On a Balcony (20 page)

He did well to die there, on the throne.

And there they found him, early in the morning, crumpled up at the foot of the dais, dead and fallen from the throne, and what he had spewed up was like plump white maggots, who had eaten him away from within.

As soon as they heard the news, the mortuary workers struck at once. It was what they had planned to do all along. In that hot climate a body could not wait. It was what they always did. Each new death always meant slightly higher wages.

And in Thebes, even before they knew he was dead, for the course of cholera was certain, at the temple of Amon, with solemn seriousness, the priests rolled out that horrible jointed doll again, and freshened up their vestments, too. For them it was a great victory, and as they had known, they had only had to wait.

There was not even enough money in the treasury at Aketaten to bury him.

In the palace everything was chaos. It was not only the endless, undulant wailing of the professional mourners, or even the anxieties of Pa-wah, caught
without
a precedent or a ritual and incompetent besides. Nefertiti appeared with a small guard and her own corps of nobles, but even they were loyal only by
circumstances
. It was that everywhere everyone was
packing
up, prepared to take refuge with Smenkara at Thebes. He was a weakling. They would swiftly
overpower
him with loyalty, seize the government, and make their peace with Amon afterwards. Nefertiti could do nothing. It was all very well for Pa-wah to hold processions in the streets and swear to the eternal life of the Aton. He found no compurgators, even among his own priests. The Aton was no more than a foible of Pharaoh’s. Naturally being loyal to Pharaoh had meant humouring him in this. But the nobles already had new arguments ready. With Pharaoh dead,
loyalty to his foibles would be disloyalty to his
successor
, and that meant disgrace, dishonour, and
confiscation
of their property.

Unfortunately no matter is so easily solved, for even an empire takes a while to die.

Horemheb, already on his way back from Thebes in any case, arrived, took over the police, paid the
mortuary
workers, and established order. Ay remained at Thebes. Until some answer came from Smenkara, everyone was to stay where he was. To make sure that they did, Horemheb closed off the harbour and set heavy guards to patrol the streets.

Meanwhile Tutmose had appeared at the palace. He had taken their faces for almost twenty years. He would also take this one, since the mortuary artists needed a model from which to work. That was not, however, his real purpose.

He had grown older himself. It made him
sympathetic
with death.

Pharaoh had been carried back to his own
apartments
and deposited rather unceremoniously on his own wooden bed. It was late afternoon and the room was deserted. Tutmose’s slave put down his master’s tools and withdrew. Tutmose went over to the bed and looked down.

Ikhnaton dead was not agreeable. He had the
distended
belly of a dog drowned in the river, and the body stripped, one could see that pathetic little penis was the black colour of a shrivelled artichoke. But while he watched the face became beautiful. Pharaoh had not lost faith after all, for we never lose what we are born with. We slide back as easily as we slide away, for some things are bred in the bone, and though the flesh may engulf them, they show up again quite readily, when the bones show through at the end.

It was like the difference between playing the harp and performing on it. About a performance there is
always something hard and brittle. It is the thing
exhibited
from the outside, for public view. Thus the parody of the last years. But if the performer is also a player, he never quite loses his contact with the music, no matter what he may do to it extrinsically, parody it though he may be forced to do. Understanding and virtuosity are poles apart, but precisely because they are, they manage to co-exist.

And if you know the musician in that late virtuoso stage, as Tutmose had done for many years, you may still come upon him unexpectedly and find him actually playing. He will not then play very well, for he is not trying to impress anybody. But he is totally selfless and intrinsic with the work. He plays then with love and understanding, until one realizes that he doesn’t
believe
in the concert version either, and never did. From a sort of admiring scorn one is thus forced to turn to a genuine admiration. For what he believes in, in private, behind all that flashy and necessary cynicism and rubato, is becoming one with the work. And so, idly listening, one understands it too, for after all, the point of any composition does not reside precisely either in the notes or in the accuracy with which they are played.

Looking down at Ikhnaton’s already withdrawn face, Tutmose could see that very well, and it did not
displease
him. It only made him sad. For he himself did not share that certainty. When you come right down to it, though other people may believe in the integrity of the artist’s beliefs, the artist knows that he has no beliefs about anything. All he believes in is the validity, indeed the paramount importance, of the quality and process of the act of believing.

So the artist whose subject matter is religion itself is always the victim of scepticism, for he alone knows it has no object, but is only a process. In the circumstances he has nothing ahead of him but disillusion. So
Tutmose
had the more rewarding task, for as a different
kind of artist, he did not have to concern himself with ends. To him everything was merely a means.

And yet, at these ultimate moments, one believes in something. He had a lifetime filled with faces to show it forth. But he was very glad that, unlike Ikhnaton, he had never had to be certain as to what that something was.

Having taken his cast, he went back to his studio. Insight is very dangerous. It disqualifies one for the immediate concerns of life. Unless one has the strength always to remember that what is true in one world can never be true in the other, one is apt to break oneself to pieces on the sharp edges of the incongruities between them. For this reason the Orientals are wise, to put off meditation until middle age, when the immediate
involvements
of life are usually over, for having become a physiological spectator, one is quite willing to admit that, after all, we do live in plural worlds, through which we most wisely proceed as the body shuts behind us one door after another on the now discarded physical delights. For one cannot furnish an altar with chairs and tables appropriate to a bedroom, or a
bedroom
with the bare walls of heaven.

It is only reasonable. One cannot breathe until one is born; one cannot talk until one has learned to breathe; one cannot take action until one has learned to move; one cannot think until one has learned that action is limited; one cannot concentrate until one has learned to think; one cannot meditate until
concentration
has taught one how limited is thought; one cannot perceive until one learns that meditation is not
concerned
with perception; and one cannot die until one has been reborn. And one certainly cannot have eternal life until one learns that it has nothing to do with
mortality
. And to do anything backwards, or at the wrong time or position, causes severe cramp and often
deformation
.

Nor, unfortunately, does the artist create. That is an illusion of the non-creative, who still believe that all things are made somewhere and had a moment when they did not exist. But an artist, in seeing that things are and are not simultaneously, knows he can only set down the appearance of one or the other at a particular moment and from a particular angle from which, perhaps, it may be true, since we call him creative, no one else had thought to look.

So he made a mask from the mould and set it up with the others. He had now the whole family, or almost the whole family, and the others would come with time.

That afternoon Nefertiti came to the studio. She had not set foot there for two years. He did not find her older. On the contrary, he found her congruent with that statue he had never shown her, the one behind the curtain, in a niche of its own.

She looked at the mask intently. “What does it mean,” she said at last.

“What difference does it make? I never judge. I let my hands do that.”

“You’ve collected all of us. Why?”

He stirred uneasily, for she had moved him. “Not all art has a meaning. Sometimes one plays, and that is when one does one’s best work. When one forgets one is playing. But as for being earnest about it, ah, you will never do anything that way. It is our great secret, we so-called artists. You know how it is. The
incompetent
like things they have to admire to be a little difficult. They’ve gone to all that trouble to admire them, even asked someone what they should admire, which is humiliating, it may have taken them years to see what you’re getting at, and naturally they want it to be hard for you, too. You can’t blame them. They never understand that the inconsequential is such hard work. It takes a lifetime.

“One has to be alone, you see. Oh not to think. Nothing as serious-minded as that. But it is such an effort, you know, to learn how not to think. One needs quiet for that. Sometimes I sit here all day and nothing happens. The sun comes up and goes down. Or
sometimes
I listen to the fish. And then my fingers get hungry. They feed on plaster, you know. And then they show me what I have to say.”

“And what do you have to say?”

“Nothing. Oh, always nothing. But that sound when the fish jump, like a fifth and a second on a harp. A sort of plonk, and yet a sort of silence. You can find it between the eyelid and the eye, that little fold between the eyelid and the eye couldn’t have happened on any other face, though I don’t even remember whose face it was. Perhaps neither does he. So that is what one does, you know: work every day, watch as much as you can, and wait. For the artist isn’t a mystic any more than the mystic is a mystic. They’re both too busy looking to go to the bother of living up to a name. And these aren’t portraits. They are just the faces one always needed, and a face is only a mask for what we mean.”

“You’ve never talked that way before.”

“My subject matter never died before, either.”

She glanced round the studio and smiled slowly, but with such a different smile from the smile on her bust up there, on its bracket above them.

“You’ll wait to do me now,” she said. “You’ll need that.”

For that he had no answer.

On the bench the mask of Ikhnaton seemed to glow and shift. It was a trick of the still wet plaster, and that was all his work was, really. They owed their
immortality
, and he his life, to nothing more than the
properties
of plaster. But it was a pity that she had grown so wise.
“What’s behind it all?” she asked.

Again he could not say anything helpful. “One goes through reality like a series of rooms,” he said. “Always looking for what is behind appearance. And then, when one is tired, one thinks one has found the ultimate door, opens it, and comes out on the other side. Then one looks back, and sees nothing but the opposite façade, and one wonders what is behind that, the habit of searching is so strong, forgetting of course that one has been through the rooms, otherwise one would not have seen that the back façade and the front are identical. So it’s easy to become confused. All one can say is that at last one has seen both. That’s all we can ever hope to do. To see both.”

That made her wistfully angry. “Do one’s servants always turn out to be one’s masters?” she asked.

“Yes, usually. They’re interchangeable, like
everything
else.” He gave her an ironic bow, simply because he did not feel in the least ironic, and knew she would never come to see him again. As before, with the slave to hold his tools, he would have to go to her.

But it was a pity. From disliking her, he had come to like her very much. And that, too, come to think of it, fitted into the parable of the two façades.

*

Pharaoh was buried the proper eighty days later, under a heavy army guard, in the unfinished Royal Tomb, in the room beyond that where Maketaten lay sealed up. The last thing they carried into his tomb was his bed. He had never been very happy in it living. Perhaps he would be more comfortable in it now. And so, having laid away the beautiful child of the Aton, the rest of the world turned to its own concerns.

It was difficult to know what to do. The city was already almost abandoned, and yet they dare not leave. No orders, as yet, had come from Smenkara and Thebes.

So life went on a little longer, like a turbine in an abandoned generator house, breaking down, but still with a few revolutions left to go, before the lights
suddenly
flicker and go out circuit by circuit, as the power is withdrawn closer and closer to the source, so that it at least may continue to burn bright, even though there is not enough to go round.

And then, just as they were all packing anyway, the news came that Smenkara had died in Thebes, of the same disease as Tiiy. It did not mean much. It was like the darkness of an exhausted candle. It would have snuffed itself out soon in any case.

N
efertiti moved at once. Of course she could not win, and yet for a while it seemed as though she could. For three years chaos was to have a director.

The northern palace was altogether a makeshift affair, splendid, but unfinished, and much too small. That end of the city lay across a wadi and at the far end a wall had been built from the cliffs to the shore, with the northern customs house on the other side of it. Living there, she could control the revenues of the northern customs house. Those and the temple lands supported not only her, but also her court. For she had a court, chiefly by design, of needy nobles who could expect nothing from Thebes, and whose loyalty to the Aton was therefore as desperate as it was assured.

She did not bother to send for Ay or Horemheb. She went herself to wake Tutankaten, at three o’clock in the morning, and led him by the hand to the central hall. There Ankesenpa’aten was waiting. The girl was now thirteen. Nefertiti had them married at once and Tutankaten proclaimed Pharaoh and Lord of the Aton. The business was done almost before her nobles were roused and assembled. Then, with Pa-wah to help, and what else could Pa-wah do but help, she had runners sent through the city, to announce the news. It was cried everywhere, and before the citizens, or more
important
, the army or the police, had time to recover from the announcement, heavily defended by guards and priests, the entire party made a state progress through the hostile city and gathering crowds to the Royal Palace. She had had the priesthood turned out
everywhere. They were to hold rites, processions, anything, to keep the streets and temples clogged with some sort of ostentation and order. She was shrewdly sure the others would fall into line.

Tutankaten was then ten. He too fell into line. He did not protest. He too was shrewd and he knew far too much. He was also sufficiently worldly to realize that she was quite capable of having him murdered and
herself
proclaimed in his stead. For the moment, until he had a court of his own, he would obey. Besides, it was exciting to stand there unblinking, in the dawn streets, his bony knuckles tight on the rail of the chariot, and to feel on his head, for the first time, the weight of the double crown.

There was no one to bar their way at the palace. By the time Horemheb was up, and as for Ay, he never rose early any more, she had him firmly seated on the throne. She had brought it off. There was nothing for even the more powerful nobles to do but sigh heavily and unpack. For he was the legitimate and only male heir, and if he was also a child of ten, and she had taken advantage of the situation to have herself created regent, there was nothing, for the time being, that anyone could do about that, since with Tiiy dead, neither was there any other legitimate regent.

She knew exactly what she meant to do. She meant to rule. After all, had she not ruled, more or less, for years?

It was not her fault if she underestimated the
intelligence
of a virtual child. For she made the same mistake with Tutankaten others had made with Ikhnaton. It had simply never occurred to her to ask what he thought about or what he knew.

He knew, as it turned out, a great deal, and what he chiefly knew was that he hated his sister Nefertiti, was afraid of Ay, and loathed Horemheb on sight, all of which he kept tactfully to himself.

What on earth would have happened if he had not been so frail, for like all the rest of them he was
obscurely
clever, adroit at intrigue, and so tutored in cynicism from the cradle that cynicism had become a way of life. For cynics also have their blind spot, which can be played upon. They would have us be cynical only about those things they are cynical about, but he was cynical about everything and knew exactly what he wanted. He wanted his own way.

The problem was, how to get it.

He waited three years, quietly, but there was very little that missed that suddenly divine eye. He had nothing against Aton worship. The ceremonial was pleasing, he was at the centre of it, and it was only a little boring. He did have a great deal against
Nefertiti’s
devotion to it. She insisted upon temple ritual, when what he wanted to do was to go hunting on the cliff-top deserts. He went to hunt on the cliff-top deserts. If she wanted the religion to herself, let her have it.

This attitude pleased her. She thought that her dominance over him was complete, and it was
refreshing
once more to be in the public eye. She took over most of his temple duties and intrigued with the cabinet while he was off to snare a rabbit.

She overlooked the truth that at any moment, once he had some power behind him, he could fling the cabinet out overnight and bring in a new one. She thought instead that she had cleverly consolidated her own power. And so, for that matter, did Ay and
Horemheb
. It never occurred to them that he knew enough about government to supplant them.

As a matter of fact, they were quite right. He knew nothing about government. But then he didn’t have to. For as Pharaoh he was the government, and the
government
was whatever he chose to call it. But not until he could find some power to put behind him, and
certainly
he had none where he was.

It was, he saw, a paper city. He could see at a glance how makeshift the palace was. It was certainly
gorgeous
. But he had only to take a walk to discover that they lived only in part of it. At least two-thirds of it now were walled off, and at the southern pleasure palace of Gem-Aton the water had drained out of the lake, so that dead bulrushes stood rigid in a tight vise of cracked mud as solid as cement.

Also the building had its anomalies. He discovered them one by one. The female harem he found
interesting
, and Nefertiti amiably kept it restocked. But it did seem to him that the older women had grown slovenly from disuse. He had them shipped away and
redistributed
as household servants.

But what of that other harem? That was indeed an oddity. The machinery of the palace administration still maintained it, but here and there in the corridors you came on a mummified mouse that nobody had bothered to sweep up. And who were all these ageing young men who used too much kohl and rouge, seemed to have such faith in the rejuvenative powers of musk and sandalwood, and who now had a frugal little orgy once a week on three bottles of Ikhnaton’s very best wine of the Royal House of the Aton, saved out of their daily allotment? It made him giggle, but it was not for him to make economies. He left them where they were, as a pious monument to his regal brother, whom he hadn’t liked either.

Like so many people in frail health, he thought nothing so much proved his own virility and stamina as a few drolls, dwarfs, hunchbacks, and cripples to serve as skulls at the highly enjoyable feast. Except for the replenished harem, those at court obediently
managed
to grow uglier. And when he was bored or
depressed
he could always look at his guardian’s white eye.

His first petty act of revenge was to have her pet
great cats hauled off in cages and released in the desert, for him to hunt. He had the pelts made into rugs.

Unfortunately the cats had ceased to amuse her the night she had gone to bed with Horemheb. She walked over the new rugs without comment, complimented him on his prowess, and even said they looked quite nice.

At the same time he was forced to alter his opinion of Horemheb. Though out of condition, the man knew everything about hunting and proved a good
companion
in the chase. He was respectful without
grovelling
, and besides, as head of an army loyal only to
himself
he had great power. In short, he had to be won over. Besides, no less than the chase, and in exactly the same way, military prowess was something enjoyable. It was impossible to consider Syria. Ay always bored him with talk of Syria. But he saw no reason why tame Nubians should not be as exhilarating to kill as tame great cats. The danger was equally slight, given one went out with a sufficient number of beaters, and the counterfeit equally exciting. And then there was glory in it. Glory was what he wanted. Therefore he was always careful to take Horemheb’s advice.

On the other hand, there seemed to be something between Horemheb and the Queen. Not exactly an
intrigue
, of that he was sure, but something. They seemed to respect each other, and though Horemheb was stupid enough to be loyal to the throne, he was more loyal to the throne than to its present occupant. He would do what was best for the country, and what was best for the country might not necessarily be best for Tutankaten.

He solved that problem neatly by ignoring Ay’s fears of further revolts in what was left of Syria and sending Horemheb north to Memphis, to reorganize both the internal and external defences of the country at that strategic administrative capital, and also to prepare the coming Nubian campaign.

It made him breathe easier to have Horemheb gone. Now he needed a tool to use against Nefertiti.

He was not in the least taken in by Aketaten. There were more priests than ever and they swarmed
everywhere
. The rituals went on all day. But grass grew in the streets and he could not help but notice that, though it was true, the Aton was all powerful and he was its living incarnation, and therefore all powerful too, the priests never left the boundaries of the city; and come to think of it, except for his wild animal hunts, neither did he.

If he was all powerful, then he must be all powerful somewhere else. But where? Horemheb was safely at Memphis. That left him Thebes.

He was then thirteen and a half, and though that was not the legal age of manhood, he had something better to bargain with than manhood. He was Pharaoh. He
undertook
negotiations with Thebes at once. Because they had to be undertaken in secret, they took six months.

He could not help but smile. He saw again familiar faces he had not seen for months, and they were now happy faces. It was as though he had suddenly joined a secret fraternity, which met at the throne instead of at some private house. And a few concessions to one
religion
were certainly to be preferred to total concessions to another, and that one moribund.

In Thebes there would be a new coronation. They would roll out that doll again now, for good. But though that might sober him, he was not one to be afraid of dolls. He had played with them all his life, and like all thoughtful children, he knew very well how terrible they could be. He was quite prepared to have one reach out and touch him. And a fear of the dark is small enough price to pay for the pleasures of the day. Besides, unlike other terrifying things, a doll can in the last resort be put away once we are strong enough to remove it.

Since it was necessary to reconcile one greed with another, he would first take away the army’s gold monopoly, and then give half of it back, leaving the other half to Amon.

That done, and he was almost ready. He had had enough of the tyranny of women, first from his mother, then from Nefertiti. But he moved with care. Though Nefertiti must know something was going on, she must not know what that thing was, until it was over. There was, for instance, the transportation problem to be solved. He solved it.

And then his moment came.

On the 10th day of the month of Athyr, year 1366, he rose particularly early and went to the temple, to
celebrate
the rebirth of the eternal Aton disc. Nefertiti was there, and he would not have missed the occasion for anything. The weather was cool and there was a stiff breeze. He said a few words to Pa-wah, congratulated the Queen on her appearance, and was just leaving the temple when news came that an immense flotilla was appearing round the bend of the river.

Of course it was. It had been hove-to over night, with instructions to appear at this hour. He had himself driven immediately to the wharfs.

To tell the truth it was thrilling. Over and over again, one behind the other, in a solemn wedge, the boats appeared from behind the cliffs, the air lifting happily at their sails, water birds screaming and
wheeling
over them, as the prows rose and fell on the almost motionless water. There must have been two hundred of them, chiefly the gold and ebony state barges of the nobility, some of them sailing for the first time in twenty years out of their berths at Thebes.

As the sun grew stronger, there rose up from them the faintly mocking rejoicing of a hundred orchestras, to mix with the crying birds and the unintelligible hymns of as many choruses.

The other boats held back, hovering, as the first of them drove forward with a smooth majestic glide
towards
the jetty attached to the palace. This was the barge of the high priest of Amon, who had been restored to all his offices, and as it drew close to the stone stairs, one could make out the immense black statue of Amon, its shell and silver eyes staring forward over Aketaten from a gilded shrine on the prow, with its own indestructible proud look of idiot certainty.

It was even the same high priest as twenty years ago, who astutely prostrated himself before Tutankaten. Together they went to the palace.

Now anyone might know the matter who chose. He was quite prepared for Nefertiti when she appeared. He was even willing to be alone with her.

“Why was I not told?” she demanded, and she was furious, and yet dangerously calm.

But some things may be dangerous without being in the least able to do us any harm. “Because you are not coming,” he said, and left her standing there.

That afternoon the boats set sail again. The jetties were crowded. The nobles had prudently taken what was most valuable with them, left caretakers behind, and would come for the heavier goods later, at their convenience. The wind had blown so many ways in their lifetime that they could not be sure, even of this almost certain departure for good.

Tutankaten was quite sure.