The City of Refuge: Book 1 of The Memphis Cycle by Diana Wilder Page B

mixture of repetition and bombast unfamiliar to Khonsu, but the upper register of the carving arrested his attention and made his breath catch in his throat.
    A king and his queen stood beneath the sun, followed by two princesses, raising their arms to the solar disk as its rays fell about them like drops of golden rain. Left side mirrored right, so that two kings and two queens raised identical faces to the sun, and the daughters behind them, standing in stylized postures of adoration, stared fixedly upward.
    The rays, painted a deep golden yellow, glanced across the white-painted stone like spears, but the ends were tipped with hands opening in caresses or offering the ankh, the symbol of life, to the worshipers.
    The people themselves seemed creatures from a fevered nightmare. With grotesquely bulging thighs and abdomens, they were nevertheless monstrously attenuated, with long, bulbous chins and narrow, reptilian eyes.
    Could it be Akhenaten and his family? Khonsu gazed without comprehension at the blue war crown worn by the king. Was this, then, the descendant of the conqueror, Thutmose III? Khonsu found his mind irresistibly circling the notion of spiders and lizards. Dizzy from the attempt to grasp and understand something utterly alien to him, he turned to find Mersu frowning and tracing a name cut into the boulder’s upper face.
    “This is it. And here's my name. Hmm… my draftsmanship's improved.”
    Khonsu looked at the formal hieroglyphs, shook his head and turned back to frown at the carvings. The sense of strangeness rose within him once more. “This is a terrible place!”
    Mersu slid down from the boulder and dusted his hands off against his kilt. “Do you mean that it's evil, or that it's ugly?” he asked.
    “I'm not sure,” Khonsu admitted.
    “You're honest,” Mersu said. “Too many people decide something's evil because it's an eyesore. If that were the case, Thebes in its entirety would be evil beyond help… Come to that… I'm not sure whether Thebes is evil, after all. I should ask His Grace... Or Perineb.” His long mouth twitched. “Anyhow, by that way of thinking everything beautiful would be good. It isn't, you know, look at me.”
    Khonsu eyed the reptilian figures again. “But why do they show him like this?”
    “As to that, His Late Majesty came from a gifted family. Thutmose the Great designed vases for the temple. Akhenaten's father, Amenhotep III, was an architect. So was Akhenaten: he planned this city, and everyone would agree that it's beautifully conceived and executed. Akhenaten also wanted to be thought of as an artist, like his ancestors, but from his drawings nothing could've been farther from the truth.. I know he spoke with Bak, the chief sculptor, and Bak came out of the interview bug-eyed and white. Next thing we knew, we were drawing the king and his family as though they looked like Hapy the Nile god. Or Taweret. Fat thighs, hanging breasts, a belly that'd do credit to a woman nine months gone.”
    Mersu paused to think. “I recall he had some notion 'To reflect in their persons the bounty and largesse of the Aten.' It was all symbolic. Symbols should be pleasing to the eye, I think, or folks'll gag and move on.”
    “Then he didn't really look like that?” Khonsu asked.
    “How could anyone look like that and live?”
    Khonsu thought fleetingly of some amazingly ugly people he knew. “But how did he look, then?”
    Mersu smoothed a blank expanse of wall, took a piece of charcoal from the pouch slung over his shoulder and quickly sketched a face, starting with the lines of the skull and then filling in the features. He surveyed the results. “The eyes were dark and set on something of a slant, like this,” he heightened the sketch a little. “The mouth was a little on the full side, but well-shaped. He was always smiling: see the lines to either side? He and Prince Thutmose were full brothers. They looked alike, and His Highness is a fine-looking