On a Balcony Read online

  He looked around him, for he was by no means indifferent to the scenery. It was, after all, his country. Where the prince might find it significant, he found it real. For immanence is not the sole prerogative of mystic young hysterics. A sober man may feel it just as deeply after the noon meal, perhaps more deeply, since he prefers not to mention it, and so cannot get rid of it.

  But it was not after the noon meal. It was evening, except that in Egypt there is no evening. The night there falls as predacious as a hawk. The cliffs seemed to edge a little nearer. A ripple ran over them, as they began to exhale the heat of the day. Then it was night, and the stars did not come out properly.

  There was a sudden gust of cold wind across the water. Horemheb felt that something was definitely wrong, and the scream of a jackal in the distance did nothing to help. It was careless of the prince to move about this disturbed country without guards.

  Nor was Ay any protection. A snake might lurk out there, or a bandit. Ay would not notice anything so simple as a snake. Ay was a man in whom a carefully calculated indifference had become a way of life. A great deal might go on behind those eyes, but he himself did nothing. He broke his astute silences only as another man would crack a crab, in order to get at the succulence they contained. His manner was avuncular. He let other people take the trouble and then dropped in unexpectedly to reap the benefits, with sweetmeats and toys. This might make him lovable, but it was wrong of the prince to trust him. Horemheb did not trust him at all.

  In other words, something had to be done. Horemheb stood up, ran across the plank to the shore, and paused uncertainly before the bulk of the temple. It was unnatural for the night to be so dark and clamorous, and he could not quite get his bearings.

  The temple was too massive to be recent, and too strongly built to support weeds. Only sand oozed up between the immense flags of the flooring. Nor was it wise to come to such places. One needed priests between oneself and the gods. Otherwise a temple was not safe. Cautiously Horemheb moved through the pylon into the outer court.

  He thought he heard voices, but could not place them. Then, abruptly, the moon came out, bobbling along the vague rim of the cliffs, with each seeming spring bounding a little higher through the heat haze, until it settled into its customary place. It was not, however, its customary colour, but the angry orange of a very old egg.

  Despite this its pale blue light was the same, and streamed across the court through an inner pylon to a confused heap of ruins beyond. As Horemheb walked down its path, the voices became louder.

  On the other side of the second pylon most of the building had fallen in, so that what should have been the sanctuary was instead a cleared space in the rubble, open to the sky. Tall swaddled statues loomed around him up into the night, the images of long-dead gods and kings, great stone mummies of what had never been men. Pillars supported nothing, but the paint was still distinct on the carved walls. One or two blocks of stone had fallen to the pavement. On one of these the prince was sitting. He was a white blur. Ay stood in front of him, and apparently the prince had been asking questions, for Ay’s voice was full of the soft, furry irony with which he always answered questions. Horemheb stopped to listen.

  “No,” Ay was saying. “It is older than that. One of your predecessors of the 12th Dynasty, long after this temple was built, Amen-em-het, after his murder, warned his son: ‘Hold thyself apart from those subordinate to thee, lest that should happen to whose terrors no attention has been given. Approach them not in thy loneliness. Fill not thy heart with a brother, nor know a friend. When thou sleepest, guard thy heart thyself, because no man has adherents on the day of distress.’”

  “Yes, that is very true,” said the prince. His voice was silvery and shrill. It echoed against those forgotten statues like a sistrum. “But I am descended from Ra, not from Amon. We have found out that much. It says so on these walls. Therefore darkness cannot touch me.”

  Ay smiled, and the moonlight made that smile less reassuring than perhaps it was meant to be. “The moon is not the sun, but in a moment you will see,” he said.

  Horemheb decided to join them. Among other things he did not like to be alone. “See what?” he demanded, and his own deeper voice echoed longer among these stones. “You should not linger here after dark. It is not safe.” He stood arms akimbo, feeling very solid above the slim weak body of the prince.

  The prince, if he had been startled, did not show it. He had courage of a sort. He peered into the shadows at Horemheb’s rounded calves and saw who it was. “Sit down,” he said, “and be still.”

  That claw of authority slipped out so seldom, that it seemed all the more sharp when it did. Ay gave Horemheb a quick look of amused mockery and gravely sat down. So did Horemheb. The moon appeared over the edge of the ruins, about a third of the way up the sky. Horemheb felt an unpleasant prickling of the scalp, under his wig. Ay wore no wig. He sat there bald, expectant, and calm.

  “When will it begin?” asked the prince at last.

  “Now,” said Ay.

  They looked upward.

  The croaking of the frogs along the river, as though old pilings had voices, sounded louder. It was because all the other restless night noises had stopped. The breeze, that had blown cold, abruptly blew warm and from another direction. Horemheb caught a glimpse of the prince out of the corner of his eye and felt uncomfortable. At twenty-three the prince had the body of an unattractive girl, the voice of a eunuch, and a face of the wrong kind of beauty. Yet there was that soft, scented, compelling, and somehow pathetic charm. One said, oh well, he will outgrow it. But one knew better. He was horribly intelligent. He knew things no prince should know, and almost nothing that a prince should. One thought he was easy to manage. And then suddenly one was up against something as brittle, but as smooth and hard, as glass. Seeing those overfull lips, pointed moistly towards the sky, Horemheb was frightened and glanced at Ay.

  But Ay merely looked gently amused and raised a slim, wiry finger towards the moon.

  Certainly something was happening to it. It looked tarnished, and now a shadow moved majestically across it. There was no way to stop that shadow. It had an inevitable pour.

  “It is symbolic.” Did the prince say that, or Ay? Horemheb was not sure. He watched. He was a military man, not a religious, but military men have their own ghosts, and stand as stiff-legged as any dog at the presence of what cannot be seen by others. It is one reason for their excellent discipline. The worse the nightmare, the firmer the will.

  The prince sat there like a well-behaved guest at a particularly good funeral, well-fed, but waiting for his dinner. The powers of darkness were eating the light. But they would be forced to disgorge it, so one could watch the spectacle, except that, for a moment, despite oneself, one did not believe that the powers of darkness would disgorge it, even though one knew this had happened before. The orange rim grew narrower. The eclipse was complete. For that instant the world was motionless. It might live or die, and who could say which? The dreadful thing was not that the moon was dead and gave no light, but that though it gave no light and was dead, one could still see it, like the ghost of a world or of a city from which everyone had vanished instantaneously, so instantaneously that their voices still rang in your ears.

  “It is only that a shadow comes between the sun and the moon, our shadow,” said Ay. “But the sun will push us away.”

  If the prince was listening, he was not listening to Ay. In the utter darkness of the temple even his white linen had become invisible. He turned to Horemheb, and just as the dead grey circle of the moon began to yellow again at the edges, he spoke. Though the temple air was motionless, along the desert above the cliffs a wind was roaring. “Listen,” he said. “Do you hear it?”

  “Hear what?”

  “The voice of silence.”

  As a matter of fact Horemheb did hear something. It made his skin prickle. He was aware of something out there, something urgent that was almost audible, but not quite. It made
him angry, because he was frightened, and it also made him impatient with silly hysterics, princes or not. “It is only the desert,” he said.

  “Then you cannot hear it,” said the prince. He hesitated, and Horemheb heard Ay stir in his clothes. “I can.” He sounded sincere. He could always sound sincere when he wanted to. As a matter of fact, he had heard nothing at all. He was metaphysically deaf. He had turned to these religious matters only out of boredom, since if we have everything in this world, then we must take our unsatisfied longings off to the next. Yet this new game was the only plaything that had ever held his attention for so long.

  He would probably have been furious, had Horemheb said he had heard it, but instead he gave his cryptic little smile.

  Ay coughed.

  The world was beginning to move again. The shadow was sliding away, slowly, inexorably retreating, as the light fought it back.

  ‘Yes, it will be like that,” said the prince, and this time he was not playing. But the others did not hear him, for the animal world had recovered its wits. It grew restive. The jackals began to shriek. Full moonlight turned the tired stone of the temple into silver plate. After so much darkness, the light was almost embarrassing, and Horemheb felt ashamed of himself. It was after all only a ruined temple and nothing more. These fears were foolish. He led the way back to the boat, and they retired.

  *

  Dawn woke him early. He was the first one to rise. The sky was pale green, the cliffs the colour of dead rose petals. Seen by daylight, the temple was much smaller, rather pathetic, and certainly nothing to inspire awe. An ibis stalked gravely through the water. No doubt these trips were only a search for novelty. There was an interest in the past these days, for people in their desperate search for that commodity are doomed from the start by their accompanying hostility towards anything new. Even Pharaoh, now he could no longer hunt, took a mild interest in the antique. The prince’s interest was of that sort, and nothing more.

  Amidships someone had lit a cook-fire. Horemheb stood up and stretched. His body badly needed exercise. Perhaps today, while Ay and the prince grubbed about some temple precinct, he could go into the rushes with a bow and arrow and a cat and flush game. This high up, the Nile was well stocked with game.

  But that was not to be. The curtains of the royal compartment parted and Ay appeared, stepping fastidiously over the still sleeping attendants, rather like that ibis through the reeds. He made his way towards Horemheb. They were to turn back for Thebes, he said. He said nothing about the scene the night before. Horemheb did.

  Ay shrugged. “It is nothing to be taken seriously. He is only a boy.”

  “He is twenty-three.”

  “Age has nothing to do with the matter, and besides, among princes trusted advisors are an excellent substitute for intelligence,” said Ay, and thus betrayed his only ambition, before he had the time to turn away.

  Horemheb gave the orders. By the time the prince was up, they were already in midstream, with the current taking over from the oars and sail. The temple and its peristaltic gorge vanished behind them, and Horemheb could not say he was sorry.

  The voyage back would be faster. They might even be able to stop from time to time, to hunt. But they did not stop to hunt. As though he had been to consult an oracle about pressing affairs and had received a favourable answer, the prince was anxious to get home.

  Nor was he friendly or talkative, as people with Horemheb usually were.

  Horemheb was puzzled by that. The prince did not make friends. They were the same age, and had been flung together for years. Yet the prince was evasive. The prince kept very much to himself. It was almost as though he felt a slight contempt for what previously he had admired, such as the skill with which Horemheb could shoot a duck, as though he had at last found some way to prove himself superior that now made Horemheb the child, not him.

  It was worse than infuriating. It was mysterious.

  On the morning they were to reach Thebes he saw Ay, as usual clean-shaven, fastidious, and very far away, coming to speak to him again. His thin loincloth flapped at his waist, and it had to be admitted that for a man of sixty, Ay had a tight, wiry body fit to endure anything. He was the opposite of soft, and therefore Horemheb treated him with respect. Together they scanned the shore.

  “What will you say to the Queen?” asked Ay. “About the prince, I mean.”

  “That Royal Father Ay has interested him in archaeology. I suppose it is better for him to be interested in something.”

  Ay smiled wryly. “So I thought. Unfortunately it hasn’t turned out quite that way. That was a temple to Ra, where we stopped. The prince has discovered he is descended from Ra. The priests of Amon are not apt to like it. Of course he is quite right, Ra is the older god, but since Amon is the stronger, we can only hope he does not insist.” He hesitated. “In other words, he has taken to theology. A rather wilful, self-centred theology, but still, theology. It could be an advantage.”

  Horemheb stared at him. And then he saw that, of course, it could be. The army and the priests of Thebes were always in competition with each other, and in that game Pharaoh was the chief taw.

  “It could also be dangerous,” he said.

  “Oh, I don’t think so. He is only playing, you know. It is only a game to him. But it is a game one might conceivably win.” And again Ay gave Horemheb a look of tacit intelligence.

  Abruptly the current carried them round a bend and Thebes lay before them, the whole vast complex of buildings on either side of the river, with Karnak and Luxor too, the great, cancerous, palpitating mass of the Amon temples, the enormous city of the dead, backing up to the cliffs, all gleaming, shining, rich, and powerful, almost hiding the sprawling white mass of the palace, in an endless hive of sacerdotal power. And there, beyond, rising out of the plain, backed by the huge bulk of their silver and lapis-lazuli temple, stood the colossi of Memnon, the twin statues of Amenophis III and his wife Tiiy, gazing blandly at nothing, from a great height.

  “I do not like it either,” said Ay. It was an innuendo, but not a harmless one. Ay was for once in earnest. “And the boy is only a boy. Let him have his head. He should not be difficult to get under control. One has only to like him a little.”

  He smiled again and went to put on clothes more suitable to an entry into the city. For already the air was full of the restless clamour of the crowds. They would pull up to the jetty very soon.

  Horemheb was surprised. It was unlike Ay ever to make a definite statement about anything, much less than to hint at a possible conspiracy. But he had not the time to think about it. They were landing and there was much to do.

  He had thought they would go straight to the palace, but instead they docked on the eastern shore, for the prince wished to make an oblation.

  It took some time to assemble the necessary retinue. The priest would have to be warned they were coming and the streets, in so far as that was possible, cleared.

  A trip through the city was never a pleasant experience. If the necropolis workers were not rioting on the western shore, then the temple workers were rioting on the eastern. A vast horde of office seekers, sycophants, unemployed workers, hangers-on at half a dozen separate courts, 40,000 useless priests, and the inmates of the theological and military colleges made disorder permanent. There was always mischief there, and if there was none, the army invented it, out of sheer boredom with having nothing else to do. For an army needs something to fight. It should not stay cooped up in the capital, while the Empire slips away.

  Life! Prosperity! Health! shouted the crowd, sometimes in irony, or sometimes out of goodwill. But it would stone you one minute and rob you the next, all the same, and then where would your life, prosperity, and health be?

  Nor did it help matters that out of all character the prince was a reckless charioteer who always took the reins himself. He had that passion for speed at any cost which is the delight of the impotent, and since he could always pay the cost, the passion never went unassuage
d. He did not even know how to sit a horse, but he did know how to drive one. Even as a child, his wet hand had closed round his first whip with the intent fury of someone whose physical passion has at last found the one outlet its body makes possible. And the crowds loved it, of course. Crowds always love to see someone else do something dangerous. He would always be loved by the crowds. It was another aspect of his character that Tiiy and Ay had been so foolish as to overlook.

  They at last drew up before a temple, but not the Amon temple, to Horemheb’s surprise. Years ago Amenophis III had built within the Amon compound a small temple to his own private ecclesiastical hobby, the royal household god, Aton. It was a tiny white building dwarfed by the huge stone walls of the Amon temple which surrounded it, and was usually seedy and run down, for Pharaoh had forgotten about it years ago, as the priests of Amon had known he would. They could afford to humour him in these small things, since he humoured them in all important ones.

  Now it had apparently been furbished up. At any rate its whitewash was new. The pritice disappeared inside. Ay and Horemheb, with some reluctance, followed, chiefly to avoid the crowd. Neither one of them went to any temple unless he had to.

  As a temple it was not much. Some indifferent reliefs ran along the walls of the inner court. The sanctuary was small and not in the least concealed from public view, as it would have been elsewhere. The prince had already vanished within it. Horemheb and Ay waited in the shadow of the surrounding colonnade.

  “By whose orders was this done?” asked Horemheb, looking at the fresh colouring.