Pillar of Fire Read online

  “She’s a virgin,” her tormentor declared.

  The bath-servants snickered. “That won’t last long,” one of them said. Nofret would have gone for the creature’s eyes, but they had taken her claws, too, trimmed her nails almost to the quick.

  When they were done with her she ached and stung inside and out. She looked like a peeled wand with a white tip—they had laughed at that, too, seeing her skull bare and pallid above the sun-browning of the rest of her. She would get revenge, she swore to herself. Somehow. When she could.

  Stay with the princess she well might, serve her and follow her orders, but she was subject to the rule of the chief of servants, and to the steward of the palace above that. She was also subject to the whim of whichever older and more powerful servant chose to notice her—beginning with the one delegated to escort her to the bath and then teach her what she must know in order to wait on a princess. Seni had taught well in what time she had had, but there was much more to know, and Nofret was expected to know all of it at once. Servants who failed to learn quickly felt the sting of the rod.

  There was nothing fair about it, and little that was honestly interesting. The weakling in Nofret begged her to complain to the princess, but the soldier’s daughter stiffened her back and set her chin and endured. Even if the princess cared, after all, what could she do? Her intervention would only make it harder for Nofret when the servants had her alone again.

  Escape she did not think of, nor would she let it vex her dreams. She was not going to escape. She was going to show the gods, or the Powers, or whatever had set her here, that she was more stubborn than they.

  The first thing Nofret learned after she was shown the ways of the palace and informed that she would be her mistress’ taster at every meal, was a bewildering array of highborn names and faces. Not only the king and queen, either, or even their six daughters, from the beautiful Meritaten to the baby Sotepenre. The king had other ladies, the daughters of allies who were sent to him as gifts and as hostages.

  Chief of them was Seni’s Lady Kiya—Tadukhipa of Mitanni, princess in her own right and a great beauty. The king favored her although she had borne him no child. Nor would she, people muttered, with veiled glances at the queen. Queen Nefertiti did not expect her husband to devote himself to her alone as lesser men were supposed to do—that was not allowed a king—but neither would she wish another woman to do what she had not, and give him a son to rule after him.

  Nofret wondered how the queen did it, if she did. It might be useful to know.

  The king’s mother was in the city for the festival, the widowed queen who commanded whomever she chose. Even Nofret was informed that she might be asked to wait on her.

  Nofret did not say that her princess had forbidden her to serve anyone else. Everyone was in awe of Queen Mother Tiye. Even, perhaps, the queen’s granddaughter Ankhesenpaaten.

  And no wonder, too, Nofret thought as she stood in the shadow of a colonnade, watching the court in its stately dance of precedence. The king sat on his throne with his queen beside him, as Nofret had seen them before. The queen mother was standing just behind her son, robed and crowned. She was a small figure, very erect, with a vitality that struck Nofret even across the width of that great hall. Her face was almost too strong for beauty, but beauty it had, with all the passion the queen’s cold perfection lacked.

  It was not an Egyptian face. Not quite. Tiye was half a foreigner. Her eyes were rounder, her nose more distinctly arched, her lips fuller than anyone’s here. She looked as if she might be partly of Mitanni, or maybe of Canaan. Her eyes were green like Nofret’s own, and the hair that she let grow under her wig was red, like cedarwood—Nofret saw a strand of it that had escaped—and her skin had a different pallor than that of Egyptian ladies who seldom braved the sun.

  Egyptians were yellow-pale when they were not a deep sun-baked red-brown. Queen Mother Tiye was blue-pale, milk-pale, almost like Nofret herself. Her father had been a foreigner from Asia, a Master of Horse to one of the old kings. He was dead not long since, but people remembered him.

  Her brother Ay was a great man in the Two Lands, with a wife of the royal lineage herself, and a house almost as big as the palace. He looked even more foreign than Tiye did, tall and elegantly narrow, with his sharp hawk’s face and his odd light eyes, like the sea whipped green-grey in a storm. He was Queen Nefertiti’s father, in the way these Egyptians had of breeding kin to kin, and father to the Lady Mutnodjme. That lady was less splendidly beautiful than the queen but still very lovely, and if anything more coldly haughty.

  The queen mother had other sons than the king, and two daughters no older than the king’s daughters. Those were all here. The daughters were nothing in particular, pretty children with none of their mother’s fire. The sons, two of them, were so wide apart in age that at first Nofret thought the younger must be the son of the elder. Prince Smenkhkare was tall and lithe and quite dazzlingly beautiful, more beautiful than the queen, to Nofret’s mind—strange to see him beside the odd and decidedly unpretty king, and to realize that they came of the same mother.

  Their brother Tutankhaten was hardly more than a baby still, a plump black-eyed child who showed promise of becoming as slenderly elegant and fully as handsome as Smenkhkare. At the moment he was just weaned and inclined to be restless.

  He had adopted the princess Ankhesenpaaten, which meant that Nofret saw a great deal of him. He followed them both with tireless persistence, imitated whatever they did, insisted that he sit with Ankhesenpaaten at dinner, and made a general nuisance of himself.

  Ankhesenpaaten sighed and endured it. She well might: it was Nofret who had to run after the brat when he strayed, and make sure he was fed, and wonder where in the world his nurses had got to. They were in the kitchens, probably, swilling beer and taking their ease.

  Ease was not a word Nofret knew the meaning of. She had to be her princess’ taster and her tamer of small uncles, and she was expected to know everyone, too, and to give each his proper degree of respect. The king’s family, the king’s lords, his ladies, his guests and allies, blurred into a mass of disconnected names and faces. Ipy the steward, Pentu the king’s physician, Tutu the chamberlain, Ani the royal secretary, Mahu who kept the peace in the king’s name, the governor of the city whose name Nofret could not say without either a stumble or a giggle: Neferkheperuhersekheper. Such a vast name for so small and round a man, of such undistinguished family—as if the size of his name could make up for the lack of the rest. She said the names over when she lay on her mat at night, made a learning-chant of them, and matched them to faces as best she might, not for fear of the rod, but because she was too proud to fail.

  Simplest of course was to bow low to anyone who looked remotely lordly, and to address him as “my lord” or her as “my lady.” But Nofret wanted to be a power in the palace. She needed to know who everyone was, what he did, how he could be used or avoided.

  It was dizzying, but exhilarating in its way. Nofret wished her brothers could see her now: their little sister in the palace in Egypt, speaking and being spoken to by whole courts of princes. Most of that was what one would expect of slavery: orders to fetch this or that, demands for services that Nofret was not about to perform, and the inevitable groping in dark corners. But some of it was worth bragging about. The king was pleasant to her when he noticed, and the king’s brother Smenkhkare actually smiled at her as if he thought her pretty—scraped pale skull and all.

  Above it all, she was in love. She knew about being in love. People were always singing about it. This was what they sang about: these wobbling knees, this melting inside, the absolute conviction that Prince Smenkhkare was the most beautiful male creature she had ever seen, and that included the king of Hatti’s white herd stallion.

  Being Nofret, and being practical, she knew that he was not really very intelligent nor very strong in the spirit. But she did not care. He was beautiful, and that was enough. He might even turn his eye toward her someday. Prin
ces were known to do that. They were even known to marry foreign women, though not to make them the Great Royal Wife. That was only for a daughter of daughters of the royal line.

  Nofret considered Nefertiti and Tadukhipa, and ventured, in such moments as she could manage, to dream.

  Nofret’s princess could be demanding, but then she could be all gracious ease, letting Nofret go to watch the soldiers’ games or to see a procession of priests among the temples. She saw the king perform sacrifice in the Aten’s great temple, making a mighty offering for the prosperity of the Two Lands. He did it as he did everything else, with a dreamer’s intensity.

  He was a strange man, and seemed stranger the more she saw of him. Only he saw his god clearly, or so he said. Everyone else was deaf and blind and must trust him to show them what the god wanted.

  The god did not even have a face. It was the Sun-disk, pure light. The painters drew it round and golden, with a multitude of arms that were its rays, and hands giving gifts of the god’s grace to the king. Nofret, remembering the sturdy solid human-bodied divinities of Great Hatti and Mitanni and everywhere else—even Egypt—thought this Aten an odd ungraspable thing.

  So did everybody else. In the palace it was never spoken of, but as Nofret took to wandering in the city when her princess gave her leave, she heard much that the palace would not have been pleased to hear. Akhetaten had been built a bare handful of years ago and was still raw and new. People lived in it not because they had been born and expected to die here, but because the king had need of them. They paid tribute to the Aten because he required it. But he could not make them worship the Aten as their only god, nor trust him to protect them from ill omens and night spirits. They kept on wearing amulets of every god in Egypt, and they prayed to those gods, though there were no temples in the Aten’s own and only city except the great temple to the Aten.

  They called the Aten the king’s god. They had gods of their own, whom they worshipped as they could. They muttered about priests in other cities, who had no love for the king and none at all for his god. One god in particular, Amon of Thebes, was fiercely jealous. His priests would harm the king if they could. The king had stopped their rites and driven them out, and called them enemies of the Aten.

  “He tries to force us,” said a seller of beer in the market, more outspoken than most, probably because she partook liberally of her own wares. “He thinks he can make his god the only god, and himself the only speaker for the god, because he’s king and god and no one ever told him he couldn’t do whatever he likes. But we can’t change what we are. I was born on Taweret’s knees, I grew up praising Hathor, I pray to Mother Isis when I need anything. Should I give them up for a bauble with hands?”

  “You came here,” one of her customers pointed out. “You could have stayed in—wherever you came from.”

  “Memphis,” the beer-seller said robustly, “and proud of it too. But there’s plenty of people brewing beer in Memphis, and there weren’t as many here. So I came to see what was doing in the new city the king made.”

  What was doing, as the woman put it, was the building and shaping of a new city in a land where new could mean a mere thousand years old. The god had led the king to this place midway between Thebes and Memphis. For long leagues the great river of Egypt ran through lofty walls of stone—save here, where the cliffs opened their arms to embrace the plain and the river.

  This was a clean place, an empty place—holy, the king said. Across the river were cities of appropriate longevity and considerable prosperity. Here, before the king came, had been only desert.

  Beyond the gardens of its princes it was still the Red Land. At night Nofret heard the cries of jackals, sounding as if they came from just outside the walls. Desert falcons hunted in the garden, and once Nofret could have sworn she saw a lioness sunning herself on a roof on the city’s edge.

  Nofret had been reluctant before that to wander past the city’s walls. After, she had her Hittite pride to contend with—she had to go out as far as the workers’ village in the place of tombs. That was set apart and starkly so, a huddle of houses in a hollow where the roads met, and past them the steep cliffs and the narrow wadis that clove them, and here and there the open maw of a tomb as yet hardly begun. Only a few were tenanted. Not many of the noble or the rich had seen fit as yet to die in Akhetaten.

  The poor of course had no such houses to live in for eternity. A grave dug in the sand had to suffice.

  The workers on the tombs lived apart and kept apart. The priests who looked after the tombs once they were built and inhabited were apart even from those. None of them had any welcome for a stranger, but Nofret was quiet and she was adept at fading into shadows. She was only driven off if she made a noise, or if she spied on something the priests wanted kept secret.

  The house of the embalmers, which the Egyptians called the house of purification, was so secret it stood right in the open, with a door that was bolted against scavengers but not sealed. Nofret skirted it every time she came, but she eyed it sidelong. Her fingers, moving of themselves, shaped a sign of protection against ill spirits.

  In the far corner of the village, where the land was most stony and barren, the foreigners had their huts and their little stone houses. Nofret heard about them from mutters here and there, even in the city: the Apiru, people called them, though they were little like the robbers and reivers who carried that name in Mitanni. They had come to the Two Lands with Yuya the queen’s father, following him from drought and famine into a country where they could be fed and looked after.

  He had done well for himself, married a lady of the line of queens and fathered a daughter who herself became queen. His clansmen had been less fortunate. Separated from their flocks and herds, robbed of their tents, they knew nothing better to do than become makers of bricks and carvers of stone for the tombs.

  For all of that, they were a stiff proud people. They all seemed to have the face of the Lord Ay, like a gathering of falcons. The men grew their hair long and wound it in plaits and covered it with a cap or a bit of cloth, and grew their beards to their breasts. The women were modest but not to absurdity, going about in robes and veils and covering their faces in front of strangers. Their gods were few and strict, and their songs were all of desert places.

  Nofret understood a little of their language. It was like the patois of the desert people in Mitanni, which Nofret had learned in bits and pieces in the marketplace and from one of the slaves in her master’s house.

  She did not know why she kept going back to the workmen’s village in particular. There were places cooler and sweeter-smelling and more alluring to wander to. But this was as far as she could get from the palace and still be in the valley of the king’s city. She could try to scale the cliff, she supposed, or explore the steep narrow wadis that cleft the hills.

  One day she would. Now she was content to seek out the place she had found, an outcropping of rock past the houses of the Apiru. She could not see the city from there, only desert. There was a stump of tree on it, clinging stubbornly to life in that barren place, under which she could sit with her back against the trunk, and plan and ponder and dream—all the things she had no time to do while she waited on the princess.

  There were goats in a pen near her rock, next to a house of respectable size for hereabouts. It was built of brick, and it had an actual door, a wooden panel that must have been rejected by builders in the city: it was cracked down the middle but still serviceable. Nofret, sitting on her rock, could see who came and went by that door. There was a woman with grey hair under her veil, and a man who was neither young nor old, and a boy.

  A youth, more like—he must be a little older than Nofret. He had the faint downy beginnings of a beard, and his voice cracked when he spoke, reducing the girls in the village to fits of the giggles. He was really dreadfully homely, long and gangly, with a vast beak of a nose and a rat’s nest of black hair under a striped cap.

  None of them seemed to notice the stranger
on the rock. They never looked in that direction, nor acknowledged anything much but each other, their family’s god, and the he-goat that was given to breaking its tether and rampaging through the village.

  The goat had a demon in him. His yellow slotted eye was endlessly wicked and evilly wise. He waited till everyone was well occupied in the house or in the tombs before he crouched low, gathered his every muscle, and lunged with ferocious intent, snapping the rope and leaving him free to strike terror in the street. The pen’s wall, sufficient though it was to keep in his harem and his young, was but a stepping-stone for him, a leap to the top, a pause to contemplate his freedom, a spring down into the village.

  He never offered to join her on her rock, which was a mercy. She had seen what he did to people who got in his way.

  The second time the goat escaped, Nofret had been to the rock several times. She thought of it as her dreaming place, the place where she was free. The goat’s leap for freedom startled her out of a daydream in which she was both the queen and the chief of the queen’s servants, and was laying down the law to the servitors in the palace, all of whom wore Hittite robes and Hittite faces. The goat made her think of one of the king’s advisors, a great droner on about trifles and a terrible groper of maidservants in corners. She laughed at the thought—and laughed even harder when she saw the boy bolt from the house in pursuit of the goat.

  It was a grand chase. She saw some of it, heard the rest: shrieks, curses, a shattering crash, and a flurry of yelping. The goat had got into a workshop and horrified the artisan’s dog. It had wrought havoc among the workbenches, too, from the sound of it.

  A rumble of hooves presaged the goat’s return at the gallop, pursued by an irate throng. Among them they herded it into a corner by the wall—not without casualties—and watched openmouthed as the goat sprang up onto the wall, farted loudly in their faces, and leaped back down among his ladies.