“I will do it,” she said. “For you.”
“And for you, King's Mother.”
Hatshepsut lay in her bath, trying to soak away a nagging dull pain in her back. It had gripped her suddenly early in the day, had plagued her throughout the court session, coming and going in regular, pinching waves. The pain had become a severe annoyance; she had grown cross, and struck now at the surface of her bath water with her palms. The water splashed into her eyes; she spat in anger.
Six weeks had passed since her talk with Iset. In that time she had sent Iset directly to Thutmose's rooms nearly every night, first bearing notes of affection from the Great Royal Wife, then baskets of his favorite sweets, and finally a troupe of musicians who played while Iset danced for the Pharaoh's own pleasure. At last, only a handful of days ago, Iset reported that the Pharaoh had imposed himself upon her. Giggling with embarrassment, squirming with disbelief at her own brazenness, Iset had recounted the brief episode to Hatshepsut, thrust for thrust. The two women had rolled in Hatshepsut's bed laughing until they could scarce catch their breath, then made plans for Iset to return the following day, and the day after, and the day after.
With Iset so often occupied with the Pharaoh, there was no one to rub the ache from Hatshepsut's back. Oh, she could have made Sitre-In or Tem do the work, but neither could work the pains from Hatshepsut's body half so well as her fan-bearer. Another wave gripped her back; she wallowed in her basin, groaning, clumsy as a carp in a shallow pool.
A light clap sounded outside the door to her bath. In a rustle of linen, beaming, holding her breath with joy, Iset entered before Hatshepsut could give her leave.
She lurched from the water. It sloshed up and onto the bath's tiled floor; Iset lifted her skirts and stepped deftly backward.
“You cannot come in unless I say it!”
“Hatet...”
“I'm sorry. I have no cause to be angry. I feel unwell; that is all.” She squinted at Iset, took in the triumphant flush of her cheeks, the brightness of her eyes. “You have news?”
But Iset's eyes dropped to Hatshepsut's groin. A curious stillness came over her face. The smile faded. Iset reached out a hand, gently brushed between Hatshepsut's thighs. She held up her fingers. The water that beaded there was dark as fertile earth.
“I have ceased to bleed,” she said, placing her dry hand atop her belly, “while you have begun.”
PART THREE
BANNER
OF THE GOD
1483 B.C.E.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
THE SEASON OF THE INUNDATION would draw to a close in only a few short weeks. Already the waters of the fields receded. At the edge of every field, lines of tangled vegetation, of sun-bleached sticks and the refuse of southern towns washed downstream, marked the flood's highest point a muddy stride or two beyond the water's edge. Soon the men who farmed the Black Land would return to their crops, while the construction of monuments and tombs would grind to a near-halt for want of workers.
But there was time yet to build. Hatshepsut stepped from her litter a moment before Thutmose emerged from his own. The royal couple had arrived at Ipet-Isut to inspect and approve the progress of Thutmose's new monument.
Thutmose stretched in the sun; his fan-bearer scurried forward from among the ranks of their guardsmen to stretch his stem of ostrich plumes over the king's head. The Pharaoh had reached his fourteenth year. The promise of the man he would become was evident in his features: broadening shoulders, slender hips, stern if haughty gaze. He was taller than Hatshepsut now, a fact which seemed to please him greatly. He often lengthened himself a little when she was near, throwing out his chest, tilting his head back ever so slightly, as if to emphasize the difference to any who may be near enough to notice. As he lost the plumpness of youth, his face grew more handsome. His wide, angled eyes, full lips, and strong cheekbones favored his mother Mutnofret, still a great beauty, while the commanding sharp angle of his nose was entirely the contribution of their shared father. Thutmose had escaped, through the gods' blind luck, the large, somewhat jutting front teeth their father had graciously gifted to Hatshepsut. He was rapidly transforming into a young man of heroic good looks, as miraculously as the butterfly results from the hideous, squirming pupa and its uninteresting chrysalis. As he left his boyhood behind, Thutmose became a more appealing prospect to the women of the harem. A few already bore tiny new babes in arms, though none pleased Thutmose more than Iset's boy, his first.
Hatshepsut crossed the dusty avenue to her husband's side. Batiret scrambled to keep up. The skinny young girl was some ten or eleven years old, the child of a Waset noble house and a cousin to Wiay, the priestess of Amun. She had been sent to Hatshepsut to act as fan-bearer while Iset recovered from the birth of her son. Batiret had taken to the task naturally. Unlike her sharp-witted cousin, she was solemn and serious; her eyes shone with great intelligence, and she had a thoughtful, eager-to-please manner that Hatshepsut liked. She would wise to find some use for the girl in her personal chamber when Iset returned to her duties.
“My new gate will be a wonder,” Thutmose declared, staring about him at the activity of the builders, hands on hips, as puffed with pride as though he had cut and set the great white stone blocks with his own hands.
He had commissioned a beautiful new entryway to Ipet-Isut, a flat-topped arch of pale limestone. The massive pylons to either side were be carved with scenes of the king's own glories. Whether these glories were to be filled in as they occurred, or whether they would be fabricated like the lion hunts of his bedchamber walls, Hatshepsut did not yet know.
“A wonder indeed,” she said.
“Where is your usual fan-bearer?”
“Her name is Iset. She is back in the palace with our son, of course. Gods' sake, Thutmose, did you not notice that the girl I sent to your bed in my place was my fan-bearer?”
He did not respond to the taunt. He eyed Batiret, scowling, and said, “Your other fan-bearer pleases me more.”
“So I hear.” The shade on her face trembled; Hatshepsut laid a hand on Batiret's wrist to comfort the girl.
“And how is my son?”
“As strong as ever.”
The boy was three months old now, plump and brown and sweet-smelling, with a quick, pink smile and a crackling little laugh. She had been relieved last year when Iset had confessed her desire for a child. There at last was a direct route to provide Ankhhor with the status he desired, and she had said whatever she deemed necessary to accustom Iset to the idea of going to the Pharaoh's bed as a servant, not as a true concubine. But once Iset's belly had begun to grow, once she had laid Hatshepsut's hand across its breadth to feel the child kicking within, the story she had spun for Iset became suddenly, irresistibly true. She did love this child even before she saw his face, for more than ever before, she loved Iset. By the time Iset entered the birthing pavilion, Hatshepsut thought of the babe as her own – as theirs, a treasure of a worth beyond measuring, a gift she and Iset would share all the days of their lives. And when the girl emerged from the pavilion triumphant, cradling their new son in her arms, Hatshepsut had wept with joy and gratitude. She had written to Ankhhor that very hour: We have given the king a son, and his name is Thutmose, the third of his name. Hatshepsut had insisted upon the name. She would have no uncertainty from any quarter that this was the Pharaoh's heir.
Thutmose led her to the nearest base of the gateway. It rose above them the height of two men, encased in a lashed-wood scaffolding. Men clung to the upper rungs, rasping the surfaces of the highest blocks; a drift of stone powder lifted on a breeze, blew from beneath their tools like plumes of offering smoke.
“Here is where I will make an image of my deeds in Kush,” Thutmose said, pointing between rungs of scaffolding to the blank white stone.
“Your deeds in Kush? Those raids two years ago?”
“And more. I am going back to see to Kush myself. The fortress is finished at last; I will inspect it and lead an attack int
o my enemy's territory. I will make them pay for their audacity when I came to my throne.” Thutmose crossed to the blocks on the far side of the avenue, detailing his plans for the carvings he would place there, fantasies of conquests to come, imagined campaigns to expand the new borders their father had forged for Egypt.
From behind her shoulder came Batiret's urgent whisper: “Great Lady!”
Hatshepsut glanced back. The girl's eyes were wide and staring. “There is a man, Great Lady, staring at you most impertinently!”
“Where?” Hatshepsut gazed past the thin brown shoulder to the shadow of the scaffolding they had left. Several men milled there, short-kilted in the heat of the day, their heads covered by the serviceable, cropped wigs of builders. They moved with heads down, some studying sheaves of papyrus, some toting reed baskets filled with tools, bread, wood scraps. One man balanced a great jug of water on his shoulder. She noted nothing unusual; it was the typical bustle of a building site. Then two builders who had been walking shoulder-by-shoulder parted, one of them twisting his mouth in an angry oath, to pass around a figure that stood rooted to the spot.
The wig confounded her only for the briefest moment, for as a priest he had been bald-headed. It seemed her heart had eyes, and they opened wide in delight, took in the familiar stance, the narrowness of his shoulders, the thinness of his arms; his hands were folded at the knot of his kilt in that special way he had; his face was still long, still solemn, still beloved. His presence filled her like the breath of life, and woke the trembling of love along her limbs. In a bright chorus, a poignant quaver of rich, rising harmony, her nine kas sang his name.
Senenmut.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
“IT IS GOOD TO SEE you again, man.” Nehesi clapped Senenmut on the back hard enough to knock his short builder's wig askew.
“And you. My assignment to the Pharaoh's new gateway was something of a surprise to me. I never thought to be near Waset again, much less in the palace.”
Nehesi led Senenmut from the courtyard where the chariot of a palace guard had deposited him. Two days had passed since he had seen Hatshepsut beneath the rising supports of the new limestone gateway. He had both feared and hoped he would encounter her there. She had glanced at him, then turned away while he stood useless as a felled ox. He had not been at all certain she had recognized him. Presently, though, the thin little girl who bore her fan had come running. “The Great Royal Wife would speak with you, builder. You will attend her the evening after next.” He had spent those two days in a constant, vague discomfort, strung helplessly between eagerness and reluctance. An unsettling nausea had fallen over him, due no doubt to his lack of proper sleep.
Nehesi swung from an inner hall to lead Senenmut down the outside length of the palace. A cedar roof extended from great supporting pillars to shade the route by day, though now the sun was low and dusk fast approaching. A lone man in the simple but well-made kilt of a palace servant moved along the walkway ahead, dipping his torch into the bowls of bronze lamps between pillars. As each lamp flared to life, it cast a yellow glow across the walkway; lamplight merged with the golden lingering light of sunset, which set the leaves of arbors and hedges in small private courtyards to shining.
Senenmut recalled walking this route once before with Nehesi. He remembered Hatshepsut sweeping down the pathway before him, the sight of her girlish back and shoulders pulling farther away, dauntless, while he struggled to keep up.
Nehesi nodded to the guards on her door. He clapped, his hands meeting precisely in time with two quick, painful beats of Senenmut's heart.
“Come,” her voice said, its strength hardly diminished by the barrier of the carved double doors.
She lay across a couch of night-sky blue, robed in white linen, her wrists and ankles cuffed in gold. The room was more splendid than Senenmut had remembered, infused as it was now with the smoke of myrrh, with Hatshepsut's own languorous glow. The faience mosaic floor glittered in the lamplight; the walls bloomed with color, row on row of dancing goddesses, of queens, all proud women. But the sight that caught and held his heart was the curve of her body, the line from shoulder to hip that dipped and rose again like the path of the moon through a starry sky. That harsh, unlovely face, its awkward angles softened by a woman's careful paint, stared back at him. He recognized in the happy radiance of her eyes his own surprise, his own joy at their reunion.
Nehesi withdrew.
Senenmut recalled himself and bowed, murmuring some appropriate words of greeting.
She laughed at him. “Come here and eat.”
He took the stool set across the table from her fine couch, and self-consciously attended to the meal. It was fine, rich food – three kinds of roasted fish, stewed fruits, and, Senenmut blushed to see, several of the peeled inner cores of lettuces, long and round-bodied, which were said to make a man tireless in love.
She plied him with questions of Ankh-Tawy, of life in the school of builders. He told her all he knew: of the man who had taken him as an apprentice only six months into his schooling, of the tomb he'd built for the headmaster of the school, so cleverly concealed among the natural features of the site that Senenmut had been released to his journeyman duties a full year ahead of schedule.
“I knew you would be a great architect,” she said, and beamed at him.
“I would never have achieved any of this without you.”
“Do you ever miss Waset? Your old duties here?”
He ducked his head, smiling. “Ah, Great Lady. I have missed you much, and often.”
When they had finished their meal she led him out into a private garden, much larger and finer than the one she had enjoyed as a girl in the House of Women. This garden was four spans at least in width and breadth. It featured a shade sycamore much older and larger than any he had seen before, and beyond it, near the high protective wall gleaming pale in the moonlight, a small private lake. They walked its graveled paths, talking quietly of the years gone since they had seen each other last. No serving women trailed them now. In fact, Senenmut had seen no servants in her chamber or garden since Nehesi had withdrawn.
Hatshepsut carried a cup of dark wine; she sipped from it now and then, tilting her face to the moonlight, eyes closed, savoring the exceptional vintage. He stole glances at her face each time she did it. There was a compelling force in her presence, a might he could not name, and nor could he deny its power. So he surrendered, and turned his eyes on her narrow, angular face whenever she could not see his impropriety. The simple pleasure of the night, of the wine, perhaps even of his poor company brought a flush to her cheeks, a dreamy, wistful, feminine tenderness to the half-smile on her lips. Even the gap between her teeth looked elegant in the dusky garden, fashionable rather than coarse, and those large teeth themselves shone like ornaments of precious ivory. If only the ladies of the court could see her this way, beautified by moonlight, graceful and happy as a goddess. Why, they would take files to their teeth in an effort to look like her.
She left her empty cup on the rim of the lake, then led him toward the garden wall, recounting an amusing tale she had heard from a harem woman. He lost the thread of her words in a sudden cold wash of fear. His unreined thoughts had caught up at last to the more sensible portion of his heart. Sake of Amun, Senenmut. You are a common man. You cannot fall in love with her. There was no chance she loved him now, at any rate; that had been a girlhood folly. All noble girls felt a few heart-pangs for their tutors, provided their tutors were not too unbearably old and wrinkled. It was a common enough thing, quickly left behind with dolls and childhood games by the time womanhood arrived. No, she had summoned him here tonight to hear his stories, to pass an idle evening with a former servant who could perhaps be thought a distant friend. Senenmut clenched his fists, as though he might crush away his yearning with his hands.
They arrived at the garden wall; seeking some distraction, Senenmut ran his hands along it, noted the fine, flush joins of its blocks. The solidity of stone brought
him back to his senses. He became aware once more of Hatshepsut's words.
“...but that is not what I think. What do you believe?”
“Er – pardon, Great Lady. What do I believe about...?”
“About men.”
Senenmut hesitated. He shook his head helplessly, lost and light-headed.
Something canine, predatory – jackal – glittered through her smile. “I said, do you believe that men can really go two or three times with a woman?” She stepped close. He backed away instinctively until he made contact with the cold wall, then held himself very still. Hatshepsut drew even closer; he could smell the sweet wine on her breath, see the fierce amusement in her eyes. “I do not know what to believe; I have never lain with a man.”
Senenmut could find no answer. He opened and closed his mouth, hoping the gods might supply some suitable response, but they granted him only a small, weak croak.
“I think you should show me,” she said.
“Oh – oh, Great Lady.” He caught her hands as they made their way to the knot of this kilt. Then he realized his brashness in touching the Great Royal Wife, and with a whimper he jerked his own hands away, pinned them to the wall.
Hatshepsut stepped back, laughing. “All right; I will stop being so cruel. I was only teasing you, Senenmut. Come away from that wall; I won't harm you.”
She turned away and vanished into the dark garden. Senenmut stumbled after her, shaking with the twin forces of relief and bone-deep disappointment. He found her sitting on the wall of the lake. She had retrieved her cup and was idly dipping it into the water, pouring it out again to shatter her dark reflection. Tentatively, he sank onto the wall beside her.
“I have missed you,” she said simply. “More than I can say.” She watched his face for a long moment, holding his eyes with the same savor she had for the wine. At last she said, “It was true, what I told you: that I have never lain with a man.”
The She-King: The Complete Saga Page 47