The Twelfth Transforming (38 page)

She moved her head once, a denial. Already she was drifting into a healthy sleep. The baby did not matter as much as the mercy of Amun. Her life had been spared. It was a reprieve.

In the following year, the tenth of Akhenaten’s reign, Nefertiti again gave birth to a girl, Nefer-neferu-Ra. The passage of time and the waning of competition between the two women had mellowed Tiye’s dislike of her niece, and she was able to feel sympathy for a woman who craved a princely son yet could only produce girls. She wondered what the last three years had done to the queen, whether constant childbearing had sagged the tight, faultless body and disappointment put lines of petulance on the smooth face. Yet she had no desire to see Nefertiti, or her son. She sat on the roof of her apartments under a canopy, looking indifferently out over the river to the heat-distorted silhouette of a Thebes already decaying into obscurity, knowing and yet not caring that she lived in an artificial peace, in a place and state of being that existed only for her, a drop of water held in the palm of the hand. It was as if she were existing in the timeless limbo of the dead whose tombs crowded the desert around Malkatta. Like them she was still, watching time slowly break down and change everything around her while she remained immovable. Only Smenkhara and the baby linked her tenuously to the future, a future in which she had no interest.

Tiye’s recovery from her son’s birth had been slow, and before long she had begun to realize that she would never regain her full strength. The knowledge did not distress her, and she was soon able to walk about palace and gardens, take her meals, confer with her ministers over affairs that were nothing more than the day-to-day problems of her small household, knowing that the fatigue taking her to her couch early each evening would be with her the rest of her life. Her physician prepared tonics and prescribed massages every day, and these remedies helped, but the days of an energetic command were gone. Tutankhaten, as his father had instructed that he be called, was healthy and grew under the ministrations of his wet nurse and her staff. Akhenaten sent regular dispatches enquiring after his welfare and hinting anxiously that Tiye should bring him north, but Tiye excused herself in various ways.

Angrily and yet with a grim humor she watched herself develop the fussy ways of an old widow; complaining if her morning fruit was not cut for her in a certain way, snapping irritably at her body servants if they did not perform their duties efficiently, grieving if her sheets were not turned down precisely. With the acute self-knowledge that had always been hers, she knew she was lacking the fresh, bracing breeze of masculine company. Huya and her stewards she did not consider, for they were servants and approached her with an almost feminine servility. Accordingly she ordered that Smenkhara’s lessons be read in her presence, and she required his company for larger portions of each day, hoping that his burgeoning manhood would offset her own cramped aging. He was unexpectedly kind, sensing in his mother a deep need for his companionship and responding with the careless cheerfulness she craved. But her mind still lay fallow. Smenkhara at eleven years could not have the maturity of an adult.

Late in the year she received word from Akhenaten. She sat on a chair at the foot of the wide steps that led into the hall of public audience, watching her servants gather to pass the time of day around the fountains of the fore-court, listening to a letter that, after the stilted greetings, lapsed into a jumbled informality that brought her son’s voice to life. “It is not right that the mother of the sun should live secluded in a palace that belongs to a former age of darkness,” he wrote. “The family of the Aten should be together. With you, dear Tiye, began Egypt’s journey into truth, yet your strength is hidden under the shadow of Amun. The beauty of the Divine Ones fills Akhetaten like a circle of brightness, but as before, when you were widowed and had not yet graced my bed, the circle is weak because of your absence. Come, I beseech you, so that I may be strong again. I am building three magic sunshades in the Great Temple of the Aten, one for myself, one for you, and one for my daughter Beketaten, whom I love dearly, so that standing beneath them, we can renew our might. I do not command the one from whose body the sun has come, but I beg her to hear my words and consider well.”

This cannot be Ay’s idea
, Tiye thought as her scribe rolled up the scroll and laid it aside.
Ay would have written me directly if he thought I was needed. Akhenaten feels threatened, but by what? Is it his health, his visions? More likely he realizes that his queen will not give him a son and so wants Tutankhaten near him
. “What is next?” she said sharply.

The scribe reached down beside him. “There is another dispatch from the Fanbearer on the Right Hand.”

“Good. Read it.” Perhaps Ay would now explain his master’s letter. Tiye leaned back, preparing as always to defend herself against the wave of homesickness Ay’s words brought.

Her scribe skimmed the formal opening. “As far as I can determine, there has been a revolt in Nukhashshe against that people’s chieftain, Ugarit. He has appealed to Suppiluliumas for help. It is very difficult for me to ascertain the truth. Tutu’s office is always in chaos, and the man himself an ignorant ditherer who is nevertheless very zealous in his religious observances. I have tried to obtain other opinions from his staff, but Tutu jealously guards his prerogatives as Scribe of Foreign Correspondence. If the news is true, there can be no doubt that Suppiluliumas will respond to Ugarit’s plea.”

Tiye clenched her jaw. Nukhashshe was so close to Egypt that its rulers had always been allies, and many treaties had been signed and cemented with marriages over the years. The fact that Ugarit had not appealed to Pharaoh to quell his people’s unrest spoke more eloquently than anything else could have done of Akhenaten and Egypt’s spreading impotence. Suppiluliumas would send soldiers, and when the dust had cleared, he would be closer than ever to Egypt’s immediate borders. It had been a long time since Tiye had thought in terms of the empire. Now it was Egypt herself that was threatened.

“Take a letter to Prince Suppiluliumas,” Tiye said wearily. It would do little good, she realized, for Suppiluliumas certainly knew how little power she still had, but at least it would serve to remind him that someone in Egypt was watching his movements with eyes unclouded by his deceit.

She wrote also to Pharaoh, her words harsh, demanding to know why, when communications to her were so clear from her own men stationed in Egypt, he did not take immediate action against his enemies. She accused Tutu of misrepresentation, but resisted denouncing his behavior as treasonous. A voice of caution warned her that unless she was physically present to justify her charges, Tutu would turn his attention to discrediting her, and she would lose what little credibility she still had. She did not mention Ay, unwilling to give his enemies an opportunity to twist his dispatches to her into disloyalty to Pharaoh. The letter took her a day to compose, deleting and correcting until she was satisfied. When she had finished and was lying on her couch, she ached for her son, knowing that, in spite of her railing against poor Tutu, it would have taken a man with the genius of the Son of Hapu to unravel the tangled threads of the country’s diplomatic situation. Egypt no longer possessed such men. Ay, trained and raised under the old administration, would have suited, but he was now chained and muzzled by men who no longer moved in the real world, whose inferior judgments had been warped by the atmosphere Pharaoh’s fantasies and dreams had generated.
It is perhaps a passing storm, a desert khamsin under whose power we hide our faces and huddle in whatever shelter we can find
, Tiye thought.
May the gods grant that it may blow itself out! Then we will dig and sweep, wash off the sand and grit, anoint our eyes, and stand again. If we can only endure, Smenkhara will take the throne, and the empire can be rebuilt. It is not yet too late. Oh, Akhenaten, my son, my son! Hapu was right. You should have died. You did not murder your father, but you are destroying everything he held together in his august person. Perhaps I should give Smenkhara his heart’s desire, send him to Akhetaten with the other two children, and then retire to Djarukha. I have always been happy there. I shall not miss the children. They, too, are part of the magic I tried to conjure and failed, and they belong to the discarded spells
. Such thoughts invited the numbing blessing of wine, and the wine brought sleep, yet sunrise and a new awakening did not dispel her feeling of fatality.

As time passed, the urge to relinquish all semblances of authority grew, until finally she began to make plans to leave Malkatta to the jackals in the new year and be settled at Djarukha just before the crops were sown. She could have left immediately, thus avoiding the worst of the summer heat, but deep in her mind was the dim idea of a last suffering, a day-to-day enduring of an almost unendurable fire as expiation for the last ten years of her life. The gods did not demand such an action. Sacrifices were never made out of guilt, only for petition and thanksgiving, but Tiye knew it was herself, not the gods, she wished to appease.

The slow moments of a sweltering Mesore went sluggishly by, and she panted in the thin shade of the trees or dipped often in the lake, her mind as faint and beaten by Ra’s ferocity as her body. She was lying on her couch one noon, trying to sleep, her swollen eyes on the bars of white light between the slats of her window hangings, when Huya was admitted. Listlessly she watched him approach, a naked, portly, once-handsome man now frequently short of breath and troubled by pains in his joints. He stopped, bowed, and she bade him speak.

“Majesty, I apologize for interrupting your rest,” he said, “but your niece has arrived from Akhetaten and wishes to be admitted at once.”

Tiye’s heart turned over, and she sat up. “My niece? Which one, you fool!”

“Princess Mutnodjme. I have shown her into your reception hall and ordered cool water for her.”

“Tell her I am coming. Piha! A loose gown, and my hair needs combing.” It was loneliness that brought Tiye to her feet with a rush of gladness at the thought of seeing the girl again, and not until she was walking along the passage under the waving white ostrich fans of her attendants did she wonder what had brought Mutnodjme to Malkatta in person.

Guards opened the door to the hall, and Tiye walked through. At the far end of the room, where pillars divided the stream of white hot light that poured like molten metal onto the floor, Mutnodjme stood, leaning against the wall, her dwarfs dicing noisily at her feet, her outline black against the blinding dazzle of the early afternoon. Hearing the herald call Tiye’s titles, she turned, and cracking her whip over the heads of the dwarfs, so that they howled and scuttled out into the garden, she strolled toward her aunt.

The tantalizing assurance of a pampered maturity was in every movement of the long legs, the loose swing of the heavily braceleted arms. The familiar face glowed with a lazy sensuousness. Mutnodjme’s full eyelids had been oiled and then sprinkled with gold dust. Thick kohl gleamed black around the eyes that always held a hint of amusement in their dark depths. The mouth that mirrored Tiye’s own was slickly red. Gold with the mauve tinge characteristic of Mitanni smiths hung from both ears to her tanned shoulder blades, and a thin gold chain passing around her shaven skull and under the youth lock held a gold disk against her forehead. She wore no necklace, but anklets tinkled on both legs. Her many-pleated sheath was scarlet, belted in gold studs and caught across one shoulder, leaving the other and one breast bare, its nipple circled in gold paint. Glancing beyond the pillars as Mutnodjme knelt to kiss her feet, Tiye caught a glimpse of her niece’s retinue, a flitting, glittering group of young men and women in drifting linens and bright jewels, themselves thickly painted against the sun. Mutnodjme had risen and was waiting.

“I see you have a new whip,” Tiye offered, suddenly at a loss for words, wanting to embrace Mutnodjme in a moment of affectionate relief but instead merely touching her yellow cheek.

Mutnodjme nodded. “White bull leather with a silver handle,” she drawled. “Not taken from a white bull, of course, but stained later. I miss my old one, but it wore out. It is good to see you, Majesty Aunt.”

Something impelled Tiye to ask, “Do I look well?” and she immediately regretted the weakness of the desire.

Mutnodjme considered, her head on one side. “Better than I had expected after such a difficult birth. I know it was ages ago, but everyone at Akhetaten has been anxious for your recovery, greedy for any word from Malkatta.”

“I do not believe it!” It had always seemed that those who left the palace to go to the new city had also abandoned their memories, but Mutnodjme was telling her it was not so.

“It is true. When word came that you had given birth but would probably die, Pharaoh turned us all out to stand for hours in the forecourt of the Aten temple while he prayed within, and he was then ill for days afterward.”

“But he did not come. For all his solicitude, he did not come.”

“No.” Mutnodjme met her eye. “He did not. The queen’s atmosphere fills the city like perfume. It is heavy in our nostrils, day and night. When we are not prostrate before the Aten, we pray to her.”

Tiye searched her niece’s face for the sarcasm that was carefully absent from the voice, and found it. “My brother. Is he well?”

“He has aged, but his health is as good as it has always been.”

“And your husband?”

Mutnodjme hesitated. “Horemheb is strong and high in favor. In the way in which you enquire, my goddess, he is well.”

“So. We will have time to discuss the family later. How starved for news I have been! Your mother?”

“I do not see Tey very often. She is never at court. But she is content on the estate Ay built for her.”

“And yourself, Mutnodjme? You are as beautiful as ever!”

“I know.” Mutnodjme laughed. “I have become the object of every young courtier’s desire. Isn’t that boring? Horemheb laughs, but I do not. I am tired of hot whispers and groping fingers at Pharaoh’s feasts. I tend to cling to my old friends, the men I have slept with before, the women who have shared my secrets in the past. I am twenty-eight, Majesty Aunt. The young are beginning to annoy me.”