Pillar of Fire Page 17

  Nofret was nothing to the king. She doubted that he even remembered her, for all the times he had seen or spoken to her since she came to serve the third princess in Akhetaten.

  None of which would matter in the least if she fell prey to a footpad in midnight-darkened Thebes. She quickened her pace to a trot, aiming where she hoped the river was, where the heavy wet scent of water overcame the human reek of the city. If she was wrong she would wander the lightless ways till dawn, unless a nightwalker caught her and left her bloodless in a midden.

  Her trot was almost a run. Her breath came in gasps. She steadied it by force of will. There was no slowing the pounding of her heart.

  She stumbled into a wall, recoiled, flung herself through a gap between it and another. And there was the river, broad empty liquid-whispering expanse aflow with moonlight. Boats rocked empty at the piers and along the quays. On the other side Nofret saw a glimmer of light.

  There was light on this side, too, some distance down the riverbank. A torch flickered and swayed, riding on a boat that tugged at its tether. Shadowy shapes bulked beneath it: men asleep at the oars. She heard the rasp of a snore, and a curse as one of the others kicked the snorer into silence.

  Nofret was a ghost, was shadow, was silence given substance. She crept toward the boat. No one on it kept watch. Her nostrils twitched at the scent of barley beer.

  These could not be Horemheb’s men, surely. He had no patience with drunkenness and none with guards who slept at their post.

  And yet clearly they were waiting for someone. The torch would not have been lit else, making a beacon to guide any thief or murderer to unguarded prey.

  In that open boat full of sleeping rowers there was still room for a woman to hide. The master’s deck with its canopy and its gilded chair offered a niche of shadow behind the chair, a space just wide enough for Nofret to huddle with knees clasped to chest. There was even warmth to be had: the rug under her and the canopy hanging down behind, and a cloth—fine-woven rug or warm mantle—flung over the back of the chair. She appropriated that, wrapped herself in it and was remarkably comfortable.

  Sleep stole up on her. She fought it for as long as she could. But the current rocked the boat on its mooring, and the snorer’s racket had quieted to a gentle purr, and the warmth of the mantle about her did battle against the chill of the wind off the water. She curled tighter, to be less comfortable, and fell sound asleep.

  oOo

  Voices woke her, and a thunderous rattle that her stunned brain knew somehow to be the running out of oars. The deck creaked and shifted beneath her. Someone was standing on it.

  She peered blinking from behind the chair, too sodden with sleep to be afraid. The man stood with his back to her, fists planted on hips, legs braced against the movement of the boat. The torch’s light shone through his linen kilt. She could see the strong muscled shape of his thighs.

  Her eyes closed. She had been right after all, or a god had guided her. She was in General Horemheb’s boat, and General Horemheb stood in front of her, face turned to the night and the wind off the river. He did not sense her presence at all. No one did. She was as invisible as a living thing could be.

  She took care to breathe lightly. Though her body cramped into a knot, she did not yield to the temptation to uncoil. The boat crawled toward the dark shore and the one light gleaming there. Bright as the moon was, she could see the shape of the palace and the faces of the cliffs behind, stark black, pale silver, that in the day were the sunstruck ruddy color of the Red Land.

  As endless as the crossing had seemed in the magnitude of her discomfort, the arrival at the bank seemed to come in a moment, too quick for her wavering wits. Men ran along the edges of the boat, leaping to secure it to the pier. The others ran up the oars and stowed them, a rumble and clatter that sounded as loud as thunder in the night. But no one came to ask who crossed the river so late.

  Nofret was trapped. Horemheb left the boat at his leisure, accompanied by the steersman and a handful of guards. The oarsmen and a pair of armored guards lingered endlessly. Not even a ship of the great sea, Nofret was sure, should take so long to secure itself after a voyage.

  If she ever escaped this trap, she would have to do it on all fours like an animal. Her back would never unkink again. Her legs were cramped against her chest, her arms aching with holding them there.

  She would burst out or scream, or do something to set at naught that endless hour of worsening discomfort. She would not be able to help herself. She was too certain of it even to regret it.

  And yet somehow she held on. The boat’s crew finished their interminable meandering duties. One by one they wandered off, followed by the guards. The last of them took the torch.

  It did not matter. The moon was westering but bright enough to see by. Muscle by tormented muscle Nofret uncoiled.

  Gods oh gods it hurt. Wonderful hurt. Hurt of lying on her back, stretched straight and stiff as a corpse, and simply breathing.

  Much later, but much too soon for her howling muscles, Nofret dragged herself to her feet. There was treason in Thebes. What she could do about it she did not know, but she had no particular desire to see her lady poisoned or killed. For one thing it would leave Nofret with nowhere safe to go.

  There were no footpads in the palace, and the only robbers on this side of the river were those who robbed the dead. They cared nothing for the living. Nofret walked more steadily as she went on, as the pain in her body faded to an ache. She went in by a postern that was neither barred nor guarded, safe at last and too numb to notice.

  oOo

  Ankhesenpaaten was not asleep. Nofret did not think that she had slept at all that night. There were no signs that the king had been there. The young queen was lying in her royal bed on her sheets of finest white linen, with her headrest of ivory inlaid with gold.

  She was not the brown thin-bodied child she had been when she made Nofret her maid. Her skin was golden still from her morning baths in the sun, but she had grown into a woman, and one who would be very beautiful when her growing was done.

  She turned her head at Nofret’s coming, her dark eyes washed clean of paint but seeming no less huge in her narrow face. She did not smile. She never smiled, Nofret thought. Not even when she drove her chariot, or when she played with Tutankhaten or with little Meritaten-too.

  Nofret knelt beside her lady’s bed. Ankhesenpaaten watched her but did not speak. That was a game she played sometimes: saying nothing, simply staring at a messenger, till the messenger blurted out everything at once.

  Nofret often won that game by saying nothing at all and letting her lady go wild with curiosity, but tonight she was in no mood for silliness. She said, “Horemheb is talking treason with the high priest of Amon.”

  “So that was where you were,” said the queen. No surprise. No shock. “You could have been killed.”

  “Would you have cared?”

  The queen closed her eyes. “Probably. I don’t know.” She paused. “Amon is dead.”

  “He is not,” said Nofret, not even thinking, but knowing it for the truth. “Your father’s general is going to help Amon’s priests get rid of your father.”

  “They won’t do that,” said the queen. “Father is the king. No priest can ever touch a king. He knows too well what the gods will do to him for sacrilege.”

  “He also knows who can be relied on to dispose of the king for him. I don’t think,” said Nofret, “that General Horemheb is a superstitious man.”

  “Superstition has nothing to do with it. The king is the king: Horus on earth, Osiris among the dead. The kingdom is as his own body. As he lives, it lives. If he grows ill or dies, it too fails, unless there is another to be king in his place.”

  “But there is!” cried Nofret. “Smenkhkare is exactly what they can use: beautiful, vain, and profoundly stupid.”

  The queen did not reprimand Nofret for that insolence. “Yes, he is stupid. That’s why they won’t be able to use him. He’s styled
himself the Beloved of Akhenaten, just as my mother did: the one who rules beside the king, the chosen of the god. He hasn’t the wits to turn against Father. If they kill Father, they have to kill him, too. Then they’ll see the Two Lands fall for lack of a king.”

  “I don’t think so,” Nofret said. “They’d find themselves a new king, one who would owe enough to Amon and the priests that he’d be paying the debt until he died.”

  “There is no one who would do that,” the queen said scornfully. She sat up and tucked her feet beneath her, frowning at Nofret. “And even if he dared, he’d have to marry a royal lady in order to have a right to the crowns. None of us would do such a thing.”

  “Wouldn’t you?” Nofret asked her. “If one of you could be convinced that it was best for the kingdom or even for your own heart. Or,” she said, “if they got hold of Tutankhaten.”

  “Tutankhaten would never let any mere mortal tell him what to do,” said the queen. She no less than Nofret had reason to know. Her young uncle was, truth to tell, a bit of a terror. But then all boys were. They grew out of it, or else they became men like Horemheb—or like the king.

  Which made Nofret think, and once she thought about it she knew. “Horemheb might pretend to be any man’s ally if it got him what he wanted. Then he’d have no scruples about disposing of the inconvenience.”

  “Horemheb is loyal to the king,” said the queen.

  “He didn’t sound loyal when I heard him telling the priest of Amon to hold off his troops while Horemheb gets your father out of Thebes,” Nofret said, snapping off the words.

  The princess sighed. “Ah, so that’s what the trouble is. You don’t think a loyal man can treat with the enemy for his king’s safety.”

  “Safety!” Nofret flung up her hands. “Oh, you are a fool! He was buying and selling your king’s life—but in his time, not in Amon’s. He wants to be more secure, I suppose, before he moves on the throne. Don’t you remember how he tried to fill Akhetaten with his own men?”

  “Oh, but that was playing power. Any man worth his ambition will do that, to show that he’s not to be trifled with. It’s no threat to the king. Not even Amon is bold enough for that.”

  Nofret could howl, or she could surrender. In the end she did a little of both. Muted howl, ferocious mutter. “I don’t understand you at all. Not . . . at . . . all.”

  “Of course not,” said the queen. She slipped out of bed and stood over Nofret. “We do have to get Father out of Thebes. Horemheb is wise in that. No one will touch Father, but the rest of the court aren’t safe, with the people so angry. They should go back to Akhetaten. Go, fetch the steward of the palace, and one of the maids. I should be dressed when he comes.”

  And what was Nofret, then, if not a maid?

  Shadow, Nofret thought as she ran on her errand. Runner at her lady’s whim. Inveterate haunter of places in which she did not belong.

  Better that than a betrayer of kings. Even such a king as Akhenaten.

  Twenty

  Ankhesenpaaten might see sense after her own peculiar fashion, but the king was blind to anything resembling it. He would not move from Thebes. Lady Kiya was ill, he said with iron obstinacy, and much too near her time to travel. The court could do as it pleased. He would remain in Thebes until his lady was delivered of her child.

  There was no shifting him. Not even Horemheb was strong enough to do it. Nofret wondered what Amon’s high priest thought of that. She did not seek out the temple to learn. One evening in that terrible place was enough.

  As Kiya kept to her rooms and her flock of maids and physicians, and the king attended her whenever he was not engrossed in praying to his god, the city grew more openly restless. Nofret did not hear of priests engaging in skirmishes with city guards, but she did hear of riots over this trifle and that, courtiers assaulted when they ventured to show their faces, seals on temples broken and rites celebrated there in defiance of the king’s ban—but never in Amon’s temple.

  Amon’s priest was keeping his word to Horemheb. No one came to kill the king. The west bank of the river was quiet, eerily so, although the eastern city snarled even in its sleep.

  On a morning some days after Nofret’s escape from city and temple, Nofret happened to be near the gate when a man in a priest’s robe asked to be conducted to the king. He did not look like a madman, and yet it was mad for any priest of Amon to show himself openly in this place.

  He had others with him, a handful of watchful-eyed young men, all tall and strongly built. Nofret recognized with a start the thin man whom she had seen in the temple. Maybe some of his guards were familiar, too, from the battle in the street.

  The king’s guards let them in without pause or objection. Nofret was astonished, but she should not have been. Horemheb was their commander.

  Amon’s priests were taken direct to the king, nor were they made to wait for more than half a day till he was disposed to speak with them. Nofret was there when they were brought in front of him, and properly so since her lady sat as queen on a throne beside the king’s.

  Nofret kept her eyes fixed in front of her and refused to glance at the tall broad man among smaller, softer courtiers. Horemheb would not betray himself. Not he, who had been a soldier for so long.

  Nor did he seem to know her. She was dressed as a royal servant and not as a slave wandering loose in the city. Her hair was tightly plaited, her body concealed in a gown of fine linen. She would, she hoped, look like another person altogether than the sharp-tongued maid in Amon’s temple.

  King and queen seemed oblivious to Horemheb or to any threat he might offer. They were at their most splendid and their most inhuman: all one blaze of gold like images of god and goddess. In the cavernous space of the great hall of audience, where echoes fluttered like bats beneath the roof, they seemed as brilliant as the sun, and as little concerned with mortal follies.

  There had been other guests and petitioners before them, the long round of royal graciousness that the king could indulge in when it suited his whim. There would be others after, gratified to be granted the light of the king’s own presence, and not merely that of his queen.

  These emissaries—emissary, really, since all but one were simple bodyguards—paid homage to the king in due and proper form, as priests of one god to the living image of another. They made clear by subtle flickerings of hand and eye that they offered their obeisance to the office and not to the man who held it; to the god whose living face he was, and not to him who had turned against all gods but the one of his own making.

  Perhaps he understood what they were saying to him without words. Perhaps he did not. He did not seem to see them. His eyes gazed into the limitless distance of the hall. His mind was wherever it went when he was consenting to be, however briefly, king.

  The thin priest’s voice woke him out of his dream. It was the voice of a singer trained in the temple, pitched to fill that whole huge hall. It was neither loud nor strident, and yet it rattled Nofret’s teeth in her skull.

  “O king!” the priest intoned. Only the title, no softening of respect. “Lord of the Two Lands, apostate against its gods, hear the word of Amon who is from everlasting, who shall be lord and god when your bones are dust in the earth. Turn back to his ways. Forsake your falsehood. Serve him as your fathers served him before you, or suffer the force of his wrath.”

  The king had not moved on his throne, but his souls were all in his body, and his wits, too—more than Nofret had ever seen. Here was open threat to his god.

  “If you fail of your duty,” the priest said, “Amon will curse you and all your posterity. Your lineage will die before you. Your name will be cut out from among the names of kings, and be forgotten.”

  A movement caught Nofret’s eye. Horemheb was signaling—to guards, to accomplices, who knew?

  No one else could move. The priest’s voice held them rapt. His words mastered them. He had made them remember fear: fear of the gods, fear of those who served the gods.

  T
he king sat immobile. When he spoke he did not stammer at all. He lacked the priest’s richness or strength of voice, but clarity he had, each word distinct as if limned in stone. “Who suffered this madman to come before my face?”

  “Those,” said the priest, “were the very words of Amon in speaking of you, O king.”

  “Remove him,” said the king.

  The guards who were nearest blanched and glanced at Horemheb. He twitched up his chin: Go to it. Reluctantly they moved to obey.

  “No,” the priest said. “No, I go by my own will and the will of my god. Remember, king. Come back to Amon or be forever cursed.”

  A murmur ran through the hall. Nofret felt the shudder in her skin. A priest’s curse was a powerful thing. A king cursed tainted his whole realm, all his lands and people, their wars, their peace, their planting and harvest.

  The king betrayed no fear of the curse or of the man who threatened it. “Amon is nothing to me,” he said. “The Aten will protect me.”

  There could have been no doubt that he would say that. But Nofret watched the faces of the court, the glitter of their eyes, the fixity that had not been there before, or never so clear to see. They loved their king no more than did the people in the city or the priests in the temples.

  He saw nothing but his god. He rose still gripping crook and flail. The flail, beads of gold and lapis lazuli on cords of gold, lashed the air. “Remove this man!”

  The guards glanced again at Horemheb, again sought his leave to obey their lord and king. Horemheb scowled at it, but Nofret saw satisfaction in his eyes. He took his time in granting leave, while the king stood quivering and the priest regarded him with something close to scorn.

  The king’s guards closed about the priest. He shook off their hands. “If your god were a true god,” he said to the king, “he would smite me now. I spit on him. I curse him to the nether realms, where Eater of Souls waits in hunger, and devouring Set remembers the savor of Osiris’ blood.”

  “Your god is false,” said the king, cold now and quiet. And to the guards yet again: “Remove him.”