by Judith Tarr
12
In the dark before dawn, in the hour when the night wind dies and the dead walk, a child was born to the living Horus and to his Great Royal Wife. The midwife raised it in bloodied hands, offering it up to the gods’ sight and to the sight of its mother.
Hatshepsut looked once, long enough to be certain, then turned her face away.
“A daughter,” said the chief of physicians. “A strong daughter for the Great House.”
The queen’s voice came too low almost to catch, yet bitterly distinct. “It was supposed to be a son.”
None of the flock of attendants had the wits to speak. The midwife, who might have said what needed saying, was engrossed in the child, cutting and tying up the cord, bathing her, crooning to her in an astonishingly sweet voice.
There was only Senenmut, still serving as throne and birthing-chair, to shake her till she stiffened against him, but turned her head at least and glared.
He glared back. “This is your child,” he said. “Your daughter, lady and queen: a princess royal, just as you were. She proves your fertility. She carries the right to kingship, that is given to no man except through a woman of your line. Why do you turn your face away from her?”
“Because,” Hatshepsut cried out, nearly spitting the words, “if it had been a son, I’d not have it all to go through again!”
“Hush,” the physicians chided her. “Be still, lady. You’ll injure yourself.”
“I don’t care!” But she subsided, though she was rigid in Senenmut’s arms. “It should have been a son.”
“This child is exactly what the gods wish her to be,” Senenmut said sternly. “She is beautiful. Look at her.”
The queen would not. “She is hideous. All babies are.”
“She will be beautiful,” Senenmut persisted. He was stubborn—not perhaps as stubborn as the queen, but quite enough to go on with.
“I wanted a son,” the queen said yet again. But the hard edge had softened. She sounded almost weary, almost sad: a child balked of her desire, rather than a queen in her wrath.
“You’ll have a son,” Senenmut said. “Next time.”
“I wanted him now,” she said.
“What you have now,” he shot back with a resurgence of temper, “should delight you to no end. She’s whole, healthy, and lively enough for any two children. There are women who would sell one of their souls to be so blessed.”
She met temper with temper, even in her exhaustion. “You love her so much, you raise her. I’ll not trouble myself with her.”
“You will,” he said, reckless of rank or respect.
“Make me.”
She sounded exactly like Ahotep. Senenmut could not clip her ear as he would his brother’s: and that was a great pity. He had to settle for the lash of words. “Very well; since your majesty commands it. I’ll take the challenge.”
“And the baby.”
“Oh, no,” he said, backing away from the maid who held the child. “I’m no wetnurse.”
“She won’t be a nurseling forever,” the queen said. “I give her to you.”
“You can’t do that,” said Senenmut. “You shouldn’t. You’re exhausted; your mind is fogged. When you come to yourself—”
“I am perfectly and completely myself,” she said with chilly precision. “I have spoken. You have all witnessed it. Now go away and let me be.”
“Lady—” Senenmut began.
“Go,” she said.
He went—not because she ordered him, but because he was too angry to linger. He paused once, to bid farewell to the newborn princess. And if that convinced her bitch of a mother that he was besotted, then so be it. He had seen her born nearly in his lap. How could he fail to marvel at her?
~~~
They named the child Neferure, the Beauty of Re. Senenmut was given a title: Tutor of the King’s Daughter, first servant of Neferure. He found himself lord and master of the entire suite of a princess, from the wetnurse to the girlchild who washed the princess’ bed-linens.
He also found himself in a most embarrassing position. Hat-Nufer was grimly proud of her son. But not too proud to inform him, when he brought home his new title and the bafflement of his new duties, that he was a blathering fool. “Never mind the honor,” she said. “What are you supposed to eat and dress and live on while you’re dancing attendance on a suckling baby?”
He had begun to outgrow the gawkiness of his youth, but the edge of his mother’s tongue flayed away all pretense of maturity. He was a clumsy child again, gifted with the pen but with little else, ducking his head and mumbling a weak defense.
“Nonsense,” his mother said. “You are brilliant, talented, and beloved of the gods, but you have no more sense than a new-hatched gosling. Any idiot would know that with new titles comes new recompense.”
Somewhere he found his voice. It was a dim and feeble thing, but it was all he had. “I’m sure the queen would—”
“Queens are like anyone else. They’ll take what they can, and pay as little as they can manage.”
Hat-Nufer sent him to bed as if he had been a child, and would hear no objections, either. He lay in the suffocating warmth of his sleeping-room, free for once from Ahotep’s pestering: the brat had been sent to the Temple of Amon to learn the scribe’s trade, and would not be back till evening.
So far he had shown little aptitude for the arts of the pen. Games, now—games he had mastered, whether a child’s game of sticks and pebbles or a headlong tumble after a ball made of sewn oxhide.
Senenmut the eldest and best, favored of the Great Royal Wife, sent to bed without his supper, reflected more wryly than sullenly on the ironies of fate. He had no honor in his own house, no respect from his blood kin.
Of course, he thought, he had a choice. He could leave. He was a man in years, favored servant of a queen. He supposed that he had the wherewithal to manage lodgings, maybe even a servant to bake his bread and wash his kilts.
He supposed. He did not know. His mother kept the accounts. His wages fed and clothed him; he thought that she might be keeping the rest in reserve against fear or famine.
If he was to be free of his mother, then he must learn to reckon his own accounts. He shuddered at the thought. The reckonings of the Two Kingdoms were dull, but he could keep them in his head. Petty frettings over a measure of barley or a length of linen for a kilt or a bedsheet. . . those bored him to tears. Hat-Nufer could reckon whole tallies in her head, keep them in order and lose not a single grain of barley.
He needed her. He cursed the need, but there was no escaping it. Not unless he took a wife; and that prospect was even less alluring than the constant, niggling presence of his mother.
Sleep dragged at him, too heavy to resist. He had had none since the night before last. His body lingered in a memory: the queen lying limp in his arms, worn down with bearing her daughter. She was warm, sweat-slicked, smelling of nothing but herself: none of the myrrh she so loved, no flowers or unguents.
He dreamed of her, but the dreams vanished at waking. He had spent himself in the night. By rare good fortune, Ahotep was sound asleep and not to be roused for anything his brother did. Senenmut bathed and dressed and recovered what dignity he had.
He could not elude his mother, not unless he went hungry, but she carried on as she always had. She made no mention of Senenmut’s failure to be properly concerned for the welfare of his fortune.
He gathered his belongings as he did every morning, endured the rituals of farewell: vague from his father, brusque from his mother, exuberant from his brothers. He went to the palace as always, to the same duties and more, and his hour, mandated by the queen, of driving a team of obedient mares round the court of the chariots.
As he returned from that, flushed and windblown and full of sun and sand and the snorting of horses, he found his lady engaged in a private audience. The petitioner made him gasp and step back, tensed to bolt.
Too late. They had seen him. “Come,” the queen said:
soft, but a command nonetheless. “Sit with us.”
Sit therefore he must, on a stool with legs carved like lotus-flowers, in the queen’s lesser hall of audience. It was a small room, made larger by the paintings on the walls: river and reeds, ducks swimming and feeding and sitting on the nest. They were vivid, colored and painted in the semblance of life. Sometimes during very dull audiences Senenmut imagined that he sat in a boat on the river, watching the water slide past, listening to the calling of birds in the reeds.
This audience was interesting. Too interesting.
“Lady,” said Hat-Nufer, bold as if this were one of her neighbors, and a young and foolish one at that: “I thank you most profoundly for raising my son to his first eminence. But eminence requires more than the simple title. It has a certain state to keep, in the honor of the king and his royal kin.”
Hatshepsut betrayed no outrage at the insolence of this commoner. She was as gracious as she could be with the ambassador of a foreign king, listening gravely and responding, “Yes, it is commonly thought that the servant should show himself in a manner fitting to the rank of his master.”
“And that,” Hat-Nufer said, “is difficult on the wages of a simple scribe and teacher. The princess’ tutor and guardian holds, surely, a higher rank?”
“He does,” the queen said.
“Then,” said Hat-Nufer, “should not his rank perhaps require him to occupy a house of suitable size and location, and a household to maintain it, and the means to maintain them?”
Hatshepsut’s brows raised slightly, imperceptible perhaps to one who did not know her well. Senenmut could not be certain, but he thought she might be amused.
He could have wished for high indignation and the ejection of his mother from her presence; but she had no such mercy. “You are saying,” she said with grave intentness, as if she truly wished to make no mistake, “that I should ennoble my daughter’s tutor? Since, after all, a house and servants and all their maintenance are the province of a lord of men.”
“I am saying,” said Hat-Nufer, unabashed, “that my son has duties and obligations that require more of him than he can manage on a scribe’s wages. He comes home at all hours, stumbling with exhaustion; he forgets to eat; he would forget to draw his allotment of barley and wine and beer and kilt-linen, except that his father sees to it that that is done.”
Senenmut bit his tongue. Rahotep had never seen to anything in his life. It was Hat-Nufer who saw to it in Rahotep’s name.
He could not remember when he had been more humiliated. His mother in front of the queen looked like what she was: a common little woman with neither delicacy nor breeding, and not much beauty, either; he had his face from her. She was in no visible awe of the queen’s majesty. And she talked of him as if he were a hapless child.
The queen did not laugh at her, which was a tribute to royal upbringing and queenly restraint. “Granted,” she said, “that your son has taken on himself a difficult if not impossible task: does that render him worthy of a noble estate?”
Hat-Nufer snorted. “Oh, come! There are perfectly acceptable houses to be had in decent quarters of the city, that don’t need a prince to call them home. Set him up in one of them, with a household appropriate to its size and dignity, and give him a comfortable place to return to when you’ve worn him out. Not,” she said, “that his father’s house is precisely uncomfortable, but it’s small. He has to share a bed with his brother, who is not the most subdued of children. Don’t you think that’s a trifle absurd? He is, after all, your daughter’s tutor.”
“So he is,” the queen said. “I had considered the matter of suitable recompense. Since, however, he never asks, nor demands more than he has—”
“Lady,” said Hat-Nufer, “you know how boys are. When they’re not too proud to use their wits, they don’t have any to use.”
“Indeed,” said the queen blandly. She refrained from glancing at Senenmut, but he saw the glitter of eyes under the lowered lids.
Oh, yes, she was laughing. If he could have shrunk to a shadow and vanished, he would joyfully have done it.
The queen beckoned to one of her chamberlains. “Escort the lady to my private dining-hall. See that she has anything she wishes to eat or drink, and that she is provided with a chair and an escort when it pleases her to depart.”
Hat-Nufer bridled. She was new to the royal art of dismissal. It was a nasty pleasure to see her escorted deftly out.
He, however, had not been dismissed. He remained where he was, too stiff with indignation to move or speak.
Hatshepsut preserved her image of queenly dignity. By that, Senenmut knew that she was plotting something dire.
When she spoke, it was not to him but to her Nubian. “Nehsi. Show him.”
The Nubian wore his habitual expression of lofty scorn, but there was a gleam in his eye. Senenmut’s anger warmed him, which was well: his heart was cold. His mother had done him a great ill turn. Now he would pay for it.
He did not try to linger. If he had, no doubt the Nubian would have lifted him and carried him out.
Nehsi would not answer any questions. Threats, Senenmut had none. Surely nothing could frighten that great beautiful panther of a man.
He led Senenmut through the queen’s palace and out. A chariot was waiting, drawn by a pair of the queen’s mares: the Star of Hathor and her yokemate, the Moon of Isis.
Nehsi ascended and took the reins. Senenmut refused to hesitate. He stepped up behind the Nubian, got a grip on the chariot-rim, braced as the horses danced forward.
He could not imagine where he was being taken. It could be anywhere. Back in disgrace to the Temple of Amon. Back to his father’s house. Even to the mines, or among the builders of tombs across the river in the cliffs of the Red Land.
They turned down the processional way. The horses stepped out boldly, moving well together, matching stride and stride. The sun was strong, its light dazzling his eyes that had grown accustomed to the dimness of the palace.
He was still half blind, eyes running with tears, when the chariot turned and passed under the shadow of a gate. For a moment he wavered in darkness; then the light returned, but lessened, softened by a rustle of greenery.
The chariot stood in a courtyard that was also a garden, bounded with rows of trees in pots. The trees were in flower: their sweet scent drifted around him. A fountain played in the center of the court. Lotus-flowers grew in it; bright fish darted among the broad green leaves.
It was beautiful and quiet, and cool with water and greenery. The tiles underfoot as Senenmut stepped down from the chariot were worn, their bright hard colors faded to browns and greens and blues.
Beyond the court was a house, worn like the courtyard to a soft sheen. It must have been nigh as old as Thebes. An air of antiquity sat on it: a faint scent of dust and age. Yet it was meticulously clean, its furnishings opulent in their simplicity: the carved ebony of a chair, the inlaid ivory of a table, the gilded feet of a couch. The walls were painted with images apt to each room: dancers at a feast in the dining-room, in one of the smaller gathering-rooms a procession of cats and geese, and in the master’s bedchamber a man and a woman in a boat, hunting ducks in thickets of reeds.
The house was old and quiet but not altogether empty. There were servants in the kitchen, clustered there as if they had been commanded to wait. They fell on their faces before Senenmut.
The scent of baking bread wound around him, and the rich smell of beer in the brewing. The truth dawned on him with distressing slowness.
“This,” he said, trying not to stammer. “This is what she—what my mother asked for.”
The Nubian nodded. “This is your house. The queen has given it to you.”
Senenmut was shaking. Gods knew why. He was a man grown, the servant of a queen. Why should he not have a house that was his to dwell in?
He had expected the mines, that was all; or the shadow of disgrace. He was caught off guard.
At length he persuaded the s
ervants to stand erect and face him. They did not seem to be castoffs of the queen’s palace; none was very young or very old, and they were all sound and hale and clear of eye. Now that it was clear to them that he would not be the sort of lord who demanded groveling respect, they held up their heads willingly enough, named themselves to him, proved that he was not mistaken.
“Yes, we are yours,” said the whip-thin nervous man who had named himself the cook. “The queen’s majesty has commanded it.” His eyes narrowed. “You are the princess’ guardian?”
“I am Senenmut,” he said, “who oversees the servants of Neferure.”
“Then we belong to you,” the cook said. “We’re free, mind you. We’re not criminals or captives. You pay our wages; you don’t own us. You do understand that, I’m sure.”
Senenmut did not know whether to laugh or scowl. He settled for a level stare and a sharp nod. “I understand. I treat you well, you serve me well, of your free will.”
“You pay us well, we serve you well,” the cook said with a spark of humor. “You’re young; you’ve much to learn. Never had servants before, have you?”
“We have a nurse and a maid at home,” Senenmut said; then caught himself. Home was no longer his father’s house. Home was here, in this noble residence with its garden court and its proliferation of rooms and its blunt-spoken servants. The queen had commanded it; so must it be.
“Never,” the cook repeated. “Well; you’ll learn. Better a babe in arms than a prince with too high an opinion of himself. Do believe that, sir: princes are miserable masters. Cheap, too. They’ll fill their houses with captives, then wonder why nothing works as it should.”
“I see you can teach me a great deal,” Senenmut said with thinly veiled irony. “Is that the queen’s command, too?”
“She’d never need to order us in that,” said one of the other servants, the boy with the beautiful eyes, whose voice was just breaking. It cracked abominably as he spoke. He blushed, but he kept his eyes up and steady.
Senenmut could give way to dismay, or he could cast himself on the gods’ mercy. He uttered his first command as a master of servants: “Go on with what you were doing. You—Hapi, is that your name? Did you call yourself a master of horse?”