On a Balcony Read Online Free Page B

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.
    “The prince, I suppose.” Ay frowned. “I had not known it had been done.”
    It was not comforting to see Ay disturbed. Ay was never disturbed.
    At last the prince reappeared, talking to the priest of the temple, a fat, unctious fool called Meryra. He had a list and a roll and a squeaky voice, and his skin was the colour of lard. They could not hear what he was saying, but the prince was smiling back and answering eagerly.
    Ay shifted from one foot to the other. “I do not like that man,” he said.
    Neither did Horemheb, but the visit was soon over, and none of his concern.
    *
    Half an hour later and they were crossing the river, towards the palace on the western side. He looked towards it eagerly. Ay and the prince were too much for him, but Pharaoh and the Queen he understood. Whatever happened, he always knew he would be welcome there.
    The palace, at some distance back from the shore, was only in its second generation. Tutmose IV hadinvented it. Now Amenophis III had extended it until it encroached upon the necropolis. It was built of wood and whitewashed brick, and though it still had the power to dazzle, already, nowadays, large areas of it were walled up and boarded off. It was possible to come across rooms in which no one had sat for years, and courtyards where the water plants had grown top-heavy in the ponds and reached the level of the roofs above. A colony of half-starved greyhounds lived, and nobody knew what they ate, in an abandoned garden of persea trees, even though, south of the deserted harem, the plane trees were clipped as tidily as ever along the borders of the private lake.
    Yet in that vast rambling palace the courtiers still circled in and out as aimlessly as flies, though, like the motions of flies in a summer room, their movements betrayed a certain mathematical periodicity. These seemingly irrational motions could be plotted against the lust for sugar and the fear of being hit, the two constants which controlled, however remotely, and it was never too remotely, their actions. It was beautiful to watch, in a way, as beautiful as any other mathematical certainty, for even flies are controlled by necessity.
    Horemheb went at once in search of the Queen.
    Tiiy, they said, was on the Royal Lake. He might go to her, for who, so long as she preferred him, would gainsay Horemheb, since it was the Queen, not Pharaoh, who ruled here. Only his attendants saw Pharaoh, who was a legend in his lifetime, and therefore kept properly remote.
    Pharaoh had had the lake dug years ago. It was a mile and a half long and two-thirds of a mile wide, surrounded by a wall, its shores trimmed with plane trees, pavilions, flowers, water plants, lotuses, reeds, water-stairs, and sometimes an audience. Nowhere was it more than five feet deep, in order to prevent drowning, should anyone fall into it drunk. When he was younger,Pharaoh had even used it for hunting, shooting on one occasion three out of the four pink baby hippopotami provided. But that was long ago.
    He stood on the shore, by a flight of water-stairs, and waved. Someone must have told the Queen, for her barge was already skimming across the water towards him. It was perhaps a quarter of a mile away. Of ebony and gold, it gleamed agreeably on the water. Horemheb removed his sandals and his wig, went down the water-stairs, slipped smoothly into the water, let it hold him voluptuously for a moment, and then stroked towards the boat. The water inshore was flaccid and warm, but farther out