The Twelfth Transforming (67 page)

As the hours passed, an apprehensive silence began to cloak the flotilla. Tutankhaten sat on a folding traveling chair under an awning, staring incredulously as his birthright slid by him. “Egypt is ugly,” he said angrily to Ay beside him. “Why does everyone tell me how beautiful it is?”

“Highness, it is high summer, that is all,” he objected quietly, realizing that the boy could not remember ever having been anywhere but in the cultivated loveliness of Akhetaten. “Soon Isis will cry, and the land will become a lake, and when the waters sink, Egypt will be beautiful again.”

“It is not just that,” Tutankhaten responded. “Egypt is…is derelict.” The prince had relished the difficult word and was smiling at his mastery, and Ay admitted to himself painfully that the boy’s precocious assessment was correct. They were now sailing past a small temple, and he could see that one of its pillars had collapsed and the others were leaning wearily outward. Brown grass almost obscured the paving of the forecourt. It was not the first of such ruins. He had seen linen hung to dry in sacred places, the remains of fires blackening sanctuaries, crude peasant children’s toys scattered around battered images of local gods.
The task is too large
, he thought, his heart fluttering erratically with the heat and his sudden fear.

Egypt is dead. I did not want to see this. None of us did. I am afraid to consider the state of Thebes
.

They berthed for one night at Akhmin, and Ay was carried on his litter to visit Tey. Walking through the garden toward the sprawling house made him feel like a ka stepping back in time, and he fully expected to see Tiye come running out of the portico’s shade with Anen at her heels. The experience filled him with dread. Those years, so far away now, buried under a lifetime, held memories more vivid to him than those more recent visits, when he had come here from Malkatta as a vigorous, arrogant man to escape briefly the demands of his energetic sister. Tey greeted him with sleepy delight. He spent the evening talking to her of what he had seen on the river but was finally forced to acknowledge in the course of their conversation that he was no different from the men and women with whom he was sharing this journey, that somewhere, somehow, he, too, had succumbed to the dream and did not really want to wake.

Thebes was at first a relief, a gleam of ancient permanence. Though the company docked at the Malkatta water steps, it was obvious even from a distance that the city on the east bank, though now shrunken and with many dilapidated buildings on its outskirts, had not physically changed very much. Everywhere Ay looked, his eyes fell on something familiar: the configuration of the small islands in the middle of the Nile, the sharp soar of Karnak’s towers against the deep blue of the noon sky, the thin pall of friendly dust over everything. The warehouses at the water’s edge were tumbledown, many without roofs, and most of the unloading docks had disappeared completely, but it was Thebes, and Ay felt an oppression leave him. Even the crowds shoving and cursing one another made him smile before his barge swung to the west bank, away from them. They seemed neither hostile nor welcoming but were simply greedy for a spectacle which they had been denied for years.

Nonetheless Malkatta was a ruin. The canal up which kings had floated was choked with silt, the water steps slimed with green river growth, the fountains dry, the mighty lake now no more than a puddle of brackish water. An aging Maya and a dozen Amun priests threw themselves at Tutankhaten’s feet, calling him Majesty, many of them in tears, but Ay looked beyond them to the imposing forest of white pillars that fronted Amunhotep’s palace. The door to the women’s garden hung from one twisted hinge. The lawn had reverted to sand. Many trees had already died, and many more lay uprooted over the weed-choked flower beds.
The servants left behind to tend the empty rooms, forgotten and unpaid, must have gone long ago
, Ay thought,
and only a fear of the dead has kept the Theban citizens from looting everything
.

With Tutankhaten by his side and the priests trailing eagerly behind, Ay walked into the reception hall. In spite of the dryness of the air, a smell of mold and disuse assailed his nostrils. The floor stirred with dead leaves and unidentifiable dry refuse. Steadily Ay crossed the room, past the throne baldachin whose frieze of cobras and sphinxes still gleamed gold, and through the great doors at the rear. As he walked, the memories woke and whispered at his back, swirling murmurous in the dust at his heels, so that by the time he entered Amunhotep’s bedchamber, he could hardly bear their mute demands. Here the force of Pharaoh’s great personality still lingered. Bes still gyrated, fat and lustful, around the walls, and grapes still hung, their paint unfaded, from the vines entwined around the wooden pillars.

“Do I have to sleep here?” Tutankhaten protested. “There are bat droppings over everything.”

“No, Highness,” Ay replied thickly. “I suggest that you stay on the barge. We must now return to Karnak and sacrifice to Amun.”

Tutankhaten grimaced but made no demur, returning eagerly to the com forts of the boat. He was poled to the temple water steps, where another group of priests hailed him almost hysterically and covered his feet with kisses. Karnak, too, had suffered. Animals scampered out of their way as the party proceeded through the forecourt and under the pylons leading to the inner court. Everywhere Ay looked the name of Amun had been savagely obliterated, the inscriptions now incomplete and meaningless. Empty niches showed where images had once stood. Everything was unkempt, neglected.

“There were not enough of us to maintain the upkeep of Karnak,” a priest whispered to Ay as they watched Tutankhaten and Maya vanish into the sanctuary, “and after Pharaoh ordered the temples actually closed and the priests dismissed, few dared to come here. Thanks be to Amun, there is a young incarnation who will restore the precepts of Ma’at!”

And how will he do it?
Ay wanted to retort sarcastically.
Shall he turn stones into gold?
Yet gladness swept over him as he stood under the canopy in the broiling sun, watching a thin plume of incense rise above the sanctuary wall, and feeling the rejuvenation of his thoughts.

That night Tutankhaten ordered Ay to have his cot set up beside the royal couch, and together they lay behind the curtains while the Followers paced the deck and thronged the bank. Ay knew that Horemheb was sleepless, patrolling his sentries, and was grateful for the commander’s vigilance. The buildings of Thebes were in darkness as soon as the sun went down, but dots of orange light flickered along the alleys, furtive and faint. Jackals howled so loudly that Ay could have sworn that they were not out on the desert but prowling the city. Sometimes Ay would doze, only to be jerked awake by drunken shouts and screaming that wafted full-blown across the Nile.

“I will never move back here!” Tutankhaten snorted once in the darkness. “This is no place for a god to dwell! No wonder my father left it.”

“It was not thus when your father began to build Akhetaten,” Ay replied. “It was the center of the world.”

“It is disgusting,” Tutankhaten said scornfully, “like the rest of the country. I am a god of poverty.”

Wisely Ay did not argue. He was as troubled as Tutankhaten.

Smenkhara’s funeral procession, made up only of the family and a few courtiers, was meager. Women had been recruited as mourners from the shrunken harem that had become the only living cell at Malkatta. A few remembered Smenkhara as a baby, but most donned the blue linen and keened and cast soil on their heads without emotion. So many Amun priests were in attendance, thin, ragged men with hope rekindled in their eyes, either walking at the rear of the company or gathered in small groups along the route, that to Ay, mopping the sweat from under his wig and gasping in the heat, it seemed less a ritual of respect and magic for a pharaoh than a ceremony of reassurance for the servants of the god. The thought gave him only a passing twinge of regret. Amun’s restoration was infinitely more important than the pitiful remains of an unlucky young man. Slowly the procession wound toward the Valley in West-of-Thebes. Under the wailing of the harem women there was talk and laughter. Ay parted the curtain of his litter in time to see the mighty likeness of the Son of Hapu, and he glanced up at the wide-open, mild stone eyes with a shudder before letting the curtains swing shut. He had been more than a man, after all.

Smenkhara’s small tomb was unfinished. He had begun it without much interest, in response to Ay’s urging, and had not cared to oversee its progress. Its floor was still rough, its walls uninscribed, and the one coffin prepared for the body stood propped against the rock beside the hole gouged for a door. The rites began hurriedly, without reverence. One by one those present knelt to kiss the foot of the coffin, their forced tears long since dried. Only Meritaten clung to the sarcophagus, hysterical with grief, laying her cheek against the painted wood with swollen eyes closed tightly. After Tutankhaten as heir performed the Opening of the Mouth, the funeral dancers went through their paces without interest. In the end even Ay wished that the hypocritical play might be over.

The coffin was carried into the tiny room and placed inside the golden shrine Akhenaten had presented to his mother. Ay was dreading another out burst from Meritaten, but she stood regally, flowers in her hands, bravely composed. He looked about, and shame stabbed him. He had ordered that funerary equipment for the tomb be selected from the place where the family had for generations stored objects they either wanted to be buried with or thought might be needed at their funerals, and those responsible for filling Smenkhara’s tomb had not chosen with much care. Furniture had been simply flung into the tomb and left to lie haphazardly about. A few token weapons bearing Amunhotep III’s cartouche, some cups of Tiye’s, jewelry belonging to harem children that had died, a canopic chest incised with a name even Ay did not recognize—such were the insults Smenkhara was to carry into the next world, providing the gods wanted him.

Ay’s glance lit upon the four magic bricks set hurriedly into the four walls. Bending surreptitiously under cover of Maya’s sonorous chants, he hoped he might read Smenkhara’s name, but saw that the bricks bore the cartouche of Osiris Akhenaten.
They must have been made
, Ay reflected dismally,
in the years when Akhenaten was still preparing his tomb in Thebes and did not yet mind having his name linked with a god who was not the Aten. What protection from the demons can the name of Akhenaten afford this poor young man?
Meritaten stepped forward to lay her flowers on the coffin before the shrine was closed. Ay moved closer, dropping his eyes to the foot of the coffin so that he might not see Meritaten’s tears. There he noticed something crudely inscribed in gold leaf, the lines uneven, the characters scrawled. Intrigued, he went closer. “I breathe thy sweet breath which comes forth from thy mouth,” he read. “It is my desire that I may hear thy sweet voice, even the north wind. Give me thy hands. Thou mayest call upon my name eternally, and it shall not fail from thy mouth, my beloved brother, thou being with me to all eternity.” Startled and deeply moved, he looked up. Meritaten was watching him, pride and love suddenly transforming her disfigured face, and he smiled weakly and dropped his gaze.

He could hardly bear to sit through the travesty of a funeral feast that had been prepared on carpets before the tomb, but he forced down the food for the sake of Smenkhara’s ka. Horemheb and Tutankhaten were discussing the lion hunt that had been planned for the following day. The courtiers and women lounged under their canopies, tossing goose bones onto the sand and flirting with one another. Ankhesenpaaten knelt by her sister, trying to tempt Meritaten with pomegranates and sweet wine, but after the obligatory tasting Meritaten sat with her knees drawn up to her chin under the transparent blue linen, watching the priests seal Smenkhara’s tomb. It was with overwhelming relief that Ay rose with the company to return to the barges. He was ashamed of the whole gathering, including himself.

He woke just after dawn, still with a tension in his chest, to find his steward kneeling by the cot in the gray light. The barge was motionless. Behind the damask curtains of the cabin, Tutankhaten was breathing evenly in sleep. Ay sat up slowly, his eyes burning. “What is it?”

“Something has happened in the harem, Fanbearer,” the man said in a low voice. “The commander was roused by the Keeper of the Harem Door, and he asks you to come.”

“Very well. Rouse my body servant. If Pharaoh wakes, tell him I will wait upon him as soon as possible.”

His sleepy servant dressed him, and taking a Follower, Ay walked the ramp onto the bank and made his way along the canal, through the rotting garden door, and across the harem lawn. It did not look quite so desolate in the early light. The large lake was a dusty bowl, but beyond the main garden and another wall was a small oasis of greenness and order where the harem attendants still cared for the grounds behind the harem. Here the women Akhenaten had not appropriated for himself swam and lazed their way through the uneventful, end less days. Most of them were old or aging, relics from the reign of their master Amunhotep III, supported over the years by funds from Akhetaten. None of them ventured far from her own quarters.

Ay was greeted abstractedly at the door by the keeper and led toward the apartments that had been hurriedly prepared for Meritaten and her sister. Before he reached the rooms, Ankhesenpaaten came running toward him, shrieking. Flinging herself into his astonished arms, she buried her face against his chest. “Meritaten is dead,” she sobbed. “They are cutting off her hair!” Even had he not wanted to pause and soothe her, his legs would not have obeyed him. Vividly he saw himself kneeling by Tiye’s couch, one hand in her red hair, the other reaching for his knife. Apprehension filled him. He eased his granddaughter’s fingers away, forcing himself to treat her gently. “Take her somewhere quiet and give her wine,” he ordered the keeper, and ignoring Ankhesenpaaten’s screams, he hurried along the passage. The door to Meritaten’s bedchamber was open, and a babble of excited women’s voices spilled out. He was met by a terrified servant girl who, seeing him enter, threw herself at his feet.