Tutankhamun and the Daughter of Ra

CHAPTER 2

CHAPTER 2

The First LoveNot yet twelve years old Ankhesenpaaten had borne a child, a daughter, to her father the Pharaoh Akhenaten. The dynasty was running out of princes carrying the royal blood. Nefertiti had produced only girls and while Akhenaten loved them dearly, a son of royal blood would make the future of the dynasty more secure. Also, for Akhenaten it was not just a matter of the physical succession, but, because of his obsessive belief that only he and his close family were capable of carrying the power of the Aten on earth and mediating it to his subjects, he was determined to produce a son carrying the pure blood of the Aten. In marrying his daughter he was not doing anything unprecedented. Sitamon, his sister, was married to her father and given the status of Royal Wife. But it was not until nearly the end of his life that Akhenaten realised that Sitamon had borne a son to her father of purer blood than himself. If it had not been for the determination of his own mother, Great Royal Wife Queen Tiye, a commoner lifted to royal status by the love of his father, he himself might not have come to the throne. The existence of the Prince Djehuti-kheper-Ra, son of Sitamon, had been kept secret and he had led a life of obscurity far from the court until a few years before Akhenaten’s death.

Ankhesenpaaten had entered the parental marriage with resignation. She did not cry out when the first coitus took place and she did not cry out when she gave birth. She knew her father was disappointed that her child, who soon died, was a girl and assumed that she would have to bear more children. But he appeared to abandon the attempt to father a son on her and became so absorbed in other matters that she lived untouched and almost unnoticed among the other wives of the House of Women.

Sometimes she was lonely and longed for the carefree days of her childhood. But when she joined her sisters and her former friends she found nothing was the same. She was bored and irritated by their games and realised she had outgrown their childish chatter. Her greatest pleasure became listening to the adult gossip of the court — watching, observing, absorbing all she could — while giving nothing back. If her parents had thought to question her she would have been able to tell them about every intrigue, every disaffection, every minute shift of loyalty, long before anyone else noticed anything.

She watched Djehuti-kheper-Ra, her father’s friend and confidant, and could have told Akhenaten long before it came out, that the man was obviously closely related to him, and that he met with the priests of Amun from time to time in secret. She monitored every expression on his face before and after such meetings. She noticed his love for her elder sister Merytaten, and his hopeless desire for Nefertiti — probably before he himself was aware of either.

She moved so unobtrusively about the court, there was hardly a thing hidden from her. She never spoke of anything she knew. Her satisfaction was in knowing it when others were still ignorant.

Her mother once accused her of loving no one, of being cold and feelingless. But this was not true. There was a need to love and be loved. It was just that in the first bewilderment of having to play the role she was expected to play she had built up such defences around herself that she no longer knew how to live without them.

Nefertiti was increasingly busy with complicated and difficult matters. The early days in the Golden City of the Sun when the family were together and were seen to represent the ideal of living under the Aten, were fast disappearing. Maketaten, one of their daughters, died. The priests of Amun, like wounded and dangerous animals, hit out at every vulnerable point. Akhenaten the dreamer became Akhenaten the oppressor. In order to force his ideas on the Two Lands he was resorting to means that as a youth he would have abhorred. Nefertiti was playing dangerous games, trying to hold the whole together. She had not much time for her third daughter — but when she did take note of her she was worried. She seemed much older than she was. The expression in her eyes sometimes almost frightened her. Merytaten had her love for Djehuti-kheper-Ra. The three youngest girls were still children and unaware of the dark clouds gathering over the sun. But Ankhesenpaaten? Ankhesenpaaten knew everything that was going on — and kept it buried in a brooding heart. She even knew that it was General Horemheb who had poisoned her father.

It was this impression that Ankhesenpaaten gave of being so cold and calculating, so old and worldly-wise, that made Kia dislike and distrust her. Tutankhaten’s mother had a much simpler personality than Nefertiti and her daughter. She loved and hated what she saw on the surface of things and never dreamed that what she saw was not necessarily what was really there. When at last she was brought back into the life of her son she fell upon him with almost suffocating affection, treating him as the baby she had been separated from for all those years. Ankhesenpaaten resented this of course and Kia sensed this resentment.

Akhenaten had been fond of Kia, and had found her warm and direct nature comforting. It was perhaps for this reason Nefertiti had sent her away. She could see that sometimes her husband would rather be in the undemanding company of Kia, having his scalp or back massaged to the accompaniment of a pleasant little folk song, than in her own company making passionate love or talking excitedly about important matters that affected this world and the next.

* * * *

When all the ceremonies and festivities of the marriage to Tutankhamun and the coronation were over there came a time when the young King and his Great Royal Wife were alone together.

Tutankhamun looked at Ankhesenamun seated at the table in their chamber. A long day of tedious and exhausting official business was over. The Queen was holding up a polished silver mirror and quietly wiping away the cosmetics from her face with a well oiled pad of soft cotton. Most women in her position would have had servants to do this for her, but Ankhesenamun preferred to do it herself. Her women had removed her jewels and her garments and stored them away, and then silently left. They knew this last rite was always Ankhesenamun’s own. It was as though, slowly, carefully, she was removing the layers of a disguise, the layers of another persona. At first she had not let her husband observe this process and see her as she really was, but this night she knew that she could not avoid intimacy any longer. Something in her yearned for it, and something else made her want to run away.

She had known this boy since infancy. She had taught him his first words. Now, still a child with the soft rounded cheeks of a child, she was expected to initiate him into manhood.

As she combed out her hair she could feel his eyes fixed on the breast he could just glimpse under her raised arm. She began to feel the tingling she had felt when she had been listening in to the erotic tales of the women in the House of Women. From them she had learned more about the possibilities of the s****l act than she had ever learned in her brief marriage to her father.

She continued to comb her hair long after it was needed, moving casually and seductively, feeling the young boy’s eyes on her all the time. Since her father no male had touched her, and with her father she had felt nothing but a dull sense of duty and a certain revulsion.

Listening to the women had set her off exploring her own body and now she was longing to feel how it would be with another. Tutankhamun was too young to give her full satisfaction — but he was a virgin and had learned no bad ways. She, if she was careful, would be able to teach him to give her pleasure. She had heard enough of the complaints of the women to know a man should not be allowed to get away with only pleasuring himself.

He stood beside the bed when she lay down, awkwardly, not knowing whether he dare make a move towards her or not.

She kept him standing there for some moments feasting his eyes and then she reached out her hand for him.

Eagerly and clumsily he lay down beside her, putting a hand tentatively on her breast — not knowing what to do next. She could see that he was hot and desperate, but fiercely shy. She turned her body against his and gently started to stroke him. She took his hand and taught him how to stroke her and in what places.

That first time was not a complete success, but the barrier had been broken and they both knew it would not be long before their nights together would be the most precious part of their lives — the only times when, burdened as they were with state duties and responsibilities beyond their years, they could seek out and find a secret pleasure for themselves and a relationship that kept them from despair.

* * * *

During the first year of his reign Tutankhamun barely spent a month in Akhetaten. The royal entourage was always on the move. Ceremonies had to be performed at all the major centres, in each case to re-establish the gods of that centre and the new king’s commitment to them. At Men-nefer the King was named the son of Ptah, the Creator, and Sekhmet, the Destroyer, the male and female deities of that great city. At Abedju he was identified with Horus, the son of Osiris who ruled the Underworld, and his sister-wife Isis.

At every centre Ankhesenamun was at his side, the importance of the balance of male and female energy constantly emphasised. But whatever ritual significance it might have, Tutankhamun was glad of her presence and at night when the watching eyes and guiding hands of Ay and Horemheb could not reach them, they performed their own and very personal ritual to release tension and make them forget their cares.

Exhausted, Tutankhamun fell asleep quickly, but more often than not Ankhesenamun lay awake for a long time beside him, thinking. The chamber was never very dark for since the violent events at Akhetaten, Tutankhamun had insisted on having at least one lamp burning all night. She stared into its flame and pondered the enigma of gods and humans. If the gods and goddesses were great spirit beings free of the restrictions imposed on humans by encasement in flesh, why were they so dependent on humans? Why must humans appeal to them, sacrifice to them, name their names? Surely they existed whether people recognised them or not? Surely they did their work whether people asked them to or not?

When her father was alive she had often been bored and irritated by his obsession with religion. It seemed to her life was a performance — a continuous enactment of set pieces, and those who were deemed successful were only those who gave the most convincing performances. She was fascinated by masks and as a child spent a great deal of time constructing them. She wondered what had happened to her collection of masks. She smiled wryly remembering the times she had frightened her nurse and her companions by appearing unexpectedly out of the shadows wearing one or other of her masks. Or did the nurse or the companions only shriek with pretended alarm? Was their reaction a performance too?

Part of her pleasure in eavesdropping and in observing all that happened at court came from figuring out what act, what script, what manoeuvre was being used to produce what reaction.

At a very early age the words of hymns and prayers ceased to have meaning for her and became patterns of sound to fill the silence — scripts to be followed and learned by rote, signifying nothing.

Even at the death of her infant daughter she wept because she knew it was expected. One mourned dead people loudly and theatrically. Only once when she was alone with the frail and sickly little body before it was embalmed, and there was no one there to see her act, did she wonder what it might have been like if the little creature had lived and shared love with her. The twinge of sorrow for an opportunity lost was not feigned.

She turned her head and looked at the boy at her side. His dark lashes lay against a flushed cheek. His full and rounded lips were slightly parted and she could hear his breath stirring very softly, very regularly. She felt sorrow that, so young and so naïve, he was plunged into a corrupt and savage world, the puppet of forces that cared nothing for him. She put her lips against his forehead and kept them there, drifting at last towards sleep, gathering him in her arms.

* * * *

Day after day lists of names were brought to the young Pharaoh by Ay and Horemheb and he was either told that they were names to be trusted and that they must be appointed to such and such a post, or that they were names not to be trusted and they must be either banished or destroyed. Most of the names meant nothing to him. Only Ay and Horemheb knew the faces behind the names. The boy put his royal seal where he was told and made no demur. Later, men were brought before him as he sat upon the throne and again, on the instructions of Ay and Horemheb, he either appointed, rewarded or condemned them. Petitions were read out, but it was not his decisions that were implemented.

Ankhesenamun was very well aware of the power of the Vizier and the General and the helplessness of the boy on the throne. She watched all that happened with growing bitterness, but even if it had been in her nature to interfere she could not. Both his grandfather and his father had broken with tradition and brought their Great Royal Wives forward to share power. Everyone knew Queen Tiye had been formidably influential behind the throne, but Nefertiti had taken one step further forward and actually ruled from the throne when her husband died. Horemheb was determined this would not happen again and he made sure it was understood that with the return of the old religious traditions, the old court protocol was to be meticulously observed. Ankhesenamun was to be seen as the loving wife, the adoring woman, the bearer of the royal bloodline and hopefully, of the royal heir, but was to have no say in government, no life of her own. She was to look beautiful and keep her mouth shut. This was made very plain, and she knew her life depended on how obediently she played this role.

Sometimes she thought of risking everything and speaking out to make Tutankhamun aware that he had power himself and should assert it — that he was being used to implement policies that should not be implemented, appoint men who should not be appointed, and punish men who should not be punished. But she hesitated. Tutankhamun was not ready to make his own decisions. Time and again she saw that he was taken in by appearances and swayed by lies and flattery. At least Horemheb and Ay knew what they were doing and were pursuing a consistent policy. If Tutankhamun took power now they would all be at the mercy of a child’s whims and fancies. Much as she loved him, she knew he had not found himself, and until he did, she would bide her time.

But when he did, she thought, Horemheb and Ay better take care!

* * * *

Tutankhamun grew accustomed to the formalities of kingship and accepted the necessity to be dressed in full regalia, seated on his grandest throne while foreign princes and diplomats filed past, doing obeisance to him and laying costly gifts at his feet. On these occasions Ankhesenamun stood behind the throne and watched in the way she had watched when her parents were alive. With an unerring natural instinct for reading human nature, she amused herself by speculating on the thoughts of those who came forward. She read their true status within their own community by the depth of their bow. She read their hopes and desires and fears in their eyes as they approached and walked away. She saw what they expected and wanted from the king at whose feet they laid their gifts, though sometimes it was at variance with the carefully rehearsed speeches they made.

Tutankhamun saw nothing but their symbols of office and the gifts they brought.

Under the great warrior king, Djehuti-mes III, Khemet had extended its borders well into the eastern countries and south, further into Nubia and Kush than it ever had before. Vassal rulers were obligated to send tribute to the mighty King of Kings. Amenhotep III, had ruled more by diplomacy than war, and had kept the far-flung empire safe for Khemet by shrewd use of bribe, hostages and diplomatic marriage. But Akhenaten, his son, had not been concerned to maintain the empire and within the chain that bound it to the Egyptian throne there were now many weak links. Khemet’s power was shifting and crumbling. Almost more than anything else Horemheb was determined to shore up the empire and secure it against foreign invasion and internal disaffection.

On Ay’s advice, he invited the rulers of the powerful kingdoms outside the empire, but now threatening its security by their own desire for expansion, to visit the new Pharaoh, hoping the massed armies on parade, the pomp and ceremony, would impress on them that the power behind the new King was not to be underestimated. They knew and he knew it would be more than a social visit. Behind the scenes there would be discussions; there would be flexing of muscles; there would be veiled threats, deals struck and compromises agreed.

Many came, curious to take the measure of the new rule. Some did not.

Among those who came were three Hittite princes. Their father, Suppiluliuma, ruled a huge country beyond Khemet’s control and expanding every year by conquest. It was a formidable enemy and had already absorbed many of Khemet’s vassal states into its own domain.

The Hittite princes did not come as supplicants. They came as equals and were royally entertained. Gifts were exchanged and they expected to return to the land of Hatti with as rich a haul as they had brought with them.