On a Balcony

by David Stacton

  The prince had stopped going to the Amon temple. He had not been there for almost two years. The priests had to come to him, as they had had, though for different reasons, to come to his father. So far he took their their advice, but if he ever wished to revolt against them, the army would be on his side. For as a poacher fears game wardens, so does an army fear the power of the Church. Whatever happened, the army would remain loyal to Pharaoh. It would have to, in order to seize the country for itself.

  But the person who had changed most was Meryra. He was fascinated, despite himself. Pharaoh had given him a problem: invent me a theology.

  Of course one did not invent it. One needed the support of precedents. It was those one invented, and this was called the rediscovery of truth. It always had been, whenever a new need had arisen. One had simply to follow the rules. And Nefertiti had to be built into the ritual.

  So there Meryra had his first postulate. God is the sun. The Sun consists of male and female energy. But Pharaoh must be more important than his consort, Nefertiti or no, therefore, though Pharaoh represents the male and the royal wife the female energy, co-existent, interdependent, and inseparable, still Pharaoh must be male and female both, since all things spring from him. And so forth.

  If there was a flaw in this, Meryra could not find it. The prestige of Pharaoh was enormous. They could rely on that.

  A ritual was more difficult. But here again there was no real problem. It could be mocked up.

  Nefertiti was big with child. It made her fretful. Whenever she was bored she summoned him. They said little to each other, but they understood much, and Meryra knew where his patronage came from. So naturally Nefertiti had to be built into the ritual. He obliged, and Nefertiti, though pregnancy annoyed her very much, as it would any fastidious animal, rewarded him with a faint smile. Whether these matters really interested her would be hard to say. As a rule, women have no taste for metaphysics. But since they took up more and more of the prince’s time, then they also had to take up more and more of hers.

  The pregnancy created another problem. It left the prince alone much of the day, and since there was no art, except that of Tutmose, with which he would not meddle, he brought Meryra his own hymns to the sun.

  They were not without merit, but to criticize their errors required some tact. The grammar was shocking. But fortunately, as chief theologian, Meryra could tactfully shift the grammar on theological grounds. And what is theology, after all, but a solicitude for syntax?

  The changes, on the whole, remained minor.

  Unfortunately the prince was learning too much theology. It was difficult, at times, to restrain him. The parturition of a god is no easy matter, and the prince was beginning to kick against his womb. Proper syntax in one system is not proper syntax in another.

  All of which made Meryra uneasy. He would have been content to confect metaphysics all his life long, well fed in the shadow of Thebes. But the prince was not. Things were becoming too much for him, and he was beginning to form his own plans. Each new annoyance made them a little clearer.

  Since Nefertiti did not have much time to amuse him, he saw life become more limited for him rather than more various. Once people had ignored him. Now they wanted to change him. It was as though people in a house wanted to shut off rooms they could not use. And indeed, he had become vastly over-populated. It was amazing how many people took shelter under Pharaoh. The only way to evict them was to ignore them.

  As a result people thought he lacked warmth. Smenkara, his younger brother, did not think so, and so he took real pleasure in playing with Smenkara. Smenkara liked him. He took the boy everywhere, and made a friend of him, for all his grown-up friends had suddenly turned into councillors. They advised him, but they obeyed Tiiy. He was beginning to tire of Tiiy.

  “Will you put that child down and listen,” she snapped. “Aren’t you interested in what happens in Nubia?”

  “No,” he said. “I’m not.” It was the first time he had said it, and he found doing so an immense luxury. In a way it was a decision. He looked at Ay. He looked at Horemheb. He looked at Tiiy. No, he did not care what happened in Nubia. He saw that they all looked exactly alike. Why on earth must people confuse personal ambition with public conscience? During office hours they had created a new sex, called the bureaucrat, whose sexual characteristics were a lack of characteristics, and they all belonged to it.

  He had an appointment with Tutmose, and they were making him late.

  ‘You like to govern,’ he said. ‘Then govern.’ He saw a way out. ‘We are pleased with what you do in our name. Pharaoh cannot do everything. Therefore he delegates his divine authority to his proper instruments, as his father did before him, and when he is pleased with his servants, he rewards them.’

  He peered at them blandly, feeling quite pleased with himself. Tiiy had some difficulty in controlling her features. Ay was the first to give in. Over his face there spread one of those slow, warm smiles with which he greeted anything that impressed him as being clever.

  The prince was well satisfied. He went off to see Nefertiti before going on to Tutmose.

  Nefertiti was in her eighth month, and refused to be seen in public. She would not even let Tutmose see her. This displeased him. She was pregnant by him, and the world should know that. ‘Truth is in itself beautiful,’ he told her.

  In this case she seemed to feel that the truth was an exaggeration. And really, pregnancy had not improved her. It made her snappish and difficult to deal with. He was puzzled. He wanted her back the way she was. But he told her everything.

  “Tiiy will plot against you, you know,” she said.

  “Very well.” He was in a good humour. “We will plot against her.” Nefertiti was a woman. She should know how the thing was to be done.

  He had brought Smenkara with him. Nefertiti looked at Smenkara, who drew back into shadow. “You do well to encourage him,” she said. “If it is not a boy, then Smenkara will be your heir.”

  The prince let go of Smenkara’s hand at once. It was something that had never occurred to him.

  Thus began a tug-of-war over Smenkara, for Nefertiti produced a girl who was named Meritaten, after the Aton cult, an act of defiance designed to please neither the Amon priests nor the family.

  The prince was just as pleased to have a girl. He liked little girls, who were smooth and slippery to the touch as little boys, and yet who had no sex. It made them singularly charming. Besides, he had Nefertiti back again, though not for long. By 1383 she was again with child.

  This time, however, she was willing to parade the fact. Perhaps she had learned a lesson. If truth was what the prince wanted, then truth he should have, but have it only from her. Nor did she care for his continued encouragement of Smenkara, since the second child, too, was a girl, to be named Maketaten.

  Tiiy made no objection to the titulary. But she allowed herself to smile, she allowed herself to say that Nefertiti seemed able to produce only girls, and she made no secret of the fact that she was giving Smenkara the education proper to a crown prince.

  She even consoled with Nefertiti. She offered sympathy; and subtly, she brought forward Tadukhipa, who blinked and giggled and seemed astonished to be rescued from obscurity. As Nefertiti could see, Tadukhipa had been receiving a great deal of attention. She was thinner. She was cleaner. Her Egyptian had improved. And she, too, it seemed, had suddenly become interested in the Aton cult.

  Nefertiti sent for Meryra at once. And certainly, though Meryra was not without scruples, he had much to be grateful for. She thought he would see to the matter.

  Meanwhile the prince was restive. After all, life was not so pleasant. He might be Pharaoh, but so was his father. Everywhere he looked he saw temples of his father’s building. And though the world bowed down to him, he did not altogether like the way the world smiled when it did so. He had the pomp and nothing more. He could do anything, and yet what was there he could do?

  Sometimes, it was true, he went to see T
utmose.

  But these days Tutmose annoyed him, too. He had never thought life particularly real, but revelation had not come, and he found being a god was much like being a man. When one’s illusions turn into illusions, this is called facing up to reality. But really, reality is nothing but a mirror in which we cannot even see ourselves. In those circumstances Tutmose fascinated him to the point of despair.

  Like any artist, Tutmose was a magician, for the transmutation of metals and of the emotions are similar studies. Half of one’s life is devoted to what one can do; half to an endless search for what one cannot. In addition to this, he was curious, and curiosity has neither morals nor compunction.

  When people have everything, life is little more than a search for a further ingredient. Compared to the boredom of that, the painful search for technique is altogether enviable. For at least it can succeed, whereas the endless search for something beyond technique is almost always doomed.

  Apparently, Tutmose saw, the prince did not even know he was a religious fanatic. Perhaps he was not yet sufficiently bored to become one, since one turns to religion out of boredom, in so far as if one knows everything, the unknowable suddenly becomes extremely attractive. It was time to hurry the process up. That was Meryra’s duty, not his, but he had no objection to taking a hand in things. The trouble with Meryra was that he had no creative imagination and scholars rouse nobody.

  It never even crossed Tutmose’s mind that to play with people is sometimes dangerous, for he knew very little about them, except as subject matter. To him they were only scale models of what he was about to do next. He was tired of doing studies in disillusionment. What he wanted now was a man in the grips of faith.

  Yet the prince admired these facile masks. “Why can I not do that?” he demanded. “I tell my artists what to make. I have even used a brush to show them. But it is they who do it. Why is that?”

  It was a question best left unanswered. “It is not your medium. A king fights wars and founds cities,” said Tutmose absent-mindedly. He would rather the prince talk about religion. When he talked about religion his eyes lit up. Besides, it was extremely unwise to tell Pharaoh anything. At the most, one could suggest.

  The prince went away thoughtful and entranced. Of course. Thebes was not his city. It was not even his father’s city, though it was full of his father’s works. It was Amon’s city. Pharaoh’s city would be different. Pharaoh’s city would be Aton’s city. No one would be able to interfere with Pharaoh there. He brought the matter up with Meryra.

  They were discussing the doctrine of effective personality. It helped to pass the time. The doctrine of effective personality was that once one was dead, one’s soul might become anything one wished.

  It was the only side of death that had ever appealed to him. You saw some sweetmeats you would like to taste. You became a bird, flew in the window, took them, ate them, and then became yourself again. Why could one not do that when one was still alive? Why could even Pharaoh only do that after he was dead?

  Merya seemed abstracted. His face was pale. “And is that what you would like to do?” he asked.

  “Oh, no. I would like to be a pink lily, floating open on a lake for a little while. And then, before it shut, I would have tired of it.”

  Meryra tried to concentrate. Tadukhipa had died that morning. It was against all his principles. Intrigue was not safe. But it had been that or lose Nefertiti’s influence, and he knew very well that the Aton cult owed everything to her. It was she who directed Pharaoh. But when he had told her what had been done, she had sent him away at once. She had looked frightened. The responsibility of the secret was then to be his. He knew she would not protect him. Therefore he must turn for protection to Pharaoh.

  He caught at that last remark. Did it mean that Pharaoh was becoming bored with the cult? Pharaoh must not become bored, for Meryra needed his attention. He must ingratiate himself.

  He had not himself, thank God, ordered her death. He had only hinted. But the people he had hinted to would have to be rewarded, and he had many enemies. Every time Pharaoh gave a new endowment to the Aton temple, another enemy was born among the priests of Amon.

  “My divine father, the Aton, has commanded I build him a city,” said Pharaoh uncertainly, and looked at Meryra out of distant eyes, his body trembling like that of a stalking cat. “And there I shall build him a temple, for Meryra, his High Priest.” It was an out-and-out bribe.

  But it was a most convenient one, and who could tell? Meryra had lost his equanimity. Perhaps the Aton did exist. After all, he had not precisely made it up. He had only enlarged upon it a little. Who knew what powers he may have released?

  He told himself it was not panic he felt, but inspiration. He told Pharaoh he would spend the night in prayer. The site would be revealed.

  And he spent the night in prayer. The courtyard was deserted, the guards restive, the altar empty, and the floral offerings wilted. Meryra was in despair. For of course where was no Aton. There never had been.

  Yet there was something here. Something did move in these corridors, and there was something wrong with the night. If one has arthritis, one tires of waiting for revelation. It is easier to improvise.

  In short, he was terrified, and inspiration came.

  The rustling resolved itself into those gentlemen to whom he had been so unwise as to hint much on the strength of the very little that Nefertiti had said. And they arrived with an ultimate irony, for it appeared that they had come too late. Tadukhipa had died a natural death. Forcible dieting had ruined a heart already strained to the breaking point by obesity.

  But no one would believe that. Tiiy would not believe it. Nefertiti would not believe it. The Amon priests would not believe it. And besides, Nefertiti was pregnant for the third time. She was a virtual prisoner in the palace, because of that, and so she could not help him.

  Under the circumstances it seemed better to leave. Meryra told Pharaoh the Aton had indeed spoken.

  Five days later, under heavy guard, they were sailing northward down the Nile, no one knew why or where.

  Thus was founded the city of Aketaten, the city of the Horizon of the Sun Disk, which was to endure for ever and ever. It endured, all told, for exactly seventeen years, which was a year or two longer than that glorious god, the Sun, its founder.

  But how were they to know that then?

  Four

  The city was waiting to be founded. Cities do. For cities are like the demons of darkness: they can do their worst only after someone has evoked them. They sit waiting invisible for the right tribe to cross the watershed or ford beside which they are latent.

  In the beginning they are charming, and pampered, and a little spoiled, for they are always the favourite child of someone. Their founders dote on them. And then, when they are strong enough, they develop a life of their own and devour those who created them. Then their servants they keep in fattening pens, called slums. They swallow down whole generations. Their founder lies forgotten. The purpose which brought them into being has long been lost sight of. But if they survive their adolescence, they are enormously long lived. Thebes was like that. One did not say Amenophis or the prince lived at Thebes. One said that Thebes was where Pharaoh lived.

  But even cities die at last. The world is littered with their exoskeletons. Some cities die young, and they have the pathos of the grave of a talented child. If you have ever wandered through a city at three in the morning, you realize very quickly how well they get along without their inhabitants. But wander through Fatehpur Sikri, and you realize the sadness of a city nobody ever believed in. Cities of this sort never escaped the mind of their creator, and so died when he did. Such cities, in that case, are like casts taken from the brain. The brain decayed centuries ago. But here these streets faithfully reproduce its convolutions. Such a city, you see, has had no time to develop illusions of its own.

  But at the moment the city had not yet come into view, and the prince was becoming impatient. In actua
lity the Nile is by no means a fascinating river, and all the best sites seemed to have been taken already.

  The party consisted of ten boats, for the prince, whose organizing abilities were remarkable, had provided stonemasons, architects, priests, sacred utensils, a squad of designers, three chariots, six horses, Meryra, and Tutmose. Tutmose was, as usual, calm and interested. He had never been present at the fulfilment of a prophecy, and he waited upon the event with the liveliest expectation.

  Meryra was nervous. He knew nothing of geography, to sail down had seemed easier than to sail up, and he hoped for the best. There would, he assured the prince, be a sign. But so far, on the fifth day out, there had been no sign.

  The prince rose early each morning, scanned the river ahead, and by afternoon had become fretful. But now, on this morning, the little birds’ flight of barges, rounding a curve of the Nile where the cliffs rose steep from the river, came suddenly to an open place. The oars dipped in the water, lifted, scattered slimy drops, and paused. Caught in a gust of wind, the sails hooped out. And with the vast chattering of a plague of anguished mice, shore birds large and small flowed in a smooth sheet off the water, flapped for an instant, turned with a shriek, hovered, and then scattered once more into constituent birds, as though someone had smashed a curtain and it fell tinkling down again like glass. Swooping and rising over the plain, the black loose-piled carpet of birds curved and arced into the distance. The boats were ordered to halt. The sign had been made known to the prince. Aketaten had been founded.

  One can have ghosts before their birth as well as afterwards. Before them rose the shimmering white city that was to be. Meryra, who by this time had grown desperate, said yes indeed, he recognized it, it was indeed the place.