The She-King: The Complete Saga

by L. M. Ironside

  Inside the chamber, Hatshepsut barred the door, then beamed at Nehesi. “Good man! Those were secret words you spoke, weren’t they?”

  “New bows, Mehu, the Delta. The three together tell any man in the royal guard, ‘Disregard your previous order. A new one has been given.’” He paused, rolled his lower lip into his mouth. “I took a risk, Great Lady, for you. I can never go back to the guard. I have falsified an order from a commander. It could mean my death.”

  “Say no more. You entered this chamber a palace guard, but you will leave my personal servant. I claim you for my own. No one will question the king's daughter in this matter.”

  Senenmut sucked in a cold breath, but she forestalled his protest with one quick, brown hand. “Now there is no time to waste. Help me, both of you.”

  Despite his fear and his strange sense of floating detachment, Senenmut could not help but gape at the luxury of Ahmose's apartments. She lived in great resplendence, from the sweep of her tiled floor – bright faience pieces forming an image of the goddess Mut that stretched the whole long span of the room – to the tall electrum mirror framed by a pair of carved ebony-wood goddesses, to the senet board perched on her little game-table, its squares and pawns fashioned from precious stones and polished to a deep, rich luster. Windcatchers near the ceiling let in a rising mid-day breeze that smelled of high water and sweet herbs; the breeze stirred tapestries of the lightest, finest linen so that the goddesses painted upon them swayed in a languid dance.

  Hatshepsut surely had visited her mother here before. Indeed, she had spent most of her earliest days in these apartments, until she reached the age of six and was sent off to the harem to be educated. She led the men confidently across the expanse of the anteroom, past a finely made table where Ahmose received her visitors, past a gold-ribbed harp, its strings sparkling in a column of sunbeams admitted past the windcatcher’s bars. She took them directly to a great door carved with the image of the sun-scarab and into Ahmose’s own bed chamber.

  The chamber was a stunning work of architecture. Through his dizzy rush, Senenmut checked and stared at the wonder of the room. The wall opposite the door was not solid, but a series of flat, rectangular columns, with spaces between perhaps two hands wide, so that one saw straight out into Ahmose’s private garden as if peeking through fingers held over the eyes, or through a grove of saplings. The columns stretched from floor to ceiling, the entire soaring height of the palace, and high up where the smoke from the queen’s night-braziers had darkened the sandstone, huge, heavy bolts of woolen fabric hung rolled, ready to be loosed to cover the miraculous wall against winter’s chill and damp. In the center of the wall, dividing the widest of the columns, a door afforded access to the walled garden.

  The whole place was lit up with an intense, bright white light, the brilliance of the sun at its zenith. It fell across Ahmose’s bed, a huge and opulent thing piled with bright linens, crowned by a curved ivory headrest. The light fell, too, on a bank of wardrobes and jewelry boxes. Hatshepsut crossed to one of these, a chest so large Nehesi could have stood inside of it comfortably. It smelled strongly of oiled wood, and faintly of sweet myrrh and lavender. Hatshepsut tugged open its doors. The sweet scent intensified, overwhelming the room. Hatshepsut paused, suddenly shaken in her strange, headlong determination. Senenmut said tentatively, “Great Lady?”

  “My mother's favorite perfume,” she said. Her eyes were locked on nothing, on some memory playing out before her own private heart. She shuddered and squeezed her eyes shut, drew in a breath as if savoring Ahmose's scent, as if this would be the last time she would ever breathe it in.

  She reached into the wardrobe and pulled out a gown, thin-woven red linen so fine Senenmut could see her hands through it; a veil, little more. She handed it to him, sorted through her mother’s belts and sashes, settled on one particularly fine belt of lapis scarabs rolling golden balls, linked one after the other. In another chest she located fine sandals, braided and wrapped with cool golden wire, beaded with turquoise. “My feet are larger than Ahmose’s, but I need not wear these for long.”

  She tugged the knot of her boy’s kilt loose. Senenmut and Nehesi both turned away from her nakedness, but she said, “Don’t be fools. We have no time for modesty. Help me into the gown.”

  “Great Lady,” Senenmut turned back at her command and looked away, looked anywhere but at her bare flesh. She had often undressed before him; the fact of it had never flustered him before. Now he felt out of his depth, swimming against a hot current of desire and regret and fear. He stammered, “I don’t know how to dress a woman.”

  “I can’t tie these knots myself.” She snatched the gown from his hands and threw it over her shoulder, fussed with its drape about her waist.

  “Sake of Sobek,” Nehesi hissed at Senenmut. “I can do it. The gods know I’ve helped enough women back into their frocks before their husbands came home. You’ve led a boring life, tutor.” Hatshepsut raised her eyebrows, gave her guard a sharp stare. “Begging your pardon, Great Lady.”

  “Only tie this thing so it stays on me, and I will pardon you anything.”

  Nehesi bent over her shoulder, knotting the delicate fabric with fingers surprisingly deft for their thickness. She fastened the belt herself, then sent Nehesi to choose the finest jewels from Ahmose’s casks.

  She settled onto the stool at Ahmose’s mirror-table. She stared at herself sternly in the round, bright mirror. “The razor, Senenmut.”

  He moved toward her on reluctant, numb feet, as slowly as a man entranced. He took up the regent’s delicate copper razor; it was ivory-handled, cleverly curved. Then he stopped, uncertain. “Er – Lady?”

  “Shave off my lock.”

  Senenmut held her eye in the mirror. He knew now what she intended. “Lady, you have not begun to bleed.” His voice was hardly more than a whisper. He would not shame her in front of Nehesi. “You cannot do this thing. Not until….”

  “I will do it all the same. Surely you two heard the council from the palace halls. If I do not do something now then Egypt will rip itself in two, starting with my mother and Mutnofret. Do you believe strife will stop with them? Of course it will not. It will spread like a disease until the whole land is broken. I will not allow that, Senenmut. It is not maat, this fighting. Shave off my lock.”

  He hesitated only a moment longer. This was where his regret came from. A grown woman has no need of a tutor. This was the last he would ever serve her. The knowledge, now named, now identified, filled him with a poignant sorrow. He gripped the handle of the razor until the skin of his his knuckles stung.

  There was no time to whip salt and oil together into a soothing froth. He shaved her head dry, scraping carefully at the root of her side-lock until the last vestige of her childhood hung by a few dark hairs, pulling at her tender skin so that she screwed her face up in a girlish wince. Senenmut made one more pass, and the side-lock parted from her head with the razor’s faint hiss. The braid fell onto the ground, still as a dead snake, its loose end raveled. Hatshepsut looked down at it, lying so frank and dark against the shining floor tiles. Then she straightened and pointed to one of Ahmose’s wigs, waiting with its sisters on their ornate stands. Senenmut retrieved it, laid the linen padding on Hatshepsut’s scalp, and set the heavy wig in place. It was worked in hundreds of small braids that brushed past her shoulders. Each braid was banded with gold and weighted with cinnabar beads like droplets of blood. The beads clattered as she turned her head this way and that, assessing. Finally she nodded. It would do.

  Nehesi laid a collar of mother-of-pearl about her shoulders. He had chosen wisely. The collar was worked in the shape of two great vulture’s wings: the wings of the goddess Nekhbet, the patroness of Egypt’s Great Royal Wives. The tips of the wings came together in a point above Hatshepsut’s small breasts, and from them hung a bright blue scarab cradling a golden sun-disc in its forelegs. The collar was heavy; she shifted her shoulders as if the skin beneath its weight itched, but the ef
fect was stunning.

  Quickly, Hatshepsut freshened the kohl around her eyes, dusted her lids with blue powder, and stained her lips crimson. Senenmut watched all these rituals of womanhood with a hot lump welling in his chest. She slid the rest of Nehesi’s selections onto her graceless, girlish body: wide golden cuffs for her wrists and rings of red jasper for her fingers. She stood and gazed a moment at her image in the electrum mirror. The scarab belt and the wide collar did fool the eye; they gave the impression of a woman’s curves. And the loose weave of the red gown both hid and revealed her small breasts with their pale nipples, the shadow of her navel, the clean-plucked juncture of her thighs. The dark slash of her wound was clearly visible. She frowned when her eyes fell upon its reflection. But painted as a woman, wigged and gemmed, she did lose much of her square inelegance; Senenmut was forced to concede that much within his pained heart. She was, in fact, very nearly pretty, ornate as she was now – a thing which was often said of the poor fierce girl by fawning courtiers, but never before said in truth.

  “I am ready,” she said. Then, “Wait. Senenmut, open that wardrobe there. Yes, that one, with the carvings of Mut on the doors.”

  Senenmut did as she commanded. Of course. He was always loyal, always devoted. Oh, how he would miss her! But a Great Royal Wife had no need of a tutor.

  The opened wardrobe revealed row upon row of slender shelves, and on each one a different crown, gleaming in the light that streamed through the wall of columns.

  “The cobra crown,” she said.

  Senenmut hesitated. “Please, Lady. I cannot touch the cobra crown. I am only a priest.”

  “You can,” she told him. “I permit it. Bring me my crown.”

  Senenmut drew a deep breath. His shaking hands moved very slowly toward the simple golden circlet with its little rearing cobra. When his fingers closed on the crown and no gods appeared to strike him down, he moved with greater speed.

  Hatshepsut took the crown from her tutor’s hands and settled it firmly on her brow.

  Senenmut let out a deep, tortured breath, a tearing sigh of loss. She looked into his eyes for a long moment, read the sadness there, and touched the side of his face with her cool hand.

  A moment later she was striding away from him, raising a hand to summon Nehesi to her heels. Senenmut followed in her new and powerful wake, all the way back to the audience hall.

  The hour away had done little to cool tempers; Hatshepsut could tell that much as she approached. When the door guard admitted her the rage inside the chamber poured over Hatshepsut as hot and sharp as a wasp's sting.

  Nehesi bellowed to be heard above the shouting. “The first princess, Daughter of the King, Hatshepsut, may she live!” His voice cut like a war drum. The arguing stopped.

  Hatshepsut stepped around her bodyguard, revealing herself to the assembly. Voices, instantly subdued, riffled air still raw and bruised by shouting.

  And then, the voice Hatshepsut had feared to hear. “Hatet. What have you done?”

  Ahmose’s face was pale with shock. Hatshepsut met her mother’s red-rimmed eyes and held them for a long, sorrowful moment. To preserve maat, she must call her mother’s visions false and break Ahmose’s heart. Forgive me, Mawat. All I do, I do for Egypt.

  “This fighting is a waste of words. I will not have my people squabble like carrion crows. If you cannot settle disputes civilly, I shall settle them for you.”

  Mutnofret stood, tense and wary. The braids of her wig were tangled about her face. “What trick is this, child?”

  “I am no child. I stand before you a woman. Have you mislaid your eyes?”

  “But you...” Ahmose took a few steps toward Hatshepsut and faltered. Her eyes found the cobra crown on her daughter’s brow, and her face hardened.

  “I am fourteen years old: of marriageable age. I have come to inform this council that I will marry my brother Thutmose and be his Great Royal Wife. You are all witness to this proclamation.”

  Ahmose flinched as if Hatshepsut’s words were a blow. “Hatshepsut, you cannot do this! You know of my visions. I told you what they mean! I am on the verge of securing the throne for you, the true Pharaoh, and you would spit in my eye?”

  Mutnofret rounded on Ahmose. “You are on the verge of nothing. For hours you have squawked at us about visions and gods. But these good men and priests would see righteousness upheld! None of us will support a girl as king. The throne belongs to Thutmose.”

  Ahmose ignored Mutnofret, and the noises of assent from the men gathered around her. She stared steadily at her daughter, her eyes pleading, compelling. “What of the priests of Annu, Hatshepsut? The men who journeyed all this way to support your claim to the throne?”

  “I know they made a great sacrifice in coming to my aid.” She turned to Messuway and Nakht. “Your loyalty is like the breath of life to me. Like you, I know the importance of maat. Without order, Egypt is nothing. Without unity, we may as well surrender to the Heqa-Khasewet, who will come testing our borders again. My father taught me that much.” She turned back to Ahmose, who trembled. “Mother, you have done so much to prepare the king’s throne for me. I can only pray to all the gods that they will make me as good and as wise a Great Royal Wife as you.”

  “Great Royal Wife,” Ahmose said, as if the title were a foul oath. Her lips twisted. She glanced back over her shoulder at Mutnofret, then, without another word, she left the hall.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  HATSHEPSUT SAT QUIET AND STRAIGHT beneath the canopy of the royal barge. A strong wind blew down from the north, raising the surface of the Iteru to white-edged chop; the deck of the barge glimmered with spray. The ceaseless rocking of the great ship, stern raising before bow, jolting down again just as the bow lifted into the sky, made her feel distinctly ill. Or perhaps it was the presence of Thutmose beside her that sickened her so. He sat kicking his feet on his golden chair, shifting this way and that to watch the oarsmen bend and strain rhythmically at their task. Hatshepsut could feel Ahmose's silent, disapproving glare burning into the back of her head. Her mother had not spoken to her for a week – not since the council meeting, not a word during the planning of the wedding feast. The force of Ahmose's rage was a palpable thing, sharp-quilled and fire-hot.

  Hatshepsut was robed in white, her gown overlaid with a heavy net of malachite and electrum beads. In her lap lay a bundle of fragrant lotuses. Her ornate woman's wig was stiff and restricting, its locks banded with tubes of lapis; her neck and shoulders ached.

  “You look green,” Thutmose observed.

  “I think I may vomit,” she said lightly, looking away from him.

  “You'd better not. Mother would be angry.”

  Hatshepsut stared at him. “Mother? You're to be the king now, so you'd better not keep clinging to Mutnofret's hand.”

  “I'm to be the king now, so you'd better stop trying to provoke me. It's not working, anyhow.”

  “Oh, isn't it?”

  The barge reached the midpoint of the river. Waset looked like a toy village on the green-brown bank, the kind children build of stones and sticks in the mud beside the fields. On the gentle rise to the east of the city, the miniature palace stood pale in the sun. Hatshepsut squinted at it resentfully as the High Priest of Amun made his way to the bow.

  “Let the bridegroom approach!”

  Thutmose, having rehearsed his part with his mother, slid out of his seat and sauntered to the priest's side. Hatshepsut admitted to herself that he did look as kingly as a boy of eleven could manage. He wore once again the long kilt of a grown man, neatly folded into dozens of pleats, and his belt was woven of thread-of-gold. He bore himself proudly beneath the weight of a colorful pectoral and the tall double crown of Egypt, its white pinnacle rising from a desert-red base. Of late he had grown. He would be a tall man one day, and not a torment to look upon, for all his plumpness and his smug pride. She would do her best to...not to love him; she could not see herself ever loving him. She would do her best to tolerate him.r />
  “As Atum brought forth all things from the water, so do we bring forth this new union. Aakheperenre Thutmose, Lord of the Two Lands, king of all Egypt, stands forth to welcome his bride.”

  Hatshepsut sighed. She took up her lotuses. It was an effort to walk smoothly, the barge heaved so, and her feet dragged as though weighted with stones.

  “Hatshepsut, king's daughter, do you consent to marry this man?”

  “I consent.” Though he is no man. She plucked a lotus from her bunch and offered it to Thutmose. She was pleased to see that some of its petals were wilted and brown around the edges. She bit the inside of her cheek to keep from smiling.

  The High Priest offered Thutmose a little bowl of salt. As she opened her mouth, Hatshepsut closed her eyes, her will finally faltering. She could no longer bear to look on her half-brother's face. It was Senenmut she longed to stand with. If she had been crowned king she would have taken Senenmut for her own, made him Great Royal Husband, and kept him.... She choked at the sudden, overwhelming taste of salt on her tongue. Hatshepsut buried her face in her lotuses to hide her spluttering. Thutmose had dropped an enormous pinch of the stuff into her mouth; she spat into her flowers, hoping no one could see, and glared at him over the violet spikes of the petals.

  Thutmose smirked back at her. Beneath the red edge of the double crown, his eyes glimmered with silent and cruel laughter.