A God Against the Gods

by Allen Drury

  Therefore I persuaded him to join me in the experiment, which at first he was a little reluctant to undertake—not for any moral reasons, for since the age of eight we have witnessed what happens in Thebes during the Festival of Opet, from peasant hut to royal Palace (two weeks of drunkenness and couplings of all kinds everywhere, even in the streets), and nothing about the morals of Kemet shocks us now. Indeed, the morals of Kemet do not exist in the sense, for instance, in which morals seem to exist in some heathen lands beyond Mittani which we read about. It is the order of things which exists in Kemet, and the order of things can be stretched to include almost anything as long as the order of things remains the order of things. This is a lesson we have learned and will not forget

  So we would both, I thought, have acquiesced, as a matter of simple practicality, had it been necessary for me to lie with his father to beget our sons: but we would neither of us have been happy about it. I explained this to him gravely, while he watched me with those calm eyes which can be sometimes almost hypnotic in their steady, deliberately expressionless gaze. I did not allow his lack of response to shake me. I did not stumble or falter. I continued to the end. But I realize now that I should have carried away inside a hurt from which I would never have recovered had he not studied me with silent intensity for a moment when I finished and then said quietly:

  “Any Sons of the Sun who are begotten on your body will be begotten by me and by no one else. I will kill myself before I will let my father or anyone else profane the only woman I will ever love.”

  After that, it all went easily; and I found out what I had to find out: that the illness by some miracle had stopped before it destroyed him altogether as a man; and that I, out of the love I have known since our babyhood and the compassion that has joined it since his illness, was capable of taking to myself his misshapen body without revulsion, without reservation, without anything but what I have always known for him, a love so deep that it can never change.

  So we are one entirely, and so the day will proceed as happily and fittingly as it should. I needed only to know about his body to be to him in all things the great Queen I know I have the ability to be. It has been many, many years since I needed to know about his heart, for it has belonged to me always, as mine to him. And for his mind I have known, as early as I knew anything, trust and respect and utter confidence in all he says and does. For he is always right.

  He is quick, very quick, though now this is hidden behind the shy, veiled eyes, the deliberately bland expression, the customarily unsmiling face. It is best that this be so, for he and I have many thoughts and many plans that Kemet must not yet know.

  An-ser-Woss-ett applies the final trace of powder to my cheeks, the tiniest final touch of rouge to my lips, one more lightest tracing of kohl along the eyelids, a swift final shower of many perfumes. She stands back and studies me. I study myself. All the ladies flutter. She likes what she sees, I like what I see. We exchange the smiles of two women working in harmony to achieve the result both desire. I take a large carnelian ring engraved with the head of Horus (she is a sweet but very superstitious woman) from the box I have concealed beneath the table and, reaching for her hand, place it upon her finger. She drops to her knees, kissing my hand and praising me. All the ladies do the same. I stand, go to the mirror, turn this way and that: I gleam with gold and jewels from head to foot. My beautiful face is perfect, my lovely long neck is white as the whitest sand and soft as the softest linen. My eyes are dark and mysterious—and as intelligent as his, which few in Kemet know. Which is just as well.

  I feel radiant.

  I look radiant.

  Very soon now they will come for me and I will go in my own special ship of state down the river to Luxor. And all along the banks of the Nile amid their wild hysterical shouts of love and loyalty, the people will say to one another, and I will hear them say it, “Lovely, lovely! Oh, she is beautiful, she is beautiful! A Beautiful Woman Has Come, and now she is ours!”

  And he will greet me with the smile that lights only for me, and in the brooding eyes that conceal so much of pain and hurt there will today be only happiness.

  And I shall be content.

  ***

  Amonhotep IV

  (life, health, prosperity!)

  The Palace hums with life, activity, excitement, the constant comings and goings of slaves and nobles, the clank of metal as the soldiers assemble for my honor guard in the center of the compound, laughter, happy outcries, joking, frivolity, eager anticipation of the ceremonies to come. But here in my room, three doors down the painted mud-brick corridor from my love, all is hushed and quiet, all is business.

  Solemnly they are dressing me, solemnly I am submitting. As always, they do not know what I think, and as always it is making them uneasy. I give them my stare, which is basically shyness but which they think is something more, something deliberately challenging and forbidding, and they move awkwardly, embarrassed by my gaze. Even my parents and my uncle Aye, who come in and out from time to time to observe our progress (themselves being dressed early for, I suspect, exactly this purpose), are a little taken aback by me, a little nonplused, almost, you might say, a little fearful.

  Until today I have been their son and nephew, their problem child whom they have been able to treat with love (I have never doubted this) and compassion (for which I have often been grateful, though more often it has only made me feel even more agonizingly helpless in the grip of my malady).

  But suddenly, today, it is upon us.

  Suddenly it is all about to become different—forever.

  Suddenly I am about to become no longer their problem child but in many ways their equal and, if time and—I almost said “and the gods,” which would have been ironic, but such is habit—health are on my side, their supreme successor, who will rule long after they have returned to the Aten and gone to lie beneath the Peak of the West.

  Today I will become Co-Regent and King, Son of the Sun sitting beside my father. Today I too will be Pharaoh, and none of us will ever be the same again … nor will our land of Kemet.

  This would be true even if I were to conform to what they expect of me and fit myself into the immemorial pattern which stretches back almost without a break two thousand years to Menes (life, health, prosperity!). Amon will crown me, and even if I no longer believe in Amon, that fact alone would set me apart in the eyes of my people and change me irrevocably … except, of course, that there is no need for me to be changed irrevocably, now.

  That is something which has already happened to me.

  The proof is before me, because I am standing now in front of my mirror—that dear friend and enemy who has kept me company so many hours, so many days, so many weeks, so many months, so many years. When I first began to change, they wanted to take him away: I would not let them. They did not want me to watch myself undergoing terrible things, but I knew better: I had to know. I had to watch it all. I had to understand myself, as I have had to understand them in their constantly shifting attitudes toward me. I have had to know what it meant to them to see me become a monster.

  I also had to know what it meant to me to see myself become a monster, if I was to survive and live long.

  I have survived. And I like to style myself “He who has lived long,” because for three years they did not expect me to live at all. They expected the gods, if it was the gods, to twist and wring my body until it could no longer exist among the living. They expected to escort me to the Valley of the Kings long, long ago.

  But I did not give up.

  And I survived.

  Do you have any concept at all of what it has been like for me? I do not expect most of you do, for how could you? Few if any of you were born a normal child, grew to the age of ten a handsome, lithe and favored lad—and then began to see horrors happen to you that no one could explain, no one could understand—and no one could stop. Few if any of you have been in the grip of so horrible a disintegration of what was once a most beautiful and
most lovely Prince. Few if any of you can look back, to this day, and see him running along the pathways of Malkata, happy and carefree and sturdy in the sun. My family can see that: I can see that. I can see him! I will always see him. Sometimes I try to speak to him, to exchange messages, to call out to him as he races by: “Stop, stop, do not hurry so! Tell me how it was then! Remind me how it was when you and I were young and strong, for I do not want to forget!” But increasingly with the years, I do: his voice grows steadily dimmer on my ear, his words are getting lost … he does not hear, he races on.

  But I shall always see him, happy and sturdy and carefree and young, always running, running, running, on the sunlit pathways of Malkata.

  And what does he do now? He shuffles. If he has to hurry, he hobbles—so he has learned never to hurry. The voice which gave promise of becoming deep and manly has a tendency to become either high and shrill or, when filled with emotion, a heavy croak that is sometimes almost unintelligible. So he has learned to be silent, for the most part, speaking little and seeking to have the little mean much. His family and his servitors apply to him such words as “brooding” and “enigmatic.” They do not know he is so only because he feels a fool, and does not wish to sound one.

  Most of them do not understand how I hide inside this ungainly shell that has been left me after the storm passed by; most do not see the desolate ba, the lonely soul that hurts and hurts and hurts, deep in the long, narrow eyes that cast upon the world that proud and speculative gaze. They think pride is all it is: pride and arrogance.

  It may be pride, but it is only pride so that they will not see how I suffer, and arrogance so that they will not dare come close enough to guess.

  Of course there are those who do: Nefertiti knows, my parents know, dear Sitamon, Aye, Kaires and Amonhotep, Son of Hapu, know; Smenkhkara, who loves me but is still almost a baby, senses if he does not understand; even Gilukhipa, in her tart, standoffish way, suspects and, as much as her dislike for her situation permits, sympathizes. Some few are perceptive, but not many. My station in life keeps most of them away; the defenses I have had to erect around myself make sure the rest will never venture further within the barrier.

  It is just as well, for they would be shocked and terrified by what they would find there.

  If Amon and his fellow gods created, ordained and caused all things, then they created, ordained and caused the heir to Kemet to be as I am today. If they are responsible for everything, they are responsible for me. If they have the power to correct all things offensive to ma’at and the eternal order of things, then they could have corrected me. If they can answer the prayers of the lowliest superstitious peasant along the Nile, then they could have answered mine.

  But they did not

  They did not.

  Have you any idea how terribly I prayed, in all those endless days and months and years? Can you conceive of my dreadful agony and my dreadful humbled prayers to them?

  But Amon and his fellows never answered me.

  They never did.

  Often and often I have asked myself why. I was a good boy, I offended no one, I did no one harm, I was always polite and happy and smiling and kind. I did my lessons faithfully, I co-operated eagerly with everything my family and tutors did to prepare me to be a good King. I loved my family, my teachers, my country, my people, my life. I was a good boy.

  But the gods struck me down; and when I begged of them, over and over and over again, so many times—so many times—with terrible weeping and frantic appeals in the privacy of my room, to rescue me, to restore me, to make me whole and healthy again, they paid no heed. My friend and enemy on the wall gave me proof of that. My mirror said, day after day, “You see? They ignore you, poor abandoned youth. You cry out to the great gods of Kemet, but they refuse to answer Kemet’s heir.”

  Day after day, month after month, year after year, my mirror told me true. And in all the length of Kemet priests and other men jeered and laughed and called me “horse-faced” and whispered of my helpless surrender to deformity.

  I still do not know why. I am sure I will never know. It might have been Amon, angered by my father’s subtle but stubborn resistance: Yet was not Amon sufficiently appeased when he took my brother Tuthmose? And what other gods have we offended, in the House of Thebes? It seems to me we have been generous and respectful to all. And of Amon we have asked only that he be again what he was always intended to be by our Dynasty, our partner and our friend.

  I know this has offended Amon, who, like my uncle Aanen, wishes to rule all. But to take such vengeance upon a child innocent of these intrigues?

  It was, in any event, a way to guarantee him an indelible education in the ways of the gods. The gods may be sure he will never forget the lesson, for it is always before him, on the wall.

  So I began to question—secretly, I know, much disturbing my uncle Aye, that good man who counsels me in all things—though he would never admit it to me. Why all these gods, who are supposed to be so marvelous and all-powerful, yet who first take vengeance upon an innocent child and then ignore his abject, bewildered cries for help? What purpose do they really serve, except to keep the poor peasant comfortable with his lot and encourage the superstitious to look to some power beyond themselves to rationalize their own shortcomings or the blows of fate they cannot understand? What do they really do, save prey upon the people and steal away from the House of Thebes the power and the wealth which should rightfully all be ours?

  I am not hostile to Thoth, who has the worthy duties of presiding over writing, wisdom and the arts; he is a somewhat severe but generally kindly-looking god as our artists depict him, standing beside Pharaoh with his ibis or baboon head on his human body. I find Sekhmet, particularly as she sits in the eternal twilit silence of the little temple to her husband Ptah along the north wall at Karnak, a most stunning and impressive figure, and I am not afraid of her, for I know she too has much wisdom. Sebek the crocodile grants long life (when he is not moved suddenly to chop it short, of course), and in most cases, as long as they are blessed with continuing good health, men seem to consider this a good thing. Horus the falcon represents my divinity and that of my father, as of all Pharaohs, in a most dramatic and emphatic way: he makes a wonderfully commanding symbol in statue, pectoral, pendant, ring and temple carving. Buto the cobra speaks for Lower Kemet and is believed to protect Pharaoh, as in my ring from Nefertiti, and there is no great harm in that. Nekhebet the vulture does the same for Upper Kemet: so be it. Great Ra moves across the skies in all his many aspects, and if the ignorant wish to worship him in many aspects instead of one, that too does little harm. Ptah began the first creation of all things in Memphis before the kingdom spread to the Two Lands, and still deserves respect for that Isis is the universal mother symbol. Hathor is full of joy, kindly to women, and she and Bes aid them in childbirth. Osiris presides over the kingdom of the dead, with vast elaborate rituals for the deaths of Pharaohs and of lesser men who can afford it, and this gives much wealth and employment to many who might otherwise have neither. It is costly, but harmless.

  So you see: I do not feel hostile to the gods in general, though I cannot forgive them for not answering my prayers. The basic thing is that I simply do not see their necessity, particularly when Amon, as their leader, directs them in attacks upon me and my House and so divides and plunders the people of Kemet, who yet do not object … which, of course, is another mystery to me.

  Why do the people like so many gods? Why do they not see the simple advantages of one?

  This I ask my uncle Aye, whom it horrifies. Apparently never, in all our two thousand years of history, has anyone, let alone a Pharaoh, questioned the gods. Apparently never has anyone, let alone a Pharaoh, thought out for himself the advantages of one single, universal god to channel the worship of all men, to simplify the gathering of all tribute, to serve as instantly recognizable, universally accepted unifier of empire, if Empire we must have.

  Apparently I am unique: though of co
urse I might not have been had the gods not seen fit to change me out of shape and then refuse my prayers that I be restored to health again. We will never know, though the gods may live to regret that they did not permit me to find out.

  Certainly I promised them everything in my awful desperation.

  I should have been so grateful.

  They could have had whatever they desired from me.

  But they chose otherwise.

  And so, therefore, have I.

  My parents have attempted to direct me toward the Aten, and I find him a most pleasant god, as light and open and friendly as the little temples they have ordered built, no doubt as a hint to Amon, up and down the Nile. Were I doing it—as of course I soon will be—I might make the hint a little stronger, for I think the Aten would indeed be a good counterbalance to Amon and the other gods.

  I think, indeed, he might be more than that. I am studying him far more deeply and carefully than my uncle knows. I have many thoughts, half formed, half hinted, half dreamed, about the Aten. I find he comes to me often: It is getting so he is always with me. (I have even designed, secret from all but Nefertiti, a representation of him: a kindly disk from which descend many little hands holding the ankh and conferring Aten’s blessings upon Pharaoh and his wife.) I do not know, yet, where he may be leading me, but in some fashion I do not yet understand, I have a feeling that I am in his hands. I do not know what will come of this, but I am beginning to sense that it is a process that is under way and may not stop.

  Sometimes this frightens me, for challenging Amon and the gods is no light thing. But already the Aten speaks to me when I pray to him, and his words are encouraging.