Horemheb stood and walked calmly to her side. “Majesty, you need to sleep,” he said soothingly. “You are distressed.”
Turning her disfigured face up to his, she began to cry. Her legs were splayed to keep her balance. She smelled of wine, of unwashed skin and undried tears, but the glinting cobra on her forehead gave her dignity. “Distressed?” she said harshly. “My heart has been torn out, and you dare to stand before me and mouth such blasphemy? I wonder what thoughts fill your wife when she lies in the arms of a god-killer? My arms are empty. Empty!” Tears choked her, and Horemheb caught her as she slipped toward the floor. At his sharp order her women supported her and led her away, her sobs growing fainter.
No one in the hall dared to look about, and the only sound was the soft clucking of the goose as it nibbled at Ankhesenpaaten’s jasper earring. Tutankhaten had gone very white. At last he rose, and at the movement the frozen company sprang to life, prostrating themselves before him as he left the dais with his entourage and disappeared through the nearer doors. For appearances’ sake Horemheb stayed a little longer, drinking and talking with Nakht-Min and the other officers whose tables were pulled close to his own, all the while feeling the overt glances of the courtiers. Finally he rose and, bidding his wife and friends good-night, plunged into the dark passages leading to the queen’s apartments.
Meritaten’s bodyguards politely tried to refuse him entrance. As their superior he could have brushed them aside, but he talked to them patiently and sensibly, aware of their irrational fear, and in the end they let him pass. At the doors to her bedchamber her herald and steward again barred his way. Resignedly he waited while the steward went to enquire if he should be admitted. Horemheb expected to be refused but found himself soon ushered into the apartments that had been Nefertiti’s. She still haunted the room. Her image smiled haughtily from the walls, beautiful and regal beneath the sun crown’s height. Her golden hands, heavy with rings, still made offerings to the Aten while her husband held the ankh, symbol of life, to her smiling lips and the Aten itself touched her with its rays. Already those things belonged to an unfathomable past. Horemheb paced slowly to the imposing couch with its golden disk, its sphinx-lined frame, its clawed feet. The small figure dwarfed in its depth watched him advance. He bowed. “Why did you let me in?” he asked.
“You have no respect for me as your queen,” she answered wearily. “If you had, you would have waited for me to speak first. But I am still queen of Egypt until Tutankhaten is crowned. I do not know why I let you in. I do not think I could have prevented you anyway, murderer.”
She sounded stronger, more lucid, and Horemheb thought that she must have vomited the wine. “Majesty, you know that your father destroyed Smenkhara long before I,” he said quietly. “I did not have to come to you tonight. I do not have to justify myself to you. You were his wife. You know better than I how like your father he was becoming. He knew it, too.”
“It was no reason to kill him.” She lay very still, pale hands loose on the sheets, her cheeks wet, and Horemheb realized all at once that she was no longer a young woman. In his mind she had remained the girl who had welcomed Smenkhara to Akhetaten, the steady, smiling daughter of the Aten. She looked up at him with contempt. “You may not have to justify yourself to me, Horemheb, but be assured that the Aten has already judged you. Smenkhara would have done anything you told him to, as long as we were left alone.” Her voice quivered. “But you took away the only chance for happiness we had.”
“It was too late,” he cut in brutally. “And you know that, too, Majesty. Smenkhara resisted me. He resisted Ay, as well. He wanted to be left alone in a time when Egypt needs the healing power of a god.” Unbidden he sat on the edge of the couch. “In a few days he will be buried. I give you a choice, Meritaten. I do not want to harm you. You may close your mouth and live here in peace. Men’s memories are short. If you will not be silent, I will have you exiled.”
“Egypt is already wounded beyond all healing when a mere noble may threaten a goddess and go unpunished,” she whispered. “Have you thought of that, Commander? In spite of the power you slowly gather to yourself, the gulf between you and me can never be bridged. You believe that it matters to me whether I go on living or not, but in that respect your threats are meaningless. I do not care. That makes me dangerous, doesn’t it?”
The pathetic challenge moved him. Taking her cold hand, he said, “In the beginning, Majesty, I was your father’s friend. We all were. We longed for change. Osiris Amunhotep had reigned too long. But your father fell under a strange spell and brought us all to ruin. We have become people who do what has to be done and do not question the morality of our acts. That is what your father has done to us. Your god-husband was no different. I wish you could understand.”
She did not withdraw her hand, but it lay in his lifelessly. “You have become evil, and you do not yet know it,” she said brokenly, her face turned away. “I do not even have a child to keep his memory bright before me as the years go by.”
He sighed and rose. “I am sorry. Akhetaten has become the grave of hopes for us all. Only in the next world can all wounds be healed.”
“You hypocrite. May your words burn your throat and sear your lying lips.” She gestured violently, and he bowed and walked quickly to the doors. Her speech, he reflected, was worthy of her mother. Her curse stayed with him, a tiny spot of coldness in his heart.
Mutnodjme was not asleep when at last he wearily closed his doors. She was lying on his couch in her sleeping robe, her face freshly scrubbed, watching the acrobatics of her dwarfs. As Horemheb entered, they bobbed to him and went scuttling out.
“I thought you would be shut in your own apartments tonight,” he said as his body servant held back the sheets and he gratefully slid beside his wife. The man bowed himself out, and the glimmering light he held was gradually replaced by a bar of moonlight, dusky in the darkness. Mutnodjme shifted beside Horemheb, and her voice came warm and close out of the dimness. “Love is a surprising thing,” she said. “Hathor not only looks like a cow, I sometimes think she has the mind of one. We, her devotees, wander blindly after her, moo moo, long after the sharper delights Bast has to offer have begun to pall. Little of the roughly honest young general I married remains, Horemheb. You are still the most handsome man in Egypt, but what I see behind those black eyes of yours is not very attractive. I suppose I do not divorce you because you pay my terrible debts.”
For answer he pulled her against him and kissed her, profoundly grateful for this lazy, infuriating woman the dead empress had forced upon him. As long as I have Mutnodjme, he thought, I know the gods have not yet condemned me.
27
Smenkhara’s body was taken south to Thebes for burial in the tomb prepared for him there. It rode the sluggish current of the summer river, curtained from profane eyes in the cabin of Kha-em-Ma’at and attended by the priest Pwah and a silent, steadily drinking Meritaten. Tutankhaten, Ankhesenpaaten, and Ay followed, and the members of the court were strung out behind in their own boats. The harvest was over. Egypt lay parched under the weight of a fiery sky, and it seemed to those who drifted slowly on the sullen brown breast of the Nile that they had left a haven of lush safety only to journey through the dangers of a hostile land. No mourners stood on the bank to wail with outstretched arms as the funeral procession floated by. The brittle, choked vegetation that formed a narrow barrier between water and fields shimmered, empty of human life in the heat. Villages seemed deserted. Oxen stood motionless under the thin shade of dusty palms, and donkeys cooled themselves, heads down, in the shallows, but no ragged village boys herded them. Crocodiles lay baking on the sandbanks.
As the hours passed, an apprehensive silence began to cloak the flotilla. Tutankhaten sat on a folding traveling chair under an awning, staring incredulously as his birthright slid by him. “Egypt is ugly,” he said angrily to Ay beside him. “Why does everyone tell me how beautiful it is?”
“Highness, it is high summer, t
hat is all,” he objected quietly, realizing that the boy could not remember ever having been anywhere but in the cultivated loveliness of Akhetaten. “Soon Isis will cry, and the land will become a lake, and when the waters sink, Egypt will be beautiful again.”
“It is not just that,” Tutankhaten responded. “Egypt is…is derelict.” The prince had relished the difficult word and was smiling at his mastery, and Ay admitted to himself painfully that the boy’s precocious assessment was correct. They were now sailing past a small temple, and he could see that one of its pillars had collapsed and the others were leaning wearily outward. Brown grass almost obscured the paving of the forecourt. It was not the first of such ruins. He had seen linen hung to dry in sacred places, the remains of fires blackening sanctuaries, crude peasant children’s toys scattered around battered images of local gods. The task is too large, he thought, his heart fluttering erratically with the heat and his sudden fear.
Egypt is dead. I did not want to see this. None of us did. I am afraid to consider the state of Thebes.
They berthed for one night at Akhmin, and Ay was carried on his litter to visit Tey. Walking through the garden toward the sprawling house made him feel like a ka stepping back in time, and he fully expected to see Tiye come running out of the portico’s shade with Anen at her heels. The experience filled him with dread. Those years, so far away now, buried under a lifetime, held memories more vivid to him than those more recent visits, when he had come here from Malkatta as a vigorous, arrogant man to escape briefly the demands of his energetic sister. Tey greeted him with sleepy delight. He spent the evening talking to her of what he had seen on the river but was finally forced to acknowledge in the course of their conversation that he was no different from the men and women with whom he was sharing this journey, that somewhere, somehow, he, too, had succumbed to the dream and did not really want to wake.
Thebes was at first a relief, a gleam of ancient permanence. Though the company docked at the Malkatta water steps, it was obvious even from a distance that the city on the east bank, though now shrunken and with many dilapidated buildings on its outskirts, had not physically changed very much. Everywhere Ay looked, his eyes fell on something familiar: the configuration of the small islands in the middle of the Nile, the sharp soar of Karnak’s towers against the deep blue of the noon sky, the thin pall of friendly dust over everything. The warehouses at the water’s edge were tumbledown, many without roofs, and most of the unloading docks had disappeared completely, but it was Thebes, and Ay felt an oppression leave him. Even the crowds shoving and cursing one another made him smile before his barge swung to the west bank, away from them. They seemed neither hostile nor welcoming but were simply greedy for a spectacle which they had been denied for years.
Nonetheless Malkatta was a ruin. The canal up which kings had floated was choked with silt, the water steps slimed with green river growth, the fountains dry, the mighty lake now no more than a puddle of brackish water. An aging Maya and a dozen Amun priests threw themselves at Tutankhaten’s feet, calling him Majesty, many of them in tears, but Ay looked beyond them to the imposing forest of white pillars that fronted Amunhotep’s palace. The door to the women’s garden hung from one twisted hinge. The lawn had reverted to sand. Many trees had already died, and many more lay uprooted over the weed-choked flower beds. The servants left behind to tend the empty rooms, forgotten and unpaid, must have gone long ago, Ay thought, and only a fear of the dead has kept the Theban citizens from looting everything.
With Tutankhaten by his side and the priests trailing eagerly behind, Ay walked into the reception hall. In spite of the dryness of the air, a smell of mold and disuse assailed his nostrils. The floor stirred with dead leaves and unidentifiable dry refuse. Steadily Ay crossed the room, past the throne baldachin whose frieze of cobras and sphinxes still gleamed gold, and through the great doors at the rear. As he walked, the memories woke and whispered at his back, swirling murmurous in the dust at his heels, so that by the time he entered Amunhotep’s bedchamber, he could hardly bear their mute demands. Here the force of Pharaoh’s great personality still lingered. Bes still gyrated, fat and lustful, around the walls, and grapes still hung, their paint unfaded, from the vines entwined around the wooden pillars.
“Do I have to sleep here?” Tutankhaten protested. “There are bat droppings over everything.”
“No, Highness,” Ay replied thickly. “I suggest that you stay on the barge. We must now return to Karnak and sacrifice to Amun.”
Tutankhaten grimaced but made no demur, returning eagerly to the com forts of the boat. He was poled to the temple water steps, where another group of priests hailed him almost hysterically and covered his feet with kisses. Karnak, too, had suffered. Animals scampered out of their way as the party proceeded through the forecourt and under the pylons leading to the inner court. Everywhere Ay looked the name of Amun had been savagely obliterated, the inscriptions now incomplete and meaningless. Empty niches showed where images had once stood. Everything was unkempt, neglected.
“There were not enough of us to maintain the upkeep of Karnak,” a priest whispered to Ay as they watched Tutankhaten and Maya vanish into the sanctuary, “and after Pharaoh ordered the temples actually closed and the priests dismissed, few dared to come here. Thanks be to Amun, there is a young incarnation who will restore the precepts of Ma’at!”
And how will he do it? Ay wanted to retort sarcastically. Shall he turn stones into gold? Yet gladness swept over him as he stood under the canopy in the broiling sun, watching a thin plume of incense rise above the sanctuary wall, and feeling the rejuvenation of his thoughts.
That night Tutankhaten ordered Ay to have his cot set up beside the royal couch, and together they lay behind the curtains while the Followers paced the deck and thronged the bank. Ay knew that Horemheb was sleepless, patrolling his sentries, and was grateful for the commander’s vigilance. The buildings of Thebes were in darkness as soon as the sun went down, but dots of orange light flickered along the alleys, furtive and faint. Jackals howled so loudly that Ay could have sworn that they were not out on the desert but prowling the city. Sometimes Ay would doze, only to be jerked awake by drunken shouts and screaming that wafted full-blown across the Nile.
“I will never move back here!” Tutankhaten snorted once in the darkness. “This is no place for a god to dwell! No wonder my father left it.”
“It was not thus when your father began to build Akhetaten,” Ay replied. “It was the center of the world.”
“It is disgusting,” Tutankhaten said scornfully, “like the rest of the country. I am a god of poverty.”
Wisely Ay did not argue. He was as troubled as Tutankhaten.
Smenkhara’s funeral procession, made up only of the family and a few courtiers, was meager. Women had been recruited as mourners from the shrunken harem that had become the only living cell at Malkatta. A few remembered Smenkhara as a baby, but most donned the blue linen and keened and cast soil on their heads without emotion. So many Amun priests were in attendance, thin, ragged men with hope rekindled in their eyes, either walking at the rear of the company or gathered in small groups along the route, that to Ay, mopping the sweat from under his wig and gasping in the heat, it seemed less a ritual of respect and magic for a pharaoh than a ceremony of reassurance for the servants of the god. The thought gave him only a passing twinge of regret. Amun’s restoration was infinitely more important than the pitiful remains of an unlucky young man. Slowly the procession wound toward the Valley in West-of-Thebes. Under the wailing of the harem women there was talk and laughter. Ay parted the curtain of his litter in time to see the mighty likeness of the Son of Hapu, and he glanced up at the wide-open, mild stone eyes with a shudder before letting the curtains swing shut. He had been more than a man, after all.
Smenkhara’s small tomb was unfinished. He had begun it without much interest, in response to Ay’s urging, and had not cared to oversee its progress. Its floor was still rough, its walls uninscribed, an
d the one coffin prepared for the body stood propped against the rock beside the hole gouged for a door. The rites began hurriedly, without reverence. One by one those present knelt to kiss the foot of the coffin, their forced tears long since dried. Only Meritaten clung to the sarcophagus, hysterical with grief, laying her cheek against the painted wood with swollen eyes closed tightly. After Tutankhaten as heir performed the Opening of the Mouth, the funeral dancers went through their paces without interest. In the end even Ay wished that the hypocritical play might be over.
The coffin was carried into the tiny room and placed inside the golden shrine Akhenaten had presented to his mother. Ay was dreading another out burst from Meritaten, but she stood regally, flowers in her hands, bravely composed. He looked about, and shame stabbed him. He had ordered that funerary equipment for the tomb be selected from the place where the family had for generations stored objects they either wanted to be buried with or thought might be needed at their funerals, and those responsible for filling Smenkhara’s tomb had not chosen with much care. Furniture had been simply flung into the tomb and left to lie haphazardly about. A few token weapons bearing Amunhotep III’s cartouche, some cups of Tiye’s, jewelry belonging to harem children that had died, a canopic chest incised with a name even Ay did not recognize—such were the insults Smenkhara was to carry into the next world, providing the gods wanted him.
Ay’s glance lit upon the four magic bricks set hurriedly into the four walls. Bending surreptitiously under cover of Maya’s sonorous chants, he hoped he might read Smenkhara’s name, but saw that the bricks bore the cartouche of Osiris Akhenaten. They must have been made, Ay reflected dismally, in the years when Akhenaten was still preparing his tomb in Thebes and did not yet mind having his name linked with a god who was not the Aten. What protection from the demons can the name of Akhenaten afford this poor young man? Meritaten stepped forward to lay her flowers on the coffin before the shrine was closed. Ay moved closer, dropping his eyes to the foot of the coffin so that he might not see Meritaten’s tears. There he noticed something crudely inscribed in gold leaf, the lines uneven, the characters scrawled. Intrigued, he went closer. “I breathe thy sweet breath which comes forth from thy mouth,” he read. “It is my desire that I may hear thy sweet voice, even the north wind. Give me thy hands. Thou mayest call upon my name eternally, and it shall not fail from thy mouth, my beloved brother, thou being with me to all eternity.” Startled and deeply moved, he looked up. Meritaten was watching him, pride and love suddenly transforming her disfigured face, and he smiled weakly and dropped his gaze.
The Twelfth Transforming Page 52
