by Judith Tarr
He had to put them aside, and rise though his heart protested. “I’ll come back,” he said, “through the front door, with proper servility. Wait for me.”
Once he had freed himself, she did not try to recapture him. She lay as he had left her, eyes drifting past him to peer into the dark. He saw how her mind drifted with them.
Fear made him pause. But morning was coming: a greater fear, and a far worse scandal than if she woke strange-eyed from a god’s visitation. A god would have been reckoned a worthy lover for a queen. A scribe, never.
He must trust in her guards and in her own good sense, and hope that morning came quickly once he was gone.
He kissed her brow. It was chill, like smooth-carved stone. She did not stir under his touch. “Father,” she said, half as if she called to him, half as if she prayed. “Father Amon.”
The god did not answer. He was gone. Senenmut followed him by much more earthly ways, in much more earthly wise.
Part Two: Queen Regent
Thutmose III, Years 5-7
24
Ineni the architect and Hapuseneb the priest of Amon and Senenmut, whose titles had multiplied until he could hardly keep count of them all, crouched together in one of the courts of Senenmut’s house. They must have seemed like aged boys bent over some game of surpassing interest: a fortress made of sand, or a war of pebble soldiers.
The thing that absorbed them had no such clarity of form: scraps of wood and papyrus, a table of sand smoothed and smoothed again as they argued the shape and substance of a dream of the queen’s. She would build a temple, she had told him, sacred to Hathor of Thebes, the beautiful goddess, watcher over the dead in the desert west of the city.
Ineni had built the greatest temple in the world, the temple of Amon at Kamak. Hapuseneb was a priest therein, when he was not waiting on the queen or building her tomb deep in the bleak valley of the tombs of queens. Senenmut was a simple fool with a peculiarity of eye that let him see a shape in stone where others saw only air.
He had always been able to look at a house or a temple or a palace and see it both in its parts and in the whole. People baffled him who could attach a stable or a garden or a harem to a house, and not consider the purity of its line or the harmony of its proportions. It was so simple, so very obvious, where everything should go. There was nothing more or less to it than to ordering glyphs properly on a page, each in the place that the gods and the mind of the maker had ordained for it.
The others understood, in their fashion. He could not admit his disappointment. They should see as clearly as he did, not in clouded images, blurred markings in the dampened sand, a structure of twigs and papyrus that bore no resemblance to the vision of his mind.
“No,” he said with barely bridled impatience. “No, and no, and no! Here is the land as the gods made it: not so level now, maybe, but strong backs and clever hands will take care of that. And here is the rise of the cliff, as sheer as makes no matter, sharp-edged against the vault of heaven. Look behind your eyes and see."
“We do try,” Hapuseneb said mildly. “Maybe if we went out there, saw the land itself, felt it underfoot . . .”
Ineni was less conciliatory. He was a proud man, haughty for a fact, lord mayor of Thebes and builder of the great temple and the tombs of kings. He did not sneer at the queen’s parvenu, her scribe whom she persisted in elevating to a ridiculous number of offices, but he did not suffer Senenmut’s impatience, either. “Even if a mere queen were worthy to raise such a monument—and not even a Great Royal Wife, either, but regent for a king who is fast coming to man’s years—what possesses you to imagine that you can build it?”
“She ordered me to try,” Senenmut replied, reining in the snap that was his first impulse. He needed Ineni: he needed the skill that the man had, the builders he knew and could command, and the long years’ mastery of an art that Senenmut had only dabbled in. He had doubled the compass of his house outside the city, made it beautiful as he thought, and it was celebrated in the court for its size and splendor; he had overseen the building of his own tomb, as every nobleman should do. But he had never ventured anything as great as this.
It might never grow beyond this set of scratchings in the sand. It was not the monument of a queen, who should efface herself in the name of the king through whom she ruled. She had bidden him conceive a temple such as had never been seen before, a monument to her name that would stand for everlasting.
Why she had asked it of him and not of Ineni, or even of Hapuseneb, was a matter of no little resentment, at least on Ineni’s part. “You have the eye,” she had said when they were alone together. “You see what no one else can see. Do you remember how you looked at the old court in my palace, and saw that it could be beautiful? It was a barren place, unblessed by any god. You set a fountain in it, taught the water to fall so that it catches the light of sun or moon, planted trees about it and raised a colonnade round the rim, and now it seems made not of stone but of light.”
“Light,” he said now in his own courtyard, to the man who was his friend and the man who was too proud for friendship. “And shadow. What is a rank of pillars but an image of the sun’s rays? What are the spaces between them but images of the shade that grants respite from the sun?”
“Pillars hold up the roof,” Ineni said as if to a child. “One makes them as vast as one can, to overawe the man who dares approach them. One shapes them as one can, like the trunk of a palm-tree or a bundle of papyrus. But all they do is keep the roof from falling down.”
Senenmut opened his mouth, but closed it again. He would make a bitter enemy if he voiced his thought. How in all the world had a mind so pedestrian conceived of a temple as monstrously imposing as that of Amon?
Perhaps he had had help. There were priests in Amon’s temple whose eyes saw past the simple matter of separating a roof from a floor, and who knew more of beauty than the correct angulation of a tomb-shaft. As for the size of the temple, what did that signify but itself? It was huge. It was not graceful. It did not celebrate the sun, or the shadow that defined the sun’s splendor.
Senenmut had been dreaming the queen’s dream. That stretch of Red Land on the west bank of the river, up against the cliff that was too stark for beauty, cried out for the touch of man’s hand—or woman’s. Beauty should shine forth there as it did from the queen’s palace and her throne.
A queen did not build herself a temple, that she be remembered when she was dead. That was the province of a king.
But she could dream, and her servants could dream with her. It did no harm, except to his patience. How could these others fail to see what he saw?
“It is so simple,” he said. “In the Black Land, lines are soft; the light falls through greenery, and the stark face of the earth is blurred, made gentle. In the Red Land the earth stands bare. Sun beats down on it. Shadows are sharp-edged as if cut with a blade. If one were to build a temple, one should build it of shadow and light. Stark lines, like the lines of the land about it; but clean, with the harmony of notes on a lute, each flowing from the one before. See, one builds with pillars, because pillars hold up the roof—but one shapes and angles them so that they seem made of light.”
“Dreamers dream,” Ineni muttered. “Builders build. You dream, scribe; but of building you know nothing.”
“But you,” said Senenmut, “know all that I do not.”
Ineni sniffed audibly. “Do you imagine that I would give you any part of the knowledge that I labored so long and so hard to acquire?”
“Certainly not,” Senenmut said. “Not to me. To the queen.”
“A queen regent has no authority to command such a monument in her name. In the name of the king, perhaps. But—”
“It’s only a dream,” Hapuseneb said. “She honors us by asking us to dream it with her.”
Ineni forbore to sneer. He loved the queen as they all did, because she was beautiful, and because she had a way of knowing what would touch the heart of every man who served her.
It should be less difficult, Senenmut thought, for Ineni to resist this fancy of hers.
“I will dream,” Ineni said, “in my own bed, without assistance from her royal highness. This”—he flicked a hand at the sand-table and its poor attempt at a drawing—“is a waste of effort. The site might not do badly for a temple, but not in the name of a queen: even such a queen as ours. If the king takes it into his mind to set a structure there . . .”
“The only structure the king will set is a siege-engine outside of some Asiatic city.” Senenmut did not mean to sound bitter, let alone contemptuous. He feared that he did both. “Besides, he’s too young. He’s only eight years old. It will be years before he takes thought for his tomb and temple.”
“No man is too young to remember that he is mortal,” Ineni said grimly. “Nor is any woman so old that she can claim a temple worthy of a king. People might think that she has ambitions in that direction.”
“And if she did,” asked Hapuseneb, “what could she do about it?”
“Order her servants to imagine what they would build if it were possible,” Senenmut answered promptly. “I would create beauty in the king’s name, if my queen asked it of me. Probably she will. She’s sensible enough when she’s not dreaming dreams.”
“Does she ever stop dreaming?” Hapuseneb met Senenmut’s stare. “Don’t tell me you believe what you’re saying. Whatever she does for our master, the living Horus, the Lord of the Two Lands, it will not be to set his name above hers in any monument that she bids us build. She’ll build it for herself. I do love her, my friend, but I’m not blind. I can see how she revels in the exercise of power.”
“She does what she has to do,” Senenmut said tightly. This was an argument he had had before, but not with Hapuseneb. The priest, he had thought, had more sense.
“Necessity may drive her,” said Hapuseneb, “but what it drives her to is rather more than might be proper. I see how she forgets to mention that she rules in the king’s name. She issues decrees and establishes laws as she pleases, without consulting him.”
“The king is eight years old,” Senenmut said. “He’s a child. His judgment is still unformed; his sense of justice lacks complexity. He’s consulted where he’s needed, in matters that he can understand. In the rest, she acts for him. She stands well within the compass of her powers as regent.”
Hapuseneb tilted his head toward the sand-table. “That’s not a regent’s dream, old friend. That’s the dream of one who will rule.”
Senenmut narrowed his eyes. He had too much intelligence, sometimes. He saw so much that he failed to see what dangled from the end of his nose. “What are you saying?” he asked the priest. “Is this something that comes from Amon’s temple? Or are you carrying tales from the court?”
“Neither,” said Hapuseneb, “though temple and court aren’t blind. They see what’s clear to see. We have a queen regent who would prefer to rule as king.”
“And if she would?” Senenmut demanded. “What difference does it make? She’s a woman. You said so yourself. She’s risen as high as she can. When the king is old enough, she’ll step down. She’ll be given no choice in the matter.”
“She might try,” Hapuseneb said.
Senenmut shook his head. Not because he disbelieved. Because his heart knew that none of them should say such things. It was a great pity that Hatshepsut had been born a woman. She ruled as well as any king—better in fact than most. But she must rule through a man, even if that man were no more than a boy, a solemn-faced compact child who never said more than he must.
The gods had made the world so. Even she, as strong and self-willed as she was, could do nothing to change it. She could only dream, and envision a temple like an edifice of light.
Truth was a stark thing. A queen regent who would step aside when her king was a man. A royal lady who would lie in a tomb among the rest of the royal ladies, apart from the kings, with great treasure, but not as great as the treasure of a king.
So must it be. He sighed, thinking of it. Ineni who had never dreamed a dream in his life, Hapuseneb who saw too clearly for sense, went away hardly aware they had been got rid of. He lingered, staring at the sand-table but seeing no such poor thing as was laid out in it. His mind’s eye saw beauty; saw splendor. Saw her glory in stone, raised to endure till the earth grew old.
25
All glory passed, that was the truth which all men living knew, or should know. Life was brief; death, once begun, knew no ending. For most it was oblivion: their names forgotten, their bodies lost in the dust of ages.
For kings and for the children of kings, and in these later years for any who amassed wealth to any notable degree, death could be as life. It required mighty effort, the labor of years to build a tomb, equip it, ward it with spells of guard and guidance. When the tomb was built, if the gods were kind its master might live for years in the surety of his life-after-death; so that when he died, and the seventy days of embalming were over and he was laid in the tomb, he was prepared for the journey. He had his servants, his banquets, his house in the otherworld; his kin if he loved them, his animals, his children. All that had been his in life would be his in death, so that he might have joy there as in the land of the living.
Senenmut had been granted a rare and precious privilege: a tomb near the tombs of kings and near the place that his queen had chosen, if only in her heart, for her marvelous temple. He had dug it deep and hidden it well lest the robbers have too easy a time of it, and adorned it himself, through such hours as he had amid his many duties.
It was not his tomb alone. A lord expected his family to share the life-after-death. Those whom he loved would dwell with him as in life, no doubt in the same prickly amity.
In the fourth year of the reign of Menkheperre Thutmose, Senenmut’s father had wandered vaguely into death as he had wandered through life. One morning he had simply failed to wake. He had died in his sleep, peacefully, of no sickness that anyone could see. The gods had taken him, and shown him mercy: for all anyone knew, he never even realized that he was dead.
He lay now in the tomb that his son had built, in the awful calm of death. For companion he had his wife’s old nurse who had died not long after the tomb was finished. In time the rest would join them—long time, they could hope.
That was the year of grief, but also the year of joy: the year Ahotep took a wife.
Ahotep had grown well from unpromising beginnings. He was prettier than Senenmut, handsome indeed in the livery of the king’s guard. His wife was a captain’s daughter, sweet-faced if not remarkably sweet-tempered, with a talent for keeping her husband in hand. Since he remained irrepressible even in manhood, that was a welcome gift.
They lived in Senenmut’s house. It seemed absurd for them to live anywhere else. When Ahotep journeyed with the king on royal progresses from city to city of the Two Lands, Iuty contested with Hat-Nufer for mastery of the house. Their battles drove Senenmut into retreat more often than not, to palace or temple or his own chambers, but he never quite mustered the bravado to put a stop to them. He was lazy, he supposed, and certainly a fool.
Still there was a little wisdom in it. After a mighty war that had gone on for days, for what cause Senenmut never understood, when at last the women had declared a barbed and muttering truce, he said to his mother, “Now do you see why I never brought home a wife?”
Hat-Nufer sniffed audibly. “Your wife would have had the sense not to argue with me. What is a daughter-in-law if not a woman’s loyal servant? She’ll be lady and mistress of the house when I am dead. The least she can do is submit to me while I’m alive.”
Iuty’s sniff was just as loud and just as indignant when she trapped Senenmut in the sanctuary of his reading-room, in the long light of evening. “I’ll be as good a daughter-in-law as I can be,” she said, “but before the gods, brother, she can be impossible.”
Senenmut could hardly deny that, nor could he deny his mother’s contention that Iuty lacked somewhat of submissio
n. “You are,” he ventured to Iuty, “remarkably alike.”
He had known better than to say such a thing to his mother. His brother’s wife bridled. “I am not impossible!”
“Well,” Senenmut admitted, “not yet.”
If a look could flay, he would have been stripped to the bone. She spun on her heel and departed in high dudgeon.
He was not a wise man. He laughed long and well. His younger brother caught him at it: young Amonhotep who had some time since discovered the beauties of women, but refrained yet from asking any of them to wife. He dropped his lanky elegance into Senenmut’s own favorite chair, propped his feet on the winetable, and said, “Don’t tell me. The ladies are at it again.”
“What, you haven’t been here for the past hand of days?” Senenmut tipped him out of the chair and settled himself in it. “It’s been open war.”
Amonhotep picked himself up without resentment and found another chair, over which he draped himself, the image of languid ease. Except for his eyes: those were wickedly bright. “I’ve been off hunting waterfowl at Ptahmose’s villa. Hadn’t you noticed I was gone?”
“Not really,” Senenmut said. “Waterfowl, yes? The kind with feathers, or the kind with a soft skin and sweet lips and willing arms?”
Amonhotep grinned. “Why, both! You should have come. You’d have had a little peace of mind.”
“It wasn’t so terrible,” said Senenmut. “I managed to escape all day; then during the worst of it I borrowed a room in the palace.”
“You work too hard,” Amonhotep said with sudden seriousness. “Don’t you ever rest?”
“Often,” said Senenmut. “I have a villa, too, you know. And the horses.”
“Certainly. A villa you visit maybe once in a season, and horses who are as much work as anything else you do. Do you know what they say of you? That you’d play the stablehand if you could.”