The Crook and Flail

by L. M. Ironside

  A year passed, and Thutmose remained detached, preferring the deck of a ship to the seat of his throne, and in matters of the harem he remained a child. On her visits to the House of Women, Hatshepsut heard tales of his pinches, his lewd remarks, but no woman could yet say that she carried the Pharaoh's child. Hatshepsut sent frequent dispatches to Ka-Khem, reporting with all honesty that the Pharaoh had not yet come to appreciate the charms of his o hewn concubines, and that Iset's womb remained empty. By the time the new year celebrations commenced, Hatshepsut found herself fretting. How long could she keep Ankhhor and Nebseny acquiescent?

  At least her efforts in the south had borne sweet fruit. Ineni reported back frequently on the progress he had made. The old fortress at the fourth cataract had been completely rebuilt with walls twice their previous height; it was now spacious enough to house four times the previous capacity of men and horses. Kush already showed a marked reluctance to raid the southern sepats; the mere sight of the new fortress looming near the river seemed to deter their aggressions.

  Hatshepsut's confidence waxed bright and full in the face of her successes. She sent for Iset more frequently, and often as not she started her days with her lover's spicy scent clinging to her fingers and lips. She did not fear angering the gods, for even had she a woman's blood, with Iset there was no chance she might carry a child who was not the Pharaoh's own. This, she reasoned, would keep the gods complicit.

  But Sitre-In saw reason for concern. One hot day in Shemu, when the shimmer of flies in the garden made Hatshepsut feel languid and lonely and she had sent Tem to the House of Women for Iset, Sitre-In leaned close to her ear.

  “Make that girl a servant, or the House of Women will positively burst from the burden of keeping your secret.”

  “Do you think they suspect?”

  Sitre-In leveled such a look at Hatshepsut that she flushed at the obvious idiocy of the question.

  “But I cannot force her out of the harem,” she protested weakly. “It is her right to remain, to bear the king's heir if she can.”

  “The girl will jump at the opportunity to be nearer you. She is besotted with you; anyone can see it. Take that foolish grin off your face, Great Lady. You should not have lured her heart the way you did. Now she will be nothing but a body servant.”

  “Better than Thutmose's bed girl. I will give her the choice. Let Iset decide where she wishes to remain; I will not appoint her against her will.”

  She had hoped, for the sake of her secret purpose, that Iset would choose the harem, where Thutmose might eventually discover her beauty. But as Sitre-In predicted, Iset leapt upon the chance to serve as Hatshepsut's fan-bearer, her face alight with gratitude. The servant's room she would occupy was small and much meaner than her room in the harem, but Iset seemed not to care. She was near to Hatshepsut, and attended her daily: that fact alone was a fair trade for luxury, in Iset's reckoning. Hatshepsut worried over how she might now engineer the pregnancy she had promised to Ankhhor. But as more favorable reports of her fortress's progress reached her, as Nebseny continued to bow low to her whenever she attended the Temple of Amun, surety in her own might grew stronger. She forgot her concerns and spent nearly every night submerged in a deep ecstasy of Iset's body, Iset's hands, Iset's mouth.

  She was jolted from her reverie in the season of Peret, at the F ateast of the Emergence, as she visited the harem's celebration with her beautiful and eager fan-bearer in tow. Her half-sister Opet stole Hatshepsut away to a secluded corner of the House of Women. In the feasting hall the women had begun to clap and chant; a drinking game of some sort had captured their attention.

  “I'm afraid,” Opet said, coy and sly, “that the time we have long feared has come at last.”

  “Thutmose?”

  “And I did not even have time to let my breasts sag, nor to grow any warts.”

  “Who?”

  “Hentumire, Tabiry, and the girl you call Nefer – the Hittite princess.”

  Hatshepsut's limbs felt suddenly cold.

  “Oh! What is it, sister? You are so pale.”

  She forced a laugh. “Only the pallor of fear. Now none of us are safe. Are any of the women with child?”

  “It is too soon to tell. We all pray that Pharaoh will give us healthy sons, of course.”

  “Of course.”

  She found Iset clapping in a ring of women, stamping her lovely small feet and shouting. Inside the ring, two women linked arms and balanced cups of wine on their heads, bobbing and stepping in time to the chant. The cup toppled from one woman's head; the circle erupted in a jeer, and she snatched the cup from her partner's wig, raised it high, and drained it in one draft.

  “Iset.” Hatshepsut tugged at the girl's arm.

  “What? Oh!” Iset's eyes were heavy with wine. She had apparently lost a few rounds of the game herself.

  “We must get back to the palace.” The House of Women seemed a forbidding place to her now, full of women praying for healthy sons, and all of them ripe to be visited by the king.

  “Oh, must we, Great Lady? Come, go into the ring. It's an easy game. I will show you how.” Iset draped her arm across Hatshepsut's shoulder, a too-familiar gesture. Hatshepsut stepped away from her abruptly, and Iset's eyes widened. Her mouth quivered on the verge of tears. “Hatet,” she wailed.

  The women nearest them turned tactfully away.

  “Stop it,” Hatshepsut hissed. Her hand itched to slap the girl; she knotted her fingers behind her back to keep herself still. “Where is my fan? Go get it. We are leaving now.”

  Iset wept bitterly in their litter. The return trip to the palace seemed to stretch on into a mortifying, fearful eternity. Thutmose might even now be passing in his orseqwn litter, making his way to the House of Women to sow his seed in half a dozen parched and eager fields. She parted the litter's curtains and peered out into the night. The road was empty, save for Hatshepsut's litter and the soldiers who guarded her.

  “Get hold of yourself,” Hatshepsut said when they were finally set down in the palace courtyard. “I won't have you sniveling all through the halls.”

  Iset pulled herself together enough to walk with quiet dignity past darkened hallways and porticoes, past servants drifting through the night-blue palace on their small errands. When they reached Hatshepsut's room she threw her fan down on the floor and stormed into the bed chamber.

  Sitre-In's raised brows and pursed lips only angered Hatshepsut all the more. She went after the girl and found her face down on the bed, sobbing.

  “What has come over you? Wine has never taken you so badly before. Talk to me; don't just lie there wailing.”

  “It is not the wine,” Iset said, lifting a corner of Hatshepsut's fine blanket. She rubbed the ruined kohl from her face.

  “Clearly not.”

  “Don't tease! It's cruel.”

  She sighed, lay down beside Iset, curled her body against her lover's. “All right. I will not tease. Tell me why you weep.”

  “Hentumire thinks she may be pregnant.” Iset dissolved into choking, moaning sobs. Hatshepsut rubbed her shoulders, soothed her neck until Iset caught her breath and went on: “Oh, Hatet, I want a child – I want a baby! I want to hold a little one in my arms, and hear him call me Mawat. It's not fair. It's not fair!”

  “Not fair?”

  “I gave it all up,” Iset said, suddenly quiet and rational. “Oh, I love you, Great Lady, but with you I can never be a mother. Since my father sent me to the harem, Thutmose became my only hope for a child. And I gave up all hope of a son...or a daughter...for love. Now I am only your fan-bearer, and I can never lie with the Pharaoh. What other man is there for me? My father intended me for the Pharaoh's harem; I cannot be married off to some soldier like a servant woman! Father would never allow me to see my mother or my sisters again. Oh, my heart will tear itself in two!” She buried her face in a cushion and wailed again.

  “You want a child?”

  “Oh – more than anything!”

&nbs
p; Praises to Mut. A way forward, as sudden as that. “But I never knew, Iset. If you want a child so badly, why ever did you agree to serve as my woman?”

  She rolled onto her side. She held Hatshepsut's gaze for at.&h long moment, her dark, soft eyes all the more compelling and sweet for their shine of tears. “Because I love you, Hatet. Because you are the sister of my heart. I want both. I want a child, and I want your heart.” She huffed a sad little laugh, turned her face away again. “I acted like a foolish child. I never considered what I was losing, in gaining you.”

  “No. You are not foolish.” She kissed Iset's shoulder. “Nothing would make me happier, Iset. You know I have never bled. The gods have cursed me with barrenness – I do not know why; it doesn't matter, for the gods have given me you.”

  Iset lay still. She breathed deep, two, three times, calming herself.

  Hatshepsut went on: “Let us have a child together, Iset. You are my woman, and no longer a member of his harem. But I may do with my servants as I please. Let me send you to Thutmose's bed in my place.”

  “It would be a disgrace. The Pharaoh has his concubines, the most beautiful and well-bred women in all Egypt. He has no reason to bed a servant.”

  “There is no woman in all Egypt more beautiful than you, servant or no. He will not think it a disgrace. And I will send you to represent the Great Royal Wife, to do what I cannot do. In this, you will be honored above any concubine; you will be nearly as honored as I.”

  “And the baby...”

  “He will be ours. Yours and mine. We will care for him together, raise him together. We will be his mawats, the two of us, and he will be Thutmose's heir. Do it for me, Iset. Say you will give me this gift.”

  In the garden, a little owl called crick-crick-cree into the night. The air was sweet with the odor of nigh-blooming flowers, and above that smell, the faint salt of Iset's tears. Hatshepsut held her breath, waiting for Iset's answer, in an agony of hopeful anxiety.

  “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 troupspape 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 emergedn we em 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 into 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.