Pillar of Fire Page 32

  She had got a whipping for that. Her father was fair: he whipped his daughters as he did his sons, if they happened to deserve it.

  Lupakki seemed to bear her no animosity. Boys did terrible things to one another, dealt dreadful wounds in the name of manliness. They resented it deeply when a girl presumed to do the same, but Lupakki had been less proud about that than most.

  He had found her amusing then. So he seemed to now, regarding her with honest delight. “Gods!” he said. “If Father could see you now, he’d take a fit.”

  “Then it’s well he’s dead,” said Nofret.

  “Wait till I tell Piyassili,” he said, oblivious to her grim expression. “Our little sister not only alive but standing at the right hand of Egypt’s queen. Remember how he used to swear you’d die in a slave-pit with your tongue still wagging, flaying your master’s hide as he flayed yours?”

  That cut close to the bone. “My lady tells me that,” said Nofret stiffly, “after she’s invited me to speak freely.”

  “She is remarkable,” said Lupakki. He was oblivious to her stiffness. “Is she as beautiful as they say?”

  “More,” said Nofret, letting go her stiffness with reasonably decent grace, all things considered. There never had been any profit in quelling Lupakki. He simply laughed and went on with whatever he had been saying to begin with. “She’s her mother’s daughter. There was never anyone more beautiful than Nefertiti.”

  “And you saw her with your own eyes,” sighed Lupakki. “What fortune! It almost makes me wish I could have been a slave.”

  “You’d have been an even worse one than I am,” Nofret said. She tugged him with her into the hall of audience. “Here. See how the echoes run.”

  He did, with delight. The hall was empty, lit only by shafts of sunlight through the louvers in the roof. His voice sent the echoes running from pillar to pillar, from paving-stone to roofbeam: the tones of the singer’s scale, the yipping of a jackal, the baying exuberance of a Hittite war-cry.

  Nofret’s heart quivered at that. But there was no omen in it. Once and only once, invaders had ruled in Egypt. They had been driven out and all their names forgotten. Hatti would never do as they had done.

  This was not mockery or defiance. It was exuberance: a young man’s innocent pleasure in a place so foreign that he could only marvel at it.

  Nofret had expected to feel old, looking at him: old and remote. Oddly, she felt neither. She was no longer of Hatti, nor could be, but this was still her brother.

  It was strange to know it. Strange and a little alarming, but somehow reassuring. She was more than she had thought. She had a place in the world, and kin, too, who had thought herself so perfectly alone.

  Thirty-Five

  The king returned with his queen before the Hittites had been in Memphis a handful of days. There was strain between the two of them: that, Nofret noticed as soon as she saw them. It was not anything obvious; but they who had ridden had in the same chariot, his arms wrapped about her and both their hands on the reins, rode each in a separate chariot. They smiled as it had become their custom to do, walked side by side into their palace, performed every office of royal amity, but it had a distinct air of ritual and not of simple joy.

  Nofret learned the cause not long after the day had waned. The king was going to war.

  Ankhesenamon spoke of it with cool dispassion, addressing the wall rather than Nofret, as Nofret cleansed the paint from her face and readied her for sleep. “It’s really quite simple,” she said. “Hatti has attacked and overcome Mitanni. King Tushratta is dead. You knew that, yes?”

  “Yes,” said Nofret. Her voice was carefully colorless.

  “I am sure,” said Ankhesenamon, “that you were pleased to hear it. Hatti is now greater than it was before. This is difficult for us, however. Mitanni was our ally. Hatti, in destroying it, becomes our enemy.”

  “It rather hopes not,” said Nofret. “It’s sent an embassy. They’re in the guesthouse, waiting to be summoned.”

  “Carousing; I suppose,” said Ankhesenamon, “and making a great deal of noise.” She shook her head. “I don’t think my lord will listen to them. They only came to Memphis. Someone else came all the way to Abydos and caught us as we celebrated the rites of the gods, clasped my husband’s knees and begged him to aid his people.”

  “And your husband raised him up and promised him every sword and spear in Egypt.”

  Ankhesenamon shot Nofret a glance. “Don’t laugh at him. He told the petitioner to rest and refresh himself—and then he shut himself up with Lord Ay and the rest of the council.”

  “And said that they could advise as they pleased, but he was going to fight in a war.” Nofret arranged her lady’s wig on its stand, smoothing the many beaded plaits. “Who’s the ally?”

  “Have you heard of Ashur?”

  “In Hatti they call it Assyria,” Nofret said. “Its king is no older than Egypt’s. He’s full of fight, they say. He thinks that if Egypt and Ashur wage their wars together, they can crush Hatti between them.”

  “You’ve been talking to the Hittites,” said Ankhesenamon.

  “Is that treason?” Nofret asked her.

  She leaned forward in her chair, set elbows on knees and chin in hands. She sighed. “I don’t think I know what treason is. No more do I want my husband to go to war. You’d call me a bad wife for that, I suppose. All Hittite wives must be miserable if their husbands aren’t out fighting like proper men.”

  “As I remember,” said Nofret, “they didn’t know that there was any other way for a man to live, except if he were a fighting man.”

  “They never argued? They never begged him to stay home?”

  “They wouldn’t dare. That would make him a coward, the scorn of the people.”

  Ankhesenamon covered her face with her hands. Her voice came muffled but clear. “That’s what he said to me. He said that I would keep him a child, stifle the breath from him, protect him till he died. A king must fight, he said. A king who doesn’t fight, who leaves it to his generals, is not a king at all; he’s a child dressed up in crowns and scepter and set on a mockery of a throne.”

  “He’s come to a man’s years,” Nofret said. “Can you stop him from wanting what a man wants?”

  “He wants to go away from me,” said Ankhesenamon. “What if he’s killed?”

  Nofret bit her tongue. She had almost answered as a Hittite answers: that if a man was killed, his women mourned him. But Ankhesenamon had mourned enough. She had joy at last, and love with it. If he died, it was all gone. She might never know it again.

  No. That was tempting the gods to take him. “He won’t die,” she said. “He may go to war, and he may ride into battle, but his men will protect him. He’s their king, the life of the kingdom. They won’t let him be killed.”

  She could taste the truth in it, though it was bitter beneath. The king would not die in battle, or in Asia. Where he died, how he died . . .

  She closed the eyes of the spirit. She did not want to see where or when the king would die. It was enough to comfort her lady now, that she could say what she had said. “He’ll come back to you,” she said. “His army will make sure of it.”

  Ankhesenamon did not argue further. Maybe she wanted to believe Nofret; maybe she was simply too tired to fight. She went to bed alone and slept alone. The king did not come to her bed, nor did she seek his.

  oOo

  The coldness between them persisted. Nofret hated to see it, but there was nothing she could do. She thought of approaching the king, but what would she say to him? That she had a gift of foresight, a Hebrew prophetess had told her so, and she had seen that he would come back—and had apprised her lady of it?

  He would curse her interference. It was for her lady to approach him, to mend what was broken; and her lady did not do it.

  They were both too proud for decent sense. Both had the right of it, too. A young man wanted to fight; it was his nature. A woman, his wife, wanted him safe, to
protect her, to hold his place beside her, to be father to such children as she might conceive. If the young man was a king and the woman his queen, their quarrel became a matter of state. If the king wished to fight on an ally’s behalf and the queen wished him to remain safe at home, then Egypt itself would suffer the consequences of the choice.

  They did not quarrel as lesser folk might have done. Their altercations were quiet, their voices calm. They were perfectly reasonable in their disagreement.

  “I remember,” said the king as they sat in the lotus garden of a drowsy afternoon, “when men spoke of your father, how he would never go to war though he wore the Blue Crown, the war-crown, and had himself painted as a lord of battles; how he was afraid of it, and kept to his temple and his courts, and never went anywhere that would threaten his life.”

  “He was not a coward,” Ankhesenamon said. “His god consumed him, left him no mind or spirit for the things of earth.”

  “He did nothing to defend the Two Lands,” said the king. “His armies did what they could, but without the king’s presence or his countenance, theirs was lessened. They laugh at us in Asia, my lady. They reckon us weaklings, too feeble with luxury to defend ourselves in war.”

  “War is a fool’s pursuit,” she said, “or a child’s.”

  “Then I am a fool and a child,” he said, rising from his seat.

  He had grown taller in this season, and leaner, and darker with sun and wind. It had been nigh on seventeen floods of the Nile since he was born in Thebes. He was a man by the Egyptians’ count of years, and bound no longer to heed the advice of his council.

  He was angry now with a young man’s anger. He bowed stiffly, turned on his heel, and left her.

  Not since they were wedded had he gone out of his lady’s presence without a kiss or a caress. She was as angry as he: a delicate flush stained her cheeks, and her eyes glittered. If he had kissed her, no doubt she would have struck him.

  oOo

  He engrossed himself in the arts of war: archery, chariotry, practice with lance and sword. She flung herself into the arts of ruling, of being queen and mistress of a great household. It was a right and proper division, if they had been Hittite. In Egypt, where king and queen did everything side by side but fight in wars, it was distressing to see.

  The Hittite embassy was in a difficult position. The king was preparing war against Hatti while Hatti’s ambassador lingered in Memphis. Hattusa-ziti was admitted in time to the royal presence, his message heard with royal courtesy. He asked that the king reconsider his war, which of course the king would not do for a Hittite, no more than for his queen. The words they exchanged were as precisely ordered as a dance.

  But like a dance, once those words were ended they lingered only briefly in the memory. Hattusa-ziti must return to Hatti before the king’s army marched; the king would not refuse him that, nor hold him prisoner. It was the honor of kings, and of kingly war.

  Nofret said farewell to her brother at dawn on the day he went back to Hatti. He had been carousing for most of the night, as all the Hittites had: the king had held a feast for them, a banquet of worthy enemies. The queen had not attended, and neither therefore had Nofret. Ankhesenamon had dined alone in her palace, refusing the company of her ladies. She had gone to her bed soon after, and feigned sleep so well that Nofret almost believed her.

  Nofret was heavy-eyed with lack of sleep. Lupakki was disgustingly lively, the wine still working in him, and the joy of going home from this strange and burning hot country. He embraced Nofret with gladness that altered swiftly into wine-scented tears. “Arinna,” he said. “Come back with me. We’re enemies now to Egypt—there’s no dishonor in taking you away where you belong.”

  Oh, names were power, and he had named her as she was before she was taken into Egypt. The name could not compel her. It was not hers any longer. And yet it had been once; it was still a part of her, the part that was of Hatti.

  And what if she took it back? What if she forsook the part of her that had given itself to Egypt? To be among her own people again. To speak the language she had been born to. To live in the women’s house, shrouded and veiled as a woman was privileged to be, married maybe to a warrior, weaving his war-cloaks and binding his wounds. To be all of that, and nothing that had ever been in Egypt.

  She shuddered. “I belong here,” she said.

  Lupakki held her at arm’s length. He seemed suddenly a stranger, a man utterly foreign to Egypt, with thick-fingered hands and a bull’s shoulders.

  She blinked hard. Her brother stood in front of her again, handsome grey-eyed young man in Hittite battle-dress, with the wine wearing off, and anger taking its place. “Have you become a slave, then?”

  “Our enemies captured me and sold me into slavery when I was nine years old,” she said, snapping off the words. “And where were you? Why didn’t anyone find me before I stood on the slave-block in Mitanni?” But then she stopped herself; she caught at the edges of his mantle and held him before he spun away. “No! I won’t part in anger.”

  “You needn’t part at all,” he said.

  “I can’t go,” she said. “I’m the queen’s servant. It would be dishonorable if I left her.”

  He opened his mouth, perhaps to remind her that the queen was Hatti’s enemy. But he did not say it. Honor was a great thing in Hatti. Nofret maybe had too much of it, or she would have let him carry her away, no matter what she went back to.

  His duties were calling him: ranks forming behind the ambassador’s chariot, waiting for Hattusa-ziti to emerge from the guesthouse. He lingered, and she held still to his mantle. Her eyes were burning dry, the way they always were when she should have been weeping. His had a wide, set look, not quite fixed on her face. “Gods keep you, sister,” he said abruptly.

  “And you, brother,” she said.

  He pulled away just as she let him go. He did not look back. She stayed where she was, in the dark by the colonnade, until the sun had risen and the Hittite embassy marched out of the gate, taking the long road home.

  Thirty-Six

  “Marry me,” said Seti.

  Nofret spun, startled. She had been folding her lady’s gowns and laying them in their presses, unattended by others of the maids, who were all playing in the lotus pool with the queen. Nofret was not in the mood for such frantic enjoyment.

  Nor was she delighted to be brought to earth by Seti. He tried to seize her and flatten her in the heap of linen, but she braced her feet. He tumbled her against the wall instead, babbling through a spatter of kisses. “Marry me. I’m going to war; the king has said it. I know in my bones, if you wait for me I won’t die in battle. Marry me, my beautiful one.”

  “I’m not beautiful,” Nofret snapped, “and I’m not going to marry you. Let me go.”

  He only held her tighter and kissed her more avidly. “So bitter a tongue, but so sweet to taste. I’ll live on the memory of you when I’m fighting the war in Asia.”

  “You can remember me as I am.”

  “As my wife.” He tangled fingers in her hair, which she had plaited so carefully that morning. It was all out of its braids now, tumbling on her shoulders and down her back. He buried his face in it.

  “Tell me,” she said, tight and cold, “that you aren’t doing this because people are afraid I’ll turn traitor. I’m the enemy, after all. I come from Hatti.”

  He drew back, half angry, half laughing. “Of course nobody thinks that! You belong to Egypt. Hatti lost you long ago.”

  “Then why are you so insistent, if not because an Egyptian’s wife is more to be trusted than a Hittite slave?”

  “Because,” he said, “I love you.”

  She twisted out of his hands, not without cost to her hair. The pain was less than the sharpness of temper, the sheer preposterous impatience that possessed her as she looked at him. He was as beautiful as a woman, more beautiful than she, and his whole heart was given to her. And she did not want it.

  She had gone to him first beca
use he was there. She had let him continue because he so longed for it, and because he gave her pleasure. The love that bound man and woman in Egypt had never been there, not in her. Maybe she was made wrong. Maybe Hittite women were different.

  Whatever the right of it, she did not want to marry him. She did not even particularly want to take him to her bed, not now, when she had so much to do. She had learned too well the art of winning a man. Now she wished that she had studied the craft of getting rid of one.

  Harsh words and scowls that would have succeeded admirably with a friend or even an enemy had no power at all, it seemed, over a lover. They only made him the surer that she needed his protection—that she even wanted it.

  She put him out bodily and barred the door in his face. He hammered on it for a long while before he tired of the sport. She shut her ears to it, folded and refolded each gown, and then took out the bed-linens and smoothed and folded each one and laid it away in its chest of cedar.

  The warm red-brown scent soothed her. She breathed it in until Seti went away, and for a long while, after, till it filled the whole of her, and nothing else could enter.

  oOo

  The men went off to war. The women remained at home, as women had always done and would always do.

  Ankhesenamon’s farewell to her king was publicly and precisely correct. Nofret’s farewell to her guardsman was as brief and as cold as she could make it. He wept into her hair, begging her yet again to bind herself to him. She pushed him toward his company: other men weeping on the shoulders of other women, and men standing alone, and men too eager for war to take notice of the mothers or sisters or wives who lamented their departure.

  They all formed in ranks, at first with dragging slowness, but the end of it was sudden. One moment they were a milling crowd of men and horses and chariots, baggage-mules and carts. The next they were an army marching.

  The king rode in his chariot at their head, his armor all of gold, and golden plumes on his helmet. He was beautiful, like a warrior god. He held the reins of his stallions in his own hands, and mastered them. His bow was slung behind him. His arrows were fletched with gilded feathers. His spear rode in its rest, his sword at his side, and his army at his back.