On a Balcony (3 page)

It was worse than infuriating. It was mysterious.

On the morning they were to reach Thebes he saw Ay, as usual clean-shaven, fastidious, and very far away, coming to speak to him again. His thin
loincloth
flapped at his waist, and it had to be admitted that for a man of sixty, Ay had a tight, wiry body fit to endure anything. He was the opposite of soft, and therefore Horemheb treated him with respect. Together they scanned the shore.

“What will you say to the Queen?” asked Ay. “About the prince, I mean.”

“That Royal Father Ay has interested him in archaeology. I suppose it is better for him to be
interested
in something.”

Ay smiled wryly. “So I thought. Unfortunately it hasn’t turned out quite that way. That was a temple to Ra, where we stopped. The prince has discovered he is descended from Ra. The priests of Amon are not apt to like it. Of course he is quite right, Ra is the older god, but since Amon is the stronger, we can only hope he does not insist.” He hesitated. “In other words, he has taken to theology. A rather wilful, self-centred theology, but still, theology. It could be an advantage.”

Horemheb stared at him. And then he saw that, of course, it could be. The army and the priests of Thebes were always in competition with each other, and in that game Pharaoh was the chief taw.

“It could also be dangerous,” he said.

“Oh, I don’t think so. He is only playing, you know. It is only a game to him. But it is a game one might conceivably win.” And again Ay gave Horemheb a look of tacit intelligence.

Abruptly the current carried them round a bend and Thebes lay before them, the whole vast complex of buildings on either side of the river, with Karnak and Luxor too, the great, cancerous, palpitating mass of the Amon temples, the enormous city of the dead, backing up to the cliffs, all gleaming, shining, rich, and
powerful
, almost hiding the sprawling white mass of the palace, in an endless hive of sacerdotal power. And there, beyond, rising out of the plain, backed by the huge bulk of their silver and lapis-lazuli temple, stood the colossi of Memnon, the twin statues of Amenophis III and his wife Tiiy, gazing blandly at nothing, from a great height.

“I do not like it either,” said Ay. It was an
innuendo
, but not a harmless one. Ay was for once in earnest. “And the boy is only a boy. Let him have his head. He should not be difficult to get under control. One has only to like him a little.”

He smiled again and went to put on clothes more suitable to an entry into the city. For already the air was full of the restless clamour of the crowds. They would pull up to the jetty very soon.

Horemheb was surprised. It was unlike Ay ever to make a definite statement about anything, much less than to hint at a possible conspiracy. But he had not the time to think about it. They were landing and there was much to do.

He had thought they would go straight to the palace, but instead they docked on the eastern shore, for the prince wished to make an oblation.

It took some time to assemble the necessary retinue. The priest would have to be warned they were coming and the streets, in so far as that was possible, cleared.

A trip through the city was never a pleasant
experience
. If the necropolis workers were not rioting on the western shore, then the temple workers were rioting on the eastern. A vast horde of office seekers, sycophants,
unemployed workers, hangers-on at half a dozen separate courts, 40,000 useless priests, and the inmates of the theological and military colleges made disorder permanent. There was always mischief there, and if there was none, the army invented it, out of sheer
boredom
with having nothing else to do. For an army needs something to fight. It should not stay cooped up in the capital, while the Empire slips away.

Life! Prosperity! Health! shouted the crowd,
sometimes
in irony, or sometimes out of goodwill. But it would stone you one minute and rob you the next, all the same, and then where would your life, prosperity, and health be?

Nor did it help matters that out of all character the prince was a reckless charioteer who always took the reins himself. He had that passion for speed at any cost which is the delight of the impotent, and since he could always pay the cost, the passion never went
unassuaged
. He did not even know how to sit a horse, but he did know how to drive one. Even as a child, his wet hand had closed round his first whip with the intent fury of someone whose physical passion has at last found the one outlet its body makes possible. And the crowds loved it, of course. Crowds always love to see someone else do something dangerous. He would always be loved by the crowds. It was another aspect of his character that Tiiy and Ay had been so foolish as to overlook.

They at last drew up before a temple, but not the Amon temple, to Horemheb’s surprise. Years ago Amenophis III had built within the Amon compound a small temple to his own private ecclesiastical hobby, the royal household god, Aton. It was a tiny white building dwarfed by the huge stone walls of the Amon temple which surrounded it, and was usually seedy and run down, for Pharaoh had forgotten about it years ago, as the priests of Amon had known he would. They
could afford to humour him in these small things, since he humoured them in all important ones.

Now it had apparently been furbished up. At any rate its whitewash was new. The pritice disappeared inside. Ay and Horemheb, with some reluctance,
followed
, chiefly to avoid the crowd. Neither one of them went to any temple unless he had to.

As a temple it was not much. Some indifferent reliefs ran along the walls of the inner court. The sanctuary was small and not in the least concealed from public view, as it would have been elsewhere. The prince had already vanished within it. Horemheb and Ay waited in the shadow of the surrounding colonnade.

“By whose orders was this done?” asked Horemheb, looking at the fresh colouring.

“The prince, I suppose.” Ay frowned. “I had not known it had been done.”

It was not comforting to see Ay disturbed. Ay was never disturbed.

At last the prince reappeared, talking to the priest of the temple, a fat, unctious fool called Meryra. He had a list and a roll and a squeaky voice, and his skin was the colour of lard. They could not hear what he was saying, but the prince was smiling back and answering eagerly.

Ay shifted from one foot to the other. “I do not like that man,” he said.

Neither did Horemheb, but the visit was soon over, and none of his concern.

*

Half an hour later and they were crossing the river, towards the palace on the western side. He looked
towards
it eagerly. Ay and the prince were too much for him, but Pharaoh and the Queen he understood.
Whatever
happened, he always knew he would be welcome there.

The palace, at some distance back from the shore, was only in its second generation. Tutmose IV had
invented it. Now Amenophis III had extended it until it encroached upon the necropolis. It was built of wood and whitewashed brick, and though it still had the power to dazzle, already, nowadays, large areas of it were walled up and boarded off. It was possible to come across rooms in which no one had sat for years, and courtyards where the water plants had grown
top-heavy
in the ponds and reached the level of the roofs above. A colony of half-starved greyhounds lived, and nobody knew what they ate, in an abandoned garden of persea trees, even though, south of the deserted harem, the plane trees were clipped as tidily as ever along the borders of the private lake.

Yet in that vast rambling palace the courtiers still circled in and out as aimlessly as flies, though, like the motions of flies in a summer room, their movements betrayed a certain mathematical periodicity. These seemingly irrational motions could be plotted against the lust for sugar and the fear of being hit, the two constants which controlled, however remotely, and it was never too remotely, their actions. It was beautiful to watch, in a way, as beautiful as any other
mathematical
certainty, for even flies are controlled by necessity.

Horemheb went at once in search of the Queen.

Tiiy, they said, was on the Royal Lake. He might go to her, for who, so long as she preferred him, would gainsay Horemheb, since it was the Queen, not Pharaoh, who ruled here. Only his attendants saw Pharaoh, who was a legend in his lifetime, and therefore kept properly remote.

Pharaoh had had the lake dug years ago. It was a mile and a half long and two-thirds of a mile wide, surrounded by a wall, its shores trimmed with plane trees, pavilions, flowers, water plants, lotuses, reeds, water-stairs, and sometimes an audience. Nowhere was it more than five feet deep, in order to prevent drowning, should anyone fall into it drunk. When he was younger,
Pharaoh had even used it for hunting, shooting on one occasion three out of the four pink baby hippopotami provided. But that was long ago.

He stood on the shore, by a flight of water-stairs, and waved. Someone must have told the Queen, for her barge was already skimming across the water towards him. It was perhaps a quarter of a mile away. Of ebony and gold, it gleamed agreeably on the water.
Horemheb
removed his sandals and his wig, went down the water-stairs, slipped smoothly into the water, let it hold him voluptuously for a moment, and then stroked
towards
the boat. The water inshore was flaccid and warm, but farther out it was cooler and fresher. The foam of his movements caught at his high, muscled shoulders and rilled there as though around rocks, before subsiding out behind him.

As he was beginning to tire, he came abreast of the boat and the boat abreast of him. He stood up in the water, which was shallower here and lapped at his nipples, and blinked in the sun. The boat was the
Gleams
of
Aton,
the barge Pharaoh had built for the Queen when the lake was first flooded.

Tiiy was sitting in a chair, watching him and
laughing
. ‘Get him aboard,” she called, clapping her hands. Her voice was not beautiful. If anything it was a little harsh. But it was full of warmth and amusement, and was always at least politely lively. It was her voice, more than anything else, that he missed when he was away, for now they had been friends so long, who had once only been lovers.

Two of her attendants hauled him aboard. He could feel the resilient hardness of their breasts, as their dresses rubbed against him. They also pinched the skin under his armpits as they hauled. He stood on the deck and shook himself like a dog, innocently proud of the way his wet body must look, but much more concerned with Tiiy.

She was not a beautiful woman, any more than she had a beautiful voice, but she managed to give the
impression
of beauty. It was difficult to believe she was over forty, for she was too much herself to be dependent upon the uncertainties of time. She had looked thirty since she was fifteen, and ten years from now, she might at last look her age. But not now.

Sometimes, it was true, at dusk, she might become uneasy. Then she would have a dim memory of
somebody
she had once been, as though she were gazing down at herself through sixty feet of water. The object moved. It was hard to tell whether it was alive or dead. But it was unmistakeably one’s self. Then, just as she was trying to catch a closer glimpse of that drowned self, something would divert her attention, and she would take up the performance once again. For after all, was not the performance life? The only way we can survive is to become imitations of ourselves, otherwise the wear and tear of experience touches us, and we change and become dull. And so she made a practice of being always cheerful, for the phoenix kindles its own fire. With immortality at stake, it is not so foolish as to depend upon the rest of the world for fuel.

For the rest she was small-boned, tight-skinned, a little lustful, a little not, a little vengeful, absolutely impossible to pin down, enormously clever, and at the moment, obviously and sincerely glad to see him, as he had known she would be, and as he was to see her.

The boat put back into the middle of the lake. She began eagerly to question him, and he began to answer with Ay.

“Oh, Ay. If the rest of the world did nothing, he would do very well, for he does nothing better than the rest of us. But since we all do something, he will never be anybody to be afraid of. What are these trips about?”

He told her what the trips were about, and also of what Ay had said about them.

She took that more seriously. “He might be right.” She was not laughing now. She was thinking. It put her in no mood for love-making. She was abstemious. She ate only when she was hungry, and it was the same with her affections. That was an attitude to life which, since he had learned it from her, he thoroughly approved of. As a result he had lasted five years, where someone else would only have lasted a week. He was very fond of her.

“We had better go to see Pharaoh,” she said. “I wonder how Ay manages to know everything? But since he does, one may just as well relax.” She gave the order and the boat put about.

It was really a whimsical existence they lived on that lake, if it had not also been a little sad. It was no secret that Pharaoh, who had once romped up and down Egypt, was now an invalid. And so the lake was now his Egypt. When he was well, he rowed about, while Tiiy ran the government, or a hunt was staged for him, though seldom these days, since now he preferred to watch acrobats or tumblers instead. When he was not well he spent most of his time in a pavilion attached to the palace, with steps to the water, from which he could both watch and get the best sun. It was towards this pavilion that the boat now turned.

“About Ay,” said Tiiy unexpectedly. “He is the wisest of all of us. If you ever need someone to trust, trust him.”

Horemheb did not know what to make of that. But apparently he was not expected to make anything of it. They had reached the pavilion.