by Judith Tarr
“It would seem to me,” Senenmut said, “that such people would die early and unpleasantly.”
“That’s the other half of the lesson,” Hapuseneb said. “Always tell the truth, but always tell it from a position of power. Show no fear. Look even the king in the eye, and never think it insolence.”
“Dangerous advice,” Senenmut said, “for a cocky boy whom you have never seen before.”
Hapuseneb laughed and saluted him. “There! You see? You know it. You’re not as cocky as you used to be, are you? Waiting on kings can do that. There’s no contending with a king for sheer and headlong arrogance.”
“What of queens? I’ll wager there’s one who puts kings to shame.”
“She does, at that,” Hapuseneb said. He peered under his hand at the river. The sun was descending from noon; in an hour, maybe a little more, it would shine direct into his eyes. “Then again,” he said, “it takes a king to drag his entire household off at dawn to hunt river-birds, and never relieve his lesser servants of the obligation to wait on him. So we wait, and he hunts ducks in the reeds.”
“Gods may do as they please,” Senenmut said.
“So devout,” said Hapuseneb. “The gods must love you.” He reached under his robe and drew out a packet. “Here, I’ve dates, and a bit of cheese. Shall we have a feast?”
Why not? thought Senenmut. His anger had lost itself somewhere. This untypical priest was refreshing. Intelligent too, and amusing. Altogether he was excellent company.
If one had to wait about while the queen indulged her husband’s whim, there were worse ways than this, sitting on the quay by the palace with courtiers either sneering or looking on incredulous, sharing dates and cheese and beer with a priest of Amon. Senenmut had bread in a napkin, his mother’s good baking; it was received with delight. They shared it back and forth, eating till they were replete.
~~~
The sun rode low when the king came back, riding the current down the river. There had been a wind, but with the approach of evening it had died to a whisper. The last heat of the day lay like a living presence on city and quay: a great slow-breathing animal, heavy with sleep.
Senenmut started out of a drowse. Hapuseneb was still snoring. Others of those who waited had moved away from the riverside, forming in ranks as if they had been in court.
The priests and the scribe found themselves set well apart. Since some of the priests out of their season in the temple were courtiers, there was a degree of irony in that.
It was irony also that the priests were farther upriver than the rest, and therefore had a clearer view of the fleet as it approached the quay. Prows and masts were gilded, and the oars likewise, prodigal of wealth as only royalty could be. Strains of music floated over the water, harp and flute and drum, tambour and sistrum, and the high sweet voice of a singer.
Senenmut did not trouble to count the boats in the fleet. Most were full of courtiers or servants. Only one mattered: the great golden barge that rode before the rest, long and broad as a hall in the palace, crowded with oarsmen, musicians, fan-bearers, people trained to fetch this dainty or that. The cooks rode beside and just behind the barge with their oven-fires lit and savory scents wafting on the faint hint of breeze.
As long as it had been since he and Hapuseneb divided the last of the bread, he forgot the growling in his stomach to stare with a wholly different hunger at the man who stood in the prow of the barge. There was a golden canopy amidships, and a pair of golden thrones set under it, and the queen in one with her maids behind her.
But the king, it seemed, had grown restless. He had left his throne. He wore the Blue Crown, the crown of a warrior, and a fine white kilt belted with gold, and golden sandals.
He was not a tall man, nor a particularly prepossessing one except for the crown he wore. His face was like his sister-wife’s, oval, delicate in features except for a noble jut of nose. His body was lightly but compactly built, his shoulders wide, well-muscled and strong. A woman might find him attractive. Senenmut had no such thoughts, nor would he allow himself to think them.
He was staring at the living god, Horus on earth, lord of the Red Land and the Black Land, Great House of Egypt, Thutmose son of Thutmose of the line of Ahmose. The living god was a man with a stern and rather chilly face and a voice rough-edged as if he had honed it on the battlefield, exchanging some pleasantry with one of the princes privileged to stand behind him. He was a warrior king, a leader of armies: that much everyone knew of him. He looked as if he hated to be still, hated worse to vex himself with the consequentialities of state.
His eyes were quick, as brightly alive as his face was stern. It was a mask, then, a trained thing. What it must do to a man to be king and god, to be constrained to a life of perpetual and unrelenting ceremony . . .
Senenmut had never thought such thoughts before. It came of sitting next to the priest of Amon, full of his beer and wanting badly to piss. But a man could hardly aim a stream into the river, with the king sailing right past him.
The king did not appear to see the people gathered on the quay. The barge had barely touched the bank before he leaped out, striding past rows of men flung suddenly on their faces, with his servants scrambling to follow.
The queen conducted herself with more decorum. Among the servants who followed her from the boat were several with bows and quivers of arrows, and strings of fat geese and ducks and long-legged wading birds. There would be a feast in the palace tonight.
She did not look as if she had quarreled with her husband. Her expression was serene to boredom, her movements languid, unhurried. Bearers waited with a golden chair to carry her to the palace. She stepped into it without visible reluctance. They carried her away.
One of her servants, a maid whom Senenmut had not seen before, left the company of her fellows and approached the scribe and the priests. She spoke as if the words were grains of barley flung at a flock of geese. “He wants to go hunting again tomorrow. She’s to go with him. You’ll be here at dawn, ready to embark. Be prepared to be amusing.”
Senenmut opened his mouth, but shut it again. Hapuseneb smiled his gaptoothed smile. “We can always be amusing. Are they fighting again?”
“They never fight,” the maid said frigidly.
“I’m sure,” said Hapuseneb.
The maid turned on her heel. Hapuseneb watched her go with open pleasure.
She was much more pleasant to look at than to listen to. Senenmut caught himself before he sank too deeply into contemplation of her beauty. The way the long plaits of her hair swung as she walked, brushing her hips behind . . .
“Yes,” said Hapuseneb. “Oh, yes.”
Senenmut thrust himself to his feet. He must have muttered a farewell: Hapuseneb replied to it in kind. He was careful to take another way than the one the maid had taken. Since he was going into the city rather than to the palace, it led him well away from her.
And why he ran away from a maid when he was bold enough to face the queen, he did not know. Maybe because the queen piqued his pride, but the maid aroused a much less lofty portion of his anatomy. Pride he knew. That other thing he had never had much time for, nor indulged it when he had leisure.
She would laugh if she knew. Most women would. He tucked his head down and beat his way through the crowds that thronged the city, escaping to the sanctuary of his father’s house.
7
The king was in a dangerous mood.
“He needs a war,” Nehsi said.
The queen’s lip curled. “I shall never understand this need of men,” she said. “What profit is there in fighting one another?”
“Much,” said Nehsi, “if the conquered is rich in gold and captives.”
“That is not what I meant,” she said. “Why do men fight with spears and swords? Aren’t words enough?”
“In most cases, no,” Nehsi said. Since, after all, she had asked.
She tossed her head in its heavy plaited wig. She was preparing for the feast. Her maids l
abored through her temper to make her as beautiful as a queen should be, but she was not making it easy for them.
“He may want a war,” she said, “but he won’t have one just yet. I’ll give him something to think about instead.”
Nehsi followed her glance. Isis the maidservant had been given the task of clothing the queen in her court gown of sheerest linen. She had not been given to the king yet. The queen was awaiting her moment.
“Is this the time?” he asked. “With the king so out of sorts, and insisting on hunting when he should be attending to matters of state—”
“When better?” said the queen. “He’s bored. He needs distraction. I’ll give it to him: set it in his way and let him do with it as he pleases.”
“It may work,” Nehsi admitted. “But the moment he finds himself a war, he’ll forget everything but that.”
“Certainly,” she said, “but it might delay him for a while. If he learns well and quickly, well enough that he’s fit to come to my bed, then I may be with child when he goes away again.”
“That is an end devoutly to be desired,” said Nehsi. “But, lady—”
She ignored him. She beckoned to Isis. “Here, child. Come here.”
Isis came obediently, eyes lowered, and bowed as she had been taught, kneeling with becoming grace and touching her forehead to the floor.
“Tonight,” the queen said, “do as I told you to do when the time was ripe. Be prominent among my servants. Let the king see you, and let him desire you. If he lacks the wits to do more, enlighten him. See that he takes you to his bed.”
Isis, still bowed to the floor, said softly but clearly, “Yes, lady. I remember.”
If she trembled with either fear or excitement, Nehsi did not see it. Sometimes he wondered if it was intelligence she lacked, or simply a normal human portion of wariness. She trusted too well. She was afraid of no one, nor saw the need to be.
The queen found that useful. He wondered, himself, how loyal such a creature could be, without fear to bind her.
Whatever his misgivings, the queen had decided. Isis would seduce the king tonight, and teach him if she could to be a lover of women rather than a soldier who took his bedmates, like his enemies, by storm. Nehsi could hope that once Isis was done, the king would turn willingly to the queen.
~~~
Feasts in the court of Thutmose, son of Thutmose, began before sunset and ran the night long. This one began late but showed no sign of ending earlier. They were all gathered in the great hall of feasting, tables laid among the pillars, and the king on his throne at the head of the hall. Naked servants ran without rest, bringing in jars of wine and beer, platters of dainties, all the booty of the day’s hunt, and for the great of appetite a whole ox borne in on a palanquin like a prince, with flowers wound around its horns, and fruits heaped about it, and bread, and savory cakes.
Most of the men and all of the ladies wore cones of scented fat atop their wigs, that melted as the night went on and the heat of their revelry mounted, streaming down over the elaborate edifices of curls and plaits, dripping in their faces. The mingling of a myriad perfumes shocked the nose into numbness, caught at the back of the throat and made thirst a constant and urgent thing.
The king was a great man for wine, and he served only the best, the royal vintage, sweet and dizzyingly strong. He was eating little, Nehsi noticed. He had the look of a man who drinks to find oblivion, an expression of boredom sunk deep and gone sour.
He was not in any mood or condition to notice one naked servant among a hundred, even if she were nearly beside him, waiting on the queen. His eyes were fixed on the wine in his cup, or, with blurred intensity, on the shadows that flocked near the roof of the hall, fleeing the lights and clamor below. Perhaps he was seeing the heat and tumult of a battlefield, tasting the heady wine of terror.
Isis sought to catch his eye each time she filled the queen’s cup or arranged a new delicacy on the queen’s plate. It was clear but not blatant: a curve of the body just so, to show the lovely line of hip; an inclination forward to let her breasts swing enticingly; a shift about on pretext of relieving another servant of a platter of spiced cakes, so that he could see the sweet rounding of her buttocks. Nehsi, schooled though he was to ignore temptation while he stood guard, felt a stirring that he could not mistake. A stone could not have resisted that most lovely of women when she set herself to drive a man wild.
A stone, or the king in his cups. He was not even aware that she existed. He took each filled cup blindly from the hand of his cupbearer, drank it dry, held out his hand for the next.
The queen was watching. Nehsi saw how her eyes narrowed. She beckoned to Isis, whispered. Isis nodded, bowed deeply. She circled round to the king’s chair and leaned toward the cupbearer. That personage was well above taking heed of any mere maidservant, but a maidservant bearing a command from the queen required at least a moment of his attention.
He obeyed ungraciously, but obey he did. Quietly, without a word to the king, he drew deep from the jar of water before he filled the cup lightly with wine. The king, as the queen must have hoped, grimaced but did not appear to notice why the flavor of the vintage had grown so weak.
Then Isis did a thing that the queen could not have asked her to do, because it was impossibly, unthinkably bold. She plucked the next cup from the cupbearer’s hand and set it teasingly just out of the king’s reach. He groped. She shifted it He lifted bleared eyes.
They must have been full of her. She stood close, so close that he could have seen nothing else.
Her smile was impossibly sweet. She slid into his lap, effrontery beyond effrontery, and linked arms about his neck, and said, “Aren’t I sweeter than wine, O beloved of Horus?”
To Nehsi’s astonishment, no one seemed to have noticed her audacity. The hall was hazy with wine and sweat and the heat of bodies crowded together. Anyone alert enough to see clearly was watching a display of dancers and acrobats, all of them beautiful, all of them impossibly supple.
The queen, who did see, could hardly contest the execution of her own order. She pretended to be engrossed in a confection of flowers dipped in honey. The maid Meritre served her wine that was mostly water, with which she took issue. “If you must feed me water,” she said sharply, “feed it untainted with wine.”
Meritre bowed low and did just that.
They were both, surreptitiously, watching how Isis wound herself about the king. No one could hear what she said—the hall was too hideously noisy, and she said it direct to the king’s ear. It was difficult to see what he was thinking. His face was never very expressive; when he was sodden with wine it set into a mask.
Isis nibbled the royal ear. The king shivered perceptibly and tensed, lurching to his feet. Isis clung. Now, Nehsi thought, he would fling her off.
His arms tightened about her, lifted her. Nehsi held his breath.
Isis giggled, clear in the lull that will fall on any crowd, even the most boisterous. To Nehsi’s lasting astonishment, the king echoed her. He shifted her, but not to cast her off; to settle her more securely. Lightly, quickly, and much more steadily than Nehsi would have thought possible, he bore her out of the hall.
~~~
The queen was not jealous. She told Nehsi so, repeatedly. She had ordered this. She had planned it from the first, set the bait and sprung the trap.
She paced her chambers in the dark before dawn, when the air was as cool as it ever became in Thebes in the season between Inundations of the Nile. Her robes and wig were laid aside; she had on a kilt like a boy, but she was no boy to look at, even so young. She could stride out in it, and stride she did, stiff-legged, fists clenched at her sides, waiting for Isis to come back. If Isis came back. The king might keep her with him. That would be a triumph.
“But she must come back to me,” said Hatshepsut fiercely.
Nehsi swallowed a yawn. A sleepless queen meant a sleepless guard; and when she was in this mood she wanted no other guard but Nehsi. She was not ab
ove dragging him out of the bed he had just fallen into, and demanding that he watch while she paced her state bedchamber with its golden bed and its headrest of chalcedony inlaid with gold, regarding none of that, aware only of her own confusion.
“You could,” he said, “distract yourself.”
She stopped her pacing and whirled. Oh, she was distracted: into a fine hot fury, with him as the target. “Are you saying that I am as scatterbrained as my husband, may he live a thousand years?”
“Your husband,” said Nehsi, “may he live a thousand years, is as nothing to the brilliance of your sagacity.”
“Are you trying to make me laugh, or are you tempting me to kill you?”
He looked her up and down as she stood there. After a while he said, “You aren’t a child any longer, that’s clear to see.”
“And I’m acting like one,” she said. She could do that: see with bitter clarity, and say what she must say, as if there were two halves of her, the one that paced and snarled and hissed with temper, and the other, the quiet one, the one that was never less than calm.
But he shook his head. “No,” he said. “It’s not a child who says these things, or does the thing that sparked them. This is a woman’s trouble. You don’t love or greatly like your husband, but you’re not as willing as you thought you were, to share him. He is, after all, yours.”
“Do you think he would share me?” she demanded. And when he was silent: “I thought not. But it’s women who have to share, isn’t it? Never men. They take what pleases them, and keep it, and never willingly let it go.”
“Like you,” said Nehsi, “lady and queen.”
Someday, he thought with distant clarity, she would have him flayed for the things he said to her. But not yet. It was her eccentricity, in this her youth, to favor servants who spoke freely to her. Time and queenship would alter that.
Until then, he was suffered to live with a whole skin. She stared at him for a long moment, a dark, deadly level stare. “Yes,” she said. “Like me. I’m not like other women, am I? I am the queen. The king will learn to be worthy of me. As for the woman I sent to him . . .” She paused. In the pause she wandered to a chair and sat in it, as close to relaxation as she had come since this night began. “If she fails to return by full morning, find her and bring her to me.”