On a Balcony (21 page)

The royal barge had been readied a month ago. Now it emerged from its boat-house. To the sound of trumpets, Tutankaten and Ankesenpa’aten left the palace for the last time, without a backward glance, and crossed the plank to the barge. Nefertiti did not appear. The plank was thrown carelessly into the Nile, the hawsers were loosened, and the barge moved out into midstream, at first ahead of the high priest’s barge, and then, more prudently, or perhaps because of an
idle riffle of the current, behind it. The music once more struck up. The fleet manœuvred into assigned order of precedence, and then, with some shouting from boat to boat, settled down and moved smoothly off.

Looking back, Tutankaten’s eye was caught by the figures on the rudder. It was the old royal barge, and the figures were those of Nefertiti and Ikhnaton, since no one had thought to remove them. The sight of them startled and displeased him, but then he saw it did not matter, for this time the boats were headed upstream and not down, and they were going the other way, back the way they had come.

It was ironic, if you liked. For they were all leaving. Not even Ay, in particular not Ay, had been left behind.

I
t was incredible.

At dawn it had been the centre of an empire. Now, at evening, it was not. Yet, even though this had
happened
, it was to keep up a shadow life, after all. It was precisely that it had been left so suddenly, that made one believe in those shadows.

For three weeks one could go through the royal magazines and still find edible vegetables and fruit prepared for the royal table. There were 15,345 bottles of wine still in the cellars, but waiting now not to be drunk, but stolen. That evening, in the royal banqueting hall, an overturned amphora still noisily dripped wine on the painted floor. On one of the food stools lay three bitten figs.

Where were the servants? Why had they cleared nothing away? Those who were left were in the
kitchens
, not knowing whether to hang themselves or gorge on the royal banquet they had been cooking all day. Being human, they wiped their tears and ate, for the food was undeniably as good as ever. For a few weeks they even fed the goldfish, the greyhounds, and the zoo.

But then Nefertiti withdrew to the northern palace, alone, for her three remaining daughters had been taken off with Tutankaten. In the course of the next six months the servants had either been dismissed, called to Thebes, or had drifted away, since no new foodstuffs came into the commissary now.

The palaces were the first to fall into disrepair. Workmen from Thebes stripped them to the walls, and
what the workmen did not take, looters did. The guards made a half-hearted attempt to stop them, but it was only half-hearted. Mahu had gone to Memphis to join Horemheb, and there was no one left to pay them. They, too, drifted away and left the population to itself.

People entered the palaces timidly at first, out of curiosity, to see how a pharaoh had lived. But with all the rich furnishings gone, they found what they saw disappointing.

Goodness knows where the creatures left in the royal harem went. No doubt they either found places or died. As for the male harem, that was not pretty. Some had become castrati and sphinctriae to seek favour, and all to no purpose. Because of the reason for their maimed condition, not even the temple eunuchs would have them. What could they do? They drifted away and no one remembered them.

Decay is too stealthy to have a historian, and few people realize that buildings, like history, have a
physiology
. No one saw or heard the first piece of plaster fall. No one could date that event. But the floors were soon littered with the chips.

There was no one to draw the curtains now. They grew rotten and the wind pulled them down. The wind was everywhere. It blew through corridors and courts, and burst exultantly into chamber after chamber, as the roofs fell in.

The gardens left to their own devices went back to natural law and choked themselves to death. The animals in the zoo starved. Those greyhounds in the kennels who could make their escape did so, and now slunk through the city in ravenous, shuddering packs, until even they were thinned out, for being overbred, they were no match for the common curs. However, a few of the wilier ones survived.

Mice came out one by one and then in bolder,
hungrier
groups, to scurry across the painted floors. And spiders, too, spun desperate webs among the columns, all to catch a single fly.

The merchants left next. It was no longer to their advantage to stay. And with the merchants gone, who was to pay the workers? The glassworks were the last to close. Tutankaten, who was called Tutankamon now, did not care for glass, so neither did his court. Those in the Delta did. The glassmakers migrated there.

The craftsmen were siphoned off, ordered to Thebes, for the new temple works Tutankamon undertook to placate the priests and to please himself. Even those sculptors cleverest at the new style went back to the old with a sigh of relief. The old had been so much easier.

Tutmose remained. He had no desire to go anywhere else. He had enough to live on, and his work was still here. He had always worked for himself, and now he did not even have to flatter his sitters, for there were no sitters. It was better that way. He liked the peace and quiet of the deserted city, and he had much to do.

The guards left. Without any traffic at the customs house, Nefertiti lacked the money to pay them. The priests went last. They belonged to a heresy and were interdicted. But even they had to eat, interdicted or not. A year later and there were only fifty left, where once there had been thousands, fifty to rattle about in three major temples of vast proportions and fifty or sixty of more modest size. So one by one the temples were shut off, of course, for the time being, until only that smaller one was left, in itself too vast for merely fifty, where Nefertiti worshipped, fifty, of course, and Pa-wah. There was indeed nowhere else for Pa-wah to go.

Tutmose never saw her. But he wondered why she bothered to go through that mockery of a service. Perhaps she needed the discipline.

Soon there was no one left in the city but the
caretakers
,
a curious body of taciturn creatures, never to be seen outdoors. In the second year, however, there was considerable activity. Hammers and chisels did not make a cheerful noise in those abandoned streets.

The nobles had at last settled down and sent to Aketaten for their precious wooden pillars and doors. However, that excitement was soon over, and nobody, as yet, except Hatiay, Ikhnaton’s Royal Contractor, had so far dared to remove wood from the public buildings. He, it was true, had taken four royal
pavilions
and six peristyle halls for resale, secretly, in the Delta, before he left.

Often now, with a cane to protect himself against dogs, Tutmose would wander through the grass-and weed-strewn city, and one of these ambles brought him to the temple of Hat-Aton, where Nefertiti persisted in holding services. Attracted by the thin sound of one harp, he went inside.

Though smaller than that of any of the other great temples, the outer courtyard was sixty feet long. Its raised ramp was lined with small sphinxes alternated with withered trees in tubs. The whitewash, though dazzling on that hot day, was now grubby. Formerly the way would have been lined with priests. Now they were spaced out thinly. They did not notice his
presence
. Nefertiti was half-way to the inner shrine. She seemed feeble, and leaned heavily on Pa-wah. She reached the inner pylon and disappeared from view. The others sighed, turned around, and marched to the priests’ houses near the outer gate.

Tutmose hesitated and then walked through the inner pylon, around the baffle, and stood in the shadow of the platform, to watch.

The inner shrine was barren and glaring. All but one of the offering tables were empty. Some of them had cracked, so that the tops had slid off the bases. She was not worshipping. Twitching her robes nervously to her,
she was talking earnestly to Pa-wah, as though asking a question. On the immense silver slab of the altar lay a small wilted bouquet.

Watching her, Tutmose realized suddenly that she believed it. That was understandable enough. What else was left of that city in which she could believe? But it was terrible to see her reduced to the nagging
superstition
of an old woman, forced to believe in a fool like Pa-wah, and to beg him for an answer to anything. It was too soon. Was it to this that the folly of that inspired child had reduced her?

Yet from this distance she was still beautiful, or worse, one could see that she had once been. He was deeply moved and very angry. He turned and slipped away.

That afternoon something happened that had not occurred in Egypt in all the seventeen years of
Ikhnaton’s
dominion. It rained, and did not merely rain, but poured down, with the helplessness of a cloud-burst.

It was magnificent. The light caught the rain, so that one stood in a mesh of silver threads. But no one had repaired anything in that city for at least ten years. One-fourth of the buildings simply washed away. Stucco gave. Parts of those royal murals of Nefertiti, Ikhnaton, and the children came loose and fell from the walls, so that where they had been sitting, now no one sat at all.

As rapidly as the water had destroyed everything, beating down even the plants in the deserted gardens, it drained off and the earth was dry.

But the temple of Hat-Aton was wanly changed. Part of the outer wall had fallen away, and much of the stucco had come loose, revealing a mass of dingy
mud-brick
. And the sheen of the silver altar top was gone for good. It was now dull and patchy.

Under these circumstances he was not surprised to notice that Nefertiti did not go there any more.

But sometimes, early in the morning, or late in the evening, he would catch a glimpse of her in the
distance
, a lean, uncertain figure, halting, but still erect and proud, moving this way and that, or merely
standing
motionless, watching. Sometimes she seemed to be calling on someone, or searching about for something.

He was relieved when one day a greyhound trotted up to her, and he saw that at least she had a
companion
, and had been searching for only that. The few maids who still paced behind her were certainly no company.

Nor, though she still had one or two petty nobles around her, did he ever see them. He had no idea what went on up at the northern suburb. Supplies, however, were becoming harder to get. He was forced to send trusted servants up and down the river for them, until he hit on the device of starting a private farm on the other bank.

The supply of plaster, though, was inexhaustible. He had merely to regrind the stucco on the walls. That was convenient.

Then, too, he was growing older. He did not go out much any more. No doubt most people would have found the deserted city eerie. To tell the truth he found it eerie, but he also thought, in a contrite moment, that it was just about what he deserved.

Unexpectedly one day Pa-wah arrived on his
doorstep
. The man was beside himself with terror and said the Queen had died. Tutmose gathered up his tools at once.

He had never been in the northern suburb. He found it a shambles, and utterly silent. Apparently everyone had fled as soon as she died. He entered the palace, if palace it could be called, only to find it had been sacked.

He sent Pa-wah out of the room and did what he had to do. He took this last mask. But he could scarcely
bear to see her. In a corner of her bedroom, on the floor, lay something the looters had overlooked. He picked it up, and found it was the head of Maketaten he had sent her long ago. He looked at it thoughtfully and put it in his pouch.

Only then did he dare to look at her. In death she was still beautiful, more beautiful indeed than she had been for years. But what had she wasted all that beauty for? She simply lay there, and she was still there. And yet she was not. It was a little more than he could stand.

He went out to Pa-wah. Someone had to do what was necessary. There was in the house only the
greyhound
, and even it shied away from him. He never did find out what became of it. But Pa-wah was worse than useless. The man was a helpless fanatic hysterical with self-pity.

It was not surprising. One man may worship an abstract principle, but ten people hoping for somewhere to take their troubles, never. Beneath the level of
meditation
, religion is nothing more than the sick man’s efforts to keep on a really good nurse. Pa-wah turned out to be despicable. He did not even know how to dig.

Tutmose left him shivering against a wall and buried her himself. Somebody had to keep that body from the dogs, and as for the meaning of it, that was how they buried the poor, in a sheet, in the desert sand. Besides, there was no funeral furniture to bury with her. She must have lain helpless, with Pa-wah in the house, for a week, and during that time the furniture had been carried away, down to the last stick.

He returned to his own house, and after some deliberation, wrote a letter to Thebes, to Tutankamon.

There was no answer. Nor had he expected one.

Indeed, in these two years Tutankamon did nothing notable. The Amon priests had begun to grow
overbearing
, so while rewarding them amply, he had
annoyed them as well, by keeping up the Aton temple at Thebes. Perhaps Pa-wah went there. Certainly
Tutmose
never saw him again.

Tutankamon did give orders that Ikhnaton’s body was to be burned, and this a party of silent workmen came to Aketaten, went up the valley to the Royal Tomb, and did. But even that could not be laid to theology, either his own or anyone else’s. That was idiot spleen and nothing more.

But why had Ay or Horemheb not done something to help Nefertiti?

The answer was simple. She had left their letters
unanswered
. Alone of them all, she had stayed on, out of pride if nothing else, until it was too late for her to go anywhere.

And yet, in a way, she survived.