The Twelfth Transforming (11 page)

Ay glanced at her and then away, knowing as well as she what had prompted the sudden urge to travel. “If you like, Majesty,” he offered noncommittally. “But are you sure that you do not also need to get away from them?” He indicated the little group gathered in the shade of the prince’s apartment wall. From where he and Tiye sat, the prince himself could be clearly seen, cross-legged on the grass as usual, short white kilt rumpled above thin knees, white helmet bobbing as he gesticulated at the listening crowd. His words did not reach Ay and Tiye, but there was no mistaking the authority in the abrupt movements of the hands, the confidence in the uplifted face.

Tiye clicked her tongue. “Look at him!” she said. “He drifts about his apartments with Nefertiti on one arm and that gaggle of priests all around him, arguing, arguing while the sun pours down outside. His nights are spent plucking on his lute and dictating songs. What is the matter with him? He should be splashing in the water with her, running naked under the sycamores, lying with her under the stars. What is he saying to them with such passion?”

“Why don’t you ask him?”

She turned her head to look at him. “I am not sure I want to know,” she replied simply. “His presence here has already changed the mood of the palace, but I cannot say how. I wait for word of Nefertiti’s first pregnancy, but that word does not come. Only silly servants’ rumors that I ignore.”

“You have never ignored a rumor in your life,” he objected. “Nor have you shrunk from the truth, however painful that may be. Why do you want to run away?”

“Because I am beginning to wonder if the game I have played with Pharaoh has gone too far and I am unable to undo a mistake. It is not a game anymore. There sits the future lord of the greatest empire in the world, with more power latent in his hands than the gods themselves have. What kind of a pharaoh am I forcing on Egypt in order to vindicate my hatred of a dead man and show my hold over a living one?”

“You are being too complicated,” he chided her gently. “The throne is his by right. It is the prospect of letting go that terrifies you, the rumors of his impotence that titillate you with a vision of Egypt remaining in your hands forever. Summon him and ask him what he teaches these hangers-on of his. Summon my daughter and ask her if she is still a virgin. Why do you shrink?”

“I shall go to Djarukha with all my musicians and friends,” she snapped. “There I shall bathe alone and take long sleeps in the heat of the day and think about what you have said. I shall get drunk at sunset and laugh immoderately over nothing. Oh, smell the wind, Ay, so full of flowers!” She stretched luxuriously. “The season of Peret always wakens memories in me, good memories. I find myself dreaming of how it was when Father and Mother were alive and we were all at Akhmin, or the many summers Pharaoh and I spent at the palace in Memphis, drunk with each other.”

“I know,” he responded quietly. “This is the only time of the year that I fancy I hear Nefertiti’s mother laughing among the women. I love Tey dearly and do not want to relive the past, but it lies in waiting every spring.”

They went on talking desultorily of the past, but their eyes were drawn to the group on the grass, and finally their conversation died away.

Tiye sailed to Djarukha on a river that had regained its banks, stopping at Akhmin to sweep Tey and her servants into the royal entourage. As Thebes receded and they left the green, landscaped estates of the nobles behind, Tiye allowed herself to surrender to the atmosphere of rural Egypt. She, Ay, and Tey sat under awnings on the deck watching the tiny mud-brick villages slip by, set in the hectic green of the new crops. The river itself was busy with native and foreign craft plying between Memphis and Thebes, but Tiye, dozing with eyes half-closed as her slave whisked at the flies around her, let her thoughts meander across the palm-delineated fields to the sheltering cliffs and the desert beyond, to an Egypt redolent with Ma’at, unchanging and peaceful, under the superficial shouts and cries of commerce.

“Already I feel calmer,” she remarked to her brother and Tey one violet evening as they sat replete after the last meal, listening to the soft wailing of pipes from the stern and turning their faces to the pungent night breeze. “Malkatta is the heart of Egypt, but it is all too easy to forget that the country is the body. When we do leave the palace, it is to scurry to Memphis with curtains drawn against the eyes of the fellahin. Our idea of beauty becomes the formality of royal lakes and flower beds ranked like a military division on display.”

“Perhaps Your Majesty would like to call a scribe and dictate a poem,” Ay murmured dryly. “Something extolling the virtues of a simple life. The fellahin would be gratified to know that the soil they water with their sweat is beautiful.”

“Oh, I don’t think they would,” Tey said, her hands moving nervously in the chaos of cosmetics, bits of jewelry, small tools, and uncut stones that traveled with her everywhere. “They have no conception of beauty, and it would only upset them to try and teach them anything. Look at this piece of jasper, Ay.” She held up a red stone against whose surface the sunset was sullenly etched. “I polished it myself for days. Artificial flowers are coming into vogue, and I thought I would try my hand at reproducing the red karkadeh, but there’s a small brown flaw in the upper corner. It didn’t show at first. I was desolate.”

Ay took the stone from his wife’s rough, blunt fingers. “I was not serious, Tey,” he said, rolling it between forefinger and thumb.

“Oh.” She snatched the jasper back good-naturedly and tossed it into the leather bag in her rumpled lap. “I must press some grape flowers when we get to Djarukha. I was thinking of a circlet done in gold and carnelian, or perhaps even ivory, for Nefertiti. But she seems to want nothing but lapis lazuli these days.”

Tiye glanced across at her sharply, but as usual Tey had spoken out of an absentminded innocence. The little head in its straight, stark, old-fashioned wig was bent over the restless hands. Tiye’s eyes sought her brother’s, but Ay was watching his wife with an indulgent smile.
There is no point in trying to discuss Nefertiti with Tey
, Tiye mused.
I will put them all out of my mind. Besides, where is the harm in Nefertiti’s decking herself with the precious stone from which the hair of deities is fashioned? It is only a matter of time before she herself is deified, and she knows it. The crowns that adorn the likenesses of myself are rimmed in lapis lazuli
.

At Djarukha the three of them swam, ate immoderately, and spent the evenings in wine and reminiscences. While Tey laid her collection of flowers under papyrus sheets and wandered the riverbank with her young bodyguard, Tiye and Ay sat in the coolness of the reception hall, sometimes talking, more often than not simply lost in their own thoughts. Ay was anxious to return to his responsibilities in Thebes, Tiye knew, but she herself was content to explore the illusion that she was again a young goddess for whom a pharaoh in the flower of an arrogant maturity waited in the new palace on the west bank. She slept long and deeply in the room that looked out over her own verdant acres, her own orchards and grapevines, and none of her pretty copper mirrors left their cases.

They returned to Thebes a month later, leaving Tey at Akhmin on the way home. Once back at Malkatta, Ay vanished into his offices, and Tiye entered the harem in search of Tia-Ha to hear the latest news. The distance she had just placed between the court and herself, however briefly, had served to heighten her awareness of change, and as she paced the gleaming, echoing corridors, she knew that a new wind was blowing. White-kilted priests bowed to her as she swept by them. Strange, youthful faces bearing the arm bands of the royal scribes and temple overseers turned to her in respectful awe. Rounding a corner, she found herself face to face with a burly soldier, who swiftly covered his face and knelt, his own surprise evident in his clumsy obeisance. He was dressed in a short linen kilt and an unadorned white helmet, and his broad chest was bare but for a gold pectoral of Ra-Harakhti, falcon-headed sun god. From his belt there hung a small scimitar, and in one hand he clutched a spear.
What is a temple soldier from On doing here?
she wondered, passing him with barely a glance, and the guards on the harem doors opened for her. Kheruef came hurrying to meet her, his staff of office held negligently under one arm, his headcloth wound loosely around his shaved scalp. Enquiring for Tia-Ha, she also ordered him to have Ay in her audience hall at sundown.

Inside the cells of the women it was cool and murmurous with whispers and soft footfalls. The door to Tia-Ha’s apartment stood open, and a gush of perfumed air funneled out to greet Tiye as she entered. Bent over a low ebony table covered with tiny, unsealed alabaster pots was Tia-Ha’s cosmetician, a spoon in each hand. He and his mistress went to the floor, and Tiye waved them to their feet. The stench of myrrh, lotus, and unnameable essences was overpowering.

“What are you doing,” Tiye asked curiously, coming forward. “The smell is making me quite dizzy.”

“I am trying to select a suitable perfume, Majesty,” Tia-Ha replied, stirring in a pot with one hennaed finger and holding it up to her nose. “I am tired of myrrh and aloes and persea. I am hoping also to sell some of these. My cosmeticians say it is a good year for rich oils. Some of these come from a cargo of goods I have had shipped to me from the Great Green Sea in exchange for linen. You can go,” she said, nodding to the man, who laid down his tools and bowed himself out.

“Send some to my own cosmeticians,” Tiye said, “but not the myrrh. The palace is already too full of the whiff of religion.”

Tia-Ha raised both carefully plucked eyebrows, clapped her hands for refreshments, and sank onto the cushions littering the floor as Tiye herself went down.

“But it wafts without bringing pleasure, My Goddess,” she retorted. “A puff of great seriousness and no frivolity. Is Djarukha so far away that your spies have not reached you?”

“I did not wish to see them. Tell me the gossip, Princess.”

Tia-Ha rolled her sooty eyes. “The harem gossip is always dripping with juices but not much fruit. And the body servants of royalty are very close-mouthed.”

“But we are old friends”—Tiye smiled—“and you will tell me all.”

Tia-Ha sighed. Her slave came quietly offering dates and wine. “We see almost as much of the prince as we did in the days when he lived in the apart ment next to this. He and the princess, the priests, and the queen.”

“Sitamun?” Tiye came alert. “Tia-Ha, are there any whispers about Amunhotep and his sister? She will end up dead by royal decree if she is not cautious.”

“There are whispers, of course, but Her Majesty is never alone with the prince. She is too clever for that.”

“Have you seen Pharaoh while I was away? Does he know there is gossip about her?”

“Majesty,” Tia-Ha said gently, pulling a sticky black date from the dish and staring at it thoughtfully, “these are the questions of a novice, a child. Even little Tadukhipa, who walks the passage with one shoulder against the wall and will converse with no one but her aunt, knows the answers. Are you well?”

No
, Tiye thought despairingly.
I am suddenly old and tired and do not wish to summon the strength to face a new administration
. She rose. “Perhaps I wish to be a novice and a child again,” she snapped brusquely. “Your perfumes have given me a headache, Princess.”

“If you want me to spy for you, I will,” Tia-Ha responded equably, “but Kheruef’s women do it better. I prefer to evaluate that which is already known.” She nibbled at the date and then reached for her goblet. “Princess Henut, she of the daunting dignity, came to blows a few days ago with one of the Babylonians. Henut belongs to a fading breed, Majesty. She has always clung to a proper reverence for Amun-Ra, and the incense in her apartment would choke a priest. The Babylonian had been putting on airs. It seems that the prince visited her and burned some incense of his own to the Babylonian’s god. The woman was boasting in front of Henut. Henut struck her with a fly whisk. The Babylonian was foolish enough to slap the princess’s solemn face. Kheruef had her whipped.”

Tiye stared at the beautiful, plump mouth against which a few strands of Tia-Ha’s long black hair had become caught with date juice. “Are you saying that a harem fight was precipitated by…by
religion
?”

“I am. It seems that Amun still has his champions.”

“I cannot believe it!”

“I must say one more thing.” Tia-Ha rose and met the empress’s eye. “The prince sent a pair of gold earrings to the Babylonian when he heard of her punishment.”

Tiye groaned. “Oh, gods.” The hierarchy within the harem was rigid, and by tradition it was Pharaoh’s Keeper of the Harem Door who meted out punishments and rewards. To flout the custom was not only unwise, it was dangerous. If the women thought they could woo anyone other than the one man set over them, there would be a scramble to bribe, cajole, or threaten, and the harem would become an undisciplined rabble.
Amunhotep has lived in it all his life
, Tiye thought, incredulous.
He must know the unwritten rules. Did he feel that the Babylonian woman was part of his family and must be protected?
She turned on her heel and left without another word.

The prince was sitting at an open window, one elbow resting on the sill, his eyes on the bright garden bathed in late afternoon sun below him. At his feet a scribe sat cross-legged, a scroll unrolled under his hands, reading aloud. Tiye had been able to hear the soporific drone long before she made out any words. The gloom in the chamber was cool but for small splashes of white light pouring from the slits beneath the roof. Three or four tiny monkeys in jeweled collars loped and grinned at each other as they eluded the grasp of their keepers, their shrieks echoing against the lines of wooden pillars that fluted up to the dusky blue ceiling. Half-woven lotus wreaths, negligently piled on the prince’s stepped throne, lay quivering and wilting under the lazy batting of a large mottled cat. At Tiye’s herald’s call, Amunhotep swung from the window, and the scribe ceased to read and bowed.