by Judith Tarr
They began in the morning. They ended near sunset. The lords who had passed were suffered to depart if they pleased, until they were called to the feast that would complete their day of homage. The queen and the king must remain unmoving, unresting save for brief intervals, from the first to the last; and then they were given little respite, but must sit in state in the hall of feasting as they had sat in the hall of audience, living images of the gods’ presence in the Two Lands.
Ancient custom and long habit compelled the lords to be civil on this of all days, though they would go back in the morning to their endless squabbles. That was well, Senenmut thought. His lady was steady on her throne, but she ate nothing and drank little. She did not snap at the maid who pressed her to take at least a sop of bread in broth from the stewed goose. She ignored her, in what might have been contrariness, or it might have been exhaustion. He feared that it was the latter.
Because the procession had ended so late, the feast began late and went into the deep hours of the night. The queen could have excused herself once the carvers had departed with the remains of the whole ox, but she did not rise, did not take her leave.
She had been toying with her untouched cup of wine. She ceased even that, and sat still. The arms of her chair were concealed beneath the table. Only those who stood closest to her could see that her hands were clenched till the knuckles whitened.
Senenmut met Nehsi’s glance. He had not intended to stand so prominently, but worry had set him at her left hand as Nehsi stood at her right. The Nubian’s brows were drawn together: as much expression as Senenmut had ever seen in him in a public place.
And how, short of lifting her and carrying her, could they persuade her to rest? She would not hear Senenmut’s murmur in her ear—perhaps she could not. She seemed enspelled, motionless and voiceless, while the princes of Egypt waxed riotous with wine.
When she sighed and crumpled, both of them were there, the Nubian’s strong arms and Senenmut’s fierce urgency, bearing her out of the hall. They were quick, and so quiet that no one called after them or pursued them.
While Nehsi bore the queen in his arms, striding long and smooth and swift, Senenmut mustered the scatter of servants. One he sent to fetch the chief physician; another, with a prayer that it might not be necessary, he bade seek out the midwife. He had chosen as carefully as he could; his messengers ran with all speed.
~~~
It was a fever she had, and great pain in her throat. Her body burned as if with fire. She could eat nothing, nor would she have drunk the physician’s potions or even water cooled in earthen jars, had he not persisted until she surrendered. He wrapped her in cloths steeped in water that he had blessed and scented with herbs and made strong with healer’s magic. He labored long over her, administering his medicines and chanting his invocations.
The midwife stood aside and scowled. “Fever’s bad,” she said to Senenmut. “It gets too hot, it burns the baby. Maims it; kills it.”
Senenmut prayed that it would not be so. The queen tossed in delirium. Her lips moved. Her eyes wandered.
When they fell on him, they burned hotter even than her fever. She stretched out her hands.
He could not refuse her. He took her hands in his, bone-thin and burning hot as they were. With strength that astonished him, she pulled him down till he half sat, half knelt on the bed beside her. She eased her grip just as it became excruciating, but she would not let him go.
He settled as comfortably as he could. That, as it happened, was in the scribe’s posture, cross-legged on the bed beside the queen, with her hands in his. Her fever was like a living thing, a creature of fire. It conquered her will and her heart’s resistance. It made her see visions.
He saw them reflected in her eyes. The physician’s ministrations blurred them, softened their edges, but they were strange still, like dreams of the dead. She walked in the dry land beyond the western horizon, where the sun shone by night and the day was black and beset with demons. Only his hands held her to the world of the living. She clung to them with all her strength.
Such thoughts as he had, dim and scattered, wondered why she came to him. Why not to her Nubian, whom she clearly cherished, and who loved her? It could not be that he had conversation, or that he could write a clear hand. It was certainly not because he had any beauty. Nehsi was the beautiful one. Senenmut with his beaky unlovely face and his narrow shoulders was massively ordinary.
He would never understand this woman. She, beauty and queen, with her army of servants, might have chosen to cling to any or all of them. But when she walked the borders of the dry land, she turned to Senenmut.
Perhaps it was only that he was a scribe; he had the power of words, and through them the spells that guided a soul through the hall of judgment and into the Field of Reeds.
He was not comforted. If anything his fear had grown greater.
She could die. He knew it with clarity that seers must know, a deep and rooted certainty. If she died, inevitably he must go on living. And he could not endure the thought of it.
Not because he was her servant, and all that he had was by her favor. He would manage well enough; he could seek employment wherever there was need of a scribe, or if that did not please him, he could go back to the Temple of Amon. He had no great fear for himself. But to live in a world without this woman in it . . .
Dear gods. He did not even like her. She was sharp-tongued, quick-tempered, and mightily arrogant. She vexed him endlessly, demanded the impossible, and when he accomplished it, rarely rewarded him with so much as a smile. Gratitude was beneath her.
And for all of that, as she clung to his hands as to life itself, he knew perfectly calmly and perfectly inevitably that he could not live without her. She was the breath in his lungs. She was the heart in his breast. As much of life as he had to give, he gave her, counting nothing of the cost.
She would never thank him. Nor did he want her gratitude, with all the burdens that rode on it. This was enough: to be the one she sought. To be granted the right to give her what he had.
He almost laughed. Seti-Nakht would have been mightily amused. So much for arrogance, he would say if he ever knew of this. All that pride, all that cockiness, and Senenmut had fallen as headlong as any yokel.
Ah, well, he thought. He was mortal flesh. She was queen and goddess. Who was he, then, to resist her?
15
The queen walking living out of the dry land. But she left her child behind: a tiny handful that would have been her son, the king who would rule when the king her husband was dead. He was not well grown enough to go to the house of the embalmers, or to be given space in his father’s tomb. In the life beyond death as in this world of the living, he had no presence, no name, no souls. He was a might-have-been, no more.
She mourned him as one mourns a might-have-been, in grief that somehow lacked a heart. She had never loved him, never known him. But he would have been king. For that she could honestly weep.
And for herself, too, that she had failed a second time to provide her husband with an heir. “I can’t do it again,” she said. “Dear gods, I can’t.”
Senenmut held his tongue while she wept on his shoulder. She had not let him out of her sight since she came to herself and found the child gone, taken away, and her body much weakened with fever. There were others who could comfort her—Hapuseneb and her Nubian not least—but Senenmut seemed to have become her bulwark.
It was nothing improper, he told himself. There were servants about, always, and guards, and priests and physicians. Not her husband; but that was explained away. The king dared not risk her fever. He was much preoccupied, it was said, in ruling the Two Kingdoms alone, without his queen to aid him.
She wanted nothing of her scribe but his strength. He wanted nothing of her that was not proper. She was the queen. He was her servant.
He was let go at last because she reckoned herself fit to put on her state robes and lift up the weight of the crown and appear before the c
ourt. She managed it by sheer strength of will. The court received her with what, for courtiers, was joy. The king embraced and kissed her, which was a great concession in the face of royal dignity. Senenmut saw how she gained life and vigor in the light of her people’s welcome.
She collapsed after, but it was a sleep of honest exhaustion, with no sickness in it. She dismissed him before it overwhelmed her, sent him home to rest. He was so astonished that he obeyed.
~~~
He rested indeed, though in that house, with two young children and his mother and a crowd of servants that seemed to swell with every sunrise, he found nothing resembling peace. Exhaustion dulled his ears and shut his mind to the clamor about him. He walked straight through it without a word, fell into his bed and dropped into sleep as into deep water.
When he swam up out of it, the world was much as before. But the center of it had changed. He looked at his wide airy room, at its walls painted with fans of papyrus, and saw that it was lovely, but that it was empty. She was not in it.
He had no doubt that she woke to her great chamber and her army of servants, and missed him little if at all. Fever had driven her to cling to him. Now that it was gone, she would return to herself, queen and goddess, trusting in no man for her heart’s ease.
That was as it should be. He could not fault her for it, nor wish it otherwise.
~~~
The morning was well advanced as he left the bath—having concluded that there were twice as many servants as he remembered; and what, he wondered, was paying for them all? They were quiet, which was in their favor, and they performed their tasks well and quickly.
That would be his mother’s doing. She had a hard hand with servants, but she was fair; and they seemed to obey her with a good will.
Breakfast waited for him, and a small mincing person who said, “When you have eaten your fill, your lady mother requests the honor of your presence.”
“Where,” Senenmut asked him, “did she come by such formality?”
The servant blushed and dipped his head and would not answer. Senenmut sighed heavily. He took his time in eating and drinking; he was hungry and thirsty, and the bread was fresh and remarkably fine, the cheese likewise, and the spiced fruit very like a dish he had had in the queen’s chambers. He would not have put it past his mother to have bullied the queen’s cook till he taught her the way of it.
When he was well ready, he sauntered to the rooms in which his mother held court. There seemed to be more servants about than he ever saw in the palace, even in the king’s presence. Most were busy: polishing floors, washing or drying linens, running on errands.
His mother did not favor the royal habit of surrounding oneself with idle attendants. She had one of the aunts with her, Aunt Tanit who was a little simple. They entertained guests: a woman whom Senenmut remembered vaguely from their house in the city, and a younger woman, not much more than a child, with a ripe body and a pretty, petulant face.
The older woman was deep in gossip with Hat-Nufer. The younger one, clearly and elaborately bored, looked about her with hungry eyes.
Senenmut could not at first see why she looked so greedy. It was a pleasant room, with its walls painted with images of a lady at home, performing her toilet, dandling her pet monkey, listening to musicians as she chattered with a handful of ladies. The paintings were not badly done, but they were dreadfully old-fashioned, with the lady decked out in ornaments that had been all the rage a hundred years ago.
Still, to a young woman from the city, they must seem wonderfully grand and lordly. The furnishings were no great wonders of richness or quality, not if one knew the palace, but they were pretty enough, with touches of gilt and a carving or two. The eye could slide past the chair-leg on which Amenhotep had cut his first tooth, and the cushions that Aunt Teti’s cat had rather neatly shredded. A girlchild from the city well might covet it all, if she knew nothing better.
Just as she caught sight of him, his mother broke off her spate of gossip. “Senenmut! Come here.”
When she sounded as brightly lively as that, all her kin had learned to step softly. The woman—Ramerit, that was her name; wife of a potter with whom Senenmut’s father had done business—fairly simpered. The girl stared frankly at him, taking him in and finding him reasonably unprepossessing. Since he found her precisely the same, he returned stare for stare, with an arch of brow that had infuriated a better woman than she.
She blushed and lowered her gaze. Senenmut set himself to forget her.
His mother beckoned him to a seat beside her. “Here,” she said. “You know Ramerit, of course. And this is her daughter Amonmose.”
Senenmut’s eyes sharpened. He remembered Amonmose: a gratingly shrill child with a talent for tormenting children younger or smaller than she. She had grown up better than he expected. She was almost pretty, and she looked mildly civilized.
He refrained from saying so. He bowed instead, in lordly fashion, and said, “I give you good morning.”
Ramerit clapped her hands. She had always been a silly woman: girlish well beyond the years of her girlhood, and given to cooing nonsense at animals and children as if they were too excessively dimwitted to comprehend plain Egyptian. Her shriek of delight made him wince. “Oh, Hat-Nufer! Isn’t he charming? He talks just like a prince.”
“Doesn’t he?” said Hat-Nufer dryly. “It’s gone to his head a bit, I’m afraid. But he does well enough.”
“Oh, he does beautifully!” cried Ramerit. “Doesn’t he, Amonmose? Isn’t he princely, with his golden collar and all. Was that a gift, young prince? Did the queen give it to you?”
Her eyes were avid. Senenmut almost sprang to his feet and took his leave, but his mother’s eyes warned him. He would be on his best behavior or she would make certain that he heard of it after.
He answered, therefore, with civility that he had learned in service to a queen. “Yes, lady, that was her majesty’s gift. All that you see here is of her bestowing.”
“Really?” Gods; the woman could not utter a word without a cloying lilt. “How wonderful. She must value you greatly.”
“I serve her as well as I can,” he said, still civil, but with a tightness in it that should do well to warn his mother. “She rewards me as it pleases her.”
Hat-Nufer caught the warning. Her response was ominously bright. “Oh, he’s too modest! The queen relies on him as she does on no one else.”
“Imagine,” said Ramerit with a blissful sigh. “Amonmose, did you hear? This is the most trusted servant of the queen.”
“There are others,” Senenmut said, “whom she trusts as well.”
“But none whom she trusts more,” said Hat-Nufer. “Ramerit; Amonmose. Date wine?”
“Oh!” said Ramerit. “No. No, we thank you. We must go. You know how my husband is when I stay away too long.”
Her giggle was meant to evoke a smile of complicity. Senenmut could manage no such thing. Nor, he was somewhat relieved to note, could his mother.
She pressed the jar of date wine on them. They did not protest too strongly. Ramerit seemed to think that it was the queen’s gift, too; she clutched it greedily, with profuse thanks.
~~~
“You should have told her you and the aunts brewed it,” Senenmut said when they were gone. A reek of perfume lingered: Ramerit must have bathed in it.
Hat-Nufer shrugged. “She can think what she likes. It’s the new brewing—it came out extraordinarily well. And her husband adores date wine.”
“So, as I recall, does she,” said Senenmut. “Father used to make a tidy profit selling her jars to drink her date wine out of. What was it, three jars a day?”
“Two,” said Hat-Nufer, “and you are impudent. What did you think of Amonmose? Hasn’t she grown up well?”
“I’m amazed she grew up at all. She was a fanged horror in her youth.”
“Ah,” Hat-Nufer said. “I’d forgotten. She bit you once for snatching away her doll and tossing it into a cistern.”
“Before I snatched the doll,” Senenmut reminded her, “she had been beating me about the head with it, laughing when I objected, and calling me Baldhead and Scribe’s Monkey. You can still see a scar or two when the light falls just so.”
“Ah well,” said Hat-Nufer. “Children grow up. They change. Have you reflected that you’ll be eighteen years old tomorrow? You’ve grown into a man.”
Senenmut had not reflected on it. The queen’s sickness had driven all such trifles out of his head. He shrugged. “So? I’ve been a man in the world’s eyes since I entered the queen’s service—and what was I then, all of fifteen?”
“Still,” his mother said. “You’re growing older. You’ve got your full height now, I think, such as it is; I notice you’ve a beard to offer the razor. Don’t you think it’s time to think about what a man thinks about?”
“What? Earning a living? Aren’t I doing it well enough to please you?”
She glowered at him. “Stop pretending you don’t know what I’m talking about.”
He opened his mouth to deny any pretense. But he was only half an idiot, though he might be all a fool. He knew what it meant when a mother summoned a son for brief converse with a woman of her own age and station, who came accompanied by a nubile daughter. Prince or commoner, it was all the same. When he reached a man’s years, his mother set herself to marry him off.
Hat-Nufer spoke in his silence. “I do worry about you, you know. As far as anyone can tell, you have no interest at all in women. Is something wrong? Do you . . . prefer men?”
That was difficult for her to say; but she had never minced words in her life, and she did not choose to begin now.