Pillar of Fire

by Judith Tarr

  Maybe the queen mother failed of her strength. She was the mother of a grown son. She had granddaughters and a great-granddaughter. Maybe her heart judged that she had lived and fought and ruled enough.

  Her will resisted. When Ankhesenpaaten grew flushed and irascible, Tiye saw the child put to bed and a guard set on her, and called for healers to tend her. Nofret should have stayed with her, but Tiye’s eyes had a glitter that Nofret did not like.

  The princess was being looked after as well as anyone could be. No one was looking after Tiye.

  Strange to think such a thing of so great a queen. But she did not seem so mighty on this day in the midst of the plague. Only a tired, aging woman in whose hands the whole of the Two Lands had come to rest.

  Messengers kept coming, most with pleas for aid from the lords of the Delta and the north. Embassies still came, though only, after a while, from the south. There were still petitions to hear, audiences to hold, a city and a palace to watch over. There were so many dead, so many dying, so few to carry out her commands.

  Nofret did not try to leave the palace. Sometimes she climbed to the top of the wall and looked out across the city. It looked much as it always had, save that the streets were all but empty. It smelled of sun and dust, and dung, and death.

  Sotepenre died in the dark before dawn, the seventh day after she fell ill. Her sisters whom Nofret had always called the Beauties, because they were named for the beauty of the god, Neferneferuaten and Neferneferure, died within an hour of one another on the evening that their youngest sister died.

  Nefertiti did not know that she had lost three more of her daughters, that they would follow Meketaten so soon through the lands of the dead. She was deep in a dream of fever, a dream that deepened into sleep, and from sleep into death.

  She was beautiful upon her bier: beautiful and cold as she had ever been alive. For a long while no one knew that she had died. Her healer-priests were all ill themselves, or strove to tend Meritaten and her baby, who were tossing in delirium.

  The baby’s wailing was thin and piercing. Nofret heard it even in the outer court as she came in on the queen mother’s errand, to tell the king that the embalmers must take his children. She found the king lying in the sun as always, the dead princesses borne away out of the light and heat, the living princesses insensible to anything but their own burning dreams, and the queen lying utterly still.

  There was a strange and ringing clarity in it. The sunlight was blinding, and yet Nofret saw perfectly well. She saw every pillar of that courtyard, every stone of its paving, every thread in the canopy of the pavilion. So much gold, she thought. Egyptians would clothe themselves completely in it if they could.

  Cold comfort in the face of death. She had a fever, she realized. It did not matter much. She could walk, and do as she was told.

  The baby’s cries hiccoughed into silence. She was sucking at the breast of a tired but seemingly hale nurse—only a little and with much fretting, but Nofret knew a glimmer of hope. Maybe the little one, frail as she appeared to be, would get well.

  There was no such hope for the queen. Nofret bent over the bed on which she lay. In the heat of the day, even under the canopy, her hand was warm. But there was no life in it. Her face for all its beauty had the look that death brings: the skull drawn close beneath the skin, the living spirit gone out of it, leaving it empty and cold.

  Nofret straightened slowly. There should have been more people about. She only saw the handful tending Meritaten and the baby, and the king lying in the sun, blind to everything but that.

  He was not dead. He was not even sick. He recoiled from the prodding of Nofret’s foot, drawing into a knot like a child waked irascible from sleep.

  She had no patience left, and no fear of him, either as king or as god. He was only a man, and a fool at that.

  “Wake up,” she said roughly. “Get up. The queen is dead.”

  The king blinked at her. “No one is dead. The god protects me.”

  “The queen is dead,” Nofret said again.

  “No,” said the king.

  She dragged him to his feet. He was a tall man, but soft, and meeker than a king should be, yielding to her fierce impatience. “Wake up!” she shouted at him. “Look about you! While you prayed your god to protect your miserable carcass, your whole city is dying or dead. Your daughters are dead. Your queen is dead. Look at her!”

  The king looked. He looked long and long. Then he began to sway. “No,” he said. “Oh, no. No, no, no.”

  Fool, and mad. Nofret turned from him in disgust.

  He would stay there, rocking and moaning his denial, until the embalmers came. He was good for nothing else. His mother would have to be king, and queen too, unless Lady Kiya could be persuaded to come out of the room in which she had barricaded herself. If she was still alive. Nofret had not looked, to be sure.

  The king could stay where he was. Nofret should go back to the queen mother. Tiye must know that Nefertiti was dead.

  Something hurtled past Nofret. She thought it a shadow till she felt the wind of its speed. It was a man, naked, bareheaded, stripped of anything that could mark him for a king.

  He still ran like a woman, knock-kneed, ill-balanced. But a woman could run fast enough for the purpose; so could the king. He ran too fast for Nofret to catch.

  She did not care at all, and yet she followed him. The guards were all sick or fled. No one would look after him if she did not, unless she reckoned on his god.

  He was still the king. Even naked, even out of his head with the cold shock of truth.

  He had a good turn of speed for a man who never stood when he could sit, or walked when he could ride. She was staggering and gasping when he slowed to an ungainly trot. He had run right out of the city, past the living who did not know him and the dead who knew nothing.

  He was running toward his tomb, Nofret thought, insofar as she had mind to think. Better if he had sought the river, to drown in it. She would have welcomed that. Cool water closing over her head, cool darkness covering her eyes.

  Instead she had the sun beating down and the dust of the road on her tongue. The king had slowed, but she could not lengthen her stride to catch him. Not till he stumbled and fell.

  She had a little malice left in her. She did not leap to catch him. But when he lifted himself up she was there, pulling at his arm, getting him to his feet. He was smeared with dust and sweat and tears. His hands and knees were torn. A rivulet of blood ran down his shin.

  The sun was a hammer on her skull. She could barely think, let alone see. She pulled the king with her toward the one place she could conceive of to go, that was close and cool, and quiet.

  Later it would occur to her that she might have brought the sickness into the workmen’s village. But that was foolish. The dead of means had come here to the house of the embalmers. Their sickness must have come with them.

  The village was quiet, but then it always was at midday. The men and boys labored among the tombs. The women kept to the cool of their houses. Evening would find them gossiping at the well or gathering in the market.

  Nofret heard no wailing, no sounds of mourning. There were no sick lying in the street, no dead to be carried away to a common grave. A dog or two followed her, fascinated by the man she brought with her. They sniffed at his heels but did not offer to nip.

  He took no more notice of them than he did of anything else. He was sniveling again. Tears ran down his long peculiar face and dripped from his chin.

  Leah was sitting in the doorway of Aharon’s house, spinning thread with gnarled deft hands, winding it on a spindle. Johanan sat cross-legged with the basket of wool on his lap and a young goat trying to clamber in.

  They received Nofret with a blessed lack of surprise. Her companion made Johanan roll his eyes like a startled colt, but Leah was unshakably serene. She led them within, gave them cool water to wash in and cool water to drink, clothed them in robes of the desert people, and coaxed them to rest on the h
eaped rugs of the room where Nofret had sat or dined so often.

  Slowly Nofret came to herself. The king was half lying, half sitting opposite her, blinking as if he had roused from sleep. Johanan tried desperately hard not to stare, but his eyes kept darting under lowered brows.

  Finally he could not contain himself. He hissed at Nofret. “That isn’t—really—”

  “Of course it is,” his grandmother said, flinging him into worse confusion.

  “But what is he doing—”

  “I ran away,” the king said. Even Nofret was surprised, though maybe Leah was not. He sounded as sane as she had ever heard him, and he barely stammered at all. “It is true, isn’t it? The Beautiful One is dead.”

  “Yes,” said Nofret.

  His face tightened, but he was in command of himself. “Even as a child I never ran away. It’s a peculiar sensation.”

  “You should have done it then,” said Nofret, “instead of leaving it for when your people need you. Your mother has been ruling in your name. Isn’t it time you did it for yourself?”

  “But,” he said perfectly reasonably, “how can I? My beloved is dead.”

  Nofret opened her mouth, then shut it again.

  It was Leah who said, “While she lived she was your pillar and prop, and much of your intelligence, too.”

  He took no offense. He nodded. If was strange to see that his eyes were dry, his face calm, his voice level, and to know that that in him was grief beyond endurance. “There’s no time, you see. The god takes everything; leaves nothing. She was the half of me that could act and rule and think.”

  “In your name,” muttered Nofret. “Always in your name.”

  “No,” he said. “For herself, too. For the children. And always, always for the god.” He wrapped his arms about himself and rocked. “Oh, I burn, I burn.”

  Johanan went white. His grandmother said, “No, it’s not the plague. His god protects him from that—and afflicts him with another fever altogether. A fire in the dark, yes, Lord Pharaoh?”

  “A fire always,” he said. “My beloved is dead. My children—the son who never comes—they will say that Amon is angry. That this is a visitation upon us and upon me.”

  “Isn’t it?” Nofret demanded.

  “No,” he said. “The god tests me. If I have not the strength, and I fear I do not—”

  “You have to,” said Leah, sounding so much like the queen mother that Nofret blinked. But they were kin, after all, of the spirit as well as the body. “The Beautiful One is gone. Her king must be king in more than name.”

  He looked about. His mouth twisted.

  Leah’s smile had a sword’s edge. “What do I know of kings and kingship? Why, nothing, Lord of the Two Lands. But I know the ruling of a household, and I know what it is that a strong woman does when her man is weak. I know what a weak man does when his prop is taken away.”

  “Why, so do I,” he said. “He totters. He falls.”

  “I do not think,” said Leah, “that you are weak. God-ridden, yes, beyond all help or mercy. But weak you are not. And your god created you to be king.”

  “My god created me to serve him,” said the king. “It suited his whim to set me in the Great House.”

  “Which you have fled,” said Leah, “now that your life of ease has grown hard.”

  For the first time Nofret saw a spark of temper in the placid king. “It was never easy! The jewels, the gold, the rich banquets, the people bowing, scraping, worshipping at my feet . . . those are all any commoner sees of what it is to be king. But jewels are cold lovers, and gold glitters but has no warmth of its own.”

  “And the banquets cloy in the stomach, and the wine turns foul by morning.” Leah shook her head sharply. “What of the people, Lord Pharaoh? What of the grovelers at your feet? Do you even know their names?”

  “I know what is fitting for me to know,” he said stiffly.

  “You know nothing,” said Leah. “Have you ever spoken to a commoner face to face, as a man and not a petition, a human spirit and not a pair of hands meant only to serve you? Have you ever cared what anyone feels or thinks or sees, except in your service?

  “Your god,” said Leah, “is a god for you and no other—Akhenaten, who alone can hear him speak. How easy for you; how convenient, since no one else can know when you err, or when you lie.”

  “It is the truth,” he said.

  “It is the truth you want to see,” said Leah. And at the curl of his lip: “Ah, so others have said the same, have they? Did they ever go so far as to tell you what this truth has done? People want their gods. Their gods, Lord Pharaoh. Gods whom they can speak to, beg favors of, even revile when their luck is bad. They don’t want a god who can only talk to one man, and that man patently cares nothing for any of them.”

  “I love my people,” said the king. “My every prayer is on their behalf.”

  “You pray for your own power, your own family, your own body’s protection. You think that that is enough, that when you’re done with the god’s favors, your people will be content with the leavings. If those leavings are sickness and death while you go on untouched, do you imagine that anyone will love you for them?”

  “I tell the truth,” he said. “I say what the god bids me say.”

  “Then your god is a fool,” said Leah. “Amon whom you hate so much, from whose attributes you took your own god—Amon knows what your Aten seems not to understand. A god may begin in one man’s heart, but if that god is to live, he must be fed and nourished on the people’s belief. Many people, Lord Pharaoh. Not only one man and his dutiful wife and his children who know no better.”

  “I have commanded,” he said. “I have made the Aten chief and only god in the Two Lands.”

  “No king can command a man’s heart,” Leah shot back. “No, not even you. Not with words and edicts, or ever with the breaking down of temples. You took away the gods whom they knew and gave them one whom only you can know. That’s no god they can worship. Not where it matters. Not in their hearts.”

  Nofret had forgotten to breathe. She was breathtakingly bold, she knew that very well, but Leah had no fear at all, and no mercy either. Nofret knew somehow that if Leah had been standing in front of the king in his hall of audience, with him sitting crowned on his throne and an army of guards about him, she would still have said what she said to him in her own house. Things that even Nefertiti, even Tiye, had never dared to say.

  The king was too shocked, maybe, to be angry. Princes, Nofret had noticed, were not punished as lesser children were. Kings were not punished at all, unless they were deposed; then they paid high for their arrogance.

  “Your god is a good god,” Leah said, “a useful god, even a true one. But without a people to worship him, he’s as mortal as you are. He lives and dies with you, because no one else can know him.”

  “But if everyone knew him,” the king protested, “everyone would be blinded by the light. Then who would be left to do what needs doing?”

  “Maybe,” said Leah, “if more people knew him, the light would be gentler and people better able to think, even when the god’s attention is on them.”

  The king’s face brightened at that. He was like a child, Nofret thought, with a child’s mingling of stubborn purpose and malleable will. He did not lack intelligence. God-ridden or merely mad though he might be, he was no simpleton.

  “Do you think,” he asked Leah, “that people would—” Then he darkened. “No, not my people. If I let them choose, they’ll only go back to their old gods.”

  “Some wouldn’t,” Leah said. “Some would come to him of their own accord. Those would bring others, who would bring others. It would grow as living things do, and endure past a mortal lifetime.”

  “No,” said the king. “Your people maybe can do this. Mine have so many thousand years of gods. One who comes new, who comes alone, is like a child against an army.”

  “What then when you die?” Leah asked. “Your god will die, too, with n
o one but you to believe in him.”

  “My god is, whether the world believes, or one man. Or,” said the king, “one woman. I’ll leave a son to be his voice among men. I leave daughters—” He faltered.

  “Meritaten lives, and Meritaten-ta-Sherit,” Nofret said, “and Ankhesenpaaten.”

  “My beautiful ones? My little Sotepenre?”

  “Dead,” said Nofret.

  His head bowed as if suddenly it was too heavy for his neck. “The Aten tests me,” he said. “Oh, how he tests me.”

  “He kills your children,” Nofret snapped. “Can’t you tell him to stop? People are saying it’s not the Aten at all, not any false god, but all the true gods of Egypt rising up against the usurper.”

  “No one compels my god,” said the king.

  “You can’t even ask?” Nofret had had enough. The incongruity of it twisted in her like pain, the king dressed like an Apiru of the desert and arguing the niceties of divine will with Leah the prophet while in the palace his children lay dying or dead. “You may be free to run away. I am going back to my duties. The queen mother needs any of us who can walk or stand. May you have joy of your leisure, my lord king.”

  She had shocked him maybe more than Leah had. She did not know why. Leah had told him the truth unadorned. Nofret simply told him what she meant to do.

  Maybe that was why he looked so stunned. Akhenaten the king was not a man who liked to act if he could dream instead.

  He rose, unfolding himself like a long-legged bird. The robe he wore must have been Aharon’s: it was long enough and more than wide enough. He ignored it except to shake the sleeves away from his hands. They fell back at once. He thrust them aside with an irritable gesture, rolled them up as a laborer would, and then appeared to forget them. “You cannot go,” he said to Nofret. “I forbid you.”

  Nofret faced him. Her heart was beating hard. “I serve your daughter and the queen mother. They both need me far more than you do. Majesty.”

  “I have no other attendant here,” he said. He sounded haughty and yet oddly frightened. Probably he had never been alone in his life, never been anywhere without at least a dozen people crowded into his shadow.