Return to Thebes

by Allen Drury

  I shall not truly exult until all has been safely accomplished. But for the first time in many years I, too, believe I will once again be happy, which in my darkest moments I thought had been denied me forever.

  It is nearing time to go to my formal banquet room for dinner, and Anser-Wossett must come to me. We have much to talk about.

  I rise from the bench before my mirror, where I have been thinking these things, hardly daring to acknowledge the growing hope and excitement I have seen in my eyes (which still are beautiful, though very sad—but much less sad now, and very soon, I hope, not sad at all), and go to the door, open it and clap my hands for a servant. For a moment none are about, the busy palace seems unusually quiet; but presently I see one of my lesser ladies in waiting coming toward me down the long painted corridor.

  Amazingly, she weeps. What can it mean?

  What can it mean?

  My heart feels a sudden terror, I do not know why. But very soon, in a voice racked with sobs, she tells me, and I do.

  I know now where Anser-Wossett is. Her battered body was tossed off at the palace gate a few minutes ago by a chariot that fled away, its driver masked and unrecognized. It was obvious she had been tortured before she died. So all must be known to someone who wishes us ill.

  My poor Anser-Wossett who has been with me so many years! Oh, my heart grieves, it grieves! Good, faithful, loving, loyal—ah, such evil, such evil! May the Aten help us now…!

  For many minutes I stand like stone while the lady weeps beside me. I am too stunned to weep, two stunned to think … for a while.

  But presently I do.

  I am not a daughter of Aye and Chief Queen of the Two Lands for nothing. My heart which has known so much sorrow can stand a little more.

  I shall harden myself. I shall meet what comes without fear. Right now there is just one thing to do: go to my husband and rescue him.

  I call the captain of my guard, I give him the orders, I prepare myself hastily to leave. I wear my golden shift and my Blue Crown, for I go as a Queen with my head held high and my face once again—as always when my people see me—commanding and composed.

  I am Nefertiti and I will not be denied.

  No one sees us leave the Palace and start across the city whose many thousands, all unknowing of the events that are occurring in their midst to affect their lives forever, are placidly eating before their peaceful hearths.

  A chill wind is driving off the Nile now that night has truly come. It is turning winter and soon it will be cold: but not for Akhenaten and Nefertiti.

  We will win this battle and, with Father Aten’s help, regain in happiness our full rule and glory.

  He has made many errors: no doubt I have. But from now on we will do all things right for the Aten and for our beloved kingdom and people of the Two Lands.

  ***

  Aye

  Now is this hour of final reckoning, before Horemheb and I go to my sister to secure her compliance in the terrible thing we must do, I seek a balance between the good I have known of my nephew Akhenaten and the evil he has brought upon our beloved kingdom and people of the Two Lands. I must also, if I can, accept the fate that very likely is about to fall equally upon my beautiful, misguided daughter, who has suffered so much and whom I have loved so much as things have spun down and down with increasing rapidity for them both.

  Of my nephew Nefer-Kheperu-Ra, what is one to say? I loved him as a handsome child before his malady overcame him, I loved him as a young, misshapen but well-meaning Co-Regent, I still loved him as an increasingly willful and headstrong King; but each stage of love has been less than the one before, and steadily my dismay and mistrust have grown. I have forgiven him so much: we all have forgiven him so much. The balance finally drawn must, I fear, come down against him.

  We could accept, I think, the early attempts to establish the Aten—the murder of my brother Aanen, who asked for it—the attempt, for which I was directly responsible, to give the Aten equal stature but still maintain Amon and the other gods. We could even accept his desperate and pathetic attempts to achieve the son Nefertiti could not give him by marrying his three oldest daughters, and by them having three daughters, all puny and mercifully now dead. But none of us has been able to accept these years just past when all the gods were destroyed, and when amiable and foredoomed Smenkhkara shared the throne, met his fate, and left his brother to decline ever more swiftly into the almost animal squalor we now see when we visit him in his haunted palace.

  Smenkhkara, I know, made some earnest if ineffectual attempts to keep the government going during the period he shared the throne, while Akhenaten became ever more lost in his fading dream of the Aten. Horemheb, my other son Nakht-Min and I did what we could to help, an assistance Smenkhkara accepted gratefully, for he was very young. But it did no good: the whole thing continued to slide both within Kemet and on our borders, until the awful night when Nefertiti inspired us to kill him, and his mother, my sister the Great Wife, agreed.

  We thought then, foolishly as it turned out, that the shock of his brother’s death would drive Akhenaten out of his lethargy and, after a period of suitable mourning, bring him back to active rule. We also thought it would make him compliant to our growing conviction that Amon and the other gods must be restored, if not to their full power, then at least to a position befitting their place in all our ancient traditions. But neither, alas, was meant to be.

  Instead we have the lonely and haunted recluse to whom we report the formalities of our rule in his name, but whose slovenly person we can hardly bear to look at, and whose intelligence, while still great, is increasingly far away in the depths of mourning and the pointless worship of the Aten.

  Or so we had thought until tonight. Suddenly tonight he has revived and with my daughter’s aid threatens to resume with all his old demanding persistence the power of the Double Crown and the active and unrelenting pursuit of his sacrilegious Sole God.

  For perhaps an hour after Horemheb came to me with the news Hatsuret and his hidden acolytes had tortured out of poor Anser-Wossett (a violence I would never have condoned had I known about it, unless it were absolutely necessary: I think frightening her with it would have been enough, though she was always fiercely loyal to my daughter and it might not have been) I remained silent in my chair, staring blankly at the wall while a thousand things raced through my mind.

  I dismissed Amonhotep, Son of Hapu, who had been with me discussing matters of government, and ordered him to tell no one. He looked deeply hurt and offended, for it is the first time in many years that we have not sought his wisdom in our family councils. But I told him that the responsibility now rested solely on my sister, myself and my son Horemheb. Wounded, he went away. For a moment I had a pang of uneasiness and regret; then I put it aside. We can count on his loyalty, we always have. He will tell no one, and it is better that on this final dreadful occasion he not be directly involved. It is truly our responsibility alone, for we, even more than his old tutor, have made Akhenaten what he is.

  So I sat and thought, while patiently Horemheb sat with me. He made no attempt to influence me, he spoke no word. He simply watched me with a complete and controlled attentiveness.

  He is very shrewd, Horemheb, very determined and very astute. There is no way for him to reach the place he would like to fill but he is an invaluable assistant to me in all that must be done to save the Two Lands.

  So a few moments ago I finally turned to him and asked:

  “What would you suggest, my son?”

  “There can be only one solution,” he replied in a somber voice.

  “I shudder to contemplate it,” I said.

  “So do I,” he said calmly, “but we have no choice.”

  “Can we not somehow banish him?”

  He looked at me long and steadily before he replied with a quiet certainty:

  “Father, you know perfectly well it would not work. Nefer-Kheperu-Ra perhaps has nothing left but his stubbornness, but he does h
ave that. The wound must be cleansed completely, and it must be cleansed immediately, now the opportunity has presented itself. We must close our hearts, harden our resolve, ask the blessing of Amon and the gods, and strike without mercy, leaving no possible chance that he could ever return to power.”

  “To kill the Living Horus,” I almost whispered, so awful is it to contemplate, even now, “is no light thing, my son.”

  “I do not approach it lightly,” he said with the same implacable calm. “I approach it as the thing that must be done to save the Two Lands from utter and final destruction, both within and without.”

  “Tut should be told.”

  “Tut is a child,” he said with a sudden harshness. “We will tell him when it is over. It will be time enough then for him to know that what he fears has happened. As Regent, I will inform him in due course. First, it must be done.”

  “‘As Regent’?” I echoed sharply. “Who said you will be Regent, my son?”

  “You have just heard me say it, Father,” he said, staring me impassively straight in the eyes. For a second I was so taken aback by his sheer effrontery that I could not speak. Then I replied in the cold tones that have made many men tremble at the wrath of the Councilor Aye:

  “I shall be Regent, and there will be no further discussion of it!”

  “You are old, Father,” he said, “and I am still in my forties, still relatively young and vigorous. And I have the army at my back. It would ill become us to engage in an unseemly battle for control of the King.”

  “You have some of the army at your back,” I said, for it is true, he has many divisions loyal to him, “but I also have many members of it who still stand in awe and complete loyalty to the Divine Father-in-law Aye. Is it civil war you wish us to fall into over the corpse of your cousin Akhenaten? If so”—and my voice was as steely and unrelenting as I have ever made it—“I am ready.”

  He paused then in his headlong flight toward insane ambition and studied me for a very long time, very carefully, while my expression remained stern and never yielding. My eyes met his with an icy sternness as I thought: This is my son. What have I created…? But I shall ever be stronger than he, and he knows it in his heart.

  And presently I could sense that with an obvious great effort of will he was acknowledging this to himself and abandoning his insane bluff to replace the one man whose consistent strength through more than thirty years has been the true salvation of Kemet in all her troubles.

  “Very well,” he said at last, very quietly, still not taking his eyes from mine. “But I shall be King’s Deputy, then.”

  “You may be that,” I conceded, for our strengths are so nearly equal that, though I did not show it, I feared a battle between us as much as he. “We shall proclaim all from the Window of Appearances in due course.”

  “After the occupant of the Window of Appearances is no more,” he said softly; and though I shuddered again at the enormity of it, I agreed with equal softness, “It is the will of the gods.… However,” I added firmly, “there must be no harm to Nefertiti.”

  “She has already been warned,” he said, “and if she is as intelligent as I know her to be, she will already have abandoned her pathetic plot and be even now preparing herself for graceful widowhood.”

  “Are you sure of that?” I demanded. For the first time in our interview he smiled, a slight, wry smile.

  “No, I am not sure of it, Father. You have bred a family of lions, and as one of them I cannot vouch for what one of the others may do.”

  “Your sister must not be harmed,” I said again sternly. He responded with a cold indifference. “That is up to her. I hope she will not be.”

  I made it an order:

  “You will see to it!”

  He gave me a steady look and shrugged.

  “It is up to her,” he said again; and turning the subject with a sudden briskness, “We must yet have the approval of the Great Wife before we act. Do you wish to go to her alone, or shall we go together?”

  “Together, I think,” I said, and repeated, again with a shudder at the enormity about to engulf us: “The murder of the Living Horus is no light thing.”

  “Good!” he said, leaping to his feet. “We must go to her at once, for the time is very short in which to catch him unprepared at the Palace.”

  “Yes,” I agreed, and also stood up. As I did so there came a frantic pounding on the door. Without announcement or apology Ramesses burst in, wild-eyed and desperate.

  “The Queen has left the North Palace!” he cried. “We must stop her at once!”

  “Yes!” Horemheb exclaimed, starting for the door. Then he paused in mid-step and said slowly, “No, let her come to him.… We will meet her there.”

  “No harm to her!” I shouted in a terrible voice that made Ramesses turn pale at my fury. But Horemheb gave no sign.

  “Go to the Great Wife and send me word at once, Father!” he yelled over his shoulder as they crossed the threshold and started running down the hall. “Tell her it is too late to stop the just vengeance of the gods!”

  “I will!” I shouted back. “But again, no harm to your sister!”

  But they were gone at the turning of the corridor and there was no answer. I flung a robe around me against the cold and hastened shouting through the house for a chariot.

  And now I am at the gates of the lovely little palace my nephew built for his mother in happier days, and now they are escorting me to her private chamber. And now together we must agree upon our last, awful act for the sake of Kemet and the millions who, all unwitting, plunge with us tonight into a future I believe not even the greatest gods can foretell.

  ***

  Akhenaten

  (life, health, prosperity!)

  Can it be hope I feel, after all these awful months? I can scarcely imagine it. Yet do I still have sufficient faith in the word of Nefertiti that I believe it must be so.…

  Only you and I, Father Aten, know the agonies I have gone through since they came to me with word of my brother’s death. The reason was never officially discovered, but for the two of them to die so swiftly and so horribly there could be but one explanation. Someone saw fit to poison them: someone very close to me. I scarcely dare admit to myself it was at the order of my mother, my uncle and my cousin Horemheb, yet there is no other sensible conclusion. Is it any wonder I have retreated into myself to nurse my awful pain and loneliness as best I could? I have not dared do other, for daily I have lived in fear that presently they would come for me.

  The Living Horus, Great Bull, Son of the Sun, He Who Has Survived, Living in Truth Forever, Nefer-Kheperu-Ra Akhenaten, King and Pharaoh of the Two Lands—cowering like a thief in his own palace, terrified of his own family! Father Aten, it has been dreadful for me. Still, I could do no other.

  For the seventy days it took to embalm him, I ventured out only to supervise the process. So terrible was my obvious grief that no one ventured to speak to me, let alone harm me, then. I was enwrapped in grief, engulfed in grief, drowned forever, it seemed to me, in grief. I do not recall now whether I even knew when Ra rose in the east and set in the west during those endless interwoven days and nights: It seems to me only a long, gray blur in which I came and went between the House of Vitality, where the rites went on, and the Palace. Priests of the Aten accompanied me wherever I went, chanting their dirges for the dead. Frequently, for hours at a time, I could not even move, but only lay weeping on the floor before the sculpture of that beloved head that Tuthmose completed for me only a week before he died. I could not believe he was gone, my little brother who grew to be such a comfort to my heart and such a strength to my being. But he was: he was.

  The mummification of Merytaten I left to others. I scarcely knew when it was completed, gave to Nefertiti and my mother (how could she have the courage, the effrontery and the heartlessness?) the task of presiding over her final going beneath the ground in the Royal Wadi in the eastern hills of Akhet-Aten. I was notified that it had occur
red, but that was only a day before I had to preside at my own grief-filled ceremony. I barely noticed: my daughter’s going moved me very little. I never liked her particularly. She was simply a convenience who, like her mother, could not even bear me a son. She was useful to keep the domestics of the Palace in line: that was all.

  To Smenkhkara, however—even now it cuts me like a knife to say that name—I gave the most tender and most loving entombment he could possibly have desired. The memory of his sunny nature, always open, generous, undemanding, comforting, supported even as it devastated me. I got through it somehow and arranged it so that all who come after will know how much he meant to me.

  I used one of the coffins originally prepared for Merytaten, for there had been no time to prepare one suitably ornate for him. Around the head of the one to whom I had given Nefertiti’s name of Nefer-neferu-aten and the title, “Beloved of Akhenaten,” I caused to be placed the sheet-gold vulture that usually bedecks the crown of a Queen: the golden wings will protect him forever. His body I caused to be mummified, not with arms crossed over the chest like a King’s as though to carry scepters, but as a Queen with his left hand closed upon his breast and his right arm stretched along his side: thus will all know the position he held in my life. And at the foot of his coffin I caused to be inscribed, as if from him to me—as the God who will someday raise him from the afterworld—the prayer I composed myself in one of those occasional curious periods of detachment that come in the midst of deepest grieving:

  “I shall breathe the sweet air that issues from thy mouth. My prayer is that I may behold thy beauty daily, that I may hear thy sweet voice belonging to the North Wind, that my body may grow young with life through thy love; that thou mayest give me thy hands bearing thy sustenance and I receive it and live by it; and that thou mayest call upon my name forever and ever and it shall not fail in thy mouth.”

  Thus will all know how tenderly and eternally he touched my heart.

  Then I came away to return here to the Great Palace and resume the seclusion from which I have not, from that day to this, gone forth.