The Twelfth Transforming (48 page)

“I knew!” The howl was from Akhenaten. Flinging out his arms, he fell to his knees and then buried his face in his trembling hands. “Meketaten died because of you. You have never been the Aten’s choice for me, but I was weak and loved you and made you my queen. If Sitamun had lived to wear the crown, Meketaten would not have died. It is a judgment on my willfulness!”

Nefertiti walked to him, ashen, shocked from her rage by the pitiless words. “As my heart must be weighed against the Feather of Ma’at, Horus, I swear I loved my daughter as fiercely as you,” she managed huskily. “I would never have harmed her. Meketaten died of your lust, not mine. Think about that before you pass judgment on me. I have supported you since the days of your imprisonment and deserve better from you than this public humiliation. I know that I am quick-tempered and often foolish. But if you punish me for something I have not done, you will be losing the strongest ally you have.”

The room had fallen so silent that far to the west the sound of oars splash ing in the river and the singing of sailors could be faintly heard. Flies circled lazily, the everyday sound strangely out of place. Pharaoh’s breath rasped in the quiet air, and he made no answer. His eyes were closed, his nostrils flared.
I did not imagine anything like this when I gave Huya his instructions
, Tiye thought in horror.
I wanted a strain, a small estrangement, room between them into which I could insert my hand, not a void large enough to swallow us all. What if he orders her execution?
“Majesty,” she began, but at the sound of her voice he screamed, “Be silent!” and came to his feet, every movement of his lumbering body a slow warning. Turning to Nefertiti, he whispered, “You have forfeited the right to belong to the family of the god. Leave my sight. Take your lover with you. Because the Aten is a benevolent god, I will not harm you. You are banished to the north palace.”

Nefertiti’s regality momentarily deserted her. Crumpling, she clung to his knees and began to sob. “Akhenaten, I have done you no harm, I have given you beautiful children, I have shared your visions. Do not cast me away, I beseech! Who will nurse you when you are ill? Who will stand with you when you rise to pray in the night? I will do anything you ask, I will cast soil upon my head, I will shave and mourn, I will have the sculptor killed if you but indicate the desire, but do not place yourself once more between the claws of the vultures who hate you.”

At her first broken words Akhenaten had visibly softened, swallowing repeatedly, but Nefertiti’s tactless mention of Thothmes caused him to stiffen. His gaze wandered to the window, and his ringed hand gestured impatiently at his guard. The captain came immediately, lifting the queen reverently but firmly and leading her to the door. Dazed, she did not resist until she came level with Tiye. Then she shook herself free of the restraining soldier and lifted both clenched fists under Tiye’s chin. “You will die for this,” she murmured so low that Tiye had to strain to hear. “And I do not care what method I devise to do it. I am already disgraced. There is nothing for me to fear any longer.”

Tiye, looking into the tearstained, distorted face, put a hand on the woman’s shoulder. “I am not sorry, Majesty,” she replied softly, knowing that her words could be interpreted in many ways. “Go with dignity.”

Nefertiti was convulsed. She launched herself on Tiye, but the empress smoothly stepped aside, the Followers sprang to her defense with practiced skill, and the doors soon closed behind the queen. Horemheb, after one glance at the king, began to shepherd the others out.

Akhenaten continued to gaze dreamily out of the window, eyebrows raised and a small smile on his lips, but his body jerked intermittently as one tense muscle after another spasmed.

Ay took his sister’s elbow. “You have won, but I do not like the cost,” he breathed.

Tiye rounded on him. “I have a good mind to go back to Malkatta, where I ought to have stayed in the first place, and let you all destroy yourselves,” she said bitterly. She would have gone on, but feeling eyes on her back, she turned to see her son’s unnaturally brilliant gaze fixed unblinkingly on her. Ay bowed and departed. Horemheb would have gone to Pharaoh, but at a violent, dumb dismissal he also bowed, lips pursed, and was gone. Tiye and Akhenaten were alone.

“Are you a vulture?” he said conversationally. “Will you pick at my entrails?” He was trying to lift a cup of wine to his mouth, but his arm thrashed so uncontrollably that the liquid was slopping onto the floor. Taking a deep breath, Tiye strode to him, guiding the cup, forcing him onto a chair. At her touch he suddenly went limp and clung to her, burying his face in her lap. “I have lost daughter and wife in the space of a few weeks,” he wept. “Surely now the Aten is appeased! I am in pain, Mother! Put your arms around me. Swear you will always be with me!”

Tiye embraced him, shrinking from the frenetic clutch of his hands. He soon ceased to sob aloud, and she was able to extricate herself, urging him onto his couch and drawing the sheet over him. He pulled it up to his chin and lay with eyes open. She asked to be dismissed, but he did not answer. After a while she bowed shortly and went away.

Nefertiti had moved disdainfully into the north palace by the next day, leaving her staff to begin the task of packing her belongings. Those courtiers who fed on intrigue were disappointed to see that she left subdued and pale but with head high. Most attendants believed, however, that the rift between the queen and Pharaoh would be temporary. Nefertiti’s crime had not been serious. Pharaoh had acted hastily and would regret it, and the queen would come gliding back to her quarters. The empress was too old to take the queen’s place, and no amount of concubines would give Pharaoh the close relationship he had shared with the empress’s beautiful niece. The court also waited for the sculptor’s banishment, and several ministers tried to hint to Pharaoh that their loyal service entitled them to the river estate he had been given, but in a peculiar way Akhenaten blamed his wife, not the handsome and talented young man, for the spectacular lapse. She had been one of the enlightened ones; she should have known better. Thothmes was not even forbidden to visit the north palace. Pharaoh merely turned his back on queen and sculptor alike.

But those courtiers who expected a reconciliation after a suitable period of chastisement had not understood the subtleties of Akhenaten’s religious philosophy. A member of the Aten’s sacred family had turned elsewhere for the affection that made the circle of protection around Pharaoh so strong. In Akhenaten’s eyes, Nefertiti’s worthiness to be a magic link was now suspect. The month of Athyr passed, and Khoyak. The Nile overflowed and turned the west bank into a calm lake that mirrored the winter softness of the sky. The empress was seen in the halls of audience and in the temple every day, haughty and unapproachable, accompanying her son wherever he went, and though the royal pair smiled at each other and talked together, there was none of the extravagant display of physical affection to which the court had become accustomed. Not even Pharaoh’s closest staff knew on what level mother and son communicated, and Parennefer was too much the well-trained servant to let slip the fact that pharaoh and empress did not share a bed.

At the queen’s dismissal, Tutu realized how precarious his own position was and attempted to return his office to a semblance of order, but the weeks went by, and it became obvious that the empress was not going to have her way. Pharaoh’s temper was unpredictable, and any pressure brought to bear on him either was studiously ignored or resulted in outbursts of passionate rhetoric. Ay, Tiye, and Horemheb finally acknowledged that Pharaoh’s refusal to consider the chaos outside Egypt’s borders came from his deep conviction that his god would bring order through nothing but his prayers, and they changed their policy. No day passed without the name of Smenkhara being dropped into his ear: how devout the young man was, how loyal to his pharaoh, how well he fitted in to the royal sun family. Their brotherhood was reiterated time and again, but care was taken not to mention the fact that Smenkhara’s father had been the man Akhenaten still hated. Pharaoh listened, smiled indulgently, but made no comment.

Tiye had recruited fresh spies from among Horemheb’s soldiers, placing them in the north palace, but it was difficult to get news. Nefertiti had withdrawn completely into herself, and her staff remained loyally silent. Traffic through the high double wall that separated the north estate from the rest of the city was slight and noted assiduously by the guards on the gate. Access was easier on the river, but even then Tiye’s men ran a great risk, for the west face of the north palace rose above a series of garden terraces that climbed down to long water steps, and anyone standing at a window had a full view of all movement on the river. Tiye’s spies in Horemheb’s household fared better. A stream of whispered information flowed into her house, but since most of it was in nocuous, she was forced to conclude that Horemheb had already spotted her men but let them alone.

Of more immediate concern were the two attempts on her life. One of her food tasters died in agony, and a steward was violently ill after surreptitiously sampling the beer that stood waiting to be carried to her bedchamber. Despite a diligent search Tiye could not track down the culprits, so that while she was fond of beer, she reluctantly kept to wine that she insisted be unsealed in her presence.

She was not afraid to die, and increasingly found herself thinking of death with longing. It was becoming harder to swing her feet to the floor each morning, to hold herself straight during the interminable days of solemn protocol, to find time simply to lie by the water and let her mind wander where it would. She knew that she was old, that rightfully she should be enjoying an increasingly eventless slide into infirmity and death, accorded the respect and rewards due to a goddess, empress, and mother of a pharaoh. But it was necessary to endure the ministrations of the man who came regularly to dye her hair, the cosmeticians who skillfully hid the ravages of her face, the dressmakers who did their best to disguise a used-up body. Appearances no longer mattered within Egypt herself, but the foreigners, knowing that Tiye still sat on the ebony throne, might pause and think twice before plunging deeper into war. They could not know, or could surmise only from garbled and suspect accounts, that she no longer wielded useful power, that she served only to hold up before the world the reminder of a happier Egypt.
I will hold on until Smenkhara’s future is assured
, she told herself.
Ay is too old to depend on, but Horemheb will guide Smenkhara back to Thebes
. She began to pray, almost self-consciously, to Hathor, goddess of youth and beauty, with a fervor she had never before brought to her religious observances, asking only that she might keep her strength until she was no longer needed.

20

S
menkhara waited in the daily expectation of a summons from his mother or Pharaoh to tell him that a contract of betrothal between himself and Meritaten had been approved, but time passed, and no herald came to him with the words he wanted above all else to hear. Sometimes he wondered if the shock of Meketaten’s death and the queen’s subsequent banishment had driven the matter of the betrothal from Tiye’s mind, but knowing her as he did, he doubted it. He willed himself to believe that she was biding her time until a favorable moment to approach Pharaoh presented itself, but in his impatience he resolved a hundred times to cast all caution to the winds and go to his brother himself. He and Meritaten talked of nothing else each afternoon when they met in her private quarters, and Meritaten characteristically calmed his restlessness by pointing out that they had waited so long it would be foolish to jeopardize their happiness by a premature move. Reluctantly Smenkhara poured his energies into his lessons with Horemheb and tried to be content with seeing the princess as often as possible.

But one day, as he went to make his usual visit, her guards turned him away from her doors. Astounded, he tried to argue with them. They listened deferentially and silently, but each time he attempted to push past them, he was held back.

“You are all mad!” he shouted at them finally as he walked away. “I come here almost every day. I will demand that the princess have you replaced!”

An hour later he had found an unguarded section of the wall that sheltered her small garden, and within minutes he was walking up to where she sat listlessly beside her pond, rubbing his knees and glowering. “What is the matter with your guards, Princess?” he demanded. “They refused me admittance, and I had to climb over your wall. See how I have scraped myself.” He sank onto the mat beside her, and his hand found a circlet. “This is the queen’s crown,” he exclaimed. “Is your mother here?” He glanced swiftly around the garden. “Has the banishment been lifted?”

Deftly she took it from him. “No,” she said shortly. “My father had it brought to me early this morning. Go away, Smenkhara.”

He edged closer, pulling her hair so that she had to look at him. “What a foul mood you are in! I thought we might go fishing in the sunset. The fish will be biting well, and the breezes on the river will be pleasant. I deserve a little time to myself. I have been drawing bow all day with Horemheb. Why, Meritaten, what is the matter?”

She jerked her head viciously so that he had to release her hair. “You may no longer call me by my name,” she said coldly, though her mouth quivered. “To you I am Majesty, Great Royal Wife. But you are still only a prince, Smenkhara.”

For a moment he did not understand. Then with a curse he pulled her to him roughly, speaking into her mouth. “Pharaoh has made you queen, hasn’t he? I do not believe it. My mother promised! Tell me it is in name only!”

Her lips moved, cold against his own. “No. It is not.” She moved back. “Yesterday my father took me to Maru-Aten. We walked in the gardens there. He offered me the queen’s crown, and when I refused it, because of you, he said I had no choice.” Her voice was even, her gaze steady on his face. “He said that unlike my mother, I am a fully royal sun child, worthier than she to wear the cobra. I am to move into my mother’s apartments tomorrow. I obey the will of the Disk.”