On a Balcony (19 page)

He let them go. He tried to think it was because, as Ay had pointed out, he could not rule without a full treasury, and that this effort at a reconciliation would replenish the treasury. A practical excuse for what we
do is always more convincing and more comforting than the real reasons.

And the real reasons were that he was tired. He longed to rest. And he knew that everything, even the affections, must be paid for, if not with cash, at least with expensive bait. And the reason why everyone became so angry when one said this, was that it was true and they knew it. They might be sorry it was true, but that would only make them the angrier. The giver was always hurt. The taker only sometimes.

Now Smenkara was Pharaoh too, he wanted a nest of his own. Ikhnaton understood. It was what he
himself
had wanted. He gave in.

“Anything,” he said. “Anything. Only leave me alone.”

They left him alone.

A week later they departed for Thebes. He even went down to the jetty to watch them go. Tiiy carried
Smenkara
and Meritaten about as though they were no more than the symbols of her own office. Perhaps that was all they were. He did not envy Smenkara. And as for Meritaten, it was better not to have any feelings about her at all, since seemingly she had none.

Horemheb and Ay also returned to the old capital. From now on they would alternate between the two cities. As the boat moved out into midstream,
Smenkara
seemed frightened. He looked back out of startled eyes, and waved. It was the last Ikhnaton ever saw of him.

Ikhnaton returned to his own quarters, slowly and reluctantly. It was now only a matter of keeping up appearances, but once one has seen through
appearances
, that is not so difficult to do. One has only to hold them from the back, like a shield, and they protect one quite well.

He had sworn never to leave this glorious city of the sun, where he would live for ever and ever. But that
had been a matter of choice. Now he saw that he could not leave it. He did not dare to do so.

He moved through time as though suspended in some fluid preservative. The months went by. It a little restricted his movements, but it kept him alive. No doubt he could have learned what was happening in Thebes, but he did not wish to. Horemheb and Ay came and went, but had rather less time for him than before. When he gave orders, they obeyed them and carried them out, but with something like impatience. He saw that look on the faces of the palace servants, too, and on those of the courtiers.

For he went on seeing the same familiar faces. It was merely that now he saw fewer of them. That was only reasonable. Not even Egypt had enough nobles to stock three courts. There was not only Thebes and his own, but Nefertiti had gathered a considerable party around herself and Tutankaten, mostly of those new nobles whose fortunes would stand or fall with the Aton cult, the nobles he himself had raised up, until they were big enough to leave him.

He would almost have called her back. It was
ridiculous
that they should be at opposite ends of the city, with the neutral, sleeping slums between them. Her speaking in anger he could have forgiven, but her speaking the truth in anger he could not. For truth is the worst lie of all. It brings down all our illusions.

He heard of her only through Pa-wah.

Recently Ikhnaton had slighted the temple
ceremonies
. He had not felt up to them. Now he exerted himself. He asked questions. He asked Pa-wah
questions
about her. He would never see her again, but he did want to know what she was doing.

Reluctantly Pa-wah told him. No one than she could be more devoted to the Aton. Even Tutankaten and Ankhesenpa’aten accompanied her to the ceremonies. He had had to ask her to moderate her zeal, on the
grounds that so much fatigue was bad for the boy. But she, too, it seemed, was dedicated to the Aton. While she lived there would be no backsliding.

“To the Aton?” asked Ikhnaton blankly.

“To the supreme, all-knowing, all beneficent disc of the Sun,” said Pa-wah.

“Oh yes,” said Ikhnaton hastily. “Yes, of course.”

He had only to look at the man to know that Pa-wah believed every word of it. For some reason this glimpse into rabid belief was not encouraging. He wanted to say: “My dear man, what on earth can you possibly know about it?”

Of course, from the gleam in his eye, Pa-wah knew everything about it, and not even Pharaoh, his own god, was any longer in a position to tell him otherwise. Ikhnaton could only wonder if when he himself had had that fervour, he had looked like that. The thought was sobering.

And could it possibly be true that the Queen was devout? No, he gave her more credit than that, for she had started at that point of amused indulgence that he had now reached only after the fatigues of a long
journey
through disillusionment. Yet, when your favourite doll is battered and broken, you do not throw it away. Instead you love it more than ever, for it has been with you for a long while, and you can still remember how it used to look. It gave him a certain pleasure to listen to the ravings of Pa-wah.

Indeed, perhaps it was better this way, with
Smenkara
and Tiiy in Thebes running the country to suit themselves, and he here left in peace. Why was it, then, that moving through the dusty rooms of the palace he sometimes found himself walking on tiptoe? And in the inner sanctuary of the temple, where even now he went to lay his flowers, he looked round that whitewashed emptiness and sometimes had the illusion that
Nefertiti
was there. He could almost hear her voice, and he
still, from force of habit, used that perfume special to them both.

His strength had rallied, and he was able to take chariot rides again. He no longer took them through the crowded noon city, for the cheering got on his nerves. Instead he would leave at night, preferably very early, just before dawn. One of his real pleasures was still to see the dawn come up. That still moved him deeply, as the first warm rays touched his face. Indeed, it was something to move the entire world, if the world were awake to see it. It had been his great fault not to know that the world prefers to sleep in.

It was on such a morning, clattering through the
unweeded
and still nocturnal streets, that something in a side alley caught his eye and he reined in to watch.

It was the servants of some noble, carrying their master’s household furniture through the furtive streets. And those cloaked figures, surely they must be the master and his family? He could not recognize who they were.

He galloped to the docks, got down to the ground, and leaning in the shadow of the door to a warehouse, watched. Yes, there were five boats being readied. And while he waited, not one, but three processions began to converge upon the jetty, amid the hushed orders of sailors and stevedores. He remained quite motionless. He watched it all. The three families had pooled their resources, no doubt.

As dawn began to seep over the cliffs, the boats put out to the middle of the river, very quietly. Why on earth did they bother to be so clandestine about the matter? he wondered. A light breeze stirred along the water, the sails ran up, and the boats tacked towards the south. Thebes.

With a wry smile he went back to his chariot and returned to the alley. He recognized the house, now. No doubt they had left a caretaker. The door to the
garden stood open. He stepped inside, with a glance at the small Aton temple beyond the pool, and went into the house. The hieroglyphics on the door lintel told him the place belonged to Tutu, a noble in the Foreign Office. No doubt Smenkara or Tiiy had made him a better offer. The house was a shambles. He kicked aside a wine jar on the floor. The wooden columns alone were left. Perhaps they had not dared to take them yet, but they would call for them in time, of that he was sure.

He thought it fitting that the first man he had ennobled should be the first to go over to the other side. He could even admire his courage for having been, if only in this clandestine manner, the first to leave.

He returned to the palace and slept all day. When he woke, it was with caution, for the beautiful child of Aton was not very beautiful any more.

Once he had asked Tutmose why he preferred to do only masks. Tutmose had thought for a while, and then said, “One morning you will wake up and discover your face is only a mask. We all do.”

Well, he had, and it was.

None the less, there were deceptive mornings when he felt quite healthy, mornings when the sunrise could be believed in. He persuaded himself then that life was as it always was.

Death was getting closer, all the same. In Thebes, after a short and unforeseen illness, Tiiy unexpectedly died.

Now it was Horemheb’s turn to discover that
loneliness
is the greediest guest at any feast, the one who stays on after the others have sensibly gone home. It was something he could not mention even to Ay, the way he felt. But wandering a little lost through the palace at Aketaten, he came at last to the household magazines and saw on the shelves the rotten fruit they no longer had the time to eat, that sat on the shelf and
spoiled. Idly he picked up an apricot that dissolved in his hand. Why, of all fruit, is it the most rotten that has the most tantalizing smell?

Angrily he flung it down against the wall.

T
hey lived on that way for another six months.

We think the upper air is inhabited no higher than the most ambitious hawk, the one with the keenest vision and the swiftest pounce, who likes to fly alone. But much higher than that, in the thin violet world between the atmosphere and that space which we like to believe contains nothing, there is a complex society of ancient bacteria.

These are the inert husks of quite a different life, frozen out there, a crew of diseases in suspended animation, in order to survive the long voyage to their destination. Then something happens. We do not know what. Something thaws them out, and a new kind of darkness falls from the air, like the invisible ashes of a plague. And thus, after all, the sun which not only gives, but also takes away, and has given the world so much, now gives the thinning gift of a new disease.

But we do not know this. It takes some time to learn that the enemy has landed.

The city was already a little unreal.

Horemheb and Ay were in Thebes, and it was they now, more than Ikhnaton, who kept Aketaten going. The others all went on tiptoe through the neglected streets.

Yet from a distance the city still looked much the same.

But, if a city may do such a thing, it looked thinner, and somehow defenceless at sunset, under those angry red cliffs. The sun ebbed away from the entrances to the rock tombs quite early in the day, and one might
look up and see the black doorways, like small square samples of the night.

It was a little restless. With less to do on the public works, the workers roamed the streets, followed closely by the police and army. The nobles seldom appeared in public any more, and then only on their way
somewhere
. The passage of the day was marked by three or four habitual processions. Nefertiti left her new palace in the northern suburb, accompanied by a sleepy and resentful Tutankaten, at dawn, moving to the Aton temple in a tight knot of nobles and guards, to
celebrate
the sunrise. There were also two new cermonies invented by Pa-wah, the kindling of the divine fire, and the perpetuation of the divine fire. These over, and the toy white procession moved back to the northern suburb, not to re-emerge again until sunset. Though it was difficult to find new acolytes, and several of the old had disappeared already, presumably to Thebes,
Pawah
was always busy.

Ikhnaton did not appear. He was ill. The court did not quite know what to do, but was not unduly
worried
. The dynasty, in the person of Smenkara, was safe. But they moderated their adoration of the Aton. Service in the palace was slack. It was hard to find the servants, let alone to get them to do anything. In the zoo the great cats snarled restlessly, or lay under the trees. Sometimes now they were not fed. But the inertia of the installed officials was enough to keep the machine in operation, and they were as busy as ever, indulging themselves in last-minute peculation.

Then, it was impossible to keep the matter secret, it was found out that Pharaoh had a new disease. He had Asiatic cholera. He was unable, any longer, to give orders.

Pharaoh’s illnesses, like the headaches of a major prophet, were well known and bothered nobody. One had merely to loiter outside the closed doors of his
apartments, with an ironic smile, waiting to be told what to do by the invisible presence. It had become a regular part of the day, and everyone enjoyed it, for you met your friends there, and could talk over the current gossip. But Asiatic cholera was another matter. It was neither a pretty nor a strategic disease. And now, of course, there were no orders.

The courtiers prowled the corridors in anxious gangs, like greyhounds without either a rabbit or a master. They had run this track so long that they had almost forgotten how to run in any other. It was the absence of a rabbit that bothered them most. Automatically, at the correct hours, they found themselves tugging
towards
the same mechanical bait, and now it wasn’t there. The wisest of them, the most independent, retired to their own houses to await developments. And no one had seen the three princesses for days. A few, perhaps, looked at their wooden pillars and estimated the cost and trouble of shipping them to Thebes.

In the absence of anyone else of authority, decisions rested with the chief household steward, a harassed man who had not been out of the palace for ten years. It was he who remembered to have the princesses fed. Pa-wah should have been consulted, but was not. And since Nefertiti represented an opposing faction, with her own court, it was to nobody’s self-interest to notify her.

The chief household steward called in Mahu, the chief of police. But Mahu would do nothing. The mobs were beyond his ability to control. He did, however, post guards around the palace and sent a despatch to Horemheb, at Thebes. Then he retired to his own household and bolted the doors.

A great many bolts shot home during that anxious four days. For that was how long the crisis lasted, four days. The chief steward caught a glimpse of Pentu’s face, as he left the royal apartments, and being a
methodical man, sent for mortuary workers. These, unknown to Ikhnaton, were installed at once.

Behind the palace, at one end of the store-houses and magazines, was the mortuary yard where Maketaten’s funeral furniture had been prepared. Work was
resumed
, on a day and night shift, for there was much to be done in a hurry. At night the adjacent courtyards were lit by the uncertain fury of the workers’ torches and flares.

Cholera is a contagious disease. It was remarkable how suddenly that palace became empty.

But Ikhnaton had a wily body. Weak and diseased from birth, he had learned a thousand ways to stay alive, of which epileptoid fits were by no means the least. Now, unexpectedly, he seemed to rally. Indeed, one symptom of that disease is a last-minute impulse towards wandering.

He had been comatose, but not altogether
unconscious
. He saw his body subjectively from the inside. It was an echoing flannel tunnel, hollow the way a broken, fallen bronze statue is hollow. Through the tunnel a heavy plush water was ebbing away, with the illusion of running faster than it was running, constantly speeding up, until the surface, if it had a surface, became an oily blur. He did not watch this from his head, or mentally, because his head was stuffed up and wadded with the white-yellow-green offal of a lobster. He watched it from some hummock inside there, about where his lungs would be. He knew of course that this had to be stopped, because it meant that he was dying, but he did not want to stop it. Bits of the roof of the tunnel seemed to be caving in, and the echo was not so much a sound as a texture. Though he knew he should panic, his consciousness felt too humid and heavy, with a dangerous placidity that prevented him from turning to flee. The process was too inevitable not to be
fascinating
, and he could not help but watch it idly. Besides,
it had nothing to do with him. It was just something he was watching, with a completely absorbed
incuriosity
. It had nothing to do with him in any way. So this, he realized cosily, was dying. He had never
expected
to watch the process and still live.

He felt no panic, though he was dimly aware that he should feel panic. When he got back he must set down the process in detail, and he felt rather pleased with himself on the whole, because no one else had ever been able to report it before. It was being watched, but it must look very different from the outside.

Then he realized it had touched him. It had lapped round his will, until he had no desire to do anything but go along with it, like a log, safely rooted to the bank, that of its own volition abruptly, with a sort of comic sigh, shoots out into the main stream, and is sucked away even as it at last realizes what is
happening
. It was like being lapped by a tight, viscous honey, full of drowned midges, up to his ankles. It was pleasant; and then, frighteningly, it took hold.

In that moment he knew that he had only the second between the grip wrapping round him and tightening to escape. Otherwise he would be swept away with it. But there was nothing he could hold on to. He couldn’t raise his body. The connective muscles would not respond. The luxury of that vertigo was too intense. He was covered with fur and couldn’t move. He knew the only way to escape was to feel frightened, but he couldn’t feel frightened. It was too much of an effort.

But that part of his will which was untouchable even by his will got him to his feet. There was a sort of wrenching plop, and he was standing up. He noticed that though he was now vertical, his consciousness was still somehow rushing unconsciously through those horizontal tunnels. If he could get his body away from there, perhaps it would be all right.

It did not occur to him that he could not get his body
away from his body. He did not know what part of him was directing what part of him. Perhaps his muscles were more tenacious of life than he, but since, having lost his brain, he could no longer communicate with them, he let his body go where it would, only impersonally concerned with whether it would win out this time or not, but inwardly smiling, because he knew it wouldn’t, he had caught it out at last, but still, you had to admire the stubbornness with which it was trying.

At the last moment, it was said, you were
overwhelmed
by light. He knew perfectly well what was happening, but had been so busy to prevent its doing so that he had not had the time to think. Now, abruptly, his head was almost clear. He opened his eyes.

For a moment the room was unfamiliar. Egyptian bedrooms were too strait. He needed space. His
hearing
, for the first time in his life, was acute. He could listen to the contented, snake-like slither of the flames in every lamp, echoed from the cornice of golden uraei beneath the ceiling. He struggled to his feet, swaying and bald without his wig, and lurched out into the corridor. He moved automatically through swirling shadows, towards the light, and so came out into a garden courtyard.

Why was everything so restless? It was as though death were everywhere, quietly stalking him through the reeds. Here and there he seemed to catch the
glimmer
of its plump, sturdy, bare calves. The wind was warm and blew every which way. He could hear a snarl from the zoo, the fretful piping of a thousand birds who had had the feathers on their bottoms stirred. And there was another sound, quite dreadful, an echo of the sound he had pretended to hear years ago at that temple up the river from Thebes, and now really heard, the sighing sound of the desert, as the
sand danced over its surface like beige snow. And how it mocked.

He felt weak. He vomited. Clutching a pillar, he forced himself on, towards a glow of light somewhere in the distance. For he had been wrong to doubt, he never had doubted, he never now would doubt, the glorious power of light. His eyelids were granulated and painful. He had always believed. It was only the other believers of whom he made mock. He had only to live until dawn, to reach that light ahead, to be well again. He would live for ever.

But why was he alone here, and why were there not more lamps? The light seemed closer now, brighter, higher, and soon the sun would be almost visible, and he would be safe. His vision had narrowed to that oblong of light ahead, and he struggled towards it. He had to reach it, and he did reach it. He held on to the doorway and peered out.

It was the mortuary yard.

The workers looked up, saw who it was, and dropped their tools. For what they saw was the very image of the death they were carving. He saw the row of ushabtis, tightly bound in, like Osiris, with his head on each of them.

Their sweaty unshaved faces stared at him in shocked disbelief. “And the dead king, Amen-em-het, said to his son: hold thyself apart from those subordinate to thee, lest that should happen to whose terrors no
attention
has been given.” It had happened. He turned and fled. He called out for Pentu, for Nefertiti, for
Smenkara
, even for Ay and Horemheb. There was no answer. For the things of the mind are irreversible. They go right along their road to the end, right to the end of the night. Even his own god had failed.

It was the death of a grasshopper. And ants are sanctimonious. Grasshoppers suffer horribly. For to be amusing and to give generously is not the same as
credit. Our debtors have no charity. Their only mercy in the winter is to tell us how foolish we were to have given them anything. No doubt they are right, but there is nothing to be gained from a lesson in morality after the act has been done.

He had reached the shadowy banqueting hall. There stood the throne. He lurched towards it. For after all, God or no God, he was still Pharaoh. He swayed up the steps of the dais. Vision narrowed down. He turned to confront that empty hall. The first thing he had thrown away was now the last thing he wanted, for it was the only thing he could have. He smiled.

And then, at last, it was dawn. The light lapped and caught at the gardens and the pillars of the hall and slid smoothly across the painted floor and up his face. It might have been a benediction.

His only mistake had been a slight confusion. Pharaoh had always been worshipped as a god, and he was the glorious child of the Aton, so why should they not worship him? But men do not worship the source of life. They worshipped Pharaoh only for what they worshipped in themselves, the source of favour, wealth, and power. For men do not adore anything. Men who do we avoid as absent-minded fools, worthy of our hate because, after all, there is the uneasy suspicion that they may have something we cannot lay our hands on, and nothing is so infuriating as intangible wealth, for it cannot be stolen. Real men worship only what they fear, and what they fear to lose. Religion is not insight. Religion is only a system of bribes and indulgences, rewards and benefits, a matter of making ourselves comfortable at God’s expense, as we do at Pharaoh’s. Insight is something we should do better to keep to ourselves, otherwise someone will find a way to take it away from us. For men are clever. Give them time and they will pull anything down, including the roof over their heads.