by Judith Tarr
The gods would never allow it. Pity; but gods were gods. Once they had fixed upon a thing, there was no changing it.
9
One morning not long after the queen sailed away undismissed from the king’s hunt, a messenger found Senenmut among the queen’s scribes. It was a woman, one of the royal maids: the one with the perpetual sniff of scorn, as if the world were beneath her notice. “She wants you,” she said, inelegant to rudeness.
Senenmut was tempted to keep her waiting. But he had finished the letter he was given to copy into the archives, and the next was both long and difficult, as well as crashingly dull: an accounting of the revenues of the nomes of Upper Egypt. He left it gratefully.
The maid led him not to the queen’s chambers as he had expected, nor to the hall where she held audiences and administered the affairs of the Two Kingdoms. The way was not one he had taken before. It led away from the inner palace and even from the outer one, to the wall that rimmed and warded the palace. Built into and along the wall were stables, barracks, armories: a kingdom of men and war, as alien to the scented quiet of the queen’s apartments as Senenmut’s family’s house to the House of Life.
The queen was in the royal stables. She looked strange, a little, with her artfully painted face, in the scent of hay and horses. But her gown was plain and her ornaments simple, and her wig was the short Nubian wig that both men and women wore when they would be practical. She was deep in converse with a tall and imposing personage, a hawk-nosed, bearded foreigner in a striped coat. From the look and the scent of him, he was a master of horse.
The subject of their discussion, a chestnut-colored horse with a white nose, stood patiently beside the foreigner. It was newly come, it seemed, as tribute from a king in Asia.
The foreigner spoke Egyptian with a heavy accent, but Senenmut understood him well enough. “No, I think not the whitefoot mare for a chariot-mate to this one. She’s too short of stride. This beauty pours herself over the ground like a lioness in the desert. The mare they call Star of Hathor—she has the movement, and she has some need of a calming influence.”
“Well then,” the queen said. “Call her Moon of Isis and try her in the yoke with Hathor’s Star.”
The foreigner bowed deeply in the Asiatic fashion. “It shall be as your majesty wishes.”
Hatshepsut nodded briskly and moved down the line of tethered horses. She could not have failed to see Senenmut, but she was choosing not to acknowledge him.
Partly at a loss, partly to be contrary, he followed her. The master of horse was just ahead of him, the maid just behind.
Near the end of the line, almost to a wall with a door in it, the queen’s Nubian guardsman busied himself about a fine blood bay. The queen nodded to him but kept walking through the door and out into a broad and sandy court. It was full of the thunder of hooves and the rattle of chariot wheels.
Senenmut had never seen a place like it. The glare of sun through a haze of dust. The snorting of horses, the champing of bits, the snap of a whip and the sharper snap of a charioteer’s voice, calling to order a fractious team. The reek of dust and dung and sweat that was Egypt was overlaid here with the pungent-pleasant scent of horses.
He had always loved horses. They were new in the Two Lands, brought in by the kings whom no one named, the foreigners who dared to conquer Egypt. Those were a hundred years gone, driven out and rightly so. Egypt had effaced their names from the earth, willed to forget them; but it had kept their gift of horses. Horses drew chariots; chariots carried princes who not so long ago would have been condemned to march and to fight on their own feet. Now they could ride, and carry their weapons without inconvenience, and strike swift against their enemies.
But Senenmut loved the horses for themselves, for their beauty and fire, their strength and their swiftness and the drumming of their feet on the earth. He had not known before how splendid their eyes were, fiercer than the eyes of cattle, with a keener intelligence. Nor had he suspected that they would welcome him with the rush of warm breath in his palm, lipping it, forbearing to bite.
He ventured to stroke a sleek red-brown neck. It arched under his hand, and the horse snorted, tossing its head. He held his ground. It meant him no harm. He could see that in its eyes.
Servants brought out two of the horses: a pair as like as two pups in a litter, red-golden both, with pale manes. A chariot waited, handsome enough but not nearly as magnificent as the state chariots that Senenmut had seen. This was meant for use.
The horses set themselves in place for the yoke, opened mouths for the bits. They were eager: one pawed lightly as the chariot was hitched behind.
The queen sprang into the chariot and took the reins from the groom. “You,” she said, flashing a glance at Senenmut. “Ride with me.”
He stood flatfooted. Of course she would be asking for him, since she had had him brought here. But why in the world . . . ?
~~~
The horses backed against the traces, dancing with impatience. The queen reined them in. “Come!” she commanded him.
He hardly knew which foot to lift first. The Nubian seized him with effortless strength and tossed him into the chariot behind the queen. He staggered, clutched at the first thing that presented itself: the queen’s body.
She most graciously declined to cry sacrilege. He pried his arms from their panic-lock about her middle and found a more permissible thing to cling to: the side of the chariot, with its rim rolled by design or by accident into the most useful shape for gripping hard to keep one’s balance.
Once he had recovered from the shock of being thrust into a swift-moving, sharp-turning chariot, Senenmut began to take a keen and still half-terrified pleasure in it. He saw how the queen stood, light, poised, firm yet supple, riding with the lift and sway of the chariot-floor under her feet. She held the reins lightly, not strained back against them as he had seen others do, battling the horses’ will to run. She rode with them, coaxing rather than compelling.
She did not, as he had expected, ride among the rest in the court of the chariots. She directed her horses toward the gate and out along the palace wall. A second chariot followed, with the Nubian for charioteer. He had no companion, nor seemed to need any. If there were an attack—as if such a thing could happen in the heart of royal Thebes—Senenmut supposed that he would bind the reins about his waist and fight as kings fought in the histories, strong-armed against thousands.
He still could not imagine what the queen could want of him. He was a scribe. He knew nothing of horses or of chariotry.
As if she had plucked the thought from his mind, she thrust the reins into his hands. They trembled like living things.
The right-hand horse tossed its head. Senenmut willed his fingers to unclench. “Lady,” he said. “What am I supposed to—”
“Steady,” she said. “Light and soft. No, not loose! Feel the horses always.”
He fought the rigidity of shock and awe. He—he, Senenmut, whose father was a seller of pots—was a charioteer. A poor and vastly nervous one, as the queen pointed out with acid precision; but he held the reins and the horses obeyed him.
It grew easier, the longer he did it. He declined to commit the error of cockiness; but he felt magnificent, like a prince, driving fee queen’s chariot around the walls of the palace.
It was glorious. Yet he had to ask. When he was surer of himself, when the horses seemed in hand and the road’s curve not too taxing, he spoke the word. “Why?”
The queen could have pretended not to understand. It rather pleased him that she did not. “Because,” she said.
He tensed. The horses jibbed. He made himself ease, for their sake. “You thought you could mock me. Didn’t you? You expected me to be run away with.”
“If I had wanted that,” she said mildly, “I would have called for the new mare, and had her yoked with a stranger. These are my best, my queens. No one else has ever driven them, except on occasion my Nubian.”
“Then why?” Senen
mut demanded.
She shrugged, maddening as a woman can be, and a young one worst of all. “I thought you might like it.” She paused. “Do you?”
No. He would not believe it. That she would give him a gift simply for the sake of giving it. She was a queen. Queens gave nothing of their free will, with no expectation of return.
“What am I supposed to do, to pay for this?” he asked her.
She was angry: he saw the flush on her cheek, that was almost alarmingly close. When the chariot swayed, she swayed against him, inevitably. She did not seem to notice how often their bodies touched.
Nor would he, nor should he, if he had not been a fool. Another woman would have meant to seduce him, if she had done as this one did. But Hatshepsut was hardly aware yet that she was a woman.
“There is a price,” he persisted. “There must be.”
“Yes,” she said. “That you take pleasure in it. That you be as glad of it as I am of the words you teach me.”
He felt his brow climbing. “Gratitude? From a queen?”
“Even from a queen,” she said.
“But,” he said. “Why this?”
That shrug again. “It seemed like nothing you’d tried before. And,” she added after a moment, “any number of fine young princes would give their hope of an afterlife to ride where you ride now. Though none of them would suffer me to teach them.”
“So that’s why,” he said. “Because I’ve never done it. You need to master me.”
“I can master any man,” said the queen with a lift of the chin. “I saw your face when you looked at the horses. I wanted you to have them. You want them, you see. So many of the rest . . . they don’t care. You do.”
What, a hint of softness? Senenmut was astonished.
It dawned on him that perhaps she liked him. He did not see why. He was sharp-tongued, waspish for a fact; he had no patience to speak of; and he had never been pretty to look at.
Strange was the mind of a woman.
“You should,” she said, “exercise your body as well as your mind and hand. I’ll not have you squatting like a toad in the scribes’ house whenever you aren’t instructing me. You may consider yourself commanded to learn the art of chariotry. The bow, too, I think; and perhaps the spear, for hunting.”
“I thought you hated to hunt,” Senenmut broke in on her.
“Oh, no,” she said. “Why would you think that?”
He opened his mouth, closed it again.
She laughed. “Ah! You saw me in my husband’s hunt. But that, O scribe of mine, was folly, time wasted, a kingdom left dangling while its king indulged his whim. The kingdom must come first in the heart of a king. When he’s attended to it—then let him hunt, let him race his chariots, let him do whatever he pleases.”
Somewhere in their colloquy she had taken back the reins and slowed the horses to a walk. They had nearly circled the palace round. Just as they would have turned and passed through the gate that led to the court of the chariots, she straightened their heads, bidding them circle the palace again.
They rode for a while in silence. Senenmut understood at last: or well enough. It was not a simple thing that she was doing. At its heart it was a message to her husband, a lesson that he should learn.
Senenmut doubted that the king would even notice. He had not seemed an observant man. And with this queen, one must watch every movement, measure every moment. She was headstrong, and she could be reckless, but in her way she was subtle. Too subtle for such a man as the king seemed to be.
He had never thought that he could pity a queen. Poor child: yoked to a man whom she understood no better than he understood her. If they had been a chariot team, the master of horse would have separated them long since.
10
All the queen’s plotting seemed like to shatter on the rock of her own obstinacy. She would not oblige her husband. She would not indulge his escapes from kingship. She was not even slightly grateful to the concubine Isis, who kept him sufficiently distracted that he showed no sign of riding off to war.
Nehsi had learned not to fret himself into a fever when his lady flew in the face of all common sense. That was well; for on an evening when she had not spoken to the king, nor he to her, in three full days, even as they sat side by side at the feast and in the hall of audience, she ordered her maids to prepare her for the king’s bedchamber.
She went about it like a king preparing for war. She mustered the weapons of her beauty. She arrayed her troops: a gown as sheer as mist in the desert, a collar of gold and lapis and carnelian, a wig of elaborate plaits and curls, garlanded with golden flowers. She was washed in the scent of musk, cloaked and armored in it.
As she swept her maids behind her in a flurry of light robes and shrill voices, Nehsi did a thing that he had sworn never to do. He caught the queen as she passed him. He demanded, “Why? Why now?”
She slipped free, but she paused. “I have to,” she said.
“Now?”
“Now.”
“But what if—”
She was gone. He could hasten after; or he could stay where he was, on guard over empty rooms.
His was the coward’s choice. Later he would drown his sorrows with the twins, a jar of beer for each. Now he paced a sentry’s track through the queen’s chambers, startling maids and chamberlains, putting them to flight with a hard flat stare.
He could imagine what went on in the king’s chambers. There were not so very many different things that a man could do with a woman. But what they said to one another, how she approached him, he did not know, nor want to know.
He knew only that she came back while the night was still young, gowned and adorned as before, but walking with a difference. He would not call it pain. She was too proud for that. She had done, it was clear, what she had set out to do.
Her maids put her to bed as always, with order and ritual as old as the throne of Egypt. When she was abed, she called for Nehsi as she sometimes did, and sent the maids away.
He said what he always said. “This is not seemly, lady.”
Always before she had laughed at him and told him to sit down, and challenged him to a game of Hounds and Jackals, or simply to a battle of wit. Tonight she had no laughter in her. She clasped her knees, sitting up in the splendid bed with its lion-feet and its coverlets of whitest linen. She looked small and bruised and defiant. “It wasn’t as bad as I thought it would be,” she said.
Nehsi did not want to hear it. No more did she care that he shrank from the telling.
“He had had a little lessoning,” she said. “He was polite enough, once he got over his incredulity.”
Nehsi raised his brows. “Polite? Then you did no more than talk.”
“No,” she said. She had no humor: it was a flaw, though she had never known it. “No. Once he’d observed a few amenities, he was very . . . direct. He agreed with me, you see. There must be an heir.”
“Were you astonished?”
She frowned at him. “What, that he understood one part of his kingly duty? No, I was not astonished. I was glad that he would oblige me.”
“I doubt he had much difficulty,” Nehsi muttered.
He rather hoped she had not heard him; but her ears were keen. Humor she had none, but her wits were quick. She flushed. “You are a low, coarse man! Why do I trust you?”
“Perhaps, lady,” he answered, “because I tell the truth.”
She shook her head. “No. That’s the worst of you. You don’t think I should have gone to him. Do you?”
“It is not my place to judge the actions of the queen’s majesty,” Nehsi said in his coldest voice.
She had never been in awe of him, and certainly never feared his temper. “What should I have done, then? Let someone else present him with an heir?”
Since he had argued against that very thing, he could hardly gainsay her now. He shrugged. He supposed he looked sullen. “It was sudden.”
“It was years in coming,” she said.
“It was a battle,” she said. “I won it.”
“Did you?”
But she was not to be conquered by the edge of his tongue. She lay down on her bed, turned her back on him, shut him out. She looked like a child, small and bird-boned and fragile.
She did not want his pity. She would sneer at his compassion. He gave her the only thing he could give, which was his silence.
~~~
She must have wrought well. The next night she did not have to intrude upon the king’s peace. He summoned her with something approaching grace, sending a chamberlain with pretty words and a prettier face, to invite her to attend him. The night after that she did not return to her rooms from the court’s banquet. The king had taken her by the hand after the wine went round, and led her away.
Among the king’s attendants Nehsi happened to notice Isis. Propriety kept the royal concubines in their own chambers, away from prying eyes and wagging tongues. But Isis had always made free of the court, a freedom that she turned into an image of self-effacement. Her head was demurely lowered, her posture humble. She ventured nothing bold, nothing openly defiant.
When the king departed with the queen, Nehsi watched the concubine carefully. She did not move from her place that had been at the king’s feet.
He could read nothing in her face, as little of it as he could see. Perhaps there was nothing to read. Still it troubled him that she, so innocent, so tenderhearted, shed no tears as she watched her lord and beloved walk away from her, and never a glance back. He was engrossed in some sally of the queen’s.
It well might be that she was loyal to the queen. Nehsi could not convince himself of it. He was a low, coarse man as his lady had said, wary and trusting no one. So must a guardsman be, or fail of his guardianship.