Pillar of Fire

by Judith Tarr

  “Does it matter if people hate him?” asked Nofret. “He’s the king. He’s a god. No one can touch him.”

  “He may think so,” Leah said, “but he has guards and tasters, and spies in every tavern.”

  “Then he knows,” said Nofret.

  “He may not choose to,” Leah said. “He took down their great god, the lord of Thebes, Amon the mighty. Amon’s temples are closed, his name forbidden—and the king himself was named for him, Amenophis, before he became Akhenaten. The people didn’t like that, nor the way he turned his back on Thebes and on every city in his kingdom, to build a city where none had ever been before.”

  “They won’t kill him,” said Nofret. “They won’t do that to their king.”

  “You think not? He killed their gods. He abandoned their cities. Now he tells them, as clear as ever he may, that no woman of theirs is fit to be the mother of his heir—only his own seed. When she fails, the second will make the attempt, and fail even more terribly than she. That will curse him surely.”

  Nofret had nothing to say. The same conviction had driven her from the palace, the same surety that what the king did would in the end destroy him. She did not know what the word was for a man who defied his people’s gods, but it was a terrible word, a word that meant only and ever ill.

  “You have the eyes to see,” said Leah.

  “No,” Nofret said. “I don’t dream dreams or see visions.”

  “You see truth,” Leah said.

  “I don’t want to.” Nofret huddled where she sat, clenched about her cold and knotted middle. “The king is dreadful enough. I don’t want to be like that.”

  “Oh, the king is mad,” Leah said, “or close enough. You’re sane. That’s your trouble.”

  “What will become of him?”

  Leah sighed. “I don’t know. I fear too much. He’ll die or be deposed, as a king must be who runs too strongly counter to his people’s will.”

  “Kings in Egypt are never deposed,” said Aharon, startling Nofret, who had forgotten that there was anyone else in the room but herself and Leah. “No more than a god can be. They die, and become gods of the dead.”

  “Or they die altogether, and their names are forgotten, effaced from every wall and image.” Leah had that blind look again, the look she had when she saw, as she put it, truth.

  “It may be,” Aharon mused, “that the queen can rein him in. She’s Yuya’s granddaughter. She’s not a fool, nor is she mad.”

  “She said not one word of protest,” said Nofret, “when she saw her husband married to their daughter.”

  “She said nothing that you could hear,” Aharon said. “She wouldn’t. She’s too perfectly the queen. What she said when they were alone—”

  “He didn’t listen,” Nofret said. “And if they quarreled, he won.”

  “Necessity won,” said Leah. “She would want no other woman’s son to supplant her daughters. A son of her daughter—that, she might endure.”

  “She would never countenance it,” Aharon said.

  “She did,” said his mother. Her voice, always so gentle, took on a hint of impatience. “Enough. Whatever was in her mind when she submitted to his will, the consequences are for all of us to face.”

  “Why?” Nofret demanded. “You’re safe enough here. The princes will fight as they please, and leave the common folk alone.”

  “Not if they drive Akhenaten from the throne and raze his city to the ground.” Aharon’s big bands clenched and unclenched in front of him. “Our livelihood is here. We have none elsewhere in Egypt, and the desert, the home of our ancestors, is farther than most of us can go. If he fails, we have nothing left.”

  “The queen should protect you,” Nofret said. “You’re her kin.”

  “We hope for that,” said Aharon.

  Six

  Leah was too true a prophet. The Aten blessed the princess Meritaten, and she conceived.

  But the king saw in that blessing the promise of doubled blessing: on the day when it was known that Meritaten was with child, the second princess, Meketaten, came to her woman’s courses. When she had finished the days of purification, he took her to wife in the Great Temple in the morning.

  They stood in front of the altar in the sixth of the courts, in the inmost house of the Aten. The Aten’s splendor shone on them both.

  The king was wholly given up to it. The princess stood straight and tall as a princess should, but to Nofret she seemed small and frightened.

  Nofret was there in the train of the princesses, standing behind Ankhesenpaaten. The third princess was still a child. Nofret kept glancing at her, making sure of it. Was that a suggestion of rounding to the child-flat chest? Was there the faintest furze of down between those child-thin legs?

  Ankhesenpaaten was next after Meketaten, born in the next year, between the river’s flood and the harvest. It could not be long before she was a woman. And when she came to it, she would go the way of her sisters.

  Unless Meritaten’s child was a son. Nofret saw her beside the queen. They were robed and crowned alike, beautiful alike, the daughter a smaller image of her mother. It was too early to see that Meritaten was bearing; she was as slender as ever.

  Nofret could not read their expressions. Were they jealous? Perturbed? Afraid?

  There was no telling. They would betray nothing to strangers.

  Nofret wondered when they learned to mask themselves so. The littlest princesses were as children always were, better behaved than most, certainly, but boisterous and fretful in season. When they were distressed, they cried. When they were afraid, one or another of them might come to Nofret and beg for the comfort of her embrace.

  They did not understand what all this was. Neferneferuaten, who was old enough to ask questions, wanted to know in a clear and carrying voice when she could wear a gown like Meketaten and stand in the sun. Her nurse hushed her.

  A wedding should be joyful; should be full of laughter and song, bawdry and merriment. This was no more mirthful than any rite in the temple, and less lively than most. The king’s family were quiet, subdued, all but the king, who was exalted. The high ones who were there with their attendants were wearing the same mask the queen wore. An interesting number were not present at all. Those were the boldest, or the ones who could invent pretexts: illness, or duties that could not wait, that took them far away in the Two Lands.

  Nofret by now had learned the names and faces of all the high ones who were often in the king’s company. Not all were here by any means. There was one stranger, a man dressed and attended like a prince, but Nofret had never seen him before. He had a face that would not be easy to forget.

  Princes in Egypt, even those who were vigorous in the hunt and in the exercises of war, had a look that would have won scorn from a Hittite soldier. They were soft, sleek. They never failed to paint their eyes in the fashion that Egypt so loved, making them long with kohl. If they ever went to war—which they had not done since Akhenaten’s father was king—they would surely manage to bathe every day and to keep their bodies plucked and shaved clean.

  This man was clean enough for Egyptian fastidiousness, and dressed with care that must be due to his servants. His wig was the Nubian wig that men and women wore when they would be practical. His jewels were plentiful, but somehow plain: bracelets and armlets of bright beaten gold, a necklace of amber beads as big as ducks’ eggs, a fillet of silver that was rare in Egypt. His face was a strong face, a hard face, its lines carved as if in granite. His body was a soldier’s body. Nofret knew the look of it from her father’s house: the knotted muscle, the sun-beaten skin, the scars.

  She leaned toward her lady. “Who is that?” she said in the princess’ ear.

  The princess did not move or turn, but she answered, just barely loud enough for Nofret to hear. “That’s General Horemheb. He commands the armies in the Delta.”

  “Why did he come here now?”

  The princess frowned. Maybe she did not want to answer. Maybe she
could not. They had begun the hymn to the Aten, the king singing first and strongly. He did not stammer when he sang. His voice was thin as it always was, but clear, and his ear was true.

  The others followed him, the priests in trained chorus, the rest more raggedly. The general from the Delta did not sing, Nofret noticed, nor pretend to sing as many were doing. He stood like a rock, feet braced as a soldier will stand on parade or a general in a chariot. Nofret could imagine him riding behind two swift horses, with the reins in his hands, the wind in his face. He would love that, if he could love anything. Such men did.

  Her father had been a man like this. There was no other likeness between them, to be sure. This was an Egyptian, a burly man but lighter boned than a Hittite, with a full-lipped, straight-nosed, firm-chinned Egyptian face. Her father was bigger, broader, his nose a great hooked blade.

  She stared too long. The general felt the heat of her eyes on him and turned his own on her, cold black eyes like stones. They found her, measured her, knew her for exactly what she was. Then they dismissed her. She was nothing that he needed or could use.

  The wedding feast was duly and dully splendid. Like the rite in the temple, it lacked passion or even conviction. The king was put to bed with his bride as soon as decently possible, well before the wine had finished flowing from the jars.

  The four younger princesses left directly after their father, set free of tedium to do as they or their nurses pleased. For Ankhesenpaaten that was to sleep, for she had slept badly in the night. She would not tell Nofret what it was, but Nofret knew the marks of nightmare.

  She seemed to be sleeping well this evening, curled with thumb in mouth as she sometimes did. Nofret watched her and sighed. She was afraid. No wonder, too, if she was to be the next bride for the king. Nofret could foresee him taking each daughter in turn as she came of age to conceive a child, trying again and again to get himself a son.

  oOo

  All the princesses were asleep with their nurses beside them. Nofret had no sleep in her. She used the chamberpot, but was too restless to go back to her mat. She prowled instead.

  There were still revellers in the great hall. The cones of scented fat set on their heads to stave off drunkenness would be melting and streaming about their faces and shoulders, raising a reek of perfume to mingle with those of wine and sweat and flowers. Nofret heard echoes of singing, the pounding of a drum not quite in time, the usual noise of a feast in the court. The hardiest would be at it till dawn. The rest would leave when their attendants carried them out.

  She was glad that her princess was a child, and was not expected to roister through the night. It would have been different for a prince. Smenkhkare had been dedicated in pursuit of that duty while he was in Akhetaten.

  The moon was high, shining down into the queen’s garden. The fruit trees were heavy with ripening fruit. The roses from Asia, tended lovingly by a gardener who devoted himself only to them, were in full bloom. Their scent made Nofret faintly dizzy. It made her think she saw things. One thing. A man walking from moonlight to shadow and back again.

  It was only the moonlight catching a treetrunk just so. Or one of the monkeys from the menagerie had got loose. That had happened before. They liked to come in here and steal fruit from the trees.

  Nofret paused by the fountain and bent to drink. The moon was brilliant in the water, a disk of white silver. She saw the shadow of her own head, the hair grown back in a curly tangle, making her look as if she herself wore the Nubian wig.

  The shadow shifted. Yet she had not moved. She heard the hiss of breath behind her and froze.

  Yes, there was someone there. Something. And nothing as small as a monkey, either.

  She turned slowly, braced to fight or flee, whichever seemed wisest. And froze again.

  There was no way not to know him. No one else looked like that, even in moonlight, even without crown and crook and flail, and away from his throne. His head was bare. The moon gleamed on it.

  Nofret’s head was empty of words.

  The king smiled at her. “Do I know you?” he asked in his light voice with its suggestion of a stammer. Before she could think of an answer he said, “No, I remember now. You’re my Lotus’ maid. The Hittite. Are you happy here?”

  Nofret gaped at him. She had never expected him to know who she was. As for whether she was happy . . .

  “No,” she said. “Yes. Majesty. I—”

  “I understand,” he said. That was well, for she did not. He bent over the fountain, dipped water in his long hands, drank. It was a very human thing for him to do, very ordinary. Not what she might expect of a god-king who drank wine only from golden cups, and beer never, that she had ever seen.

  He straightened with water dripping from his chin and sighed. “Oh, that is good. Pure water from the rock—it comes from there, you know. In the beginning.”

  “Yes,” said Nofret, since he seemed to be expecting an answer.

  “Everything comes from the god,” he said, “in the end. Beginning is the earth. We are all born of it.”

  Nofret nodded.

  His eyes sharpened, glittering in the moonlight. “You think I’m mad, don’t you? They all do, even the ones who believe in the god. No one understands. How strong he is. How he burns. He blinds me. I see him even at night, even in the dark. Even now. The moon is his child, you know. Its light is the offspring of his.”

  “The moon is the blind eye of Horus,” Nofret said.

  “Who told you that?”

  She bit her tongue. She should know better than provoke a madman. “It’s what they believe in this country. Isn’t it?”

  “Not I,” he said. “I know the truth.”

  “Yes,” said Nofret.

  “You don’t need to humor me,” the king said irritably. “If I were anything but the king, I’d be scoffed at for a fool.”

  “But you are the king,” said Nofret. She was no less dismayed to be standing here under the moon talking to the king, but he was beginning to intrigue her. He was not at all what she would have expected, either as a madman or as a king.

  “I am the king,” he said with a regal inclination of the head, as if he sustained the weight of the Two Crowns. Then he laughed, short and bitter. “I know how little my people love me. Even my children. But the god drives me. No one hears him but me. He deafens me to anything else.”

  “It might,” said Nofret with breathtaking boldness, “be no god at all, but your own heart speaking.”

  He did not leap on her and strangle her where she stood. He sank to the ground beside the fountain, long legs folding as awkwardly as a foal’s, long hands trailing limply on the paving. “So I thought when it first began. So I ventured to hope. But I’m not so fortunate. The Aten has made me his instrument. I’m powerless to be anything but that.”

  He was both pitiful and terrifying, crouching there, with his long strange face and his long strange body and that soft hesitant voice. The raising of this man’s hand could lay a nation low. And yet he was only a man, whether mad or truly god-ridden.

  “He will consume me,” the king said. “Already when I stand in his temple in the morning I feel my body become a pillar of fire. My heart is charred and will wither to ash. Then I will be nothing but his instrument.”

  “Is that why you do what you do?” Nofret demanded. “Because he makes you?”

  “Yes,” he said. “Everything is as he wills.”

  “Your bride today,” said Nofret, “was trying her hardest to obey the god, but she was terrified. Did the god bed her, too? Or did he let you be gentle with the poor frightened child?”

  He lowered his head to his knees. His voice came muffled and infinitely tired. “She is so young. So tender. So very brave.”

  “You could have let her be. Or waited. She’s a baby. She shouldn’t have been ready for bedding for years yet.”

  “She must be ready now,” said the king, still huddled into himself. “The god says she must. There must be a son, or it all fail
s; all falls. Akhetaten sinks back to desert again, to sand and stone. The Aten’s glory is forgotten. All the old false gods return to power in the Two Lands.”

  “For that you take your children’s lives and make them serve you with body and soul?”

  He raised his head. His eyes were clear, clearer than Nofret had ever seen them: as if prophecy brought him back to the world instead of taking him away from it “You have a dangerous tongue, child of Hatti. Were you exiled for it?”

  “Twice,” she said. “I was in Mitanni before I came here.”

  “You won’t be exiled from the Two Lands,” said the king. “Not while I am lord of them. You have my word on it.”

  The word of a king, thought Nofret. That was worth either more or less than most.

  Seven

  The king in daylight was as he had ever been, dreamer and god. If he remembered the night in the garden, he gave no sign of it to Nofret. Nor did she try to remind him. Best if he forgot, or pretended to forget.

  Egypt was a strange country even apart from its strange king. People here loved life and laughter, lived for the sun, drove away the night with lamps and revelry. Because they loved life so much, they never forgot that life must end; that even a god, as they believed, must dithe.

  Death’s country for them was a frightening place, as it was everywhere that Nofret knew of. They set it in the west, behind the setting sun. They filled it with demons and with souls of the unquiet dead. But for those who were fortunate, who were kings or who aspired to the wealth of kings, and lately even for the lesser luminaries with wherewithal to build the tomb and pay the priests to keep the rites, there was a country within death’s country that offered all the pleasures of earthly life. The way to it was hard, the paths marked by magic. There was a book to guide them, a book as old as Egypt, that the fortunate man took with him to his tomb.

  The tomb was the house of everlasting, the place of rest for the body. That was the peculiarity of death in Egypt: that the body must remain and the name be remembered, or that part of the soul which went to the death-country could not endure. Every king and every prince and every man or woman of wealth or note began to build his tomb while he was young. He furnished it as richly as his palace; he filled it with images of the life that he hoped for in the otherworld, life exactly as it was in life.