Pillar of Fire Read online

  Nofret’s cold, contained princess would never have done such a thing. When she turned away from the Aten, she seemed to have turned away from her old somberness, too, and become as lighthearted as her husband. He had a deadly aim with a fistful of lotus blossoms. She caught them, laughing, and flung them back over the narrow stretch of water.

  Some of the maids were dancing on the boat’s deck in the rain of blossoms. Nofret found herself alone behind the queen’s empty chair. She felt old and cold, not a little like a tomb. If she had ever known how to laugh, still less to play as children played, then she had forgotten.

  Maybe Ankhesenamon was just learning it. If so, she was an apt pupil. She had turned her back completely on Akhetaten and was caught up in her joyous battle with the king and his friends.

  oOo

  Egypt welcomed its young king with open arms, with cheering and singing and carpets of flowers. Its gods all came out to greet him, made richer already by his gifts of gold and silver and precious things. Their images were renewed, their temples built higher and prouder than ever. The coldness with which the Two Lands had regarded Akhenaten was forgotten, their joy immeasurable. They had their pride back again, and their ancient ways, and the gods that had been theirs and their ancestors’ from the morning of the world.

  By the time the king came to Memphis, most of Egypt must have been hoarse with shouting his name. That city, set for so long beside but just beneath Thebes in the hearts of the kings, was mightily proud to be this new king’s chosen place. There had been war of words, rumor said, between the priests of Ptah of Memphis and those of Amon in Memphis.

  Whatever the truth of the rumor, when the king came they were all sweet amity. It was to Amon’s temple that he went first, and broke the seal on the gate, and with his own hands—and the assistance of a troop of stalwart priests—flung it wide. Half the city seemed to pour in after him, to hear the rite of Amon sung in Amon’s temple as it had not been in ten years and more, and to see the priests returned to their duties and their offices. But it was from Ptah’s temple that he spoke his proclamation, uttering it in his own voice, clear and yet unbroken, declaring the restoration of the gods to their thrones in the Two Lands. This was politic, poorly though it might please Amon’s priests: for after all he was Lord of the Two Lands, north and south, Memphis and Thebes, Ptah and Amon, and not simply of one alone.

  Ankhesenamon kept to the king’s side, performed the queen’s part, received homage as he did. No one mentioned her father’s name or the name of his city. Those were forgotten. She was in Ptah’s city now, with the blessing of Amon on her, and the priesthoods of both gods bowing low at her feet.

  It must have been heady to be so loved when she had been hated for so long for her father’s sake. Nofret could hardly blame her for letting him be forgotten—she would have done the same, and gladly.

  oOo

  “They’re going to kill his memory,” said Ankhesenamon after all the feasting and singing were over, when she had gone to her chamber in the queen’s palace to rest and perhaps to sleep. It was deep night, some while yet from dawn: the hour when all is silent, before the birds begin to sing. She had bathed and anointed herself lightly and was sitting naked on her bed. She looked hardly more than a child, though she was a woman grown, and well grown, too, for all her slenderness and smallness.

  She spoke of her father as if he had been a king of ancient times, observing calmly, “They hate him so much—they’ll pull his city down and carve out his name wherever they can find it. It’s what those who come after always do, when a king has earned his people’s hatred.”

  Nofret opened her mouth, closed it again. Since Akhenaten went away, his daughter had said no word of him, nor spoken of him by name except as the king who was dead. Maybe he was dead to her as to the rest of Egypt.

  It was not Nofret’s place to remind the queen that her father was alive. Not if the queen chose to forget.

  Instead of saying what had first come to her, then, of a king who was no longer king, Nofret said, “You’re not going to stop them from killing his memory.”

  “No,” said Ankhesenamon. Her old chill remoteness had come back. “Call me coward if you like. I honored him while he was king. I did as best I could to serve him. But this is another age. We have a new king, and the old gods have come back again. If they choose to take vengeance on a name, who am I to stop them?”

  “You are the queen,” Nofret said.

  Ankhesenamon’s eyes glittered. No, she was not so cold after all, and not so remote. “The queen is nothing and no one in front of the great gods.”

  “Even though she’s Amon’s own many times greatgrandchild?”

  “Then more than ever,” said Ankhesenamon. “What do you think a god thinks when his children turn against him, call him false and worship another? Do you think he’ll forgive either easily or quickly?”

  Nofret shook her head. Gods were unchancy beings at best, capricious and, she sometimes thought in the privacy of her self, much too powerful for anyone’s good. She often thought that it might be wisest to bring herself to the notice of none, not even for protection against ill. A mortal without a god stood less chance of running afoul of the gods than a mortal who devoted herself to one in particular and made all the rest jealous.

  That had been Akhenaten’s mistake. It had killed his kingship and most of his family. Now his daughter, to Nofret’s mind, was being sensible.

  “I don’t know much of Egyptian gods,” Nofret said, which was only partly true, but true enough, “but I do know this: you never laughed or even smiled in Akhetaten. You had no joy. Here you have it in all the measure you ever lacked. It makes the day brighter, somehow, and the night less dark.”

  “Ah, a poet,” said Ankhesenamon. “I never had time to laugh. I was too busy trying to be a queen.”

  “That hasn't changed,” Nofret said. “Not the being queen. But you have light in you. You never did before.”

  Ankesenamon thought about that. Her eyes narrowed. She frowned, not to be grim, but because she was thinking. After a while she said, “I think the Aten was too strong for my spirit. Amon is strong and he can be vengeful, but he doesn’t oppress me. He shares, you see. He lets the other gods be.”

  “That does ease the burden,” Nofret agreed.

  Ankhesenamon drew up her knees and clasped them and rocked as she had done when she was much younger. She was still thinking aloud. “The Aten only ever spoke to Father. He never spoke to me. I never knew if he was pleased with me, or if he even knew that I existed. The more I tried to serve him, the less I felt of his presence. Whereas Amon is everywhere in the Two Lands, not only in Thebes. He talks to his priests and he talks to his people.”

  “Does he talk to you?”

  Ankhesenamon shrugged, sighed. “I don’t know. I suppose so. I feel the anger in him. He’s not angry at me, I don’t think. I don’t matter enough.”

  “Or you matter too much,” said Nofret. “You carry the king-right. No one can take that away from you.”

  “But my life,” said Ankhesenamon, “that, anyone can take. The priests have learned that they can kill a king. I doubt they’ll forget.”

  Nofret shivered. “Are you afraid for your king, then?”

  “No,” said Ankhesenamon, perhaps a shade too quickly. “He’s their darling and their delight. He undid all that my father did. They’ll cherish him and keep him alive as long as he does what they want him to do.”

  Which was mostly to let Amon have all the power in Egypt. Nofret knew what priests were like. They were men like any others, and men always wanted power. It was their nature.

  What women wanted was a little simpler, and a great deal more complicated.

  “I want to live,” said Ankhesenamon, “and to give my husband a son when he’s ready to come to my bed. Are those such terrible things to want?”

  “They make a great deal of sense to me,” said Nofret.

  “Ah, but you’re a foreigner.”

&n
bsp; “Not any longer,” Nofret said. “I can’t remember what I was in Hatti. Everything I am, I take from Egypt.”

  “But you aren’t Egyptian,” said Ankhesenamon. “You don’t think like us.”

  “I don’t think like anyone.” It was too old a thought to be bitter. Nofret knelt at her lady’s feet, sitting on her heels. “I think I grew up twisted somehow. Or I was born that way. I think things that are never proper for a woman, let alone a slave. I used to wonder why I couldn’t learn to fight like my brothers.”

  “That’s not difficult to answer,” Ankhesenamon said. “Women are weaker. Everybody knows that.”

  Nofret surged to her feet. “Look at me! Do I look weak? I’m as tall as most men in this country. I could lift an ox if I had to.”

  “But in Hatti men are bigger than you. It’s always the biggest who win in fights, because they’re strongest.”

  “Not always,” Nofret said. “Often it’s the clever ones who win, who wait while the strong thrash about, and then move in the perfect moment and strike too fast to see. I told my father I could learn to fight like that. He laughed at me. I was a girl. Girls don’t fight, not anywhere that anyone knows of.”

  Ankhesenamon looked at her, quietly curious. “Do you want to wear armor and learn to carry a spear?”

  Nofret sank down, disgusted with herself. “Of course not. It’s years too late, even if I weren’t a female. I’d look a right fool, trying to learn the arts of war at my age. I’d trip over my own spear or put an arrow in my foot.”

  Ankhesenamon did not smile at that, though Nofret had rather expected her to. “What do you want, then?” she asked. “Do you want to be free? To marry, have children?”

  No one ever asked a slave such questions. Except Ankhesenamon, who was as odd in her way as Nofret was.

  They were not questions Nofret much cared to think on. “What would I do if I were free? Where would I go?”

  “To a husband,” said Ankhesenamon. “To have his children.”

  “Who would marry me? I’m a great gawk of a Hittite. What Egyptian would want the likes of me?”

  “Why,” said Ankhesenamon, “any man who fancies a strong woman. And one who’s not so ill to look at, either.”

  All this made Nofret uncomfortable. She had had men enough pawing at her in corners, but no one she wanted to lie with, much less marry.

  There was something wrong with her in that, too, she supposed. The other slaves had lovers, or let men lie with them for the simple pleasure of it. Nofret never had. The closest she had ever come was with that idiot in Mitanni, whom she had fought off with every art and skill she had. No one since had pressed as hard: maybe because in Egypt she was larger than most women, and so plainly strong.

  “I don’t want to marry,” she said. “I’m content where I am.”

  “Everyone marries,” said Ankhesenamon.

  “I don’t,” Nofret said. “I said I was different. You didn’t believe me.”

  “I believe,” said Ankhesenamon, “that you need to learn how to be happy. I thought it was much more difficult than it is, before I came here. There was never enough laughter in that other place.”

  “There was never any,” said Nofret. “I think it’s still inside me. Or I never was very lighthearted.”

  “You could learn to be,” said Ankhesenamon.

  “Maybe,” Nofret said.

  Thirty-Three

  Nofret was never one to do what someone else wanted of her, but it struck her as useful to be as her lady wished: to be happy. It was a simple exercise. First one learned to smile, then to laugh. After that one learned to play, and to be silly. Silliness was in great fashion in the court of Tutankhamon, where everyone was young, or pretended to be.

  The queen became a great master of the art of being happy. The king taught her. He was a bright spirit, he always had been. Ankhesenamon, raised like a bird in a cage, wing-clipped and silent, learned under his tutelage both to fly and to sing.

  They had married in sorrow while he was but a child, to give him the right to wear the Two Crowns. In the sixth year of his reign, in the fourteenth year of his age, when he was come to a man’s age if not yet to a man’s strength, they married in the body.

  Ankhesenamon, half a dozen years the elder, once already a wife and a queen, learned from him to be lover as well as wife. Wife she had been before, and mother; but she could not have taken much pleasure from it, as young as she had been, and forced to it by duty and by her father’s will.

  Now she was a woman, and ripe for loving. Her husband, young though he was, was eager; and he had loved her since he was small.

  They were beautiful together, two slender elegant people, he growing tall, she not small but not large either, standing just as high as his chin. They loved to sit side by side, to link hand with hand, even when they were being king and queen. When one had to be without the other for whatever reason—duty, pleasure, the needs of the kingdom—each seemed, not diminished, but as if the other should be there; there was an emptiness that should have been filled.

  It was not all light and laughter. Twice Ankhesenamon conceived. Twice the child was born too soon, in much pain, and died before it drew breath. It was as it had been with Akhenaten: only daughters, and those frail, unable to live.

  The blood was too close. Nofret thought that but never said it, no more than anyone else did. One did not say such things to a queen.

  Ankhesenamon carried each child in great hope and lost it in grief. They mourned together, she and the king, as she had never done with Akhenaten. Grief shared was grief halved, the old women said. Certainly it was easier to bear in a lover’s arms.

  “We’ll make a son,” Tutankhamon told his queen in Nofret’s hearing, as they lay together chastely, her head on his breast, her cheeks still wet with weeping for the second of their children. He wept as he spoke, but his voice was steady. “This is our sacrifice, the price we pay the gods. Next time it will be a son, and he will live.”

  Ankhesenamon did not say anything. No more did Nofret, who should not even have been there. Maybe the king had foresight. He was god and king, Horus on earth. Maybe he knew what the gods wanted of them all.

  “We’ll pray,” he said. “We’ll make offerings to Amon and to Mother Isis, and to Taweret who watches over women in childbirth. We’ll give them all rich gifts, and they’ll give us a son.”

  They did as he had said, over and over. Maybe their prayers had one worthy result. Ankhesenamon did not conceive another daughter, or lose her.

  She conceived no son, either. But the king was young. The gods had years yet to forgive him for his kinship to the Aten’s servant, and to grant him his prayer.

  oOo

  Nofret found it no easier to grieve than to be happy. Both seemed arts that she had never quite mastered. Mostly she felt inept and a little empty. She did her duties well; she knew that. She was the chief of the queen’s servants. She commanded and others obeyed; set the queen’s palace in order and kept it so, a task that often took the whole of the day and part of the night.

  In the midst of that she fulfilled the promise that she had made to Amon of Thebes, and gave him his gift of bread and beer for raising her to this eminence: a gift that, for her own peace, she renewed at each passing of the moon. She had accomplished what she had set out to do when she was a tribute-maiden from Mitanni. She was happy in it, but the happiness felt hollow.

  She was not one to be easily content, she supposed. Ankhesenamon had a gift for taking what she had and making the most of it. Nofret was always looking for something else.

  Memphis was a splendid place to look. It was as old as Thebes—some said older—and fully as splendid, as befit the capital of the north. Where Thebes had its valley of the tombs of the kings, Memphis had a wonder of the world: the old tombs, the great tombs, the mighty Pyramids that shone blinding white in the sun, ghostly white in the moon, guarding the horizon of the west.

  Memphis was closer to Asia than Thebes by many a
hundred leagues, and its streets were fuller of strangers than Thebes’ had ever been, or even Akhetaten’s. Among them all, Nofret found one face she knew: the beer-seller from Akhetaten who had gone back home and set up a shop with a table and a bench, and a room behind where a woman could entertain a lover of an afternoon.

  Not that Nofret ever did such a thing, though the beer-seller winked and smiled and hinted strongly that she should. She went there sometimes to drink decent beer and watch the people go by. Maybe once or twice she went back to the palace faintly tipsy. Mostly she brought bits of gossip to make her lady laugh, or a bauble from the market. It should have been enough to satisfy her. It never quite was.

  oOo

  The king might have made his residence in Memphis, but he traveled everywhere in the Two Lands, up and down the river, all the way downriver to the Delta and all the way up past Thebes to the borders of Nubia. Thebes itself he visited in the end, but only when it suited him, and only as a distant second to his residence in Memphis. He was having his tomb built in the valley that lay to the west of Thebes because his ancestors had done so, and not, he made it clear, because that city came first in his heart.

  It was not completely politic, but the king was uncharacteristically obstinate. “Thebes will have exactly as much of the king as it is owed, and no more,” he said. “I’ll live there forever after I’m dead. While I live, I prefer to live elsewhere.”

  Even Lord Ay could not persuade him to be more politic. He listened to reason in everything else, but in this he would not budge.

  Since he was king, there was nothing anyone could do to force him—and no one yet had tried to kill him. His counselors sighed and let him be. Amon’s priests said nothing, nor threatened him. They had their power back, and their god in his glory. They chose to be content, or to feign contentment.

  When the king traveled in the Two Lands, unless—as happened more, the older he grew—he traveled in arms, his queen went with him. Nofret went too at first, but by the time their second child died, she had too much to do in the palace in Memphis.