by Judith Tarr
“But why?” he cried. “What am I, that you should even look at me?”
She blinked. “I don’t know,” she said, direct as a child. “Ever since I saw you standing in my chamber, furious that you had been sent to serve a mere queen, with a curl in your lip and a glitter in your eye—I’ve been helpless to resist you. You have no beauty and no sweetness of temper, certainly no grace, and only a hard-won elegance, but you make my body sing.”
“The gods are mocking us,” he said. “I am as far below you as a beetle in a dungheap.”
“And is it not the dung-beetle that rolls the sun across the sky? Ra-Harakhte, my beloved.”
He caught his breath. He was no slave to superstition, but she tempted the gods with her irreverence.
She laughed at his expression. He seldom heard such laughter from her, light and free, unconstrained by the bonds of her royalty. “My beloved,” she repeated. “You do love me.”
“Of course I love you,” he snapped. “No man could avoid it. But for you to look at the likes of me . . .”
“Your arrogance is a sham,” she said. “Your heart is a shy and modest thing, too tender to show itself bare. You see? I see the whole of you.”
“You don’t—”
Her hand stopped his mouth. It was warm. It lay lightly on his lips, but it shook him like a blow. He gasped and staggered.
She caught him, held him up. He remembered the shape and feel of her body—oh, vividly; every night he dreamed it. Her breasts were fuller than his memory had made them, her skin softer, her scent sweeter. Her lips tasted of honey and wine.
He stiffened to pull away. “We can’t—the king—the gods—”
Her eyes caught him, held him. “I am queen and goddess,” she said with the calm of perfect surety.
“But I—”
“The gods have given you to me. You are their gift and their consolation.”
“But why now?”
He could never take her off guard, never catch her unprepared. She smiled a sweet slow smile. “Why not now?”
“Because,” he said, though it burned his throat, “your husband’s concubine is with child as you are unable to be, and you fear that she will give him the son who will be king when he is dead. I am your defiance. You cast me in his face.”
“Yes,” she said, serene as ever. “And I love you, and no danger will ever come to you. That is my vow and my promise. I loved you before I learned to hate him. When he is dead and his concubine’s son is king, we will endure. We will walk together even in the Field of Reeds, where no power of his will sunder us. I dream, you see. And what I dream, I dream true.”
He should do battle with her relentless, illogical logic. He should break away, flee, escape while he still could.
But he did not move. He did not wish to. She was queen and goddess; but she was woman, too, and beautiful, and warm in his arms. His dreams had taught him how she loved to be embraced: tenderly, without haste, till urgency woke in her.
He was awkward, even with dreams to guide him. If she had laughed he would have shriveled, but she was sweetly intent, gentle as he had never seen her, even with her horses. It was strange to be all new to it, and yet to find it utterly familiar. He could believe then what she had told him: that the gods willed it. Why, to what end, he did not know. It might be his death.
Glorious death, if that were so: wrapped in his lady’s arms.
“So be it,” he said into the fragrance of her hair. “As the gods will: so let it be.”
17
Nehsi knew nigh as soon as they did, that his queen and his queen’s scribe had become more than lady and servant. It only surprised him that it had taken them so long. He had seen it when Neferure was born, how she sought that waspish unlovely man as the wild goose seeks its mate. Between them then had stretched a bond like a shining cord, never dimmed, never weakened, however far apart their bodies were.
Others had no such eyes as he had, or willed not to see. The king, by the gods’ mercy, was one of them. He had never been a jealous husband, but he had had no need to be. And now he had his concubine, whom he doted on and fussed over as if he had been an old grandmother. One would have thought that he had never sired a brat before.
Isis, sly creature that she was, encouraged him in his fretting. She carried well and easily, unlike the queen, but every ache, every flutter of heart or stomach, threw her into prostration that was only to be relieved by the king’s presence. When the child roused and began to move, she kept the king by her by day as well as by night, leashed like a dog, and no will in him to protest.
The queen bore perforce the burden of the Two Kingdoms. That of course was nothing new. “I like to rule by myself,” she said. “No fool of a man interfering with my decisions. No royal whim to disrupt the course of my judgments.”
Her heart might be given to a scribe, but her friendship remained securely in Nehsi’s hands. He continued to play the guardsman, though less often than before: for the comfort of it, the pleasure of a task so familiar that it seemed bred in the bone. When she took an hour’s grace in her garden, he still stood watch over her solitude. No duty could prevent him, no task interfere.
“Sometimes,” she said on that particular day, not long before Isis came to her time, “I wonder what it would be like to yield to no man—to be what the king is.”
The earth did not shake at the enormity of the thought, nor did the Horus-falcon stoop out of the sun to rend her. Nehsi, born in Thebes but a foreigner by blood and breeding, paused to consider what an Egyptian would think of a woman who said such a thing. Senenmut, perhaps—
No. Senenmut worshipped her as queen and goddess, loved her as a woman, spoke as freely to her as Nehsi ever had, and quarreled with her, too. He must know what was in her heart. If he did not, he was a blinder man than Nehsi had given him credit for.
She lay on the rim of the fountain, letting the light wind blow its spray across her body. Her hair was free, her gown a shimmer of gauze.
He regarded her dispassionately and was glad of the woman who would warm his bed tonight. The twins, in the way of women, had turned their affections elsewhere in the Nubian Guard, finding greater sport in a man for each, to share and share alike. He had dallied for a while with the queen’s sharp-tongued maid, Meritre, but she was a strong dose for a weary man.
Of late he had found a kind of contentment with a lady of the queen’s wardrobe, half a Nubian, warm and soft-bodied and quiet. Memory of her soothed him now: her rich brown skin, her densely curling hair, her heavy breasts with their great nipples full of milk for the girlchild that she had borne to one of the king’s bodyguard. The child was nigh weaned, and toddled about while its mother lay with Nehsi: a quiet child, almost unnaturally so, but very like gentle Kamut.
Half-dreaming though he was, he heard his queen clearly. “I never wish to be a man, but to have what a man has—to claim the power that he claims by the simple fact of his sex—for that I would give much.”
“Most men,” he said, “would be overjoyed to answer to one man, and one man only.”
Her glance was sharp, meant to wound. He raised armor of imperturbability. That piqued her. She said, “I would answer to none. The gods shaped and fashioned me to rule, in all things but one. By accident or oversight, they made me a woman.”
“Woman and queen,” he said. “No woman stands higher; and only one man.”
“One shallow fool,” she said. “One man who would have done better to be born a petty lordling of a small domain, with nothing to do but fight and hunt and sire sons.”
“I’ve heard the priests say,” said Nehsi, “that the gods set each man where they will, for their own purpose.”
The sound she made was pure disgust, vulgar enough for a guardsman. He snorted at it. She closed her eyes, affronted, and would not speak to him again while she lingered in the garden.
He did not trouble himself over her ill humor. Real, true and deep wrath was rare in her. These fits of temper were of
no more moment than a fine mare’s flattened ears and snapping teeth at the touch of a stranger’s hand. They warned a man to move with care, but they set him in no danger.
And perhaps, he thought, her sharpness with him would preserve decorum when she faced the king. She must not offend him, or give him reason to curtail her power. Courtiers muttered that it was too great already; that she governed too much by her own will, nor consulted the king in whose name she ruled.
Courtiers were always muttering. A wise chamberlain listened and kept his own counsel. Amid the dross, sometimes, one found gold; or poison.
~~~
Senenmut was a wealthy man. It had crept up on him: a gift here, a reward there, a bribe that he would have refused, but the queen laughed and bade him take it. It amused her to let him enrich himself with the treasure of fools. He might do as he was bribed to do; or not. She left him to choose for himself.
Since that was mostly to present a case to the queen, more often than not he did it, in no expectation that she would favor the petitioner. Sometimes she did; sometimes she refused. He never tried to coax her; and for that she professed to find him refreshing. “Which of course is why I love you,” she said. “You never lie to me, nor soften the truth.”
He was a dreadful liar. He had learned with difficulty to be silent when he could not be truthful. Even at that, his face too often betrayed him.
But petitioners seeking the queen’s favor did not want lies, only a voice on their behalf. He never promised to gain them what they asked. They persevered in spite of it.
And he had become amazingly rich. Rich enough to refurbish his beloved, faded house; to pay his brother Ahotep’s way into a company of the king’s guard, and to equip his youngest brother Amonhotep with a tutor worthy of a prince. There was no need any longer for his father to peddle pots in the market.
Rahotep, whom age had only made the more vague, seemed to feel no lack. He continued to spend his days in the tavern where he had amused himself with friends since he was a young man. The same men downed the same jars of beer as they always had, told the same weary jests, sang the same songs. As far as Senenmut could see, they were happy; and his father was content.
His mother took a fierce delight in the office of lady of his household. She never ceased her efforts to see him married off, though that would set a wife in her place. “Mothers are not logical,” she said. “I want grandchildren. It’s your duty to give them to me.”
It was not likely he ever would. The queen was barren. He had no more doubt of it than he did of her love for him—however unworthy he was. It was grief, but it was relief, too; that she would bear no embarrassment to her baseborn lover.
Though if she had, or could . . .
No. No son of Senenmut would sit the throne of the Two Lands. It was enough for the gods’ humor that he lay with the woman whose body belonged to the king alone; who had been born to suffer the embrace of no lesser man.
She was discreet. She called him to her only when there was no fear of discovery: deep in the night, or when she had taken a holiday in her barge upon the river, or when they rode in chariots from Black Land into Red Land, and found secret places where no hunt could find them.
When the king was away she slept alone and decorous. Then a spy might look to see who warmed her bed; but she was wiser than that.
She gave her lover great gifts, heaped him with titles, weighted him with duties. He was not loved in the court, commoner that he was, with no inheritance but cleverness: and so clearly one of the queen’s great favorites, one of the few whom she kept closest. But he remained alive and unpoisoned through a simple expedient. He groveled to no courtier, but neither did he play the prince. He was a scribe who had proved himself in the queen’s service. Wealthy though he was, he claimed lordship of no domain, nor ruled anywhere but in the queen’s palace.
For that, barely, they suffered him. He suffered them in turn, idiots that most of them were. Lordly scions with any grain of intelligence sought the priesthoods, particularly that of Amon, or went for scribes in the House of Life; or, if they were bloody-minded, sought the king’s army and rose to high places in it. Those who loitered about the court were the idlers, the witlessly fashionable, the players at intrigue.
But they were lords of the Two Kingdoms. The queen depended on their goodwill for the execution of her commands. The army was the king’s. The lords and courtiers, the nomarchs and their servants, could choose to ignore her, to heed only such commands as the king himself chose to utter.
“Even a king,” she said once, “rules by his people’s sufferance. He commands; they must choose to obey—even if that choice is laid on them by force. Though rule by force is the resort of a weakling. A strong king rules by the will and the love of his subjects. My father taught me that. He was a strong king, was my father; and a great warrior, too. His son, my half-brother, my husband, is but a shadow of him.”
Whereas she, thought Senenmut, was the image of her father’s strength. Except in war. She had no love for it, and no inclination—no talent, either, perhaps. The battles she chose were all fought in the hall of audience or in the courts of the kingdoms’ justice.
~~~
Senenmut was a wealthy man; but of leisure he had little. Such of it as he was granted, he took grudgingly.
He had not known how weary he was, or how short his temper, until what he had thought a civil reply to some question of the queen’s made her lips tighten and her eyes glitter. She dismissed him out of hand, bade him go away and not come back until he had taken a full day’s holiday.
“But,” he protested, “the princess—the palace—the court—”
“Go!” she commanded him, with a glance at her guards. They closed in with purpose that he could not mistake. He would go on his own feet or in their hands.
He left with such dignity as he could muster. He was too shocked to be angry; and too startled by the leap of his heart. Free. Unwillingly, cast out of duties that would multiply tenfold before he came back to them—but free.
He had not known such liberty since he was a boy, when a festival freed the scribes’ pupils to do as they pleased. He had wandered at loose ends till he found himself a corner to sit in and practice his letters. Idleness had never been an art that he could master.
And now he was left to his own devices. If he went home, his mother would reckon that he was ill, or that he had fallen out of favor; she would try to cure him with yet another marriageable female. He had no one whom he could call friend; no confidant, no drinking companion. All his heart and his wit were given to the queen.
He was not lonely. He needed no friend. But someone to bear him company, to teach him how to be idle, would have been welcome.
He wandered without purpose, as courtiers constantly seemed to do. He lacked their languid ease, their propensity for gossiping in corners. His heart inclined toward none of their diversions. Wine did not allure him, and of women he desired only one; and he had never seen the sense in poisoning his enemies. If he could call them enemies. He would have had to poison the whole court, and the king too.
There were always the horses. But the Star of Hathor was lame, and the Moon of Isis would not run without her. He had no others; had never had time for them.
Still, he thought, the queen’s stablemen knew him. He could command a team and a chariot. It would pass the time, certainly; and if he tarried long enough, he might find his way into the training-court, where the young horses were gentled to the yoke.
His heart was light as he sought the stable, his reluctance diminished to a niggle on the edge of his mind. Such adventure: to go out alone in a chariot, to drive where he pleased and to pause when it suited him, and no one to call him back.
The queen’s own master of horse met him at the stable door. “She sent word,” he said. And there were her own beauties, her red-golden mares whom she suffered no other to touch, save the master of horse. It was a gift, subtle and splendid. He accepted it with the joy that it d
eserved.
18
When Senenmut returned to the stable near sunset, having run the queen’s mares well and far, he found the master of horse in the foaling-stall. The mare who stood there, so huge with foal that she could only brace her feet and endure, was the queen’s own darling. She had been foaled herself in this stall, of a mare whom the old king had given his daughter: a queen for a queen, he had said, or so Hatshepsut remembered, and had told Senenmut.
It was a beautiful mare, even so swollen with pregnancy. She was a red horse as the queen preferred, a deeper red than some, the color of dark carnelian. She had no marking, nor any scar or flaw. She was surpassingly light and swift of foot; few could match her, and for this year and more she had had no companion in the traces. She had been put to the swiftest of the stallions, the king’s moon-white Eye of Horus.
She had yet a while before the foal came. A mare almost never foaled in daylight. It was horse-magic, moon-magic; the sun enfeebled it.
The master of horse was called Kamose. His true name was something incomprehensible in one of the tongues of Asia; but Kamose did well enough, and he answered to it. He stood in his striped robe, bent from his great height to press his ear to the mare’s flank. His hands ran over her belly and slipped beneath. He nodded. “Tonight,” he said.
The mare sighed and lipped at a wisp of cut fodder. Kamose stroked her neck and withers. “Ah, beautiful one,” he said in sympathy. “It’s over soon, and well over.”
She knew. She had foaled before. But as all mares will when they are within hours of their time, she chose not to believe him.
Senenmut stayed to comfort her. Kamose welcomed the assistance. As much as he loved this one mare, he had a stableful to look after, and a horde of stablehands who must be driven with a tight rein and watchful eye. Senenmut, sitting on a heap of straw just outside the foaling stall, was out of the way and acceptably quiet.
He even slept, dozing with his back to the wall, but it was a light, uneasy sleep, marked by the movements of the queen’s red mare. He was aware, if distantly, of the evening round of the stable: bringing in those horses that had been turned out to run in one of the courts, feeding them all, bedding them down, snuffing the lamps one by one in procession toward the doors. A lamp remained burning on a shelf over his head, casting a glimmer of light into the mare’s stall.