On a Balcony

by David Stacton

  He could not even grant his daughter eternal life.

  And lying back, with his eyes half-closed, in that bouncing litter, he could see the sweaty, sanctimonious faces of the court, re-echoing the words of that petition as though they believed in them. How dare they believe in them, when he did not.

  The gorge was majestic but its walls were too close. The sun scarcely penetrated here. The air was fetid and dry and there was too much dust. Far ahead he could see, borne aloft, that small gold and lapis lazuli coffin carried feet first towards what these foolish people dared to call eternity.

  Nor did he spare himself even the royal tomb.

  He had never entered it before, and would never enter it again. The litter was set to earth. He stepped out and glanced angrily at all of them. But they were bowed down. He could not see their faces. That hymn they chanted was only a monstrous jeer.

  Meryra would have spoken to him, but he brushed Meryra aside. They entered the tomb.

  The builders had done their job too well. It was commodious enough to hold a whole dynasty. Beyond the entrance hall lay his own chambers, looming dark beyond the light of the torches, except for a reflection out of darkness, where a stray gleam caught the edge of his own pink sarcophagus. Maketaten was to be buried in a hall to the left. From all the walls shimmered stucco reliefs full of gaiety. They showed himself, the Queen, the princesses, and the court, rejoicing in the light for ever and ever. He could have smashed them.

  It was the Queen who placed upon the coffin case, once it was in the sarcophagus, a tiny circlet of small white and sapphire flowers, such as one gathers in a meadow, nestled gently in green leaves, cornflowers, and some bitter sweet thing shaped like tiny stars. The rope was cut and the lid of the sarcophagus came down with a dusty slam that seemed to shake the walls. The lights retreated. Nefertiti hesitated and then turned towards him, touching his waist with her hand. After all, it was her daughter.

  But she had turned the wrong side of her face. Caught in the flickering obscurity, but lit pink by a torch, he saw the white, tear-stained mass of that blind eye, staring at him helplessly, sightlessly. So though her fingers were timid, he shook them off and fell back.

  There was nothing to say. She stood rigid, and if anything her chin went higher.

  They left the tomb. But he would not leave the outer hall, until the attendants had piled into the room every stick and piece of furniture or personal possession Maketaten had ever owned, until the black hole was a mass of gold and gilt and precious stones, and glitter. He wanted no reminder of her, for if she could no longer be, then it was as though she never had been. He stayed until the masons had bricked up the opening, and it had been secured with plaster seals.

  When he left it was already evening. He had the bearers virtually run back down the gorge, having given orders that all work on the royal tomb, and on every other tomb at Aketaten, should cease.

  It was a matter, now, of staying awake every night until dawn. From now on it would always be a matter of that.

  When he entered his bedroom, alone, with all the lamps lit, he found on a stand beside his bed a small sandalwood box, and when the servants had been dismissed, though only to sleep across his doorway, he opened it.

  There was no message. It contained a small quartzite head of Maketaten, four inches high, done years ago, when she was five. He did not acknowledge it, but he fell asleep with it in his hand, and he was always to keep it by him.

  Tutmose had not expected him to acknowledge it. Nor did he see any point in admitting that it was one of two, the better of which, with his name on a scrap of papyrus, he had sent to the Queen.

  In these matters one is better off without words, but they had had a long tug-of-war, he and she, and somehow he had wanted to send her at least his name, whether they were friends or not.

  Maketaten was never referred to again. But two or three days later Horemheb was sent to Thebes, to fetch back Smenkara and Tutankaten, the male heirs. From now on they were to reside in Aketaten.

  Eleven

  He would have gone in any case, Pharaoh’s displeasure or no. He had his virtues, and therefore his responsibilities, and only official business in Memphis had kept him away when Amenophis was dying. For more than anyone else, Amenophis had been his father. They had loved each other in their own fashion.

  About Tiiy his feelings were more mixed, for she was now almost fifty, and he in his thirties, and a great deal was over between them. That made it awkward to know what to say.

  It would be a mistake to say that Thebes was deserted. It was rather as though its important people were hiding out in the hills, waiting until it was safe to return. Indeed, in view of all those royal tombs in the cliffs of Pharaohs loyal to Amon, was that not literally true?

  Tiiy was still a woman of some importance, and she did not hide. Her retirement was not occlusion, but the invisibility of an important official, temporarily out of office, but yet with much to do. Her weakness was not that she was weak, but that she had been too strong for all of them.

  She even continued to receive ambassadors and envoys of state. Unable to appeal to Ikhnaton, they appealed to her. She knew all the affairs of the Empire, and even more than Ay, perhaps she was the only person who did know. She still had much to teach. Society might converge like sheep down a slaughter-house runway upon the capital at Aketaten, but the political capital remained at Thebes, if it could be said to be anywhere. In her own person, she was the political capital, what was left of it.

  Horemheb found her, rather surprisingly, at the Memnonion. That vainglorious, echoing, and bejewelled monument to vanity had at last, somewhat unexpectedly, actually become what it set out to be, a shrine. For we are apt to forget that bad taste is by no means incompatible with a noble character, and that a noble character, for the matter of that, has little or nothing to do with being good.

  Then, in the heat of a particularly hot summer, the place had the merit of being cool. In a way, too, it was rather as though, now Amenophis was dead, she drew some comfort from sheltering behind the remains of his identity.

  An attendant went to fetch her. She came clattering up across the brightly polished floors, from some wing of the building, very assured and tight-skirted, her sandals showing off the taut, brittle ankles of a woman who refuses to grow old. Her face broke into a smile of pleasure when she saw him.

  “You came,” she said. “I was wondering if you would.” And she looked at him shrewdly, from the immense distance of what had once been between them, and showed, in that way, that she was both touched and enormously gratified.

  He was touched himself. For he had always felt guilty about her. Or rather, since guilt is not an attribute of character, but a substitute for it, wistful and sorry. Still, one of them had had to tire of the other first, and if it had been she, she would not have been so fond of him now, for what she admired best in others was independence of herself, so that she could not help both to despise her children and to reduce them to the very thing that she despised.

  Now they were old friends she could accept, rather than resent, the strength of character that had made him fail her. Besides, she was safe on the far side of menopause. Her emotions were therefore less demanding, and sensation could be, and in her case no doubt was, satisfied anywhere. This had the effect of making her somehow more humorous and brisk, as she had been in the days when she had first taken him up.

  Now it appeared she proposed to take him up again, though in a different way. She was full of politics. She had an immense desire, as had Ay, who had already taken him up, to pass on what she knew to someone capable of remembering it. So though their pleasure on seeing each other again was mutual, the profit was almost entirely his.

  “Ay has told me he finds you promising and only slightly stupid,” she said. “What happens down there, in that madhouse?”

  He laughed, for it was a little warmth again, without having to be so eternally guarded. He had discovered the relaxed and amiably mocking joys o
f that old acquaintance which is perhaps the real end of any love affair, though we may not think so at the time. Certainly it makes new love affairs more endurable. For one thing it gives us someone to grumble to about them, a thing scarcely possible to the young.

  So he gained some insight into that relationship of hers to Amenophis, which had survived so many lovers, and which had so puzzled and defeated everyone.

  About Aketaten she was completely cynical. Honesty, clearly, at least in her case, was a much more physical matter than her son supposed.

  This made it easier for Horemheb to tell her the purpose of his errand. He had expected her to take it badly. She did nothing of the sort.

  “Yes, he would want them now,” she said. She looked up and her face was sad. “Have you seen them yet?”

  He shifted uncomfortably.

  “It doesn’t matter. I’m old enough to be honest. I had the wrong womb. Let him have them. They won’t do him any good. They’re even weaker than he is. Ay will probably outlast us all. They should go very well with all those girls of his.”

  And indeed, thought Horemheb, a few days later, she was quite right. They would.

  He watched the princes from the shelter of the deck-house, on the way back to Aketaten. Tutankaten, who was five, had thrown a scene on having to leave, but only about his pet rabbits. His mother filled him with indifference, but pet rabbits were another matter. For a child so thin, he was surprisingly tough, but those periwinkle eyes, though determined, were not intelligent.

  Smenkara, on the other hand, was twenty-one. He looked at you as though wondering how much you cost, and his precocity was frightening. No doubt he meant to be agreeable, but he also meant to keep his place and he had little energy. He knew twenty-five ways to be indolent, all graceful, and if occasionally he left one out, you could be sure he would put it back in again later, out of series. In particular he had an annoying habit of throwing you an impromptu, but none the less well-rehearsed, happy smile over his left shoulder as he left a room. It was impossible not to notice that he presented always his better profile.

  The simplest thing to do was to shrug and give him up. It seemed unlikely, somehow, that Egypt would ever be ruled over the left shoulder, smile or not. At least there was no harm in him.

  Tutankaten, even at five, was spiteful.

  Horemheb was well content to hand them over to the household steward at Aketaten and go to his offices. There he found Ay waiting for him, and with good reason.

  For the next few months the Commander of the Armies would have more than enough to do. Ikhnaton had promulgated some violent and ill-chosen orders, in a spirit of bare-faced revenge. From his own standpoint, he could scarcely be blamed.

  After the scene over Maketaten’s funeral, he had sworn revenge against the Amon priests. Not Meryra, but Pa-wah, had shrewdly played on that, in his own game for power. Besides, unlike Meryra, who had made it up, Pa-wah was a fanatic where the religion was concerned. Why should he not be, since he wanted the office of high priest for himself?

  He had served up the rumour that the Amon priests were praying for Ikhnaton’s death. No doubt they were, but privately, and without feeling any need to bring the matter to Pharaoh’s attention.

  There are some poisons a drop of which will tincture a whole glass. There are also rumours that do the same thing. Pharaoh’s health was in a state of collapse. His tuberculosis had advanced. There was nothing Pentu could do but prescribe anti-spasmodics, and it is not pleasant to watch one’s body rot while fools get on quite well. They might pray for his death, but it would do them no good. He would abolish them instead.

  Whether for Maketaten or himself, he gave orders that everywhere, throughout the double kingdom, the name of Amon was to be destroyed, chiselled out of all monuments, and never mentioned again. A hundred thousand workmen, under protection of the army, were to begin work at once. They were to enter even the tombs, and pull down whole monuments. Workers, sculptors, and vandals were to be remorselessly drilled in what to do, and watched and whipped, if necessary, until they did it.

  All the Amon temples were to be disbanded and, if possible, torn down, the priests forcibly secularized, their farms, fields, cattle, chattels, treasure, prerogatives, and possessions seized for the crown. He had smashed their Holy of Holies and that horrible black doll. Now he would smash them.

  It was a war against death, and since he was Pharaoh, it would be fought and won. And why stop there? Ptah, Osiris, even Ra, they all served death, and they should all be destroyed. The Aton alone served life.

  Since he was Pharaoh, it was fought, and who was to say whether it was won or not?

  It took the entire army to keep the riots down. Never mind disaffections in the Syrian Empire. Troops were withdrawn to serve in Egypt, at his order.

  And again, he was wilier than people supposed. In Thebes the army was expected to defect. The army did nothing of the sort, and for a very simple reason, and one, moreover, that he had thought of at once. The wealth of Egypt came from the Nubian gold-mines. Its distribution was a monopoly of the Amon cult. He blandly turned the monopoly over to the army, at no loss to himself, and since the profit of the monopoly was one in four, the army had no difficulty in remaining loyal.

  Meanwhile he had the royal princes, his little brothers, firmly under his own thumb, and could bring them up as he pleased. Death or no, the rule of the Aton would go on.

  In the resultant confusion everyone overlooked Smenkara and his twenty-five ways to be indolent, all graceful, and one a smile over the left shoulder. It turned out to be a mistake, but then the one thing wisdom does foolishly, is to overlook the power of folly.

  Twelve

  It was the thirteenth year of the reign, which left them only five to go. But of course they could not know that, for secure as they were at Aketaten, nothing much happened in this year.

  True, the temples were closed and the economy of the country was wrecked. The army was growing stronger than Pharaoh, which was dangerous. But nobody in the army had bothered to tell Pharaoh that. In Asia, Egypt lost Mitannia to the Hittites and six cities in Syria; in Africa, Nubia as far as the Fifth Cataract. The coastal trade, however, continued to flourish, since the Phoenicians ran it at a sufficient profit to themselves to keep them loyal, but even so, new waves of piracy hampered the steady flow of goods. The cost of wood went up, the supply of spices down. Pharaoh did not care for spiced food.

  Thebes, they said, was orderly, apart from the perpetual strikes, but then there had always been strikes, because the officials in charge of grain allotment were hopelessly venal. When they grew too venal, which was every three or four years, one changed them, and the strikes abated for a while. It was a nuisance, but quite traditional.

  All these things had nothing to do with Aketaten, and were in any event scarcely Ikhnaton’s concern.

  It was in this year that he saw his first pair of gloves. They came from the interior of Arabia, and they were marvellous. They were so impersonal. Anything you did in gloves, you did not do at all. He had a pair made for Smenkara.

  If you cut off a man’s hand, as was done with prisoners of war, you could not use it for anything at all. But here you had something that could do things you would never dare to do yourself. Inside gloves your own hands felt secret and safe, and could do as they pleased without anybody ever being able to see. If surrogate hands, why not then noses, eyes, a penis, ears? We already have wigs instead of hair. On the same principle, gloves made the dirtiest moral action clean, for one had no responsibility for what one touched. Any dirt that might be involved rubbed off on the gloves.

  They said Royal Father Ay was Pharaoh’s right hand. Why not give him these surrogate hands, then, a pair of gloves? Then Pharaoh would have no responsibility for anything done in Pharaoh’s name. The gloves would bear the responsibility.

  They were a marvel. He would distribute them to Ay from the balcony, as soon as the matter could be arranged.

  And so we have the scene
, on a rock painting done the same year. It was a gala event, and one of the Queen’s infrequent recent appearances. The nobles in the street below cheered themselves hoarse. Smenkara had begged for the privilege of being on the balcony, but since Ikhnaton kept him in the background, was not visible.

  The irony of the scene made Ikhnaton giggle.

  Unfortunately, as far as Ay was concerned, gloves were only gloves.

  To tell the truth, Ikhnaton was a little bored, though not unpleasantly so. Mostly that year he played with the children. Their little fists grabbed rapaciously at things, like the tentacles of a stranded octopus, before it dies in the sun. He enjoyed that. It was agreeable to be the father of small girls, even if Meritaten was now too old to play, and had been relegated to the harem, though Smenkara seemed to like her well enough.

  They owed one everything. They had sometimes the power to annoy, when their voices piped too loud in very hot weather, but they were charming, and they did not have the power to hurt. It was a little like keeping cats, if cats were not sacred, and always remained kittens.

  He played with them as though they were toys, the clay toys one gives to children and which grown-ups play with when they are sure they are not observed, or feel nervous. For this he could not be blamed, for they were not children. They had been brought up to be toys, and that is what they were. They could never be taken over into adulthood, and made to serve some purpose. They could only be forgotten, broken, or discarded. It must be said it gave them a certain gaily painted charm that would only later seem horrible.

  Thirteen

  Nothing much happened in the next year, either, not that was, at first.