On a Balcony

by David Stacton

  There was no answer to that. They watched him roll the cart back and forth on a table, while Tiiy lectured him. He looked like a guilty child.

  But the guilty child had rather liked the pageant of Foreign Tribute. It was something, after all, to be Pharaoh. He said Nefertiti had persuaded him to neglect such matters. He had perhaps come to lean too much on her advice. Which in a way was quite true, since she had always made a practice of advising him to do what he wanted to do anyway.

  From now on, he said, yes, he would act. He would take measures at once. He would save Syria. And meanwhile, would she please go and leave him in peace. She was impertinent. He was Pharaoh, not she.

  When they left he was still playing with the toy, his face thoughtful.

  None the less, when she went back to Thebes, he escorted her to the wharves. Ay and Horemheb had decided to accompany her a little way up the river, on the return journey. Ikhnaton even stood there while the boat pulled out into the current, so that the last thing he saw was the figure of Amon on the rudder of her barge, staring back at him, as the flotilla set sail for Thebes.

  He was not sorry to see her go, but true to his promise, he took action at once.

  When Horemheb and Ay returned two weeks later, they discovered he had instituted an entirely new service, in the temple attached to the Foreign Office, a hymn to the glorious disc of the Aton, requesting that the light of Ma’at should break over the dark hearts of the rebellious. In addition, he had increased the staff of the Aton temples in both Syria and Nubia. That, he thought, should do. The service was to be held daily, and Nefertiti was to be rigorously excluded from it. After all, though it was convenient to have someone to blame, she had made him look ridiculous before his mother.

  It was the beginning of her fall from power.

  Meanwhile, the cart was quite fascinating, and he ordered three, with improvements of his own devising, for the children to play with.

  Fourteen

  Boredom produces its own sense of urgency. Aketaten had become a little feverish. They had three years.

  Smenkara had done well. His whole art consisted in sliding neatly but gravely into an empty place, and he blended nicely with the girls. Not being a monotheist, or indeed much concerned with such matters in any way, he even accepted the Aton. In his own way he had summed things up, and he was waiting. He knew perfectly well he would become Pharaoh some day, and so he had nothing to be ambitious about. This made him restful. Still, it could not be denied that a certain sparkle of anticipation came into his eye, when he saw how his opportunity was ripening, though when people gave him things, he was ingenuous enough to receive them with a quite sincere exclamation of, “Oh, is all that for me?” As a result people gave him things for the pleasure of it. In short, he had become the favourite. He had scarcely the volition of a minnow, and was quite content to drift with the current, and to preserve that air of never wanting anything that made everyone but Nefertiti overlook him.

  She had only two defences in her new position. No one could dislodge her from the Aton cult, which gave her power; and as virtual guardian of Tutankaten, who would one day be the second man in the Empire, she was in a secure place from which to bargain. Because of this, though she detested the child, she gave him everything he wanted, automatically, out of policy. It was somewhat humiliating to descend from the status of Royal Wife to that of no less Royal Sister as Aunt, but she made the transition unobtrusively. And so to her own adherents were now added his.

  All of which went on behind the scenes. To public view she and Ikhnaton were as devoted a couple as ever, though a close observer might have noticed something wrong with their smiles.

  In the height of summer, however, he fell dangerously ill, as unexpectedly and almost in the same place as Maketaten had died in the garden. He was thirty-eight now. To look and act like a boy was one thing. But to live like one had ruined his health. He was carried into a pavilion in the garden, and over that white glittering city there fell an intent and almost surgical hush. Everywhere, both in the palaces, and in the temples and hovels, the inhabitants huddled like immigrants, miserable to know where to go next.

  Pentu had no easy time. More even than most physicians, he knew his own health depended upon that of his patient. But what could he do? He looked at that bloated and yet wasted body, motionless in its coma, and had no idea of what went on in there. He was the cleverest doctor in the Empire, but all his knowledge amounted to no more than that he knew virtually nothing.

  For thirteen days Ikhnaton lay still. He had become the mummy of himself. One could only watch for the slow signs of certain death and hope one would not see them.

  As for the court, it had not given way to panic yet, but there were rumours. Horemheb and Ay advised Nefertiti to move back to the palace from her own retreat in the northern suburb. Of all that crowd, she was still the only one who could hold the court.

  No doubt many of the nobles made their secret preparations. There were more messengers to Thebes than usual. But hold them she did. She even went to the temple more often, rather than less, and Meryra was instructed to hold the rites more publicly and with a firmer splendour.

  In Pharaoh’s pavilion there was no sound. She went there at night once, to see him, attended only by Ay.

  She did not like what she saw. That garden was the world he loved. And now, through it, off the river, there blew a disturbing wind that ruffled the stagnant water of the tanks and drove the flowers each way. There was even an angry shimmer from the trees, as though black death were playing some game up there, crouching to drop down on their heads, and unable to suppress a giggle. The flowers stood in their precise beds, a little past their prime, washed out of their colour by the moon, their stiff foliage turned a mouldy blue. It was not nice. It had a futile melancholy. And the creaking skiffs at the jetty, invisible beyond the garden wall, made the scene no better. Why is everything we own so anxious to depart?

  The pavilion was spotless, its curtains drawn back against their poles. The attendants, who had just washed him, withdrew. Even now his orders were not disobeyed. Courtiers are the first, servants the last, to seek a new master. Fifty lamps must have been burning there, on the floor, on stands, or hanging by chains from the eaves.

  It was the twelfth day of his coma. He lay motionless with his eyes closed, slightly propped on cushions, his hands aimlessly at his sides. His breath was not perceptible. Bathed five minutes ago, his forehead was again beaded with sweat. Between slightly parted lips one could see the bone-white glitter of his teeth.

  The room smelled of aromatic gums, it all seemed purposeless, and they were both so much older now. Nefertiti stood quite quietly, without so much as stooping, about five feet away. Her face was empty. Ay could not tell what she was thinking. Yet something in it woke up and turned over for the last time, that was obvious. He wondered what.

  Then she went away.

  The next afternoon Ikhnaton opened his eyes. In the evening he took nourishment, a thin gruel, but moved little. The first thing he saw was that life-mask Tutmose had taken of him, which stood on a stand at the foot of his bed, where it had replaced that other mask of Amenophis. He stared at it for some time.

  A week later he was allowed to sit up.

  Nefertiti, coming with her personal attendants to pay him a state visit, was stopped and turned back at the entrance to the garden. No explanation of any kind was given.

  He would see no one. He came out of the pavilion only at dusk and midnight, for short walks. And so matters went on for the next month. In the circumstances such state business as had to be handled, which was not much, was routed to Nefertiti.

  About that lady Horemheb felt a certain curiosity. But she had become evasive. Without either head present to direct them, those in the palace became disorderly and at the same time strangely preoccupied. The banquets went on as usual, but before an empty throne. The consumption of the very good and very old rare wine of Aketaten significantly went up.

  H
oremheb wandered uneasily about the endless corridors and courts, but perhaps it was no accident that he came upon her at last. Subconsciously that was what he had wanted to do.

  She was on the terrace overlooking the enclosure devoted to the great cats. Now she had withdrawn to the north palace, they looked singularly shabby and neglected. But they seemed to know her. In a clearing beneath the terrace they prowled back and forth, and he could hear an occasional snarl.

  Nor was the reason for that snarling far to seek. She had an enormous basketful of joints of meat which, as they began their nervous pacing, she threw down one by one.

  He could sense, rather than see, that she was sad. If she knew he was there she gave no sign. But the night was cold and at last he went up to her. She turned her face towards him, and he had a momentary impression of that white, diseased eye. Then, swiftly, she turned her back to the balustrade, so that he was on her good side, and so manœuvred him around, until she could face the garden again. She threw out another piece of meat.

  “Pharaoh’s favourite roast,” she said almost dryly. “Why are you here?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Very faintly, in the moonlight, her lips curved into the ghost of a smile. “I think we understand each other perfectly,” she said.

  He put his hand on her hip and then let it fall. Over the garden the stars were hard. He would have wished them softer. Angrily he took one of the joints and threw it down to the cats.

  “If I were younger I should mind,” she said.

  “And now?”

  There was a brief silence. “No, now I shall be remembered. It’s something. It’s rather nice.” Who had said that before?

  Another silence. He thought what he felt was probably pity. And pity, in his case, took the form of an inward heaving rage.

  “Don’t you ever drop your mask?” he asked.

  She turned on him suddenly, so that he could see both her eyes. Her voice was no longer controlled. “This isn’t a mask. It’s my face,” she said. “Besides, the few times I’ve tried, it hasn’t got me very far. Do you remember that scene in the banqueting hall?”

  “Don’t you ever forget anything?”

  She looked down at the animals again. “Only the good things,” she said, and they were silent again. But she did not draw away when once more he touched her. “No beautiful woman will ever accept pity,” she murmured.

  “It isn’t pity.”

  She tipped the basket over the balcony and turned savagely on her heel. “Come,” she said, and led the way through the palace to her own apartments, with a furious disdain for appearances. Her apartments overlooked the garden. There he went to bed with her. It was not a pleasant experience, and he found it dismaying. For it made him realize that locked up inside and way down in her, beneath all that cautious and now utterly ruined beauty, too late to escape, or even admit that it was there, was a young impulsive girl whose tenderness had never found anyone and now knew it never would. Often, alone, she must catch glimpses of that drowned self, thirty feet down, so concealed by the glaucous heave and swell of time, that she would never be able to tell whether it was alive or not.

  She cried out, at that sudden, futile glimpse of pleasure. It was so fugitive.

  And in the garden Ikhnaton heard it.

  For these days he wandered restlessly about the exterior of that half-deserted palace, unwilling, at night, to go within. He had been alive again such a little while that he found the later summer odorous sweetness of the dying garden almost unbearably kind.

  And even he, who had imitated everything, now found that there were moonlight nights when he looked across the lonely rooftops of the city, through that quiescent blue which is the magic of moonlight, and wished that life were otherwise. But life was not otherwise. Who had he been, he wondered, when he had still lived with the Queen?

  And so, though he would not come to see her, he did sometimes steal through the garden, part the shrubs, and look towards her apartments. Tonight he found them blazing with light. That in itself was unusual, and he paused uncertainly, shivering in the quick breeze off the river. The spore of a dandelion floated aimlessly in front of him.

  Then he heard her little scream, and moving closer, saw them together. Illness had left him slightly unbalanced. He had always been curious as to what ordinary people did together. Leaning against a tree, he watched until they were through.

  Now why had he never been able to do that?

  At last they stopped. Everything was still, except for the low baying of the wind. Horemheb left. After a long time Nefertiti came to the end of the pavilion, and stood beside one of the pillars. The expression on her face was appalling. Then she withdrew, without bothering to unfasten the pulled-back curtains, and one by one the lights went out. He heard her stir once, and then she must have slept.

  He blundered out from behind the tree. Something brushed against his face. He swept it aside. It brushed against his face again, like a thousand furry fingers. He sobbed and ran away, hurrying, half-bent, down one of the garden paths.

  It was the end of summer. The flowers were over. The sudden gusts of wind detached every winged spore from the naked pips and they rose in a vast whirling cloud from which he could not escape, moved this way and that, until he waded in them, darting as they did in and out, up and down, higher, sweeping downward upon him, until he was overwhelmed. He ran faster.

  They strung out behind him, and though seeming to whirl away, in another gust returned, hovering maddeningly around him, and feinting away when he batted at them, until angry with tears he saw they rose from everywhere, like mocking stars soaring up to their proper places in the sky.

  He sat down on the cope of a pool, protected by rushes, and wept. Then, by caprice, the wind drew them off, to drift and settle some otherwhere, and so take root. Only one or two drifted before his vision now, the little lost ones, too weak to go anywhere else, who must do the best they could here.

  And there was nothing he could do to them, absolutely nothing at all. He could banish Horemheb, but Horemheb would not care. Horemheb had the army. And to abolish Nefertiti would be to abolish one-half the Aton, and have even that crumble away.

  He had lost them both, a friend and a wife. He could not banish them. Nor could he go on alone. There must be someone left to him, there must be something that was not an appearance.

  On the other side of the pond the rushes parted. A figure stood on the alabaster cope, almost naked, and wistful. It neither saw him nor spoke. It was Smenkara.

  To have no one was better than to have Smenkara. He returned to his pavilion.

  There he saw staring at him his own life-mask, with all its foolish confidence. It was true, unlike his father, he had not died. He had survived. But for what? For what?

  Picking it up, he dashed it down, and smashed it, and left the pieces where they were.

  Part Three

  Fifteen

  But even the God cannot destroy God. Once he has revealed himself, his worshippers will not let him. They have too much at stake.

  He had almost died, he was worried, and there was no one with whom to share his worry. Our characters cannot sustain so much weight. Too much worry eventually makes us cave in on ourselves, like a summer roof packed with winter snow, with a splintering roar that in our own ears sounds much like a giggle.

  And a giggle it should be. For the scales had fallen from his eyes at last. He saw things as they were. And why, then, should he not snatch this last secret game for himself, in a savage parody of faith?

  For he saw now there was not one here who believed. Not one. Well, perhaps a foolish few, who had not the wit to see through anything, but of these loyal, devout, these sedulous courtiers and high priests, not one. It had been nothing to them but a game with Pharaoh’s vanity.

  Very well then, now he would have a game with theirs, beginning with the Queen, for to give him credit, yes, he saw now, Horemheb had never pretended anything. He did not even think of Ay. No one
ever thought of Ay, which was as Ay wished it.

  He prepared to enjoy himself.

  For once more he had discovered something new. A sense of humour they had in those days, and some verbal wit. But a sense of comedy had nothing to do with either of those. The subject matter of humour is man taken on his own terms at the wrong time, the subject matter of wit, a game with language merely. The essence of wit is to pretend that the words we use to describe each other also define us. But your comedian is a zoologist with a genius for classification. That special form of deceit called honesty particularly appeals to him. Ma’at is only a vanity.

  Your man of humour strangles whole towns in the name of justice. Your comedian destroys nothing. He does not have to, for he knows it will destroy itself, given the time. To him futility is not even futile. It has not even that much dignity. It is merely meaningless. So your true comedian will not die for his beliefs. He would much rather let his beliefs die for him, which is more natural, and besides, they would die in any case, so they may as well die to some purpose. If anyone else goes on believing in them, that only improves the comedy. Any horse can say haha in the midst of battle; but it takes a firmer strain to say haha in the midst of peace. This is what it means to be mettlesome.

  While he had believed in it, it had never occurred to him that this new faith of his was so ludicrous. Now he began to see the possibilities. One could laugh at it all day, and he proposed to. Others did. Why not he?

  Once discovered, and the trick was very easy. And yet was it, for alas, no matter if one laughed all day or not, even so, one cried all night. All his life he had craved understanding, and now, instead of receiving it, he was ready to give it. It was called comedy. Whether he cried all night or not, he was at least beginning to understand what a blessing it was not to have anyone there to watch. It was better so. It had more dignity.