Valley of the Kings (14 page)

“I am late. I must go.” She strode toward the door.

“Wait,” Nefertiti said.

At the door, Ankhesenamun turned her head; her gaze crossed her mother's one more time. “I am sorry,” the daughter said to the mother. She went out and left Nefertiti there alone.

Plague stalked Egypt like a lioness, taking victims at her will, and everywhere was famine. Still, when the temple of the Aten at Thebes was complete, Nefertiti chose to go herself to consecrate it.

The temple stood on the east bank, close by the Temple of Amun. Thus the Aten challenged the dread god of fear in his very sanctuaries. The Temple of Amun was close and dark, buzzing with the flies that fed on the blood of sacrifices; the new Temple of Aten enclosed wide courtyards open to the sun. Amun was served only by men; the new temple was dedicated to women. On all faces of the columns of the temple were painted images of women, worshiping the Disk of the Sun, whose rays streamed down around them, each ray ending in a hand that caressed them with love.

Amun kept his people miserable with fear. The Aten loved all people. This was the difference between them, and it was this difference that Nefertiti thought would save Egypt, even as famine and plague ate up the people, even as terror of things to come ate up their hearts.

The Queen Regent was passing by along the Avenue of the Sphinxes that led to the temple. Above the massed heads and shoulders of the crowd in front of him, Sennahet could see the golden tassels swaying from the awning of her chair; he saw the high plumes of her fans, white as wool against the brilliant sky.

No one cheered her. Her chair, which six men bore, was surrounded by rings of armed soldiers.

Sennahet lowered his gaze to the backs of the people before him. He was sweating; his eyes shifted back and forth, looking to see if anyone was watching him. As far as he could see along the Avenue of the Sphinxes, people stood packed together to watch the procession. They stood on tiptoe; they held their children up to look. No one was paying any heed to Sennahet.

Directly in front of him was the broad back of a young man with heavy gold rings in his ears and a purse dangling from his belt. Sennahet's fingers curled when he looked at the purse. The muscles tensed in his thighs.

A great cry went up from the crowd. The King was coming. First came men swinging censers, turning the air peppery with the smoke of the incense; flute boys followed, piping and dancing. In their wake the King appeared.

His chair was made all of gold, worked in the images of lions and giraffes, the sacred beasts of his house. He sat on the skins of lions and he wore the towering double crown of Egypt. The people could not watch him in silence as they had the Queen Regent. His appearance drew gasps and sighs from every throat. He was laden down with jewels like a savage bride; his arms were armored in bracelets; amulets hung about his neck; on his breast was a great Eye of Ra made of glass paste and gold. Inside the casing of his royalty, the face of a weakling boy looked out, with pouting lips and a beardless chin. In his hands he carried crossed over his breast the authority of Egypt, the crook and flail of Osiris.

So richly adorned was Tutankhamun that to Sennahet it seemed his very flesh was made of gold.

Now the King was passing before him. The back of the youth jumped with muscle as the young man flung his arms up and shouted in amazement at the god passing. Here and there people knelt and pressed their faces to the dirt. Most of the men and women in the crowd simply stood awestruck. Sennahet's hand shot forward; he plucked the purse from the belt of the youth.

“Thief!”

The cry was like a sword in his ears. He whirled and fled.

“Thief! Stop him!”

Before him was the solid mass of the crowd. He slithered between two bodies and dodged around a fat woman with a child and shoved and pushed at the family behind her. A hand gripped him. He jerked his arm free. He could not run, there was no room to run.

Right behind him someone shouted, “Stop him—he's a thief!”

He blundered into an old man and knocked him down. That taught him the way. He began to seek out weaklings—old people, children. He charged at these weaker people. Knocked them aside, trampled them. A man seized hold of his skirt and the skirt tore and Sennahet ran on naked.

“Thief!”

The cry was fainter, farther behind him now. He threaded his way through the mob. Here, back from the street, people were scattered. He walked in among them, one hand over his nakedness. They were all watching the King. No one gave him more than a curious glance.

In the shadow of one of the great sphinxes that lined the road, he stopped and opened the purse. It was empty. He swore and shook it upside down, but it was empty. He cast it into the dirt and went away, cursing the youth who wore his wealth all in his ears.

Hapure had been standing in line before the new temple for two hours, since before dawn. His legs hurt.

The line curved across the broad apron of the rear courtyard of the temple. There were young palms growing in jars around the sides of the courtyard, and people were sitting on the edges of the jars to rest; people sat on the lip of the little lily pond in the center of the court. The head of the line stopped at the rear entry to the temple, and there it had stood for hours, since before Hapure had taken his place at the tail, and no one yet had come to attend to the suppliants.

At noon, when the sun was at its height, the Queen Regent and the young King made their magnificent procession down the Avenue of the Sphinxes to the temple. Hapure was still standing in the line behind the temple. The ceremony of dedication took place on the far side, and he did not see the Queen. He heard the roar of the crowd and knew what had occurred and he began to despair, because the line had not advanced one inch since before dawn.

The people before him grumbled and spoke evilly against the priests of the temple. Hapure shut his ears to them. He looked around the courtyard at the tall columns of the temple. They were so newly painted that the colors seemed to shine forth with their own light. It was a beautiful temple, if a little strange, with its broad expanses, its airy vistas. The sunlight shone down through the columns all the way to the ground. Idle, musing, Hapure let himself imagine that the columns of the temple and the rays of the sun twined like the fingers of two hands clasping.

At last a scribe came down the line, beginning at the head, and asked each person waiting there what his purpose was. Hapure saw him, and he stood on his toes to watch the scribe's progress.

Many of the people to whom the scribe spoke left the line and went off. Hapure wondered what sent them away; puzzled and uncertain, he felt in the rolled top of his skirt for the coins he had brought and fingered them out to his palm.

The scribe came to the man and woman in line before Hapure.

“We have come to ask a share of the sacrifice,” the man said. “When the Queen Regent consecrates the temple. May she live forever! We are hungry, and to share the sacrifice is the right of the hungry.”

The scribe looked sympathetic, but he wagged his head from side to side.

“There is nothing to share, unless you can fill your stomachs with flowers. The Aten asks no blood sacrifice, no flesh of lamb or oxen, only gifts of flowers. The Queen Regent will give him lilies; and the King, hyacinths.”

The man and woman cried out in one voice. “Shame! For shame! We are hungry. What manner of god is this, who denies food to the hungry?”

“Go to Amun,” said the scribe. “Today eighteen prime oxen will be slain for his pleasure, and he takes only the flesh of the left thigh.”

The man and woman moved away, talking in angry voices. The scribe turned to Hapure.

“What do you wish of the Aten?”

Hapure said, “I have money, and my wife is sick with the plague. I want some priest to speak her name during the ceremonies, so that the God will favor her and make her well again.”

The scribe was shaking his head. “I am sorry. The priests of the Aten do not take bribes.”

“Alas,” said Hapure.

“And they will tell you that the Aten looks on all of us the same, and will heal your wife if it is his will.”

The scribe went on to the next in line. Hapure stared after him, gloomy. In his fist were the precious coins with which he might have bought his wife's health. Now the scribe had told him that her health was beyond any price.

“I will go to Amun, then,” he said.

Without turning, the scribe said, “Surely Amun will take your money.”

Hapure went away.

Meryat knelt at the left hand of the Queen Regent. The great words of the prayer sounded over her, and she was half in tears with the memories it wakened in her.

Thy dawning is beautiful in the horizon of heaven,

O living Aten, beginning of life!

When thou risest in the eastern horizon of heaven,

Thou fillest every land with thy beauty!

Pharaoh himself had composed this song, the hymn of Akhenaten to his God. Meryat had heard him sing it countless times, in his New City, away to the north. There every day had passed in contemplation of the Aten. There, where no enemy came, and no adverse word was spoken, Meryat had believed that the triumph of the Aten was complete. How could she have guessed that everywhere else in Egypt, people did not understand the Aten and clung secretly to their ancient gods?

When the chicken crieth in the eggshell,

Thou givest him breath therein to preserve him alive;

When thou hast perfected him that he may pierce the egg

He cometh forth…

When the King had spoken thus of his God, none could listen without yielding to his vision. But Akhenaten was dead.

And here in Thebes the old gods were vigorously alive. Meryat prayed that the Aten would protect her; she trembled with dread even as she rejoiced in the great hymn. The sacred columns around her would protect her in the temple. The images on them would protect her when she imitated them, doing her daily work. Yet she was afraid.

Before her, Nefertiti stood at the foot of the high pillar. As she spoke the words her husband had taught to them all, her body swayed, and Meryat too began to sway. Many in the crowd began to speak with the Queen Regent. They locked arms and their bodies moved from side to side.

Meryat closed her eyes. Surely while Nefertiti lived, the Aten would protect his people. She put away her fear and gave herself up to the welling joy of communion with the God, her arms locked fast with those of the rest of the worshipers, her tongue speaking in unison with them and once more with Akhenaten.

Akhenaten's face was ugly: his jaw like a plow blade, his eyes slanted above high, slanting cheekbones. He looked down on his daughter Ankhesenamun with a faint unreadable smile on his lips.

Rather, six stone images of him looked down on her, and she bowed deep before him.

“Greetings, my father. I have offerings for you, for the delight of your ka.”

She set the little dish of millet and honey at the foot of the first statue.

The six images were set around the sides of a courtyard at one end of the Temple of the Aten. They were fashioned in the extreme style that her father had encouraged toward the end of his reign, in which the grace of the Aten in him showed itself in a swelling of his loins, and his special powers of life and death were represented by female breasts, so that he seemed both man and woman together in the same body.

Once every courtier in Egypt had hastened to have himself depicted in painting and statue in this same style. Now, of course, they ordered that the artists show them thin and frail, like Tutankhamun.

Nefertiti had come here this afternoon to consecrate the courtyard to the immortal ka of her husband. Then the courtyard had rung with the strong voices of men loudly worshiping the dead King. Ankhesenamun had not been able to bear it; she had gone away. She knew none of them still loved the King. They loved Tutankhamun now. The Grand Vizier and the General Horemheb put on whatever face and manner would keep them in the favor of Tutankhamun and Nefertiti.

So Ankhesenamun had waited to pray alone, sincerely, before her father. But she did not pray. She brooded on the failures of her mother.

Tutankhamun had looked on as Nefertiti consecrated her temple. He had not led the prayer, or even joined in it, although Nefertiti had pleaded with him to show that favor to the Aten. He had toyed with his rings as the Queen Regent sang the hymn to the God. Akhenaten meant nothing to Tutankhamun. Daily Nefertiti's influence waned over him. Soon even she would mean nothing to him.

“My father,” the young Queen Ankhesenamun said, “he does not honor you, but I shall.”

She clasped her hands together, looking up at the face of the statue, and fell into a dreamy reverie of times she had sat so at his knee, and heard him tell of the Aten. He had had such a fire in him, such a spellbinder's gift of words, that she had listened to him for hours, even as a tiny child.

Now, of course, she saw how much he had failed—even though she adored him, she saw that he had failed. The old gods were still masters over Egypt, and the Aten was a lonely god who wandered in the desert and called out, but none came. In Egypt things were done the old way, or not at all. Ankhesenamun saw the virtue in that: otherwise, the whole world would fly apart.

Her mother was not so sensible. Her mother was a fool. Even today, Nefertiti had pointed to the presence of the high officers of the court as proof that this ceremony would reunite Egypt. Ankhesenamun, remembering, frowned and clenched her fist. She had seen how the Grand Vizier and the General Horemheb murmured together when Nefertiti's back was turned.

And Tutankhamun had not taken part in the ceremony; he had not come to this courtyard at all. That was the worst.

Ankhesenamun rose to her feet. She bowed down again before each image of her father; she knew that each bow would gladden his ka, wherever it should be, even all the way north in the New City where he was buried.