Akhnaton, King of Egypt

by Dmitry Sergeyevich Merezhkovsky

I

Tutankhamon-Tutankhaton, the envoy of Akhnaton, the king of Egypt, brought him a marvellous gift from the island of Crete—Dio, the dancer, the pearl of the Kingdom of the Seas.

He boasted that he had saved her from death: but it was not he who saved her. When she killed the god-Bull in the Knossos arena to avenge her friend Eoia who had been sacrificed to the Beast, she was sentenced to be burned at the stake. But Tammuzadad, a Babylonian who loved Dio, went to the stake in her place and Tutankhaton merely hid her in his ship and brought her to Egypt.

Before bringing Dio to the king in the new capital, Akhetaton, the City of the Sun, he settled her near Thebes, or Nut-Amon, in the country house of his distant relative Khnumhotep, formerly the chief superintendent of the granaries of Amon's temple.

Khnumhotep's estate was enclosed by high brick walls that formed an oblong quadrangle making it look like a fortress. Within it were granaries, cattle-yards, wine-presses, hay-lofts, barns and other buildings, vineyards and gardens divided into regular squares: kitchen garden, orchard, flower garden, woods of pine and other trees and a palm plantation with three ponds, one large and two small ones. Two high three-storied houses, a brick one for winter and a wooden one with a brick bottom storey for the summer, stood facing each other on opposite sides of the big pond.

Dio spent a couple of months in this quiet country place resting from all that had happened to her in Crete and learning Egyptian dances.

One afternoon, in the middle of winter, she was lying on carpets and cushions on the flat roof of the summer house, in a light trellised shelter supported by a row of cedar pillars, carved, gilded and brightly painted. She was looking at the sun in the dark, almost black-blue sky, so abysmally clear that it seemed there never had been, nor ever could be, a cloud in it. The sun of southern winter—of winter's summer—bright but not dazzling, warm but not scorching, was like the smile of a child asleep. Half closing her eyes, she looked straight at it and the light broke into a diamond rainbow like a tear on the eyelashes.

"Ra the Sun, the Sun Ra—no better name than Ra could be invented for the sun: Ra cleaves the darkness with a sword," thought Dio.

The winter swallows cleaved the radiant darkness of the blue with the sword of their whirring flight: they sang to the sun, crying and shrilling with joy: 'Ra'!

Everything was good and joyous. There was goodness and joy in the air, pure and dry as nowhere else in the world, giving long life to the living and making the dead incorruptible, air so divinely light that one breathing it for the first time felt as though a stone which had lain on his breast all his life had suddenly been lifted and he understood for the first time what a joy it was to breathe.

Close by stood a monstrous tree, covered with thorns and prickles, with dull leaden-coloured thick joints that seemed full of poison, and a huge blood-red flower like the open mouth of a snake. But the tree, too, was good: the fragrant flowers breathed of the sweetness of paradise—the joy of Ra.

Beyond the talc-like streak of the shallow, wintry Nile the hills of Amenti, the Eternal West, yellow as lion's hair and honeycombed with innumerable tombs, lay drowsy in the rosy haze of sunshine. But even death here was good: the souls of the departed, like bees, collect the honey of death—the eternal life.

"And perhaps on our Mount Ida the wind is howling, the pines creak and the snow is falling in big flakes," thought Dio, and the blue sky seemed to her still more blue, the bright sun still brighter; she wanted to weep with joy and to kiss the sky, the sun, the earth, like the faces of loved ones after a long parting.

She was smiling at the familiar feeling: it was not for nothing that she had felt the touch of death as she lay on the pyre, a victim ready to be slain. It was as though she had died then, and now another life, a life after death had begun: a different sky, a different sun, a different earth—alien? oh no, more like home than her own native land.

"Sick with sorrow I lie on my bed
Wise physicians are trying to heal me.
My loved one comes to my bedside,
My sister—she mocks the physicians.
Well does she know what ails me."

sang in an undertone a man of thirty, with a face fine as a woman's and large sad eyes like the eyes of a sick child; his head was shaven like that of a priest and he was wearing a white linen robe and a leopard's skin thrown over his shoulder. This was Pentaur, a former priest of Amon and the master of the temple dancers, who was teaching Dio Egyptian dances.

Kneeling down, he lightly touched with the tips of his fingers the crossed strings of a tall Amon's harp that stood on a hollow resounding box, adorned with two rainbow-coloured sun discs and a four-horned head of the god Ram.

The dulcet notes of the harpstrings accompanied the voice of the singer. He finished one song and began another:

"Each time that the door
In my sister's house opens
My sister is displeased.
I wish I were her doorkeeper,
She would then be displeased with me.
Each time that I heard her voice,
Frightened as a child I should be."

"Is that all?" Dio asked with a smile.

"That's all," said Pentaur, flushing slightly as though ashamed of his song being too short. He flushed often and easily like a little boy; it was strange and almost absurd in a man of thirty, but Dio liked it.

"Frightened as a child I should be," she repeated, this time without a smile. "Yes, hardly anything is said and yet all is said. With you in Egypt love is wordless, just as the sky is cloudless...."

"No, we have longer songs, too, but I don't like them so well; the short ones are better."

He struck the strings and sang:

"I long for you more
Than a starving man longs for bread,
Than a sick one longs for health,
Than a woman in travail for the baby's cry."

The strings sobbed passionately, almost brutally, as men sob with hunger, thirst, or pain. And all of a sudden came a subtle, cunning tune:

"I love truth, of flattery I scorn to think
I would rather see you than eat and drink."

"Love compared to eating and drinking," she said in surprise and she pondered. "How coarse—coarse and tender at the same time! But of course that is the very subtlest flattery."

"Why flattery?"

"Why? Ah, my dear brother, that is just what is so bitter in life, that without bread and water men die, but without love they live."

"No, they die, too," he said quietly, and was going to add something, but merely gazed at her in silence and his eyes looked sadder than ever. He blushed and hastened to change the subject.

"I must send the pleater to you: the feathers don't lie properly."

He put out his hand to straighten the tiny pleats—'feathers'—on her sleeve. Dio took his hand; he tried to draw it away, but she kept it in hers almost by force, roughly and tenderly at the same time, looking into his eyes with a smile. He turned away and this time, instead of turning red, he turned slightly pale under his bronze-coloured skin, frightened as a child.

This happened at every meeting: her charm, always new, seemed to him a miracle. Oh, this body, much too slender, the narrow hips, the angular movements, the rebellious curls of bluish-black hair cut much too short, the colour in the cheeks, dark-skinned like a boy's and girlishly tender, the colour of the rosy almond blossom in the gathering dusk, and the darkish down on the upper lip—an absurd little moustache! A girl who was like a boy. This was always so; but it was new that all of a sudden the girl did not want to be a boy.

She let his hand go, blushed and spoke of something different.

"It is not the pleater's fault, it is simply that I do not know how to wear these clothes—one can see at once I am not an Egyptian."

"Yes, but it is not the dress—it's your face and hair."

Dio did not wear a wig or plait her hair in small tight plaits as was the custom in Egypt.

"And Tuta ... Tutankhaton says that the bell suits me better."

"The bell" was the Cretan women's skirt, widening towards the hem.

"Oh, no! In our dress you are still more..." he broke off; he wanted to say 'still more like a sister' and dared not: in Egyptian 'sister' also meant 'beloved.'

"Still more beautiful," he added with cold politeness. They were not speaking their thoughts; both were thinking of what was important and speaking of trifles, as often happens when one is already in love and the other does not yet know her mind.

Dio remembered the vow of the virgin priestesses of the Mount Dicte goddess:

"I would rather choose the halter
Than the hateful marriage bed."

A man's love was still as hateful to her as the hot sun to the flowers under water. But it was the same with love as with everything else: she had died and another life had begun, another love—love through death, like sunlight through water, having no terrors for the flowers in the depths; or like this winter sun—the smile of a child asleep.

"When are you going?" he asked about the most important thing as though it were a trifle.

"I don't know. Tuta hurries me, but I am quite happy here." She looked at him with a smile and again the boy disappeared and only the girl remained.

"I am happy with you," she added so low that he need not have heard.

"You will go away and we shall never meet again," he said, looking down as though he had not heard.

"My timid, absurd little boy—the winter's sun!" she thought with gay tenderness and said:

"Why never? Akhetaton is not far from Thebes."

"No, his city is the other world for us."

His—King Akhnaton's, she understood.

"And you don't want to go to the next world—not even with me?" she asked, with provocative slyness.

"Why do you talk like this, Dio? You know I cannot..."

He broke off, but she understood again: "I cannot relinquish the faith of my forefathers; step over my father's blood." She knew that his father, an old priest of Amon, was killed in a popular rising against the new god Aton.

Tears trembled in his voice when he said 'I cannot,' but he controlled himself and said calmly.

"Do not go out to-day."

"Why?"

He answered after a pause:

"Maybe there will be a riot."

"Come, come, riot in a country like yours!" she laughed. "You Egyptians are the most peaceable people on earth!"

She looked at him as though he were a little boy and said: "And you, too, will go rioting?"

"Yes, I will," he spoke as calmly as before, but there was a light in his eyes that made her think once more of his father's having been killed in a riot.

"No, don't go, dear!" she begged with sudden anxiety.

He made no answer and began singing again in a low voice, lightly touching the strings.

"Death is now to me like sweetest myrrh,
Death is now to me like healing,
Death is now to me like refreshing rain,
Death is now to me like a home to an exile,"

"Aïe-aïe-aïe! What is it?" cried a little girl who was sleeping in the shelter.

A little tame monkey was sitting at the top of the tree eating yellow pods. It threw the skins into the shelter trying to hit the little girl or the tame gazelle asleep at her feet. It missed its aim every time. At last, hanging on to a branch with one paw, it threw with another a handful of skins, hitting the gazelle. The animal jumped up, and bleating ran to the girl and licked her face.

The girl jumped up, too, and shouted in a fright.

"Aïe-aïe-aïe! What is it?"

She was about thirteen years old. Her brown bronze-coloured body, slender and supple like a snake, showed through the transparent web of her dress 'the woven air.' She was a strange mixture of woman and child; the rosy-bronzed nipples of her breasts, firm and round like a grown girl's, lifted the linen as though they would pierce it, but there was something childishly mischievous in the eyes and childishly piteous in the thick, pouting lips. Her face—ugly, charming and dangerous like a serpent's head—seemed tiny under the mass of dull-black fluffy hair, powdered with blue.

Miruit was one of Pentaur's best pupils; he was training Dio to imitate her. She threw back her arms, stretched and yawned sweetly, still failing to understand what had happened. Suddenly a handful of pods fell at her feet. She looked up and understood.

"Ah, you bare-back devil!" she cried, and seizing an earthenware jug from which she had drunk pomegranate wine at dinner—that was why she had slept so soundly—threw it at the monkey.

The animal hissed maliciously and, snapping its teeth, jumped on to another palm tree and hid itself; only a dry rustle among the leaves betrayed its presence.

"It is too bad! As soon as I begin dreaming of something nice they are sure to wake me!" Miruit grumbled.

"And what were you dreaming of?" asked Dio.

"Oh, all sorts of things. Too good to tell." Suddenly she came up to Dio, bent down and whispered in her ear:

"It was about you. I dreamt that you ... No, I can't say it before him; he will hear and pull my ears."

"I will do it anyhow, you fidget! Do you imagine I don't know where you go gadding every day?"

"Oh, thank you for reminding me. I am late! My merchant must be waiting for me and raging, and he had promised me a necklace for to-day. Mine is so shabby that I am simply ashamed to wear it."

"You nasty hussy!" Pentaur shouted at her with sudden anger. "Mixing yourself up with an unclean dog, an uncircumcised!"

"He may be an unclean dog, but he is rich and he feeds me and there is no making broth with your holiness!" the girl answered back insolently, imitating old market women. "It is four months since we have had any flour or grain or beer or oil, it's no joke! We've tightened our belts on the hunger rations, we've got as thin as locusts on the Salty Lakes. A well-fed devil is stronger than a hungry god; other people's Baal may be of avail and our own Ram is meek but not sleek!"

"Ah, you wretch! Do you want to be thrown into the pit?"

"Into the pit? No, sir, that's more than you can do! Times have changed, you can't throw innocent people into the pit nowadays. If you try to lay hands on me I'll run away and you won't catch me! I am a free bird—wherever there is food, there is my home."

"Oh, birds of Araby,
Oh, myrrh anointed!"

she sang, turning the tambourine above her head as she ran towards the staircase. The gazelle followed her like a dog.

At the top of the stairs she ran into Zenra, Dio's old nurse, and nearly knocked her down.

"Plague take you, you giddy goat!" swore the old woman and going up to Dio handed her a letter. Dio opened it and read:

I am going to-morrow. If you want to go with me, make ready. I must see you to-day before sunset. I will wait for you at the White House. I will send a boat for you. May Aton keep you. Your faithful friend,

Tutankhaton.

"The messenger is waiting, what shall I tell him?" Zenra asked.

"Tell him I will come."

When Zenra had gone, Dio looked at Pentaur. Like all the priestesses of the Great Mother she was skilled in the art of healing; she had seen people die and remembered the fateful sign—the seal of death—which sometimes appears in a face when the end is near.

She suddenly fancied she saw that sign in Pentaur's face. 'He is young, healthy, there is no danger in sight. Riot? No, it is nonsense,' she thought, and as she looked at him more intently the sign disappeared.

"Are you going?" he asked quietly, but so firmly that she understood she must not deceive him.

"Tuta is going to-morrow and I do not know yet. Maybe I will not go...."

"Yes, you will. You wanted to go as soon as possible, you know."

"I did and now, all of a sudden, I am afraid."

"What of?"

"I don't know. I was not burned at the stake then, and now—it is like going from one fire to another.... You remember what you told me about the king...."

"Don't, Dio. What is the good? You will go anyway."

"No, you must tell me. Taur, my dear brother, if you love me, tell me all you know about him. I want to know all."

She took his hand and he did not draw it away this time.

"You will go anyway, you will go!" he repeated sadly. "You love him, that is why you are afraid; you know you will not escape; you fly like a moth to the flame. You were not burned in that other flame, but you will be in this...."

He paused, and then asked her:

"Will you go to see Ptamose?"

"Certainly, I will not leave without seeing him."

"Do see him. He knows everything—he will tell you better than I can."

Ptamose, the high-priest of Amon and King Akhnaton's bitterest enemy, had long asked Dio to come to him, but she had not done so yet and only now, before going away, decided to see him.

"Ptamose is nothing to me," she went on. "I want to know from you. You had loved him once, why do you hate him now?"

"It is not him I hate. Do you know, Dio, I sometimes fancy..."

He looked at her with the smile of a frightened child looking at a grown-up person.

"Well, tell me, don't be afraid, I understand!"

"I sometimes fancy that he is not quite human...."

"Not quite human?" she repeated in surprise: there was something knowing, something clairvoyant in his face and voice.

"There are dolls like that," he went on, with the same smile. "If you pull a string, they dance. That's what he is like, he does not do anything of himself, but somebody does it for him. Don't you understand? Perhaps you will when you see him."

"Have you seen much of him?"

"Yes. We were pupils of the Heliopolis priests together—he, Merira, who is now the high priest of Aton, and myself. I was thirteen then and the prince fourteen. He was very handsome, and gentle, very gentle, like the god whose name is Quiet Heart."

"Osiris?"

"Yes. I loved him as my own soul. He often went to the desert to pray or, perhaps, simply to be alone. One day he went—and disappeared. We looked and looked for him, and thought he was lost altogether. At last he was found among the shepherds in the fields of Rostia where the Pyramids are and the Sphinx—the ancient god of the sun, Aton. He was lying on the sand like one dead, probably after an epileptic fit—it was then he began having fits. And when they brought him to the town I did not know him; it was he, and not he, his double, a changeling—as I have said just now, he was not quite human. Perhaps it was there in the desert that he entered into him...."

"Whom do you mean?"

"The spirit of the desert, Set."

"The Devil?"

"You call him the devil and we—another god. Well, that was the beginning of it all."

"Wait a minute," she interrupted. "You say Aton is an ancient god?"

"Yes, more ancient than Amon."

"And you worship him?"

"Yes, just as we worship all the gods: all the gods are members of the One."

"Then what is your quarrel about?"

"Why, did you think it was about this? Come, we are not such fools as not to know that Amon and Aton are one and the same god. The visible face of the Sun is Aton, its hidden face is Amon, but there is only one Sun, only one God. No, the dispute is not between Aton and Amon, but between Set and Osiris. Set has killed and dismembered Osiris and he wants to kill and dismember the holy land of Osiris, Egypt. This is why he has entered the king.... You are not listening, Dio."

"Yes, I am. But you keep telling me by whom the king is possessed and I want to know what he himself is. Simply wicked?"

"No, not wicked. It is just like the devil's cunning to possess a saint and not a man of evil. The country is perishing in a fratricidal war, the fields are empty, the granaries plundered, the people's skin is black with parching hunger, the mothers cook their own children for food—and it is all his doing, the saint's. And he has done more: he has killed God. 'There is no Son,' he said. 'I am the Son.'"

"Never, never has he said that!" cried Dio, and there was such a fire in her eyes as though she, too, were possessed by Set. "'There has been no Son, but there will be'—this is what he said. Has been or will be—the whole question is in that."

"Cursed is he who says there has been no Son, said Pentaur, turning pale.

"Cursed is he who says there will be no Son," said Dio, turning pale also.

Both were silent—they understood that they had cursed each other.

He buried his face in his hands. She went up to him and, without speaking, kissed him on the head, as a mother kisses a sick child. She looked into his face and it suddenly seemed to her again that there was the seal of death upon it:

Death is now to me like sweetest myrrh,
Death is now to me like healing,
Death is now to me like refreshing rain,
Death is now to me like a home to an exile!