Pillar of Fire Read online

  Nofret would have lingered in the cool shade with the taste of pomegranate sweet on her tongue, but curiosity brought her out to the colonnade and thence to the outer court, the court of the foreigners. A numerous embassy milled and babbled there, with much clattering of horses’ hooves and shouting of men.

  Her heart caught in spite of itself. Emissaries had come from Great Hatti before, and often: companies of tall broad pale-skinned men in long kilts and embroidered mantles, their thick curling hair grown long behind and shaved smooth in front, and their hands never far from hilt or haft of a weapon. Even weaponless in front of the king they managed to look as if they were armed to the teeth.

  They never took notice of the queen’s maids, nor cared that one of them was a Hittite. Nor should she care who they were or where they came from. She was bound to Egypt.

  And yet whenever men from Hatti came to speak with the king, Nofret came over all strange. They were her people, and they were not. The language they spoke sounded strange to her, though she could understand it well enough. One could lose one’s capacity to do such things, she knew: she had seen it in others of the tribute-slaves, who when their own people came before the king, wept because they could not understand the envoys, only the interpreters.

  Nofret clung grimly to her birth-tongue. Part of it was pride, part stubbornness, and part conviction that it might prove useful. She could assure herself that the interpreters were honest; and so they had been when she was there to hear them.

  Her lady had never asked her to play the part of interpreter. It was not something Ankhesenamon thought of or Nofret saw fit to propose. Nofret was a maidservant, not a speaker of tongues.

  oOo

  There were Hittites in the court of the foreigners, an ambassador and his train, carrying the seal of the King of Kings, the Great King of Hatti. It was still Suppiluliumas as it had been when she was taken away to Mitanni. He was one of the great kings, Nofret had heard Lord Ay opine, and not entirely with admiration. Great kings could be a nuisance. They made war all too often, and thought too much of increasing their lands.

  Nofret wondered if Suppiluliumas was in a conquering mood again. If he was, General Horemheb would deal with him. General Horemheb was commander of the king’s armies in Asia now, a higher post than the one he had held in the Delta, and comfortably distant from Egypt.

  She lingered in the shadow of a column, more idly curious than anything else, watching the Hittites. In the king’s absence and outside of Nofret’s jurisdiction the palace had become a bit slack: the minister in charge of welcoming embassies was slow in coming, and the grooms and servants were at somewhat of a loss.

  Nofret shook her head. Idiots. Even she, who held power only in the queen’s palace, knew where the stables were and how one welcomed ambassadors, and where one sent them to bathe and rest and refresh themselves. No one here seemed willing or able to do any of that. The Hittites were conspicuously patient, but the nobleman in the middle had begun to frown, black brows knit over his mighty arch of nose.

  Queen’s servant she might be, but she belonged to the palace, too. Its honor reflected on hers. More so maybe because she was Hittite, and Hatti would not think well of Egypt if it offered so poor a welcome.

  She drew a breath, smoothed her gown, and stepped into the light. It struck hard, and with it the shouting of men, milling of horses, baying of hunting hounds, even the snarl of a lion in a cage: Hatti had sent the lion-cub of Egypt a most proper tribute.

  She wove her way through the hurtling bodies. Men were cursing. Some of the dogs had got into a fight. The ambassador, high in his chariot, looked ready to haul his horses about and send them galloping back to Hatti.

  Armed men surrounded him. The king’s minister should have seen to that, too: none but the king’s men could go armed in the palace.

  A woman alone could be in danger amid so many men, but Nofret had her own armor: her height and breadth of shoulder, and her haughty glare at any man who offered insolence. The wall of men about the ambassador was the only quiet thing in that place, but there was nothing harmless about their weapons.

  Nofret parted a pair of spears as if they had been the leaves of a door. The spearmen stared at her. She stared back.

  They were young men, smooth-shaven like Egyptians, but otherwise utterly different. Their faces were Hittite faces, arch-nosed and full-cheeked. One had a scar on his chin. The other’s eyes were peculiar, not brown or black as most men’s were, but grey, and his hair had a reddish cast. It was uncommon coloring in Hatti, but not as uncommon as that. Nofret had it herself.

  Still, she thought, there was something . . .

  “Lupakki,” she said suddenly. “What in the world are you doing here?”

  Well, she thought. That settled the question of whether she could still speak Hittite. It came rough, but it came clear enough.

  Her third-from-eldest brother looked her over from head to foot. Maybe he did not remember her. Brothers could easily forget a sister who had been snatched away in childhood.

  His grey eyes went wide—so wide they rolled white. He looked as if he had seen a ghost, or a dead woman walking. “Arinna,” he said.

  The name shook her. It was a stranger’s name, and yet it rang in her bones: her birth-name, the name that she had made herself forget.

  It woke something, some part of her that she had thought was gone. He said it again. “Arinna.” He reached out to touch her arm, flinching a little, but holding firm. “Arinna, you were dead. We saw the place where they killed you.”

  That too she had thought forgotten: the hunt, the capture, the fierce and hopeless battle. “I stabbed a bandit,” she said. “He bled like a pig.”

  “We thought the blood was yours.” His fingers tightened on her arm, then let go, as if he remembered suddenly where he was and who was staring. “Great gods, little sister. We’ve been mourning you, propitiating your spirit, praying you wouldn’t haunt us for not looking hard enough for your body. And all the while—”

  “And all the while, I was in Mitanni, and then I was here.” She lifted her chin. “I’m the chief of the queen’s servants.”

  He did not say the word that some would have said, the word that was shame: slave. His lip curled faintly, maybe, at the fact of her servitude, but his voice was light, deliberately so. “You’re higher up than I, then,” he said. “I fight under the king’s general.”

  Nofret tilted her chin toward the man in the chariot, who took no notice of her at all. He was much too lofty, of course, and much too far out of patience. “That one?”

  “That,” said Lupakki, “is my lord Hattusa-ziti, and he is much insulted.”

  “I can see that,” Nofret said dryly. “Will you let me by?”

  “Why?”

  Oh, that was Lupakki: always a question and never a simple acceptance of orders. Nofret wondered how that served him in his lord’s army.

  She was steady. Her mind was clear. Duty helped, and numbness, the shock of a face that she had thought never to see again.

  She stepped between her brother and the man beside him and caught the bridle of the horse who was nearest. The stallion was restive, but it was well trained; it dipped its head to her.

  She looked up past its ears to the ambassador’s face. He greatly disliked the necessity of noticing her, but she had outraged his dignity: she had touched one of his horses. She addressed him direct and clear, with as much respect as she could manage.

  “My lord, I welcome you to Memphis. I beg you be not offended by my presence, or by the regrettable lack of efficiency that you see here. The king is away, you see, and his servants were not expecting your arrival.”

  Lord Hattusa-ziti came close to a sneer at such a confession of disorder. Nofret did not care if he despised her. She did care that he be got out of this place and settled somewhere where he could be appeased.

  “It was known,” he said haughtily, “that I was to arrive.”

  “My lord,” she said, “your messeng
ers were not precise as to the day and time. You traveled quickly. I trust you traveled well?”

  He snorted like one of his horses.

  She suppressed a sigh. This was not going well. She raised her voice. “You will please, my lord, to come down from your chariot. Rooms will be ready, and all that you desire for your comfort, you and the men with you.” She held out her free hand, the one that did not rest on the stallion’s bridle. “Come, sir.”

  For a wonder he did. Maybe it was startlement, or the novelty of taking orders from a woman and a slave, and one who wore the gown of an Egyptian and the face of a Hittite.

  She bowed in front of him, low as befit the messenger of the King of Kings. “I am called Nofret,” she said. “I am the chief of the queen’s servants. I speak with her voice, and offer you the courtesy that she would offer were she here and not in the Upper Kingdom.”

  Courtesy begot courtesy. Hattusa-ziti was an ambassador; he was trained to it as a chariot-horse to the yoke. He unbent for her, enough at least to accept her guidance into the palace.

  oOo

  A few well-placed words sent servants racing ahead and roused the rest to remembrance of their duty. In remarkably short order, the embassy was escorted to a guesthouse, its horses stabled, its gifts taken to a place where they would be safe until they were presented to the king.

  The minister in charge of receiving embassies appeared late and rumpled and reeking of perfume. He had obviously been enjoying his afternoon’s rest. Nofret offered him no reprimand. It was not her place. She left it to Hattusa-ziti, who had a well-honed and exquisitely lethal tongue.

  With Huy’s arrival, Nofret’s part in the proceedings was done. She withdrew gladly. Contending with Hattusa-ziti was rather like a duel with swords: sharp, short, and dangerous.

  She had held her own, she rather thought. But she was glad to hand him over to the one who should have dealt with him to begin with.

  She was even gladder to leave her brother behind. She needed time to think, to remember what she was and what she had been.

  oOo

  Seti was waiting for her, warm and rather silly with the date wine he had drunk while he waited. He gave her no time to greet him, fell on her at the door and carried her to the bed, tugging at her gown and cursing it, but laughing, when it proved intractable.

  Her body arched toward him but her spirit recoiled. She was in bed before she knew it, while he rutted on top of her.

  She was not innocent of it, either. She made no move to stop him. Her spirit was tugging free of her body again, trying to fly as it had flown on the day she first lay with Seti. It had taken her to him then. Now it wanted to take her away.

  It was a fickle thing, her spirit. It was thinking of her brother Lupakki, and the Hittites lodged in their guesthouse near the king’s palace. She had refused to think of any of her brothers, or her father either, while she was a slave in Egypt. Now one of them had come to her, right before her face as she did her duty.

  Seti did not fall asleep as he usually did, but stayed awake and wanted to talk. Wine touched some men so; and maddeningly now, when Nofret would have preferred that he sleep.

  He did not seem to notice the shortness of her answers. He chattered happily of nothing and everything, bits of gossip, nonsense to which she paid little attention. She fed him wine while he babbled, but it only made him babble faster.

  At long last and so abruptly that it caught him between one word and the next, he succumbed to the power of the wine. Nofret heaved a sigh of relief. She almost drained the winejar herself, but she had more sense than that.

  She got up instead, washed, combed and plaited her hair. She hesitated between the gown she wore every day and the one she wore for festivals. It might be reckoned a festival to see her brother again and all unlooked for; but the gown was of transparent linen, and Hittites were modest people. She chose the lesser garment, which was clean and of good strong linen, if not so handsome as the other.

  With that she put on a jewel or two, her pendant of malachite carved with the Eye of Horus that Seti had given her, and the earrings of gold and malachite that had been a gift from her lady. She looked well, she thought, peering at herself in her lady’s fine bronze mirror. She was not beautiful as Egyptians were, but she was not ill to look at, either. She would not shame either herself or her lady in front of the Hittite embassy.

  oOo

  There were women with the embassy, lesser ladies of the household brought in curtained wagons for the ambassador’s entertainment. There were none who would speak as an Egyptian woman could, with the voice of an equal. Even queens in Hatti, whose sons alone could be kings, kept silence before the men, and spoke only in the inner room, where their lords might listen or not, as they chose.

  Nofret had never had any talent for effacement. She walked boldly to the guards on the gate, tall men in armor but with empty scabbards, and said to them, “I would speak to the warrior Lupakki.”

  One of them moved to thrust her away. The other stopped him. “No, let her be. She’s his sister: I heard them talking. She belongs to the queen.”

  Nofret smiled sweetly. “I am the chief of the queen’s servants. Is there anything your lord requires? Be sure to apprise my lord Huy.”

  “What, the old woman in the kilt?” The guard curled his lip. “It will be a pleasure to keep him at the run.”

  “By all means, keep him running,” said Nofret. “It’s his duty and his office.” She lifted her chin. “Where is Lupakki?”

  “Inside,” said the guard who had recognized her, “in the guardroom.” He grinned at her. “If you can’t find him, come and find me. I’m off duty when the sun dips below the rooftree.”

  Nofret patted his well-muscled arm. “I already have a guardsman,” she said.

  The man laughed. “An Egyptian? When you could have one of us?”

  “My brother can’t defend my honor against an Egyptian,” said Nofret with a flash of teeth. She left him to ponder that, and went to find her brother.

  oOo

  Lupakki was not displeased to be called away from the labor of settling in the guesthouse. He still had a little of the startled-deer look about the eyes, but he seemed to have overcome the first shock of the meeting. He greeted her with deliberate insouciance. “Ah, a rescue! If you hadn’t come, little sister, I’d have been condemned to unloading baggage.”

  “You were lazy as a child, too,” Nofret said to him as they walked through the court of the foreigners. It was empty now, its paving scoured, no sign of the throngs of men and beasts that had filled it. Lupakki gaped at the size of it, the pillars like the trunks of mighty trees, the length and breadth of it, larger than a lord’s palace in Hatti. And yet it was one of the lesser courts in this palace.

  “Egyptians build so big,” he said. “How do they live in it?”

  “As anyone does,” she answered. “They eat, they sleep. Sometimes they quarrel.”

  “That must wake echoes,” he said, “in halls as big as this, and ceilings so high.”

  He was half laughing, but half not. “Kings and queens don’t raise their voices,” said Nofret. “The angrier they are, the softer they speak.”

  “How alarming,” said Lupakki. He stepped up to a pillar and tried to circle it with his arms. He was a big man and long-armed, but not long enough. He peered up at the top of the pillar, which was painted to look like a fan of papyrus. “Imagine if it all fell down on us.”

  “I would rather not,” Nofret said. “How is our father? Is he well?”

  Lupakki turned to face her. “He died four years ago.”

  Her heart stopped, then started again, staggering in her breast. She should have expected it. Warriors never lived long, and her father had been well out of first youth when he mourned her supposed death. And yet it struck her hard, cramping in her belly. She spoke through it. “He died in battle?”

  He nodded.

  She let her breath go in a long sigh. “That’s well enough, then. He’d h
ave hated to die in his bed.”

  “Unless it was with a woman.” Lupakki smiled, maybe in spite of himself. “All the rest of us are alive. Piyassili’s head of the family now.”

  “Is he as dull as ever?”

  “Duller,” said Lupakki, “and very dutiful. His wife is even duller than he. But their sons are hellions.”

  Nofret laughed painfully. “Then there’s justice in heaven,” she said.

  “So we like to say,” said Lupakki. He paused if to gather courage. “And you? You’ve been well?”

  “Well enough.”

  She began to walk, she did not care where. He followed.

  His silence expected a better answer than she had given. Because he was her brother, she said, “I wait on the queen. She’s kind to me; she indulges my eccentricities.”

  “She must be an unusual woman,” said Lupakki.

  He was being facetious, a little, but Nofret was not. “No queen or king in Egypt is precisely ordinary,” she said. “You’ll see her soon enough. She’s coming back here before the moon wanes.”

  “And the king?”

  “He’ll be with her. They go everywhere together.”

  “Even to war?”

  “Well,” said Nofret, “no. But he hasn’t gone to war yet. He has generals to do that for him.”

  Lupakki raised his brows. “They really are like that? It isn’t noble here to be a warrior?”

  “Egypt is old,” said Nofret. “It’s grown past the urgencies of youth.” And why she was defending it, she could not tell.

  “This king is young, they say,” Lupakki said. “He must want to do what young men do, surely: love a woman, hunt a lion, fight an enemy.”

  “He loves his queen,” said Nofret, “and he hunts lions—and kills them, too.”

  “Then he’ll be wanting to fight,” said Lupakki, “if he’s as much a man as that.”

  “You are a bloodthirsty savage,” Nofret said.

  He grinned at her, showing strong white teeth, and one broken. She had done that, defending herself against him in an altercation: snatched a stone and hurled it at him, and struck better than she meant.