It was a sight to make Amun proud. When the barge reached the confluence with the temple road, the obelisks would be unloaded and rolled atop fire-hardened logs to Ipet-Isut, where they would rest on their sides while Hatshepsut's artists embellished them with scenes of the king’s glory. Then each would receive a crown of gold, so the light of her strength would reflect far out onto the Iteru; all who approached Waset would be dazzled by the greatness of the Pharaoh, and the greatness of Waset's god.
Neferure stepped to Hatshepsut's side. Her small, fine hands reached up to pull her frail little body onto its toes. She peered over the wall, her brow furrowed as if she were trying to solve one of Senenmut's clever riddles. “Mother, where will the new obelisks stand?”
Hatshepsut allowed Thutmose to slide back onto his own feet. He hopped in place, unable to contain his glee.
“They will stand where the blank pylons stood, outside the Temple of Amun.”
Neferure stared up at her, still gripping the wall with white-knuckled fingers. “Stand.”
Hatshepsut watched her daughter's face, suddenly reluctant to say any more.
“The blank pylons are still there. They stand.”
“Yes,” Hatshepsut said, angrily aware that she sounded foolish.
“You will tear down the pylons?”
“There is nothing on them.” Thutmose the Second had never had a chance to carve the pylons with his own great deeds. Indeed, he had never committed any deeds to speak of; any carvings he might have made would have been fantasies – lies.
Neferure lowered herself onto her heels, stepped back to regard her mother in reproachful silence.
Hatshepsut called over her shoulder for Senenmut. “Take the King's Daughter to the garden. It is shady there; I believe the sun here on the roof is too much for her.”
“It is not,” Neferure said coolly.
“You will go.”
She turned away from the child, back to the sight of her monuments making their way down the canal. I will not let her strangeness best me. Not today.
“A great accomplishment, Majesty – the finest monuments Waset has ever seen!” A man in the crowd raised his cup above his head, saluting Hatshepsut.
Grateful for the distraction, she raised her own cup in reply, grinning, and called for more music and dance. She sank down on the small throne beneath her sunshade, pulled Thutmose onto her knee, hugged him close to her chest while he giggled and squirmed and declared that one day he would have obelisks taller than the Great Pyramids.
“You are exactly as a child should be,” she told him, and laughed at the face he made, innocent and puzzled.
She turned the boy loose to watch the obelisks once more.
**
Just after sunset, when the party had dispersed, she found them in the palace's great garden. Senenmut was making little boats from leaves and setting them adrift on the smooth, dark surface of the lake, while Neferure plucked petals from a bundle of flowers that lay on the lake's wall, and laid the petals carefully inside Senenmut's tiny green barques.
“May I come to your quay?” Hatshepsut called softly.
Senenmut glanced up at her and smiled, but Neferure pulled the thick black braid of her side-lock across her own eyes, hiding her mother from view.
Hatshepsut sat on the lake's low wall. “My sweet girl, you nearly scolded me in front of all our fine guests. You must not do such a thing. I am the Pharaoh.”
Neferure turned away. “So is Thutmose. I can scold him.”
“You should not.”
“He is just a boy.”
“He is the king. We all must show him respect.”
“Even you?”
“Of course; even I.”
“Then should you not show respect to dead kings?”
Hatshepsut glanced at Senenmut, thinking to give him a look full of reprimand for putting such ideas into his charge's heart. But he looked so genuinely startled, his brows arching sharply beneath the fringe of his wig, that Hatshepsut could only turn her eyes back to her daughter in helpless silence.
At last she managed, “Are you troubled by the question of respect? It is only natural. Yes, Thutmose is just a boy, and perhaps it angers you that we must show him the respect due a king. Perhaps it is time for you to hold the respect of the court, too.”
Neferure glanced up from her petals, eyes suddenly keen with interest.
“Yes?” Hatshepsut felt a sudden wash of relief at the girl's approval. “Would you like that? There is a special place for you at court, Neferure. A very sacred place.”
“Sacred?”
Hatshepsut nodded. She caught Neferure's beautiful face in her hands and said, “How would you like to be God's Wife of Amun?”
Neferure frowned.
Hatshepsut's hands fell. “Will it not make you happy?”
The girl shrugged. “I am honored.”
Senenmut grimaced, twirling a leaf in his fingers.
“I thought you would be thrilled,” Hatshepsut said. “You are so keen on religion.” Neferure said nothing, and Hatshepsut sighed. “What is this, child? What gnaws at you?” She bent over Neferure and said playfully, “I think you have little mice in your heart, gnawing and gnawing!” Hatshepsut tickled the girl's chest, but Neferure did not smile. She only flinched away.
Senenmut spoke up softly. “It is the pylons, is it not?”
Neferure nodded.
“Oh, dear girl. You cannot let such things trouble you.”
“You should not tear them down.” Tears came to Neferure's eyes. Hatshepsut drew back a little, startled; she had seldom seen her daughter cry, since she was old enough to speak.
“The pylons are blank. They were never carved.”
“You should carve them.”
Hatshepsut ignored the suggestion. “We build these monuments to the gods, Neferure. The gods deserve beautiful things, do they not?”
“Those obelisks are not for the gods. They are for you.”
Heat flushed into Hatshepsut's face. Senenmut caught her eye and gave a tight half-shake of his head. Calm, his eyes cautioned.
“The gods…the gods will be angry.” Neferure tripped over her own tongue, and flushed like her mother, frustrated by her own inability to explain. “And I will be angry.”
“Why will you be angry?” Senenmut asked gently, taking Neferure's hand.
The tears spilled over her cheeks. She turned from Hatshepsut and threw herself into Senenmut's arms, her face pressed against his shoulder. “Because he was my father,” she wailed.
Senenmut looked up at Hatshepsut over Neferure's frail little body, heaving with her sobs. The pain in his eyes stabbed deep into Hatshepsut's heart.
CHAPTER NINE
Ahmose came to the Pharaoh's chambers within minutes of Hatshepsut's summons.
“You are still living in the palace,” Hatshepsut said, startled, taking her mother's hands in her own. “Wouldn't you prefer an estate in the hills, with breezes coming off the river, and good smells from your fields? Waset reeks like a midden heap half the time and like a whore's neck the other half.”
“Who taught you such coarse language, Majesty? Never your mother.”
Hatshepsut kissed her cheek. The lines of old worries had settled deep into Ahmose's face. The skin on her hands and had begun to slacken ever so slightly. Hatshepsut recalled her mother when she was a young regent, ruling Egypt in the name of Thutmose the Second, her face hardly touched by the cares of such an impossible task. She was over forty years now, well on her way to old age. Somewhere between then and now, the past had imprinted itself indelibly on the former Great Royal Wife.
“No, I do not wish to live outside the palace again. It has been my only true home since I became a woman. The years I spent living elsewhere were a mistake. I've no doubt an estate would be quieter – and yes, sweeter smelling than the city. But I would never know what to do with myself in the hills. Can you imagine me farming? Crops don't obey a command to grow. I know how to do nothing but give co
mmands. Once a Great Royal Wife, always a Great Royal Wife, I suppose.”
Hatshepsut led her across the bright tiles of the anteroom floor, past couches and tables of precious wood upholstered in eastern silk and fine Retjenu wool, past the alcove where her musicians' many instruments stood on polished stands, waiting the king's pleasure. She had had the walls painted and carved afresh when she had taken her throne, undoing the damage Thutmose the Second had caused, restoring what she could remember of her father's murals and the works of Pharaohs before him.
Ahmose hesitated before Hatshepsut could lead her through the doorway to the private chambers. She brushed with her fingertips the face of the first Thutmose, her long-dead husband, the father whose face and ways Hatshepsut could barely recall.
“I miss him,” Ahmose said. Her voice did not rise above a murmur. She sounded like a woman talking in her sleep. “For all the difficulties between us, I loved him – my Tut.”
Hatshepsut took her elbow. “I did not intend to wound you by summoning you here. These were his apartments, too, and you and he...”
“It is no matter. I am growing old, and old women are sentimental.”
Ahmose allowed herself to be guided through the private chambers and out into the garden, where Hatshepsut's women were finishing their tasks, spreading a light supper on a table in the early evening shade. Where light lanced through the branches of broad-leafed trees, families of gnats spun in shimmering, wavering funnels above the grass. A hesitant evening wind shook the trees, disturbing the gnats. Ita and Tem had tied gleaming strands of copper plate in the branches, and they chimed with a musical patter like water pouring from a jar. Ahmose paused at the sound, smiled a little sadly. She was often melancholy now, in the years since Hatshepsut had sent Mutnofret away. The question of whether Hatshepsut had been cruel to exile her aunt had plagued the king often over the past seven years. Little Tut – Pharaoh Thutmose, Hatshepsut reminded herself; the boy balled his fists and scowled whenever she called him Little Tut – was Mutnofret's grandson, and she had not seen the boy since he was a baby. Perhaps there is little difference between cruelty and justice, she thought as she led Ahmose to her place at the table.
“You brought me here for a reason,” Ahmose said, lifting a pretty enameled bowl full of fine, light beer to her lips. “It was not to feast my excellency.”
“You are quite excellent enough for any king to feast.”
“A Pharaoh has no need to flatter her subjects.”
“You enjoyed it, all the same.”
Ahmose smiled. “Why did you summon me, Hatet?”
Hatshepsut drew a deep breath. “Neferure. I am concerned about her.”
Ita presented a steaming roast duck on a platter carved with papyrus fronds. It smelled rich and earthy, filled as its cavity was with a bundle of herbs singed black at their ends from the roasting fire, but Ahmose did not touch the portion that was placed in her supper bowl.
“What concerns you? Is she ill?”
“I do not know, in truth. Something plagues her – has always plagued her. She is so solemn, one might almost call her grim. And she seems to understand things no child can understand.”
Ahmose chuckled to herself, and sliced a bit of her duck. “Is that all?”
“She is upset over my obelisks. She knows I plan to tear down my brother's gateway and raise them in its place. It's put her into a sulk the likes of which I have never seen. I cannot get through to her.”
“She will learn to accept it.”
“She is too quiet.”
“Most mothers would bless the gods for sending them a quiet child.”
“There is a strangeness in her quiet. It is not...not maat.” Hatshepsut gazed into the dense shadows of the garden. The trees moved again in the breeze, and the copper bangles sounded somehow menacing, alien and knowing. “I fear Neferure may have a demon in her heart.”
To Hatshepsut's surprise, Ahmose burst into laughter, full and loud. When she narrowed her eyes at her mother, Ahmose composed herself with an obvious effort, the fingers of one hand pressed to her mouth. “I am sorry, Majesty. Forgive me.”
“Why do you laugh?”
“Oh, Hatet. Neferure is not demon-ridden. Don't you see? She is god-chosen.”
Hatshepsut rocked back in the seat of her stool, relief warring in her heart with a new, nagging suspicion. “God-chosen? Are you certain?”
“Did I not tell you as much that night I found you in the garden, when Mut showed me what you intended to do and sent me to stop you?”
“You did not say...”
“Daughters never listen to their mothers.”
Hatshepsut's mouth twisted wryly. “Ah, and that is the gods’ own truth.” She took a much-needed draft of her beer, for her mouth had gone quite dry.
“When Neferure seems quiet and strange, she is only listening to the voices of the gods.”
A bristling intensity crept beneath Hatshepsut's skin. She stared blankly at her portion of duck, examining the sensation, prodding at it with her heart until at last its meaning became suddenly, shockingly clear. She was jealous. She envied the girl this connection to the gods. Indeed, it seemed more than a bit unfair, that Neferure should hear their voices speaking within her. She was but a child, and Hatshepsut was the king, and son of Amun, after all! Hatshepsut had never heard Amun's voice – not with any certainty, at any rate – not in the way the god-chosen reputedly heard. She tried to silence the voice of envy, but it only wailed the louder. Yes, and Neferure had so much more of Senenmut's heart than she, tied up as Hatshepsut always was with the demands of the throne. Ah, she and Senenmut saw one another often enough, worked together – but they had had no time of late to love one another.
You are being ridiculous, she told herself firmly. The Pharaoh will not be consumed with envy over a seven-year-old girl. Do try to recall that you are the Lord of the Two Lands and not a shrieking fishwife.
When she had stifled the flush of envy, a more sinister chill gripped her. She remembered too vividly the terrible night she had spent watching the bats flit over the palace lake, the reflection of the hanging star burning in the water, the cramping in her womb.
“I wonder whether she is god-chosen after all, or whether it was something I did that made her so strange. The potion...”
“It is not the potion, nor a demon. Neferure will come to understand what it means to be god-chosen as she grows. She will open to it like a flower in the sun. That is the way it happens for those who are chosen. It’s how it happened for me.”
“Will you tutor her for me?”
“She has her tutor, I think.”
Hatshepsut smiled a little sadly. “Senenmut can teach her many things, but not this. She needs you to guide her.”
Ahmose lowered her eyes, a show of obedience – but Hatshepsut could see the spark of joy that shone behind her downcast lashes.
“I offered Neferure the station of God's Wife recently, you know. She did not seem pleased.”
“How could she be? She is far too young. You were twice her age when you took the station.”
“She is not too young to begin learning. Just simple tasks – the temple songs, how to burn incense...”
“Ah, such tasks may be within her reach, but pushing her too far and too fast would be a grievous mistake. A woman – or a girl – should come to Amun's service willingly, ready to give her heart in full to the god.” A muscle in Ahmose's jaw pulsed faintly; it seemed to Hatshepsut that her mother dragged these words from her throat. And well Hatshepsut knew why: Ahmose had not come to the station with a pure heart, but with selfish motives, and she had suffered for her folly.
“I fear what it could mean to Egypt, if I were to leave the station unfilled much longer. I cannot take it up myself; I am Pharaoh. I cannot perform the ceremonies of both a man and a woman. I already tread a careful road as it is. I would not risk the gods' wrath with hubris.”
“I agree that Amun needs a wife, and sooner rather than later.�
�
Hatshepsut eyed her mother, making no effort to disguise the scrutiny in her gaze. She would not re-appoint her mother to the position. Though it would pain her to deny Ahmose, she could not risk the gods' displeasure by reinstating a disgraced God's Wife of Amun to the temple. But in another moment Ahmose went on speaking, and Hatshepsut released the breath she had not known she held.
“Why not appoint a woman from the harem? They are all from good families, loyal to the throne. It would be a great honor, and doing honor to a powerful house has stood many a Pharaoh in good stead.”
“I have my fears where that is concerned. If I extend such an honor to one house, would I not slight a dozen more? And well do I know that not all the women of the harem are from loyal houses. If I gave the title to some woman or other, must I not then strip her of her honors in order to set Neferure in her place, once she comes of age? It would only breed ill will toward the throne.”
“Perhaps you are right.”
“Nor will I see Neferure without some prominence at court.”
“She is King's Daughter. What more prominence can any girl have?”
Suddenly uncertain, Hatshepsut swallowed a long draft of her beer.
Ahmose's mouth tightened, but her look was speculative, not disapproving. “You would make her your heir.”
Hatshepsut pressed her hands to her face, rubbed hard at her cheeks, her forehead, as if she could scrub away the buzzing ache, the tension that seemed to fill her body and kas whenever she turned her thoughts to Neferure. “The throne does need an heir.”
“Whose throne? Yours or Thutmose’s?”
“Our thrones are one and the same.”
“You know they are not. He is eight years old.”
“One day he will be a man.”
“Until then, you are the sole power of Pharaoh. All of Egypt knows this is true.”
“Very well. She will be my heir alone, if you like. My brother died young; I suppose the same fate could befall me. Though Mut knows I don’t intend to go facing any captives unarmed.”
“And you will not marry, to produce a royal son.”
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