On a Balcony (2 page)

Sources and Acknowledgements

This introduction was prepared with kind assistance from Robert Brown, archivist at Faber and Faber, from Robert Nedelkoff, who has done more than anyone to encourage a renewed appreciation of Stacton, and from David R. Slavitt. It was much aided by reference to a biographical article written about Stacton by Joy Martin, his first cousin.

T
hirteen eighty-six
B.C.
They had come up the river, that fifty years ago, he, Royal Father Ay, and the young prince. For the other two these journeys had become almost customary. He had not himself wanted to come, but Tiiy had forced him to. She wanted to know what the purpose of these travels was.

He knew now what the purpose of these travels was. And he did not like it.

Horemheb was twenty-four, the son of petty
nomarchs
from Alabastronpolis. He had his way to make at court, and his only means were personal. So far they had served him well.

He was short but not stocky. His hips were correctly narrow, his shoulders admirably wide. His chest was thick and square, with nipples like bronze wine
stoppers
, and his face luminous, though it would have been hard to say why. His complexion was brown, his voice low-pitched and deceptive. One had the feeling that he hadn’t caught up with himself yet, though clearly he was a coming man. This is not to say he was an
opportunist
. On the contrary, he had the wisdom of those who can afford to wait, and therefore people trusted him.

He was the perfect person to teach the prince how to hunt. Unfortunately the prince absolutely refused to hunt, and since the family had been athletic for three generations, this made everyone uneasy.

Horemheb was himself uneasy. For one thing, he did not know for certain where they were. They were anchored five days above Thebes, which, since the
current was slack, meant that they had travelled a
considerable
distance. The cliffs closed in around the Nile here, and were creased and bulged like the muscles of an over-developed wrestler. As the sun set they turned iodine in the folds, exactly as would the muscles of someone left in the sun too long. There was almost no shore. On what shore there was rambled the immense, quivering ruins of an abandoned temple. It was their third temple in two days, and thus Horemheb’s annoyance.

He looked around him, for he was by no means
indifferent
to the scenery. It was, after all, his country. Where the prince might find it significant, he found it real. For immanence is not the sole prerogative of mystic young hysterics. A sober man may feel it just as deeply after the noon meal, perhaps more deeply, since he prefers not to mention it, and so cannot get rid of it.

But it was not after the noon meal. It was evening, except that in Egypt there is no evening. The night there falls as predacious as a hawk. The cliffs seemed to edge a little nearer. A ripple ran over them, as they began to exhale the heat of the day. Then it was night, and the stars did not come out properly.

There was a sudden gust of cold wind across the water. Horemheb felt that something was definitely wrong, and the scream of a jackal in the distance did nothing to help. It was careless of the prince to move about this disturbed country without guards.

Nor was Ay any protection. A snake might lurk out there, or a bandit. Ay would not notice anything so simple as a snake. Ay was a man in whom a carefully calculated indifference had become a way of life. A great deal might go on behind those eyes, but he
himself
did nothing. He broke his astute silences only as another man would crack a crab, in order to get at the succulence they contained. His manner was avuncular. He let other people take the trouble and then dropped
in unexpectedly to reap the benefits, with sweetmeats and toys. This might make him lovable, but it was wrong of the prince to trust him. Horemheb did not trust him at all.

In other words, something had to be done.
Horemheb
stood up, ran across the plank to the shore, and paused uncertainly before the bulk of the temple. It was unnatural for the night to be so dark and
clamorous
, and he could not quite get his bearings.

The temple was too massive to be recent, and too strongly built to support weeds. Only sand oozed up between the immense flags of the flooring. Nor was it wise to come to such places. One needed priests
between
oneself and the gods. Otherwise a temple was not safe. Cautiously Horemheb moved through the pylon into the outer court.

He thought he heard voices, but could not place them. Then, abruptly, the moon came out, bobbling along the vague rim of the cliffs, with each seeming spring bounding a little higher through the heat haze, until it settled into its customary place. It was not, however, its customary colour, but the angry orange of a very old egg.

Despite this its pale blue light was the same, and streamed across the court through an inner pylon to a confused heap of ruins beyond. As Horemheb walked down its path, the voices became louder.

On the other side of the second pylon most of the building had fallen in, so that what should have been the sanctuary was instead a cleared space in the rubble, open to the sky. Tall swaddled statues loomed around him up into the night, the images of long-dead gods and kings, great stone mummies of what had never been men. Pillars supported nothing, but the paint was still distinct on the carved walls. One or two blocks of stone had fallen to the pavement. On one of these the prince was sitting. He was a white blur. Ay stood in
front of him, and apparently the prince had been asking questions, for Ay’s voice was full of the soft, furry irony with which he always answered questions. Horemheb stopped to listen.

“No,” Ay was saying. “It is older than that. One of your predecessors of the 12th Dynasty, long after this temple was built, Amen-em-het, after his murder, warned his son: ‘Hold thyself apart from those
subordinate
to thee, lest that should happen to whose terrors no attention has been given. Approach them not in thy loneliness. Fill not thy heart with a brother, nor know a friend. When thou sleepest, guard thy heart thyself, because no man has adherents on the day of distress.’”

“Yes, that is very true,” said the prince. His voice was silvery and shrill. It echoed against those forgotten statues like a sistrum. “But I am descended from Ra, not from Amon. We have found out that much. It says so on these walls. Therefore darkness cannot touch me.”

Ay smiled, and the moonlight made that smile less reassuring than perhaps it was meant to be. “The moon is not the sun, but in a moment you will see,” he said.

Horemheb decided to join them. Among other things he did not like to be alone. “See what?” he
demanded
, and his own deeper voice echoed longer among these stones. “You should not linger here after dark. It is not safe.” He stood arms akimbo, feeling very solid above the slim weak body of the prince.

The prince, if he had been startled, did not show it. He had courage of a sort. He peered into the shadows at Horemheb’s rounded calves and saw who it was. “Sit down,” he said, “and be still.”

That claw of authority slipped out so seldom, that it seemed all the more sharp when it did. Ay gave
Horemheb
a quick look of amused mockery and gravely sat down. So did Horemheb. The moon appeared over the edge of the ruins, about a third of the way up the sky.
Horemheb felt an unpleasant prickling of the scalp, under his wig. Ay wore no wig. He sat there bald, expectant, and calm.

“When will it begin?” asked the prince at last.

“Now,” said Ay.

They looked upward.

The croaking of the frogs along the river, as though old pilings had voices, sounded louder. It was because all the other restless night noises had stopped. The breeze, that had blown cold, abruptly blew warm and from another direction. Horemheb caught a glimpse of the prince out of the corner of his eye and felt
uncomfortable
. At twenty-three the prince had the body of an unattractive girl, the voice of a eunuch, and a face of the wrong kind of beauty. Yet there was that soft, scented, compelling, and somehow pathetic charm. One said, oh well, he will outgrow it. But one knew better. He was horribly intelligent. He knew things no prince should know, and almost nothing that a prince should. One thought he was easy to manage. And then suddenly one was up against something as brittle, but as smooth and hard, as glass. Seeing those overfull lips, pointed moistly towards the sky, Horemheb was frightened and glanced at Ay.

But Ay merely looked gently amused and raised a slim, wiry finger towards the moon.

Certainly something was happening to it. It looked tarnished, and now a shadow moved majestically across it. There was no way to stop that shadow. It had an inevitable pour.

“It is symbolic.” Did the prince say that, or Ay? Horemheb was not sure. He watched. He was a
military
man, not a religious, but military men have their own ghosts, and stand as stiff-legged as any dog at the presence of what cannot be seen by others. It is one reason for their excellent discipline. The worse the nightmare, the firmer the will.

The prince sat there like a well-behaved guest at a particularly good funeral, well-fed, but waiting for his dinner. The powers of darkness were eating the light. But they would be forced to disgorge it, so one could watch the spectacle, except that, for a moment, despite oneself, one did not believe that the powers of darkness would disgorge it, even though one knew this had happened before. The orange rim grew narrower. The eclipse was complete. For that instant the world was motionless. It might live or die, and who could say which? The dreadful thing was not that the moon was dead and gave no light, but that though it gave no light and was dead, one could still see it, like the ghost of a world or of a city from which everyone had
vanished
instantaneously, so instantaneously that their voices still rang in your ears.

“It is only that a shadow comes between the sun and the moon, our shadow,” said Ay. “But the sun will push us away.”

If the prince was listening, he was not listening to Ay. In the utter darkness of the temple even his white linen had become invisible. He turned to Horemheb, and just as the dead grey circle of the moon began to yellow again at the edges, he spoke. Though the temple air was motionless, along the desert above the cliffs a wind was roaring. “Listen,” he said. “Do you hear it?”

“Hear what?”

“The voice of silence.”

As a matter of fact Horemheb did hear something. It made his skin prickle. He was aware of something out there, something urgent that was almost audible, but not quite. It made him angry, because he was frightened, and it also made him impatient with silly hysterics, princes or not. “It is only the desert,” he said.

“Then you cannot hear it,” said the prince. He
hesitated
, and Horemheb heard Ay stir in his clothes. “I can.” He sounded sincere. He could always sound sincere
when he wanted to. As a matter of fact, he had heard nothing at all. He was metaphysically deaf. He had turned to these religious matters only out of boredom, since if we have everything in this world, then we must take our unsatisfied longings off to the next. Yet this new game was the only plaything that had ever held his attention for so long.

He would probably have been furious, had
Horemheb
said he had heard it, but instead he gave his cryptic little smile.

Ay coughed.

The world was beginning to move again. The shadow was sliding away, slowly, inexorably retreating, as the light fought it back.

‘Yes, it will be like that,” said the prince, and this time he was not playing. But the others did not hear him, for the animal world had recovered its wits. It grew restive. The jackals began to shriek. Full moonlight turned the tired stone of the temple into silver plate. After so much darkness, the light was almost embarrassing, and Horemheb felt ashamed of himself. It was after all only a ruined temple and nothing more. These fears were foolish. He led the way back to the boat, and they retired.

*

Dawn woke him early. He was the first one to rise. The sky was pale green, the cliffs the colour of dead rose petals. Seen by daylight, the temple was much smaller, rather pathetic, and certainly nothing to
inspire
awe. An ibis stalked gravely through the water. No doubt these trips were only a search for novelty. There was an interest in the past these days, for people in their desperate search for that commodity are doomed from the start by their accompanying hostility towards anything new. Even Pharaoh, now he could no longer hunt, took a mild interest in the antique. The prince’s interest was of that sort, and nothing more.

Amidships someone had lit a cook-fire. Horemheb stood up and stretched. His body badly needed
exercise
. Perhaps today, while Ay and the prince grubbed about some temple precinct, he could go into the rushes with a bow and arrow and a cat and flush game. This high up, the Nile was well stocked with game.

But that was not to be. The curtains of the royal compartment parted and Ay appeared, stepping
fastidiously
over the still sleeping attendants, rather like that ibis through the reeds. He made his way towards Horemheb. They were to turn back for Thebes, he said. He said nothing about the scene the night before. Horemheb did.

Ay shrugged. “It is nothing to be taken seriously. He is only a boy.”

“He is twenty-three.”

“Age has nothing to do with the matter, and besides, among princes trusted advisors are an excellent
substitute
for intelligence,” said Ay, and thus betrayed his only ambition, before he had the time to turn away.

Horemheb gave the orders. By the time the prince was up, they were already in midstream, with the
current
taking over from the oars and sail. The temple and its peristaltic gorge vanished behind them, and Horemheb could not say he was sorry.

The voyage back would be faster. They might even be able to stop from time to time, to hunt. But they did not stop to hunt. As though he had been to consult an oracle about pressing affairs and had received a favourable answer, the prince was anxious to get home.

Nor was he friendly or talkative, as people with Horemheb usually were.

Horemheb was puzzled by that. The prince did not make friends. They were the same age, and had been flung together for years. Yet the prince was evasive. The prince kept very much to himself. It was almost as though he felt a slight contempt for what previously he
had admired, such as the skill with which Horemheb could shoot a duck, as though he had at last found some way to prove himself superior that now made
Horemheb
the child, not him.