King and Goddess

by Judith Tarr

  “Foreigners,” said Nehsi the Nubian, not meaning to dismiss them; trying to explain them.

  Bastet heard him. She did not, as he had half expected, upbraid him for false judgment. She went silent, that was all.

  Silence seemed to be her way of letting a man know when he had displeased her. She was taciturn at dinner that night, speaking, if she spoke at all, in monosyllables.

  Nehsi refused to humble himself with an apology. She had not told him that he had offended her, or explained why. Until she did, she could sulk in solitude.

  That night when he went to his bed on the deck, she was nowhere near it. She had taken Tama to her old place in the corner by the water-barrels, spread her pallet there and gone to sleep.

  ~~~

  They came to Punt on a hot and breathless morning, when the sea was like grey-green glass, rolling softly as it neared the shore. The sailors sweated at the oars, rowing to the beat of the drum, and chanting what from its tune should have been a hymn of praise to the Egyptian river-god, but its words extolled the charms of a certain famous lady who lived and loved in Memphis.

  It heartened them immeasurably, though Nehsi would have preferred that Tama not take up the words and the tune. She perched on one of the huge hawsers, as thick as a man’s waist, that ran the length of the ship on either side, and made her own ditty of the sailors’ song.

  As she celebrated the breasts of Neferneferure, which swelled like pomegranates, Bastet swooped on her and carried her off. Nehsi laughed to himself and turned back to the lookout’s post. They were coming in to the land now, rocking hard on the swell. The shore curved deeply there into harbor with a narrow mouth.

  High above the harbor stood a rocky promontory. Something moved up there, a figure shrunken with distance but moving and calling out like a man: a high, wailing cry that echoed inland.

  That, Nehsi had been told to expect: the watchman of Punt, set there to look for ships that came to trade in his country. As they rowed into the harbor’s mouth, they saw him running down along the rim, into the sandy bowl. There in the quiet water stood the strangest city Nehsi had ever seen.

  In Egypt people built in mudbrick, or in reeds along the river’s bank. Here they built in reeds, or something like them, but not on the undefended shore. They built in the harbor itself, on pilings above the water. Skiffs ran from house to house, or ramps that stretched to the land, with people running along them, calling to one another.

  They were handsome enough people, like dark Egyptians. The men were as tall, which made them small in Nubia, broad in the shoulder, well-muscled and strong. Their beards were striking in their familiarity: grown long and wound into a thick plait suspended from the chin. Just so was the king’s beard in Egypt, but that was never grown on the king’s chin, even when the king was not a woman; he wore it for state occasions, and took it off to be at ease.

  As strangely familiar as the men were, the women were truly odd. Some were slender enough, but many were gone exuberantly to fat: great-breasted, huge-bellied, wobblingly vast in the rump. Such rumps as these, Nehsi had never imagined among the slender women of Egypt or the strong tall women of Nubia. He did not know whether to be fascinated or appalled.

  The children were as children everywhere, lissome and quick, tugging at the hands of mother or father, begging them to hurry. Some broke free and ran down to the water, hopping from foot to foot, calling out in their language. It sounded like the crying of birds.

  “They say,” said Bastet, appearing suddenly beside Nehsi, “‘Welcome! Welcome to the Sun-god’s land! Who are you? Where do you come from? Are you gods out of heaven? Have you brought gifts for us? Come and talk to us!’”

  “Tell them,” said Nehsi, “that we come in the name of Amon-Re, who is god over all gods, and in the name of his daughter, the king, who rules in Egypt.”

  She seemed to think little of wasting such courtly words on children, but she spoke in the same language they were speaking—he hoped in the words that he had told her to speak.

  He had to leave the prow and consider the duties of an ambassador. His bodyservant was waiting in the cabin, looking more than slightly impatient, with his bath all drawn and the razors ready, and everything prepared to make him fit to stand in front of a foreign king. He submitted to it without protest. He did like to look well. It honored his king, whose voice he was in this country.

  ~~~

  From the expressions of the sailors as he emerged again into the sun, and from the evidence of his own mirror, he looked well indeed. He happened to catch a glimpse of Bastet’s face: she looked whitely shocked, as if the sun had grown too much for her. He spared a moment’s worry, and nor only because he needed her to speak for him. Illness in this remote and barbarous country could be a deadly thing.

  She seemed well enough when she came to his side, standing on the deck while the ship finished mooring just offshore. She had taken care for her appearance, too: put on her best gown and her wig, and painted her face becomingly, and donned a collar he had not known she had: beads of lapis and ivory and gold, and a broad disk of beaten gold, such as, he took note, some of the men wore who waited on the shore. Others of them wore disks of ivory or black ebony or what seemed to be shell, gleaming softly in the sun.

  She had had her own disk worked into a pectoral in the Egyptian fashion, and splendid it was, too. She looked, he thought, like a princess, erect and proud, and—he could not help thanking the gods for that—slender as Egyptian women were. No billows of flesh; no huge shelf of rump, only a sweet womanly curve that begged a man’s hand to stroke it.

  He whipped his thoughts back to their proper course. The crowd on the shore flurried briefly, then parted, opening a path in the sand.

  These were the chieftains, the lords and princes. They rode on donkeys, with an air that proclaimed their pride in the privilege. Last of them all came a handsome man of early middle years, with a beard longer and more richly plaited than any of the rest, and a disk of gold on his breast, so broad and so resplendent that it rivaled the sun.

  But he paled beside the woman who rode with him. Her donkey was of surpassing smallness and delicacy, a beautiful silvery creature with ears like the fronds of a palm-tree. She sat on its back like a mountain atop an obelisk.

  She was the pattern from which the rest of the women were cut, the sun to the moon of their strangeness. Her flesh swelled in rolls and folds on arms and belly, thighs and knees. Her breasts hung vast and pendulous, their huge nipples clear to see under the garment that she wore: white Egyptian linen of the finest quality, girdled beneath the swell of her middle, sewn to circle the vastness of each thigh, cut to the knee below. Round her vast neck lay a collar of golden disks bound together with rods of gold. On her head, tied with fastidious neatness, was a golden ribbon, a diadem, for she was a queen, the queen of this country, which her people called the God’s Land.

  Nehsi took great care to determine that no one laughed. No one even grinned, though he saw lips tightened and jaws clenched. Nothing like it had ever shown itself to Egyptian eyes: this vast grotesquerie of a woman on her tiny donkey. The young scribe who never stopped scribbling had dropped to his favored corner of the deck and begun to draw furiously, eyes fixed on the procession that approached across the sand.

  Nehsi was forgetting his duty in the fascination of so much strangeness. He recalled himself abruptly, and descended into the boat that waited, where Bastet and a pair of scribes were already sitting, and rowed in princely state to the shore of Punt.

  ~~~

  The people of this country, diligent in their courtesies, had pitched a pavilion some distance from the water. It had an Egyptian look to it, but with oddities: poles tipped with ivory, and golden embroidery along its edges, depicting in a strange style, half Egyptian, half foreign, a procession of beasts and birds. There in the cool shade were people who must be servants, offering jars of water, beer, and something fierce that was, Bastet said, a kind of barley spirit. A sip or two of that was enou
gh to convince Nehsi that he should smile and pretend to drink the rest, but refrain from draining the cup.

  Here the queen and the king of Punt received him sitting on chairs made of the tusks of elephants. He was given another, which he took after he had made obeisance: bowing as a prince to a prince who stands slightly higher, but certainly not as to a king in Egypt.

  The queen, seen close in the shade of the pavilion, was no less grotesque than she had seemed on the strand. Her face was as odd as her body, long-boned, heavy-jawed. But her eyes were those of a lovely woman, dark and almost distressingly beautiful in that oddity of a face. Her voice was deep and sweet, like dark honey. It was she who spoke; the king her husband was content to sit listening.

  It was a strange, hesitant colloquy. Each of them spoke in his or her own tongue, with Bastet between, rendering it into words that the other could understand. Her light voice faded after a while to a kind of echo. Nehsi, accustomed to embassies in Egypt, acknowledged the strangeness and then forgot it, focusing his mind and body on the exchange of greetings and courtesies. It was a dance; like all dances it had its steps and its cadences.

  The heart of it was buried deep, and took long to arrive at. First these majesties of the land that they called Tomery, Beloved, must bow low and low again to the god of the sun, who, they declared, was none other than Amon-Re of Thebes. They were most particular in this regard.

  “But in your country, it is said,” the queen observed, “he rules remote and distant, except when he comes to love one of your queens. Here is where he lives. This is the country that he loves. He is our king, our near and present lord. We live by the breath of his mouth.”

  “Our king is Amon’s own child,” Nehsi said. “She rules from the throne of the Two Lands. She speaks with his voice; she sees with his eyes. She is the living image of Amon.”

  The queen inclined her head. “He has blessed your country greatly; and indeed he loves it.” She paused. “So it is no rumor or falsehood. Your king, the one whom you have raised to rule above you, is a woman.”

  “Yes, majesty,” said Nehsi. “Maatkare, she is named: the Truth of Re.”

  “Re is truth,” the queen said, nodding, “and life and strength. Is she beautiful, your king?”

  “More beautiful than anything,” Nehsi said; and no matter if he offended this most ugly of women.

  She did not appear angry, or even perturbed. “It is good,” she said, “that a king be beautiful. See, my king, how beautiful he is.”

  Her king neither blushed nor looked down. He had been chosen for his beauty, perhaps. He was younger than his wife. He had the look of a man who took great care for the comeliness of his body, oiled and plucked it to show it to best advantage, and exercised it to harden the smooth gleaming muscles.

  The queen stroked his arm and smiled, but her eyes were on Nehsi, weighing him with clear intent. “You are beautiful,” she said, “and wonderfully so. Do you have a wife, O beautiful one?”

  Bastet spoke the words levelly, but her voice had roughened. Not much, not enough for most to notice, but Nehsi was attuned to its cadences. He glanced at her sharply. But she was being nothing and no one, wearing no expression, simply saying what she was told to say.

  Nehsi answered, since he had been asked. “No, O queen. I have no wife.”

  “Shame,” said the queen of Punt, “that a man so beautiful should have no wife to keep him virtuous. Are you a great lion of the bedchamber, then, O prince?”

  “Lions,” said Nehsi, “are lazy beasts, drowsing the day away. It’s the lionesses who hunt and fight and rear their young.”

  “Just so,” the queen said. “But the lions will fight when they must, when the lionesses are occupied or overmatched. Then he comes, their great-maned king, and conquers all their enemies, and sires sons upon the bodies of his queens.”

  Nehsi flushed under the blessed darkness of his skin. “I have been a warrior, lady, and a guardsman of the one who was then my queen. My sons are at home in Egypt, learning to fight and hunt and rule a domain. My daughters—”

  “Such as this one?” the queen inquired.

  Nehsi caught himself before he whirled roaring on the one she smiled at. He turned with dignity.

  There was Tama, whom he had thought safe under armed guard in his ship, peering from behind a guardsman’s kilt. The man—boy, if truth be told—looked as startled as Nehsi.

  “Papa,” said Tama in the ringing silence. “You forgot to bring me.”

  “I did not—” Nehsi caught himself again. He jabbed with his chin. The guard, blushing furiously, reached to catch her. But she was gone, darting across the tent, coming to a halt in front of the queen of Punt.

  Nehsi suppressed a groan. Before he could swoop down on her and clap a hand over her mouth, she said in her clear uncompromising voice, “I’ve never seen anything like you before.”

  Bastet, damn her, rendered the words in the language of Punt—at least, she must have done, because the queen laughed. It was wonderful laughter, richer even than her voice in speech, like deep music. “Come here,” she said, and beckoned.

  Bastet did not need to interpret that. Tama, who could be perfectly obedient when she had a mind to be, did as she was told. She climbed into the lap amid those billows of flesh, and she let herself be embraced, and did not either shriek or object.

  The queen held her at arm’s length, looking her over with evident approval. “You do your father justice,” she said. “You’ll be a beauty when you’re grown.”

  “No one is as handsome as Papa,” Tama said. She frowned. “Why does Bastet have to talk for you? Can’t you talk like a normal person?”

  “I know a little Egyptian,” the queen said, “but not enough. Would you like to teach me?”

  Tama nodded.

  “Well then,” said the queen. “Ask your father if I may borrow you while he tarries here. He might say no, mind you. A father is well advised to keep his daughter close.”

  “With that child,” Nehsi said, “such a feat is near impossible.”

  “I’ll come and teach you,” said Tama, “but I have to be with Papa, too. He needs looking after.”

  “So do all men,” the queen said, “and beautiful men in particular.”

  “Papa is the most beautiful man in the world,” said Tama. “I’ll teach you. First you must learn to say my name. It is Tama. Sometimes people say Tamit, which means ‘she-cat,’ but my proper name is Tama.”

  “Tama,” said the queen of Punt obediently.

  Tama nodded. “You learn well,” she said, sounding so exactly like the tutor Nehsi had hired to teach his sons their letters, that he resolved to interrogate the man when at last he came home again, and discover how often his imp of a daughter had intruded on her brothers’ lessons.

  The queen of Punt was pleased: she looked almost comely as she smiled. “I shall be a good pupil,” she said to Tama. And to Tama’s father: “Rest if you will; eat, drink, ask for whatever pleases you. I’ll return your daughter before evening.”

  Nehsi opened his mouth, shut it again. When he spoke, it was hardly more than a sigh. “As you wish, O queen.”

  41

  Tama was an admirable ambassador to the queen of Punt. Nehsi, resigned but watchful, sent a man with her who carried no weapon but who was strong enough and skilled enough to defend her.

  It was not that Nehsi feared she might be attacked. But he did not know these people. They might reckon that he had given his daughter to their queen, and be dismayed when he wanted her back again.

  He did not try to prevent her going to the queen. That was admirably done; worthy, if he dared think it, of his own king.

  While Tama taught the queen to speak a few words of Egyptian, the rest of the embassy traded splendidly with the people of Punt. Their beads and gowns and mirrors were received as if they had been gold. In return they gained all the wonders that the captain had spoken of, and more.

  Nehsi had made it clear that he would be most pleased t
o trade in the glory of this country, the incense-trees that made the air so richly pungent. They brought him boughs and bundles so strongly scented that the nose gave up in despair. They took him to the hills where the trees grew. He stood in the midst of them and looked about, and knew what he truly, honestly wished to do.

  “Can these be taken back with us?” he asked through his interpreter.

  His guides murmured among themselves, taking so long about it that he grew impatient and was about to speak. Then the leader of them said, “For that, we must ask the queen.”

  She was with Tama, as always. She greeted Nehsi in Egyptian, and not too terribly accented, either; though those few words clearly exhausted her store of knowledge. Thereafter she spoke through Bastet—or through Tama, who in teaching this queen her own tongue had become astonishingly fluent in the language of Punt.

  Through the two of them Nehsi presented his petition. “My king loves myrrh beyond any other unguent,” he said, “and cherishes the trees that grow in her garden. It would be a great gift to her, and great joy, if we were to bring back such of the trees as our ships can carry.”

  “That is a great thing you ask,” the queen said. “The trees are our greatest treasure. If we give them to you, you’ll not come back to trade with us again, or to make us rich.”

  “On the contrary, O queen,” Nehsi said. “My king would promise, I’m sure, not to plant the trees save in her own garden, nor to trade in their fruits or their seed. These would be for her own pleasure, and for her delight.”

  “Well,” said the queen. “And you would promise to come back often, and trade with us?”

  “For myself I may not promise such a thing,” Nehsi said, “but for my country I can do it. You have known Egypt for time out of mind. It will be pleased to trade with you, and not only for your incense-trees. Your riches are immense and beautiful, and much to be desired.”

  “Your words are sweet,” the queen said, “and your daughter is delightful. I’ll not trade for my trees, O prince. I’ll give them to your king as a gift. This is the sun-god’s country; she is his daughter. I’ll send her this remembrance of him, and of us who also are his children.”