Aye
I have misgivings: but events proceed.
Soon we will be leaving for Luxor, and nothing at all can now reverse the course that all our lives are taking.
I have done much to decide that course, I am as responsible as any, I have desired nothing more than this. Why, then, should I have doubts now, when it is much too late to change anything at all? When what I have dreamed and planned for fifteen years is about to come true?
The reason is, I think, the boy, and, in equal extent, my daughter, whom we have trained since babyhood to be his mirror image—if I may use such a term, knowing what the mirror now reflects … yet this, I suppose, is a cheap shot and unworthy of Aye: for the mirror not only reflects grotesquerie but a brilliant mind, a dreamer’s imagination, an idealist’s heart—and a will which is, I suspect, of iron.
He has confided much in me in these recent years, more than his parents have ever suspected, more than I have ever told. So has she, though her thoughts have usually paralleled his so closely that I have needed to know only the one to anticipate the other. I do not believe this has happened with Amonhotep, Son of Hapu; I am sure Kaires, for all the relative closeness in age and all the easy intimacy he was shrewd enough to establish early with them, has never been taken into their confidence so deeply. It has imposed on me a great burden, one more of those I have always carried for Kemet. Much of the molding of those two minds which now are about to acquire such power over the land has been done in the quiet private talks we have managed to have out of sight and sound of the rest of the Family.
From the others they have received all the standard things. From me they have received not so much instruction as sympathy and a patient ear. This they have apparently considered of greater value. Certainly to it they have given greater response, even though their response to the others has been impeccable. They have been dutiful children in all respects, moving with an easy grace to acquire the knowledge and the skills needed for government.
To the others they have revealed the formal results.
To me they have revealed the inner questionings.
These began, as did so many things in the minds of my nephew and my daughter, with the illness. That watershed in his life, whose consequences, still only partially revealed, still mysterious and not yet fully knowable, will obviously become part of the history of Kemet, apparently started many wonderings in his mind. They seem to revolve basically around the gods.
Why it should be that after almost two thousand years of recorded history there should appear in the land a Pharaoh who questions the gods, who have been ordained from the Beginning and are eternal, I could not say, unless it is that none came to his assistance when he prayed to them for help. But question them he does—not only Amon the obvious, whose relationship to the Family makes us all uneasy, but all the rest as well. Ptah … Ra-Atum … Ra-Herakhty … Mut … Hathor the cow … Sekhmet the lioness … Isis … Osiris … Nut … Geb … Khons … Thoth the ibis or baboon … Horus the falcon …
There is not a one whose existence and justification he has not challenged in our private talks these past two years. Dutifully his little echo my daughter has parroted him. What am I to make of this?
I have tried to tell them how our belief in the gods began: how the first unification of the Two Lands came with Menes (life, health, prosperity!) of the First Dynasty, which believed in Ra, and so gave Ra—the Sun at the height of his noontide glory—an initial supremacy over all other gods. I have told them how our ancestors—those dim and distant folk whom we call, across the haunted valleys of two thousand years, the Ancients of Kemet—initially worshiped the deities they saw in the major elements about them, in the earth, the sky, the waters of the River Nile, the wind, the rain, the scarab in the sand who symbolizes the formation of the earth as it forms tiny balls of dung in which to house its eggs and thus shelter and bring forth life. I have told them how the spreading unification of the land after Menes—psychological and mental unification, as well as physical unification—gradually merged Ra with all these other deities, yet kept him supreme, so that the sun cult always remained the dominant religion down to the time of their own immediate forebears of the Eighteenth Dynasty, when Amon (even he still retaining Ra in his formal name) became through circumstance and politics “the king of all the gods.”
I have told them how each town and locality had its own god, how each developed its own priests and temples, how all were absorbed finally by Ra and Amon, yet how each has still to this day retained its separate individuality in the hearts and minds of the people, who worship, fear, or love many gods.
I have told them why we worship certain animals and birds—not because we actually worship them but because we worship certain attributes they have which we associate with the gods they represent: the falcon, fierce and protective of Pharaoh and the land, as Horus; the ibis and baboon, shrewd and quick and full of shining wisdom, as Thoth; the lioness, stern and punishing to those who transgress, kindly and protective of those who obey, as Sekhmet; the crocodile, who guards longevity in the good and takes it away brutally from the bad, as Sebek; and all the rest. I have told them how we worship ritual because ritual each day reaffirms the order of things as it existed from the Beginning, and enlists each god anew in the service of the land and of Pharaoh—and in turn, of course, enlists Pharaoh himself anew in the service of the land and of the gods.
And from two shy yet stubborn eyes, and from two sparkling yet equally stubborn ones, there has looked out the one question I cannot answer if they cannot comprehend:
Why?
I have told them why, many times over. And so I think it is not a matter of “cannot” comprehend but a matter of “will not” comprehend.
And this, I tell you frankly, much disturbs me.
For if Pharaoh himself does not believe in the gods, then what will happen to the land? What will happen to the ancient order of things which, save for the unhappy subjugation by the Hyksos and one or two other relatively brief chaotic periods of our history, has always kept Kemet a happy, prosperous and stable country, a marvel to the nations and a beacon to the world? What will become of all of us, when the Co-Regent and the new Chief Wife pick up the power that already trails listlessly from the hands of my brother-in-law, that needs only time to fall forever from the strong, indomitable hands of my sister?
What will happen to Kemet then?
I can only hope: I can only hope. I have done my best to listen sympathetically, to try to understand, to try to end their questioning and bring them back. If they have an alternative to offer, they are not telling me. If they are not telling me, I know they are telling no one.
I cannot believe—I cannot believe—that they really contemplate any serious attempt to change the immutable order of things which has come down to us from the Beginning. I must tell myself, as I have told myself constantly since this most disturbing irreverence began, that it is simply the exuberance of young minds, simply the game of youth running free for a few last independent hours before it goes under the yoke of discipline and joins in the task with which all in the Great House are charged, the preservation of the eternal order of this eternal land,
I have to believe this, but I am not sure I do. The wind blows cold off the Nile, but it is not only the weather that chills my bones: the cold goes deeper, it strikes my heart. I love them both most dearly, yet if they really feel as they hint they do—if they really attempt to challenge the very soul and being of the Two Lands—then there can be only one ending.
And in that ending there can be for the Councilor Aye, in love and fear and horror, devoted always and only to the good of Kemet, only one role he can possibly play. And he will not be alone.
The cold strikes deep, it ravages my heart. I dress to go to Luxor now, but I go in a growing fear I hope I may succeed in hiding from them all.
They must never perceive it, for there is the possibility I cling to as desperately as every sailor tossed unsuspecting into the arms of Hapi clings to the floating palm branch.
I may be mistaken.
I pray to all the gods that this is so.
***