“Tomorrow night.”
“You would rob my palace to buy seed, but you will not do with me the ritual necessary to make it grow?”
Her lips were white. There was a long silence. He struggled to make her look at him rather than beyond him. With all his will he fought to lower her gaze to him.
“Very well,” she said, almost in a whisper.
He touched his lips. His fingertips caressed his own cheek. His body was warm with new feelings.
“We shall make sons,” he said. “I shall see that they are all sons.”
He turned. The door was hung with tissue of gold; as he reached it a hand yanked it aside. His attendants closed around him and he went off through the palace to his own chambers.
Meryat went into the Queen’s chamber and found Ankhesenamun all in tears.
“I cannot do it!” Ankhesenamun struck herself with her fists. “No!”
“What has happened?” Meryat cried. She took the Queen by the hand and led her to the couch and made her sit. “What can you not do? Oh, my dear one, there is nothing beyond your ability. Here, let me fetch you wine.”
The Queen was shaken with weeping. Her voice was ragged. She said, “Pharaoh has commanded—commanded, as if I were a—something to be bought, a jar of ointment, or a doll—as if I were dung—oh! I will kill myself, Meryat—poison myself!”
Meryat brought her a cup of wine. She sat down beside the Queen on her couch and slid one arm around the girl’s shoulders.
“Tell me what he has ordered.” Meryat stroked the Queen’s cheek. Her breast was heavy with affection for Ankhesenamun. She used the gestures and the words that she had seen Nefertiti use a thousand times. “Tell me what is wrong, and we shall right it.”
Ankhesenamun flung back her head. Her eyes gleamed like a beast’s. “He wishes to lie with me.”
Meryat startled from head to foot. Her arm lay heavy as harness over the shoulders of the Queen.
“Ay,” Ankhesenamun said scornfully, “we shall not right that, shall we?”
She rose and stalked across the chamber. Meryat sat still.
“I will slay myself,” the Queen said, “before I allow him to handle me.”
The fine linen bedcover had slid down to the floor. Meryat bent and lifted it, folded it carefully, placed it on the bed. She passed her hand over her face.
“I shall not do it,” Ankhesenamun said.
“It is Pharaoh’s will,” Meryat said.
“Bah! You are like all the others. Full of easy sympathy, but when I need help—when I am all alone—you shrink like the others.” The Queen wheeled around; she strode down on Meryat, her fisted hands like hammers in the air. “You tell yourself you are my friend, my closest friend, but see what worth your friendship is! Behold, you are a servant, with a mouthful of bread and a heart of money.”
Meryat flinched. In her throat a lump grew painfully hard and large.
Ankhesenamun gulped for breath. She flung her arm over her face. Restlessly she paced around the room again. Meryat sat still in her place, miserable. One of the other servants popped her head in the door, saw the Queen’s mood, and rapidly withdrew. The curtain stirred a little and was quiet again.
“I have no choice,” Ankhesenamun said. “You will prepare some potion for me.”
“Oh, you must not,” Meryat said.
“He comes tonight. He will find a cold bride in my bed, and a hot enemy in the world of the dead.”
“But what of Egypt?” Meryat said. “Will you leave us all to his mercies? You saved us, my Queen—we need you to rule us.”
“I will not be defiled.”
Meryat bit her tongue. Her mind scurried from thought to thought. The Queen paced up and down through the room, beating her hands together.
“My father and I performed the ritual of fertility a hundred times together. With him it was as pure and blessed as the light of the sun, his mind was so elevated. But with Tutankhamun! I cannot believe he was my father’s brother, they are so unalike. He will use my body as a potter beats and pounds the Nile mud.”
“He is Pharaoh,” Meryat said. “He must be satisfied.”
The Queen strode the width of the room again. She passed the tall windows where the sun shone in; her body made the sunlight seem to wink.
“Perhaps there is a way. If you love me, Meryat—do you love me?”
“With my whole heart,” Meryat said.
Ankhesenamun sat down beside her on the couch. Her eyes blazed. “Then we shall satisfy Pharaoh.” She clasped Meryat’s hand in hers. Meryat could not look away from the Queen’s fierce eyes. Ankhesenamun said, “What I tell you now must never be spoken to anyone else. Do you swear to keep faith?”
“I swear,” Meryat whispered, frightened by the look of the Queen.
Ankhesenamun put her mouth to Meryat’s ear and whispered to her. “You shall take my place in Pharaoh’s bed.”
“I! But how?”
“Be still and listen to me. I will lie down beside him when the lights are bright. But then I will rise to put out the light, and you shall take my place.”
Meryat could not speak. Her hands were slippery in Ankhesenamun’s grasp.
“You must! If you love me—”
“I love you.”
“Then you will do it.”
Meryat closed her eyes. “No man has ever used me.”
“We shall deal with that,” Ankhesenamun said. “Meryat, I swear to you, do as I ask, and you and I shall be as sisters. If you swell with a new life, I shall raise him as my own child. Your son will become Pharaoh, and your daughter shall be the princess of the sun.”
Meryat nodded her head, her eyes still closed. She was unable to speak.
Ankhesenamun kissed her, and said many other words to her, but Meryat’s ears were stopped, her sight turned inward. Although the Queen pressed kisses on her and hugged her, yet Meryat felt distant from her; she felt a distance of the soul between them.
They set about preparing for the night. They sent all the other waiting women away on errands. Meryat lay down on the Queen’s couch, and Ankhesenamun took a wand of ivory. With this stick she made a place for Pharaoh between Meryat’s thighs; she broke into the chamber of her waiting woman, so that Pharaoh would not know he used a virgin. There was blood. They wiped it away. Meryat rose up again, ready for words of sympathy and gratitude. Ankhesenamun was turned away from her, disposing of the bloody clothes. Meryat shut her eyes again, angry.
In the evening the King joined his Royal Wife, Ankhesenamun, in her bedchamber. They lit incense and prayed together, so that the Queen might conceive. Tutankhamun was flushed. He could not keep the smile from his face. He looked no older than a boy. The Queen, older than he, taller, said little. Her wide eyes were painted larger with kohl. She hardly looked at her young bridegroom.
Their attendants placed them side by side in the bed under the canopy and put out the lamps on the wall; only one lamp burned, on a small round table by the door. The servants crept backwards out of the room.
“Turn out the light,” the Queen said.
Tutankhamun turned his head toward her. “Don’t talk to me that way. Tell me loving things.” He lay beside her in the gloom; he made no move toward her.
“I will turn out the lamp,” she said.
She went to the lamp beside the door and cupped her hand over it to snuff out the flame. The room fell dark. Ankhesenamun looked behind her at the bed, but she did not go there. Meryat came through the door and in silence lay down in the King’s arms. Ankhesenamun stood beside the door, her fists clenched against her breast, and her gaze fixed on the wall beyond the bed, where groaning and sighing the two bodies thrashed together.
13
Sennahet was carrying jars of oil to the palace pantries; he crossed through the garden behind the apartments of the Queen. As he
bore the heavy jar down a path of colored gravels, he heard the sound of weeping beyond a hedge and looked over it.
There sat a wretched-looking girl on a bench, her hands covering her eyes, and she wept. Sennahet put the jar down. He stood watching her curiously, but he made no move toward her, until with a start he realized that the crying woman was the Queen’s favorite waiting woman, Meryat.
When he recognized her, a scheme came to him, and without even thinking it through he went around the hedge and sat down on the bench.
“Here, girl,” he said, and pulled one hand down from her face and chafed it between his palms. “Do not cry. Such a pretty one, you will make even the gods unhappy, and we want the gods to go on smiling on Egypt, don’t we?”
Her eyes were red and swollen, all the handsome paint washed away. She gave him a look of scorn and turned her face away.
“Go away,” she said. “Leave me.”
Her hand was still in his. He rubbed it vigorously. “Tell me what makes you cry, my child.”
“Child!” Again she faced him. Her eyes were bright with fresh tears. “Whom do you take me for? A child!” She laughed a broken, unhappy laugh. “Child am I not, no, never again.”
“Has someone mistreated you?”
He knew she was beloved of the Queen, tender and sheltered. He did not expect the wild look she gave him, the strength with which she pulled her hand free of him. She cried, “Leave me alone!” Twisting away from him on the bench, she set her back against him and, burying her face in her hands, wept in storms of tears.
Sennahet sat on the bench watching her, unnerved. The great folk led such certain lives, with plenty to eat and drink, and all their rights and duties assured, that it startled him that one of them could be genuinely unhappy. He put out his hand and touched her shoulder.
“Tell me, child.”
“I cannot,” she said. She put her hands in her lap. “It is doings of the Sun People.” Turning her stained face away, she jammed her hands down between her thighs,
Sennahet put his face close to hers. “Do not let them make nothing of you, girl.”
She blanched. He saw fear in her eyes. “I have said too much,” she said. Biting her forefinger, she shut her eyes, and new tears slipped from beneath the lids.
“They care nothing for those under them,” Sennahet said. “People like you and me—what are we to them but straw? They care more for their faceless gods than for us.”
Meryat was staring off across the garden, her face slack. In a dull voice, she said, “No—Pharaoh knows nothing of us.”
“Then why do you serve them?”
“It is my life to serve the Queen,” she said, in the same listless voice.
“Meryat—” He clasped her arms. He spoke with heat to her. “You could be a queen. You could be rich and loved as the Queen—”
“What are you saying?”
“With the gold of Pharaoh! You served Nefertiti. You must know, then, that she buried her husband, Akhenaten, in the desert, and surrounded him with gold—”
She was rising, shrugging off his grip, her face set scornfully against him. “Don’t tell me any of this.” She marched away down the gravel path below the palm trees.
Sennahet pursued her, speaking into her ear as he followed her. “Pharaoh stole away my patrimony! My farm was the finest in the district. Three buffaloes had I, and a house with windows in every room, like the palace—”
“Shut your foolish mouth,” she said. She wheeled around to confront him. Her eyes were narrowed. She looked much older. “There is no tomb,” she said, “and if there were, how could treasure repair what he has done to me? Shall I make a new maidenhead of gold—”
She broke off. Sennahet goggled at her, his thoughts galloping after this bait. She struck at him.
“Go away! I don’t need your comforts. And it is not what you think!” She was backing away, her voice rising with each word. “I am pure—go away! Leave me alone!” She raced away down the path and disappeared through a gap in the hedge.
Sennahet stood where she had left him. His mind whirled. Surely there would be some way to use what she had told him. Full of thoughts, he turned and went slowly back to take the jar of oil on to the pantry.
The corn ripened in the fields. Splendidly ornamented in gold and sacred stones, Tutankhamun was carried in a litter into the ceremonial field in the palace. All the court watched. The King took a gold scythe in his hand and cut one sheaf of the ripe grain.
Those watching lifted their voices in the ritual phrases, shaped in the ancient tongue, which no one understood anymore. Meryat knew what it meant, because someone had told her.
“Thanks to thee, Osiris, who has died that I may live.”
Her voice trembled as she spoke. Her voice was only one among the hundreds that spoke the same words. She knelt behind Ankhesenamun, her head down, and her eyes on the figure of the King.
He was across the millet field from her; she saw him only as a gorgeous doll in his towering atef crown. Her palms knew the smoothness of his body beneath the gold-encrusted robes. She knew him unlike any other man, and no other woman knew him as she did. She could not take her gaze from him. All the hundreds of people around her, greater than she, took her for an ordinary woman, but they knew nothing of the King, and she did.
Now, in the distance, Tutankhamun was passing his scepter back and forth over the grain. The people watching recited formulas. Ankhesenamun knelt just before Meryat. The Queen’s back was straight, her shoulder blades like little folded wings.
A man appeared unobtrusively and knelt near the Queen. Meryat recognized the Grand Vizier. While the court and the little gilded figure in the field spoke ritual words, the Queen and the Vizier whispered together.
Meryat watched Tutankhamun. Ankhesenamun was a fool; she thought she dealt in power. Meryat shifted on her knees. She felt much older than the Queen. Now she knew what power was.
With drums and twittering flutes, the ceremony ended. Tutankhamun was carried away. Meryat attended Ankhesenamun back across the open courts and passages of the official quarter of the palace. The Queen was excited; she walked with long strides, her arms swinging. Meryat followed her with her fan. Just as they reached the entrance to Ankhesenamun’s private apartments, a man in armor approached them.
This was Horemheb, the King’s favorite general. He greeted Ankhesenamun with flourishes of his hands, his head bobbing so that the silver-braided locks of his wig swayed. The Queen allowed him to come near, and they spoke.
Meryat watched them with concealed interest. Ankhesenamun was dealing much in private with the great men of the court. Meryat saw the Queen with new eyes, with the eyes of her own power. She guessed that Ankhesenamun was plotting against the King.
“Meryat,” the Queen said. “Run and see that my dinner is ready.”
Meryat backed down the steps. Almost she forgot to bow; she dipped down at the foot of the step instead of at the top, but no one noticed. She lingered a moment longer, her eyes on Ankhesenamun’s face. The young Queen’s cheeks glowed a fiery red. Her eyes blazed as she spoke. Meryat had seen her so when she was preparing for the hunt. The servant went away toward the Queen’s kitchen.
The Queen’s game now was Pharaoh. Of that she was sure. If Pharaoh were destroyed, then what would Meryat’s power be? As she walked, she laid her hand over her womb. She would be an annoyance. A bringer of bad memories.
In the kitchens the cooks had laid out trays of bread and meat. The scullions hurried about, their faces shining with sweat, and their arms laden with jars of honey and wine. Curls of steam hung in the air. Meryat stood in the doorway. She saw that Ankhesenamun’s meal was ready, and she took it away to the Queen with her own hands.
As she carried the tray across the courtyard, she took a sip of the wine, a bite of the bread, and a taste of the meat. It was the Queen’s food,
after all, and Meryat knew herself to be the true Queen.
In the evening, when the moon had risen, Ankhesenamun called Meryat into the garden. They walked together near the foot of the lily pond.
“He is coming again tonight,” Ankhesenamun said, low-voiced.
Meryat twisted her fingers together in the thin stuff of her dress. She could not bring words to her lips.
“You must do it,” the Queen said to her. They spoke face to face, like equals. “It shall not be for very long. Soon it will be over.”
“Do you mean to depose him?” Meryat asked.
The Queen put her hand over Meryat’s mouth. They stared at one another a moment. Finally Ankhesenamun lowered her hand to her side. They both turned away. In spite of the evening cool, Meryat’s brow was damp with sweat. She wound her fingers in her linen dress, around and around.
“I shall repay you for all that you suffer,” Ankhesenamun said. “In a little while.”
There was no coin to repay Meryat. Yet she knew of a way that Meryat could repay the Queen.
She said, loudly, “That Sennahet, you know—the man whom you have saved, now, twice—”
“The wretch.”
“He told me the oddest tale.”
“Oh?”
“That your mother brought the king, your father, with her, when she came back here from the New City.”
“He was dead,” Ankhesenamun said harshly.
Meryat gladdened at the strident note she heard in the Queen’s voice. She said, “Nefertiti brought the justified body of Akhenaten here and buried him in secret in the desert.” Lifting her eyes, she looked into the fretted face of Ankhesenamun. “Is that not a strange tale?”
Ankhesenamun did not speak.
“But of course, if she had done anything of the sort,” Meryat said, “you would know.” She started toward the door.
“Where are you going?”
“I will make myself ready for Pharaoh.” Meryat went along the garden toward the doorway into the palace.
In the evening, when the moon shone in the eastern sky and the admiring waters of the Nile copied that image, the King caused himself to be taken to the bedchamber of the Queen. There he lay down on the bed, and the Queen came and lay down beside him. The stars looked in the window. The sweet breath of evening was scented with myrrh and royal incense. The King and the Queen lay side by side. After a few moments had passed, she turned and began to caress him.
Valley of the Kings Page 17