The Twelfth Transforming (37 page)

Smenkhara glanced at her distorted, thinly veiled belly. “Or he will see if you are going to give him a boy. I shall have to grow up to be very powerful and get rid of him and take Meritaten for myself.”

“You are boring when you snap all the time. It is not natural for a nine-year-old boy to worry and fret about the future. You have everything you could possibly want.”

“I only want Meritaten. I wrote to Pharaoh and begged him to send for me.”

“I know you did. I destroyed the letter, and if you are so foolish again, I will destroy every letter from you bound for Akhetaten. Get out of my sight, Smenkhara, and enjoy your youth while you can. Go swimming and fishing. Ride in your chariot. Shoot with the soldiers. Tease the servants. Do not ruin yourself with impatience.”

He flung away, and in the set of his angry shoulders Tiye saw his father. Guilt filled her. Amunhotep would have loaded the boy with lessons, put him in the army for a while, but she did not care enough. For the first time the welfare of Egypt did not concern her as much as her own comfort.
Pharaoh will give Meritaten to no one
, she thought as Smenkhara’s hunched form disappeared into the dancing heat haze. S
he shares the sacred stela in his temple with him. He will keep her for himself. Why should that thought worry me? My husband married Sitamun, his daughter. Why is this any different?
She could find no answer.

Early in the following year word came to Tiye that her niece had given birth to another girl, named Nefer-neferu-Aten-ta-sherit. Tiye, very close to her own time, laughed both in relief and in smug pity for Nefertiti, surely smarting under her inability to produce a royal son. Accompanying the official communication was a report from Ay. After much hesitation Pharaoh had at last taken Ay’s advice, and Aziru was summoned to Akhetaten to account for his behavior. The letter granting him a year to appear had been returned by the same messenger who had taken it, and who reported that Aziru was not at home to receive it. Aziru had later written, apologizing fulsomely to Akhenaten and explaining that he had been away campaigning against Suppiluliumas in the north and so did not meet the Egyptian envoy. Pharaoh was now undecided. Should he demand Aziru’s presence in Egypt again, or should he praise him for his efforts against Suppiluliumas and let him be? Of equal interest to Tiye were Mutnodjme’s infrequent, often short messages that nevertheless gave a vivid picture of the state of affairs in Akhetaten. “We wallow in family affection,” she sent by the dumb servant. “Pharaoh, the queen, and the girls are seen everywhere in the chariot, kissing and fondling one another in displays of what Pharaoh teaches are the truths of love. All courtiers are encouraged to follow the royal family’s example. Pharaoh’s health is not good.”
What does she mean by that?
Tiye asked herself irritably as she made her usual walk to the brazier and watched the papyrus catch fire.
Pharaoh’s health has never been good. Are his headaches worse? Or does he have a brief fever?
She mused on the vision of Akhenaten, Nefertiti, and their daughters providing such a distasteful public spectacle.
Poor Akhenaten
, she thought.
He means so well, he is so transparently eager to expound what he knows to be his truth
. Tiye wanted to gather him into her arms, to protect him from his own indiscriminate, simple tolerance.
Perhaps it is time for me to leave Malkatta
, she thought.
Not to sail into Akhetaten as empress, no, but to arrive as a mother wanting to provide a haven for her son. When my baby is born, if I survive, I will go
.

For two days she seriously entertained the possibility of sailing north, but on the third day her half-formed plan dissolved. She had been woken earlier in the morning than she had wished, not by the delicate strains of music but by a dull roar she could not at first identify. She sat up with difficulty on her couch, and Piha rose from the corner to help her to the window.

“It is too far away to be coming from this side of the river,” Tiye said presently. “What do you think, Piha?”

“I do not know, Majesty. I think it is voices. I have heard crowds shouting like that during Amun’s processions.”

It was indeed voices, a continuous babble rising and falling as the wind veered. “I cannot tell if it is a crowd of happy or angry people,” Tiye murmured. “Something is happening in Thebes. Call Huya.”

Her steward presented himself but, when she questioned him, said he did not know the reason for the uproar.

“Well, send a herald across the river to find out and see that he has an escort. Call my bodyguards and have the commander deploy troops along the riverbank in front of the palace, and particularly by the canal. It is as well to be prepared.”

By the time an answer came, the noise had died away to be replaced by an ominous silence. Tiye was walking to her reception hall when the herald met her. He was panting and sweating. At her curt permission to speak he fought to control his breath.

“The First Prophet of Amun is behind me,” he gasped, “together with other temple dignitaries. Half the priests from Karnak are on barges between here and Thebes.”

“Have Maya announced to me immediately.”

She had scarcely seated herself and placed her feet on the ivory footstool when the room began to fill with people. Between her officials of audience and the door a stream of white figures flowed, bending in worship and then shuffling and whispering together. Last came Maya, swathed in the leopard skin, accompanied by his acolytes. Tiye spotted Si-Mut’s shaven head and distinctive bulging forehead far back in the throng.

She bade Maya approach, and as he made his obeisance, she studied him. He was breathing shallowly. The whites of his eyes showed, and he nervously wet his quivering lips. She nodded.

Maya’s voice was measured though thready with emotion. “Majesty, at dawn many barges arrived at the temple water steps, together with soldiers from Akhetaten. The captain bore a scroll from Pharaoh. It was a directive, ordering me to open Amun’s Treasury and deliver the god’s possessions into the hands of the soldiers to be loaded onto the boats.”

Tiye in her turn strove to remain calm. “Did Pharaoh give any reason for his directive?”

“No, Majesty, but the captain said that the wealth of Amun was needed to pay for the purer offerings to the Aten. There are thousands of altars at Akhetaten, and every day they are piled with fresh food, wine, and flowers.”

There was a small silence, and then Tiye said coolly, “I trust you obeyed your Pharaoh.”

Maya’s eyes widened in disbelief. “Yes, Majesty, I had no choice. The soldiers were armed and the temple guards unprepared. But…”

Tiye leaned forward. “But what?” she shouted. “How dare you come running to me, expecting me, your pharaoh’s wife and empress, to countermand his divine will! How
dare
you presume! Your words imply that if the temple guards had been ready, you would have resisted.”

She sat back, her heart racing, the baby struggling frantically within her. “Would you?”

Maya spread his hands. “Majesty, before the god I do not know. Everything has gone. The Treasury held so many riches that they could not be counted. Gold, silver, ebony, ivory, jewels. Sacred vessels. The offerings of thousands. All Amun’s goods for trade. All his profits from his estates in the Delta. His land is also confiscated.”

Fear flared like a sudden burst of fire along her veins, but she mastered it. “Maya, you know that Egypt and all within it belong ultimately to the ruling god. No pharaoh has ever before wished to strip Karnak, but each has had the power to do so.”

“No pharaoh has done so because each Horus has been Amun’s son,” Maya replied. “But now Pharaoh repudiates the god who is Egypt’s protector and clothes another with Amun’s own glory! We, his priests, are in terror that Amun will curse the land. Majesty, have pity on us. Tell us what to do. The Treasury was also used to pay our servants, our cooks and architects and masons, the fellahin who tended Amun’s herds and tilled his soil. These people now have no work.”

“It is commendable,” Tiye remarked dryly, “that you think of Amun’s slaves before his priests. If the Treasury is gone, can the priests not exist on offerings alone?”

The gathering at the rear of the hall muttered quietly. Maya shook his head. “There are fewer worshipers all the time.” He did not dare to explain, but everyone listening knew that rich offerings came from the wealthy, and the wealthy now carried their gold to the Aten’s door. Only the flowers and loaves of the poor were left in Amun’s forecourt these days.

“Majesty, there is more,” Maya whispered. “Pharaoh has forbidden Amun all public processions. We may celebrate the god’s feasts, but only in the privacy of Karnak itself.”

Tiye stared at him. “No Beautiful Feast of the Valley? No blessing of the dead? I…” She came to herself. “How many priests can Karnak now support?”

“I have not yet tried to calculate, Divine One,” Maya replied more confidently, the gleam of relief in his eye. “But of twenty thousand, the offerings of Theban citizens will not support more than five hundred, and that not well.”

“The quality of that support is irrelevant.” She pondered briefly, and then came to a decision. “Out of the love I bore my first husband, Osiris Amunhotep Glorified, I will provide gold from my own fortune to keep another five hundred in the god’s service. You may decide who they will be. The rest must leave the temple and find work elsewhere.” She glared at the men clustered by the door, and the whispers of protest were immediately stilled. “Understand that I do this not because I disagree with Pharaoh, who is all wise and all holy, but out of love for he who now sails in the Barque of Ra. I have spoken.”

Swiftly Maya accepted his dismissal, and the delegation silently filed out.

No sound was heard once the doors were closed. Tiye’s men waited in a shocked numbness. Tiye herself sat frozen, her mind working furiously.
If I had spoken otherwise, I would have laid the foundation of a civil war
, she thought grimly,
and civil war would play into that snake Suppiluliumas’s hands. What madness, Pharaoh! The priests will starve, begging in the streets of a city already dealt one death blow. Is it malice against Amun, a peevishness against a city you have always hated, a new vision sent to you from the Aten? At least worship may continue. What should I do? First, a protest to Pharaoh. I must put my reasons clearly, or he will lose interest halfway through the scroll. Did Nefertiti put him up to this? Too many questions I cannot answer. I am blindfolded, my ears are muffled here. Yet I do not wish to leave after all. Egypt may need me at Malkatta. Me and Smenkhara
.

She prepared to rise, but a stab of pain and then another caught her across the small of the back. She gasped. “Huya! Call my physician, and send Piha to help me to my couch. Amun’s problems must wait.” The men around her sprang into life. She sat suddenly folded in upon her pain, her concentration now only on herself.
A curse
, she thought, teeth pressed tightly together, lips bared.
Has Amun chosen this moment to make his displeasure known? Is the curse to begin with my death?

Piha touched her reverentially, and she opened her eyes, leaving the dais with her maid’s support and walking slowly to her bedchamber. “Is Huya there?” she asked. Lowering her onto the couch, Piha nodded. “Send him after Maya. I want priests here with incense and prayers. Bring me magicians also, and surround the couch with amulets. I do not want to die!”

It was the last time she allowed herself to panic. Gathering a lifetime of dignity around her, she lay waiting for the birth of her child, her eyes straying from one anxious face to another as the hours moved slowly past. She heard the click and rattle of the charms being laid around her, and catching the sweet whiff of incense, she was comforted. Sometimes the eyes regarding her were Huya’s, brown and worried, but more often it was Osiris Amunhotep bending over the couch, breathing the odor of cloves and wine heavily into her face, his black eyes neither sympathetic nor dismayed but merely steady and mildly commanding. Gratefully she drew strength from his refusal to enter into her suffering, his presumption that on her own she would win. “But I do not want to win!” she groaned to him once. “I want to be with you, Horus. I am lonely.” “Do not bother me with trifles, Empress,” he rumbled back, smiling. “If it does not need my seal, it does not deserve my attention.” Somehow the words took on a numinous meaning. Tiye clung to them, repeating them to herself many times as she trod water in the Duat, watching the Holy Barque sail slowly past with Osiris Amunhotep unmoving among his divine predecessors. The dead around her called piteously for light.
I am not properly dead
, she thought.
I still feel such pain. And now the barque is leaving us, is entering another House
. Cold water gripped her from feet to waist, numbing and impenetrable, its temperature drop ping rapidly as the doors closed behind the barque, and blackness prevailed. Terror-stricken, the dead began to wail. Tiye opened her eyes wide, striving to find one glimmer of light. For an age she strained, until all at once it seemed to her that a faint grayness was suffusing the cavern. The doors were opening again.
But how can that be
, she thought, puzzled.
The barque cannot be drawn backward
.

Then startlingly her surroundings gained clarity and color, and she realized that she was lying on her couch, her head turned toward the window, whose stiff papyrus hangings were moving gently in the breeze. With difficulty she rolled her head on the pillow and found Huya smiling down on her. “Speak,” she managed to whisper.

“You have a son, Majesty. But you lost much blood and have been walking in the shadow world for five days.”

She was too weak to feel any emotion. “Water.” Her lips moved. “My husband…”

He snapped his fingers, and Piha came, lifting her gently and holding a cup to her mouth. Warm milk mixed with bull’s blood slipped past her throat.
I have been purified
, she thought as she tasted it.
I am clean
. “Word was sent to Pharaoh,” Huya continued. “You may expect a dispatch with the chosen name within days. The baby is well-formed though as tired as you. I have chosen a wet nurse for him. Shall I bring him?”