by Judith Tarr
His eyes widened. “You will? You’ll be queen?”
“What, nobody told you?”
He shook his head.
Neferure tossed her own in disgust. “What idiots! Telling you wild stories about my terrible mother, but never letting you know the important thing. It’s not she who will be queen when our father is dead—if she lives that long. I will. You can’t be king without me.”
He drew himself up, affronted. “I will be king! I’m Father’s son.”
“No man is king,” Neferure said, “unless he marries the woman who carries the king-right. That’s the daughter of a ruling queen, brother; a descendant of Queen Nefertari.”
“That’s you,” Thutmose said. His eyes were wide still. “They didn’t tell me. Tell me why they didn’t tell me.”
“I think you know,” Neferure said; but she did not tease him with it. “Because they didn’t want you to know. They don’t want you to know me, either, or talk to me. Maybe they’re planning to get rid of me somehow, or to convince the priests to change the law. Then they can marry you to someone they choose, who has nothing to do with me or with my mother.”
That was perhaps too complicated for him; but perhaps not. He said, “I don’t mind if I marry you. You won’t make me pretend. And you aren’t afraid of me.”
“But if you marry me,” Neferure pointed out, “you’ll have to know my mother.”
“I won’t be afraid of her if I see her,” he said. “I’m afraid of things in the dark. Things that hide. Not things I can see.”
She tilted her head, puzzling out the logic, maybe, or simply studying her brother. “Mother always stands in the bright sun. It’s you who’ve been kept in the shadows.”
“Mama is afraid,” Thutmose said with the hint of a sigh. Storm-in-the-Desert had come to a snorting, foaming halt, still full of herself, but a little more willing to greet him calmly as he came to her. He seemed to take comfort from the lowering of her nose into his cupped palms, the warm hot horse-smell of her, the brightness of her red-golden coat in the sunlight.
Neferure sighed, too, and said to the air, or perhaps to Senenmut, “I wish people wouldn’t quarrel. Wouldn’t it be so much better if everybody just admitted that the gods made me to be queen and him to be king, and let us grow up decently together?”
She was not asking for an answer. She went to drown her own sorrows with the Dawn Wind, sent her out to run on the line as Storm-in-the-Desert had done just now. The task absorbed her, perhaps completely; perhaps not. Senenmut forbore to ask. So young, and so much a woman already—and so very like her mother.
21
Deception, Senenmut had discovered long ago, was the meat and drink of courts. No one told the truth if he could help it; and no one ever walked a straight path. A web of lies bound the royal court together, so intricate that even the most skillful courtier could not distinguish the truth beneath the weaving.
Senenmut was no more innocent of deception than any other courtier. From the time he first shared the queen’s bed, he came to it in subtle and devious ways. If he happened to be attending her toward evening, he departed as a proper servant should, but later he came back. There were passages where no one walked, even servants; chambers that no one saw, and doors concealed in cleverly carved or painted walls. The last of them opened behind the queen’s bed, disguised subtly as itself: a door framed in papyrus pillars.
It was proof, if he ever needed it, that his queen was not the first of her line to seek the arms of a man other than the king. “It’s inevitable, I suppose,” he said to her, “when even the muddiest fieldhand can marry to suit himself, but the queen is given no choice in the matter. She’s bound to the man who will be king when her father is dead, who as often as not is her cousin or her uncle or her brother—since the kingship should properly stay in the family. And if she detests him—if she can’t abide the sight of him—what grace is she given but to suffer in silence?”
“Or to take a lover,” she said. They lay together in her great bed under its canopy of netting, he tangled in her hair, she in his arms. No maid spied on them. The guards were all without.
It was known that the queen preferred to sleep in solitude. Every night a priest set wards of magic and of incense about her bed, and the guards retreated, and the maids went to their own beds, more often in company than not. Nothing and no one could come near the queen, living or dead or spirit of ill.
Nothing and no one but Senenmut, who knew the secret of the hidden door. He was all the guard and ward she professed to need. He came in the quiet hours of the night, and left in the dark before dawn. Sleep was nothing he needed a great deal of, and that was fortunate; or he would have succumbed to exhaustion long ago.
Tonight he was in a reflective mood, and she was pensive. They were as comfortable as years could make them. Their bodies were grown familiar, woven together like two strands in a carpet. He knew the exact curve of her shoulder, the precise softness of her breast. She knew exactly how his head sat on his neck, and how his little fingers were crooked, and that he preferred slow and gentle loving to swift and fierce.
The fear of discovery had sunk to a murmur. No one had ever caught them. “The gods guard us, I suppose,” Senenmut said.
“One god,” said Hatshepsut. “There’s one who guards me above all. I feel him all about me, burning but never consuming.”
He stared at her. She was never one to invoke the gods with every breath she took. She mentioned them seldom except in their place: in rites in the temples, in invocations in the court.
On this night like so many other nights, no more or less magical than any that had gone before, she seemed to have fallen into a strange half-dream. Her voice was soft, slurred a little as if with sleep.
“Amon,” she said, or sighed. “Father Amon. He loves me. He protects me. He even suffers you. You love me, you see. You honor me. You would never betray me.”
“And the king’s right to you? His honor and his reputation?”
She arched her back, curving away from him. Her hair streamed down on either side of his face. He saw hers above him, white and fierce. “What honor is there in lying like a fish while he pumps me full of his seed? What joy is there in listening to him boast of all the heads that he has broken, the booty he has won in battle? He hears nothing that I tell him; cares nothing for me, except that he wears the Two Crowns through his marriage to me.”
He had seldom heard her so bitter, or with so little apparent cause. The king was back from his long hunt, somewhat indisposed with a fever that he had caught in the marshes. She had had to hold audience alone today, and fend off those fools who would speak only to the king. That should have troubled her not at all. She was most content when she could rule alone, unfettered by her husband’s presence.
She should be all sweetness, all warm and smiling, delighted to have had a day free of the king. Senenmut coaxed her down, smoothed her tangled hair, kissed her till she stopped frowning quite so terribly.
She stilled in his grasp, looking hard at him. “Stop trying so hard not to ask. No, there’s nothing troubling me. I don’t know why my mood is so black tonight.”
“Not black,” Senenmut said. “God-ridden. It’s that, isn’t it?”
Warm as the night was, she shivered. Her fists clenched and unclenched. She said in a voice that might have seemed light if one had not known her, “When I was small, I saw gods everywhere. I saw Amon in the sun; Hathor in every cow with horns like the young moon; Sobek in the crocodile that sunned itself on the riverbank. I dreamed that the gods hovered about me as I slept. I heard their voices; I knew what was to be.
“But I grew older,” she said, “and the dreams faded. The sun was only the sun, a fire in the sky. An ox was an ox, a crocodile a simple beast, all belly and teeth. I forgot what they had been before.”
“And now you remember,” Senenmut said.
She peered narrow-eyed into the dark beyond the nightlamp’s glimmer. “I don’t know why it came b
ack. Nothing is different. There have been no signs, no portents. The world is quiet.”
“My mother has always said,” Senenmut said, half somber, half wry, “that when the house is quiet, then she’s most certain one of her sons is about to afflict her with a scandal.”
“You will not,” said the queen with a return of her royal manner, “tell your mother where you spend your nights.”
His lips twitched. So did his body at the thought of Hat-Nufer’s merciless eye on this of all improprieties. “The gods witness it,” he said: “if she ever learns, it will not be from me.”
“See that she never learns at all.”
“I can try,” he said, “your majesty.”
She did hate it when he laughed at her; but the darkness was in her again, blinding her to his mockery. She faced it wordlessly, cold and still beside him, unwarmed by his warmth. Even when he wrapped himself about her, she was chill, unmoving. The gods had claimed her, he thought a little wildly. They left nothing for any mortal man.
In the morning the queen was utterly herself. He, heavy-eyed and woolly-minded, was hard put to make sense of anything. He performed his duties somehow, handed Neferure into the care of a lute-master and then of a master of the bow, slid past her babble about her brother. She had the sense not to burst out with it until she was alone with her tutor; but he had nearly forgotten the whole of the day before, lost it in the queen’s night fancies. He baffled Neferure, he could see, but he had no comfort to offer.
It was as if the dark had slipped from the queen with the coming of dawn, and hidden inside of Senenmut. In her it had unfolded itself in dreams and visions. In him who was neither king nor god, was only darkness.
The king was still indisposed. Marsh-fevers could be tenacious; and the king was nursed by the chief of his concubines, whose fretting could turn a touch of fever into deadly sickness. None but she would have fetched priests and physicians together and set them to curing the king of what needed but time and rest and a cool bath or two.
Rumors of the to-do in the king’s chambers made their way even as far as the queen’s ears. Senenmut, his mind still fogged, reckoned the tale nonsense. He wondered dimly if Isis was sliding into a madness of her own. She seemed to see fear everywhere, threats to her son or her husband, terrible things that to other eyes were no more than shadows.
He left earlier than was his wont, declined to eat, sought his bed in his own house for, he thought, a few moments’ rest. Then he would go back to the palace through the secret ways. Perhaps not the same as he had been using. Perhaps another that he had found. And perhaps he was as mad as Isis, seeing threats in empty air.
~~~
He woke with a start. It was black dark and very still. For a moment he did not know where he was. Not with the queen; the air’s scent was wrong, the bed under him harder, the linens less princely fine.
He was at home in the bed he so seldom slept in nightlong. If a lamp had been burning, it had long since emptied of oil, guttered and gone out.
Slowly his eyes discerned shapes in the dark. Bed; chests; a chair. Walls, and the dark shape of a door. A window through which glimmered a wan ray of moonlight.
Something chittered in the roof. It could have been a bat, or a bird, or a spirit: dead soul or wandering magician, lingering in his rafters. Except for that, he was alone. He, like the queen, was known to cherish solitude in the nights. None who noted the likeness seemed to see what it signified.
And maybe a god did protect the queen, and therefore her lover. Senenmut was sure of nothing, here in the dark; not even that he was truly alive. He might be dead, and this might all be nightmare, a taste of torment before his soul went to the hall of judgment.
He was breathing hard. His skin prickled with apprehension. What he was afraid of, he did not know. The dark itself, maybe. Maybe something worse.
He rose, stumbling, catching himself against the bed-frame. The silence was immense. He heard no voice in the house, no sound of snoring, not even Amonhotep’s pet monkey chittering in its cage.
He had to go to the palace. It struck him with a snap of urgency that had nothing to do with reason. He must go— he must be there. He knew no more than that.
~~~
Senenmut was not the only fool stumbling about in the dark, warding off night-demons with a bit of torch and a borrowed cat. Aunt Teti’s cat shrieked at the loom of shadow out of shadow near the palace gate, raked Senenmut’s shoulder, and bolted into the night.
He stood with stinging, bleeding shoulder, glaring half blind at the figure that bobbed under a torch of its own. The light gleamed on a shaven skull and a pair of bright black eyes. “Why, good morning,” said Hapuseneb.
Senenmut’s nose twitched. Yes, he could smell the morning coming, though the night seemed as black as ever. Soon enough it would be dawn, and then the sun would rise, and all his night fancies would vanish with the demons that had spawned them.
“Oh, I don’t think so,” Hapuseneb said, though Senenmut had no memory of speaking aloud. “We’ve all had dreams and sendings. The temple is like an anthill stirred with a stick.”
“But,” said Senenmut, “it’s quiet. There’s nothing to make us think—”
“Dreams aren’t enough?” Hapuseneb grasped his arm and pulled him toward the gate. The guard was surly and sleepy, but for the priest of Amon and the queen’s scribe he agreed grudgingly to open the gate.
Senenmut had nothing to do with it. Hapuseneb was a priest; gods must vex him endlessly, clamoring for his notice. He was as cheerful as ever, and as difficult to resist. He even coaxed the guard into a twist of the lip that might have been a snarl, or might have been a smile.
Whether in exasperation or in respect for the queen’s servants, the guard let them into the palace. They found all quiet, as it should be at this ungodly hour. The first bread of the day’s baking sent forth its fragrance from the ovens near the king’s palace. Apart from the bakers, no one else seemed yet awake.
But as Hapuseneb dragged Senenmut past the queen’s palace and into that which could only belong to the king, a murmur rose, as it seemed, out of the stones of wall and paving. Someone deep within was shouting or weeping or praying. The guards on the door had a pale, haunted look. Like dead men in a dream, Senenmut thought.
He dreamed this, perhaps. The dark that seemed a living thing, lying even on this palace, breathing vast and slow beyond the flicker of lamps or torches. The distant cries, sounds like women keening, wailing for the dead. What it signified—that was nightmare. It could not be—
“The king is dying,” Hapuseneb said, “or dead.”
Senenmut’s hand slashed the air in a sign against evil. “Avert! If he hears of this, if he believes you have ill-wished him—”
“I’ve done nothing,” said Hapuseneb. “A little fever, an imp of the marshes, a few days’ inconvenience, has conquered our lord and king. Who’d have thought it?”
“Who,” muttered Senenmut, “except the Lady Isis?” He paused. “Do you think—?”
“No,” Hapuseneb said. He smiled sweetly at the king’s door-guard. “You will let us in,” he said.
The guard opened his mouth, then shut it again. Maybe Hapuseneb laid a small magic on him. Maybe not. Senenmut was no priest, to know the truth of it.
~~~
The king lay in his bed which was much grander and higher than the queen’s, in a room full of the images of his kingship: Thutmose in the Two Crowns, Thutmose administering justice, hunting lions, conquering enemies in their hundreds and thousands. Senenmut’s eye, wandering, took in a scrap of inscription: “Mighty am I, unconquerable, living Horus, god and ruler, Great House of Egypt.”
The mighty, the unconquerable, the living Horus, Thutmose son of Thutmose of the line of Ahmose, had fallen not to the sword of an enemy but to the indignity of a fever. He seemed to have felt the shame of it before it stripped the life and souls from him. His face was set in lines of petulance, small niggling irritation that he must die so soo
n, and for so little.
The one who had shrieked and wailed over him was gone, carried away on a wide black shoulder. Nehsi the Nubian came back as Senenmut stood like a witling in the door. “Her women will tend her,” he said in his voice like a lion’s purr.
Hatshepsut nodded briefly. Of all the crowd of priests and physicians, guards and servants, not one dared interfere as she stood over the body of her husband. How she must have come in where for so long she had been forbidden, Senenmut could well guess. She had done it as simply as he had. She had walked up to the door and informed the guard that she would enter.
Her eyes were clear, untormented by visions. Her face was calm. She could hardly mourn this man whom she had liked so little. But he had been king, and her husband. She must know at least some small stabbing of regret.
There was none that he could see. “How like you,” she said to the king, heedless of any who heard, “to go galloping off into the Field of Reeds without a thought for the turmoil you leave behind. Your son is three years old. My daughter, whom he must marry, has hardly begun her tenth year. You leave the Two Kingdoms in the care of children.”
He had nothing to say. His eyes were open, blind as the eyes of the dead must always be. If any of his souls lingered, fluttering in the dark, it offered no response.
She loosed a sound that was half a sigh, half a snort of disgust. Her voice rose. “You! Yes, you, sniveling there. Fetch the embalmers.”
The sniveler was a great prince, a darling of the court, but under her cold eye he could do no other than obey. She sent others on errands of like import: summoning the king’s counselors, passing word to the court, informing the temples that the living Horus was become the dead Osiris. None protested. None dared disobey her. She was terrible in her calm, goddess and queen; and no king now to stand against her will.
22
“You did it!” Isis shrieked. “You poisoned him! You ill-wished him! I know it! I smell it in you!”