On a Balcony (7 page)

Meryra was not sure.

And then the whole story of the Holy of Holies came tumbling out. Meryra was not impressed. “A painted doll,” he said, “moved by strings, with an echo box behind. Nothing more.”

“I shall never go there again,” said the prince.

Meryra looked guilty. He should not have spoken. It was never wise to give away trade secrets, if only
because
it meant that one then had to make up tricks of one’s own, which was fatiguing.

“Then it was not a god,” said the prince.

Reluctantly Meryra shook his head.

“Then where is God?”

“God”, said Meryra, hoping to end what had been an uncomfortable and indiscreet five minutes with a benign platitude, “is within you.”

“I know,” said the prince.

This, if anything, was even more disturbing than what had gone before. How on earth could the prince
know anything of the sort? He was, of course, himself a god, but then that was purely a state manner. Meryra waited respectfully, wondering what to say.

They had reached what had been the Holy of Holies. The prince was having it torn down, as part of his improvements. It was an activity Meryra could look upon with some equanimity. The old Holy of Holies had been bad for his arthritis; and it had been boring to duck in there and wait for the correct length of time, without anything to do, while pretending to receive a suitable message from the god. The new shrine, he trusted, would be larger, airier, and drier.

The prince told him there would be no new shrine. “Aton is a god of light. All good comes from light. All bad comes from darkness. I will not have anything shut up. We will have an open altar and offering tables.”

Meryra was astonished. And then he saw the
possibilities
. There would be a new ritual, priests, temples, new formulas, a whole system.

“With flower sacrifices,” he said, and the prince nodded eagerly.

Very well, then, thought Meryra, with flowers it will be, a very small and special cult, patronized by Pharaoh, aristocratic, with a limited clientéle and
himself
at the head of it. It would be a fascinating game. For so long as he could hold the prince’s attention, for so long would the Aton cult prosper.

*

But to Meryra, already dreaming his new dreams, was added Tutmose, the sculptor, dreaming his. For
Tutmose
, like Meryra, also combined indifference with ambition, and perhaps also liked to play with the game of appearances, though in a slightly different way. Much more than Meryra, Tutmose held the right keys to immortality. Tutmose, or rather his fingers, knew what Ma’at was very well.

It was no accident that he should arrive at the temple on that day when the installation of the new statues was finished and the prince had come to see himself new, shiny, and reproduced twenty-four times.

The day was mercilessly bright. Only the best work, delicately modelled, could stand up to such strong light, and Bek’s, as Tutmose knew, was not the best work. The effects of inferior craftsmanship and too much haste showed plainly. Besides, Bek did not know how to make a virtue of abnormality.

For an instant the prince thought that Bek had made fun of him. He had asked for truth. But Bek had given him a literal-minded veracity so thoughtlessly done as to be a cruel caricature. The prince wanted to turn and run.

From twenty-four pedestals twenty-four jeering parodies leered down at him. Bek was not to be blamed. The prince saw his own ugliness from the inside, where it was almost a grace; but no artist can ever give any subject a grace he does not possess himself, and so there was no veil of art between these statues and the prince’s ugliness.

From a height of ten feet his own white face looked down at him, stretched taut like a piece of muslin drawn over the skull of a ferret. The eyes were beady, the skull misshapen, and the lower lip flapped down of its own weight. The pose was stiff and hieratic, after an Osiris mummy. The arms were like spindly cucumbers suffering from winter rot.

Show me as I am, he had said, but this was not the same as sculpting him as he looked. The hips were a calamity, like gigantic white sponges six feet high. And there were twenty-four of them. It was his first defeat at the hands of the fine arts, and once the panic of being seen like that was over, he was furious with the artist. But where could he find a better man?

As it happened the better man had come to find
him. Tutmose stepped from the column behind which he had been lingering.

“You should not blame the man,” he said. “He did his best.”

“Where did you come from?”

Tutmose shrugged. “I have been here all morning. But you are quite right. They have no truth. They are very bad.”

The prince had been taken off guard, and taken off guard, Tutmose thought, he was charming, slightly spoiled, only a boy, potential of great mischief, but still charming. With his guard back up, on the other hand, he was shrill and difficult to put up with.
Tutmose
, however, wanted a government stipend and an adequate workshop.

“You were talking about truth. And you are quite right. It cannot be shown from the outside. If you will come to my studio, I will show you. Unfortunately sculpture is not portable.”

It was a daring thing to suggest. Pharaoh went to no one. But as he had been sure he could, he had caught the prince’s attention.

They went.

It was the prince who arrived first. Tutmose found him in the outer courtyard of the house, a little
bewildered
. And indeed, to an Egyptian, no doubt the house
was
bewildering. For one thing the trees in the garden were not planted in orderly rows, but scattered in no pattern. Tutmose preferred to find order rather than to impose it. For another, there were no clamorous servants. Tutmose did not care for servants. And for a third, the building was stripped of all ornament, with nothing but whitewashed walls, so that the rooms were full of light and the dancing shadows of water plants from the pool of the courtyard.

When he led the way to the studio, there was no work in the studio at all. The room was empty, for
Tutmose did not like his own works. There was only a chair on a dais and a work-table.

“Sit down,” said Tutmose, and began to mix
something
in a tub. Rather unexpectedly the prince sat and even sent away his guards. For clearly he felt quite safe here. The room was flooded with light.

“What shall I do?” he asked. To pose still made him self-conscious, particularly after having seen the best of which Bek was capable.

“Do nothing. After all, you
are
,” said Tutmose, and began to slap wet plaster on an armature. He had
prepared
for this for weeks. He had made head after head and smashed them all. He had studied these features until he knew how these features wished to look, and until he could reconcile the way they wished to look with the way they did. For in these matters the prince was no fool. No matter how uncertain his taste, still, obviously, he had taste. Therefore the thing must be done just so, and it had to be done quickly. Well, it would be.

Besides, the subject was interesting. There was some vigour in that boyish voice. All he needed was
something
to believe in, and then, even if it were an error, he would be worth sculpting indeed.

The model grew. It only took three-quarters of an hour. Tutmose revolved its stand. The light came down through a hole in the ceiling. It played and leaped and altered the surface of everything, as Tutmose gently rotated the stand. And there, out of the still wet plaster, shimmered the prince’s very heart and voice,
changeable
, young, quick, eager, never for an instant the same, and always self-renewing. Tutmose had only to watch, to know that he had succeeded.

“Yes,” said the prince. “That is truth.”

For that was what Tutmose knew about the truth: the truth is always changing and always the same. And besides, it is pleasant to thrill the sitter sometimes. And
the sitter is so easily flattered. All he wants to see is his own conception of himself. Tutmose was rewarded on the spot. It remained only for him to flatter Nefertiti, and about that he had no doubts. It would merely be necessary to make her beautiful. Women were like that.

And so the pattern fell into place. First Meryra, and then Tutmose, the man who showed them the truth, flickering, changing, but always the same, and always beautiful, and always what they wanted to see. He would be personal portraitest to all of them.

And what was the secret of that sudden rise, and of that no less sudden truth? Wet plaster, and a trick of modelling porous surfaces, so that they should always catch the light and so always seem to change.

It was ridiculously easy. Yet it was not so easy as all that, for Tutmose, too, had his concept of the truth. Once the prince had gone he set his face aside and did another one, one on which he spent a lot of time and thought, and which utterly held his attention. The first had been a piece of sleight of hand. But this was a little more than that. It was a study of the prince a few months from now, when he was at last at the mercy of what he was really thinking; when his own fears, so badly nourished by other men’s ambition, had at last hardened into a system of belief. For after all, we are all other men’s means, even Tutmose, who more than any of them, hoped to save something out.

He had this hope, because he knew what he was up to.

Of course there were times, in the middle of the night, when he wondered if he was any good at all. But, since he also knew that it was only people who were good who had such doubts, these night thoughts, though
profoundly
disturbing, were also reassuring, for he knew that that very quality of badness which one perceives in oneself is nothing more than the sum of one’s merits, for only excellence shows us how we have failed. All the
world’s most admired works are nothing more than a rubbing of the artist’s original idea, an uneven replica of something that at the time was quite clear. And, of course, such is the creative process that as soon as the rubbing is taken, we destroy the original.

But only the artist knows this. It is his great trade secret, the secret perhaps of any trade, for only those at the top know how little is the distance they have climbed, how far there is they failed to go, for only at the top can we catch a glimpse of what lies beyond.

*

Meanwhile, at the palace, there were problems. Tiiy, Amenophis, and Horemheb were in the pavilion by the lake.

It was difficult, these days, to get Amenophis to do anything, for he was completely wrapped up in the astonishing news that after all he was not dying. The light which this had flooded over his whole life had blinded him to everything else. Now his son was
co-regent
, he proposed, despite his pain, to enjoy himself. Except for the family hobby of building, he left matters of state to Tiiy.

The great jewelled mortuary temple of the
Memnonion
, which he had erected to both of them was, they said, finished, and he was determined to see it. Beyond that, his responsibilities were over, so far as he was concerned.

So Horemheb and Tiiy, with Ay for company, were forced to discuss political affairs in the Memnonion, a setting that was not exactly conducive to worry, for into this vast pile Amenophis had poured the luxury of a lifetime. Obscure revolutions in Syria and scrubby revolts in the Delta shrank into insignificance here.

They carried him in in a litter, and even he looked lost in that wilderness of burnished marble, silver and gold inlay, prismatic jewels, shrines of lapis lazuli, and formal statues of himself all taller than he was. Even
though they whispered, the walls reverberated to their voices. It was as useless to tell him the Empire was falling to pieces, as it was to tell the prince. Commander of the Armies Horemheb might be, but there was nothing he was to be allowed to command them to do.

“After all, the boy is young. He will learn,” said Amenophis.

That was exactly what they were afraid of.

Ay asked if either of them had been to the Aton temple.

Tiiy only half listened. Somewhere behind all this was her daughter, she knew that. And Nefertiti was sly. For Nefertiti now also went to the Aton temple. Meryra had tactfully adapted the ritual to fit her.

“Who is this man Meryra?” demanded Tiiy.

“The prince apparently sets great store by him.”

“He must be a fanatic. Put a stop to him,” snapped Tiiy, and thought no more of the matter.

By then Meryra could not have stopped himself.

Horemheb had a moment of disillusionment. They were not busy, wise, good, and impersonal. They were not all understanding. They were not gods. They were only Amenophis and Tiiy, two intelligent and beautiful toys, who played with their Empire as though it, too, were a toy; and who would protect that Empire only as a rich man would protect his investments, when at long last he came to realize that his income had shrunk.

For the first time in his life he saw that, dwarfed by the dimensions of his own monument, Amenophis looked smaller, and Tiiy, just for an instant, irrelevant. It saddened him. He had always believed that loyalty was an emotional matter. Now he began to realize that it could also be abstract.

And then the magic was back again. She laid her hand on his arm. She needed his help.

I
n two years one can persuade oneself of almost
anything
. Familiarity, in that event, breeds confidence.

Nefertiti had persuaded herself that she was happy. Since she had never been happy, this was not too difficult to do. She was now the first, or almost the first, woman in the Empire.

The prince had persuaded himself he was Pharaoh, the ruler of his people, well loved, universally trusted, the eternal well-spring of favour, powerful, gracious and understanding. He had not persuaded Tiiy, and whether Ay believed it, or indeed anything, would have been difficult to judge. He was much too busy to believe in anything, for he virtually ran the government, and Tiiy ran him.

As for Amenophis, nobody ever saw him, so he was able to believe, despite an inability to move about in cold weather and despite, or even because of, the pain, that he was still a remarkably vigorous man.

Horemheb, who had grown less muscular, but not noticeably so, was almost convinced that it was the duty of a Commander of Armies to stay in the capital and amuse the court. He was still Tiiy’s lover. He could not help that. But sometimes, in the middle of the night, he wondered why her body made him so sad and so considerate, and why Nefertiti made him so nervous. He drilled the soldiers in the capital rigorously. Some might have called it discipline, others boredom. He called it strategy.

The prince had stopped going to the Amon temple. He had not been there for almost two years. The priests
had to come to him, as they had had, though for
different
reasons, to come to his father. So far he took their their advice, but if he ever wished to revolt against them, the army would be on his side. For as a poacher fears game wardens, so does an army fear the power of the Church. Whatever happened, the army would remain loyal to Pharaoh. It would have to, in order to seize the country for itself.

But the person who had changed most was Meryra. He was fascinated, despite himself. Pharaoh had given him a problem: invent me a theology.

Of course one did not invent it. One needed the
support
of precedents. It was those one invented, and this was called the rediscovery of truth. It always had been, whenever a new need had arisen. One had simply to follow the rules. And Nefertiti had to be built into the ritual.

So there Meryra had his first postulate. God is the sun. The Sun consists of male and female energy. But Pharaoh must be more important than his consort, Nefertiti or no, therefore, though Pharaoh represents the male and the royal wife the female energy,
co-existent
, interdependent, and inseparable, still Pharaoh must be male and female both, since all things spring from him. And so forth.

If there was a flaw in this, Meryra could not find it. The prestige of Pharaoh was enormous. They could rely on that.

A ritual was more difficult. But here again there was no real problem. It could be mocked up.

Nefertiti was big with child. It made her fretful. Whenever she was bored she summoned him. They said little to each other, but they understood much, and Meryra knew where his patronage came from. So naturally Nefertiti had to be built into the ritual. He obliged, and Nefertiti, though pregnancy annoyed her very much, as it would any fastidious animal,
rewarded him with a faint smile. Whether these
matters
really interested her would be hard to say. As a rule, women have no taste for metaphysics. But since they took up more and more of the prince’s time, then they also had to take up more and more of hers.

The pregnancy created another problem. It left the prince alone much of the day, and since there was no art, except that of Tutmose, with which he would not meddle, he brought Meryra his own hymns to the sun.

They were not without merit, but to criticize their errors required some tact. The grammar was shocking. But fortunately, as chief theologian, Meryra could
tactfully
shift the grammar on theological grounds. And what is theology, after all, but a solicitude for syntax?

The changes, on the whole, remained minor.

Unfortunately the prince was learning too much theology. It was difficult, at times, to restrain him. The parturition of a god is no easy matter, and the prince was beginning to kick against his womb. Proper syntax in one system is not proper syntax in another.

All of which made Meryra uneasy. He would have been content to confect metaphysics all his life long, well fed in the shadow of Thebes. But the prince was not. Things were becoming too much for him, and he was beginning to form his own plans. Each new
annoyance
made them a little clearer.

Since Nefertiti did not have much time to amuse him, he saw life become more limited for him rather than more various. Once people had ignored him. Now they wanted to change him. It was as though people in a house wanted to shut off rooms they could not use. And indeed, he had become vastly over-populated. It was amazing how many people took shelter under Pharaoh. The only way to evict them was to ignore them.

As a result people thought he lacked warmth.
Smenkara
, his younger brother, did not think so, and so he took real pleasure in playing with Smenkara. Smenkara
liked him. He took the boy everywhere, and made a friend of him, for all his grown-up friends had suddenly turned into councillors. They advised him, but they obeyed Tiiy. He was beginning to tire of Tiiy.

“Will you put that child down and listen,” she snapped. “Aren’t you interested in what happens in Nubia?”

“No,” he said. “I’m not.” It was the first time he had said it, and he found doing so an immense luxury. In a way it was a decision. He looked at Ay. He looked at Horemheb. He looked at Tiiy. No, he did not care what happened in Nubia. He saw that they all looked exactly alike. Why on earth must people confuse
personal
ambition with public conscience? During office hours they had created a new sex, called the
bureaucrat
, whose sexual characteristics were a lack of
characteristics
, and they all belonged to it.

He had an appointment with Tutmose, and they were making him late.

‘You like to govern,’ he said. ‘Then govern.’ He saw a way out. ‘We are pleased with what you do in our name. Pharaoh cannot do everything. Therefore he delegates his divine authority to his proper instruments, as his father did before him, and when he is pleased with his servants, he rewards them.’

He peered at them blandly, feeling quite pleased with himself. Tiiy had some difficulty in controlling her features. Ay was the first to give in. Over his face there spread one of those slow, warm smiles with which he greeted anything that impressed him as being clever.

The prince was well satisfied. He went off to see Nefertiti before going on to Tutmose.

Nefertiti was in her eighth month, and refused to be seen in public. She would not even let Tutmose see her. This displeased him. She was pregnant by him, and the world should know that. ‘Truth is in itself beautiful,’ he told her.

In this case she seemed to feel that the truth was an exaggeration. And really, pregnancy had not improved her. It made her snappish and difficult to deal with. He was puzzled. He wanted her back the way she was. But he told her everything.

“Tiiy will plot against you, you know,” she said.

“Very well.” He was in a good humour. “We will plot against her.” Nefertiti was a woman. She should know how the thing was to be done.

He had brought Smenkara with him. Nefertiti looked at Smenkara, who drew back into shadow. “You do well to encourage him,” she said. “If it is not a boy, then Smenkara will be your heir.”

The prince let go of Smenkara’s hand at once. It was something that had never occurred to him.

Thus began a tug-of-war over Smenkara, for
Nefertiti
produced a girl who was named Meritaten, after the Aton cult, an act of defiance designed to please neither the Amon priests nor the family.

The prince was just as pleased to have a girl. He liked little girls, who were smooth and slippery to the touch as little boys, and yet who had no sex. It made them singularly charming. Besides, he had Nefertiti back again, though not for long. By 1383 she was again with child.

This time, however, she was willing to parade the fact. Perhaps she had learned a lesson. If truth was what the prince wanted, then truth he should have, but have it only from her. Nor did she care for his
continued
encouragement of Smenkara, since the second child, too, was a girl, to be named Maketaten.

Tiiy made no objection to the titulary. But she allowed herself to smile, she allowed herself to say that Nefertiti seemed able to produce only girls, and she made no secret of the fact that she was giving
Smenkara
the education proper to a crown prince.

She even consoled with Nefertiti. She offered
sympathy
;
and subtly, she brought forward Tadukhipa, who blinked and giggled and seemed astonished to be rescued from obscurity. As Nefertiti could see,
Tadukhipa
had been receiving a great deal of attention. She was thinner. She was cleaner. Her Egyptian had
improved
. And she, too, it seemed, had suddenly become interested in the Aton cult.

Nefertiti sent for Meryra at once. And certainly, though Meryra was not without scruples, he had much to be grateful for. She thought he would see to the matter.

Meanwhile the prince was restive. After all, life was not so pleasant. He might be Pharaoh, but so was his father. Everywhere he looked he saw temples of his father’s building. And though the world bowed down to him, he did not altogether like the way the world smiled when it did so. He had the pomp and nothing more. He could do anything, and yet what was there he could do?

Sometimes, it was true, he went to see Tutmose.

But these days Tutmose annoyed him, too. He had never thought life particularly real, but revelation had not come, and he found being a god was much like being a man. When one’s illusions turn into illusions, this is called facing up to reality. But really, reality is nothing but a mirror in which we cannot even see
ourselves
. In those circumstances Tutmose fascinated him to the point of despair.

Like any artist, Tutmose was a magician, for the transmutation of metals and of the emotions are similar studies. Half of one’s life is devoted to what one can do; half to an endless search for what one cannot. In
addition
to this, he was curious, and curiosity has neither morals nor compunction.

When people have everything, life is little more than a search for a further ingredient. Compared to the boredom of that, the painful search for technique is
altogether enviable. For at least it can succeed, whereas the endless search for something beyond technique is almost always doomed.

Apparently, Tutmose saw, the prince did not even know he was a religious fanatic. Perhaps he was not yet sufficiently bored to become one, since one turns to religion out of boredom, in so far as if one knows
everything
, the unknowable suddenly becomes extremely attractive. It was time to hurry the process up. That was Meryra’s duty, not his, but he had no objection to taking a hand in things. The trouble with Meryra was that he had no creative imagination and scholars rouse nobody.

It never even crossed Tutmose’s mind that to play with people is sometimes dangerous, for he knew very little about them, except as subject matter. To him they were only scale models of what he was about to do next. He was tired of doing studies in disillusionment. What he wanted now was a man in the grips of faith.

Yet the prince admired these facile masks. “Why can I not do that?” he demanded. “I tell my artists what to make. I have even used a brush to show them. But it is they who do it. Why is that?”

It was a question best left unanswered. “It is not your medium. A king fights wars and founds cities,” said Tutmose absent-mindedly. He would rather the prince talk about religion. When he talked about religion his eyes lit up. Besides, it was extremely unwise to tell Pharaoh anything. At the most, one could suggest.

The prince went away thoughtful and entranced. Of course. Thebes was not his city. It was not even his father’s city, though it was full of his father’s works. It was Amon’s city. Pharaoh’s city would be different. Pharaoh’s city would be Aton’s city. No one would be able to interfere with Pharaoh there. He brought the matter up with Meryra.

They were discussing the doctrine of effective
personality
.
It helped to pass the time. The doctrine of effective personality was that once one was dead, one’s soul might become anything one wished.

It was the only side of death that had ever appealed to him. You saw some sweetmeats you would like to taste. You became a bird, flew in the window, took them, ate them, and then became yourself again. Why could one not do that when one was still alive? Why could even Pharaoh only do that after he was dead?

Merya seemed abstracted. His face was pale. “And is that what you would like to do?” he asked.

“Oh, no. I would like to be a pink lily, floating open on a lake for a little while. And then, before it shut, I would have tired of it.”

Meryra tried to concentrate. Tadukhipa had died that morning. It was against all his principles. Intrigue was not safe. But it had been that or lose Nefertiti’s
influence
, and he knew very well that the Aton cult owed everything to her. It was she who directed Pharaoh. But when he had told her what had been done, she had sent him away at once. She had looked frightened. The responsibility of the secret was then to be his. He knew she would not protect him. Therefore he must turn for protection to Pharaoh.

He caught at that last remark. Did it mean that Pharaoh was becoming bored with the cult? Pharaoh must not become bored, for Meryra needed his
attention
. He must ingratiate himself.

He had not himself, thank God, ordered her death. He had only hinted. But the people he had hinted to would have to be rewarded, and he had many enemies. Every time Pharaoh gave a new endowment to the Aton temple, another enemy was born among the priests of Amon.