Return to Thebes (2 page)

Bek

I am the apprentice of His Majesty, I have been taught by the King; and now that I come to die—for I am dying, they cannot fool me however much they attempt it—I feel that I have served well him whose creation I have been … as he has been mine, for it is as fellow artisans, almost more than as ruler and subject, that Nefer-Kheperu-Ra Akhenaten, tenth King and Pharaoh of the Eighteenth Dynasty to rule over the Two Lands of Kemet, and Bek, his chief sculptor, have labored all these years.

Now my duties pass to my principal assistant, Tuthmose: and it is better so, for I am old and ill and much disheartened by these recent days. Ever since His Majesty returned from the funeral of his father, the Good God Amonhotep III (life, health, prosperity!), in Thebes three years ago, I have been asked to do things I would never have done were I in a position to refuse. Of course I have not been, and it has not been a happy time for me. I am not sorry it is ending, though I could have chosen some better means, had it been left to me, than this steady weakening that thins my flesh and brittles my bones and withers into uselessness the strong hands that carved so many wonderful things for him in the years when we were younger.

I hardly feel that I know His Majesty now. I thought I did, so closely were our thoughts and projects intertwined. But this, I suppose, only proves how slippery is the slope on which humans meet and pass one another—particularly when one of them is a god and answerable only to his own conscience for what he does.

I suppose the Good God Akhenaten (life, health, prosperity!) has a conscience, though of late it has not been visible to me. In the North Palace the Chief Wife Nefertiti lives her life alone, unmolested but, as nearly as we in the Court can determine, unloved. With her resides Queen Kia, native of Mesopotamia, second wife of His Majesty, small, dark, quiet, friendly to all save him, and observant—always observant. I have sculpted them both, and both have befriended me. I grieve for the separation, particularly for the Chief Wife, who has, I think, loved His Majesty greatly all her life, and now must live out her days without his presence to enliven them; even though I think she had decided, quite some time before he sent her from his side, that she must go.

With her also resides the Prince Tutankhaten, just a week ago entered upon his eighth year. He is growing into a reserved, quiet, thoughtful little lad. We used to see him toddling about, fat, happy, always gurgling with laughter. Now he is thinner, less happy—rather sickly, in fact—and now he walks more solemnly, forcing a dignity beyond his years, as though he feels already the weight of the Double Crown he may someday have to wear … someday not too far off, I am afraid, unless His Majesty decides to live his life much differently than he has in recent times.

In the North Palace also reside three of His Majesty’s four surviving daughters by the Chief Wife: Ankh-e-sen-pa-a-ten, thirteen, who is to be married to the little prince later this year; Nefer-neferu-ra, nine; and Nefer-neferu-aten Junior, eleven, named for her mother when her mother bore this name. This was before His Majesty took the name from her and gave it to His other Majesty, his younger brother the Prince Smenkhkara, now Ankh-Kheperu-Ra Smenkhkara, Co-Regent, King and Pharaoh also, in the union that has all of Kemet, and especially all of us here in the Court, saddened and dismayed that such things can be.

That is why I say the little prince may come to wear the Double Crown “someday not too far off.” Akhenaten flies in the face of all right and reason: he overturns
ma’at
,
the eternal order and fitness of things that has existed in Kemet from the Beginning. He affronts the gods, whom he has hurled from their temples and driven from the land. And he hurries their return, for they live in the hearts of the people where his vengeance can never reach them, and wait patiently for their time to come again. As it will, for His Majesty’s time is no more than a ripple on the Nile when matched against the eternal calendar of theirs.

Yet I should not be happy to see his downfall, and so in a way I am just as pleased that I shall probably not live to witness it. Because His Majesty and I have known great days. We have performed many “wonders,” as he calls them, together. I shall never regret, though I live in the afterworld forever and ever, for millions and millions of years, that I was at his side and was given the privilege of assisting him, in the days before he went beyond us into his strange world and left us all behind.

Have you been to Karnak and seen the three colossal statues of him that I sculpted there? They guard the entrance to his first great temple to the Aten, which he built in the days before he established this city of Akhet-Aten. Have you noticed how I captured him, the very essence of his being, the long, narrow eyes, proud and arrogant and yet hiding such pain—such pain!—the pain of his awful ailment, which came upon him as a youth, and whose bitter gifts I also captured in the stone: the sagging belly, the woman’s hips, the spindly shanks, the skinny arms, the elongated neck, the pendulous lips, the high cheekbones, the face that Kemet has called “Horse Face” for almost twenty years. All, all, I captured in the stone. And he approved my doing it, he urged me to do it. When I demurred at first, he said, “Bek! Bek! I live in truth, and you must too. Make them see me as I am, and they will know what a wonder they have as Pharaoh! I command you, Bek. Make me as I am!”

And so I always did … until lately, when it has become more important to him to try to keep pace with one whose favors from nature he can never match, than to live in truth. And so he no longer cries, “Make me as I am!” but rather indicates, “Make me as I wish to be, to equal him!”

And so obediently Tuthmose and I have begun to round out the cheeks, smooth out the hollows, make him look younger, more conventional, more perfect in the style all Pharaohs before him have favored. I have tried to help him match Smenkhkara’s golden beauty, which of course he can never in reality do, and becomes thereby, to all who see him as he actually is, pathetic in the trying.

Pathetic and more than pathetic: for in these past three years he has ordered me to sculpt and paint things that not only have offended me as a man but have violated my honor as an artist. And for that, since I of course have had no option but to do as he wished, I think I cannot find it in my heart to forgive His Majesty.

Statues of a king embracing a king—paintings of a king kissing a king—stelae of a king fondling a king!

I hope they may all be destroyed sometime. I hope they may never see the light of day in after years. But they will last our time, I know that, for he has ordered them created without shame, and he has ordered them displayed without shame, and without shame he has forced upon Kemet the spectacle of himself and his brother almost as man and wife. And shame has come to the House of Thebes because of it, and because of it great sadness and foreboding lie upon the Two Lands.

I know the pretense he used to offer, though in recent months he has abandoned even that—the pretense that because the Chief Wife is no longer beside him (and why is this, one may ask, if not that he himself decreed it!) therefore King Smenkhkara stands in her stead and takes her place as his helper in the worship of the Aten, and so must have her titles, her power and (who dares guess how fully?) her wifehood as well.

Who believes such madness? It is folly, self-delusion. It is
worse: it is insanity, though none dares call it so for fear of His Majesty’s vengeance. Or perhaps I should say: none outside the Great House dares call it so. Because, as one who passes quite freely in and out and is able by virtue of his skills to spend some time in both the North Palace and the South, and sometimes in Queen Tiye’s Palace of Malkata in Thebes as well, I sense that there are some within the walls who have more freedom to speak their minds than we do—though even they, I think, hesitate to challenge him direct, but instead satisfy themselves with doing what they can to conceal the record of his folly.

Thus the matter of the “coronation durbar” which has now become such an issue in the Palace.…

When he returned from Thebes after his father’s funeral—never, to this day, to leave Akhet-Aten again—he held a “coronation durbar,” as he called it. At first he proposed that he should crown King Smenkhkara and that King Smenkhkara should then crown him. One can only imagine the arguments that took place in the Family. There must have been some, because presently it was announced that fierce old Pinhasy, chief servitor of the Aten, would crown them both, chanting His Majesty’s Hymn to the Aten for the first time directly to His Majesty, as though His Majesty now embodied the Aten and should now be worshiped
as the Aten.

(No priests of Amon dared protest. None, at least openly, are to be found. Amon’s temples stand desecrated and deserted from one end of Kemet to the other. Only an occasional whisper indicates that the young priest Hatsuret and some of his closest friends still move in hiding through the land. Once I came upon the Councilor Aye—who now styles himself “Divine Father,” meaning “father-in-law of the God,” namely Akhenaten—and General Horemheb talking in a corridor at Malkata. “—suret,”—I thought I heard that portion of a name as the general spoke to his father—“is now near Memphis where I am sending him gold and sustenance.” “Good,” Aye said. “Tell him to be of good heart. Tell him that soon we will bring him—” Then abruptly they became aware of my approach and turned away with a sudden burst of talk about innocuous things. I pretended I had not heard, though I am convinced that the full name Horemheb spoke was “
Hat
suret.”)

So the coronation durbar was held, a tragic spectacle for all who love the eternal
ma’at
and fitness of things in the Two Lands—and that is everyone, I think, except Their two Majesties, who care neither for
ma’at
nor for the feelings of their people.

Side by side they sat upon their thrones, King Smenkhkara at his brother’s right hand where the Chief Wife should have been, no others of the Family anywhere about. Pinhasy put the crowns upon their heads and chanted the Hymn to Akhenaten as the embodied Aten. Smenkhkara rose from his throne, stepped forward, turned, bowed low, offered sacrifice and formal worship to his brother. Akhenaten raised him up, kissed him, handed him gravely to his seat. A dutiful shout went up from the scanty crowd of court sycophants gathered before the King’s House to witness this sad proceeding. A straggling little line of emissaries from abroad—Mittani, Naharin, Byblos, wretched Kush—all that cared, or could be commanded, now in these days when our possessions fall away from the slack hands of His Majesty—jostled one another by with meager gifts: this was the “Parade of Tribute.” Akhenaten clapped his hands. Trumpets blew, a chariot race began, youths dutifully leaped into athletic contests, a forced air of gaiety covered all. Within the hour the games and envoys were gone, the two kings had withdrawn, the crowd had dispersed, the palace grounds were deserted. Ra moved on impervious through an empty sky, over an empty scene.

As quickly as possible, all was forgotten—until a week ago, when both Huy, the chief steward of Queen Tiye, and Meryra, the chief steward of Queen Nefertiti, reached that point in the building of their tombs where they wished to pay tribute—which one still must do, of course, on fear of death—to His Majesty. Then arose the question of how they should best do this. To me, who am still consulted graciously though I give my advice from a bed I do not think I will leave alive—and to Tuthmose, who now actually carries out my suggestions and his own skilled ideas—they both proposed that they use the scene of the coronation durbar.

“As it was?” I questioned, startled that they should make such a choice.

“Without the Chief Wife and the Family?” echoed Tuthmose, equally aghast.

“His Majesty lives in truth,” Huy said, a smug look on his face. “He will want it exactly as it was.”

“If we, too, are to live in truth as he wishes all men to do,” remarked Meryra with similar superiority, “then you must portray it as it happened.”

“I would suggest,” I remarked, I am afraid quite dryly, “that you consult your mistresses and see what they advise.”

“They need not know,” Huy said, though here in Akhet-Aten, where the tombs along the northern and southern ridges bounding the city are open to public view at all times, nothing is concealed.

“I would rather risk their anger at being told than risk their anger if things are hidden from them,” I said with sufficient severity to stop their flippant attitude and sober their smug faces. When they spoke to the Great Wife and Nefertiti later that day, their carefree approach ended altogether. And now we have the bitter controversy that flares within the Palace and seems to have produced some sort of culmination in the continuing crisis we have all lived with ever since Akhenaten sent his wife to the North Palace and installed his brother in her stead.

In the cities and villages of Kemet, no one knows that this battle rages. But it is not in the cities and villages, of course, that the fate of Their Majesties will be decided. It is always from within the palaces that changes come in the rule of Kemet, for the people have never rebelled in all our nearly two thousand years of history. Even now, ruled by the One who is increasingly, if still with great secrecy, called “the Madman” and “the Criminal,” they will not rebel. He is still the Good God, and it is unthinkable to them that they might ever rise against him.

Unhappily for him, such superstitious acceptance does not prevail within the Family.

Yesterday the orders came down, almost simultaneously, from his palace, from Queen Tiye’s and from Queen Nefertiti’s, to poor unfortunate Huy and Meryra. It will be quite a while, I think, before they find life a subject for smug jesting again.

His Majesty commanded: portray the coronation durbar exactly as it was, himself and his brother alone (fondly entwined!) the paltry “Parade of Tribute” straggling by.

The Great Wife and the Chief Wife commanded: portray the coronation durbar as the eternal traditions and
ma’at
of Kemet dictate, as it has always been throughout our history—Nefertiti seated beside Akhenaten, their daughters (even those who are dead, for this is royal myth, not royal fact) around them, a lavish and fawning Parade of Tribute maintaining the dignity of the Double Crown—not exactly truthful, of course, but as truthful as most of the pictures of royal triumphs that have come down to us from ancient days.