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  Nofret was very quiet. She dared not say what she thought now. If all of what Ay said was true, then Egypt was in worse case than he could have dreamed. Smenkhkare was not only a weak king, he was a king who fancied himself alone. But Akhenaten was not dead. He had left his crown and his throne, cast them off as useless, as no other king in Egypt had ever done.

  What if he could not actually do it? What if his being alive and pretending to be dead did something to the heart of Egypt—to the power that made it strong? He had denied Egypt’s gods. They might not care who held the throne now. They might take revenge on the man who sat in it—and then turn their eyes on the one who had abandoned it.

  Good riddance to a bad lot if they did as much, but Ankhesenpaaten was kin to both. She could be the sacrifice. And then—

  Lord Ay had wandered away, murmuring to himself. He had forgotten Nofret completely. She was rather glad. Slaves who knew too much did not live long.

  Thirty

  The queen had worked herself into a fever. Nofret put her to bed, assisted—silently, irresistibly—by Leah, and coaxed a cup of herb-brew into her. She made a face at it but drank a sip or two.

  Her flushed cheeks and unpainted eyes made her look even younger than she was. She lay back and pretended to sleep, a pretense that Nofret allowed. Better that than sitting up chattering of everything and nothing, trying to summon clerks and ministers who should long since have gone to their own beds. She was like a horse that had run too long, that kept trying to run even when its legs had failed.

  Nofret put out the lamps, all but the one that was always lit beside the bed, and sat by her lady. She had taken to doing that since the king pretended to die, and often fell asleep so, head on folded arms, half on her lady’s bed and half on the floor.

  Tonight Leah sat on the bed’s other side, shadowy in her black robes, with the black veil over her hair. Only her face was clear to see, familiar and yet strange, as if the skull had come clearer under the soft wrinkled skin.

  Nofret wanted to ask her why she was there, why tonight of all nights, the night of the day when Lord Ay had as much as said that Smenkhkare was no king in Egypt. Silence held her. The weight of the night was heavy, bearing her down. It was not sleep; she was wide awake. It was a heaviness of the limbs, a dullness of the mind and spirit. She could only sit and wait, and watch for what would come.

  The wailing had grown terribly familiar since the year of the plague. One could listen, could train the ear to its direction, could mark the place and the intensity.

  This was wild: more a shriek than a formal cry of grief. It came from the north, from the king’s palace. Someone there was dead, or dying fast.

  Shouts, cries, sound of running feet. The queen, asleep at last, heard nothing. Nofret moved to shield her. As if anything could protect her from what came: darkness visible, embodied in a Nubian maid—Tama who had served Meritaten since the queen was a child, recognizable only for her size and her black skin. Her face was all twisted, bleeding where she had rent it with her nails.

  She stopped within the door, staring at Nofret and at Leah as if she had never seen them before—even Nofret who had been her friend. She did not seem to see the sleeper between them.

  When she spoke it was with quiet that shocked Nofret, It was so ordinary to speak such words as it spoke. “They are dead,” she said. “My lady, my lord.”

  Nofret did not understand. “Someone in the court has died?”

  Tama shook her head, hard, side to side. “No. No, no, no. Are you a fool, then, after all? They died in the night. They lie in one another’s arms, stiff and growing cold. It was the wine, I think, that they had before they slept. Or maybe the dainties she fed him one by one. Or nothing but air and spellcasting. I fed a cake to the cat—it hardly turned a whisker. I drank the dregs of the wine. There’s no pain in my belly. But someone killed them. Someone wafted poison across their faces.”

  At last Nofret’s staggering wits caught up with her tongue. “Smenkhkare? Smenkhkare’s dead? And Meritaten? But—”

  Tama nodded. Her nod became a stagger. Nofret sprang to catch her, crumpled under her massive weight. Her face was grey, her lips blue-tinged. She was gasping, shuddering. Her tongue had grown thick, but Nofret understood her. “Wine. It was the wine. Tell—if anyone—it was the wine!”

  “I’ll tell whoever will listen,” Nofret said. Her heart was cold, colder than the body that shivered in her arms. Weeping might have eased it, but she could never summon tears when she needed them. She kept on thinking, kept on yattering inside her head.

  Tama died in Nofret’s arms. Nofret knew the precise moment, though the shivering went on for a little while longer, the body empty of soul but the cold still in it, coming to possess it wholly. She looked up just then into Leah’s face, the dark eyes shadowed under the dark veil, the whole like an image in an old, old temple. It seemed no more human than that.

  “You knew,” Nofret said.

  “As did you,” said Leah. “In your heart, where all true knowledge is.”

  “No,” said Nofret, but she barely heard herself. She was not denying what Leah said. She was refusing to hear it. Hearing it meant that she had known, and shut off the knowing. She did not want to be a prophet as Leah was.

  “It’s not,” she said, maybe to herself, maybe to Leah, maybe to the woman who lay dead in her arms, “that I can see. It’s that I can’t act on what I see. I knew—my heart knew that they would try to kill him. But I said nothing. I wouldn’t even listen to my heart.”

  “Maybe you wanted him dead,” Leah said.

  Nofret sucked in a breath. It was hot, like the anger in her. “I know who did it.”

  “Do you?” asked Leah.

  Nofret wavered. That made her angrier, but Leah’s eyes on her were steady, compelling her to think—to use her wits. Lord Ay had seen a way to perceive Smenkhkare as something less than a true king in Egypt, but could he have killed his sister’s son and his daughter’s eldest child, both together, with a single draught of poison?

  Then who? Who would want Smenkhkare dead?

  “Anyone,” said Leah as if Nofret had spoken aloud, “who could see a way to do it without angering the gods. He was king, but not full and sole lord of the Two Lands, not till the elder king comes out of the house of purification. He was less than king, in that he refused to perform his duties to god or kingdom. Better no king at all than one who fell so far short of what a king must be.”

  “But if people can think like that,” Nofret said, “then anyone can kill a king any time he pleases, simply because that king isn’t precisely what he wants a king to be.”

  “Yes,” Leah said. “And from there he can wonder why one needs a king at all, if a king is such a simple thing to do away with.”

  Nofret shivered. She laid Tama down very carefully, not for horror of the dead, but for the cold that was on her in thinking what she was thinking. “They killed a king and a queen both. If they wanted to dispose of this other queen, too, the one of them all who ever did anything fitting to a queen . . .”

  She leaped toward the cup that lay on the table by the bed, the cup into which she herself had poured herb-brew from the flask that the king’s physician had given her. The cup was still mostly full. The potion in it smelled faintly bitter, faintly green.

  She sipped, and grimaced. Bitter, yes. But not deadly. Not poisoned. She had tasted it herself before she made her lady drink of it. Her stomach was hollow, clenched in on itself, but that was grief and fear, not poison.

  Still she was afraid. She could not stop herself. There had been intrigues in Mitanni. No one drank from a cup that had been left to itself, or that one’s enemy might have touched. But in Egypt she had forgotten what it was to live on the edge of slow and secret death.

  “Stop that,” said Leah gently, but Nofret felt it with the force of a blow. “If you’re going to have hysterics, put them off till this is over. A king and a queen are dead. There’s now no king in Egypt.”
/>   “Do I care for that?” Nofret shook her head. “No. No, don’t say it. I know I should, because my lady must.”

  “What? What must I know?”

  Nofret whirled. The queen was sitting up, heavy-eyed with sleep and yet dismayingly alert. “What’s happened?” she demanded. “Why are you whispering? What’s that noise outside?”

  Her eyes shifted from Nofret’s face. Nofret moved too late. The queen saw Tama. There could be no mistaking that she was dead.

  It was Leah who spoke to her, gentle as ever, and merciless. “Your sister and your sister’s husband are dead. Poison took them. It was Amon, I think, and some in the court who have tired of kings who will not conduct themselves as kings should do in Egypt.”

  The queen scrubbed sleep out of her eyes, childlike and yet not a child at all. She said nothing either foolish or expected. She rose and reached for the robe that Nofret lacked the wits to hold for her. She wrapped it around herself.

  Whether it was prescience or whether a god guided her, she was ready, armed as a woman could be in white linen and royal pride, when men ran through the door. They were her own guards, and others with them, and in their midst two who were unarmed and unarmored. Lord Ay led a child by the hand, a boy of some eight or nine years, well grown and limber-strong.

  He came under protest, flushed and irritable as if he had been roused from a sound sleep. While Lord Ay was distracted, disposing his guards about the room and sending most of them back to guard the door against the invasion that must inevitably come, the boy pulled free. He was in a fine temper.

  Then he caught sight of the queen standing by her bed, stiff and still. His face lit like a lamp. “Lotus Blossom! You look terrible. Did they tell you the lie too? That somebody killed Smenkhkare?”

  “It’s not a lie,” said the queen. She seemed to believe it only because she had said it.

  “It is a lie,” the boy insisted. “People can’t kill him. He’s the king.”

  “Still,” she said, “they have.” She held out her hands. “Come here, lion-cub.”

  The lion’s cub, who was her uncle Tutankhaten, came to take her hands. He had been receiving tutelage in being a man: he did not break down as a child might have, or fling himself on her and beg her to make it all better. “But if my brother is dead,” he said, “then who’s to be king?”

  “You are,” said the queen. “There’s no one else.”

  “But,” said Tutankhaten, “I can’t be king. I’m not married to someone who has the king-right.”

  “I have the king-right,” said the queen.

  “Well,” said Tutankhaten. “Then I had better marry you if I have to be king.” He frowned at her. “I do have to, don’t I?”

  “I’m afraid you do,” said the Lord Ay behind him. To the queen he said, “Lady, I judged it best to bring him here. There are those in the palace now who would be excessively eager to get possession of the only possible heir to the throne.”

  “And those who are in the palace would not think as even an eight years’ child does, that while he may be the heir, the right to rule resides in one of the royal ladies?” The queen spoke as she had since she woke, cool and quiet, as if she felt nothing at all. “Grandfather, have you secured your wife and your daughter?”

  “My lady and my lovely Mutnodjme are taking the air at my estate outside of Memphis,” said the Lord Ay. “You may reckon it a pleasant coincidence that a company of my personal guard is in residence at that same estate.”

  “You knew,” said the queen.

  “Let us say,” he said calmly, “that when your father died, I found it expedient to move my ladies out of harm’s way. I would have done the same for you, Granddaughter, if it had been possible.”

  She inclined her head, gracious as ever, even in this extremity.

  Tutankhaten still held her hands, looking from her to her grandfather, who was also his uncle. He had been kept close among his nurses and his tutors; Nofret had not even known he was in Akhetaten, though he could hardly have remained in Thebes while his eldest brother was king.

  He was not the plump brown-cheeked child she remembered. He had grown tall for his age, slender but strong, and beautiful as he had promised to be. He looked like Smenkhkare, but Smenkhkare blessed with quickness of wit. “Will it protect you,” he said, “if you marry me? I’m going to learn the sword next year. I can shoot a bow, a little.”

  The queen did not smile as a woman might at a child’s fancy. She answered him seriously. “It will protect us both. You because you will be king. Me because no one can be king unless I marry him.”

  “And,” said Lord Ay, “a child-king may offer less of a threat than a man grown.”

  “Threat?” asked Tutankhaten. “What threat are we?”

  “Why, a terrible one,” the queen said. “My father killed all the gods. Then his brother refused to bring them back again, or even think about them.”

  “That wasn’t right,” said Tutankhaten. “I know that there are gods. I hear them talking in the night when everyone thinks I’m asleep. They aren’t dead at all, nor are they sleeping. Some of them are very angry.”

  “Yes,” said the queen. “Some are angry enough to kill a king.” She drew him to her and laid an arm about his shoulders, a gesture half of comfort, half of seeking comfort.

  He hugged her tightly. “They won’t kill us,” he said. “I won’t let them.”

  “Gods willing,” said Ankhesenpaaten.

  PART TWO: BELOVED OF AMON

  How lovely the moment.

  May it endure forever:

  I have made love with you,

  You have lifted up my heart.

  —From the Songs of Entertainment

  Thirty-One

  It seemed they were forever struggling up to the royal tombs, first with Akhenaten, then with Smenkhkare and Meritaten; that the only banquets in the palace of Akhetaten were funeral banquets, and the only sounds those of mourning. But when the kings were laid to their rest, when the weeping was done and the priests left to perform the rites of the dead in peace, there was a new king raised up in the Two Lands, and a royal wedding, and what to some was a promise of new things. The king after all was a child, nor was his queen much more than that. He might be more malleable than either of his brothers had been.

  Ankhesenpaaten ruled for him. Lord Ay led the council of his ministers in advising both the queen and the young king. The king himself seemed inclined to do as be was told, to learn all that he could learn, and to oppose nothing that his counselors proposed.

  Nofret did not commit the error of thinking him too easily led. Far too many people did. Enough of that might have torn the Two Kingdoms apart, but Lord Ay was strong in his quiet way, and kept the council firmly behind him; and Ankhesenpaaten had learned the arts of queenship from Ay’s sister Tiye. They held on. The court followed them as much for laziness as for any other cause.

  The rest of Egypt seemed willing to wait and to be patient. The king, at his counselors’ urging, did not wall himself in Akhetaten as both his brothers had, but went on royal progresses, traveling the length and breadth of the Two Lands, making his face known to the people and establishing his presence in the kingdom. He always came back to Akhetaten, always spent at least part of the year there in the palace that his brother had built.

  Egypt watched and waited and was patient. The temples had been opened again and priests worshipped their gods with impunity, although neither Smenkhkare nor Tutankhaten had unmade the decree against them. Only Amon in Thebes kept his gates sealed.

  Amon’s priests came to Akhetaten in the first year of the reign of Tutankhaten, came and saw and went away unmolested. They did not request audience. They did not, as many had feared, cast a new curse on this new king. They would bide their time, it was clear, and see how this child king went about his kingship.

  Akhetaten was dying. It had been ill since well before Akhenaten left it through the door of the house of purification, but under Tutankhaten it fad
ed perceptibly. The court lingered perforce, and the functionaries who lived and died by the king’s will, but the lifeblood of the city, the common people who filled its walls and made it sing, had drained away. The strength of the Aten was not enough to hold them, nor could it grant life and substance to a city built on emptiness.

  In the fourth year of the reign of Tutankhaten, the priests of Amon returned to Akhetaten, where the king was living during the river’s flood. They bore with them a gift of tribute and a plea that was in fact a summons. “Come back to Thebes,” said the chief of them, bowing low at the young king’s feet. “Come back to the place where you were born, to the city of your forefathers. Leave forever this bleak and desert place. Let it fall into the sand from which it rose, under the sun for whose glory it was made.”

  He spoke in the great hall of the palace before the gathered brilliance of the court, a figure stark in the simplicity of white linen and clean-shaved skull. The king, seated beside his queen on the dais in a glittering army of courtiers, regarded the priest in silence.

  Tutankhaten was no longer a child, though not yet a man: boy maturing into youth, with a face like a golden mask, beautiful and impenetrable. But he had never quite mastered his eyes. Those were quick with intelligence, flickering from the priest’s face to those of his following.

  It was most often the queen who answered petitioners, or Lord Ay in his office of regent. But Ankhesenpaaten was silent, sitting rigid—whether with anger or resignation, Nofret, standing near her in the flock of maids and servants, could not tell.

  Lord Ay stirred as if to speak. The king’s hand lifted, stilling him where he stood.

  Tutankhaten leaned forward. He lowered the crook and flail that he had been holding crosswise in the royal fashion. The crook he rested across his knees. He ran the lashes of the flail through his fingers, toying with them. They were precious and seeming useless, all lapis and gold, but Nofret suspected that they could deal a vicious blow before they shattered.