by Judith Tarr
She was quiet, but it was a restless quiet. She had picked at her evening’s fodder, scattering more than she ate. She went back to it at intervals, but she was beginning to feel the pangs of the foal’s coming: stamping, snapping at her sides.
When she went down, Kamose was there as if some god had called him; and another behind, a slight figure in a kilt with its hair in a braid. But for the eyepaint that no Egyptian would be seen without, the queen was bare of adornment, stripped for whatever action the night would bring.
They had foaled mares before, she and Kamose; and Senenmut was no novice, either, though never such a master as the others were. They moved in concert as they had more than once before. The mare knew her duty and did it well and quickly, without fuss. She left them little enough to do until the foal lay wet and glistening on the straw. Then she suffered them near her, inspecting the red filly-foal, uttering words of guard and guidance upon it, awaiting and then examining the afterbirth and finding it all as it should be.
That was great power, great magic, to bring a creature whole and perfect into the world. And such a creature: red like her mother, it seemed she would be, and on her forehead a marking like a crescent moon. It was Senenmut who held her soft and still damp in his arms, welcoming her to the world of the living, finding in her eyes the secret of her name. He whispered it in her ear, and she heard him: the ear twitched; she butted her head against his hand.
She was seeking her mother’s teat. He let her go. She wobbled in her soft new feet, tangling them in one another, questing with blind intensity for the thing she must have above all others. The mare, the worst of her task done, nuzzled its outcome and urged it gently toward her flank.
Senenmut was grinning like an idiot. So was Hatshepsut; and Kamose had so far forsaken his dignity as to allow a smile through the thicket of his beard.
“She is beautiful,” said Senenmut, “like the young moon in the planting time.”
“She will be as lovely as her mother,” Kamose agreed, “and as noble as her father. See how she stands already, straight for one so young, and strong. She’ll be as swift as a wind in the desert.”
“Then let her be the Dawn Wind,” the queen said. Her eye caught Senenmut’s. “And let her belong to my scribe, the tutor of my daughter.”
Senenmut caught his breath. “Lady! You can’t mean—”
“Do I ever say aught but what I mean?”
He flinched slightly at the edge in her tone, but he was not cowed by it. “Lady, she was to be her mother’s heir, the queen of your stable when her time comes. You can’t give her to me.”
“I can,” Hatshepsut said inflexibly, “and I have. Are you fool enough to refuse her?”
“No,” he said. “But you are a fool to give her away.”
“Sometimes,” said the queen, “it pleases me to be a fool.”
He shook his head. The filly, just then, chose to wander away from her mother, pressing up against him, unbalancing him till he must embrace her or fall. He could feel the sleep in her, the sated hunger, the drowsy wonder at all this strange new world. As he sank down, she went with him, laid her head in his lap and sighed and went to sleep.
“You see,” the queen said. “Even if I hadn’t given the gift, she would have given herself.”
If anyone else had been standing where Senenmut had stood, that one would have received the gift instead. He did not say so. The gods were playing with him again. It had been a hard lesson; but he had learned not to quarrel with them when they were determined to give him whatever he had dreamed of.
He bowed therefore, as formally as if he had been in court, though somewhat impeded by the weight of the foal in his lap. “I thank my lady,” he said, “with all my heart.”
~~~
The king’s concubine bore her child on the same night that Senenmut’s filly was born. It was a son, as its father had prayed and its mother had serenely expected. He was named Thutmose, like his father and his grandfather before him. That in Senenmut’s mind was great presumption.
The queen was astonishingly calm. “It’s fitting enough. His father was a concubine’s son, too. Now if he had been mine . . . I would have named him something different. Something powerful, something worthy of a queen’s son.”
~~~
She went in the morning to call on the king and on the king’s concubine. She had dressed with care, as queen and goddess; but not so splendid that she mocked the concubine’s rank and station.
The guards at the gate of the king’s palace stood firm in front of her and would not let her pass. Nehsi, who spoke as her herald, chose calm reason over wrath. She did not gainsay him, which spoke well for her wisdom. “Send word to his majesty,” he said, “that her majesty waits without.”
“His majesty is in seclusion,” said the captain of the guard, as calm as Nehsi, and as reasonable. “I am certain that when he emerges he will be delighted to receive her majesty.”
“Her majesty recognizes the king’s desire for quiet,” Nehsi said, “but she wishes to speak with him now.”
“Alas,” said the captain of the guard, “his majesty will see no one.”
“He will see her majesty,” Nehsi said, suffering a hint of iron to enter the blandness of his voice.
The captain of the guard neither moved nor yielded. Nehsi set himself to thrust past, but the queen’s voice halted him. “No. Allow him this indulgence. For the moment.”
She did not retreat. She withdrew as if the choice had been hers, with the air of a queen who humors her husband’s whim.
~~~
Not until much later, when she had held the day’s audience and judged in the tribunal and entertained a gaggle of court ladies at a feast in honor of one who was to marry the nomarch of Abydos, could she retreat to her chambers. Then she unleashed her temper. It was short, but it was fiery. Her maids fled the blast. Her guards took refuge in the corridor—all but Nehsi, who retreated to the door but did not escape through it.
Senenmut alone was bold enough or fool enough to remain where he was. He had come to read to her from a new book, a collection of poems that he had found thrust inexplicably into a heap of archives from the time of Queen Nefertari. He clutched the scroll-case to his chest, standing in the middle of her sitting-room while the storm broke about his head.
She could swear like a trooper, but when she was truly, bone-searingly angry, she uttered each innocuous word with the mincing precision of a court dandy. Likewise, when she was merely furious, she hurled whatever came to hand, with deadly accuracy. True rage found her motionless, erect and still, hands clenched into fists at her sides.
But ah, such things she said, such devastating commentary on the king, on his proclivities, on his fondness for leaving her to do all his duties that he found excessively dull. She spoke rapidly, in a tone so flat it might have seemed calm, except for the crisp and crackle of fire on a listener’s skin. It was that calm which had struck terror in the hearts of her servants. Hatshepsut in a rage was dangerous. Hatshepsut in the calm beyond rage was deadly.
Senenmut did not honestly fear for his life, nor overmuch for his hide. But that he risked exile or return to the rank of his birth, simply for showing his face in front of her when she was clearly ready to kill something, he did not doubt for a moment.
“He does not trust me,” the queen said to the air just in front of her. “He dares to tell me, as clearly as if he had written it on papyrus, that he will not permit me to visit his concubine or to look on her son. Fool! Does he think that I would strangle the brat in his cradle?”
Senenmut bit his tongue. She wanted no answer, and certainly no comfort. He had to hope that his presence would calm her, soothe her rage, turn her mind away from the magnitude of the insult. Vain hope—arrogant, too. But he could not help it.
“That child,” she said, “will be king, the husband of my daughter, the lord of these two kingdoms. I am their lady and queen. It is my right that I should see him; that I should know what he is.”<
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“At that age,” Nehsi dared to say from the safety of distance, “there’s no telling what a baby will turn into. They all look like shriveled monkeys.”
Her eyes blazed. Her chin rose even higher. “I would know. A queen knows a king. Even when I was small and my so-noble husband was a handful of years older than I—even then I knew that he was no match for my father.”
“Can’t you wait?” Nehsi asked her. “Patience is a queen’s best virtue. If he’s healthy he’ll live; if not, he’ll be out of your way. And when he’s old enough that the kingdoms may see him, and he them, then you can reckon his worth.”
She laughed, a whipcrack of sound with no joy in it. “This is not about patience. This is about my right as queen to know who—and what—will be king when my husband is dead. My husband denies it. Were I a man, O my servant, I would go to war for it.”
“You still could,” Nehsi observed.
“Yes. Indeed I could. And I could put on wings, too, and leap from the highest tower of this palace, and command the gods to let me fly.”
She dropped down abruptly, heedless of her robes’ stiffness, sitting on her heels on the floor. Her fists struck the tiles once, twice: a child’s fierce eruption of temper, as swiftly ended as it had begun. “May a jackal devour his liver! I had no love for him ever, but I was never his enemy. Never till now.”
“That, I think, may be what Isis is hoping for,” Senenmut said.
Both the queen and the Nubian started. He had been standing between them, buffeted by the force of their contention, but they had seen through him as through air and shadows. His return to solidity took them aback.
“I don’t think,” he said, “that this comes from the king. He’s not a subtle man, and he’s not afraid of you, either. He didn’t try to keep you out while his concubine was carrying the child, when he might well have feared some poison or some curse that would cause her to miscarry. This shutting of his door now that the baby’s born—that’s another mind at work. Isis is feeling her triumph, I think. She’s trying to play the queen.”
“Then she can play it properly,” Hatshepsut snapped, “and instruct the guards to speak in her name and not in my husband’s. That’s weakness, if the little idiot only knew it. I can demand a guard’s obedience, and get it.”
Senenmut allowed himself the relief of a sigh. She was still in a fury, but she was thinking. She was arguing sensibly, as far as this whole affair had any sense in it.
He was glad to see her returned to herself again; but he was mildly wary still. She had fallen silent, chin propped on fist, frowning at the air. She was plotting something. But what it was, she was not about to confess.
She rose abruptly. “Nehsi. Fetch my maids. I’ll bathe, I think, and rest. Senenmut: read to me while I bathe.”
Both men bowed. They did not exchange glances. Nehsi, thought Senenmut, was as watchful as he was, and as mistrustful of her sudden change of mood. It would hardly be like her to send an assassin to the little prince’s chamber; but when she was at this pitch of temper, there was no telling what she would do.
19
What the queen did, as far as anyone could tell, was nothing. She went about her duties as before. She did not approach the king or his chambers, or ask to look on his son. She had sunk into a kind of quiet that alarmed Nehsi the more, the longer it lasted.
When the king’s son was presented to the people, given his name and lifted up to the sun that was the eye of Horus and the protector of kings, the queen could not be prevented from attending. Nor was she. She came no nearer to the child however than a spear’s length, the half-width of the circle of guards that stood about her.
There was no open insult in that: the queen was often so guarded, and the king too, a guard of honor to her majesty. But she was a prisoner, however subtle the prison. And she knew it.
Nehsi, who had taken command of the guards rather than suffer the king to set a man of his own over them, saw how the king favored his concubine. She need not walk in procession to Amon’s temple; she was given a chair like a great lady, and set in it in the gown and ornaments of a queen, though never—and that was well indeed, thought Nehsi—a queen’s crown. Her elaborate plaited wig and her golden circlet were such as any lady of rank might claim.
And rank she had now, by virtue of the bundle she carried. The child had a nurse; one could hardly expect her to ruin her beautiful round breasts with giving suck to her son. But this she would surrender to no other woman: the great joy and honor of standing up before the Two Lands with the king’s son in her arms.
She looked, as ever, like a cat in cream. She was careful not to stare boldly at the queen. She would not gloat openly; she was no such fool. But the glances she slid at Hatshepsut were wickedly bright. See how I triumph, they said: I, the serving-girl, the morsel you sent to be the lion’s dinner.
Hatshepsut’s face was still and her eyes quiet, betraying no outrage, offering no insult. Isis was disconcerted, perhaps. Her glances were more frequent as the day went on, procession and rite in the temple, presentation before the people, feast in the court from which the child, sound asleep with his nurse’s teat in his mouth, was taken softly away. She had to eat what was set in front of her; a taster was not suitable and would have been a cry to war, but she was careful to touch nothing that the queen had not also eaten.
“Idiot,” the queen said when it was over, safe in the sanctuary of her own chambers, with her trusted people about her. “I’d never have poisoned her; only the baby. And seen to it that she conceived no more.”
Since that was manifestly true, no one took issue with it. Isis, who might have done so, was locked within the walls of the king’s palace, well away from the queen’s influence, guarded so scrupulously that she could hardly visit the privy-pot without its being watched and recorded. The queen was a freer woman than she: free of the sky if she chose, and of the palace certainly, all but the rooms in which the king’s son grew from a plump quiet infant into a plump quiet boychild.
~~~
Thutmose, son of Thutmose, son of Thutmose, was hardly a guardsman’s son as people sometimes whispered. Even as a young child he had the unmistakable stamp of the king’s family: the short compact body, the small square hands, the nose that in the king was a jut like a ship’s prow, and in the queen a haughty arch. His half-sister Neferure had it, too, but like her mother she was fortunate; hers was elegant rather than imposing.
She was a lively child. She spoke her first word early, and followed it quickly with a hundred more. She read, wrote, sang and played harp and lute, mastered the arts of a lady as well as the arts of a queen—even to the bow and the chariot—while her brother was still dreaming at his nurse’s breast.
He was much quieter than she, by all accounts. Contrary to the wisdom of nurses and tutors, that boys are invariably more boisterous than girls, he never cried, never misbehaved. He was so quiet that people whispered. He was mute, they said, or simple. Or, murmured a few bold spirits, afflicted with a curse.
~~~
In point of fact, as Senenmut undertook to discover, the boy had a voice and seemed to have a fair sampling of wits. He simply preferred to keep his own counsel. He was a remarkably self-contained baby, content to lie for hours in his cradle, watching the play of sun and shadow on the wall; or to play by himself in the walled garden that adjoined his mother’s chambers. His first plaything, so Senenmut was told, was a wooden horse with a wooden chariot. He would gallop the horse through the garden, and cause the rider in the chariot to do battle with enemies made of reeds and woven grass.
When he had passed his third year, he went from his mother’s care to that of a tutor. Isis did not give him up easily, but although the king was still besotted with her, willing to yield to her every whim, in this he was adamant. His son would be raised as befit a man and a king.
Therefore the prince came out from among the women and into rooms of his own, with his own servants, his own guardsmen, his own tutor and precep
tor.
That was a man whom Senenmut happened to know, if not well. Nebsen as he was called—his proper name and titles were much longer and more dignified—had been a handful of years ahead of Senenmut in the Temple of Amon. He had won a name for easy camaraderie and willingness to please. His skills with the pen were less remarkable, but as Seti-Nakht had been heard to observe, a man did not need to be a great scribe to attract and keep a king’s notice.
Nebsen had completed his studies and entered the king’s service, assisted by noble connections and a remote claim to kinship with the royal line. His affable ways must have endeared him to the king; as for how he had won the prize, the care of the king’s son, he would tilt his head and smile and say as coyly as a woman, “Let us keep our secrets, shall we?”
He did not seem to share Isis’ fear of the queen, nor did he trouble to shun the princess’ tutor. They shared a jar of beer on occasion, exchanging tales of royal offspring. And in short order Senenmut won what he had been hoping for: an invitation to visit Nebsen in the little prince’s chambers.
A wiser or less trusting man would have been careful to avoid just that, letting the queen’s favorite so close to the king’s son. But Nebsen had never seen any harm in Senenmut, nor in much of anyone else, either.
Senenmut came to the prince’s chambers as a guest, and carefully not as a spy for the queen. He had been engaged in teaching his own charge the intricacies of poetic meter; he brought with him a gift for the prince, a scrap of papyrus rolled and tied with a ribbon. On it was a poem that Neferure had written, charmingly artless but by no means clumsy, addressed to her brother and admonishing him to be both beautiful and wise. She had insisted that Senenmut bring it, and that he present it to the prince with her greetings.