The Egyptian (71 page)

Shubattu, the Hittite prince, slapped him on the back and laughed, “You say rightly, Horemheb! You will not now deprive us of our pleasure. To save him for your enjoyment we tore no flesh from his bones but only very carefully pinched him with pincers and wooden screws.”

In his vanity Horemheb resented these words, nor did it please him to be touched by the prince. He frowned and said, “You are drunk, Shubattu. As for Aziru, I have no other purpose than to show the whole world the fate that awaits any man who trusts the Hittites! Since in the course of this night we have become friends and have drunk many fraternal cups together, I will spare this ally of yours and for friendship’s sake will give him an easy death.”

Shubattu’s face was distorted with rage, for the Hittites are tender of their honor, although as everyone knows they betray and sell their allies without a thought if profitable. Indeed all nations do so and all able rulers. The Hittites are more barefaced in their behavior than others and made no effort to find pretexts and excuses to disguise the matter and give it some veneer of justice. Yet Shubattu was wroth. His companions laid their hands over his mouth, and dragging him away from Horemheb, they held him fast until his impotent fury caused him to spew up the wine he had drunk, and he grew quieter.

Horemheb summoned Aziru from his tent and was greatly astonished to see him step out into the sight of all with the proud bearing of a king, wearing a royal mantle over his shoulders. For Aziru had eaten fat meat and drunk strong wine. He tossed his head and laughed aloud as he walked to the place of execution and shouted insults at the officers and guards. His hair was combed and curled, his face gleamed with oil, and he called to Horemheb over the heads of the soldiers: “Horemheb, you filthy Egyptian! Fear me no longer, for I am defeated and you need not hide now behind the spears of your troops. Come hither that I may wipe the dirt from my feet on your cloak, for such a sty as this camp of yours I never saw in all my life. I would enter the presence of Baal with clean feet.”

Horemheb was delighted at his words, and laughing loudly he shouted to Aziru, “I cannot approach you, because the Syrian stench of you turns my stomach, notwithstanding the mantle you have somehow stolen to hide your uncleanly carcass. Yet without doubt you are a valiant man, Aziru, to laugh at death. I give you an easy death, for the sake of my own honor.”

He sent his bodyguard to escort Aziru and to prevent the soldiers from casting mud on him. The ruffians of Horemheb surrounded him and smote with their spear shafts at any who offered him abuse, for they no longer felt any hatred for Aziru because of the great sufferings he had brought on them; they admired his courage. They escorted Queen Keftiu also and Aziru’s two boys to the place of execution. Keftiu had adorned herself and painted her face with red and white, and the boys stalked to the fateful spot with the bearing of princes, the elder leading the younger by the hand.

When Aziru saw them he weakened and said, “Keftiu, Keftiu, my white mare, my love and the apple of my eye! I am grieved indeed that you must follow me even into death, for life would still have been very sweet to you.”

Keftiu answered, “Be not distressed for me, my king. I follow you willingly. You are my husband, and your strength is that of a bull. There is no other man who could content me after you had gone. During our life together I have sundered you from all other women and bound you to me. I will not permit you to go alone into the land of death, where all those fair women who have died before me are assuredly awaiting you. I would follow you there though my life were spared—I would strangle myself in my own hair, my king, for I was but a slave and you made me queen, and I bore you two fine boys.”

Aziru was elated at her words and said to his sons, “My handsome boys! You were born into the world as the sons of a king. Die then like princes, that I need not blush for you. Believe me, death is no more painful than a drawn tooth. Be valiant, my sweet boys!”

With this he knelt upon the ground before the headsman. Turning to Keftiu he said, “I am weary of seeing these stinking Egyptians all about me, and their bloodstained spears. Bare your sweet bosom to me, Keftiu, that I may behold your beauty as I go. I shall die as happily as I have lived with you.”

Keftiu bared her opulent breasts, the headsman raised the great sword and at one stroke swept Aziru’s head from his shoulders. It fell at Keftiu’s feet, the rich blood spurted violently from the great body with the last beats of the pulse and splashed the boys so that they were stricken with horror, and the younger one shuddered. But Keftiu lifted Aziru’s head from the ground, kissed the swollen lips, and stroked the torn cheeks. Pressing the face to her bosom she said to her sons, “Hasten, my valiant boys! Go to your father without fear, my little ones, for your mother is all impatience to follow him.”

The two boys knelt down obediently, the elder one still holding the other by the hand, and the headsman smote their heads from their young necks with ease. Then, having thrust their bodies aside with his foot, he severed Keftiu’s fat, white neck at a stroke. Thus all of them received an easy death. But by Horemheb’s order their bodies were thrown into a pit to be devoured by wild beasts.

Thus my friend Aziru perished without seeking to bribe death, and Horemheb made peace with the Hittites. He knew as well as they that this peace was but an armistice since Sidon, Smyrna, Byblos, and Kadesh were still under their sway. The Hittites had made a strongly fortified base of Kadesh for the control of northern Syria. But now both the Hittites and Horemheb were weary of war, and Horemheb was glad to make peace, for he had interests in Thebes that required his supervision. He needed also to restore order in the land of Kush and among the Nubians, who in their freedom had run wild and refused to pay tribute to Egypt.

Tutankhamon reigned in Egypt during these years, though he was but a stripling and took interest in nothing but the building of his own tomb. The people blamed him for all the loss and misery resulting from the war. Their hatred for him was bitter, and they said, “What can we expect of a Pharaoh whose consort is of the blood of the false Pharaoh?”

Eie did not quell such talk but rather spread new stories among the people, of Tutankhamon’s thoughtlessness and greed, and of his attempts to gather all the treasures of Egypt into his tomb.

Throughout this time I was never once in Thebes but traveled everywhere with the army, which required my skill, and I shared its hardships and privations. Yet from the men of Thebes I learned that Pharaoh Tutankhamon was frail and sickly and that some secret illness consumed his body. It seemed that the war in Syria had used up his strength. Whenever news come of a victory for Horemheb, Pharaoh fell sick. After a defeat he recovered and rose from his bed. This, they said, had every appearance of sorcery, and anyone who kept his eyes open could see that Pharaoh’s health was bound up with the Syrian war.

As time went on, Eie grew ever more impatient, and time after time he sent this message to Horemheb:

“Can you not cease this warfare and give peace to Egypt? I am already an old man and weary of waiting. Conquer, Horemheb, and bring us peace that I may have my agreed reward. I will see to it that you too have yours.”

For this reason I was not at all surprised when, after the war was over and we were sailing up the river in warships decked with banners, we were met by the news that Pharaoh Tutankhamon had stepped into the golden boat of his father Ammon to sail to the Western Land. It was said that Tutankhamon had had a severe attack on the day that tidings reached Thebes of the fall of Megiddo and the conclusion of peace. The nature of the fatal disorder was the subject of dispute among the physicians of the House of Life. It was said that his stomach was blackened with poison, but no one had certain knowledge of the cause. The people would have it that he died of an access of his own malignance when the war ended, because his greatest delight had been to see Egypt suffer.

I know that in pressing his seal into the clay at the foot of the peace treaty, Horemheb killed Pharaoh as surely as if he had thrust a knife into his heart. Peace was all that Eie had been waiting for before sweeping Tutankhamon from his path and ascending the throne as the “Peace King.”

We were compelled to soil our faces and to haul down the bright pennants of the ships, and Horemheb, in bitter resentment, loosed and threw into the river the bodies of Syrian and Hittite commanders, which, in the manner of the great Pharaohs, he had hung head downward from the bows of his ship. He had left his marsh rats in Syria to bring peace to the country and to stuff themselves on the fat of the land after all the hardships and tribulations of the war. His ruffians—his scum—he brought home with him, to celebrate the peace in Thebes. These also were bitter and cursed Tutankhamon, who even in death destroyed their pleasure.

So I returned to Thebes and resolved never again to leave it. My eyes had seen enough of man’s evil ways, and there was nothing new beneath the ancient sun. I resolved to remain and live out my days in poverty in the copperfounder’s house. All the wealth I had acquired in Syria had been spent on sacrifices for Aziru, being riches I had no desire to keep. To me they smelled of blood, and I should have had no joy of them.

Even yet my measure was not full. A task was now allotted me that I did not desire and that filled me with dread. I could not evade it, and once more, after only a few days, I departed from Thebes. Eie and Horemheb believed that they had spun their webs and carried out their plans with great sagacity, so as to bring power fully into their hands. But this power slipped through their fingers before they knew it, and the destiny of Egypt hung on a woman’s whim.

IN ACCORDANCE with the bargain struck with Horemheb, Eie was to be crowned Pharaoh as soon as Tutankhamon’s funeral obsequies were over. He therefore hastened the embalming and stopped further work on the tomb, which remained small and insignificant in comparison with those of the great Pharaohs. By the same agreement he had engaged to coerce Princess Baketamon into marriage with Horemheb, thus enabling Horemheb to prefer a lawful claim to the throne after Eie’s death, despite his low birth. Eie had arranged with the priests that, after the period of mourning was over and Horemheb came to celebrate the festival of victory, Princess Baketamon should appear before Horemheb in the guise of Sekhmet, in Sekhmet’s temple, and there give herself to him, that their union might be blessed by the gods and Horemheb himself become divine. Such was Eie’s plan, but the Princess, with much care and forethought, had made her own, in which I know Queen Nefertiti encouraged her. Queen Nefertiti hated Horemheb, and she hoped also to become-next to Baketamon—the most powerful woman in Egypt.

So godless, so iniquitous was this plan that only the guile of a malignant woman could have conceived it. So incredible was it that it came near to succeeding. Only when this scheme became known could the magnanimity of the Hittites be accounted for, as shown in their offers of peace, their yielding of Megiddo and the land of Amurru, and in their other concessions.

Since the death of Nefertiti’s husband and her enforced submission to Ammon, the Queen had been unable to endure the thought of being set aside from the throne and becoming of no more consequence than any other lady about the court. She was still beautiful, though her beauty now required meticulous care for its preservation. It won to her many of Egypt’s nobles, who hung like drones about the court and its inconsiderable Pharaoh. By her intelligence and guile she also won the friendship of Princess Baketamon, whose innate haughtiness she fanned to a blaze until what had been pride became mania. The Princess became so arrogant that she would not suffer the touch of any ordinary mortal nor even allow anyone to pass through her shadow. She had preserved her virginity in the belief that there was no man in Egypt worthy of her and was already past the normal age for marriage. Maidenhood had gone to her head, but I believe a good marriage might have cured her.

Nefertiti persuaded Baketamon that she was born to achieve great things and to liberate Egypt from the hands of low-born usurpers. She spoke to her of the great Queen Hatshepsut, who fastened a royal beard to her chin, girded herself with a lion’s tail, and ruled Egypt from the throne of the Pharaohs. She declared that Baketamon’s beauty resembled that of the great queen.

She also spoke much evil of Horemheb so that the Princess in her maidenly pride began to dread him as a man of low birth and as one who might possess her with a warrior’s roughness and defile her sacred blood. Yet I believe she was secretly fascinated by his rough strength—she had looked on him overmuch and been inflamed by his glance, although she would never admit as much even to herself.

Nefertiti had no difficulty in exerting her influence over the Princess when, as the Syrian war drew to an end, Eie’s and Horemheb’s plans became ever more evident. I do not fancy that Eie attempted to conceal his purpose from his daughter Nefertiti. But she hated her father because, having made what use he could of her, he had thrust her aside and kept her hidden in the golden house because she was the widow of the accursed Pharaoh. Beauty and intelligence united in a woman whose heart the years have hardened are dangerous qualities—more dangerous than knives unsheathed, more destructive than the copper scythes of chariots. The best proof of this lies in the scheme Nefertiti contrived and in which she persuaded Princess Baketamon to join.

The plot came to light when Horemheb, having just arrived in Thebes, began in his impatience to loiter about the apartments of Princess Baketamon in order to see and speak with her, although she refused to receive him. Chancing to see there a Hittite envoy who sought an audience of the Princess, he wondered why she should receive such a man and give him so long an interview. Of his own accord, therefore, and without taking counsel of any, he arrested this Hittite, whose manner was haughty and who addressed him in terms only to be used by such as are sure of their authority.