by Judith Tarr
She had never been in this house before, and yet she moved as if she knew it, taking the chair opposite the one he favored, propping her sandaled feet on a footstool, regarding him bright-eyed as he stood gaping in his own doorway.
“Well?” she said. “Aren’t you going to offer me wine?”
He did not move. “You should never have come here. Are you really alone? How did you escape? What do you think you are—”
“Hush,” she said. And he obeyed her, as all of Egypt did, because she quite simply did not expect him to do otherwise. “Not,” she went on, “that I’m precisely thirsty for wine. I’ve been swimming in it for a solid week, till I’m near dying for a jar of plain barley beer. Or even water.”
Water he had. He fetched it for her in a plain and ordinary cup. No gold or chalcedony here, where he could be most purely himself. She drank gratefully and accepted a second cupful, at which she sipped, watching him the while. He stood flatfooted, his wits at a standstill, as empty of coherent thought as the water-jar in his hand.
“So,” she said after a while, as if he had spoken. “You don’t hate me after all.”
“I never hated you,” he said.
“I’d hardly have known it,” she said, “for all the love I’ve had from you since the river rose in flood.”
“Since you named yourself king,” he said, yet without bitterness. It was the simple truth.
“You won’t forgive me for that, will you?”
“Do you think I should?”
“I think,” she said, “that my coming here is worth a moment’s respect.”
“You have it,” he said. “Now go back where you came from, before the scandal overwhelms us both.”
“A king,” she said, “may love where she pleases.”
He opened his mouth, closed it again. When he spoke, it was with the same reckless insouciance that had possessed him since she entered this chamber. “If it is true that you may take any lover who suits your fancy, then why have you come here? I’m nothing to look at. I’m not particularly young. I’m not even willing to accept that you are king.”
“Did I say that a king can be reasonable in whom she loves?”
“You should be,” he said.
“I do not choose to be.” She rose, set aside her cup, and came into his arms. They were not there to receive her, but she made do. She was warm and supple, familiar, beloved.
He stood stiff. She laid her head on his rigid breast. “Why do you resist me? Why you alone in all of Egypt?”
“I’m not the only one,” he said through set teeth. “When the rest of the people come to their senses, they’ll rise up and destroy you.”
“Not while I live,” she said with perfect confidence. “The god has promised me.”
“But how long will you live?” Senenmut demanded. “How long before someone succeeds in killing you?”
“No one will kill me,” she said. Her head moved on his breast. Her lips were soft, circling his heart with kisses. “Beloved,” she said. “Oh, how I’ve missed you!”
Not more than he had missed her. His arms rose to complete the embrace. He still could not speak.
She spoke for him. “We should never have quarreled. It was so cold in the night, so lonely. No one else is as warm in my arms as you. No one else—”
“Has there been anyone else?”
He had thought he spoke calmly, but she drew back, tilting her head till she could look into his face. “I am not required to answer that,” she said.
He twisted out of her grasp, thrust past her. She caught at him. She was strong, stronger than he had expected; and he had thought he knew her strength. She held him fast. “No,” she said. “No, there has been no one. You know that. You know me.”
“Do I?”
She shook him. “Look at me! Am I any different? Have I changed at all?”
“Your hair,” he said. “Shorn for the wearing of the crowns. Your name, that you have altered. Your rank and power in the Two Kingdoms.”
“I am still myself,” she said, shaping each word as if in bronze. “I am still the one whom you love.”
“No,” he said.
She slapped him. He reeled, more startled than hurt. She had never struck him. Their quarrels were always wars of words, not of blow and furious blow.
While he gaped and staggered, she hissed at him. “Stubborn. Muleheaded. Obstinate. Man.” But having slapped him, she kissed him where her hand had struck, caressing him, nearly weeping. “This is nothing but jealousy. You think I’ll have no time for you. You think I’ll choose someone younger, prettier, more charmingly stupid.”
“I think that I will lose you,” he said. “That you will die for this intolerable presumption.”
“Not before you,” she said. “I promise you.”
“How will you do that? Poison me first when you feel the dagger sinking into your back?”
“Stop that,” she said. She pulled him with her through the chamber and into the one beyond. How had she known his bed was there, unless a god guided her?
Where else would it be? There was only the outer door and the one that led to this room.
She thrust him down upon the bed and sat on him. Her weight was not inconsiderable. Nor was the force of her temper. “I honor your honesty,” she said, “but I weary of your stubbornness. Stop struggling so, and love me.”
“How can a mere mortal love a king?”
“As he always has,” she said. “As he always will.”
There was no fighting her. The harder he struggled, the more determined she was. She was as blind obstinate in that as in taking the Two Crowns, and as perfectly convinced that she was entitled to it.
While she was queen and queen regent, he had been worthy of her. Now that she was king . . .
“You only pursue me because I fight,” he said, twisting in vain against the weight of her on his chest. “If I stop, you’ll grow bored. You’ll wander away. You’ll find yourself someone who worships you without restraint.”
“I only ever wanted you,” she said. “Even when you weren’t fighting.”
That was manifestly true, but he did not want to hear it. “I’ll go on resisting you. I can’t help myself. I’m too blind to the god, too deaf to his words. I only see that you do a thing no woman should do, and that you’ll die for it.”
“All men die,” she said. “You love me too much. That’s the heart of your resistance. Let me live as I may. Only love me. Let the gods fret over the rest.”
“I can’t,” he said in a strangled voice. “I’ve always done my own fretting. I’ll go on doing it.”
“Then I order you to stop.”
“How like a king,” he said.
“Do you hate me for it?”
“No,” he said. “No, never. Only . . .”
“Only?”
“I wish you hadn’t done it.”
“I could do no other,” she said.
“Even the lie? The story about your father, how he named you king after him?”
“It is no lie,” she said. “He did say it. He called me king and goddess.”
“But his son, your husband, wore the crowns. And you allowed it.”
“Because I was afraid. Because I was a child, even as that other king is now. I couldn’t be what he wanted me to be. I had to grow to a woman; I had to gather courage. Years, it took, until the god himself forced me to open my eyes to it.”
Senenmut shook his head. Even pinned beneath her weight, captive to her will, he could not accept what she had said. It was a kind of pride. And fear, yes. Fear for her; for what she might grow into, and that she might die in the doing of it, for this enormity that she committed upon the face of Egypt.
It was true. He loved her too much. He wanted her to be as she had been, regent to the king, safe in the place that her sex allotted her; not raised to this terrible eminence.
Such eminence, dropping beside him on his own bed, in his own house, where it was never safe for her to
be. She kissed him till he gasped, attacked him with such passion that he had no will left to resist.
She had always had more ardor than he. Tonight she burned so hot that he caught fire himself, flared up like a torch, forgot everything, even fear, in the white heat of her.
When he had cooled again, when they lay together, wound in one another, he hugged her to him so tightly that she gasped. “I could never lose you,” he said. “Never, not though I die for it.”
“You never will,” she said.
“Why?”
The question, asked bare, made her lift her head to stare at him.
He asked it again. “Why? Why did you choose me?”
“Because,” she said, “you were always arguing with me. And making sense.”
“Other people argue with you. Nehsi, Hapuseneb, Ahmose the General—”
“Not as you do, as you always have. Because you love me, but you will never be blind to my failings.”
“It’s never stopped you.”
“No,” she said, “but it makes me think.”
“You should have thought before you did what you’ve done.”
“I did,” she said. “Long and long.”
“And then you did it.”
“Because I had to.”
There was a silence.
Senenmut filled it, in the end, because he had to. “I love you beyond measure. You are more beautiful than anything that is. I believe that the god is in you, that he begot you. But—”
“But?” she asked when he did not go on.
“But I don’t want to lose you.”
“You won’t.”
“Promise.”
“On my name as king.”
“Maatkare,” he said. “Hatshepsut. Chosen of Amon, beloved, king and goddess.”
“Just so,” said the king.
Part Three: King of Upper and Lower Egypt
Thutmose III, Years 9-22
Hatshepsut, Years 3–14
37
Nehsi the Nubian was more amused than not to watch Egypt contend with the spectacle of a king who was a woman. And not only Egypt, either. Most of the embassies that came soon after her coronation did not know where to look or whom to approach. Sent, many of them, to address a queen regent on behalf of a child king, they found themselves facing a king enthroned.
They were in no more comfort than her scribes, struggling to address her by the titles that were proper, but most were only made to fit a man. None went so far as to refuse to address her. Curiosity drove them, or a kind of sickened fascination. But they all went away in awe of her.
If she had been a man, Nehsi thought, there would never have been any of this nonsense. People would agree that she was as strong a king as her father was, as firm of will, as intent on the prosperity of the Two Lands.
And they did prosper. After the Inundation that had been so wonderfully great, there was a harvest so rich that it fed the whole of the Two Kingdoms for that year and much of the next. And when the floods came round again, they were not so high, but still glorious, still a wonder to the priests and the people. They proved it, people said. The gods blessed the king’s accession, and sanctified her reign.
She had taught them to love her. She did what kings seldom thought to do: she spoke to them, admitted them to her audiences, sent them forth in awe of her, loving her, calling her beautiful.
It was marvelous how she did it. She never sacrificed her dignity, never forgot that she was king and goddess; and yet she looked on them with unfeigned warmth.
Courtiers muttered that she had always been overfond of commoners. With them she was much less amiable. She was their king. They would obey her or pay such penalty as she deemed just.
It was tribute to the strength of her will that she put none to death, nor had the need to do such a thing. The god spoke in her. Even they, proud fools that they were, could see that.
She had a great heart, and strength beyond the lot of mortal woman. Nehsi, who had known her since she was a small imperious princess, delight of her father’s eye, knew no great surprise that she wore so well the crowns of the Two Lands. Her late and feckless husband had never done so well, nor did the young Thutmose seem likely to exceed his father. Certainly he seemed inclined to bow to the will of the elder king, nor did he dare oppose her.
Not that anyone had ever succeeded in thwarting Hatshepsut. What she wanted, she got. Now that she had the greatest prize of all, she wielded it with both grace and competence. Nehsi was proud of her.
She had made him her chancellor, which meant in essence that whatever she needed done, he did it. Unlike Senenmut who heaped up titles as a dung-beetle rolls together his ball of odorous treasure, Nehsi satisfied himself with the one. Hapuseneb stood higher than either of them, vizier of the Two Lands, chief minister and high priest of Amon, hereditary prince and count, Treasurer of the King of Lower Egypt, Overseer of All Works of the King—but those were only the tithe of Senenmut’s titles, and none, in Nehsi’s mind, meant as much as Nehsi’s proud and lonely one.
Nehsi, so lightly titled, could move more freely than they, and with more ease through the intricacies of government in Egypt. He was pleased with it, content to watch others bury themselves beneath the weight of princely offices. Most of them in any case were obliged by rank or necessity to bow to him, to seek his counsel, to petition him for audience with the king.
He was a great prince. He had never thought to be such a thing; had expected to be content with a captaincy in the queen’s guard, or if he was particularly fortunate, to become commander of the royal bodyguard. But Hatshepsut had insisted on raising him above the rank of simple guardsman, setting him in the rank and office of a prince, making him the steward of her affairs.
He had a house now, a prince’s mansion, and the flock of servants that was required to keep it in order; estates and incomes scattered hither and yon; and a treasure-house that would not have shamed a king in Nubia. All through his king’s bestowing, in recompense for his service.
There was always a woman in his bed, but never a wife. Somehow he had never seemed to come round to it. It was not for lack of interested women—ladies, too, and some of quite high rank, noble daughters or widows who sighed after his body and coveted his wealth. That he was reckoned beautiful he knew, though he was no longer quite as young as he had been. He had no lack of willing bed-companions, nor slept alone save as he chose.
But he had never taken a wife. He was beginning to think that he never would. If it was sons he wanted, he had a half-dozen, and daughters too, running wild in his house in the city. There was never any doubt as to who their father was: they were all larger than children in Egypt, blunter-featured, and richly dark of skin and hair and eye. One baffled and dimwitted Egyptian husband might have been hard put to explain his wife’s night-colored baby, but she had feigned an illness and smuggled the infant into Nehsi’s house when it was born. That was his daughter Tama, the image of him even at the tender age of three, and wilder than all the rest together.
She had committed some infraction that had her nurse in hysterics, something to do with one of the dogs and the kitchen cat and a vat of beer. Nehsi had been called to serve as judge and executioner. Just as he was about to administer the rod, the porter brought word that a king’s messenger waited without.
Nehsi was not unduly put out to be diverted from the task of whipping his obstreperous offspring. He tucked her under his arm, ignored her yowling, which in any event had muted to a half-hearted whimper, and went to see who it was.
~~~
A messenger, indeed. He would flog the porter later for being a purblind idiot. The king herself sat in his reception room, with Senenmut standing like a guardsman behind her.
Nehsi suppressed a raise of the brow at that. The scribe had grown no prettier with age; his thin and weedy body had grown soft about the middle, even with the time he reputedly spent among the horses that he loved.
At least the house-servants had had the intelli
gence to set the king in the best chair and offer her refreshment. It was not the first time she had come to his house, nor the first time, either, that she had played her own messenger. It was an eccentricity she cultivated. No one ever knew when the king might appear herself with this message or that. It kept her courtiers nicely off balance, and won her more than a few battles thereby.
Nehsi was wise to her, though his servants were distressingly slow to understand what she was doing. He greeted her with composure, upended his now silent and big-eyed offspring, and sat with her in his lap.
Hatshepsut smiled at them both. “She looks more like you every day,” she said.
Tama wriggled in her father’s grip. He considered for a moment, then let her go. As he had expected, she went straight to the king and clambered into the royal lap, curled up with her finger in her mouth, and proceeded to go peacefully to sleep.
Hatshepsut regarded Nehsi over that small round head with its tightly curling sidelock. He regarded her in turn, refusing to be flattered, though he knew that she, like every other woman in Egypt, found him very good to look at.
Her lips twitched. “No wonder the palace servants and most of the court walk in terror of you. You have the most appalling stone-hard stare. Do you study it in front of a mirror?”
He held the stare for a while longer. Then he grinned at her. “Of course I do. What brings you here, my lady? Anything interesting?”
She tilted her head. “That may be,” she said. “I’ve had in mind a thing or two, as always. Myrrh, for example. Do you remember the myrrh-trees that that protege of Lord Ranefer’s brought him?”
“Indeed,” said Nehsi. “As I recall, you have half a dozen in your spice garden.”
“Then you must remember what he said of them, that they came from the land of Punt.”
Nehsi nodded. And waited.
She was accustomed to his silences. She went on easily, with a glance at her scribe, and such warmth in it that Nehsi wondered if either of them still believed that their liaison was a secret. No one ever spoke of it, but everyone knew. It was not permitted to be a scandal. She was king, after all. Kings could choose whom they favored, even in their beds.