A God Against the Gods

by Allen Drury

  It was this full power, of course, that I challenged in our last unhappy talk. But it was not I who desired the challenge. It grew out of his summons to me, made more insulting by his choice of messenger. I could not escape challenge, were I to retain my self-respect and my place beside him as the Chief Wife. I am not Nefer-Neferu-Aten Nefertiti, daughter of Aye and Queen of the Two Lands, for nothing. I may be desperately unhappy, but I have my pride and self-respect—and, as I said, and may the Aten pity and help me for it, love him in spite of all.

  After Smenkhkara left there was silence for a while. Akhenaten did not look at me, simply staring off without expression at the Nile, not so busy as it was in the days when we grew up here, but beginning to fill up with the anchored boats and feluccas of the thousands who are gathering for the Good God’s interment.

  When he finally spoke it was abruptly, still not looking at me, with a hurried and embarrassed harshness.

  “I think it might be best if you were to move fully to the North Palace when we return to Akhet-Aten.”

  For what seemed a very long time I was unable to answer anything at all, I felt that my heart had stopped, my breath was gone. The world whirled about and I felt for an awful second that I might faint away and so lose whatever advantage I might still retain.

  But I am of tougher stuff than that. Presently the world settled down, my heart resumed, my breath returned. An icy and unshakable calm took possession of my ba and ka, my soul and being. I spoke in a level and unimpressed voice.

  “Why is that, husband? I am happy where I am.”

  “But you spend much time in the North Palace,” he said, turning about now so that he faced me, his expression somber but his eyes, as always, alert and watchful.

  “Only because you and your”—I hesitated deliberately and changed the word he knew I was about to say—“your brother are too often in the Great Palace where I prefer to live. I go only to gain a little peace for myself, and to keep an eye on the children.”

  “How are the children?” he inquired, not choosing for the moment to pick up the challenge of my reference to Smenkhkara.

  “All in good health,” I said. “Ankhesenpaaten carries your child in the second month, of course, and you know how she is. Merytaten does not seem to mind being a wife without a husband—”

  He made a protesting movement of his hand, but I ignored it.

  “—Tut is well and Beketaten flourishes. The rest of the girls are well, as you know when you occasionally permit us to accompany you to worship the Aten. We all survive, though we do not see you so often now. I am not surprised you had to inquire after your own family, for it has indeed been weeks since you have deigned to have us with you. And how,” I added with a deliberate cruelty in my voice, “is Smenkhkara? He appears to be well and flourishing also.”

  “Smenkhkara, as you have seen, is well,” he said, more mildly than I expected. “Why do you not sit down?”

  I realized suddenly that I had indeed been standing all this time; but then, he had not asked me to sit, and I had been too absorbed in my anger to notice, and insist upon it.

  “Thank you,” I said, still coldly, “but I think I prefer to remain standing.”

  “As you like,” he said, still mildly. He gave me a sudden sharp glance, then looked away again to the river. “Well then, what of the North Palace?”

  “What of it, husband?” I inquired crisply.

  “I should like you to go,” he said, and again for a second the world threatened to spin away. But I reached for it and held it firmly in place.

  “And if I prefer not to go?”

  He sighed deeply, a sudden sad sound that might even now have overwhelmed me with sympathy, as it has so many, many times, for poor Akhenaten, child of unhappiness all his life. But things had gone beyond that now. I remained rigidly silent and politely attentive.

  “Then I may have to order you,” he said at last.

  “I will not go,” I said, remembering a conversation many years ago in this same room between himself and his father, and taking inspiration and strength therefrom. “I live in truth, and I would rather you kill me than that I go.”

  “I want you to go,” he said, his voice rising slightly but his face remaining its usual impassive mask.

  “Then you must kill me,” I said quietly, and although his eyes widened suddenly with anger I did not flinch, any more than he had on that long-ago day when his father threatened him.

  For several moments, while we stared at one another in open hostility—for I was past caring now, I was not afraid to let my feelings show, rage consumed me—he said nothing. Then he took me off balance with an entirely unexpected remark.

  “You have not given me sons. Therefore you will go.”

  “It is not that!” I exclaimed, and I am afraid my voice rose. “It is not that! It is not sons you want in the Great Palace, it is—”

  “Be careful!” he cried with a sudden terrible harshness that fortunately returned me to my senses. “Be careful!”

  With a great effort I managed to control myself. I said only four words. I said them calmly, coldly, and with an iron steadiness as great as any he has ever been capable of displaying, and then I turned and left, to the sound of his angry shouts behind me.

  “I will not go.”

  “You will! You will!”

  But I did not reply, I did not look back. His shouts died in the distance as I hurried away past startled guards. And since that day we have not seen one another or spoken.

  But tonight we will speak, in the Great Wife’s room. Tonight we will all speak. And then, fine husband and glittering cousin, I shall tell you what I think before them all.

  I pray that love will not betray me, and that I may say what should be said as calmly yet as firmly as Nefer-Neferu-Aten Nefertiti, Queen of the Two Lands, should.

  ***

  Smenkhkara

  My mother wants us to meet with her before we go to watch my father being placed in his sarcophagi. Something in her tone warns me that she wishes to say something critical of someone. There are only two possibilities, because all else still moves as the Great Wife desires.

  I wonder if we are afraid.

  I know that I am not, for Akhenaten is not; and I am Akhenaten as he is Smenkhkara, and together we will defy our mother, if defiance is what she wants.

  I am quite prepared for it and so is he. We have often discussed the possibility. We are not concerned. How can we be? He is now the only King, and all things everywhere, on earth and in the sky, bow down to him. Our mother will do the same or he will have her head.

  She will not dare attack us too harshly.

  She knows it would not be safe.…

  Do I feel regret for this? I do not know, entirely. Sometimes I think I still do. Strange moods of melancholy and weeping sometimes still overtake me, when I hide from him because they hurt him and he does not understand them or know how to handle them. But they seem to come seldom now, increasingly far apart as the years pass and we move deeper and with more accustomed ease into the union that gives him happiness and me … what?

  Again, I do not know, entirely. At first it was strange and almost repellent to me, but pity and love swiftly overcame that. The first time, on the ledge along the Northern Tombs, after the excitement and the celebration and the long hypnotic chanting of the Hymn, it was inevitable, overwhelming, marvelous. Next day came reaction, revulsion, contrition, dismay. These lasted until he called me again to his apartments that night. I moved in various ways down fantastic pathways, entered the vortex, drowned, revived, emerged—never, I think, knew such happiness—and never looked back again.…

  Except, as I say, that now and again I am swept by melancholy, which really has no place between us, and so I do not believe it can be caused by what we have. It must be that I still feel responsibility toward my mother and my cousin Nefertiti, for they are the ones I know have been hurt the most by what, to us, has become the most comforting and most natural of things.


  So perhaps at heart I am not so defiant of the Great Wife as I like to think I am—as I hope I can appear to be in her rooms two hours from now. I do not like to hurt people deliberately, it goes against my nature, which has always been sunny and open and loving of the world. The God Smenkhkara has always been a good boy. Not once in all my seventeen years, I think, have I ever been deliberately cruel to anyone. I do not mean to be now, but I feel they may interpret it so. This hurts me, and so, I suppose, I defend myself with flippancy and arrogance, and that hurts them.

  It is a tangle. But it is not one that they can persuade me out of with either endearments or harshness, for it has become my life. And I now know, and would have, no other.

  The Good God needs me—more, he makes me feel, than he has ever needed anyone, even Nefertiti. How can I abandon him, who is not only my King and Pharaoh but my brother, my being, my heart, my world? How can I betray such love as he gives me, when it obviously brings him more happiness than he has ever known in all his sad and lonely life? And besides: he tells me that the Aten considers it right and holy. And what the Aten considers right and holy, we who believe in his son Akhenaten also consider right and holy … except, of course, the Great Wife and my cousin. And just possibly my niece and wife, Merytaten, though I do not really think she cares very much.

  We have been married now two years, and we have never spent the night together sexually, though many in Kemet no doubt think so, seeing us pass behind properly closed doors into properly shuttered rooms. Invariably this ends in a game of senet, at which my wife is quite good, actually: she moves the pieces with great good fortune, her black ones conquer my white ones with steady regularity on the checkered board. Between throws we sometimes talk, quite philosophically, about our situation. She explained on the very first night that she had been injured bearing her father’s child, and that she had no desire to risk having another.

  “In any event,” she said, with something of the dry manner she has inherited from him, “this does not greatly distress you, Smenkhkara. You have other interests. Not so?”

  “I would be willing to father your child, nonetheless,” I said evenly, “if it were a son and heir to the Double Crown.”

  “But suppose I only had daughters,” she said lightly. “My mother is cursed with daughters, my father is cursed with daughters—perhaps our House is fated to go down in a welter of women.”

  “Not for a while yet,” I said, I am afraid rather sharply. “I stand ready to succeed Akhenaten. Tut will succeed me. Among us we have the possibility of many sons. After all”—I could not resist a small dig, since Merytaten is always so superior and smug—“you may not be the only wife I take. The next may not be handicapped as you are. She may be able to bear me sons.”

  “You say you would father sons, Uncle,” she said, knowing the term annoys me since we are only five years apart, “but I doubt you would go near any woman.”

  “We will not know, will we,” I inquired with something of her own dryness, “since you say you do not wish me to touch you?”

  “Even so,” she said calmly, studying the board. “Even so—There! I have you on that move!”

  “Perhaps,” I conceded, examining her play in the hopes it might yield some way out of the fiasco; but, as usual, it did not. I scooped the pieces off the board and we began rearranging them. “What do you think your mother will do, now that your father has got Meketaten with child?”

  “I do not give a fig for sniveling Meketaten, that sickly girl!” she said with a sniff. (This was before that poor unfortunate died.) “Or”—her eyes narrowed—“for my mother, either, she has always been so beautiful and perfect. I am tired of her. Tired of her! I can hardly wait until I can take her place.”

  “How can you do that?” I asked; rather blankly, I am afraid, for this was the first glimpse I had been given of Merytaten’s ambition—which is, I have learned, quite boundless.

  “She will leave him in time,” she said calmly, “because of us girls, and because of you. And then I will take her place, and all the world will bow down and honor me.”

  “As his wife?” I asked, startled. “How could that be? You are my wife!”

  “You are his wife,” she said with an acrid humor. “I am his wife’s wife. As such, if my mother leaves, I will receive her privileges, her palaces and her power. He will need a woman about for spectacle, whatever he may do elsewhere. As the oldest daughter, it will be I. Then if you all die or are killed,” she added, still with that acrid, oddly embittered humor of hers, “I may emerge as the second Hatshepsut, who knows? It would not be such a bad fate for a Queen of the Eighteenth Dynasty.”

  “You will be my Queen when I take the throne,” I observed mildly. “Will that not satisfy you enough?”

  “If you live,” she said indifferently, lifting her hand and, in her accursed fashion making a move that swept three of my men off the board. “That remains to be seen, dear Uncle.”

  I did not attempt to answer this, because it was beneath my dignity. Merytaten is an unlovable girl, and even if I were not—even if I did not love Akhenaten—I doubt if I should touch her, anyway. She is too sharp and prickly for me—and unkind about it, too. “You are his wife,” indeed! “I am his wife’s wife.”

  There is no need to be so crude.

  She does not know—no one knows—the wonderful world in which we live. It is a happy world, a world filled with love, with harmony, and with constant prayers and hymns to the Aten, who simultaneously creates, knows, understands and forgives all that exists on earth and in the heavens. We do other things together, of course, but above all else, I can truly say, we devote our days to the Aten in perfect love and understanding of one another, and of him.

  But only slowly—still so slowly—the doctrine spreads. We talk constantly about this. My brother keeps himself in constant turmoil over it, he considers and rejects many things he might do to speed the process. Always he meets opposition, from within the Family, from the lingering priests of Amon (who appear to have gained a new lease on life under young, ambitious Hat-sur-et), and above all, as he acknowledges, the people.

  “They still do not see,” he told me sadly a month ago. “They still do not understand. They go through the rituals I decree, they worship me and the Aten because I tell them they must, but in their hearts they do not really understand that it is all for their good. They do not see that the Aten means freedom for them, from old tradition and superstitious awe and the crushing weight of overweening priests. They do not realize that they must believe in the Aten, for the Aten will set them free.… Sometimes,” he added bitterly, his voice low, “I think they do not want to be free. I think they are content to remain just where they are, the slaves of the centuries.…”

  “Now you are the sole King, Brother,” I said soothingly. “Now you can truly order them to do as you desire and no one in all the world can say you nay.”

  “I could,” he agreed gloomily, his eyes acquiring their faraway look, “but it would still be gesture only. They would give me lip service because I am Pharaoh, but they still would not believe in their hearts. And until they do that …” His voice trailed away; and then suddenly he spoke with a renewed vigor, his eyes became animated, his voice excited. “But perhaps they will, now that I am sole Pharaoh! Perhaps now they will see that the Aten has preserved me all these years, and has let me live long and finally brought me total power, for some purpose. They will see what the purpose is: that I may preach to them the true doctrine, and thus lead them in my Father Aten’s footsteps so that all the world may be happy and free in the light of his glorious beneficence. They must see this,” he concluded, very quietly. “They must.”

  Then we came up the river to Thebes, where we have been these past twenty days awaiting the final mummification of our father, and since then we have not had much chance to talk, as we have been engaged daily in the rituals for the dead that have required us to go among the people at regular intervals to display our mourn
ing. We have made sure that we could be together often, but he has said nothing further about what is in his mind, and I have not pressed. We all have too many things to attend to, until our father goes beneath the ground. Then will come new excitements—the coronation durbar at Akhet-Aten when all our allies and dependencies (we still have some, though there has been a considerable falling away, I understand, in the past few years) come to pay tribute—and perhaps even changes in the Family.

  But in our love for one another there will be no change, for I am Akhenaten and he is Smenkhkara; and no matter what anyone says, we shall continue to live in our own world, the world of gods no mortals dare challenge—blessed and comforted by our Father Aten, who creates, knows, understands and forgives, all things.

  I hope our mother and the Family realize this, else they may truly risk the wrath of Pharaoh. And that would be a sad thing, for them.

  ***

  Horemheb

  My cousins dream away the days like two enamored fools, in some fantasy world where they apparently feel no one notices or cares.

  But the real world notices and cares.

  Kemet and all notice and care.

  Word comes that even in far Naharin, even in wretched Kush, they notice and care.

  Everywhere gossip, sniggers and outrage erode the throne.

  It is not enough that Nefer-Kheperu-Ra has done all the rest that he has done: now he must do this.

  It is madness.

  He actually believes, I think, that divinity makes him immune to the restraints of ordinary men. True, it makes him immune to the punishments reserved for ordinary men. But there are punishments reserved for kings, even kings who are gods, and he is not immune to them.

  It is madness.

  I think the time grows closer when I must keep my pledge to our grandmother. But all must be ready, all must be done in due time. Mystical protections surround Pharaoh, even such a One as this, in the minds of the people: it takes much to make them ready for his removal.