A God Against the Gods (14 page)
Read A God Against the Gods Online
Authors: Allen Drury
At one particular spot, I remember, a vast bend of desert on the eastern bank of the river about halfway between Thebes and Memphis, so many thousands had gathered from the countryside about that they seemed to stretch almost as far as the low, rocky ridges that bounded the sands. Here he asked that the flotilla be halted so that he might greet them more intimately, proposing that he and Nefertiti be permitted to disembark and ride among them in one of the two ceremonial chariots we had brought along in the supply ships. With considerable misgivings his father and I looked at one another, but the two children were so radiant, so excited, and so happy that we did not have the heart to say no. We asked Aye and Amonhotep, Son of Hapu, to ride with them, gave our blessings and waved them off.
For almost two hours, while we stayed aboard and strained our eyes to watch their progress, they rode back and forth across that enormous plain, their passage marked by a constant wave of excited and happy cheers.
Finally, exhausted and almost drunken with delight, they returned to us and we set sail again. But long after we began to move they stood together at the railing looking back at that vast plain and its throngs which still shouted distantly after them.
“That was the best of all,” he said to us as the river turned away and the plain passed finally from view. “That was best of all.”
“It was,” agreed Nefertiti, her eyes alight still with the glow of it. “Oh, it was!”
But in Memphis, of course, and indeed everywhere, it was the same: acceptance, understanding, loyalty, love. We stayed three weeks, returned in the same triumphal way. This time we did not stop at their favorite river bend, but again they stood at the railing to wave and stare back, long after the loving crowd had again roared its greeting.
“Still the best,” he said with his little enigmatic smile as the plain once again slipped from view. “Still the best.”
“Yes,” Nefertiti said, holding close to his arm. “We must come here someday again.”
“We will,” he promised gravely, “when I am King.”
After that trip there has been no turning back. He took his place once more with the Family in all our public appearances, presently began to go accompanied only by Nefertiti: lately, sometimes, even alone, when his father and I for one reason or another have been unable to attend. Since the co-regency and marriage were announced, he has traveled with her again all the way to Memphis and back, to the same acclaim. They have accepted him. He has survived.
Now on this chilly day that threatens rain he is about to take his place on the throne-beside-the-throne. I am satisfied as a mother with his remarkable recovery, satisfied as a ruler with what we have all accomplished with the two of them. Under my guidance he will be a good Co-Regent and she will be a wonderful helpmate.
I, the Great Wife Tiye, Pharaoh in all but name of the Two Lands, welcome the new Pharaoh and his Chief Wife to power beside me.
Should the Aten call away me or my husband, which will effectively end my power whichever it is, Kemet will rest in good hands.
I, the Great Wife Tiye, Pharaoh in all but name of the Two Lands, have so arranged it.
***
Aye
I have misgivings: but events proceed.
Soon we will be leaving for Luxor, and nothing at all can now reverse the course that all our lives are taking.
I have done much to decide that course, I am as responsible as any, I have desired nothing more than this. Why, then, should I have doubts now, when it is much too late to change anything at all? When what I have dreamed and planned for fifteen years is about to come true?
The reason is, I think, the boy, and, in equal extent, my daughter, whom we have trained since babyhood to be his mirror image—if I may use such a term, knowing what the mirror now reflects … yet this, I suppose, is a cheap shot and unworthy of Aye: for the mirror not only reflects grotesquerie but a brilliant mind, a dreamer’s imagination, an idealist’s heart—and a will which is, I suspect, of iron.
He has confided much in me in these recent years, more than his parents have ever suspected, more than I have ever told. So has she, though her thoughts have usually paralleled his so closely that I have needed to know only the one to anticipate the other. I do not believe this has happened with Amonhotep, Son of Hapu; I am sure Kaires, for all the relative closeness in age and all the easy intimacy he was shrewd enough to establish early with them, has never been taken into their confidence so deeply. It has imposed on me a great burden, one more of those I have always carried for Kemet. Much of the molding of those two minds which now are about to acquire such power over the land has been done in the quiet private talks we have managed to have out of sight and sound of the rest of the Family.
From the others they have received all the standard things. From me they have received not so much instruction as sympathy and a patient ear. This they have apparently considered of greater value. Certainly to it they have given greater response, even though their response to the others has been impeccable. They have been dutiful children in all respects, moving with an easy grace to acquire the knowledge and the skills needed for government.
To the others they have revealed the formal results.
To me they have revealed the inner questionings.
These began, as did so many things in the minds of my nephew and my daughter, with the illness. That watershed in his life, whose consequences, still only partially revealed, still mysterious and not yet fully knowable, will obviously become part of the history of Kemet, apparently started many wonderings in his mind. They seem to revolve basically around the gods.
Why it should be that after almost two thousand years of recorded history there should appear in the land a Pharaoh who questions the gods, who have been ordained from the Beginning and are eternal, I could not say, unless it is that none came to his assistance when he prayed to them for help. But question them he does—not only Amon the obvious, whose relationship to the Family makes us all uneasy, but all the rest as well. Ptah … Ra-Atum … Ra-Herakhty … Mut … Hathor the cow … Sekhmet the lioness … Isis … Osiris … Nut … Geb … Khons … Thoth the ibis or baboon … Horus the falcon …
There is not a one whose existence and justification he has not challenged in our private talks these past two years. Dutifully his little echo my daughter has parroted him. What am I to make of this?
I have tried to tell them how our belief in the gods began: how the first unification of the Two Lands came with Menes (life, health, prosperity!) of the First Dynasty, which believed in Ra, and so gave Ra—the Sun at the height of his noontide glory—an initial supremacy over all other gods. I have told them how our ancestors—those dim and distant folk whom we call, across the haunted valleys of two thousand years, the Ancients of Kemet—initially worshiped the deities they saw in the major elements about them, in the earth, the sky, the waters of the River Nile, the wind, the rain, the scarab in the sand who symbolizes the formation of the earth as it forms tiny balls of dung in which to house its eggs and thus shelter and bring forth life. I have told them how the spreading unification of the land after Menes—psychological and mental unification, as well as physical unification—gradually merged Ra with all these other deities, yet kept him supreme, so that the sun cult always remained the dominant religion down to the time of their own immediate forebears of the Eighteenth Dynasty, when Amon (even he still retaining Ra in his formal name) became through circumstance and politics “the king of all the gods.”
I have told them how each town and locality had its own god, how each developed its own priests and temples, how all were absorbed finally by Ra and Amon, yet how each has still to this day retained its separate individuality in the hearts and minds of the people, who worship, fear, or love many gods.
I have told them why we worship certain animals and birds—not because we actually worship them but because we worship certain attributes they have which we associate with the gods they represent: the falcon, fierce and protective of Pharaoh and the land, as Horus; the ibis and baboon, shrewd and quick and full of shining wisdom, as Thoth; the lioness, stern and punishing to those who transgress, kindly and protective of those who obey, as Sekhmet; the crocodile, who guards longevity in the good and takes it away brutally from the bad, as Sebek; and all the rest. I have told them how we worship ritual because ritual each day reaffirms the order of things as it existed from the Beginning, and enlists each god anew in the service of the land and of Pharaoh—and in turn, of course, enlists Pharaoh himself anew in the service of the land and of the gods.
And from two shy yet stubborn eyes, and from two sparkling yet equally stubborn ones, there has looked out the one question I cannot answer if they cannot comprehend:
Why?
I have told them
why
, many times over. And so I think it is not a matter of “cannot” comprehend but a matter of “will not” comprehend.
And this, I tell you frankly, much disturbs me.
For if Pharaoh himself does not believe in the gods, then what will happen to the land? What will happen to the ancient order of things which, save for the unhappy subjugation by the Hyksos and one or two other relatively brief chaotic periods of our history, has always kept Kemet a happy, prosperous and stable country, a marvel to the nations and a beacon to the world? What will become of all of us, when the Co-Regent and the new Chief Wife pick up the power that already trails listlessly from the hands of my brother-in-law, that needs only time to fall forever from the strong, indomitable hands of my sister?
What will happen to Kemet then?
I can only hope: I can only hope. I have done my best to listen sympathetically, to try to understand, to try to end their questioning and bring them back. If they have an alternative to offer, they are not telling me. If they are not telling me, I know they are telling no one.
I cannot believe—
I cannot believe
—that they really contemplate any serious attempt to change the immutable order of things which has come down to us from the Beginning. I must tell myself, as I have told myself constantly since this most disturbing irreverence began, that it is simply the exuberance of young minds, simply the game of youth running free for a few last independent hours before it goes under the yoke of discipline and joins in the task with which all in the Great House are charged, the preservation of the eternal order of this eternal land,
I have to believe this, but I am not sure I do. The wind blows cold off the Nile, but it is not only the weather that chills my bones: the cold goes deeper, it strikes my heart. I love them both most dearly, yet if they really feel as they hint they do—if they really attempt to challenge the very soul and being of the Two Lands—then there can be only one ending.
And in that ending there can be for the Councilor Aye, in love and fear and horror, devoted always and only to the good of Kemet, only one role he can possibly play. And he will not be alone.
The cold strikes deep, it ravages my heart. I dress to go to Luxor now, but I go in a growing fear I hope I may succeed in hiding from them all.
They must never perceive it, for there is the possibility I cling to as desperately as every sailor tossed unsuspecting into the arms of Hapi clings to the floating palm branch.
I may be mistaken.
I pray to all the gods that this is so.
***
Nefertiti
The day is here, the day is here! It is
here.
I, Nefertiti, shall be Queen. My cousin, my love, will be King. We will rule Kemet with the Good God and the Great Wife as long as it pleases the Aten to let them live.
Then we will rule alone.
And things will change.
My noble ladies in waiting have washed me thoroughly with scented waters softened with salts of natron. Now they dress me, here in the main Palace of Malkata. They bring me warm woolens against the windy cold They bring me, to go over them, a sheath of gold, pectorals filled with many jewels, rings, bracelets, golden sandals for my feet, my own special conelike blue crown which I designed and which is like no other, rising high and drawing back from my face to reveal it in all its beauty.
There is no one in Kemet as beautiful as I. There is no one in Kemet—I hesitate, but I am strong and fearless, and I say it—there is no one in Kemet as strange as he. He believes this gives us great advantage. I believe it too. What he believes, I believe. For he is always right.
The ladies in waiting flutter about me, exclaiming and awe-struck by my beauty. They increase it with kohl for my eyes, powders and rouges for my cheeks, tints for my hair. I hold my head very still, examining myself over and over in the bronze jewel-ringed mirror which he gave me on our last birthday. (I gave him a small scarab which he wears as a ring, showing on its reverse Horus the falcon representing Pharaoh, standing on Sebek the crocodile representing longevity, and flanked by two cobras representing the goddess Buto of Lower Egypt—thus, Lower Egypt protecting Pharaoh and giving him long life. These are things we no longer believe in, but it is a pretty conceit. And it symbolizes something for us: we seem to feel more at home in Lower Egypt, away from the intrigues of this city, though it is here in Thebes that we will chiefly rule.)
I study myself in the mirror, and slowly, carefully, with infinite delicacy, my principal lady in waiting, An-ser-Woss-ett, draws rings of green kohl, made from ground malachite, around my eyes, heavily shading my eyelids, drawing out the fine lines at the end of each eye to exaggerated lengths to make me seem glamorous and mysterious—not that I need much of that, for I
am
glamorous and mysterious: but it is the custom. Then from another little pot she takes powdered red ochre, which she applies to my lips and cheeks to heighten their already lovely color. My hair (which will be seen briefly when my unusual crown is removed after the wedding and then formally returned to my head by my uncle Aanen to signify my coronation as Queen of the Two Lands and Chief Wife of the Co-Regent) she tints lightly with henna—again, a custom, for it shines with a beautiful dusky red color, as it is. Custom also calls for it to be shaven after I become Queen, and for me to wear heavy wigs thereafter; but this I think I will not do. I have classic features, a long, lovely neck; why hide them under an ugly thatch of someone else’s hair? I will permit them to be covered with cloth of gold for certain major ceremonies, but for the rest I shall wear my crown and look as nature intended me. This will be treat enough for Kemet, I think, and while there may be a little grumbling that I break tradition, what of it? It is not the only tradition we intend to break.
Now An-ser-Woss-ett is preparing to drench me with perfumes, which I must admit I like. Myrrh and frankincense, cinnamon, bitter almond, sweet wine mixed with honey, sweet rush, cardamom—they all blend together in a delicious jumble which I thoroughly enjoy. I shall smell lovely when I come to his bed, though it will not be the first time: we have had each other many times in the weeks since our marriage was announced and no one, save possibly Kaires, has even suspected. We have become very clever at concealing what we do—and concealing what we think. Only my father suspects our thoughts a little, and even him I think we have succeeded in confusing. It is vital that we do so, until we have the power. There will be time enough then for the world to exclaim.
I said “many times” but actually it has only been twice, for it has not been easy to arrange: but it has been enough to prove to me that I can be his wife, as he can be my husband, willingly and joyously in every sense. I was not at all sure of this, for you must understand that his terrible illness imposed a strain on me greater than it did on anyone save himself: and of course I did not know what final damage it might have done to him. For a long time I was uncertain on all counts, even though I have known almost from the time I knew anything that someday we would marry. I knew that this would still be true if he should survive the change, no matter what he looked like, or what, if any, his powers might be—for from the first our marriage has been considered necessary for Kemet. But I really thought for a time that it might have to be a marriage complete with all the love, affection and support I could give him, but incomplete in the one thing that matters most to us and to Kemet—that we should be able to love one another in all ways, and that we should also be able to have many healthy sons to strengthen our House and continue the Eighteenth Dynasty forever and ever.
Since the continuation of the House and the Dynasty are so important, I was even prepared if necessary to accept the fact that I might have to submit myself to some substitute father (undoubtedly Pharaoh himself, ailing as he is), so that my sons could be produced for Kemet behind the public screen the marriage would provide. But now I know that this will not be necessary. It is the one thing I had to know to be able to go through this day with the genuine joy and happiness I should feel, and show the people.
Therefore I persuaded him to join me in the experiment, which at first he was a little reluctant to undertake—not for any moral reasons, for since the age of eight we have witnessed what happens in Thebes during the Festival of Opet, from peasant hut to royal Palace (two weeks of drunkenness and couplings of all kinds everywhere, even in the streets), and nothing about the morals of Kemet shocks us now. Indeed, the morals of Kemet do not exist in the sense, for instance, in which morals seem to exist in some heathen lands beyond Mittani which we read about. It is the order of things which exists in Kemet, and the order of things can be stretched to include almost anything as long as the order of things remains the order of things. This is a lesson we have learned and will not forget
So we would both, I thought, have acquiesced, as a matter of simple practicality, had it been necessary for me to lie with his father to beget our sons: but we would neither of us have been happy about it. I explained this to him gravely, while he watched me with those calm eyes which can be sometimes almost hypnotic in their steady, deliberately expressionless gaze. I did not allow his lack of response to shake me. I did not stumble or falter. I continued to the end. But I realize now that I should have carried away inside a hurt from which I would never have recovered had he not studied me with silent intensity for a moment when I finished and then said quietly:
“Any Sons of the Sun who are begotten on your body will be begotten by me and by no one else. I will kill myself before I will let my father or anyone else profane the only woman I will ever love.”
After that, it all went easily; and I found out what I had to find out: that the illness by some miracle had stopped before it destroyed him altogether as a man; and that I, out of the love I have known since our babyhood and the compassion that has joined it since his illness, was capable of taking to myself his misshapen body without revulsion, without reservation, without anything but what I have always known for him, a love so deep that it can never change.
So we are one entirely, and so the day will proceed as happily and fittingly as it should. I needed only to know about his body to be to him in all things the great Queen I know I have the ability to be. It has been many, many years since I needed to know about his heart, for it has belonged to me always, as mine to him. And for his mind I have known, as early as I knew anything, trust and respect and utter confidence in all he says and does. For he is always right.
He is quick, very quick, though now this is hidden behind the shy, veiled eyes, the deliberately bland expression, the customarily unsmiling face. It is best that this be so, for he and I have many thoughts and many plans that Kemet must not yet know.
An-ser-Woss-ett applies the final trace of powder to my cheeks, the tiniest final touch of rouge to my lips, one more lightest tracing of kohl along the eyelids, a swift final shower of many perfumes. She stands back and studies me. I study myself. All the ladies flutter. She likes what she sees, I like what I see. We exchange the smiles of two women working in harmony to achieve the result both desire. I take a large carnelian ring engraved with the head of Horus (she is a sweet but very superstitious woman) from the box I have concealed beneath the table and, reaching for her hand, place it upon her finger. She drops to her knees, kissing my hand and praising me. All the ladies do the same. I stand, go to the mirror, turn this way and that: I gleam with gold and jewels from head to foot. My beautiful face is perfect, my lovely long neck is white as the whitest sand and soft as the softest linen. My eyes are dark and mysterious—and as intelligent as his, which few in Kemet know. Which is just as well.
I feel radiant.
I look radiant.
Very soon now they will come for me and I will go in my own special ship of state down the river to Luxor. And all along the banks of the Nile amid their wild hysterical shouts of love and loyalty, the people will say to one another, and I will hear them say it, “Lovely, lovely! Oh, she is beautiful, she is beautiful! A Beautiful Woman Has Come, and now she is ours!”
And he will greet me with the smile that lights only for me, and in the brooding eyes that conceal so much of pain and hurt there will today be only happiness.
And I shall be content.
***