A God Against the Gods

by Allen Drury

  Six little princesses, and no little son. It is I, the old Pharaoh, who produces the sons. Neb-Ma’at-Ra is not dead yet, by the gods!

  Secretly I know this worries them very much: they wish a son who would succeed to the Double Crown and carry on the work of the Aten. It appears more and more likely that this will never be. Beautiful Smenkhkara stands next in line, and now my little Tut-ankh-aten after him. What will they make of their brother’s heritage, such as it is? Tut is too young to know, as yet, and Smenkhkara is too gentle and diplomatic—and at heart, I think, too much in awe of his older brother, and too adoring—to express opposition, but I wonder if he really believes. I watch him closely for signs, but so far the only signs I see are that he prefers his brother’s company to that of any woman, which may or may not be a good thing. No doubt it will change: he is very young yet, in many ways much younger at his age than Akhenaten, who, it sometimes seems now, was never young.

  My brethren Tushratta and Burnaburiash say true when they describe the state of Kemet, yet they are unfair when they blame me for it. I am ill, I have been ill for many years; I never had much enthusiasm for whipping my vassals, though I did make expeditions to Nubia and Sidon when I was much younger, and there punished bands of rebels, as you may see on my monuments. Mostly I have preferred to hold them to me, as I have held my people, by beneficence, though I know this has often worried Tiye and Aye, Amonhotep, Son of Hapu, and Kaires. They have felt, and often said, with varying degrees of politeness and temerity, that I should take a firmer line, send my forces far afield, perhaps every two or three years go myself, just to prove that I am here and that Pharaoh’s power is still supreme. I do not worry as they do about our vassals: let them squabble with one another, as I said before. It only makes Kemet stronger, and leaves her in peace to enjoy the calmness of my rule. And it permits me to enjoy it, too, which has not always been the case with some of my hard-working ancestors!

  “Enjoy,” I put it. I wonder how long it has been since I have really enjoyed wearing the Double Crown. Quite some years now, I am afraid. Ever since my oldest son began his erratic reign. Ever since he gave himself, his family, and—if he could do it, which I thank all the gods he cannot—Kemet away to the Aten.

  More temples dot the land, more priests wear the crimson robe of Aten. And still there are no great throngs flocking to his altars, no great streams of tribute coming to his coffers. My people leave the Aten as severely alone as my son, up to now, has left Amon. Now my son is beginning to change his indifference; and this, to me, suggests unhappily that my people may before long begin to change their indifference to him and to the Aten—and not in a way that my son will like.

  In the two years that the major part of this city was abuilding, he and Nefertiti (I cannot bring myself to say “Nefer-Neferu-Aten”—“Akhenaten” is hard enough) had much to occupy them. They were into everything, consulting with Bek and Tuthmose, with Amonhotep, Son of Hapu, and Ramose, with all who were concerned with the great task. I doubt if there is a single temple he has not personally supervised, a single garden or pathway that she has not designed. Ten thousand peasants have worked here steadily night and day for two years to create Akhet-Aten out of desert and a ridge of hills; and although the number has now dropped to about two thousand, they still work incessantly, putting the finishing touches to the paintings, the sculptures and the hieroglyphs on the walls that all hymn the praises of the Aten. Bek and his colleagues, like all of Kemet’s sculptors and artists, abhor a blank wall. As has been the custom throughout our long and ancient history, there is scarcely a square inch uncovered anywhere. In this new city as in all the older ones, the mind is bedazzled by so much.

  It is not, I think, impressed, as it is in the cities of Amon.

  Again, as so many times before, I wonder: What would have happened if I had been content to fight alone my battles with Amon? If I had not dedicated my son to another god? If I had not underestimated both the son and the god? If I had let well enough alone?

  It is perhaps the only instance in my rule when I have not left well enough alone. It is also, of course, the most disastrous.

  Even so, it has not ever been quite so disturbing as it is now, because now he is showing some signs that the toy of Akhet-Aten is beginning to bore him. He is finally beginning to show some impatience that the Aten has not made the advances in the people’s hearts that he wishes it to do. He is finally beginning to show an increasingly open anger with Amon—not the searing flash of rage that finally brought my brother-in-law Aanen the death he deserved, but a steady, smoldering, unyielding, implacable dislike, which appears to be husbanding its fire and awaiting its opportunities. This, I think, bodes ill for Amon, for Kemet, and for him. I pray to both Amon and Aten that it will not be so, but my worries grow the more as my ability to influence my son grows less.

  Of course, the Great Wife and I cannot complain that he is not a thoughtful and considerate son. He has built us small palaces here, he has built a sunshade like Nefertiti’s for Tiye, where she may sit and meditate, he hopes, about the Aten. Personally, I think she sits and broods about him, though we rarely discuss it nowadays, and when we do she sounds harried and sharp. She is looking much older, now. These years of uncertainty with him, now perhaps to become even more uncertain, have taken their toll of her as they have of Nefertiti. Nefertiti remains as always outwardly serene, composed, assured, every beauty line and shadow of kohl in place, every inch of make-up perfect as though glued to her face: but I think she too has tensions.

  Their days pass in prayers and sacrifices to the Aten; in frequent ceremonies at the Window of Appearances, where they disburse gold trinkets to those whose work on the city has particularly pleased them; and in frequent wild dashes with their daughters in an open chariot about the confines of the city, while all the workmen down their tools and join the people to cheer them with the good nature of those who know where their next meal is coming from. Now and again they have made state progresses to Memphis, sudden journeys to Thebes; now and again, I believe, he consults on the public business with Aye’s son Nakht-Min, who at twenty-three is already a Commander of Horse and an assistant to faithful old Vizier Ramose—so rapidly do we rise, in this new world of his. And of course he consults faithfully with Aye himself, and with Kaires, who is always there, always thoughtful, always patient—and, I have the feeling, always ready: for what I do not exactly know, but if I were my son, I would pay more attention.

  But I am not my son, and thank the gods for that. I am only dull, sick old Amonhotep III (life, health, prosperity to me!), who is capable only of making little princes and princesses, and of being loved by his people. For I am loved. Recently Tiye and I traveled the length of Kemet for my Second Jubilee, and everywhere in their millions my people turned out to greet me with their love. They worship me, both formally as a god—they have done this for many years (and indeed I frequently worship myself, particularly at my big mortuary temple near Medinet Habu)—and, with a deeper instinct, as their beloved King and Pharaoh.

  Akhenaten, as he cannot match me in princes, also cannot match me in the love of our people. I think he still fascinates them with his ugliness. They watch him and they fear him. But they do not love him. I doubt if he even realizes, so absorbed is he with the Aten. He and the Aten love each other, and that for him is apparently enough.

  I must send for Amonhotep, Son of Hapu, who is still my favorite scribe and confidant. There is time before we must gather at the Window of Appearances. Together we will draft replies to my brethren of Babylon and Mittani.

  I may be ill, old, fat, bald and waddling, but I can still turn a phrase or two.

  They will hear from Nibmuaria, though it will please me to give them considerably less gold than they wish to have.

  Then listen to them squeak!

  ***

  Tiye

  He is in better spirits than he has been for some time, now that he has been given renewed proof that the people love him more than they love
our son. This has done mighty wonders for his ego, as has the arrival of our happy little Tutankhaten and our sweet little Beketaten. You would think I had nothing to do with these two, only Neb-Ma’at-Ra. Such are men, even when they are gods.

  I, too, have been pleased by these events. Now, as always with our people, I, the Great Wife, have received my equal share of love and adoration. In our triumphal progress the length of Kemet for our Second Jubilee, I sat as always beside the King, full and equal in dignity and power. Up to us from the endless throngs came such a wave of greeting as we had never received before. It was as though the world split open for us everywhere we went. There was a hunger in it, too, a yearning, a wistfulness which I, at least—being, as always, more sensitive than he—could sense. I knew the sad reason, too: because we represent something that is going, great days that are no more; a stability, a peace, an order and a joy in Kemet that no longer exist. Ever closer comes the day when we will not be here: ever closer the day when something they mistrust and instinctively fear assumes full control of the land. Ever closer comes the full and unrestricted kingship of Akhenaten. No wonder the desperate wistfulness in the people’s greetings to his mother and father.

  On all sides, the land falls apart. Abroad our vassals squabble, our allies fulminate, our false friends such as Babylon and Mittani utter their puling cries for gold even as they busily spin webs against us. False, false, false! There is not one we can rely upon: there is not one we can trust. And, carefree and happy as he dashes about his city playing god, my son pays no attention.

  At home the Two Kingdoms deteriorate under his lackadaisical rule. Corruption creeps in at many levels. The central government remains relatively free of it, but in the twenty-two nomes of Upper Kemet and the twenty nomes of Lower Kemet, the political subdivisions of our land, local governors, overseers, petty officials grow fat on their secret exactions from the people. Thievery and venality advance hand in hand, and no one says them nay. Constant complaints come in to Akhet-Aten (no longer to Thebes or Memphis, of course: now Thebes and Memphis sleep beside the Nile) and in their faithful way Ramose and the others do their best to respond. But they are only men; they are not the One whose diligent care and just commands could right all this. The central force that drives the wheel is not there.

  Carefree and happy as he dashes about his city playing god, my son pays no attention.

  True, you will say, it all began with his father and he is only reaping the harvest of what Neb-Ma’at-Ra has sown over the years. But say this not to me, the Great Wife, Queen Tiye! It is not I who have been slovenly and uncaring. It is not I who have permitted our alliances to deteriorate, our local governments to become corrupt. I, the Great Wife, Queen Tiye, I have done my best all these years to carry the burden the Good God has been too self-indulgent and too lazy to carry. It is only thanks to me that some order has been preserved. The wonder is not that we have so little now but that we still have as much as we do. It is not all gone, though it is going. Such as remains is a tribute to me. I, Queen Tiye, for many years Pharaoh in all but name of the Two Lands, have done this.

  And, like so many, I have been bitterly disappointed that my son does not have the devotion to duty and the integrity of purpose that his mother has. For if he did, the Two Lands would be in much better condition than they now are.

  Life is a round of worship, family frolics and happy gambols now. He and Nefertiti, who grows if anything more chillingly composed and more glacially beautiful as she ages, spend hours every day making offerings at the great altar stone of the Aten. Usually they take my granddaughters, so the people are treated constantly to the spectacle of his grotesque, ungainly figure, hers, trimmer but sagging a good bit from childbirth, and those of six little girls like six little steps descending in height from Merytaten to the youngest, Set-e-pen-ra, who can barely walk—all naked, of course—making their way by chariot through the streets to the House of the Aten. There such few as gather to watch—they are not many, for it has long since become a sight too usual and too accustomed (my son has never grasped the royal mystique of not doing too much too often)—watch in a silence respectful but almost sullen, as his family performs its rituals. They sing, they chant, they solemnly beseech the Aten, and from him, apparently, receive some message that satisfies them. Meanwhile the people stare, sometimes with an air so close to boredom that it becomes virtually treason—or would be, were he a Pharaoh who cared more about his position. Then, ceremonies over, they remount the chariot and are off and away.

  Sometimes in this second phase of it they will spend another couple of hours simply dashing through the city. He loves the plain that gave him his first great welcome after his illness, and it may be in pursuit of those lost echoes that he so frequently roams from end to end of it. He has never found them, nor, I predict, will he: for he baffles the people now. They do not understand him and I am very much afraid that they no longer care whether they do or not. And this is very sad and very rending to me, who am still his mother, for all that I criticize him, and who still remember him as a happy little boy, and who often cry in the night because it has all gone so wrong for him.

  So they dash about. Sometimes when the Good God and I come down from Thebes to spend a month or two, as we do from time to time each year, he will invite us to go with them. Usually my husband pleads some excuse of tiredness or necessary work. (I hardly consider it so: he usually brings four or five girls from his harem with him, and I know the kind of “work” it is. Our late-arriving children have inspired him anew. But no matter.) It is mostly I who join them in the chariot, thinking that courtesy and the necessity to put a good public face on it require my presence, at least occasionally.

  After we have worshiped—and again it is for reasons of public policy that I do this, not any great devotion to the Aten, though he is easier to follow than gloomy Amon—there is usually a picnic.

  We go far across the plain, leaving the center “island” of temples and palaces, passing the residences of the Court and the nobility, the humble homes of the servants and slaves, finally going past the barracks where the workmen of the city live and so come at last to open desert. We drive on at his command until we reach the low ridge of the eastern hills. Sometimes he directs us to what we have come to know as the Southern Tombs—where he has already ordered a magnificent resting place for my brother Aye, now his Private Secretary as well as Councilor—sometimes to the Northern Tombs, where work is already under way for lesser dignitaries. On occasion it is even to what we know as the “Royal Wady,” the cleft midway along the ridge that runs back about four miles into the barren bills.

  This is where he is preparing his own tomb and that of his family, and where he is also preparing tombs for his father and me. Personally my inclination is to lie beneath the Western Peak at Thebes as Kings and Queens of Kemet have done for hundreds of years, but I am not arguing it with him now. Magnificent tombs for the Good God and myself are already excavated, decorated and waiting in the old necropolis. But if it makes our son happy to dream of us lying here, let him. We shall see who outlives whom, for he is frail beneath his fanaticism, and may not live as long as he thinks he will. There is no point to argument over that, when there are so many more serious things to argue about.

  So we come to whichever resting place he has determined upon for the given day, and there the servants spread an elaborate feast and we dismount and eat. In the Royal Wady he used to love to talk of his plans for the new necropolis, and how he was going to create a new style of tomb as he had created a new style of art. (Actually it only exaggerates the old, but as with everything to do with the Aten, he prefers to call it “new.”) Instead of being buried hundreds of feet beneath ground, covered over with tons of rock to hide us and protect us so that we may live forever without the kindly ministrations of the grave robbers of Qurna who persist in desecrating the tombs of our ancestors at Thebes, we would all be buried in small, open, free-standing temples, each containing the sarcophagi of one roya
l individual.

  “But,” I once objected, “you will simply make it easy for the grave robbers, my son.”

  “There will be no grave robbers here,” he replied serenely, “for all who come will come in the love of Aten, and they will think no evil thoughts or do any evil thing. We will rest safe in their love.”

  “Then you had best guarantee their love with good, strong guards,” I said, I am afraid somewhat tartly. But it did not disturb his serenity, particularly when Nefertiti gave me a cool, amused look and agreed calmly:

  “Do not be concerned for your safety, Majesty. The Aten loves you and will permit no harm to any who loves him.”

  I did not respond to this obvious bait but only gave her cool look for cool look and asked Merytaten, the oldest, to pour me a little more wine. The subject dropped, but it was typical. And typical, too, perhaps, that after offering this idea he should later have commanded Bek to begin excavation of a royal necropolis dug back into the rock like all the rest.

  It is the commanding elevation over the plain provided by the row of Northern Tombs that he most enjoys visiting, and it is there that we have had most of our picnics following worship. I have always been surprised, in fact, that he did not select this site for his palace, so spectacularly does it afford one an overview of the city—and, indeed, of Kemet itself, for from here one can see all of the narrow strip of green, no more than three or four miles wide on each side of the Nile, which, breaking sharply and decisively into desert at its eastern and western edges, contains all that there is of our long snakelike land. So it goes for more than six hundred miles along Hapi’s meandering route. Here would have been the ideal spot, to my own eye. But of course I have always supposed that he preferred to be nearer to the temples of his god, and so it was done.