by Judith Tarr
Her treasurer, Thuty the endlessly precise, made a strangled sound. She arched her brows at him. A lesser man might have quailed before the utter blandness of her expression, but he said without hesitation, “No.”
“No?” She had reared like the cobra in her headdress, golden hood flared, deadly and beautiful. “No? Am I not the richest king in the world?”
“You are not rich enough,” said Thuty, “to cast an obelisk in electrum. You might have enough gold for it, mind you, if you make it smaller than the ordinary; but you’ll have nothing left to pay the workers, and as for keeping the kingdoms in funds . . .”
“You are a petty-minded counter of barley-grains,” she informed him. “For my father’s glory, should I not do what no one else has done before?”
“You could,” said Senenmut, evolving the thought as he uttered it, “build it of stone and sheathe it in electrum.”
She pondered that, eyes narrowed, painted brows knit. “Stone, you say? From where?”
“Aswan, I think,” he answered. “The good red granite, that can be cut whole from the living rock, and carried on barges into Thebes.”
“Yes,” she said, still musing on it. Her eyes brightened. “Yes. Yes, that could be done. And more than that. Two of them. Two pillars of heaven. Since gold is so scarce, says my treasurer, and stone so plentiful.”
“If you do two,” Thuty said, “there’s not enough gold and silver to sheathe them both. Tips only. Twelve baskets’ worth. That’s all.”
It was great vexation to a king to be so constrained by the niggling of her treasurer; but Hatshepsut could not have forgotten that it was she who had objected to the trouble and expense of her husband’s wars. She bowed, if not with grace, then with resignation. “Very well. We’ll do what we can. We’ll do it quickly. A year, no more, for the honor of my father’s name.”
“Why?” Ineni the builder demanded in Thuty’s ringing silence. “Why so brief a time?”
“Because,” she answered promptly, “if it were too easy or too slow, it would never be as great a sacrifice.”
“A year,” said Hapuseneb, shaking his head. “And two of the things. I don’t envy the man who has to do it for you.”
“I won’t,” Ineni said. “I’m not a madman. I won’t work myself to death, either.”
“I will,” Senenmut said—heard himself say it, as if he had nothing to do with it. He was not thinking at all. He was seeing in his mind’s eye the temple of Amon at Kamak, that vast and arrogant place, terrible in its beauty. She would add to it; would proclaim her kingship in the most virile way of all, with a twofold monument.
As if her temple, her Djeser-Djeseru, were not enough. This was pure vaunt, bravado bare.
“I’ll do it,” he said. “A year? I’ll give it to you in half of that. Only give me men, and time to prepare. A month—I’ll have it all ready and set to begin.”
“You are as great a fool as she is,” said Ineni with a curl of the lip.
“Probably,” Senenmut agreed, amiable as he always was with Ineni, because it drove that prince of builders to distraction. “Djeser-Djeseru is finished. I need something else to engage my mind.”
Ineni sniffed loudly. He had not been asked to build the king’s temple. That was her dream, and Senenmut’s. He had dug her tomb instead, and set her father’s body in it.
He grew old; he was not often now in Thebes, but in his mansion near Abydos, resting, fishing, hunting waterfowl. “A man needs rest,” he said. “You’ll get none if you carry out your boast.”
“Oh, I’ll rest,” said Senenmut. “When I’m done, when the king’s obelisks stand in the temple, I’ll rest as I never have, not even when I was young.”
~~~
“Don’t kill yourself,” the king said to Senenmut. He had spent the day and half the night drawing the plans for the undertaking, and spread a blanket in a corner of his workroom, and roused at dawn to begin again. By the time she found him, someone—he never remembered who—had persuaded him to bathe and shave and change his kilt. He was presentable, if hollow-eyed.
At first when she came in he did not know her. She was a stranger, a lady of the court in wig and golden headdress; her face in its mask of paint could have been anyone’s.
But her voice he knew, and her hands tugging him away from his worktable, pushing him into a chair, holding a cup to his lips till he drank. Braced for wine or beer, he nearly spat out the cool clean water that was in the cup.
“I’ve never seen you like this,” she said. “Your assistants are saying that you’re possessed.”
“By what?” he asked, honestly curious.
“They aren’t specific,” she said. She sighed a little, and though the room was open and anyone passing by could look in, kissed him softly on the lips. There was no passion in it. It was simply love, and worry that surprised him.
“Oh, come,” he said. “You’ve shown me a task that’s worthy of me. I’m delighted with it.”
“Djeser-Djeseru wasn’t worthy of you?”
“But that’s done,” he said. “It rises in beauty; it gladdens my heart. I could fiddle with it, I suppose, and work on the tombs, and pass the time in small things. This, now—this is a great work, a grand challenge. To quarry the stone, carve it, sheathe it in bright metal, raise it in your father’s temple, and all within a year, is a feat that men will remember for a thousand years.”
“You have a year to quarry the stone,” she said. “That was my boast.”
“And mine was half a year,” he said.
She shook her head at him. “You’ll have all that you need,” she said. “Whatever it is, ask, and it shall be given you. My treasurers have their orders, and my masters of works. What I wish to inscribe on the stones—”
“I know,” he said. “It will all be done. Do stop fretting over me. I’m happy. I’m always like this when I’m happy.”
“Are you glad,” she asked, “that you will be gone from Thebes for half a year, and away from me? Do I bind you too tightly? Do you need to be free?”
He stared at her. His mind, which had been running on through the reckoning of men, wages, and materials, stumbled unwillingly to a halt. “What ever makes you think that?”
“When I sent Nehsi to Punt,” she said, “you sulked for months. You wanted to go. I wondered then if it was the glory you longed for, or the respite from me. Now you leap into this undertaking with grand glee. What else am I to think but that you need to be apart from me?”
He suppressed a sigh. “Oh, lady. Oh, beloved. You understand what it is to want glory, to want it so badly that you’ll sacrifice anything for it—even tradition so hallowed with years that no one dreamed it could be broken. This I do for you, for the splendor of your name; but for myself, too. I want it. I need it.”
“So,” she said, a little wearily, a little wryly. “You are a man after all, and I am a woman. You yearn for great things. I yearn for you, and dread the parting.”
“I’ll come to Thebes as I can,” he said, “if I can. And when it’s over I’ll come back to you. That I promise you.”
She nodded slowly. “I surprise myself,” she said. “I don’t want you to go.”
“You could,” he said, “send someone else. Ineni, Hapuseneb—”
“No,” she said. “You’d hate me for it.”
Since that was true, he did not answer.
She embraced him with sudden fierceness. “Look after yourself. Remember to eat and sleep. Don’t wear yourself away. A year is more than soon enough.”
“Half a year,” he said, set on it, determined to do it.
~~~
With the full power of the king’s name and a free hand in her treasury, Senenmut gathered a force of laborers several thousand strong, with all that they needed for the work ahead of them. The king sent great logs of cedar and sycamore; boats and barges for the men and their tools and provisions; smaller luxuries: tents, blankets, even a lovely young thing with a lute and a smile, who said that
his name was Harmose. He had a sweet voice, and he seemed to know every song that had ever been sung in Egypt. Senenmut called him guard and nursemaid, dog and servant, spy for the king. Harmose only smiled and tuned his lute, and sang a song of a dog and a monkey and a tree of fruit.
Harmose was not the only king’s man who followed Senenmut to Aswan. Thuty the treasurer came too, to keep the accounts. Amonhotep, an older man than Senenmut’s brother of that name who had died, who had been Senenmut’s right hand in much that he did since Hatshepsut took the Two Crowns, was Senenmut’s second yet again, and capably so.
And Nehsi came, the king’s chancellor, bringing his wife but leaving all but one of his tribe of offspring behind, the dark beauty who was his daughter Tama. They were escaping, and rather gleefully, too. Senenmut was ready to begrudge the Nubian’s presence—he had not been allowed to sit in Nehsi’s shadow when Nehsi went to Punt—save that Nehsi came to him not long before they left Thebes.
It was not uncommon for the king’s chancellor to visit the king’s master of works on this errand or that. But Nehsi had not come to Senenmut’s house except on the king’s errands, nor had Senenmut invited him. They served the king together as they might; they respected one another. They were not, however, friends.
On this morning Nehsi came not as the king’s man but as himself. Senenmut received him over breakfast, which, because he was courteous, he offered to share with Nehsi.
The Nubian declined to eat, but did accept a cup of beer, which he drank with evident enjoyment. “It’s good,” he said.
“Yes,” said Senenmut. “It’s made on my estate. The brewery’s nearly as illustrious as the horses.”
“I had heard of it,” Nehsi granted him. “Its reputation is deserved.”
Senenmut nodded. He spread a round of bread with softened cheese, and ate it not because he was hungry but because the king would ask her Nubian if Senenmut had eaten, and Senenmut did not want to vex her with yet more fretting for his welfare.
Nehsi drained his cup of beer, declined a second. Senenmut ate his bread and cheese. When the silence had grown almost intolerable, Nehsi said, “I don’t suppose you’re delighted that I’m coming to Aswan.”
“I can’t say I am,” Senenmut said.
“You know she worries,” said Nehsi. “She was going to send Hapuseneb, but he told her to send me—and ordered me to bring Bastet. She’s an excellent lady of the household. She’s offered to oversee your house, and to take over such duties as you may find tedious, with as much as you have to do.”
“That is generous of her,” Senenmut said.
“She is fond of you,” said Nehsi.
“One wonders why,” said Senenmut.
Nehsi shrugged. “Who can fathom the mind of a woman? I’ll tell you true, it wasn’t my doing that I was given this duty. They conspired between them, my wife and the king. They think you’ll be well served if I do whatever needs doing, under your command of course, and completely at your disposal.”
“And you? Does that gall you?”
“No,” Nehsi said. “I think you may be mad to think you can do this as quickly as you promise—but I’ll do my best to help you.”
“Why?”
“Because,” said Nehsi, “the king loves you. She’s afraid for you. She thinks this will be too much for you.”
“Everyone does,” Senenmut said with an edge of irritation. “Do believe me: it isn’t.”
“She believes you,” Nehsi said, “or she would never have let you do it.”
“And she sends you with me, to make sure my nose is wiped and my kilts are clean.”
“That’s Bastet,” said Nehsi with the glimmer of a smile. “I’m to keep the workers in order, and oversee the overseers.”
“Leaving what for me to do? Sit on a hill and watch?”
“I’ve never been a builder,” Nehsi said, “nor a carver of stone. Men I know. Stone, wood, the shaping and building of monuments—no. That I leave to you.”
“That’s fair enough, I suppose,” Senenmut conceded after a while. “She frets too much, and gods know why; but I confess, I could use you. We’ll need every good man we can get, to do what we have to do in the time we’re given for it.”
Nehsi inclined his head. “I thank you. You are generous.”
“Don’t cherish any illusions. I’m practical. Tell your wife that I thank her for her offer, and I’ll take it; provided that she promises not to fuss over me. I hate to be fussed over.”
“So do I,” said Nehsi. “I’ll make her promise.”
“You do that,” said Senenmut.
When Nehsi had gone and Senenmut should be going himself, he lingered for a while. That was not a friend, he thought; but neither was it an enemy. Fellow servant, that was it; and the king trusted him.
So did Senenmut. Liking was no part of it, nor needed to be. Nehsi would do well by his king, and therefore by Senenmut. Senenmut was not sorry, after all, to have him.
47
The sun beat down like a hammer on bronze. The air shimmered with heat. Men shouted; hammers rang. The shapes of the two obelisks were drawn in the red stone of the quarry; the lines of men followed them, entering the mountain as they called it, hewing the great shafts out of the living rock.
Senenmut, seated on a hill under a canopy with the scribe Tetemre and the singer whom the king had sent to nursemaid him, watched with tight-drawn intensity the hewing of the nearer obelisk. Harmose plucked soft notes on the lute, each one like a drop of water falling in a pool. The sound of them was somehow comforting, a remembrance of coolness in that bleak and burning place.
Nothing green grew here. There was only the red stone and the blue vastness of the sky, and the river beyond, the roar of its cataract almost drowned out by the clamor of the quarry.
There was a town just north of this place, a city as it was reckoned in these parts, hard upon the borders of Nubia. Its people mostly had Nubian faces; Nehsi for once looked almost ordinary, though no one that Senenmut had seen was as beautiful as that. Here most of the workmen were from farther north, but some had been brought in by the good offices of the governor of Aswan, who looked to share a little of the glory.
It was a sweaty undertaking, daylong, nightlong by torchlight. Senenmut had lost the memory of sleep. The men labored by turn and turn, day and night. The night laborers had nothing to fear from ill spirits: Senenmut had seen to it that a company of priests walked the quarries each night at sunset and midnight and in the dark before dawn, blessing them in the gods’ name and casting out any demons that might be lurking.
They had begun one obelisk before the other, tracing the shape of it in the stone and setting two long lines of men to hewing it out. It was the tallest that had ever been, two dozen manlengths and somewhat more from base to tip. The raising of it would be an awesome thing. It would tower up to heaven, taller than the cedars of the Lebanon, taller than any other work of men’s hands.
Senenmut confessed them to no one, but he had his doubts of this thing. It was too tall; it would break of its own weight. He should shorten it by a manlength, two, four, perhaps one more than that.
But he had begun it, and it was taking shape in the quarry below him. It was nearly freed of its surrounding stone. The men who had hewn it out had gone to begin the second shaft. Stonemasons were in the trench now, carving out the four sides. When it was lifted up and carried out to the river and thence into Thebes, it would be smoothed and polished, its sides carved with words as the king directed, its tip sheathed in electrum.
The crews were waiting with the rollers, the huge logs that the king had given, the sledges on which the shaft would ride down to the river. The barge that would carry it was tethered there, enormous beyond the belief of the boatmen who had flocked about it all the way up the river from Thebes. It dwarfed them. Its length was thrice the height of the obelisk; it rose towering from hull to upper deck.
Nothing like it had ever sailed the river of Egypt; nor, Senenmut suspected,
ever would again. It was built of precious sycamore, great beams gathered from the whole of the Two Lands of Egypt, sent here by the king to build the ship that would bear her obelisks to her city.
It was vast, enormous, huge beyond believing. It was purely Egyptian, and absolutely royal.
Down in the quarry, the chief of overseers, none other than Nehsi the Nubian in a kilt that shone in the sun, stark against the gleaming darkness of his skin, raised an arm in the signal that they had agreed on. The shaft was ready to raise from its bed. Senenmut sprang to his feet and leaped down from his eminence, with the scribe and the singer trailing behind.
Nehsi seemed in his element. He grinned wide and white as Senenmut halted panting at his side. It was hideously hot down here, like the breath of a furnace. He passed Senenmut a jar that proved to be half-full of beer—excellent beer, too. Bastet had lured Senenmut’s brewer away from the villa, and brought him to this desert place to practice his art among the workers and their overseers.
He was content, Senenmut gathered. Men who worked hard and long under the burning sun were marvelously appreciative of good beer.
Senenmut drank deep and passed the jar to Harmose who happened to be behind him—in his shadow as usual. It rather amazed him that he had stopped minding that perpetual presence. The sweet voice and the fine touch upon the lute had a great deal to do with it; and the boy’s temper was as sweet as his voice. There was no guile in him that Senenmut could discern. He was simply and completely as he seemed: the queen’s servant, given to Senenmut to keep him well and in comfort in this terrible place.
Harmose left a few swallows for the scribe, handed him the jar and wandered a little way down along the rim of the cutting. The carvers had drawn back. Strong men labored now to lift the shaft. The overseers’ whips cracked. Men shouted, fierce, rhythmic: "Heave and roll! Heave and ho!”
Up out of the earth. Up, oiled by the sweat of a thousand men, lifted on ropes, balanced, hanging in the air, sinking down with awesome slowness onto the sledge that waited for it.