On a Balcony (22 page)

I
n Thebes, inevitably, while Horemheb was absent at Memphis, Tutankamon sickened and died.

There was considerable disorder as a result. Even the priests of Amon were upset. They need not have been. For though Tutankamon had no children, there was still one heir left.

Ankesenpa’aten, but of course she was
Ankesenpaamon
now, for the titulary was changed, did something pathetic, that no one would have guessed she would have had the courage or the wits to do.

She despatched a letter to Suppiluliumas, King of the Hittites, saying she was a defenceless widow and asking him to send one of his sons to marry her and assume the throne of Egypt. Thus the power of the Hittites had made its impression even on that stubborn, watchful, girlish head. She almost succeeded.
Suppiluliumas
actually did despatch one of his sons.

Fortunately Ay discovered the plot and sent word of it to Horemheb in Memphis, with the result that the prince was murdered as soon as he crossed the Egyptian border. Whereupon the Hittites marched into Syria,
captured
the murderers, and sent them to Boghazkoy, which they would not otherwise have seen, to be hanged, drawn, and quartered, or something worse. But of that no matter, for though the Empire had fallen, at least the throne was safe.

Ay quietly took it for himself.

For Ay was such a very old man that there was one thing about him that everyone had forgotten. Royal Father Ay was quite literally that. As he had opened
the period, by siring Queen Tiiy, in whose image they had been made, so should he close it. He had served them all for such a long time, and to such little point, that he saw no reason why he should not now serve himself in this, and be Pharaoh, too.

He would die soon, and for that he was not sorry. After all, the real question is not whether there is life after death, but whether there is death after life. If we knew for certain the answer to that, then our lives might be easier, and we, too, might stand on the
balcony
and watch, with a free conscience, without fear of consequences. But, as it was he who had first brought scepticism into the family, and so destroyed the faith of an empire, so it was only fitting that he should be the one to answer that question for certain by quietly slamming a dynastic door in the faces of the curious.

As for the little princesses, they simply did not count. For the rest, he was satisfied that in this life there was nothing to be done but to make the best of what could not be helped, to act with reason himself and with good conscience towards others. And though that would not give all the joys some people might wish for, yet it was sufficient to make one very quiet.

This was what one earned by being wily. But wiliness is not incompatible with a sense of what needs to be done. So after he had buried Tutankamon, and with him every stick of furniture and personal memento of the whole sorry succession, until the palace was stripped bare of every reminder of what they had been and were now no longer, he had the tomb sealed and sent for Horemheb.

To Horemheb he explained exactly why he had taken the throne and exactly what remained to be done.

“I shall live only two or three years,” he said. “But that should give you enough time to bring the army into position and between us to satisfy the priests. And
then, when I am gone, you must restore order as best you can.”

He looked at Horemheb with some satisfaction, for though time had taken away much from Horemheb, it had left his sense of responsibility, and a sense of responsibility was what was needed now.

*

So it came about that in the year 1360 Horemheb lost a real father, and became, he, a commoner, Pharaoh of Egypt. It cannot be said that he regarded this as any accomplishment, though he understood the irony well enough. But something, as Ay had seen, had to be done.

He was then a man of fifty, and of good sound stock. He was to rule until he was older than Ay had been, until he was a man of eighty-two, for thirty-three years.

And he was to be a good administrator.

When they rolled out that jointed doll in the Holy of Holies, he took the matter with equanimity. But he also took it firmly. When the god spoke to him, he in turn spoke back, for he knew very well how to manage such things, and in particular a high priest.

“Come out from there,” he ordered. “For we have much to do, and we cannot waste time on these dumb shows, you and I. You may save that for my successors.”

And so to Pharaoh, from the priests, because he gave them what they wanted, Life! Prosperity! Health! and from the army, too, since he was careful to keep the gains of twenty years and play the two factions off against each other, for the country’s good, as strong men have always done, throughout history.

H
e never gave a thought to Aketaten, which was a pity, for in a sense certain things still happened there.

Not a great deal, of course. Workmen came and razed the temple of Aton, pouring over the ruins a smooth sheet of cement, as though to seal the god in for good. This was what the Theban priests wished, and if such petty acts pleased them, after all, why not? Workmen also removed all the wood from the royal buildings and from the palaces of the nobles, which meant that even the caretakers at last took their departure, to search for some other silent, mole-like sinecure.

The props of the balcony of audience were taken out, though it did not at once collapse. It stood up for a while of its own weight, so that anyone curious to view life from that vantage point could have done so. But since nobody any longer wished to do so, in time it too fell down, and Tutmose found its ruins, in the course of one of his morning walks.

When he returned home he did the last of his works, and it was by no accident that it was about the one of them that the others had forgotten, the one whose reputation, alone among that crew, was still glorious.

It was at the death-mask of Amenophis III he looked, and then, taking a little plaster, he summed it all up and himself as well.

What he did was a face of Amenophis at forty, a face that outstared posterity, simply because it had no
choice but to stare it down, a young face, a permanent face, a transient face, and a very old one; and a face with some capacity for feeling and even for love of a sort, though that capacity was small.

Then he laid down his tools.

Whether he was dying, or whether the time had come for him to die, the outcome was much the same. His turn had come.

He had nothing to complain about, since beyond our own motives, existence has no reason. It is merely phenomenal. Once we have realized that we are free to turn to other things.

Looking round his studio he could see, as he had always felt, that art was a branch of metaphysics, older, more diverse, infinitely more subtle, tougher, and much better suited to meditation and the indication of the nature of the ineffable than any theology or
eschatology
, which, no doubt, was why theologians and mystics affected to despise it. At least Ikhnaton had not made that mistake. Besides, art survives, and of what theology can that be said? Theology outlives its
worshippers
always, but those to whom it might be of some use, never.

Again he looked round the studio, but now for the last time. What did he believe in? This was what he believed in. And by an odd trick of patronage and neglect, he was able to leave it all behind him. From the shelf high above, the bust of the Queen stared down the future with one eye, poised and assured. But was it the Queen? Who could say? It might as easily be something that lasted, skipping from face to face, in the human animal. But to be able to transmit even that much of insight he found singularly
comforting
.

So much for theodice, that science of justifying evil in the good, which like so much of science, was devoted to the justification of something that did not
exist in the name of something that did not exist either.

It was not so bad to die.

In the past it had to wait quite a long time.

Then, in 1335, when Horemheb was a vigorous man of seventy-five at the peak of his powers, it happened that he passed Aketaten on his way down to Memphis.
From the river the city almost looked real, and he decided to go ashore.

He wandered for a while through the decaying streets, empty except for a single greyhound, which would have nothing to do with him. It feinted in a wide circle always ahead of him, and must be the descendant of one of the royal ones, but what on earth had it found to breed with here?

So, at last, he came to Tutmose’s studio, and after some hesitation, entered it. Tutmose had never taken his face, nor had he ever wished Tutmose to do so, but now he was curious.

To see dust and sand piled up here and there against the floor, and in the studio itself, open to the sky, almost as high as his thighs, was not unexpected. But to find all those masks there was.

Tutmose had not outlived his art. His art had
outlived
him. From four walls these faces jeered Horemheb down, and he thought it better to leave. Merely by their existence he found the place disturbing. It brought them all back again.

Before going back to his boat, he paused to look over the desert outskirts of the city. And from somewhere out there, as he had heard it fifty years before, came the voice of silence. It was only a delusion, for nothing stirred. And yet he had heard it. It was there.

But he had not caught what it had to say, and the voice of silence can never be repeated. It can only be heard once, and in the works of a few artists, seen. Besides, it does not really speak. It only sighs and says, “I know”.

Nor had those masks told him anything. They were not really the people they depicted. They were only what Tutmose had learned from the people they depicted. And as for himself, he was not sure after all that he had learned anything from them.

It upset him. But he continued on his journey, after
a last look round. For after all, even there, too, at Aketaten, it had only been a game. The voice of silence was only a game, as the emotions were only a game, sincerity was a game, and even Man was only a game that something else was playing. As for the voice of silence, it was only the sigh of something that had found the game a little long. And that was all it meant. But that meant a good deal, for to tell the truth, he found it a little long himself.

For no, it was not difficult to be a god, but it was very hard to be worshipped, when one knew one was not one, and even harder to be loved personally, if one’s capacity for love was small.

He should never have set foot there again.

For he was a very old man, and was to become even older. It made no difference. From the moment of birth our life grows daily a little shorter, and we soon grow accustomed to that. But his thoughts could not help but turn back to that long ago time, even without this unforeseen prompting. And he could remember very well how as a young and eager body, he had wanted also to stand naked in the rain. The patter was reassuring. It was like silver fingertips in the middle of the night. Feeling it, we want to say: I am. But those who need us will not let us be. And so we come to say: farewell, I am never now, I was; which alas is true of all of us, except that some of us cannot even say that much.

He could have used the convenience, right then, of Ay’s amused philosophy, as the boat drifted down
towards
Memphis and responsibility.

For it was all very well for the priests to shout Life! Prosperity! Health! but just by inconveniently
believing
, Ikhnaton had robbed his successors of all the
comforts
of convenient belief.

Who more than Horemheb, who had restored the public power of Pharaoh, could more see through that
fiction that Pharaoh was a god? And yet he was still worshipped as one, he who believed in no gods, and yet still believed in the power of Pharaoh, which in part derived from that worship. So more than anybody else, more than any of them ever had been, he was left with the worst question of all, the one that can never be answered.

W
ho was this Horemheb, this God?