by Judith Tarr
“Please,” said the queen in silence that rang after the shrilling of Isis’ voice. “Sit down. Will you have wine? It might calm you.”
Isis gasped and sucked in breath like a great, whooping sob. Nehsi braced to leap if she succumbed yet again to hysterics.
But she seemed to have mastered herself. She could even weep beautifully, he noticed: a glistening trail of tears down those ivory cheeks, and a pathetic charm to that mouth all twisted with grief. In the hour and more since he had carried her into her chamber and entrusted her to her servants, she had managed to bathe, refresh the paint of cheeks and eyes, and put on a mourning robe. He contemplated that without great surprise. No one else had been prepared for this; but Isis in her fear and her foolishness had expected that the king would die.
He admired her no more for that. Nor for her sudden, lightly trembling calm, her big eyes fixed on Hatshepsut’s face. “I do not need wine,” she said in a small, contained voice. “You do not need to treat me like an idiot child.”
“I treat you as your conduct deserves,” the queen said. She stood while Isis sat, in Isis’ chambers deep in the king’s palace, but it was she who ruled here and Isis who remained by her sufferance.
“You were my servant,” said Hatshepsut, “before I gave you to my husband. Now that my husband is dead, you hold a certain rank as the mother of his heir. You continue in that rank; no one will or can deprive you of it. But you will remember, O concubine whom men call Isis: I am Great Royal Wife. I am the daughter of daughters of Queen Nefertari. If I am given the smallest reason to suspect that you aided my husband on his passage to the realm of Osiris, then you will join him on the journey.”
Isis had gone even whiter than paint and artifice could make her. “You cannot blame me for his death. He died of a fever.”
“Certainly,” Hatshepsut said. “And whose yearning to hunt in the marshes caused him to fall ill? He could have remained here, horrendously bored but safely alive.”
Nehsi thought that Isis would burst into tears again, but she seemed to have wept herself dry. Burning dry; or perhaps that was hate. “He never loved you,” she said with sudden venom. “He detested you.”
“And I detested him,” said Hatshepsut. “He was still the king, and I was his wife. You may cherish illusions of ruling as regent in your son’s minority. Dispose of them. I am the daughter and wife of kings. You were born into servitude, of a line of servants. You have risen higher than any before you. But you will rise no higher.”
“I have friends,” Isis said. “Those who were the king’s loyal servants, who have no love for you, nor ever will—”
“They may not love me,” said Hatshepsut, “but they know whose daughter I am. What will you do to contest it? Seduce them singly or all together?”
“You are reckoned beautiful,” Isis said, “but I am more beautiful than you. And the prince—the king—is my son.”
“You mew like a cat,” Hatshepsut said to her. “Have you claws, then? Will you wage war with me? Or have you just enough sense to understand how tedious it is to rule two kingdoms? Dispose of me, destroy me with treachery, and it all falls to you. All of it, little kitten. Forty-two nomes, forty-two nomarchs, a hundred scribes for each one, each reckoning up a hundred accounts for his lord and master. How many baskets of grain, how many cattle, how many fat geese and how many jars of beer are in each nome, and who receives them, and how, and for what services—”
Isis clapped her hands to her ears. “Oh, stop that! He told me what it was like. He hated it. He said you love it—live for it.”
“I loathe it,” said Hatshepsut. “But it is necessary; and I have a gift for it. Before you dream of seizing power, of making yourself regent while I languish in exile or worse, consider that without me you have no one to bear the tedium.”
“A queen can command anyone she pleases,” Isis said with what perhaps she fancied was queenly hauteur.
Hatshepsut, who was queen in truth, lifted her chin a fraction. “A queen may. A regent who was a concubine, who has no gift or talent for ruling kingdoms . . .” She shrugged. “Perhaps I should leave you to it. It would be pleasant to be free; to call my time my own, to do and go as I please.”
“You would go into exile,” Isis said.
Hatshepsut laughed, light and free. “Oh, how hard you try to roar like a lion, and still you mew like a kitten. Of course I would not be exiled. You might demand it, but the lords of Egypt would decline to obey you. No man will touch or harm the living Isis.”
“I am—” Isis stopped. Nehsi doubted that it was wisdom that constrained her. She was afraid of Hatshepsut—deathly afraid; and hating her for it.
The hatred of a child was a frail and changeable thing. Hatshepsut seemed undismayed by it. Nehsi was more wary. A child could harm where it hated; could kill, if it came upon a weapon. It lacked the sense that would stay a wiser hand.
“The kingdoms will look to us for strength in this time of trouble,” Hatshepsut said: “a king dead before his time, his heir hardly more than an infant. We must present to them the face of amity, and give them a strong regency, that they may have no fear of the kingdoms’ fall.”
“The Two Lands can never—”
Almost Nehsi thought that Hatshepsut would strike the little fool. But she struck the arm of her chair instead. “A hundred years ago, the king in Thebes was subject to a foreign king. Yes, the Two Lands can fall. They can topple in a night, if the gods will it. You who do not know this, whose faith is as blind as it is inviolate: would you presume to demand a share in this regency?”
“I must.” Isis’ voice was light and sweet; it could not be otherwise. Yet it was astonishingly firm. “My son is not safe with you.”
“Which?” demanded Hatshepsut. “His life or his adoration of you? Are you afraid that once he knows me, he may learn to despise you?”
“You would teach him to hate me,” said Isis. She was perhaps close to tears, but too stubborn to give way to them.
“And therefore you teach him to hate me,” Hatshepsut said: “as if one hatred could fill him up, and leave no room for more.”
Isis twisted her hands in her lap. She was grievously overmatched, and she must know it. “I am his mother,” she said. “To you he is nothing but a head on which to set the Two Crowns, since you can’t wear them yourself.”
“And whose fault is that? Who has kept me rigorously apart from him, and never allowed me to come within a spearlength? He must marry my daughter. What will she have of him who is her brother, whom she has never spoken to, whom she has never known?”
Nehsi drew breath to speak, but said nothing. What the tutors had done was common knowledge among the servants: that they had brought sister and brother together, and the two had begun to be friends.
The high ones knew nothing of it. He was not sure why he kept silence. Out of circumspection, he hoped; to forestall a war. It was not loyal, but it seemed to him that it was wise.
“She will know him now,” Isis said, “since they will marry. But until he’s old enough to do what a husband does, it were best if—”
“My husband and I were kept apart,” said Hatshepsut. “No one was afraid, and no one feared that my mother would corrupt my husband until he turned against his mother. It was simply the way of things. I am a woman, he was a man. Our worlds seldom met.”
Isis brightened visibly. “Then they can—”
“No,” said Hatshepsut. “That way lies division, and eventually hatred. The king and his queen are the twinned souls of Egypt. When they are at odds, the kingdoms suffer. These children who will be king and queen—for them I would wish a better fortune.”
Isis did not understand. Nehsi did not think that she ever would. She lacked both subtlety and wit. Nor was she one who changed her mind once she had made it up. She had decided that Hatshepsut was a threat to her son. She would not alter that decision, nor yield to reason.
Yet fear could sway her; and Hatshepsut wielded it as a king should w
ield a sword. “We will preserve all semblance of amity,” Hatshepsut said. “Our children will be wedded and crowned as soon as may be: when the seventy days of the king’s embalming are over and he is laid in his tomb, and the kingdoms turn again to the world of the living. Now and hereafter, I am queen regent of the Two Lands. You may continue in this place, or in another if you so wish. One properly distant and appropriately secluded.”
“I will stay here,” said Isis, shaking but standing fast. “Someone must protect my son.”
“The whole of Egypt will protect him,” Hatshepsut said, not troubling to conceal her exasperation. “Very well. Stay and fret. It matters nothing.”
~~~
“You could have handled that better,” Nehsi observed in the quiet of the queen’s inner chamber.
Hatshepsut paused in readying herself for sleep. The maid Mayet, deft and circumspect, continued to brush out her mistress’ hair. Hatshepsut took no notice of her except to refrain from turning to glare at Nehsi. “How should I have handled it? The woman is an idiot.”
“She was a perfect match for your late and too little lamented husband.” Nehsi leaned back in the chair that he preferred: the tall one nearest the door. “It’s the gods’ jest, you know: to give you the gift of winning hearts—all but those of your husband and the mother of his heir. Nothing that they say or do can please you.”
“It’s always calculated to the finest degree, to drive me into screaming fits.” The queen sighed. “Oh, gods, Nehsi, I have no self-control around either of them. If anything she’s worse than he was. He had a glimmer of intelligence, hidden deep. She has none at all.”
“Maybe not,” said Nehsi, “but she has a certain level of cunning. She knows what will vex you past the edge of reason.”
“So does that blasted monkey Neferure used to keep,” Hatshepsut snapped. “It had the grace to die before someone throttled it.”
“One can always hope,” Nehsi said with careful lack of expression.
Her brows rose; then lowered and drew together. “No. Don’t think of it. Don’t say it. Such things solve nothing. Her only crime is that she provokes me into fits.”
“And she teaches her son to hate and fear you.”
She barely paused. “I shall put an end to that. Watch and see how I teach him to love me.”
23
When the days of the embalming were over, the king was laid in his tomb far away in the bleak hills of the west, out of sight or scent of the Black Land. Then those who mourned him came back to the green and living places, to Thebes that had turned from grief to gladness. So it had been since the world was young, and so it would be for thousands and thousands of years. One king died. A new king was raised in his place: took the crowns and the crook and the flail, the throne and the titles, the name and power of a god.
Menkheperre Thutmose was raised up in the Temple of Amon, and then before the people, on a day that was a rarity. Many reckoned it a portent. It rained, a storm out of a turbulent heaven, lashing the people who thronged the processional way. It drenched those who marched in the procession, draggled the feathers of the great fans that should have cooled and shaded the king; it buffeted the little king riding high in the great state chair, and threatened the balance of his bearers, who were hard put not to slip and stumble on paving stones gone suddenly treacherous.
He seemed unafraid. The tall crowns, White within Red, had been cut to his measure and bound securely to his head. The false beard, which looked truly absurd on that soft young chin, had gone somewhat limp, but he did not try to remove it. That was a relief: Senenmut had labored long with the boy’s own tutor to persuade him that he must wear it.
Senenmut should have been trudging in the king’s following, cradling a dripping feather of honor as did the rest of the notables nearest to the new young majesty; but he had escaped when the rain began, and slipped and wriggled along the crowd’s edge till he could see the procession as one apart from it.
It was an antic impulse, a child of the storm. He did not often yield to such things. It was the rain: it was all out of nature. It pummeled his head even through the wig, deafened his ears and fuddled his wits—or perhaps cleared them as they had not been since the last king died.
The crowd’s roar drowned all sound, but he could see how the king bent his head back to catch the rain in his mouth, and laughed. He seemed oblivious to the throngs about him, or the weight of his crowns, or the burden that would fall on him when he set foot again in the palace.
Neferure rode in a chair beside his. He was her husband now. They had stood together in the temple, and would stand again in the palace, to swear the vows and affirm the contract between husband and wife, between the king and his queen. He had spoken the words as he was taught, though how much he understood, Senenmut could not be certain. Neferure had understood them all. Her voice had trembled ever so slightly, but she had not refused; she had not turned coward and fled.
Brave child. She had years to wait before she must fulfill the whole of vow and contract. She would be a woman grown and well ready, when at last Thutmose was old enough to do what a man does with a woman.
She admitted to no regret that she was bound to a child so much younger than she. “At least I like him,” she had said to Senenmut before she went out to her wedding. “Not as a woman likes a man, I don’t think—but I can talk to him. I’m not grieved that he must be my husband.”
“Do you wish he were older?” Senenmut had asked.
She thought about it for rather a long while before she answered. “No,” she said. “No, I don’t. I’m not old enough yet, either. We’ll both wait. And when we’re ready . . .”
A dozen years, thought Senenmut, or precious little less, before Thutmose was of age to be a proper husband to his bride. She might not find the waiting so easy when she was a young woman and he was still a child.
But it was done. There was no undoing it. They rocked and swayed through the rain, gleaming in gold, a small erect boychild and a girlchild who was not so far from being a woman. King and queen of Egypt, Great House and Great Royal Wife, bound and sealed before the face of Amon.
And Amon had hidden that face, veiled it in rain. Water from the sky: a blessing, one might suppose, a promise of prosperity for the Two Lands.
The procession made its slow way past Senenmut’s vantage. His place was open, just: a gap in the ranks of higher functionaries, behind the nomarchs and the princes and the lords of lesser rank. He slid back into it. He was hemmed in again, surrounded by men in their best finery, able to see no more before or behind than bewigged and befeathered personages.
~~~
On this of all days, the queen regent effaced herself with great and exacting care. The king must be seen to be king, and his queen beside him.
“Time enough later,” Hatshepsut said, “to remind the Two Lands that there is still a firm hand on the steering-oar.”
Senenmut had come to her tonight, against his better judgment—if they were caught now, no matter that her husband was dead and she was nominally free to choose her bedmate; that choice was narrow, and did not encompass a tradesman’s son. But she had looked so worn at the king’s first high court, so thin and drawn, that he could not leave her to face sleep alone.
Nor had she cast him out when he slipped through the hidden door into her bed. She wrapped arms and legs about him and clung, face buried in his breast. It was a long while before she eased enough to do more than lie against him; longer yet before she could speak.
He had thought she would not say anything at all: would love him into exhaustion, and then sleep. But the heat of body and body seemed to warm her spirit. She lay cradled in his arms, tracing twisting patterns on his chest, murmuring more to herself than to him. “The world needs the appearance of order. Order is a male fundament upon the throne, no matter how young or how incapable it may be.”
“I wouldn’t call him incapable,” Senenmut said. “Only very young.”
“Is there a
difference?” She laid her hand on his lips. “No, don’t answer that. When I consider his parentage, I wonder what the gods were thinking. If he were a stud colt, I’d pray he took after his grandsire.”
“I think he does,” said Senenmut, kissing her fingers as she drew them away.
“It will be years before we can know for certain,” she said. “Sometimes a young one fails of his promise. He grows up as his father did. As a fool.”
Senenmut had not known the elder Thutmose before he was king. But that his son was more than he had been— Senenmut was certain of it. Such children as the younger Thutmose were rare; and they did not grow into fools.
He held his tongue. She sighed against him. Her body softened slowly. Her breathing eased and deepened.
She slept in his arms, while he lay awake, counting the slow passage of hours toward the dawn.
Very near to first light, when he should rise and slip away or be betrayed, she stirred. Her eyes opened. They were dark with sleep, but a brightness hid in the heart of them. She looked into his face as if she had not seen it before: not a hostile stare, nor fearful. Simply intent.
Then she smiled. It was a slow smile, almost unbearably sweet. He yearned to kiss her, but he dared not.
“I dreamed,” she said drowsily. “Such a dream . . . oh, my friend! Such a dream as I dreamed—you would never guess—”
He bit his tongue. She never saw. She laughed against him and clasped him tight. And yet, he thought, there was a tension in her, a tautness that mingled strangely with her laughter.
Out of that tension she said, “No, don’t guess. Don’t think. Forget.”
That, he could not. But he could keep silence. He could even conceal the resentment, the irrational stab of jealousy. Jealous of a dream—and how did he know she had been dreaming of a lover? He was all she had, that he had ever known. He had thought he was all she wanted.
He berated himself for a fool. Whatever she had dreamed, it was nothing merely mortal. Some god had walked in her. He saw the marks: the brightness, the brittle mirth, the arms that bound him and would not let him go.