Return to Thebes

by Allen Drury

  Now I am in Pharaoh’s house itself, having been presented to His Majesty six months ago by General Horemheb as a slave captured in some skirmish in Canaan. Horemheb had directed me to grow a beard, which is almost unheard of in clean-shaven Kemet, so this made me look foreign enough, and to that I added a reddish dye to my glossy black hair, and also affected a noticeable limp in my right leg, which served to disguise me further. Horemheb explained that my perfect tongue for the language was due to my actually being a native of Kemet whose family lived close to the border. I was kidnapped by a marauding band of Canaanites when I was twelve years old, he explained, and spent ten years in captivity before being retrieved. My leg, he said, had been deliberately broken by my brutal captors, and thus the limp.

  His Majesty, who seems to pay so little attention any more to what is actually going on in the land of Kemet that he barely glanced at me, accepted all this without question. My very oddity was my safest disguise. The only break in his indifference came when Horemheb called attention to my limp. Then he asked me to walk up and down before him, which I did with an easy awkwardness, since I have practiced this handicap until I am now almost afraid that I shall not be able to walk normally again after His Majesty has been removed.

  “Ah,” His Majesty said, a genuine sympathy in his voice. “I, too, know what it means to limp. You are welcome to my household, Peneptah (for such is the false name I have taken). We shall limp about the Palace together, you and I, and keep each other company.”

  And he gave me for a moment a smile of quite extraordinary sweetness, which, did I not hate him so and were I not so dedicated to his death, might well have made me pause, ashamed by what we are doing to betray him. But even as I teetered for a dangerous second on the brink of this fatal precipice, he destroyed my mood by abruptly turning away.

  “Where is Ankh-Kheperu-Ra?” he demanded in a high querulous voice, using King Smenkhkara’s coronation name. “He was supposed to wait upon me half an hour ago, and still he does not come. Cousin, fetch him!”

  “Yes, Son of the Sun,” Horemheb said smoothly. “At once. It is all right, then, for Peneptah to be assigned to the ranks of your household scribes?”

  “Take him to Amonhotep, Son of Hapu,” he said impatiently. “Tell the old man to put him to work. We’ll find something for him to do.”

  “Thank you, Majesty,” I said, bowing low and feeling a great relief surge through me, for had he suspected anything I should have been dead upon the spot. But he turned his back upon me and shuffled away to a window where he could look out over the city, resting one clawlike hand against the wooden lintel, long bony fingers drumming insistently while he waited for his brother—a rasping, scratching, anxious sound in which all his uneasy yearning was expressed.

  General Horemheb led me away before I could witness their touching reunion, which I am sure, now that I know them, came after a separation of no more than an hour at most. Since then I have seen them together many times. The younger King treats the elder with a deferential yet self-confident air, joshing, good-natured, patient and obviously deeply affectionate. The elder receives his confident deference with a gratitude so humble and self-effacing that it is almost embarrassing to see. It is but one more reason why the rule of Nefer-Kheperu-Ra must come to an end. It is the thing that will make its ending easier, perhaps, than we now think.

  These past six months I have been working as a scribe with that wise old man, Amonhotep, Son of Hapu, probably the most honored of all the commoners of Kemet. Across the Nile from Thebes in the necropolis, his mortuary temple, given him by grateful Amonhotep III (life, health, prosperity!), has now been completed and is open for worship. He still, though in his sixties, supervises many of the architectural and public works. He continues to head the corps of scribes who assist Their two Majesties, and his opinion is almost always sought in the counsels of the Family.

  “If Amonhotep, Son of Hapu, takes a liking to you,” Horemheb told me, “all your plans will be greatly assisted.” A fleeting smile touched his shrewd, sharp-featured face. “He has assisted mine, and I know.…”

  But somehow I have never been quite able to establish such a relationship with the old man. He knows who I am, but he has never revealed it to anyone else by so much as a hint. He could betray me and have my head in an instant if he would, but he does not do so. I assume this means that he agrees with my purposes, but I can never be sure. Perhaps he wants it this way, because it means, of course, that I cannot move without his agreement. No more can I move without the agreement of Aye and Horemheb. Together these three, and possibly the Great Wife as well, whom they all consult, will decide the timing of my vengeance—and theirs.

  I had been working for Amonhotep, Son of Hapu, two months when he discovered my secret. He caught me with the simplest of ruses. We were alone in the writing room, he at one side, I perhaps fifteen feet away. He lurched suddenly against a table, tipping it just sufficiently so that a pot of black ink began to slide toward a pile of pristine papyrus lying on the floor.

  “Oh!” he cried in well-simulated anguish. “How stupid of me! Catch it!”

  And instinctively, abandoning my carefully nurtured limp, I sprang to do his bidding.

  “Thank you very much, Hatsuret,” he said serenely when I had secured the ink and returned the table to its upright position. “I am getting so stupid in my old age.”

  But I would not say Amonhotep, Son of Hapu, is stupid at all.

  Aside from an involuntary start at the sound of my name, which I could not suppress, I made no response. Nor have we ever discussed the matter. But Amonhotep, Son of Hapu, keeps a very close eye on me: I think for Aye and Horemheb, though he never reveals in the slightest where his sympathies lie. So I conduct myself with extreme care at all times, understanding that it is apparently my task to wait until I am needed, and that I will be told when that time is, and what to do when it comes upon us.

  In the meantime I can only watch in anguish the desecration of the gods and the ruin of religion throughout the Two Lands. There are many among the palace servants who are still faithful to Amon, and very cautiously, little by little, I have let it be known to a few trusted ones who I am. Through them I am able to keep in touch with my principal priests in exile, and thus am I able to know most of the news of Kemet. So I know that from the Fourth Cataract to the Delta the temples of Amon lie in ruins, that the priesthood is dispersed and mostly in hiding as I am, that all the other principal gods, including Osiris whose rituals and customs for the dead His Majesty has abandoned, are in equal despair and desolation.

  Never has there been such a great overturning of the gods as has happened under this Pharaoh, not even in the days of the Hyksos kings. Even they honored Amon-Ra and his fellow gods; even they associated the temples with their ruling. Not so the Heretic of Akhet-Aten, the Criminal, the Madman. Not so His pathetic Majesty, who shuffles about his palaces here as in a dream world, sacrificing to his false god the Aten, still trying to convince the people that one god can be so great and so all-embracing that he can know and respond to all the infinite needs of mankind, which is absurd on the face of it.

  I serve discreetly, I listen, I observe. I see two foolish lovers trying to pretend that they are rulers of a great country. I see all, all, religion, civil government, Empire and all, falling away around them.

  I see a man of thirty, so crippled in body and so discouraged in heart—for I believe he is greatly discouraged at last, though he still pretends he is not and tries to put a good face upon it—that he seems almost to have no energy left to rule.

  I see a man of twenty, strong and vigorous and, yes, let me admit it, handsome, generous, kindly, and appealing, though of limited brain, wishing harm to no one, friendly to all—I see this amiable but inadequate man trying to administer the Two Lands for his listless brother.

  Was there ever such a pair tried to lead a modern nation? And will it not be right and fitting in the eyes of Amon, and of all the gods, when their puny and
pathetic charade is put at last to end?

  So do I believe, and for that day I work. Now there is battle in the Family—they conceal it from the servants, who learn all things—over the tombs of Huy and Meryra. It would be a minor issue in any reign but this. Now, I think, it has suddenly become a symbol of everything, the issue on which the Living Horus may be brought to ground.

  I am ready when they need me.

  Hatsuret, who will yet be High Priest of Amon in the temple of Karnak when the great days return, is here.

  ***

  Sitamon

  My mother Queen Tiye invited me to go with her this time to Akhet-Aten, and I was bored in Thebes, so I came. But she has not invited me to accompany her to the North Palace tonight, so I can only speculate what is going to happen there. At first I was annoyed by this, but then I thought: One more family row, this one probably the most bitter we have ever had with my peculiar brother. I am probably well off out of it. I have had enough wrangling and disputation over the years. The last battle of wills can proceed without me. At thirty-eight the Queen-Princess Sitamon is beginning to reach an age where she is just as happy not to be involved in angry things. I shall hear the results soon enough.

  Sometimes I look back on these three years since my father died and marvel at what has happened in the land of Kemet. Partly I suppose it began with him, who married me when I was very young in order to secure his own legitimacy to the throne (the Double Crown passing, as it does, through the female line, though I sometimes wonder what good that does us, who have no real right of our own to happiness but must always be subject to whoever marries us). He spent most of his life enjoying the luxuries our ancestors handed down to him and managed by his amiable ways to persuade the people that this was good government. Already Kemet looks back with heavy longing to the “golden age” of the Good God Amonhotep III (life, health, prosperity!). They call him “Amonhotep the Magnificent” now, forgetting how he lolled away the Empire and let civil government slip, beginning all the things my poor brother has carried grimly on to the point of near destruction. But in retrospect, as with most rulers whose people perceive their personal foibles and are so astounded to find them human that they gladly forgive them all their trespasses, he has emerged in an increasingly favorable light.

  “We loved your father!” they shout at me when I pass in procession, adding commendation for him to the obvious love I can truly say they bear for me. I have never quite shouted back, “So did I!”—such informality does not become a royal princess and Queen to Pharaoh—but they can tell from my expression that our sentiments coincide. Their shouts of joy redouble and they always conclude by looking sad because he is gone forever and they cannot have him back.

  Such unity with the people as our father had, Akhenaten has never achieved, except in the very early days when he first returned to public view after his ailment, and when he married Nefertiti. For a brief year or two they had such adoration as only my father and mother enjoyed, excepting one difference: my father and the Great Wife had it as long as he lived, and she has it still, whereas poor Akhenaten—and poor Nefertiti, whom I have come to feel dreadfully sorry for in these recent years—enjoyed the people’s love for a fleeting moment and then lost it forever.

  I suppose I have become so sympathetic toward my cousin Nefertiti because to some extent my situation parallels hers. You will remember that for many years I and he who turned out to be my cousin Horemheb have been lovers. I helped him keep this secret, bore him three children whom I had to dispose of, since I was married to my father (in name only, but nonetheless irrevocably) and it was thus impossible for us to acknowledge one another openly, however open our secret eventually became in the Court and, I suppose, in the Two Lands. Then Horemheb (“Kaires,” as we knew him then) declared himself to be Horemheb, son of my uncle Aye; my father died; and I assumed—naïve girl that I was at thirty-five!—that all was now clear for us to announce our love and be married by my brother, who gave me his blessing after enjoying the pleasure of frightening me for a moment with possible refusal. But when I took the glad news back to Horemheb it was suddenly no longer as simple as it had always seemed. Horemheb, I began to perceive, had other plans.

  He was, I found, not so eager as I to rush into marriage. He was not, in fact, eager to rush into it at all. He preferred, he said, to keep “our loving relationship,” as he called it, exactly where it was—officially secret, officially unacknowledged, officially no restriction upon him at all. He told me this was necessary because his duties as general and chief scribe of the army took him too often from home. These journeys had never interfered with us before, and I could not see why they should now. But he was adamant, and although I perhaps could have tried to insist, we both knew it would probably not succeed. It would require my brother’s full support, and Horemheb and I both know I do not have it; and Horemheb would have to be much lower than my brother has raised him for my brother’s command to be effective. Above all, my brother would have to be a much different and more powerful Pharaoh than he is. He would have to be more like Horemheb.

  In fact, I said almost as much the other day and apparently hit closer to the mark than Horemheb found comfortable.

  “You treat me as though you were some Pharaoh!” I shot out angrily in the midst of our most recent quarrel on the subject. For a second he looked at me with complete and almost ludicrous dismay: he actually turned pale. He grasped my arm so tightly that it hurt, which is what he meant it to do. I cannot be quite so melodramatic as to say he hissed at me, but it was certainly a furtive and emphatic sound.

  “Don’t you ever say that again!” he ordered in a savage whisper. “Don’t you ever say that again!”

  I gave him stare for stare, since I am daughter and wife of a Pharaoh, but I must admit that for a moment I was genuinely frightened by the enormous suppressed anger in his voice. I have been his wife in all but name for almost fifteen years, borne him three children—and now I no longer think I even really know him.

  Except that I know one thing now, after that exchange.

  He wants to be Pharaoh and fully intends to be, if he can.

  Somewhere down the years we have lost Horemheb, too—bright, cheerful, willing “Kaires” who came mysteriously and unexpectedly to the Palace of Malkata and charmed us all with his enthusiasm, diligence and idealism. He loved Kemet then, and I think he loves her now; but down the years he has also become enamored of power. I think he thinks he wants it only that he may better serve Kemet. And perhaps this is true: but, men being men, perhaps it is not, entirely.

  Power for its own sake is enormously attractive, particularly when, as is the case with my headstrong brother, it is being so sadly misused by those who have it

  In any case, the quarrel did not advance the cause of our marriage, for which I have now almost abandoned hope. If he will not marry me, he will not, and there is little I can do about it. He talks vaguely of marriage “later, when it is more fitting.” But when is “later,” and when will it be “more fitting”? In the meantime, he says firmly, we will continue as we are. Unfortunately this, too, I will accept, because I suffer from the same disease as Nefertiti: I love him, as she still loves my poor, misguided brother, against all fitness, logic and common sense about what is best for us, not them.

  There was a time long ago when I rather made fun of my perfect cousin Nefertiti, always so steady, so cool, so icy calm and self-contained in the face of all adversity. No hair was out of place on that beautiful head, no trace of consternation ever creased that perfect brow. Each eyelash was in perfect order above those lovely, contemplative eyes. Nothing seemed to disturb the serenity of the remote and impregnable fortress of her being. But I learned, in time, that a woman as vulnerable as any lived inside the fortress, and I came to admire her for the great dignity with which she conducts herself in the very difficult situation in which she lives now.

  My brother is in his special world, my younger brother has followed him there, and now only
the youngest of all, solemn little Tut, stands between the House of Thebes and extinction. Tut—and, of course, my mother the Great Wife, my uncle Aye, and my cousin Horemheb. But Tut carries the blood of Ra in direct line, and he it is who will rule next … if, as now seems steadily more possible, some move is made to remove our two brothers from the throne.

  I feel sorry for Smenkhkara, who goes smiling and amiable through the world like our father, but without our father’s genius for abiding by the eternal order and ma’at of Kemet. Our father also had Queen Tiye, of course, and Smenkhkara has only sour little Merytaten, who tries to lord it over us all and pretend that she is a greater Queen than any of us. This is nonsense, and I hope the gods will render her suitable justice when the time comes. Why Akhenaten permits it I do not know, unless it be some lingering feeling that it looks more fitting to have a woman in the King’s House. He does not seem to feel the necessity in other respects, but it may be he wants her there for ceremonial reasons. And in her waspish little way she does have a good head for household management. Par-en-nefer, the major-domo, is a careless old man behind whose back all sorts of thieving and cheating goes on among the servants, particularly in the purchase and distribution of foodstuffs for the palaces. I do not know how much is spirited away to the servants’ families every day, but it must be an enormous amount. At least Merytaten tries to keep that under control. Her nagging voice is often raised to Par-en-nefer, and he can then be seen bustling busily and angrily away, protesting as he goes that he will “set all to rights—set all to rights!” These reforms last a day or two and the pilfering begins again. I do not envy my niece her task, though this is the only sympathy I can find in my heart for her pinched and spiteful personality.

  So Smenkhkara has no one to help him keep his balance in a situation in which I do not think he has ever really wanted to preserve it anyway. I think he has been quite content from the beginning, being lazy and easygoing and also adoring his older brother, who did not hesitate to take advantage of this. Now they pretend to rule the country, though actually it is the Great Wife, our uncle Aye and Horemheb who carry out the orders, and indeed originate them, half the time.