Pillar of Fire

by Judith Tarr

  “My royal brother,” said Smenkhkare. His voice was deeper than the king’s, and clearer, no stammer to mar it. “Is all well in Akhetaten?”

  “Now it will be well,” the king said, raising his brother and embracing him,

  Meritaten waited her turn as a lady should, patient, with eyes lowered. When Smenkhkare took her hands she looked up. She did not smile, but her eyes were bright.

  He was much taller than she. He smiled down at her. “Little Kitten,” he said. “How lovely you’ve grown!”

  She blossomed under that simple flattery. When he lifted her into the chariot that waited for him, and stepped up behind her so that she had to stand pressed against him while he took up the reins, no one said a word, least of all she. She shot a lone unreadable glance at her father before the horses began to move.

  Everyone scrambled to form the procession. Smenkhkare led it, laughing, with his princess in his arms. The king seemed half baffled, half amused. He took with good grace his brother’s insolence—for it was nothing less than that.

  Poor plague-battered Akhetaten came out in such force as it could muster to see the great ones go by. The cheering was thin, the processional way wide; there were times when there was little more sound than the clatter of hooves and the rattle of wheels and the occasional snorting of horses.

  Ankhesenpaaten, however, with Kiya’s encouragement, had taken measures to avoid the humiliation of a king riding in silence to his palace: musicians both led and followed the procession, beating on drums, braying on horns, rattling timbrel and sistrum. They made a brave noise coming up from the river, and a brave sight in their golden splendor.

  oOo

  That night, for the first time in many days, no one died of the plague. “The god blesses us,” the king said when word was brought to him.

  With Smenkhkare here he actually paid attention to the work of a king’s days, instead of leaving it to his ladies. Maybe Smenkhkare’s presence shamed him into it. Maybe he had roused and seen that the kingdom needed a king.

  He looked odder and frailer than ever beside his tall beautiful brother, but the drawn and weary look had faded from his face. The malaise of the spirit that had held him immobile seemed to have lifted, at least enough for him to put on a show of strength. He even held audience as he had not since before Nefertiti died.

  It must have been difficult for him to mount the dais that first day, and to sit on the throne that stood alone where once had been two, and Nefertiti on the other. Where all his daughters had been were only Meritaten and Ankhesenpaaten. There were empty places among the court, princes and high officials who were ill, fled, or dead.

  Lord Ay was there, gaunt and pale but determined to do his duty despite the death that had nearly taken him. He had gone all the way to the edge of the dark lands before his will and the will of the gods brought him back. He was still half among the dead, his eyes as strange almost as the king’s, but Nofret saw the effort with which he made himself rouse. Lord Ay was a practical man. He had none of the divine madness that vexed the king.

  Neither, Nofret took note, did Smenkhkare. He held the crown prince’s place beside the king, looked beautiful as always, but was profoundly bored. Sometimes he cast glances at Meritaten, to see if he could make her blush.

  She was different since Smenkhkare came to Akhetaten, more alive somehow. She was not more interesting for it. All her life and gaiety were focused on her husband-to-be. She went boating with him on the river. She went riding with him in his chariot. She sat with him in a pavilion in the garden, playing the harp and singing in her thin sweet voice.

  He seemed less besotted with her than she was with him, but he was not averse to her attentions. She was a pretty creature, and trained to give pleasure to princes. No one ventured to remind him that another had been there before him. Her daughter was kept in the nursery, out of sight and mind. There was nothing to stand between prince and princess, and no one who would prevent them from doing as they pleased.

  oOo

  For once Ankhesenpaaten was the pale shadow of her sister. Where Meritaten was vivid, smiling, even learning to laugh, Ankhesenpaaten went quiet and slow, with her head lowered and her eyes downcast. Sometimes they flashed up in temper, but that was too rare for Nofret’s liking.

  The king did not try to woo her. He wanted her with him as she had always been, from morning greeting of the sun until the quiet of evening, when they sat in a chamber lit with lamps and listened to a singer or a storyteller; or if there was a feast she had to attend it, crowned with perfume and garlanded with flowers. In between she had a little time to herself, which she spent sleeping or pretending to, or sitting in the garden staring at nothing.

  Nofret tried shaking, shouting, anything to rouse her from her listlessness. She took no notice. She had not said two words together, Nofret reckoned, since Smenkhkare came.

  The burial of Nefertiti and her three youngest daughters fell on a day of brutal heat. The desert shimmered. The sun beat down like a hammer in the forge. The narrow wadi that led to the royal tomb seemed steeper and rockier than it had ever been, and searingly hot.

  The mourners were not supposed to notice anything but the depth of their grief. They struggled behind the priests with the biers, wet with sweat and tears. Their wailing echoed to the molten sky.

  Nofret wailed with them, because it kept her from having to think. She kept a wary eye on her lady. The princess stumbled behind her father, eyes blank, face blank, keening.

  The rite of burial was a blur of heat. The feast in the tomb was hurried, and much more of it than usual left as sustenance for the spirits of the dead. The king was minded to linger, but Smenkhkare coaxed him away with soft words and gentle tugs.

  He had not tried to fling himself on the coffins as Nofret had seen people do at other funerals. He had not eaten, either, or joined in the keening. He kept his sorrow within, nourished it and treasured it, lest he forget.

  The dead were at rest. That was a blessing. As many as had died, as untimely as they had fallen to the sickness, some surely must be haunting their kin. But Nofret had seen no restless spirits, nor heard them since people stopped dying. They were all gone away.

  She said her own farewell to Queen Nefertiti and the three little princesses. There was no sense of them here, the children with their laughter and their silliness, the queen with her cold composure and her glimmer of hidden warmth. The four stone sarcophagi, shut up in the dark amid the wealth of kings, held nothing but dust and dried husks.

  Wherever the spirits had gone, Nofret wished them well. They had never done harm to her.

  Whereas if it had been the king . . .

  She stumbled, following her princess back along the wadi. Her ankle twisted but held. She cursed the stones and her own clumsiness, but even in her fit of temper she knew that that was not why she had set her foot awry.

  She hated the king.

  No, not as strong as that. She despised him. She hated what he did in the name of his god, what he was doing to her princess, sucking all the life and spirit out of her and turning her into a mute shadow of a creature.

  Ankhesenpaaten had tried to be strong. She had tried to be worthy of her grandmother’s memory, to be a queen and not a half-grown child. But she was too young, the burden too great. She could not bear it.

  It was the king’s fault. He had killed one daughter already. He was killing this one.

  Nofret’s fists clenched. The king scrambled in front of her, awkward undignified figure in this cruel place. The guard behind him had a dagger in a sheath, bouncing at his hip as he descended the slope. One leap, that was all, one swift movement, and she could snatch the knife and plunge it into the king’s narrow back.

  It would not even be murder. Execution, rather. Disposal of a madman. Nofret would die for it, of course, but too quickly to feel the pain.

  She measured the distance. She flexed her fingers, feeling already the shape of the hilt, the shock as the blade plunged home.


  Ankhesenpaaten stumbled against Nofret. Her skin felt much too cool. Her face was greenish-pale. She was breathing much too fast and much too shallow.

  “Water,” said Nofret. Then louder: “Water, here, quick! Her highness is ill of the heat.”

  Ankhesenpaaten came to herself once she had had a sip of water. She shook off the solicitous, tried to shake off the sunshade that Nofret had wrested from a protesting slave, but Nofret ignored her. It was Nofret who drove the princess’ chariot back to Akhetaten, while her lady rested as best she could under the sunshade.

  And the king went on living. He would have said that the god had intervened to prevent Nofret from doing murder. Nofret preferred to attribute it to chance—and an opportunity that would not come again. She was a warrior’s child. She could not kill a man, even this man, in cold blood.

  “And that,” she said to herself under cover of their entry into the city, “is a ghastly pity.”

  Sixteen

  After the days of mourning for his queen and his children were over, the king led the court in grand processional up the river to Thebes. Prince Smenkhkare had gone ahead to prepare the city for a threefold feast: the funeral of Queen Mother Tiye, the triumph of the king and his god over the plague, and the wedding and crowning of the prince. The king also would be wedded to the third of his daughters, but more quietly.

  Not, to be sure, because of any shrinking on his part from what he was doing. It was Smenkhkare’s time, he said, and Smenkhkare who should stand in the light for all the people to admire. The king could be generous when it pleased him.

  King and court, guards and servants and hangers-on, rowed in boats up the river, singing as they went. Prince Smenkhkare, soon to be king, shared his own glittering barge with his bride. He sat in his gilded chair, she stood leaning on its arm, until he pulled her laughing and protesting into his lap.

  They were all light and laughter, all forgetful of the carved and painted coffin that rode on its barge far back in the procession, with its escort of priests and mourners. Even the king seemed to forget that he escorted his mother to her tomb, in contemplation of the two who lived so perfectly for the present.

  People laughed too seldom in Akhetaten. The king was not a mirthful man, nor had his queen been. His children had learned their ways from him. But Meritaten had a new preceptor, and he lived in laughter. All the lightness, all the frivolity that his brother lacked, he had in abundance, as if the god had given all the dark to one and all the bright to the other.

  The king was indulgent, lying on a couch under a canopy, with the breeze off the river cooling his cheeks. He felt it, Nofret could see. But Ankhesenpaaten did not.

  The princess sat like an ivory image at her father’s feet. She did not hear the laughter ringing over the water, or see the flash of sun on gilded oars, or catch the scent of river mud and fish, green reeds and flowers, that was the river of Egypt.

  Once a crocodile got among the servants’ boats. It was driven off with oars and spears, with much shrieking and carrying on. She did not turn toward the sound. Her eyes were blank, like carven stones. The heart in her, for all that Nofret could see, was as dead as the queen mother in her coffin.

  It was not only the wedding that she went to that drained the spirit out of her. Her mother the queen was dead, and her sisters, all but one, who had eyes and ears and mind for no one but her pretty prince. The queen mother whom she had loved was being taken to the tomb, had left her to be queen when she was no more than a child. It was all too much for her.

  The king nibbled bits of fruit that Lady Kiya had peeled and cut for him, and sipped wine from a cup carved of pale chalcedony. The princess ate nothing, drank nothing. Nofret had got a bite or two of bread and a sip of water into her in the dawn before they left Akhetaten—hardly enough of either to keep a bird alive.

  Nofret had seen much apathy before, but only in the very sick or the very old. Only in those who did not care to live.

  Crouching at her lady’s feet, staring up into that lifeless mask of a face, Nofret began to be afraid. If Ankhesenpaaten died, it was all to do again: gain the notice of a princess, become her favored servant, stand beside her when she became a queen. No delicate court lady would want a great gawk of a Hittite girl with barely a civil tongue in her head. Certainly she would never suffer a servant to speak as freely as Nofret did to Ankhesenpaaten.

  Ankhesenpaaten was different. As careful as she was, as hard as she tried to be a perfect image of a queen, she honored plain speaking. She found Nofret interesting. She liked a servant to speak her mind.

  Nofret had to do something. Something swift, before her lady withered and shrank to nothing. Something that would last, that she would not have to do all over again when the princess’ courage failed.

  Something, she thought. Something drastic. But what, she did not know, nor could she foresee. Her mind was as blank as her lady’s eyes.

  oOo

  Nofret had grown up near Hattusas in Great Hatti. She had served an idiot of a lordling in Mitanni. She had seen the cities of Egypt when she came to be tribute to the king in Akhetaten. Memphis was very great. Akhetaten was new and raw, but mighty, and in places even beautiful.

  Thebes was greater than any, and ancient, as old as Egypt. Older. Before the Two Lands were, Thebes had stood on the eastern bank of the river.

  Now it sprawled from east to west with the river between. East was the old city, the place of temples, the houses of princes, old palaces, and the uncounted dwellings of people whose ancestors had lived exactly as they did, for years out of count. West was the palace that the king’s father had built, and a lesser, younger city, and beyond these, on the border to the land of the dead, the mighty tombs and temples of the old kings.

  Everything in Thebes was older and higher and vaster than anything else that Nofret had known. Thebes loomed. Even its sky seemed immense, blue without cloud; no limit, no end to it but the roofs and walls of the city.

  The king rode in processional from end to end of Thebes, from river to easternmost boundary and back across the river to his father’s palace. The way was lined with cheering throngs and carpeted with flowers. Everything was bright, beautiful, splendid.

  And yet the splendor rang hollow. Nofret saw the sealed gates of temples, the names of gods cut out, leaving raw wounds in paint and stone. She saw that the crowds pressed tight, but she also saw that they moved, flowing with the king in his processional. She, caught in the middle of it, clinging as always to the back of her lady’s chariot, could not see the beginning or end of the throng. But she suspected that it was smaller than it looked, that it ended abruptly before and behind, and all about it was sullen silence.

  In the most ancient part of the city, where the processional way was narrowest and the crowd most deafening, more than flowers rained down from rooftops and out of the crowd. Fruit ripe to rottenness, handfuls of dung, fell reeking on the king’s attendants. Even as his guards scattered in pursuit of the miscreants, one of his chariot-horses bucked and squealed. Something had struck its flank: a stone or a bit of brick, hurled with stinging force.

  The team’s stately pace quickened to a trot. Guards closed in. The king did not flee, he was too dignified for that, but he did not linger, either.

  Nofret never knew if the guards caught anyone with proof of his transgression clinging ripely to his hands. That one barrage seemed to be all the honesty that Thebes deemed necessary. All else was cheering and flowers, avid and well-paid loyalty, and silence ringing with echoes beneath.

  oOo

  The tombs that Aharon and his fellows were building outside of Akhetaten were no more than burrows in the sand beside the great temples and houses of everlasting in the desert to the west of Thebes. Queen Mother Tiye’s was far from the least of them, and far from the most easily discovered, far up in the valley of the tombs of kings. There she was laid in full and royal state, surrounded by all that she would need in the life beyond life: food, drink, furnishings, wigs and gowns and j
ewels, and servants to look after them, carved of wood and imbued with magical life, and a palace to live in, and words of magic carved and painted on all the walls, to give them life and substance.

  When she was set on her way to the land of the blessed dead, her sons turned from the care of the dead to that of the living. She would not have minded. She had always been a practical woman.

  Prince Smenkhkare was wedded to the princess Meritaten in the great temple of the Aten that his father and his brother had built in Thebes. There too he was crowned with the Two Crowns, invested with the crook of a shepherd and the flail of a master of slaves, and set upon the throne that had, in the last time of twofold kingship, belonged to his brother.

  The younger princess was married much more quietly, while the court was still recovering from the grand revel that had been her sister’s wedding. A simple rite in the temple, a feast no greater than any that the court indulged in when the king was in residence, and she was a crowned queen.

  It seemed to matter little to her. Thebes had not brought her to herself. On her first day in the city she was conducted to the queen’s palace by a great concourse of the queen’s servants and bidden to tell them her will. She could even disperse them and bring in her own people if she so desired: that was done more often than not when a new queen succeeded the old.

  She roused enough to decline the privilege. “No,” she said. “No, stay. Serve me as you served the queen before me.”

  That was as much as she would do. The palace could not run itself—Nofret had seen as much in Akhetaten after Queen Nefertiti died—but while it had a queen to look to, it could pretend that she cared what happened to it.

  On the day of her wedding, she stayed at the feast exactly as long as was proper, before the queen’s servants led her away to be prepared for what they called her blessed duty. She stood immobile while they bathed and anointed her and dressed her in a gown of linen so thin as to be transparent. Her wig was more extravagant than she would ever have chosen for herself, a mass of curls and braids woven with golden beads, with a beaded headdress over it, and perfume scattered on it till she smelled like a garden of spices.