A God Against the Gods

by Allen Drury

  “Is it your belief, Son of the Sun,” he asks quietly, “that the course you and Smenkhkara have pursued these two years past really is good for Kemet and really reflects credit on this House?”

  “What is that course, Uncle?” the King inquires, and his tone is dangerous now, and promising storms to come. But Aye is not Aye for nothing, and he proceeds, quite calmly and matter-of-factly, to spell it out.

  “It is said—” he begins, but Akhenaten interrupts.

  “Do not tell me what is ‘said’!” he orders sharply. “Tell me what you think, Uncle. You have never been one to evade.”

  “No more will I now,” Aye agrees, his voice still calm and only the whitened knuckles on his chair arms revealing the tension he feels. “I think”—and he pauses to look gravely from one end of our little half circle to the other—“and I think we all think—that you and Smenkhkara are not wise to continue this association of yours. We think it not wise in any sense, but most seriously do we think that it is not wise to continue it, and conduct it, in the public view. You cause much talk and unrest in the Two Lands, thereby. You weaken the crown, you weaken this House, you weaken”—his voice rises and so does his warning hand as Pharaoh shifts angrily on his father’s throne—“the kingdom you have inherited and whose supreme head you now are. It is not necessary. It is not wise. It will destroy you both if you do not swiftly bring it to an end.” His voice softens and almost breaks with sadness as he concludes. “I hope you will believe me, Nefer-Kheperu-Ra, when I say that I utter these harsh things with great reluctance and only out of eternal love for you and your brother, whom I have had about my house and playing at my knee since you both were very tiny babies, and very dear to me.”

  Again there is silence, which lengthens as Akhenaten studies him, while Smenkhkara, a little shamefaced but trying to show a defiant bravado, stares at the floor and plays absently with the tassel on his ceremonial belt.

  “Uncle,” Pharaoh says at last, and his voice is low and filled with emotion also, “I appreciate the spirit in which you speak, and the love you bear for Smenkhkara and me. I do not doubt that love. I do not doubt it”—and suddenly he looks full at Nefertiti who pales but does not change her set, unyielding expression—“from anyone. But”—and the hope that had begun to grow in all our hearts sinks away—“you do not understand about—about—everything.”

  “What are we to understand?” Nefertiti demands suddenly, and her voice is clear and angry. “What every sniggering gossip in Kemet understands? Or is there something higher and more mystical we are supposed to believe in?”

  “We believe in it,” Akhenaten answers very quietly. “I am sorry if you do not, for you are my dear wife, mother to my daughters—”

  “Not the only mother to your daughters!” Nefertiti snaps, and Queen Tiye, alarmed, places a gently restraining hand upon her arm. But she shakes it off and plunges on. “Not the only mother to your daughters, and not the only companion of your bed! You have Kia and any girl in the kingdom you wish to command. Why is it necessary to humiliate me by turning to your own—”

  “Am I not being humiliated right now?” Pharaoh shouts with an answering anger, his voice going into the croak that overtakes it when great emotion comes. “This is not humiliating, to be brought before the Family as before the Forty-Two Judges of the Dead, and be called to answer for my life? And this to the Living Horus, this to the King! How dare you? How dare you all?”

  It is the greatest display of sheer anger any of us has ever seen Akhenaten show, and we are struck dumb by it and by a sudden genuine terror of what he may do. This is increased when Smenkhkara, still playing with his tassel, still not looking up, says in a soft and deliberately mocking voice:

  “You must remember he is the only Pharaoh now. You must not forget this … for it is the case.”

  Abruptly Horemheb leans forward in his chair and inquires in clear, cold, level tones:

  “Shall I kill them all, O Son of the Sun? Would that solve your problem? Say the word: I am yours to command.”

  His eyes lock with those of Akhenaten, and for a long time, it seems, they stare at one another. But, unlike that other occasion long ago, the contest does not end with automatic victory of Pharaoh. Horemheb’s eyes do not drop, he does not concede the enormity of his challenge. Akhenaten’s also remain steady, it is obvious he will not yield either. Presently he speaks, more quietly. A certain contempt is in his voice, for he is indeed the only Pharaoh now.

  “Do not be a fool, Cousin,” he says in an offhand manner that makes Horemheb flush, though now he prudently holds his tongue. “I am not a killing Pharaoh … unless,” he adds thoughtfully, his eyes never leaving Horemheb’s, “I should find myself too much provoked.…” His eyes swing at last away, back to the Great Wife, sitting upright and rigid on her throne. “Mother! Is this all you wished to say to me tonight?”

  “We wished to plead with you, my son,” she answers quietly, “for a return to sanity as you assume the full power of the Double Crown. I will concede”—and it is obvious the concession costs her greatly, but she says it firmly and seems to mean it—“that there may exist a perfectly deep and genuine love between you and your brother—even such—such a love as—as you seem to have. But certainly you must know that it can be no more deep and genuine than the love we all feel for you both. Does not that give us some right to speak to you, some right to be heard, some right to hope our words may be taken as sincerely and helpfully as they are meant? I should not like to think my sons had grown so alien to us in their love for one another that we can no longer reason with them, for the good of Kemet and this House … and,” she concludes quietly, “for their good, which to me, who am still their mother, means more than all.”

  “We know that,” Smenkhkara blurts out in an anguished tone before Akhenaten can answer, and now he seems not the defiant beloved but only a forlorn youth suddenly crushed by the heavy weight of emotions in the room. “Mother, we know that!”

  “Then why—” the Great Wife protests, but this time it is Pharaoh who answers.

  “Because our Father Aten—”

  “Forget your ‘Father Aten,’” she snaps, “and remember your responsibilities in this world!”

  But now, it is clear, emotion has proved too much. She has gone too far. She has said the wrong thing. She has attacked the sacred name. A mother’s anguish has made her challenge the god who, in her son’s mind, is unchallengeable.

  To his brother he holds out a hand that visibly trembles and indicates his wish to rise. Smenkhkara stands up, strong and lithe, perfect features drawn and tense in the flickering light of the wall torches, muscles rippling smoothly as he virtually hoists the awkward body beside him to its feet.

  Silence, tense, quivering, absolute, enfolds us all.

  Pharaoh stares at us one by one, his narrowed eyes moving carefully along our now frightened half circle. He can indeed order us all killed if he so desires. Perhaps he will … but of course he does not: he is still Akhenaten. But he is an Akhenaten transported out of himself once more by such an anger as we have never seen in him.

  Finally his mouth, which has repeatedly tried to form words and been stopped each time by too much feeling, steadies. His voice comes heavy and slow, at moments almost unintelligible, so great is the weight of anger it carries.

  “Smenkhkara and I,” he manages to grate out while we stare at him with wide, affrighted eyes, “will live in truth as we please. I shall rule this land as my Father Aten directs me. I will never—never—discuss these things with you again: never. Do not ever mention them to me again, or I will—I will—”

  But then emotion overwhelms him, his voice gives out. His eyes are filled with tears of rage, his face works terribly. We are left to imagine the awful struggle between vengeance and reason that must be swirling in his heart. I am sure the thought strikes the others as it does me: How utterly alone he is—how utterly alone we must make him feel! And with it, finally, come the other thoughts tha
t from now on will, I am sure, be inseparably linked with that first thought in all our minds:

  But how much of it comes from him! How much of it is his own fault! Akhenaten is many things—and some are great—but how tragically, fatally flawed he is.…

  At last Queen Tiye rises calmly to her feet. She speaks in a clear and steady voice, deliberately emptied of all emotion, deliberately returning us to the principal duty of this sad night.

  “It is time to go to the House of Vitality. It is time to see the Good God placed within his sarcophagi.”

  She looks at me. I step quickly to the door, clap hands for servants. They come at once with torches.

  The Great Wife steps forward to her sons, the one so glittering and misshapen in his regalia, the other so sleek and beautiful as he stares at her wide-eyed, looking no longer insolent now, but terribly young and uncertain in the glancing light. With great dignity she places herself between them, a hand on the arm of each.

  Head held high, she takes a step. They follow.

  And so our procession forms, and passes in the dancing shadows along the brightly painted mud-brick corridors of Malkata, which once knew so many happy times but now hold little but sorrow and uncertainty for the once all-powerful Eighteenth Dynasty and the haunted House of Thebes.

  ***

  Kia

  It is chill. The wind whips off the Nile, unseasonably cool for the final day above the ground of my father-in-law, that good, amiable and lazy man, Amonhotep III (life, health, prosperity!). He would have complained of it, asking Queen Tiye to have the servants bring him extra robes. She would have complied, with the usual half-patient, half-exasperated air with which she always assisted him to do the things he should have done himself. Now it no longer matters: he is cold beyond the coldness of the Nile, chill beyond the dullness of the winds. But soon he will be warm, for awaiting him are the myriad servants and multiple pleasures of the afterworld.

  I have been in Kemet, now, for twelve years, and I have come in time to understand their religion and their funerary beliefs. The former is unique but the latter are not so far from ours in my native Mesopotamia. We, too, conceive of a happy land where all is honey, incense and abundant pleasure. May the Good God find it when he gets there, for he has not known overmuch happiness on earth in recent years.

  The procession is forming on the east bank just south of Thebes. We shall move slowly north through the city to the great temple of Luxor which the Good God built, and which now is almost completed. There we will pause for rites at the altar of Amon before proceeding down the avenue of ram-headed sphinxes to Amon’s most ancient temple at Karnak, where we will pause for further worship. From there we will be ferried back across the river to the west bank, where we will pass between the dead One’s two colossal statues and pause to do worship at his mortuary temple. We will be accompanied most of the way by the weeping and wailing of hundreds of professional mourners, by the outcries of the people, who genuinely loved him and are greatly worried about what comes next, by the somber bellowing of great bronze trumpets, the heavy beating of drums, the slow, rhythmic shaking of a thousand sistrums in the hands of the priestesses of Amon. Finally, alone at last save for the highest priests of Amon, we will come to the Valley of the Kings, and his final resting place.

  In a few moments I shall be ferried across the river in company with Nefertiti to take our places in the baldachin that will come second after that of the Great Wife and Naphuria and immediately after the one of Sitamon, Smenkhkara, Tut and Beketaten. Earlier this morning there was a sudden stirring in the Family, a short, sharp argument, apparently almost a continuation of the one Horemheb told me they had last night. I understand that Naphuria’s first idea was that his mother and all the children should ride together in one conveyance giving her and Sitamon the leading seats and ranking the other children two by two behind them. This would of course have placed himself and Smenkhkara side by side just behind the Great Wife and Sitamon.

  Naphuria and Smenkhkara side by side, “living in truth” on public display, would be exactly what Naphuria wants, of course—and exactly what the Family does not want. Thus the argument, settled by Aye, who suggested that logically the Great Wife, as principal widow (Tadukhipa is unfortunately too dim-witted to attend), and Pharaoh should ride side by side in the first baldachin. Then the four other children in the second; then Nefertiti and myself as principal wives of Pharaoh; then Akhenaten’s five surviving daughters; then Aye, his wife Tey and Horemheb; and lastly, Aye’s two other children, the General Nakht-Min, who is expected soon to be named Vizier by Naphuria, and his sister the Lady Mutnedjmet, an odd little character who, at twenty-six, seems already centuries older. (She always goes about accompanied by two dwarfs, Ipy and Senna, for some reason known only to her, and is becoming one of her half sister Nefertiti’s closest confidants as the coolness grows between Nefertiti and Naphuria.)

  Mutnedjmet may yet come to wield considerable power in Kemet—as long as Nefertiti does. How long this will be remains problematical. There are rumors the break may fast become unhealable, which could mean drastic changes in the Family, very soon.

  In any event, now Nefertiti comes; and I can see, as she walks toward me with head held high and lovely face perfectly composed, that she is determined to play her role this day as though nothing threatened it. I, too, have become quite close to the Chief Wife in these recent months, though I have no such cause as she to be affronted by Smenkhkara, for my relations with Naphuria were always formal and have long since dwindled to the barest of civilities. Nefertiti has gone so far as to offer me apartments with her in the North Palace if I should ever desire them, and I have thanked her warmly and said I might well accept her kind thought if the need arises.

  “If Smenkhkara moves in, I shall move out,” I said matter-of-factly only last week. Her eyes flared for a second as she replied flatly, “I shall never move out unless he forces me to, and that I do not think he will dare to do.”

  But we both knew the bravado of that, though we did not spell it out to one another: we did not have to.

  Now she steps forward, looking lovely and serene in her gorgeous sheath of gold cloth, her gleaming jewels and her favorite blue conical crown. Gravely she gives me the kiss of welcome on both cheeks.

  “Be of good cheer,” I counsel in a whisper as I return the gesture to the wild applause of the massed thousands waiting for us on the east bank.

  “I am trying,” she replies as we both turn and begin to walk with stately tread out onto the landing stage and so into the royal barge that will take us across the Nile.

  Her faithful Anser-Wossett has concealed with the cleverest of makeup all traces of strain about her mouth and eyes. She looks absolutely stunning, and I flatter myself that I too, though somewhat taller and darker and not by any stretch so beautiful, look sufficiently glamorous and royal on this solemn day.

  How can Naphuria be such a fool?

  But he is: and as we land on the other side and are carried high in litters to our baldachin, above the shouted love and greetings of the adoring masses, it becomes apparent that he is an even bigger one than I imagine.

  But this time, he pays.

  Already we see that the Great Wife is seated in the first baldachin, and that behind her Sitamon and the two youngest children are also seated and waiting. In back of Nefertiti and myself Aye and his family are ranged in the order he suggested: even today, Nefertiti and I note with a brief smile to one another, Mutnedjmet has insisted on her dwarfs. The three of them are chattering together like little magpies as they wait, while shrewd and handsome Nakht-Min, beside them, looks both amused and bored.

  Naphuria and Smenkhkara are nowhere to be seen.

  But then from the landing stage across at Malkata there come the military shouts and noises that indicate the approach of Pharaoh. It swiftly becomes apparent that, partially, at least, he has decided to have his way—as it soon becomes apparent that for it he will pay an unprecedented, an unheard-o
f, a terrible and a terrifying price.

  While the thousands fall silent, and the Great Wife turns with a piercing glance that sweeps the two of us and her brother Aye and Horemheb—and says many things before she turns back and stares stiffly straight ahead—the two gleaming figures, the misshapen one leaning heavily on the arm of its straight and arrogantly challenging companion, move slowly forward to the royal barge, which has returned for them.

  They walk slowly up the plank, Smenkhkara steadying his brother as they come; move to the center of the barge and stand facing the eastern bank. The boatswain shouts his orders, the heavy paddling begins, they start across the river … and there is no sound.

  They reach the middle of the river, the brisk wind ruffling their gorgeous raiment, the oars splashing—splashing—splashing … and there is no sound.

  The prow of the barge touches land, the waiting crewmen leap to secure it … and there is sound.

  Faint and far away, starting who knows where but growing instantaneously louder until it seems to fill the world, there comes an awful, unbelievable, unimaginable greeting.

  Nefer-Kheperu-Ra Akhenaten, Living Horus, Son of the Sun, Great Bull, Lord of the Two Lands, He Who Has Lived Long, Living in Truth, tenth King and Pharaoh of the Eighteenth Dynasty to rule over the land of Kemet, is being hissed.

  For a long, fantastic, utterly unreal moment, the ugly sibilance continues. Then, as if by some instinctive signal that moves the body of the crowd as it would move the body of a great animal, it ceases. And once again an absolute silence falls.

  The two figures have stopped thunderstruck. Their frozen immobility lasts almost beyond bearing. Then abruptly the misshapen one shakes itself, as if coming awake from some inconceivable nightmare, and starts to shuffle forward. Beside him his brother, no longer rigid and arrogant but now oddly crumpled and unsure, moves to his side. Only swift-flowing Hapi, lapping gently at his banks, breaks the silence as they are lifted carefully into litters and borne to the head of the procession, Naphuria to his mother’s baldachin, Smenkhkara to that of his brother and sisters.