On a Balcony Read online

  In the State Department, the foreign minister under Ay received his fifth appeal from Rib-Addi of Byblos, against the disloyal manœuvres of Aziru, who had gone over to the Hittites. Byblos was of some importance as a trade centre. But the foreign minister knew better than to bother Pharaoh with such matters, and since the bribe offered by the Hittite ambassador turned out to be surprisingly large, he did not mention it to Ay either.

  At court one saw rather more of Smenkara and of Nefertiti rather less. She now appeared only for Aton worship and the distributions of gold collars and other valuable honorifics from the royal balcony. In public the Royal Couple was as affectionate as ever. In private, she could be seen alone by anyone who sought her intervention or interest. The foreign minister was not among her party. She had no interest in politics in Syria, and supported Pharaoh in his disinterest in the matter, as she always had. It was another way she had of holding his attention, which these days was increasingly difficult to hold.

  She found it prudent to avoid the court, for Smenkara did not like her. For the most part she stayed in the northern suburb and strengthened her position.

  Tutankaten did seem to like her. He was seven now, and quite knowledgeable. Since Pharaoh neglected him, she had virtually adopted him, and thought his affection almost genuine. One does not expect self-interest from a child of seven. Unfortunately for her, he was, like the rest of them, precocious.

  Since he showed an aptitude for sport, wiser than her mother, she hired male tutors and bowmen to instruct him. She also paid them well. She did not think much of Smenkara, and a prince with a faction is more useful than a prince without one. She made sure that Tutankaten’s servants should be loyal to her.

  Smenkara, who collected art objects, had not only reawakened Ikhnaton’s interest in them, but had added a new piece to his own collection. In Pharaoh’s rooms he had found a small quartzite head and admired it. Ikhnaton had given it to him at once, without the slightest compunction. He had almost forgotten Maketaten. Not only did he have Smenkara to talk to, but he had a new interest now, or at least he tried to persuade himself that he had.

  The matter was kept quiet, and in any case was rather pathetic. He had added a male harem to the royal establishment. Nefertiti could scarcely blame him. His tuberculosis had had the usual side effects, and in a way she had taught him the method, years ago. It was only because he could not sleep at night, and she doubted if he enjoyed it; but then again, thinking the matter over, he might.

  She grew thoughtful. Purely apart from the desperation it revealed, boys were apt to be more spiteful than girls, and in sexual intrigue, more quarrelsome and adroit.

  She need not have worried. Smenkara, though unduly decadent, had no such interests, and besides, it was an entertainment which Pharaoh preferred to keep locked up in one room and never refer to.

  However, if he had no interest in the fate of the Empire, Tiiy did. Copies of all official documents were sent to her as a matter of course, not by the Foreign Office, but by their original senders. She sent word down from Thebes that now Amenophis was dead she wished to visit the new capital. She was not so naïve as to believe her visit would produce any particular result, but it might, and besides, she was not without curiosity.

  Ikhnaton would have refused her permission to come, but then his eye was caught by the death-mask of Amenophis.

  He had forced Tutmose to give it to him. Having it about satisfied his new and restless mood. Having his father’s dead face there to watch somehow made life a little livelier. The Queen admired dangerous cats. This dangerous face might serve him equally well. He kept it by him, he supposed, out of defiance. Therefore, why not defy it now?

  His mother, no doubt, thought of him as a weakling, incompetent to rule in her stead. If the Foreign Office did not plague him, she did. He was tired of all these petitions. He had begun to tire of the whole panoply, and was by no means averse to a chance to show off, which would make it for a moment new, seen through someone else’s eyes. He would let her come.

  The preparations took six months. Unexpectedly Nefertiti found herself back in favour. She had built herself into the religion solidly, and now she was needed to show it off. She knew all that and tended Tutankaten with particular care. She had never liked her mother, either.

  The preparations rejuvenated all of them.

  She brought the blind harpers out of retirement with her. She thought she deserved the gesture. But Ikhnaton did not even notice them. He was too busy, for there was building to be done, and a pageant to be organized.

  To Ay and Horemheb that pageant was ironic, for by this time, by force of finding it around him every day, Horemheb had had to master irony himself. Irony, in this case, turned out to be hugely expensive. The treasury was not so full as it had been, but the army coffers were fuller. He had no objection to paying up, if the object lesson provided did any good.

  Needless to say, it didn’t.

  As a national symbol, however, it was effective, in a way that Tiiy may have overlooked. For in coming to Aketaten, Tiiy made it look very much as though the old order had at last been made to bow down before the new. On the other hand, her personal prestige was so great, and the partisan motives for applauding her so complex, that nobody bothered to look at the matter that way. To many she was the glory of the Empire, Pharaoh only what was left of it. Her reception by the army she found especially gratifying.

  Nor did she see any reason to remove the figure of Amon from the prow and rudder of her own barge, or his standards from among those of her personal guard.

  The shout these raised, when her flotilla approached the jetty of the south custom house, and the size of the crowd that raised it, was no doubt one reason why Pharaoh had caused the flotilla to dock there rather than at the wharves opposite the palaces and the Aton temple. She smiled graciously and was satisfied.

  As for Ikhnaton, he relished the impertinence, for here, at Aketaten, he could put it in its place, which is what he had planned to do all along.

  Rather than let her proceed to the dwelling built for her, he insisted she join in Aton worship at an altar built along her route for just that purpose. She could scarcely refuse, he thought. She had no intention of refusing. She felt the liveliest interest.

  She was a pragmatist. Religion to her was a branch of the government, whereby one handed over spiritual ownership of the state to a series of venal officials, called priests, whose sole function was to maintain metaphysical order in one’s name. Like any officials, they sometimes forgot themselves, and had to be brought into line or even stripped of office, but one could not do everything oneself, and by and large the arrangement was satisfactory. The priesthood in other words was a branch of the police, and only slightly more corrupt, but then corruption is the price we have to pay for order, and always has been.

  As for the rest, she was superstitious about trifles and needed religion on her death-bed, and that was that.

  She thought the white altar with its four staircases very pretty. Flowers she had always been fond of; she had never minded hot sunlight, and the hymn, of course, should not have been written in the vernacular, but the harpers played it very well. Meryra she did not even recognize.

  That bright feverish glitter on her son was somewhat more disturbing. She looked round at the rest of them. The princesses did not count, but Meritaten looked as though she could bear children, which would be some help. Smenkara she had given up, but he was at least physically normal. To Nefertiti she was deliberately gracious. Tutankaten was too young to be forced to toddle through such fatiguing ceremonies, at his age so much standing was bound to make him bandy-legged. She made a note to mention it.

  Indeed the only people she enjoyed seeing were Ay and Horemheb. They were very close now, those two. They even stood close together. It was always agreeable to see Ay. His cynicism was refreshing and never rude.

  She saw what he meant about Horemheb.

  Horemheb had turned out well. It was odd and even star
tling that he should be the perfect popular image of what a Pharaoh should be, manly, supple, direct, and powerful-looking, when they all looked like something else. Or perhaps it was not so odd, for in point of fact his family was older than the dynasty. In the obscurity of poverty they had probably taken the opportunity to renew their blood. Whereas her own brood was clearly the scuttle-butt of inbreeding. It always happened. After two or three generations a family fell in on itself.

  Like everyone else, she looked at Horemheb’s calves. One forgets at times that it is not always the face that sums up the character. It may as easily be some other part of the body, the finger-nails, the hand, the navel, even the foot. In his case it was the calves. They were so firm and sturdy.

  They left the altar and she was escorted through the city.

  She was escorted mercilessly through all of it, and exposed to a good deal of aesthetic prattle as well. She thought it was a pity Ikhnaton had no other hobbies. Between architecture and theology she was beginning to find it an unduly hot day.

  The temples, she could see, in a light summer pavilion way, were pretty, but she was more interested in the Foreign Office.

  It turned out Ikhnaton had never been in the Foreign Office.

  She stared when he said that, and beside her, Ay gave a slight shrug. The courtiers, too, were little better than an ennobled rabble. She was relieved when she had been left alone in the temple of reception he had had built for her. The temple was decorated with alternating statues of herself, Amenophis, and Ikhnaton. The workmanship was bad, but it was a graceful touch. She took a nap.

  There was something to be said for ritual and ceremonial after all. Moving that way in processions, appearing only at state dinners and other public functions, it took her longer to lose her temper, for not being alone with anybody, she had nobody to lose it with.

  Private meals were less agreeable. She sat in one chair, and Nefertiti and Ikhnaton sat in another, ten feet opposite her, the space between occupied by food racks, flower arrangements, and wine bottles. The acoustics in the banqueting hall were bad and the orchestra noisy. It was really a relief when the acrobats arrived, and made sustained conversation unnecessary.

  Ikhnaton’s table manners had not improved. If anything they had become worse. Nor were Nefertiti’s much better. Seen thus, gnawing away at a chicken or a roast, their faces had a look of abstracted bliss that seldom came over them in the temples. If they washed their hands frequently, it was only to prevent their slipping on a greasy bone.

  She was astonished, sipped wine, and watched. Nefertiti, at least, had always been fastidious. Indeed physically, despite that eye, she was still fastidious, in a curious sick-bed way. But they were gluttons. On the other hand, there was some excuse. The cooking, she had to admit, was superb.

  Conversation was boring. Nefertiti, to her surprise, talked about the religion rather more, and Ikhnaton, less. Perhaps, as the fountain-head of inspiration, he preferred to staunch the flow of a well that could not be inexhaustible. Nefertiti on the other hand almost talked as though she believed it, and of course, as she well knew, Nefertiti believed in nothing.

  Tiiy saved her conversation for Ay and Horemheb. They acted out their game of domestic affection well, but she was not convinced. She knew what domestic affection was, and it was not this. Even as a performance it seemed a little tired. There was no feeling in those understanding smiles.

  Also, Smenkara was rude to her. Not even Nefertiti seemed to control him. No doubt they all wanted to show how independent they were, since they were her children. She could not help but find them saddening.

  She found the pageant of foreign tribute even more so.

  They viewed it from a reception hall built for the purpose at one side of the Foreign Office.

  It came in three parts: a spontaneous demonstration of loyalty on the part of the ambassadors of subject states; a procession of captives, which was an excuse for the army to parade in force; and the presentation of tribute. She settled into place and was not impressed.

  For one thing, there had been some difficulty with the ambassadors. The Foreign Office, caught between Pharaoh and the facts, had been forced to improvise. Ambassadors should have presented themselves from the Sea Peoples, Crete, the Mitannians, the Hittites, the Phoenicians, and all the lesser cities of Philistia, Sharon, Acre, Esdraelon, Beth-Shan, Damascus, Kadesh, Aleppo, Lachish, Beth-Shemesh, and Judea. Unfortunately Lachish, Kadesh, and Aleppo were undergoing siege, and could not get their ambassadors out. It had been a task to find natives of those regions in the foreign quarter and dress them up. The Sea Peoples were no longer under control, but one of their petty chieftains, who hoped to defeat his countrymen with Egyptian help, had been pressed into service. The Mitannian kingdom had fallen ten years ago, and so had Crete. None the less a real Cretan had been obtained in the person of a Mycenean merchant, and without his beard he did very well. The Phoenicians were there in full force, but twenty Phoenician ambassadors, though they filled out the procession, might seem excessive. This had been solved by having each one represent a different city.

  The Hittites, however, were openly at war with Egypt, though they sent protestations of loyalty, but since they had absorbed the Mitannian state, three of whose daughters had married Pharaohs, including Amenophis III and Ikhnaton himself, these protestations failed to convince. So they had been left out.

  All the same, it made a brave show.

  The procession of captives had proved more difficult, since the army had not been active for twenty years. It had been necessary to comb the slave gangs in the marble quarries and gold mines, but those who had not died of exhaustion were now in their late forties, and looked more as though they had been defeated by old age and overwork than by Pharaoh. Fortunately, the chieftain of the Sea Peoples had been able to provide two boatloads of pirates. These were unruly, and gave the army something to push against, which looked well. Forty Hittite hostages, most of them craftsmen from the recently founded ironworks, also helped out. The yellow and white peoples accounted for, it was necessary only to fill out the throng with a few Africans.

  This proved harder. A forced draft on the court dwarfs added pygmies, but three hundred Nubians in various states of preservation were not many. An extra four hundred men of the right build had been pressed into service and brought down from the Sudan. Unfortunately intermarriage with Egyptians had reduced their racial characteristics to a minimum. But someone had suggested that by pricking their lips and rubbing in tar, the resultant swelling would make them look properly central African, and this had been done.

  So the captives did not make such a bad show, particularly as the army made a very good one. Horemheb had done well with the army.

  The army was followed by the tribute.

  Since the army monopoly of the gold-mines kept the treasury relatively well-to-do, despite the drains of the building programme, the tribute was impressive. The display of logs from Lebanon was particularly fine. Still, the treasury was not that full, and it had been necessary to exhibit the gold bars from the army treasury and to eke the whole thing out with a few ostriches and lions and a raree show from the royal zoos.

  All in all, the Foreign Office could congratulate itself on having done a good job, and to Ikhnaton, who had never seen anything like it before, since his father’s last campaign had taken place before his birth, it was overwhelming, and he had a sketch artist on the spot, to take it all down.

  Tiiy was not impressed. This procession had taken three hours. That after Amenophis’s last nominal victory twenty years ago, and it had been a very minor campaign, had taken six.

  For the moment she said nothing.

  They went back through the Foreign Office, where the dust lay thick on clay despatches and dictionaries stacked on shelves, and out on to the balcony of audience.

  Ikhnaton was very proud of his balcony of audience. Here he passed out gold collars and cones of incense to all those responsible for arranging the pageant, amid hearty ch
eers of congratulation. But Tiiy, who stood between Nefertiti and Pharaoh, looked down on the vacuous faces of the courtiers, and could not help but notice the grass growing up through the paving, or the deserted streets beyond the crowd.

  In her own quarters, with Horemheb and Ay, she held a council of war. She was furiously angry.

  Ay had nothing to suggest. He sat in the shadows, playing with something, and watching them.

  “Will you stop doing that?” she snapped.

  He did not stop. “You should look at this,” he said. “I bought it in the market last week. All the children have them. They’re really very ingenious. And instructive.”

  She looked. On a tabouret in front of him he had a clay chariot on movable wheels. Standing in the chariot were two little monkeys, driving. The resemblance to Ikhnaton and Nefertiti was unmistakable. Ay felt around on the floor of the chariot and lifted up three more monkeys, smaller, and set them on the tabouret. “The children,” he said.

  She stared at it. “It’s only a toy.”

  “Of course.” He held up one of the drivers. “But you see, detachable. It’s very convenient. This one already has a crack. If one breaks, you can replace it.” He turned it over in his fingers. “It should break very soon.”

  “Doesn’t he know he’s dying?”

  Ay shrugged. “We none of us know that until too late. Besides, he’s been dying now for fifteen years. There’s no reason why he shouldn’t go on dying for quite a while yet.”

  “I’m going to speak to him.”

  “Don’t you think we’ve tried? Besides, would someone else be any better? Smenkara, say, or Tutankaten?”

  She couldn’t help staring at the toy. “Put that thing away,” she snapped.

  “If you wish,” he said. “But don’t underestimate it. In its way it’s a very clever toy indeed.”

  She went to speak to Ikhnaton, taking Horemheb and Ay along with her. And Ay was quite right. In its own way, it was very clever. It also found the toy, after a brief silent pause, very amusing, and asked why it had never been shown one before.