The Twelfth Transforming (20 page)

Tiye nodded faintly. “But it would be better to wait until morning,” she objected, surprised to hear her voice so calm. “Most of them are unfit to speak. Kheruef will help you.”

There was a stir beyond the torches’ harsh flare, and someone whispered, “Horus comes!” Already the crowd was prone in the grass, faces pressed into the earth, and Tiye realized immediately that she could not bear to witness her son’s shock. She took a last look at the waxen face, the glazed eyes that leaped with a semblance of life under the torches’ light, and turned away.

Tiye paced her apartments for most of the night, too distraught to rest. She expected Ay to request an audience, but the day turned into afternoon and the afternoon into the stale breathlessness of a summer night, and he did not come. She made no effort to summon him, knowing that he would appear when he was ready. She choked down some food and allowed Piha to see to her bathing, dressing, and painting, but refused to receive either Tia-Ha, who came to her at noon, or Nefertiti, who asked to be admitted in the evening. She walked from reception hall to bedchamber and back repeatedly, her mind taking refuge in the exercise of the solving of a puzzle. Sitamun was an excellent swimmer. Drunk or sober, the lake represented no threat to a woman who had been a fearless worshiper of river and lake since she had been old enough to walk. Sitamun was empress, and Nefertiti’s swift acceptance of a race lost had been too facile, too eager. Or had it?
Am I misreading my niece’s character through the wavering vision of my own grief? Sitamun was very drunk, and so were most of the other women. Was Nefertiti sober? The party was Nefertiti’s idea. A perfect setting
. Tiye placed both hands over her burning eyes and groaned aloud.
I wish you would come, Ay
, she thought as she stopped by her couch and heard Piha moving quietly behind her, lighting the lamps.
My daughter lies under the knives of the royal sem-priests. My son has shut himself away in his own chambers, and his sobs can be heard outside those heavy double doors
.

Ay was finally announced an hour later and, ordering her servants out, closed the doors behind them himself. His eyes were filmed and sunken under the protective kohl, and for the first time Tiye saw the sharp military set of his shoulders curved in anguish. They eyed each other over the soft glow of the lamps until Tiye motioned him to sit and herself sank nervously to the edge of her couch. Although he did not often observe the strict protocol surrounding an audience with royalty, he now waited for her to speak first, and she was forced to take a deep breath.

“I do not think I want to know,” she said harshly.

“You know already. So do I. Every slave and servant in the palace has been cajoled, threatened, or beaten. Every one of Osiris Amunhotep’s wives and Tehen-Aten has been questioned. Only Princess Tadukhipa had anything useful to say.”

“And what was that?”

“She saw Nefertiti and Sitamun enter the water together sometime before the fire walking began.” He put out a hand to forestall Tiye’s shocked outburst. “No,” he said grimly. “My daughter did not perform the deed with her own delicate hands. The princess saw her not long afterward, being dried by her body servant.”

“Did you caution Tadukhipa?”

“I told her never to speak of what she had seen because it would embarrass Queen Nefertiti. It was a long time before the little one understood.”

Tiye looked down on the hands that had twisted together painfully in her lap. Carefully she loosened them. “There is always some doubt.”

“Of course. But only the shadow of a shadow. The desert police found a man wandering behind the desert hills this morning. His tongue had been cut out. It was a wonder that he had not drowned in his own blood. Needless to say, he could not read or write. He was a palace slave, that much is certain from the softness of his skin and hands. He was scratched about the arms and stomach. I saw him myself.”

Their eyes met. “She cannot be punished,” Tiye whispered.

“Of course not. Even if her guilt could be proved, which it cannot, she is a queen, and as such her person is above the common law. We cannot even arrest the steward Meryra. That would be tantamount to admitting that we believe Nefertiti is at least implicated.”

“I would like to see both of them flayed until the flesh falls from their bones!” she cried out bitterly. “What can I tell Amunhotep?”

“There is no point in telling him anything, Majesty. Only he can discipline in this matter, and I do not think he will do anything but be distressed. Besides…”

“Besides, we are all guilty of similar acts of jealousy and fear,” she finished for him hoarsely. “Nefertiti will learn discretion, as we did. Let me rest against you, Ay. I am sick at heart and so tired that I cannot think anymore. I want to grieve like any mother, and with you I can lay my divinity aside.”

He came and sat beside her. Her head slid against his chest with the ease of long familiarity, and he put both arms around her neck, as he had so many times in their childhood. The steady beat of his heart comforted her, and for the first time since she had glanced out over the lake the previous evening, she felt her body relax and her eyes grow heavy. Ay kissed her and, laying her carefully down, drew the sheet over her.

“Sleep now,” he said. “I will send Piha and your fan-bearers. Do not feel guilt, Tiye, over the thought that you might have prevented this by plotting to keep a balance between my daughter and yours. If Sitamun had been more wily and less sure of herself, it might be Nefertiti who was awaiting beautification in the House of the Dead.”

She murmured, eyes closed, and heard him go out and call to her servants.
Of all the children born to Amunhotep and me, only Sitamun and my son grew to adulthood
, she thought dimly, already half-asleep.
Now Sitamun is gone. Oh, my husband, is it possible that all our fruit will wither and fall? So much love over the years, without living trace? I wish you were here in my arms
.

9

P
haraoh did not appear in public during the seventy days of mourning for Sitamun, and it seemed to the court as though he were once again in a prison, this time of his own choosing. The forbidding double doors leading to his reception hall remained closed. He was not seen in the garden or on his building sites, though Tiye received word that he had ordered new quarries opened at Gebel Silsileh to provide sandstone for the masons. His butler, Parennefer, and his chief steward, Panhesy, passed through the palace corridors unobtrusively, seeing to the wants of their lord. Tiye questioned them occasionally, anxious for news of her son, and they assured her that Pharaoh was well, that his grief was almost spent, and that he was purifying himself in coarse linen and incense ash before his Aten shrine.

“Why is it necessary for him to be purified?” Tiye asked Panhesy, puzzled. “And if that is his desire, surely only Ptahhotep has the authority to perform such rites.”

Dropping his earnest gaze, the young man bowed low to her and answered with his face hidden between his outstretched, silver-laden arms. “It is Pharaoh the man who cleanses himself, not Pharaoh the god on behalf of Egypt,” he said diffidently, and with that Tiye had to be content.

Like her husband Nefertiti was staying away from active involvement in court life. She was sometimes seen walking decorously in her gardens dressed only in white linen, her black hair sleekly shining, her arms bare of jewels. Tiye noted grimly, on the few occasions when she caught a glimpse of the slim, straight figure, that Nefertiti’s beauty was only enhanced by the naturalness she had affected. Tiye herself bore no ill will to the girl. She understood Nefertiti’s vicious act with the wisdom of a ruler for whom an uncompromising line between virtue and dark necessity did not exist.

Any royal death precipitated rumor and excited gossip, particularly among the harem women. Tia-Ha told Tiye that conjecture was running rife, but the women were tolerant. They believed that both queen and empress had been in love with Pharaoh, and Nefertiti had been driven to destroy a rival by jealousy and passion. Such affairs of the heart were commonplace. The inhabitants of the harem understood such things, and the talk was kindly. The only detail that caused them unease was the discovery of the mutilated servant. It was usual for them to pursue their intrigues through subordinates, but to torture the instrument of one’s freedom instead of rewarding him violated one of the harem’s unwritten laws. They approved of Tiye’s decision to have the man nursed back to health and taken into her service, and regarded her action as the only real proof that the queen was guilty.

Tiye listened carefully to her friend’s words. She knew that once Sitamun was buried, the gossip would wither. It was a matter of waiting through the slow days of mourning.

The empress’s funeral was a restrained tribute to a woman who had run second in almost every race she had attempted. Still young at her death, she had nevertheless belonged to the old administration. After only a few brief years in the arms of her popular brother, Thothmes, she had been forced, when he died suddenly, to please an aging, unpredictable man. Since then she had walked in the shadow of her mother, less intelligent, less vital, less powerful than Tiye. Even the winning of the empress’s crown, her one bid for self-determination, had brought her merely a momentary vindication.

Only those ministers and courtiers obliged to attend royal interments formed the cortege, together with the official mourners. Pharaoh emerged from his period of meditation looking ungainly and alarmingly vague and took his place silently with Ay, Tiye, and Nefertiti. They rode on their litters without exchanging a word, the procession strung out behind them along the same route to Amunhotep III’s tomb they had taken such a short time ago.

The rituals were performed in the same mood of dignified simplicity. Tiye had dreaded the moment when she would pass her husband’s possessions to reach the chamber adjacent to him, where Sitamun was to lie. But when the time came for her to walk through the tomb behind her daughter’s coffin, she found that all trace of him had already been rendered anonymous by the events in Malkatta since his death. Time had moved the living forward. The thrones he had filled with his regal bulk, the glittering chests closed upon his thousands of gowns, the boxes hiding his many jewels could have belonged to one of the ancients.
I wonder if the darkness will stir when I leave this place
, she thought as she stepped forward to lay flowers over Sitamun,
if currents will flow between father and daughter through the magic eyes of their sarcophagi. One of your queens has come to you, my husband. How long will it be before I, too, share these damp rooms?

The feast that brought the days-long ceremony to an end was conducted with quiet decorum, and as soon as good manners allowed, the courtiers drifted to their litters and vanished back to Malkatta.

Tiye rode back to the palace beside Pharaoh. He had wept over Sitamun’s remains quietly and with a dignity that surprised them all, and he did not talk to Tiye as they swayed along under Ra’s blind ferocity. They passed through the city of the dead, Thothmes III’s magnificent beige funerary temple shimmering like a paradisiacal mirage on their right, and were almost in sight of the palace walls when Amunhotep gave an abrupt order, and both his litter and Tiye’s swung left. His father’s great temple began to overshadow them, bars of shade alternating with white sand, but the litters did not turn onto the ram-lined avenue that would have led to its pillared fore-court. The two colossi loomed ahead, their shadows short in the noon sun. Amunhotep spoke again, and the litters came to a halt. He stepped down, inviting Tiye to do the same, and she followed him as he walked up to the nearer statue. For a second he craned his head, his gaze traveling its awesome height, and then he took her arm politely and drew her into the pale shade.

“Majesty Mother,” he said, his voice still thick with the tears he had spent, his eyes under swollen lids resting on her face with a look that was almost an apology. “For seventy days I have prayed and wept in my rooms, beating my breast and rubbing my forehead with ashes from my shrine, because I could have saved the life of my sister and did not.”

“Amunhotep,” she protested, touching him gently, “her death was not the fault of Pharaoh. Why do you reproach yourself?” His sincerity, so genuine but misdirected, disarmed her. She touched the corner of his mouth with one hennaed finger, as she had often done when he was a child, a sign of affectionate disagreement. He kissed it and drew away.

“I have heard it said that Sitamun was a victim of her own ambition, but it is not so. She died because I was a coward. I did wrong in the sight of the god.”

“How can that be? You are Amun-Ra’s incarnation.”

“I knew what I was obliged to do but quailed. The eyes of Egypt are blind, her ears stopped with deceit. She would have shouted against me. But I am braver now. I am ready.”

Tiye suppressed the sigh that rose to her lips. “You frighten people with your riddles,” she chided gently. “A king must speak clearly so that his people may obey as one.”

“It is yet two months to the end of Shemu and the celebration of New Year’s Day,” he said. “I want us to go north to Memphis, just you and I and our servants. Can you leave the court for that long?”

His request sent a tide of uneasiness flooding through her. Turning away from him, she let her gaze wander the cracked brownness of the fields that spread from her feet to the line of dusty palms that traced the Nile.
Why do I suddenly cringe?
she thought.
It is natural that he should want to distance him self from the pain of loss for a time. But just the two of us? Does he have something serious to discuss with me? It is the prospect of him and me alone together that alarms me. Why?
Behind her, Amunhotep’s breath was warm on her naked back, and she felt his hand settle pleadingly on her shoulder. “I suppose that Nefertiti can take my place for a while,” Tiye said without turning. “There is always a lull at this time of year, and it is true, I would like to see Memphis again. It has been a long time. Not since your father and I….” Her voice trailed away, but then she resumed. “Very well, my son. I would like that very much.” It was the truth. More than anything she wanted to escape the miasma of death that had for so long drifted through the palace, the whispers and innuendoes, the strain of trying to see beyond men’s eyes to their hidden thoughts.