The Twelfth Transforming (30 page)

The building that housed the offices of ministries was also unusually busy for the time of day. Pharaoh’s civil servants were seldom in their offices before midmorning, if at all. Many of them, having received their sinecures as bribes or payment for loyalty, had immediately hired capable assistants and devoted their time to the more pressing demands of fashion and intrigue. But today, bleary-eyed and grumbling, they were all waiting for the appearance of the empress, preferring inconvenience to punishment.

Tiye swept first into the airy cell where Bek son of Men, engineer and architect, worked. Men had designed brilliantly under the Son of Hapu for Osiris Amunhotep, and his son’s talent was as great. Tiye knew that Bek had earned his position. He bowed profoundly as she was announced. She indicated that he might sit, and he lowered himself behind the sturdy desk strewn with scrolls, empty ink pots, and draughtsman’s pens. Her fanbearer unfolded her stool.

“I would have thought that you were under Pharaoh’s orders to accompany him to his building site,” she said after a moment. “Are your servants packing, Bek?”

The young man smiled politely. “My underlings have completed a survey of the site, Majesty,” he replied, “and I will visit it in person later, when I may walk it with only my scribes. Horus does not need me in order to demarcate the boundaries of the city. I am commissioned to design.”

“Did your surveyors experience any difficulty with the site?”

His dark eyes dropped. “No, Goddess. The land is level. They did their work in a surprisingly short time.”

“What did they say about it?”

He did not look up, but his gaze traveled over the untidy heap of scrolls on the desk. “Only that, in spite of the fact that the sand is deep, the masons and engineers will find their work easy.”

“That is not what I meant.” The low voice had sharpened.

Bek stiffened. “They said that even at this time of the year the heat was oppressive.”

Tiye stifled a sigh. “You are a loyal servant of your king, and that is commendable, but if you truly desire Pharaoh’s well-being, Bek, you will do your best to dissuade him from this plan. The survey, as you say, was done hurriedly. There may be problems that were missed.”

Now his face came up. “My father took great pride in his work as glorifier and beautifier in Egypt,” he said. “So do I. I will not paint over any difficulty that might arise, but neither will I carve one where it does not exist. I try to live in truth, as my lord has taught me.”

“Bek,” she said patiently, touched in spite of herself by his youthful trust in her son’s dubious interpretation of Ma’at, “truth is not always a gentle thing. It can eventually wound and destroy. Think of that as you labor over your drawings for Pharaoh’s new city. You will be helping him use a truth to destroy himself.”

“Perhaps.” The tone was polite, noncommittal.

Tiye rose, and he also. “Your work is very harmonious and beautiful,” she said, and Bek recognized that she was not flattering him. He bowed.

“My father taught me well. Long life to Your Majesty.”

She nodded and went out.

Over the next few hours she went from office to office, conferring quietly with all Akhenaten’s ministers, trying to convince them to dissuade him from his scheme. She even visited Ranefer, Ay’s second-in-command, standing outside the stables on a mat unrolled for her clean, soft sandals while behind the man the horses shuffled and whickered and the pungent smell of dung made her wince. Two strong impressions had emerged for her consideration by the time she got onto her litter and was carried back to her quarters. One was the power to convince or confuse that her son’s Teaching had. Each man had referred to it in some way. The other was the strength of the inadvertent bond Akhenaten and Nefertiti had forged between themselves and the young men who had surrounded them in the days of his princehood. Akhenaten had carried them with him in his rise to power, and they were still young enough to be grateful.

Her son came to bid her farewell just before noon. Politely she knelt and kissed his feet, acutely aware of her puffy eyes, her sallow complexion dulled by the wine of the night before. He raised her and returned the kiss on her gold-circled forehead. He was so transparently guilty, so eager for her approval that she bit back the arguments rising to her tongue. Perhaps, when he saw the site again, he would change his mind. Perhaps its appeal for him would have been lessened in the course of his own growth.

“I will return in fourteen days,” he said. “I hope, dear mother, that you will have decided by then to move to my holy city yourself.”

“The building of it will take years,” she responded noncommittally. “Is Ay traveling with you?”

“He must. My horses and chariot are needed.” He hesitated, clearly unable to decide whether to stay or to leave her, and seeing his distress, she put her arms around him.

“May the soles of your feet be firm, Akhenaten.”

He embraced her, pathetically pleased at her use of his new name. “I love you, my mother.”

It was like a return to the times that had gone to hold him thus, to feel her cheek against the thin, bowed bones of his shoulder, his breath stirring in her hair. Tears of regret and weariness blurred in her eyes. She pressed her lips against his neck. “You had better go,” she said unsteadily. “My precious egg, my poor prince. Go!” He smiled warmly and departed.

The palace sighed with relief when the last of the barges in Pharaoh’s party disappeared from sight. The tempo of life slowed, and Malkatta slipped briefly back into the indulgent gaiety of days past. There was a loud cheerfulness to the feasting, a casual laziness to the sun-drenched days. As if to test their freedom, the courtiers wandered across the river to Amun’s temple at Karnak in greater numbers than the priests had seen in years, and prayed with a fervor that surprised both the god’s servitors and the new worshipers themselves.

Tiye felt as though she were an invalid recovering from a long illness. She called her jeweler and spent a day selecting new earrings, pectorals, anklets. She ordered a dozen new gowns. Together with Smenkhara she went to her dead husband’s mortuary temple, offering him food and flowers and burning incense. She saw to new apartments for Smenkhara and Beketaten and hired them new tutors from the House of Scribes at Karnak. For the first time in many months she appraised her son, seeing in him his father’s full lips and almond eyes, though the boy’s were paler than Pharaoh’s had been. He had also inherited Amunhotep’s confident, regal walk. But he was as yet too young to display any character traits she could recognize as her first husband’s. His conversations were often punctuated by long periods of silent rumination, whether for pondering or simply because of loss of interest and concentration, Tiye could not tell. He could also be surly when he chose. “I want Meritaten back,” he demanded one day as they rocked in Tiye’s barge anchored to the shore. Smenkhara had a fishing line dangling over the edge and was holding it in one negligent hand as he half-turned to his mother on his ivory chair. “She must miss me. Doing lessons by myself is boring, and I hate Beketaten. She whines when I won’t play with her.”

“That is simply her age,” Tiye reminded him. “She is only two, Smenkhara. Meritaten was also a whiner at that age.”

“No, she wasn’t, she just sulked. And anyway, how would you know what she was like? You only came into the nursery to see Beketaten, and then you hurried back to my brother the king.” He dragged the line sullenly to and fro. “Pharaoh took Meritaten and Meketaten with him on his trip downriver, and I wanted to go, too, but you wouldn’t let me. They are all having fun together.” His lower lip stuck out mutinously, and the youth lock was flung off the brown shoulder.

Tiye pulled her bare feet into the shade of the canopy. “Well, I didn’t go either,” she pointed out, and he raised both elbows rudely.

“Pharaoh didn’t want you, that’s why.”

“Is that what the servants are saying, or did you come to this conclusion by yourself? In any event, you are a nasty, spoiled little prince,” she snapped. “How long is it since your teacher whipped you?”

“My teachers have never whipped me. I threaten them if they try. And I decided all by myself that Pharaoh was happy to leave you here.”

“I can see that discipline in the nursery has been lax. You may be pharaoh one day, Smenkhara. You must know what it feels like to be an ordinary mortal before you taste the joys of godhood.”

The precocious child swore under his breath. “I bet my new fish pendant that you were never whipped, O my mother.”

“Yes, I was. Your uncle Ay whipped me once and slapped me many times because I was willful and refused to learn from him.”

A long silence followed, and Tiye assumed he was ignoring her. Drowsily she half-closed her eyes, letting the breeze caress her face. But after a while he said, “That is different. You are a woman. Will I really be pharaoh one day?”

“I am empress and goddess and will not be insulted by any,” she barked back. “Now fish quietly. I want to sleep.”

Moodily he kicked the side of the barge and relieved his feelings by sticking out his tongue at his silent body slave. “I don’t want to fish anymore. I want to swim.”

“Not without your instructor. Your stroke is not strong enough yet.”

“When I am pharaoh, I shall do what I like.”

“Probably,” Tiye replied, almost asleep. Smenkhara’s bad temper was fading, and she saw he hauled in his empty line and went to sit under his own canopy to play sennet.

For the auspicious day marking the formal establishment of the boundaries of his new city, Akhenaten had laid aside the clinging, many-pleated female gowns he increasingly preferred to wear, and had donned a short white male kilt. His slender neck was heavy with gold circlets, and an amethyst pectoral portraying the sun disk surrounded by silver bees, hung on his breast. Above the thickly painted face rose a tall blue soft crown to which the cobra and vulture were attached. The hands that gathered up the guiding reins of the chariot were al most invisible under ring scarabs, cartouches, and the loose amulets around his wrists. Behind him Nefertiti leaned against the burnished sides of the vehicle, looking radiant in pale royal blue. Miniature crooks and flails hung from her belt, and between her blue-painted breasts a rearing lapis lazuli sphinx snarled. Her own crown was a curious conical sun god’s helmet into which all her hair had been piled, accentuating the sweeping, flawless lines of her jaw and temple. The result was that her face lost some of its femininity and acquired a sternness that reflected the intractability that was beginning to appear in her character. Meritaten, blue and white ribbons in her youth lock and naked under a loose linen cloak with enameled ankhs, held her mother’s ring-encrusted hand, while little Meketaten sat on the floor of the chariot, one hand tugging at her father’s gold sandal and the other shaking a little bell Tiye had given her. Behind Pharaoh, other chariots waited, full of wigged and kohled dignitaries sweating under the fringed canopies attached to their vehicles. It was midmorning, and the sun’s force, unchecked because the sheltering cliffs trapped all wind, beat onto the sand and was reflected up onto protesting skin.

Akhenaten took a last long look around him as he waited for Ay’s signal. Water trickled along the metal band of his helmet past his jeweled ear and down his neck. His eyes scanned the unsullied run of gold-white sand spreading, shimmering, from the sparkling blue of the Nile on his right to the tumble of cliff and shadowed gullies on his left. Ahead, dancing on waves of heat, the curve of rock was consummated eight miles away in its meeting with the river, its heights sharp brown against the vivid blue of the sky. In spite of the low laughter and conversation of the waiting courtiers, the prevailing silence, ancient and mysterious, flowed over and muted mere human sound. There were those who looked about uneasily, cowed by the impression that some presence was watching the interlopers, but the majority were lighthearted, eager for the ceremony to be over so that they could return to the sumptuous tents Pharaoh had provided. Akhenaten acknowledged his uncle’s signal. Turning, he smiled at Nefertiti, who planted a kiss on his hennaed lips.

“A new beginning,” she said, eyes shining. “It was ordained so.” “Yes it was,” he agreed as his horses strained for an instant against the sand clogging the golden chariot’s spoked wheels before jerking it forward. “From this place, hallowed by my presence, the worship of the Aten will spread over the whole world.” Behind him the glittering cavalcade began to roll. Meketaten squealed with delight and held her father’s calf with both chubby arms. Meritaten’s solemn gaze was fixed on his back.

For the rest of the day the nobles and princes of Egypt, growing hungrier and soon consumed with raging thirsts, followed their god’s chariot slowly around a circuit of the cliffs. At intervals along the route, portable altars had been raised. As Akhenaten and his family arrived at each one, the attending priest lit incense and lay prostrate in the burning sand while Pharaoh dismounted and his prophet, in the chariot behind, came to make an offering to him and to the Aten who fired the sky with the same spirit imbuing Pharaoh’s body. By the time the eighth and last offering had been set aflame, the sun had changed from blinding white to a rich red and was sinking over the river. Cheerful cooking fires flickered between the clustered tents and the flotilla of tethered barges. The disheveled courtiers shouted, more with an inexpressible relief than with adoration, when they saw Akhenaten whip his horses into a canter ahead of them as the chariot finally gained the firmer gray sand by the water. Already the musicians were filling the pale twilight with quick harmony, and on the carpets, beside the inviting cushions, servants waited with wine jugs that had been cooled in the river. Dismounting and handing the reins to Ay before his own tent, Akhenaten looked out to where the last offering still burned, a leaping, erratic point of red light. “Where each altar stood, I will have stelas erected,” he said to Nefertiti. “I saw many secluded rifts in the rock where royal tombs might be hollowed out. Did you? I intend to move all the bodies of the Mnervis bulls from On and bury them here, and institute the care and worship of the living one here also.”