A God Against the Gods (26 page)

Tiye

He is in better spirits than he has been for some time, now that he has been given renewed proof that the people love him more than they love our son. This has done mighty wonders for his ego, as has the arrival of our happy little Tutankhaten and our sweet little Beketaten. You would think
I
had nothing to do with these two, only Neb-Ma’at-Ra. Such are
men
,
even when they are gods.

I, too, have been pleased by these events. Now, as always with our people, I, the Great Wife, have received my equal share of love and adoration. In our triumphal progress the length of Kemet for our Second Jubilee, I sat as always beside the King, full and equal in dignity and power. Up to us from the endless throngs came such a wave of greeting as we had never received before. It was as though the world split open for us everywhere we went. There was a hunger in it, too, a yearning, a wistfulness which I, at least—being, as always, more sensitive than he—could sense. I knew the sad reason, too: because we represent something that is going, great days that are no more; a stability, a peace, an order and a joy in Kemet that no longer exist. Ever closer comes the day when we will not be here: ever closer the day when something they mistrust and instinctively fear assumes full control of the land. Ever closer comes the full and unrestricted kingship of Akhenaten. No wonder the desperate wistfulness in the people’s greetings to his mother and father.

On all sides, the land falls apart. Abroad our vassals squabble, our allies fulminate, our false friends such as Babylon and Mittani utter their puling cries for gold even as they busily spin webs against us. False, false, false! There is not one we can rely upon: there is not one we can trust. And, carefree and happy as he dashes about his city playing god, my son pays no attention.

At home the Two Kingdoms deteriorate under his lackadaisical rule. Corruption creeps in at many levels. The central government remains relatively free of it, but in the twenty-two nomes of Upper Kemet and the twenty nomes of Lower Kemet, the political subdivisions of our land, local governors, overseers, petty officials grow fat on their secret exactions from the people. Thievery and venality advance hand in hand, and no one says them nay. Constant complaints come in to Akhet-Aten (no longer to Thebes or Memphis, of course: now Thebes and Memphis sleep beside the Nile) and in their faithful way Ramose and the others do their best to respond. But they are only men; they are not the One whose diligent care and just commands could right all this. The central force that drives the wheel is not there.

Carefree and happy as he dashes about his city playing god, my son pays no attention.

True, you will say, it all began with his father and he is only reaping the harvest of what Neb-Ma’at-Ra has sown over the years. But say this not to
me
,
the Great Wife, Queen Tiye! It is not
I
who have been slovenly and uncaring. It is not
I
who have permitted our alliances to deteriorate, our local governments to become corrupt. I, the Great Wife, Queen Tiye,
I
have done
my
best all these years to carry the burden the Good God has been too self-indulgent and too lazy to carry. It is only thanks to
me
that
some
order has been preserved. The wonder is not that we have so little now but that we still have as much as we do. It is not all gone, though it is going. Such as remains is a tribute to me. I, Queen Tiye, for many years Pharaoh in all but name of the Two Lands, have done this.

And, like so many, I have been bitterly disappointed that my son does not have the devotion to duty and the integrity of purpose that his mother has. For if he did, the Two Lands would be in much better condition than they now are.

Life is a round of worship, family frolics and happy gambols now. He and Nefertiti, who grows if anything more chillingly composed and more glacially beautiful as she ages, spend hours every day making offerings at the great altar stone of the Aten. Usually they take my granddaughters, so the people are treated constantly to the spectacle of his grotesque, ungainly figure, hers, trimmer but sagging a good bit from childbirth, and those of six little girls like six little steps descending in height from Merytaten to the youngest, Set-e-pen-ra, who can barely walk—all naked, of course—making their way by chariot through the streets to the House of the Aten. There such few as gather to watch—they are not many, for it has long since become a sight too usual and too accustomed (my son has never grasped the royal mystique of not doing too much too often)—watch in a silence respectful but almost sullen, as his family performs its rituals. They sing, they chant, they solemnly beseech the Aten, and from him, apparently, receive some message that satisfies them. Meanwhile the people stare, sometimes with an air so close to boredom that it becomes virtually treason—or would be, were he a Pharaoh who cared more about his position. Then, ceremonies over, they remount the chariot and are off and away.

Sometimes in this second phase of it they will spend another couple of hours simply dashing through the city. He loves the plain that gave him his first great welcome after his illness, and it may be in pursuit of those lost echoes that he so frequently roams from end to end of it. He has never found them, nor, I predict, will he: for he baffles the people now. They do not understand him and I am very much afraid that they no longer care whether they do or not. And this is very sad and very rending to me, who am still his mother, for all that I criticize him, and who still remember him as a happy little boy, and who often cry in the night because it has all gone so wrong for him.

So they dash about. Sometimes when the Good God and I come down from Thebes to spend a month or two, as we do from time to time each year, he will invite us to go with them. Usually my husband pleads some excuse of tiredness or necessary work. (I hardly consider it so: he usually brings four or five girls from his harem with him, and I know the kind of “work” it is. Our late-arriving children have inspired him anew. But no matter.) It is mostly I who join them in the chariot, thinking that courtesy and the necessity to put a good public face on it require my presence, at least occasionally.

After we have worshiped—and again it is for reasons of public policy that I do this, not any great devotion to the Aten, though he is easier to follow than gloomy Amon—there is usually a picnic.

We go far across the plain, leaving the center “island” of temples and palaces, passing the residences of the Court and the nobility, the humble homes of the servants and slaves, finally going past the barracks where the workmen of the city live and so come at last to open desert. We drive on at his command until we reach the low ridge of the eastern hills. Sometimes he directs us to what we have come to know as the Southern Tombs—where he has already ordered a magnificent resting place for my brother Aye, now his Private Secretary as well as Councilor—sometimes to the Northern Tombs, where work is already under way for lesser dignitaries. On occasion it is even to what we know as the “Royal Wady,” the cleft midway along the ridge that runs back about four miles into the barren bills.

This is where he is preparing his own tomb and that of his family, and where he is also preparing tombs for his father and me. Personally my inclination is to lie beneath the Western Peak at Thebes as Kings and Queens of Kemet have done for hundreds of years, but I am not arguing it with him now. Magnificent tombs for the Good God and myself are already excavated, decorated and waiting in the old necropolis. But if it makes our son happy to dream of us lying here, let him. We shall see who outlives whom, for he is frail beneath his fanaticism, and may not live as long as he thinks he will. There is no point to argument over that, when there are so many more serious things to argue about.

So we come to whichever resting place he has determined upon for the given day, and there the servants spread an elaborate feast and we dismount and eat. In the Royal Wady he used to love to talk of his plans for the new necropolis, and how he was going to create a new style of tomb as he had created a new style of art. (Actually it only exaggerates the old, but as with everything to do with the Aten, he prefers to call it “new.”) Instead of being buried hundreds of feet beneath ground, covered over with tons of rock to hide us and protect us so that we may live forever without the kindly ministrations of the grave robbers of Qurna who persist in desecrating the tombs of our ancestors at Thebes, we would all be buried in small, open, free-standing temples, each containing the sarcophagi of one royal individual.

“But,” I once objected, “you will simply make it easy for the grave robbers, my son.”

“There will be no grave robbers here,” he replied serenely, “for all who come will come in the love of Aten, and they will think no evil thoughts or do any evil thing. We will rest safe in their love.”

“Then you had best guarantee their love with good, strong guards,” I said, I am afraid somewhat tartly. But it did not disturb his serenity, particularly when Nefertiti gave me a cool, amused look and agreed calmly:

“Do not be concerned for your safety, Majesty. The Aten loves you and will permit no harm to any who loves him.”

I did not respond to this obvious bait but only gave her cool look for cool look and asked Merytaten, the oldest, to pour me a little more wine. The subject dropped, but it was typical. And typical, too, perhaps, that after offering this idea he should later have commanded Bek to begin excavation of a royal necropolis dug back into the rock like all the rest.

It is the commanding elevation over the plain provided by the row of Northern Tombs that he most enjoys visiting, and it is there that we have had most of our picnics following worship. I have always been surprised, in fact, that he did not select this site for his palace, so spectacularly does it afford one an overview of the city—and, indeed, of Kemet itself, for from here one can see all of the narrow strip of green, no more than three or four miles wide on each side of the Nile, which, breaking sharply and decisively into desert at its eastern and western edges, contains all that there is of our long snakelike land. So it goes for more than six hundred miles along Hapi’s meandering route. Here would have been the ideal spot, to my own eye. But of course I have always supposed that he preferred to be nearer to the temples of his god, and so it was done.

There is something about that site, however, that seems to encourage the brooder and dreamer in him: not, the gods know, that it takes much to encourage that side. But in that place it always comes out.

He talks then about all his plans for Akhet-Aten and Kemet, while I come close to drowsing from too much good food and good wine, and while Nefertiti interrupts from time to time to call sharply, “Girls! Girls!” when the princesses, bored by their father’s monologue, stray too far down the steep side of the cliff. (Their mother prides herself on being a good disciplinarian, but she is not. They are all hopelessly spoiled.) It is then that I, who begin by feeling drowsy, come slowly awake again to the gnawing fear that haunts me always, the fear of what will happen to this strange son whom I have loved, and still love, so much: he who seems determined to defy all the history, traditions, customs and
ma’at
of Kemet and yet manage to escape the retribution which all the ancient past can bring to bear upon rebels, even royal ones.

Sometimes I cannot resist a taunt, in an attempt to bring him to reality.

“My son,” I say, while, below, the crowded jumble of Akhet-Aten’s whitewashed mud roofs and gold-tipped temples dances and shimmers away into the distance, “what good are these plans of yours? What have they availed you? You have been Co-Regent for ten years, now, and I do not perceive that you have done much to change the ways of Kemet. You have your temples and your priests, you have your city, you and your family worship as you please—but what of our people? They have not changed. Amon still reigns in their hearts, and reigns too much in the land. The High Priest Maya may be senile, but he has assistants who have not been frightened by the death of your uncle. And they still have the people’s love—or at least their fear, which suffices.”

“
I
have their fear!” he says with a dry acerbity that persuades Nefertiti to reverse herself and say sharply, “Run along and play, girls!” to Meketaten and Ankhesenpaaten, who have strayed too close to this conversation of their elders. “I have their fear,” he repeats, more softly; and then, alarmingly, his face begins to contort and I think he may be about to cry as he adds, softer yet, “though, I will grant you, I do not have their love.”

“But, my son,” I say, and I start to lean forward and touch his arm, only to draw back instinctively even as he too draws quickly away, like some hurt animal—my own son, and I can no longer comfort him, as a mother’s heart cries out to do!—“my son, you could have their love, too, did you but seek it out.”

“Pharaoh should not have to ‘seek it out’!” he says with a sudden anger that obliterates the threat of tears. “It is Pharaoh’s
right.
It is the Aten’s
right.
We do not have to ‘seek out’ love from anybody!”

“Perhaps if you did not seek it together,” I suggest, fearing his anger but determined to make my point, for Kemet’s sake and for his. “Perhaps if you let the people come to love
you
,
and only then, if they so desire, request of them that they love the Aten—”

“I
have
‘let them come to love me,’ if they but would,” he says harshly. “And I have not
requested
of them—though I could have—I have
suggested
to them, far more by example than by word—that they come to love the Aten. I have not forced either myself or my god upon them, for my Father Aten tells me that only if men make free choice will they make lasting choice. And they have ignored me. Thanks to Amon’s constant appeals to the superstitious and the ignorant, they have ignored me. But I think”—and his eyes narrow in the way they have, long slits of contemplation, resolve and pain—“I think Amon may not succeed forever in alienating the people from me. I think they may soon ignore me no longer.”