The answer seemed to displease her. She turned away.
“You were hoping I would deny it.”
“No – yes. I don’t know.”
“What troubles you, Hatet?” There was no one to hear him use the pet name, the name she had been called from the time she was a child, learning at Senenmut’s knee. No one to hear his outrageous disrespect, the unseemly familiarity of a simple scribe for Maatkare, the Good God.
“I am afraid,” she said, and her voice broke with the strain of keeping her tears in check. He stretched his arms toward her, and she crumpled onto the grass, pressed her face against his chest. Her body shook with sobs.
“What? What do you fear?”
But she would not answer. She only wept.
Far in the forest, echoing amongst the trees, a coughing call sounded, then a yowl. The men had heard something similar in daylight while they dug the myrrh saplings. Their Puntite guides had identified the caller as a cat: one of the cats that stalked the woodlands – small, but known now and then to attack a man when easier prey was scarce. Never had two people been easier prey, lying prone in the grass, one of them weeping like a lost ka in a tomb. And yet Senenmut was not afraid. Was she not the Pharaoh? Did the gods not watch her and protect her? He pulled her tighter against his body, his shield against the terrors of the night.
Hatshepsut mumbled something against his chest. He drew back, looked with concern at her deep-shadowed face.
“What is it, Great Lady?”
“I do not want to be forgotten.”
He laughed, the way he had often laughed at Neferure’s small fears when she was just a little thing. “You can never be. Look at your temple, your monuments! Look at your works! Your name is carved on every beautiful thing in the Two Lands – every obelisk, every mural, every palace wall. The gods will always know you – ah, and men, too. You will not be forgotten.”
She drew away from him, sat up, rubbed the heels of her hands into her eyes. “Yes. Yes, my monuments. My temple. My name.” She pulled her knees to her chest and hugged them, lost in her own thoughts, and Senenmut studied her face in the moonlight. She had grown thinner under the strain of their journey, the long trek across the dry Red Land, the lean provisions, the heaving and dullness of appetite on the sea. The shape of her face stood out sharper and starker than ever before, and he was struck by how like a falcon she was, the sharp curve of her nose, the piercing darkness of her eyes. And how frail she seemed, holding herself, pensive and quiet. This was a Hatshepsut he seldom saw, and though her strange, dark mood disturbed him, still he reveled in their solitude, in the chance to drink the sight of her as a parched soldier drinks at an outpost well.
“Will you tell me why you are so upset?” he said, hesitantly, reluctant to break this rare spell.
She shook her head.
“Then let me cheer you, at least.”
“You cannot cheer me.”
“Oh, can I not?” He stroked her shoulders, let his fingers run slowly down the curve of her spine, the skin smooth and supple and scented with the lush oils of Punt.
“No, you cannot. I am in no mood for lovemaking tonight.”
“When will we have another opportunity?” Likely not until they were back in Waset, and even then it would be days before they settled into the court routine, before chance was kind enough to lend them a few precious moments of solitude and they could touch each other’s skin, taste each other’s bodies. Senenmut was parched for her, starved of her. He brushed the strands of her wig aside and took her ear in his teeth gently, and heard her quiet gasp of pleasure. It was her secret place – the one way he could always turn the current of her moods to his favor, turn her refusals into acquiescence.
“That’s not fair,” she said, shrugging her shoulder to push him away. But then she was in his arms, pressing her mouth to his, slipping her tongue past his teeth. Her breath was faintly perfumed with incense.
Senenmut pulled her to her feet, the better to undress her, and stood back to take in the sight of her as the skirt fell from her hips, as she pulled the wig from her brow and shook out her natural hair. It was grown to a hand’s width now, dense and tightly curled, black as onyx. It framed her eyes with a dark halo. Her unpainted face was as colorless as silver in the moonlight, but still its tones darkened with a flush that filled him with impatience. Yet he made himself wait, made his body yield to his eyes, allowed his eyes the rarity of the sight of her unclothed. Beneath her wreath of golden necklaces, her collarbone moved delicately with her breathing, and her breasts, flattened only slightly by motherhood and the intervening years, stirred too. Below the shadow of her navel, below the few pale tracks in her skin bearing witness to her long-ago pregnancy, a thick thatch of unfamiliar hair darkened the unplucked crux of her thighs. A jagged line cut through it, the scar – the wound she had inflicted upon her own flesh to win over the men of Egypt’s court. Senenmut recalled, with a force of memory that startled him, the weight of Hatshepsut falling into his arms, fainting away from the pain and the loss of blood. He recalled how light she had been. He had lifted her, cradled her, shouted for a chariot – and known in that moment that she carried his helpless heart, held it as tightly as he held her body.
He fell to his knees before her, pressed his face against the scar. The black hair of her groin trapped the smell of her, intensified it, and his senses were flooded with her scent, flooded like a field yielding to the rising river, encompassed entirely by her.
The cat in the woodlands coughed again. He tugged at her until she, too, fell to her knees, and put her arms about his shoulders, covering him with the shield of her power. He kissed the tears from her cheeks, from her eyelids. He tasted her salt.
“Senenmut,” she whispered, and his name on her lips was deep with the sound of relief.
“Maatkare,” he replied, invoking her divinity, pulling her protection like a cloak around their two hearts.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
It was not such an unusual thing, Neferure told herself, scowling, to see the Great Royal Wife in Waset’s palace. So why, then, did the people who filled it glance at her wide-eyed and startled before they dropped into their requisite bows? Indeed, Neferure spent much time alone in her small private palace, sequestered with her own thoughts, her prayers, her worship, her endless longing. But she made her appearance at court daily as duty dictated. She presented herself to Thutmose whenever he summoned her – though he had summoned her again only twice since that disastrous time when the magic of her own expectations, the anticipation of her great and beautiful fate, had fallen from her eyes. Now when she went to her husband, she lay back as servile as a captured slave and allowed him to rut upon her, tainting her with his mortal flesh.
True, she was not yet the consort of a god, and so her own flesh was still mortal. But this unfortunate circumstance was only temporary. She would discern her sin – whatever unknown flaw in her person blocked her divine lover from coming to her bed. She would make the proper amends, debase herself before the proper altar, grovel, sacrifice. And then she would be elevated.
Neferure paced from the doorway of the audience hall through a long colonnade where pale light alternated with the shadows of the great pillars. The sun was high and hot, the season of Shemu nearing its close. The light in the palace’s halls was bright and blue. All about her, servants moved with lagging feet, their linens damp with sweat, their minds dully on their small and meaningless tasks until they caught sight of the Great Royal Wife moving among them, a shaft of sunlight in cloud, and staggered into their bows. Neferure ignored them. The impudence of their behavior infuriated her – the implied insult, that they should be startled by her presence in the palace.
She left the colonnade and made her way through the long eastern garden. A god’s-kiss bush held the last of its pink blooms up to the sun; small birds dived among its branches, feasting on the insects attracted to the sweet smell of the flowers. Neferure stood and watched a moment, soothed by the simple beau
ty of the scene, encouraged by it. She plucked the freshest blossom she could find and tucked it into the strands of her wig so that she might enjoy the perfume of the god’s-kiss all afternoon while she searched.
For it was a search, a restless roaming, chasing her thoughts down the airy corridors of Waset’s great palace, circling her own footsteps past store-rooms, treasuries, ambassadors’ quarters and servants’ rooms. Any place in the palace might hold the answer to the mystery of her sin. Once her mother returned from Punt, Neferure’s various duties to the throne and the Temple of Amun would redouble, and she would no longer be free to search. Hatshepsut had been gone over a month already. Time was growing short, and Neferure had found nothing to enlighten her in all her many days of searching.
As she stood gazing into the surface of the palace lake, watching the ripples of rising fish distort her dark reflection with its one bright pink bloom, she realized with sudden certainty where the answer to her quandary was surely hidden – the one place she had not yet thought to search, had not even dared to consider. She paused, listening to the whisper in her heart, half-unheard as it always was. She felt the faint wobbling in her middle that indicated the words of a god.
“Mistress,” she whispered. “Lady of Delights.”
Hathor struggled to respond through the dense cloud of Neferure’s unatoned sin.
I will clear your way, goddess. I will.
It had been many years since Neferure had visited the Pharaoh’s apartments – the other Pharaoh, the chiefest of the two. Her mother, Maatkare. Many years, yet still Neferure’s feet knew the correct path. She allowed her own ka to lead her, obedient to the strength of her own assurance. Soon enough she reached the two great doors, carved with twin scarabs raising sun-disks above their backs, gilded and painted in lapis-blue. With the Pharaoh away on her expedition, there was only one guard on the door, and he stepped aside with a bow when Neferure smiled at him, sweetly, benignly. What harm was there in the Great Royal Wife, the king’s own daughter, entering the royal chamber?
Her mother’s fan-bearer looked up sharply, an angry remark ready to spit from her lips. When the woman saw who approached her, she dropped into a hasty bow.
“Great Lady,” she said smoothly.
“Rise.”
She did. The fan-bearer’s face was calm, but Neferure did not miss the light of suspicion flaring in her eyes.
“Your name?”
“Batiret, Great Lady.”
“You have served my mother long.”
“Ah; I have served her since before you were born, Great Lady.”
“That is a long time indeed.” Neferure gazed around Hatshepsut’s anteroom, outwardly airy, even lazy in the late Shemu heat. Her eyes, though, swept keenly over the rich hangings, the fine furniture, the very tiles of the floor she stood upon. She searched the scenes depicted on the walls, the various kings of the past striding and fighting, hunting, conquering, worshipping. They were all as alike as lentils in a pot, all of them mortal. And none of them yielded up her answer.
She made toward the first of several doors set along the nearest wall. Batiret scampered after her, fussing with the length of linen she had been folding when Neferure arrived.
“Great Lady, is there aught I might do for you?”
How to search the apartment thoroughly without this pest of a woman buzzing around her? Neferure turned to look Batiret full in the face – and stopped, seized with revelation.
“You have ever been loyal to my mother.”
“Of course, Great Lady. Always.” The gruffness of simple pride was in Batiret’s answer.
Neferure considered the woman, her frank, honest face, her open and fearless nature, evident in the way she stood square and unafraid under the Great Royal Wife’s scrutiny.
“I would reward you for your good service to my mother, and to Egypt.”
“Reward me, Great Lady?” Suspicion crept into Batiret’s voice, and she tried to temper it with a half-bow.
“I would have you come to supper tonight in my own palace.”
Batiret straightened. She was silent for as long as propriety would allow, and in that brief moment Neferure saw the doubt and worry clouding in her face. But no one could refuse an invitation from the Great Royal Wife.
Batiret had no choice but to bow her acceptance. “As you wish, Great Lady, though I am unworthy of the honor.”
Neferure took the flower from her wig, breathed in its sweet smell once more. Then she tucked it into Batiret’s own hair, smiling, and left the Pharaoh’s rooms.
**
Thutmose sighed as his guards closed the doorway to the House of Women behind him, shutting out the distant sounds of Waset – the merchants crying in the great central marketplace, the blows of carvers’ hammers ringing like bird cries in the marsh. The doors shut out the smell of Waset, too, the fishy odor of the quayside, the acridity of pitch coating boats’ hulls, sewage draining down the sides of the streets, the faint sweetness of bread baking, beer brewing, meat roasting. The young king did not know whether his sigh was one of relief or despair. For as the pleasant perfumes and soft music of feminine laughter washed over him, he felt the weight of duty settle over his shoulders, cold and stiff as a jeweled collar against his skin.
Neferure had grown cold and unresponsive in his bed, and his confidence in his ability to please her – as a husband or as a king – was badly shaken. He had turned to his harem nightly, taking two or three women into his bed, rising to the charms of each one until, by the end of the night, he had to be carried in a litter back to the great palace, too weak and sleepy to drive his chariot at the head of his guards. The women laughed with delight and made bawdy jokes about the greedy desires of their handsome young king. The men of his guard – those he was close to – advised him with knowing winks to enjoy his stamina while he could, for when his youth left him he would not manage to throw his spear so many times in a single evening. Hesyre wordlessly prepared salves for Thutmose’s overworked flesh, raising his fussy brows in the bath while he bent over his work. But no matter how pained he became, no matter how he longed for a night of simple sleep, Thutmose returned to his women.
Part of it was the pleasure. Ah, as Neferure was quick to remind him, he was only a man, and what man could resist so many willing women in his bed, such an endless parade of beauty and variety? Ankhesebet with her squirming and her squeals, Nedjmet with her lithe dancing and her eager mouth, Sheshti’s translucent white skin, always under veils to protect it from the harsh sun, Khuit with her skin as black and sweet as ripe figs. Bebi and Benerib, who would happily tangle the sheets together. Ankhesiref who liked it on her back. Meritamun who straddled him. Henuttawy with her firm, round buttocks and her preference for it on her knees, face pressed into the mattress, her yowls stifled by a silk cushion – no, he would be no man at all if the lure of so many singular pleasures did not draw him back night after night.
But more than the pleasure, it was the pressing need of his house. Neferure wanted nothing of him. That was now plain, and he would not force her. And so he told himself that even a son conceived on a harem girl would be better than no son at all, would hold the throne securely enough. Was he himself not the son of a harem girl? That was the thought that pushed him onward, to take another woman into his bed, and another, long after the lamps had burned low.
No woman had yet announced a pregnancy, though, and Thutmose felt his ka tremble under the weight of his unfulfilled duty even as he fell atop another willing woman.
It was Henuttawy who was the first to meet him in the harem’s antechamber, swaying in a transparent fall of pleated white linen. The gown was caught below her pretty round breasts by a green ribbon studded with wrought-gold flowers, appealing in its simplicity. She offered him a cup of cool wine, took his arm as they strolled out into the gathering night. It had been a long day of hearing petitions, deciding on an endless stream of matters that seemed so small and insignificant to Thutmose. What did it matter which noble ho
use would inherit the property left by some deceased merchant who had no heir? What did it matter how great a percentage of the emmer harvest should be set aside against famine the following year? What did it matter that the House of Hirkhepshef sought the blessing of the throne on the marriage of a daughter to some Ankh-Tawy lord? Nothing mattered at all, when set beside the empty wombs of Thutmose’s wife and every one of his concubines. In the face of his dark fear, Henuttawy’s soft, gentle bearing and easy smile were a welcome light – even if she did cast little sneers of triumph at the women who had not been quick enough to greet their king.
A purple dimness fell over the harem garden, softening the edges of the flower beds, soothing away the fierce heat of daytime. Bats emerged from their hiding places, dipping and weaving across the grounds. Thutmose lost himself in the peace of watching them, allowed his eyes to become pleasantly fooled by the crossing of their paths. Henuttawy’s melodious voice lulled him, talking of some quiet nicety – a music lesson she had taken, the harp, the flute. As if in response to her story, distant music rippled across the grounds from the direction of the House itself, a tinkling of electrum bells, the strings of a harp singing a smooth counterpoint to the rhythm.
She led him to a favorite place, a small clearing surrounded by a ring of sycamores. Hundreds of tiny white flowers bloomed among the short grass, little stars in a reversed, violet sky. Suddenly Henuttawy dropped her story mid-sentence and kissed him, lifted his hands to her firm breasts. “Here, my lord. Take me here.”
“Here? Outside?”
“Ah, yes – the women will all stay away. I made sure of it. I told my servant where we would be.”
“Why here?”
Henuttawy sank gracefully to her knees, her hands working now at her own soft breasts, shivering. “When a woman’s skin touches the earth during the act of love, it increases her fertility tenfold. Didn’t you know that, Majesty?”
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