A God Against the Gods

by Allen Drury

  “Life has little here for a Queen who is not a Princess of Kemet. These people think themselves superior to all beings who walk the earth, they despise anyone who is not of Kemet, they look down upon us all. Particularly is this true of the young Pharaoh and Nefertiti. So pay them no attention. Make your own life. Concern yourself with the Family as much as you can—be helpful and kind to its other members, most of whom are also kind when they are not involved in ceremony. Involve yourself with the children, be a friend to his brothers who may someday rule—above all, be a friend to Kaires and to Sitamon, whose friend I have been, and whose friendship has done much to keep me sane. And do not worry if Akhenaten never comes near you. In fact, be thankful, for he is very strange and not as other men—stranger even than a god should be strange, for if gods are to be understood and worshiped they must be at least a little like men. And Akhenaten is like no other man. He is unique, and it is well to stay far from him … even though,” she added thoughtfully, a surprising sadness coming into her voice, “it is impossible sometimes not to feel pity for him. He has not had an easy life.”

  I have tried to follow her advice, and I have even come in time to understand her final comment; for I, too, sense the deep underlying sadness of Naphuria’s life, which he carefully conceals on most occasions but which now and again breaks through in unexpected ways. I believe the sculptor Bek has caught it best of all in the colossi that stand at Karnak. I am surprised, in fact, that Naphuria has let them stand, for deep in their brooding expression much of his inner pain is apparent to those who are sensitive enough to see it. I believe he must be aware of this, for he is very sensitive himself—at least where he himself is concerned—and he must know how revealing these stone portraits are. It as though once again he were saying, “Here I am, living in truth. Take me or leave me: thus am I.”

  I concluded long ago that he was too complex for me to understand. I decided that was Nefertiti’s task, and I have been happy that it has been a very long time since he expected me to share in it. He visited me a few times in my bedchamber, a process I did my best to assist him with—because, of course, if I were to bear him a son, I should suddenly be something very much more important than just a minor forgotten Queen from Mesopotamia—but I was unable to conceal my distaste, not having been trained and schooled for it all my life as the Chief Wife was. I tried very, very hard, but as I say: he is very sensitive where he himself is concerned, particularly where his physical deformities are concerned; and he knew. He knew. I never conceived, and the last time, which now is almost three years ago, he actually apologized to me, after. There was something so abject in this that I could not help but burst into tears: I knew then very well what Gilukhipa meant. He cried too, and for a few fleeting moments we clung to one another in a genuine love and sympathy. But then he arose awkwardly, refusing my assistance; the usual mask come down over his face; his eyes again became hooded; the moment passed. He never came near me again, nor have I made any attempt to seek a private audience with him. Sometimes he asks me to be present at the Window of Appearances, once in a great while he invites me to join him and Nefertiti and the girls on one of their picnics or on a furious chariot dash around the city to observe the builders’ progress. But most of the time we leave one another strictly alone, only a moment’s melancholy touching us both when we happen to meet accidentally in the corridors of the palace and exchange brief, formal greetings as we pass.

  So I have, as good Gilukhipa suggested, busied myself with the rest of the Family, and have not been too alone or too unhappy. Sitamon and Kaires are very kind, the Councilor Aye is also kind if somewhat remote, the old Pharaoh and the Great Wife, in their rather absent-minded fashion these days, have sometimes gone out of their way to include me in things, and of course to always laughing Smenkhkara and gurgling little Tutankhaten I am, I think, a genuinely loved “big sister” whom they often include in their games. And I have my ladies in waiting with whom I gossip, and my knitting and spinning, and my jewels and my musical instruments and my comfortable quarters, and good food and good wine—the years pass. Now and again I receive a letter from my father asking anxiously if I am all right. I always answer cheerfully that I am; and this, I suppose, is as near the truth as it is when anyone on this earth says it to anyone else. And actually I should be thankful, I am much better off than most: I shall never want, I shall live all my days in luxury and be buried with these gods-on-earth. I cannot complain.

  The old lady stirs and groans, and instantly I am at her side inquiring gently, “My I get you something, Majesty?”

  Queen Mother Mutemwiya is sixty-seven and dying of some wasting disease our superstitious quacks can neither diagnose nor treat; and in the past few months, as the illness has attacked her frail body with ever increasing savagery, she and I have become very close. No one else in the Family has had the time—or, perhaps, the courage—to sit with her day in and day out and watch her shrink away. I think it has been just too painful for them, because I know they genuinely love her. Yet aside from an occasional dutiful visit at intervals several weeks apart, her son and the Great Wife have almost never appeared in her room, and the others have been similarly preoccupied. Only Kaires makes it a point to visit her on every possible occasion. He and I together are the concluding solace of this tiny little bag of bones that once was a very great Queen who ruled with her husband over a very great empire.

  Now she awakens at the sound of my voice. Her eyes, shrewd and intelligent still in the sunken face, light with a little smile as, after a moment, she recognizes me.

  “Just a little wine, dear,” she whispers, and carefully I pour it into a cup, place my hand under her head and lift it gently so that she can sip a few drops before she signals with her eyes that she has had enough, and I let her gently down again.

  “Have you heard what he said today at the Window of Appearances?” she whispers. I shake my head.

  “No, Majesty.”

  “You did not go?” she inquires, forgetting that I told her this before she dropped off into her increasingly deep sleep a couple of hours ago.

  “No, Majesty. He did not invite me.”

  “My grandson is—” She pauses and searches for the word, cannot find it, and with a faint but visible annoyance with the mind that no longer responds, abandons the attempt.

  “Yes,” I agree with a smile, “he is.”

  This amuses her, and together we laugh, I aloud and she with a very faint, very fragile humor that momentarily crinkles the paper-thin skin stretched so tightly across the tired old bones. She starts to say something else, hesitates, and in the interval is distracted as the door swings open without announcement and on the threshold Kaires stands. Now she smiles again, a deep and genuine fondness in her eyes. I start to rise, but he gestures me down again with a kindly firmness.

  “Majesty,” he says, bowing to Mutemwiya and gently kissing her tiny hand. “Majesty,” he says to me, bowing and kissing mine. “You must both hear what has happened this day at the Window of Appearances. His Majesty has provided us with several wonders, and I thought you both should know.”

  And he sits down, still holding the Queen Mother’s hand gently in his strong, brown-skinned one, and generously and patiently tells us of the day.

  When he has concluded neither of us speaks for several moments. Then with that faintest of smiles, the Queen Mother whispers:

  “I shall not be here long enough to learn to call you Horemheb. You must not mind if I still use Kaires.”

  “Majesty,” he says, in that little game we all play with the dying and which the dying so gallantly play with us, “you must not say such things! You will be about again, and you will learn to call me Horemheb with the best of them! But in the meantime,” he adds with a gentle smile, “I shall not feel at all hurt if you continue to call me Kaires.”

  “Good,” she whispers. “It would be hard to break the habit of twenty-five years.…” A frown, faint like all her expressions now, but still unmistakabl
e, creases the ghostly-gray forehead. “You must serve my grandson well, but if—if—”

  She pauses and we both lean closer to the bed.

  “Yes?” he asks, suddenly intent.

  “If you find that he is destroying Kemet, then”—her eyes open full and she returns his stare with the terrible intensity of those who wish to impart final instructions before they go—“then … you must not hesitate.”

  He gives me a quick sharp look which says, as if in so many words:

  I trust you with this confidence forever—I nod gravely—and he turns back to the tiny figure on the bed.

  “Majesty,” he says, “I shall not hesitate. On that I give you the pledge of Kaires and the word of Horemheb.”

  Her eyes open wide again, she clutches his hand with a sudden surprising strength, half raises herself in a fashion we thought we would never see again, cries with a startling loudness, “You must not hesitate!”—clings for a second to his hand—suddenly relinquishes it and falls back—utters a long, rattling sigh—and is gone.

  For many minutes we remain silent beside the bed, heads bowed, weeping. Finally he rises, gently draws the sheet over her face, holds out his hand, takes mine and raises me slowly to my feet.

  “In your presence, Majesty,” he says somberly, “and in hers, I pledge once more: I will not hesitate.… And now, come. We must call the servants, spread the news, begin the preparation of all things suitable for the safe passage into the afterworld of this very great Queen and very dear lady, our friend Mutemwiya.”

  ***

  Amonhotep,

  Son of Hapu

  Across the molten river the light lies soft and purple on the distant hills of the West. Soon it will be gone altogether and Nut will assume her dominion of the world. The silver boat of Khons, a narrow sliver in these early phases of his passage, rides low in the sky. It carries tonight Mutemwiya and no doubt many another who has departed Kemet for the afterworld this day. And it looks down, as always in these recent years, upon a troubled city and a troubled House.

  He has offered us further wonders and with them, as always, further cause for concern and worry about his course and the future of the Two Lands. His appointment of Kaires—Horemheb, as we will learn to call him now—confirms my own judgment of the bright lad who came to us mysteriously so long ago. I am happy I have been able to assist his rise and I regard his new authority as perhaps the single most hopeful thing that has happened to Kemet in a decade. It does not surprise me that he has the parentage he has: like father, like son. Greater strengthening—and, if need be, greater discipline—for the House of Thebes and its reigning King there could not possibly be. Akhenaten will do well to trust him, to support him, and to be guided by his wisdom and the wisdom of Aye. To this, in my modest way, I also hope to contribute.

  Leaving aside Kaires, what else is one to say of the Co-Regent’s performance this day? It has left many mixed emotions in the Court, in the city and, no doubt, when word of it is carried up and down the river, in all of Kemet and the world beyond.

  He has finally, after all these years of patience and forbearance, moved against Amon. Yet it is, in a way, a curiously halfhearted attack. He has gone halfway, to take half of Amon’s goods and half of Amon’s priests, but in doing so he has stirred up far more than half of Amon’s wrath. Has he thought beyond this curious compromise, which Horemheb tells me was first suggested by Aye? Perhaps in this instance Aye’s advice was not as wise as it usually is. Or perhaps Aye, who sees far ahead in many things, has some purpose in mind that is not apparent to us now. In any event, it leaves neither Amon satisfied nor the Aten fully in command. If I had been asked, I would have said: strike completely or not at all, for time is not in the habit of granting second chances. I think he would have been better advised to do nothing or to do it all. But even now, apparently, his peace-loving nature will not permit him the unchecked anger, the necessary violence, to achieve his will. And so he finally declares a war but then hesitates to fight it to the full. He may in time pay bitterly for this.

  And his marriages to his daughters? The desire for sons is understandable: it is also, I am afraid, rather pathetic and unnecessarily public. He antagonizes Nefertiti, who has given him complete devotion all her life, and to what purpose? Why was it necessary to announce it, if this is what he wishes to do? Why could he not simply do what he wishes in the privacy of the Palace and then declare the sons, if sons there be, the children of Nefertiti? I suppose he would not consider this “living in truth”; and I suppose, since she has always followed him faithfully in this very risky human pursuit, that she should not justly complain. But it is one thing to live in truth in an abstract sense and quite another to have one’s pride and dignity as wife and mother affronted before the whole world. This, too, he may live to regret, however proud he is of himself at the moment for his “living in truth.”

  And his “Hymn to the Aten”? It is lovely and moving, and perhaps it may be that the gods will yet decide that this is what Akhentaten will be remembered for when all our present questioning has been forgotten. But whether the words are enough to persuade the people to abandon Amon and the other gods and willingly worship what he chooses to call the “Sole God” seems doubtful to me. The Hymn is the noble conception of a mind undeniably brilliant, for all its strange quirks; but no matter how omnipresent he may make it—and already, I understand, riders carrying hundreds of papyrus scrolls are taking the river highway north and south to post them in the market squares of every village and town—it takes more than reiteration to create faith. It may in time create a dulled acceptance, but whether it will create the living faith that he himself has in his “Father Aten” is at best, it seems to me, a tenuous hope.

  And there is one other matter, whispered in the Palace, but as yet, I believe, unknown in the streets: and that is the matter of the golden brother. If this comes about, which many little signs seem to indicate, will he eventually try to “live in truth” about that, too? If so, I would really fear for him, because I know the common folk from whom I come: they are deeply conservative, and some things they will never accept. That, though he might try to impose it upon them, they would in truth never accept. Yet, as I say, the signs are there and he seems determined to do it; which, I think, Smenkhkara expects and does not—alas for them both, and perhaps for the Two Lands as well—reject.

  Even now they are alone together on the ledge that runs along the front of the Northern Tombs: I can see in the far distance the brightly lighted place where they stand, and I can visualize it well as twilight hurries on into night and stillness begins to fall on the heat-exhausted land.

  I was there myself scarcely an hour ago: so were Amonhotep III (life, health, prosperity!), the Great Wife Tiye, Nefertiti, the Princesses, Sitamon, Aye, Horemheb, Smenkhkara, even little Tut, crowing and gurgling in the excitement of it all.

  Great flares burned on either side. Below, the servants waited in humble curiosity. What would happen now?

  There sounded the booming of a great drum and the blare of trumpets; and then in a loud voice he cried:

  “Let us now give praise to Father Aten!”

  And each of us obediently opened the roll of papyrus we had been handed as we stepped at his command upon the ledge; and facing the city, we all began to chant in unison as he led us in his high, shrill voice:

  “Thou arisest fair in the horizon of Heaven, O Living Aten, Beginner of Life. When thou dawnest in the East, thou fillest every land with thy beauty. Thou art indeed comely, great, radiant and high over every land. Thy rays embrace the lands to the full extent of all that thou hast made, for thou art Ra and thou attainest their limits and subdueth them for thy beloved son, Akhenaten. Thou art remote yet thy rays are upon the earth. Thou art in the sight of men, yet thy ways are not known.

  “When thou settest in the Western horizon—”

  Three times he had us repeat the Hymn in unison, following him. Then he directed me, Aye, Horemheb, Sitamon and the servan
ts to leave; and as we left, he began the chant again. As our chariots moved slowly down the hill the voices grew fainter but we could see them still: his parents, his brothers, Nefertiti and the Princesses standing on either side of his ungainly, unmistakable body.

  Still farther down we turned and looked again, and this time he had reduced the number again: other chariots were coming slowly down. In the brightly lighted space only he, Nefertiti, their daughters and Smenkhkara remained.

  And farther down yet, we turned again, and this time yet another chariot was descending, and on the ledge only two tiny figures remained, their voices carrying very faintly on the soft wind rising out of the Red Land to the east: the young Pharaoh and his brother.

  And so we all came back to the city, and far in the distance the lighted space still glows and apparently the chanting still goes on.

  It is a strange and somehow frightening spectacle, both impressive and saddening: as if he thought by sheer insistence to invoke his Sole God and have him work his magic upon the city, the plain, the Two Lands and the world.

  It is all very typical of this strange Son of the Sun.

  He lies with his own daughters, he seduces his own brother, he lets the Two Lands and the Empire slide to a point which will soon mean actual disaster—and he produces something as powerful, as reverent and as moving as his Hymn to the Aten.

  What is one to make of him, Nefer-Kheperu-Ra Akhenaten, Living Horus, Son of the Sun, Great Bull, Lord of the Two Lands, tenth King and Pharaoh of the Eighteenth Dynasty of the land of Kemet?

  I do not know.… I do not know. I am an old man and getting older, and the more I know the less I know, particularly about this One.

  I am beginning to suspect, now, that none of us will ever know, that there is no consistency, there is no answer—at least visible to us, his contemporaries. We can only follow, while he lives: however long his god—and all the gods—may permit that to be.