A God Against the Gods

by Allen Drury

  I look once more to the north, though I know already in my heart, with a sad, unhappy protest, what I will see.

  The city lies dark and hushed.

  Khons rides above in his silver boat.

  Nothing stirs.

  On the ledge along the Northern Tombs, the lights have been put out.

  ***

  Book V

  A God Against the Gods

  1364 B.C.

  ***

  Pani

  He lies now in his bath of natron, where he has been for seventy days. This afternoon he will be taken out and placed upon a mat of reeds, which will absorb the excess moisture from his body. This will be done—like all things preceding and all that will come after until he goes beneath the ground—to the chanting of priests, court officials and professional women mourners, who have appeared in the streets twice each day since his death to extol his virtues and offer appropriate tributes in the temples for his safe passage into the afterworld.

  Tonight his body will be smeared with heavy oils and unguents. With great care my corps of expert embalmers will take long linen strips, about three inches wide, dip them in water to moisten the gum with which they have been impregnated, and will bandage individually his hands, fingers, arms, legs, penis and toes. Then they will begin to bandage his entire body, working upward from the feet. After they have swathed his body to the armpits, with many thicknesses of linen, extra linen strips will be knotted across to keep all in place. Then beneath his shoulders one end of a thick bandage of twenty-five folds of linen will be placed. The other end will be drawn over his head and down upon his shoulders to rest evenly upon his chest. Further strips of linen around the neck will hold this head-wrapping in place

  Thick pads of linen will be placed around his ankles so that his feet will not be damaged should his sarcophagi be placed upright in the tomb. (In his case, of course, he will rest recumbent, but the wrapping has always been done in this fashion, and so it will always be done, according to the eternal ways of Kemet.)

  A heart-scarab of lapis lazuli, inscribed with a chapter from “The Book of the Dead,” will be placed above his heart, and within the linen folds will be tucked jewels, items of gold and the blue faience and steatite ushabti, small figurines representing those who will serve him in the afterworld. Upon his mummified head the wig and gold uraeus will be placed for the last time. Heavy jeweled pectorals will be placed around his neck. His tightly wrapped arms will be drawn into place across his chest and in them, in their proper position, will be placed the crook and flail.

  Then still more bandages will be wrapped about the whole. These final bandages will be painted with special prayers for his safety and further chapters from “The Book of the Dead.” And finally his mummy will be placed in the sarcophagus of gold that bears the image of his face, youthful and handsome as he was, and as he will be when he is returned to life in the afterworld.

  Over the inner sarcophagus three more, made of wood gilded with gold, will be tightly fitted and sealed.

  Further prayers and incantations will be said.

  And finally, about the time that Ra’s first faint flush appears in the east to begin the day of entombment, Amonhotep III (life, health, prosperity!), Son of the Sun, Living Horus, Great Bull, Good God, ninth King and Pharaoh of the Eighteenth Dynasty to rule over the land of Kemet, will at last be ready to make his final journey through his capital of Thebes to lie beside his ancestors in the Valley of the Kings beneath the Western Peak.

  I, Pani, overseer of the Theban necropolis as my father Maya was before me and as my son Maya will be after me, have given to the preparation of this great King my deepest care and devotion, for he deserves it. He was much beloved in the Two Kingdoms, wise, generous, farseeing, ever alert to protect his people and to guard Kemet against all her enemies. He was a good servant and father to us all. He was a good man. It appears unlikely that we shall soon see his like again.

  Great fear stalks the Two Lands because of this.

  During these prescribed seventy days of mummification, I have not been tied exclusively to my duties here. I have excellent assistants, including my son who will succeed me: in deference to my advancing years, they have begun to assume much of the burden. There is, in addition, a long period of waiting while the natron does its work.

  So for the first time in many years I have not been captive here. I have been able to go to Memphis and Sakkara, I have been to Akhet-Aten and Heliopolis and many other cities, making arrangements for the ceremonies that will accompany and suitably honor the interment of the Good God at the precise moment he goes beneath the ground tomorrow. And what I have found has greatly disturbed me.

  We live, in the necropolis, in a world of our own—the world of the dead, in which we are constantly preparing new bodies for mummification as they come to us daily from the nobility, the court officials and all the higher ranks of Kemet. It is only because my son has recently become old enough to relieve me of some of the burden that I have finally gotten out. It must be twenty years, literally, since I left the necropolis. Reports and rumors have of course reached us over the years, even in our special hushed world. But I had no idea of the actual state into which the Two Lands had fallen.

  Everywhere I have found dismay and disarray, the spread of internal corruption, the intimations of distant chaos and disaster along the outer reaches of the Empire. And universally I have found that the people blame, not the Good God, whom they have come to love ever more deeply as he has slipped inexorably away from them, but his son, whose rule—if rule it can be called—has become ever more erratic and unsettling in these past two years as his father has grown weaker and less able to exercise the care that has for so many years guided and protected our beloved land.

  Everywhere I went I was told that the King Akhenaten—whom many refer to secretly as “Horse Face,” but many more are coming to call (in whispers, but they are increasing whispers) either “the Heretic of Akhet-Aten” or “the Criminal of Akhet-Aten”—has embarked upon strange courses and followed strange paths, both in the pursuit of his god the Aten and in pursuit of other things.

  He has reduced the temples of Amon substantially, but the only result apparently has been to make the people love Amon and the other gods more. He has built further temples to the Aten and has caused his “Hymn to the Aten” to be inscribed on stelae, in tombs and on walls in many public places throughout the land. But it has not increased his converts outside the Court, where those who seek preferment and riches must necessarily do as Pharaoh wishes.

  He has sought sons from his daughters, but so far has achieved only two dead daughters, of the Princess Merytaten, who survived the experience, and the Princess Meketaten, who died only two months ago as a result of it, and was followed within two weeks by her child. (They were buried at Akhet-Aten in the new necropolis there that I know nothing about.) Now it is rumored that his daughter Ankhesenpaaten is pregnant by him.

  He has become openly enamored, apparently—or so goes the crude gossip in the bazaars—of his younger brother the Prince Smenkhkara, and openly neglects the Chief Wife Nefertiti, whose loveliness and goodness all people everywhere admire. He pays little attention to civil administration, ignores or deliberately flaunts the overtures of Kemet’s friends and allies abroad. His days pass in prayers and dreaming, so it is said; and ma’at and the safe protected life of centuries falls away into confusion, uncertainty and fear.

  And now he is sole King and Pharaoh, supreme in power over all Kemet. And the Two Lands lie helpless beneath his hand, because Amon, who might choose a successor to displace him, no longer has that power, and there is no unity in the people that could rise against him. Insurrection, indeed, would be unthinkable, because after all: Is he not the Good God, King and Pharaoh? Only the gods could displace him; and he has weakened them so that they cannot. The people themselves never have done such a revolutionary thing, and never would.

  So I have returned to the necropolis as to a special refu
ge, which indeed, for me, it is. Here I have spent my life, here before too long I also will lie for seventy days in natron, and go in my turn to the Valley of the Nobles to join my ancestors in the beautiful life of the afterworld.

  I stare down into the tub wherein lies all that remains of a great King. His once heavy body is thin and shrunken now, the face that smiled so often and so pleasantly upon us is tight and leathery, drawn in death.

  Tomorrow when the procession is over and he lies in the enormous tomb that awaits him beneath the Western Peak, the King Akhenaten, who rests this night in the Palace of Malkata, will stand before him and, using the sharp-pointed iron instrument that tradition prescribes, will perform the Ceremony-of-The-Opening-of-The-Mouth, so that his father may speak when restored to life hereafter.

  I wonder what he would say at that moment, could he actually speak? Would he call down imprecations on Pharaoh for all his strange, unsettling ways? Or would he, as we hear he did in life, still love, still try to understand, still forgive?

  The speculation is pointless, of course, but I think it might be the latter. Because everywhere I have gone in these recent weeks I have heard that the Good God whose mortal shell lies here before me did indeed love and grieve over his son, and tried to understand and help him.

  I think perhaps that is what we, his people, must still try to do, though it is not easy, and our time of tolerance, I sense, is running out.

  ***

  Tushratta of Mittani

  To Tiye, Queen of Kemet, Tushratta, King of Mittani.

  May it be well with thee, may it be well with thy son, may it be well with Tadukhipa, my daughter, thy young companion in widowhood scarce two years wed.

  Thou knowest that I was in friendship with Nibmuaria, thy husband, and that Nibmuaria was in friendship with me. What I wrote to him and negotiated with him, and likewise what Nibmuaria wrote to me and negotiated with me, thou and Gilia and Mani, my messengers, ye know it. But thou knowest it better than all others. And none other knows it as well.

  Now thou hast said to Gilia, “Say to thy lord: ‘Nibmuaria was in friendship with thy father and sent him the military standards, which he kept. The embassies between them were never interrupted. But now, forget not thou thine old friendship with thy brother Nibmuaria and extend it to his son Naphuria. Send joyful embassies; let them not be omitted.’”

  Lo, I will not forget the friendship with Nibmuaria! More, tenfold more, words of friendship will I exchange with Naphuria thy son and keep up right good friendship.

  But the promise of Nibmuaria, the gift that thy husband ordered to be brought to me, thou hast not sent. I asked for golden statuettes. But now Naphuria thy son has had them made of wood, though gold is as dust in thy land.

  Why does this happen just now? Should not Naphuria deliver that to me which his father gave me? And he wishes to increase our friendship tenfold!

  Let thy messengers to Yuni my wife depart with Naphuria’s ambassador, and Yuni’s messenger shall come to thee. Lo, I send gifts for thee, boxes filled with perfume and many good things.

  Let Naphuria send gold as Nibmuaria thy husband promised, so that our friendship may increase tenfold as he says. Tell thy son Naphuria to send gold! Send gold!

  ***

  Tiye

  My world ends, and this little man cries gold! Had I the troops, the weapons, the means to transport them instantly to his land, I should strike him dead where he stands, this sniveling piss-pot of a grasping king! How can he bother me with things so petty at such a time! I wish the gods might do the work for me, and strike him dead this instant, this very moment! Aiee, I wish him dead…!

  But—no. Of course—no. I, Queen Tiye, the Great Wife, for many years Pharaoh in all but name of the Two Lands, must be more responsible than that. Anger is no good right now, it only blinds and confuses. Tushratta and all the rest must be kept at my side, and if possible bound closer. I shall indeed speak to “Naphuria,” though if I know my son the cause is lost already.

  Yet I cannot admit that the cause is lost already. I cannot admit that any cause, of the myriad I fear, is lost already. That would be to concede all things to Akhenaten. And that, for the sake of Kemet, our House and his own life, I cannot do.

  My husband goes to lie beneath the Peak of the West, and I am left alone to save the Two Kingdoms if I can. To help me I have allies, but in the face of all the traditional power of Pharaoh we cannot be open about it: we must be close and we must be clever. My brother Aye—my nephew Horemheb—my daughter Sitamon—Amonhotep, Son of Hapu—and yes, my niece Nefertiti—stand with me. All the rest belong to Akhenaten now, some by virtue of his power and some by virtue of their own willing subservience. We must move subtly if we are to save the land from him, and him from himself.

  Both of these I wish to do. I believe that—for the present, at least—the others agree. How much longer I can hold them to the gentler course I do not know. Aye is ever subtle but capable of reaching irrevocable decision in time. Horemheb has inherited the subtlety and the patience, but he too can eventually become adamant. Sitamon, as always, will do as he says. Amonhotep, Son of Hapu, is a philosopher, but his greatest love is Kemet and we have never tested the limits of his tolerance where its ultimate good is concerned. And my niece the Chief Wife? (No one, even now, gives her my title. I shall always be “the Great Wife,” to the day I die. And rightly so: I have earned it.) Her motivations are mixed and many, but in the final reckoning I do not care, as long as she stands with me. And I think she will.

  In these final two years of my husband’s decline (he barely roused for his Third Jubilee—it was held at Thebes and was over in a day), my niece and I have become much closer than we have ever been. That perfect mask, always calm, always cool, always serene and never shattered in public, has shattered for me on one or two occasions of late. An anguished woman has looked out, turning to me for sympathy, not as niece to aunt or daughter-in-law to mother-in-law, but as woman to woman. I know her concerns and she knows mine. If the time is coming when we must all make a final choice, I believe we will be together—though she loves him still. As, may the gods have mercy on me, so do I.

  She is spending increasing time, now, in her North Palace at Akhet-Aten (though she has not yet formally moved there), taking with her the two older girls. The three younger, too immature to be objects as yet of their father’s desperate desire for sons, remain with the royal nursemaids in the King’s House. Merytaten, married last year to Smenkhkara, is twelve, consumed by ambition for the throne: it is well her mother has her where she can keep her under constant watch, for if Merytaten can increase the alienation between her father and her mother and thereby assume her mother’s power, she is certainly going to do so. Ankhesenpaaten, ten, is pregnant by her father but has secretly asked both her mother and me if we cannot find a midwife who can arrange a miscarriage—“accidental,” as her father’s wrath might be great and unpredictable if the child were a son, and he ever discovered our plotting. We hope to do so. Ankhesenpaaten’s ambitions are as fierce as her sister’s—their rivalry has increased to the point where they barely speak—but she has prudently decided to remain her mother’s friend, at least for now.

  At the North Palace there also reside my own sweet little Tutankhaten, now five years old, and my daughter Beketaten, now three. I have been too preoccupied with their father’s slow dying (as prolonged and sad, in its way, as his mother Mutemwiya’s) to give them the attention I should. Nefertiti volunteered to take them for me, and I was glad to accept. I have seen them when I could, but the care of their father and the crushing burdens of government, devolving increasingly upon my shoulders, have often kept me from them. Nefertiti loves them both and is a fine and gentle “substitute mother” to them, aided by her odd little sister Mut-nedj-met, always traipsing about with her two dwarfs in attendance. I am very grateful to my daughter-in-law for that.

  I am also grateful to her for not having parted openly and finally with my son, even though she has bee
n given much cause. As it became increasingly apparent that my husband was finally dying and that our son would soon be sole Pharaoh, it became increasingly important that the appearance of a united Family be preserved. The moment of Akhenaten’s accession would certainly not be the moment for a separation from his wife. Nefertiti has an earnest care for the fitness of things, and it is to her great credit that she is concealing her unhappiness from the people and doing all she can to make the transition smooth and acceptable.

  I pray constantly that my son will be equally responsible. But I have great fears. Tomorrow my husband will be entombed at noon when Ra stands high above. We will then all travel by state barge downriver to Akhet-Aten, where ten days from now my son’s coronation durbar will be held. It is an occasion that cries out for more of his “wonders.” Knowing him, I do not think he will be able to restrain himself. I shudder at the possibilities.

  I weep over them, too, more than the world, or anyone save Nefertiti, will ever know. There was one time recently, the time when we finally opened our hearts completely to one another and spoke candidly of our mutual fears, when we wept together.

  But it happened only once. And there is a difference.

  She weeps for one of my sons.

  I weep for two.

  Ever since the night of the day when Akhenaten revealed his Hymn to the Aten, he and Smenkhkara have been more than brothers: of that their mother is certain. There has been about my elder son too much of an air of secret satisfaction, about my younger too much of a glow. He is seventeen, now, married to Merytaten, but I do not think he goes near her: his feeling for his brother enthralls him too much. This suits Merytaten, who cannot have further children anyway, and of course it suits Akhenaten, who has no rival. So the two gods consume one another, having moved far beyond the innocent idealism with which both, I believe, began. And Kemet gossips, sniggers and stands appalled; and my elder son continues headlong down the path he has set for himself, which can only lead to disaster for his marriage, for our House, for the Two Lands, for his brother—and for him.