by Judith Tarr
It was midwife’s work, but the midwife was too well known in the palace. Her coming would be noted, and her going; and people would know the queen’s secret. Neferure must live though her child did not, and rule, and be a wife to the king when he was old enough. She could not be tainted with the rumor of this.
With the physician’s assent, Senenmut let one or two of the maids ran abroad with news of the queen’s sudden, fierce fever. If they whispered of ill-doing, he did not choose to prevent them. No more did he know for certain that this had come about at the gods’ hands. Men—or a woman—might have taken part in it.
That was not a thought he cared to think, but it niggled at him till he could not help but think it. Hatshepsut was the beloved of his heart. She was also queen and goddess. She might well have judged it necessary to be rid of this child; to be certain that it would not live to challenge any trueborn daughter of her daughter.
If she had done that, then she had not considered the cost to Neferure—and that, he thought, was unlike her. He took what comfort he could in it.
That was little enough. It did not go well. Neferure was young, she was strong, she was built to carry a child. She should have suffered less, even miscarrying, than she so clearly did.
She had not cried much even as an infant, nor did she now, but when her eyes squeezed shut, the tears ran out of them, tracking down her cheeks into her sweat-sodden hair. The physician gave her a stick of wood to bite on, to focus the pain. She bit it through.
It went ill, and it went on too long. Senenmut did not remember so much blood when she was born, nor even when Hatshepsut lost the second child, the son who closed the gates of her womb behind him. It was a river of blood, a river in spate.
The physician muttered to himself. The maids had all fled. Senenmut could not follow, to make certain that none of them chattered untimely. He could only hope, and trust in their loyalty.
There were only the two men, and the woman straining between them. And in time a fourth, a pair of strong hands bracing Senenmut’s, and clear eyes over them, too stark for grief.
Those were not the eyes of a woman who had moved to slay a child, or to cause its mother so much pain. Senenmut had not known how taut his back was, until the tension had gone and he nearly fell.
Hatshepsut held him up. Neferure tossed in her bed. The sheets were scarlet. Senenmut and the physician had changed them twice; must do it again, and see them all burned, for the secret’s sake.
Yes, even if she was dying. Her name’s honor must continue, nor be besmirched.
He saw death creep over her face. Nothing that he did, no rite or magic of the physician, not even her mother’s will could stop or even slow it. This child conceived untimely, this unwanted burden, slipped out of her with her life’s blood.
When the last of the stillbirth was ended, she drew a breath, hardly more than a sigh. No more came after.
Neferure was dead. She had been the anchor of Senenmut’s life since she was born, as her mother was its center. Without her he drifted astray, too shocked to weep.
It was only evening. It had been a long day of suffering, and yet too devastatingly brief. The sun’s rays slanted through the high windows. Their light poured like blood upon the floor.
“May Amon-Re protect her,” Hatshepsut said, soft and steady, “and guide her on the dark ways. May Anubis speak for her in the Hall of Judgment; may the feather of Maat be as light as a breath in the balance, and her heart as heavy as worlds. May she walk in the Field of Reeds, and know contentment everlasting.”
~~~
The king did not weep at the death of his sister-wife. He mourned, Senenmut thought and his tutor insisted, but Thutmose had grown from a silent and self-contained infant into a silent and secretive boy. He spoke as seldom as ever, and then mostly of war and warriors.
He had, perhaps, loved his wife, as a brother loves his sister or a friend loves a friend. She had been able to coax him out of his silence, to trick him into laughter. Without her there was no one possessed of such power.
It was Hatshepsut who told him that Neferure was dead. She went herself, which was a great concession, with an escort of trusted servants: Senenmut, Nehsi, the priest Hapuseneb, and her two most favored maids.
Thutmose had been, as usual, in the courts of the soldiers, learning the arts of sword and spear, bow and chariot. Now that it was evening and nearly full dark, he had come in to be bathed and fed and put to bed.
He was still enough of a child that his nurse hovered, fretting over him, but he was enough of a man to be embarrassed. He dismissed her summarily, rather too much so perhaps. He had not yet learned the precise balance of discipline between master and servant.
Perhaps he had learned it very well, but nervousness caused him to forget it. He was always so around Hatshepsut: more awkward than usual, clumsy, seeming younger than he was. If he could drop a scepter or stumble over a footstool, he would do it in front of his queen regent.
Tonight he failed of courtesy: he did not offer her wine or refreshment. He received her in his bedchamber, since she had refused to wait until he could compose himself in a more dignified place. A hastily fetched chair served as a throne; another, offered to Hatshepsut, was refused.
Hatshepsut had been very quiet since she left Neferure’s body to the wailing crowds of maids. The embalmers would have come and gone before she returned.
She wanted that, perhaps. Senenmut remembered from his father’s death, how they came with their hard dry hands and their sharp reek of natron; how they lifted the corpse with little ceremony, and carried it off as if it had been a sack of barley.
The royal embalmers would be more respectful, perhaps. Perhaps not. Dead was dead, as Senenmut had heard one of them observe. They lived with death. It had not lost its terror; not in the least. To mask their fear they learned to laugh in its face, and to deal casually with its leavings.
And so Hatshepsut was her own messenger to the king, and Neferure was taken away in her absence. She was cold and still in front of him, her face locked shut. She must have been terrifying to one who did not know her.
The king never spoke to her if he could avoid it. When he did, he stammered. Therefore he was silent now, and waited for her to speak.
She did so without adornment and without preliminary. “Your queen is dead,” she said.
Thutmose regarded her as if he could not understand the words. He still did not say anything.
“Neferure has died,” said Hatshepsut when it was clear that the king was not going to speak. She was impatient as she always and only was with him, intolerant of his hesitations. “She had a fever. It seized her and consumed her.”
Thutmose shook his head very slowly. Disbelieving, denying, there was no telling. He seemed to have gone mute.
“The embalmers by now have taken her,” the queen said, brisk and seeming cold. His silence did that to her, Senenmut was sure. “You will mourn her as is proper. My chancellor here will instruct you.”
“I know how to mourn,” Thutmose muttered, so low that Senenmut barely heard him.
The queen’s ears were keen. She heard: she frowned. “You will inform your mother. She will be so kind as to join in the mourning. This after all was the queen.”
Thutmose’s jaw set. Perhaps Hatshepsut did not see: his head was lowered, his nemer-headdress slipping forward, hiding most of his face. But Senenmut saw. Thutmose bowed low, lower than a king should.
“Well,” said Hatshepsut. His silence offered nothing, asked nothing. It was a dead thing, as dead as Neferure in her bloodied sheets.
Which the physician would have had the wits to change before the embalmers came. Senenmut’s mind was chipping and shattering. He had never been so, not for anything that had befallen him. Even tears were more than he could muster.
His eyes were independent of his faltering mind, his ears recording what the queen said to the king.
“Well,” she said. “See that you do as you’re told. Nehsi will inst
ruct you.”
Thutmose nodded, head still bowed. He was a brave child, but Nehsi terrified him almost as much as Hatshepsut herself did. It was the man’s size, Senenmut supposed, and his quiet that put even Thutmose’s to shame. Nothing dismayed Nehsi, nor did he fear anything. To a child whose fears were many, he must have seemed as incalculable as one of the gods.
It was not well that the king should so fear his regent and her servant. Senenmut could not see what to do about it, not now. Neferure was dead. He had offices, rank, honors enough; but without her they meant nothing.
He had never believed that a man could die of heartbreak. Nor had he known how much Neferure mattered, how much of his heart she filled, until she was gone. He was as much a fool as ever. And unlike Thutmose, he was not sure that he knew how to mourn.
31
Mourning was an art. One could study it for years, decades, all of one’s life; but in the end one simply did it. It was a greyness of the soul, an emptiness in the heart. Wailing and beating of thighs made it a little less, perhaps, but never enough.
Senenmut mourned. He cried aloud; he beat fists on thighs till bruises heaped on bruises. None of it brought her back.
He knew then, in the deeps of a night as empty of sleep as his heart was of the one who had died, that if Hatshepsut died before him, he would not be able to bear it. He prayed aloud in his chamber, invoking the god who walked so often in her dreams: “Amon-Re, great god, beloved of my lady, listen to me. Let me die first. Let me never know the absence of her as I know that of her daughter.”
The god gave no sign. Yet he heard. Senenmut’s heart felt it. Whether the god would grant the prayer, there was no telling. But he had heard it.
~~~
They mourned for the full seventy days of Neferure’s embalming. Then they laid her in her tomb among the queens of the Two Lands, far to the west in the valley of the dead, dug well and deep to thwart the thieves that flocked as thick as vultures round the tombs.
It was not the king who performed the great magic, the rite that would open her senses to the world of the dead: the opening of the mouth as it was called. Hatshepsut did it. She spoke the words and performed the gestures, calling the gods to witness that her daughter went whole and blessed upon her journey.
In this she slighted the king, but he ventured no objection. He had been friend and brother to his wife, but never husband, never in truth.
No more did he know why she had died. She had fallen to fever. That, everyone believed, and Senenmut repeated until he almost believed it himself. Better a demon of sickness than the truth: the sheets taken and burned; the red and bloodied scrap that had killed her, the son who had never waked to look on the world, disposed of in secret.
Nehsi had done that. He had laid magics on it too, perhaps, lest its fragment of a spirit rouse and walk, hunting the self that had never had time to grow.
Whether the Nubian had taken such precautions or no, Senenmut never felt the child’s presence. Neferure he sensed often, a flutter of winged spirit, a whisper of longing in the breeze that played through her chambers.
Once her body was buried and her spirit-self set upon its journey, her presence shrank to memory. He still fancied that he could see her, hear her voice calling him, feel her hand on his when he worked among the queen’s scribes. But she was gone; he had only remembrance.
~~~
As difficult as Senenmut’s mourning was, it was a feeble thing beside Hatshepsut’s. Perhaps she too had not known how much she loved her daughter, nor wished to acknowledge it, for love so great could be a weakness.
She continued as she always had, being queen regent, ruling the Two Kingdoms, ignoring the king. He preserved his silence, played with his soldiers, refrained from attracting her notice. It was all as it had been since Thutmose took the throne.
But her heart had conceived a thing, a great thing, a thing of which she would speak to no one, not even Senenmut. He knew only because she took him often to her bed just then, loved him with an urgency that was rare in her, and when he fell asleep was still awake; and when he woke to return to his own house, her eyes were open and staring into the dark.
He did not ask. With Hatshepsut, one did not. She spoke as she chose, and not as any man would compel her.
It was long days, weeks, months before she spoke, except once. “I dream,” she said then. “Every night, I dream.”
~~~
One day not long after the queen spoke, if briefly, of her dream, Senenmut visited Hapuseneb in the house that he had acquired recently near the temple of Amon. It was a noble house, the house of a man who had won both wealth and high standing in the service of god and queen.
Hapuseneb met his guest in a grand reception hall, with a wry fillip of the hand at its many gauds and flummeries. “The prince who lived here before me had rather elaborate taste in decor,” he said. “There never seems to be time to get rid of it all.”
Senenmut nodded. “One wonders whether to gape or to gag.” He inspected a particularly ornate piece of carving on what was, for lack of a better description, a chair. “This looks like Asiatic work.”
“Indeed,” said Hapuseneb. “Mitanni, I suppose. Or somewhere farther afield. I speak the language, but I never did understand their predilection for adding insult to injury.”
“You’ve seen how they dress,” Senenmut pointed out.
Hapuseneb sighed and shook his head. “Here, come with me. This is doing neither of us any good.”
The room to which he led Senenmut was simpler in its furnishings, nearly bare in fact, with new plaster laid over the walls, but nothing as yet painted on them. The artist had begun in a corner: a red-limned sketch of a fan of papyrus.
The scent of new-laid plaster was remarkably pleasant. Hapuseneb sat in a chair that was rather the worse for wear, and gestured Senenmut to another. A small servant, with ears like jar-handles on either side of a round shaven skull, brought bread and cheese and barley beer.
“After your predecessor,” Senenmut said, “you must be a profound shock to the servants.”
Hapuseneb grinned, as wicked as ever though he had lost most of his teeth. He was aging well except for that, neither gaining nor losing flesh, simply continuing as he always had. His fondness for beer had not gone to the belly as it too often did, nor did it weaken his will.
“I am going to shake the servants up,” he said. “And while I’m at it, and with the high priest’s blessing—or at least his lack of interference—I’m going to show the temple a thing or two, too. Amon’s grown so powerful that he’s gone soft. He’s lost the edge that a man gets, or a god, when he has to struggle for what is his. It’s time he tightened his belt again, and remembered where he left his sword.”
“You talk like the king,” Senenmut said. “All war and weapons.”
“Do I?” Hapuseneb sounded surprised, but Senenmut was not deceived. “Dear me. It must be catching.” He sighed. The mockery faded. “That is a charming child, old friend. When he chooses to be.”
“He often doesn’t,” said Senenmut. “And never before the queen regent.”
“So I noticed,” Hapuseneb said. “It’s as if there’s a curse on them. She can abide no one who is called Thutmose, except for the first of that name, with whom she never ceases to compare the others. This youngest of the line is terrified of her, and knows it. He hates her for it. Hatred makes him stammer; stammering makes him seem a fool. And when he goes silent, he simply proves to her that he has precious little store of wit. Whereas she—”
“Whereas she,” said Senenmut, “who has all the patience in the world with recalcitrant princes and truculent embassies, has no patience left for a half-stammering, half-mute fool of a boy.”
“He’s not a fool,” said Hapuseneb. “Not even at his worst. Not ever.”
“I know that,” Senenmut said almost impatiently. “Gods! It hurts to watch them. She loses all good sense in his presence. She sees nothing but the mooncalf boy, the stumble-tongued half-i
diot; if he could bring himself to be as he is everywhere else—but it’s too late for that, isn’t it? It’s been too late since she began her regency.”
“It was too late the moment Isis conceived him.” Hapuseneb met Senenmut’s stare. “Don’t gawp at me like that. You know who’s to blame. She’s taught him all her own fears and hatreds, and greatest of them all is her fear and hatred of Hatshepsut.”
“But Hatshepsut will not dispose of her.”
“That’s her stubborn pride,” said Hapuseneb. “She will not be defeated by a servant whom she herself sent to be concubine to a king.”
“And killing her would be defeat.” Senenmut sighed. “Yes, I understand. Often I wish I didn’t. I can see ill things coming of this, a king who hates his regent, a regent who despises her king.”
“If you knew what to do about it, you’d do it,” said Hapuseneb. “So would I.”
“So too I think would our lady,” Senenmut said, more in hope than in expectation that it was the truth.
32
It was Hatshepsut who decided to do something about it. She made a conscious and publicly acknowledged effort to befriend the king. She visited him wherever he happened to be: on the training fields, in his chambers, in court among the princes. She labored to show him patience. She strove to gentle him as one would a frightened small animal, moving slowly, speaking soft.
Senenmut admired her for the effort, but in his estimation it harmed rather than helped her cause. The boy was no fool. He could see beneath the smiles, the gentleness, the inquiries as to his welfare.
Her attempts to be interested in the arts of war were particularly unsuccessful. Thutmose did not often show emotion, but Senenmut saw impatience then, as sharp almost as anger, and wariness that was always in the king when he stood before Hatshepsut.
More than once he considered speaking to the king himself, but some god, or simply prudence, restrained him. He did venture to speak to the king’s tutor.