Pillar of Fire

by Judith Tarr

  The king knew that very well. He was not being subtle. “I have been here seldom enough,” he said. “I’ve traveled everywhere in the Two Lands.”

  “Everywhere but Thebes,” the priest said.

  “Thebes has made us unwelcome,” said the king. “It tried to kill my brother. Can I be assured that it won’t kill me?”

  “Thebes will welcome you,” said the priest, “in Amon’s name.”

  The king sat back. Maybe he was pondering. Maybe not. After a while he said, “Suppose that I do as you ask. What will you do in return?”

  “Why, serve you, majesty,” the priest replied.

  “And forbear to curse me? How generous.” Tutankhaten left off playing with the flail. “What if I refuse?”

  “That is your right, majesty,” said the priest. “You may remain here in an empty city, where none but courtiers and their slaves have chosen to be. Or you may go back to a city that lives as it has lived for thousands upon thousands of years.”

  “I remember,” said Tutankhaten, “how we left Thebes rather than be killed there.”

  “Your brother was cursed,” the priest said. “You, majesty, are not. You may return and be welcome.”

  “May the Aten return? May he rule again outside of his own city?”

  The queen’s voice held the stillness that meant, to those who knew, that she was deeply moved. Still Nofret did not know what moved her, whether she was angry or whether she was on the verge of surrender.

  The priest addressed her with careful respect. “Lady, the Aten was never god to Egypt, only to a single king and to those who were his kin. Amon is lord in Thebes, and always has been.”

  “Therefore,” she said, “to live in Thebes, we must bow to the rule of Amon.”

  “Amon has always ruled in Thebes,” said Amon’s priest.

  “You ask,” she said, “that we abandon all my father did, all he was. Will you have us forget even his name?”

  The priest did not answer. His eyes had flashed as she spoke, briefly, but not too brief to see.

  Nofret shivered. Here was a man who hated, and whose hate would last. But he was subtle in it. He could wait, and be patient—as he had waited for long years, until Akhenaten was dead.

  Maybe he had had a hand in disposing of Smenkhkare. She did not know. No one did. They had never found the person who poisoned Smenkhkare and his queen. A slave or two had gone missing—maybe fallen prey to crocodiles, maybe disposed of for knowing too much.

  Amon’s priest would wait again if he must, but his patience was reaching its limit. Here was a child king, a court holding to its splendor in a dying city, a kingdom cut off from the one who ruled it. Nofret could not see what choices there were. Everything had led to this, from the moment Akhenaten sailed out of Thebes to build his city in the desert place.

  The queen must see it: it was in her eyes, in the way she held herself, too stiff, too still. What Tutankhaten saw, Nofret did not know. He seemed transparent, a beautiful bright child who took an innocent pleasure in being king. But there was more to him than there had been to Smenkhkare.

  He did not glance at Ay or at his queen. He kept his eyes on the priest. He said, “We will think on it. You may go.”

  The priest bowed. His patience would endure for yet a while, the gesture said. But only for a while.

  oOo

  “What choice do we have?”

  In the privacy of the royal chambers, in the comfort of plain kilt and few jewels, both the king and his uncle were free to speak freely. The queen, freed of crown and scepter and heavy wig, paced like a cat in a cage. It was she who had spoken, startling the other two. They had been talking around it, Ay because he fell into indirection when he was being king’s counselor, Tutankhaten because he needed to think it through.

  She met their stares with impatience that made them stare even harder. “No, I haven’t gone mad, and there isn’t a demon in me! I’ve been thinking. And not about going to Thebes, either. About living here, even for as little time as it’s come to lately. I’ve been watching this city die by fingerbreadths. What can we do to keep it alive? Nothing! The Aten doesn’t speak to us as he spoke to my father.”

  Nofret held her breath. No one knew that the queen’s father was still alive. Only the queen and Nofret, and Leah, who was still the mistress of the queen’s wardrobe when the queen was residing in Akhetaten.

  Leah was standing in the shadow of a pillar, dark robe and dark veil, watching, listening. She only did that when there was something to watch and something to hear.

  Neither the king nor his counselor seemed to hear anything odder in the queen’s voice than that she spoke at all, and with such intensity. Lord Ay said slowly, “Yet if the Aten is the true god—”

  “Maybe he is,” she said. “Maybe he’s not. He hasn’t told me. Has he told you, my husband?”

  Tutankhaten looked startled. “All he ever gives me is a headache.” He flushed as if at his own temerity. “No. No, that wasn’t fitting. He doesn’t talk to me that I know of. There’s only the brightness when I perform his rites, and the way the world seems darker after. Should I ask him, do you think? Should I beg him to answer, before we forsake him for the other gods?”

  “I already have,” said Ankhesenpaaten. “Every day, every night, since . . . since Father went into the house of purification. He never says anything. I think he died with Father.”

  No one seemed horrified to hear her say that. No wind howled out of the dark, no lightning struck.

  “Only Father ever saw the truth,” she said. “It was truth for him; we never had any doubt of it. But the rest of us . . . what did we have? The Aten never said a word to us.”

  Maybe she had not known herself that she would say such things, not until she said them. Once said, they were not to be unsaid. There was a world of bitterness in them, bitterness so old that it was turned to resignation.

  “A god who speaks only to one man cannot be god to a whole people,” she said. “I remember, someone said that once. But if we give in to Amon, and Amon grows too powerful—”

  “Amon was too powerful before the Aten came,” Tutankhaten said. “You said so yourself, uncle, and others say so, too. The Aten shut down more than a temple. He broke the power of priests who were beginning to think themselves above kings.”

  “So he did,” said the Lord Ay. “And yet you see what came of it. He went too far. Better if he had used his authority as king to rein in Amon’s priesthood, than to shut it down altogether.”

  “Is that what you were thinking?” the queen asked him. “All those years, were you thinking that my father had done wrong?”

  Ay looked on her in deep affection, but he did not make the mistake of addressing her as a troubled child. He spoke to her as to a woman and a queen. “Lady, a man’s thoughts may be his own, even when he serves his king to the best of his ability.”

  She bowed to that, though she did not precisely forgive him. “You were loyal always. But now he’s gone. What loyalty holds you now? Will you go over to Amon?”

  “I will go where my king and my queen go,” said Ay. “Wherever that may be.”

  “Even to death?”

  His eyes were steady, his expression as calm as ever. “Even to death, my lady.”

  “And if we refuse what Amon offers—what he threatens?”

  “Then I stay with you,” said Ay.

  “You want us to go, don’t you?” Tutankhaten had sat to watch them talk, perching on a stool and tucking up his feet. “You think this place will be dead, with us or without us.”

  “What do you think, my lord?” Ay asked him.

  He did not blink. Ay had always taught him so, by asking him to choose, even when everything had been decided already among the counselors. “I think,” Tutankhaten said slowly, “that I want to let this place die. It’s been trying to for so terribly long, and we’ve been refusing to let it. I want to leave it to crumble in peace—even if it means letting Amon have his way. We can bridle hi
m, can’t we? We can make him serve the king, no matter how powerful he wants to be.”

  “If Amon is restored,” Ay said, “he may be amenable to the royal will, to a degree. But he will insist on one thing. He will demand that the Aten’s worship be ended, and the Aten returned, if at all, to what he was before: a lesser aspect of a lesser aspect of Amon-Re.”

  “Amon hates the Aten,” Tutankhaten said. “The priest tried to hide it, but he couldn’t—not anything as strong as that. If we leave here, the Aten won’t be god and king any longer. He’ll be forgotten.”

  They both glanced at the queen, who had prowled to the wall and back. She stopped in the middle of the room, with lamplight turning her whole body to gold, limning the shape of it in her light linen gown.

  Tutankhaten did not seem to notice either her beauty or her womanliness. He was still a child in that, still had not come to her bed as a husband should.

  Nor was she thinking of it then. Her hands were fists at her sides. “I think,” she said, “that if the Aten wanted to live, he would say something to one of us. Will you come with me to the temple, lion-cub? Will you pray there with me?”

  “One last time?” he asked. She nodded. He bent his head. “I’ll go with you, then. To ask him, and demand that he answer. And if he doesn’t . . .”

  No one finished the thought for him. No one needed to.

  oOo

  It was dim in the temple, among the great courts and under roofs as high as the sky. The priests on night-duty were startled to greet the king and the queen and their small company of attendants: only Ay and Nofret and Leah quiet behind, and a handful of guards. The temple itself was empty of worshippers, but then it always was, except when the king was performing a rite that required an audience. The Aten had no followers so devoted as to pray to him in his own house, unless the king commanded it.

  They went all the way through all the courts to the inner shrine. The altar was bare of gifts, those of the day before cleared away and distributed among the priests, those of the new day not yet offered—that was for the king to do at dawn. Here at midnight there was only the bare stone table and the golden image of the god, the disk of the sun with its many hands offering blessings to the painted figures of Akhenaten and Nefertiti and their children. Dead, all of them, except for Ankhesenpaaten.

  She bowed with Tutankhaten before the altar, lifted her hands and prayed aloud, though in a formal rite it would more properly have been he who spoke. She named the Aten by all his titles and his beautiful names, taking care not to leave out one. But the heart of her prayer was brief, and simple. “Lord of light, if you truly are, if you are the one and only and truest god, speak to us now. Give us a sign. Tell us what we must do.”

  The echoes ran away to the roof. No bat fluttered there, nor any breath or spirit. The shadows were empty. There was nothing stirring in them. Not even the spirits of the dead that liked to spy on the living, sipping of their warmth: not even they lingered here.

  Ankhesenpaaten waited long and long. She repeated her prayer three times, each time more clearly, till her voice rang among the pillars. But there was nothing to answer her. The god, if he had ever been in this place, was gone away.

  Maybe, thought Nofret, he had gone into Sinai with his sole and most devoted servant. The one who had been king was there, or so Leah had told her, bringing word only once in four long years: a message of almost hurtful brevity. We are in Sinai. We all live, we are well.

  No more then, and no more since, not even rumor. The desert had swallowed them all, both the nameless man and the two Apiru who had spirited him out of Egypt.

  Wherever he was, whatever had become of him, his god was nowhere in the temple.

  “He is gone,” said the queen at last, her voice a sigh.

  “If he was ever here at all,” said Tutankhaten.

  She rounded on him in rare anger. “He was here! But he is gone. He’s left us. He can’t hear, nor will he answer.”

  “Even,” asked Tutankhaten, raising his voice as if he wished the god to hear, “if his absence means that we go back to Amon?”

  “Even so,” said the queen in the ringing silence. “He was my father’s god. It seems he has no inclination to be ours.”

  “Then we go to Amon,” said Tutankhaten. He spoke boldly, though his eyes flickered toward the image of the god upon the wall, as if he expected it to reach out with its many golden hands and punish him for his presumption.

  The Aten did nothing. The image glimmered in the gloom, receiving its eternal tribute from its only chosen servant. Those whom it had forborne to choose turned away from it and left it, not looking back.

  Thirty-Two

  Neither the king nor the queen looked again on the image of the Aten in his temple that Akhenaten had built. In the morning they performed the rites of the dawn in the king’s chapel in the palace. The god they invoked was Amon, and the hymn they sang was the hymn to Amon. It had an air of defiance, of daring the Aten to strike, but no ill fell on them.

  It was Akhetaten that died. Emptied of its god, with its king and queen turned away from him, it withered like a flower in the sun.

  The king went back to Amon, but not, till it well suited his pleasure, to Thebes. It was Memphis he chose, and to Memphis that he went. “Thebes would have been a killer of kings,” he said, “and Amon cursed a king. I grant them their power, but I am king. And the king sees fit to rule in the north, under the protection of Ptah of Memphis.”

  Amon could hardly refuse him that, or even question it. He had his power back again. The king had proved it: he had altered his name, such an act as none in Egypt did lightly, for names were power. He turned his back on the Aten. He was Tutankhamon, and his queen, beside him in this as in everything, had become Ankhesenamon.

  It was, as she had said, an easier name to say, and more melodious. She professed to be fond of it. She would not answer to her old name, nor hear it spoken. She-Lives-for-the-Aten was dead; she lived for Amon now, and worshipped in his name.

  It was her way, Nofret thought, of sealing her father in his tomb. She rejected the name that he had given her and the god he had imposed upon her. She took back what he had taken away, the old gods of Egypt, and made them her own. If she regretted what she had done, or feared that her father would learn and somehow find a way to punish her, she did not speak of it to anyone. She had chosen as her spirit moved her. She did not retreat from the choice.

  oOo

  The king and the queen left Akhetaten on the festival day of Amon in Thebes, taking ship up the river with their court and their following and all of the city that could be lifted and moved. Everything went, living and not. Even the bodies of the dead would go, joining the long slow caravan that went down to the river and then upon it in boats.

  Only the tomb of Akhenaten remained, sealed and forbidden, with the body in it that wore the king’s name and his seals but had belonged to a nameless slave.

  Nor did they take away his queen or his children. Ankesenamon forbade it. “This was their city,” she said. “Let them remain in it after it is dead.”

  But everyone else came, and everything that could be moved. No one wanted to linger. It was as if the city had been a rootless thing, a plant of the desert that shriveled and faded, till the wind caught it and blew it far away.

  oOo

  Nofret stood on the deck of the queen’s ship as it sailed away from Akhetaten. It was a splendid day, cool for the season in Egypt, the sun more warm than searing hot. People were singing on the water, a song not of grief but of rejoicing. It was like a holiday, this exodus from the Aten’s city.

  She did not know what she felt. Relief, yes, to be out of that place so like a tomb. But regret, too, and not a little sadness. She had come to the Horizon of the Aten as a slave among slaves, determined to be a queen’s servant. Now she was that, and secure in it. She would never walk again in the palace at Akhetaten with its odd painted images and its beautiful courts, or ramble the city, or make the journe
y to the workmen’s village to visit Johanan and Aharon and Leah.

  Leah had not come in the queen’s following. She had left as quietly as she had come, asking no leave of the queen. To Nofret she had said only that she was going back to her people. “We’ll be going down to Thebes,” she said, “whether the king will go there or no. There are tombs in plenty to build there, and hordes of the living to add to the ranks of the dead. Look for us in the western valleys, if you ever come back.”

  She did not even wait for Nofret to speak before she was gone. Farewells were not a thing she liked or did well, no more than did Nofret. Nofret would have to trust that Leah would do as she had promised, and that the king and the queen would decide in the end to forgive the city as well as its god and go back to Thebes, taking Nofret with them.

  There was no telling if the Apiru were still in their village, or if they had left already. Maybe they would choose to walk rather than go in boats, desert people that they were, with their flocks of goats and their sheep. The old he-goat was dead, but he had a son who had grown to be as cantankerous as his father. Maybe he would come to Thebes and be a terror to the workmen there.

  The thought made her smile a little as she looked back up the river. They had come a remarkably long way in a little while. Akhetaten was far enough behind them to seem insignificant, a city made of clay and set up in a princeling’s tomb for him to live in after he was dead. Its walls were high still, its roofs unbroken, and all of it whole and beautiful in the embrace of its cliffs, and yet it was no living place. It was empty, stripped of its god and its people.

  The desert would cover it. Men would forsake it. It would die as mortal things die, and be forgotten.

  She turned to look at her lady. The one who had been She-Lives-for-the-Aten, now She-Lives-for-Amon, was a different person. It was still the same face, the same slender body and elegant hands, but the spirit that lived inside it had changed. Ankhesenpaaten would never have smiled as she sailed forever away from the city that her father had built, but Ankhesenamon not only smiled, she snatched a garland of flowers and called to her maids, and incited them to wage fierce war on the king and his young men in the boat beside hers.