by Judith Tarr
She had never met her brother, no more than her mother had. When Senenmut was younger he would have sighed with envy, particularly after a night of sharing a bed with a fractious Ahotep. Now that he was older and had a bed to himself, he knew a moment’s pity for a sister who was denied all the pleasures and pains of a younger brother.
Why, he thought, should it go on so? These were more than brother and sister. They would be king and queen in their time, wedded as their father and her mother were. Senenmut could hope that they got on better than the two before them.
He would know when he saw Thutmose. If anything could be done to bring these children together, he would do it.
~~~
The prince’s chambers were guarded as all royal chambers were, by men whose service and whose loyalty were to the prince. They offered no objection as Senenmut approached, nor stood in his way. He was known to belong to the queen, but it seemed he was reckoned harmless.
Isis might not agree. But Isis was not in these rooms, nor likely to appear there: she had gone with the king on a several days’ hunt, leaving the prince behind under heavy and, she seemed to think, sufficient guard. That was precisely as Senenmut wished it. He entered with a firm step, turning where the guard directed, through an antechamber and into a wide airy room.
Its walls were painted with images of war. The king loomed in his chariot, wearing the Two Crowns, wielding a bow while his horses trampled a horde of enemies. His soldiers marched behind him, rank on rank around the room: footsoldiers in their companies, lords and princes in their chariots.
Senenmut had seen such images in his few brief forays into the king’s chamber. These were new, the paint fresh and vivid. They overwhelmed the two who sat in the room’s center.
Nebsen rose with a glad cry. “Senenmut! Welcome!”
Senenmut murmured a greeting, but eyes and mind were fixed on the other, the small compact figure sitting on a cushion. The prince was naked as all young children were, his head shaved but for the plaited lock of a child and a royal heir, which he would wear even into manhood if his father lived long. He was much as Senenmut remembered from more distant views of him: small for his age but sturdy and strong, with a gift that was vastly rare in a child so young: to sit still.
He was not feeble of wit. His eyes were quiet, but there was intelligence in them: a calm intelligence, as of one who knows well how to wait; but Senenmut sensed a fierce intensity beneath.
Senenmut bowed before him and greeted him as a servant should greet a prince. He inclined his head but said nothing.
“He talks,” Nebsen said, perhaps a little quickly. “Just not often. But when he does, he does it extraordinarily well.”
The prince seemed accustomed to being spoken of as if he had not been there. He regarded Senenmut with that enormous and changeless calm, as if he measured this stranger and pondered his judgment.
“It was quite strange,” Nebsen went on—rattling, it might seem, but Nebsen’s chatter usually had a point concealed somewhere within it. “He never spoke a word till this past Inundation. Not one; hardly even baby-babble. Then one day shortly after he was given into my care, he said to me, ‘Nebsen, take me down to the river. I want to watch Father’s soldiers practice their marching.’” Nebsen laughed and shook his head. “Oh, he took me fair aback, he did. Spoke as clear as you or I, not a lisp or a stammer; and such words as you would hardly expect a baby to know.”
Either of Senenmut’s brothers at Thutmose’s age would have maintained loudly and continually that he was not a baby. The prince did not trouble himself. Having received the guest as was polite, he returned to what he must have been doing before Senenmut came there: playing on the floor with a wooden army.
Senenmut, watching him, observed a little wryly, “I see he is his father’s son.”
“Oh, no doubt of it,” said Nebsen. “Day and night, indoors and out, that’s all he thinks about: soldiers and chariots, horses and weapons. He insists that I read to him from accounts of old wars, such as you would think would put him to sleep, but he listens to every word. If I didn’t keep him close as his mother commands me, he’d be among the soldiers from dawn till dark.”
“And what does his mother think of that?” Senenmut inquired.
Nebsen rolled his eyes. “Ah, his mother! So beautiful a lady, so charming, so perfectly obliging to her husband. Still, she is a woman. Women, Senenmut, are incalculable. Why, my wife . . .”
While Nebsen rambled through a long and crashingly dull tale, Senenmut watched the prince. Thutmose had lined up his troops in orderly rows, foot in front, chariots behind. The enemy were less precise, a scatter of foot and chariots, each appearing to be a lord and his retinue or a barbarian chief and his warband; though that would be very sophisticated for a child as young as he was.
Nebsen ended his story with a sigh and a flourish. Senenmut looked appropriately sympathetic. “Ah well,” said Nebsen. “You’ve never married. Wise of you, to keep yourself free of that bondage.”
Senenmut shrugged, mustered a smile. It was probably crooked. He could not help that.
Nebsen did not take offense. “So you see, her gracious highness would prefer that her son be less warlike in his inclinations. To which his majesty the king replies that one might as easily command the lion to eat grass with the ox. His majesty is delighted with my young lord.”
“I can imagine,” Senenmut said. He bent toward the prince. “Is that a particular battle, my lord?”
The prince looked up. His glance was quick, startling in that placid face. “Yes,” he said. “That is the battle in which Ahmose defeated the foreign kings. He could have fought it so many ways, you see. I want to know which one was best.”
Indeed, thought Senenmut, he could speak as clearly as a much older child. Senenmut regarded him with respect, but no shock or awe. He too had been precocious; he had had his fill then of astonished exclamations. “Do you always think of battles?” Senenmut asked.
“I like battles,” said the prince. “And soldiers, and marching in ranks. A king should always be so, Father says. He has a world to conquer, so that he may rule as the gods meant.”
Senenmut raised a brow. “Do you care for nothing else?”
“I like horses,” Thutmose said.
“Ah,” said Senenmut. “Do you? I came to them much later than you, but I love them dearly. I have a filly—we’re training her to the yoke. She has to wait to be a team, for her sister who is a year younger than she, because no one else is swift enough to match her. She was born on the day that you were born, and her sister was born the next year to the day. We call them our two queens.”
“I like stallions better,” Thutmose said.
“But,” said Senenmut, “mares are faster. And quieter. And more sensible in battle.”
“Have you ever been in a battle?” asked that astonishing child.
“Oh, not I,” Senenmut said. “I’m a scribe, not a soldier. But I can drive a chariot and train a horse.” He paused. “If your highness wishes and your guardians allow, you may make the acquaintance of my two queens.”
For the first time Thutmose smiled. It was a sweet smile, with a touch of wickedness—like, Senenmut thought, Hatshepsut’s.
This could—indeed should—have been her son. He looked like her, talked like her. To be sure, he loved war as much as she hated it; but he was a manchild. Menchildren could be terribly bloody-minded.
Suddenly and quite unexpectedly, Senenmut burned with anger. Such pure white rage in him was rare. Temper he had, and no little share of it. But genuine anger almost never beset him.
He was angry now. Hatshepsut should have known this child. Should have held him in her arms; should have shared in the teaching of him, in the pleasure of his wits that were so much like her own. But while Isis ruled in the king’s bedchamber, Hatshepsut would not be suffered to approach Isis’ son.
Senenmut struggled to keep his anger out of his face. Thutmose smiled, so like his father’s Great Wife,
and said, “It would please me greatly to meet your horses. Even,” he added, “if they are only mares.”
“Then you shall meet them,” Senenmut said. “And you will learn that no mare—or woman either—is only a mare.”
“I’ll always like stallions better,” said Thutmose. “But I will be very respectful toward your mares.”
“That will do,” Senenmut conceded, “until you meet them.”
20
Once Senenmut had won the prince’s consent, he made haste before the king and, more to the point, his concubine should return from their several days’ hunt. On the morning after he made the prince’s acquaintance, he had his fillies, his Dawn Wind and his Storm-in-the-Desert, brought to the palace. They were as like as two birds from the same nest, red-golden beauties marked on the brow with a crescent moon. The Dawn Wind bore no other marking. Storm-in-the-Desert had a ring of white above her right hind hoof.
They had not been in the palace before. He had bought a country house for them outside of the city, that when the river was low, looked down on broad green fields to the water. When the river was high, as it was now, the house stood on an island at the end of a causeway, and his horses dwelt in his stable in the city. They were restive with confinement after their long season of freedom, dancing on their leads, snorting and flagging their tails and calling to the stallions.
“I thought you said mares were quiet,” Thutmose said. He had been waiting in the stable court, Senenmut suspected, for much longer than his guards had liked. Nebsen, easygoing soul that he was, had settled in the shade of the colonnade with a cushion and a jar of beer. He had drunk it well down, as Senenmut could see.
Thutmose stood in front of the younger filly, Storm-in-the-Desert. She eyed him with a wicked glint, and reared up over his head, striking playfully with her forefeet.
Senenmut had never moved as fast as he moved then; or stopped so neck-snappingly short. Thutmose had somehow, in the flurry of hooves, caught the filly’s neck and whirled with her, and ended on her back.
She had never carried a rider. She had not even drawn a chariot. It would be a year and more before she began.
And yet she stood still under the weight of the child, nostrils flared and ears flicking nervously back. He stroked her neck and smiled. No one dared move lest the filly erupt. Senenmut was not even breathing. If the king’s son died under the hooves of one of Senenmut’s horses, not only Senenmut would suffer for it. Senenmut was the queen’s servant, one of her favorites. No one would ever doubt that she had had a part in it.
Easily, smoothly, and completely fearlessly, Thutmose slid from the filly’s back and stood beside her, still with his hand on her neck. “Do be calm,” he said. “I’ll never hurt you.”
She snorted in disbelief, but then she lowered her head and sniffed lightly at his palm. When she found no sweetmeat in it, she nipped the air above it and nudged him with her nose. He laughed and wrapped arms about her neck, but gods be thanked, he did not swing himself astride again.
“That was very foolish,” said a voice from the colonnade, “but very brave.”
Even Nebsen started. The person who had spoken came past him into the light. Senenmut’s back both eased and tightened: eased, because he had expected Neferure before this, and tightened because this thing that he had wrought might be more dangerous even than Storm-in-the-Desert’s hooves striking above Thutmose’s head.
Thutmose regarded his sister with interest. He did not seem to mind that she had called him a fool. “You look like Father,” he said. “And like her.”
There was no doubt of whom he meant. Senenmut had heard that precise tone from Isis when she spoke of the queen. Half fear; half resentment.
“Yes, I look like my mother,” said Neferure. “So do you. It’s all in the family, you know.”
“My mother says that you can’t be trusted,” Thutmose said. “I think she’s afraid. You look trustworthy to me.”
“Oh, do I?” said Neferure from the grand pinnacle of her nine years—almost ten, as she would insist. “I suppose she tells you not to trust your eyes, either.”
“My mother is afraid,” Thutmose said, as if that explained everything. And perhaps it did.
Neferure took the Dawn Wind’s lead from the stablehand. The older filly was Senenmut’s heart’s darling as he was hers; but she adored Neferure. The princess always had a sweetmeat for her, a bit of cake or a date or a handful of barley. It was a honeycake today, and a second one for Storm-in-the-Desert—“Not,” said Neferure severely, “that you honestly deserve it.”
Storm-in-the-Desert devoured her cake and pawed for more. The stablehand, belatedly possessed of sense, pulled her away and set her to running round him on a long line, far out in the court where she could trample no one.
Her sister, having coaxed another cake out of Neferure, turned from the princess to thrust her nose into Senenmut’s hand. When he declined to give tribute, she nipped him sharply in reprimand and laid her head on his shoulder.
He smoothed the mane on her neck. It was slightly paler than her coat, more gold than red, thick and long. The neck on which it lay was beautiful; she was all beautiful even in her awkward youth, with her delicate strength and the lightness of her stride. She reminded him piercingly of the queen who had given her to him.
For that, and because she was herself, he loved her. He rested for a while in the calm of her presence.
But the world went on about him, nor waited for him to take notice of it. Nebsen had drained his jar of beer and fallen asleep. His snores rasped beneath the thud of Storm-in-the-Desert’s hooves on sand, the Dawn Wind’s soft whicker in his ear, the voices of the two children as they withdrew to a patch of shade.
They crouched on their haunches like peasants in the market, even haughty Neferure, and watched the filly dance and curvet at the end of her line. Shoulder to shoulder, companionable, comfortable in each other’s presence, they conversed as if they had known one another for far more than these few moments.
It was not so much what they said—questions about one another; commentary on the horses; idle ramblings such as children could wander into—as that they said it at all, and with such ease. Senenmut doubted that their father and Neferure’s mother had ever conversed so. They would always quarrel, no matter how innocuous its beginning. They rasped on one another like mismatched halves of a door, meeting only to thrust one another apart.
Neferure was wise for her years. Some found her frightening; Senenmut was only glad that he need not suffer the frustration of contending with ordinary childish stupidity. Her brother, for all his extreme youth, was as quick-witted as she. He understood a great deal; and when he did not understand, he was never too proud to say so.
“I think you must be our grandfather all over again,” Neferure said. “He was clever, too, and wise, and he loved to play the soldier. You aren’t anything like your mother; and you’re much brighter than our father ever was.”
“You shouldn’t say that,” Thutmose said. “They’ll hate you if they find out.”
Neferure was unperturbed. “Do you?” she asked.
He shook his head. “Oh, no. They don’t think very fast. They worry too much; they’re afraid all the time.”
“That’s because my mother makes them afraid,” Neferure said. “She never intends to, but she does. You must, too. You think so much faster than they do.”
“I pretend,” said Thutmose. “I make believe I’m still a baby.” He lightened his voice to a shrill child-whine, and mustered a remarkably convincing lisp. “Oh, mama, I’m hungwy, mama. Give me a honeycake, mama.”
Neferure roared with laughter. He gaped at her. Senenmut almost laughed himself, though he knew that laugh of hers, astonishingly deep and infectious to come from so delicate-seeming a girlchild. “O my brother!” she said, still laughing. “Oh, how they must simper over you.”
He grimaced. “Just the ladies, and Mama. Father tells me to stand up straight and talk like a man. But I can�
�t do that. He’d be afraid.” He paused. “I’ll be glad when I’m big enough to stop pretending.”
“Then you’ll have to start pretending something else,” Neferure said, somber of a sudden, and pensive. She nibbled on her finger as she did when she thought hard on a thing that did not please her. “I scare people, too. But not Mother, and not Senenmut. I tried to pretend to be ordinary once: giggling over nothing, shrieking at the boys, worrying about my hair and my eyepaint and my dress. Mother told me to stop the foolishness, and Senenmut set me a lesson so hard I had to do it perfectly or die of shame.”
“They scared people when they were little,” Thutmose said. “I know. Father said, about her—about your mother. She was terrifying. Unnat—unnatural.”
“So are we,” said Neferure.
He looked at her, long and level, as serious as only a small child can be. “I’m afraid,” he said. “If I stopped pretending, Mama would hate me. She hates your mother, she hates you. She’ll hate me, too.”
“That’s not why she hates us,” Neferure said. Her tone was not particularly soothing, but he seemed to take comfort from it. “She hates us because my mother gave her to your father, and in a way gave you to them both; and she’s going to have to pay for it someday. She thinks the price will be your life. So she protects you, and wraps you in worry, tight as a mummy in a tomb; and she tells you stories about my mother, to make you hate her, too.”
“Mama says,” said Thutmose, “that she will kill me because she wants her own son to be the prince.”
“My mother doesn’t have a son,” Neferure said, “and she won’t. She means you no harm at all. She doesn’t even hate your mother, though you must think that’s impossible. She feels sorry for her.”
“I do, too,” Thutmose said. “I’m still afraid of your mother. Father says she wants to be king.”
“Well, she can’t be,” Neferure said briskly. “So there’s nothing to be afraid of. You’ll be king when our father dies and becomes Osiris, and I’ll be queen because that’s how it’s done.”