“Now we will take his body back to Thebes so that all can ridicule this ridiculous prince of Hatti!” said Salitas.
Horemheb raised his hand in the air and the cheering stopped.
The general turned his cold gaze upon Salitas. “I don’t recall giving you the order to kill the chamberlain. Do I need to remind you, Salitas, who gives the orders here?”
“He disrespected you in the face of your army. I merely upheld your honor. If anything, I should be rewarded.”
“When have I ever needed you to uphold my honor? I decide who is executed and the timing of the execution, not you. Do you understand!?” shouted Horemheb.
“As you wish, General. I would only say one last thing on the matter. It would be a grave mistake to allow this Hittite convoy to return to Hatti with the prince’s body. His appearance in his homeland will only fester rage and contempt against us for generations, just as we had for the death of Lady Lupita. Martyrs will surely be borne of Zenanza’s death,” said Salitas.
“Whoever possesses the boldness to rise up against Egypt will be slaughtered. My word to the Hittite prince will be kept and you will not disrupt or change my orders again or I will strip you completely of your rank,” replied Horemheb.
Salitas matched Horemheb’s stare before reversing his horse, and racing back to Egypt alone. Horemheb and his army remained while the Hittite convoy loaded the bodies of their chamberlain and Prince Zenanza onto the carriage for the long journey back to their land of Hatti.
CHAPTER 40
At the first sight of the morning sun, a crowd gathered in front of the Amun temple chanting Senpaten and Ay’s names. Dancers and musicians flooded the main road encircling the temple, performing in celebration of the day’s wedding festivities.
In the solitude of her bedchamber, Senpaten sat alone lamenting her fate. She wiped her tears away and applied double the amount of black kohl around her eyes to conceal it. Mayati entered her room just after she finished applying the last of the beet-colored paint to her cheeks.
“Ay forced me to tell him about the letter,” confessed Mayati. "I'm so sorry."
“Don’t cry, sister, it’s what’s meant to be. Perhaps, it’s best to keep royal blood on Egypt’s throne,” replied Senpaten. “It may have been what Mother would have wanted.”
“Mother would have never wanted you to marry her father. It was never her plan for us. Don’t marry him, Senpaten. He’s an evil man, and we should leave this evil city behind and travel away together.”
“To where, Mayati? Thebes is our home now, there’s no more Amarna. The fire has reduced it to ashes.”
“What about T’aru? Father used to speak of it as his parents’ place of refuge and contentment. With Halima’s help, we could steal away in the late hour when no one would see us,” said Mayati.
Senpaten stood up and kissed her on her cheek. “No, sister. It would destroy me to see what happened to Hani come upon Halima. It’s too risky.”
Despite the gloom brewing inside her, Senpaten’s outward appearance was beautiful, as she was dressed in her best linen, and adorned with gold, silver, and lapis-lazuli jewels. Bead-net layered her body from head-to-toe.
Mayati smiled and gave her sister a hug. “You look so much like Mother,” she said.
The mention of their mother brought up a question in Senpaten’s mind she had longed to ask Mayati.
“Do you still believe in the afterlife?” asked Senpaten.
“What do you mean? Of course I do. It’s what our parents, and their parents and even the Aten teaches us. How could you question it?”
“Then why have we not seen our mother, nor our father, or even our sister Meketa again? They should have completed their journey by now and returned to us. Something is wrong, Mayati.”
“They could have lost their way, but it’s only a matter of time before the Aten god will set them on the right path and sends us their message.”
“Maybe the Aten is powerless here in this city of Amun, and maybe the afterlife doesn’t exist, and all we really have left are just hopes and memories,” said Senpaten.
“No, sister, you mustn’t think that way. If there is no afterlife then we have nothing.”
Senpaten embraced Mayati again. “We have each other.”
“Forever through eternity,” replied Mayati.
The sisters locked hands.
“Escort me to the ceremony. I don’t want to go alone,” said Senpaten.
The sisters boarded the royal chariot and were driven to the Amun temple, holding each other’s hands for support the entire ride.
When they arrived, Sia and Kafrem were already inside prepared to bear witness to the ceremony. Senpaten was despondent at the first sight of Ay and his wife, Teyla, entering the temple. Ay approached her with a lotus blossom and Senpaten accepted it without looking at his face. Once they stepped up to the altar together, Sia unrolled the marriage contract that he and Ay had written prior to the ceremony and read it aloud:
“This man, Ay, son of Yuya and Tuyu, comes before us today in the year thirteen hundred twenty-two to form a union of marriage with Queen Senpaten, daughter of Akenaten and Nefertiti, queen of Upper and Lower Egypt. They stand before the god Amun and I, Sia, his lector priest. This marriage contract validates the authority of Ay to rule as pharaoh and it prohibits you, Queen Senpaten, from divorcing him and marrying another—”
Senpaten looked over at her sister. They both shared the same distressed expression. Not even a divorce now could help her escape the claws of her grandfather.
While Sia read the rest of the marriage contract, Senpaten allowed her thoughts to roam free as she focused away in the distance, her attention not in the present, but faraway in her past, to the time when her mother would shower her with little kisses on the bank of the river, and her father would sing her favorite lullaby before putting her and her sisters to bed. Maybe her parents, Tut and her sister Meketa were all together in the afterlife enjoying each other’s company so much that they had forgotten about her and Mayati, and decided to remain there without ever returning.
Sia interrupted Senpaten’s daydream. “Do you understand, queen?”
She didn’t know what she was expected to have understood, but she replied “yes,” anyway.
“Then I will continue,” said Sia. “Upon your death, your royal treasures will be divided among your husband, Ay, or any children you might conceive with him. Ay will move from his home with Teyla into the royal palace chamber to reside with you, Queen Senpaten. This will take place in the eyes of Amun and in front of the witnesses, Kafrem and Teyla. Now, as I have ordained you husband and wife, you will both sign and seal this document.”
Ay took the reed brush from Sia and signed his name to the papyrus. When he finished, he handed the reed to Senpaten. Hesitating before the scroll, she turned and gazed at her sister. Mayati shook her head “no” with tears in her eyes. Senpaten shifted her focus away from Mayati and dipped the brush in ink and signed the contract.
Outside the temple, Horemheb and his soldiers had returned from their confrontation with Zenanza and his convoy. Surprised by the riotous crowd celebrating in the streets, Horemheb dismounted his horse and approached a blind musician playing his harp in the courtyard.
“Why is there a celebration today? Is there a new festival in honor of Amun?” asked Horemheb.
“It’s not a festival. It is a royal union taking place now in the Amun temple.”
“What royal union?”
“We celebrate the marriage of our Queen Senpaten to her grandfather, Ay, our new pharaoh,” explained the musician.
Horemheb was stunned. It can’t be true, he thought.
The general ordered his men to remain in the courtyard as he hurried into the entrance of the temple. He entered the moment Sia placed the crown of Upper and Lower Egypt upon Ay’s head.
“You are now husband to Queen Senpaten and pharaoh of the glorious kingdom of Egypt. May you and your queen reign for a thousand y
ears under the guidance of Amun, Osiris, and Anubis,” Sia decreed, unaware of Horemheb’s presence.
Ay turned to Horemheb and smiled. “General, it is good to see you. I’ll need you to report to me at dawn on Egypt’s state of affairs with our tributaries. I believe there is gold owed to us that needs to be collected.”
Horemheb had no choice but to nod and prostrate himself before the new pharaoh. Ay had won, proving himself to be more devious and clever than the general had estimated, and for that, the Amun god had rewarded him.
Before Mayati took a step to leave the temple with Horemheb, Senpaten embraced her as if it would be their last time. Ay had promised Senpaten that her sister would neither be harmed nor banished from Egypt as long as she went along with the marriage, but he also made it clear that Mayati was no longer welcome inside the royal palace. She would now have to reside in Horemheb’s and Mundi’s home.
Senpaten told her sister she loved her and would see her again soon. Once Mayati left the ceremony with Horemheb, Ay grabbed Senpaten’s arm and pulled her close.
“I am your only family now and I expect you to conceive my heir,” he whispered in her ear. “Return to your chamber and prepare yourself for me.”
Senpaten was repulsed by the thought of copulation with Ay. Though the threat was imminent, she refused to believe it could ever be enforced. Nonetheless, she was determined to maintain her dignity by not shedding a tear in his presence as she walked out from the Amun temple with her head held high.
IN THE SACRED TEMPLE OF ARINNA, a lamb was brought forward by a Hittite servant and placed into a pit at the base of the Sun-goddess statue—the most powerful god of the land of Hatti. Plated in gold, the towering structure portrayed a woman seated on her throne, and around her shoulders, a long flowing robe made of a purple cloth. King Suppiluliumas stepped into the pit, forced the head of the lamb against the ground, and slashed its neck in an upward motion so as to direct the flow of blood directly into a golden beaker handed to him by the servant. Once it was filled, he set the beaker on the ground before the Sun-goddess, and allowed the remainder of the lamb’s blood to drain out into the pit. The servant then carried the lamb carcass out of the temple to be butchered and eaten by the sons of Suppiluliumas, while two additional servants brought loaves of bread and placed them into the blood-filled pit.
King Suppiluliumas was dipping pieces of the bread in the lamb’s blood and consuming it when his wife, Tawanna, burst into the temple’s inner sanctuary.
“What are you doing here?” he asked, wiping the blood away from his mouth.
She didn’t answer. She trudged straight to the altar and knelt in front of him, face-to-face, her lips close to his as if she was contemplating kissing him. There was something unnerving about her blank expression and the one tear that formed in her eye and rolled down her cheek. Tawanna suddenly slapped Suppiluliumas across his face.
“I begged you not to let him go,” she said. “I begged you!”
Before the king could react, Tawanna stormed out of the sanctuary past the guard carrying Zenanza’s body. He carried the boy over to his father and placed him in his arms. King Suppiluliumas held his dead son in disbelief. A piercing wail rose to his lips and the grieving father screamed at the top of his lungs.
Suppiluliumas rested Zenanza’s limp body on the altar of the Sun-Goddess and knelt beside him, caressing his son’s withered gray face. “Oh goddess of Arinna,” he prayed. “You did no evil to the people of Egypt, yet look what they have done to me!”
WHEN AY ENTERED SENPATEN’S BEDCHAMBER, he was delighted to find her sitting up under the bedcover prepared to consummate their marriage. Ay removed his garments. Tut’s Aten amulet momentarily drew Senpaten’s attention away from the old man’s sagging, wrinkled skin hanging from his arms, chest, and abdomen.
“You are as beautiful to me as your mother,” said Ay as he crawled into bed with her.
Senpaten flinched at what he said but kept her eyes locked on the amulet. Her eyelids appeared heavy, and she struggled to keep them open.
“What’s wrong with you? Are you intoxicated?”
When she didn’t answer, Ay became suspicious and reached under the bedcover to touch her. There was a dampness, thick and slippery, that met his hand. He snatched the bedcover off of her and was horrified by what he saw.
Senpaten sat calmly, drenched in her own blood with a dagger buried deep in her abdomen. Only the handle was visible. As Ay searched her eyes for an explanation, Senpaten lunged forward, grabbed a hold of Tut’s amulet and ripped it from Ay’s neck.
“I am a queen of Egypt and my body belongs to me. You are nothing but a lowly servant and I will never be a wife to you, because I am, and will forever be, the wife of my beloved Tutankhaten.”
Senpaten took in a deep breath, but it was her last. Still clutching Tut’s Aten amulet in her hand, she drifted off to an endless sleep, quietly onward to her journey.
ON A CLEAR, SUNNY MORNING, Sia walked to the Amun temple to prepare a sacrifice for the gods Mut and Khonsu. All was calm in Thebes. The disease that had ravaged much of the Egyptian empire had disappeared as mysteriously as it had first emerged in the Theban village.
Out on the river, Sia caught a glimpse of the royal canoe with its single sail expanding in the wind. It had been some time since Sia had spoken with the pharaoh. Since Queen Senpaten’s death, her entombment in the Valley of the Kings and the pharaoh’s subsequent official coronation, Sia had interacted very little with Egypt’s new ruler.
After the sacrifice, Sia went into the temple’s inner sanctuary. He put on his high priest leopard skin cloak and knelt before the Amun statue. The new edifice, built after Akenaten’s guards destroyed the original many years before, was not as tall. It was identical to the old statue and bore the same ram’s head, but with no built-in contraptions that allowed blood to flow on command or the statue to spontaneously rumble.
Sia retrieved a clay pot and filled it with twigs and grass. In it, he placed a wax figurine formed into the likeness of a man and wrapped in a piece of the pharaoh’s nemes head cloth. He torched the contents of the pot and it silently burned to ashes. Sia grabbed a nearby vase where he had collected blood from a bull calf and poured a generous amount of the coagulated blood into the clay pot. He then smeared some of the blood mixture across the back of his left thigh.
Carrying the pot, Sia left the inner sanctuary, descended the steps of the temple, and went to the bank of the river. He spat into the pot and set it on the ground. Sia unearthed a stone halfway buried in the mud and with it smashed the pot to pieces. This was the same ritual the Oracle had taught Sia in his youth.
After reciting an incantation, he scattered the pieces into the fast-moving current of the river, the same river that Ay and his wife Teyla were sailing that day. The newly ordained pharaoh and queen were admiring the beauty of Thebes as they did every morning. On his head, Ay wore the nemes head cloth and around his neck, Tut’s Aten amulet hidden underneath his garment. He wore it not because he admired it, but because it had been a possession of a pharaoh, one of true royal lineage, a position he envied.
As Ay and Teyla sailed in their royal canoe, Ay, as he always did, dipped fruit in the river to cleanse it before feeding it to himself and his wife. When Ay turned to retrieve more berries from the fruit basket, Teyla saw a mark on his leg, partially hidden by the hem of his garment.
“What is that on your thigh?” she asked.
Her concern alarmed him. “Where?”
“Pull your garment above your knee.”
Ay pulled up his garment. A purplish bruise the size and shape of an olive was on the back of his left thigh. Ay couldn’t believe what he was seeing.
“It’s an illusion. The disease perished years ago,” said Ay.
“It cannot be an illusion if we both see it, my husband. It’s more sinister than a disease. It is an unrelenting plague, and it has found you,” cried Teyla.
NINE YEARS LATER, citizens of Thebes gather
ed in the courtyard of the Colonnade Hall to hear their pharaoh speak. Pharaoh Horemheb was now in his fifth year of reign. Ay, whose reign had last only four years, was long buried, his life cut short by the mysterious disease that had killed thousands before in Amarna. Buried with Ay was the knowledge that he deliberately left Amenhotep with the fatal doses of the cure, knowing the pharaoh would consume it all at once to his demise. It was the first step he had taken to secure his position as pharaoh, but what happened in the unexplained death of his daughter, Queen Nefertiti, remained a mystery.
Ay’s death had cleared the path for Horemheb’s ascension, and to prevent Sia, Ay’s staunchest enemy of the two, from succeeding him as pharaoh, Ay had turned over Neper’s scroll (that contained Sia’s illicit secrets), to Horemheb just before his death, and the general used it as collateral to quash any ambition Sia might have had for the position of pharaoh. As a token for his cooperation, Horemheb gave Sia his blessing to become the new oracle of Egypt.
On the day of the festival commemorating Sia’s new position as oracle, Pharaoh Horemheb appeared at the podium side-by-side with Sia, wearing his copper war helmet in place of the customary nemes head cloth. His wife, Mundi, stood directly behind him, admiring the enthusiasm of the crowd for her husband.
A young sturdy man in a soldier’s uniform escorted Mayati to her royal position next to Mundi. The soldier was well-built, tall and muscular, as Pharaoh Horemheb had been in his youth. The pharaoh welcomed him to stand by his side opposite of Sia.
“Praises to the almighty god Amun and to Osiris, Montu, Isis, and Horus,” shouted Horemheb, his voice amplified and echoing off the surrounding cliffs. “Egypt has flourished with law, order, peace, and abundance now that the heretic Pharaoh Akenaten and his god, the Aten have perished. Their blasphemous names have been erased from the Colonnade Hall and from every monument and statue in Egypt. I have destroyed their city of Amarna by fire so neither their works nor the Aten will be remembered. The names of Akenaten, Senpaten, Ay, Nefertiti and Tut have been stricken from the history of Egypt and of the world forever. They will be forgotten, but my name, Pharaoh Horemheb, will last until the end of time!”
Valley of the Kings Page 33
