A God Against the Gods

by Allen Drury

  There is something about that site, however, that seems to encourage the brooder and dreamer in him: not, the gods know, that it takes much to encourage that side. But in that place it always comes out.

  He talks then about all his plans for Akhet-Aten and Kemet, while I come close to drowsing from too much good food and good wine, and while Nefertiti interrupts from time to time to call sharply, “Girls! Girls!” when the princesses, bored by their father’s monologue, stray too far down the steep side of the cliff. (Their mother prides herself on being a good disciplinarian, but she is not. They are all hopelessly spoiled.) It is then that I, who begin by feeling drowsy, come slowly awake again to the gnawing fear that haunts me always, the fear of what will happen to this strange son whom I have loved, and still love, so much: he who seems determined to defy all the history, traditions, customs and ma’at of Kemet and yet manage to escape the retribution which all the ancient past can bring to bear upon rebels, even royal ones.

  Sometimes I cannot resist a taunt, in an attempt to bring him to reality.

  “My son,” I say, while, below, the crowded jumble of Akhet-Aten’s whitewashed mud roofs and gold-tipped temples dances and shimmers away into the distance, “what good are these plans of yours? What have they availed you? You have been Co-Regent for ten years, now, and I do not perceive that you have done much to change the ways of Kemet. You have your temples and your priests, you have your city, you and your family worship as you please—but what of our people? They have not changed. Amon still reigns in their hearts, and reigns too much in the land. The High Priest Maya may be senile, but he has assistants who have not been frightened by the death of your uncle. And they still have the people’s love—or at least their fear, which suffices.”

  “I have their fear!” he says with a dry acerbity that persuades Nefertiti to reverse herself and say sharply, “Run along and play, girls!” to Meketaten and Ankhesenpaaten, who have strayed too close to this conversation of their elders. “I have their fear,” he repeats, more softly; and then, alarmingly, his face begins to contort and I think he may be about to cry as he adds, softer yet, “though, I will grant you, I do not have their love.”

  “But, my son,” I say, and I start to lean forward and touch his arm, only to draw back instinctively even as he too draws quickly away, like some hurt animal—my own son, and I can no longer comfort him, as a mother’s heart cries out to do!—“my son, you could have their love, too, did you but seek it out.”

  “Pharaoh should not have to ‘seek it out’!” he says with a sudden anger that obliterates the threat of tears. “It is Pharaoh’s right. It is the Aten’s right. We do not have to ‘seek out’ love from anybody!”

  “Perhaps if you did not seek it together,” I suggest, fearing his anger but determined to make my point, for Kemet’s sake and for his. “Perhaps if you let the people come to love you, and only then, if they so desire, request of them that they love the Aten—”

  “I have ‘let them come to love me,’ if they but would,” he says harshly. “And I have not requested of them—though I could have—I have suggested to them, far more by example than by word—that they come to love the Aten. I have not forced either myself or my god upon them, for my Father Aten tells me that only if men make free choice will they make lasting choice. And they have ignored me. Thanks to Amon’s constant appeals to the superstitious and the ignorant, they have ignored me. But I think”—and his eyes narrow in the way they have, long slits of contemplation, resolve and pain—“I think Amon may not succeed forever in alienating the people from me. I think they may soon ignore me no longer.”

  “What do you propose, O Son of the Sun?” I ask in sudden alarm, a panicky concern striking my heart at his somberly determined tone.

  “More wonders, Mother,” he says dryly. “What do you expect? I have not performed many lately. Do you not think it about time?”

  “My son,” I say gravely, “do not jest with the Two Lands. You have caused enough concern with your name, your city and your abandoning of the old gods for the new. Is that not enough to satisfy you? Do not push it further, I beseech you.”

  “‘Satisfy’ me?” he demands, his voice a mixture of irony, anger and pain. “Do you think I worship the Aten just to ‘satisfy’ myself?”

  “You satisfy no one else,” I cannot resist saying, instantly shocked at my own temerity, but after all I am the Great Wife, for many years Pharaoh in all but name of the Two Lands, and he is still my son. I expect an explosion and decide with a sudden recklessness that I am ready for it. It is time someone talked to him like this, and since his father does not dare, it must fall to me.

  But, amazingly, the explosion does not come.

  For a long moment he too stares across the plain, over the enormous, bustling city he has created, shimmering away, like the dream it is, toward the southern hills. When he speaks it is with a curious gentleness, as though from a far distance, in realms where I cannot follow.

  “Mother,” he says, “you must understand me: It is not for my own satisfaction, though I have it and in great measure, that I worship the Aten. It is not for her satisfaction or theirs that my wife and our daughters join me in worshiping the Aten. It is, rather, that we would bear witness to what he is: that we would say to our people:

  “‘Look you at this Great God, Father Aten, and see how kind he is! Look you how he is fresh like the morning and sweet like the dew! See how he is the Great God, the Sole God, the Universal God! See how he gives life to all things on earth! See how he makes the grass grow, the birds fly, the animals leap, the waters move! See how all men and all women spring from his serene brow to gleam like jewels of glory in his crown! See how he loves his Son, Akhenaten, who brings you his message and reveals how he will comfort you in all things and all places!

  “‘Great is the glory of Aten the Father and Great is Akhenaten his Son!’ … This is what we say to the people, Mother: this, and no else.”

  “But if your god is the greatest god—”

  He interrupts instantly.

  “The Only God! Amon and the rest are but profanations now!”

  “If he is, then, the only god,” I persist, “why is it that the people must worship anyone besides him? Why must they worship you, my son? Why cannot they worship the Aten directly without your intervention?”

  “Do the people worship Amon directly without the intervention of my father?” he asks sharply; and there, of course, he has me. “They worship Father Amon and they worship my father who is his son—Father and Son, indivisible. They would not dare worship Amon did they not also worship my father. He speaks for them to Amon; he speaks for Amon to them. So they are worshiped jointly. Is it not so? Has it not been immemorially so? Therefore do I ask them to worship me, who am the Son of the Aten, that I may speak for them to the Aten, and for the Aten to them. It is no different … except,” he adds softly, “that it is my god who will ultimately prevail.”

  “I wonder, my son—” I begin, and fall silent for a moment while I consider whether to say what I wish to say next. Over the cliff’s edge we can hear Merytaten screaming furiously at Ankhesenpaaten: there is already bad blood between the two little girls, both already prideful of position and apparently destined to become jealous women as they are now jealous children. Nefertiti, who has been listening to us with close attention, springs up and strides toward them as one of the royal nursemaids comes puffing up the hill from the servants’ resting place below.

  “I wonder, my son,” I resume when we are alone, “whether in your heart, in your ka and ba, the very essence and soul of your being, you wish the people to worship the Aten to glorify the Aten—or whether you wish them to worship the Aten because it will glorify you?”

  For a split second his eyes narrow dangerously and again I expect an outburst of rage. It does not come. He controls himself. A bland, ironic smile comes to the heavy lips.

  “Mother,” he says, “I have witnessed my father’s way with Amon: I have witn
essed what the lack of a firm hand with priests can do to the power and might of Pharaoh. I have seen the inroads of Amon upon this House. Surely you, the realist, the practical one, surely you who have been for many years Pharaoh in all but name of the Two Lands”—I have never told him I feel this, and secretly I am thrilled to learn that he recognizes it, too—“can understand. When I became Co-Regent the pattern was too firm, the direction too set. As a young Pharaoh of fifteen I should have been even less able than Neb-Ma’at-Ra to control the priests of Amon. But now I have created a new god, a new priesthood. Who is to say me nay with them? I created them.

  “Thus shall I be Pharaoh again as Pharaoh was always meant to be—truly supreme in Kemet. Thus will the House of Thebes regain its full powers in the Two Kingdoms, and over all the Universal God will spread his unifying rays.…

  “You should approve of me, Mother, for I work toward the same goal that you always have, only to be prevented by the Good God’s weakness.”

  “Do not speak thus disrespectfully of Pharaoh!” I say automatically, but he recognizes its ritual quality, for he openly smiles.

  “I do not speak disrespectfully of this Pharaoh,” he says, touching his narrow chest with a long, bony finger. “Never of this Pharaoh!”

  And so, somewhat (if not entirely) relieved, I laugh. And he laughs. And thus Nefertiti finds us when she comes back up the ledge leading a chastened and obviously punished Merytaten.

  She smiles in open relief that we should be agreeing thus amicably. I smile back in a rare moment of unity with my daughter-in-law. It is only later, after we have completed our meal and dashed back across the sands into the city, after I have been deposited at my own small but beautiful palace in the southern section and they have dashed on away to their own beautifully painted apartments on the “Island” that the doubts return to me.

  He spoke most fervently as priest when he discussed his faith, but he spoke most calculatingly as Pharaoh when he discussed his power and the power of this House. Was the blind faith what he really feels, and was the emphasis on practical considerations something he offered deliberately to appease and divert me from his true intentions?

  When he admitted that the people have for the most part ignored him and the Aten up to now, why did he say with such chilling certainty, “I think they may soon ignore me no longer”?

  I do not trust my son, though it breaks my mother’s heart to say so. Many things move beneath the strange surface of him the world now knows as Akhenaten. This afternoon he wishes the Court and the city to gather at the Window of Appearances for another of his “wonders.” He indicates this will not be the usual awarding of gold to faithful servants. Something more portentous impends.

  We have learned to mistrust Akhenaten’s “wonders,” in Kemet. Which of his two sides will he show us this afternoon—the mystic follower of the Aten, or the jealous Good God who lately is becoming more and more impatient with Amon and more and more determined to challenge him openly at last?

  He has been slow to provoke, enwrapped as he has been in building his city, extending his temples and extolling his god. Meanwhile Amon has not rested, though since Aanen’s death—a fitting murder-for-murder, though I could wish it had taken place more discreetly and out of public view—the white-robes have been more secretive and more circumspect

  During Neb-Ma’at-Ra’s reign (I already speak as though it were over, though he lives; we plan his Third Jubilee for next year, but I wonder) there was continued grumbling, a steady pushing to gain more power and influence, a hundred thousand little gnats nibbling away at us and our throne. In recent years this has increased, encouraged by the general breakdown in civic control and general morality. Aanen’s death has only driven them underground. They have become more circumspect on the surface, more treacherous beneath.

  I do not blame my son for the gradual end of what has been a monumental patience, re-established at great cost to himself, with Nefertiti’s help, after the wild spasm of my brother’s murder. But I fear the result.

  I shall go with the rest to the Window of Appearances at three o’clock. He has just sent word that he wants his father and me to stand with them in the opening as he speaks: he wants us to sanction with our presence what he does.

  He does not do us the courtesy to tell us what it is.

  He does not tell us whether it will be safe or dangerous.

  He simply asks us to attend and expects us to comply.

  And because, unlike the people, we do truly love him, we will be there.

  ***

  Aye

  He calls us again to the Window of Appearances. So many times to that place, so many lavish distributions of gold, so many showings of himself and his family, usually naked and “living in truth”! So much pomp, so many ceremonies! And not only here but throughout the land, for they have traveled far in their attempts to spread the faith of the Aten.

  And what has it availed? For ten years he has been Co-Regent, built his temples, called on the people to worship his Universal God … and still the temples are mostly silent and deserted save for a handful of red-robed priests, a few furtive worshipers inclined his way but frightened of Amon, and the sycophants of the Court who model themselves upon Pharaoh, since they must.

  I watch them come to the great temple of Aten here, the great temple of Aten at Karnak, dutifully bowing and scraping and bringing their offerings: Pa-ra-nefer, butler and chief craftsman to the Co-Regent; Bek the sculptor and his assistant Tuthmose; Ipy, chief steward of Memphis; Penthu, High Priest of the Aten and chief physician to the King; devious young Tutu, the Foreign Minister; my own son Nakht-Min, assistant to Vizier Ramose; faithful old Ramose himself, face in perpetual grimace with his worries about the increasingly erratic course of the Two Kingdoms; pompous, self-important Mahu, chief of police of Akhet-Aten; Kheruef and Huya, stewards of Queen Tiye; Pin-hasy and Mery-Ra, also high priests of the Aten; Surero, chief steward of Amonhotep III (life, health, prosperity!); Menna, overseer of crown lands; Kha-em-het, overseer of the granaries of Upper and Lower Kemet; Amonhotep, Son of Hapu, Kaires and the members of the Family, more out of personal loyalty to him than anything else; and, of course, last but certainly not least, the Councilor and Private Secretary Aye, doing his duty as always for the House of Thebes, whom men must call the biggest sycophant of them all.…

  Well: am I? He has ordered dug for me in the southern ridge the most elaborate of all the Southern Tombs, indeed of all the tombs of Akhet-Aten save the royal mausoleum itself. I have already had it inscribed: “My lord taught me and I carry out his instructions.” Thus may all men see—for these tombs, unlike those in the necropolis at Thebes, are not secret places but open to public view, and indeed private parties of the people go there all the time to marvel at the way the work progresses—how loyal I am to Pharaoh. Behind the dutifully humble words, of course, a man of fifty-five does not yield his views, his personality or his character—particularly if it is as tenacious as mine—to those of a youth of twenty-five. If that youth is Good God, King and Pharaoh, his elder defers in public and most times in private. But he does not cease to press his ideas when the moments are ripe.

  And there still are such moments. He still trusts me, he still depends upon me. Occasionally (though not as often as before) he will fall into contemplative mood in my presence and we will talk philosophically of the future of the Two Lands, of the Aten and of himself. And rather more often than she did before, I estimate, my daughter comes to me with troubled air and we talk alone. For all is no longer well in that marriage.

  And all is no longer well in the Two Lands. The gradual erosions that began under the slothful hand of my luxury-loving brother-in-law have spread like an insidious growth through Kemet. My sister has tried valiantly to hold him to duty, to strengthen his resolve, to bring him back to the onerous demands of worthy kingship: he laughs (if he is feeling well), groans (if he is feeling ill) and, in either event, turns her aside with a ruthless gentleness and continues as he ple
ases. Everywhere the land suffers, and abroad the Empire, always a fragile thing at best, crumbles away.

  Weekly, almost daily, it sometimes seems, the dispatches come in, written in the Babylonian cuneiform that serves the world as diplomatic language. Tutu translates them and, at Akhenaten’s orders, sees to it that I receive copies. Their plaint is unanimous and universal, whether they come from Burnaburiash, Tushratta, Rib-Addi of Gebal or the sly and sneaking Aziru of the Amorites who constantly foments trouble north of Damascus. They beg, of course, for gold, since as Tushratta so delicately stated it to my brother-in-law “… in my brother’s land gold is as the dust of the earth.” This may or may not be—some of the mines in Nubia are beginning to assay increasing impurities, and the endless glittering stream that winds through our history may conceivably be receding—but they all think so, and demand it. They also fight constantly among themselves, ignore the attempts of our generals and viceroys to maintain calm along our borders, and generally flaunt the authority of Pharaoh. The reason for this, in my judgment and that of my sister, is very simple: Pharaoh—neither Pharaoh—ever appears among them. The great days and great campaigns of Amose and Tuthmose III (life, health, prosperity to them both!) are long gone. Two weak successors, one old, one young, permit the precious fabric to fray away.

  I say two weak successors, yet in truth I think I can only apply the adjective to my brother-in-law. For my nephew is not weak. He is many things, but he is not weak. His powerful personality, though it seems to lie dormant, is no less powerful for that. Lately there are signs it may awaken—but in what direction, no one can predict. Probably not, it seems likely, in the direction of restoring empire, or of restoring the ancient ma’at and order of Kemet which have also become sadly frayed in recent years.

  The Two Lands drift ever more rapidly as the years speed by. Again, it began under my brother-in-law: it continues under my nephew. He cares no more for administration than his father, as long as the inhabitants of Akhet-Aten remain suitably respectful and he can worship the Aten and ride about his plain, with an occasional visit to Thebes or Memphis to break what he pretends is not the monotony. But I know it is, and I know from his own remarks at unguarded moments, and from my daughter’s increasing unhappiness, that monotony is causing things to happen in the King’s House that may yet become open scandal.