A God Against the Gods

by Allen Drury

  Until, perhaps, today.

  Today, using the excuse of my health and the desire that he become fully educated in the methods of government should the Aten decide suddenly to call me to the Valley of the Kings, I am making the Crown Prince Amonhotep IV my Co-Regent and am simultaneously marrying him, as I was married myself, into the sturdy house of Yuya and Tuya which has already given Kemet two strong queens in Mutemwiya and Tiye, and great public servants such as Aye. This is good, strong blood, which has been of great benefit to the House of Thebes. It will continue to be so, through Nefertiti. And in due course other purposes will be achieved.

  It is quite true that the growing uncertainties of my health make it vital that I have someone young and vigorous—or if not “vigorous” in the usual sense, at least determined—beside me. I find ceremony increasingly burdensome, increasingly hard: yet there are times, ordained on the calendar from the Beginning, when I must participate, no matter how I feel. It is true that three years ago I delayed by one day the start of the Festival of Opet—which I myself established—that ceremony in which Amon in his sacred barque is carried up the river from his temple at Karnak to visit his new temple at Luxor which I am building for him, there to remain for two weeks while all of Thebes gives itself up to carnival, and then be returned with similar pomp to his ancient resting place. But only once have I been so ill. All other times, even when I have had to be carried in a litter, I have attended the various ceremonies required of me. But particularly in these recent years it has been a major ordeal. I shall be glad to let the new Pharaoh share the burden.

  I shall also be glad to encourage him in what I believe will be his determined attempts to bring Amon back within reasonable bounds.

  For he is very determined, my second son; and the determination, if anything, has become even more deep-seated and adamant as his mysterious and tragic ailment has bent and twisted him out of the shape of ordinary men.

  Sometimes I almost fear for him, in fact, so headstrong does he seem. His mother discounts this, serene in the certainty that we have educated him in statecraft and guile beyond all danger of misjudgment. Yet sometimes I am not so sure. Those bland, intelligent, self-protective eyes stare at me without expression, the huge flabby lips draw up in a slight and enigmatic smile.

  “Do not worry, Father,” he says calmly. “I shall know what to do.”

  But will he?

  Tiye is convinced of it, but Tiye always is convinced that she can foresee all things, bend anything to her will, conquer everything even when events prove her wrong—and that anyone trained by her can only acquire the skill of governance she has herself. Yet it need not be necessarily so. And therefore I wonder.…

  We have trained them both, of course, with equal care, knowing from almost the day of birth that we would marry them to one another someday should they survive. Aided by Aye and Tey and Amonhotep, Son of Hapu, and also, in his casual yet careful way, by young Kaires, we have explained to them patiently the situation with regard to Amon, our hopes for the Aten, our desire that they might succeed in redressing the balance we have failed to achieve. It has been our impression that the lessons have gone home, though both are extremely closemouthed and skilled at keeping their own counsel. Kaires has told us that they talk to him vaguely of “strengthening Amon by strengthening the other gods,” which we all interpret to mean basically the Aten. Yet they do not say so specifically, and they do not tell us how they plan to go about it. It is imperative that Pharaoh keep his counsel except with those he absolutely trusts: yet not to absolutely trust his own parents!—It has hurt us deeply, but we have learned not to pry, for we know it will avail us nothing.

  Only once since his ailment changed him from the direct, outward-going, happy lad he was into the brooding, withdrawn, almost unknowable figure he has become has the Crown Prince shown open emotion and that was two weeks ago when his mother and I finally revealed the fate of his older brother.

  At first he looked absolutely horrified. Then he dropped his ungainly head into those long-fingered, bony hands and began to weep as deeply and bitterly as though his brother had been his dearest friend, not an almost mythical figure who died on the day he was born. Instinctively both Tiye and Nefertiti went to him and offered comfort with gentle hands on the narrow, shaking shoulders, the bald, elongated skull.

  Finally he grasped their hands in his and looked up at me with a haunted look.

  “He will pay,” he said, as determinedly as I once did myself. “Amon will pay.”

  Then the storm seemed to pass, he relinquished their hands, wiped his eyes on a corner of his kilt, subsided into the empty, brooding look he often has. Only an occasional, gradually diminishing sob broke the silence. Presently he stood up, shrugged off our still-murmured sympathy. The bland veil dropped again over the eyes that so often look hurt inside when you catch him in unguarded moments.

  “Thank you for telling me,” he said gravely. “It is well that I should know everything.”

  And everything he now knows, so we shall see how he proceeds as Co-Regent. He is trained, knowledgeable, educated, equipped—greatly intelligent, shrewdly perceptive, at once moody, introspective, decisive—and determined.

  Determined.

  May it be to Amon’s humbling, the good of our House and Kemet’s good that I elevate him to my side this day and give him wife as determined as he. I should like to continue ruling alone, but I have lost the vigor of my ba and ka, the very soul and essence of my being, and by myself can do no more.

  ***

  Tiye

  I rule, as surely as ever Hatshepsut (life, health, prosperity!), though I do not wear the Double Crown. I rule through an ailing man, who looks to me increasingly to carry the burdens of Kemet and the broader burdens of empire. I rule with the help of Aye, Ramose, Amonhotep, Son of Hapu, Kaires, my mother-in-law, our other trusted intimates: but above all, I rule. And so I intend to do after this day, for together we have trained a Co-Regent who will do for Kemet and the Empire what I have done in these later years of my husband’s failing health. He will consult me, as he often does now. He will take my advice, as I have accustomed him to do. Together we will do what needs to be done.

  Kemet senses Pharaoh is not well. It has made it difficult for me to maintain the ceremonies, the contacts with allies, the needed regular show of force along the boundaries of empire that keep the whole intact. I have managed to do so, with great diligence, strength of character and the help of friends—but without the strong figure at the center that made it all so simple in our earlier days. He tries still, my poor husband. But something—perhaps, though we never admit the thought to one another, the vindictiveness of Amon—weakens his will and steadily saps his strength.

  It was for this reason that I decided six months ago that he should make our son Co-Regent. Pharaoh, as always when I make up my mind to something, was easy to persuade. The thought, he said, had occurred to him also, and indeed perhaps it had: it carries its own logic, given the state of his health, the needs of the country and the necessity to be always on the alert against the insatiable greed of Amon. I forget which of us coupled the idea with the thought that it would also furnish the perfect occasion for the wedding; probably I did, but he may have, for it too has its logic. My son, intelligent, educated and decisive as he is, yet needs the strengthening Nefertiti can give him—the same strengthening I have given his father. It has always been inevitable: Why not do it now?

  So it was decided. We told them, they were delighted—we thought. We sometimes find it hard to divine exactly what the Crown Prince is thinking, particularly since his ailment changed his personality so drastically from the candid child he was to the brooding, enigmatic adult he is becoming; and taking her cue from him, Nefertiti often is equally aloof and unknowable. Together they seem to inhabit a private world into which outsiders, even parents, do not win easy admission. Sometimes Pharaoh and I try, now and again Aye will have a long, confidential talk with his daughter; but from these
discussions we all bring back to one another the same story. There has been polite respect, solemn attentiveness, apparent agreement on many points—but after it all, nothing really solid, nothing you can put a finger on and say with confidence, “Here they stand.”

  It has been most frustrating and most hurtful. We have only their best interests at heart: Surely they should accord us that, and treat us with candor accordingly. It baffles us, but after several frontal assaults in recent years (which has always been my way when, through Pharaoh, I have held supreme power), I have learned to back away and approach it indirectly. Not that this has done me much good, either, to tell the truth; but at least it has restored our relations to one of easy mutual reliance and familial compatibility, if not the complete trust we as their parents would desire.

  Yet we have, I think, done our best to train them for the hard tasks they begin to assume today. Invaluable Amonhotep, Son of Hapu, who has so many responsibilities of building temples, supervising armies, acting as Pharaoh’s chief scribe and one of our principal advisers, was given the additional job of directing their education. He managed it brilliantly. We all assisted. Extensive education in the history of Kemet, a thorough knowledge of the royal House, reading, writing, the endless details of government, the problems of empire—they have had them all, plus the necessary training in ceremonies, the study of the gods (with particular attention to Amon and the way in which he became so entwined with our House), the duties they owe to Kemet as well as the rights they have inherited—there is little they have not learned in fifteen years … except, of course, the practical, day-to-day, human side of running the government, which I have had on my shoulders so much in recent years, and of which they must now relieve me—that is, to some degree.

  I expect it will be some time before they are sure enough of themselves, confident enough of their new powers, to govern without me. Indeed, as long as Pharaoh lives and I remain in good health, they cannot have complete power anyway. They must still consult us, final decisions will still rest with my husband and so, in ultimate fact, with me. I shall still rule Kemet. Which is just as well.

  I love my son. Like Nefertiti’s, my love if anything has grown deeper, more compassionate, more tender, as his terrible ailment has run its physical course upon his body and worked its inevitable transformations upon his personality and his mind. I love him. But I think he needs, for a time, a restraining hand, and one not quite so near, nor quite so blindly devoted to him, as Nefertiti’s.

  Now and again it has occurred to us that perhaps we have done our work too well with those two. We have trained them to be lovers from their earliest days, done everything to make their union inevitable, created a devotion so strong it stands like a great bridge between them, defying the world. But it must not defy the world too much: and there, perhaps, we have gone too far. For there will be great testings of such a one as my son. And sometimes, if bridges do not bend a little, they break.

  We have only been able to guess at what has gone on inside that quick, intelligent mind as it has witnessed its formerly handsome body spread and sag, elongate and become grotesque. It was a horrible thing to watch, which we did, helplessly, though all of the temples and all of the gods were appealed to, and even Amon, I think, tried sincerely to assist. (I am not one who thinks my brother Aanen to be quite so malevolent as others do, though of course I can never forgive him for the death of my first son, who would have been the ideal ruler. But conflicts are conflicts and it is not the first time in Kemet that a prince has died. It has often been a matter of who struck first. Amon did, that time, and looking back with some dispassion, now, over fifteen years, I can see that it was our fault that we were so stupid as to let him seize the advantage. In the past two weeks since he got over the initial shock of the knowledge, we have tried to instill in the Crown Prince the lesson to be gained therefrom: delay your vengeance as long as possible, but when it becomes inevitable, strike first and strike hard. His father and I have never really recovered the advantage we lost that day.)

  As I say, we could only imagine what went on inside while the outward shell was being transformed into something larger than, more awful than, and in some strange fashion more attractive than, life.

  I can remember him sitting in his room in Malkata for hours on end—days, even—staring, with a sort of brooding wonder that was heartbreaking to see, at his body as it grew steadily more malformed. I think in the beginning he thought it was some awful punishment we had visited upon him for some unknown reason, and I can only imagine the dreadful inner hours this must have given him. But when he finally let us know this thought, giving a pain that cuts me still, blurting it out suddenly in his high, shrill voice—“Why have you done this to me?”—we were able to convince him with tears and love and earnest lamentations that it was none of our doing, that we felt as stricken and as helpless as he. And thank the gods, he believed us.

  So he would sit, staring for hours without a sound as his body changed. Now and then I would come into the room without warning and there would still be no sound—only tears, welling up and falling unheeded down the inexorably enlarging cheekbones. Welling up and falling unheeded down … welling up and falling unheeded down … welling up and falling unheeded down. And always silently, helplessly, with no word of complaint any more, just a sad, hopeless acceptance that broke my heart and breaks it still, though eventually that phase passed and he seemed to become reconciled to it and, as we all sensed, even strengthened by it.

  Out of such adversity there could have come, in a character less strong and less determined, something touching upon, or perhaps going beyond, the far reaches of sanity. We could have had a royal madman, who would, for the sake of Kemet, have had to be either hidden permanently away, or killed; or we could have had a royal suicide; or we could have had a vegetable driven mindless by horror. But he survived: he survived. His father and I were powerless to impede or control his illness, but one thing it could not take away from him—what we had given him at birth: character—strong character. He would not have survived, else.

  When the storm finally passed, leaving behind the ravaged body, there began, aided by Pharaoh and myself, by Nefertiti, by Aye and Amonhotep, Son of Hapu, by Kaires, by Sitamon and even, in her odd, begrudging fashion, by Gilukhipa, a process of rebuilding which we all found easier than we had anticipated. Secretly we all dreaded what the end result would be, did not know what response we would receive when we tried to help him re-enter the world of ordinary men. We forgot—in fact we did not know, for when the disease began he was only ten and had been given little opportunity to show it—that we were not dealing with an ordinary man. We were dealing with one quite extraordinary, made even more so by the ordeal through which he had passed.

  At first he did not wish to emerge from the confines of Malkata, where we had kept him, with his willing acquiescence, away from the general eyes of Kemet during the three years in which the transformation occurred. Word of course went out through all the slaves, servants, soldiers and visitors who constantly pass in and out of the compound that something most strange was happening to the Crown Prince. But we did not expose him to the people as a whole. We simply let them gossip, knowing there was nothing we could do to prevent it.

  There came a day, some three or four months after we were beginning to conclude that the disease was arrested and would savage him no more, when Pharaoh and I decided we would go down the Nile to Memphis, to open several new temples to the Aten that we had ordered built, to worship at the chief temple of Ptah and to spend several weeks there in our northern capital, worshiping at the tombs of our ancestors in Sakkara and seeing to the general business of Lower Kemet.

  We asked him if he would like to go with us. His response was to shuffle—not stride as he used to do, how beautifully and how swiftly as a boy, but shuffle, breaking our hearts all over again—to the full-length mirror which he had insisted that we leave in his room all during his illness.

  “Looking like that?�
�� he demanded in a harsh croak, heavy with emotion.

  “Yes, my son,” Pharaoh said gravely. “Like that.”

  “Mother,” he said, and he turned to me in an almost frantic desperation, “do I have to go? Do I have to go?”

  There ran through my mind in a second many things. But the main one was: we can help, but his recovery is principally up to him.

  “No, my son,” I said as gravely as Pharaoh, “you do not have to go. But remember that you are Amonhotep IV, that you are the Crown Prince, that the day is coming inevitably when you will be Pharaoh—even,” I added gently but fearfully, not knowing what the response would be—“like that. Will Pharaoh hide away from his people? His people love Pharaoh. Will he answer their love by being afraid to look them in the eye and let them see him?”

  “Trust the people, Nefer-Kheperu-Ra,” my brother Aye said softly, using the name my son will have at coronation with the familiarity of love and caring. “Trust them. They will not abandon you.”

  “I must think,” he said then, covering his eyes with his hands and rubbing them wearily like an old man. “Let me think.”

  “Yes,” Pharaoh said gently. “Think, my son. And then, we hope, you will come with us.”

  We withdrew quickly and left him; and within the hour, asking only that Nefertiti be allowed to go with us, which of course fitted perfectly with our plans in any event, he came to us and said firmly:

  “I will go.”

  After that, for a few minutes, we all cried together in one another’s arms in sheer relief and love for him and for each other; and after that he never looked back from the road he had chosen, the only road open to a Pharaoh if Pharaoh he was to remain.

  We sailed the next morning in full flotilla, my husband, our son, Nefertiti and I housed in the golden ship of state in the center of the line of seven vessels that formed our expedition.