VI
There was brilliant sunshine outside, but it was dark as night in the bedchamber of the Maru-Aton palace, with the shutters closed and the windows curtained; only the gilded columns glimmered faintly in the dim lamplight.
A bed of carved ebony and ivory, painted and gilded, stood in the middle of the room on a platform with four steps. It was shaped like a fantastic monster, a mixture of crocodile and hippopotamus, with lion's feet and open jaws: it guarded the sleeper; the more fearful the bed, the sweeter the sleep. Strangely convex, round and hard, with a wooden crescent for a pillow, it seemed uncomfortable, but was in truth better than any other bed, for it was cool to sleep on in the hot nights when feather beds and pillows were unendurable.
Princess Makitatona lay on the bed. On the fourth day after her delivery she had been attacked with child-bed fever.
The dark, stuffy room smelt of drugs. Pentu, the physician, was pounding in a mortar of stone a complicated remedy, composed of forty-six ingredients, corresponding to the same number of blood vessels in the human body. In addition to medicinal herbs it contained lizard's blood, sulphur from pigs' ears, powder from the head and wings of the sacred beetle, Kheper, a pregnant woman's milk, a hippopotamus's tooth and flies' dirt.
In another corner of the room a Babylonian sorcerer, Assursharatta, was boiling in a cauldron the blood of a freshly slain lamb with magical herbs and muttering a spell against the seven demons of fever:
Sibiti shunu, sibiti shunu,
Sibit adi shina shunu.
They are seven, they are seven,
They are seven twice over.
There are seven of them in heaven,
There are seven of them in hell.
They are neither male nor female,
They are childless and unmarried.
Whirlwinds that bring destruction
Do not know what mercy is,
Do not bend their ear to prayer.
They are evil, they are mighty,
They are seven, they are seven!
But nothing helped the patient—neither the medicines nor the spells, nor even the healing water from the well of the Sun in Heliopolis, where the god Ra washed his face when he lived on earth.
In vain old Asa whispered the incantation:
Mother Isis cries
From the top of the hill:
"Horus my son,
The hill is on fire,
Bring me water,
Quench the fire."
The fire of the fever would not be quenched.
In vain the queen read over her daughter the prayer of Mother Isis. When a scorpion stung baby Horus she cried to the sun and the sun was darkened, night was upon the earth until the god Tot healed the baby and gave it back to its mother. Since then the magical prayer of Isis had always been read over sick children.
"Stand still, O Sun, stand still until the child is restored to its mother!" the queen repeated with frenzied entreaty, but she knew the miracle would not happen, the sun would not stop.
She recalled the hymn to Aton:
Thou conquerest all through love,
Thou soothest the babe in the womb
Before its mother can soothe it.
But now He failed to soothe her.
Thou hast mercy upon a worm
And upon the midges of the air.
But now He had no mercy upon her.
The king and queen never left the invalid's side, but she was delirious and did not recognize them. If a ray of sunlight penetrated between the curtains or through a crack in the door, she grew restless and cried:
"It is coming, it is coming again! There it is stretching out its leg.... Abby darling, do drive it away, quick! It will seize me and suck me dry like a fly ... whoever could have let a spider into the sky?"
The king understood: Aton the Sun was the spider, the hand shaped rays were the spider's legs.
But most often she talked in her delirium about Shiha, the eunuch.
"Shiha, what does it mean 'light is greater than darkness'? Who has blasphemed against divine darkness? Do you say King Uaenra is godless? .... How dare you, you old monkey? .... Drink, drink! Isn't there something cooler? You gave me boiling water last time, it scalded my mouth...."
They gave her the freshest water out of porous Tyntyrian vessels, but she pushed the cup away:
"Hot water again!"
The baby boy had been born prematurely; it had no nails, no hair and was weak and pale like a blade of grass grown in darkness. It hardly cried at all and only wrinkled its face painfully at the lamplight.
"It isn't right for a baby to be in darkness: it may go blind; it must be taken into the sunshine," the midwives decided.
But as soon as they took it out into the light of day it screamed and struggled as in a fit; they had to take it back into the dark. It was born an enemy of Aton the Sun.
"Is it night outside?" Maki asked in one of her lucid intervals.
"No, it is day," the king answered.
"The day of life is short, the night of death is long," she said, with a quiet smile, looking into his eyes, as it were into his very heart. "Shiha says 'darkness was before light; sunshine is a veil over darkness.' Shall the dead see the sun? What do you think, Enra?"
He was about to answer, but she began to wander again.
"A hen, a white hen with a red wig on like Ty's.... It is running after me.... Oh, it has stuck its teeth into me!"
The king remembered that the white hen was the mate of the cock with which he and the princesses had played once. Old Asa wept bitterly: she thought the hen with teeth was a bad omen.
"Do explain, Shiha," Maki wandered, "King Uaenra is wiser than all the sons of men: how is it he does not know death? He lives and sings to the sun as though there were no death and all were well... What will he sing when he does know death?"
Sometimes the king fancied it was not mere delirium: it was as though she knew that he was there without seeing him and spoke for his benefit, passed dreadful judgment upon him, laughed at him with a terrible laugh.
"Enra, Enra, why don't you pray?" the queen repeated like one insane, looking at him with dry, tearless eyes. "Pray! Your prayer is strong: the Father will hear His son. Save her, Enra!"
The king was silent. He felt so ashamed that he could have screamed with shame, as with pain, but worse than shame, pain and death was the mockery "what will you sing when you do know death?"
At the same time princess Meritatona was lying ill in the apartments of Saakera, the heir-apparent.
Maki kept talking of her as of one dead.
"All through me, through me!" she repeated in anguish.
"But, darling, Rita is alive," her mother said, trying to comfort her. But she would not believe it.
"No, mother, don't deceive me, I saw how they carried her, dead."
"She might be saved if only she believed me," the queen thought. "But how can I convince her? And what has happened between them? A fine mother I am—I don't know why one daughter strangled herself and by whom the other has had a child.... Perhaps Enra knows? He spoke with her then—he must know."
She questioned the king when they were alone together.
"Enra, do you know who the baby's father is?"
"No, I don't know."
"Haven't you asked her?"
"I have, but she did not say."
"How is it you didn't find out, how could you have left her to face such torture alone?"
"I pitied her."
"And don't you pity her now? Enra, Enra, what have you done!"
The baby did not live long: it died by the evening of the fifth day as quietly as though it had gone to sleep.
"Where is the boy?" Maki asked, coming to herself.
"It is asleep," the queen answered.
"Never mind, I'll be very careful, let me have him!"
No one moved or spoke.
"Give him to me, do!" Maki repeated, looking round at them all. "Mother, where is he? Tell me the truth.... What has happened? Is he dead?"
The queen covered her face with her hands.
"Well, perhaps it is better so," Maki said quietly. "We shall soon be together...."
That same night before dawn the death struggle began. She no longer tossed about or wandered; she lay quite naked: the lightest covering oppressed her; the slender, childish body seemed flat and crushed as though it had been trodden on like a blade of grass; the head with the elongated skull was thrown back, the eyes closed, the face immovable and the breathing so faint that at times it was not noticeable.
Pentu, the physician, brought to her lips a round brass mirror and when it grew slightly clouded, he said:
"She breathes."
Suddenly she opened her eyes and called:
"Enra, where is Enra?"
"Here," the king answered bending over her, and she whispered in his ear, like a blade of grass rustling:
"Open the shutters."
He knew she was afraid of light and did not venture to open all the shutters at once, but ordered them to draw the curtains from one window only.
"All, all," she whispered.
All the windows were flung open. The morning sun flooded the room—the rays of the god Aton like a child's hands embraced her naked body.
"Lift me up," the blade of grass rustled, and the king lifted her as easily as though she were a blade of grass. The sun lighted her face.
"Akhnaton, Sun's joy, Sun's only Son!" she said, looking into his eyes so that he understood this was not delirium, "I know that you are...."
She did not finish, but he understood: "I know that you are He."
Suddenly she trembled in his arms, like a leaf in a storm. He laid her down on the bed.
Pentu put the mirror to her lips, but this time its brass surface remained clear. The rays of the Sun—a child's hands—embraced the body of the dead.
There was the sound of weeping in the chamber. The women cried, wailed frantically, beat their breasts, tore their hair, scratched their own faces till they bled, with a kind of rapture of despair. But all was decorous like a holy rite: this was how they had wailed thousands of years before and how they would wail thousands of years hence.
The king heard the wailing, but there was bitter laughter in his heart: "you are He!"