The Twelfth Transforming (25 page)

“I know these truths, Tiye,” Ay reminded her gently. “But perhaps Pharaoh is trying to state other truths. He believes he is Ra’s incarnation, Aten the Visible Disk, and unlike Amun, the Aten has no sex. I think he believes Egypt has nothing to fear from these representations of himself because the magic they cast is stronger than Amun’s magic. He talks a great deal about how he and everyone else must live in truth. The images are an example.”

“But it is Nefertiti who will draw the approval and recognition of the gods by the blasphemous portraits of herself we saw a moment ago! They will believe that she is pharaoh, and my son nothing but a vulnerable man!” She had paled.

Ay stepped to her side. “Let us leave,” he said. “It will be different here when the tables are heaped with food and flowers and a priest stands with incense rising on each dais. Unfinished building sites often have an air of forbidding about them.” His voice rang hollow.

“Not like this.” She met his eyes. “Ay, I am pregnant. I have not felt resentful or afraid about it, merely resigned. But now I sink under the knowledge. I did my best to prevent this, but when it happened, I was glad for Amunhotep, and yes, I gloated a little when I thought of Nefertiti’s reaction. Now I could wish myself back in Memphis with a denial for my son on my lips.” She spoke with great bitterness. Putting his arm around her, Ay led her out to where the litter bearers lounged in the shade of the pylon. Her skin was cold.

When Amunhotep came to her that night, she still had not shaken her mood. He smiled at her, talked of small things, and made love to her with, she fancied, a willing mind but an unexpectedly reluctant body. She could not respond. Her visit to the Aten temple had changed her perception of him, and now it was as though she was seeing him for the first time. His innocuous words seemed sinister to her, the movements of his deformed flesh in the lamplight an unspoken threat. Though she wanted to, she did not dare to question him.

Next day she paid a visit to Tia-Ha, hoping that her friend’s cheerful common sense would restore her anxiety to a proper perspective. The princess was sorting through her gowns with the aid of her body servant, and her apartment was even more chaotic than usual. Tiye greeted her, received her reverence, and picked a way through the disorderly piles of bright linens to the cushions that had been flung out of the way against a wall.

“You are always in such a muddle, Tia-Ha,” Tiye said, sinking onto the pillows and settling back. “You have more servants than anyone else in the harem, yet your visitors can hardly get through the door.”

“I am not well organized,” Tia-Ha answered, waving the girl out. “I promise myself that I will become neater, and I dictate long lists of things to be done, but before my servants can carry out the instructions, someone brings me a new board game to try, or I receive an invitation to a party and must make myself beautiful, and my women and I end up playing together or dabbling with cosmetics.” She lowered herself onto a chair facing Tiye, kicking aside the gowns that littered the floor. “Today is a good example,” she went on. “I decide to get rid of my old gowns, give them to my servants, and what happens? Scarcely have we begun when the empress comes to see me! It is of course my greatest pleasure to gossip with you, dear Tiye. You are looking well. So is Pharaoh, if I may say so.”

“Yes, I suppose he is,” Tiye replied noncommittally, her eyes on Tia-Ha’s sandaled feet. “Tell me, Princess, have you by chance been across the river to see the sanctuary of Amunhotep’s Aten temple? It will soon be finished and closed to the populace.”

Tia-Ha laughed. Swinging her legs up onto the couch, she shrugged deep into the cushions and began to pull the rings from her plump fingers, dropping them one by one with a tinkle into a glass bowl on the floor. “By chance, Majesty? When the courtiers in their hundreds have been trotting like sheep into their barges to be poled across the river solely to look at their naked pharaoh in stone? No, not by chance. I, too, followed my curiosity and went to see what all the fuss was about.” The last ring rattled into the bowl, and Tia-Ha began to massage her knuckles.

“And what did you think?”

“I was prepared to see some grave violation of Ma’at,” Tia-Ha explained, “but the images offend only my concept of good taste. Why, Majesty, you are upset!”

Tiye had transferred her gaze to her own hands clasped in her lap. “Art is a sacred pursuit,” she said faintly. “A king may not cause his true physical likeness to be copied. Any statue or painting is to represent only the king as Divine Incarnation, without human flaws.”

“But Pharaoh’s predecessor did it. Do you remember the delight our husband took in unveiling that little stela that showed him slumped on a chair with his body wrapped in thin feminine linen?”

Tiye’s heart lightened. She smiled gratefully at the princess. “I remember. But that stela stands in the palace. Temple art is different.”

“Not very. Besides, there is no god in Pharaoh’s new temple to see his body, so what does it matter? Shall we have some shat cakes?” Tiye nodded. Tia-Ha clapped sharply, and a servant appeared immediately, listened to her order, and went away. “What amuses me is the way the courtiers are rushing to have them selves portrayed as little copies of your husband. In the Teaching, he tells them that Ra has given him a unique body as a mark of especial favor, so they hurry to their craftsmen with instructions to cover the walls of their houses and tombs with distorted images of themselves. If there is benevolent magic in such ugliness, they want to share it. But how on earth the gods are expected to recognize the overseers, stewards, generals, and commanders from such grotesqueness, I do not know! Even the two mighty viziers are slavishly following the fashion. Everyone wants to ingratiate themselves with Pharaoh. That is the way it has always been.”

“So you believe it is all a fashionable diversion and will pass?” Tia-Ha’s servant had returned with a dish of shat cakes, and Tiye, suddenly hungry, took two.

“Of course I do.” Tia-Ha was hesitating over her choice of the sweet concoctions, her head on one side. “Now, with Your Majesty’s permission, I would like to change the subject.” She darted a shrewd glance at Tiye and began an involved account of the boating party she had attended the evening before, and soon Tiye was laughing as she ate, her misgivings forgotten for a while.

In the middle of the season of Akhet, as the river was rising and the air was relieved by a slight cooling, Tiye gave birth, with difficulty, to a girl. She had successfully hidden a fear for her life that had increased with the swelling of her body, knowing that in the veiled glances of the courtiers was an expectation of punishment for her flaunting of a forbidden relationship. In the face of Pharaoh’s disapproval she had set statues of Ta-Urt, goddess of the childbed, about her chambers, and when her labor began, she had ordered magicians into her bedchamber with amulets and chanted spells. Their voices and her groans were the only sounds in the crowded room, for the few courtiers who were privileged to watch a royal birth only looked on in an anticipatory silence. Defenseless and drowned in pain, Tiye felt their hostility. There were no murmurs when the birth was announced, and the small audience filed out in the same accusatory silence in which they had stood. Amunhotep held the child proudly to his shallow chest.

“Sister-Daughter,” he said, looking down on the tiny, sleeping face, “you, above all, are the proof of my piety. I shall call you Beketaten, Servant of the Aten. And you, Tiye, most favored Great Lady, your fears were ungrounded.”

Tiye half-opened eyes that felt weighted with every year she had lived. Her husband stood beside the couch, a blurred, stooping figure, his bag wig hanging loosely over his bony shoulders. She murmured but did not have the strength to make a coherent reply. Yet some fleeting impression had impinged itself upon her consciousness, and though sleep prowled the fringes of her mind, she held it at bay, searching hazily. She heard Amunhotep give the baby to the nurse, exchange words with her, and pad to the door. She felt the physician’s hand on her forehead. The doors opened, Ay’s voice asked a question, the doors closed. It had something to do with the baby held against her husband’s chest. No, not the baby, the chest itself. The pectoral. Electrum, no jewels, just fine-linked chain holding … A stab of foreboding slashed through her drowsiness. Holding the Aten, symbol of Ra-Harakhti of the Horizon, but it was not right. Where was the falcon-headed god? Only the disk remained, circled by royal uraei and sun rays ending in hands. Ankhs hung from the Aten’s neck.
I must tell Ay
, she thought dimly.
What does it mean?
But before she could think about the matter, she fell asleep.

11

T
he year that followed was outwardly a time of optimism. In the harem nurseries the royal children throve. Some weeks after Tiye, Nefertiti also gave birth to a girl, and Amunhotep named her Meketaten, Protected by the Aten. It did not seem to worry him that as yet he had fathered no royal son. Nefertiti recovered quickly, buoyed by the relief she felt that Tiye also had produced a girl and there would be no precipitate scrambling to name an heir. But Tiye’s body knitted slowly, and through the weeks of the Inundation she rested, conducting what business was necessary from her couch, content to drift in a somnolent placidity. Perhaps that was why she felt more affection for the baby Beketaten than she had for any other of her children save her first son, Thothmes. The love she had felt for Amunhotep as a child was a fierce, irrational protectiveness in the face of his mortal danger, but as she fondled and watched Beketaten, her strength growing slowly with the baby’s own growth, a genuine bond was forged. She did not peer coolly into her daughter’s future as a consort for her son Smenkhara. She held the tiny sleeping weight against her own warm body, and the present was enough.

Smenkhara himself was now almost four, a quiet little boy given to bursts of volubility, with the natural grace of his dead brother Thothmes. He began his official schooling in the harem under the watchful eyes of Huya, an event that caused him distress, for Meritaten was still only two, too young for education, and the two had become inseparable. She was a tiny, doll-like child with Nefertiti’s gray eyes and her father’s aquiline nose, a creature that belonged to the fluttering soft linens, the jewels, the ribbons and perfumes with which she was surrounded. She would stand outside the schoolroom where Smenkhara and the young children of Pharaoh’s ministers droned their lessons, her gray eyes fixed with a serious patience on the door, ignoring the sighs and shufflings of her attendants. When she heard the prayer to Amun and the brief chant to the Aten which signaled the end of classes for the day, her fragile body would tense in anticipation until Smenkhara emerged. Shaking himself free of the excited horde of shouting boys, he would run to her to receive with the calm assurance of undoubted affection whatever she had brought—a flower, a glittering dead scarab beetle, a piece of broken pottery. They held no long conversations through the hot afternoons but would play at whatever took their fancy in a separate but completely companionable silence.

Nefertiti was pleased with the harmony between them, seeing it as a basis for future negotiations, but Tiye simply listened to the daily reports from the schoolroom and nursery and stored the information in the back of her mind. Love had nothing to do with dynastic necessity.

Tiye herself sat easily on the pinnacle of power during this year, secure in Amunhotep’s continued affection. Nefertiti’s jealousy appeared to subside to a sullen smolder, dampened not only by the fact that they had both produced girls but also by the recurrence of Pharaoh’s impotence. If he was unable to make love to her, she also knew from her spies in Tiye’s apartments that he did not bed Tiye either. The fire that consumed him was the invisible flame of religious fervor.

Amunhotep often prowled his still-unfinished temple, watching his artists chisel the Aten’s name enclosed in the cartouches of a reigning monarch under the new symbol he had adopted for it. Long into the nights he prayed in his brightly illumined bedchamber, standing before the Aten shrine in the pleated female gowns he had begun to wear, golden incense holders smoking in both hands. To the crowds who filled the audience halls to hear his Teaching he often shouted, his shrill voice rising as he leaned over them from the throne on the dais, the sweat of his enthusiasm staining the gown that folded over his painted feet. After the Teaching he would retire to his couch and fall into a deep, exhausted sleep while the listeners dispersed, some hurrying to more congenial pursuits but an increasing number drifting slowly onto the forecourt or into the gardens, arguing furiously. Under the regal panoply of daily government, the palace was charged with petty animosities, and at its center Pharaoh walked with his attendant monkeys, a gowned and moving reflection of the grotesque representations of himself that had begun to adorn Malkatta’s richly painted walls. As the atmosphere at court became testier, Tiye took refuge in the voluminous foreign correspondence that never seemed to decrease, and spent much time with courtiers of her own generation who could share her memories of her first husband.

One day Tiye was passing with her servants and bodyguard along the road that led from Amunhotep III’s funerary temple to Malkatta. She had been offering sacrifices to her dead husband, bringing food and flowers to lay at the feet of his likeness while she whispered prayers for the well-being of his ka. It was a rite she liked to perform, for with the closing of the sanctuary doors behind her she was transported back through the years. Amunhotep’s mocking, warm personality seemed to fill the vast, pillared room, bringing to her a feeling of security. In the presence of her son, in his arms, she was always uneasy with the dread of some future judgment against her despite her acknowledged divinity and sometimes longed for the turbulent though uncomplicated relationship she had shared with his father. A faint echo of it existed here, in the temple built for his worshipers, and Tiye sipped at it judiciously. She knew better than to indulge in fanciful longings for what was past but took comfort from it nonetheless.