Pillar of Fire Page 33

  The people cheered him out of Memphis. His queen watched him go from the gate of the palace, standing erect and still under a golden canopy. She said nothing, not one word: not to him before he went, not to anyone who stood with her. Her face was perfectly still. Her hands were fists.

  oOo

  Egypt with the king gone to war was its ancient self, undiminished by his absence. His people were proud of him, pleased to have again a warrior king. His council that remained behind kept its fears to itself, nor said what was in all their minds: that he had left no heir to inherit if he should die in battle. There was no son of his line left alive. His queen carried no child; her courses came in the dark of the moon, two hands of days after he rode out of Memphis.

  She carried the king-right in herself, as did her aunt Mutnodjme, and the Lady Tey who was kin to her through the Lord Ay. But there was no man or manchild to take the king’s place.

  Lord Ay was gone with the king. Nofret missed his presence and his strength. Perhaps Ankhesenamon did as well. Since she had gone silent, there was no telling. She ruled capably as she had since she was a child, little discommoded it seemed by the king’s absence.

  The people loved her and called her their lady of the lotus-blossoms, for she was always seen to cradle one in her band or wear one in her hair. Her lord had begun that custom not long after they became lovers as well as wife and husband, crowning her with flowers in front of court and city. She continued it even through their quarrel and his departure, for habit perhaps, or hope, or even defiance. She professed to love the sweet scent and the cool softness of the petals.

  Nofret’s flower, if she had had one, would have been the flower of the bramble-bush that grew in Hatti. She was not ashamed of herself for failing to be in love with Seti, but it troubled her that she did not seem to be able to love a man in the way that women in Egypt did.

  She did not love anyone. Her brothers were in Hatti; she did not know them, except for Lupakki, and he had gone away as he must, and she had remained behind. Her lady was her lady. Love or even liking had little to do with what was between them. Everyone else was a stranger.

  Sometimes she thought of Leah. No word had come from Thebes, not even whether Leah had gone there. Of Leah’s kinsmen Nofret would not think at all. They were alive, she supposed, somewhere in Sinai, and a dead man with them, worshipping his god in the desert. They were nothing to her but names remembered.

  She was growing smaller inside herself. It was strange to know it. Seti had given her body pleasure and diverted her mind. He had also, it seemed, kept her spirit whole, simply because he was there. Any man might have done, or any woman who could have been her friend.

  There was no one here who could serve such a purpose. The maids were silly fools. With so few young men left in palace or city, they squabbled endlessly over nothing, and fought, sometimes bloodily, for the attentions of a fat scribe or a shaven priest. Ladies of the court were little better; those who might have preserved their intelligence were gone to their estates to manage them in their lords’ absence. Ankhesenamon was doing much the same, though she lingered in Memphis, which after all was the king’s capital.

  oOo

  The war in Asia was going well. Ashur had crossed the Euphrates unmolested and trapped Hatti’s governor in his fortress. Egypt marched from its own borders into Kadesh and besieged the city. Victory, said the messengers, would follow swiftly. Hatti was taken by surprise.

  “Hattusa-ziti was too slow to return to his king,” said Ankhesenamon when she heard the news. “Is he dead, I wonder? Did our army catch him and hold him back before he could cross the border?”

  “Whatever befell him,” said the Lady Tey, who was in attendance on the queen in the Lord Ay’s absence, “it’s clear that the gods favor us.”

  “May it always be so,” said Ankhesenamon.

  oOo

  Everyone said that Kadesh would fall, and Ashur would take and hold the province that Hatti had seized from Mitanni; and then Hatti itself would be conquered. It sounded both simple and swift. Nofret, who had heard her father’s tales of long grueling marches and bloody battles, reckoned that there was more to it than anyone in Egypt knew.

  Hatti had been taken by surprise, but its king was a great king, a lion in battle. He had teethed, it was said, on the thighbones of slaughtered enemies, and drunk the blood of war with his mother’s milk. He would not cower in his palace while both Egypt and Ashur marched against him. He would muster his forces—no doubt had mustered them already—and go to war.

  Egypt knew nothing of such a thing. Egypt was a kingdom of women and old men, its people innocents, untried in war. While they celebrated a victory that had not yet come and perhaps never would, Nofret retreated to the shelter of her duties. She was safer there in any event, if anyone remembered that she was Hittite and possibly an enemy.

  The garden was her sanctuary, the forgotten queen’s pleasure-place near the court of the foreigners. More and more often she retreated there when she had need of rest. Its bareness soothed her, its worn paving and its weed-tangled spaces where once had been a garden of flowers. She would sit on the fountain’s rim with the tree shading her head, and watch the fish dart among the lilies. There was peace in it, a blessed emptiness of spirit.

  One day when she had lingered there much longer than she should, even drowsing a little in the heavy heat of Memphis during Nile-flood, a stranger came into this place that she had taken to thinking of as her own. She was aware first of the footstep, the tread of callused bare feet on paving; then a shadow in the colonnade, too large and voluminous to be one of the maids or menservants. By the time the shadow took substance she was on her feet, too angry to be afraid.

  Indeed it was a stranger—a foreigner, a savage from the desert in swathings of dusty robes, with dust in his matted beard and Nile mud staining his feet. He would have been a peculiar sight in the streets of Memphis, where all the world might choose to wander. In the heart of the palace, within so many guarded gates, his presence was an outrage.

  She seized the first weapon that came to hand, a broken bit of paving stone, and tested the weight and the heft of it. It was heavy enough, but clumsy. If he was fool enough to attack her, she would break his head.

  He did not seem inclined to do any such thing. He advanced only a step or two into the court, dark eyes fixed on her above a nose as noble as any Hittite’s. He was not a Hittite: he was tall enough and wide-shouldered, but lean rather than bull-broad. And he was too dark, and he was bearded, and dressed in the robes of the desert.

  He spoke her name, the one that was hers now and not the one that she had had in Hatti. “Nofret.”

  She kept her grip on the bit of stone. “Who are you? How do you know who I am?”

  He raised his brows. His expression, as far as she could see it in the thicket of beard, was wounded, but his eyes were glinting. “Ah, so I’ve changed that much? You haven’t. You’re as sharp in the tongue as ever.”

  Very slowly Nofret’s mind set name to the face. The voice was new, rich and deep, with an accent as pure as an Egyptian noble’s. But the face, the way he stood, the expression that called to mind a certain half-grown boy . . .

  “Johanan,” she said. The stone had fallen from her fingers. She was moving, and no memory of the first step—walking, then running, hurtling into him.

  He barely staggered as her weight struck him. He wrapped arms about her and whirled her in a laughing, dizzying dance.

  They stopped laughing in the same instant, breathless, hiccoughing. Nofret groped for the dregs of her anger. They were nowhere that she could reach. He had spun them all out of her, every one.

  He dropped bonelessly to the bit of turf under the tree. She tumbled down with him, hands locked in his. Neither was minded to let go.

  They looked at one another, hard, without embarrassment, recording every line and every alteration. Johanan was taller than ever and broader-shouldered, and his coltishness was gone. He was a big man but grace
ful, as a panther is.

  Nofret, moving on impulse, dipped a corner of his mantle in the pool and washed his face with it. He grimaced a little but endured, suffering her to cleanse the dust from his cheeks. His beard, wetted, curled into ringlets; she could see the strong line of chin beneath, and the long mobile mouth. He had a fine brown skin, more olive than the red-brown of Egyptians who lived long in the sun. Where veil and headdress had shielded it, it was as fair almost as her own.

  Once his face was clean, she washed his hands and feet. He had grown into himself, she noticed. His feet were elegant rather than gawky, and his hands were long-fingered but strong, with calluses that spoke of hard work. Some might be weapons-calluses: mark of bowstring or swordhilt or spearhaft.

  He was not carrying a weapon now, except the small knife in his belt, half-hidden in his robe. “Is Aharon with you?” she asked him. “Is . . . ?” But that name she could not say, even if she had known it.

  He shook his head. “They stayed behind in Sinai. I came to visit my grandmother.”

  “She’s not here,” said Nofret, irrationally annoyed. “She’s in Thebes.”

  “I know that,” he said. He was amused, and not making any effort to hide it. "Memphis is very much on my way to Thebes. Do you object? Was I mistaken to stop here?”

  “No!” She was shouting. She lowered her voice. “How did you get in? The gates are all guarded.”

  “I went over the wall.”

  She glared at his levity. He widened his eyes, spread his hands. “Truly, I did. There’s a place where it’s easy enough, provided the guard doesn’t look your way while you’re in the middle of the climb. Handholds everywhere. I’ll wager there’s many a young rake from the city who’s come up that way to visit a pretty maid in the palace.”

  “I should hope not,” said Nofret. “My lady will want to increase the guard on the wall if the palace is so easily invaded.”

  “Oh, but it’s a friendly invasion,” he said. “Anyone who came in arms would be caught before he passed the first court. I came in peace, and with extreme caution.”

  “Then how did you know where to find me?” she demanded.

  “I asked a maid,” he said. “She told me I needed a bath, and offered her services.”

  “They always do, with you,” said Nofret sourly. She wrinkled her nose. “You do need a better bath than I can give you here. Come with me.”

  He followed without protest. He was smiling, maybe: it was hard to tell behind the beard.

  oOo

  It was not Nofret who oversaw his bath, or any of the willing maids, but certain of the king’s menservants who had stayed behind in Memphis. He came out of it glistening clean and dressed in a linen kilt, with his beard tamed and trimmed and his hair confined in a fillet. His robes, said the chief of the king’s bath-servants with delicate distaste, would be cleaned and returned to him as soon as might be.

  He did not appear overmuch to miss them. He was covered from navel to knee, which was enough for Apiru modesty. The rest he had no shame of, nor any need of it.

  While he was in the bath, Nofret had ordered a small feast laid for him in one of the smaller retiring-rooms, with a roast duck and three kinds of bread, cheeses and fruits and a jar of honeyed wine. He greeted it with pleased surprise. “What, am I royal, that you feast me royally?”

  “You’re an old friend,” she said, “and I’m the chief of the queen’s servants. Now eat. I don’t want the cook to be insulted.”

  “By all means,” he said, “we must not insult the cook.”

  Not that he needed much encouragement. He ate as if he were starving—and from the look of him he had been on short commons for a while; his ribs were more prominent than she liked to see. Gods alone knew what he had been living on in the desert, or on his journey into Egypt.

  “You came alone?” she asked him when he paused, the edge taken off his hunger, to sip the dark sweet wine.

  He set the cup down and nodded. “I was safe enough. A lone traveler is reckoned either mad or penniless, and bandits are minded to let him be.”

  “You have nothing? No baggage? Not even a weapon?”

  “I have a little,” he admitted, “in the house I’m staying in in the city. A bow, arrows for hunting. A spare tunic. A measure or two of barley meal.”

  “So poor,” she said. “And you were rich once, as tomb-builders go.” Her breath caught. “Johanan! You were the king’s man. As far as anyone knows or can know, you escaped from his service. If anyone thinks of that—”

  “No one will,” he said with lordly confidence. “Who knew me, after all, except as your friend who came to visit you in Akhetaten? Now I visit you in Memphis. There’s nothing criminal in that.”

  Nofret shut her teeth on what she might have said. The queen knew the truth; if he was brought to her by a zealous minister, she would speak for him. Nofret would have to trust in that.

  He ate everything he could hold, and sat back sipping wine, replete and smiling. At the sound of a step, he lifted his eyes. He was on his feet before Nofret turned to see who it was, and then on his face, bowing as low as man could bow.

  The queen pulled him up with her own hands and with little subtlety. “Stop that,” she said. “Tell me. How is he? Is he alive?”

  Johanan was quick-witted: he was taken off balance only briefly. He stood towering over her, which neither of them could like overmuch; when he sank to one knee, she allowed it, for that set his head somewhat below hers, and their eyes level enough to converse. “He is well, great lady,” he said, “and speaks often of you when he prays.”

  She stiffened at that. “He knows. He must.”

  “He understands that a queen must do what she must,” said Johanan.

  “Then he has changed,” she said.

  “He has changed,” said Johanan. He paused. When he spoke again, his voice was quiet and a little remote, as if he recalled things from long ago. “The Black Land, the land that you live in, is a soft land, and gentle. The desert, the Red Land, is different: harsher, grimmer, more exacting to the spirit. Your gods are gods of the Black Land. In the Red Land live your demons and your dead.

  “The desert is a forge of souls. A man who goes to it willingly, who lives in it, who knows the hammer of the sun, is tempered in it, is altered, is made strong.”

  “And a king who is dead?” asked Ankhesenamon. “What does it make of him?”

  “It makes him . . .” Johanan thought for a while, while she waited in tight-drawn patience. “It makes him something else. Something new. It teaches him to see more clearly. And yes,” he said with a swift glance at her face, “it teaches him to forgive what he might have regarded as a betrayal.”

  “I betrayed everything that he lived for,” said Ankhesenamon.

  “No,” Johanan said. “You served the one thing that was strongest in him. You served the kingdom.”

  “I bowed to Amon. I still bow to him. My very name—”

  “He knows. He understands.”

  “How can he? He knows no god but the one. I’ve turned my back on that one to worship the many—to be false, as he would think of it.”

  “And by that falsity you preserve the Two Lands of Egypt. He does understand that. He could never do it, but he knows that you do what you must.”

  “How weak he must think me,” said Ankhesenamon.

  Johanan held her up when she tried to sink down, and helped her into the chair that he had vacated. She looked small and delicate there, child-small, too desolate for tears.

  He knelt in front of her and took her hands in his. “Lady,” he said, “never believe that he has forgotten you, or that he despises you for your courage. No, don’t deny me! It took great bravery to surrender to the gods of Egypt so that Egypt could be strong again.”

  She stared at him, searching his face as if she could find something there, something that she had lost. “I don’t understand you. Or him.”

  “That’s because you haven’t lived in the desert
. Your soul is steeped in the rich earth of the Black Land. The Red Land demands a different spirit, a different way of looking at the world.”

  “A strange way,” said Ankhesenamon. “A way that sees only one god, but forgives a woman for abandoning him.”

  “A woman who is a queen,” Johanan said.

  She bowed her head. When she lifted it her eyes were bright, maybe with tears. “He is well, then? He is . . . whole?”

  “As sane as he can ever be,” said Johanan. “He goes up on the mountain to worship his god. Some of our people follow him, at least to the lower slopes. His god is well shaped for the desert: a stern god, and just. He demands much of those who worship him.”

  “And he—my father? What does the god demand of him?”

  “Everything,” said Johanan. “Everything he is.”

  Ankhesenamon sighed. “He gave up everything when he died to Egypt. What is left?”

  “Body,” said Johanan. “Soul. Breath. Spirit.”

  “But not his name.”

  “No,” Johanan said. “He had to leave that behind. Our people call him the prophet, the god’s voice in the desert.”

  “Then he has become nothing,” Ankhesenamon said.

  “No,” Johanan said again. “Our people have given him a name, of sorts. They call him the Egyptian—the man of the Two Lands. We have a word for that. Moshe.”

  “Mo-she?” Ankhesenamon frowned. “What in the world is that?”

  “Mose,” said Johanan. “So many Egyptians have that in their name, you see: Ahmose, Ramose, Ptahmose.”

  “That’s only the word for son,” she said. “It’s not a name, not a whole one.”

  “For him it is. He took it to himself. He’s Moshe the Prophet, and he worships his god in Sinai.”

  “We have not heard—” Ankhesenamon stopped. “No. No, someone told me . . . or I overheard . . .”

  “A prophet in the desert,” said Nofret, breaking in. “It’s idle gossip amid the marriages and the birthings. How the desert bandits have a new madman to lead them, or so it’s said.”