Free On a Balcony by David Stacton

For so long as he could hold the prince’s attention, for so long would the Aton cult prosper.
    *
    But to Meryra, already dreaming his new dreams, was added Tutmose, the sculptor, dreaming his. For Tutmose , like Meryra, also combined indifference with ambition, and perhaps also liked to play with the game of appearances, though in a slightly different way. Much more than Meryra, Tutmose held the right keys to immortality. Tutmose, or rather his fingers, knew what Ma’at was very well.
    It was no accident that he should arrive at the temple on that day when the installation of the new statues was finished and the prince had come to see himself new, shiny, and reproduced twenty-four times.
    The day was mercilessly bright. Only the best work, delicately modelled, could stand up to such strong light, and Bek’s, as Tutmose knew, was not the best work. The effects of inferior craftsmanship and too much haste showed plainly. Besides, Bek did not know how to make a virtue of abnormality.
    For an instant the prince thought that Bek had made fun of him. He had asked for truth. But Bek had given him a literal-minded veracity so thoughtlessly done as to be a cruel caricature. The prince wanted to turn and run.
    From twenty-four pedestals twenty-four jeering parodies leered down at him. Bek was not to be blamed. The prince saw his own ugliness from the inside, where it was almost a grace; but no artist can ever give any subject a grace he does not possess himself, and so there was no veil of art between these statues and the prince’s ugliness.
    From a height of ten feet his own white face looked down at him, stretched taut like a piece of muslin drawn over the skull of a ferret. The eyes were beady, the skull misshapen, and the lower lip flapped down of its own weight. The pose was stiff and hieratic, after an Osiris mummy. The arms were like spindly cucumbers suffering from winter rot.
    Show me as I am, he had said, but this was not the same as sculpting him as he looked. The hips were a calamity, like gigantic white sponges six feet high. And there were twenty-four of them. It was his first defeat at the hands of the fine arts, and once the panic of being seen like that was over, he was furious with the artist. But where could he find a better man?
    As it happened the better man had come to findhim. Tutmose stepped from the column behind which he had been lingering.
    “You should not blame the man,” he said. “He did his best.”
    “Where did you come from?”
    Tutmose shrugged. “I have been here all morning. But you are quite right. They have no truth. They are very bad.”
    The prince had been taken off guard, and taken off guard, Tutmose thought, he was charming, slightly spoiled, only a boy, potential of great mischief, but still charming. With his guard back up, on the other hand, he was shrill and difficult to put up with. Tutmose , however, wanted a government stipend and an adequate workshop.
    “You were talking about truth. And you are quite right. It cannot be shown from the outside. If you will come to my studio, I will show you. Unfortunately sculpture is not portable.”
    It was a daring thing to suggest. Pharaoh went to no one. But as he had been sure he could, he had caught the prince’s attention.
    They went.
    It was the prince who arrived first. Tutmose found him in the outer courtyard of the house, a little bewildered . And indeed, to an Egyptian, no doubt the house was bewildering. For one thing the trees in the garden were not planted in orderly rows, but scattered in no pattern. Tutmose preferred to find order rather than to impose it. For another, there were no clamorous servants. Tutmose did not care for servants. And for a third, the building was stripped of all ornament, with nothing but whitewashed walls, so that the rooms were full of light and the dancing shadows of water plants from the pool of the courtyard.
    When he led the way to the studio, there was no work in the studio at all. The room