Pillar of Fire Read online

  “I don’t know what came over me,” Nofret said, rough with the unshed tears. “To walk in like that—”

  “You came where you needed to come,” said Leah. “Is it so bad with your princess, then?”

  “No!” said Nofret sharply. She sucked in a breath. “No. She’s well. As well as she can be . . . considering . . .”

  “Considering that she is barely thirteen years old, and going to have a baby.”

  Nofret gasped and lurched to her feet. “How did you— she isn’t—”

  “You know she is,” said Leah. She clasped Nofret’s hands and drew her down again so that they were face to face. “The good god was kind to her. He kept her from conceiving as quickly as her sisters.”

  “What’s the good in it?” Nofret muttered bitterly. “It will only be another daughter.”

  “Only a daughter,” Leah said. “Why, and so were you. So was I.”

  “But we weren’t supposed to be a king’s sons!”

  Nofret stopped. The silence was enormous. “You weren’t,” she said.

  “Oh, no,” said Leah. “I was only to be priest and prophet. My poor father was dismayed to discover that I had the gifts without the blessing of being a man. None of the sons who came after me had the least calling to the god’s ways. They all went for fighting men in Pharaoh’s armies, or shepherds among his flocks. Our father died a disappointed man.”

  “So will this king do,” said Nofret, “and none too soon for any of us.”

  “Maybe,” Leah said. “Come, let me up. There’s bread fresh from the baking, and cheese, and—”

  “No,” said Nofret. “No, I’ll fetch it. I remember where you keep everything.” She paused. “Your servant . . . ?”

  “Zillah left us,” said Leah. “She married Shem the goatherd, whose mother needed someone to look after her. There’s a child who comes in in the mornings to learn to weave and sew and cook, but when the sun touches noon, she leaves me to my solitude. It’s very satisfactory.”

  Nofret could barely imagine such luxury. To be alone every day, to do what she wanted, when she wanted it—astonishing.

  Leah smiled. “Here, we’ll both lay the table. Miriam gave me a basket of cakes that she’d baked. She tried something new with dates and honey, and it smells delectable.”

  “But won’t Aharon and—” Nofret began.

  “Oh, they’ll come,” said Leah serenely. “They don’t see true, not as we do, but they both have a nose for their dinner.”

  Nofret laughed, and stopped, because it felt so strange. She had not laughed in—months? Years?

  Since the last time she was among these people. She found herself chattering to Leah, telling her nothing in particular, and yet telling, her a great deal: of Thebes and its splendors, of the young king, of her lady and of Tama who was her friend, and of the court in its golden prison.

  Leah had trivialities of her own to counter Nofret’s: this woman married, that one widowed, and half a dozen either with child or just delivered of children. The goat was still lord of his kingdom, and all his harem had produced kids, to his considerable pride. “And yes,” she said, “though he grows old and stiff in the joints, he still leaps the wall and thunders round the village on market days, for old times’ sake.”

  Nofret was still laughing at that and arraying the last of the cups and bowls when the door-curtain parted and Aharon stooped to come in. He seemed bigger than ever, and stronger, with his dusty black hair and his—

  Her mouth was hanging open. That was not Aharon at all, unless Aharon had misplaced a score of years and a span of beard.

  Which he had not, as she could see, for Aharon came in behind the stranger, grinning white in his rich beard that had at last begun to show a thread or two of grey. “Nofret! Little fish. You’ve grown into a woman.”

  She blushed like a silly girl and nearly dropped the jar of goat’s milk that she was holding. He laughed at that, relieved her of the jar and swept her into his embrace.

  He had never welcomed her so before, never so much like family. She was too startled to resist, or to respond, either.

  He held her at arm’s length. “Ah,” he said without undue regret. “I’ve embarrassed you.” He shook his head. “I should learn to be more like a courtier.”

  “Don’t do that!” Her vehemence made him laugh. He let her go, somewhat to her disappointment, and went to embrace his mother and to be embraced in turn.

  That left the other, the young one. He was blushing bright red under his beard. By that, and by the noble arch of his nose, she knew him. “Johanan?”

  His blush did not fade, but he laughed. His voice was almost as deep as his father’s. “I wouldn’t have known you, either, if Grandmother hadn’t said you’d come today.”

  She stared at him. He stared back, as bold as she, and as shy. “You aren’t bad-looking,” she said after a while.

  “Nor are you,” he said. “Are you a great lady now? I didn’t see your chair outside. Did you send it home?”

  “No,” she said tartly. “I walked. Every step of the way, sir, just as I always have. Just because you finally noticed I’m female doesn’t mean I’ve gone soft.”

  “I’ve always known you were female,” he said. “I surprised you, didn’t I? You never thought I’d grow up.”

  “You still haven’t,” she said. His coat was crooked. She tugged it straight and brushed stone-dust from it, brisk, annoyed for no good reason. Maybe because he let her do it. Maybe because he was there, and different, and yet the same. He was supposed to be as he had always been, or to be so changed that she did not know him. Not both at once.

  Boys were like that. One season they were children, or nearly, with patchy beards and cracking voices. The next, they were men: tall and strong and deep-voiced and ineffably pleased with themselves, as if they had anything to do with it at all.

  He was staring at her. She wanted to snap at him, to make him stop, but something held her back—maybe his grandmother and his father, waiting for them to sit, to eat. Both seemed much amused.

  She glared at them all and sat in her old place at Aharon’s right hand, where a guest would sit. But once she had sat, she leaped up again. There was no one to play the servant’s part, no one to fetch the pot from the kitchen or—

  “You sit,” said Johanan with the authority of his new-minted manhood. “I’ll play the maid.” And at her half-voiced protest: “I’ve done it before.” His grin was the same as it had always been, in that new and quite amazingly handsome face of his.

  Who would ever have thought, Nofret mused to herself as he waited on them all like a well-trained servant, that gangly beaky-nosed Johanan would grow to look just like his father?

  She drew a breath, let it out again. She was at ease here, more than she had ever been anywhere else. Yes, even in Hatti, in her father’s house. And even though she had come in feeling like a stranger, and found strangers, but strangers who were kin.

  oOo

  Near sunset Nofret rose regretfully and readied to go. Aharon and Leah said their good-byes at the door of the house, but Johanan trailed after her, for all the world like a lost dog. Nofret said so, not slowing or turning, striding with grim purpose toward the road and the city.

  A long step brought him level with her. “It will be dark by the time you get to the palace,” he said.

  “So?” said Nofret. “I used to go back in full night, and you never said a word.”

  “That was before,” he said.

  “Before what?”

  He knew that tone: his brows were up, but he was not grinning as he might have before. “Before I really looked at you,” he said.

  “Why, do I have spots?”

  “Well,” he said. “One or two.”

  She checked and nearly stumbled, but caught herself. She was not going to let him take her off balance. No matter how hard he might try.

  With teeth-gritted calm she said, “I am not fragile. You can stop hovering. Go home and feed the goa
ts.”

  “I fed them before I came in,” he said. “Can’t I take a walk in the evening? Is it cooler than it was yesterday, do you think?”

  Nofret hissed. “How old are you? Fifteen floods of the river? Shouldn’t you be courting some sweet pink-faced girl in a striped veil?”

  “I am sixteen,” he said with dignity, “and I don’t like sweet pink-faced girls in striped veils. They’re dull. And,” he said, saving the worst for last, “they giggle.”

  Nofret did not know how to giggle. She wished she did. “If I were in Hatti I would be married now, or about to be married.”

  Gods. That was not what she should be talking about, and she certainly had not meant to say any such thing.

  Johanan still walked with a bit of his old gangling awkwardness, as if parts of him were inclined to wander on their own. He tripped over a stone, righted himself, blushed furiously. The word he muttered in Apiru was not genteel at all.

  When he spoke to Nofret, it could only be with as little control of himself as she had had. “Have you—I mean, do you—did you ever—if there was someone who wanted—”

  She understood him. It made her whitely angry. “Why do you want to know? Because I’m a slave, and slaves are wanton? Because you want to tumble me under a bush?”

  “No!”

  His voice cracked on the word. He looked shocked, and then furious. “What makes you think I would ever insult you like that?”

  “Because you did.”

  “I did not!”

  “Did too!”

  She stopped. So did he. Time was when they would have laughed, and the quarrel would have ended with them arm in arm, running wherever they would think to run to. But not any longer. They had grown up.

  “I hate it,” said Nofret. “I hate the way you look at me. As if you didn’t know me. As if I were something—something horrible. Instead of—instead of—”

  Oh, gods and goddesses. She was leaking like a sieve. Of course he would fold her in his arms as men were trained to do, and calm her and protect her and make her hate him even worse.

  Except that he did not do that. He touched her, yes: laid a hand on her shoulder, lightly, as a friend does, to let her know he was there.

  And she hated him for that, too, for not doing what a man would do with a woman.

  She tried to shake him off, but all that did was persuade him to lay his arm about her shoulders. They were still walking through all of this. The sun was right in her eyes, dazzling her through the tears. Some idiot part of her reflected that Egyptian men walked like this with their wives, and had themselves carved so in their tombs, side by side, his arm about her shoulders. Saying for all eternity that they were friends as well as lovers.

  Her courses were about to start. That was all it was. She grew weepy then, and irritable, and lately she had been thinking far too much of what men did with women. But never with her. She wanted to choose the man and the moment. Even if neither ever came.

  This boy was a friend, that was all. Dear friend. Kin. He knew when to be quiet sometimes, as now.

  She dug in her heels, stopping them both. He stood watching her. His eyes were big and dark, rounder than an Egyptian’s, with long curling lashes like a girl’s. She wondered what he saw in her. Puffy eyes, probably, and skin blotched with crying. Nothing for a man to dream of.

  “Go back home,” she said. “I can take care of myself.”

  “I know that,” he said. “I want to walk with you.”

  “You do not. You were in the tombs at dawn, I know that perfectly well, and you’re so tired you can barely see straight. Go home and sleep.”

  “No,” said Johanan.

  Johanan seldom said that word direct. When he did, he was unshakable. He began walking again, and so perforce did she.

  After a few strides he said, “Maybe I missed you. Did you think of that? Maybe I want to see a little more of you before you go away for another year.”

  “Maybe I was in Thebes for most of that year,” she retorted. “Maybe I was shut for so long in palaces that I forgot how to walk under the sky. Maybe I simply didn’t want to hear you go on at me for never coming to see you, when you never came to see me at all, not while we were children, and not once in all that year and more. I don’t belong to you that you can tell me when to come and go.”

  He barely flinched at what she had hoped would be a strong blow. “I came to the palace,” he said, “after you came back. I asked for you. They told me to give it up. The queen’s Hittite would never cast those eyes of hers on anything as worthless as I was. They made it sound as if you were grown immensely proud and high, much too high for the likes of me.”

  “So you turned around and left.” Nofret wanted to curl her lip, but the demon of perversity that had been in her all this day made her soften instead. “You silly boy. You should have laughed at them and told them that you are a prince of a line of princes, and they would conduct you to me then and there or they would have my wrath to face. That’s how it’s done in palaces, when solitary strangers come asking after a queen’s servants.”

  “I didn’t know that,” he said sulkily. “I was never raised in palaces.”

  “And well for you that you weren’t.” Her anger was gone, lost somewhere. So were her tears. Her arm was cramped against his side. She freed it and let it rest around his waist, thumb tucked into his sash, where it could be comfortable. She had never done that before, and yet it was as if she had always done it, as if it were only right and proper to walk this way, down the stony road to the Aten’s city.

  “The next time you come,” she said, “tell the people who stop you that the queen’s personal maid has asked for you. Be a prince to them. Make them listen, and make them do as you bid.”

  He thought about it for a while. The sulky look left his face; a smile crept across it. “I can do that. It’s just like being a foreman in the tombs. I’ve been one for the past season, did you know that? I’m good at telling people what to do. Not so good,” he added a little glumly, “at working stone. But orders, I can give.”

  “A leader of men,” said Nofret, mocking him, but gently. She stopped yet again and worked herself free. “Now go home. Come and see me when you can—when you’ve a day to yourself. I can get away if I ask. My lady’s reasonable about such things.”

  “I know that,” said Johanan. “I’ll come. And walk in like a prince, even if they laugh at me.”

  She looked at him in the sunset light. He looked nothing at all like an Egyptian: all that curling black hair, and the beard, and the immense authority of his nose. He was going to be tall, and strong too, from all his years of labor in the tombs. “They’ll call you foreign,” she said, “but they won’t laugh at you. Not if they have any sense at all. After all,” she pointed out, “you’re taller than any of them, and strong as an ox.”

  He blushed. “Clumsy, too, I know. They will laugh.”

  “Idiot,” said Nofret, pushing him back toward his village. “Get on with you. Come and see me. Promise.”

  “Promise,” he said. Even if he was afraid of being laughed at.

  Twenty-Two

  Amid the splendor and shallowness of the courts in Akhetaten, the king moved like a soul wandering apart from its body. He did not seem any madder than he ever had, or any more or less interested in royal duties, and yet to Nofret he seemed somehow more distant, less a part of anything about him.

  When the new sickness came, they said it was Amon’s curse. It struck only in the palace, and only the most royal. It killed Kiya, who had never recovered from the birth of her daughter. It seized and devoured Meritaten the younger, the frail milk-pale child going up like a torch within a night and a day. It took Kiya’s daughter, though she had seemed the strongest of all the king’s children, took her and left the lifeless body for the king to stare at as if he had never seen death before.

  It almost took Ankhesenpaaten. She had been ill with pregnancy, but that had seemed to pass, and she settled to the long
quiet waiting for the baby to be born. The waiting ended too soon, in fever that brought the baby wailing into the light. It was very young and small, but it seemed inclined to live nonetheless.

  It was another daughter. Nofret ignored it, let someone else take it and wash it and do what needed to be done. She was Ankhesenpaaten’s. She withstood the cold glare of the midwife and the colder one of the king’s own physician, who had come to meddle when the women were done with their women’s nonsense. She held her lady though she struggled, though her skin felt like papyrus stretched over a burning brand.

  Priests came to chant prayers and work magic. The king’s physician and his flock of assistants performed the dance of their trade. The king himself came and stared and went away.

  Nofret was glad that he did not stay. Ankhesenpaaten did not know anyone, did not need to know him. Her spirit was wandering far away in the land of her childhood, or among the dead. She talked to her sisters and to her mother. She laughed and prattled as a small child will, but clinging always to Nofret, fretting if Nofret tried to move away.

  Nofret preferred to think that although Ankhesenpaaten called her everything from Mother to Sotepenre, somewhere beneath the fever she knew that she spoke to Nofret. It was easier than admitting that she was altogether forgotten except as a body to clutch at.

  The night was long, the day after longer still. Nofret heard wailing somewhere near and yet far away. Someone else had died. She did not trouble to ask who it was. Ankhesenpaaten was still alive. She lay on her bed, child-small, child-slight, what little flesh she had had seeming to have melted from her bones. Her breath rattled as she drew it in, caught as she let it out, over and over.

  Priests and doctors had stopped trying to separate Nofret from her mistress. They made a space for her, a circle of quiet at Ankhesenpaaten’s head where it lay in Nofret’s lap. She was covered in amulets, reeking of the priests’ spells and the physicians’ doctoring. Dung was the least of it, and the most easily named.

  Nofret gagged on the stink. One of the priests shot her a glance of pure annoyance.