A God Against the Gods

by Allen Drury

  “Go, you, to the temple of Amon. Take with you a thousand in gold. Tell them Pharaoh apologizes humbly for the deaths of Anion’s priests. Tell them he was seized with a madness, but it has passed and will never happen again. And then”—his voice breaks a little but he makes it firm and goes on—“find Ramose and tell him to announce to the people what he already knows. Tell him to send word to all the cities of Kemet and all its farms and all its people that the Crown Prince Tuthmose has been drowned accidentally in the Nile on his way from Memphis”—a startled groan goes up from the soldiers and is quickly carried out into the compound—“and that beginning at sunset the land of Kemet will be in seventy days’ mourning for His Highness, who has returned”—he hesitates the tiniest second, then concludes strongly—“who has returned to the Aten, and will presently go to lie with his ancestors in the Valley of the Kings beneath the Western Peak. Go!”

  The scribe, white-faced, bows and rushes away. I increase the pressure of my hand upon Aye’s arm, as now, finally, after his work is done, he gives me a dazed, far-off glance and then nods and begins to move. We walk through the hushed corridors. Outside a new sound, uneasy, unhappy, disturbed, comes distantly: the soldiers have spread the news, and the word of Tuthmose’s death is out

  “My dear,” I say as we reach the place where our paths diverge to his villa on one side of the compound, and to my small palace on the other, “let me come to your house and keep you company tonight.”

  He cannot speak, but only nods. And so we walk hand in hand along the empty pathway while Ra glares pitilessly down in the blinding afternoon, and in the land of Kemet the people both mourn and rejoice for the House of Thebes, which this day has known great joy and great sorrow and has seen the world change, to move in new directions no one yet can foresee.

  ***

  Ramose

  Tonight I am tired and I am sad, but I must not admit it.

  For look you, what a great man I am and what a great office do I hold!

  My distant predecessor Rehk-mi-re, Vizier to Tuthmose III (life, health, prosperity!), described himself thus:

  “There was nothing of which he was ignorant in heaven, in earth, or in any part of the underworld.”

  I do not claim quite such omnipotence, being kept sensibly modest by many things including my own nature and the constant advice of my busy half brother, Amonhotep, Son of Hapu: but I do much, and know much.

  This is what the Good Gods advise those of whom they appoint Vizier:

  “Look after the office of the Vizier and watch over everything that is done in it, for it is the constitution of the entire land. As to the office of the Vizier, indeed, it is not pleasant; no, it is as bitter as its reputation. He is one who must give no special consideration to princes or councilors nor make slaves of any people whatsoever.… Look upon him whom you know as on him you do not know, the one who approaches your person as the one who is far from your house.… Pass over no petitioner without hearing his case.… Show anger to no man wrongfully and be angry only at that which deserves anger. Instill fear of yourself that you may be held in fear, for a true prince is a prince who is feared. The distinction of a prince is that he does justice. But if a man instills fear in an excessive manner, there being in him a modicum of injustice in the estimation of man, they do not say of him: ‘That is a just man.’ … What one expects of the conduct of the Vizier is the performance of justice.”

  This is my office and my charge: to do all things evenhandedly, and all things well; to assist Pharaoh in all the daily details of the kingdom and Empire; to hear litigations over land, to establish and enforce the laws by which herds, flocks, harvest, fish, game, trees, ponds, canals, wells are taxed; to determine justice in civil cases; to dispense the common law, which is not law as it is written in books, but law as it falls from the lips of Pharaoh, derived from his three divine qualities of hu—authority; sia—perception; and ma’at—justice. And derived also, of course, from the hu, sia and ma’at of all his predecessors, back into the mists of time to Menes (life, health, prosperity!), first ruler of the Two Lands and fountainhead of all the wisdom of all the Good Gods since.

  Such is my position: overseeing all, guiding all, knowing all.

  For the first time since Pharaoh appointed me Vizier of Upper Kemet, I wish tonight I did not hold this post. Tonight I know too much, of death and birth and tragedy. Tonight for the first time I feel old. Intimations that Anubis and the judges of the underworld are waiting surround me in my silent room, in this palace sleeping uneasily now in strange mixture of jubilation and sorrow. I would not mind being back with Amonhotep, my half brother, in our home town of Athribis in the Delta, playing innocently along the mudbanks of the Nile, long before our native brilliance called us both to the attention of the Great House and started us upward on our rise to power in the land of Kemet.

  Tonight the Palace sleeps: all is quiet. The family, with all its heavy burdens, has long since gone to rest. In the painted corridors and down the long palm-lined avenues the soldiers stand at attention; in hushed tones the guard is changed at the usual four-hour intervals.

  The savage heat of Ra’s full vigor in the afternoon has faded into the gentle yet still oppressive exhaustion of the summer night. A soft wind blows off the Red Land. High above, Khons in his silver boat transports the souls of the dead across the sky; his cold white light shines down to cast strange shadows on pillar, cornice, tree, and massive temple, on obelisk and monstrous statue. Even the river is quiet now, only lapping gently at the dock: all boats tied up, all sailors snug ashore in their stopping places. Once in a great while the soft hooting of an owl breaks the silence. Which god or goddess inhabits his furry form tonight? I do not know, but bow my head and wish well whoever it may be. For it is not wise to antagonize the gods of Kemet, who are everywhere, in everything, most present when we see them least.

  It is not wise to antagonize the gods: but it has been done, and now I suspect, as I patiently write down the final records of the major happenings of this one day in Kemet’s eternal history, that tonight the Palace sleeps but its principal residents do not. I can imagine, for I know them well, how the Good God and the Great Wife still lie weeping in one another’s arms, even as the gentle fretting of the newborn god at their side reminds them that life does not stop when one life stops. In her little palace in a far corner of the compound, Gilukhipa probably lies awake, staring at the ceiling, not knowing whether to be pleased or sad at the strange events of the strange House to which statecraft has assigned her, unwilling but helpless, for as long as she may live. In the house of Aye in another quarter, the good man, yielding to open emotion for once in his life, weeps for gracious Hebmet, dead too young in giving birth, while at his side the Queen Mother from time to time wrings out cloths in cold water and places them with loving tenderness across his eyes. In another room the young wet nurse Tey suckles the baby girl, whose occasional gurglings remind them, too, that continuity survives in change. Only Sitamon in her little doll’s palace will be soundly asleep in the innocence of childhood: troubled while awake but instantly forgetful of it all the moment her head hit the pillow.

  Sitamon and one other rest soundly tonight. Down the silent river behind the secret walls of Karnak, cold Aanen presides in the vast stone room, dimly lit by tapers flickering in the Red Land’s breath, where on a catafalque the body of a little boy lies sleeping. The priests are preparing to place a heart-scarab on his breast to preserve the seat of life, to draw out his brains through his nostrils, to remove his entrails and other organs, to place them in four canopic jars in which they will be preserved forever, and to fill all his cavities with natron, that resinous material which for the next seventy days will mummify his body and make it ready for its final journey to the Valley of the Kings.

  Is Aanen satisfied this night? I suspect not, for Amon-Ra won this battle, but both Aanen and I know this Pharaoh and the Great Wife. The war will go on.

  And the five million people of Kemet, in a
ll the cities, towns, villages, farms and empty places, all up and down the life-giving river where Hapi holds sway? Many sleep, I suspect, innocent and unknowing as yet of what has happened here, and destined, perhaps, to be uncaring, save in a remote and general way, when they do know. But many others will be lying awake as Khons’ silver boat passes slowly overhead, and in its lovely and impersonal light they will be greatly aware and greatly disturbed, and they will be wondering, as I wonder: What will this day mean for the House of Thebes? What does it portend for Kemet? What will the gods weave for us all as this day’s ripples extend and spread outward in their slow, inexorable development down the years?

  Eh, well. I do not know. I know only that the Vizier must continue his work, whatever. So I take my writing brush and my roll of papyrus, and on it I inscribe:

  That on this day, on his way from Memphis to Thebes, there died:

  Tuthmose V, Crown Prince, High Priest of Ptah.

  And there was born, in the Palace of Malkata, to the Great Wife Tiye:

  Amonhotep IV, the new Crown Prince.

  And also in Malkata, to Hebmet, wife of Aye, a daughter, named by her mother, just before she gave up her life for the child:

  Nefer-ti-ti.

  Which means: A Beautiful Woman Has Come.

  ***

  Book II

  Education of a God

  1377 B.C.

  ***

  Gilukhipa

  Now all is pomp and ceremony in the Palace, and once again, as on so many boring occasions in the past fifteen years, we must all troop ourselves out to see and be seen. Today the strange horse-faced boy is to become both God and married. It is almost too much for one glorious day in this glorious household. Can I stand the ineffable joy and excitement? Or shall I swoon completely away, as I have often thought of doing in the midst of some ceremony, just to find out what my marvelous husband and his smug Great Wife would do about it? Probably order me summarily swept into the Nile, there to become the plaything of Hapi and the speedy meal of Sebek the crocodile god. A fitting end, they would tell one another, laughing the while. Poor old Gilukhipa has finally brightened somebody’s life for a few seconds, anyway!

  Well: It is not as though I have not tried. When I first came to this country, a girl of fourteen, political pawn of my father, I did my best to please the little brown man who greeted me. He was God, supreme ruler, Pharaoh, the living Horus, Lord of the Two Lands, the King, the Great Bull, and all the other mighty things his titularies tell us he is. It was not my fault that I was almost a foot taller than he and plain in the bargain. The contrast brought immediate titters, hastily suppressed, when I disembarked at the landing of Malkata from the elaborate state barge on which I had spent almost two months coming down from Mittani. First my three hundred and seventeen ladies and I had been obliged to travel overland two weeks by donkey caravan, to the sea which they call in Kemet “the Great Green.” Then I had been bidden away behind curtained doorways while my ladies were free to gambol about on the decks of our flotilla enjoying the fresh air and sunlight. I was forced to stay inside, away from the eyes of the impious, while we hugged the coast slowly down past Phoenicia, Palestine, Edom and Sinai to the Delta, and so into the onrushing currents and slowly winding passages of the great river with which even I have come to feel a mysterious bond, in my years here. Still I was not to reveal myself, for I was to be a surprise to the people of Kemet.

  Certainly I was a surprise to him: I could tell from the instantly suppressed flash of anger in his eyes that somebody was going to hear about it, and not in a friendly way. Obviously they had not told him of my height and my plainness, though it was clearly the height that rankled most. “You are tall!” he blurted out—the first and last time he ever said anything purely spontaneous to me. “The better to see Kemet, Majesty,” I replied calmly, for I am not a daughter of Mittani for nothing, and was no more impressed with all their fuss and feathers then than I am now, though I soon came to see the necessity as a method of statecraft. “This,” he said, and already his tone dismissed me, “is the Great Wife Tiye. I commend you to her friendship, and she to yours.” Another little figure, not so brown as he, much prettier than I, stepped daintily forward and held out her hand. I did not know exactly what to do, so I bent low and kissed it. This proved to be right, for she smiled graciously, drew me close, and kissed me on both cheeks in return. “All hail Queen Gilukhipa!” she cried in that deceptively soft and silvery voice that nonetheless rose with a startling power and carried clearly over the river to the massed thousands on the eastern bank. A great answering shout dutifully went up. Flanked by the two of them, I was escorted into the Palace.

  Next day the formal marriage ceremony took place. That night he visited me dutifully, and dutifully he continued to do so, sporadically, for the next three or four years. I never conceived and bore him a child, and presently our relations lapsed into a grudging informality in which I have been neither consulted nor confided in by them, and also not mistreated, either—neither fish nor fowl, neither friend nor enemy—just Queen Gilukhipa, paraded at ceremonies, given my own small palace and court within the compound of Malkata, attended by the small handful of my ladies who did not soon marry and melt away into the ranks of the nobility. Left to my own devices, principally. And bored—bored—bored.

  So to amuse myself I have made my lifetime study the House of Thebes. There are many about who have done the same—the Councilor Aye, for instance, constantly gathering new honors, titles and powers as the years go by … the Queen Mother Mutemwiya, at fifty-seven gradually shriveling into a little wizened gnome like a scarab beetle in the sand, but faithfully prodding and pushing the dung ball of her family up the hill of years … Amonhotep the Scribe, Son of Hapu, into everything as always, working closely with Aye and gathering almost as many honors … faithful Ramose, growing gray but still Vizier of Upper Kemet … the bitter, ever watching priest Aanen and his white-robed, twittering cohorts in the temples of Amon … the soldier Kaires, now serving far up the Nile near the Second Cataract as chief scribe for all of Pharaoh’s armies in Upper Kemet—an unusually high post for a man of thirty, but he is an unusual man and a friend of mine (not lover, though the gossip claims it. Pharaoh’s queens do not have lovers; some of them do not even have Pharaoh) … and the Queen-Princess Sitamon, also my friend and somehow managing to be her usual placid and cheerful self even though her life too is one of boredom as she leaves girlhood and moves on into her twenties and a future as empty as my own. (Gossip never touches her and Kaires, thanks to the shield I provide them willingly with my well-known friendship for him. I wish them well, feeling sorry for them, too, because of course nothing can ever come of it save a few scattered, furtive meetings over the years—and Pharaoh’s terrible vengeance should he ever find out. But we are all clever people. We have a pact that he will not. And he will not.)

  The study of the House of Thebes, then, is the lifework of Gilukhipa of Mittani, third Queen of the Two Lands after Sitamon and the Great Wife Tiye—who remains all-powerful as always, as much the ruler of the Two Lands and the Two Lands’ ruler as she has always been. She is supremely shrewd, that one, though she no longer has quite the air of serene assurance that she wears on their joint colossal statue that stands at the entrance to the temple he is building to Amon at Luxor, just up the river from the vast complex of Karnak. She has given him three more children, now, two of them princesses stillborn, the third the boy Smenkh-ka-ra, who is so beautiful he might as well be a girl and already, to my mind, gives some indications that he probably is. He is too delicate and cloying for my taste: I find him sticky, like the sweets with which all in Kemet love to complete their meals. But he is of course very popular with his parents and with the people, so one dissembles in this instance as one does in so many others. And he has one virtue, I suppose, at least in his parents’ eyes: he tags along after his brother like a little shadow all the time. So the Crown Prince has at least one unthinking, uncritical, absolutely devoted
follower, in any event.

  That he does not have many of these, aside from Smenkh-ka-ra is, I suspect, one of the things that has brought the lines of tension and care that are beginning to mar noticeably the heretofore smugly placid and untroubled countenance of his mother. For most of her life, particularly since her parents, Yuya and Tuya—both now mummified and resting peacefully in their sarcophagi in the Valley of the Nobles a couple of miles north of here—cleverly maneuvered her forward to become the wife of Amonhotep III (life, health, prosperity!), everything went exactly as she wanted it … until the day she gave birth to Amonhotep IV. And that has become another story.

  For the boy’s first nine or ten years, everything appeared normal. He was a handsome and well-formed child, obviously intelligent; quick to perceive, quick to understand, quick to learn. At age five he was placed in the hands of Amonhotep, Son of Hapu, who has supervised that intensive and thorough education that is given all heirs to the Double Crown. Kemet’s Pharaohs are working rulers, and with few exceptions most have been able men, educated far above the average run of their subjects, excellently trained for future duties and responsibilities.

  So it was with the Crown Prince until at some point—coming on so gradually and unexpectedly in his tenth year that, looking back, none of us can say exactly, “This was the day”—there began those curious physical and psychological changes which set him apart from the run of ordinary men. And by this I do not mean set apart from ordinary men as all Pharaohs are set apart by their divinity; I mean set apart in ways strange, unpredictable, unprecedented, impossible to hide and, to the superstitious, almost terrible.

  I have said that he was physically well formed and handsome as a child, and so he was, aside only from the enlarged, almost platycephalic skull which seems to have crept, for some unknown reason, into the line of Thebes. Although hardly anyone (certainly not I) saw the two stillborn princesses, so quickly and secretly were they whisked away to the mummifiers and hustled to their tombs, word gets around in the Palace, particularly to those like myself who listen carefully. Their skulls, too, had the odd enlargement; and so too—though Tiye keeps the sidelock of youth carefully wound around the top of his head in an unusual fashion she refers to with a challenging laugh (yet who could possibly challenge her?) as “my new style for sons”—does that of Smenkhkara. Throughout Kemet I hear the whisper goes, in the mud-brick villages, the busy bazaars and crowded cities, that Amon is angry with the House of Thebes; and though he dismisses the idea with a scornful laugh, I think my husband suspects so, uneasily, too … as so he should, considering everything.