Return to Thebes (12 page)
Authors: Allen Drury
Tags: #Literature & Fiction, #Genre Fiction, #Historical, #Mythology & Folk Tales, #Historical Fiction, #Science Fiction & Fantasy, #Fantasy, #fairy tales
As I leave the Palace I become aware that Hatsuret is signaling me insistently from the small crowd of watchers that always idles about the gates. He wants me to meet him in the market-place. He, too, has an urgency about him. I consider for a second whether it can do harm. I know I will tell him nothing of what has occurred—and perhaps I can find out something from him that will be helpful in furthering Their Majesties’ plans. With the slightest of movements I return his nod.
When my carriage reaches the market-place I order the driver to stop and wait in a shady corner. I dismiss my escort of soldiers and send them on their way back to the North Palace, asking their captain to tell Her Majesty only: “The Lady Anser-Wossett has good news.” Then I compose myself beside a vegetable vendor’s stand and pretend to inspect his offerings while I wait for Hatsuret.
Presently, he comes.
***
Nefertiti
Word has reached me from the captain of the guard that “The Lady Anser-Wossett has good news,” though she has not yet returned from the market-place to give it me herself. She likes to go to the market from time to time, though it is not necessary for her to do so, since my steward Huya oversees the buying for the North Palace. (Poor Huya! He has been cowed since the decision to depict the coronation durbar in his tomb as the Great Wife and I desired. But I have told him nothing was his fault: he and Meryra simply got caught in the midst of a family argument, and all is well. Nonetheless, he still finds difficulty meeting my eyes sometimes.)
So Anser-Wossett has not returned but her message indicates that our wildest hopes must have come true. He is going to accept my plan: he is coming back to me, and the world will begin anew, for me and for poor threatened Kemet.
For this I have dreamed and planned and plotted for a year, ever since the murders of Smenkhkara and Merytaten. I did not know, for a time, whether I could recover from those two deaths, which were in considerable measure due to me. When I mentioned Smenkhkara’s name that night during our family conference, I did not contemplate that he would be removed so swiftly and so violently: I had thought some gentler means, such as banishment to wretched Kush or the Red Land, might be used. But I suppose my father Aye and Horemheb had no choice: he would not have gone, Akhenaten would not have permitted it, and nothing would have been achieved.
So, though I cried wildly for a time when I heard the news, for my hapless, well-meaning cousin and even for my shrewish, unnatural daughter—but most of all for myself who had been party to such a dreadful thing—I did not cry overlong. I thought the principal obstacle to my husband’s rule (and my own happiness) had been removed, and that we could now go forward to a better day for all of us.
I did not contemplate how terribly he might be shattered, for I had refused to believe the signs that revealed how deeply he cared for his brother—and I had also grievously misjudged the determination of my father and the true nature of my half brother Horemheb.
I am now desperately afraid of them both; and so, I think, is Queen Tiye.
We have not discussed it very much, but when we have she has spoken with a profound and still grieving sadness of the son whose murder she had to agree to in order to save, she thought, the son who must be saved if he was to continue to wear the Double Crown and discharge the great responsibilities of the Two Lands.
Except that her plan, too, went awry: he still wears the Double Crown but he has retired almost entirely from the rule of the Two Lands. It rests now with Aye and Horemheb; and I sense that Horemheb, in particular, is growing ever more restive as he exercises many of the rights of power without the sanction of power.
This the Great Wife senses as well as I; and both of us, now, are coming to perceive how iron is his will and how ruthless his determination. We know what his ultimate ambition is, because Sitamon, embittered by his refusal to marry her, recently told the Great Wife. Yet he cannot possibly be Pharaoh, for poor little frightened Tut comes next, and soon now he will be married to Ankhesenpaaten, which will sanctify his full claim upon the throne; and where does Horemheb fit then? We cannot see: yet we know he dreams of it, and we know that such a dreamer is dangerous indeed to Pharaoh.
So both Queen Tiye and I have come to realize that what we were responsible for has not worked out at all as we thought it would. Just yesterday when she was visiting me—having finally come down from Thebes to spend a few days in her palace here and see for herself what all reports have told her—we admitted this to one another. Finding that she agreed with me, I decided to put into effect at once the plan that is apparently going to save the Good God and the Two Lands, at last.
(It is now nearing dinnertime. Ra is sinking in the west. The Nile has turned to copper. Across on the other bank the cultivated lands that serve Akhet-Aten, and the distant mountains beyond, are becoming purple and misty in the dying light. Anser-Wossett should be back by now. I shall send very shortly to find out where she is, for she must report to me in detail all that she said to my husband, and all that he said to her.)
Actually I did not need the approval of the Great Wife for my plan, because I have become determined to do it. And actually she did not say in so many words that she does approve. But I could tell from her expression that she was relieved to know that I was going to accomplish what we have both desired so desperately in this past year: the beginning of the campaign to restore Kemet to all her glories, which will be long and hard because of Akhenaten’s almost complete uncaring for it in these recent months.
For me, of course, it will mean even more: the return to my side of him whom I have loved since a child and still love, despite all the insults and indignities he has heaped upon me and the coldness with which he has treated me since he put me aside to take Smenkhkara in my place.
It has not been an easy time for me—sometimes I have thought I would die of it, so bitterly has it hurt my heart—but I have been strong and I have persevered, as becomes a daughter of Aye and Chief Queen of the Two Lands. Now it is all going to come right at last, as I have always felt it would if I could just be brave enough to withstand the burden that might have crushed me completely were I made of weaker stuff.
But most of all, I hope and believe, it will mean happiness for him who has had so little in his tense and lonely life. As a boy, before his ailment, when he was Crown Prince, handsome, vigorous, joyously active with all the world waiting for his rule, I know he was happy. I think that perhaps for six years after we were married, while our six daughters were entering the world and our childhood love for one another was ripening into maturity, that he was happy with me. Then he began to lose heart because his worship of the Aten, even though he built this great city in the Sole God’s honor, was not spreading to the people. He destroyed Amon and the other gods, he abandoned me, he turned to Smenkhkara. Perhaps he was happy with his brother, but I do not believe it, for still the Aten failed to win the people, and still his dreams of a universally loving world under a universally loving god did not materialize. And even if he was happy with Smenkhkara, that, too, only lasted three years—could not last more, for Kemet’s sake. All his young beauty lost, all his dreams frustrated, all his plans gone wrong: I do not think Nefer-Kheperu-Ra has been very happy with his life. It has made me love and pity him the more.… Even when he turned against me I could not stop.
In this past year word has come to me through my father, through Horemheb and through Anser-Wossett—in just a moment I will send for her, I am anxious to know that all is ready for my plan—of how completely he has abandoned physical pride and self-respect. It has been obvious to all of Kemet that he has virtually abandoned civil government, but since he has kept himself mostly hidden in the South Palace in the past twelve months only the Family and his immediate servants have been aware of his personal deterioration. Anser-Wossett from time to time sees Peneptah, the bearded scribe who assists Amonhotep, Son of Hapu, and from him she has brought me stories of little things that the others have not known—the lateness of the hour at which he rises, the listlessness with which he shuffles about the Palace, the growing disinterest in eating, the frequent nocturnal passages when he cannot sleep but goes, driven by demons—or the vengeful gods—to wander the corridors alone and unbefriended. These things have made me weep many bitter tears and have made my heart cry out to him … though when I have tried to convince him of my continuing love and my desire to help he has refused to see me and has continued on his desolate way.
But now all that will change: I shall make him happy again at last.
He is coming back—I still cannot quite believe it! I do not know what prompted me to organize my plan, to realize by some blessed instinct that now might be the time when he would respond—but somehow
I knew.
So I formed my household guard of twelve men, giving no explanation to my father or Horemheb, both of whom were curious but did not quite dare ask me outright. I tested their loyalty, I waited until I was sure I could trust them completely—and then I sent Anser-Wossett to him today, and all has fallen into place beyond my dearest hopes.
I shall not truly exult until all has been safely accomplished. But for the first time in many years I, too, believe I will once again be happy, which in my darkest moments I thought had been denied me forever.
It is nearing time to go to my formal banquet room for dinner, and Anser-Wossett must come to me. We have much to talk about.
I rise from the bench before my mirror, where I have been thinking these things, hardly daring to acknowledge the growing hope and excitement I have seen in my eyes (which still are beautiful, though very sad—but much less sad now, and very soon, I hope, not sad at all), and go to the door, open it and clap my hands for a servant. For a moment none are about, the busy palace seems unusually quiet; but presently I see one of my lesser ladies in waiting coming toward me down the long painted corridor.
Amazingly, she weeps. What can it mean?
What can it mean?
My heart feels a sudden terror, I do not know why. But very soon, in a voice racked with sobs, she tells me, and I do.
I know now where Anser-Wossett is. Her battered body was tossed off at the palace gate a few minutes ago by a chariot that fled away, its driver masked and unrecognized. It was obvious she had been tortured before she died. So all must be known to someone who wishes us ill.
My poor Anser-Wossett who has been with me so many years! Oh, my heart grieves, it grieves! Good, faithful, loving, loyal
—
ah, such evil, such evil! May the Aten help us now…!
For many minutes I stand like stone while the lady weeps beside me. I am too stunned to weep, two stunned to think … for a while.
But presently I do.
I am not a daughter of Aye and Chief Queen of the Two Lands for nothing. My heart which has known so much sorrow can stand a little more.
I shall harden myself. I shall meet what comes without fear. Right now there is just one thing to do: go to my husband and rescue him.
I call the captain of my guard, I give him the orders, I prepare myself hastily to leave. I wear my golden shift and my Blue Crown, for I go as a Queen with my head held high and my face once again—as always when my people see me—commanding and composed.
I am Nefertiti and I will not be denied.
No one sees us leave the Palace and start across the city whose many thousands, all unknowing of the events that are occurring in their midst to affect their lives forever, are placidly eating before their peaceful hearths.
A chill wind is driving off the Nile now that night has truly come. It is turning winter and soon it will be cold: but not for Akhenaten and Nefertiti.
We will win this battle and, with Father Aten’s help, regain in happiness our full rule and glory.
He has made many errors: no doubt I have. But from now on we will do all things right for the Aten and for our beloved kingdom and people of the Two Lands.
***
Aye
Now is this hour of final reckoning, before Horemheb and I go to my sister to secure her compliance in the terrible thing we must do, I seek a balance between the good I have known of my nephew Akhenaten and the evil he has brought upon our beloved kingdom and people of the Two Lands. I must also, if I can, accept the fate that very likely is about to fall equally upon my beautiful, misguided daughter, who has suffered so much and whom I have loved so much as things have spun down and down with increasing rapidity for them both.
Of my nephew Nefer-Kheperu-Ra, what is one to say? I loved him as a handsome child before his malady overcame him, I loved him as a young, misshapen but well-meaning Co-Regent, I still loved him as an increasingly willful and headstrong King; but each stage of love has been less than the one before, and steadily my dismay and mistrust have grown. I have forgiven him so much: we all have forgiven him so much. The balance finally drawn must, I fear, come down against him.
We could accept, I think, the early attempts to establish the Aten—the murder of my brother Aanen, who asked for it—the attempt, for which I was directly responsible, to give the Aten equal stature but still maintain Amon and the other gods. We could even accept his desperate and pathetic attempts to achieve the son Nefertiti could not give him by marrying his three oldest daughters, and by them having three daughters, all puny and mercifully now dead. But none of us has been able to accept these years just past when all the gods were destroyed, and when amiable and foredoomed Smenkhkara shared the throne, met his fate, and left his brother to decline ever more swiftly into the almost animal squalor we now see when we visit him in his haunted palace.
Smenkhkara, I know, made some earnest if ineffectual attempts to keep the government going during the period he shared the throne, while Akhenaten became ever more lost in his fading dream of the Aten. Horemheb, my other son Nakht-Min and I did what we could to help, an assistance Smenkhkara accepted gratefully, for he was very young. But it did no good: the whole thing continued to slide both within Kemet and on our borders, until the awful night when Nefertiti inspired us to kill him, and his mother, my sister the Great Wife, agreed.
We thought then, foolishly as it turned out, that the shock of his brother’s death would drive Akhenaten out of his lethargy and, after a period of suitable mourning, bring him back to active rule. We also thought it would make him compliant to our growing conviction that Amon and the other gods must be restored, if not to their full power, then at least to a position befitting their place in all our ancient traditions. But neither, alas, was meant to be.
Instead we have the lonely and haunted recluse to whom we report the formalities of our rule in his name, but whose slovenly person we can hardly bear to look at, and whose intelligence, while still great, is increasingly far away in the depths of mourning and the pointless worship of the Aten.
Or so we had thought until tonight. Suddenly tonight he has revived and with my daughter’s aid threatens to resume with all his old demanding persistence the power of the Double Crown and the active and unrelenting pursuit of his sacrilegious Sole God.
For perhaps an hour after Horemheb came to me with the news Hatsuret and his hidden acolytes had tortured out of poor Anser-Wossett (a violence I would never have condoned had I known about it, unless it were absolutely necessary: I think frightening her with it would have been enough, though she was always fiercely loyal to my daughter and it might not have been) I remained silent in my chair, staring blankly at the wall while a thousand things raced through my mind.
I dismissed Amonhotep, Son of Hapu, who had been with me discussing matters of government, and ordered him to tell no one. He looked deeply hurt and offended, for it is the first time in many years that we have not sought his wisdom in our family councils. But I told him that the responsibility now rested solely on my sister, myself and my son Horemheb. Wounded, he went away. For a moment I had a pang of uneasiness and regret; then I put it aside. We can count on his loyalty, we always have. He will tell no one, and it is better that on this final dreadful occasion he not be directly involved. It is truly our responsibility alone, for we, even more than his old tutor, have made Akhenaten what he is.
So I sat and thought, while patiently Horemheb sat with me. He made no attempt to influence me, he spoke no word. He simply watched me with a complete and controlled attentiveness.
He is very shrewd, Horemheb, very determined and very astute. There is no way for him to reach the place he would like to fill but he is an invaluable assistant to me in all that must be done to save the Two Lands.
So a few moments ago I finally turned to him and asked:
“What would you suggest, my son?”
“There can be only one solution,” he replied in a somber voice.
“I shudder to contemplate it,” I said.
“So do I,” he said calmly, “but we have no choice.”
“Can we not somehow banish him?”
He looked at me long and steadily before he replied with a quiet certainty:
“Father, you know perfectly well it would not work. Nefer-Kheperu-Ra perhaps has nothing left but his stubbornness, but he does have that. The wound must be cleansed completely, and it must be cleansed immediately, now the opportunity has presented itself. We must close our hearts, harden our resolve, ask the blessing of Amon and the gods, and strike without mercy, leaving no possible chance that he could ever return to power.”
“To kill the Living Horus,” I almost whispered, so awful is it to contemplate, even now, “is no light thing, my son.”
“I do not approach it lightly,” he said with the same implacable calm. “I approach it as the thing that must be done to save the Two Lands from utter and final destruction, both within and without.”
“Tut should be told.”
“Tut is a child,” he said with a sudden harshness. “We will tell him when it is over. It will be time enough then for him to know that what he fears has happened. As Regent, I will inform him in due course. First, it must be done.”
“‘As Regent’?” I echoed sharply. “Who said you will be Regent, my son?”
“You have just heard me say it, Father,” he said, staring me impassively straight in the eyes. For a second I was so taken aback by his sheer effrontery that I could not speak. Then I replied in the cold tones that have made many men tremble at the wrath of the Councilor Aye:
“
I
shall be Regent, and there will be no further discussion of it!”
“You are old, Father,” he said, “and I am still in my forties, still relatively young and vigorous. And I have the army at my back. It would ill become us to engage in an unseemly battle for control of the King.”
“You have
some
of the army at your back,” I said, for it is true, he has many divisions loyal to him, “but I also have many members of it who still stand in awe and complete loyalty to the Divine Father-in-law Aye. Is it civil war you wish us to fall into over the corpse of your cousin Akhenaten? If so”—and my voice was as steely and unrelenting as I have ever made it—“I am ready.”
He paused then in his headlong flight toward insane ambition and studied me for a very long time, very carefully, while my expression remained stern and never yielding. My eyes met his with an icy sternness as I thought:
This is my son. What have I created…? But I shall ever be stronger than he, and he knows it in his heart.
And presently I could sense that with an obvious great effort of will he was acknowledging this to himself and abandoning his insane bluff to replace the one man whose consistent strength through more than thirty years has been the true salvation of Kemet in all her troubles.
“Very well,” he said at last, very quietly, still not taking his eyes from mine. “But I shall be King’s Deputy, then.”
“You may be that,” I conceded, for our strengths are so nearly equal that, though I did not show it, I feared a battle between us as much as he. “We shall proclaim all from the Window of Appearances in due course.”
“After the occupant of the Window of Appearances is no more,” he said softly; and though I shuddered again at the enormity of it, I agreed with equal softness, “It is the will of the gods.… However,” I added firmly, “there must be no harm to Nefertiti.”
“She has already been warned,” he said, “and if she is as intelligent as I know her to be, she will already have abandoned her pathetic plot and be even now preparing herself for graceful widowhood.”
“Are you sure of that?” I demanded. For the first time in our interview he smiled, a slight, wry smile.
“No, I am not sure of it, Father. You have bred a family of lions, and as one of them I cannot vouch for what one of the others may do.”
“Your sister must not be harmed,” I said again sternly. He responded with a cold indifference. “That is up to her. I hope she will not be.”
I made it an order:
“
You will see to it!
”
He gave me a steady look and shrugged.
“It is up to her,” he said again; and turning the subject with a sudden briskness, “We must yet have the approval of the Great Wife before we act. Do you wish to go to her alone, or shall we go together?”
“Together, I think,” I said, and repeated, again with a shudder at the enormity about to engulf us: “The murder of the Living Horus is no light thing.”
“Good!” he said, leaping to his feet. “We must go to her at once, for the time is very short in which to catch him unprepared at the Palace.”
“Yes,” I agreed, and also stood up. As I did so there came a frantic pounding on the door. Without announcement or apology Ramesses burst in, wild-eyed and desperate.
“The Queen has left the North Palace!” he cried. “We must stop her at once!”
“Yes!” Horemheb exclaimed, starting for the door. Then he paused in mid-step and said slowly, “No, let her come to him.… We will meet her there.”
“
No harm to her!
”
I shouted in a terrible voice that made Ramesses turn pale at my fury. But Horemheb gave no sign.
“Go to the Great Wife and send me word at once, Father!” he yelled over his shoulder as they crossed the threshold and started running down the hall. “Tell her it is too late to stop the just vengeance of the gods!”
“I will!” I shouted back. “But again,
no harm to your sister!
”
But they were gone at the turning of the corridor and there was no answer. I flung a robe around me against the cold and hastened shouting through the house for a chariot.
And now I am at the gates of the lovely little palace my nephew built for his mother in happier days, and now they are escorting me to her private chamber. And now together we must agree upon our last, awful act for the sake of Kemet and the millions who, all unwitting, plunge with us tonight into a future I believe not even the greatest gods can foretell.
***