Pillar of Fire

by Judith Tarr

  oOo

  “You should have had him killed,” said Horemheb.

  The king, having seen the priest removed, had returned to the holding of audience. He had not seemed to notice that no one was paying attention to anything he said. The court was abuzz with Amon’s stroke, the blow that had fallen at last and—or so they said—long expected. The king in Thebes had defied Amon to his face. Now he paid.

  He would say that he paid nothing. The priest had pricked his temper, but the priest was gone, and the king was still in Thebes, still dispensing his justice in the hall of the palace.

  Now that the audience was over, the king had thought to go to his rest. But Horemheb followed him into the retiring room where he was being soothed and anointed by his daughter-queen, attended by Nofret and a flock of maids and menservants.

  “You should have had him killed,” the general repeated when the king did not acknowledge him. “Now he’s gone, and he’ll tell the Two Lands that he cursed the king and escaped alive.”

  “His curse was nothing,” said the king, “but wind and air.” He yawned and patted his daughter-wife’s cheek. “A little more of the flower scent, I think; a little less of the musk.”

  “My lord king,” said Horemheb through gritted teeth, “a priest’s curse is rather more than wind. It will sway the kingdom against you.”

  “The Aten protects me,” the king said placidly.

  “As he protected your queen and kin and kingdom in the plague?” Horemheb shot back. “Like that, lord king?”

  The king stiffened slightly. Ankhesenpaten rubbed sweet oil into his shoulders, easing him back into his complacency. She did not speak or offer to speak. The king said, “A god who is false has no power.”

  “He is not false to the people!” Horemheb muted his battlefield roar, but the walls of that small space shook, and maids squeaked and quailed. He ignored them. He spoke more softly but with all the force he could command. “The people cannot be told to stop worshipping the gods of their fathers simply because a king thinks he’s found a better god to follow. If that god curses the king, the people remember—and every ill that falls on them, they set against his name. You are already hated, lord king. Keep on and you’ll be worse than hated. You’ll be struck from the people’s memory.”

  “Do you too curse me?” the king asked mildly.

  “I tell you the truth,” said Horemheb.

  “I will not bow to a god who is false,” the king said, “or leave this city until it pleases me to do so.”

  Horemheb widened his eyes. “What, did I ask you to go?”

  “You were going to,” said the king. “Everyone does. I am staying here. My son will be born in Thebes as kings’ sons have been since the gods were young.”

  Horemheb bowed, stiffly correct, and took his leave. Neither he nor the king remarked that he had not been dismissed. The king sighed with relief, and to all appearances forgot him.

  oOo

  No one else could be so fortunate. With the king convinced that he was in no danger, the people in Thebes were emboldened. Courtiers clung to the palace or fled to their own estates. The king’s servants and the servants of his ladies and queens went nowhere unguarded.

  The young king and his queen, who had kept to their own palace in Thebes itself, had been refusing to leave the city that Smenkhkare reckoned to be his own. But in the blazing noon of the day when Lady Kiya was brought to bed of the child she carried, a golden boat rowed in haste across the river, and a straggle of lesser boats behind it, carrying whatever their passengers had been able to seize as they fled.

  “Fire at the gates,” said Smenkhkare, still breathless, though more with temper than with haste. “Men howling like dogs. Stones flying. Insolence beyond belief, brother. And all for a bit of holy nonsense.”

  Stupidity might be said to be Smenkhkare’s greatest virtue. He had no conception of the hate that had driven him here, and nothing but astonishment that any man of Egypt would presume to do such a thing to his king. His fearlessness kept his queen from slipping into hysteria, which in Nofret’s mind was a very good thing.

  It fell to Ankhesenpaaten to see everyone housed and fed. That was not as difficult as it might have been, with so many of the court already gone, but there were still a multitude of vexations. This princeling must be housed well apart from that petty lord lest there be murder committed, and this lady should not be suffered to look on the face of that rival of hers for some young idiot’s favor, and everyone’s servants were intriguing endlessly for their own and their masters’ precedence.

  Meritaten was no use. She only wanted to sit in her husband’s lap while he idled in the garden. The thought of doing anything useful gave her the vapors.

  She was really rather clever, thought Nofret, watching her poor lady try to be queen over two courts and two kingdoms. Of all the yattering crowd who had come across the river with Smenkhkare, Nofret was only glad to see Meritaten’s chief of servants.

  Tama, unlike her mistress, was a great deal of use. She would of course never say it, but she made it clear in the way she looked at Ankhesenpaaten that she was pleased to find someone in Egypt who knew how to rule a kingdom.

  oOo

  That night there was music in the younger queen’s chambers, Tama’s harp and her deep sweet voice sounding as they had not since all the princesses were alive and living together in Akhetaten. Meritaten had gone to bed with her beloved. The king was in the palace temple praying for his lady, who labored still to produce his heir. There was only Ankhesenpaaten to listen, and a gaggle of maids, and a lady or two.

  Nofret, crouched at her lady’s feet, let her arm rest across Ankhesenpaaten’s knees and rested her chin on it. It was a familiarity, but Ankhesenpaaten did not rebuke it. She was watching Tama. As Nofret watched, a tear escaped the corner of her eye and slipped down her cheek.

  Tama was weeping too as she sang. Nofret wondered if there was something wrong with herself. She did not want to cry, remembering the world as it had been when the king’s daughters were children. She wanted to do something terribly painful to the king. Drag him behind a chariot. Rend him with hooks. Prove to him that his god was a lie.

  oOo

  In the dark before dawn, Lady Kiya bore her king a daughter—the ninth that he had sired, big and lusty and strong. The mother was not so fortunate. The birth of so large a child tore her, and she bled, and nearly died.

  There could be no leaving Thebes while the lady was still so ill. She, however, when she woke from the long sleep of one who has walked the edge of the dry land, among the souls of the newly dead, summoned the king and the king’s younger daughter.

  She looked like a corpse—a beautiful one, white as the bones under her delicate skin. Her body, which must be still shapeless from bearing the child, was artfully hidden under a coverlet of fine linen. Her hair lay in a plait on her shoulder. She seemed no older than Ankhesenpaaten.

  She did not have much strength, but what she had, she put into her voice as the two whom she had summoned came to stand beside her bed. The king took her hand in both of his. The king’s daughter stood a little apart. Kiya said to them both, “We must leave this city. Tomorrow, have the boats readied. Let us go back to Akhetaten.”

  “Beloved,” the king said, “you cannot—”

  “I want to go back home,” she said with a quiver of the lip—masterful, Nofret thought.

  Ankhesenpaaten apparently did not think so. “Who’s been talking to you?” she asked, sharper maybe than she intended.

  Kiya closed her eyes. “I have ears. I can hear. I know that the young king is here, and his queen. They would never have left their palace if it had been safe to stay.”

  “It’s safe here,” the king said.

  Kiya kept her eyes closed, knowing maybe how frail she looked, and how enchanting. “I want to go home,” she said, her voice growing faint.

  She was not feigning her exhaustion. The king opened his mouth. He shut it again.

 
A sound made Nofret glance quickly toward the door. It was not so close. It sounded like thunder, or like the roar of the sea, muted by walls.

  It was the city of Thebes massed along the eastern bank of the river, howling at the king in his palace. They were singing a hymn to Amon, with a command in it, and a promise. Depart. Depart from my city, or I come to destroy you.

  That, Nofret learned later. Now she only heard it and shuddered. She knew the sound of the wolfpack closing in for the kill.

  Ankhesenpaaten spoke very quietly, very steadily. “Have the boats made ready. We sail at dawn.”

  Twenty-One

  Dawn was almost too late for the kings and their courts and queens. All night long the people of Thebes sang both hymns and curses, invoking each of the gods in turn, naming each as living truth. The king tried to counter them with his own people along the palace walls singing the hymns of the Aten, but they were too few and too scared. What he had conceived as a mighty lifting up of voices in the honor of his god, sounded thin and frightened, and died away almost as soon as it began.

  He went on singing alone when the last of them had given up and fled. His voice was true, but it was weak and light, and barely audible a spearlength away. He stood in the waning moonlight, hands braced on the parapet of the palace wall, and sang the praises of the Aten into the clamorous dark.

  In the morning the kings left Thebes in a golden ship, with as brave a show as their weary, frightened people could muster. The kings themselves were above anything so mortal as fear. They sat on a double throne on the deck of the ship in hieratic stillness, crowned each with the Two Crowns, and each clasping crook and flail. Their faces were immortally serene, their eyes masked in paint.

  So too their queens on a second ship well warded in boats full of armored guards. Meritaten was stiff with terror, but Tama had coaxed her into gown and wig and crown and set her on the gilded throne, and given her the scepter to hold. She clutched it as if it were her only protection against an army of demons.

  Ankhesenpaaten beside her was as calm as the kings were, but with more intelligence in it. Nofret saw how her eyes slid toward the eastern bank, toward the people linked arm in arm all along it, still singing, still mocking their king with their devotion to their gods.

  No arrow flew from among them, no spear aimed to dispose of a king. They would not kill him, only defy him, and drive him out of their city.

  He went not as one driven but as one who turns gladly toward home. Lady Kiya traveled in his boat: Nofret could see the crimson canopy under which the lady lay, and the servants who came and went, looking after their mistress. The wail of a child echoed over the water. Strong lungs, this latest of the king’s failures had, and no reluctance to use them.

  Long afterward she would remember that flight from Thebes: the golden boats, the frightened boatmen, the bank as thick with people as a marsh with reeds, and the rise and fall of voices in a hymn to ever-living Osiris. The strong sun of Egypt striking dazzle on the water might in the king’s mind have been counter enough: hammer-force of living light against a god whom none could see.

  The singing followed them far down the river. With wind in their sails and current to drive them, they sailed swiftly and in silence, the only sound the baby’s wail and the song of the wind.

  oOo

  Akhetaten seemed strangely small after the magnificence of Thebes. Its beauties were all new beauties, without the life and soul that centuries could give them. Its mountain-walls closed in about it, shutting it away from the kingdom and its gods.

  The kings were still kings, and the Two Lands still needed them. But they did not travel outside of Akhetaten. It was their choice, they proclaimed, to rest and to worship the Aten in the Aten’s blessed city. But that choice was made perforce. They were not welcome in the rest of Egypt.

  For a prison it was spacious and most luxurious. The court gave itself up to frivolity, inventing and discarding fashions by the hour. The kings conducted themselves each according to his nature: Akhenaten in prayer and visions, Smenkhkare in dalliance with his queen and his lesser ladies, or else on the hunt or at games among the young men.

  They did not seem to notice that they had only this city and the desert about it and the river in sight of it to play in. Messengers came as they always had, embassies, letters from kings and princes. Nothing on the face of it had changed.

  But Egypt had rejected its king. It suffered him to live because his office was sacred, but it would not accept his god or suffer his presence. His brother king, his Beloved, his younger and more beautiful image, was in no better case.

  They were still kings. That to them was all that mattered.

  Nofret found herself seeking out a kind of imprisonment as if in echo of the kings. What had become habit in Thebes, not to leave the palace, lingered in Akhetaten where she was safe, where she knew all the roads and byways. She clung to the round of her days, waiting on her lady, chattering with Tama in the long drowsy afternoons while their ladies slept or idled with their husbands, becoming narrower and more circumscribed, till one morning she looked out of the window in her lady’s chamber, and the courtyard without seemed intolerably vast.

  That scared her. In the afternoon, although Tama wanted to settle in for a long delicious gossip, Nofret saw her mistress settled in the cool of the resting-room with a maid to fan her and another to fetch whatever her whim desired. Then she fled.

  oOo

  She was a woman of consequence now. She was a queen’s personal maid, and entitled to wear a linen gown and a wig. She hated the wig but did not mind the gown. Her wild mane of hair she mostly tamed in plaits with beads on the ends, or wound in a cord and let hang down her back. Today she had braided it and coiled it about her head, to be cool. The amulets she had bought in Thebes hung on their string between her breasts, under the gown.

  She walked boldly to the palace gate. It was open as it always was in daylight, a guard with a spear on either side of it, shining in armor of gilded bronze. They both knew her, and knew better than to grin at her as she went by. One of them still had the dent in his nose from the last—and only—time he had tried to force his attentions on her.

  She strode past them into the city proper, and froze.

  The world was too big. There were walls, but they were all too far away. The sky was unreachably high. She was falling into it.

  She gasped and stiffened her knees before they buckled. The guards were staring straight ahead, conscientiously not watching her. She thanked them in her heart for that, though she would never say so. That would give them leave to take advantage.

  As firmly as she could, but with beating heart, she made her way into the city. It was all strange, like a fever-dream. Was she cursed, then? Had some echo of the curse on the king come to torment her, to bind her within walls more of fear than of stone?

  No, she told herself. She had been mewed up too long, that was all. The world looked too big and the sky too high. She had been the same way in Mitanni, when she had spent whole rounds of the moon in the same half-dozen rooms doing the same half-dozen things for the same handful of women. She only had to face it full and it would go away. Walls would be plain walls again, and the sky only sky.

  She jostled through crowds in the market, too dizzy and befuddled to buy anything, although vendors sang for her, coaxed her, begged her to come and see their wares. She was going somewhere in particular. It had nothing to do with hot onion-pies or cheap baubles.

  Walls again, and desert beyond them, the road that looked east to the cliffs and the tombs. Here the sky was not so terrible, the air less full of empty fear. Her throat was dry: she regretted, then, refusing to exchange a bit of barley for a jar of beer.

  She shrugged. Thirst would not kill her as quickly as that. Part of her objected, but she did not listen to it. She was going to the clean place, the place that had nothing to do with kings or their gods.

  oOo

  The workmen’s village was much the same as it had alw
ays been. The same dogs barked at her, the same naked children played in the street. Where the Apiru were, the women gossiped at the well or sat on doorsteps spinning wool and dandling babies. They stared at Nofret as if she had been a stranger: not hostile, but not friendly, either.

  Some she knew by name, but she did not call to them. Their eyes did not know her. The hurt of that was sharp. It had not been so terribly long since she last came here. Had it?

  Maybe it had. A year, more . . . she did not remember. Did she look that different, then, simply because she was wearing a dress?

  By the time she came to the house at the end of the village, up against the rock with its stump of tree, she was growing angry. She stopped in front of its door, ready to hammer on it and demand to be let in. But she paused. If truly it had been so long, then Leah and Aharon and Johanan might not live here at all. They could be dead, or—

  She was being a fool. Leah was inside. She did hot know how she knew it, but that presence was distinct, and it was waiting for her.

  She walked in as if she had every right in the world, into the heavy warmth and the smell of goats, and past that to the curtain that was like the flap of a tent. It was a little more worn than she remembered, a little more dusty, but the room within was much the same.

  So too the woman who sat in a shaft of light, weaving on a loom. The cloth was a handsome thing, stripes of red and black and fallow gold, woven tight and smooth. The gnarled fingers moved swiftly among the threads, not pausing even when Leah raised her head to smile at Nofret.

  As if she had been there only the day before or had lived there always, Nofret folded herself at Leah’s feet and rested her head on the wool-clad knees. Leah thrust the shuttle through warp and weft and straightened her back, and laid her hand on Nofret’s head.

  She did not say anything. Nofret was glad of that. If she had, Nofret would not have been able to keep from bawling like a baby.

  After a long while Nofret sat up. She had not wept, but she felt as if she had: empty and clean. Leah was watching her with calm interest, offering nothing, taking nothing.