On a Balcony Page 10

  It is as though a vast net were cast out into eternity, of which, at each instant of its falling, each knot, and yet the whole seeming pattern of the knots, were now. That net is not only music, not only silence, not only light, but also history.

  So all history is one unique event, while in the sky over Thebes, that three thousand two hundred years ago, the voice of silence, which after all must issue from some image in our minds, raises a compassionate and warning finger to the lips, as a warning, as a friendly sign, or as an order to be still, it would be hard to say. Yet we are used to that sad face with the finger to the lips. It is always there, to tell us where we are, and we are always grateful for the advice. But few of us would wish to repeat the name of that place, even were we able.

  At dawn Thebes was an empty shell. From a great height the temple of Amon, that vast and overpowering complex of irrational damp symmetry, looked small and pathetic. The colossi of Memnon were a pair of startled rabbits, flushed, at the instant before they turned and fled.

  But down by the quays along the river, sails billowed out, voices shouted, and in an enviable disorder of departure, a hundred and fifty boats put out into the main stream, caught at the current to pick up speed, and with the instinct of rotifers, ciliated the water all one way. To the music of harps, the shouts of strokers, the clamour of hoisted sail, the fleet got under way. It was as though the guests at a party should, with the entertainers, migrate on impulse to a house they had never seen.

  Gold, gilt, and ebony, staring statues on the tillers, of himself and Nefertiti, silk sail and jewels, flowers, perfume, and incense, that vainglorious flotilla moved off. If some looked back, in a moment there was nothing for them to see. With an almost audible sigh, as the oars dipped through the flaccid water, Thebes seemed to fall behind, and there was only one way left to look.

  “My God,” Tiiy had said, “he believes it.”

  He did, and the god was going home, to a home as new as he was, which he had never seen, but from which he had vowed never to stir, and where he would live for ever and ever.

  Meanwhile, it was pleasant to have this vast concourse on the water, with a hymn to the Aton, which in a way was himself, sung every dawn and evening, and Nefertiti beside him more amusing than she had ever been. Truly, there is nothing so delightful as eternal youth, particularly when one is twenty-eight, and so knows how difficult a thing to keep is youth, and with what care one’s youth must not be contradicted.

  In Aketaten there would be no one to contradict.

  Part Two

  Six

  This matter of age is as important in a city as in a man. If one feels young, one is young. The rest is merely a matter of keeping up appearances. When people angrily ask you to act your age, what they usually mean is that you should act theirs. Here at Aketaten there would be no more of that.

  The fleet had been on the river for ten days, and Ikhnaton was eager to catch the first glimpse of his new capital. He did not expect it to be finished, but he did expect a rough sketch, much as Tutmose never blocked out the figure himself, but let apprentices do that to his design, so that he might improve the details at his leisure.

  And a rough sketch was exactly what he got. Aketaten was an imposing fraud, designed chiefly to be seen from the water. He wanted to arrive there at dawn, so he and the sun would both animate it at the same time. Therefore the night before arriving the flotilla anchored around a bend in the river. Now it was under way again. He did so hope he would not be disappointed.

  Nor was he, for appearances, to him, were reality. As the boats rounded the bend the courtiers looked west, and saw only a barren desert, planted here and there to garden vegetables. They should have looked in the opposite direction.

  For there, sleek, white, and smooth, lay Aketaten. It was exactly as he had imagined it, but a little smaller. From the quick intake of her breath, he could sense that Nefertiti was impressed. He smiled knowingly. It was agreeable to show them what he could do. He almost wished Tutmose were beside him; for it was all very well for Tutmose to pride himself on his ridiculous little faces. They were of merit. But he, Ikhnaton, had made a world. That was what the sun could do.

  Indeed, given gypsum and whitewash to reflect from, the sun could do a great deal. Seen from this distance, and newly faced, the city did not look jerry-built. It looked poised and self-contained. Seen from the water, the jetties seemed hungry for boats. Behind them rose the blue and green gardens of the palaces, with here and there a white shrub. Beyond the palaces themselves rose the roofless white bulk of the chief Aton temple, its pinions snapping briskly at tall golden poles, against the angry rose of the cliffs.

  A crowd had been assembled to welcome them. As the royal barge floated into the royal jetty, there was Meryra, backed by a corps of priests, the army, and the police, waiting to receive him.

  He and Nefertiti, together with Ay and Horemheb, went at once through the gardens and into the cool white and polychrome high-ceilinged rooms of the palace. Here they would rest, before crossing the balcony of audience, in actuality a bridge, to the official palace where the nobles would receive their first audience in the new capital.

  Meryra had become officious in his new security. And how would a god look at a priest? Much as a judge would look upon the attentions of an overly zealous recorder. Ikhnaton sent him away with an indulgent smile. There are times when even a god wants to relax.

  Aketaten was really delightful. Even the servants were new. Except for Ay and Horemheb, there wasn’t a person there to remind him of the past. He had finally found a solution to the awful boredom of rank, or so he thought. One made the rank higher still. He was not the first nor would he be the last monarch to become a god out of ennui. For the gods must have some amusements. It is only necessary to find out what they are.

  To its rulers, the world is an occupation. Inevitably one’s small talk becomes overly professional and therefore dull. But to its gods, the world is an avocation, and any hobby is in itself entertaining. To a god, the world has all the intricate joys of a scale model. One is always installing new improvements here and there.

  He looked at the city with animated eyes. It was simply wonderful to have so much to do. What Horemheb and Ay thought of it all was another matter. They did not say. Probably Horemheb saw that the workmanship was poor and Ay that the surface was rich. The only thing to break the silence was their own voices and the roaring hunger of the animals in the well-stocked private palace zoo.

  The zoo had been Nefertiti’s idea. She could not move about without a zoo. Ikhnaton found large wading birds restful, and was not unresponsive to the leap and plonk of fish. Nor were monkeys to be despised. He esteemed especially the cynocephali. Now nothing must do but that they look at the menagerie.

  Horemheb found it disturbing. Amenophis and Tiiy had also had their raree show, but theirs had been a matter of keeping wild animals in confinement to listen to them roar. Here the principle was somewhat different. This generation was more subtle. It had learned that though one cannot clip the tiger’s claws, one can give it a manicure.

  No one had seen Nefertiti so animated before, except possibly Ikhnaton. That face she carried before her like a shield, was now burnished by a genuine admiration. At long last Horemheb had found out what interested her.

  For Nefertiti collected the greater cats. Ten or twelve feet below them, among the persea trees and the sycamores, they roamed sulkily at their leisure. One had only to release a deer among them, or, if one felt capricious, an ostrich, to see them race. Alone, disdainful, bored, but sleek, resourceful, and quite dangerous, there were the lion, the lioness, the lynx, panther, and ocelot, and that was what she liked, the way they moved and the way they did not move. She used them for purposes of study. How to move, how to be beautiful, and more than those, how and when to think, and how to rearrange oneself with great care, at the exact moment when it was time to strike.

  She turned to Horemheb, her lips drawn back from her teeth, and said some
thing, he did not exactly hear what. But for once her eyes were unveiled.

  The expression in them made him thoughtful. He had always regarded her as a silent, unreliable, and selfish girl. She was nothing of the sort. She was an enormous force, quietly waiting in the wrong body, which none the less she turned to her own purposes with fantastic guile. The smooth muscles under her lovely neck moved with the same involuntary purpose as those of a cat who has patience and so can wait for hours for the one particular sparrow that, out of its vast boredom, it has decided to find edible.

  Beside such skill, Ikhnaton was merely ingenuous. It made Horemheb feel both anxious and tender for the man.

  The time had come for the first ceremony at the Aton temple. Proceeded by sistrums, they passed down a long corridor which made a right-angled turn and opened into a small square room gorgeous with animal frescoes, from which a ramp led upward towards daylight.

  The atmosphere had changed. The zoo was for her. This was for Ikhnaton. And watching her also alter, Ay, in his turn, could see that, yes, this was exactly the religion a cat would like, clear, bare, ceremonial, and centred squarely on itself.

  They passed up the ramp. At the top was a large room painted to resemble a grape arbour, floored with lapis lazuli, and with three windows on each side, the centre ones large and with low sills.

  It was the balcony of audience, curiously like a Holy of Holies turned inside out. It was from this elevation that the new god wished to be seen: Ay looked out the window, wondering how the god would look from the street. Ikhnaton also paused.

  But the city was still so new, that there were not enough people to see him from the balcony and from the outer enclosure of the temple at the same time. The street was deserted. For a little way, in either direction, it swept smoothly by the palaces and temples, and then petered out into a confused mass of vacant lots, stone cairns, and naked scaffolding. So much crouched silence was somehow mocking.

  They went down the ramp on the other side and into the temple.

  The nobles were assembled on either side of a long ramp leading through the outer court to the pylon at the farther end. To them these ceremonies were a novelty, and a courtier without a protocol looks lost indeed. They were waiting to see what Pharaoh would do.

  Unfortunately they were doomed to disappointment. For Pharaoh’s nature as a god was threefold. He was the incarnation of the God, and thus holy and to be worshipped. He was the image of the God, and thus symbolic. But he was also the God himself. And what the Father has to say to the Son, when they are both the same person, is entirely a family matter. The gods themselves worship before a mirror, en famille.

  The priests chanted laudatory hymns, which the nobles echoed with a nimble mumble. Floral offerings were laid on each noble’s assigned offering table. Then a trance state descended with luminous immobility upon the royal faces, which it had to be confessed Ikhnaton did very well, and Nefertiti even better. They were now inhabited by the Father. There was a judicious, even a shocked, silence. Then, to the rhythmic sussuration of the sistrums, followed by one sonorous beat on a shoulder drum, the royal party moved forward.

  It was undeniably impressive. Even Ay had to admit that something did happen. Quite visibly the royal pair had changed, and quite visibly they did look like two aspects of the same thing, whatever the thing was. But who could say what the thing was, for to catch a fluid you must first have a cup. It was decidedly unnerving to see the same person before you in two bodies.

  Because of the nature of the god, the construction of the temple at the second pylon was something never before seen. At the entrance, he must have appeared after the drum, stood Meryra. There was nothing god-like about that face. It was affable, human, and safe.

  Perhaps Meryra had never seen the double god before either. As Nefertiti and Ikhnaton swept forward, his face underwent a rapid alteration, in which confusion and fear gave way rapidly to unctuous gravity. No longer was he the host of the house: he became the previous owner, allowed to stay on in the servants’ wing.

  It was, thought Ay, a remarkable performance. Even he felt slightly unnerved by it.

  In most temples the avenue of progress led straight and without impediment to the inner shrine, the Holy of Holies alone being concealed from view. But here, since Ikhnaton was in his third person, a large wall of masonry made an L-shaped baffle which concealed the inner temple from the outer world. Pride does not like to be watched licking its face.

  None the less, pride needs an audience. Horemheb and Ay were allowed to follow. They descended a right-angle stair and came out on a loggia. Here they were to stop. Indeed, they were so blinded by the sudden light they could not have moved anyway.

  The inner shrine was smaller than the outer, but being an enclosed space, seemed larger. Thirty-foot walls stood open to the sky. A ramp ran between more offering tables to an open altar against the far wall. Niches around the walls had yet to receive their statues. The courtyard was apparently deserted, and every inch of its exposed surface was whitewashed and unadorned; but flecks of metal had been ground into the whitewash. The surface of the far altar was of silver. The effect was that of a glaring crucible, hot enough to melt the eyeballs, and in this white fire, for even the flowers on the offering tables were white, the top of the altar was an incandescent core. From the blue-green sky overhead the rays of the sun poured down like invisible hands.

  As a study in aesthetics it was overwhelming. Ay, who had played with mathematics all his life, was deeply moved. But physically it was unendurable. The idea that Pharaoh could go where no one else dared to venture was amply underlined, and was even, in some unintelligible way that not even mathematics could demonstrate, convincing. Physically it was incredible. But as a glimpse into the unsuspected vastness of a singularly ingenuous mind it was absolutely staggering. For mathematicians are apt to underestimate the non-figurative abilities of those without mathematical training. If Pharaoh could show even this much, what on earth was it, beyond the farthest limits of his mind, that he saw? It was as though one leaned on a balcony at the end of being, to watch something that stirred beyond. It was so far away that even there few people could so much as catch a glimpse of it.

  It was all very well, in one’s capacity as family advisor, to deplore Pharaoh’s childish approach to practical affairs. It was equally possible to take his religion with a grain of salt, and to make use of it, as Horemheb did, politically. But this was a concept and an ability far beyond the limitations of religion. To affectionate loyalty, Ay now added something close to awe.

  The trouble was Ikhnaton did not even know he had such power. Given the proper mental tools, he could have changed the world. But for that kind of thought there were no tools, and so all that power was frittered away on an unconscious religious mania. That made Ay angry.

  Beside him Horemheb grew restive. To Horemheb, no doubt, this was only a light that hurt his eyes. At the altar Nefertiti and Ikhnaton took large white blossoms from a covered tray and cast them on the silver altar. They shrivelled brown almost at once.

  The royal pair returned. It was amazing. They did not even sweat. As they started back down the ramp, a chorus concealed beneath the loggia floor burst into the hymn to the Aton. Nefertiti and Ikhnaton swept by, and Horemheb and Ay fell in behind.

  This was the best of which Ikhnaton was capable. The worst of which he was capable was equally embarrassing, if in a different way.

  For no one minded Pharaoh’s building his city. But what would be left when at last the scaffolding was taken down?

  This insight was not the result of reason. It was the result of a fear so strong that it had driven him right beyond the limitations of his own mind and out at the top.

  He was afraid of growing old. He was afraid of darkness. He was afraid of anything strait. He was afraid of dying. When you captured a grave robber, as often they did at the necropolis of Thebes, his punishment was terrible. He was wrapped with mummy wrappings, sometimes with his head exposed, someti
mes only his nose. The wrappings were very tight. He could not move. He could only writhe. His body was smeared with naptha, which burned and ate and corroded his flesh while he squirmed and screamed. A death like that took a long time.

  That was what Ikhnaton was afraid of. That was what death meant to him. Death meant being unable to move.

  Thus no one was to be buried at Aketaten. No one was to die there.

  It was Meryra, poor foolish Meryra, who so wanted to be wise, who brought this subject up. It was not his fault that Pharaoh had been ill and locked up with Pentu, the physician.

  Pentu had been forced to tell Ikhnaton that though of course Pharaoh was glorious, immortal, beautiful, and eternally young, still there were degrees of youth, and that though the epileptoid seizures to which he was subject were in fact the means whereby his body was eternally renewed, a statement in which there was some truth, at the same time there was not much even a god could do about chronic bronchitis. He would have to rest a good deal more from now on.

  So now Pharaoh slept in an immense pavilion in the garden, with lamps, attendants, and Nefertiti always within call.

  As far as ritual went, as Nefertiti suggested, his burden could be lightened if she took over the dawn and evening worship. At those hours the Aton is weak, yielding, compassionate, and feminine. Pharaoh could thus gather his strength to carry on the worship from ten until five in the afternoon, during which hours the sun is strong, vigorous, powerful, and masculine. The suggestion was adopted, and gave her much power.

  But it was as Pentu left that Meryra entered to bring up the matter of the royal tombs. It was untactful of him.

  The courtiers had by this time settled down. Those Ikhnaton had ennobled already had their houses at Aketaten. The others, with their palaces as yet unbuilt, lived in light tents or on the hospitality of the parvenus. There was nothing else for them to do, for they were courtiers. What else would they do, where else could they go, but at court? Therefore, willy-nilly, they had been forced to build, if only to get free of those parvenus whose hospitality they found so galling. The city was full of palaces now.