Return to Thebes Read Online Free

startled that they should make such a choice.
    “Without the Chief Wife and the Family?” echoed Tuthmose, equally aghast.
    “His Majesty lives in truth,” Huy said, a smug look on his face. “He will want it exactly as it was.”
    “If we, too, are to live in truth as he wishes all men to do,” remarked Meryra with similar superiority, “then you must portray it as it happened.”
    “I would suggest,” I remarked, I am afraid quite dryly, “that you consult your mistresses and see what they advise.”
    “They need not know,” Huy said, though here in Akhet-Aten, where the tombs along the northern and southern ridges bounding the city are open to public view at all times, nothing is concealed.
    “I would rather risk their anger at being told than risk their anger if things are hidden from them,” I said with sufficient severity to stop their flippant attitude and sober their smug faces. When they spoke to the Great Wife and Nefertiti later that day, their carefree approach ended altogether. And now we have the bitter controversy that flares within the Palace and seems to have produced some sort of culmination in the continuing crisis we have all lived with ever since Akhenaten sent his wife to the North Palace and installed his brother in her stead.
    In the cities and villages of Kemet, no one knows that this battle rages. But it is not in the cities and villages, of course, that the fate of Their Majesties will be decided. It is always from within the palaces that changes come in the rule of Kemet, for the people have never rebelled in all our nearly two thousand years of history. Even now, ruled by the One who is increasingly, if still with great secrecy, called “the Madman” and “the Criminal,” they will not rebel. He is still the Good God, and it is unthinkable to them that they might ever rise against him.
    Unhappily for him, such superstitious acceptance does not prevail within the Family.
    Yesterday the orders came down, almost simultaneously, from his palace, from Queen Tiye’s and from Queen Nefertiti’s, to poor unfortunate Huy and Meryra. It will be quite a while, I think, before they find life a subject for smug jesting again.
    His Majesty commanded: portray the coronation durbar exactly as it was, himself and his brother alone (fondly entwined!) the paltry “Parade of Tribute” straggling by.
    The Great Wife and the Chief Wife commanded: portray the coronation durbar as the eternal traditions and ma’at of Kemet dictate, as it has always been throughout our history—Nefertiti seated beside Akhenaten, their daughters (even those who are dead, for this is royal myth, not royal fact) around them, a lavish and fawning Parade of Tribute maintaining the dignity of the Double Crown—not exactly truthful, of course, but as truthful as most of the pictures of royal triumphs that have come down to us from ancient days.
    Now the battle rages. I do not care what the outcome is, for I am now, ironically, in a position where I am privileged to watch—a privilege I would gladly yield were it possible, but one which I do not think the gods will permit me to evade. Tuthmose is a little more in the center of things, but he too is safe. We exist to carry out orders, not give them. There is much stirring in the palaces. Horemheb and his chief aide General Ramesses have hurried back from Memphis, where they had gone to attend to the government’s business in the Delta. Aye and his sister, Queen Tiye, have come down from Thebes. Amonhotep, Son of Hapu, that sainted scribe whose wisdom becomes more universally respected as he learns to express it less, is bustling about. Tuthmose is keeping me informed. I feel the wind, though I am no longer able to be at the center of the storm. And storm it is, I am afraid, for His Majesty.
    I fear for him and weep for him, because I think in his own strange way he has always meant to do right, and to live in truth. It is his tragedy that his truth is unlike the truth of