Return to Thebes

by Allen Drury

  This I could not answer; although in fairness it must be said that on this occasion the responsibility is equal. It is Naphuria who wishes to tell the unadorned truth about the pathetic little coronation durbar. It is the Chief Wife and the Great Wife and the rest of the Family who want to tell the official lie.

  It is, as usual, a head-on clash of opposites such as he always seems to invite. Poor Naphuria, indeed—and poor Smenkhkara, too; because this time, I think, the results may be very serious. The confrontation that is coming has been building for three years. It could have come over almost anything but, rather absurdly to me who am still, and will always be, essentially an outsider, it has come over something as seemingly trivial as two paintings in a couple of tombs.

  The feeling must have been growing in the Family for some time that a turning point would have to come. Nefertiti and the Great Wife have deliberately helped to precipitate it by their orders to Huy and Meryra. They could only have done so, I believe, at the direct suggestion of Aye and Horemheb. Naphuria’s order came first—that made him vulnerable. The decision seems to be that now is the time to make use of this.

  Poor Naphuria and poor Smenkhkara! I do not like either one, particularly, but as a disinterested party I do not enjoy seeing them so willfully rush headlong into what may prove to be great disaster for them, for Kemet, and for us all.

  ***

  Smenkhkara

  (life, health, prosperity!)

  I wonder what is happening here. My mother landed at noon today, and already, so my brother and I are told, she has notified Nefertiti that she, Aye and Horemheb will visit the North Palace this evening before they see my brother and me. I do not understand it. Simple courtesy would dictate a call upon the Sons of the Sun before seeing a castoff wife (two, for Kia of course has chosen, in her spiteful way, to go with her) whose only purpose must be harm to us.

  Perhaps the purpose of my mother, my uncle, and my cousin is also harm to us. If so, we are ready for it. It does not frighten us. We are strong together and we will defy them. Not all their spiteful plottings will drive Akhenaten and me from the path of love and glory for the Aten to which we have decided ourselves. We defy them.

  I have been Co-Regent for three years now, and have been many times in Thebes, never failing to visit the Great Wife dutifully on each occasion. At times she has tried to argue with me, as mothers will, but I have not paid much attention. I have turned it all aside with a laugh and a joke, as I long ago learned to turn aside everything hurtful and unpleasant. Or did I have to “learn” this? As far as I can remember, it has always been my nature, save for the occasion when my brother and I first became one, many years ago. Then for a few days I did feel a terrible remorse and sadness, a terrible regret for what I seemed to be “doing” to my cousin Nefertiti and to my mother. Soon, however, my brother convinced me that whatever was being done, they were doing, since they were attempting to interfere with a union ordained by the Aten and intended only to strengthen my brother so that he might better conduct the Aten’s worship and better carry his faith to the people. Since that time I have never worried, regretted or looked back. And I do not intend to now, whatever they may be plotting in the North Palace.

  On my visits to Thebes I have now and then investigated the temples of Amon at Luxor and Karnak. The few remaining priests there, those gaunt-eyed, starving ones who scuttle about the silent corridors and peek out at me from behind deserted columns as I pass, obviously think my brother has sent me there to spy upon them. And so he has, and why should he not? They spy on us all the time, those few who are left openly, and those many who hide among the people and make their futile plans to overthrow us. We still have not caught Hatsuret, though our spies report him here, there, and everywhere from Karoy to Memphis and back. The people secrete him among themselves and not all my brother’s threats of vengeance serve to bring him out. But he only plots: he does not put plots into effect. We can suffer that, as long as he does not receive help from those who are closer to us.

  This may now be about to happen, though I would prefer it not, for it will only mean great danger, and perhaps death, for my mother, for Nefertiti, for Aye and Horemheb. We cannot suffer them to plot against us, breeding treachery in the Two Lands, the army, even in the palaces. That would violate the very ma’at of Kemet, because an attack upon the Sons of the Sun is an attack upon the soul of the land itself. My brother and I are the guardians of that soul: indeed we are that soul, as Pharaoh has always been. Were the hands of the Great Wife, my uncle, my cousin and the Chief Wife to be lifted against us, then, surely, would the people rise in our behalf. And sad would be the fate of the Family.

  I do not want this to happen and I do not believe Akhenaten does either. Therefore we must hope, very desperately, that good sense will prevail and keep them from this folly. Anything else would be sad—very sad, because we would have to take vengeance, and we would not hesitate. And the people, rallying to our cause, would make their names anathema in Kemet forever and ever, for millions and millions of years.

  I know Akhenaten has wished Merytaten to convey this warning to the Chief Wife before it is too late, but I do not believe she obeys her father. She told me with a sniff, “Why should I go out of my way to see her? I am the mistress of the Great House and the King’s Palace. Let her come to me, if she wishes to be warned!”

  That is one of the many reasons why I do not like Merytaten, who is my niece and my wife and who despises me just about as much, I think, as I despise her. We have never been close, there has always been a prickly truce between us. The way she treats her mother has always appalled me: she positively preens herself upon the way she now lords it over her. As far as I know, she has never gone near her since Akhenaten sent Nefertiti to the North Palace three years ago. And on the one occasion, a year ago, when Nefertiti finally found sufficient forgiveness in her heart to attempt a reconciliation, Merytaten dashed the basket of fruit and gifts from the hands of Nefertiti’s messenger and drove him out of the Palace, shrieking threats and imprecations against her mother which the terrified fellow had to promise he would swiftly carry back.

  Two minutes later, of course, Merytaten had gathered together all the gifts—some of them quite ornate, including two golden pectorals and a lapis lazuli scarab bracelet from Nefertiti’s own private collection—and was sitting on the floor placidly eating one of the pomegranates she had sent, spitting out the seeds in all directions and humming a satisfied little song to herself.

  “Why are you so cruel to her?” I could not help blurting out. “She has done you no harm.”

  “She does me harm just by living,” she said in a flippant tone. To which I could not resist:

  “I think she did us all harm by giving you life.”

  Thereupon, of course, she screamed and shrieked at me, casting various aspersions upon my character and manhood which I chose to suffer in patient silence, as there were servants about in the outer hall and I have some respect for the dignity of the Double Crown, if she does not. She did not quite dare go so far as to attack what makes her most jealous, namely the perfect understanding that exists between her father and me, but she made enough unpleasant insinuations so that I am sure the servants had another good gossip that day, as they often do at our expense. This is largely because of her, however: Akhenaten and I of course make no secret of our union, because we live in truth, but we conduct ourselves with dignity as Father Aten wishes us to do. It is only Merytaten who lowers the aspect of everything.

  I have suggested upon occasion to my brother that he discipline her for this, but he seems curiously listless about her effronteries as he does about so many things these days. I think he is not in very good health; his energies seem to be declining; the strain of maintaining the cause of the Aten against the growing opposition of the Family, the still virulent hatred of the dispossessed priests of Amon, and the general apathy (if not outright hostility) of the people toward the Sole God have inevitably begun to take their toll.
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br />   Lately there has been added to this a growing arthritis that attacks and weakens his always vulnerable frame. As if defying it, he has asked Bek and Tuthmose to portray him in a fashion ever younger and more handsome in their sculptures, stelae and paintings. I do not know really why he has done this, unless it is to impress the people, who now see him no longer save here in Akhet-Aten, and even here on increasingly fewer occasions. I asked him once why he, who has always prided himself on living in truth, should now be engaged in a deliberate lie about his appearance. He looked at me in the strangest, most stricken way, and asked, in the emotional croak his voice becomes in moments of tension, “You mean you do not know?”

  “No,” I said, I am afraid in a somewhat offhand manner. “You are always handsome to me.”

  He cried out, some harsh, inarticulate sound: his eyes filled abruptly with tears. Apparently I had hurt him deeply in some way I have never been able to understand, no matter how many times I have gone back over it. After a moment he composed himself, clearly with great effort, and reached out a hand to comfort me, because his stricken countenance had of course turned mine stricken too.

  “It does not matter,” he said then. “It does not matter.”

  And he refused to discuss it with me, ever again. But his physical glorification in the sculptures continues, so that if one were to see only the portraits of these later years in Akhet-Aten one would believe he had always been as handsome and as virile as any other Pharaoh.

  Apparently, as I say, he does it to impress the people, since he goes no longer among them very much. He has not left this city since we returned here after our father’s entombment in Thebes, and even here his appearances are becoming more and more infrequent. Occasionally still he will worship the Aten in the Great Temple, occasionally he will still dispense gifts from the Window of Appearances, now and again he will still visit the ledge along the Northern Tombs from which one gets such a commanding view of the city and the plain (and where so many significant things, including our own understanding, have happened, over the years). But all of this is becoming steadily rarer. Increasingly he worships in his private chapel in the King’s Palace; it has been six months since he held a ceremony at the Window of Appearances; even longer, I think, since he ventured to the Northern Tombs. And to Memphis, our northern capital in the Delta, and to Thebes, he ventures, in these recent years, not at all.

  He has become increasingly what I overheard our cousin Horemheb remark to his faithful shadow Ramesses one day—“the Prisoner of Akhet-Aten.”

  (I let them see that I heard it, and did not like it, but our cousin Horemheb did not look impressed by my annoyance, and Ramesses, not knowing which of us to fear the most, only gave me a sickly smile as I brushed past with a deliberately imperious air. They are always huddling together, those two, planning I know not what: though Horemheb continues faithfully to execute my brother’s orders against the priesthoods, and Ramesses apes him dutifully in that as in all else.)

  “The Prisoner of Akhet-Aten”—and therefore, of course, my own frequent travels. “I want you to be my eyes and ears,” he said soon after we established our joint household in the South Palace with Merytaten three years ago. I did not know then that he intended to isolate himself—or rather, perhaps, that the Aten would further cripple his already crippled form, perhaps so that he could concentrate more upon the Aten’s worship without the distractions of travel. I knew only that he wished me to do this to assist him. In the same loving spirit in which I have always assisted all his enterprises, I of course said I would.

  My first move was to return to Thebes and secure my mother’s permission to construct a small palace for myself and Merytaten—who, insufferable as she is, is still Pharaoh’s daughter and my Queen, and has her birthright of official honors—within the compound of Malkata. I then began the regular round of travels which takes me three times a year to Thebes and three times a year to Memphis. Thus am I able to supervise those activities of government with which he has entrusted me, and to act truly as his Co-Regent and helper in ruling the Two Lands.

  I think I do these things very well. And I also am able to fulfill some of the public ceremonial demands that he no longer cares, or perhaps is unable, to perform. I always take his latest statue with me and place it, in full regalia, beside me on the platform: and I suspect that in the minds of our younger people, and among the elder who have not seen him in many years, and whose memory grows hazy with time, there is a gradual replacement, by this handsome and sturdy figure, of the awkward, misshapen, shuffling reality that once was known everywhere in Kemet. Thus do I assist him in that aim of his also.

  I really do think I conduct the government very well for my brother. And although at first I was made somewhat hesitant and confused by the foreign policy, for instance, conducted by our Foreign Minister, Tutu, I think I have come to understand it quite sufficiently. It consists of trying to maintain those alliances we still have in the far north toward Mittani and Naharin. Tutu gives me copies of the dispatches that come in from there. I read them and report on them to Akhenaten. We discuss them from time to time and I report back to Tutu his instructions: keep trying to warn off our enemies and keep trying to satisfy our friends, who always clamor for gold and also, of late, beg us to send troops to protect them from their neighbors.

  This last I am unable to have Tutu promise, because my brother does not have the inclination or now, perhaps, the strength, to make the show of force that held our possessions secure in the days of our forebears, beginning with our great-great-grandfather, Tuthmose III (life, health, prosperity!) and lasting down through our grandfather, Tuthmose IV (life, health, prosperity!). Our father abandoned this practice in his later years, and now it seems almost too late, in some areas, to revive it. I might enjoy, myself, going on expeditions to distant lands to re-establish their awe of Kemet and the holders of the Double Crown but, without my brother’s agreement and active support, I cannot do it by myself. And he does not seem to desire this. Again, energy flags and, with it, the will to do in time what might save us much trouble later.

  But I do not worry overmuch about this, because all my life I have worshiped my brother and have believed that what he decided about things was right. He believes that Kemet’s wealth and strength should be devoted to the worship of the Aten, to the establishment of the Sole God, to the banishment of magic, misery and old, evil things from the lives and minds of our people.

  “If people everywhere,” he has said to me often, “will but believe in the Hymn and worship the Aten as I do, then the teachings of the Aten will make them happier than they have ever been.”

  At first I was young and flippant, even with him, and asked:

  “Has the Aten made you happy, then, Brother?”

  He looked at me for a very long time and finally replied quietly, “In my heart, I am happy.”

  And I never dared question him thus again.

  And, in fact, I have never really wanted to, because I too have come to believe in the Sole God, loving all men and all nations, who can make us all happy. Certainly the Aten has made me happy, for he has placed me at my brother’s side and made me, too, Living Horus, Son of the Sun, King and Pharaoh of the Two Lands: and I know there is no higher happiness a god such as I could have.

  I know this, as I know that it is only some passing melancholy now that makes me worry about the gathering of the Family, about this ridiculous and unnecessary quarrel over the tombs of Huy and Merya—which of course will be decided in truth, as Akhenaten and I desire it—and about the uneasy feeling I have that my mother, my uncle Aye, Nefertiti and our cousin Horemheb plan some unpleasantness for us if we persist in the course Father Aten has told us to follow.

  It is melancholy only, of that I am certain … though I could wish this night were past us, and all decided happily for all of us, as we desire.

  ***

  Hatsuret

  They do not know, the two besotted fools, how closely at hand wait the ins
truments of their destruction. They do not know that I am in Akhet-Aten, yea, even in the Great House itself. They do not know how well this is known to others, who also wait, and how secretly and subtly I am being helped to my tryst with them … for tryst I have, and all signs now point that it will not be long in coming.

  When I was given assurance of my safety and was aided in my hiding by General Horemheb and the Councilor and Divine Father-in-law, Aye, I did not know at first the real meaning of their assistance—though I have been sure for ten years, since I first became an acolyte in the most holy ancient temple of Amon-Ra at Karnak, that eventually the Pharaoh Akhenaten would have to die for his sins against Amon and his betrayal of the ma’at of Kemet. When my brilliance and shrewdness took me up to become chief aide to doddering old Maya, Amon’s High Priest, this conviction grew. When Akhenaten ordered Maya’s murder and desecrated the temple on the day of the entombment of the Good God Amonhotep III (life, health prosperity!), I had no further doubts. Such monstrous evil as Pharaoh did that day can have only one final repayment, however long we must wait and plot to secure it. For never was there such a dreadful thing!

  He ordered General Horemheb to batter down the doors. He ordered Maya and myself to be killed as we faced the soldiers and their battering rams, our arms outspread across the ancient planks. At the last second I leaped aside, to be spirited instantly away by many willing hands among the crowd. Maya, less nimble, died. Then Pharaoh directed the soldiers to seize the sacred statue of Amon-Ra, King of the Gods, and hurl it into the Nile, which they did, and called down eternal curses upon any who would seek to recover it. Of course a team of divers recruited by Horemheb recovered it that night, after Akhenaten and his brother the new King Smenkhkara had sailed downriver to Akhet-Aten; and it, too, is in hiding, safe until the day when Amon may rule again in his rightful place in the Two Lands.