by Allen Drury
“No, Your Majesty,” I say, emboldened by his evident willingness to remain calm, “she does not understand that because she still loves you.”
“What cause have I given her to do that?” he asks bluntly, and this time I do turn to him and face him as squarely as he faces me.
“No cause whatever, Your Majesty,” I say, as bluntly as he. “In fact, much cause to the contrary. But we women are like that: it is the only explanation. She has been committed to you from a child. She, at least, remains true.…” And then, because he still does not rage but continues to look at me curiously from those strange, hooded eyes we will never get used to, I venture still further. “Is there nothing in you that remains true to her, Your Majesty?”
“Why did she send you here?” he asks, ignoring my question. “It was not to tell me of old love, surely.”
“No,” I say very quietly. “It was to offer you a plan to escape.”
“Escape?” he asks blankly. “Are you telling me, then, that the Living Horus is a prisoner?”
“You would not be if you would still go about among the people,” I say. “But Your Majesty stays always here, always secluded, always alone.”
“I am alone!” he says sharply.
“They take advantage of it,” I say, wondering at my own courage but feeling now that I have gone too far to stop.
“Who?”
“Many.”
“Name them!”
“They are as numerous as the sands, Your Majesty,” I say, trembling again inside for fear my evasion will provoke his wrath, but determined not to be diverted from the Chief Wife’s purpose. “They are in your house, they are throughout Kemet, they are north in Naharin, they are south in wretched Kush, they are everywhere along your borders—everywhere. And as long as you remain here in the South Palace and do not break out, as long as you do not take the government back in your own hands—”
“Are you saying my uncle Aye and cousin Horemheb are betraying me?” he interrupts sharply.
“I say they are ruling Kemet because Your Majesty will not,” I retort, and truly then I do not expect to live, for at last his face clouds and a furious expression comes into his eyes.
“You go too far, Lady,” he says, his voice suddenly choked with emotion.
“I humbly beg Your Majesty’s pardon,” I say, and lower my head and draw my veil across my eyes, which I close in both fright and resignation, for I fully expect the next step to be calling of the guards, followed by prison or death for me.
Instead, nothing happens. I am aware of his heavy, angry breathing, I am sharply aware that the effect of the perfumed water is wearing off and the odor is returning; I am aware that I am but a humble subject daring to speak to the Good God as only the Family, I am sure, has ever spoken to him. I am aware that I am sitting, incongruously, on the throne of Kemet, a thought that almost makes me burst into hysterical laughter. I am aware of many things, but the principal one I am aware of is that he is not going to kill me, or even let his rage continue much longer.
“You speak treasonous things,” he says at last, quietly, “but no doubt you believe you have good cause. Exactly what is the reason my wife sent you here?”
At this I am greatly encouraged, for I believe it has been a very long time since he has acknowledged the fact that Her Majesty is still his wife.
“She has prepared your escape,” I repeat. This time he studies me intently.
“Tell me,” he says, half mocking, “where does Pharaoh ‘escape’ to?”
“Twelve of her household troops are trained and ready,” I say. “Prepare yourself. They will come tonight at midnight while all the Palace is asleep. Her Majesty will come with them. She will announce to the guards that she is coming to see you. You, meanwhile, will have told your guards that you expect her, very late, and that she is to be admitted. They will not dare challenge her if you have given the order. She will remain but a very brief while. You will then see her to the outer door, accompanied by her soldiers. Hidden around the corner in the next street will be a litter for you. You will proceed together, not in haste but without slowness either, to the litter. No one will dare challenge you. You will go to the North Palace, take up residence and tomorrow a new day will begin for the Two Lands when you go together to the Window of Appearances to announce to Kemet that you are reunited and that henceforth you are resuming active control of all Your Majesty’s affairs, removing Aye and Horemheb from their offices and appointing others loyal to you.”
I pause, a little out of breath from this lengthy recital. I can see that he is, for the moment at least, interested and perhaps even excited: his face shows more animation than I have seen it show since the death of Smenkhkara. For a moment this lingers, I can see him thinking about it almost as though he believed it possible. Then as abruptly as his face has begun to glow with life, the glow fades. He seems to shrink, to withdraw, to hide away into himself again; he actually seems to grow smaller and more wasted even as I watch. It is a very odd sensation I have, and it tells me before he speaks that we may have lost him. But he is courteous about it: His Majesty has always been courteous to me. And I do not intend to give up without an argument, having gone so far.
“Lady,” he says, “tell your mistress I appreciate her care for me, but tell her that what she proposes is impossible. I could not leave this house where I have been happy to return to one where I was unhappy—even though I am no longer happy here. But it is here I belong. It is here I can best worship the Aten and the memory of—of him who strengthened me in all I did. I could not abandon them to return to the Chief Wife.”
“I do not believe she wishes you to abandon them, Your Majesty,” I say. “She worships the Aten as you do. Together you can give him new life in the Two Lands, where few now favor him. And as for His late Majesty Smenkhkara”—he flinches at the name, but I go bravely on as Her Majesty would wish—“I believe Her Majesty fully respects your grief for him, and would not resent your expression of it. Her Majesty,” I conclude quietly, “has suffered much, and learned much, in these last three years. I think she will be happy only to have you returned to her side, and well again.”
“Yes,” he says gloomily, distracted and as if to himself, “I am not well.…”
“Then come to the North Palace, Your Majesty!” I urge. “Come back to those who will love and care for you! Do not remain here where you are so unhappy and alone. They do not really care for you here—no one does. I think Your Majesty knows this, in his heart.”
Again I have dared greatly in saying such candid things: but I feel I must. And it appears that I have been right, for now he turns finally, draws himself back in his throne and again looks me full in the face.
“It would be nice,” he says, so forlornly that it wrenches my heart, “to be where someone cared for me again.”
“Then return to the North Palace tonight!” I exclaim. “Give the orders! Receive Her Majesty! Leave here with her! And restore yourself tomorrow to the power that grief has driven from your hands!”
He looks at me thoughtfully for a very long time, during which I hardly dare breathe for fear I will wrongly affect his decision.
“Well—” he says at last.
“Return to those who love you, Majesty!” I dare exclaim, encouraged by his hesitation.
“Aye and Horemheb would be much upset,” he says in a faraway tone, and I can see him considering—rejecting—accepting—rejecting—accepting again—“but if it were done swiftly and without warning—if they did not know until I appear tomorrow at the Window of Appearances what my intentions are—if I perform wonders again for Kemet, my people—”
“Then Your Majesty will do it!” I cry joyfully.
He reaches out a long, thin hand and clutches mine with a desperate grasp like one drowning in the arms of Hapi.
“Go and tell my wife,” he says in a hurried, almost frightened voice, “that I will receive her at midnight tonight and we will go to the North Palace!”
“Majesty!” I cry, and leaving the throne of Kemet, where I had never expected to sit in all my life and of course never will again, I kneel at his feet, lift the hem of his garment and press it to my lips.
He places a hand gently on my head.
“Go, now!” he says with an excited urgency. “The Lady Anser-Wossett has served the Two Lands well this day!”
“Thank you, Majesty,” I say humbly, backing out of his presence. The last I see of him is the misshapen figure leaning forward intently on the throne, the long, narrow eyes wide with thought, the mind far away—but alive again now, no longer dull, no longer dead, as he contemplates with an evident excitement what will happen this night and tomorrow.
I have succeeded beyond the wildest hopes of Her Majesty and myself. Acting entirely on Her Majesty’s intuition, we have caught him at that exact moment at which even the deepest mourning becomes boring and it is time for life to resume.
As I leave the Palace I become aware that Hatsuret is signaling me insistently from the small crowd of watchers that always idles about the gates. He wants me to meet him in the market-place. He, too, has an urgency about him. I consider for a second whether it can do harm. I know I will tell him nothing of what has occurred—and perhaps I can find out something from him that will be helpful in furthering Their Majesties’ plans. With the slightest of movements I return his nod.
When my carriage reaches the market-place I order the driver to stop and wait in a shady corner. I dismiss my escort of soldiers and send them on their way back to the North Palace, asking their captain to tell Her Majesty only: “The Lady Anser-Wossett has good news.” Then I compose myself beside a vegetable vendor’s stand and pretend to inspect his offerings while I wait for Hatsuret.
Presently, he comes.
***
Nefertiti
Word has reached me from the captain of the guard that “The Lady Anser-Wossett has good news,” though she has not yet returned from the market-place to give it me herself. She likes to go to the market from time to time, though it is not necessary for her to do so, since my steward Huya oversees the buying for the North Palace. (Poor Huya! He has been cowed since the decision to depict the coronation durbar in his tomb as the Great Wife and I desired. But I have told him nothing was his fault: he and Meryra simply got caught in the midst of a family argument, and all is well. Nonetheless, he still finds difficulty meeting my eyes sometimes.)
So Anser-Wossett has not returned but her message indicates that our wildest hopes must have come true. He is going to accept my plan: he is coming back to me, and the world will begin anew, for me and for poor threatened Kemet.
For this I have dreamed and planned and plotted for a year, ever since the murders of Smenkhkara and Merytaten. I did not know, for a time, whether I could recover from those two deaths, which were in considerable measure due to me. When I mentioned Smenkhkara’s name that night during our family conference, I did not contemplate that he would be removed so swiftly and so violently: I had thought some gentler means, such as banishment to wretched Kush or the Red Land, might be used. But I suppose my father Aye and Horemheb had no choice: he would not have gone, Akhenaten would not have permitted it, and nothing would have been achieved.
So, though I cried wildly for a time when I heard the news, for my hapless, well-meaning cousin and even for my shrewish, unnatural daughter—but most of all for myself who had been party to such a dreadful thing—I did not cry overlong. I thought the principal obstacle to my husband’s rule (and my own happiness) had been removed, and that we could now go forward to a better day for all of us.
I did not contemplate how terribly he might be shattered, for I had refused to believe the signs that revealed how deeply he cared for his brother—and I had also grievously misjudged the determination of my father and the true nature of my half brother Horemheb.
I am now desperately afraid of them both; and so, I think, is Queen Tiye.
We have not discussed it very much, but when we have she has spoken with a profound and still grieving sadness of the son whose murder she had to agree to in order to save, she thought, the son who must be saved if he was to continue to wear the Double Crown and discharge the great responsibilities of the Two Lands.
Except that her plan, too, went awry: he still wears the Double Crown but he has retired almost entirely from the rule of the Two Lands. It rests now with Aye and Horemheb; and I sense that Horemheb, in particular, is growing ever more restive as he exercises many of the rights of power without the sanction of power.
This the Great Wife senses as well as I; and both of us, now, are coming to perceive how iron is his will and how ruthless his determination. We know what his ultimate ambition is, because Sitamon, embittered by his refusal to marry her, recently told the Great Wife. Yet he cannot possibly be Pharaoh, for poor little frightened Tut comes next, and soon now he will be married to Ankhesenpaaten, which will sanctify his full claim upon the throne; and where does Horemheb fit then? We cannot see: yet we know he dreams of it, and we know that such a dreamer is dangerous indeed to Pharaoh.
So both Queen Tiye and I have come to realize that what we were responsible for has not worked out at all as we thought it would. Just yesterday when she was visiting me—having finally come down from Thebes to spend a few days in her palace here and see for herself what all reports have told her—we admitted this to one another. Finding that she agreed with me, I decided to put into effect at once the plan that is apparently going to save the Good God and the Two Lands, at last.
(It is now nearing dinnertime. Ra is sinking in the west. The Nile has turned to copper. Across on the other bank the cultivated lands that serve Akhet-Aten, and the distant mountains beyond, are becoming purple and misty in the dying light. Anser-Wossett should be back by now. I shall send very shortly to find out where she is, for she must report to me in detail all that she said to my husband, and all that he said to her.)
Actually I did not need the approval of the Great Wife for my plan, because I have become determined to do it. And actually she did not say in so many words that she does approve. But I could tell from her expression that she was relieved to know that I was going to accomplish what we have both desired so desperately in this past year: the beginning of the campaign to restore Kemet to all her glories, which will be long and hard because of Akhenaten’s almost complete uncaring for it in these recent months.
For me, of course, it will mean even more: the return to my side of him whom I have loved since a child and still love, despite all the insults and indignities he has heaped upon me and the coldness with which he has treated me since he put me aside to take Smenkhkara in my place.
It has not been an easy time for me—sometimes I have thought I would die of it, so bitterly has it hurt my heart—but I have been strong and I have persevered, as becomes a daughter of Aye and Chief Queen of the Two Lands. Now it is all going to come right at last, as I have always felt it would if I could just be brave enough to withstand the burden that might have crushed me completely were I made of weaker stuff.
But most of all, I hope and believe, it will mean happiness for him who has had so little in his tense and lonely life. As a boy, before his ailment, when he was Crown Prince, handsome, vigorous, joyously active with all the world waiting for his rule, I know he was happy. I think that perhaps for six years after we were married, while our six daughters were entering the world and our childhood love for one another was ripening into maturity, that he was happy with me. Then he began to lose heart because his worship of the Aten, even though he built this great city in the Sole God’s honor, was not spreading to the people. He destroyed Amon and the other gods, he abandoned me, he turned to Smenkhkara. Perhaps he was happy with his brother, but I do not believe it, for still the Aten failed to win the people, and still his dreams of a universally loving world under a universally loving god did not materialize. And even if he was happy with Smenkhkara, that, too, only lasted three years—could not last more, for
Kemet’s sake. All his young beauty lost, all his dreams frustrated, all his plans gone wrong: I do not think Nefer-Kheperu-Ra has been very happy with his life. It has made me love and pity him the more.… Even when he turned against me I could not stop.
In this past year word has come to me through my father, through Horemheb and through Anser-Wossett—in just a moment I will send for her, I am anxious to know that all is ready for my plan—of how completely he has abandoned physical pride and self-respect. It has been obvious to all of Kemet that he has virtually abandoned civil government, but since he has kept himself mostly hidden in the South Palace in the past twelve months only the Family and his immediate servants have been aware of his personal deterioration. Anser-Wossett from time to time sees Peneptah, the bearded scribe who assists Amonhotep, Son of Hapu, and from him she has brought me stories of little things that the others have not known—the lateness of the hour at which he rises, the listlessness with which he shuffles about the Palace, the growing disinterest in eating, the frequent nocturnal passages when he cannot sleep but goes, driven by demons—or the vengeful gods—to wander the corridors alone and unbefriended. These things have made me weep many bitter tears and have made my heart cry out to him … though when I have tried to convince him of my continuing love and my desire to help he has refused to see me and has continued on his desolate way.
But now all that will change: I shall make him happy again at last.
He is coming back—I still cannot quite believe it! I do not know what prompted me to organize my plan, to realize by some blessed instinct that now might be the time when he would respond—but somehow I knew. So I formed my household guard of twelve men, giving no explanation to my father or Horemheb, both of whom were curious but did not quite dare ask me outright. I tested their loyalty, I waited until I was sure I could trust them completely—and then I sent Anser-Wossett to him today, and all has fallen into place beyond my dearest hopes.
