A God Against the Gods (10 page)

Gilukhipa

Now all is pomp and ceremony in the Palace, and once again, as on so many boring occasions in the past fifteen years, we must all troop ourselves out to see and be seen. Today the strange horse-faced boy is to become both God and married. It is almost too much for one glorious day in this glorious household. Can I stand the ineffable joy and excitement? Or shall I swoon completely away, as I have often thought of doing in the midst of some ceremony, just to find out what my marvelous husband and his smug Great Wife would do about it? Probably order me summarily swept into the Nile, there to become the plaything of Hapi and the speedy meal of Sebek the crocodile god. A fitting end, they would tell one another, laughing the while. Poor old Gilukhipa has finally brightened somebody’s life for a few seconds, anyway!

Well: It is not as though I have not tried. When I first came to this country, a girl of fourteen, political pawn of my father, I did my best to please the little brown man who greeted me. He was God, supreme ruler, Pharaoh, the living Horus, Lord of the Two Lands, the King, the Great Bull, and all the other mighty things his titularies tell us he is. It was not my fault that I was almost a foot taller than he and plain in the bargain. The contrast brought immediate titters, hastily suppressed, when I disembarked at the landing of Malkata from the elaborate state barge on which I had spent almost two months coming down from Mittani. First my three hundred and seventeen ladies and I had been obliged to travel overland two weeks by donkey caravan, to the sea which they call in Kemet “the Great Green.” Then I had been bidden away behind curtained doorways while my ladies were free to gambol about on the decks of our flotilla enjoying the fresh air and sunlight. I was forced to stay inside, away from the eyes of the impious, while we hugged the coast slowly down past Phoenicia, Palestine, Edom and Sinai to the Delta, and so into the onrushing currents and slowly winding passages of the great river with which even I have come to feel a mysterious bond, in my years here. Still I was not to reveal myself, for I was to be a surprise to the people of Kemet.

Certainly I was a surprise to him: I could tell from the instantly suppressed flash of anger in his eyes that somebody was going to hear about it, and not in a friendly way. Obviously they had not told him of my height and my plainness, though it was clearly the height that rankled most. “You are tall!” he blurted out—the first and last time he ever said anything purely spontaneous to me. “The better to see Kemet, Majesty,” I replied calmly, for I am not a daughter of Mittani for nothing, and was no more impressed with all their fuss and feathers then than I am now, though I soon came to see the necessity as a method of statecraft. “This,” he said, and already his tone dismissed me, “is the Great Wife Tiye. I commend you to her friendship, and she to yours.” Another little figure, not so brown as he, much prettier than I, stepped daintily forward and held out her hand. I did not know exactly what to do, so I bent low and kissed it. This proved to be right, for she smiled graciously, drew me close, and kissed me on both cheeks in return. “All hail Queen Gilukhipa!” she cried in that deceptively soft and silvery voice that nonetheless rose with a startling power and carried clearly over the river to the massed thousands on the eastern bank. A great answering shout dutifully went up. Flanked by the two of them, I was escorted into the Palace.

Next day the formal marriage ceremony took place. That night he visited me dutifully, and dutifully he continued to do so, sporadically, for the next three or four years. I never conceived and bore him a child, and presently our relations lapsed into a grudging informality in which I have been neither consulted nor confided in by them, and also not mistreated, either—neither fish nor fowl, neither friend nor enemy—just Queen Gilukhipa, paraded at ceremonies, given my own small palace and court within the compound of Malkata, attended by the small handful of my ladies who did not soon marry and melt away into the ranks of the nobility. Left to my own devices, principally. And bored—bored—bored.

So to amuse myself I have made my lifetime study the House of Thebes. There are many about who have done the same—the Councilor Aye, for instance, constantly gathering new honors, titles and powers as the years go by … the Queen Mother Mutemwiya, at fifty-seven gradually shriveling into a little wizened gnome like a scarab beetle in the sand, but faithfully prodding and pushing the dung ball of her family up the hill of years … Amonhotep the Scribe, Son of Hapu, into everything as always, working closely with Aye and gathering almost as many honors … faithful Ramose, growing gray but still Vizier of Upper Kemet … the bitter, ever watching priest Aanen and his white-robed, twittering cohorts in the temples of Amon … the soldier Kaires, now serving far up the Nile near the Second Cataract as chief scribe for all of Pharaoh’s armies in Upper Kemet—an unusually high post for a man of thirty, but he is an unusual man and a friend of mine (not lover, though the gossip claims it. Pharaoh’s queens do not have lovers; some of them do not even have Pharaoh) … and the Queen-Princess Sitamon, also my friend and somehow managing to be her usual placid and cheerful self even though her life too is one of boredom as she leaves girlhood and moves on into her twenties and a future as empty as my own. (Gossip never touches her and Kaires, thanks to the shield I provide them willingly with my well-known friendship for him. I wish them well, feeling sorry for them, too, because of course nothing can ever come of it save a few scattered, furtive meetings over the years—and Pharaoh’s terrible vengeance should he ever find out. But we are all clever people. We have a pact that he will not. And he will not.)

The study of the House of Thebes, then, is the lifework of Gilukhipa of Mittani, third Queen of the Two Lands after Sitamon and the Great Wife Tiye—who remains all-powerful as always, as much the ruler of the Two Lands and the Two Lands’ ruler as she has always been. She is supremely shrewd, that one, though she no longer has quite the air of serene assurance that she wears on their joint colossal statue that stands at the entrance to the temple he is building to Amon at Luxor, just up the river from the vast complex of Karnak. She has given him three more children, now, two of them princesses stillborn, the third the boy Smenkh-ka-ra, who is so beautiful he might as well be a girl and already,
to my mind, gives some indications that he probably is. He is too delicate and cloying for my taste: I find him sticky, like the sweets with which all in Kemet love to complete their meals. But he is of course very popular with his parents and with the people, so one dissembles in this instance as one does in so many others. And he has one virtue, I suppose, at least in his parents’ eyes: he tags along after his brother like a little shadow all the time. So the Crown Prince has at least one unthinking, uncritical, absolutely devoted follower, in any event.

That he does not have many of these, aside from Smenkh-ka-ra is, I suspect, one of the things that has brought the lines of tension and care that are beginning to mar noticeably the heretofore smugly placid and untroubled countenance of his mother. For most of her life, particularly since her parents, Yuya and Tuya—both now mummified and resting peacefully in their sarcophagi in the Valley of the Nobles a couple of miles north of here—cleverly maneuvered her forward to become the wife of Amonhotep III (life, health, prosperity!), everything went exactly as she wanted it … until the day she gave birth to Amonhotep IV. And that has become another story.

For the boy’s first nine or ten years, everything appeared normal. He was a handsome and well-formed child, obviously intelligent; quick to perceive, quick to understand, quick to learn. At age five he was placed in the hands of Amonhotep, Son of Hapu, who has supervised that intensive and thorough education that is given all heirs to the Double Crown. Kemet’s Pharaohs are working rulers, and with few exceptions most have been able men, educated far above the average run of their subjects, excellently trained for future duties and responsibilities.

So it was with the Crown Prince until at some point—coming on so gradually and unexpectedly in his tenth year that, looking back, none of us can say exactly, “This was the day”—there began those curious physical and psychological changes which set him apart from the run of ordinary men. And by this I do not mean set apart from ordinary men as all Pharaohs are set apart by their divinity; I mean set apart in ways strange, unpredictable, unprecedented, impossible to hide and, to the superstitious, almost terrible.

I have said that he was physically well formed and handsome as a child, and so he was, aside only from the enlarged, almost platycephalic skull which seems to have crept, for some unknown reason, into the line of Thebes. Although hardly anyone (certainly not I) saw the two stillborn princesses, so quickly and secretly were they whisked away to the mummifiers and hustled to their tombs, word gets around in the Palace, particularly to those like myself who listen carefully. Their skulls, too, had the odd enlargement; and so too—though Tiye keeps the sidelock of youth carefully wound around the top of his head in an unusual fashion she refers to with a challenging laugh (yet who could possibly challenge her?) as “my new style for sons”—does that of Smenkhkara. Throughout Kemet I hear the whisper goes, in the mud-brick villages, the busy bazaars and crowded cities, that Amon is angry with the House of Thebes; and though he dismisses the idea with a scornful laugh, I think my husband suspects so, uneasily, too … as so he should, considering everything.

Greater change than this, however, had been reserved for the Crown Prince; and were he intrinsically a more lovable child, which I do not consider him to be, I should feel a genuine sympathy and sadness for him. As it is, I feel some, though his attitude toward me has always been remote and no real communication exists between us. But it is impossible not to have some regrets for his sake—and a secret and profound gratification for my own.

For the first time since I came here I have been glad that I have been unable to bear Pharaoh’s children.

Almost imperceptibly, as I say, yet still so swiftly that within two months we were all aware of it, there began in his tenth year a curious transformation of the child Amonhotep IV. His hips began to broaden, grow heavy, sag like an overweight woman’s; his belly began to spill forward over the edge of his kilt like a middle-aged man’s; his genitals, I am told, almost disappeared in rolls of fat; his arms became spindly; his neck and face seemed almost hourly to elongate. “Horse-faced” I have called him, and such is the common description—only whispered, never, ever, stated in his parents’ presence—used by everyone in the Palace and throughout Kemet.

Tragically, out of this increasingly strange body, his fine, intelligent eyes have continued to stare; and gradually, as he realized how different he has become, there has entered into them something veiled, secretive, self-protective, withdrawn—yet at the same time harsh, imperious, arrogant and commanding.

Kaires, I think, was the first to put his finger on it, one time three years ago when he was in Thebes on official business and had come, under the guise of our friendship, to my palace to be alone with Sitamon. Later they came to my bedroom where I had dismissed the servants and prepared with my own hands a nourishing meal. The talk turned, as it inevitably does in the Palace, and I am sure all over the Empire wherever thinking people gather, to the Crown Prince. Kaires frowned, deeply troubled.

“I think we have here,” he said slowly, “the makings of a fanatic. May Amon and the gods help us if this proves true when he becomes Pharaoh.”

“My brother may never become Pharaoh,” Sitamon said in a voice equally troubled. “The disease may continue, to his death. Which,” she added, and her voice became both pensive and sad, “might be better for him—and for all of us.”

But her forebodings—unfortunately, I agree, for both him and the Two Lands—have not been borne out. The disease did not go on to his death; soon after our conversation, as mysteriously and suddenly as it began, it was arrested. After a year of discreet but intensive observation by everyone, it became apparent that there would be no more changes. A grotesque—but a highly intelligent and, in some curious way, not unattractive grotesque—was destined to live on as Crown Prince.

And today, at the command of his father, the second part of his sister’s prophecy also fails. Today he becomes Co-Regent, Pharaoh, God—and, of all things, husband. For I was not entirely accurate when I said that his only devoted follower is little Smenkhkara. Nefer-ti-ti loves him also, and apparently quite genuinely so. She must have done from a very early age, not to be repelled by the changes. If anything, they seem to have made her more protective and more tender toward him. It is, as Kaires, Sitamon and I agree, the thing that may prove his salvation and that of Kemet. Much rides on the lovely child whose dying mother Hebmet, with a prophetic accuracy greater than most mothers are capable of at such a time, named her “A Beautiful Woman Has Come.”

For she
is
beautiful, Nefertiti: there is no denying it. She too is different—a trace of platycephalic skull there also, carefully hidden under wigs and the oddly shaped “crown” she affects. (Could that particular flaw have come down through her father Aye to his children, through his sister Tiye to her children, a last bequest of Yuya and Tuya lying quietly in their tombs?) But in her the difference is a refined and beautifully structured beauty almost unique in the land of Kemet; at least, in the rarefied world in which we live. Now and again, in some mud-brick village along the river, in some crowded market place in Thebes or Memphis, I have seen a girl, a boy, a startling vision of perfection, gleam suddenly from the crowd and as swiftly disappear. Such beauty does exist in Kemet, here and there, most unexpectedly; but it is very rare in royal and noble houses. Where it exists among the peasantry, it will swiftly wither and be forgotten with all the anonymous millions who till the soil and grow the food and build the temples and do the work that supports the royal world. But in Nefertiti, I believe, it will live forever.