A Cloudy Day on the Western Shore

by Mohamed Mansi Qandil

  Then he heard Nefertiti’s voice behind him. “They are growing quickly, and he is growing up in their midst. You must do something.”

  The following day he took the boy hunting with him. They rode together in one war chariot, and he let the child take the horses’ reins. He taught him how to steer, how to drive the horses gently and firmly. He noticed that the boy’s voice had begun to deepen, a sign of his approaching maturity. They went slowly around the perimeter of the far-reaching lake, and plunged into the forest where the wolves had suckled him at their teats. Akhenaten watched the boy, expecting memories of the wild forest to awaken in him and rouse his yearning for it. But he went on driving the chariot as if he were now of another world. Akhenaten tried to teach him to throw a spear and shoot arrows, but he himself was not a skilled hunter to begin with.

  He waited a little, until the time came to rest at the edge of the shimmering lake. Then he said, “From now on you must not see the girls except when they are clothed, nor let them see you naked. Then you won’t lust after them, nor they after you.”

  The boy nodded his head obediently; in general he did not speak much. “Just one of them,” Akhenaten continued, “is destined for you. It is she who will reveal her body to you and make you king of Egypt, so do not betray her, or show your own body to any other.”

  The Pharaoh rose and went to the chariot, the boy following him, speechless. From the time he had entered the palace and understood his inferior position, he had never imagined that he should be a king. Akhenaten himself had not thought to mix his royal blood with a child fostered by wolves, but what alternative did he have? At last he said to him as the city walls came into view, “Tomorrow we shall perform your ritual circumcision.”

  This was the beginning—circumcision distinguished Egyptians from all the primitive tribes. This, then, was the beginning, the boy’s inauguration into the realm of maturity and legitimacy—a rite of purification through which he must pass in order to become a Pharaoh—it was essential that his manhood be apparent to all, with nothing obscuring it. Akhenaten had happened upon the heir he sought, and his daughters would not now be vulnerable to opportunists and adventurers. The city was decorated with palm fronds and branches of holm oak, while torches blazed atop the walls and in the center of every square. Drumbeats sounded and the air was heavy with incense, as the priests advanced, their heads shaven as was required of all who practiced medicinal arts of this kind. They bore their instruments, keen-edged, polished and gleaming, wrapped in linen cloths, as well as a box of pharmacopoeia, containing narcotic herbal compounds to alleviate pain.

  The boy, however, appeared frightened and pale, and too small to be fit to take the throne. Tut came forward, having been bathed and perfumed, and dressed in pure white garments. Once the foreskin was cut and drops of blood had been spattered upon the cloth, the garment would be preserved as evidence of young Tut’s having achieved manhood, proof that he could now stand proud before the gods, who decreed that all of their followers, Pharaohs and priests, must be circumcised. The hall was crowded with members of the city’s nobility, while the Pharaoh, upon his throne, presided. They seated Tut on a little bench and placed between his feet a basin made of gold. He was terrified, his knees knocking, but the priests gripped his hands and forced his knees apart. At the sound of his shrill cries the drumbeats started up again, and the nobles approached the Pharaoh, bowing before him and offering their congratulations. No one paid any attention to the boy, who had lost consciousness and whose wound the priests were busy bandaging. They all knew it was enough that Tut should marry one of the Pharaoh’s daughters for him to ascend the throne—but was this wild child truly fit for the throne of the gods?

  The drums beat on, and the dancers swayed. Nefertiti watched it all with sadness in her eyes. She wished that the king to be were a child of her womb rather than a mere vagrant raised by wolves, but Akhenaten was besotted, drinking wine that had been brought specially for him from the city of Buto at Tel al-Faraina and made after the fashion of the goddess Hathor, when she pressed the grapes with her bare feet so as to stoke the warmth in her lovers’ souls . . . but now, suddenly, all grew quiet. The drums fell silent and the dancers stood still. The slave girls shrank back and the nobles rose from their seats in alarm. A queer-looking man stood in the middle of the hall, dust-covered and unkempt, dressed in torn clothing, wounds all over his body: a pitiable wretch. No one knew how he could have got into the palace. Akhenaten rose to his feet—it seemed to him that he knew this face.

  The man spoke loudly enough for all to hear. “The noble delegation,” he said, “has returned, my lord.”

  Without waiting for an answer, he turned and staggered, exhausted, out of the palace. Akhenaten dared not raise his voice or issue an order. Already on his feet, he started after the man; Nefertiti rose and followed, trying to catch up with him. Without a sound, everyone went, no one daring even to breathe. Darkness had descended utterly; the torches flickered, casting their light upon a wagon standing in the palace courtyard: a crude thing made of untrimmed tree branches bound together with plant fibers and drawn by a single broken-down horse. An intolerably putrid stench issued from the wagon. Nefertiti shrank from it, as did the other women and the slave girls, nearly asphyxiated by the smell. Akhenaten, however, kept going. And he saw his noble delegation—or, rather, what was left of it. It had been transformed into an undifferentiated heap at the bottom of the wagon, covered by bloodstained cloaks. The strange man stepped forward and drew back the coverings from the heap: severed heads with staring eyes starting from their sockets; severed arms with fingers contorted in supplication—a futile attempt at self-defense; dismembered legs; bellies slashed and eviscerated—the delegation had been transformed altogether into fragments of amputated limbs, flayed skin, broken bones, and the smell of rot. The Pharaoh stood appalled. He had offered up ten of the most eminent of Egypt’s noblemen—those who always wore white cloaks embroidered with gold thread, who perfumed themselves with sandalwood and ambergris, who gave good counsel and were skilled at reciting poetry and recounting ancestral tales, at telling jokes, and at describing the indiscretions of the ancient gods—had offered them up as easy prey to the northern tribes.

  Crows came to life and spread suddenly across the city skies, croaking raucously, announcing their hunger. The ragged man pointed at them and said, “They never stopped pursuing us. They’ve followed me from the land of Canaan—now occupied by the Hittites—all the way here.”

  The cawing of the crows roused Akhenaten. This must be a nightmare—what else could it be? But the scene before him was real, in all its horror and sorrow. Some of the women gasped and then began to weep: solitary wives made widows, mourning the last remains of their husbands. Panicked, Akhenaten turned and looked about—he wanted someone to explain to him what had happened, but all the men near him were ashen-faced and struggling for breath as if the battered corpses lay upon their chests. He turned to the man in the tattered clothing and said, “Who are you?”

  “I am the last witness of their death, sir—the only one the Hittites left alive. I was of no account—the only thing I was good for was to bring back the bodies of the noblemen and give an accounting of their tragedy.”

  Akhenaten turned to Ai, his minister, and commanded, “Prepare these worthy men for burial, and arrange ceremonies for them befitting their station.” Then he signaled to the man in rags. “Follow me, and tell me what happened.”

  Inside the palace, Tut lay upon the floor, bleeding and moaning. The servants fled before the ragged man, as if he were an emissary of the dead, and they hesitated long before they would reenter the hall and carry the bleeding boy away to tend to his wound.

  He who had come back from the dead was the scribe who had accompanied the delegation, having gone with them because he could write and speak Hittite fluently. He had witnessed the slaughter, and endured the degradation that preceded it. When the Hittite kings, who had taken Canaan by storm and then assumed control
of it, learned that an elite delegation had come from Egypt to make a truce with them, they listened, sneering, to the proposal. They were not pleased to know that a new god had been born from nothingness. They all believed in Set, the god of murk, and they were not about to change their ways. They bound the ten noblemen by their necks with ropes and paraded them through the dusty streets, between the leather tents and the houses of thatch, proclaiming their triumph. They beat the faces of the nobles with the soles of their shoes and branded their skins with the tokens of prisoners and slaves: such was their revenge upon Amenhotep’s army, which had relentlessly humiliated them. Now victory had come to them easily and resoundingly. They assembled all the city’s residents in the main square and lit a great bonfire, in which they burned all the gifts the delegation had brought. Then they began to revel in butchering the noblemen and severing their limbs. They ate their victims’ livers and smeared their chests with their blood, dancing all the while to the beat of their war drums.

  The man stopped speaking and waited for further questions, but the Pharaoh was silent, his face pale—the pile of severed limbs answered all questions, not merely heralding the abject collapse of his dream but also putting him on notice that he was perched upon a dangerous precipice. Worse still, Horemheb was aggrieved, and it was his own fault. Atun had forsaken him and failed to set him on the right road. And if he himself had begun to doubt Atun, then how were others to believe in him?

  Symbols of mourning were hung throughout the city. The locked crypts were quickly opened and made ready. The embalmers confronted the problem of the dismembered bodies, and the reunification of each severed limb with its owner, lest a body enter the afterlife in an incomplete state. The Pharaoh did not sleep that night. Tut’s fever was high, his little member swollen, and the girls surrounded him, mocking and teasing him. Akhenaten looked at his flushed face and felt that all was lost, that it was up to him to redeem his throne.

  Ai came precisely on time. “We must go to war,” Akhenaten said at once. “There is no help for it—you must assemble the army and resume their training. We shall make haste to recall Horemheb—he is the only one capable of engaging this battle.”

  Ai stared at him, but made no reply—he had not expected such a reaction. But the northern tribes had declared war, and the Pharaoh must face a war whether he believed in it or not. Hesitantly, the minister replied, “I am afraid this will not be possible, my lord. We do not have the necessary funds to ready such an army.”

  The Pharaoh looked at him in disbelief. Once, no one would have opposed him—nothing could have stood in the way of what he willed. He glared at his minister, who prevaricated, “The tax revenues were not good this year—the priests from the south withheld their share, and their sting is more potent now, since the renegade leader Horemheb joined forces with them.”

  Had he lost the war before it even began? Had he forfeited, in a single stroke, both the required moneys and the most capable of leaders?

  “I shall open my grain-storage facilities,” he said, “and I shall offer up all the gold in my possession.”

  “And from where shall the men come?” replied the minister. “In this regard, Horemheb is one step ahead of us—he is preparing to attack us.”

  Why had he known nothing of all this? Why had all these disasters been concealed from him? Was everyone, in fact, awaiting his downfall? “Why did you not inform me of all this in a timely fashion?” he demanded.

  “We thought we would be able to overcome these difficulties without troubling you about them, but calamities have accumulated in a way that could not have been foreseen.”

  Akhenaten roamed the palace like a madman. He looked into Nefertiti’s eyes and saw that they were sadder than before; he saw that the faces of his girls had grown pale with fear, and that the swelling persisted at the site of Tut’s wound. He ascended to the upper floors of the palace, from which he turned about, now toward the north, now toward the south. Who would come for him first, the barbarians of the north or his erstwhile allies? Who would be the first to spill his blood?

  “The boy,” he said to his wife, “shall recover in a day or two. I wish to prepare him for marriage to Ankhesen.”

  “Why such haste?” whispered Nefertiti uneasily. “She is older than he, and he is still weak and ill.”

  “I want the new Pharaoh to be ready.”

  She did not understand what he meant, but he was not in a fit state for her to debate matters with him. She knew that their whole world might collapse at any moment. The girl herself, however, Ankhesen, lost no time in voicing her protest. “How can I marry that foundling, with his swollen thing? I want a husband who is actually a man!”

  Nefertiti gazed at the girl. Her body was beginning to bud out, and she gave every evidence of having a sensuous nature such as no one could mistake. She showed a distinct preference for going without the benefit of clothing and had filled her room with mirrors. She followed the Pharaoh’s guards with a misty-eyed gaze in which desire and apprehension mingled. But now she was expressing her wishes in no uncertain terms.

  “Your father,” said Nefertiti, “has chosen him to be the Pharaoh who shall sit at your side upon the throne.”

  Furious, the girl cried rudely, “Shall sit at my side upon the throne! But who will lie beside me in bed?”

  “Such words, my young miss,” her mother replied angrily, “are fit not for the queen of Egypt, but for the whores who walk the streets!”

  Ankhesen stormed out, casting a contemptuous glance at Tut as she passed by his room. She took to watching the palace guards hungrily.

  “Why have you distanced yourself from me this way? And why have you caused my enemies to move in so close to me?”

  More alone than he had ever been before, Akhenaten contemplated the sun disc as it sank slowly behind the horizon. Torches by the dozen would not serve, however brightly they blazed, to deliver his heart from the darkness that was creeping over it. The colors were draining away from the clouds, and the light upon the horizon was blinking out. Was it possible he could see the first of the torches carried by the invaders as they approached? He would stand long in expectation of them, and just when he tired of waiting they would come suddenly. How many Pharaohs had stood as he did, waiting for the blow to fall? He alone had lost his weapons and been forsaken by the gods.

  The youth recovered, and the priests removed the bandages from his wound, but Ankhesen’s anger was not appeased. The date of the wedding must be arranged, but it was not a propitious time for any kind of celebration. The Pharaoh himself paced the walls, fortifying the city. He drilled the soldiers and inspected the weapons. Everywhere he went, the chieftains and builders followed. He ordered that all points of entry be sealed and the thickness of the inadequate walls be doubled; everything was poised, everyone feeling the tension that gripped the city. But Akhenaten kept asking himself, “How long can we hold out?”

  He felt the need to breathe freely in the open air—perhaps Atun would be pleased with him, take him up once more, and inspire in him some means of extricating himself from this mortal chaos. Nefertiti gazed fearfully at him on hearing what he had to say.

  “You would venture out again? All these fortifications around the city, and yet you’d leave it and go out into the open? Will you not be risking your life?”

  “It is what I need at this moment,” replied the Pharaoh. “I shall go and return in secret.” She could not oppose him—he had become an anguished spirit, unquiet the whole night through, wandering furtively about the city, subject to accidents and insults. Might the open country be good for him?

  He sneaked out by way of one of the rear gates to the city, with no one the wiser but a few trustworthy guards, who smeared their faces with dust as they begged him to allow them to accompany him and keep watch over him through the night. Nevertheless, he went forth alone, as was his fate. He removed his shoes and his feet sank into the mud. Feeling the cold and the sharpness of the gravel, he proceeded by the routes
that had not been cut off. He traversed the interlinked irrigation ditches and drainage canals, then removed his cloak and stood naked beneath the stars. He was conscious of the nighttime chill as it touched his skin, imparting to him the sense of peace he had been missing. How feeble he seemed! And how infinitely old the world appeared to him. He panted as he ascended the ancient hill. He would remain there, naked, until his pores opened and the first rays of the sun burst forth. It would be a long night, but he must endure it until the world began to awaken. As he started to shiver, he recited the prayers he had not uttered for a long time. He understood that his moment had come as his stomach roiled and he could not repress the moan that escaped his lips against his will, and he vomited some dark liquid. Exhausted, he sat upon the ground, held fast to the grass and pebbles. Nothing was secure here anymore; everything was too slack to get hold of, nothing could be relied upon. His face bathed in cold sweat, he curled up on the ground, spent. He knew he would not be able to rise again, would never more grasp the scepter, or sit upon the throne.

  From a long way away, he heard a voice asking, “Are you all right, my lord?” The inflection was neutral, evincing neither malice nor sympathy, but it was that voice and none other, deep and gravelly, resounding in the silence of the empty air, with nothing that could give back an echo. The man advanced and stood before him, towering in his massive height, with his white cloak and the spear that was ever in his hand, gazing impassively down at him. There was the Pharaoh, naked, prostrate upon the earth, his body smeared with dew-moistened dust.

  With an effort to compose himself, Akhenaten said, “As always, Horemheb, you have come just in time. How long have you been watching this place?”