by Judith Tarr
She did not disgrace him, however. Nor did the rest. They entered in procession, knelt each as he had instructed, and did obeisance. He observed them out of the corner of his eye. The center of his focus was the queen.
The twins had guided him well. All six whom they had aided him to choose were young—none more than three years past first womanhood—but skilled in the arts of love. They were all beautiful, all lissome and graceful of body. Most could sing well, and one sang remarkably. All played an instrument, none badly. And every one was prepared to offer allegiance to the queen whose whim had raised her fortunes.
Nehsi named each as she came forward, with her age and rank and service and her particular talents. They were all servants, some of the palace, some in lords’ houses. Two had been noblemen’s concubines, but one lord had died and the other set all his women aside when he married a jealous wife. Four were named Hathor, for the goddess of love and beauty. One was Meritre: Beloved of Re.
The last was named Isis for the mother of Horus. She was the youngest, only a season or two older than the queen, and in Nehsi’s estimation the loveliest. She had a face like a flower, and soft ivory skin unkissed by the sun, and masses of blue-black curling hair that she kept fastidiously clean and scented with myrrh. Like the rest she was naked but for a string of beads about the hips, but she had made herself a collar of lotus-blossoms that all but hid her little pink-tipped breasts.
The Hathors stood huddled together like heifers, staring with wide brown eyes at the terrible golden queen. Meritre seemed above such folly: her chin was lifted, her lips tight with scorn. She was the eldest, the one whose lord had died, it was said, in her embrace.
She had neither confirmed nor denied the rumor. Nehsi reckoned her too proud to have much sense, but there was passion in her glance as it flicked upon him, a smoldering promise that he knew better than to acknowledge. If she was meant for the king, the least he would lose for trespassing with her would be his two best jewels.
If the king must have a teacher, she would do admirably. The subtleties of courts and kings were beyond her. But in the bedchamber she would have few equals.
Beyond a word or two of greeting and inquiry, the queen ignored her. She was more interested in the Hathors, who had recovered enough to stammer out their names and the places from which they had come: the house of the queen’s maids, the household of a lord, one child of a woman who had sold herself on streetcorners but who had found herself a patron of ample means and little concern for his lover’s antecedents. The queen’s rank and power made them stammer and stumble and cling to one another more tightly than ever.
Isis, like Meritre, preferred to stand erect and a little apart, but not perceptibly for scorn. Like the Hathors she shivered as she darted glances at the queen, but she was not terrified into immobility. She kept her eyes lowered, seeming unaware of how alluring she was with the long lashes on the ivory cheeks.
Hatshepsut left the Hathors in what might have been relief. They had little of intelligence to say. Not, Nehsi thought, that the king would care for witty conversation in the bedchamber, but a woman who would teach him the finer arts would need more than a halting tongue and trembling knees.
“Isis,” said Hatshepsut.
The girl stiffened slightly but did not look up. “Lady,” she murmured.
“Here, look at me,” the queen said with the exasperation of five times’ repetition.
Isis lifted her eyes. They were large and dark, less heavily painted with kohl than most women in Egypt preferred.
Their expression was at once wary and trusting: wary of the queen’s majesty, trusting her to do nothing actively dreadful.
“What were you before you came to me?” Hatshepsut asked her.
Nehsi had told the queen already, but neither he nor Isis said so. “Lady,” Isis said in her soft sweet voice, “before I came to this place I was a servant in your own household, the least of your many children, attendant of an attendant in your majesty’s bath.”
The queen tilted her head slightly under the weight of the tall crown. “And how, may I ask, did you acquire expertise in the pleasuring of men, if you were a servant of servants in my bath?”
The faintest of delicate flushes stained the ivory cheeks. “Lady, I have only been a servant of servants for a season. Before that I was a maid to Lord Hapi’s wife. Lord Hapi was—is—a man who prefers his ladies young. He loves to teach them, lady, and to give them pleasure in such measure as they give him.”
Hatshepsut’s brows had risen remarkably. So too had Nehsi’s when he first heard the child’s story. Lord Hapi was a man of late middle years, soft and rolling in fat, with a reputation for subtlety in the poisonous games of the court. His wife was older than he, as wiry thin as he was roundly plump, with all the sweetness and gentility of a hungry crocodile. Astonishing to think of that man, married to that woman, as a beloved preceptor to his wife’s young maids.
“He . . . taught you to give men pleasure?” Hatshepsut asked.
“Oh, yes,” said Isis. “His own predilections are for maids whose breasts have barely budded; but he takes great pleasure in preparing them for the service of men who prefer their women less youthfully tender. It’s a gift he gives, and with great pleasure, too.”
“And you,” said the queen, “have grown a little old for him.”
Isis looked sad. “Yes. Yes, when my breasts grew—it was so sudden, lady; it was distressing—he lost his passion for me. He was very good to me, lady. He saw me placed in your majesty’s service. He does that for all his ladies: not here, not before this, lady, but in good service and with fine expectations.”
The queen’s eyes narrowed. “Yes? Did he say why he chose to send you here?”
“Why,” said Isis with all appearance of innocence, “yes, he did. He said that I deserved better than to disappear among some lordling’s concubines. I could please the king, he said, but he thought that you, lady, might need me more.”
“What need would I have of you?” Hatshepsut demanded.
Isis blinked at her vehemence, but did not flinch. “Lady, a queen needs many things. How may I serve you?”
“You could,” said Hatshepsut, “be a trap. Still . . . Lord Hapi? What has he to gain?”
“Your favor, one would suppose,” Nehsi answered, though she had not directed the question at him, “and perhaps a useful degree of gratitude.”
“No,” said Hatshepsut. “It’s too subtle. If he had meant to throw her across my path, he would have placed her higher than attendant of an attendant in my bath. He was disposing of her as he best might.”
“With maybe some small hope that she would come to your attention,” Nehsi said. “Why not? Forcing her on you would dispose you against him. In this he lost nothing and stood the chance of gaining much.”
She frowned. “Are you telling me that I should choose this one?”
“I think,” said Nehsi carefully, “that you will choose as you are best pleased to do.”
“Don’t be politic with me,” she said sharply. “It makes me feel a fool.”
He set his lips together and bowed.
She rose from her throne, moving with slow grace under the crown. The Hathors clung together all the more tightly. Meritre lifted her chin a fraction higher. Isis watched calmly. Was that a gleam of avarice as her eyes rested on the queen’s adornments? Or was it only the glitter of gold, dazzling her?
The queen walked down the line of them. She paused before each, searching the face turned up to hers. The Hathors tried to flinch away. She caught each, and held her till she would look up.
She shook her head. “Too shy,” she said. “Too much in fear of royalty. Nehsi, was this meant for a mockery?”
“Hardly, lady,” he said. “They were bold enough in front of me.”
Meritre sniffed loudly. “They didn’t think. The palace lured them—it never occurred to them to recall who lives there.”
“Did it occur to you?” the queen inquired.
>
“Immediately,” said Meritre. “What do you want of us? You can’t have need of our particular skills, surely.”
“I admire a sweet singer,” Hatshepsut said.
“None of them sings more sweetly than I,” said Meritre. “But there are singers among your attendants who put me to shame. What we all have in common, which is the pleasing of men—what is your need of that, great lady and queen? Is it true what they say, that no man has yet touched you? Are you looking for a teacher?”
“You are more clever than I thought,” Hatshepsut said. “No, not I. The one I would have you teach . . . he likes his women sweet-spoken and biddable. Or so I’m told.”
“Then he must not be overly fond of you,” said Meritre.
At least one of the Hathors sucked in her breath. Nehsi held his own.
Hatshepsut smiled. “I, on the other hand, have rather a fondness for insolence in a servant. It’s a challenge, you see. To turn insolence into respect; to tame the crocodile.” Before any of them could respond, she took Isis by the hand. “Come, my friend. I have a task for you.”
Isis had the grace not to look unduly complacent. Meritre shrugged. The Hathors burst into tears.
Hatshepsut shook her head at them. “Find them something to do, Nehsi. I’ll be needing more bath attendants, I suppose. But this one”—she indicated Meritre—“may try her hand among the maids of my chamber.”
Meritre sniffed again. No gratitude there. Hatshepsut laughed, a startling sound if one was not accustomed to it: it was as free as a boy’s, untrammeled by maidenly delicacy. Still leading Isis by the hand, she left Nehsi to contend with the rest.
The Hathors, freed of the constraint of the queen’s presence, were not shy at all. They screeched rather alarmingly, in fact. He handed off two to grinning guards, thrust the third into Meritre’s unsympathetic grasp, and took the last in his own charge, clapped a hand over her mouth to stop her shrieking and carried her off to the queen’s baths.
6
Senenmut was surprised, not that the queen was a quick study—he had rather thought so—but that the teaching of her was not as unpleasant as he had expected. She showed him no great respect, but she took his instruction without argument, and suffered him to correct her when there was need.
There was not, much. She learned swiftly and she learned well. It gave her rather too much pleasure, and she was rather too forthright about it, but that was easy enough to forgive.
As elegantly as she dressed, as beautifully as she was painted and plucked and oiled to seem a lady, she was at heart no lady at all. Someone had failed in the teaching of her. She lacked womanly discretion. Her rich laugh was a boy’s, and she had little restraint in indulging it.
Senenmut was too often its target. “You are a brilliant scribe,” she said to him once, “and a fair to middling teacher. But the airs you put on—Hathor! How silly you look with your nose in the air. Where did you learn to be so haughty?”
“I begin to think,” Senenmut said acidly, “that all the world colludes in taxing me with arrogance. I’ll grovel, O living Isis, but only after you’re done with this passage from Imhotep.”
She grinned at him, unrepentant, and rattled off the passage so quickly that the words ran together. But she read it accurately, as he had expected that she would. Almost in the same breath she said, “I didn’t say arrogant. I said haughty. You carry yourself like a prince of princes. Though some of it must be your nose. A falcon would be proud of such a weapon.”
He rubbed it, caught himself, scowled. “Not every living creature can be as beautiful as you, lady.”
“Oh, I’m not beautiful,” she said. “I’m interesting. I much prefer that. Beauty can be crashingly dull.”
Was that an apology of sorts? He rather doubted it. Hatshepsut was queen. She did not apologize.
~~~
Every morning he went to the palace. Every evening he returned to his father’s house. He was not with the queen for all or even most of the day. She had duties and pleasures that had no place for him. While she indulged in those, he sat among the queen’s scribes in their cramped and antiquated hall, doing whatever the chief of scribes saw fit for him to do.
He was given no preference, offered no favors for that he was the queen’s instructor in reading and writing. Nor did her scribes trouble to envy him, that he could discern. They were all men of middle years, and some were elderly. They had been in service in the palace since long before their lady was born. They were rooted in it, bound to it, oblivious to the world beyond their cracked and faded walls.
He regarded them with a kind of horror. Their existence was little different from that of scribes in the House of Life, but it seemed notably worse. It was dull; it led nowhere. Day after day, copying letters, rendering them into the language of this embassy or that, recording accounts of the queen’s household, keeping the records in endless and exacting detail.
Senenmut endured it because he did not intend to do it for his life long. He could silence the clatter of his mind and become, as it were, one with the march of words, each glyph drawn swift and sure in his clear firm hand that had won him such praise in the Temple of Amon. There were some, and not all of them ignorant, who said that words were magic, and the glyphs themselves gave it shape.
He had studied little of the hidden arts. They did not engage him. But in those long slow hours while the sun tracked across the worn tiling of the floor, he began to understand the allure of the word without flesh or substance, simply the power of itself.
It was not, nevertheless, enough. One day as he came from the scribes’ hall to the queen’s lesson-chamber, he found no one there. All her chambers were likewise empty; except for a bored guard or two and a maid desultorily sweeping the floor, they were deserted.
Senenmut stood in the outermost antechamber, at a loss. The sweeper was mute and simple. She had barely looked up as he passed.
This was a child’s nightmare, or a courtier’s: to find oneself in the palace, but the palace was empty, the king and queen departed, and nothing left but dust and sunlight. There had been no word spoken of the queen’s departing for another city or another palace; no rumor of a royal progress. She was simply gone.
After loss came anger. She could at least have informed him that she had no need of him, or told him where else he was to come. He might have nothing better to do than wait about for her, but in merest courtesy she might have left a message.
He was in a fine pitch of temper by the time he approached the guard on the outermost door. The lout had been snoring when he came in, was awake now but barely.
He did not seem to understand plain Egyptian. “The queen,” Senenmut gritted through clenched teeth. “Your lady, the Great Royal Wife, the living Isis. Where is she?”
“Out,” said the guard, yawning and loosing a belch that was purest insolence.
Senenmut’s fists clenched on his scribe’s satchel. “Out? Out where?”
“On the river,” the guard said. “In a boat.”
Which could mean a journey of any duration at all, for any purpose. Senenmut was too furious to manage another question. He knew more or less where the royal barges were moored, in the river outside the palace walls. He ran from inner palace to outer palace to river, hardly aware of his speed until he stumbled to a halt on the quay.
A scribe never ran if he could help it. Mostly he sat and wrote, and others ran for him. Senenmut crouched, gasping for breath. Only slowly did he become aware that he was watched: there were a number of people about, most with the air of lofty ennui that marked a courtier. Those under parasols, being waited on by servants with fans, were elaborately bored. The lesser luminaries were engrossed in finding what shelter they could from the sun.
They were all waiting as if they had been doing it since time began. Since morning at least, and for much the same reason as Senenmut: they had services to perform, but had met with empty rooms and insolent guards.
One of those who waited was less pr
etentious than the rest. He was not young, but neither was he old. He wore the robe and the emblems of a priest of Amon and was attended by a gaggle of younger priests, but he squatted in a patch of shade with no more dignity than a laborer in the fields. He even had a jar of beer, which he held out as Senenmut stood staring. “Here, boy,” he said. “You look thirsty.”
In a calmer mood Senenmut would have declined to do anything so openly vulgar, but at the moment he did not care. He lowered himself beside the priest, tucking up his legs as a scribe learned to do, and took the jar. The beer startled him. “It’s good!” he said.
The priest grinned. He was missing a handful of teeth; the rest were decidedly unlovely. Still it was a remarkably appealing grin. “What did you expect? Back-alley cat piss?”
Senenmut choked. The priest pounded him on the back. He gasped and gagged, hiccoughed, swallowed mightily. His eyes were streaming; his nose itched. He glowered at the priest. “You have no dignity,” he said.
“None whatsoever,” the priest agreed. He reclaimed the jar, downed another draught. His eyes were bright and wicked. “They call me Hapuseneb,” he said.
“Senenmut,” said Senenmut somewhat grudgingly.
The priest nodded, still grinning. “Ah: I thought so. The young scribe who enjoys the favor of Seti-Nakht. You shouldn’t feel too insulted that the queen wants you for a schoolmaster. She’s young but she’s quick, and she’ll not let herself play weak second to the king. Serve her well, and you’ll go far.”
Senenmut nearly dashed the remnants of the beer in the man’s face. Priest or no, he far overstepped his bounds.
He did not seem alarmed by Senenmut’s expression. “There now,” he said. “Learn a lesson from an old courtier. Bluntness can be the best weapon of all, and truth more dangerous than any deception. People who tell the truth, you see, are difficult. They can’t be talked round. They don’t yield to threats, nor will they tell a lie when it would best serve them. The common run of courtiers find them appalling.”