VII
Tutankhaton's troops were approaching the City of the Sun.
Tuta had proclaimed throughout Egypt that King Akhnaton and the heir-apparent, Saakera, had been killed by the traitor Ramose and that he, Tuta, henceforth the only legitimate heir to the throne, was going to put the regicides to death. Troops loyal to Ramose met the rebels at the southern frontier of Aton's province. The issue of the battle was doubtful. The rebels retreated, but so did Ramose. The old leader understood that his cause was lost; his soldiers were dispirited; disturbed by rumours from the enemy camp, they did not know with whom and for whose sake they were fighting or who the real rebel was—Tuta or Ramose. The only way to silence these rumours was for the king to show himself to the troops; but Ramose had hardly any hope of this left.
All the same he retreated towards Akhetaton, so as to give the final battle in the presence of the king. "Perhaps he will think better of it and refuse to give up his kingdom to Tuta, the thief," Ramose thought.
But there was unrest in the city, too. Robber bands of Tuta's followers had stopped the supply of corn to Akhetaton. There were hunger riots, first among the prisoners of war and hired labourers, numbers of whom had been employed in building the new capital, then among the troops left for the defence of the city and, finally, in the Jews' Settlement.
Ramose came to Akhetaton on the first day of the riots but did not venture to enter the town with his untrustworthy troops, and Tuta, who was following him, overstepped the holy boundary of Aton's province.
About one o'clock in the morning, Mahu galloped up from the city to the royal gardens of Maru Aton, bringing nine war chariots, and gave orders to place the best detachments of the palace guards so as to defend Maru Aton from a double attack of Tuta's army and rebels from the city.
"Where is the king?" Mahu asked, running into the ground floor hall of the palace.
"He is asleep," Pentu, the physician, answered, glancing at Mahu in alarm: he looked terribly upset and his head was bandaged: he had evidently been wounded.
"Go and wake him," Mahu said.
"Wake a sick man in the middle of the night?"
"Make haste and go!"
"But what has happened?"
"Rebellion in the town. The king must be saved."
Both ran up to the first storey where the king lay asleep on a humble bed in a small panelled room that had belonged to the princess's nurse, Asa.
They called Dio and sent her to the king. Screening the flame of the lamp with her palm, she went on tiptoe into the king's room and stopped to look at him from a distance. He slept so sweetly that it seemed a pity to wake him. But recalling Mahu's words 'life is dearer than sleep,' she went up to the sleeper and, bending down, kissed him on the head.
He woke up and smiled, screwing up his eyes at the light.
"What is it, Dio? Sleep, I am well."
"No, Enra, we mustn't sleep, get up. Mahu has come and says he must see you."
"Mahu? What for?" he asked, looking at her attentively and half-rising from the couch.
"He will hear it at once in any case," she thought and said:
"There is a riot in the town."
"And Tuta is coming with his army?" he guessed: he must have heard something before. "Why haven't I been told sooner? Though it is better so—all at once."
He spoke calmly, and, as it were, thoughtfully.
"Where is Mahu?"
"Shall I call him?"
"No, I will come."
He began dressing. Dio helped him: they were not shy of each other. He dressed without hurry.
"What is this?" he asked, seeing a glow in the windows.
"There is a fire somewhere."
"Where?"
"I don't know. Mahu will tell."
They went into the next room. From there the fire in the town could be seen: the king's granaries, the barracks, the palace and Aton's temple were burning.
Mahu approached the king and fell at his feet.
"Life, power, health to the king...."
He could not speak for tears. The king bent down and embraced him.
"What is it, Mahu? Don't cry, all will be well. Are you wounded?" he asked, seeing the bandage on his head.
"O, sire, never mind me—we must save you!"
"Save me from what?"
Mahu briefly told him what had happened and exclaimed, falling at his feet again:
"Come, come quickly! The chariots are waiting at the garden gates. We shall manage somehow to go through the desert to the river lower down, where there are no ambushes, take boats and in another five days be in the loyal provinces of the North."
"Run away?" the king asked, as calmly as before.
"Yes, sire," Mahu replied. "Tuta's rabble may be here any minute. I can't answer for your life."
"No, my friend, I cannot. If I run away, what will happen here, in the holy province of Aton? Endless war because of me! I have begun with peace and I shall end with war? I say one thing and do another? No, I have had enough of this shame. And from whom should I run away? From Tuta? But what can he do to me? Take away my kingdom? Why, this is just what I wish. From the rebels? And what will they do to me? Kill me? Let them—death is better than shame. Ankh-em-maat, He-who-lives-in-truth, is to die in falsehood? No, in death I shall say what I have said all my life: let there be peace...."
He stopped suddenly and listened; the blast of trumpets and the beat of drums were heard in the distance. There was a panic in the palace and in the gardens.
The centurion of the Hittite amazons, the king's bodyguard, ran up the stairs shouting:
"Tuta's soldiers are here!"
"Where?" Mahu asked.
"At the garden gates. The fighting has begun."
All, except the king and Dio, ran downstairs.
The fierce noises of war invaded the quiet Maru-Aton gardens: the blast of the trumpets, the beat of the drums, the neighing of horses, the creaking of carts, the rumble of chariots, the cries of the chieftains. Torches glowed in the black shadow of the palm groves: the moonlit sky was red with the dancing flames of the fire that made the face of the moon look pale and crimsoned the gold disc of Aton above the altar on the temple roof.
The gardens were surrounded by a quadrangle of high, thick walls, like a fortress, with only one gateway that gave on the river; an inner wall divided the enclosure into two: stables, cellars, granaries and barracks of the palace guards were in the southern half while the northern was occupied with summer houses, shelters, chapels of the god Aton and the palace by the big artificial pond.
The vanguard of Tuta's troops stopped on reaching Maru-Aton. Knowing how many treasures it held they wanted to plunder it.
They tried to force the gates. Mahu's soldiers repulsed them every time. But reinforcements came to the enemy continually and the rebels from the town joined them. They surrounded the garden, besieging it like a fortress and, at last, forced their way in.
The battle was now fought at the inner wall. The half-savage mercenaries from the north—Achaeans and Trojans—fought like lions. Naked but for brass leggings and brass plumed helmets, they flung small round shields behind their backs and fought desperately with the triangular iron sword-knife, one in each hand. Overcome by superior numbers they retreated to the pond. The water in it was shallow and only reached to the men's waists. The battle continued in the water so fiercely that it became clouded and warm with the blood.
Eteocles, the youthful leader of the Achaeans, was dying on the bank under Maki's withered birch tree and as he looked at its white stem he saw through the darkness of death his far-off native land.
Some were fighting and others plundering.
The tender stalks of the flowers in the beds broke under the soldiers' heavy tread. There were pools of blood on the floor of the chapel. The wood of the sacred pillars was chopped for bonfires, the purple of the sacred curtains was torn to make leg wrappings; the gold was scraped off the walls with fingernails. An old woman from the Jewish settlement, seeing that a precious casket had been screwed into the floor and could not be carried away, bit at it so hard that she secured a pearl with her teeth.
Naaman, the prophet, also from the Jews' Settlement, was stamping on a gilded wooden disc of Aton—a gold one would not have been given even to a prophet—dancing and shouting.
"God of vengeance, Lord God of vengeance, show Thyself! Arise, judge of the earth, and judge the proud!"
Cellars were broken into. They were so flooded with wine that people went down on their hands and knees and lapped it up. People drank themselves to death. Two drunken men had a fight and falling to the bottom of the cellar were drowned in the wine.
The screams of women and the blood of murdered children formed a ghastly tribute to their respective gods—Aton, Amon or Jahve.
The Sun's garden, God's paradise, was turned into hell.
A handful of Achaeans and Trojans, who had not been massacred in the pond, retreated towards the palace that stood in the narrow part between the pond and the north wall of the garden. The palace was defended by Mahu's war-chariots, the black archers, Lycian slingers and Hittite Amazons.
Hearing that the king was in the palace, Tuta's soldiers attacked it: they wanted to take the king, dead or alive, so as to end the war.
At the same time Tutankhaton's main forces were approaching from the south and Ramose's troops from the north. The great battle that was to decide the destinies of Egypt began under the very walls of Maru Aton. It looked phantom-like in the darkness of the night, the white moonlight and the red glow of the conflagration. The blast of the trumpets, the beat of the drums, the neighing of horses, the rumble of chariots, the clashing of swords, the whistling of arrows, the moans of the dying and the cries of the victors were all mingled in one seething hell. And the centre of it, the fixed axis in the whirling hurricane of the war, was the quiet palace tower.
The king and Dio were looking down from its flat roof.
"It's all because of me!" he repeated, wringing his hands, or, stretching them out to the combatants, he cried with desperate entreaty.
"Peace! Peace! Peace!"
It was as though he still hoped that men would hear him and stop fighting.
Or he stopped up his ears, covered his face with his hands, so as not to hear, not to see; or, running up to the roof bannisters, bent down and looked greedily at people dying and killing with his name on their lips, and there was such anguish in his face that it seemed as though every sword and spear and arrow pierced his heart as its aim. Or he ran to the staircase door that had been locked, banged it with his fists, and knocked his head against it, shouting:
"Open!"
And when Dio tried to restrain him he struggled out of her arms and begged her, with tears:
"Let me go to them!"
She knew he wanted to throw himself among the combatants so that they should kill him and stop killing one another.
Now and again he suddenly grew quiet and sat down on the floor, muttering something under his breath, quickly and inaudibly, as in delirium. Listening attentively, Dio caught once the words of the incantation the old nurse Asa had said over the dying Princess Maki:
"Mother Isis calls
From the top of the hill,
Horus, my son,
The hill is on fire,
Bring me water,
Quench the fire!"
"He will die insane," Dio thought, and sitting next to him on the floor, she gently stroked his head and whispered: "My poor little boy! My poor little boy!"
Listening to the roaring laughter of war, seeing the sun disc of Aton turn red as though filled with blood, she thought: "Perhaps we were mistaken after all and God is not Love but Hate and the law of the world is not peace, but war?"
Time ceased to exist, it was eternity: there always had been, was, and would be this seething hell of war to the furthest ends of the earth from the beginning to the end of time.
"Bring me water.
Quench the fire!"
No, no water would quench it and they would burn in it for ever and ever.
"My poor little boy!" she kept whispering as she stroked his head and suddenly she added, with despairing tenderness: "My poor little girl!"
"Here I, too, am going mad," she thought. They both smiled—they understood each other—and there was exquisite joy in this in spite of all the pain.
She saw blood on his face: he must have been wounded with an arrow when he looked at the battle leaning over the parapet; he had not felt it and she had not noticed it. She wiped off the blood with the edge of her dress, but a trace of it still remained.
Gazing at him she recalled the prophecy: "As many were astonied at Him; his visage was so marred more than any man, and his form more than the sons of men."
"You are He! You are He!" she whispered, with joyous terror.
"No, Dio, I am only His shadow," he answered, calmly and rationally. "But if His shadow suffers such agony, what will His suffering be?"
Suddenly he raised his eyes to the sky and jumped up.
"He is coming!" he cried in a voice so changed and with his face so altered, that she thought he would fall down in a fit. But she, too, looked at the sky and understood.
A gigantic, pyramid shaped ray, with its base on the ground and its apex in the zenith, flashed in the greyish sky of the morning, above the dying glow of the city fire, and the white opalescent lightnings of zodiacal light danced and quivered in it.
"Quick! Quick!" he repeated, trembling like those tremulous lights in the heavens.
They both made haste as though they were indeed meeting the Unexpected One.
Blowing up the embers on the altar the king put on them splinters of sandalwood and cannacat. Lighting a long golden censer, shaped like an outstretched hand, Dio gave it to the king and herself took a cithern—a brass hoop, threaded with fine silver snakes that gave a high ringing sound. Both stood before the altar facing each other:
"I come to glorify Thy rays, living Aton, one and eternal God!" he intoned, and it seemed to her that his voice drowned the roaring laughter of the hell let loose.
"Praise be to the living Aton, who didst create the heavens and the secrets thereof! Thou art in the sky and Thy beloved son, Akhnaton, is on earth!" she replied.
Suddenly the sound of axes came from below. The building trembled as though it were going to fall; the enemy had rushed into the palace and the battle was being fought indoors.
"Fire!" someone shouted on the stairs and the cry re-echoed, with a familiar dread, in Dio's heart: she remembered how she had lain on the pyre, a victim ready to be slain. She rushed to the bannisters, leaned over, and in the breach of the garden wall saw Tutankhaton, the conqueror, in his chariot, wearing the royal helmet with the royal serpent over the forehead.
He saw her also and shouted to her, waving his hands. She did not hear the words, but understood that he wanted to save her and was calling to her to come down.
A black warrior, agile as a monkey, climbed to the top of a palm by the roof of the lodge and cleverly threw from there right at Dio's feet a rope-ladder. Hardly knowing what she was doing, she picked it up, fixed one end of it to the bannisters and let the other down.
It would have been quite easy for her who had tamed wild bulls on the Knossos arena to take the king in her arms and carry him down—he was thin as a skeleton and no heavier than a child.
But she stopped to think. She leaned over the bannisters once more and looked down. Tuta went on shouting and waving to her. She looked into his face: it was neither ill-natured nor kind; neither stupid nor intelligent: the everlasting mediocre face of the average man.
"Akhnaton will disappear, Tutankhaton will remain and the kingdom of this world shall be Tuta's kingdom," she recalled the saying and thought "Should I spit into that face? No, it isn't worth while."
She threw the ladder into the fire—the bottom storey was in flames already—and returned to the king.
Hearing and seeing nothing, he stood on the same spot stretching out his hands to the rising sun.
"O Lord, before the foundations of the earth were laid Thou didst reveal Thy will to Thy Son Who lives for ever. Thou, Father, art in my heart and no one knows Thee, but me, Thy son!"
With furious roaring laughter red tongues of flame shot up on all sides through the white coils of smoke, as though the hell let loose had leapt up to heaven.
Dio rushed to the king, looked into his face that was like the sun and recognized Him Who was to come.
"Is it Thee, O Lord?"
"It is I!"
He embraced her as a bridegroom embraces a bride and in a fiery storm of love raised her to the Father.
The palace, a light trellis-work structure of cedar and cyprus-wood, dry and resinous, burned like a candle and its fragrant smoke coiled like incense upon an altar to greet the rising sun.
But when the sun rose it shone upon a smoking black ruin—the tomb of Akhnaton and Dio.