by Allen Drury
Greater change than this, however, had been reserved for the Crown Prince; and were he intrinsically a more lovable child, which I do not consider him to be, I should feel a genuine sympathy and sadness for him. As it is, I feel some, though his attitude toward me has always been remote and no real communication exists between us. But it is impossible not to have some regrets for his sake—and a secret and profound gratification for my own.
For the first time since I came here I have been glad that I have been unable to bear Pharaoh’s children.
Almost imperceptibly, as I say, yet still so swiftly that within two months we were all aware of it, there began in his tenth year a curious transformation of the child Amonhotep IV. His hips began to broaden, grow heavy, sag like an overweight woman’s; his belly began to spill forward over the edge of his kilt like a middle-aged man’s; his genitals, I am told, almost disappeared in rolls of fat; his arms became spindly; his neck and face seemed almost hourly to elongate. “Horse-faced” I have called him, and such is the common description—only whispered, never, ever, stated in his parents’ presence—used by everyone in the Palace and throughout Kemet.
Tragically, out of this increasingly strange body, his fine, intelligent eyes have continued to stare; and gradually, as he realized how different he has become, there has entered into them something veiled, secretive, self-protective, withdrawn—yet at the same time harsh, imperious, arrogant and commanding.
Kaires, I think, was the first to put his finger on it, one time three years ago when he was in Thebes on official business and had come, under the guise of our friendship, to my palace to be alone with Sitamon. Later they came to my bedroom where I had dismissed the servants and prepared with my own hands a nourishing meal. The talk turned, as it inevitably does in the Palace, and I am sure all over the Empire wherever thinking people gather, to the Crown Prince. Kaires frowned, deeply troubled.
“I think we have here,” he said slowly, “the makings of a fanatic. May Amon and the gods help us if this proves true when he becomes Pharaoh.”
“My brother may never become Pharaoh,” Sitamon said in a voice equally troubled. “The disease may continue, to his death. Which,” she added, and her voice became both pensive and sad, “might be better for him—and for all of us.”
But her forebodings—unfortunately, I agree, for both him and the Two Lands—have not been borne out. The disease did not go on to his death; soon after our conversation, as mysteriously and suddenly as it began, it was arrested. After a year of discreet but intensive observation by everyone, it became apparent that there would be no more changes. A grotesque—but a highly intelligent and, in some curious way, not unattractive grotesque—was destined to live on as Crown Prince.
And today, at the command of his father, the second part of his sister’s prophecy also fails. Today he becomes Co-Regent, Pharaoh, God—and, of all things, husband. For I was not entirely accurate when I said that his only devoted follower is little Smenkhkara. Nefer-ti-ti loves him also, and apparently quite genuinely so. She must have done from a very early age, not to be repelled by the changes. If anything, they seem to have made her more protective and more tender toward him. It is, as Kaires, Sitamon and I agree, the thing that may prove his salvation and that of Kemet. Much rides on the lovely child whose dying mother Hebmet, with a prophetic accuracy greater than most mothers are capable of at such a time, named her “A Beautiful Woman Has Come.”
For she is beautiful, Nefertiti: there is no denying it. She too is different—a trace of platycephalic skull there also, carefully hidden under wigs and the oddly shaped “crown” she affects. (Could that particular flaw have come down through her father Aye to his children, through his sister Tiye to her children, a last bequest of Yuya and Tuya lying quietly in their tombs?) But in her the difference is a refined and beautifully structured beauty almost unique in the land of Kemet; at least, in the rarefied world in which we live. Now and again, in some mud-brick village along the river, in some crowded market place in Thebes or Memphis, I have seen a girl, a boy, a startling vision of perfection, gleam suddenly from the crowd and as swiftly disappear. Such beauty does exist in Kemet, here and there, most unexpectedly; but it is very rare in royal and noble houses. Where it exists among the peasantry, it will swiftly wither and be forgotten with all the anonymous millions who till the soil and grow the food and build the temples and do the work that supports the royal world. But in Nefertiti, I believe, it will live forever.
Soon after her mother’s death, Aye married the wet nurse Tey, who I understand will today be officially designated “nurse, stepmother and tutor to the Queen” as soon as Nefertiti is married and crowned. She is a pleasant woman, not overly bright but placid, comfortable, completely devoted to her husband, her stepdaughter, and the two children she and Aye have had together, the girl Mut-nedj-met and the boy Nakht-Min. She is also friendly with Kaires, which gives me a conduit of information from that household. Aye encourages Kaires’ familiarity with his family, as he has encouraged most things having to do with Kaires and his career. Indeed, were it not for Aye, Kaires himself acknowledges he would not have risen so far so fast in Pharaoh’s service. He has a quite genuine liking for the Councilor, who is a forbidding man in many respects but a most worthy one; and the Councilor and his family reciprocate.
So we have watched, Kaires, Sitamon and I, the growth of Nefertiti and the predestined ways in which she and the Crown Prince have been directed together by the shrewd if not always subtle hands of their parents. Born on the same day—that day fifteen years ago when the first Crown Prince, Tuthmose V, was murdered by the priests of Amon, thus hardening the feud between my husband and the priesthood into the pattern it has followed ever since—the children were obviously fated to marry should they both reach marriageable age. Aye, Tiye and Pharaoh, in fact, must have decided this within hours after the two were born; and all their actions have looked to that objective since.
In keeping with the unprecedented pattern established by Pharaoh when he raised the Great Wife to a position virtually equal to his own on the throne of Kemet, Nefertiti and the Crown Prince have been treated with the same equality in their education, their training and their general upbringing. Both have sat at the feet of Amonhotep, Son of Hapu, that busy man whose infinite wisdom, so fervently hailed by others, I sometimes fail to perceive. Both have been thoroughly educated as scribes, as scholars, as rulers. Both have been thoroughly schooled in the history of the Eighteenth Dynasty and of all the dynasties preceding, back to Menes (life, health, prosperity!) of the First. They have been taken to Sakkara to see the vast city of the dead where many of their ancestors lie. They have been taken to Giza to see the pyramids and Harmakhis, the Sphinx—one thousand, four hundred and fifty-six years old this year, majestic and moving as always in his ancient grandeur and mystery. They have been given instruction in the rights, duties, and responsibilities of Pharaoh and his consort. They have been shown to the people together time and time again. They have even had a joint “household” set up for them, with nurses, servants, personal attendants, even their own cook.
Is it any wonder that since the age of four they have wandered about the Palace hand in hand, or that between them an indissoluble bond of love and trust should have grown?
For a time we thought, Kaires, Sitamon and I, that the changes in the boy might frighten Nefertiti, drive her away, make the fulfillment of her destiny an intolerable agony instead of the natural outgrowth of the years of careful intimacy arranged by their parents. We underestimated the work of Pharaoh, Aye, and the Great Wife. We knew they doubted, too, and worried frantically. (Tiye’s wrinkles and strained expression, begun with Tuthmose’s death, grew deeper. By now they are so indelible that she will never lose them, for all her pride and cleverness.) For a time the parents were as uncertain as we all were. But the Crown Prince only gave his bland, enigmatic smile and Nefertiti only clung to him closer. Sympathy and pity have given an even deeper dimension to her love. And so, to
day, all comes right for the planners—in that sector, at least.
In others, I am not so sure. Certain aspects of the children’s education have been highly secret, yet one speculates with some accuracy after having had as many years as I with the freedom to observe. My husband’s feud with Amon has grown more embittered with the years, even if he has constructed a new pylon, a massive ornamental gate, at the entrance to the temple of Amon at Karnak; the start of a new hypostyle colonnade leading to the ancient mystery; new temples to Amon’s wife Mut and their son Khons; and even though he is now into the seventh year of building a huge new temple to Amon along the riverbank at Luxor, a mile to the north of Karnak, with a new avenue of ram-headed sphinxes to lead to it. These are gestures, engaging thousands of workmen, costing millions: but I suspect his heart does not forgive Amon, any more than Amon forgives him. I wonder what the children have been told about this, and what it will mean when the Crown Prince inevitably acquires, along with his status as Co-Regent and his new title of Pharaoh, a power and influence that will be, in many ways, the equal of his father’s.
Equal—and perhaps greater. For my husband is not a well man these days, and there is more behind the co-regency than the simple desire to confirm his heir in the authority that will someday be fully his.
It has become the fashion in recent years to refer to Pharaoh as “Amonhotep the Magnificent,” and so he is; but aside from the care he has devoted to the upbringing of the children, an increasingly listless participation in necessary ceremonies, and an occasional languid passage down the river to Memphis and back, the magnificence has become mostly self-indulgence, the crown an excuse for selfish inattention to duty. Were it not for Tiye—who must be given credit, for all that I do not like her—for Aye, for Ramose, for Amonhotep, Son of Hapu, and for such rising younger functionaries as Kaires and his friends, the Empire would be in parlous shape today. My father King Shu-ttarna writes me from Mittani, warning of disaffection in this place, unease in that: there is a sense of things coming unloosed at the center. Self-indulgence may have gone on too long, selfishness and languor may have been permitted to gain too much the upper hand. And yet none of us in the Palace can find it in our hearts to blame Pharaoh too much, because he is not, as I say, a well man.
Lately he has begun to suffer occasional intense pain from abscessed teeth; a growing corpulence has blurred and engulfed the small, tightly muscled brown body I first knew; a near paralysis sometimes seems to hamper the movement of his limbs. He no longer hunts: more and more he is carried about on litters and covered thrones, when he shows himself at all. He is only thirty-seven, yet already Amonhotep III (life, health, prosperity!) shows troubling signs of becoming an old man. It is the hope that the co-regency will correct this, that it will provide the necessary youth and vigor to prop up a flagging man—that it will restore the center.
And yet what kind of a co-regency will it be?
A grotesque to help a cripple!
Is this to be the salvation of the House of Thebes?
I must linger no more on such gloomy thoughts. It is nearing the third quarter of morning. Soon my ladies will be here to help me dress (warmly, for it is a chill winter day) for the twin ceremonies of the Crown Prince and his lovely love. Once again we must all go down the river, as we have so often in these empty, endless years. This time it will not be to the ancient temple at Karnak: this time my husband wishes the ceremonies to take place at his new, half-finished temple at Luxor. Again, it is a defiance of Aanen and his fellows, who wish all ceremonies to be held at Karnak, always.
The body wastes, the mind at times seems wandering: but the hatred remains.
We shall see how it flowers in the son and in the daughter-in-law.
Grotesque or no, Amon may yet have met his match in our strange Crown Prince.
***
Aanen
My sister asked me—nay, commanded, in her imperious way which becomes more overbearing as Pharaoh becomes less interested in the necessities of governing and permits more and more power to slip into her willing hands—that I make the ceremonies this day “absolute perfection.”
Other than this, she gave me no instructions. I concluded that it was simply another challenge, another testing. For me, “absolute perfection” means the highest reflection of the power and grandeur of Amon. For her, I know it means the less to do with Amon the better. She was simply giving me another of those endless challenges they always fling at me from the Palace, to see whether I would dare glorify Amon, whom I know they fear and despise. She obviously thought I would be afraid to do so, and so would devise some empty show of pomp and frivolity in which Amon would be forced to take a secondary place to meaningless spectacle. Once again she underestimated me, as they all have all through these years when the Palace has been unrelenting in its indirect but incessant pressures against the god I serve.
I have ordered “absolute perfection,” and it is a perfection that will cry “AMON!” and “POWER!” in tones so loud that even the Great Wife, my ailing brother-in-law and all their sycophants of a sickly Court will bow down in awe before the great god’s majesty.
One thing they obviously thought would be a handicap for me. Pharaoh roused from his slothful lethargy (brought on by all these years of dissipation, luxury and self-indulgence) to add his own command: the ceremonies of co-regency and marriage for their monstrous boy should not be held in the ancient holy of holies at Karnak where Ra first stood upon the hill and created life by spilling his own seed when the great waters receded. They should be held in the new half-finished temple Pharaoh is building for Amon at Luxor.
“Building for Amon.”
Busily he runs about, adding a hypostyle column at Karnak, it is true, but spending far more to add endless bits and pieces to the complex at Medinet Habu, which now includes not only Malkata but a vast mortuary temple to himself, to be guarded by two vast colossi of himself, and which he has now formally named—Amon, note this!—“The House of Neb-Ma’at-Ra Shines Like Aten.”
And Amon is supposed to believe he worships Amon!
“Building for Amon,” indeed!
A bitter jest, in my estimation, employing thousands who should be devoted exclusively to glorifying the only true temple, at Karnak; costing millions that should be going directly into Amon’s coffers, if tribute is what he wishes to pay—which of course he does not, as we all know in the Family, however much the show may persuade the people of Kemet. The people of Kemet by and large are ignorant fools, fit only to till the soil and cultivate the annual bounty of the Nile. But they have one great quality which the House of Thebes will not destroy in them, does not dare destroy in them, could not destroy in them, no matter what. They worship—they venerate—they love—they fear—the god Amon. And nothing from the Palace can change that fact, or will ever change it. Amon, raised to his pinnacle by the House of Thebes, at once their creation and their creator, has been supreme too long. His power, his temples, his lands, his gold, his cattle, his priests, his spies are everywhere.
It will take more than my disloyal family, more than their weirdling son, to change that fact
So I have accepted the Great Wife’s challenge. I have devised the ceremony this day to reflect what Amon truly is, the extent of his influence, the magnitude of his power. Not forty, as is customary, but three hundred white-robed priests will greet the Family when they land at Luxor—and not just priests from Amon, either. I have enlisted friends from Ptah, from Sebek and Buto and Ra-Herakhty and Isis and Osiris and the rest. We are all threatened: we must all stand together. Not ten or twenty trumpets, gongs and cymbals will herald their coming, but two hundred. Not ten or fifty flags will fly from the half-completed pylon preplanning Amon, but a thousand from every pillar, every cornice, every stage in the progress from landing to inner temple, proclaiming Amon and all the gods. And after they land, before the ceremony can begin, we will delay them and hold them up and make them wait, while still more hundreds of priests of all persuasions, t
o the blare of still more trumpets, gongs and cymbals, bear the sacred barque with the golden statue of the god down the sacred mile-long avenue from Karnak to Luxor.
Only then, when everyone has been suitably impressed with Amon and his fellow gods, only then, when they have had to wait—and wait—and wait, shivering beneath the chill winter skies which today look down upon the sacred precincts, threatening rain—and may Amon deliver even that upon them!—only then will they be allowed to proceed within and hold their ceremony.
Only then will my misshapen nephew become Co-Regent, Pharaoh and God; only then will my luckless beautiful niece take to her side for life her deformed, her ludicrous love. Only then will they be able to imagine, poor fools, that they can finally do to Amon what they have secretly dreamed of doing all these years.
And only then will Amon have proved once again that the dream is hopeless and that only he, borne high on the people’s love, and aided by his fellow gods, is really supreme in the land of Kemet.
I stand here in Luxor in the uncompleted hypostyle hall, beneath the dark and lowering sky. My high priest’s leopard skin flaps against my shivering thighs in the sharpening breeze. About me hundreds of priests of all persuasions bustle as we prepare for their coming. And I say to Amon: Kemet will never desert you! And I say to my traitorous family: Return to Amon, before it is too late! He will still forgive you: but not for long.