On a Balcony (6 page)

Even the high priest was obsequious, as so he should be. Standing there before the entrance to the Holy of Holies, slim, top-heavy with jewels, alone, as he wished to be, the prince found it not so much a triumph, as to know, that being now untouchable and omnipotent, he was at last secure. So, though tired and sweaty in the sun, he was happy. Not even the dank walls around him, or the dark shadows under the colonnades, could
oppress him. Was he not now a god? Was he not now immortal?

It was time for him to visit the Holy of Holies.

He motioned Ay to him. “Come with me,” he ordered.

Ay shook his head. “No one may go with you there.”

Suddenly he panicked. And the high priest was not obsequious now. There was on his face quite a different look. There was nothing for the prince to do but follow, in a vast beetle-backed wave of priests that dragged him, like an aphis, down into the dark cellars of the soul, there to milk him dry.

They had crowned him only in order to put him in one of those few ultimate situations which we have to face alone. And such situations should not exist, for they involve an unavoidable choice, and every time we make an unavoidable choice a little of us dies.

People are dishonest. They tell us we always have a voluntary choice. And then they dump us, defenceless, into some situation where no choice is possible. All this false splendour of the priests was designed to one
purpose
. No wonder he had always thought the priests
unclean
. They were spiritual butchers. They did not save souls. They merely fattened them up for their own purposes.

He ran over everything Ay had told him. But Ay had not told him much.

The high priest going ahead, a row of lesser priests on each side of him, chanting and wailing, and with
sistrums
that rattled like snakes, they plunged him deeper into this stone charnel-house. Not even the walls had the life to echo here.

All light had gone. Here they used naphtha flares.

This part of the building was very old and no better than a tomb. The corridor became narrower. The priests were ahead of and behind him. They were now silent, as he was forced along.

He had expected the priests to be friendly. After all, belief in all this mummery was all very well for the laity, but the royal family was sceptical. Surely that gave them the right to know the truth?

On the contrary, the high priest would say nothing. The prince was sobered. It had never occurred to him before that the aweful might of this dark, vengeful god Amon might exist, that the god might actually be
lurking
in this holy of holies, waiting to do something horrible to him, the way shadows waited when you could not sleep at night.

Why had no one told him that scepticism was merely a day-time amusement? Why had Ay not told him that this terrible god they all laughed at was not so
laughable
here?

He turned to the priest.

They had reached a small, square room without windows. In one wall was a door covered with seals. Not even a sistrum rattled now. The room was
unpleasantly
fetid from the torches. The priest forced him to break the seals. He did so, and the door swung open on absolutely nothing beyond itself at all.

The priest forced him through the door, which then swung shut behind him, smoothly into the stone wall, by what mechanism he could not tell.

He stood stock still. If he did not do as he had been instructed to do, he would not be let out. He found it difficult to keep from shaking.

Somewhere there must be some concealed source of meagre light. Slowly his eyes adjusted to the darkness. At first he could make out nothing, not even the limits of the walls. He had only an impression of disease and damp.

Then, by a faint glimmer that seemed to spring from nowhere, he saw against the deeper darkness the shadowy bulk of a closed shrine. The god had arrived.

It was his duty to break the seals on the shrine doors.
This, with trembling fingers, he did. He could not bring himself to open them, however, nor did he have to. They swung back of their own accord.

In the glow that came from somewhere inside the shrine he could make out the black and brittle outlines of an enormous jointed doll. It was sleek and glistening, but its head and face were hidden. It seemed to stir, and there were odd angry gleams of blue and red from its jewels. Its eyes were white shell, and they stared.

He was supposed to anoint the god from a small
unguent
pot inside the shrine. It was only a statue, but even so, he could not bring himself to touch it. He dipped his fingers in the slimy, greasy mass, and flecked the unguent over it.

There was a sound as though someone had dropped a stone lid over a cistern in a stone floor, and a bright magnesium flare of light in the glare of which the giant doll became actual. It started forward jerkily, glaring at him, as the light suddenly went out. He stumbled
backwards
, over a groove in the floor, and heard as much as he felt the thing whirring towards him in the blackness. Something clawed at him. He felt wooden finger-nails, immensely brittle, poking and scratching across his face. He tried to brush them aside, but could not. And that must have been when he screamed.

The statue withdrew.

He found his back against the wall. He stayed there, his body very tight, shivering, looking this way and that, unable to see anything, and that was when the god spoke to him. Its voice was hollow and dead. It told him that the god was mightier than Pharaoh, that the god could destroy Pharaoh, even as it had made Pharaoh a god, and that therefore Pharaoh must follow the advice of his appointed priests, for it was not wise to contradict the oracle of a god. For just as the god had touched him now, so would the god seek him out, wherever he was, should he disobey. And every day he
should come to anoint the god, and when he was in doubt how to act, the god would tell him.

There was an absolute silence. The prince could still feel that touch. It was not the touch of life, to make him immortal, but the prurient touch of death, to make him vulnerable for ever. The silence grew longer. He heard the doors of the shrine shut. He was alone again.

He did not know for how long. At last the panel opened in the wall. He was blinded by the glare of torches out there. The high priest stepped forward. No one else dared to approach.

“And has the god spoken?” he asked. By the
peculiar
smile that hovered on his lips, the prince knew that somehow, even through stone, his scream had been heard, and that the priest knew perfectly well the god had spoken. It was not a smile he would either forget or forgive.

He allowed them to take him back the way they had come. The false door closed smoothly behind them, but he knew the god was still in there, waiting.

Once more he was presented to the crowds. He had been gone over an hour. Having been touched divinely by the god, he was now proclaimed Pharaoh. Life! Prosperity! Health! shouted the priests. Instead he felt like a sacrificial goat, displayed to the people both before and after the sacrifice, and then to be cut up for the priests to eat at leisure. They were only acclaiming their dinner.

When he rejoined the family, he was very quiet, so quiet that even Nefertiti knew something had gone wrong, and wondered what. None of them had seen him so shaken before.

It is by similar methods they break horses.
Amenophis
saw this and tried to be jovial. His manner was that they were now both initiates, and perhaps he had forgotten how much the rite had frightened him, in his day. As far as he was concerned, these things had to
be got through, and once they had been seen through, things went well enough. It was in this way he tried to reassure his son.

Unfortunately the prince had seen through the scene to something quite different on the other side, and was not apt to forget it ever.

That night he spent with Nefertiti, many attendants, and many lights. There could never be enough lights now. And though he was not supposed to speak of what went on in the Holy of Holies, she got him to tell her.

Nefertiti had a mind as direct as her father’s, and saw through things much as he did. She knew very well what the priests had been up to. And if the prince was afraid of the dark, the best thing for her to do was to give him light. She was afraid of the dark herself, and could not know that though light may fail, darkness never does.

She had the Aton priest, Meryra, in attendance. Now she would send for him. If the prince did not like the religion he had, then someone would have to provide him with another one. He had an interest in such things. It was necessary only to feed that interest, and her power over him would be assured.

Thus, in the middle of the night, with five hundred lamps hissing in that otherwise silent palace, fell one god and one dynasty. But the birth of the new god was to take a little longer than the downfall of the old one, for gods have to be evoked, with much cunning, out of the hidden mind, and this takes time, skill, and
ambition
.

Ambition Meryra had, though Nefertiti was mistaken to think him her creature. He was no creature at all, but like most of us, only an ambition on two legs.

It would be a mistake to underestimate this man Meryra. He was not wicked. On the contrary, he was good whenever he was able and always willing to listen to the troubles of those by whom he might rise.

He was forty-eight, and so far he had not prospered. That he was attached to Aton worship was no accident. It was the only job he had been able to get, for the Amon priests would have none of him. They had had others to prefer over his head. He had not been unduly ambitious, but he did know that he had certain
abilities
. He wanted comfort, ease, and the right to spend long hours in meditation. Without being in the least creative, or having a scrap of insight in his nature,
except
, occasionally, when watching the lotuses in his garden after a good meal, he was yet a man who loved a system for its own sake. He could play with theology by the hour, for diversion, as someone else would play with a particularly promising child. Sincerity was never in question. He could believe in anything for a day, a month, a year, for the sake of the game, as someone else would accept a geometrical assumption, in order to learn how a bridge was built.

Therefore, when he had managed to secure the chief priesthood of the family Aton cult he had been well pleased. It completely freed him from doctrinal
disputes
with his Amon colleagues, who did not happen to share his sense of humour, and it allowed him to keep an excellent table.

He was altogether flattered by the attentions of the prince. For one thing, they meant more money for the temple, and therefore ultimately for him. The Amon priests, who scorned the Aton and him, would now be jealous. And besides, he found the prince bright,
intelligent
, remarkably well versed in theology for a layman, and given to the sort of puzzles with which he amused his spare time anyway.

The prince had decided to enlarge the Aton temple, and this meant that they met daily. And really, if
anything
, the prince talked too much. For instance, he asked: “What is truth?”

Meryra was delighted. It was one of those
unanswerable
riddles that one could discuss for hours, if the other person did not suddenly begin to shake like a whippet.

One could answer cynically: truth is the prevailing prejudice of the greatest number at any given time, mystically, except that this tended to cut off the
discussion
: truth is the perception of God; erotically, truth is what we want others to see in us; militarily, truth is on the winning side; politically, truth is whatever
justifies
our self-interest; philosophically; truth is that
invisible
, impalpable reality of whose various aspects appearance is the pale momentary reflection;
practically
and pragmatically: truth is the best butter, and comes salted, plain, with garlic, and sometimes rancid.

“But what is
the
truth?” asked the prince.

“Why, whatever you think it is,” said Meryra.

“And what do you think it is?”

Meryra’s thoughts did not move in quite that
terrifyingly
adolescent way. He had never thought that truth was anything in particular. “Truth”, he answered blandly, “is illimitable. To define it, therefore, is to make it untrue.”

The prince was not quite up to that sort of thing. Meryra was disappointed.

So was the prince. “Is what I believe truth to be, true?” he asked.

“Why, yes, of course, I suppose so,” said Meryra. He was watching the workmen set up the new columns which extended the forecourt of the temple. It would look splendid when they were all in place. “What do you believe truth to be?” he asked.

“Honesty and frankness. Showing things as they are.”

“In so far as you can never know what they are,” said Meryra, “that’s being merely literal-minded.”

Fortunately the prince did not hear him. “Is Bek a good sculptor?” he asked.

“No,” answered Meryra. “I don’t think so. That is, the effect is sure to be very fine.”

“Is he deficient in Ma’at, in truth?”

“How on earth should I know?” asked Meryra. “Sixteen statues, you say. The effect will be absolutely marvellous.”

“Twenty-four,” corrected the prince. This matter of truth was important to him. As for example in the matter of his descent from Ra. If he was descended from Ra and not from Amon, he need never go to that Holy of Holies again. He asked Meryra about his descent from Ra.

Meryra had been saving up his grudge against the Amon priests for years. He was delighted to tell the prince that, yes, he was quite right, Ra was the older god. He was descended from him. But in Thebes, he would still have to go to the Amon temple. Now if he was in Heliopolis, matters would be different.

“You mean, if I went away, there would be nothing the Amon priests could do?”