Sovereign of Stars

by Lavender Ironside

  Neither spoke. Neferure watched Thutmose with shy, dark eyes, painted with the alluring, metallic shimmer of the crushed carapaces of sacred beetles. The light danced around her eyes, which said all that her lips did not. He took in her fragile beauty, her retiring gentleness, in contented silence. I could look at you for hours and never mind the passage of time, he wanted to say. But he did not wish to break the beguiling silence.

  When the boat found the center of the lake and rotated idly in a chance breeze, Thutmose recalled the work at hand. He cleared his throat, and Neferure looked away, her lashes lowering like a modest fan obscuring a court woman’s face.

  “You enjoyed your time in Iunet, I trust.”

  A smile lit her face, so sudden it made the breath catch in his chest. “Oh, yes, Majesty. I will be forever grateful for your gift.” Then the smile faded, and a queer intensity flooded her face, an expression tense with the weight of momentous expectation.

  Thutmose’s thoughts fumbled about inside his heart. He recalled the mystery of her face as she gazed up at him from the side of the white bull, recalled the ribbons of the God’s Wife crown dancing about her shoulders. Here were those same shoulders before him now, bared to the sun, adorned by red ribbons that held up a strange white gown. It covered the swell of her small breasts against all dictates of current fashion, and was closer in style to a priestess’s robe than a great lady’s sheath. The fabric of it was enticingly sheer, so that he could see the color of her skin beneath it, but no detail of her body.

  “Well,” Thutmose said, flustered. “Well. I have brought you here to ask…to tell you…” Inwardly, he cursed himself for a fool. In the three weeks since Hatshepsut had been gone from Waset, he had accounted himself well, handling the court and the throne with an alacrity that at first surprised him, then seemed only natural, only maat. Was he not the Pharaoh, after all? But here, before the shy gaze of his sister, his confidence and his words failed him. He drew a steadying breath and tried again. “I would make you,” he said in a voice that sounded far more confident than he felt, “my Great Royal Wife.”

  Neferure stared at him, her expression unreadable.

  “If you would have it,” he added weakly.

  “Great Royal Wife,” she repeated, her voice faint, considering. Then her eyes sharpened, and she leaned toward him on her cushions, as hawkish as her mother ever was in negotiation with ambassadors or nobles. “But the Pharaoh has already made me heir. The other Pharaoh, I mean – Maatkare. A Pharaoh’s proclamation cannot be undone, brother.”

  Thutmose sat up straight. A sudden quiver of excitement came to life in his belly, a trembling of power he had not felt before on his throne, at the reins of his chariot, training with his soldiers. “It can be undone by me. I am a Pharaoh – as much as Pharaoh as she.”

  “My mother will be angry.” The prospect did not seem to displease her.

  “Only at first. When she sees the reason of it she will understand.”

  “The reason of it?”

  “There is no woman in the Two Lands as fit to bear an heir as you, Neferure. Both your mother and your father have ruled from the Horus Throne, and your mother was sired by Amun himself.”

  “Yes,” Neferure said quietly, that curious intensity lighting her face once more.

  “What is more maat – that a woman such as you, with your breeding, your blood, be the heir, or bear the heir? Our child,” he said, low and urgent, “will have more royalty and more divinity than any man who has ever lived. The gods mean this, Neferure. Look into your heart – you will see it.”

  She breathed deeply; her eyes fluttered closed, sparkling in the sunlight reflected from the surface of the lake. A rising joy seemed to suffuse her, coursing along her skin until she visibly trembled.

  She sees it, Thutmose thought, half frantic, half afraid, entirely eager.

  “I will,” she said at last. “It is maat. At last, maat will be served.”

  And before he could speak another word, Neferure reached up to the red ribbons at her shoulders, loosed the ties. Her gown fell to her waist, exposing in one rapid, ragged heartbeat the smoothness of her chest, the slimness of her body, the dark shadow of her navel, the sweet, ripe fruit of her breasts. Stop; go slowly, a voice cautioned in Thutmose’s heart, but he was already moving toward her. His hands found her, reached to trail along the hollow of her back until she arched, gasping. He bent his head to take her breast into his mouth, and her cry of pleasure was filled with a wild ecstasy.

  Thutmose had never seen such eagerness in a woman before, not in any of his harem concubines, though they never failed to please him. Neferure was something different altogether. She fumbled at her gown, tore it from her hips, then went for his kilt with her nails flashing. Thutmose shied back, undid the knot himself. When he stretched her along the cushions, down in the warm hull of the boat, she clawed at his shoulders, pulled him to her body, raised to meet him, her legs locking around his hips with a force he never dreamed the small, delicate girl could command.

  When he entered her, whimpering, yoked and trembling under the power of her passion, she whispered a word in his ear. Her breath was hot with the sound of it.

  Maat.

  **

  The king and the King’s Daughter summoned Ahmose two days after their union. She was not surprised. In fact, she expected the summons sooner; gossip concerning the event on the palace lake reached her well before Thutmose’s brief letter informing her that Neferure had accepted his offer and would soon be declared Great Royal Wife. She sat limp in the shade of a sycamore, Thutmose’s papyrus curling on her lap. She watched the gardeners go about their business of weeding and watering with unseeing eyes, puzzling at her sudden despondency.

  I have done wrong, somehow, somewhere. Yet the gods would not elaborate, and Ahmose still felt a thrill of certainty that this marriage was right. She had told Hatshepsut once that even the god-chosen could not always be sure of divine will. Hatshepsut had countered that Amun would not allow her to choose wrongly. And what of me? Would Amun allow me to choose wrongly? He has before now. Oh, Mut, bless your foolish daughter. Guide me.

  She waited a long time, while the gardeners moved from row to row, and finally worked their way out of sight, their bent backs disappearing beyond the dark line of a hedgerow. Mut stayed silent. Ahmose shook her head, rose briskly from her bench, braced herself against the dizziness that accompanied such movements of late.

  I am growing old. Gods, so many years have passed me, and what wisdom did I glean from them?

  She recalled Mutnofret in her youth, splendid and arrogant, swaying through the House of Women as bright and arresting as a beam of light through a temple door. A sudden yearning to see her sister again seized her, so sharp it pierced her heart and would have made her cry out, had its force not stolen her voice away. Did Mutnofret still live? Ahmose did not know.

  “Lady?” One of her servants left her spinning lying on the grass and stepped quickly to Ahmose’s side, steadying her sway with a strong young arm around her shoulders. “Are you well?”

  “Yes, yes, Tenetsai. It is only the heat.”

  “I’ll fetch you some cold beer, Lady.”

  Ahmose stepped away from her on steadier legs. “Very good. And lay out a better gown than this one, if you would be so kind. The king has summoned me, and I must go to him.”

  An hour later she was admitted again to the king’s fine chambers, and swept inside on a tide of firm self-admonishments that she was god-chosen, she had been a Great Royal Wife once herself, consort to a god, and was surely no fool, no matter how adamantly her beating heart said otherwise. Thutmose and Neferure rose to receive her, then settled again onto one of the fine couches, huddled close as only two children in love may do. Neferure held tight to Thutmose’s hand, a soft, dreamy glow pinking her skin. Thutmose looked at Ahmose with a somewhat bewildered gaze.

  “I was pleased to hear your news, Majesty.”

  “Yes. It is a great thing.”
r />   “And Neferure – you are amenable to this?”

  “Amenable, Grandmother?” Neferure laughed sweetly. “Of course.”

  “It is nothing to be undertaken lightly. The mantle of Great Royal Wife is a heavy one.”

  “I know it. I supposed as much. But it is an opportunity, too – one I cannot pass by.”

  “An opportunity?”

  “I learned so many things in Iunet, Grandmother – so many wonderful things. If I am Great Royal Wife, I will have the freedom to restore Hathor to her former glory: all her temples, all her rites. I will spread the love of Hathor throughout the Two Lands, and it will be as it was long ago.”

  Many people, even in the royal family, had their particular preferences among the gods. There was nothing unusual about a woman devoting herself wholeheartedly to Hathor, who was, after all, the paramount of women. But the fervency of Neferure’s devotion stirred Ahmose’s vague sense of uneasiness.

  “You will still be God’s Wife of Amun. On that we are agreed.” She looked to Thutmose for confirmation, and he nodded. “You will not neglect your duties to Amun in favor of Hathor.”

  “No.” Neferure spoke the word solemnly, and turned an intense gaze, full of palpable longing, upon Thutmose. “I will not neglect any of my duties to Amun.”

  Ahmose stood, went to them, took their hands in her own. “Then I give you my blessing, Majesty, God’s Wife. Not that you require it – but it is yours.”

  They passed an hour in conversation, planning the marriage rites, which were, at Thutmose’s insistence, to be announced and enacted in all haste. Ahmose suspected that he hoped to have a little heir already growing in Neferure’s womb by the time Hatshepsut returned. That might stay her anger, some, Ahmose thought.

  When the king dismissed her, Ahmose walked slowly back to her own apartments. Night was gathering above Waset’s palace, filling the courtyards with the softness of violet shadows. From the direction of the ambassadors’ wing, the sound of foreign music lifted and moved gently through the night-darkened pillars. The tune was both bright and melancholic, soft and benign. Yet somehow the sound of the reedy flute filled her with guilt, with horror. She stopped at the edge of a courtyard, looked about her with wide eyes. A breeze ruffled the leaves of a climbing vine winding its way across the porch of an apartment with a tight-shut door. A cat trotted across the smooth paving stones, slender tail erect. Ahmose’s women drew up around her, glancing curiously about, looking for the threat that had stopped their mistress in her tracks. But only shadows moved in the courtyard, only late-roosting birds moved in the dusky sky.

  “Lady?” Tenetsai said softly.

  “Nothing – it is nothing at all,” she said, and led her women on.

  I have stayed too long in Waset, Ahmose said sensibly to herself, passing from the courtyard and back into the deep blue shadow of a pillared hall. Perhaps I should take to one of my estates in the country, after all.

  Hatshepsut’s wrath would be terrible when she returned from Punt to find her careful plans undone, no matter that a Pharaoh was the one who undid them. Ahmose had played a part, and she would be blamed.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  Five boats set out from Tjau. They were made from planks of a lightweight wood, well lacquered with wax and oil, lashed one to the other by ropes of some rough, pale fiber. Lengths of rope mortared the cracks between planks, too. Ineni had explained to Hatshepsut how the fibers would swell in the sea water, packing the space between the planks until the hull became watertight. Hatshepsut did not quite trust the engineering, and yet the boats did float. They floated perhaps too well, yielding to any small movement, rolling violently on their bowl-shaped bellies with the passing of each wave. And thousands upon thousands of waves came and went, came and went, as the little fleet made its rocking way along the red coastline south from the isolated port. No ship on the Iteru ever sailed so roughly – not even in the cataracts. Hatshepsut braced herself against the nausea of the motion. Most days she was able to keep her water and dried fish in her stomach.

  They put ashore each evening at sunset, camping gratefully on solid land that still seemed to pitch with the fearsome memory of the angry sea. The shore was a wilderness, showing no signs of human use. Her expedition raised tents whose linen walls felt entirely too thin against the vastness of the untamed land. Every night she brought into her tent a certain gift from the governor of Tjau: Bita-Bita, a young woman of the port town whose mother had come originally from Punt. Bita-Bita did have the dark skin the people of the fabled god’s land were reputed to have; Hatshepsut had no cause to doubt that the girl was authentic. Bita-Bita’s now-dead mother had taught the girl the Puntite tongue from the cradle, and she still spoke it passably well, as far as she could tell, having never ventured outside of Tjau. It would suffice. It must suffice; Bita-Bita was the only Puntite speaker that could be located, even by Ineni, though he had assured her that trade could still be accomplished using nothing but hand-signs, if necessary.

  On nights when her stomach was not too tender from the disorienting motion of her boat, Hatshepsut joined the men in hunting. It was a welcome distraction from the strain of long travel, and for the most part, the creatures of this land were the same as the creatures of the Iteru’s green valley: waterfowl and brush birds, pigeons in the stands of trees, dark-colored gazelle that sprinted along the crests of grass-fringed dunes. When they were a week outside of Tjau, Hatshepsut even managed to bring down a gazelle with a shot through the heart – a shot which was more luck than skill. That night she tried to focus on Bita-Bita’s lesson in rudimentary Puntite, listening from the solitude of her tent as her sailors and basket-bearers sang around their fires, roasting bits of gazelle meat on twig skewers. Senenmut brought a haunch dripping with savory juices, dismissed Bita-Bita from her duties, and shared the meat with Hatshepsut, wiping the fat from her chin, kissing the sheen of it from her lips there in the lamplit glow of the king’s tent, where no one else could see.

  Senenmut had grown foreign to her, as foreign as the shores where her encampments rose at night, but as exotic and enticing. There was no room on their Set-cursed boats for luxuries, and neither time nor still mooring to attend to one’s appearance. Razors and cosmetics were left behind, save for the kohl that protected the eyes from the sun, so even the king went as plain-faced as a rekhet. Senenmut’s hair, like hers, grew, and stood out in tufts beneath the foremost fringe of his wig. It was shot with silvery grey, an intrigue she found most appealing. His cheeks and chin roughened with a sparse growth of hair, and a trail of black fluff crept from the belt of his kilt, up his rather soft belly like a climbing vine. His legs and underarms darkened. He was a wild thing, as was she, stripped of civilization, pure as Atum’s first creations. She loved him anew, seeing him so untamed.

  In another week more the shores turned from dry grassland to scrub, with pockets of trees holding fast in the stream-carved depressions of the hillsides. In the evenings when they landed Hatshepsut could see the dense dark greenery looming to the south, where the land sloped steadily from waterline to a wall of hills so large and steep she could sense their monumental weight even from a great distance. “Forest,” Ineni had said, nodding to the wash of deep emerald along the southern horizon. Hatshepsut tried to imagine what a forest was like. She pictured a garden, well-trimmed and planted in organized beds and rows, and knew in her kas that it could not be so.

  At mid-day, when the sun was high and merciless on the restless, gray-green surface of the sea, the expedition of Maatkare, the Good God, arrived in Punt. “Thank Amun,” Hatshepsut whispered fervently as her boat rolled toward the shallows. She peered anxiously over the dipping and rising rail. A crowd of people had gathered on the sand, waving their arms. Most of them were rather short of stature, with the cool-hued, deep brown skin of southerners. Men and women alike wore brief aprons about their waists, made from some rather sheer cloth; yet she could tell even from the rail of her ship that it was not fine enough to be called l
inen. Their chests were bare, and she could see ornaments of gold and polished stone glinting at the women’s breasts, pierced through their nipples.

  Beyond the strand where the waves made fall in long, frothy arcs, a line of short dunes stood sentinel amongst tufts of salt grass – the kind with leaves as sharp and strong as blades, as they had seen on Tjau’s shoreline. Beyond still, the deep green-black density of forest reared toward the sky, a profusion of heavy, damp trunks, cold shadow, and the incessant, mindless, sinister waving of the leafy canopy.

  The boat ran aground with a loud scrape. Nehesi was the first over the rail, and he reached up to assist first Hatshepsut onto land, then her servant Bita-Bita. Hatshepsut’s feet hit the cold water with a splash; the feel of the waves surging about her calves, seething up to soak the hem of her kilt, filled her with excitement. She strode toward the Puntites with Nehesi and Bita-Bita in tow, heedless of any danger. In spite of the dark menace of their environment, there was nothing to fear from the people themselves. Of that she was certain. They welcomed the Egyptian fleet with eager gestures, with broad smiles, and she smiled back at them, throwing her arms wide.

  Bita-Bita took to her work at once. She raised her girlish voice above the cheering crowd, speaking her mother’s native tongue. When she fell silent, the Puntites looked at one another in confusion. Hatshepsut waited.

  “I told them you are the king of Egypt, Great Lady,” said Bita-Bita apologetically.

  A man’s voice burst into laughter amidst the Puntites. Nehesi took a menacing step toward the crowd, one hand on his hilt.