Amonhotep, S.H.
So do I sign myself, remembering the small, wizened, modest man who gave me life, thinking thereby to give him in return a fame of which he never dreamed in all his sixty humble years as a farmer:
Amon-ho-tep, Son of Hapu, risen very high and destined, as we all declare so stoutly on our tombs and monuments, to live forever and ever.…
Now that I too am very old, I sometimes question this. It is not in the children of Kemet, the Black Land, to question such things, but now and again some of us do … when we are very old … and very secretly.…
It would never do for one who has passed most of his life in the Great House, most of his life as the willing and, I like to think, useful servant of Pharaoh, the Good God, the One-above-all-others who lives there, to have in public a thought so unsettling. But sometimes, as I say, I do have such thoughts. I am a little more independent of mind, and no doubt of demeanor, than most. It is possibly the reason why the Good God has always chosen to favor me, and why I have been able to survive these recent years and remain, as I do to this day, a famous and honored man upon whom he still smiles with favor when he sees me—even though the One who smiles upon me now is many years away from the One who smiled upon me first. It is not his fault that he profited from the troubles of the House of Thebes; indeed, having his nature, he could do no other. Particularly when those who were of that House so grievously lost ma’at—the sense of the fitness of things—and allowed such evil days to fall upon the land of Kemet.
I went down the Nile a month ago, leaving from the never ending clamor of the docks at Thebes in the old familiar way, watching the pleasant life of the eternal stream passing by on all sides—the excited shouts and chatter of the pilots and sailors, the greetings called out cheerfully from the banks, the barges laden with goods going up and down between Thebes and the cities of the Delta, the small papyrus boats carrying families on business or pleasure, the occasional state barge of the high official parting all before it. I no longer travel like that save on the greatest of occasions when I am sometimes called back to the Great House to participate; but like all the sons and daughters of Kemet, I love the river. As we should, for from it comes our past, present, future, our reason, our purpose, and our life.
So I traveled down, being poled by two of my slaves, taken captive by my namesake, Amon-ho-tep III (life, health, prosperity!), on that expedition to Nubia upon which I accompanied him so long ago, when we were young. He never made another, though on his monuments you will find him telling you how he subjugated Syria, Naharin, and wretched Kush. They all say things like that, the Ones who live in the Great House, and sometimes you cannot tell who has done what, or indeed who is who. But does it matter? They are all gods, they are all eternal, they come and go unchanging in the endless story of Kemet, always conquering, always victorious, always all-knowing, always all-powerful, always, essentially, the same … save one. And although the One who sits in the Great House now has done everything he could to obliterate his name and his memory, from the life and deeds of that One the land of Kemet will never really recover. Him she will never forget, though forgetting is official and always will be official, forever and ever.…
I passed by his city on my eighth day on the river. It was nearing dusk and along the banks in the little villages the humble folk from whom I come were cooking their evening meals. Across the water floated laughter, happy voices, the comfortable noise, and bustle of family concourse. It was so until we neared the great bend against the eastern cliffs where he decreed that his city should be built, and where it rose, complete, in two furious fantastic years. Then all habitation ended, a great silence fell, and on the soft winds blowing out of the Red Land came no sound save the ghostly sounds an old man heard in memory:
The high, imperious cries of Akh-en-aten (life, health, prosperity!) … Nefer-ti-ti’s firm yet gentle voice … the happy gossip of their daughters … the eager boyish voices of his two younger brothers, Smenkh-ka-ra and Tut-ankh-amon (life, health, prosperity to them both!), innocent of care before they too became God and Pharaoh … the calm, unhurried phrases of his uncle and father-in-law Aye (life, health, prosperity!) as he waited patiently for the day when he, too, would so ascend … the soft, unyielding tones of his mother, Queen Tiye … the weary complaints of his father, Amon-ho-tep III (life, health, prosperity!), not to be saved by divinity, doomed soon to pass to the West and knowing it … the sibilant comments of the other uncle, Aanen, Second Priest of Amon, bitter and unforgiving, working ceaselessly toward the day when he dared challenge the God who worshiped the Aten … and all the others, myself among them, younger then, confident, certain, perhaps a little contentious in the power I still held in the Palace … and my friend Hor-em-heb (life, health, prosperity!) who holds the Palace now and who, for Kemet’s sake, had to join in silencing, finally, the most dangerous of the many voices of the House of Thebes.…
Ghostly they are now, ghostly and yet curiously alive for an old man dreaming on the river. I could hear them as clearly as I hear you, see them as clearly as my eyes see you. When I returned up the river to Thebes from Heliopolis, where I had gone on the business of one of my sons, just dead, it happened again.
I stood for a long time by the rail but I do not think I will go that way again. I am very old, now, and there is little chance that I will again have business on the river even if Amon were to give me strength, which lately he has not. I think it better, perhaps, that it should be so, for there is no profit in it for me, and certainly no satisfaction. I cannot find it in my heart to condemn that One even though I understand why my friend in the Great House now feels he must. And I agree with that. I agree with that. Make no mistake, I agree, it must be done. But I do not want to hear their voices any more.
All, all are gone, the House of Thebes. A year ago his sister, the Queen-Princess Sit-a-mon, to whom in these later years of my retirement I served a comfortable time as High Steward, died at her own great age: the chapter closed. Already in so short a time, twenty-six racing years since his death, nothing remains of his city but a few half-finished tombs in the cliffs; piles of rubble; the crumbling outline of a mud-brick palace here and there. The wind from the Red Land blows gently over them, the sand piles ever deeper. Men stay away, it is a haunted place. I do not want to go there again. But it was a wondrous city once and he was a wonder, too. And while few men in the land of Kemet understood him or will ever understand him, the fact of his living cannot be denied by the One who rules now or by anyone, no matter how determined the attempt. That fact, I truly believe, will live forever and ever, whether or not men ever really know why it all happened.
It did not seem necessary to know, then: we were, for a time, swept away by it. I doubt if we shall ever know, now. He was strange, very strange. I can see him as a child, far back before his city, before he became Co-Regent, the strange, gangling, malformed, horse-faced boy, walking the painted mud corridors of the Palace of Malkata at Thebes with his awkward, painful, shuffling gait, child of a god and soon to be God himself. What was he? Who was he? Why did he come our way? Why did he savage so the land of Kemet?
These are questions the river does not answer as it runs forever through the Black Land and the Red, through the Two Kingdoms, the narrow, winding corridor of life and green, past Thebes, past Abydos, past Memphis, past all the rest … past the terribly lonely ruins of Akhet-Aten-Amarna, his city.
Those were troubling days in the land of Kemet. We did not know their like before. I suspect we shall never know their like again. I pray we never shall. But I am glad that I was there.
It began, as many things do in a royal house, with the birth of a child—two, actually, for she had much to do with it also—and the death of a child.…
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