The Sekhmet Bed (The She-King)

by Lavender Ironside

  “Never say that. Your husband does not hate you. He is the Pharaoh, Great Lady. You seem to forget that sometimes, if you’ll forgive my saying so.”

  “I’ve never forgotten it.” Her voice quavered, though no tears came to her eyes. Perhaps she had cried that river dry. “We used to be close, Twosre. He used to spend his time with me. We used to ride together. We used to talk.”

  “That was before.”

  Before the war. Before the princes. Before Ineni. How was she to face her subjects today? How could she face her grandmother at the temple? How could she ride in her gilded litter behind her husband’s and know that he would feel no urge to glance back at her and smile?

  “Out now, and I’ll shave you.”

  Obedient, mindless, Ahmose took the offered hand and came from the bath. It was best to do as she was told now. Better to be like a puppet, made to dance and sing by another’s hand, than to be like a queen.

  She was dressed, perfumed, beautiful and empty-headed, never minding Twosre’s scowls. Her servant wanted her to set this shadowy illness of the heart behind her, she knew, and dimly, distantly, the part of her that wanted to please tried to do just that. She fought to summon up a smile and painted it on her lips. Then the absurdity of smiling when her heart was in a tomb redoubled the formless pain. She had to blink hard to keep sudden tears from ruining her kohl.

  Twosre made her sit down to breakfast and told her to eat. Ahmose did as she was told. She tasted nothing of her thin porridge and hard bread.

  There was a clap outside her anteroom door. Twosre and Ahmose both looked up from the meal. Who could be calling on the Great Royal Wife at this hour, when preparations for the festival were underway all over the palace?

  Twosre puttered over to the door and opened it a crack. A thin, high voice leapt into the room.

  “I must see the queen!”

  “She’s busy. She’s eating.”

  “Please, Mistress Twosre. It’s so very important. You must let me in.”

  “Let her in.” The command in Ahmose’s own voice startled her. Twosre looked round, eyes wide, then stepped back, swinging the door open.

  It was Sitamun, Mutnofret’s skinny servant. Her big eyes watered. She ran across the room and fell to her knees beside Ahmose’s chair. “Don’t go to the festival, Great Lady. You must stay away.”

  “What?” The words pierced Ahmose’s haze. “What’s going on? Speak up!”

  “Lady Mutnofret. She plans something – something to humiliate you.”

  “Do you think I’m so stupid as to trust your words? You’ve spied on me and betrayed me to my vile sister.”

  Sitamun’s face crumpled. “Great Lady, please, I beg your forgiveness. I did only what I was made to do. I have never wished you ill. Mutnofret…Mutnofret requires me to…to tell her things. Mut frowns on me for betraying the God’s Wife. I am afraid of her wrath. But I am Mutnofret’s servant; what can I do?”

  “If you truly fear Mut’s wrath, you can atone for your spying by telling me things. What is Mutnforet planning?”

  “I wish I knew. All I can tell you for certain is that she told me you’re to get your payment today at the festival.”

  Ahmose’s face flushed hot. She tasted her breakfast on her tongue suddenly, the sweetness of honeyed porridge so cloying she wanted to retch. “Isn’t it enough?” Her voice was high and loud, desperate, angry, violent.

  Twosre was at her side, one hand steady on her shoulder. “Calm, calm. It won’t do you good to get worked up.” Not in front of Mutnofret’s creaure, Twosre’s hand said.

  “Calm is not for Mutnofret,” Ahmose replied, though her words were more controlled.

  “Great Lady, she plans something to mortify you.” Sitamun held her palms out now, as if appealing to a goddess. “She’s relishing it. I can see it in her face. She’s been as smug as a crocodile all morning. Stay away, I beg you. Claim illness. I don’t want to be a part of this anymore. I don’t want to see you harmed. You’re favored by the gods – everybody knows it – and Mut will curse me for the part I’ve played in harming you. Oh, Mut, forgive this miserable servant!”

  Moments before, Ahmose had been reveling in the surrender of control. It was pleasant enough to be under Twosre’s command. Twosre would never do her any harm. But to give command to Mutnofret? As well throw herself into a crocodile’s pool as allow herself to be the plaything of the second queen.

  Her sister’s challenge fanned the last ember back to light. The temple was not her home anymore, Ineni was gone, Tut wanted nothing of her. There was not a thing left for her at all, but this: to put Mutnofret in her place at last. In this one battle she would claim her victory.

  “Whatever happens to me today, Sitamun, the gods have heard your heart. You will be forgiven. Do you want me to find a new assignment for you in the palace? Or perhaps in the temple?”

  Sitamun’s eyes widened. Her hands shook. “Can you, Great Lady? Oh, please.”

  Ahmose waved at the woman, a quick, ready dismissal. “It will be done. Go now, and clean your face up. Don’t let Mutnofret know where you’ve been.”

  Sitamun stood in paled, shaking silence for a long moment, then bowed, and crept away.

  “I’m ready to go to the temple, Twosre. It’s time.”

  “You don’t believe that creature, do you? No doubt that’s exactly what Mutnofret told her to say, to lure you out! Sitamun feels guilty…bah!”

  “It doesn’t matter whether she’s telling the truth, or whether Mutnofret intends to draw me out today. I am going to the festival to face my sister, no matter what her payment may be.”

  THIRTY

  They were halfway to Ipet-Isut when it happened.

  Ahmose’s palanquin, a lone golden chair on a slender, red and blue platform, was borne by eight strong men through the streets of Waset. There was no humiliation, no outcry, not an eye batted at her that seemed suspicious. Mutnofret was behind her and quiet, unconcerned. Thutmose, the embodiment of Osiris on this day, rode alone at the front of the procession, splendid and serious with the tall double crown on his head and a bull’s tail tied about his waist. He had greeted her distantly, but not unkindly. She didn’t care. She was prepared for her husband’s distance.

  She was tense, braced, all through the city streets. She waited like a horse waits for the whip. No blow came, though. Mutnofret was placid. Tut was his accustomed far-off self. The people cheered dutifully, looking somewhat more ragged and strained than they had a year ago. There were fewer flower petals scattered in their path, perhaps, but the people were in a mood for a festival and they’d turned out to see the royal family’s procession to the Temple of Amun.

  Guards walked in two rows beside each rank of litter-bearers. Last year the people had cheered Ahmose’s name with real fervor. The guards had been necessary then, to keep the crowd back, to keep the path down Waset’s broadest street and out toward the Holy House cleared of the people who would crowd around to touch Ahmose for luck. Now, cattle and children were thin and Egypt had little to show for its depleted grain stores but a fortress in Ugarit that had as yet failed to show its worth. The trade would come in, Ahmose was certain, and make Egypt secure again, even in the midst of this red-cursed drought. But the certainty of the Great Royal Wife meant nothing to the rekhet. Who among them, after all, could know her thoughts? So their cheers lacked zeal and had the sound of obligation. But better cheers than silence.

  Waset receded behind them. The crowds along the long road to Ipet-Isut were different here, out among the fields, in the open spaces beneath an impossibly blue sky. Herders and planters of grain, trainers of dogs and horses – the people of the earth, mud between their toes, unshaven heads, like the man who’d heard the voice of the goddess at the well so many thousands of years ago. Shabbier clothing than what the city-rekhet wore, perhaps, but the people here cheered with a real excitement. They didn’t see royalty often, living as they did beyond the city walls. This was true festivity for them, even if th
eir cattle were thin. The real happiness in their voices lifted Ahmose up out of her tension, out of her clenched anticipation. She smiled a genuine smile and waved here and there.

  Then she heard it.

  “The unfaithful queen!”

  Her head snapped sharply to the left. She scanned the faces on that side, but her litter glided past. She must have heard wrong. No rekhet would dare to call out such an accusation to the Great Royal Wife.

  “Whore!”

  The word was clear this time, shouted, meant to be heard. It had come from the right.

  “Stop,” she said to her bearers. They didn’t hear her. “Stop!”

  The litter lurched to a halt. She sat forward and turned to the crowd. No face looked guilty there, but plenty looked confused. The rekhet stared about them, muttering, heads turning this way and that as if they, too, sought the speaker. So she hadn’t imagined it.

  “Flood-killer!”

  Ahmose snapped fingers at her guards. They needed no other command. Six of them were in the crowd on the instant, jostling, shoving. Women screamed. Children cried. The rear rank of the crowd, butting up against a field of scraggly fig trees, surged, bulged, and scattered. The guards’ white kilts flashed here and there among the figs as they gave chase. The hissing of the orchard leaves was drowned out in an instant by the crowd’s roar. She caught a word here and there: Unfair! Let him go! …she did do it! …wickedness! The gods are punishing Egypt! And again and again she heard it. First as a question, first as disbelief. Then with conviction. Unfaithful queen!

  “Go on,” she said to her bearers. They didn’t move for a long moment. She turned around in her chair and looked back at her sister. Mutnofret was looking about her with a hand raised to her mouth, eyes popping, the very picture of shocked disbelief. She caught Ahmose’s eye and shook her head, as if to say, I knew nothing of this. Ahmose sat forward again and said fiercely, “Go on!”

  She thanked all the gods that Tut’s litter hadn’t stalled when hers did. His bearers, oblivious, had carried him on toward the temple, and the crowds ahead cheered him. She had stopped for only a handful of heartbeats – a minute, barely – and it took almost no time for her own chair to catch up to her husband’s. He made no move to stop and never looked back. If the gods were good, he hadn’t even marked the disturbance in the crowd. So far ahead, how could he distinguish treacherous words from the cheers of the rekhet?

  She gripped the arms of her chair hard and bit her cheeks to keep her face calm. Mutnofret’s stupid look of innocence – as if Ahmose could be so easily fooled! Whore! Flood-killer! None of them understood, none of them cared to know! They listened only to Mutnofret, beautiful Mutnofret, perfect, unfailing, dutiful Mutnofret. Evil, hissing cat Mutnofret.

  She only needed confirmation of Mutnofret’s guilt, and after perhaps half a mile, it came to her. The six guards were back in formation, panting and sweating.

  Ahmose looked down at the nearest as they plodded toward Ipet-Isut. “Well?”

  “We caught him. He tripped over a downed tree and dropped this.” He pulled a ring from his belt pouch. The band was small – a woman’s ring, faceted milky quartz. She recognized it at once. A mere trinket to the second queen, but a treasure beyond riches to a farmer with mud between his toes. A cheap price to pay for revenge.

  “And the man?”

  The guard glanced at his comrades. “Dead.”

  A shame. She’d have liked to have a confession from him. A confession was more, much more, than a ring. But the ring would be enough.

  She held it in her fist, squeezed it hard until its edges dug into her flesh. She didn’t let go, all the way to Ipet-Isut. As her litter was lowered and Tut helped her to her trembling feet, she held it. As she stood beside the smiling Mutnofret, as she watched her wrinkled, stooped grandmother deliver the ceremony and open the festival, she held it. She held it all the way back to Waset, while the crowds cheered around her and the people shared cakes in the streets. She held it hard, and it bit at her, left red indentations and a bruise in her palm. It striped her, shamed her, brought her back to life.

  THIRTY-ONE

  There was time before the feast began. She changed into the pure, unadorned white of a priestess. She set the cobra crown on her forehead. She left all jewelry behind, save the quartz ring. She carried in the other hand now, the left hand, for the right was too bruised and cut by the ring to hold it tightly.

  She walked to Mutnofret’s apartments with a green, river-deep calm. There was no clapping for entrance. There was no storming inside and waiting like a snake in the grass, as she had done the day she’d put on her wings. She was far inside the center of her own self, assured, knowing, prepared.

  Mutnofret was not in her anteroom. She was not in her bed chamber. Ahmose passed through these like an implacable wind and stepped out into the bright sunlight of her sister’s garden.

  A nurse, watching over the princes as they played in the flower beds, was the first to see her. The nurse’s body tensed. Her face went dark with fear and sympathy.

  “Nurse,” Ahmose said, her voice like a drum, “take the princes out of here.”

  Mutnofret, sitting on a bench with Sitamun, her back to the palace, turned slowly around. Her eyes met Ahmose’s. She smiled.

  “I gave you an order, woman,” Ahmose said.

  The nurse stooped and propped Amunmose on her hip. Wadjmose’s fat arms reached up to her; she scooped him up, too, and hurried out of the garden, looking down.

  “You don’t give orders to my women in my presence,” Mutnofret said languidly, pleased with herself.

  “Sitamun, leave us,” Ahmose said.

  Sitamun looked from one queen to the other, sitting like a skinny toad on the bench.

  “Stay where you are,” said Mutnofret. She didn’t look at the thin woman. Her eyes never left Ahmose’s.

  Deliberately, Ahmose turned her face away from Mutnofret’s and stared at the quaking servant. The woman gulped and rose to her feet. “Please,” Sitamun said.

  Ahmose pointed out of the garden.

  Mutnofret’s tone of sleepy amusement was unchanged. “You have no right to dismiss my servants, little sister.”

  “Sitamun,” Ahmose said. Her voice was hard and shining edges, faceted quartz. The thin woman ducked a bow to Mutnofret. But she ran from the garden.

  With her women gone, Mutnforet’s anger rose to the surface at last. “It’s funny, Ahmose, how far you’ll go. How much you like to prod at the limits of what a queen can do. It’s funny, if you can call a traitor funny at all.” She stood and came toward Ahmose, tense, ready to strike. It was no matter. Ahmose had her weapon. She flung it at Mutnofret’s feet.

  The ring bounced on the pebbled garden path, rolled, tipped, stopped a hand’s span from Mutnofret’s toes. The second queen looked down at it with a blank face.

  “You call me a traitor,” Ahmose said, green, river-deep, calm. “You buy dissension from your husband’s subjects and you call me a traitor.”

  Mutnofret bent and picked up the ring. She slipped it onto a finger. “I told you you’d pay,” she said quietly. “For everything you’ve taken away from me. My position. My son. My life.”

  “You never would listen to me. You’ve only ever heard the words you wanted to hear. You’ve made yourself bitter because being bitter pleases you.”

  “Pleases me? You think it pleases me to have my throne taken away by my sister?”

  “I won’t explain myself to you anymore, Mutnofret,” Ahmose said. “You’ve stepped too far out of line. Our husband should have put you in your place long ago.”

  Mutnofret barked a laugh. “Yes, he should have! Should have made me Great Royal Wife when I gave him Wadjmose! Should have put Wadjmose in his place, too. But where is the announcement that Egypt has an heir? Where is my son’s place? Tell me that, Holy Lady. Tell me how you’ve managed to steal my son’s birthright as well as my own.”

  “I never stole your son, Mutnofret, and I will nev
er take his birthright. Don’t push me. Wadjmose is my blood, too.”

  “Your blood! You dare to say such a thing to me?” Mutnofret was on her now, her snarling face hanging before Ahmose’s own, near enough that Ahmose could feel the heat of her breath. “You are no blood of mine, you beast! I have no sister! No, not even by marriage! When Thutmose hears how the crowds jeered you as a whore, he’ll have to put you aside. You’re finished, Ahmose! It won’t even be the harem for you. You’ll have to go all the way to Ugarit to escape what you’ve done.”