Pillar of Fire Page 23

  “That is not true,” the queen said with heat that seemed to startle him: his eyes widened a fraction. “My father is as well as he has ever been. He prays, that’s all, and fasts, and hears the commandments of the Aten. He’s not dying. He’s not even ill.”

  “That,” said Horemheb, “could be remedied.”

  Even the queen gasped at that. He shook his head, looked as if he would have liked to spit, clearly thought better of it. “You don’t understand, do you? Even after Thebes. They wouldn’t touch the king then, because he is king. But if enough people believe he’s dying . . . they can make it so. Amon cursed him, after all. It may be left to mortal means to complete the curse.”

  “You mean,” said Lord Ay in the monstrous silence, “that there may be attempts to slay the king.”

  “Not attempts,” said Horemheb. “They’ll succeed. Maybe not the first time, or the tenth, but they won’t stop at that. They know they have their god’s blessing.”

  “But my father is not ill,” said the queen. She seemed in shock, unable to understand what Horemheb was saying. “They can’t kill him if he’s alive and well. He’s the king.”

  “He’s cursed by Amon and all the gods whom he named false. He no longer even walks outside of his god’s temple. The people do what they can to forget him. And what’s forgotten,” said Horemheb, “has never been at all.”

  “He is ill,” the Lord Ay said, drawing the heat of the queen’s anger but keeping his eyes on Horemheb. “Ill in the spirit. In the body, too, maybe. Fasting as he does, praying, conducting himself more like a prophet of the desert than a lord of the Two Lands . . .”

  “I do not hear this,” said Ankhesenpaaten in her softest, clearest voice. “I will not hear it.”

  “Someone is going to have to,” Horemheb said harshly. “The rest of your kin shut ears and eyes and pretend that the world is all golden joy. Yes, even your father, who’s nothing by now but a shell full of a god that only he can see. You’re the only one whom I could call either sane or sensible. You’d best listen, and think. The Two Lands are about to make themselves a new king, since neither of the ones they have is either willing or able to rule.”

  “They can’t do that,” said the queen. Her mask was cracking.

  Horemheb wasted no time in satisfaction. “Lady,” he said almost gently, “whether they can or no, they are going to do it. They’ve already begun.”

  “But there is no sign—”

  “Then you’re blind. You saw how he left Thebes. It’s worse now. If he tried to go back there, he’d be torn from his boat and fed to the crocodiles. This city is cut off from the rest of Egypt. Cut off rather completely, as you’d know if you tried to leave it.”

  “That much is true,” Lord Ay said. “The embassies are fewer than they were even half a year ago. The tribute that comes in is less than it used to be. And people are leaving the city. Parts of it are empty that once were full.”

  “But,” said the queen, “everything is quiet here. There’s as much to do as ever.”

  “Because there’s only you to do it.” Horemheb knelt beside her chair, maybe to give her tribute, maybe to address her directly, without the distraction of his looming over her. “Lady, you do your best, and that is very good indeed, but it’s not enough. You can’t be king and queen both. You can’t hold together a kingdom that’s falling apart. The heart’s out of it, has been since the old king died.”

  “Because of the Aten,” she said. “That’s what you’re saying, isn’t it? The old false gods are what held the Two Lands together. Without them they can’t hold.”

  “The old gods who may be true and may be false,” said Horemheb, “but who are the heart of the Two Lands.”

  “What you say,” she said, “is defiance of the king’s decree. By rights you should die for it.”

  “Then I’ll die for telling the truth.” Horemheb gripped the arms of her chair, walling her in. “Lady, listen to me. This grand venture of the king’s has failed. No one outside of Akhetaten worships the Aten, and precious few of the people here believe in their hearts that the Aten is the only true god. If he won’t back down, if he won’t at least let the temples be opened again, he’ll pay. That payment will likely be in blood.”

  “Do you threaten us?” The deadly softness was back, the intransigence that reminded Nofret forcibly of the king himself.

  “I do whatever I need to do in order to protect the king. But, lady,” said Horemheb, “my first oath is to the Two Lands. If the king’s actions threaten the kingdom, then I must choose the kingdom.”

  “Then you had best leave,” she said, “or be arrested and tried for treason.”

  He rose slowly. Maybe his knees were stiff—he was not a young man, after all, though some distance yet from an old one. Or maybe the pain was in the heart. “If I leave, there will be no one to protect you.”

  “I have my people here,” she said, “and my father’s guards, who are an army.”

  “Not if I take them with me,” he said.

  There was a pause. Impasse, Nofret thought.

  Horemheb broke it, but not as one who yielded to weakness. “Lady, I leave you to think on what I’ve said. If you can beat reason into his majesty’s head, then all Egypt will be grateful. Only let him open the temples in law as in fact, and that will be enough, at least for the moment.”

  “And when the moment passes? What then, lord general? Will my father be found dead of something he ate?”

  “Probably not,” Horemheb answered her. “If they have their gods, they should be well content.”

  “But he won’t allow that,” she said. “He can’t. The Aten doesn’t allow it.”

  “Pray that the Aten has more sense,” said Horemheb.

  oOo

  The queen sent everyone away, even Lord Ay. But Nofret did not count herself among the rest. She stayed, and her lady seemed not to mind it. Much.

  Once alone, the queen rose from the chair in which she had been sitting. She put off her crown, laid aside her scepter, moving slowly, deliberately, as if too swift a motion would cause her to shatter.

  Then she stopped and stood still, as one who does not know what to do next. She raised her hands, lowered them. She turned to stare at Nofret. “You always know what to do,” she said. “What would you do now?”

  Nofret was taken aback. “You ask me?”

  “I seldom do,” her lady said dryly, “but you always manage to tell me. You can’t be as much at a loss as I am.”

  “But I am,” Nofret said. “I’m not a queen, or a princess either.”

  “That never mattered to you before. What do you see now? Do you think we’ll ever persuade my father to open the temples, or my father’s brother to care for anything but his pleasure?”

  “No,” said Nofret. “Not before the sun starts shining at night.”

  “It does,” said her lady, “in the lands of the dead.” She pressed her hands to her cheeks. “Oh, I wish I were there, with everyone else who could help me!”

  Nofret let the echoes die before she spoke. “Be careful—you might just get what you wish for. Did you hear what General Horemheb wasn’t saying? That’s the next thing. Amon comes to Akhetaten and razes it, and disposes of the king and all his followers. That’s what I see, lady. That’s the best of what’s to come.”

  The queen sank down where she stood, heedless of the gown that crumpled and lost its careful pleating. “I see it,” she said. “I see it, too. Nofret, I’m afraid.”

  Nofret knelt beside her. She groped for Nofret’s hands as a blind woman might, and held them tightly. Nofret felt the trembling in her, matching her own.

  It was so peaceful here. There were no rioters in the streets, no attackers at the gates. The palace ran smoothly and quietly as it had since the queen made order out of the plague’s confusion. Everything might have been as it was when Nofret first came to Akhetaten, the king strong on his throne, his family alive and thriving, and the kingdom subdued if not perfectly ha
ppy under the rule of the Aten.

  “Something happened,” said the queen, following Nofret’s thought as she sometimes could, or matching it with one of her own. “In the terrible year, when everyone died—no, even before that, when Father knew he wasn’t going to have a son. Something broke in him, and in the Two Lands, too. It’s never been mended. Now it never will. There’s no one to do it. No one strong enough. No one great enough to work a miracle.” She stopped to draw breath, to blink away tears that seemed to make her angry: she tossed her head till the stiff beaded plaits of her wig swung and danced. “I know. I shouldn’t surrender. There must be something I can do. But I don’t see anything. Not one thing.”

  Nor could Nofret, and that was painful to admit. She was resourceful, and famous if not notorious for it. For this she had nothing to offer. Despair lay on her like fog in the hills of Hatti, heavy and damp.

  She said the only thing she could think of. “Let’s go out. Let’s go somewhere.”

  “Where? To grind flour out by the tombs?”

  It was bitter and not meant to be taken at its word, but Nofret said, “Why not? It’s better than sitting here wailing and gnashing our teeth. Besides,” she said as the thought came to her, “you have kin there. Do you remember Leah the prophetess? A queen might consult her, if that queen were desperate enough.”

  “I don’t know if I am,” said the queen. But then: “Why not indeed? Let me go as a commoner, then, and consult the seer of the Apiru.”

  Twenty-Six

  Ankhesenpaaten was not used to walking as far as she would have to, and her feet even in sandals were delicate, accustomed to walking on palace floors. But she did not complain, and Nofret did not try to coddle her.

  It was no more difficult for the queen to escape the palace unnoticed than it was for the king. She simply walked out, wearing no crown and carrying no scepter, and no one knew her or tried to stop her. The few who might—Lord Ay, Lady Tey, General Horemheb—were nowhere to be seen. They would be conferring in private places, deciding what to do with a king who had become an embarrassment to them all.

  The city was quiet, quieter than a city should be. It was emptying of people as sand seeps through a sieve, slower than water but just as sure. The seller of beer whom Nofret always passed on her way to the village was gone, her stall vanished. She must have gone back to Memphis, where competition was keener but custom more reliable.

  That more than riots, invasions, assassins with knives, proved to Nofret that she was not lost in a fever-dream. Akhetaten was dying. Its people were scattering to the places from which they came. Rumor ran among them that the king was ill, or even that he was dead.

  No one mourned him or troubled to discover the truth: that he was as well as he ever was.

  She kept a grip on the queen’s hand. Her lady was unaccustomed to walking as a common woman walks, and kept being offended that people would not give way as she passed. Fortunately she kept quiet.

  By the time they reached the sunrise gate, she was footsore and tired and willing to follow blindly, saying nothing. Nofret bought her a skin of water—just as Johanan had when Nofret was ill, she thought with a stab half of amusement and half of sadness—and made her sip from it as she went. She did not like the taste or the warmth of water stored in a skin, but she had sense enough to drink when she was thirsty.

  It took the two of them much longer to walk the distance from the gate to the village than it would have taken Nofret alone. Nofret throttled her impatience. If an army came after them with chariots to bring the queen back to her proper place, then so be it. The queen could not walk faster on those tender feet of hers.

  The village, unlike the city, was much as it had always been. No one had left it, nor did the air seem full of dying voices. The people went on as they had since first Nofret knew them, raising their children, buying and selling in their market, going up to their work in the tombs.

  Yet there was less work there, and more of the faces in the streets were men’s faces. They gathered on doorsteps and in the market, idling and drinking beer. They leaned against walls, blank-eyed with boredom. They sat in the shade and called out to women who passed, who ignored them or gave as good as they got.

  No one was sitting on Aharon’s doorstep. Aharon and Johanan were not at home; they had work still, then, or could pretend that they did. Which was true of most of the Apiru in the village. All the men whom Nofret had seen on her way to Aharon’s house had been Egyptians.

  Leah was not in the house, either. It was not deserted, nor had she fled from it. Everything was in its place, the goats in their pen, and even a new thing, a cat sunning itself in front of the door. But there were no people either within or without.

  The queen had sunk to the doorstep while Nofret went in to warn Leah of her coming. When Nofret came out, she was sitting with the cat in her lap, petting it while it purred. She looked more peaceful than Nofret had ever seen her, and not particularly tired, even as sore as her feet were.

  Some of Nofret’s anxiety seeped away, enough that she could put on a calm expression. “No one’s home,” she said. “You stay here while I see if I can find Leah. She’s visiting the neighbors, I expect. Rahal’s having a baby—maybe Leah’s at the lying-in.”

  The queen nodded. She did not sense that anything was wrong, Nofret hoped. Nofret put on a smile, glanced about to make sure that no one was coming to vex her lady, and walked away as purposefully as she could when she did not know where she was going.

  Rahal’s house first, then, since she had mentioned it. But Leah was not there. Rahal, huge with pregnancy and looking frayed about the edges, had not seen the prophetess at all. Nor had Miriam next door, nor Dina, who was visiting Miriam and who always knew where everyone was. “Maybe she’s up at the tombs,” Dina said, not to be caught in ignorance. “I saw her walking that way this morning, and didn’t see her coming back.”

  That way also was the market, of course, but Nofret would have seen Leah there. She looked back from Miriam’s door. The small figure in white linen was still sitting in front of Aharon’s house, cat in lap, waiting as queens learned to wait. There would be no getting her up to the tombs, not as tired as she already was.

  Nofret thanked Miriam and Dina and went back to her lady. “Come inside,” she said, “and sit down. There’s always water in the jar, and I know where they keep the bread and the cheese. I’m going to have to go up to the tombs. Leah’s there with her men.”

  “I’ll go with you,” said the queen.

  “You will not,” said Nofret firmly. “It’s a long way up there, and your feet are blistered raw as it is. You’re safe here. Nobody comes in unless he’s invited, and if anyone tries, go and let the he-goat out.”

  “But,” said her lady, “how do I know which goat is a he?”

  Nofret gaped at her. “You don’t—” Of course she did not. Princesses did not commune with goats. Only with horses, and pet gazelles, and cats of varying sizes. Kingly animals. Goats were for commoners, and for princes of the desert.

  Nofret gathered her wits. “It’s simple enough. Follow, your nose. See which one is the biggest and the rankest and wears a chain around its neck. Let him out, and I promise you, whoever invades this house will go out again as fast as his legs will take him—with the goat directly behind.”

  The queen frowned slightly. Then her brow cleared. “Oh! I had forgotten. The he-goat who always gets out, and everybody chases him everywhere, but he only comes when he’s ready.” She smiled, rare and wonderful. “May I see him now, before I go in? So I’ll be sure which one he is?”

  Nofret suppressed a sigh. It was worth the delay to see her lady smile.

  It did not take so long for them to pause by the goats’ pen. The he-goat was particularly redolent today; the queen held her nose, but she regarded him in delighted fascination. He stared back at her with his yellow slot-pupiled eyes, ancient and evil and wise.

  Then he did a remarkable thing. He lowered his head with its great
crooked horns, right to the ground, never taking his eyes from the queen’s face. And she, little fool, climbed the gate and went to him and petted him, forgetting even that he reeked—and he butted up against her as gently as one of the kids.

  She came out reluctantly, with many pauses to greet the she-goats and the young ones. When she was back outside the pen, Nofret finally remembered to breathe. The stench of he-goat came nigh to gagging her. And he, the incalculable creature, was watching her lady as if she had been the favorite of his harem.

  Maybe after all there was something in the Egyptian conviction that their royalty were gods. Nothing else would explain the he-goat’s infatuation.

  The queen did not even know what she had done. She washed herself in the basin that Nofret showed her, let Nofret pour her a cup of water and fill a platter with bread and cheese and a handful of fruit, then lay on the heap of rugs where the men liked to sit in the evenings, and made it clear that she would rest. Nofret left her there, hoping to whatever gods would hear, that she would stay there and stay safe.

  oOo

  Without a delicate lady to impede her, Nofret could move as quickly as her legs would take her, up the steep way to the king’s own tomb. She barely noticed how steep it was, or how far, or how rough and narrow the way could be. The sun, beating down, barely troubled her. Maybe she had a god with her, or a demon of haste. And no matter that her lady in Aharon’s house was as safe as she had ever been in her life—safer by far than she could be in the palace, with servants who could poison her, guards who could draw their swords and stab her to the heart, courtiers who could cast her out for the mob to rend to pieces. Time, Nofret knew in her bones, was fearfully short.

  The work on the king’s tomb went on, and to Nofret it seemed more urgent than it had before: the urgency of work that must be finished, and soon. There were more men working than she remembered, and working deeper in, carving, painting, limning.

  Aharon was in the place of the king’s burial itself, down the long corridor and the two steep flights of stairs, laboring with the masons to carve a deeper chamber. Johanan was overseeing the plasterers along the wall, making certain that everything was done exactly. Of Leah there was no sign.