The man bowed and ran, the marks of her nails white in his flesh. Behind her the Keeper of the Royal Regalia hovered, the damask-lined box open to receive his holy charge. Tiye tore the crown from her head and flung it at him with such force that he staggered back even as he caught it. Whispering prayers of apology to its magic, he set it lovingly in the box. “I am not ashamed to show my displeasure!” she shouted at the hapless priest. “Put the useless thing away, but remember this. On no account are you to deliver it to Queen Nefertiti until you have consulted with me first. Now take it away, before I toss it into the lake.” With one horrified stare he made a quick obeisance and fled.
Ay caught up with her as she was entering the passage to her apartments. Bowing perfunctorily, he followed her into the seclusion of her reception room and waited for her to speak. For a long while she could not. Fighting to control her breath, she stood with her back to him, fists clenched and gently pounding her white-clad hips. In the end he went up to her, removing the ringleted wig and passing his hands soothingly through her long hair, massaging the rigid muscles of her neck. She pulled away from him and rounded.
“You heard?”
“Yes. I was with the Khatti ambassador at the back.”
“Ingrate! Asp! Worm of Apophis! I have given him everything! Everything, Ay, even my body! Thebes was a sleepy, poverty-stricken mud village until the princes of our dynasty graced it. The people know, they will see the city sink once again into obscurity, there will be riots. Doesn’t he know that he is running into madness…”
“Hush!” he said, halting the tirade. “You have a conveniently selective memory, Majesty, if you think that you gave him your body for any reason other than that of good policy. May I remind you also that our dynasty, as you put it, only began less than two hentis ago with our father’s father arriving in Egypt a warrior prisoner. As for riots, the army is perfectly capable of quelling a few. And you hate Thebes, anyway.”
“He did not tell me!”
“Ah!” He smiled sympathetically. “Of course he did not tell you. How could he? He must have suffered agonies at the thought of facing you with such news. Put your hurt pride away and look at yourself, Tiye, at me. It is time to relinquish a little, a very little, of Egypt to the next generation.”
Her face was still flushed, and a vein stood out angrily on her forehead. “If he has come under the special protection of the gods, we can replace him with Smenkhara.” She spoke euphemistically of the insane, whom all were forbidden to harm.
“I do not believe he is mad, although I do think that from time to time such fits come on him. In any case, it would be a difficult task to prove that claim to the people. He is not a cruel god. He has made no wars, offended no foreign kings, he is fertile, he worships what he calls the truth. Perhaps it is not Ma’at, but neither is it entirely sacrilegious. Let him go, Tiye. Thebes is too well established to wither. There will be peace at Karnak and Malkatta with him out of the way, have you thought of that?”
“I do not want the center of power taken from Malkatta, from the place where I can oversee everything.”
“It does not matter. The empire maintains itself under the system your husband Osiris Amunhotep established.”
“He is grotesque, an affront!” Her tone was biting, cruel. Going to the throne, she picked up the jug always kept filled with wine and poured for them both. By the time Ay had taken his cup from her hand, she had drained hers and was pouring more. “I have two courses of action open to me,” she said. “I can acquiesce to him in everything and hope that this stupidity tires him eventually. Or I can fight him with every resource I have.”
“You would lose. Any command of yours can be overridden by him, and you are well aware of it. Will you poison a pharaoh, Tiye?”
She shrugged and, raising her cup, saluted him mockingly. “Why not? I am better for Egypt than he is.”
“Oh? How I admire your facility for self-justification! You might as well know that if the court is transferred to a new site, I have decided to go with it.”
Tiye coughed and spat out her wine. “What?”
He met her shocked gaze warily. “It is not a question of taking sides. You know that I love you, that you and I have never kept secrets from each other. But, Tiye, I do not want to end my life drooling impotently over past glories in a crumbling palace. I am a man of many talents, and I intend to go on using them until I drop.”
“What a pretty picture of my end you conjure!” she shot back sarcastically. “I suppose you think that I should also pack and follow my mad son to some forsaken rural hole?”
“Yes, I do. You underrate the influence you still have with Amunhotep. You are a steadying force on him.”
“How boring.” She strode up the steps and flung herself onto the throne. “Who would have thought, when my father led me through the harem doors, that one day I would be reduced to being a steadying force. Leave me alone, Ay. Can you not see that I am in pain?”
He bowed immediately and, setting his half-full cup beside the jug, strode away.
Horemheb will support me, she thought, watching Ay’s straight, bare back vanish and the doors close quietly. And Amunhotep likes him and will listen to him. He must abandon this silly scheme. “Huya!” she yelled irritably, and the Keeper of the Harem Door entered. “I want Smenkhara and Beketaten removed from the nursery at once. I do not care where you put them. I will decide that later, and also what new tutors to hire. But they are to have nothing more to do with Nefertiti’s brood.” Not for the first time was she grateful that the ordering of a pharaoh’s harem belonged to the chief wife.
“I understand, Goddess. It will be a blow to Princess Meritaten.”
“I know that. I have no other choice. Do it.”
I think I will go to my bedchamber and get drunk, she thought when he had gone. I am not too old for that, Ay. In wine there is often inspiration as well as a sore head. Wearily she pulled herself to her feet. Well, why not kill him and stop pretending to a virtue I do not possess? A seat of government trundled to gods know where! Four whole days from Thebes. Suddenly her breath caught in her throat. She knew where, but had forgotten until now. The desolation of that place where she and Amunhotep had stopped on their way to Memphis, the daunting, echoing heat of it. Oh, Amun, no, she thought as she descended the steps and crossed the floor. It will drive them mad, my soft, spineless ministers. If he wishes to worship himself in perfect silence, let him give the throne to Smenkhara and dig himself a hole in that cursed burning waste, like the mad old priests dotting the desert outside On.
Enraged and frightened, she came to her bedchamber. Its atmosphere welcomed her with the faint, musky whiff of her perfume, the drifting sweetness of persea and lotus blossom, a swirl of the odor of wet soil blowing through the undraped window. But it brought a less welcome element with it, and as Tiye crossed, exhausted, to the couch, her mind began to fill with images of her son as lover. “Piha, bring wine,” she ordered, a lump in her throat, “and send a slave to undress me. I am going to spend the rest of the day on my couch.” She knew it was cowardly, but it was also a relief to recline with a full cup in her hand while her thoughts grew vague and her stomach unknotted.
Sometime during the long, darkening evening she awoke and remembered Piha’s solemn face at the door, telling her that Queen Nefertiti requested audience. She also remembered, even through the drunken haze, the satisfaction of her reply. “Tell Nefertiti to plunge into the Duat and stay there. I will not see her.”
13
In spite of swollen eyes and a pounding head, Tiye rose just before dawn and submitted to her dressers and cosmeticians, scarcely able to bear their touch. As she sat squinting with difficulty into her copper mirror, she was aware that the court, too, was abroad early. Malkatta was murmurous with low voices, banging doors, an occasionally sleepy curse, and when she left her quarters with her herald and bodyguards, her nostrils were assailed by odors of fresh-baked bread and stewing fruit that nauseated her. The
Song of Praise drifted fitfully into the gardens with the sun’s first rays, and with a wave of depression Tiye wondered at the thoughts of Amun’s servants who had to sing for a pharaoh who would always be deaf to the adoration in the time-hallowed chant.
The building that housed the offices of ministries was also unusually busy for the time of day. Pharaoh’s civil servants were seldom in their offices before midmorning, if at all. Many of them, having received their sinecures as bribes or payment for loyalty, had immediately hired capable assistants and devoted their time to the more pressing demands of fashion and intrigue. But today, bleary-eyed and grumbling, they were all waiting for the appearance of the empress, preferring inconvenience to punishment.
Tiye swept first into the airy cell where Bek son of Men, engineer and architect, worked. Men had designed brilliantly under the Son of Hapu for Osiris Amunhotep, and his son’s talent was as great. Tiye knew that Bek had earned his position. He bowed profoundly as she was announced. She indicated that he might sit, and he lowered himself behind the sturdy desk strewn with scrolls, empty ink pots, and draughtsman’s pens. Her fanbearer unfolded her stool.
“I would have thought that you were under Pharaoh’s orders to accompany him to his building site,” she said after a moment. “Are your servants packing, Bek?”
The young man smiled politely. “My underlings have completed a survey of the site, Majesty,” he replied, “and I will visit it in person later, when I may walk it with only my scribes. Horus does not need me in order to demarcate the boundaries of the city. I am commissioned to design.”
“Did your surveyors experience any difficulty with the site?”
His dark eyes dropped. “No, Goddess. The land is level. They did their work in a surprisingly short time.”
“What did they say about it?”
He did not look up, but his gaze traveled over the untidy heap of scrolls on the desk. “Only that, in spite of the fact that the sand is deep, the masons and engineers will find their work easy.”
“That is not what I meant.” The low voice had sharpened.
Bek stiffened. “They said that even at this time of the year the heat was oppressive.”
Tiye stifled a sigh. “You are a loyal servant of your king, and that is commendable, but if you truly desire Pharaoh’s well-being, Bek, you will do your best to dissuade him from this plan. The survey, as you say, was done hurriedly. There may be problems that were missed.”
Now his face came up. “My father took great pride in his work as glorifier and beautifier in Egypt,” he said. “So do I. I will not paint over any difficulty that might arise, but neither will I carve one where it does not exist. I try to live in truth, as my lord has taught me.”
“Bek,” she said patiently, touched in spite of herself by his youthful trust in her son’s dubious interpretation of Ma’at, “truth is not always a gentle thing. It can eventually wound and destroy. Think of that as you labor over your drawings for Pharaoh’s new city. You will be helping him use a truth to destroy himself.”
“Perhaps.” The tone was polite, noncommittal.
Tiye rose, and he also. “Your work is very harmonious and beautiful,” she said, and Bek recognized that she was not flattering him. He bowed.
“My father taught me well. Long life to Your Majesty.”
She nodded and went out.
Over the next few hours she went from office to office, conferring quietly with all Akhenaten’s ministers, trying to convince them to dissuade him from his scheme. She even visited Ranefer, Ay’s second-in-command, standing outside the stables on a mat unrolled for her clean, soft sandals while behind the man the horses shuffled and whickered and the pungent smell of dung made her wince. Two strong impressions had emerged for her consideration by the time she got onto her litter and was carried back to her quarters. One was the power to convince or confuse that her son’s Teaching had. Each man had referred to it in some way. The other was the strength of the inadvertent bond Akhenaten and Nefertiti had forged between themselves and the young men who had surrounded them in the days of his princehood. Akhenaten had carried them with him in his rise to power, and they were still young enough to be grateful.
Her son came to bid her farewell just before noon. Politely she knelt and kissed his feet, acutely aware of her puffy eyes, her sallow complexion dulled by the wine of the night before. He raised her and returned the kiss on her gold-circled forehead. He was so transparently guilty, so eager for her approval that she bit back the arguments rising to her tongue. Perhaps, when he saw the site again, he would change his mind. Perhaps its appeal for him would have been lessened in the course of his own growth.
“I will return in fourteen days,” he said. “I hope, dear mother, that you will have decided by then to move to my holy city yourself.”
“The building of it will take years,” she responded noncommittally. “Is Ay traveling with you?”
“He must. My horses and chariot are needed.” He hesitated, clearly unable to decide whether to stay or to leave her, and seeing his distress, she put her arms around him.
“May the soles of your feet be firm, Akhenaten.”
He embraced her, pathetically pleased at her use of his new name. “I love you, my mother.”
It was like a return to the times that had gone to hold him thus, to feel her cheek against the thin, bowed bones of his shoulder, his breath stirring in her hair. Tears of regret and weariness blurred in her eyes. She pressed her lips against his neck. “You had better go,” she said unsteadily. “My precious egg, my poor prince. Go!” He smiled warmly and departed.
The palace sighed with relief when the last of the barges in Pharaoh’s party disappeared from sight. The tempo of life slowed, and Malkatta slipped briefly back into the indulgent gaiety of days past. There was a loud cheerfulness to the feasting, a casual laziness to the sun-drenched days. As if to test their freedom, the courtiers wandered across the river to Amun’s temple at Karnak in greater numbers than the priests had seen in years, and prayed with a fervor that surprised both the god’s servitors and the new worshipers themselves.
Tiye felt as though she were an invalid recovering from a long illness. She called her jeweler and spent a day selecting new earrings, pectorals, anklets. She ordered a dozen new gowns. Together with Smenkhara she went to her dead husband’s mortuary temple, offering him food and flowers and burning incense. She saw to new apartments for Smenkhara and Beketaten and hired them new tutors from the House of Scribes at Karnak. For the first time in many months she appraised her son, seeing in him his father’s full lips and almond eyes, though the boy’s were paler than Pharaoh’s had been. He had also inherited Amunhotep’s confident, regal walk. But he was as yet too young to display any character traits she could recognize as her first husband’s. His conversations were often punctuated by long periods of silent rumination, whether for pondering or simply because of loss of interest and concentration, Tiye could not tell. He could also be surly when he chose. “I want Meritaten back,” he demanded one day as they rocked in Tiye’s barge anchored to the shore. Smenkhara had a fishing line dangling over the edge and was holding it in one negligent hand as he half-turned to his mother on his ivory chair. “She must miss me. Doing lessons by myself is boring, and I hate Beketaten. She whines when I won’t play with her.”
“That is simply her age,” Tiye reminded him. “She is only two, Smenkhara. Meritaten was also a whiner at that age.”
“No, she wasn’t, she just sulked. And anyway, how would you know what she was like? You only came into the nursery to see Beketaten, and then you hurried back to my brother the king.” He dragged the line sullenly to and fro. “Pharaoh took Meritaten and Meketaten with him on his trip downriver, and I wanted to go, too, but you wouldn’t let me. They are all having fun together.” His lower lip stuck out mutinously, and the youth lock was flung off the brown shoulder.
Tiye pulled her bare feet into the shade of the canopy. “Well, I didn’t go either,” she po
inted out, and he raised both elbows rudely.
“Pharaoh didn’t want you, that’s why.”
“Is that what the servants are saying, or did you come to this conclusion by yourself? In any event, you are a nasty, spoiled little prince,” she snapped. “How long is it since your teacher whipped you?”
“My teachers have never whipped me. I threaten them if they try. And I decided all by myself that Pharaoh was happy to leave you here.”
“I can see that discipline in the nursery has been lax. You may be pharaoh one day, Smenkhara. You must know what it feels like to be an ordinary mortal before you taste the joys of godhood.”
The precocious child swore under his breath. “I bet my new fish pendant that you were never whipped, O my mother.”
“Yes, I was. Your uncle Ay whipped me once and slapped me many times because I was willful and refused to learn from him.”
A long silence followed, and Tiye assumed he was ignoring her. Drowsily she half-closed her eyes, letting the breeze caress her face. But after a while he said, “That is different. You are a woman. Will I really be pharaoh one day?”
“I am empress and goddess and will not be insulted by any,” she barked back. “Now fish quietly. I want to sleep.”
Moodily he kicked the side of the barge and relieved his feelings by sticking out his tongue at his silent body slave. “I don’t want to fish anymore. I want to swim.”
“Not without your instructor. Your stroke is not strong enough yet.”
“When I am pharaoh, I shall do what I like.”
“Probably,” Tiye replied, almost asleep. Smenkhara’s bad temper was fading, and she saw he hauled in his empty line and went to sit under his own canopy to play sennet.
For the auspicious day marking the formal establishment of the boundaries of his new city, Akhenaten had laid aside the clinging, many-pleated female gowns he increasingly preferred to wear, and had donned a short white male kilt. His slender neck was heavy with gold circlets, and an amethyst pectoral portraying the sun disk surrounded by silver bees, hung on his breast. Above the thickly painted face rose a tall blue soft crown to which the cobra and vulture were attached. The hands that gathered up the guiding reins of the chariot were al most invisible under ring scarabs, cartouches, and the loose amulets around his wrists. Behind him Nefertiti leaned against the burnished sides of the vehicle, looking radiant in pale royal blue. Miniature crooks and flails hung from her belt, and between her blue-painted breasts a rearing lapis lazuli sphinx snarled. Her own crown was a curious conical sun god’s helmet into which all her hair had been piled, accentuating the sweeping, flawless lines of her jaw and temple. The result was that her face lost some of its femininity and acquired a sternness that reflected the intractability that was beginning to appear in her character. Meritaten, blue and white ribbons in her youth lock and naked under a loose linen cloak with enameled ankhs, held her mother’s ring-encrusted hand, while little Meketaten sat on the floor of the chariot, one hand tugging at her father’s gold sandal and the other shaking a little bell Tiye had given her. Behind Pharaoh, other chariots waited, full of wigged and kohled dignitaries sweating under the fringed canopies attached to their vehicles. It was midmorning, and the sun’s force, unchecked because the sheltering cliffs trapped all wind, beat onto the sand and was reflected up onto protesting skin.
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