Egypt. I stood back, and Nefertiti shouted, “We welcome you to the greatest Durbar in history!”
“They will think you love him,” I whispered to my husband during the procession to the temple. “All the soldiers will think you have bowed to Aten!”
“They will think no such thing.” He pressed close to me. “They aren’t fools. They know I am a believer in Amun who is only in Pharaoh’s presence because of you.”
I looked ahead at the procession of men in their soldiers’ kilts and military belts. “They will also know that I am the reason you are no longer general.”
“Horemheb is imprisoned; I would be there, too, if you hadn’t loved me.”
We stopped in a courtyard crowded with chariots. They were ablaze with electrum, turquoise, and copper. Then Panahesi stepped forward to carry Nefertiti to the destiny she had carved for herself without sons or history or precedent. His face was arranged in a smile, as if her ascension to Egypt’s throne over his grandson was his greatest wish.
“Now he will have to hitch his star to hers or plot against two Pharaohs,” my husband said.
“Even at the expense of his daughter and grandson?” I asked.
Nakhtmin spread his palms. “Whatever star is rising.”
We were swept away into a sea of chariots and carried across the Courtyard of Festivals to the temple with its statues of Nefertiti and Akhenaten. Trumpets blared and a path to the gates was cleared. “You look as if you’ve swallowed something bitter.” Nefertiti laughed musically, descending from her chariot. “What’s wrong, Mutnodjmet? This is the greatest day we shall ever know. We are immortal.”
My sister turned an incredulous face to Nakhtmin, then back to me. “Why are you saying this during my greatest triumph?”
“Shall I lie to you, the way everyone else will do when you are Pharaoh?”
Nefertiti was silent.
“Just don’t touch them,” I advised. “Don’t let them kiss your ring.”
“Touch who?” Akhenaten appeared behind Nakhtmin.
“The Hittite emissaries,” Nefertiti said. “Do not let them kiss your ring,” she told him, and Akhenaten sneered.
“No, they shall kiss my feet when they see what I have built.”
Throughout the Durbar, there was nothing Akhenaten did not lavish on Nefertiti. She was his Chief Wife, his chief adviser, his partner in every plan, and now she was Pharaoh. And so that the world should never forget it, we traveled to the borders of Amarna, where he erected a pillar to her reign. He stood before the emissaries of the East and ordered Maya to read the inscription he had written for his wife, the Pharaoh-Queen of Egypt.
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No Pharaoh had ever granted the crook and flail to a woman. But when Nefertiti stood before the crowds to bless them, they pressed against each other and stood on stools simply to catch a glimpse of her face.
“They love me,” she swore on the second day of the Durbar. “They love me more than when I was queen!”
“Because now you have greater power over them,” I said.
But she ignored my cynicism. “I want the people to remember this forever,” she answered. In the waning light of her Robing Room, the setting sun turned her skin to gilded bronze. “Mutny,” she said, “find Thutmose. I want to be sculpted just as I am.”
I crossed the palace to the artist’s studio. The Durbar would last six days and seven nights, and already there were drunken men in the streets, while the wives of dignitaries went stumbling to their litters, reeking of scented oil and wine. Thutmose was in his workshop, laughing in the midst of a gaggle of young girls and handsome men. His eyes lit up when he saw me.
“A sculpture?” he asked breathlessly. “I’ll be ready at once. When I saw her at the temple with the crook and flail,” he confided, “the cobra rearing on her crown, I knew she would call for me. No queen has ever worn that crown with such grace.”
“No one has ever worn it at all,” I said dryly.
Thutmose laughed. “Tell Her Majesty she should come,” he said grandly, then motioned with his hands. “Everybody must go!” The women pouted, trailing out the door with their wine cups and beaded skirts.
When the crowd was gone, I asked Thutmose, “Why is it that the women love you so much?”
He thought for a moment. “Because I can make them immortal. When I find the right model I might use her for Isis, and when the winds of time erase her memory from her house, there will still be her face looking down from the temples.”
I thought of what Thutmose said when I went to tell Nefertiti that he was ready. She had changed, and I wondered if this was the way she would be remembered to history. She was wearing a linen so thin that it was perfectly transparent. On her wrists, at her ankles, from her ears and on her toes, thick gold and faience glittered. We walked through the halls of the palace together as we had done so many years before in Thebes, on the night when she had gone to Akhenaten as a virgin. We could hear the crowds outside in the courtyards, laughing and dancing, but inside the palace it was cool and silent.
In Thutmose’s studio, cushions had been placed where Nefertiti should sit. There was an armed chair for myself and when Nefertiti entered Thutmose executed a deep bow. “Pharaoh Neferneferuaten-Nefertiti.”
My sister smiled at the sound of her new name. “I want a bust,” she told him. “From my pectoral all the way to my crown.”
“With the spitting cobra,” Thutmose nodded approvingly, coming closer to study the rubies that made the snake’s glittering eyes. Nefertiti sat a little higher on the cushions. “I shall do the bust in limestone,” he announced. I stood up to go and Nefertiti cried, “You can’t leave! I want you to see this.”
So we spent the afternoon that way, and although my memory of the greatest Durbar in history is filled with images of drinking and dance, the memory that remains clearest to me is that of Nefertiti sitting forward on her ocean of cushions, the coral and turquoise from her golden pectoral catching the sun’s last light, her black eyes like pools of obsidian. There was true tranquillity on my sister’s face. At last, Nefertiti was convinced that she would never be abandoned, that a Pharaoh’s crook and flail would mean that she would be remembered by eternity.
