The Twelfth Transforming (24 page)

Her complacency regarding the harmlessness of the Teaching was shaken one day, however, when Ptahhotep appeared at the hour of formal audience with one of his young priests. She had earlier caught sight of him waiting far back in the hall, and something in his stance, arms tensely folded over the priestly leopard skin that hung across his chest, shaven head lowered, made her uneasy. The young priest beside him was fidgeting, moving from one leather-sandaled foot to the other, fingering the white ribbons that encircled his head.
Not a we’eb
, she thought.
Perhaps a Master of Mysteries, but I cannot see his arm band
. She had to wait through three more ministerial speeches, her scribe’s pen scratching diligently at her feet, before Ptahhotep and the younger priest approached the throne and made their reverence. The hall was now almost empty, and Tiye’s stomach reminded her that it was past the time of the noon meal.

Ptahhotep came closer, hesitated, and Tiye motioned her herald and bodyguard out of his way.

“You may speak, High Priest.”

He stepped to the foot of the throne. “Majesty and Goddess, I do not know how to put this carefully. Since Great Horus began his Teaching, there has been increasing unrest at Karnak. No priest had neglected his daily observances, but among the younger men there have been arguments, discussions, even quarrels, and the peace and orderliness of the cells is threatened. My phylarchs tell me that the young priests do not always sleep at night. They creep into one another’s cells, they take scrolls from the temple library, suddenly little animosities are breaking out. Everywhere but in the holiest of holiest itself, the priests whisper of Ra-Harakhti. Others even question the omnipotence of Amun himself. Myself, Si-Mut, the older men know that this is but a small eddy soon dissipated, but others are not so patient.”

“We have discussed this before. Pharaoh means no disrespect to Amun. Has he not ordered you to continue to make the sacrifices each day on his behalf? Control your priests yourself, Ptahhotep, and do not look to me to do it.”

“Majesty, the question is not one of my control,” he replied, offended, “but of this priest.” He indicated the shamefaced young man at his elbow. “He has requested permission to leave Amun’s service and join the ranks of the Aten priests preparing to serve in Pharaoh’s new temple. If I let him go, will there be others? Do I discipline him, command him to go home to his family in disgrace, command him to stay?”

“Really, Ptahhotep, I…” Tiye began but then stopped herself. The decision was not an easy one. Several courtiers had recently closed their Amun shrines, ordering new shrines to the Aten from their goldsmiths, but for them it was a new game to play. Before her now was the first stirring of something deeper, the first priest with the conviction to act. Tiye had sometimes seen priestly linens among those who gathered to hear Pharaoh teach. If she ordered Ptahhotep to discipline this man or to send him home, it would be admitting that his priests served under coercion. If he were released to the Aten, he might start a mass desertion. “You,” she said, turning to the young priest, “what is your name and station?”

The young man bowed. “I am Meryra, Master of Mysteries in the House of the Ben-Ben of Amun.”

“What do you want?”

“I want to be released from the service of Amun. He is a great god, Egypt’s salvation in the days of Hyksos domination, but I no longer believe that he is almighty. It is the Aten who shines on all the world.”

“Why can you not serve both gods?”

“I can worship Amun, but I can only serve the Aten. I wish no harm to any man. I am pure of speech and have never caused offense either with my body or my words. Majesty, I only wish to leave Karnak quietly and join the Aten temple staff.”

“Does Pharaoh know of this?”

“Yes. But he will allow it only with the permission of my superior.”

At least Amunhotep has been diplomatic in this
, Tiye thought.
I can see why Ptahhotep did not go to Pharaoh with his complaint
. “It is pointless to keep men against their will,” she said to the high priest. “They will serve Amun only grudgingly and will make trouble. Let this man go. But, Meryra, you leave having forfeited all you have to the god you are deserting. Do you understand?”

The clear eyes met hers without flinching. “Yes, Majesty.”

“Ptahhotep, I suggest you make it known at Karnak that any priest who leaves on behalf of the Aten immediately impoverishes himself. Thus only the most fervent will go, and the waverers will stay. Is there anything more?”

“Your Majesty is gracious.”

“Go, then. I want my food.”

It would have been dangerously foolish to hold that young man against his will
, she thought as she and her entourage walked toward the banqueting hall.
I only hope that my son has the good sense not to reward Amun’s traitors openly, or we will have a veritable river of greedy priests flowing from one temple to the other at Karnak. Well, to Sebek with them all. Today I want beer with my bread
.

In the weeks that followed, Tiye’s judgment proved to be less effective than she had anticipated. While the abandonment of Amun’s temples that she had feared did not take place, there were enough dissatisfied priests who were encouraged by Ptahhotep’s announcement to shift their allegiance to the Aten. She knew how important it would be to keep a diligent eye on all religious activity and held regular conferences with her spies in priests’ dormitories, hoping that any similar problems could be forestalled.

The few minor disturbances that did occur were promptly dealt with, and Tiye had again begun to feel that she was gaining control over the situation when she received a visit from a visibly disturbed Ay. It was Shemu, when the Inundation still seemed an eternity away, and the scalding wrath of Ra’s breath spread fever and violence through the land.

She had just risen from her afternoon sleep feeling enervated and still exhausted and was sitting on the edge of her couch when her brother was announced. She nodded for him to speak.

“Tiye, I want you to come across the river with me. Pharaoh’s Aten temple is almost complete. There has been much talk of the statues that line the forecourt, and we should see them before the temple is dedicated and we cannot walk where we will.”

Tiye rose listlessly, and Piha draped her in a white gown, fastening jewels around her neck, wrist, and ankles. “I have heard the rumors also. Amunhotep has been trying to persuade me to inspect his craftsmen’s work, but truthfully, Ay, I have not been able to find the interest.” She sat before her cosmetics table and picked up the mirror. It showed her a heavy, puffed face and sallow skin. She put it down again as the cosmetician began to open his pots.

“Find it today.
Aten Gleams
is waiting to ferry us. There might be some air stirring on the river.”

“Don’t taunt me. My eyes are watering, Nebmehy, so be careful with the kohl. I have not seen Mutnodjme for a long time, Ay. Where is she?”

“She and Horemheb have gone north to Memphis, and then to Hnes to visit Horemheb’s father. The marriage seems a good one, Tiye. Depet and Werel’s parties are not the same without my daughter.”

“Your other daughter is not so retiring. Her hostility puts me off my food every evening. Huya tells me that she is pregnant again.” Her Keeper of Wigs set the one she had absently selected on her head, tucking her own auburn hair out of the way, and her Keeper of Jewels draped the hairpiece with a golden, carnelian-studded net. After the Keeper of the Royal Regalia had placed the queen’s cobra coronet on her brow, Tiye picked up the mirror again and this time man aged a smile.

“So her steward told me.” Ay laughed. “She has paid fortunes to every seer and oracle around to promise her a boy, and she has even bought spells from the Anubis ones.”

“I know. Call for a litter, Ay. I want to ride to the water steps. It is too hot to walk.”

They gossiped as they were ferried across the river, and Tiye was revived by a small puff of wind that stirred out of the north. At the Karnak water steps they were met by a litter and a covering contingent of guards who escorted them past Nefertiti’s Aten temple. Tiye, who had been letting her gaze wander idly as they glided past the temple’s first pylon, suddenly called a stop. “Step down, Ay, and come here. I think my eyes have sand in them.” Obediently he walked to her litter, and the fanbearers rushed to shade them. Tiye felt rage and bewilderment as they came to a halt and craned their necks upward.

The stone pylon towered over them. On each of its supports, incised deeply into the stone and painted vividly in blue and gold, a giant Nefertiti strode across the bodies of dead Nubians and vile Asiatics. The scene was an approximation of one that ran around Tiye’s own throne. But in that carving Tiye was represented as a clawed and breasted sphinx with enemies beneath her. Here Nefertiti was portrayed in a male’s short kilt, and her pose, now frozen in the stone, was one in which no one but a ruling pharaoh had ever been depicted. Raised in one vengeful hand was the royal scimitar, with the flail lowered in the other. The figure had no breasts, and on the head was a tall, flat-topped crown fronted by a cobra. Only the face was recognizably feminine, unmistakably Nefertiti’s.

Tiye and Ay looked at each other. “The days when I knew what was happening in my dominion before it came to pass are over,” Tiye muttered between clenched teeth. “How dare she do this? It is sacrilege! What is she trying to prove?”

“She is saying in stone those things she cannot say with her mouth,” Ay replied shortly. “I trust Your Majesty has honest food tasters and incorruptible guards.”

“She would not!”

Ay turned back to the litters. “She has struck before without warning. This is a warning.”

I was stupid to ignore the building here
, Tiye thought, sick with anger.
I have the feeling that the cords that bound Egypt to me alone are being unpicked by Nefertiti’s deft little fingers
. Stiffly she got back onto the litter, and Ay ordered the procession to move on. He was brooding and had little to say as they approached Amunhotep’s temple.

They left the litters beneath the first pylon leading to the huge flagged court and, sheltered beneath a sunshade, walked toward the private inner court. Groups of Aten priests, regal in white linen, turned from their conversations and bowed profoundly. Sweating stonemasons laid aside their tools and prostrated themselves on the hot stone. Several pillars that marked the outer walls were already in place, but between them were still only pits where the others would be sunk.

Tiye and Ay came to the second pylon, taller and wider than the first. Flagstaffs holding aloft the blue and white emblems of royalty stood before it. Once the temple had been dedicated, priest-guards would stand at either side of the entrance to prevent the common people from entering the inner court, but today the pylon was deserted, sending waves of heat that beat out at them as they passed. Tiye had expected some manner of a roof under which worshipers could stand in comfort, but there was none. The sun poured into the vast space without pity.

She stopped just inside the entrance. Hundreds of offering tables spread before her in seemingly endless rows, each set on a small dais of two steps, filling the court with just enough room between them for processions to pass. The wall of the court was marked at regular intervals by pillars only three-quarters freed from the stone of the wall itself. On each pillar was an image of Pharaoh— hundreds of identical images of Amunhotep staring down into the holy place. Ay touched Tiye’s arm. “Come and look at them.” They made their way around the offering tables to the wall and gazed upward.

The likenesses were immense but well executed, conveying perfectly the calm infallibility inherent in Pharaoh’s godhead. The cobra and vulture rose together from the winged helmet. Amunhotep’s eyes were canted downward, giving a slightly forbidding, judgmental cast to the otherwise serene face. The nose was beautifully delicate, the full lips closed and faintly smiling, the pharaonic beard jutting to where the crook and flail—it was already well known that Amunhotep disdained the scimitar—were crossed on the smooth chest. The stone hands grasped the regalia firmly, and carved on bracelets around each wrist and upper arm were the king’s cartouches. The figures were unpainted. Tiye stepped back and looked along at the others, an infinity of motionless images of her son staring down on the tables from which the flames of offerings to his god would rise.

Then, as her eyes moved lower, she saw that Pharaoh’s full belly curved down into hips and upper thighs that in turn became the bottom half of each pillar. Apart from the helmets, the statues were naked, and as no kilt had been carved to hide them, it was obvious that not one of the figures had genitals. The thighs of each lay tightly together, like a woman’s. Tiye began to walk beneath the walls, eyes on the statues passing slowly above her. As she paced, a deep spiritual disturbance began to afflict her, emanating from the massive things above, an invisible aura that flowed toward her, surrounded her, until she began to believe that her eyes were deceiving her, that the carved mouths were crying out some tormented truth that only they could feel, filling the temple with the eddies of their inner torture. She came to the end of the wall and turned, shocked and faint.

“Where is the ben-ben?” she whispered.

“There is no ben-ben,” Ay said soberly. “No god, no pyramid, no holy stone. The Aten is not present in this temple.”

“Ay, I am afraid. There is great evil in this place, and I feel like a child stumbling upon living terrors in some deserted valley. My son knows that Pharaoh is the Mighty Bull, the symbol of fertility in Egypt, ensurer of the vital seed of man and crops alike. To have himself portrayed without the organ of regeneration is to invite sterility for all of Egypt.” Walking to the nearest offering table, she leaned against it. “But that is not the worst transgression. Pharaoh’s essence inhabits every carving of himself, every painting, every place his name is written within the cartouche. He is fully present wherever these things are placed, casting his virile, ageless magic over all, as the god he is, and long after his death he protects and nurtures his people. What protection for Egypt is there in these misshapen things?”