by Judith Tarr
By his will I did it, she had them carve in the hard red stone. He led me, my father Amon. Well I knew the desires of his heart.
There was one who wandered in nearly every day, but he could not be kept out. He came in his guise of a minor priest of Amon, a burner of incense before the god; but all the guards knew him, and Nehsi, taking command of them as often as not, forbade them to bar his way.
Thutmose had grown up well. He had no height; his was a line of smallish men. But he was solidly built and strong, and he looked uncannily like his aunt the elder king. A life of exercise in the training fields had bronzed his skin and strengthened his body. Beauty, alas, he would never have: his face was too odd, full-cheeked and narrow-chinned, with a jutting prow of nose. But he was an attractive young man, graceful in his movements, well known among the soldiers for his skill with bow and spear and sword.
He was nearly twenty now. By rights he should have emerged from the regency some years since. But Hatshepsut was king, and a king in the full pride of her youth and power did not step down for a younger king. He had sat through her feast of the Myriad of Years, watched her run the race that every king ran who would renew his strength and the strength of the Two Kingdoms. No one had read the expression on his face. It was pure and hieratic stillness.
In the temple, watching the stoneworkers carve his name and that of his father and grandfather, and of his aunt, too, he seemed much more a human creature. He was curious as any young man would be, asking questions where he could do it without interrupting, waiting with laudable courtesy for the answers.
The workers were not in awe of him. If he had come crowned and in his majesty, they would have fallen at his feet. But a shaven priest in a plain kilt, perched on a stray block of stone, watching bright-eyed as a painter outlined in vivid colors the glyphs that shaped his own name, Menkheperre Thutmose, was nothing to be afraid of. He was a living god, but this was the great god’s temple. His presence here seemed somehow fitting.
He never spoke to the elder king’s ministers who came and went, overseeing the work of the carving and gilding, nor did he acknowledge them beyond a glance or an inclination of the head. Except Nehsi. They had always got on well together, considering that Nehsi was wholly Hatshepsut’s man.
It might be that Thutmose knew the virtues of silence. Nehsi, who had never been a chatterer, found it restful. They stood often side by side, Nehsi at ease but on guard, Thutmose watching the carving. Nehsi could not be there every hour of every day; he had duties that crowded close and filled his days from dawn till long after sunset. But he was there often enough, and perhaps it was the young king who brought him.
When they finished carving the third Thutmose’s names and titles and set to work on Hatshepsut’s, Thutmose happened to be present. He watched them limn the glyphs one by one, cutting carefully so that each stood forth from the stone. They had already carved the words of her royal vaunt, that she was more beautiful than anything in the world. He read that aloud, with the ease of one who reads well and quickly. When Nehsi glanced at him he said, “Do you believe that?”
“I believe that she is beautiful,” Nehsi said.
“Oh, yes,” said Thutmose. “But more beautiful than anything? Is she?”
“What do you reckon beautiful?”
Thutmose thought about it. It was this slowness, this deliberation of mind, that led people to think that he was slow-witted. But that, he most certainly was not. He could judge swiftly when he must: on the training field, at the reins of a chariot, on the hunt. It was only in speech that he came close to being hesitant.
After a while he said, “To me a horse is beautiful, running in the yoke of a chariot. The flight of Horus’ falcon in the morning. A woman seated by a lotus pool, combing her hair.”
“Why, you are a poet,” said Nehsi.
The dark eyes narrowed, contemplating temper. But Nehsi was not mocking him. “I do not believe,” Thutmose said, “that nothing in the world is more beautiful than that one.” He paused. “Do you?”
Nehsi did not answer.
“Yes,” Thutmose said, as if he had. “I shall never make such a boast.”
“A king should boast of something,” Nehsi said.
“Then I’ll be the greatest king and conqueror the world has ever seen.”
Thutmose looked as unmartial as it was possible to be, dressed as a priest and sitting on a block of stone left over from the carving. Still Nehsi was not moved to laugh. “That’s a worthy vaunt,” he said.
“She,” said Thutmose, “speaks continually of peace. See, they carve it on her stones: how she raises them in peace, and proclaims her power through gentler means than war. What is wrong with war, that she sets herself against it?”
“She says that it is costly and wasteful of blood and spirit,” Nehsi said.
Thutmose curled his lip. “That is woman’s thinking. A man knows better. You know better. I’ve seen you in the practice-yards. You’re a fighting man. And yet you bow at her feet.”
“She is my king,” Nehsi said.
The younger king regarded him sidelong. “And she always will be. Yes? That too I’ll never understand. How men love her; how they fall down before her.”
“Do you envy her?”
“No!” But then Thutmose said, more slowly, “Yes. Yes, I do. I watch how she wins men’s souls. She does it so easily. A lift of the brow, a tilt of the chin, and every man’s heart is in her hand. I have no such art, and no grace. If I try, men forbear to laugh—after all I am the king—but I see how their eyes mock me.”
“No one laughs at you,” Nehsi said, “even in his heart.”
“Don’t lie to me,” said Thutmose. “I know what men say behind my back. That here am I, a man grown, and I suffer a woman to set her foot on my neck. I’m afraid of her, they whisper. I’m so much less than she; I can’t move for fear of offending her.”
“You would do well,” said Nehsi, and his voice was cold, “to learn to be reasonable about her. She could have deposed you or had you killed. She did neither. She means you to be her heir.”
“She despises me.”
Nehsi could not deny that. He said, “So do you despise yourself. Be a man, my lord. Be as strong as your lineage allows you to be. You are not the least of the men of your line.”
“I am still less than that one woman.”
“She is older than you,” Nehsi said, “and has ruled since before you were born. She learned the arts of kingship at your grandfather’s knee. Your father, however noble his memory, was not greatly gifted in kingship. She ruled for him, and with his consent.”
“She ruled well.” The words seemed dragged out of him. Nehsi admired him for suffering himself to speak them. It was hard to tell the truth. “She . . . does . . . rule well. Better now than I.”
“If you would test that,” said Nehsi, “you might contemplate taking on your share of the kingship.”
“My share?” Thutmose was sneering again, and not to his advantage. “My share is here, ladling incense into the burners for some greater priest to light. She’ll never give me more. She dares not. For if she does, Egypt might remember: it has a second king. A king who is a man.”
“You wait for her to give,” Nehsi said, “when you could take.”
“She would never let me take anything,” said Thutmose with bitter certainty.
“Have you ever tried?”
Thutmose fixed him with a long and burning stare; then turned abruptly and strode—it could not be said that he fled—down that vast and pillared hall.
Nehsi watched him go with some regret. It had not been wise, perhaps, to provoke this of all discontented young men. A lesser man, a soldier perhaps, vexed to immobility by his women—yes. But the woman who wielded such power over Thutmose was Hatshepsut the king. Nehsi’s lady. The one whom he would serve until he died.
Nonetheless it ate at him to see a spirit so stunted and embittered, and no need for it to be so. They had done ill who raised that child
—and Nehsi counted himself among their number. On his own ground Thutmose was capable, even brilliant. But before Hatshepsut he could show none of it.
It was a curse, perhaps. A jest of the gods. Hatshepsut had worshipped her father, despised her brother-husband. That brother’s son, she could not love or even respect. And he—perhaps in his heart he was desperate to win her admiration, even to love and be loved by her who after all was his blood kin; but nothing that he did sufficed. He would always be inept and stumbling, hopelessly awkward before her.
Yet, thought Nehsi, in himself this Thutmose was nothing like his father, and very much indeed like the great king his grandfather. No one chose to remember how that Thutmose too had been slow of speech except at need, deliberate unless necessity demanded that he act with blinding swiftness; and he too had seemed hesitant, even simple, to those who did not know him well. If was as if their minds worked so swiftly that their bodies could not keep pace.
Hatshepsut remembered none of that. With his daughter the first Thutmose had been at his best always, moved to match her quickness with quickness of his own. When she saw him in council, saying no word perhaps from beginning to end, she called it wisdom, and an art of ruling that let his counsellors talk themselves out. Then when they had reduced themselves to silence, he uttered a few firm words that settled everything; and they yielded to his kingly judgment.
She never waited for this younger Thutmose to do the same. Nor had time softened her contempt for him or his fear of her. Nehsi knew little of despair, but when he pondered the two of them, he knew something remarkably like it.
“What I fear most,” he said to Bastet, “is not that it will go on for years as it is now, as ill a thing as that will be. No; I’m afraid it will change, and not for the better. He’s a deep one, is Thutmose; and when he takes a thing into his head, he never lets it go.”
“And he hates Hatshepsut.” Bastet nodded. “I see it, too. I think everyone does. It scares me, how he sits so quiet and never says a word. Men like that—when they break, they shatter everything around them.”
“She won’t listen,” Nehsi said. “I’ve tried to tell her; nor am I the only one. She won’t hear us. Her husband was a weak-spined fool. She’s sure his son must be the same.”
“Well then,” said Bastet. “If she won’t do anything about it, then someone else must.”
He stared at her. “No man can kill a king. The gods will destroy him.”
“That was not what I meant,” Bastet said, exasperated. “And you should know it. He needs to be kept occupied—the more, the better.”
“A war would be just the thing,” Nehsi mused.
“You know Hatshepsut will never agree to that,” Bastet said.
“Pity,” said Nehsi. “Asia has been restless of late. It’s thinking of breaking itself free of us, I think.”
“But she won’t do anything about it.”
“She is not incapable,” Nehsi said, pricked almost to sharpness. “She simply does not see where war can be of any use.”
“Even,” said Bastet, “where it is. She’s spent far more on these great rearing vaunts of hers, and on that temple she is so proud of, than her husband ever did on his campaigns. Sometimes I think Thutmose should get up his courage and tell her so.”
“You know what she would tell him,” Nehsi said. “She makes and builds; she rules in peace. The Two Lands are the better for what she does, and the gods are pleased, and bless her with prosperity.”
“Maybe she should let him build a temple. Or lead an embassy.”
“She won’t give him that much power,” said Nehsi. “She can’t afford to.”
“No,” said Bastet. “But in the end she’ll have to do something. He won’t sit still forever, or keep bowing his head.”
“Which is what I said to begin with,” said Nehsi. He dug fingers into his aching temples. “Ah, gods. I don’t know what to do.”
She laid cool hands over his. “We watch him, and we do what we can to stop him if he shatters. That’s all we can do.”
He looked up at her as she stood over him. Sometimes, he thought, she seemed much older than he, who was still young enough that strangers mistook her for one of his daughters. “Are we presumptuous?” he asked her. “He’s a living god. We’re all too mortal.”
“If the gods give us the gift to see, they expect us to use it.”
It might be youth that made her so certain. Or wisdom. Or perhaps, thought Nehsi, both.
He sighed and bowed his head. She worked fingers into the knots in his neck and back, rousing them to sharper pain, and then to a blissful ease.
If only this trouble of kings might be resolved as swiftly. There might be no help for it at all; no hope but to watch them play it out, even to extremity.
50
The Dawn Wind was ill, and might be dying.
Senenmut had left his mare, his beloved, his king’s gift, at home while he labored in Aswan. She had been bred then and had come in foal. While he oversaw the sheathing of the king’s obelisks in gleaming golden metal, she delivered herself of a handsome filly. The young one had done well, and the birth had gone as it should. The mare was up, nursing her foal, seeming well; but then, with deadly swiftness, she took sick.
When he was brought to her by a white and trembling stablehand, his master of horse was with her, and the man who looked after the mares and the foals. She was down, thrashing in the straw.
Someone, Senenmut noted with distant precision, had had the wits to remove the foal. An old mare who had lost her colt, but who had remained heavily in milk, had been persuaded to nurse the filly.
The Dawn Wind was beyond caring for the loss of her child. Senenmut was cursed with clear sight. He could not see hope where there was none. She had the foal-fever, and it was killing her.
She was only an animal—a horse, a creature who had never spoken a word, nor uttered a prayer to any god. And yet he grieved no less to watch her die than he had at the deaths of his kin. She had been born in his hands. He had raised her, trained her, cherished her companionship. She had been used to paw with her foreleg, demanding tribute, as imperious as any queen. Now she lay still, except when she struggled, senseless with pain.
She died with her head in his lap, too worn by then with pain to struggle against it. He smoothed her forelock, worked a tangle from her mane. The people who stood about had blurred in his sight. He had forgotten who they were. “Call the embalmers,” he said.
One of them ventured to remonstrate. “Sir! They won’t come for a horse.”
“Call them,” he said, and kept saying it until one of them obeyed him.
While he waited for the embalmers, he remained where he was. All the life was gone out of her, and yet her neck kept its silken softness. He rubbed it where it was stiff with sweat, grooming her with his fingers as she had loved to have him do.
Only a horse, he thought. Indeed. Only the companion of his heart, the joy of his days, a delight in memory when he was away from her. She had never grieved him, never caused him pain; had only loved him as a good beast can, with all her great heart. She was not even very old, still in the prime of her life, dead because he, the arrogant one, had insisted that she give him a foal to enrich his herd.
“She will guard the gate of my tomb,” he told the embalmers when they came. “Wrap her well and surround her with words of power. When I come to the Field of Reeds, I would see her waiting there in her harness, with the chariot behind her.”
The embalmers bowed to him. That was more than their usual reverence, but he had paid them extraordinarily well. They took up the mare, with no little muttering at the weight and the mass of her, and carried her away. He resolved to visit them on the morrow, to be certain that she lay in her own vat of natron, and for the full seventy days, so that she was well fit to travel into the Field of Reeds.
When they were gone and the Dawn Wind with them, Senenmut was seized by a fit of coughing. There were knives at the bottom of it, as was not
unusual; but these felt as long as swords. He could not stop once he had begun. Blind, doubled up, spitting blood, he was still aware of hands on him, lifting him, carrying him away from that place.
~~~
Senenmut was infuriatingly weak, but not so much that he could not finish his labor with the obelisks. “I’m wearing myself out even more, fighting with you, than I would if I just went out and got to work,” he snapped to Hapuseneb.
The First Prophet of Amon, who should have been far too lofty a personage to sit in Senenmut’s bedchamber and bar his way to the door, fixed him with a disconcertingly level stare. “So stop fighting with me. Do you want another dose of the wine?”
Senenmut hissed in exasperation; or tried to. Everything he did seemed to set off another spasm of coughing. Hapuseneb held him up until the fit had passed, and wiped away the issue of it. He said nothing, only held the cloth so that Senenmut could see.
Blood. Of course there was blood. His lungs were full of knives.
“Just don’t tell her,” he managed to gasp.
“She already knows,” Hapuseneb said.
“She doesn’t, either. Or she’d be here.”
“Well,” said Hapuseneb. “We didn’t tell her everything.”
“Good,” said Senenmut. Cursing, but silently, as he began to cough again.
He was dying. He could not seem to stop it. He called in healer-priests, who should have been able to do something useful; but all they did was raise a reek of ordure and put the steward of his household, the heretofore endlessly amiable Harmose, out of temper. Senenmut had to raise himself up as much as he might and dismiss them; and that prostrated him for hours after, while Harmose alternately sang to him and upbraided him for a fool.
One thing in particular he wanted, and would be outraged if he could not have it. He wanted to see his obelisks raised in the temple of Amon, set gleaming on their bases and towering up to heaven. Hapuseneb could not hover over him through every moment of every day, and Harmose had to sleep, if only in snatches.