Pillar of Fire

by Judith Tarr

  The palace was full, said the guard whom Nofret bullied into speech, and so were all the lords’ houses—overflowing with gifts and tribute. When there was room, the ladies from Mitanni would be taken into the palace. Or else, he said, they would go to one of the other palaces.

  “Thebes, you can hope,” he said. “Thebes is best of all. Not like this place.” He spat. “So new it creaks, and so raw you can’t take a breath without gagging on stone dust.”

  “It’s not that bad,” said one of the others with a meaning glance at the captain, who was settling the reckoning with the innkeeper—mostly with the blade of his sword and the keener blade of his smile. “The pay’s good and the barracks’re clean. More than you can say for a lot of places.”

  Nofret had a little trouble understanding their speech— she had been taught to speak Egyptian like a lady, not a soldier—but she made enough sense of it to go on with. “You aren’t happy here?” she asked. “In Akhetaten?” She said the name carefully, as she had been taught.

  “We are happy wherever the king is, may he live long in health and prosperity,” said the cautious guard—and none too soon, either. His captain was approaching, ordering him back to duty in the king’s festival.

  Which the king’s possessions—or these portions of it at least—were not to see, now that they had played their part in it. They had orders. They would remain where they were until their master summoned them. However long that might be.

  oOo

  The inn was a crashingly dull place. Everyone who might have livened it with drunken song was out carousing at the feast laid out in all the markets. The king’s servants were not allowed to go. They ate barley bread and drank thin barley beer under the innkeeper’s jaundiced eye. Then, because there was nothing else to do, they made what comfort they could in the sleeping-room, and drowsed or chattered or wept the day away.

  Nofret did none of those things. She had plans. The gods meant her to be a slave: so be it. She was going to make the best of it. She would turn her shame into triumph.

  How she would go about it she did not yet know, but she would find a way. She sat in a corner with her back to the cool stucco of the wall and propped her chin on her knees, and told herself how it would be when she was the chief of the queen’s servants.

  Two

  In the morning the festival was still going on, and the king’s servants were still relegated to the inn. Toward mid-morning more came in: a chattering flock of girlchildren from Libya and Nubia. Some were as wild as desert falcons, and their faces were marked with blue swirls and scars. Only one or two spoke any Egyptian. They had not had the good offices of a royal lady to give them Seni for a teacher.

  Nofret envied them. She was thinking of running away to the festival, the tables laden with good things to eat and replenished every morning and evening, the spectacles that went past as the high ones celebrated their king and god. She had heard people saying that the king was coming himself after he had run the course of his rebirth in the court of the temple, dressed as a runner and giving his strength to the people. She wanted to see that tall narrow soft-bellied man running. He would be knock-kneed, she thought, and run like a woman. But a woman could run very fast, if she had reason.

  She was just done with plotting the routes of her escape when someone new appeared in the inn. Nofret regarded her with mild interest. She wore a gown like a lady but had to be a servant: no lady would stoop to appear here, and without servants or a palanquin besides.

  She picked her way fastidiously through the crowd. Her feet in their delicate sandals looked barely fit to touch the earth, let alone tramp the streets of the city. Nofret remembered the naked princesses with their supple bodies and their well-callused feet. Everything in Egypt was turned about, it seemed. Princesses going naked like slaves, slaves dressed and jeweled like princesses.

  The woman halted in front of Nofret and regarded her with fastidious distaste. Nofret smiled sweetly back. The woman frowned. “You are summoned,” she said. “You will come with me.”

  “Who summons me?” Nofret asked.

  The thin nostrils pinched thinner. “A slave asks whom she serves? Come with me.”

  Nofret followed because she was curious, and because she was fool enough to hope for something wonderful. Something royal, maybe. Something that would separate her from the lot of a common slave and set her at the feet of queens.

  oOo

  The disdainful servant led Nofret to the palace, to the high royal house beside the temple of the Aten. As raw as the rest of the city was, this part of it was more nearly finished, and more finely made. People who lived here did not have to live in the midst of scaffolding, half-laid bricks, plaster barely dry. The walls were straight and tall and clean, and the paint on them was brilliant, as new as the morning and almost as splendid.

  Nofret was not sure what to think of the way people’s images were painted on every wall and gatepost. They all looked like the king, but stretched to grotesquerie—even likenesses of a woman who must be the queen, because she wore the queen’s crown, and naked children who had to be the princesses. They looked like nothing truly human. Their eyes were stretched long and narrow, their chins drawn vast, their breasts hanging low whether they were the king or the queen or his children, their bellies huge and their thighs immensely round. They were most peculiar, and rather disturbing.

  And yet, like the king, they were oddly beautiful, marching in procession through the halls of the palace, bearing their gifts of tribute to the god or embracing one another in a garden of flowers and palm trees or sitting on golden thrones while dancers whirled about them. The king waged no wars here, destroyed no enemies. No bound captives abased themselves at his feet. In Hatti, that would have made him a very unkingly king.

  Nofret’s guide left her in a room with nothing in it but a table, a reed mat, and a chest that held a few flower petals and a length of undyed linen. Light came from the portico, for the room was less a closed place than an alcove that opened on a courtyard full of trees and flowers.

  Nofret could not imagine what the room was supposed to be used for. Its walls were painted with river-scenes, people in boats, fishers with nets, hunters shooting at birds in the reeds. They were all shaped like caricatures of the king, with the king’s long dreamer’s face.

  She amused herself counting images of the king. There was a lady on the river, and she wore the queen’s crown; she too had that face. Nofret, who had seen the queen’s true face only yesterday, felt sorry for the lady. How terrible to be so beautiful, and to see oneself painted over and over as a grotesque.

  Maybe the queen did not mind. She looked endlessly serene, as if nothing ever troubled her. Maybe being queen meant being able to endure anything, even a blow to one’s vanity.

  Nofret traced the line of the queen’s hair—a wig, really, in the style that Seni had called Nubian: short, with curls. It was wonderfully drawn. “I wonder,” she said aloud, “what the painters thought when they were told to draw people like this.”

  No one answered her. She was all alone but for the chittering of a bird in a branch just outside. The whole city was at the festival.

  It was quiet here. Nofret liked it, rather, or told herself she did. It was nothing at all like anything she had known in either Hatti or Mitanni. Her old mistress’ garden had been a crowded, chattering place, full of flowers that made her sneeze. This was serene, and strangely austere in its splendor.

  Nofret wandered into the courtyard, since no one seemed likely to stop her. The trees were fig trees, heavy with green fruit. There was a hive, too, and bees in it. Nofret shied from that.

  Just as she was about to explore the gate at the court’s far end, it opened. A small body slipped through, supple and perfectly free of itself without the encumbrance of clothes.

  Nofret recognized the third princess, the one who had whispered to the others at the giving of tribute. Nofret was a little disappointed. She was been wagering on the queen, or on the eldest
princess at least.

  The third princess would do if no other was to be had. Nofret studied her with what no doubt was shocking frankness.

  She returned the favor. She had an air that Nofret could not begin to imitate, as if she was born so far above anyone else that she had no need to condescend. When she clearly judged that she had seen enough, she said, “Come with me.”

  “That’s what the servant said,” said Nofret. “Are you a servant, too?”

  “No,” said the princess. She turned on her heel and walked through the gate.

  Nofret thought about staying where she was, but curiosity got the better of her. On the other side of the gate was a garden with a pool in it, full of lilies. A pair of gazelle fawns were drinking from the pool. At sight of Nofret they raised their heads but did not run away.

  The princess was sitting by the pool. There were fish in it: she fed them bits of barley bread, which they took from her hands. She did not glance at Nofret till the bread was gone.

  Nofret sat on her heels a little distance away. She should fall on her face, she supposed, but she did not see the use in that. There was someone on guard: she saw a shadow among the flowers, with wary eyes. But shadows did not care if one bowed properly to a princess of the Two Lands.

  Nor, it seemed, did the princess. While she fed the fish, Nofret tried to coax one of the gazelles to come and be petted. The gazelles were easy enough in her presence, but not as easy as that. They browsed by the water’s edge, nibbling on the lilies, ignoring Nofret’s importunings. Just as she reached to pluck a lily for bait, the princess said, “Tell me your name.”

  “Tell me yours,” Nofret almost shot back, but she was feeling suddenly circumspect. Instead she said, “I was told to call myself Nofret.”

  “That’s not your name,” said the princess.

  “The one I had before is gone,” Nofret said. “I let it go. It’s little loss, I suppose. Seni says all my people’s names sound like the start of a catfight.”

  “You’re not from Mitanni,” the princess said. “Names in Mitanni sound like bubbles underwater.”

  Nofret drew herself up on her knees. “Do I look as if I come from Mitanni?”

  “You look foreign,” the princess said. Her tone was indifferent.

  “I come from Great Hatti,” Nofret said, stung in her pride, “where the Great King bows to no one—no, not even the king of Egypt. He calls your father Brother, not Father or Lord or Master.”

  “He is presumptuous,” the princess said. She tilted her head so that the sidelock swung, brushing her shoulder. “Are you loyal to him?”

  “My loyalty belongs to myself,” said Nofret.

  “You will be loyal to me,” said the princess. “You’re mine now. Mother says that if you try anything in the least treacherous, I’m to have you flayed and bathed in salt and hung from a spike. I might not be so drastic. I might only feed you to a crocodile.”

  Nofret laughed. It was more a gasp than real mirth. “You’re very bloody-minded.”

  “I’m the king’s daughter,” said the princess “My name is Ankhesenpaaten. You will call me Lady. And Princess.”

  “What do your sisters call you?” Nofret asked.

  The princess narrowed her long eyes. She looked like a cat in the sun, both wary and serene. “You are not my sister. You are my servant.”

  “I’ll wager they call you Minnow,” said Nofret. “Or Kitten.”

  “Kitten is my eldest sister,” the princess said: “Meritaten. Meketaten is Fawn.”

  “And you?”

  “I see you are a Hittite,” the princess said. She did not look angry. Bemused, yes. Even amused. “You imitate your king’s presumption.”

  “So it is Minnow,” said Nofret.

  “It is not,” said the princess. “It is Lotus, and you are not to call me that.”

  Nofret bent her head. “Yes, lady,” she said, as meek as she could manage.

  She slanted a glance. She had not caught the princess off balance after all. The princess had expected obedience. She did not even thank Nofret for granting it.

  The princess had plucked a lily and tucked it behind her ear and bent to peer at her reflection in the pool. It was not as if she was vain; it was more a game, to see how clear her image would show itself before the fish came darting to shatter it.

  Nofret crouched beside her, not too close. Her own reflection was larger and broader and wilder, with hair in exuberant curling tangles, and eyes glaring out of it like a lion from a covert.

  The princess was not even on her guard against the half-wild slave. She said, “You will wait on me alone. If my sisters ask you to serve them, you will tell them that you belong to me and not to them. Do be polite when you say it. My sisters aren’t as forbearing as I am.”

  “I thought you shared everything,” Nofret said.

  “Oh, no,” said the princess. “That’s for show, because we’re the king’s children, and the king wants us to seem perfectly in harmony. And so we are, because we don’t have to share anything but each other’s company. My older sisters have their maids. My younger sisters have their nurses, each her own. My nurse died. Now I have a maid, and you belong to me.”

  “But,” said Nofret, coming to heart of it at last, “why me?”

  “Because,” said the princess.

  That was all she was going to say, too. Nofret could see it. Nofret had been forgetting how young a child this was—eight, nine summers at most. She talked and acted much older, mostly; as old as Nofret, and Nofret had been a woman since before the last harvest.

  But the princess was still a child, and like any child she could choose to be infuriating.

  Nofret smiled at her. “I think you think I’m fascinating. I don’t look anything like anybody else who came in from Mitanni, and I don’t look much like the Hittite princelings, either. They aren’t bringing their own women to give to the Egyptian king.”

  “No, they’ll sell their sisters and daughters to him for anything he’ll pay.” The princess’ smile was as bland as the one Nofret struggled not to lose. “Great Hatti has a king. The Two Lands have a god.”

  “Does that make you a god, too?”

  “My lineage is royal,” said the princess, “and descends from the gods.”

  “I’m awed,” Nofret said.

  “You are impertinent,” said the princess. “Is that why you were given away? Because you couldn’t keep a civil tongue in your head?”

  “Partly,” said Nofret. And in sudden ferocity: “And because I wouldn’t bed a fat louse with fleas in his beard.”

  The princess’ eyes widened slightly: her only sign of startlement. “You were given a choice?”

  “I bit him,” said Nofret, snapping off the words with relish. “He’s glad he’s got a pack of sons to start with.”

  “You won’t be biting me,” the princess said after a perceptible pause.

  “You won’t be trying to rape me, either,” said Nofret.

  “Not if you behave yourself properly,” the princess said, “and save your tongue’s freedom for when we’re alone. You are very . . .” She paused. “You are refreshing. But everyone isn’t as odd as I am.”

  Nofret had no reason to doubt her. Seni’s education of her charges had been as thorough as time permitted. It had had much to say of royal manners and of the behavior expected of servants. Silence, obedience, and perfect effacement were the virtues she proclaimed most often.

  Nofret had never learned to be quiet, was only as obedient as she could remember to be, and had never been able to efface herself. But she had become maid to a princess, and not, she thought, because she had kept her head down and her eyes fixed on her feet like a proper servant.

  “Play a game with me,” the princess said. “When anyone’s about, pretend that you’re the very perfection of servitude. When we’re alone, you may chatter as you will.”

  “Is that a bargain?” Nofret asked.

  The princess stiffened perceptibly. “I’m
the king’s daughter. I never bargain.”

  “Of course you do,” said Nofret. “You just don’t call it that. Let’s say we play the game, then. And you don’t have me flayed for whatever I say when there’s no one else about.”

  “That depends on what you say,” said the princess.

  Three

  The life of a maid in the palace of Akhetaten was not unlike that of a maid in a middling great house in Mitanni, in that one waited about a great deal, and spent a remarkable amount of one’s time being expected to divine one’s mistress’ wishes from hints so subtle as to be imperceptible. Otherwise it was profoundly different—and it was anything but dull.

  The accommodations were better to begin with than the cramped and perfume-reeking women’s quarters that Nofret had known. She was required to sleep at the princess’ feet, and hence to spread a reed mat in the room that all the princesses shared, wide and airy, with tall bright-painted pillars and frescoed walls and a floor of richly woven rugs over jeweled tiles.

  The food was better, too. Nofret’s first duty under her new mistress was to taste everything before the princess ate it, and afterwards she could dine on the leavings. The shiver in the gut, the fear that this time there might be poison, never quite went away, but Nofret was the daughter of a fighting man—she was raised to be brave, and to sneer at cowards.

  But although she lived and ate as much like a princess as anyone could, she was still but the newest of servants in a palace teeming with them. As soon as she had met the princess she was handed over to a linen-gowned palace lady who looked her over as fastidiously as the messenger had in the inn, and taken to be bathed and inspected and, as her guide put it, cleansed.

  Cleansing meant losing her hair, her beautiful hip-long curly mane that was black in the shade but deep red in the light. It meant being plucked and shaved all over, and then rubbed with something ghastly and stinging that would kill the rest of the vermin with which these arrogant Egyptians imagined she was infested. It meant standing truly naked and shivering and trying to cover herself with her inadequate hands, while rude fingers prodded in places they had no business to be.