Pillar of Fire Read online

  Here was only Nofret, and Leah who served no man that Nofret knew of, and Johanan big-eyed and silent. Johanan had been tongue-tied ever since he recognized the king. Nofret had never taken him for the sort to be awed speechless by any man, even Akhenaten. It seemed she did not know him as well as she thought she had.

  “These people,” she said to the king, “are friends to me. I trust them. They’ll look after you till it pleases you to come back to your palace.”

  His back was stiff; so were his lips as he spoke. “My palace and my people and my duties. I understand you very well. You will escort me back to them.”

  That was not what Nofret wanted at all. It was what she had done, no question of that. She had issued a challenge. The king was man enough after all: he had risen to it.

  “Come then,” she said ungraciously, “and be quick. Night will catch us before we get to the gate.”

  “And the gate closes at sunset.” He met her stare. “Yes, there are a few things I do notice.”

  The king was not a man whom Nofret could like, nor would he have cared if she had. She certainly did not admire him. Yet she had to grant that he was interesting. He seldom did or said what one would expect.

  She said what was polite to Leah, and Leah smiled, understanding. The king of course did not say anything. Kings did not thank commoners for kindness that was only their royal due.

  Walking stiffly, face to the setting sun, Nofret led the king back to Akhetaten.

  Thirteen

  The king returned to his palace but did not, as far as Nofret could see, become any stronger a king for his lessoning at Leah’s knee. He did devote only his days to the temple, returning at night to his own bed, often with Lady Kiya in it. He mourned Nefertiti, there was no doubt of that. But mourning had never, that Nofret had observed, kept a man from taking pleasure where he could get it.

  Queen Nefertiti and her children were given the full seventy days of embalming. The embalmers might lessen the time to nothing for a mere prince of the Two Lands, but for the queen and the princesses they spared no tiniest detail of their rite.

  Well before the time was ended, Queen Mother Tiye was laid beside them in the vats of natron. She had concealed her sickness with the skill of a woman accustomed to the sleights of courts, ruling as she had since the plague began, until she rose from the throne after a long day of audience, staggered and fell into Ankhesenpaaten’s arms.

  The princess braced against the sudden weight. “Grandmother,” she said. “Lady.” She touched palm to the queen mother’s cheek and recoiled.

  Nofret did not need to touch Tiye to know how she burned. Most who died of this plague caught fire slowly and sank by degrees into ash. A few went up like torches, from weakness and swelling fever to death in a day or a night.

  For Tiye it was not even so long. Nofret shouted for guards, servants, anyone who would come. Two pale and frightened guards and a single servant who had come forth alive from the fever came to her call, took up the queen mother and carried her to her bed.

  The princess would not let go her hand. She was awake and aware: once she was laid in bed with a maid easing crown and robe and jewels from her and bathing her with cool water, she said in a husk of her old strong voice, “Listen to me. Don’t interrupt.”

  The princess opened her mouth to do just that, but Tiye overrode her. “You must look after your father. He is not capable of ruling alone, nor can he discipline his mind to do everything that must be done. You must do it, little Lotus Blossom: you and your sister, if she’s of any more use than your father. Seek out wise counselors. Lord Ay, if he lives, is loyal and circumspect and will serve you well. Most of your father’s toadies and parvenus are useless if not worse. Avoid them as you can. The priests of the old gods are dangerous. They fear your father not at all, although I taught them to respect the divinity of his kingship. You must continue to teach them. Never let them forget. Never let them grow too bold. Kings have died before for causes that were less than certain—and no king has ever been as truly hateful to them as this.”

  The princess tried more than once to speak. But Tiye would not hear her. Time was short, the fever mounting, her voice sinking as she told over all the lessons in queenship that she had given this child since the plague began.

  The princess received them as if they had been blows. At first she wept. But as Tiye went on, the tears dried. Her face went white, her body rigid. Her hand that gripped the queen mother’s hand looked fair to break those fragile bones, until with a gasp she forced her fingers to unlock.

  She did not, as Nofret had more than half expected, beg Tiye not to die. Death on death had taught them all the uselessness of such follies.

  Tiye held souls to body by raw will. Nofret heard the death-rattle through the words she spoke, the last of them forced through it. “Look after my little one, my Tutankhaten. See that he remembers me.”

  The princess bent her head. Tiye smiled faintly as the life slipped out of her. Nofret saw it go, like the passing of a shadow in an empty room.

  The princess gasped, caught at air. If anything had winged past her, it was too insubstantial for mortal hands to catch. “Grandmother,” she said. “Tiye.”

  But the power of names was not enough to bring back the dead. The princess sucked in a breath. Now, thought Nofret, she would howl her grief.

  She surprised Nofret. She pushed herself to her feet. There was no one here but the two of them. Everyone else was dead or fled. She smoothed the coverlet over the lifeless body, kissed the brow that must be fever-warm still.

  She straightened. She moved as if her every bone and muscle ached. “Fetch a guard,” she said, “or a servant. Someone to watch over her. Someone must still be alive here.”

  Someone was: a guard almost too sodden with beer to stand up, sobered remarkably quickly for the dashing of a half-jar of beer in his face. While he gasped and sputtered, Nofret said in a voice like a slap, “Get up and move. Queen Tiye is dead. She needs a man to guard her body.”

  The man was too befuddled to bolt, or even to disobey. Propped up against a wall with his spear for a brace, reeking of beer, he was at least a breathing body to watch over the one that would never breathe again.

  “When morning comes,” said the princess in a still, cold voice, “there will be order in this palace. No more drunken guards. No more servants running for no one knows where.”

  Nofret did not say anything. Somewhere in the long ordeal of the plague, the child had become a woman. A woman who must be a queen.

  She walked, and Nofret walked in her shadow, through the queens’ palace to the rooms in which Meritaten had shut herself. To keep her daughter safe, her messenger had said; to escape the plague. As far as Nofret knew, she might have died, and no one had sent word because no one was left alive.

  Meritaten’s rooms were strange after the emptiness of the rest. The guard at the door was awake, aware, and much upon his dignity. The servants within were as they should be, maids to wait on the young and now only queen, and an elderly steward to conduct the visitors to his mistress.

  She had been asleep. Her daughter was in the bed still, nested in cushions. She sat in a chair, dressed in a light, transparent robe. Her body was little less childlike than her sister’s. Her face was much the same, delicately lovely, but softer, less clean-drawn.

  She had her father’s capacity for ignoring the inconvenient or the unpleasant. She did not even seem perturbed by the plague that raged beyond her safe and solid walls. She greeted her sister warmly as these princes would think of it, cool to indifference to Nofret’s foreign-born eye.

  Ankhesenpaaten endured the niceties, the dance of politeness that would have made Nofret scream with impatience. She sat in a chair across from her sister’s, she sipped date wine and pretended to nibble a bit of cake, she listened to Meritaten’s inconsequential chatter and murmured inconsequentialities of her own.

  Well after Nofret would have ended the game, well before Meritaten might have ch
osen to, Ankhesenpaaten said, “Grandmother is dead.”

  Meritaten paled but kept her composure. “I grieve for her,” she said.

  Ankhesenpaaten inclined her head. “So do we all. The whole world is sick with grief. So many dead. So many who still could die.”

  Meritaten was stark white. “Not I. Not my Meritaten-too.”

  “May the god grant it,” said Ankhesenpaaten. “Father lives and is well. Everyone else—” Her voice broke, but she mastered it. “Everyone else is gone.”

  “Lady Kiya?”

  That was more perceptive, and more to the point, than Nofret might have expected. Ankhesenpaaten did not seem startled by it. “She keeps Father warm of nights.”

  As Meritaten did not. Neither sister remarked on it Meritaten said, “Then we are all that is left. Is Father . . . awake?”

  “As much as he ever is,” said Ankhesenpaaten. “We have to do something, Mayet. No one else can or will.”

  Meritaten closed her eyes. “I’m very weary,” she said. “I need to sleep.”

  “We are all weary,” said Ankhesenpaaten. But her flash of temper faded fast. She tried again, sweetly, with just the proper degree of quiver in her voice. “Mayet, won’t you help me? I’m so much younger, I know so little, and I’m not a queen. I was never supposed to be. It was always you and Meketaten. I was the afterthought. Won’t you help me think on what to do?”

  “I can’t think,” said Meritaten. “Lotus Blossom, I have to sleep. Can’t you come back tomorrow? The dead will be no less dead then, and the sickness no less dreadful.” And Meritaten, thought Nofret, would be no more help then.

  Ankhesenpaaten seemed inclined to press harder, but she was no fool. She knew her sister. She left almost indecently quickly—before, maybe, she throttled the lovely idiot.

  “Meritaten,” she said to Nofret as they left the door and the guard behind, “had the great fortune to inherit our mother’s beauty and our father’s mind.”

  “Whereas you take after your grandmother Tiye,” said Nofret.

  The princess slid her a glance. The name was pain, Nofret could see. Nofret did not try to unsay it. “I look more like our mother,” her lady said.

  “You think as Tiye thought.”

  “As she taught me to think.”

  “She taught you because she knew you could learn. The others were all too young or too nearly witless.”

  The princess shrugged, quick, almost angry. “I am what I am. My sister is the queen, insofar as anyone is. If she can’t or won’t do what’s necessary, then I’ll do it for her. That’s what I’m for. To do what the others won’t do.”

  “You’re too young to be that bitter,” said Nofret.

  “I am as old as Cheops,” said the princess. She had stopped under a torch that flickered and tried to go out. She reached up and twisted it free of its mooring, sweeping it in a long arc to set it flaring. It was a very childlike thing to do, and yet very much like a woman grown, if a woman could be a warrior.

  The bright unsteady light made the shadows leap and dance. Some of them, maybe, had eyes: spirits of the night or of the dead, come to wonder at these two walkers in the dark. For all Nofret knew, one of them was Tiye.

  She shivered in her skin. No, not Tiye. Tiye would haunt her son if she haunted anyone.

  The princess began to walk swiftly, almost to run. Nofret had to stretch her stride to keep up. At first Nofret thought she must be going to beat sense into the king, but she went deeper into the queens’ palace instead of escaping from it. She went up into rooms that Nofret had never seen, wide and airy, with the moon shining in. Someone had omitted to shield the windows against the spirits of the night.

  There were people alive here as there had been below. Nofret knew a surge of dizziness. The faces here, the garments, the furnishings and rugs and hangings, flung her back into a life she had willed to forget. This was Egypt, she told herself. Not Mitanni.

  And yet Mitanni was here, in these rooms. The maids with their arched noses and their waving hair confined in braids and veils, the eunuchs murmuring in corners, the blind harper singing a song that Nofret had not heard since she came to Egypt, were all strangers to this place. Their manners too were strange, the fashion of their courtesy.

  Lady Kiya had not been sleeping, nor had she been warming the king’s bed. The harper sang to soothe her spirit, but she seemed hardly to be listening. She lay on a couch heaped with cushions, her great dark eyes intent, but not on the song.

  At the princess’ coming she rose and performed obeisance gracefully despite the growing bulk of the child she carried. The princess seated herself on the end of the couch and gestured, a little imperiously Nofret thought. “Come, lie down again. Be at ease.”

  Kiya laughed with a catch of pain. “Ease is nothing that we know in these days, highness.”

  “Some of us might not think so,” said the princess. She was not being polite, she was not being patient. She had exhausted that in contending with Meritaten. “Lady Tadukhipa whom the king loves, listen to me. There is now no queen regnant in the Two Lands. The Beautiful One is dead. Queen Mother Tiye has died.”

  “Queen Meritaten is young and has little skill as yet.” Kiya met the princess’ eyes directly, without the studied shyness that Nofret had always seen in her. “So you come to me. I do not want to be queen, highness. My ambition has never stretched so far.”

  “Well for you it hasn’t,” the princess said. “And well you know it. I never took you for a fool, lady, nor did the queen mother. Is it your urging that keeps the king lost in a dream of the god?”

  “How would that serve me?” asked Kiya.

  “Since you ask,” said the princess, “it keeps him docile. It allows him to be ruled by anyone with wits and will to command him.”

  “Have I done so?” Kiya asked gently.

  “No,” said the princess. “But it’s not so long since my mother died. You might simply be biding your time.”

  “I might,” said Kiya. “I might be content to wait till my child is born. If it’s a son, then I’m mother to the heir.”

  “If it’s a daughter, you’re no worse off than you were before.” The princess sighed. She had not relaxed by any fraction that Nofret could see. “My mother was never fond of you, but she always told me that you had more and better wits than anyone gave you credit for. My grandmother told me the same thing. Neither ever had need of you; they were strong enough in themselves.

  “I,” said the princess, “am not. I need an ally. You are loyal to my father. I don’t ask you to be loyal to me or to Meritaten, but for his sake I ask you to help me decide what to do. He can’t rule by himself. Meritaten won’t help him or me.”

  “And only I am left,” Kiya said. She seemed unoffended, which was more than Nofret could have managed. No doubt she was inured to Egyptian arrogance, from having been so long the brunt of it. “I thank you for coming to me. That took great courage.”

  “It took great desperation,” said the princess. “You are a foreigner, but you belong to the king. Your son may be king after him. That’s all very well, but your son hasn’t been born yet, and he might be a daughter. What then?”

  “I try again,” said Kiya, “and again, till the gods grant me a son.”

  “Admirable,” said the princess. “It does nothing for us now. Someone has to hold the reins of kingship while Father communes with the god.”

  “Is there not,” mused Kiya, “an expedient that might suit? Your father ruled from youth to full manhood while his own father lived and was strong in Thebes. For a dozen years the Two Lands had two kings, the old king and the young. Might that not be done again?”

  “But the old king had a son,” said Ankhesenpaaten. “He had more than one. He had . . .” She trailed off. “Oh, I am a fool! Smenkhkare.”

  Kiya nodded. “Smenkhkare,” she said.

  “You understand,” said the princess, “that if Smenkhkare is crowned Lord of the Two Lands beside my father, then your son, if
son you bear, may never take the throne.”

  “My son, if son I bear,” said Kiya, “will be very young for a very long time. And Prince Smenkhkare is a man already.”

  “He would have,” said the princess, “to marry a princess who carries the king-right, in order to be king himself.”

  “Yes,” said Kiya.

  The princess’ fingers knotted in her lap. “There are only two princesses left alive. One is already a queen.”

  “Yes,” said Kiya again.

  The princess drew a breath that shook her where she sat. She looked pale and small and cold. “I . . . am still a child. But it won’t be long before I’m a woman.”

  “I wish you could wait till you are much older, more truly a woman,” Kiya said with unusual and rather surprising feeling. “But the kingdom has no mercy. It needs you now.”

  “I know,” said the princess. “Do you think . . . we can persuade Father to allow a coregency?”

  “I think we can,” Kiya said.

  “That would mean,” said the princess, “that my son would rule instead of yours. Are you sure you want that?”

  Kiya looked her in the face. “Princess,” she said in something close to anger, “you would never have come to me unless you trusted me at least a little. Or are you planning to slip poison in my cup, once you’ve taken from me everything I know or can advise?”

  Ankhesenpaaten went stiff with wounded pride, but her lessons with Tiye had taught her much. She spoke softly, choosing the words with care. “Lady Tadukhipa, I believe that you esteem my father. You may even love him. For his sake you will do what is necessary. Your honor is bound up in it.”

  “Women have no honor,” said Kiya. “Women have their men and their children. They do whatever they must in order to protect them.”

  “That’s what I hope,” said the princess. “That’s what I fear, too.”

  “I give you my word,” said Kiya, “that I will do nothing to harm the king—even if that king is Smenkhkare.”

  The princess paused, eyes narrowed, thinking hard. Kiya sat still and waited. At length the princess said, “I trust you. I think you’ll act honorably for your own pride’s sake. I would welcome alliance with you.”