The Twelfth Transforming (70 page)

“I thought I had forgotten it,” Pharaoh replied, “but it all comes back to me now. There is the tree I used to climb, and from there I could swing down all the terraces. It was a stiff climb back up, though.” His servants waited while he admired the view, the gardens, the long prospect of the river. Ay did not know whether he was giving his queen a moment to collect herself or was insensitively prolonging her anguish, but at last he turned to the steward Meryra’s prostrate form by the open entrance. “Get up and lead us to your mistress,” he ordered.

Meryra rose and bowed several times. “It is a great honor, Mighty Bull,” he said gravely, and they followed him into the welcome coolness of Nefertiti’s little kingdom.

The public hall was filled with statues. As Meryra glided ahead, Ay looked about incredulously. Nefertiti gazed at them solemnly as they went, her face formed from the dark oiliness of ebony, the streaked shine of marble, the warmth of sandstone. Some of the works were busts, some merely heads, but the majority were full-size likenesses. Some were very formal, the head wigged and crowned with the cobra or the masculine lines of the sun crown, the stiff body covered in pleated linen to the sandaled feet, the arms rigid at the stone sides. But many were soft and flowing with the curves and arrested movements of life. The artistic genius Akhenaten had clumsily tried to foster had found its flowering here, in one man’s hidden tribute to the woman he adored. Every piece portrayed Nefertiti in the fullness of her character. Thothmes had no illusions about her. Together with her sensuality and beauty, the hall breathed her arrogance, her pettiness, her strange defenselessness.
This is my daughter
, Ay thought, dazed. One statue caused them all to pause. Nefertiti, in white limestone, the heaviness of middle age in her thighs and sagging breasts and belly, was bending to one side. In her outstretched hand she held a lotus. She was smiling slightly. Her eyes were closed, and her nostrils flared toward the open bloom. Her own hair fell straight to her shoulders, and she wore a thin circlet that held an ankh above her forehead. Ankhs were strung around her neck and fingers. The whole piece was languorous with the worship of life.

“Gods!” Tutankhamun exclaimed with disgust. “Sculptors are far from being anything more than the servants of better men, but this one is no more than a slave. He would starve before he found a patron.” Ay pulled his gaze from the statue and walked on.

The passages leading to the private reception hall were also graced with carvings of Nefertiti, and it seemed that Thothmes was a painter as well, for the walls of the hall itself were brilliant with immense likenesses of her. Here he had kept to traditional modes of expression, but Ay noticed that the flesh had been painted red, the color used for portraying males, and the hair blue, for the lapis lazuli of the gods.

Meryra had led them to where a few chairs were pulled close together at a low table containing refreshments and flowers. As they approached, Nefertiti and the sculptor rose from their seats. Thothmes whispered in Nefertiti’s ear, and immediately she knelt and prostrated herself, rising with his help to stand unsmiling with hands clasped before her. She was simply dressed in a soft white sheath that fell from the onyx jewels at her throat in many pleats to the floor. More onyx studded her belt. On each arm she wore thick bracelets. Her wig, too, was simple, a straight black fall of hair to her shoulders, fringed and surmounted by a gold circlet made up of tiny disks. She looked, Ay thought, as though she had stepped out of another age. Her face was heavily painted, but the paint could not obscure the delicate nest of lines around her eyes or the faint grooves in her cheeks. Thothmes was also painted, wigged, and ribboned, but beneath the formality of his attire Ay saw a lean, graceful man with a deep, generous gaze. Ankhesenamun smiled at her mother, but Nefertiti seemed not to notice her. Nor would she meet her father’s eye as her glance swept them. Without invitation, Tutankhamun took a chair and said, “It is good to see you again, Nefertiti.”

The others sat, Ankhesenamun looking down at her distorted lap, hurt and disappointed.

“Your Majesty has grown a great deal since I saw you last,” Nefertiti said, “and you, Father, you are fatter!”

Ay looked at her curiously, for he had, in fact, lost weight since assuming the responsibilities of regent. Her old fire was gone, the restless body strangely calm, her movements studied. At Ay’s glance, Thothmes leaned toward Nefertiti with a small proprietary gesture. Ay took Ankhesenamun’s hand.

“But, no,” he replied. “I have become thinner in the service of my king.” He turned to Ankhesenamun with a silencing gesture. “Nefertiti, I am sorry that your daughter could not come today. You were expecting her, but she is not well.”

The wide mouth turned down. Nefertiti seemed to be listening, her head on one side, and then she smiled coldly. “You are senile, Regent. Ankhesenpaaten, is your health not good?”

“You are blind, aren’t you?” Ay said softly before the girl could answer. “Oh, Nefertiti, such pride! If we had known…”

“If you had known,” she sneered, her voice thin, “I would have had to endure everyone’s pity. Poor Nefertiti, once so powerful, now an aging, blind traitor who cannot take one step without assistance. Let us fling her a little sympathy, though surely the gods do not expect it of us. After all, she sinned and she is being punished!” One hand flitted briefly over her pale face. “No, I am not completely blind. I can distinguish between light and darkness.”

The words hung over them. With a cry, Ankhesenamun left her chair and embraced her mother. Nefertiti’s arms closed around her.

“You must leave here at once!” Pharaoh exclaimed. “At Malkatta you can have apartments and servants, and my own physicians will attend you. Come with us, Nefertiti.”

Her fingers were exploring Ankhesenamun’s face. “Malkatta?” she replied quietly. “No, Majesty, it is too late for that. I will not endure the silent laughter of the court behind my back day after day. Here I am still queen. My husband is gone, all my children but one dead, no son of mine sits on the Horus Throne. But at last some measure of peace has come to me. Would you destroy it in order to show your mercy?”

Stung at the condemnation in her voice, Tutankhamun said hotly, “We are not obliged to show you mercy! We listen to the entreaties of our queen!”

Nefertiti set Ankhesenamun gently away from her and nodded. “My husband made me holy,” she said. “The city of Akhetaten is a song of praise to the Aten, and to me. It is mine. I will never leave.”

“I cannot guarantee your safety once the Mazoi go,” Ay reminded her anxiously.

She shrugged. “I have soldiers of my own. Four of my daughters lie here in the rock, Father. I will not desert them.”

“Your duty lies with Ankhesenamun, the survivor!”

“Ankhesenamun? Your father would weep to hear the name of that god. As for my duty, Ay, I have done it.”

She had allowed the memories to warp, to change shape to fit her own long ambitions and disguise her old frustrations. Here in the north palace, Ay thought, her dreams had taken on a kind of reality. It was a shrine to her, a sanctuary of adoration, and the man sitting quietly beside her with such composure had at last given her the love for which she had always yearned. In her new fulfillment she no longer inspired pity.

For a while they sat on together, talking of innocuous things while Meryra, directed by Thothmes’ unobtrusive gestures, served them delicacies. There was no trace of fussy possession in his attitude, no flaunting of ownership. Ay was convinced by the time they rose to leave that Thothmes’ love for Nefertiti was honest, unselfish, and steady. He and she prostrated themselves to Tutankhamun and walked with him into the late afternoon sunshine, Nefertiti’s hand resting on Thothmes’ guiding elbow. At the last moment, as Pharaoh was stepping into his litter, the queen turned back to embrace her mother.

“I will have incense burned before the Son of Hapu for you every day,” she said, weeping, “and I will send you many letters.”

Nefertiti turned blank gray eyes in the direction of her face. “Give Egypt a son, Ankhesenamun, and do not meddle in things that do not concern you. I love you.”

Still sobbing, Ankhesenamun got onto her litter. The last glimpse she had of her mother was of Nefertiti’s immobile face, the white linen pressed against her stately body by the wind, and the flash of sunlight on her rings as she reached for Thothmes’ hand.

Two days later, in the cool of early morning, Pharaoh and Ankhesenamun sat on the deck of
Kha-em-Ma’at
and were poled away from the palace water steps for the last time. The queen, watching the central city slide past, tried to pretend they were merely on a boating party and in the evening would return home. But the illusion was hard to maintain, for Akhetaten had shut them out. The green palms ranking along the bank rustled in the fresh breeze, the vine-hung white walls gleamed in the new sunlight, and flashes of bright color showed through the lush wetness of many trees, yet an atmosphere of incipient decay already hung over the empty homes and deserted gardens. Behind the sealed doors and boarded windows, many rooms were left as they were, the chairs still waiting to be used, the tables laden with vases of wilting flowers, the shuttered bedchambers still dim with rumpled couches and lamps still warm from the night. There had been both a sudden panic to leave a ghost-haunted, ill-omened place and an uncertainty about the future. Perhaps Pharaoh would not settle at Thebes and would return. Perhaps he would become homesick for the city’s beauty and greenness; perhaps the Aten’s eclipse would be brief after all and in his maturity Pharaoh would return to his father’s god. Regret lingered in the gardens and imbued the quiet streets with nostalgia.

As the royal barge slid past Horemheb’s estate, Ankhesenamun gave a cry and turned to her husband. “Tutankhamun, look! What is happening?”

Naked brown children were leaping into the river from Horemheb’s white water steps with shrieks of delight. A woman knelt by his ornamental pool, scouring a pile of coarse linen. Two goats were tethered to the pillars of his entrance hall. The homeless had begun to converge on the city even before all its occupants had left.

Pharaoh watched, fascinated. “I suppose I should order them thrown out,” he said. “But today I will be magnanimous. There is no point, in any case. I do not think that we will ever return, and as yet we cannot afford to pay soldiers to police an empty city. The glass and faïence factories are still working. I suppose those peasants want work in them.”

Ankhesenamun rose and went to the rail. The ethereal pleasure palace of Maru-Aten was passing, and she thought she caught a glimpse of the shady pavilion beyond the trees. Then it was gone. Into the past. The southern customs house was almost abreast, and the end of the long sweep of high cliffs that had sheltered Akhetaten. Ankhesenamun looked back. The city was a silent mirage of white, green, and gold, dancing on the warm haze, held tenuously to the present only by the umbilical cord of glittering barges strung out behind. Ankhesenamun did not look away until the cliffs and the bending river removed it protectively from her sight.

The flotilla beat its way slowly back to Thebes, bearing with it the bodies of Akhenaten and Tiye, whom Ay had arranged to inter at Thebes. The travelers had begun in good spirits, whiling away the long hours on the river with parties held on deck under the sheltering canopies, but before long the presence of the two imperial coffins and the anxiety about what awaited them at Thebes had sobered the court. Sleep became fitful and troubled. The more impressionable women among the courtiers began to see unfavorable omens, and many felt burdened by a sense of foreboding. It would have been better, they whispered among themselves, to have left the accursed one and his mother-wife to the hot silence of the cliffs. Surely they were bringing with them a taint that would infect Malkatta. It was unlucky to disturb the dead.

Long before Pharaoh’s barge nudged the Malkatta water steps, the river banks began to be thick with people who lay reverently beneath the palms and then rose to cheer him, and when his captain gave the order that swung the flotilla toward the west, the whole of Thebes could be seen filling the east bank, screaming and jostling in delirious relief. The barges turned into the canal. It had been dredged, the huge lake scoured and filled, the water steps repaired. Flags of blue and white rippled on the wooden flagstaffs before the imposing facade of the palace. As Tutankhamun and his retinue stepped from the ramp, priests in flowing white linen sent clouds of incense pouring to the heavens, and the paving was already sticky with milk and wine. By the portable altar a garlanded bull waited patiently for the slash of Pharaoh’s knife.

It was more than a homecoming. It was a return to sanity, to the immutable ways of Ma’at, and the ceremonies moved forward with a lighthearted gaiety. The courtiers flooded through the refurbished palace, laughing and singing. Delicious odors wafted from the kitchens. In the harem, the new women mingled with the old, their apartments a jumble of belongings through which their servants picked their way while the women themselves spilled into the harem gardens and rushed to the lake. The tumultuous welcome of the Thebans could be heard fitfully for hours, a rumble of sound coming across the Nile. Incense columned thickly above Karnak. The feast Tutankhamun presided over that night went on until dawn, a noisy, music-filled expression of joy and thanksgiving. Pharaoh retired to his apartments just after midnight, falling onto Amunhotep’s wide couch and into his dreams almost simultaneously, and when he awoke as Ra tipped the horizon, Maya and his acolytes began the Song of Praise outside the door. “Hail Living Incarnation, rising as Ra in the east! Hail, Divinely Immortal Source of Egypt’s Health.”

Later in the day Tutankhamun stood in full panoply in Amun’s dark sanctuary. Before him the god towered, a figure fashioned by Tutankhamun’s own artists and clothed in his own gold. Dishes of choicest delicacies were set at his feet, and flowers hung from his neck. Mildly he smiled at his obedient son while the priests held the censers and Maya, resplendent in the priestly leopard skin, bowed reverently before him. “The sun of him who knows Thee not goes down, O Amun!” the temple singers chanted in the forecourt. “The temple of him who assailed Thee is in darkness!” There was no mistaking the gloating triumph in the words. Tutankhamun listened soberly. He had no other father now but Amun.