Pillar of Fire Read online

  It was rather peaceful. Nofret might have been free to visit in the village or to wander in the city, but she lacked the inclination. She did her duties without speaking, attended her lady as the most distant and least regarded of her servants, and set herself to be grimly patient.

  On the sixth day, something arose in audience that needed the king’s ear. It was midmorning and he was supposedly deep in communion with his god, but this particular matter could not wait. Nofret did not even know what it was: she had been on the roof of the queens’ palace, performing the delicate task of pleating her lady’s new-washed gowns and pressing them with stones and laying them out to dry in the sun. She expected it to take all day, and she hated it, endless finicking thing that it was, each pleat exact, and hundreds of them in each gown.

  The maid who came to fetch her was one of those who had been most pleased to relegate Nofret to nonentity. She was not delighted to address her now, and showed it with a spiteful jab of the foot at the gown Nofret had just finished pleating and spreading to dry. Nofret set her teeth and smoothed the gown as best she could.

  The maid smiled a little, as if in satisfaction. She did not venture a second jab of the foot. She said with an audible sniff, in the tone she reserved for the lower orders, “Her majesty bids you come to her.”

  Nofret rose, straightening a kink in her back. “Does she, then?” She looked about. “Oh, dear. I can’t go now. There’s still the three court dresses, and the best one, the state robe . . .” She paused as if she had had a revelation. “Ah! What an idiot I am. Of course. You’ll take my place.”

  Before the maid could protest, still less take flight, Nofret had thrust a damp bundle of linen into her arms and knocked her to her knees. “Be sure,” Nofret said, “that every pleat is precise, and not one is missing. And make sure the linen stays white, not a smudge or a stain, or you’ll have it all to do over.”

  She paused then, peered at the gown that the maid had kicked at, and shook her head. It gave her great pleasure to intone sadly, “Alas, this one is spoiled. It will need the pumice stone, and do be careful; it’s the most fragile of them all, no more than gauze. If it’s damaged, our lady will not be pleased.”

  Revenge was sweet, she thought as she went to obey her mistress’ summons. The maid lacked even the sense to point out that Nofret had no authority to command her. She obeyed blindly as a slave will, in a mighty sulk to be sure, but too much a fool to refuse.

  Such was the difference, Nofret thought, between a slave of necessity and a slave of the spirit.

  oOo

  The queen had left the hall of audience for the resting-room in which she could take her ease, put aside the weight of scepter and crown, even eat or drink if she was inclined. She had done none of those things. The scepter was still in her hand, the crown on her head. She was pacing with restlessness that Nofret had never seen in her.

  As Nofret came in, her lady wheeled, scattering maids and servants. “Out!” she cried to them. “Get out!”

  They were shocked enough to obey. She had never raised her voice to them—had never, that Nofret could remember, spoken loudly at all. Her mother had taught her too well to speak softly and sweetly and with queenly restraint.

  Even when she spoke to Nofret the raw edge remained, though she was no longer shouting. “My father is nowhere to be found.”

  “You know where he is,” said Nofret.

  “No,” her lady said. “I know where you think he is.”

  “So send someone to fetch him,” Nofret said. She had little patience to spare at the best of times, which this certainly was not.

  The queen dropped her scepter onto the wine-table. It clattered and rolled but forbore to fall.

  She took no notice. She seized Nofret’s shoulders and shook her.

  Nofret braced against her. Her face was more animated than Nofret had seen it in a long while. “How can I send someone there? People will know!”

  “Know what? That he’s mad? The whole world knows that, has known it for years.”

  “No!” cried the queen. “That he would go—there. To do—that.”

  “Oh come,” said Nofret impatiently. “I know he’s a king and therefore useless for anything but warming his behind on a throne, but he really is very good at grinding flour for the workmen’s bread. He manages a whole day’s work between morning and noon.”

  “Oh,” said the queen as if struck to the heart. “Oh, that is worse than unbearable. I can’t possibly tell the courts of the Two Lands that their lord is unable to attend them because he’s—gone to—to—”

  “Then you had better lie to them, hadn’t you? Tell them he’s deep in trance, completely surrendered to his god. Which,” said Nofret, “as a matter of fact is true. It’s an eccentric way to pray, but prayer is what it is. There’s no doubt of it.”

  The queen began to pace again, like a lioness robbed of her one cub. It struck Nofret that that was what her lady’s father was to her: more child than man. She loved, indulged, even worshipped him. But no one, not even his own children, had ever regarded him as a man like other men.

  As she paced she muttered to herself, almost too rapid for Nofret to catch. “Yes. Yes, I must dissemble. If anyone should learn—oh, if it’s true, what shame to us! It’s not kingly.”

  “Anything is kingly,” Nofret said, “if a king does it. Maybe he’ll set a fashion. Can you see the ladies of the court tripping out in their tight little dresses to play at baking bread?”

  “With their wigs on, and the perfume dripping in their faces.” The queen was not even smiling. If she had been less careful of her eyepaint, Nofret suspected that she would have been in tears.

  “There,” said Nofret roughly. “There now. Come noon he’ll be back, ready for his bath and his afternoon of being a proper kingly king. Surely you can hold off the inquisition till then. Can’t you yourself be indisposed? It’s hot, after all. You’ve been ill. You should be craving rest and coolness, and maybe a swim in the lotus pool.”

  “Even when I do it because a queen must,” said Ankhesenpaaten, “I hate to lie.”

  She stopped pacing, looked about with a distracted air. Nofret retrieved the scepter and set it in her hand. She stared at it, and then at Nofret. “I wish I could run away, too. I’d be a worker in the fields by the river, with the cool green around me and the sun beating down.”

  “But you can’t do that,” Nofret said, finishing the thought for her, “because a queen can’t. And a king shouldn’t indulge himself, either.”

  “A king does whatever a king will do.” She recited it like a lesson. She drew herself up as she had been taught to do, and went to lie barefaced to the courts of the two kingdoms.

  oOo

  What exactly Ankhesenpaaten said to the king of his eccentricity, Nofret did not know. When he came back as he did every day, his daughter-wife was at her coolest and most queenly, taking the throne beside him and saying nothing to him that was not prescribed by courtly ritual. That night she went to his chamber, her first such visit in a long while, and stayed there not much past the rising of a waning moon. When she came back she was silent, and her face told Nofret nothing.

  Nofret had almost decided to press her and never mind the consequences, when she said, “You told the truth. He prays to the Aten as the Aten requires. He said . . .” It was hard for her to get it out, but in the end she did. “He said that it’s a thing he must do. Because the god will no longer speak only to him, and won’t speak to anyone princely. Maybe, he said, the god will speak to the least princely of all, to the people who are lowest.”

  “That is . . . unusual,” Nofiret said, “for a god in this country. Don’t they give everything to kings, and kings give what they please to everyone else?”

  “That is how gods are,” said Ankhesenpaaten. “But Father says—not the Aten. Maybe. Not any longer.”

  She dropped to her bed, for once forgetting to be either graceful or queenly. Then Nofret could see her as she might have been i
f she had been anyone else’s child: neither child nor yet entirely a woman, all long limbs and big eyes. There were shadows under those eyes, and shadows in them.

  “Nofret,” she said with the calm of bone-deep fear, “I don’t think he’s thinking like anyone else any longer. Not even a little.”

  That was the closest she had ever come to confessing that her father was a madman. Nofret, who had been yearning for long and long to hear just such a thing, found herself saying, “Maybe he’s starting to go sane. Any new god needs followers, and he hasn’t won anyone to the Aten. The princes follow him because he’s the king. If he can win the common people and turn them away from their other gods, then he’s got numbers behind him, and strength to give his god, to set against Amon and the rest.”

  Ankhesenpaaten regarded Nofret in mingled pity and exasperation. “Don’t lie to me as I’ve been lying to myself. No king has ever done what my father has done—not any of it, not from the first. But this is a thing that even the Two Lands may balk at: a king who makes himself like a slave. If Amon’s people learn of it, they’ll have the proof they need that he should be disposed of.”

  “He’s still the king,” said Nofret, “no matter what he does.”

  “No,” her lady said. “If he acts like a slave, some might think that he’s become no better than a slave. And a slave can be got rid of. A slave can be killed.”

  There it was again: that strangeness which was Egypt. And royal Egypt at that. “True enough,” said Nofret slowly, “if his enemies need a pretext—and any pretext will do . . .”

  Her lady nodded. “I’m afraid. He says he can’t hide. He can’t keep it secret. If the Aten wants to be worshipped by a king in the guise of a slave, then the Aten must be worshipped so, and people will flock to his name. So Father says. He won’t listen when I tell him he could die for it. ‘The Aten will take me when the Aten wills,’ he says. Nothing I say will make him change his mind.”

  “You never tried before, did you?” Nofret regretted that once she had said it: it won her a look of such pain that her own heart stabbed in sympathy. “I think maybe we need to ask for help. This isn’t anything a single person can do, even a person who’s a queen.”

  “There is no one,” the queen said bleakly, “whom I can trust with this.”

  “Not even the Lord Ay? He’s your uncle. His father was Apiru, and it’s among the Apiru that your father goes. He might understand.”

  “I can’t trust him,” the queen said. “Not even him. He’s loyal to the king, but this . . .”

  Neither of them had mentioned the younger king, or the younger king’s queen. Nofret did not expect that they would, either. Neither Smenkhkare nor Meritaten would understand, still less believe—no more than her lady had until she had proof.

  “I have to bear this alone,” the queen said. “I have no choice.”

  Nofret shook her head firmly. “You do not. Maybe you can’t trust even your own kin in the palace, but there’s someone—several someones—who I know can help. Or at least help hide him when he goes out.”

  “There is no one,” said the queen with the gentle stubbornness that she had from her mother—and from her father, too.

  “There are three,” Nfreto said. “Leah the prophetess and her son and grandson. They’re your kin, too, though you’re too high-flown and they too modest to make much of it. Give me leave and I’ll talk to them. Aharon’s a leader of men after his fashion. He may know what we can do.”

  “You’ll go whether I will or no,” said the queen. “Why do you bother to ask my leave?”

  “Because,” said Nofret, “I like to be proper where I can.”

  The queen laughed, the laughter that comes through tears: the only kind she knew. But her words were somber. “If they betray us, then we have nothing. And Father may be dead.”

  “They won’t betray us. And if they would, who would listen? They’re only slaves, workers in the tombs, and foreigners besides. No prince will hear a word they say.”

  “Pray for that,” said Ankhesenpaaten. “Pray with all your heart.”

  Twenty-Five

  As terrible as Ankhesenpaaten had reckoned the king’s eccentricity, it was only the faint beginning of a real and advancing lunacy. Or, as he would call it, an ever increasing urgency in his god’s demands.

  First he labored like a slave among the lowest of his people. Then he would not put on the Two Crowns to sit in his court, nor would he ride out in his chariot as he had done before, to show himself to his people. As he had in the year of the plague, he prayed in the temple by night and day. He did not eat. He drank only when his priests compelled him. He was wasting to sun-blackened flesh on hollow bones.

  His younger king was no use at all. “My poor brother,” Smenkhkare sighed. “So ill. So wasted. I fear he’ll not live long.”

  He hoped it, Nofret thought nastily. It was a vague memory of childhood, and embarrassing at that, that she had ever thought him desirable. Even his beauty seemed to her overwrought, no more than prettiness, as shallow and silly as his whole court and all his mincing followers.

  His queen was pregnant, and greensick with it. He was not as attentive to her as he had been. She pined after him like a street-cur after a bone. Occasionally he remembered to pet her and call her his pretty puss. More often he said with barely concealed impatience, “Oh, do take care of yourself! Go on, rest, play with your maids. You’re making yourself ill trying to keep up with me.”

  So she was, but she lacked the wits to upbraid him. She drooped and moped and even sank so far as to come weeping to her sister.

  Ankhesenpaaten, beside herself with anxiety for her father, overburdened with the cares of being queen enough for all the rest of them, was far more patient with Meritaten than Nofret could have been. She petted and soothed and comforted her sister, saw her settled in a cool dark room with maids to fan her and eunuchs to lave her face with sweet-scented water, and summoned the king’s physician in case she should decide to lose the baby that was still but the slightest bulge in her belly.

  For herself the younger queen would take nothing but a sip of water and a bite of bread. She had too much to do. She was doing it from dawn till well into the night.

  It was not that she had to do it completely alone. She might have fared better if she had. Advisors vexed her from every side. Stewards, chamberlains, lords of the nomes of Egypt, princelings of the court, priests and scribes and petty functionaries, all of them saw the young queen ruling where no one else would. And every one had his own certain path through her difficulties.

  The king of course, they all agreed, was ill. Very ill. Maybe dying. The young king was preoccupied with his hunts and his fishing and his amusements. He could not be troubled to perform the duller duties of his office. When compelled, he performed them as briefly and perfunctorily as he could manage.

  oOo

  “This kingdom is not well served.”

  Horemheb said it, playing the blunt soldier as he best could. He had requested a private audience with the young queen, and been granted it to a degree. She was attended by a flock of servants, and of course by Nofret. She had summoned the Lord Ay to hear what the general of the Delta had to say to her.

  The Lord Ay was the only one of the lot for whom Nofret had any use. She supposed that her lady knew better than she how far he was to be trusted, since her lady was princess and queen and also his granddaughter, daughter of his daughter Nefertiti. But Nofret liked him a great deal, maybe because he reminded her of Johanan. If Johanan were old enough to be a grandfather, his beard and his thick curly hair shaved clean in Egyptian fashion, his noble nose given leave to rule the strong-carved face, then he would look very much like the Lord Ay.

  The Lord Ay’s wife, the Lady Tey, was of the line of Nefertari, but she did not parade her lineage as many in the court might have done. She was not in fact Ankhesenpaaten’s grandmother; her lord had had another wife before her, who had been mother to Nefertiti. But she was fond of her husba
nd’s grandchild. Nofret did not often call a lady noble, with all that that meant, but the Lady Tey was both noble and gentle.

  It was she who had persuaded the queen to receive her guest in some semblance of ease, after eating and drinking a little. Now she stood among the ladies not far from Nofret. Her lord stood at the queen’s right hand, at ease there, and yet he too, like his lady, was on guard.

  General Horemheb came into that scented and soft-lit place in a ringing of bronze and a scent of wind and sand and horses. He spared little time for preliminaries, less for politeness. He would not even sit in the chair that the queen had graciously ordered set out for him, or partake of any refreshment, though he accepted a cup of water.

  “I’ll be honest, lady,” he said. “This kingdom is not well served. Its elder king is ill or dying—no one is sure which, but everyone knows it’s one of them. Its younger king does nothing but play like the child he seems never to have ceased to be. You do as well as you can, but you have neither the authority of a king nor the strength to be the queen that Tiye was before you. You’re too young, and you’ve been ill. You’re burdened beyond your strength.”

  “I am stronger than I look,” said the queen in the cold stillness that she had learned from her mother.

  Horemheb was not one to be cowed by it. “You look like forged bronze. But you’re hardly more than a child. You should never have been weighted with all of it—and you’ve been carrying it since Queen Tiye died. That’s too bloody long.”

  His coarseness made some of the maids gasp, but the queen maintained her composure. “You are outspoken,” she said.

  “Someone has to be,” he said. “Listen to me. Word’s out that the king is sick. They’re already celebrating in Thebes. The seals are off Amon’s temple, and the other gods aren’t far behind. They’re singing in the streets that Amon cursed the apostate king, and the king is dying and will soon be dead.”