled to him, touching the royal foot with his forehead. “I believe it to be unnecessary, Holy One. The people have always worshipped as they chose, in secret.”
“But they must be told publicly, they must be reassured, or else…” Ay had come to his feet. Smenkhara leaned down at him.
“Or else what, Uncle? Are you going to threaten me as Horemheb did when I was still a prince? I gave him his way then, but I swore to myself I would never again hear a word he said. If you have finished, you may go.”
“There is one more thing, with your permission.” Ay knew he ought not to stir Smenkhara’s anger further, but he was determined to discuss the matter that had brought him here initially. “This matter of selling our grain to foreigners. From ancient days, Pharaoh has stored grain against times of famine. Your predecessors emptied the granaries in exchange for gold, and when famine struck many starved. Egypt is still recovering from the drought, and is still vulnerable. I beg you, Horus, keep the grain!”
“Oh, leave me in peace.” Smenkhara glowered at Ay. “You are a meddlesome old man. Let Egypt starve, I do not care. The land belongs to me, as well as everything that grows in it or lives on it. I am master and god.” Sullenly he evaded Ay’s eye. “You seem to take a delight in making me angry, Uncle. You lack the respect due to me as pharaoh. You are no longer welcome at court.” It was an immediate dismissal. Ay made his prostration and left.
Sitting rigid on the deck of his barge while his sailors struggled to pull him across the swiftly flowing river, Ay grew aware of the perfume of Akhetaten drifting around him, made more languorous by the humidity in the air. Flowers, budding trees, a hint of incense, wove with the stench of muddy water, Egypt’s most ancient odor. Laughter and the faint tinkle of finger cymbals reached his ears, and on the receding bank he caught a glimpse of brown limbs and white linen as a group of young men and women ran under the palms. He has a daunting likeness to his brother, but there is much of Tiye in him as well, Ay thought, and that is why I have some sympathy for him. He will do nothing to bind up Egypt’s wounds, but neither will he harm her further. That is some comfort.
Walking through the cool passages of his house, he fancied that he heard Tey’s laughter coming from her apartment, and he stopped and turned toward the sound before he realized it was only a servant girl cleaning and gossiping. He accepted that it was his fault that she had gone, but he had never needed her more.
He did not try to sleep that night but sat in his bedchamber in a woolen cloak, watching the pattern of fire and darkness the brazier made on the ceiling. Several times he was on the point of summoning his steward and dictating a message to Horemheb, but each time he changed his mind. It was impossible. He knew what Horemheb wanted him to do, wanted to implicate him in, wanted his support for, and he could not consent. I am too much a man of reflection, not action, he thought, to murder again, too traditional an Egyptian to contemplate the killing of a young man who is now a god. To become Horemheb’s accomplice in this thing would also be to place myself forever under his thumb. Let him bear the responsibility, and let him bear it alone.
He took
a lamp to his cosmetics table and, lifting his copper hand mirror, gazed at himself. You are a stupid old man, he thought, critically appraising the black pouches under rheumy eyes, the rough, sun-weathered, loose skin, the deeply furrowed forehead and dry, knobbed, shaven scalp. Give up, retire, go home to Akhmin. But he knew he could not, not yet. Not as long as members of his bloodline survived to perpetuate the power they had fought for generations to acquire. He had a duty to Tutankhaten, and to his granddaughter Ankhesenpaaten. He smiled grimly into the mirror. “You lie to yourself, stupid old man,” he whispered. “You hope that Horemheb will do the unthinkable and thus you will be enabled to rule as regent behind Tutankhaten, if death does not claim you first.”
Hearing of Ay’s unsuccessful and humiliating audience with Smenkhara, Horemheb expected an offer of complete cooperation to arrive at any moment from Pharaoh’s uncle, but the days passed with no communication from him. In spite of the rivalry between the two men, Horemheb respected Ay’s political acumen, and in the dead hours at his own house, when he lay without sleeping in the silence, he wondered why Ay did not want to act. Was there some consideration that he had overlooked? Some reason, not obvious to his own straightforward, military mind but clear to Ay with his diplomatic thinking, why the murder of Pharaoh would not be expedient? Horemheb tried to imagine every result of such a plot. He did not lack support, and although he knew that he was not in favor at court, neither were any of Akhenaten’s men, with a few exceptions. It was the army, finally, that mattered. He had questioned his officers closely. Some of the soldiers’ faith in him had been shaken because of their rout at Suppiluliumas’s hands, but it seemed unlikely that they would not support him if he reached for the crown.
Reflectively he tried to remember when the idea of himself as pharaoh had taken shape in his mind. When the empress had died, and with her Egypt’s belief in the absolute authority that had always been accorded to royalty? When he had threatened Pharaoh, then a prince, with so little, so very little, and been believed? Or had it happened many years earlier, when he had looked at a pharaoh and for the first time seen only an uncertain, tortured Egyptian, dependent on him, a mere captain at the time, for friendship?
He knew that for Ay, a return to security in Egypt had to begin with the reinstatement of Amun as lord and a slow reestablishing of diplomatic relations with what was left of the empire. But he himself disagreed. An immediate priority was the securing of the borders against the Khatti, another attempt to regain Egypt’s Syrian dependencies, the stabilization of Nubia, and only then a turning to the internal problems of the country, which would take a very long time to correct. There was no time to wait for Ay to try his way. He seemed to have no sense of urgency regarding the threat of a Khatti invasion that might begin tomorrow and would mean the death of Egyptian sovereignty forever. Then considerations such as the preservation of Pharaoh’s divinity and Amun’s rightful place as Egypt’s major deity would be meaningless. Save Egypt first, he thought as he tossed restlessly beside a quietly slumbering Mutnodjme, even if it means destroying the mighty dynasty that began with Smenkhara’s god ancestor Thothmes I, hentis ago, when the Hyksos were driven from this soil. The greatest obstacle to safety is Smenkhara himself, repository of all hereditary authority. He must be removed. But if I kill him, Tutankhaten will come to the throne, and behind him stands Ay, adamantly refusing any military solution to our troubles. Would anything have been gained by murder? Would Ay be more amenable with Smenkhara gone? They were questions whose answers would not become clear until action had been taken.
Am I prepared to damn myself before the gods by such an act? he wondered as night after night the dead hours stood still. Surely they know that I would have served my king all my life if he had been worthy. But he was not. Neither is Smenkhara. But an Egyptian does not serve his pharaoh because that pharaoh is worthy to be served, he reminded himself. He surrenders his allegiance to the unchanging spark of the god within the man, to that immortal essence passing unblemished from king to king. Yet Akhenaten broke that thread. Does it exist anymore? I do not know.
For many days he struggled with himself. Mutnodjme and her friends went north, to Djarukha and the Delta, to celebrate the completion of the sowing. He stood in his chariot behind the city, watching his troops go through their drill with the sun sparkling on the thousands of polished spears and filtering through the choking dust. Often, listening to the spies he had placed long ago in Ay’s household give their reports, he had to fight a desire to go to the fanbearer, confess his agony, ask the older man’s advice. He knew that it was only a need to show his hand, to somehow rid himself of the constant ache of guilt for an act he had not yet committed. Briefly he considered approaching Nefertiti with an offer of marriage but discarded the idea with the contempt it deserved. The dowager queen had long ago been discredited in his eyes.
On the morning of the first day of Phamenat he woke with his decision made. Calmly he allowed his servants to dress him, ate some dried figs, and rode out to the parade ground. Since the army’s ignominious defeat he had ordered regular maneuvers, forced marches, and mock battles for the soldiers. This morning he sat under a canopy and watched critically as the Shock Troops ran obstacle courses in the chariots. The day was pleasantly warm, with a light breeze, the sky a cornflower blue, and the sheltering semicircle of cliffs cast cool shadows over the sand, but Horemheb brooded, blind to the freshness around him. When the drenched, exhausted troops wheeled in the direction of the stables, he summoned his favorite general under the canopy. Nakht-Min bowed and sank to the carpet, pulling off his blue linen helmet and using it to mop his face.
“I am still not satisfied with the men from the Division of Splendor of the Aten,” he said, nodding his thanks as Horemheb pushed wine toward him. “They seem to think that, as they are an elite, it is beneath them to have to learn to drive chariots as well as being able to fight. I have pointed out that charioteers get killed in alarming numbers, and who will handle the horses for the proud idiots then? Ah, well. We all had to learn.”
“We did indeed.” Horemheb smiled. “And most of us still bear the scars of that learning.” He waited until the young man had drained his cup, then said, “Nakht-Min, I want you to send to Tjel for me. I need the services of a Medjay assassin.”
Nakht-Min nodded calmly. He knew from whom any advancement would come. “There are many of our desert police much closer,” he objected. “Mahu could bring one quickly from the Sinai.”
“No. I am not in a hurry, and I want a man who has seen fairly constant action and who, moreover, has never been anywhere near Akhetaten. I want him brought to my house, not quartered in the barracks. How long?”
Nakht-Min considered. “Tjel is our farthest outpost on the Asiatic border. A month, perhaps. Some of the Medjay are Apiru mercenaries. Do you want a foreigner?”
“Yes,” Horemheb said slowly. “A foreigner would be very good. Needless to say, this is a private matter.”
“I understand.”
Horemheb knew that Nakht-Min never needed to have an instruction repeated. He changed the subject immediately and, after some minutes of light conversation, dismissed him.
Horemheb ate and slept better in the weeks that followed and at times even forgot that he had set his plan in motion. He was disciplined enough to wait calmly for whatever fate would send him. Mutnodjme returned pale and satiated from the Delta, kissed him wanly, and scarcely stirred from her couch for four days. He held a boating party for his senior officers. He prayed to the local god of his natal village of Hnes, and to Amun also.
He was not surprised when, sitting in his garden in the dusk one evening in the first week of Pharmuti, he saw his steward bowing Nakht-Min and a stranger in his direction. The Medjay was much as he had expected, a tall, long-haired man whose flowing thick robes doubtless hid a body without any excess flesh. Pharaoh Amunhotep III had used just such an individual to murder Aziru’s father. Horemheb wished, not for the first time, that the entire Egyptian a
rmy could be composed of Medjay. He welcomed them and had food and wine presented, talked of the border forts and their welfare, and then rose to escort Nakht-Min to the water steps. Returning to his guest, he attempted a little more conversation before showing him to his quarters and warning him to remain in them and to speak to no one. The man did not demur.
Now it is a matter of luck, Horemheb told himself as he went to his bed chamber. I know where Smenkhara will sleep tomorrow night. I know the hour he likes to retire, and how many Followers guard him, for it was I myself who appointed and deployed them. I can do no more.
In the morning he gave Nakht-Min further instructions under the rattle of drums and the shouted orders of the drill officers. “Bring two of your own personal staff to my garden tonight,” he said. “The Medjay will come up from the water steps toward the entrance. Kill him before he reaches the house, but be very careful. Remember, he is himself trained to strike and survive. If you are not seen, weigh him with rocks and cast him into the river. If one of my servants discovers you, you can say you were coming to receive orders and caught an intruder in the garden.” His voice lost its crisp, authoritative tone. “Do you believe, Nakht-Min, that I love and serve Egypt?”
The Twelfth Transforming Page 50
